Plague

by C. C. Humphreys

  No. he would live off air for now, and when he could bear his thirst and hunger no longer, or when sleep threatened to take him and so rip the nails through his ears, only then would he awake.

  “ ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’ ”

  No! That was not the missing verse. That was not even the right psalm. And he had roared it. His two fellows in the stocks started to shout. Those manacled on the ground nearby took up the cry. Some prayed. Some cursed. Through one blood-clotted eyelid, he saw the guards turn to look.

  Lower the head, Pitman.

  Then he heard a different sound. Not the guards kicking and cursing their way toward him, but the sound of the gate opening. Pitman risked a glance. The guards had turned back, part of a crowd now moving toward the gate, prisoners and warders, the latter beating back the former; clearing the way so that the visitors could enter. Each inhabitant of Newgate hoped for something from those who came, the family members or friends who could bring food, or coin to buy a little better treatment.

  Pitman knew he should not hope. Yet he did. Perhaps his house had been shut up in error. Perhaps Bettina was among those entering now, lining up to pass the expectant guards. She would give them the bribe they required, suffer their pats and pinches. She would walk across the yard, carrying her husband a bottle of ale, an apple, a chunk of cheese.

  He gazed, yearning. But only a small group of men was there. No Bettina. No succour.

  He was about to lower his head to the chin point again, to close his eyes, to try to recall the verse of the psalm he’d meant to recite, when something about one of the visitors made him look harder. The man was taller than most there; his clothes were less shabby. There was colour too, in the plume on his hat, its vivid green almost painful in a world so grey-brown and drab. But it was the way he held himself, near all the weight on his back leg, like a swordsman, that made Pitman realize it was him.

  “Captain Cock,” he said, and despite everything, smiled.

  “You, sir! Do you come to visit a prisoner?”

  The head guard, whose girth seemed all the vaster in contrast to the shrivelled wretches still pressing around, was beckoning Coke closer.

  “I do.”

  “Name?”

  “My name is Robert Bartholomew.”

  “The prisoner’s, sir. I care not a jot for your name.”

  “Pitman.”

  “Given name?”

  “I never knew it. He goes only by Pitman.”

  The jailer spat on the cobbles beside him. “Jesu, man! There are four thousand here and much coming and going.” He jerked his chin at the dead cart behind Coke. “Very well. Describe him. Begin with his crime.”

  Yet before Coke could start, another guard stepped close and whispered in the jailer’s ear. He listened, then turned back to Coke. “It appears that we do know him. A notorious murderer. We can take you to him directly. But first you should consider this.” He cleared his throat. “This Pitman was brought in by the All Hallows watch with nothing. So clear was his crime that he would have been sent to hang straightaway had the courts not suspended that very day. No one has been to visit, so he has been living on our charity. In plain words, sir, he has cost us. Do you wish to help your friend?”

  “I do. I have brought him food.”

  Coke put the basket on the table. Half the contents disappeared immediately into a box behind the jailer. Coke saw three of his six apples taken, one of the ham hocks, one of the two loaves. The man lifted a bottle. “What’s this?”

  “Whisky. I was sure you’d have been kind to him, hence a gift?”

  The man grunted. “I’d have to confiscate it anyway. No liquor allowed in here but what we sell. So I’ll keep that.” He tucked it behind him. “Now, have you any coin? He’s had no bedding, just straw to sleep on. For a crown …”

  The rest of the transaction went swiftly. Coke had coins secreted about his person, and only handed over all that remained in the purse: three florins. The man grunted but seemed satisfied enough. “Your sword, sir,” he said. As Coke unbuckled and passed it across, he continued, “Any other weapons?”

  “None,” he replied, feeling the small dagger pressed against his spine.

  “Well, we have to believe a gentleman, don’t we?” He swept his hand in a gesture of welcome. “Enter, sir.”

  Coke took a step. “Pardon me, but where will I find him?”

  “In the centre of the yard.”

  “Near the stocks, then?”

  “Very near them indeed.” The man nodded, his face impassive. “I am sure he will be all ears.”

  Laughter exploded from those standing by. Coke frowned, moved off. There was no obvious path to the stocks, so he threaded his way through the sprawled prisoners, most lying with their tongues out, panting like dogs in the sun. Many sat up to beseech him; with several he had to wrench his cloak from their grasps. One of the guards was trailing him, still chuckling. When Coke reached the stocks, he placed one foot upon its platform and searched about him. “I do not see him,” he said to the guard.

  “Then you are blind,” was the reply.

  Coke searched again, his gaze passing over the three unfortunates actually in the stocks, two with their arms just fastened in the holes, the worst off with his ears nailed to the board as well.

  Then Coke gasped. He had not recognized him because Pitman was so changed. It wasn’t just the rags. The vast, neat beard was gone, but some rough growth hung from the chin, merging with chest hair that glistened with blood. There was hair too, on a head that before had been shaved as bald as a Pell Mell ball. Mostly, though, the sheer diminishment of the man shocked. A giant did not hang there. A lanky scarecrow did.

  “Pitman,” Coke called out. The other man’s head lifted slowly. Coke turned back to the guard. “May I free him?”

  The guard looked to the gatehouse. The officer who’d examined Coke there was watching. He nodded. The guard turned back. “You may. But it’ll cost ya.”

  Coke did not want to delve into his clothes, revealing that he had more concealed coins, so he pulled his timepiece from his doublet pocket. “Will this do?” The man sniffed but accepted it. “Will you now free him?” Coke asked.

  “For a poxy clock?” he said, “Nah. But you can.” He threw down some pliers and walked away.

  Coke snatched up the tool. He examined the ruin of flesh before him.

  Pitman opened one eye. “Welcome to hell, Captain Coke.”

  “Easy, my friend,” he said, and put the pincers over the nail head.

  He had never done this before. A gentle wiggling caused Pitman to moan. Cursing, Coke got a good grip of metal on metal, placed his other hand on the board of the stocks and wrenched.

  Pitman gave a great cry, his head flopping over to the still-pinned side. Coke stepped across, placed, jerked. The other nail came free. Pitman sagged, held up now only by his wrists in the stocks’ holes. Swiftly Coke moved around, pulled the pin out, threw up the bar and was around in time to catch Pitman just before he fell. “Easy,” Coke said, lowering him till the big man could put his back against the post. Then Coke looked about. There was a well nearby. He went to it, picked up a bucket on a rope. A different guard there looked to the officer at the gate. Another nod. Coke lowered the bucket, pulled it back up; detached it and carried it over to the stocks. There was so much blood that he did not know where to begin.

  Pitman did. He took the bucket, raised it to his mouth, drank most of it off, then lowered it to peer over its rim at Coke. “What news?” he rasped. Then he saw the basket Coke had set down. His eyes went wide and he reached.

  Coke picked up the basket in one hand and helped Pitman rise with the other. “Here, man. Let us get you out of the sun.”

  The two of them made a halting progress to some shade. The yard, which had gone near silent while Coke freed his friend, now burst into noise again, with cries, with pleadings, with laughter
and drunken song from the prison tavern they collapsed before. Someone within it was tuning a fiddle.

  Pitman ate two of the small, bitter apples whole, stem, core and all, and tucked the third apple within his rags. He chewed every scrap of meat from the ham hock; though the bone, thrown aside, was still fought over by three men and sucked hard by the victor. The bread was swallowed in four bites, and only when it was gone and the empty basket shown to those hovering near did the crowd give back.

  “What news?” Pitman asked again.

  Coke kept his recounting short. There was little he could do but tell the truth, certain that Pitman would recognize a comforting lie. He was silent until the tale turned to his house and Coke’s meeting with Bettina.

  “My Sweet Imogen? And the babe Jeremiah?”

  “Aye. I am so sorry for it.”

  A tear ran down the grimed face. “And Josiah?”

  “Lives. Sick, but lives. That is all I know.”

  “I see.” Pitman went silent then, and Coke took the chance to pull out his mouchoir, dip it in the bucket, and try to dab the worst of the blood from the torn ears. Pitman ignored him, until he suddenly gripped Coke’s wrist. “I also have news for you. I have seen the face of the devil.”

  “Pitman,” Coke replied, “how could you not, when you live in hell?”

  “No, Captain. It is why I am here.” He told the story of the church, of Tobias Sym and of glimpsing the face of the man who’d struck him before oblivion came.

  “Did you know him?” Coke asked.

  “I …” Pitman touched the side of his head. “I cannot remember. It was but a glance before he hit me and I had never, never been hit that hard before.” He rubbed his temple. “That blow has blurred everything. But this I can say. I saw blood.”

  “On the victim?”

  “No. On the man who hit me. An apron covered in it. Like a butcher’s.”

  “You are certain?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you are certain it was our killer and not another?”

  “Aye.” He jerked his head to the jailers at the gate. “They have delighted in recounting the tale. The butcher of Finchley and St. Giles, caught at last. The jewel found in this victim’s mouth as in the others. I am famous here. It is why I receive special favours.” He touched an ear. “His face … I think I do know him. But I cannot remember.” He groaned. “I cannot.”

  Coke put his hand over Pitman’s. “Easy, my friend. We old soldiers, there are things we forget.”

  “I will remember. I will!” He swallowed. “Now, tell me of Mrs. Chalker.”

  Coke told of their journey to Cornwall, of leaving Lucy, the long walk back—and of the note from Rochester, the rendezvous that had been arranged—which he must depart for shortly. At this Pitman frowned. “The Earl of Rochester has not been freed from the Tower.”

  “He has. The news cannot have reached here yet.”

  “I tell you, man, we would have been the first to hear of such a thing. There is a fellowship of jails, where every common villain thinks himself the kin of any nobleman because both view the world through bars. Word would have come at the freeing of one so famed as John Wilmot.”

  “Then who sent the—?” Coke flushed cold, stood. “I must go.”

  “Go, then.”

  The captain looked down. Pitman was in a sorry state: starved, his body a mass of bruises, cuts and flea bites, his ears torn. He had just been told of two dead children, another sick, a family in peril. He was about to be left hopeless. In hell.

  The bell of St. Sepulchre’s struck the hour. Three of the clock. Coke had a little time. “Here,” he said, crouching. “You might find a use for this.” Keeping his movements small, he slipped the dagger from its spine sheath, slid it over. “And these—” he dug out the coins from all the little pockets Sarah had sewn for him “—might keep you for a while, until we find a way to free you.”

  “Free me? If I last another week, it will be a miracle.” He coughed. “And if that miracle happened, what then? I would survive long enough only for the courts to sit again, before I’ll be doing the hemp jig on the Tyburn tree.”

  Coke could not think of a reply. Then in the tavern at their backs, one song ended and another began, a famous ballad. About a highwayman. “Well, since we are speaking of jigs and since they are now playing ‘Whisky in the Jar,’ shall I buy us one with the last coin I possess?”

  Pitman considered for a moment. “When I made my wedding vow, I swore to leave off both cursing and spirituous liquors.” He spat phlegm and blood. “But fuck, man, a whisky can’t hurt me.”

  “I’ll fetch them, then.”

  As the captain entered the tavern, the song reached its chorus. To distract his mind, he joined in under his breath:

  Musha rin du-rum do du-rum da, Whack for my daddy-o, Whack for my daddy-o, there’s whisky in the jar.

  The swaying, singing crowd was mainly men, a few women. It was even hotter within the room than the yard, the stench different, that sweet liquor note to it equally foul. Coke, who’d raised his scarf on entering, now dropped it to speak. “Two whiskies,” he said, handing over his coin to the large man sweating hard on the other side of the trestle, who poured tots into two chipped mugs and swept the shilling into a tankard.

  “No change?” Coke asked, but the man just laughed and went to serve someone else.

  Coke sniffed. What was within the vessels made his eyes water. Christ, he thought, I’d scarce clean my sword with it.

  The song, so popular the first time, had immediately been struck up again, from his favourite part—the bold highwayman betrayed by his lover. The fiddler’s not bad, he thought, and looked into the man’s face. Knew him, in the instant that the fiddler looked into his, and knew him too.

  Coke had dropped the mugs and was already at the door, when the fiddle screeched a foul note and stopped. “Well, look there,” the fiddler cried, “and if it isn’t my old comrade Captain Cock.”

  Coke was out of the tavern, walking swiftly for the main gate, trying not to run. But he was never going to beat that Irish voice. “Remember me, guards, and treat me special,” shouted Maclean from the doorway, “for there’s thirty guineas on that thoroughbred’s head and I wants me share!”

  Twenty paces to go, and Coke thought he might make it, until the two guards blocked his path. He was moving fast though, and they were uncertain, so he ducked under the one’s spread arms and hit the other with the heel of his hand under his chin. Ten paces now to the gates, and he could see the cobbles of Giltspur Street beyond. But what he didn’t see was the flung cudgel, though he felt it strike him behind his right ear. Somehow he kept going, though his legs were not working so well, indeed one knee dipped, touched the ground. He forced himself up, managed one more step, when someone landed on his back. Then he was looking closely at a cracked paving stone, with the man on him shouting, as if from far away, “Got ’im!”

  Sarah, he thought. Must warn her about—

  The darkness took him, and the only words left were from the chorus. He didn’t like them so well now:

  Devil take the women for they never can be aisey …

  27

  GILDED CAGE

  Lord Garnthorpe stood before the mirror in his dressing chamber at St. James’s, turning about. Dissatisfied. Though he had curbed his tailor’s worst excesses, was even the little he’d retained not too much? Sarah loved him as he was: plain, honest and only as handsome as God had made him. So there must be no artificiality in their exchanges. Nothing false. She’d known that before he had. It was the reason she had so demurely declined his offering of the sapphire.

  A knock. “What?” he snapped.

  “A visitor, my lord,” Maggs called.

  “Of what estate?”

  “He would not give his name. He’s plainly dressed. Not a nobleman.”

  Garnthorpe snorted. Maggs had all the snobbery of a manservant. Was he not noble and yet as plain as any other man? Then a thought: “Wha
t is the colour of his hair?”

  “Such as there is, my lord, is fair.”

  Garnthorpe turned from the mirror. “Does he have a scar across his nose?”

  “He does.”

  He knew who waited below. He had been neglectful of the man in the past week. Of all his brothers. And in neglecting them, he’d also neglected God.

  “Ask him to wait in the parlour. Give him what he wants to drink. Inform him that I will be down shortly.”

  “My lord.”

  He considered himself again in the mirror. If the woman who loved him wanted him plain, how much more so the old comrade, his fellow Saint? He began to strip off the petticoat breeches.

  “Brother S.,” Lord Garnthorpe said as he entered a few minutes later, “did my servant not provide you with something to drink?”

  The straw-haired man shook his head. “I want only this: to speak with you, on a matter of great urgency.” He looked around the room. “It is richly furnished, your house.”

  The words had not been uttered as a compliment. “My father’s house. I have not enriched it since he died. You know I care nothing for exterior show.” He gestured to his sober clothing to emphasize the point.