The Ashes of London

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘Your broth, sir,’ I said. ‘I will ask them about it in the kitchen.’

  My father nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, do. Are they late again? I’m very hungry.’

  I left him to the Book of Daniel. Bound thumbs, I thought as I went downstairs. That’s where they came from.

  With my hand on the latch of the kitchen door, another thought came to me. Sir Denzil’s thumbs had not been tied. Perhaps it was simply because there had not been time for it.

  The alternative was that someone else had killed him.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  WHEN HER FATHER appeared in the coffee house on Saturday evening, the shock of it had made Cat’s head swim and brought her to the brink of fainting.

  He summoned a hackney and took them away. In the privacy of the coach, he hugged her, fiercely, laying his cheek hard against hers, so the stubble rubbed her skin. She hugged him back and found that she was weeping.

  ‘Hush,’ he said gently, drawing away from her. ‘Hush, child.’

  They went round by the wall, changed to another hackney at Newgate, to a third beyond Bishopsgate, and finally reached a house somewhere east of Moorfields. Cat had been to the neighbourhood before when, in another life that seemed already remote, Mistress Noxon had sent her to collect her embroidered gloves.

  Her father took her to a substantial cottage backing on to a desolate area of waste ground. The owner, Master Davy, was another of the old comrades who supported her father. He welcomed them with open arms. His wife was less hospitable, but she did as she was bid by her husband. There were also three children, who stared wide-eyed at the newcomers but did not speak.

  It was clear that the Lovetts – or at least Master Lovett – were expected. Mistress Davy brought them bread, ham and small beer. Afterwards there were prayers, with many thanks for their safe deliverance. After that, everyone went to bed.

  The Lovetts slept in the best bedchamber over the parlour.

  When they were alone, her father said, ‘Have you heard the news? Sir Denzil Croughton is dead.’

  She nodded, keeping her head modestly bowed. Her heartbeat accelerated, thumping like a muffled drum against her ribs.

  ‘Murdered, they were saying in the coffee house, on Primrose Hill. This very morning. Your cousin Edward was with him but escaped unharmed.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘I heard you were betrothed to Croughton at one time. Had you any tenderness for him?’

  She looked up. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad. He was a sad profligate, by all accounts. And he would have made you unhappy.’

  Her father did not encourage further conversation. He told her that she should have the bed. They knelt for prayer before they slept. Afterwards he cupped her face between his hands and stared at her for a moment. He stooped and kissed her forehead. She clung to him, until he pushed her gently away.

  He himself slept on a child’s palliasse on the floor, his large feet dangling over the edge and swathed in a separate blanket against the cold. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ he said as he blew out the candle. In the darkness she heard him murmur, ‘May God keep you safe in the night.’

  Cat slept in her shift, but kept her pocket with her. It contained what was still hers: the knife, a few coins and the doll that Jem had made for her. Clutching Hepzibah in her right hand, she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  After his years in exile, her father was more like a battered hawk than ever. His high-bridged nose jutted from his narrow face. His dark eyebrows were knitted together, and a deep vertical furrow ran up his forehead. The rest of his hair was now completely grey, but he seemed as upright and vigorous as ever. He was dressed quietly but respectably, like a clerk who had done well for himself or a shopkeeper of the middling sort.

  Before breakfast on Sunday morning, but after his private prayers, her father drew her into the chilly closet off the bedchamber and talked to her in whispers.

  He had tried to see her early in September, he explained, with the help of Jem. But the speed of the Great Fire’s advance had taken them all by surprise and made that impossible. Afterwards he had believed her to be at Barnabas Place. He had gone into the country to avoid the men searching for spies and incendiarists in the aftermath of the Fire. It was only this week, since his return to London, that he had heard from a drunken servant at the Alderleys’ that she had gone away from Barnabas Place in September, and that no man knew where.

  Jem had written to him about his niece, Mistress Noxon, coming to London, saying that she might offer a refuge in a time of trouble. So her father had gone to Three Cocks Yard, only to discover that he had missed Cat by a matter of days. Mistress Noxon told him that Cat was staying at the coffee house before she took up a position as a maid to Master Hakesby, a draughtsman. He had also learned that she was calling herself Jane.

  ‘You talked to Mistress Noxon?’ Cat said. ‘Why would she speak to you?’

  ‘Because she once worshipped as we do, and as her uncle did. Because she knows that it is best for a daughter to be with her father.’

  Then where were you, Cat thought, these last seven years?

  ‘Did she know you for who you really are, sir?’ she said.

  Her father smiled. ‘She prefers to know as little as possible, child. There are many like that. I don’t think she will betray us. She would have handed you over long before if that were the case.’

  When he had enquired for Cat at the coffee house, the landlord had taken him for Master Hakesby, and her father had thought it best to allow the mistake to continue.

  ‘The rest you know,’ he said. ‘Except perhaps one thing. Did your Uncle Alderley tell you that he had sold Coldridge?’

  She stared at him. ‘But he can’t. It’s mine.’

  ‘He has.’

  She bit down hard on her lower lip. Her eyes filled with tears. She tasted her own blood. ‘Does he keep the money safe for me?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Her father covered her hand with his own. ‘But don’t take it to heart. Coldridge is only a parcel of common clay. To desire it is a mean ambition. In due time, you will have your reward many times over in heaven, and there will be nothing mean or common about that.’

  Cat didn’t want her reward later in heaven. She wanted Coldridge now.

  ‘But how could he, sir? Is my uncle a thief?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her hand still in his, her father sat down on the window seat. ‘I trusted him once with my life – with everything. Including yourself. When I went into exile, he could not have been kinder. It was he who arranged everything, he who converted most of what I had to gold. It was only afterwards that I found that he had kept back the greater part for himself. And that was not the worst of it. Money is only money, after all, and usually as much a curse to its possessor as a blessing.’

  She saw to her astonishment that his eyes had filled with tears. ‘How so?’

  ‘When I went into exile, it was your uncle who betrayed me, and sent the King’s soldiers to where I was lodging. Henry Alderley. My dead sister’s husband. My comrade. My friend. Even though I escaped arrest, the King gave him my house in Bow Lane as a reward, together with the promise of his favour. If I’d been taken, the King’s gratitude would have been boundless.’ A note of pride entered her father’s voice and unexpectedly he smiled. ‘He would have given half his kingdom to lay his hands on me. No doubt he still would.’

  ‘Because you are named as a Regicide, sir?’

  He flicked his fingers. ‘There are degrees in all things.’ The smile broadened. ‘To the King, I am not only a Regicide.’

  ‘What else?’ Cat whispered.

  He ignored her question. ‘Your uncle betrayed others, as well as me, and they did not escape.’ He drew her closer to him and stared into her face. ‘I cannot suffer him to live. Henry Alderley has taken his thirty pieces of silver. Now he must pay for them.’

  After breakfast, Master Lovett conducted prayers and gave several lengthy readings from the Books of Job and Revelatio
n with his usual relish. After these he preached an extempore sermon on the text ‘And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’

  The whole household was there – the Davys, the undersized maidservant and even a small boy from the yard at the back who did not appear to have any function whatsoever.

  Cat felt as if the last seven years had vanished in a flash, leaving her where she had been as a child. For her father, Sunday had always been a day of prayer. This Sunday he praised the Lord for permitting himself, Thomas Lovett, to be God’s humble instrument in this wicked city. And he praised the Lord yet again for allowing him to be reunited with his daughter. He prayed that it would not be long before the Last Times began and King Jesus, the only true king, came to reign on earth.

  With her father, everything came back to God. Cat wished that he would listen occasionally to someone else. Herself, for example. But there were tears in his eyes when he embraced Cat once the prayers were over. There were tears in hers as well.

  After prayers came dinner, which Mistress Davy prepared with the assistance of her elder daughter and Cat. When they had eaten, her father took her aside again.

  ‘I have one more thing to do in London, my dear. Then we shall leave.’

  ‘What thing, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s better that you don’t know.’

  ‘And after that is done, where shall we go?’

  ‘Switzerland first. And then, God willing, we shall take ship to America.’

  ‘But how shall we live?’ Her voice was almost a wail. ‘How shall we eat?’

  ‘God will provide. We have friends. Consider how the Davys have helped us. There are many such around the world. God’s fellowship is a stronger bond than the power of any tyrant on earth.’

  She did not want to live in a strange land. Nor did she wish to subsist on the charity of people like the Davys and fill her days with scouring pots and pleading with God. But he was her father. She could not leave him.

  ‘Take comfort, child,’ he went on, mistaking the meaning of her silence. ‘God will protect us. He will smite our enemies. Did he not smite that sinner Croughton on Primrose Hill?’

  Cat lowered her eyes. The colour was rising in her cheeks. It didn’t matter. Her father would take guilt for maidenly modesty. She had not liked Sir Denzil, and she would not mourn him. But she had not wanted to kill him.

  There was only one person in the world she wanted to kill. Cousin Edward.

  Her father talked much with Master Davy, who was chiefly employed on the clearances at St Paul’s. Even now, more than two months after the Fire, there was still a quantity of rubble to be moved, and much work to be done on stabilizing the ruins while the authorities debated what should be done with the cathedral. There was a degree of urgency about it all, because the signs were that a hard winter lay ahead, with many storms.

  Master Davy ran a team of scaffolders. They had just begun the dangerous job of building a network of poles inside the central tower, whose ruined stump still dominated what was left of the city below. The tower was unstable. Its complete collapse would make either renovation or rebuilding much harder.

  On Sunday evening, the two men sat for more than an hour by the parlour fire, their heads close together. The children and the maid were already in bed. As it was Sunday, Mistress Davy had laid aside her sewing and was reading her Bible at the table by the light of the single candle, her lips moving silently. Cat sat opposite her, with another Bible open before her. Occasionally she turned a page but her attention was on the conversation between the men.

  They spoke in low voices, their conversation coming in spurts, with silences between them. Her father spoke softly and Cat could catch only stray words and phrases. But Master Davy had a voice that grated like a magpie’s.

  ‘When the gentlemen are there,’ he was saying, ‘we must all stop work in case the noise distresses them. Dr Wren shows them over the church, if he is there, or sometimes the Dean or the Chapter Clerk. Nothing can be done without these gentlemen, they say – neither the City nor the King can bear the whole expense of it, even between them, and they must raise the money somehow.’

  The conversation moved to other subjects, but not before Master Lovett said, quite clearly, the name ‘Alderley’ in the midst of other words she could not hear. Then Mistress Davy distracted Cat with some instructions on the subject of breakfast. By the time she could listen again, the two men had moved to a different subject.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘We take a wagon in most days. The cost is considerable, but there’s always something that needs taking or fetching.’

  Her father said something about staircases. Then: ‘… parapet … a sad prospect now.’ He reverted to his mumble again.

  Later, Master Davy said, in reply to an inaudible question: ‘Not easy, sir, because of the size. We brace the putlogs diagonally at the corners, of course, so both ends are secure. The supply of poles is another problem, particularly with such a great height to contend with. The Baltic trade is much disrupted because of the war with the Dutch, and after the Fire the demand for poles is immense. So there’s a terrible shortage of standards. Ledgers and putlogs can be hard to find, too.’

  Putlogs, Cat thought, ledgers and standards: the words slipped into her mind like old friends, trailing memories of the yard behind their old house in Bow Lane. The different lengths of scaffolding poles, each with its own purpose.

  Another mumble from her father.

  ‘Two nightwatchmen and a dog,’ Master Davy replied. ‘Idle sots – they keep by the brazier in their hut in the yard. They hardly ever make their rounds. Not that there’s much left worth stealing.’

  ‘It will do very well,’ her father said in a suddenly loud voice that made Mistress Davy look up with a start. ‘And there is a rightness in it. I told you God would provide, Master Davy, and He has.’

  And so to Monday, another day of dreary work and grinding boredom.

  Her father changed into the clothes of a labouring man with a leather apron on top. He and Master Davy left the cottage before it was light, leaving the rest of them to the work of the household.

  Cat had been used to work in Three Cocks Yard. Mistress Noxon was a hard task-mistress. But, at the Davys’ house, everything from emptying chamber pots to bringing soiled linen to the boil was done in the Lord’s name. The children worked as hard as anyone. They rarely smiled.

  The eldest child had the temerity to laugh when the cat sprang at a sparrow in the yard and ignominiously missed. Her mother boxed her ears so hard that the force of it sent the child reeling against the wall of the house.

  The hours of the day elongated themselves. No strangers came to the house to vary the monotony. The men did not return for dinner at twelve o’clock. After Mistress Davy had prayed that they might deserve the Lord’s bounty this day, they ate in silence the hard bread and the harder cheese that the Lord had provided.

  In the evening, the men returned. It was clear from their manner that they were elated.

  But there was no conversation worth hearing after supper, only more prayers and an interminable reading, this time from the Book of Micah.

  Cat went to bed first. She was almost asleep when she heard the creak of her father’s steps on the stairs.

  The door opened. She kept her eyes closed and listened to the slow tread of his feet across the floor. He kicked off his shoes with a clatter. She heard him draping his coat and breeches over the stool. He gave a sigh as he sat down on the mattress. He blew out the candle.

  ‘Catherine?’ he whispered. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Listen to me. I must go away tomorrow.’

  ‘When will you return?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ His breath came and went in the darkness. ‘It depends on many things. I have changed my plans. You will not come with me when I leave L
ondon. But after I’m settled, wherever that may be, I shall send for you or come for you. In the meantime, you will stay here instead.’

  ‘Here? You mean in this house?’

  ‘Yes. The Davys walk in the ways of the Lord. I shall place them in authority over you. They will treat you as their own daughter.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘That’s all. You will do as they command until we are together again. Let us say a prayer and then we shall sleep.’

  Master Lovett knelt down. She extracted herself from the warmth of the bed and knelt beside him. He whispered a prayer into the darkness. Cat murmured amen when it was time to do so.

  Afterwards, she listened to him settle himself to sleep. His breathing slowed and grew regular. In a while he began to snore, quietly at first and then ever more loudly. The sound mingled with other snores from the neighbouring chamber, where the Davys lay with their children.

  She wept silently in the darkness.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I WAS FORCED to spend Monday morning at Whitehall, copying letters and correcting proofs for the Gazette. I had been so little in the office that my work for Williamson had steadily accumulated over the last few days.

  I worked mechanically, even carelessly. Most of my attention was elsewhere. I was trying to find a way of linking the three appearances of my grey cloak in a way that did not suggest to an outside observer – Master Chiffinch, say, or Mistress Alderley or even the King himself – that I was a complete lunatic.

  If I could argue them away, I would. But I couldn’t. The cloak’s three appearances were facts, each of them in its own way as unassailable as the mounting block outside my window in Scotland Yard or Master Williamson’s habitual ill-temper.