The Cheapside Corpse (17 page)

‘How can the plague be a financial disaster?’ asked Stedman.

‘Is it not obvious?’ said the bookseller. ‘Labourers will die, so there will be no one to supply us with food and fuel, which means industry will grind to a halt. The wealthy will flee for their lives, so no one will buy what few goods
are
available. And we shall not be able to export cloth, leather and glassware, so there will be no money coming into the country.’

‘We cannot export them anyway,’ shrugged Farr. ‘Because of the Dutch, who sink or seize any ships that belong to our merchants.’

‘Speaking of the Dutch, did you hear what they did in Guinea?’ asked Stedman. ‘They invaded one of our ports, took fifteen hundred people – men, women and children – tied them back to back and tossed them into the sea.’

Chaloner started to say that no African outpost had that many settlers, so the tale was almost certainly apocryphal, but Stedman was getting into his stride, and Chaloner did not have the energy to argue. He shoved Randal’s pamphlet back in his pocket, finished his coffee and left, aware that the others were so engrossed in their debate that they did not notice.

The coffee had done nothing to dispel Chaloner’s lethargy, and he was still thick-headed as he threaded through the maze of alleys surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral to emerge on Cheapside. Thus when someone flew out of the porch of St Michael’s church and raced towards him, he was slow in dropping his hand to the hilt of his sword. If it had been a person with evil intent, rather than Neve, he might have been in trouble.

‘I have been looking everywhere for you,’ the upholder snapped irritably. ‘Where have you been? The Earl told me that you would be on Cheapside today, but I thought you would have arrived a lot sooner than this.’

Chaloner was not in the mood to be scolded, especially by an interior designer. ‘Do you have a message for me?’ he asked coolly, biting back a more acerbic response.

Neve regarded him suspiciously. ‘Do you have a sickness? Your voice sounds very odd.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Chaloner sourly. ‘A cold.’

Neve covered his face with his sleeve, so his next words were difficult to understand. ‘The Earl sent me to say that he wants his last curtains
urgently
. The other seven pairs look very nice now they are up, so getting the rest is more important than whatever else you are doing. He is worried that an outbreak of plague will prevent them from being made, and he hates the thought of waiting for months. He wants you to approach Baron today.’

‘His compassion is duly noted,’ muttered Chaloner.

‘What?’ Neve cocked his head, but made no attempt to move closer. ‘Speak up.’

‘Tell him I will do it at once.’

‘Good, because he said you cannot have any more of your salary until they are delivered. I tried to tell him it was unfair, but he would not listen. You know how he is.’

Chaloner did. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Yes. He is very concerned about the fact that the Frenchman – DuPont – died of plague and wants you to find out exactly when and where he caught it.’

Chaloner regarded him sharply. The Earl’s orders had been to stay away from such areas, and he was sure he had not changed his mind about protecting Clarendon House – which meant that Neve was lying. And Chaloner knew why.

‘It is
you
who is eager to know, because
you
are the “mutual acquaintance” who introduced DuPont to the Earl,’ he surmised. ‘The person who told him that DuPont had information to sell. Bearbinder Lane is not far from the Feathers, where you would have gone to deal with Baron about the drapery.’

‘No!’ gulped Neve, although his furtive eyes told the truth. ‘I did treat with Baron in the Feathers, as it is where he conducts all his business, but…’ He tailed off when he saw Chaloner’s scepticism, and sagged. ‘Damn!’

‘Why the secrecy? Putting the Earl in touch with a potentially useful source of intelligence is not a crime.’

‘No,’ acknowledged Neve. ‘But it is distasteful, and I am an upholder, not a spy. However, when DuPont told me that he had important news to hawk, I thought I had better do something about it. If you had been here, I would have put the matter in your hands, but you were in Hull, so I was forced to go directly to the Earl.’

‘What kind of “news”?’

‘He had intercepted reports from Dutch agents in London, but he died before he could pass any of them on. He and the Earl had agreed a price, and he was going to bring them to Clarendon House, but he never came. The Earl asked me to find out why, and I learned in the Feathers that he was dead – although no one said it was the plague. I assumed enemy spies had killed him.’

Chaloner thought about the messages in his pocket. Could they be what DuPont had intended to peddle? They were not in Dutch – or even French – and Chaloner had already decided that they were too short to contain anything important. Perhaps DuPont’s death had prevented the Earl from wasting his money.

‘Did you know he was a felon?’ he asked.

Neve shook his head. ‘But it does not surprise me. He was an unsavoury fellow, which is why I was loath to become involved in the first place. Yet the war is balanced on a knife-edge, and I am not qualified to judge who will be useful and who will not. The only thing…’

‘Yes?’ asked Chaloner, when the upholder hesitated.

‘It is probably nothing, but when he was first trying to convince me that he was worth taking seriously, he said something about Onions at the Well.’

‘What does that mean?’

Neve shrugged. ‘He nodded and winked, but I did not like to express my ignorance by telling him that I had no idea what he was talking about. So I nodded and winked back.’

‘Did he mention a friend called Everard?’

‘Not to me, but we never spoke for long. To be frank, I found his company repellent.’

All of a sudden, he grabbed Chaloner’s arm and dragged him into a nearby alehouse, an insalubrious place that reeked of unwashed bodies and spilled drink. Chaloner could have resisted, but the upholder looked frightened, so he allowed himself to be bundled out of sight. Neve peered nervously out of the window.

‘Those three men,’ the upholder whispered. ‘They are Taylor’s villains.’

Chaloner glanced into the street, and saw the same trio who had terrorised Hannah. One was limping, presumably as a result of being stabbed during the subsequent skirmish. ‘You owe Taylor money, too?’

Neve nodded. ‘I had to borrow from Vyner to start my business, but he sold the debt to Taylor, and I do not want to be accosted in the street by those louts. Did you hear what happened to Sir George Carteret?’

Chaloner shook his head. ‘Who is he?’

‘The Treasurer of the Navy. They cornered him on the Strand and cut off all his jewelled buttons with a knife. They were pretty baubles, too – thirty of them, each with a diamond and rubies set in gold, valued at forty shillings each.’

‘His buttons were worth sixty pounds?’ asked Chaloner, stunned.

‘Yes, and they looked lovely on his coat. But I had better go. Some new paintings are arriving at Clarendon House today, and I should be on hand to receive them.’

Chaloner headed for the Feathers, supposing he had better do as he was told and enquire after the Earl’s curtains – and while he was there, he would ask about DuPont – but he was barely past the Little Conduit when he ran into trouble. Evan appeared next to him. He tried to move away, but liveried henchmen materialised on his other side and hemmed him in. He cursed the cold that numbed his wits, because he would not have been caught in such a position had he been himself.

‘I am glad we met,’ said Evan softly. ‘Father has decided that it is time you paid off some of the money you owe, and he wants to discuss it. I would have given you longer, personally, but he is in charge, so you had better come. Now, if you would not mind.’

Chaloner did mind, but suspected resistance would be used as an excuse for violence, and he did not feel up to a brawl. He nodded obligingly and began to walk at Evan’s side, alert for a chance to escape. Unfortunately, the guards were used to people objecting to where they were being taken, and were careful to ensure that no opportunity arose.

‘The tale of my father’s three-headed snake is all over the city today,’ said Evan smugly, as they went. ‘No one will believe you now if you say he was mistaken. Indeed, others claim to have seen it, too. It has become a fact, not a story.’

Chaloner could only suppose that either the ‘witnesses’ aimed to curry favour by pretending to have seen what had not been there, or Evan had paid them to lie, to protect his father’s credibility. He understood why: no one would want a man who suffered from delusions to be in charge of the city’s fiscal well-being.

They arrived at Goldsmiths’ Row, where Chaloner was escorted straight up the stairs to Taylor’s office. The banker had his rosewood box on his knees, and appeared to be crooning to it. The henchmen took up station by the door – not so close that they would be able to hear the discussion between banker and client, but certainly near enough to act should there be trouble. Joan was there, too, her ferret face proud and haughty above a new dress that was adorned with six diamond and ruby buttons. Chaloner wondered what had happened to the other twenty-four.

‘You again,’ she said coolly. ‘I hope you are not wasting your time with my first husband’s murder. It will never be solved, as I told you, and I would rather he was left in peace. Indeed, recalling that terrible night is distressing, so I shall not speak of it with you again.’

‘Quite right,’ nodded Evan. ‘If the Lord Chancellor wants to do something useful, tell him to pay his retainers’ debts. You, Neve, Kipps, Edgeman – you all owe us a fortune.’

‘My box,’ announced Taylor suddenly. ‘It contains all I need to defeat the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse – the ones in the Book of Revelation.’

‘
Four
Horsemen,’ corrected Chaloner, then staggered when Evan delivered a warning thump from behind. He whipped around fast, but thought better of hitting Evan back when he saw that one of the guards held a handgun, while the others fingered daggers and knives.

Taylor seemed unaware of the hostility that crackled in the air around him. ‘The Bible miscounted,’ he declared. ‘There are three. I saw them when you were last here, Chaloner.’

‘You saw a snake with three heads, Father,’ Evan reminded him. ‘As did many folk.’

Taylor scowled furiously. ‘How dare you contradict me! I saw the Three Horsemen: plague, death and war. There will be no famine, because we shall be able to eat the corpses of the—’

‘Chaloner has come to pay the money he owes,’ interrupted Joan briskly. ‘Where is the ledger? Or have you already calculated what you want from him?’

Taylor grinned, an abrupt change of mood that caused Evan to shoot Joan a worried glance. The banker coughed, took a sip from a bottle labelled
The Duchess of Kent’s Plague Water
, then looked up, his dark eyes blazing acquisitively.

‘I want three pounds a week,’ he said, and suddenly he did not seem mad at all. ‘Ten shillings every day. Except Sunday, when I shall be in church. I shall take the first instalment now. Do you have it, or shall we visit your house to see what might suffice in lieu of specie?’

Chaloner did have ten shillings, but parting with it would leave him virtually penniless, and he had just been told that he could not draw more pay until the Earl had his curtains. However, he was heavily outnumbered, and suspected they would have the money from him anyway, so he handed it over, deciding to keep his dignity intact. Taylor counted it greedily.

‘Thank you. Come again at the same time tomorrow.’

Evan opened the door to indicate that the interview was at an end, and Chaloner was about to step through it when someone else arrived. It was Silas, the youngest of the Taylor sons. He was a bluff, hearty fellow with sandy hair and a ready smile. Unlike Evan, he had considerable presence, and had been a popular commander during the wars, although Chaloner had liked him mostly because he was a talented composer and music had been an important diversion during a time when so much else had been bleak and harrowing. Silas stopped dead in his tracks, then his face broke into a wide grin of delight.

‘Tom Chaloner! What are you doing here?’

‘You know him?’ asked Evan suspiciously.

Silas flung a comradely arm around Chaloner’s shoulders. ‘We fought in several skirmishes together after our families enrolled us to fight for Cromwell.’ Then he pretended to look hangdog. ‘But I misspeak. No one admits these days that they hedged their bets during the wars by having a foot in both camps.’

Chaloner’s clan had been Parliamentarian through and through, and there had been no hedging of bets with them, but he made no effort to say so. Evan grimaced his annoyance at his brother’s remarks, while Taylor frowned, almost as if he was trying to recall who Silas was.

‘We never—’ began Evan irritably, but Silas interrupted.

‘It is
good
to see you, Tom!’ He turned to his father. ‘He and I shared many a bold adventure. We were ambushed once near Newbury, and I was knocked senseless and tossed in a raging river. He risked his life to fish me out.’

The ‘ambush’ had been a prank by a group of their friends, and Silas had been drunk. He had fallen in a brook, and Chaloner had indeed pulled him out, although the water had only been knee deep, and the only danger had been getting wet.

‘Then we owe you our gratitude,’ said Taylor, although Evan remained pointedly silent, and Chaloner sensed there was no love lost between the brothers. ‘Perhaps you will accept a biscuit as a reward. Joan bakes them for me every day, because they are my favourite.’

Silas’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment to learn that his life was only worth a pastry, while Evan grinned tauntingly. Chaloner took a cake from the proffered plate, and recognised it as one from a cook-shop on Fleet Street. Joan shot him a threatening glare, an expression that was quickly masked when Silas looked at her. She simpered, and Chaloner saw she was smitten with his old friend.

‘Randal is a lucky man,’ Silas told her gallantly. ‘A wife who is pretty, intelligent
and
can cook.’ Joan inclined her head graciously, but Silas had turned back to Chaloner before she could respond further. ‘Do you still play the viol?’