The Ashes of London

by Andrew Taylor

  Then I saw Chiffinch himself descending the stairs, candle in hand and arrayed in a splendid bedgown of figured silk and beturbanned like the Turk. ‘What’s this damned racket, Martin?’ he bellowed. ‘Who is it? It’s the middle of the night. Have you all gone stark crazy?’

  ‘Sir,’ I said. ‘I must speak to you.’

  ‘What?’ He peered through the gloom, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. ‘Marwood? Is that you?’

  ‘I’ve news, sir. It won’t wait. For your private ear.’

  ‘If you’re wrong, I’ll see you both suffer for it.’

  I glanced at the servant, who scowled at me. Chiffinch ordered the man to kindle a fire in the parlour and set water to boil. He led me upstairs to his closet, which was well sealed against the draughts and still held a little warmth from last night’s fire. He told me to light more candles, took up a blanket and sat in his chair.

  ‘Well? Have you found Alderley?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But he’s dead. And so’s Lovett.’

  Chiffinch whistled, soft and low. ‘Are you sure? How? Where?’

  ‘At St Paul’s. Lovett had smuggled him into the ruins and forced him up the tower at knifepoint. There must have been a struggle. They had fallen from the top, inside the tower, right down to the floor of the crossing. Lovett’s dead as well.’

  ‘’Sblood.’ Chiffinch scratched his scalp under the turban. ‘You’ve seen them? You’re absolutely sure they’re dead? Both of them.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Lovett had stabbed him before they fell. I don’t know if that killed Master Alderley, or if it was the fall. As for Lovett, the back of his head is quite broken apart.’

  ‘The King won’t like it,’ Chiffinch said. ‘He wanted Lovett to himself. He wanted to look the man in the face. When did you discover this?’

  ‘Last night. I fell in with Master Hakesby—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The draughtsman who works with Dr Wren. He lodges at Three Cocks Yard, off the Strand.’

  Chiffinch nodded. ‘I remember.’

  ‘He offered one of the house’s servants employment as a maid in his new office because she seemed clean and to have her wits about her. It was Mistress Lovett, though of course he did not know that.’

  ‘Why did you not come to me sooner with the news?’

  ‘Because I had to search the rest of the cathedral, sir. And then Master Hakesby was taken ill, so I took him home.’

  He sat in silence for a moment, staring at the ashes in the fireplace. I waited, still wrapped in my cloak but shivering nevertheless. I felt suddenly exhausted, now I had told my news. For good or ill, I had surrendered any power I had. It was out of my hands.

  Apart from the Cromwell letter.

  Chiffinch looked up. His scratching had pushed the turban to one side, giving him an unexpectedly jaunty air. Stranger still, he was smiling at me. ‘Well, Marwood,’ he said. ‘I always say it’s an ill wind that blows no man good.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  AND THEN – NOTHING.

  When I was young, after the King came back but before my father’s disgrace, we apprentices would sometimes kick a ball about the streets on public holidays, to the great peril of ourselves and any bystanders foolish enough to get in our way. These were brawls by any other name, wars between factions, the printers against the cordwainers, or the haberdashers against the glovers. There were broken bones in our bodies and splashes of blood on the cobbles. But it was a game.

  What made it a game was the existence of a pig’s bladder inflated with air.

  This unlovely object was the prize we fought for with such vigour, and at such a danger to ourselves. Once, however, a group of us strayed into the path of a drunken gallant, who drew his sword and stabbed the pig’s bladder repeatedly. He was under the illusion that he was killing a New Model Army trooper because all the while he was shrieking, ‘Die, foul lobster! Rot in hell!’

  The ball deflated and became nothing worth kicking, let alone fighting for. Later I saw it tossed aside in the kennel, along with all the stinking refuse of the street. Naturally we attacked the gallant instead, but it was not the same.

  When Master Chiffinch sent me away that morning, I felt like that pig’s bladder – deflated, useless, without a purpose in life. I had hated the fear and worry of the last few weeks. I had also hated the strange excitement that possessed me. I didn’t want that sort of excitement back. But I found that I craved it as a drunkard craves wine.

  Chiffinch warned me to keep my mouth shut about what had happened in St Paul’s on pain of severe punishment. After I had left him, I went to Master Williamson’s office, where the servants were lighting the fires, and I waited for the other clerks to arrive. I didn’t know what else to do.

  I waited all day for Master Chiffinch to send for me. I tried to foretell the questions he would ask me and to work out the answers I should give. I even imagined that the King himself might summon me. Sometimes my expectations were gloomier – at every step on the stairs I heard soldiers coming to arrest me. My mind leapt ahead to an even darker future, with myself rotting in prison and my father dead.

  At dinner, I heard a story circulating that a gentleman had died of a fall in the ruins of St Paul’s, and that a workman had been killed with him. No one knew the gentleman’s name.

  I heard nothing from Chiffinch or anyone else that day. Or the next, though by then the gentleman had been identified as Master Alderley, the goldsmith, who was known to be a friend of Dr Wren’s and a man with an interest in the rebuilding of the cathedral; the King was said to be much grieved at his death.

  Nobody summoned me on Saturday. Or Sunday.

  I didn’t call on Master Hakesby, either in Three Cocks Yard or at St Paul’s. It was safer to pretend our brief acquaintance had never happened. As for Mistress Lovett, there was no news of her at all, and I sought none. A few days later, Master Alderley was buried with much pomp. I heard a rumour at Whitehall that he had not been as rich as the world had believed, and his affairs were much entangled.

  As the days of silence became weeks, I grew increasingly fearful. Fear is an anticipation of evil, akin to a pain of the spirit. Or an emptiness so deep and all-embracing that it sucks your soul into it and leaves you a mere husk of your former self, fit for nothing that matters.

  Like the pig’s bladder that was once a ball.

  Christmas was approaching.

  It was already very cold. Everyone said it would be an exceptionally hard winter, which always hurt the poor worst of all. This year, it would be even crueller than usual, for so many people were still refugees from the Fire.

  Perhaps it was worst of all for those who had returned to the ruins of their former homes. Here, they lived miserably in the corners of cellars littered with debris and open to the sky. They built sheds and shelters among the frozen ashes, where they waited for spring and hoped that God would smile on them again one day.

  On St Lucy’s Day, the shortest of the year, I walked past St Paul’s on my way to Whitehall. The government and the City were still arguing about what to do with the cathedral – whether to restore or to rebuild – and in the meantime it grew increasingly decayed and forlorn. The roads around it were now cleared of rubble, and there was far more traffic on them during the day than there had been even a month earlier.

  At Whitehall, there was a message for me at Master Williamson’s office: I was to wait on Master Chiffinch at his lodgings.

  I found him swathed in furs and huddled over the fire in his study. He looked unwell, perhaps from too much wine, for his eyes were mere slits and his plump cheeks were pink with sallow patches. He was reading a letter, and he kept me standing before him until he had finished.

  ‘Master Williamson speaks satisfactorily of you,’ he said at last, laying aside the letter. ‘All in all. A discreet young man, he says, who applies himself to his work with diligence and keeps his own counsel.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘He tells me he intends to offer y
ou a permanent clerkship after Christmas. A junior position, of course – he will have a vacancy that needs filling. Perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds a year.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ I spoke softly but inside I was shouting with joy. This was preferment that meant something – not just for the income, of course, but also for the other emoluments that would come with the position, and the status it would give me among my fellows.

  He sneezed violently. ‘Do you know the Board of Red Cloth?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It comes under the Lord Chamberlain. It does very little these days – and never has, as far as I know. But it carries on, as these things do. The members meet every quarter to assess their requirements of the next three months. They have a vacancy for a clerk to record what is decided at these meetings, and I have put forward your name to his lordship.’ He held up his hand when I tried to thank him. ‘Master Williamson will give you leave to attend to business there on the days when they meet. As there are only four meetings a year, I doubt it will inconvenience him overmuch. It pays about fifty pounds a year, I believe.’ He took up his handkerchief and blew his nose very loudly, which turned him pinker than ever. ‘I sit on the board myself, as it happens, and I may occasionally call on you to undertake other duties as well.’

  I thanked him as effusively as I knew how for his kindness and his condescension, wondering what those other duties might be but deciding it would be unwise to ask.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘You’re to call at Cradle Alley on Sunday. Three o’clock sharp. Don’t be late.’

  St Lucy’s Day, the thirteenth of December, had fallen on Thursday. I had three long days to wait until Sunday.

  In the meantime, I was pleased with myself to the point of smugness. It was not every day, I told myself, that a man was given a position at Whitehall, let alone two of them. I discovered that the news of my advancement had reached the office – my fellow clerks treated me with more respect, and even Master Williamson condescended to nod affably when I greeted him on Friday morning with my usual bow.

  I told my father that I had had a piece of good fortune, and that we could, if we wished, move ourselves to a more convenient set of lodgings. But he grew agitated at the idea and begged me to let us stay. He liked the smell of ink and paper, I believed, and the familiar sounds of the press. He even liked Mistress Newcomb, who was firm with him to the point of ruthlessness, but also consistent and never unkind for the sake of it. He knew where he was with her, and after his imprisonment that was luxury indeed.

  The Newcombs heard that I was to be promoted, and they made much of me. I promised them a celebratory dinner in the New Year. I put in a good word for Margaret, too, arranging for her to spend several hours a day with my father. At my expense, she was to clean our part of the lodgings, look after our clothes and take him out for air if the weather and his health permitted.

  I had another scheme for Margaret and Sam as well: that of bringing them both to live within the Savoy. Like Alsatia, the Savoy and its surroundings were a liberty, a legal sanctuary, in this case under the Duchy of Lancaster. A man might owe a fortune in London or Westminster, but his creditors could not pursue him here. The Savoy was far safer than Alsatia, and there would be a convenience in the arrangement for my father and me.

  But there was a worm in my apple, gnawing away at my smugness. A month earlier, four people had gone up the tower at St Paul’s, and only two of us had come down alive. I knew the truth of that, and sometimes I relived it in my dreams, even though I tried so hard to forget what had happened.

  I wished I could talk to Mistress Lovett about what had happened that night, and about the letter. But I did not enquire after her, though it would have been easy enough to seek out Master Hakesby.

  Part of me wanted to burn the letter, as I had the rest of the papers in Lovett’s portfolio. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was not my secret to destroy. Perhaps, I thought, if I ever saw Mistress Lovett again, I would decide that she should know the truth.

  A child deserved to know what her father had been, after his death if not in his life. Suddenly it struck me that, by a similar argument, the King deserved to know how his father had died, and by whose hand.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  ‘HER LADYSHIP GAVE orders to admit you.’

  The porter stared down from his great height, giving the impression that, in her ladyship’s place, he would have kept the door barred against me. He was a different, haughtier porter from the man who had admitted me on my previous visits.

  ‘Her ladyship?’ I said.

  ‘My Lady Quincy,’ he said, his air of disapproval increasing. He stood back to allow me to enter.

  A sign of changing times: Mistress Alderley had reverted to her old name, the name that belonged to her first marriage. I went into the hall. The light was already fading. There were shadowy figures beyond the staircase whose faces I could not see. The house seemed busier than before, full of secret life. I hadn’t seen the manservant who took my cloak before, either.

  The shutters were up in the drawing room. The glare of candlelight filled the chamber and brought a smoky warmth to the air. The old screen was still across the corner, and Lady Quincy was in her usual chair. She acknowledged my bow with a gracious inclination of her head and told me to sit.

  She was in mourning, as far as her clothes were concerned, but there was nothing sorrowful about her face or her manner. She looked in remarkably fine spirits. As for her dress, black did not suit everyone, but it agreed well enough with her. I began to mutter something about the loss she must have suffered by her husband’s death. She cut me off with a wave of her hand.

  ‘There’s no need to talk of that now, sir,’ she said. ‘Let me be blunt, it will save time. Do you know what’s become of my niece? Did you find her?’

  I hesitated. I had no way of knowing her reason for asking. I had to trust my instinct. ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘With friends.’

  ‘Friends whose beliefs are like her father’s?’

  ‘No,’ I said, trying not to stare at the flame-tinted richness of her skin. ‘Loyal subjects of the King.’

  ‘Is she content with her lot?’

  ‘I believe so, madam.’

  ‘That’s as well.’ Lady Quincy – the name seemed more naturally hers than Mistress Alderley had ever done – took up a fan and toyed with it. ‘You see, I can offer her nothing but charity, and not much of that. It turns out that her uncle’s estate is much embarrassed.’

  I frowned. ‘I thought he was rich. One of the richest men in—’

  ‘So did everyone. But he was more than a goldsmith, you understand. His clients deposited their gold and their plate with him for security, on the understanding that he would allow them to withdraw it whenever they wished to have it. In return, Master Alderley lent out the money, and charged interest, or sometimes invested it in a venture, and so made a profit on the transaction.’

  So, I thought. A man who makes other people’s money breed for him, first cousin to a usurer. It was a strange way to make a living, let alone to become rich.

  She seemed to read my mind. ‘But he was not a moneylender in the old, avaricious way that we must all condemn. He used to cite the parable of the talents in the Gospel, in which Jesus praised the man who used the money entrusted to him to make more money rather than let it moulder unprofitably in the ground. He told me that everybody gained by this – the depositor, the lender and the borrower. Even England itself, he used to say, from the King downwards – for money must flow safely and easily if a country is to prosper and the government is to have its revenues. Gold is the lifeblood of nations.’ She paused. ‘At least – that was the theory of it.’

  She fell silent, staring down at the fan.

  ‘But perhaps practice does not always follow where theory leads?’ I suggested.

  ‘Just so.’ She looked up. ‘
There was a flaw in the logic, it seemed to me, though of course I’m only a woman and cannot understand the matter as a man does.’ She glanced at me, and I could have sworn that I saw mockery in her eyes. The woman was like quicksilver; I could never pin her down. ‘What if everyone wants his money at the same time? If the depositor wishes to withdraw his gold, and the borrower demands more, while the lender finds that his investments have gone bad and his debtors will not pay him what they owe. All that money is flown away, leaving the man in the centre with nothing. With worse than nothing, if the truth be known, for he still owes his depositors the value of their original deposits.’

  ‘So Master Alderley left nothing but debts?’

  There was no mockery in her face now. I thought of another man who was a bankrupt – Samuel Witherdine, crippled in his country’s service and denied the pay he was owed. I knew who the better man was.

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Lady Quincy said slowly, as if drawing each word painfully from her mouth. ‘A little before he died – in order to balance his books … my husband was tempted to … to use money that was not his to use.’

  It seemed to me that, strictly speaking, most of Master Alderley’s money had not been his to use, that his wealth had been nothing but a bubble.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So he sold Coldridge, which belonged to his niece, and pocketed the proceeds.’

  Lady Quincy had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Truly, there is nothing left. Worse than nothing. My late husband’s creditors will have every last penny from his estate, and still they won’t be even half satisfied. The jointure I brought him on my marriage is safe from them, and so is this house, but I have only a life interest, and on my death they must go to the heirs of Sir William, my first husband. The only persons who have gained by his death are some of Master Alderley’s debtors. The ones who gave him no security for the loans he made them, whose word he trusted.’

  I remembered Master Chiffinch’s words when I had told him that Alderley was dead: Well, Marwood, I always say it’s an ill wind that blows no man good. ‘I wonder, madam, was Master Chiffinch among these debtors?’