Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  He looked towards another group, in the middle of which George Goring, handsome and wild-eyed, was gesticulating fiercely.

  It? New world?

  Goring shouted: ‘You cannot make such demands of the King!’

  His hand went to his waist, and if swords had been allowed in the chamber, he would have drawn his. He moved towards John Pym, but he was already disappearing with others into a meeting room. I heard Goring mutter that there had been enough words and it was now too late for meetings.

  Another group round Sir Simon D’Ewes, who in any debate found one side totally convincing until he heard the arguments of the other, were finding they had urgent business in the shires and were sending out servants to prepare the horses.

  Various members strode about dictating to scriveners. Some, like Mr Ink, had portable writing tables strapped to their waists.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

  At first he made no answer. He was writing a clear copy from notes which, I knew, came from Mr Pym, threaded through with spidery scribbles of his own. His quill dipped. The ink flew.

  Then, scarcely pausing in his transcription he said: ‘The Grand . . . Remonstrance!’

  Even in his haste, he uttered the words with a flourish, like that of a gauntlet being flung down.

  ‘The Grand – what? What does it mean?’

  He flung his hands to his head in frustration, tried to continue, but had lost his train of thought. He turned on me. For a moment I thought he was going to throw his dripping quill at me. Then, although he had long made it plain he thought me a miserable, unintelligent wretch, his long gloomy face relented a little.

  ‘It is a plea to the King,’ he said, ‘from his humble servants to leave our reformed religion alone and not listen to malignant advisers –’

  ‘Like his Catholic Queen Henrietta?’ I broke in.

  He clapped an ink-stained hand over my mouth and looked nervously around. But I thought that for the first time he looked approvingly at me.

  ‘And a plea to listen to our humble opinions, not to dismiss Parliament when he chooses and to take money from his humble servants by taxing everything in sight: bricks, salt, even the humble bar of soap we wash with.’

  Since he looked as if he washed in ink and I scarcely washed at all in winter, avoiding the freezing pail in the yard, I thought soap unimportant and the whole Remonstrance thing sounded a good deal too humble for the King to care a jot about.

  Perhaps that showed in my face. His face flushed. For the first time he looked as if he had blood, rather than ink in his veins.

  ‘But the plea is really to you,’ he said.

  ‘To me?’ I said, amazed.

  ‘To the people. This will change the world.’

  This? What did he mean? Not taxing soap? I thought him a magician as his writing table bounced and the words in his head, now unknotted, flew on to the paper. He spoke as he wrote, the sonorous cadences of Mr Pym entering his voice and some of his phrases, such as ‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth . . .’ , echoing in my mind.

  It was as if he had cast a magic spell over me. The spell was in the words drying in my hand. They would change the world. I believed it utterly. I would change myself. As I ran out into the dark night, I determined to be a reformed character, and not stop at the Pot Upside Down for a beer and a game of pass-dice with the other apprentices. Alehouses and dice were near the top of the list of the thousand things apprentices were forbidden to do.

  But I must admit my pace slackened as I reached the alehouse. Although it was so late, excitement and rumours about the debate spilled out of the doors. One tankard, I persuaded myself, would help me run all the faster.

  There was a stranger near the bar, a gentleman in a beaver hat and a fashionable short cloak, questioning regulars. I heard him say ‘red’. My ears are sharp, particularly for that word. My hair, red as fire and just as unruly, is a curse to me. My master could spot me in an alehouse however dim the light and thick the smoke. People thought I had Scottish blood, or even worse, Irish, and, since the papists were in rebellion over there, twitted me for being a spy. I had the hot temper supposed to go with the hair and got into several fights over it.

  I caught the man in the beaver hat staring at me. He turned quickly away, to address a man I took to be his servant, who had the thick neck and shoulders of a bulldog, and a face pitted with smallpox.

  Sometimes the Guild used the Watch to catch apprentices in alehouses. I suddenly remembered that I was a reformed character and had sworn never to go into an alehouse again. I wriggled my way through the crowd and out of the alehouse, gripping the precious words Mr Ink had given me tightly in my hand. I really believed that those words, although I did not understand them (perhaps because of that), had changed me for good.

  As I ran, I imagined how being a reformed character would turn me into a good apprentice. I would become a Freeman of the City, marry Anne, in spite of my feet, have my own printing and book-seller’s shop by St Paul’s Churchyard and, after a few years, become Lord Mayor of London.

  So I flew down the sweet street of dreams, so deep in them I was scarcely aware of the stench (ten times worse than that of the ordinary streets) of Smithfield Market. The stink hit my nostrils at the same moment as I realised someone or something was behind me.

  I dived down a dark alley, my footsteps echoing. I stopped abruptly. Was that the echo, or someone’s footsteps stopping shortly after mine? I stuffed the precious papers in my pouch.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  There was a shuffling whisper of a sound and I kicked out at the rat scuttering past my feet. I had been a fool to come this way. I should have gone the long way up the Old Bailey. There were vagrants here, come to fight the red kites and the ravens for what offal they could find. London, I knew, because it was on one of the pamphlets I sold, had grown bigger than Paris and so was now the biggest city in the world, attracting thousands of the poor and desperate who would kill me for the flat cap on my head.

  Out of breath, I hurried into the market itself, clapping my hand to my nose. The air reeked of stale blood and urine. I jumped as ravens lumbered up from a yellow mess of intestines. The moon was up, casting long black shadows in the stalls into which the cattle were driven at dawn to be sold and slaughtered.

  The whole place was deserted and silent, except for the hovering, cawing ravens. A kite swooped. He was after the rats which came out at night to grow fat in the market. Behind the barn where the hay was stored there was a clatter, like a pail going over. I saw the man’s shadow before I saw him. I scrambled over a stall, and, in sheer terror, vaulted over another, a thing I’d never been able to do before. I heard him curse as he slipped in some cow-clap.

  He was two stalls behind. Another stall and I would reach Cloth Fair, and the twisting closes and passages which were home to me, where he would never catch me. I jeered as I prepared to jump down from the last stall. Then the sound stuck in my throat as I saw a glint of metal in front of me. Another man came out of the shadow of the wall, blocking my way to Cloth Fair. It was the man in the beaver hat from the alehouse.

  I took out the dagger from my belt, the only weapon an apprentice was allowed to carry. It was next to useless against the sword he had drawn, but he hesitated – not because of the puny dagger, but because of the ditch in the centre of the street in which a dead dog floated, and into which I was retreating.

  In those streets you had to sum up a man in an instant. The indigo doublet he wore was splashed from recent meals. His cloak was patched. His face, too, bearded in imitation of his King’s, pouched and veined, had seen better days. But it was the look in his eyes that told me how I might escape him. The look was a mixture of arrogance and aversion that signalled he was what we apprentices called a wall man. In the narrow streets he would, come what may, stick close to the wall, rudely facing-off approaching passers-by, forcing them into the ditch.

  I made to come at him, then, as his sword came up, duck
ed under it and ran through the ditch to the opposite wall. I was right. He would not cross the ditch but slashed from a distance. He cut at me. The blow sliced my hat askew. I staggered but ran on and would have got away but the other man, who had no such aversion for the ditch, grabbed me from behind.

  He had a grip like the jaws of a bulldog. The knife fell from my hand.

  ‘Did you see that, Crow?’ said the other man.

  ‘Went for you with a knife, sir.’

  ‘The little wretch insulted me.’

  He taunted me, demanding satisfaction, putting the point of the sword close to my eyes then, in a whirl of movement, cutting my belt and pouch away from my waist.

  I kicked and struggled but then, I am ashamed to say, I broke down. It was the sight of the papers, lying in my pouch at the edge of the ditch. One sheet was floating in a filthy pool, those precious words, which were going to change the world, shivering and leaking away.

  ‘Please, please let me go. Take my belt, my pouch, what you like, but let me have my papers!’

  Grimacing, the man picked up the pouch floating in the sewer with the point of his sword. ‘Item – one pouch. Pig’s-arse leather. Value?’

  Crow grinned. ‘Half a groat.’

  I felt the wind from the sword, the point of which grazed my head as he flicked off my hat, spinning it around before dropping it with distaste into his hand.

  ‘Item – one hat, London Apprentice’s thereof. Slightly damaged.’

  ‘One farthing.’

  ‘Half a groat and one farthing!’ he cried in mock amazement, then drew his hand across his throat, which I took to be part of the same jest until he abruptly turned away and Crow grabbed me by the hair and jerked my head back.

  I hung like a chicken that has had its neck wrenched, too paralysed with fear to kick or struggle. I heard the clink and slither of a knife being unsheathed. The sound drove me to struggle and kick, trying to twist my neck away as I glimpsed the glint of the knife, but he was far too strong for me and yanked my head further back. There was a sudden flutter of sound in my ears, a blur across the patch of sky.

  Crow jumped as a kite rose from his dive near us, a rat squealing briefly between its talons as the life was squeezed out of it. The rat losing its senses made me find mine.

  Distracted for a moment, Crow had relaxed his grip, instinctively turning the knife towards the kite. I jerked my head out of his grip and bit his hand so savagely I felt a tooth judder and loosen. He yelled, dropping the knife. The other man was bending to pick up the pouch. He grabbed at me but I head-butted him again and again in a frenzy. He slipped on some cow-clap and fell in the ditch, his shouts choked off as he took a mouthful of it.

  I grabbed the pouch with the precious words and ran as I had never run in my life before, almost knocking over the Bellman and the man who should have been watching the barn.

  There were cries of ‘stop thief’ from behind me. The Bellman tried to grab me but I pulled away – it is always the apprentice who is guilty – running into the maze of courts, alleys and twisting passageways off Cloth Fair.

  Chapter 3

  My master’s concern was so entirely bent on the dishevelled pottage of words I unpeeled from my pouch he seemed scarcely to notice the mess I was in.

  The cold, God-like fury which I had expected to fall on me fell instead on the task of turning the chaos of smeared sentences into ordered Octavo newssheets. He would have failed his God and Mr Pym (and his purse) if the speech was not circulating round the inns and the taverns where the respectable gathered that week.

  Who were Crow and the man in the beaver hat? They were not common cutpurses. Nor were they from the Guild. They had been told I frequented the Pot, and that I had red hair. All I could conclude was that the words I carried really were important, perhaps they would change the world, and they had hunted me and sought to kill me to get them.

  My guilt and misery increased as Mr Black struggled to make sense of one ink-stained page after another. At that time we all thought that the end of the world was close – George was convinced the Last Judgement was due in 1666, because, in Revelation, 666 was the number of the first beast to be overthrown. For myself, I thought it had started that night. I had had the words in my hand that would save the world, and I had lost them.

  My thoughts grew so crazy I even wished they would beat me rather than ignoring me, until Mr Black came to a page which completely defeated him.

  ‘Parliament is . . .’ he began. His eyes bulged as he struggled to decipher the words. He flung the sheet from him. ‘Damn the speech! Damn the boy!’ he yelled.

  I picked up the sheet, clutching at a word I saw in the dark grey smudge as a drowning man clutches at a spar. The word, in a mess of obliterated ones, was ‘soul’. Other words, miraculously, seemed to form before me in the smear of ink, as I remembered what Mr Ink had declaimed.

  ‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth,’ I said.

  They stared at me in astonishment, waiting for me to go on, but I could not. The spar was slipping from me and I was about to drown. Then Mr Black snatched the paper back and was able to de cipher the next few words:

  ‘. . . the Commonwealth that alone is able to understand the . . . the . . .’

  Again we came to a dead halt. In desperation I took the sheet from him and stared at the smudged word. I may have deciphered it, but I rather think that, grabbing into my memory, I somehow retrieved it.

  ‘Diseases!’ I said triumphantly.

  Mr Black seized the sheet as again I came to a full stop. The following words were indecipherable, both to his eyes and my memory; but a politician’s phrases and arguments become as familiar as his face, and Mr Black knew Mr Pym’s backwards.

  ‘Diseases that strike at the heart of the body politic!’ he cried.

  No poetry has ever moved me as much as that bedraggled line of political rhetoric, for it was uttered with such a religious fervour, and a look at me that was a second cousin of the look I got from Susannah when she thought that I read the Bible; while, in truth, I was piecing it together from my memory of her readings and her promptings.

  ‘God is with us!’ he exclaimed exultantly.

  Gloomy George, left out of this totally unexpected communion between us, scowled at me.

  ‘Compose!’ Mr Black shouted at him. ‘Don’t just stand there, man – compose!’

  The scowl became a look of pure malevolence as George seized his composing stick. Before, I had simply been someone to chastise and, however hopeless the task, save from sin; now I was unredeemable, his sworn enemy. The devil was a very subtle creature, who had somehow slithered and slived me into Mr Black’s favours, and must, at all costs, be rooted out. That was how George’s mind worked.

  Even George, however, got swept up in the desire to catch Mr Pym’s words and have them all over town as soon as possible. There was no faster typesetter in the City of London. If Mr Ink’s fingers had flown, George’s were a scarcely visible blur, dipping from case to stick and back to case again, working his own magic, reproducing the words backwards as between us Mr Black and I excavated John Pym’s fine phrases.

  As the night wore on we ceased to care about the increasing gap between what he had actually said, and what we invented. For the first time I had a glimmer of understanding about the power of the words we were handling. They were as explosive as gunpowder. All that was wanted was a fuse. Parliament had the right to approve the King’s ministers. The right? The King chose his own ministers, by Divine Right. Parliament alone had the right to make laws. Alone? Without the King?

  And there, by a miracle unsmeared, unequivocal, in Mr Ink’s flowing, cursive hand was the biggest keg of gunpowder of all: Parliament had the right to control the army.

  Mrs Black stumbled downstairs to see what was happening, awakening her daughter. I caught a glimpse of Anne in her nightgown at the foot of the stairs, hoping she would see from the excited chatter between me and her father that he was looking at me in
a different light. But she merely wished her father goodnight, turning away from me with a wrinkle of distaste. The flicker of that nose, with its tiny upturn I thought no sculptor could copy, made me miserably, hopelessly aware of the stink and grime of Smithfield on me, to which was being added the ink I was coating on the formes, now locked together for printing.

  I heard her laughter on the stair, and the hated word ‘monkey’. I was too fearful to curse her again. I hated her then. I hated the whole Black family. I hated being an apprentice. I wanted, above anything else in the world, to kick my boots off and be in the shipyard with Matthew again.

  After we had proofed and printed, I broke the ice in the pail in the yard, washed what dirt I could from my face and hands, and began to eat the cold pottage and drink the beer Sarah had left out. Mr Black took some wine for himself, gazing with pride at the newssheets, gleaming wet in the candlelight. There was a fine portrait of the King, hair curling luxuriously to his shoulders from his hat cocked at the front, and a more modest one of Mr Pym, his pointed beard chipped because we had used the block so many times.

  Mr Black’s idea was to put Parliament’s explosive demands in a respectful wrapping, viz:

  a Grand Remonstrance

  of PARLIAMENT

  to his MAJESTY THE KING

  Being the onlye true & faithful reporte of the

  proceedings of Parliament praying His Majesty to

  adresse the most humble supplications of his subjects

  I had swallowed my beer in two draughts when Mr Black said to George: ‘Take some wine yourself and pour Tom some.’

  George’s eyebrows lifted and looked as if they would never come down again. He was only offered wine on his name day, and Mr Black had never offered me it before; rarely had he called me Tom. I had always been ‘that boy’, ‘sinning wretch’ or ‘little devil’; only lately, as I had grown almost as tall as he was, kept my boots on regular, and was suddenly useful to him had he begun to call me, albeit with heavy sarcasm, ‘Mr Neave’.