The Ashes of London
Page 38
It was a question I had no right to ask. Lady Quincy didn’t answer. In the silence that followed, I heard, quite distinctly, a floorboard creak nearby. I could have kicked myself. Chiffinch was probably behind the screen again, listening to every word I said. I would not last long in Whitehall now.
I rushed on, desperate to move the subject to safer ground. ‘And Edward Alderley? Is he penniless too?’
She shook her head. ‘Before he died, his father transferred the ownership of several freeholds to Edward, including Barnabas Place. The creditors can’t touch that either. But Edward has no love for his cousin. I fear he does not accept that she has a claim on him. He thinks she must be dead, or fled abroad to be with her father’s friends.’
‘I don’t understand why you are telling me this, madam.’
She flared up at me. ‘Then you are more foolish than I took you to be, Master Marwood. I had a duty towards my niece, and I did not discharge it as I should have done when she was living in my household. I wish to make some small amends, if that’s possible. To help her. Is that plain enough?’
‘How can you help her?’
‘I can give her a little money, if she will take it from me. I cannot have her here to live with me. She’s the daughter of a Regicide. And worse. Also, there is the question of Sir Denzil’s murder. Edward has made certain allegations. Only in private, so far, but if she appears in public again, or makes a claim on him, it will be a different matter. If that happens, I cannot protect her.’
‘The mastiffs,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ Lady Quincy intoned their names like a charm: ‘Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse. Especially Bare-Arse, who stood by while Sir Denzil was murdered and did nothing.’
‘Her cousin couldn’t prove anything, madam.’
‘You think not? Edward will think nothing of perjuring himself if he needs to. He says he has found a servant who will swear that she saw that grey cloak in Catherine’s chamber on the day before she fled from Barnabas Place. The cloak they found on Primrose Hill. He may be lying, but it’s a dangerous lie. And no jury will show favour to the daughter of the Regicide.’
I took a deep breath and jumped into the unknown. ‘They say the King himself and his brother borrowed large sums of money from Master Alderley.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Do they indeed? Well, that’s no concern of yours or mine. I think we have finished our business, Master Marwood. I understand you have been rewarded handsomely for your pains. But bear in mind that what the King gives, the King can also take away.’
I stood up. ‘Master Alderley committed treason of the worst kind. The King need not repay a debt to a traitor, even in death.’
‘What nonsense is this?’
‘I’m persuaded that when the King knows all, he will look mercifully on Mistress Lovett and suffer her to live quietly and unmolested, free from any fear of prosecution. He will not visit the sins of the father on the child.’
‘The King will do as he pleases. Now, will you—’
I spoke over her. ‘Henry Alderley was a traitor and hypocrite. Nearly twenty years ago, he—’
‘Pooh!’ she interrupted. ‘As you well know, many were foolish in those days, and forgot their allegiance to their king. The Act of Indemnity draws a line under that.’
‘The Act would not cover this, my lady.’ I took out the letter I had found among Thomas Lovett’s papers. ‘And the King would not wish it to.’ I unfolded the letter and said in a voice I tried to keep level, ‘Madam, the second executioner of the late King was not Thomas Lovett. Lovett was ill that day. It was Henry Alderley who kept up Brandon’s nerve and who held up the King’s head to the crowd. I saw him do it myself, with my own eyes, though I did not know it. That’s why Alderley prospered under the Commonwealth. Cromwell favoured him.’
Ashes and blood.
The warmth and the colour faded from her face. ‘You cannot prove this.’
‘This letter does. It’s in Cromwell’s own hand.’
Another creak from a floorboard. Then another. The candle flames flickered. A tall man appeared from behind the screen.
I flung myself on my knees. Lady Quincy rose and curtsied.
‘Give me that letter,’ the King said.
The King turned aside to read it. I stood in silence. Lady Quincy sat down again. Time stretched out. My legs ached. The coal shifted in the grate. One of the candles guttered and died. How long could it take to read one short letter and digest its contents?
I thought the King might be weeping. But when at last he turned back to us there were no tears on his cheeks, and his voice was as deep and calm as ever.
‘You were there, Marwood, were you not? Among the crowd at the Banqueting House.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What – what was my father like? How did he bear himself?’
‘No man could have carried himself more honourably, sir.’ I thought of that small, sad-faced man in his waistcoat, with a nightcap on his head. I thought how calm he had been, how self-possessed. ‘No man could have borne himself more like a king.’
‘You were a mere child,’ he said softly. ‘To see a sight like that … What did you think of it then? What did you do?’
‘I wept, sir.’
Blood and ashes. Ashes and blood.
Afterwards, Lady Quincy sent me home in her coach. It was the one that I had been in before, when she talked to me at the New Exchange, but the device on the door had already been changed. The flames of the servants’ links showed that Alderley’s pelican feeding her young had been replaced by a widow’s lozenge bearing arms I did not recognize, presumably those of Sir William Quincy quartered with her own. The inside of the coach smelled of her perfume, as before.
It was a clear, cold night. The coach was well lit, and the servants were armed. We went round by the City wall, skirting the ruins. The moon had risen, coating the ashes of London with silver.
The King had sworn us both to secrecy. There was nothing to be gained by revealing what Alderley had done, and it would not help Lady Quincy either. Edward would never know the truth about his father. The King was not a vengeful man; he would not visit the sins of the father on the child.
I knew I should feel happy. The King had shown me favour. My father was content enough in his way, and safe from harm. I now had an income to support us and a modest position in the world. Mistress Lovett would live without fear, if she were careful, with the help of Master Hakesby and her father’s purse of gold. Even London itself would grow again, phoenix-like, from its own ashes. I had enough.
But enough is never enough. Instead, as the coach swayed and jolted its way to the Strand, my mind dwelled on Olivia, Lady Quincy, and the impossibility that she would ever look kindly on me.
Somewhere among the ashes, a dog barked at the moon.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
IN THE DISTANCE, a dog was barking as if it would never stop.
‘Close the window,’ Master Hakesby said.
From the wide attic window of the house in Henrietta Street, almost everything in sight was a shade of grey, speckled with faint yellow pinpricks from windows and lanterns. The sky was darkening towards night. The air smelled of coal smoke and the river, a sour blend that caught the back of the throat.
‘The draught, Jane! We’ll catch our death!’
‘Your pardon, sir.’
She closed the casement and drew the curtain across the window. Master Hakesby was sitting over the fire, trembling from the cold or his ague or both. A candle burned on the table at his elbow, and there was another on the mantel. Away from the fire, the long room was a place of shadows, with the draughtsmen’s slopes rearing up from the long table.
‘Did you fetch more coals?’
‘Yes, sir.’
She picked up the scuttle that she had brought up from the cellar and carried it to the hearth.
‘You must keep warm,’ he said as the coals rattled on to the embers. ‘Look at you – chilled to the bone.�
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She nodded and smiled, though in truth it was Master Hakesby who looked chilled, not herself.
‘And mind you make the room warm for us in the morning, too. Build up a good fire before we come. A man cannot do fine work when he’s cold.’
Cat put down the shovel and turned to him. ‘Will you not go home now, sir? Mistress Noxon will be wondering where you are.’
Master Hakesby scowled at her but he levered himself up from his chair. He took up the poker and fussed at the fire. When he had finished, Cat fetched his cloak. He allowed her to arrange it around his thin shoulders.
‘Would you like me to attend you, sir?’ Not to Three Cocks Yard, of course, not to the house, but at least along the Strand, which even on a Sunday evening was thronged with traffic.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘You must still keep within doors as much as possible. You must not court danger.’
But it wasn’t her safety that concerned him, she knew, so much as the fear that she might think him incapable of managing by himself.
‘Are you not afraid here?’ he said. ‘On your own at night?’
‘No, sir.’ How could she explain to him that solitude was what she most desired? ‘Besides, I’m not alone in the house.’
Master Hakesby and Dr Wren had taken only the top floor, with its huge workshop windows. They employed two draughtsmen, as well as Cat, but they lodged elsewhere. There was a hatter on the ground floor, and a French Huguenot family immediately below the drawing office. A porter guarded the common entry during the hours of daylight and slept in a room off the hatter’s back kitchen.
‘Up here you are entirely by yourself at night,’ he said, worrying ineffectually at the subject like an old dog with a bone.
Cat was standing by the door now, waiting for him to leave. ‘I can sit with Madame Charvet if I need company.’
He peered at her. ‘I’ll be back before it’s light in the morning. We have so much work on hand we cannot afford to lose a moment. Soon there will be even more to do.’
The rebuilding of London would start in the New Year. The government and the City authorities had at last agreed on what should be done and, more importantly, how to pay for it. The necessary Bills were going through Parliament and would soon become law. Master Hakesby hoped that commissions for new projects would pour in.
She opened the door for him, took up a candle and lit his way down the stairs.
‘It is a most horrid shame though,’ Master Hakesby said as they descended the final flight. ‘Posterity will say we threw away the chance to make London a great capital city, fit for all ages. Instead, all we shall do is piecemeal stuff, trying to make good what was there before.’
It was a familiar complaint, and she didn’t reply. The porter unbarred the door and summoned a linkboy.
When Master Hakesby was gone, Cat went quickly upstairs. In the drawing office, she bolted the door and lit two more candles, which she placed on the sconces beside the slope nearer the fire. She fetched her private papers from the closet in which she slept. She laid out the largest sheet on the slope and studied the maze of pencilled lines.
Firmitas, utilitas, venustas, Cat murmured. Buildings should be like the nests of birds and bees.
She took up her pen and dipped it in the ink. As she worked, the city rose in her mind from the paper. She saw its towers and bridges, its churches and halls, its avenues and piazzas. Everything was interconnected, the elements combining with each other to work for the whole. In the heart of the city, taller than every other building, drawing the eye from every quarter, was the shining dome of St Paul’s.
Here was London. Not London as it was or London as it would be. But the London in her head, displaying the great Vitruvian virtues in all its parts, from the greatest public buildings to the smallest alleys.
Her London.
If you enjoyed The Ashes of London, try:
Paris, 1792. The city is gripped by revolution and the gutters run with blood as thousands lose their heads to the guillotine.
Edward Savill, a London merchant, receives word that his estranged wife has been killed in France. Her ten-year-old son, Charles, has been taken by émigré refugees to Charnwood Court, deep in the English countryside.
Savill is sent to fetch Charles, only to discover the child is mute. The boy has witnessed unimaginable horrors, but a terrible secret keeps him from saying a word. Locked in a prison of his own mind, his silence is the only thing that will keep him safe.
Or so he thinks …
Click here to buy The Silent Boy
About the Author
Andrew Taylor is the author of a number of novels, including the Dougal and Lydmouth crime series; the psychological thrillers Bleeding Heart Square and The Anatomy Of Ghosts; the ground-breaking Roth Trilogy, which was adapted into the acclaimed drama Fallen Angel; and the historical crime novels The Silent Boy, The Scent of Death and The American Boy, a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and a 2005 Richard & Judy Book Club choice.
He has won many awards, including the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger, an Edgar Scroll from the Mystery Writers of America, the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award (the only author to win it three times) and the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger, awarded for sustained excellence in crime writing. He also writes for the Spectator.
He lives with his wife Caroline in the Forest of Dean.
@AndrewJRTaylor
www.andrew-taylor.co.uk
By the same author
The Silent Boy
The Scent of Death
The Anatomy of Ghosts
Bleeding Heart Square
The American Boy
A Stain on the Silence
The Barred Window
The Raven on the Water
THE ROTH TRILOGY: FALLEN ANGEL
The Four Last Things
The Judgement of Strangers
The Office of the Dead
THE LYDMOUTH SERIES
THE BLAINES NOVELS
THE DOUGAL SERIES
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