She stood up stiffly from the bed she was making, curtseying awkwardly, and at a gesture from the steward the two of them fled. It was the last room to be visited, reached from a narrow flight of stairs into the jetty. A sweet smell of marjoram had been released from the sheets the maids had put on the bed. By this time Scogman was losing faith in the whole enterprise.
‘House is as empty as my stomach, sir,’ he said hopefully.
With simulated patience, the steward held up a candle so I could peer under the bed. There was nothing but a chamber pot. I took the candle from him and held it up. Against the wall was a chest of drawers, perhaps large enough for a man to crouch behind. The floor was so uneven here that I stumbled, catching the lid of the chest to save myself, wincing as hot wax dribbled over my hand. The chest contained nothing more than women’s clothes, folded among layers of rose petals. Outside, the clank of a pail rang through the still air. The jetty overlooked the backyard of the coffee house. The owner was trudging back inside. A dark smear stained the snow where he had tipped away grounds.
As I gave the candle back to the steward, it caught a darker patch on the wall. ‘What picture was there?’
The steward barely concealed a yawn. ‘Another of the master’s fleet, sir. Damp. The wall needs replastering.’
Scogman said nothing as he unhitched the horses, but his whispering to the horses suggested scepticism. ‘I saw Challoner,’ I snapped, sucking at my burned hand. ‘I wasn’t imagining things.’
Before Scogman could reply there was the sound of an argument outside the coffee house. The old merchant and his son were leaving. The merchant broke away from him, crying that he would salute old comrades in arms, slid on a patch of ice and was caught by his son, only to break away again, making a precarious passage towards us, holding out his stick.
‘Trail your pike … Palm … Charge your pike!’
‘Lord have mercy,’ Scogman said. ‘Drunk on coffee.’
The man’s son began walking away. ‘Come on, Father. Leave it. You’ll only have another fall.’
The merchant was certainly drunk on something, perhaps memories of the war; if so they must be false memories, for he appeared far too old to fight. ‘Know you,’ he said, poking his wavering stick at my chest. ‘Fought with you. Turnham Green.’
Turnham Green? I shook my head. I had not been there and in any case the Royalists had never got that near London. The son had turned, with the resigned, hopelessly confused look of a man who had to both obey his father and deal with the elderly child he had become. ‘Your son is waiting.’ I took him by the arm to guide him to his son, but he slipped and fell against me.
‘All Hallows, Farringdon,’ he said.
‘Good Lord,’ I said. ‘The All Hallows Trained Band.’
‘The very same.’
Now I remembered. Just before the war there was no army for Parliament. The City trained its own militia, mainly apprentices. The merchant must have been at least fifty. There was a battle of Turnham Green, or rather a skirmish. Prince Rupert had got as far as Brentford. The sacking of it so enraged the City it rose up, old as well as young, often with no more than sticks such as the old merchant was brandishing, but their numbers blackened the common that November day and Rupert retreated. The Royalists never got near London again.
‘You had red hair. Carrot red.’
‘So I did.’
Suddenly he gripped me tightly by the shoulder band of my belt. He stank of coffee and what remained of his teeth were stained with it. I thought he had had some kind of a fit, but his voice suddenly became sharp and urgent as he whispered in my ear. ‘The young man you’re looking for was in there tonight. Mr Purge.’
‘Mr Purge?’
‘That’s what we call him. Spends more time in the privy than drinking coffee. You might find him still on the pot. I ain’t seen him leave.’
‘Come on, Father.’ The young man gripped the merchant’s arm and the old merchant did a capricious little slide across the snow, dropping his stick. ‘Sorry about that,’ the young man said. ‘He thinks he knows everyone.’ They were still arguing as they made their wavy journey down the street. The son gripped him by the arm, refusing to give his father back his stick, rather as he might keep a toy when a child has thrown it once too often.
‘The Good Old Cause!’ the old man cried, twisting a bent head and raising a crooked arm.
‘The Good Old Cause!’ I returned, raising my sword.
17
The coffee shop was locked, but the gate at the side leading to the yard at the back was open. The owner was filling a coal scuttle to damp down the fire for the night.
‘I have urgent need of the privy,’ I said.
He lifted the coal scuttle, blocking the way, and replied that I should use the street like everybody else. Scogman professed shock and said as a freeman of the City he would not soil his own streets. The owner looked at him sourly, eyed his sword, stood to one side and said that as a freeman he was welcome to the experience.
I could smell what he meant several feet from it. They talked in the Rota Club endlessly about great political issues of religion and speech but ultimately the fate of a government, whether it was ruled by a Crown or Parliament, turned on the price of bread and the state of the privies. The City was only threatening a tax strike, but scavengers had not been paid and in some parishes shit wagons had not rolled for several weeks. When I pushed open the rotting, creaking door the stench was overwhelming, even for London. The hole was filthy and encrusted. The door swung to and I was in darkness. I slipped on a slimy patch and retched, kicking the door back open. A weak patch of moonlight revealed someone had a bad case of worms.
It was capacious, for a privy. Driven into the back wall was a nail, from which hung torn scraps of old shipping reports. A crumpled used one stuck to the toe of my boot. I kicked at the wall to release it. There was a hollow sound. I rapped round it.
‘Scogman.’
‘After you, sir.’
When I began kicking at the wall he entered, clasping a handkerchief over his nose. The keyhole had been crudely concealed with a plaster-coloured piece of paper, but nothing more was needed for no one in his senses would visit that place for longer than strictly necessary.
We kicked in turn. The lock was new but the wood, like most in that rambling Elizabethan house, was rotten and soon splintered. There was a short passage, at the end of which was a steep winding flight of stairs. At that point what little light there was ended. I swore as my head hit the ceiling. Plaster pattered round us. I felt my way as the stairway curved. Backs bent, we inched our way upwards, the sewer-stink of the privy giving way to the damp smell of mildew and decay. Abruptly we were in a wider space. Groping around in the blackness there was what felt like a truckle bed. I knocked something over.
Scogman seemed able to see like a cat in the dark. ‘A candlestick,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing to light it.’
I gripped his arm at the sound of voices and footsteps on a stair, followed by a door closing.
‘I know where we are, sir,’ Scogman said.
By this time I was shivering cold, my boots smelt vile and I feared another dead end. Luke was not here, if he had ever been. ‘How can you possibly know that?’ I said, with great irritation.
‘There was a time when my neck depended on it. We have gone thirty-five steps and in a house built in Elizabeth’s time that’s about four flights. We started west but twisted back a half circle. I reckon we are in that jetty above the shop and … ah, yes. Look up, sir.’
I saw nothing, but he took my hand and drew my fingers over an uneven line in what I took to be the ceiling above us. We pushed upwards but the ceiling was as solid as a rock.
He bent his neck, flexed his shoulders, and while I pushed he heaved. A chink of light appeared at the edges of a trapdoor, illuminating his bulging neck and the throbbing pulse in his forehead. There was a small sliding noise above us, then Scogman’s legs started to buckle. Frantically, I got b
oth hands on it and heaved. There was a crash which seemed to bring the whole crumbling house down and the trapdoor flew backwards, releasing a cloud of dust. Somewhere there was a scream, then silence.
Scogman coughed as the motes of dust eddied round him. ‘Well done, sir. You’ll be a prig yet.’ He heaved himself into the room above and pulled me after him. We were, as he had predicted, in the room above the coffee house. The thin moonlight shone on top of the oak chest we had dislodged. The rest of the house was dark, apart from a wavering glimmer of light at the top of yet another twisting staircase which led to the attic. The skivvy, a shred of a girl, screamed in terror and hid in the maid’s arms, convinced we were evil spirits.
Scogman, whose voice was never gentler than when he talked to a woman, particularly as pretty as the girl was, said if she was not convinced they were flesh, at least she could give them credit for having blood. He tapped the stained bandage on his head and grinned. It was the grin more than the bandage that reassured her and, while the maid remained mute, the girl, whose name was Amy, told us that the steward had gone. They had been warned never to go into that room and the rooms near it. Well, they didn’t need no warning, it was a blessing, weren’t it, not to clean anything in this rambling old tub of a place. By this time she had gone from childlike terror to a pert, knowing cockiness.
That morning, the whole house had been turned upside down.
‘What time was this?’ I asked.
She told me she thought it was a hundred.
‘A hundred?’
She marked the hours by the number of flights she climbed, by which method she was hoping some day to learn her numbers table. By this process she hazarded it to be ten of the morning. A cart came and took away books and pictures. What they were she did not know. They were told to clean the forbidden part of the house. They were terrified but forced to do it. Worst thing was cleaning the floors, muddy as a street. And shifting that heavy chest. Amy lit us both candles and followed us, at a distance, terror returning as abruptly as it had gone as she gaped from the corridor towards the open trapdoor.
A cold draught almost blew out our candles. Shielding them, we squeezed down into a small chamber which had the musty smell of the river. As well as the truckle bed there was a small wickerwork chair. Propped up against it was a picture which had presumably come from the wall of the room above. It was of Charles I portrayed as a Christian martyr. A beam from the clouds above him carried the words Clarior e tenebris: brighter through the darkness. The plaster wall behind the bed was scrawled with names and dates, going back to Elizabeth’s time. Some of the names ended with the initials SJ.
‘What is it?’ Amy peered down at us, curiosity overcoming fear.
‘A priest’s hole,’ I said. ‘SJ is the Society of Jesus. Catholics used to hide in here.’
She gave a little scream, and vanished. For her, Catholics and evil spirits were one and the same. Up and down the country, from the time when Elizabeth persecuted the Catholics, there was a network of such cramped hiding places, by which priests could administer Mass throughout the land. This, however, had served a more recent political purpose. Stacked at the foot of the bed were crates of a book, Eikon Basilike or Royal Portrait, which claimed to be Charles’s diary in the months before his execution. I leafed through a copy. If I had done anything for Parliament, it was to help start the war of words, which, with pamphlets, had opened the eyes and ears of the common people about how they were ruled, or more often misruled. The Royalists had learned late, but they had surpassed us. This was their masterpiece. I doubt Charles had written a word of it. It portrayed him as a forthright King, appointed by God, who confessed his weaknesses in striving to do his best for his people, and accepted his fate, as Jesus accepted the cross. Milton produced a lofty argument rebutting it, but it was the King’s diary that people read. What they wanted was not theology, but tears.
I lifted the candle. If I needed any more evidence Luke had been here it was scrawled waveringly on the crumbling plaster.
I could not love thee, dear, so much … Loved I not honour more.
LS SM
The initials of their names were intertwined in a love knot, fashionable on rings. The King and a woman. A martyr and love. I threw the book down. The draught extinguished the candle. I felt not the rage that had consumed me earlier, but a deep sadness. I had lost him.
18
Anne still had the windows open in Luke’s apartment. Her teeth were chattering, but at first she would not let me close the shutters, swearing she could still smell the laudanum. When I told her what I had seen in the priest’s hole she began pulling open drawers, searching in Luke’s clothing. She found what she sought between the leaves of a book: a scrap of poetry, hasty scribbled lines about meeting, trivial, but the sort that a lover can never bear to throw away. Four of the Clocke … I shall be there. S. It was dated November.
‘This must have started months ago,’ she said.
‘I know. He told me.’
‘He told you?’
She could scarcely get the words out. There must be no parents on earth, however much they love each other and their children, who do not have special bonds with one child or another. He told her everything. That he had told me, of all people, seemed at that moment almost as bad a defection as going over to the King.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘We were scarcely speaking.’
She was shivering uncontrollably and, afraid she would catch a chill, I guided her back to her room, sat her in front of the fire and told Agnes to bring her a hot posset.
‘You let him walk into the Royalists?’
She spoke as if I had planned it, part of the plot, perhaps, when I told her I was changing my will. ‘Do you honestly think I would do that? He swore, on his honour, he would have nothing more to do with the Royalists while he was in our house.’
Her eyes shone with a sharp brilliance that made me wonder if the laudanum in Luke’s room had affected her, or if she had taken some. ‘Then he would abide by that. I’m sure.’
‘The whole place deified Charles! The room where he met this woman was full of books justifying what he did. I think he’s been looking at my correspondence.’
‘Spying?’ She stared into space, the cup slipping from her fingers. I took it from her. ‘You must find him.’
‘I will.’
Abruptly, she dipped her head into her hands. I put my arms round her. She held on to me for a moment, then pushed me away. ‘I’m all right. You will find him?’
‘I will. Don’t worry.’
She caught the edge in my voice, her head jerking up. ‘What will you do?’
I said nothing to that, telling her she must get some sleep. I rang Agnes and, before her maid arrived, her eyes were already closing.
People who were expecting ice on the Thames were disappointed, for the next day the wind changed and the snow was melting to a dirty slush as I made my regular journey down Holborn towards Lincoln’s Inn. It was comfortingly normal. An ass was being milked, fish criers were shouting that mackerel were particularly good that day, and smelts and flounders and mussels had the tang of the sea, and there were pudding pies and hot bread. The bitter sharpness of yesterday’s wind had mellowed and a lemon-yellow winter sun brought fresh vigour to the cries, and fresh heart to me. It was impossible to believe that London was in crisis. The criers must sell and the great belly of London must be filled. Like the wind, fortune would change.
Among this brightness was a thin black cloud. It came from Thurloe’s chambers. The chimney was on fire. Clarkson, Thurloe’s clerk, was struggling with a servant to fix a hose to a nearby water pipe. Under London’s main street ran a network of elm pipes. Sometimes, in a hot summer, aled-up apprentices bored a hole in the pipe, to create a cooling fountain.
This, or something like it, seemed to have happened here; the pressure in the pipe quickly dropped, the flow from the hose reduced to a mere trickle. Sometimes the wonders of what m
y Spitalfield son Sam called the new philosophy got in the way of the obvious. The panic-stricken Clarkson and the servant seemed to think the only solution was to find the damaged pavement, which would lead to the hole in the pipe.
‘Use snow,’ I shouted. ‘Is Mr Thurloe in there?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Thank the Lord for that.’
By the time we carried in buckets of snow, what was an everyday hazard of London life, the smouldering chimney, had spread to the panels round the fireplace in Thurloe’s room and was charring the floorboards. It took bucket after bucket and the bootboy clambering up to the roof to tip more melting snow down the chimney, before we managed to put it out.
The servant brought hot Dutch gin, which we drank outside, while the windows were opened to clear away the acrid, damp smell. I asked how the fire had started.
‘It was all those papers,’ said the bootboy.
Clarkson looked uneasy and sharply told the boy to go and clear up the place.
‘Where is Mr Thurloe?’ I asked.
Clarkson looked even more uncomfortable. ‘In the country, sir. He left at first light this morning.’ He excused himself and went back inside. Through the window I saw him go into Thurloe’s room, carrying a sack. He bent down over the fireplace. Puzzled that he was doing such a menial task which would normally have been given to the servants, I finished the gin and went inside. He was so absorbed in his task he did not look up as I squelched in a puddle in the doorway. He was not clearing the fireplace but picking out any half-burned scraps of paper, crushing and tearing at them with an obsessional persistence to make not a line readable.
Behind Clarkson, like a drift of dead leaves blown by the draught from the open window, were a number of blackened pieces. I recognised them as the state papers Thurloe had said he was consulting in order to write a history of Cromwell. It was clear from a scrap I picked up that there was another, rather more urgent purpose for writing, or rather rewriting, history. The fragment was dated January 1650, a year after the King’s execution. His son, from his makeshift court in Europe, had declared himself Charles II. The stained words outlined an elaborate plot to poison him, guaranteeing that the symptoms would replicate those of the plague. I remembered it. It was from a time when all Europe recoiled in horror from England for, as they saw it, murdering its divinely appointed monarch. It was one of a number of such schemes put forward in the first heady but panic-stricken year of the Protectorate.
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