Plague

by C. C. Humphreys

  “Nay,” said Pitman, restraining in his turn. “There might be more gates to climb down there and I cannot do it with this.” He lifted the arm in the sling. “So leave me the front.”

  “Fair enough. But be wary, Pitman. According to Mrs. Chalker there may be two of them, and one at least the real Monstrous Cock. So I’ll only say this: if you get the chance, kill both the bastards straight.”

  “And you the same, Captain,” replied Pitman. “Go with God.”

  As Coke ran off down the passage, Pitman watched from the shadows. Then, at the first screech of the fiddle, the guards tapped out their pipes upon their boot heels, and stepped inside. They stayed close to the door, so when Pitman came up to it, he was able to see, through the expensive glass and between their shoulders, near everyone in the room.

  He shut his eyes, drew a deep breath, looked again. The room no longer appeared to him as a muddle of people, but of individuals. He could tell by the cut of their clothes who were the secretaries, who the noble advisers. Watch the servants enter from the opposite side of the hall pause and wipe their feet before crossing to the table to lay down jugs and platters. Note the fiddle player who’d begun to play, even see the annoyance of the other fiddler with his ear to his strings, still trying to tune. Finally see the one man moving away from the table toward a small door near the hall’s main one, as he turned to call something back.

  Recognize him. Not because he’d ever seen him before. But because he’d watched Charles I, the father of this man—now stepping through the door, now closing it behind him—have his head chopped off before the Banqueting House not two hundred paces from where he now stood.

  The Duke of York, with his father’s gait, his hair, his eyes, had just left the room—though not by the door. Pitman would have given short odds that he’d gone, in fact, into a privy closet.

  With the duke safe, Pitman scanned again the others in the hall, the servants especially. If you were going to assassinate a royal, surely posing as a scullion would be the best way to achieve it.

  He’d missed something. He looked back to the privy. Lamplight from above its door glimmered on some wetness on the floor before it. It was a boot print. Its toe pointed toward the door.

  As he burst into the hall, Pitman was quite sure that the boot print would be red with the clay of the path outside, and that it had been left by a man too hurried to wipe his feet.

  For a long moment, save for the fiddler still plying his horsehair, he was the only one moving. Indeed the first shout did not come until Pitman was halfway across the hall.

  “Stop there!” a guard screamed.

  But he couldn’t, and the one thing that slowed him was his need to use his injured arm to jerk open the privy door.

  “What this?” snarled the duke, his hands at his hips, pushing down his breeches.

  Candlelight reflected on rising steel just behind the duke’s head. “Aside!” Pitman shouted as he threw his cudgel.

  It missed the royal scalp by one of its hairs, striking the man behind, not on his head but on the hand that grasped a cleaver. Howling, he dropped it, raised a knife. Pitman, seizing the duke by his shoulder, hurled him from the privy. There he impeded, for just a moment, the guards for whom he was now screaming.

  Pitman lunged, grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted the knife down. The movement brought them close, their faces near touching. In that moment the cloud that had held him was swept away and he recognized the man who’d hit him in All Hallows.

  Then all was a jumble of limbs, and yells, and blows, as the guards fell on Pitman and dragged him from the closet. The wrenching pulled away Pitman’s hand; he saw the blade raised once more. “Protect the duke!” he cried, reaching again to block the strike down with his forearm. Then a blow struck hard across his head. He fell. Yet even as he did, and just before all went as dark as Limbo, he glimpsed the killer leap the struggling mass of bodies and run from the hall.

  —

  Coke was glad that Pitman had not come along the river path. The wounded bird would not have been able to handle the gates and walls Coke had been obliged to scramble over. He was less glad that he had, for he was filthy now, his hands scraped and bleeding. He had found the river and been forced east along it. Now he’d come to what he assumed were the palace water stairs, with several skiffs and one larger, finer wherry tied up at them. It had all taken too much time. But at least he’d found a passage heading back to the hall. Shouts had come faintly over the walls as Coke approached its entrance, and the music of fiddles had suddenly ceased.

  “Now, then,” he said, and had taken a step along the path, when a noise behind him had him wheeling, knife in hand. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  “M-me, Cap’n,” said Dickon, rising from the water like a wraith. Or so it seemed to Coke at first, till he drew closer and saw the boy was standing in a skiff.

  “Jesu mercy, boy, but you frighted me. How come you there?” Dickon put one foot on the dock. His master’s sword was in his hand, still sheathed. “You told me to find an entrance from the r-riverbank, so I did.”

  “Good. Stay here. I go in search of Pitman.”

  “I go too.”

  “I need you here. This boat is our escape, you see?” The boy looked at him suspiciously, so Coke added, “It is like when we are about our business. I hold the gun—you keep the horses, yes?”

  “Awright, Cap’n,” he said. He loosed the rope. “I keep the horses.”

  “Good lad.” Coke turned, then remembered and turned back. “Dickon, if I do not return by the next bell—” He broke off, as Dickon started. Both had heard the same noise: someone was approaching fast toward them along the walled passage from the palace. “Be still,” the captain hissed, and placed himself on guard, dagger out before him.

  The man who burst out of the passage’s entrance didn’t look like a lord. He had no wig but a stubble of greying hair; no fine clothes but a stained butcher’s apron. Garnthorpe’s accomplice, then; the second man Mrs. Chalker had talked of.

  “Hold there!” Coke cried. “Stand and deliver yourself to me.”

  The man stopped, blinked. Then with a roar ran at Coke.

  The captain wished he had his sword, still in Dickon’s hand in the boat. But he had his dagger, and God forgive him, he’d killed with it before. He saw a dagger also in the other’s hand, his left, and in an overhand grip. So as the man came, his blade striking down, Coke stepped hard in, throwing up his own left arm, catching the blow forearm to forearm before it could descend, twisting his fingers to clamp around the wrist, pulling the body down, then punching with his dagger at the man’s exposed side.

  But his attacker had followed the pull, so the blade, instead of driving full into him, slipped along his leather apron. Continuing his half fall, the man used his weight to jerk himself free.

  Coke kicked, missing the groin, the toe of his boot driving instead into the thigh. The man howled, slashed his knife before him, near enough to force Coke to leap back. Immediately the captain lunged again. His opponent brought his dagger hard across to parry the thrust, steel ringing.

  Now, thought Coke, withdrawing his feint, dropping lower, thrusting for the gap between the front of the apron and its back. The blade entered his opponent’s side … but only a half finger deep, for the captain’s rear foot had slipped on the dock’s rainslick wood, shortening his lunge. Still, the man cried out, and staggered toward the water.

  Lights glimmered along the path, voices there calling the hunt. “No!” the man roared, and ran down the jetty to where Dickon in the skiff now raised, too late, the sword he’d partly unsheathed. Coke, following fast, was not there in time to prevent the man snatching the weapon, stepping behind the boy into the boat, pressing the half-drawn blade to his throat.

  “No closer,” he called, “or he dies.”

  Dickon dropped the rope. They started drifting into the current. The skiff was yet a short leap away that Coke could have made and almost did—but for the line
of blood that now appeared at his ward’s throat. Then the moment was gone, the boat too far, and the man hurled both sword and Dickon into the water. Coke threw his knife; it missed, though not by much. But skiff and man were gone, taken by the swift current, blended into darkness.

  Dickon clung to another boat. Untying it, Coke pushed it out as he leaped in, and managed to haul up the boy without capsizing them. Grabbing the oars, he pulled hard, just as the royal guards ran shouting from the passage.

  The dizziness had increased from the time he landed at Essex House Stairs to his dropping off at Billingsgate. A fast tide had taken him and for most of the way he only had to steer, which was as well, with one hand broken. But he’d been clearer in his mind when he was alone so it was only after he’d persuaded the wherryman—with a gold guinea, twenty times the usual fare—to shoot the race under London Bridge by moonlight and he had leaned back into the prow of the vessel that his mind clouded, and he’d dozed. The wherryman had woken him when they ground against the fish market’s dock. He limped along Thames Street, up Idle Lane, into St. Dunstan’s Churchyard. He could see the house. Yet here, so close to his desire, he lurched off the path. He needed to gather himself before he saw her, before his dreams were realized.

  Amid the muddle of gravestones, there was one by the path he would come to sometimes, to think, to remember, to be inspired. He found it now, sank before it. Flowers lay strewn upon it, recent but past their prime. Though the moon was bright, he still had to blink several times before he could read the inscription. He knew it by heart, of course. He said it now, for it always renewed him:

  Here lies Abel Strong. Butcher of this parish. From his comrades in the regiment and his brother Saints in Christ. “For the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

  He touched the stone. Moss had grown in the letters. Damn Maggs, he thought. Did I not order him to clean this?

  Garnthorpe rose as the church bells tolled. Renewed. Changed. He saw the house ahead. Within it, his bride awaited him.

  Sarah sat in the chair of the bedchamber, gazing at the swaddled bundle in her arms. He had slept well, John Edward Rombaud Absolute, as his mother had named him just before she died. For the boy’s father and grandfather, Lucy had whispered, and for another ancestor too. Now he stirred, his dark eyes blinking; perhaps the bells of St. Dunstan’s tolling midnight had awoken him. Soon he would soon be hungry. Then what would she do?

  She tried a lullaby: “ ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly, lavender’s green …’ ”

  Her song stilled the earl’s son for a while but did not hold him long past its ending. When he cried, she rose and set him upon the bed. He protested, but she only left him long enough to lower her blouse and take him to her breast.

  “There, there,” she said, sitting again. Her tears flowed then, even if her milk could not.

  Then she heard it—knocking on the front door, muffled shouting; finally, the turning of a lock.

  She had so given up the hope of it that her tiredness almost made her forget what she’d prepared. She rose, removing the boy from her breast, lifting him to her shoulder, patting his back until he belched. Then she went to the privy closet, a door behind and to the side of the bed. The breast, even without milk, had lulled him. His eyes fluttered and closed as she laid him in a basin she had lined with ripped blankets and a pillow.

  “Sleep, child,” she whispered. “Sleep awhile.”

  As she tucked herself into her blouse, she heard the front door open.

  Garnthorpe put a hand to the sticky wetness at his side and then wiped his fingers on the door before knocking loud. But Maggs did not respond to that, nor to his shouts. Fortunately he had a key, though at first it did not want to fit. When at last it did, he pushed open the door. “Maggs!” he called, but received no reply.

  The door to the parlour was ajar, a lantern burning within. “Sarah,” he said, moving toward the room, “where are my servants? Have they negl—”

  He stopped on the threshold. At first he thought no one was in the room, for the two chairs were empty. Until he glanced down and saw the bare feet on a mattress on the floor. There was something about the colour of them that he did not like.

  “Sarah?”

  He entered the room, bent to the mattress. Yet it was not Mrs. Chalker upon it but Mrs. Absolute, the harlot he’d lured back from the country to influence her friend. He could tell that she would influence no more, for clearly she was dead. A closer glance told him what had killed her.

  His eyes filmed as he moved back to lean against the wall. Someone else was meant to die this day. Someone who was meant to hold a jewel in their mouth.

  “The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald.”

  He had an emerald in his pocket. He pulled it out. Candle flame moved in its facets, making him dizzy again.

  Was it for her mouth? This earl’s whore?

  Death stank. He shut the door on it. “Sarah?” he cried.

  Her voice came softly from above. “Up here.”

  Garnthorpe placed a foot upon the stair.

  Sarah heard each footfall. She’d moved the chair to face the door, four steps away. She sat in it now.

  She was surprised at him, his coarse clothes, the stained apron. No plain wig on his head, just grey stubble. “You bleed, Roland,” she said.

  Garnthorpe paused in the doorway. He touched his hand to his side, brought it away. “I am sorry for the state of my clothes, Sarah. Sorry too that I have not had the opportunity to have the banns read a second time. But as you said, love does not need to wait. And if I could not bring you a ring as my pledge, still I have brought you … this.”

  He held out his swollen right hand. The fingers would not open. “Come closer,” she said. “I also have something for you.”

  What gift could she give him? Only her love, promised in that first time they’d looked into each other’s eyes, in her arms lifting to him now. He took a step into the room.

  She was so tired. So she used both hands to raise the pistol Maggs had forgotten when he fled.

  The explosion was loud and her first thought, as the man was lifted from his feet and thrown out of the room to crash against the banister, was that the noise would wake John Edward. But the babe did not cry out, not yet anyway.

  Garnthorpe had his legs before him, his back against the railing, his eyes open. As she drew nearer, he gazed up at her over the ruin of his chest. She had loaded with two balls, as her husband had once taught her to do, since she knew she would not need much range.

  His eyes were as startled as a baby’s. He was trying to speak. “What is it?” she said. “What?”

  He stretched out an arm. His swollen fingers unfurled. On the palm of his hand was an emerald.

  She knelt, took it. “I thank you, my lord. But I told you once before, I cannot accept jewels from you. So you keep it. Keep it for John Chalker.” She pushed the stone into his mouth. “Choke on that.”

  He was blown; he had to admit it. This night’s hot actions at Whitehall had taken what remained of his jail-diminished strength. If not for Dickon urging him on, he might have curled up on some comfortable cobbles and given up.

  Yet even as he thought it, Coke knew it to be untrue. There could be no rest until Mrs. Chalker was free. Afterwards … Well, he suspected that was still a dream: the real murderer remained at large, a price still lay on the Monstrous Cock’s head and God only knew what had happened to Pitman.

  Their quarry had escaped them. Coke had followed him close, but the man had hired a wherryman at Essex House Stairs and soon put distance between them. The captain knew he was not oarsman enough to shoot the race under London Bridge even when rested. They’d docked, headed to the streets. A hackney carriage heading to his home stable near the Dyers Hall had taken them most of the way for the last shilling he possessed but would take them no farther without more coin. Hence this stumbling r
un along Thames Street. He could only thank providence for Dickon’s watch this past week. The boy knew exactly where he was going and only paused to let his captain catch up at every corner.

  Finally they were in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, slipping on cobbles made slick by sudden summer rain. “Close, lad?” inquired Coke, pausing to lean on a gravestone, flowers scattered before it.

  “C-close,” replied the boy, gesturing him impatiently on.

  When they were before the house, tiredness loosed its hold. The front door was open, and through it came a long, shrill wail. Drawing his sword, the captain ran in, Dickon a step behind. Off the hall all the doors were shut. The strange cry came again, from up the stairs. He climbed them two at a time, Dickon at his heels.

  A man was sitting on the landing, his back against the railing. Coke thrust his sword before him—but he had no need of it. For the man he’d stabbed and then pursued on the Thames was dead. The glaze of his open eyes, the hole torn in his chest, showed that.

  The cry that had drawn him had ceased as he’d mounted the stairs. He listened for it and heard instead a gurgling. It came from the room the dead man faced. The door was half closed. Bidding Dickon to silence with a gesture, he used his sword to push open the door, and peered in.

  He knew that when exhausted on battlefields, sea voyages, in siege works, he was prone to see things, strange things, things that were not necessarily there. So it took a moment to believe the sight before him: Mrs. Chalker, asleep on the end of a ravaged bed, a baby near a single exposed breast. And it was the baby who looked at Coke now, at Dickon behind him, then let out another cry.

  Coke was so shocked that he did not move.