FFfAW: Another’s fate is sealed

This week’s photo prompt is provided by TJ Paris. Thank you TJ for our photo prompt!

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The pair meet at Moll King’s coffee house.

An unlikely couple, one small, slight, linen clean and crisp. The other’s face is hidden beneath a cape that smells of chop houses, the red stench of the abattoir.

Surrounded by the usual pickpockets and whores plying their trade among the foolish rich, the sons of lords and earls who think it fashionably daring to drink a bitter brew with London’s unwashed.

It’s summer, so the rot of the market competes with tobacco and unwashed bodies, the composting rushes on the floor bringing the smell of the Thames in Autumn.

A bag of coins appears from a spotless sleeve, sags to the table, spirited away beneath the vast cape.

Without a word, one man leaves, vanishing into the throng. The small man stays, orders coffee he doesn’t drink, refuses offers of flesh old and young.

Money changes hands and another’s fate is sealed. He will not sleep tonight.

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Written for Priceless Joy’s Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers. To join in and read other stories see here.

Moll King was a formidable woman of many ‘talents’, most of them disreputable. Read more about her life here. And more about the coffee house she and her husband Tom ran here.