Plague Child (9 page)

I found the entry.

She did not understand the words, but stared in such wonderment at the number, she did not react to Dr Chapman’s voice.

‘I will call in tomorrow morning.’

There was no reply from Mr Black, but his wife said: ‘Look – he is writing something!’ I could hear the doctor go back into the room.

‘Twenty
pounds!’
Anne exclaimed.

It was as much as a skilled clerk earned in a year. I told her what it was for.

‘A picture! Of you? It must be something to do with the man with the scar.’

‘So I imagine.’

‘I hate him!’ she said vehemently. ‘Shouting at my father when he’s ill; ordering him about. Who is he?’

I shook my head. She kept looking at the entry in the book and then at me. I do not know what she was seeing, but it was no longer a clown, a tumbler, or even an apprentice. She bit her lower lip as she often did when she was vexed or puzzled.

‘Twenty pounds,’ she kept saying with awe. ‘For a picture. Of you.’

‘A monkey.’

‘Don’t joke. Where is it?’

‘How do I know?’

‘I knew it.’ The words came out in a tiny explosion. ‘One day my father –’ She stopped herself.

‘Your father what?’

She shook her head and refused to say more. We heard Dr Chapman saying goodbye and hurried through the darkened print shop to the door. I desperately tried to think of a way of seeing her again.

‘Can you bring me my Bible?’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll write to you. Through Sarah.’ I groaned inwardly again at the frustration of her being unable to read.

‘I will learn,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as though it was something she could do in a day or two. ‘If my father cannot speak, I shall have to read. My mother is no good at business.’

‘Bring the Bible to church. Sunday.’

She stood there, slight, determined, letting me out through the back door, while her mother let the doctor out of the front. There was something about her I had never even guessed at before, behind all the mockery, the trivial games, something that I can only call, even at that age, calculation.

Whatever it was, I leaned forward, before she could close the door, and kissed her.

Chapter 7

I was in a daze, a dream after that kiss. I suppose you could scarce call it a kiss, more a bump of noses, a collision of my lips on her cheek, as cold and splintered as the ice in the bucket, a brief holding of her trembling slightness, as slight as the bird fallen from its nest I had once picked up in Poplar and tried vainly to warm back to life. But it opened up the whole world to me.

I was careless of my safety, oblivious of what was going on around me. All I wanted to think about was that trembling, that cold cheek, that slightness against me. For, however clumsy and brief it had been, her arms had held me.

I could well have walked into George and the constable he sought, but he must have been unsuccessful, for I learned from people streaming away down the streets that there had been a big riot outside Westminster. Mingling with the crowd, I was much more difficult to find.

One man had a pike wound oozing blood. He almost staggered into me. I ducked as he raised his stave at me, but he was only demonstrating exultantly how he had broken the head of the guard who gave him his wound. He said his radical Puritan master had equipped him with the stave and urged him to fight for the Bill.

‘The Bill?’

‘The Grand Remonstrance – the Freedom Bill! The King’s side are trying to stop Mr Pym from publishing it officially because it will give him control of people like me. The army!’

‘Are you a soldier?’

‘No, a weaver.’ He held up his stave proudly. ‘And a member of the All Hallows Trained Band!’

‘You must know Will,’ I said, for Will was an enthusiastic recruiter for the All Hallows.

‘And his father!’ The weaver held up his stave again and yelled: ‘Ormonde! Ormonde!’

‘Ormonde! Ormonde!’ the crowd chanted.

Will’s father was a radical supporter of Mr Pym, standing against an East India merchant, Benyon, in the City elections. Whoever controlled the City, the weaver told me, controlled citizen militias like the All Hallows, which together totalled ten thousand men.

Intoxicated as I was with Anne, I now became drunk at the thought of all this as I approached the Pot, to which many of the demonstrators were repairing. This was what Mr Ink had predicted. The appeal had been made to the people – and the people had responded!

The words he had copied and I had rescued from the dirt had done this. Or so I thought. Now the struggle was to have them officially published. Our pirated copies were in the alehouse, ringed with beer, passed from hand to hand, read out to people who could not read, people who nodded silently.

They were not talking then about rebellion. People talked of Magna Carta. Of old rights to disappearing common land, which had driven them to leave their families and come to London. Of rights to religion. And of the biggest right of all – the right to afford a loaf of bread.

I could not see Will. I was clutching a beer a complete stranger had given me when I glimpsed in the throng something that drove all this from my mind. At the bar was the man in the beaver hat. Anger fought a desire to run. I believed he had killed my mother. I had eaten little and the beer had gone to my head. Anger won and I fought my way through the laughing, shouting crowd. Now I saw the bulky shape of Crow, and felt again the sensation of him wrenching my head back to cut my throat. Crow turned and stared round. I put my hand on my knife, sure he had seen me, but he was the sort of man who habitually glanced about him, watching his back.

‘– last place he’ll come,’ I heard him say.

‘A dog always returns to smell his own shit,’ the man in the beaver hat said.

There were a couple of candles on a table as I got closer to the bar. I snuffed them out with my sleeve. Someone shouted. My approach to the bar was plunged in shadow.

The feel of the knife was quite different from my apprentice’s knife, which was a toy by comparison. This knife was heavier, balanced. I loosened it from my belt. I stopped, inches from their backs. They had caught the landlord’s attention.

‘. . . red hair – Tom Neave,’ the man in the beaver hat was saying. He drew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. As he unfolded it I glimpsed one of the sketches the artist had done of me that summer. In a few lines he had caught my grin, the sharpness of my nose between the dark gleam of my eyes.

I moved closer. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. There was a rent in the back of Crow’s tough leather jerkin like an open mouth, gaping wider as he moved. I became drawn to it, fascinated by it.

The landlord was saying: ‘Haven’t seen him for a week.’

‘We’re working for the Stationers’ Company and Mr Black,’ the man said. His voice was grave and concerned. ‘He’s wanted for breaking his bond, theft . . . You can reach me at the Cock and Hen in Holborn . . . There’s a reward of five crowns.’

The landlord’s eyebrows lifted. I could see that he regarded that as a much more substantial profit than he would ever get from selling beer. But it was not this that made me lose control. It was hearing that Mr Black, whom I thought such a godly man, and who had hypocritically claimed to warn me of danger, was part of this plan to kill me.

The knife seemed to have a life of its own as I drew it from my belt. I could see nothing but the rent in Crow’s jerkin, opening and closing, a perfect target.

‘Tom!’

As God is my witness, I thought it was the Lord’s stern voice stopping me. Crow and the man in the beaver hat whirled round, bumping into a man trying to get to the bar, who knocked into me. My knife spun to the floor.

‘Tom!’

Will was waving near one of the doors. The man in the beaver hat pushed through a group of drinkers towards him. Crow immediately went to cover the other door. I could see his eyes moving meticulously from head to head. Even with my hat firmly wedged on and the dim light I could feel the red hairs crawling on my neck as if they were burning like a beacon.

Will was staring at me. All I could do was shake my head numbly at him. When the man in the beaver hat spoke to him, Will shook his head and pointed to the door where Crow was standing.

‘He’s run for it!’ the man in the beaver hat shouted to Crow, who dived out into the street, the other man following.

I picked up the knife, staring at its blade as Will pushed his way through to me with another, older man, who wore a jump jacket, Dutch style, with a square linen collar.

‘I was going to kill him,’ I said stupidly.

The older man shook his head. ‘You were wrongly positioned,’ he said, in an educated drawl. ‘You would only have wounded him. He would have turned and killed you.’ He drew his finger across his throat.

Will cut across him sharply, seeing the landlord say something to the pot girl. ‘Get him out of here, Luke!’

He grabbed me by one elbow and the man called Luke took me by the other and they hustled me into the night.

Chapter 8

That night I slept curled up in my Joseph coat on bales of the best Virginia tobacco, in the warehouse of Will’s father. Ever since then the smell of Virginia curling up from a clay pipe has meant the smell of rebellion to me. It rose from the pipes of Will and Luke when they woke me next morning. They took me through to the counting house, where there was a third man, Ben. What followed was a counting, not of money, but of me – an interrogation.

All three were members of the All Hallows Trained Band. Will and Ben were typical of many of the City’s part-time soldiers: middling men fighting against the City’s richest merchants, who generally supported the King. Will’s father, like many tobacco merchants, was struggling to break the monopolies of fabulously wealthy spice merchants such as Benyon, his opponent in the City elections the following month.

Ben was an apothecary. Prevented from working in the City by another monopoly, the doctors, he practised medicine in Spitalfields outside the walls, dispensing herbal cures to the London poor. Ben was as quiet and diffident as his grey jacket and hose, but there was a stubbornness in his silences, a refusal to take anything for granted, that I liked.

Luke was totally different. He seemed to have only one aim in joining the militia, and that was to fight. He had just come from fencing practice, and propped his sword against a rickety table in the counting house. A pupil to a lawyer in Gray’s Inn, he was the second son of a gentleman, and looked it. The achingly soft leather of his funnel boots ridiculed my shoes ‘as worn at court’. I hid them under the table, my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but could not hide the shabbiness of my breeches, the stink and stains of my Joseph coat, at which he wrinkled his nose. He stared at me quizzically, as if I was one of those curiosities exhibited at a travelling fair.

‘You’re on the run,’ he drawled.

‘Yes,’ I said defiantly. ‘Are you going to take me to Newgate?’

‘Bridewell,’ he corrected, ‘for petty offenders like you – unless you’ve actually murdered someone?’

He was looking meaningly at the knife in my belt. I jumped up, rocking the table. A week on the run had already changed me. Acting first had become a way of life. Another moment and I would have been on my way to the door, prepared to shove Luke from his stool if he tried to stop me. ‘What happened, Tom?’

Ben’s voice was soft, his concern calming. Ashamed now at my over-reaction, I dropped back on my stool. I told them everything, from Mr Black first taking me to Poplar, to the attempt on my life and the receipts and notes on me I had discovered in Mr Black’s office.

When I had finished there was a silence, except for the clang of bells from barges on the river. Will puffed at a clay pipe of his father’s best Virginia, which had gone from the ‘foul stinking novelty’ derided by King James to a soothing cure for all illnesses, from cholic to bladder stones.

‘Is this a pamphlet you’re writing?’ Luke said sceptically.

‘It’s true!’ I banged my fist down on the table, but then over the ships’ bells came the much deeper sound of a church bell.

‘St Mary-le-Bow,’ Will said. ‘It means –’

The end of his sentence was drowned by a great tumult of bells, spreading through the City from the east. Like a fire leaping from roof to roof the noise swelled, the deep-throated boom of St Katharine by the Tower, the clangour of St Dunstan-in-the-East, sparking into life the carillons of St Lawrence Jewry and St Giles’ Cripplegate, St Paul’s, St Martin’s, St Dunstan-in-the-West and St Clement Danes until the whole warehouse shook in one huge cauldron of sound.

Luke was inaudible, but no one needed to hear him. ‘The King,’ were the words he formed.

The King had arrived to talk to Parliament! All our arguments were forgotten as we joined the great crowds pouring along Thames Street, past Fishmongers’ Hall and up Fish Street Hill. Shouting questions and holding our ears close to people’s mouths, we gradually made out that the King had met the Lord Mayor and aldermen at Hoxton, in fields just beyond the sprawl of new building, which (if it was anything like Poplar) had come to an abrupt halt in the present crisis with half-built houses and littered wood left in muddy pools.

‘The King knighted the Lord Mayor on the spot,’ someone told Will.

Will groaned. ‘Knighthoods for gold – the King wants the City to buy him an army!’

A burst of cheering silenced him. I wondered why the crowd, after the demonstrations last night, could be so happy about it until we reached the corner of Gracious Street. We could not move for the press of people round the fountain. Men and women staggered from it with what looked like blood on their hands and clothes.

Even Luke had lost his coolness and was shoving his way through the crowd. He yelled at me, but I could not hear a word. The bells near us stopped, others petering away, and Luke’s voice boomed into my ear.

‘Drink to the King! And damn his bad advisers!’

He vanished among the heaving mass, reappearing with his fine lace collar stained with crimson, his hands running red.

‘The best Bordeaux!’ he yelled. ‘When the King favours you – you’re all for him!’

I could not believe it. The fountain was running with wine. A woman carried away a pot of it. Most held out their hands and slurped it into their mouths before it dribbled away then, having lost their places, fought to get back for more before the casks that were supplying it ran out. I wriggled on my hands and knees under a drayman’s apron, catching the wine that ran through his fingers, sucking it up then turning my head to the sky to catch the red rain until I lost my balance and was in danger of being trampled into the crimson mud. Whether it was the best Bordeaux or vinegar I did not know, and I did not manage to swallow very much of it, but I was certainly drunk. Drunk on the press around me, then, turning like one towards Cornhill, on the thunderous roar of the crowd coming from there. He had arrived! We were missing him! The thought was on everyone’s faces as they pushed and elbowed past Leadenhall Market.

People must have been in their places for hours. The route for royal entries to the City had been the same for over a hundred years. The King had entered at Moorgate, the procession doubling back on the route of the old Roman wall, turned again at Bishopsgate and was now approaching Merchant Taylors’ Hall, rising in front of us. Spectators were pressed together as solidly as a brick wall and no matter how I dodged and jumped I could see little but fluttering banners brightening the grey November day and people leaning perilously from windows shouting with one voice:

‘Long live the King! Long live the King!’

Tall as he was, Will had to stretch on his toes to see. He was flinging his hands in the air, shouting with the rest of the crowd. I was pressed against a half-timbered house. Above me was a cross-beam beneath the upper-storey windows where people were leaning out. Later I heard they had paid an angel for the privilege.

‘Will, for the Lord’s sake – give me a step.’

He linked his hands together. I slotted my foot into them, swung my other foot on to a stud, scrabbling for a hold in the loose herringbone brickwork. Plaster dribbled on me as a hand above grabbed me and pulled me up. I clung on to a cross-beam to cheers from the people round me. When I took in the sight below me, I nearly fell back again. The streets were lined with City liverymen. A great rainbow of colour made it as bright as midsummer as another entourage passed down Cornhill, followed by the City Artillery Company, pennants flying from their pikes, pistols at their saddles. I had thought them radical, but it seemed that they had joined the crowds in succumbing to the King.

Two by two on magnificent horses, which trod so exactly to the beat of the drums it looked as though they too were awestruck by the occasion, came the great peers. Constantly in danger of falling, I kept calling out like a small child: ‘Who’s that, who’s that with the sword?’ and someone from the window, or more often Luke, who had managed to worm his way to the front, shouted the answer.

‘That’s the Marquess of Hertford with the Sword of State . . .’

He seemed to know who everybody was, and the significance of who had been chosen and of his position in relation to the King.

‘That’s Manchester . . . Lord Privy Seal . . . and that’s the Marquess of Hamilton . . . fancy choosing him to be Master of the Horse . . . they’re all moderate reformers . . . You see? You see?’ he yelled at Will. ‘The King is sending a message – he’s got rid of his evil counsellors!’

I thought that wonderful news. Then I had to cling to the cross-beam as the crowd below me flung up hats and the people in the room above drummed with their feet on the floor so that the whole house shook. There he was!

‘The King! The King!’ the crowd roared.

I never again in my life used a woodblock of that oval face, long curling hair and pointed beard without thinking how totally inadequate it was, and without remembering that moment. He seemed to float rather than ride on his magnificent black horse, saddle embroidered in silver and gold, his gossamer-light riding cloak fluttering like wings behind him, embroidered with the insignia of the Garter, a star emitting silver rays.

Every time he raised his hand or smiled, the crowd erupted. Already from mouth to mouth the word had spread that at Hoxton he had vowed not to be swayed by popery but to protect the Protestant religion of Elizabeth and James. He looked up as he passed. He seemed to smile and lift his hand directly at me. I was near to fainting, my fingernails scrabbling as I hung on, the crowd a continuous roar in my ears. I loved him. There is no other word. The Divine Right of Kings? Of course he was divine! Were not people all along the route struggling to get close to him, held back by the liverymen – the halt, the lame, beggars trying to get relief from their sores? A woman pressed forward, holding up her blind child in the hope that for a moment he would breathe the same air.

I twisted round to follow the King as long as possible as he disappeared towards Cheapside. When I reluctantly turned back I was immediately transfixed by the woman in the carriage below. Anne was beautiful, but in a fresh and simple way. This woman was beautiful by art. Pearls glittered in her hair. Her skin was like thin porcelain, marred cunningly with a beauty spot on her cheek. Her dress was cut low and, because of my elevated position, I glimpsed more of a woman than I had ever seen before. I had no doubt in my mind who she was.

‘The Queen!’ I shouted. ‘Long live the Queen!’

The woman looked up and smiled. The eyes were not artifice. You could not paint them. They were such deep blue they were almost black, and full of humour. The porcelain round them cracked with tiny laughter lines before she was whisked away and it was a moment before I realised that people round me were howling with laughter.

‘The Queen has been and gone, you idiot!’

‘That’s Lucy Hay!’

‘Countess of Carlisle.’

‘Strafford’s whore!’

The Earl of Strafford had been one of the royal advisers hated not only by Parliament but by many on the King’s side for his ruthless, near lawless, drive for power. There was so much feeling against him the King had been unable to prevent his impeachment. With great reluctance, he had signed the death warrant for his execution in May that year.

‘Now Strafford’s gone, she’s John Pym’s whore!’

‘Changes beds as she changes sides!’

There was more laughter and a fight broke out below. I took no notice of the vile accusations made about such a beautiful woman, who, because she was at court, must I thought have attracted to her some of the spirituality of the King. I was overwhelmed by the thought that I had been to her house, even if it was little nearer than her shit heap, and that, if I ever delivered letters again for Mr Pym, I might catch a glimpse of Lucy Hay.

‘Look at him!’

‘He’s in love.’

‘Come and join us!’

Drunken hands stretched out for me. I realised how much my arms were aching and gladly let go of the cross-beam, whipping up my hand to be caught by someone above me. Another hand grabbed me by the collar. It was as I thrust upwards from the stud I was standing on and grabbed for the sill above me that I saw the pennant. It fluttered from the guard of one of the out-of-favour peers, judging by the distance he was behind his King. Inscribed on the pennant was some kind of bird, I knew not what, but I felt I had seen it before. It appeared and reappeared as the wind caught it, as if the bird was really flying. A falcon. I
had
seen it before! As though it were yesterday, I was back in the dockyard with Matthew, carrying pitch to the
Resolution
, which was flying the same flag, the falcon, in honour of the great gentleman who commissioned it.

There he was! Stiff on a horse, as if he rode little these days. He winced as he stared round at the crowd and I saw that face. That beard. That kindly look. No, not so kindly now, screwed up like crumpled paper, greying eyebrows knotted together in a frown but there was no doubt in my mind he was the gentleman who had bent over me while I slept after I burned myself with pitch. The gentleman Matthew had been frightened of, and after whose visit Mr Black had apprenticed me.

‘That’s him! That’s the man!’

I must have been out of my wits. I pointed. Saw the gentleman crick his face upwards, staring at me as I hung for a moment by one hand. They tried to grab me but the man holding me lost his grip and I fell on to the people below. A man went sprawling, cursing. Others cheered. Luke shouted something. Will and Ben were coming towards me but I pushed and shoved and wriggled and fought my way through the crowd to get to the man before he passed. I reached the liverymen, barring the way with staves. I seized the stave of one of them and threw him off balance. What drove me forward were the words in that scrap of a letter I had found in Mr Black’s office: ‘he now looks at the boy in a different way’.

It must have been written by the man with a scar, on the old gentleman’s instructions. I had one object and that was to reach the gentleman who had, for some reason, decided to make something of me then, like a potter discarding a faulty vessel, determined I was ‘a great Folie’ who must be got rid of.