Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  I returned downstairs.

  ‘It looks as though it started down here. You were lucky.’

  ‘Yes. I thanked the Lord.’ Mother Banks clasped her hands. ‘Near the church, two whole streets went up recently. We were lucky the men acted so quickly.’

  I walked round the room where Susannah had slept, and where most of the damage was. King James had said he found London ‘built of sticks’ and wanted to leave it ‘built of bricks’, but had stopped at the eastern suburbs where the marsh would not support such houses. The builders rushing up the houses for new dock workers had daubed between the timbers a mess of mortar and rags that in a fire rapidly crumbled away. The debris crunched beneath our feet as the damp fog swirled round us from the street.

  I picked up the candlestick again, turning the twisted stem round and round in my fingers. I remembered once trying to sneak upstairs with it so I could read after everyone had gone to sleep. It was the only time I had ever seen her angry.

  I shook my head. ‘Susannah wouldn’t have left the candle alight.’

  She pressed my hand gently. ‘She must have done, Tom.’

  I pulled away from her, flinging the candlestick away. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  She was frightened by the sudden violence, exploding out of a mixture of anger, bewilderment and grief. So was I. I couldn’t stop shaking. Two men. The day after I had run away. Thinking the obvious thing, that I would come straight to Poplar. Finding not me, but my mother.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Buried. Yesterday. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Come with me.’

  I was like a child again, going from sudden violence to uncontrollable weeping. She led me to her house, murmuring that weeping would make me feel better, but I did not believe it, did not believe it would ever be so. First to lose Matthew, for I was convinced then I would never see him again, and now Susannah . . .

  Mother Banks had little coal so I went back to the wreckage of our house and foraged for pieces of half-burnt timber. Outside, the clinging, yellow fog was now so thick a muffled ship’s bell rang insistently, for any ship which had not sought shelter must be travelling dead slow. She built up the fire and heated up some pottage, which first I refused to eat, but once I started swallowed greedily.

  The empty plate was slipping from my fingers. I felt her gently taking it from me.

  ‘She would not . . . leave a . . . candle lit . . .’ I muttered stubbornly.

  ‘Susannah had changed. She was not as you knew her.’

  ‘Changed?’

  ‘Ssshh. Go to sleep.’

  ‘How changed?’ I mumbled.

  ‘She turned preacher.’

  ‘A woman preacher!’

  I smiled. This was the sort of story I loved in pamphlets, the sort you knew could not be true but wanted to be true, the sort that people bought for a penny or two and repeated over fires like this until many people believed it. The sort of story to fall asleep over. But this one jerked me awake, staring at Mother Banks with amazement.

  Susannah had stopped going to Mr Ingram at St Dunstan’s, going instead to an independent minister where they prayed in silence until a person was inspired to speak. Most of the women were short on words, and looked to the minister, as a man, for guidance; but it appeared that Susannah had what he said was the gift of tongues. She rose to her feet and held the room spellbound as her words rang round it.

  She said the great tumult in London stirred up by Parliament was the Second Coming. Christ had been born again, not in a stable this time, but in a plague pit. She claimed to have been a witness to it, speaking in a strange muddle of Bible stories and things that she claimed had happened to her. Oxford became Bethlehem and King Charles Herod.

  People began to come from the surrounding parishes to hear her, even those who thought she was mad, for a strange voice came out of her, and some actually believed her prophecies, that Christ was being plotted against all over again.

  ‘What did you think of what she said, Mother?’ I asked.

  She hesitated. ‘At first I thought it was hunger.’

  ‘Hunger?’

  ‘She fasted. She took nothing for days but small beer. Then . . .’ She hesitated again. A log settled and threw a flickering light on her face. ‘She spoke in riddles, like the Bible. She said you be her child, and not her child.’

  I laughed. ‘What does that mean?’

  The flickering flame died and her face was in darkness. ‘There was one child who was his mother’s, and not his mother’s,’ she said.

  I stopped laughing and stared at her. Her hands were clasped together and her face came into the light again. ‘I prayed so much for you to come! And when you came out of the fog like that . . . I thought . . . for a moment . . .’

  I took her hands and shook my head, unable to speak for I was so overwhelmed by the faith and the hope in her face.

  ‘You are not . . . He that is to come?’

  She stretched out a hand to touch my face, and I took it and kissed it and now I could not help smiling and laughing.

  ‘No, no, Mother Banks, I’m sorry, but thank you – I am much more often mistook for the devil! But I’m neither, I hope. I am the same old Tom, Tom Neave, hands black as ever, look – but with ink now, not pitch!’

  I hugged her and she laughed with me, for we both needed some laughter on that gloomy day. She laughed with relief as much as anything else, for she had a practical bent like me; yet I felt there was a tinge of regret and I saw again the narrow line between the stories we tell one another and believing them to be true.

  When I finally fell asleep that night in front of the dying fire, Susannah’s riddle spun round and round in my head. Her child and not her child. For the first time I began to ask questions I should have put to myself long before.

  Had I not too easily believed stories I had told myself? That Mr Black, for instance, had apprenticed me for no other reason than that he had heard of my miraculous gift for reading?

  A bitter eastern wind sprang up during the night and cleared the fog. Mother Banks took me to St Dunstan’s and showed me the unmarked plot where Susannah was buried. It was in a neglected corner where the wind cut across the marsh. It bent the trees in one direction while the church, from the settlement of the land, leaned in the other. There were no stones and the grass was rank and uncut, except for the new grave.

  At least it had the open view of the marsh which I loved, where the land, patches of flood water gleaming, mingled with the tumbling grey sky. I felt tears coming again and fell on my knees and tried to pray, but kept thinking about the two men and the fire.

  We marked the spot with a little cairn of stones, and I vowed to return one day and have a proper stone made.

  ‘Did anything happen that evening before the fire?’ I asked, as we walked back.

  ‘Nothing. Well . . .’ She hesitated.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I went out to the privy, I heard Susannah shouting and screaming.’

  ‘Did you knock on her door?’

  ‘No.’ She swallowed nervously. ‘I was frightened. You don’t know what she was like, Tom. She would stand up at a meeting and shout that the Lord had come to her!’

  ‘Is that what she was shouting then?’

  ‘No, no, no. I can’t remember. Well, I heard her shout, “God knows I don’t know where he is!” Then there was silence. I thought she was calling out in her sleep.’

  There was the skeleton of a new ship in the dry dock, but no men working on it when I went there after leaving the graveyard. I passed some pitch, frozen in a bucket, on my way to the shipwright’s office.

  He exclaimed at the size of me, saying he used to look down at me and now had to look up; and would not have recognised me but for my red flare of hair and the jutting prow of my nose. He took it I had returned because of the death of Susannah and I said nothing about the breaking of my bond, but there was an edginess about his greeting, as if he suspected something. He had a bad leg, a
nd at the sound of a footfall outside from one of the few workers in the yard, he limped quickly to the door to see who it was, as though he was afraid of some unwelcome visitor.

  Most of the workers had drifted away to find other work, he told me. After the keel of the ship outside had been laid down, the money had run out. Three gentlemen had shares in the boat. When one had been imprisoned for debt, the others had refused to pay until they could replace the shareholder. Until the arguments between King and Parliament were settled, he said, all business was marooned, like the skeleton of the ship which was slowly beginning to rot.

  I asked him who the sailors were who had stayed with Susannah that night.

  ‘Sailors?’ He shook his head. ‘Weren’t sailors. Boatman brought them from the City. They said they were friends of yours. Hoped they might find you here.’

  ‘Did you believe them?’

  He spat and went to the window again. ‘Wouldn’t have them aboard ship,’ he said. ‘One looked like a soldier.’ He spat again. ‘Or had been. He had a long face. Wore a beaver hat. The other I wouldn’t like to argue with. Said they were helping you find your father.’

  ‘Matthew? What did you tell them?’

  ‘Same as I told the other man that came looking for him, soon after he vanished.’

  ‘What other man?’

  For the first time he looked at me directly. ‘In trouble, are you?’

  I said nothing.

  He hesitated, then went on. ‘I told them and the other man that Matthew was looking for a berth on a boat to Hull, or maybe a coal boat back to Newcastle.’

  ‘Is that where he went?’

  He looked at me searchingly, spat again, then moved some charts from a stool and told me to sit down. He took down a flask from the same shelf on which stood the bottle of London Treacle they gave me the day I burnt myself with pitch, and I remembered the strange dream of the old gentleman bending over me that day as I slept in this very room.

  ‘How’s your scar?’ he asked.

  I showed him the discoloured, slightly puckered flesh. He looked at it almost approvingly as he shoved to one side of his desk drawings of ships that might be, or might never be, and poured a dark brown liquid from the flask.

  ‘You’ll have a few of those before you’re done.’

  I coughed as I swallowed the fiery brown liquid and tears came to my eyes. This seemed to put him in better humour.

  ‘And a few of those.’

  He swallowed what he said was the best Dutch brandy-wine, duty paid (a wink), poured himself another and stared out at the half-finished boat in the silent dock.

  ‘Matthew stood here, the day you went. He wanted to go down and say goodbye. He heard you shout “Father” and he very nearly went down then. But he was too frightened.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  He pointed at the river. ‘He went upstream, not down, the day after you left – the very next tide. I got him a berth in a barge. I heard him say he wanted to be dropped off somewhere between Maidenhead and Reading. I’ve no idea where he was going from there, but he reckoned it was a day’s travel, by the green road, whatever that means.’

  I embraced him. ‘Thank you, thank you! You said there was another man came looking for Matthew. Just after he vanished. Who was that?’

  The shipwright gave me something between a shake and a shudder. ‘I never seen him before, and I’m not very particular about seeing him again. Told me where to send knowledge of Matthew, but I never had no knowledge to send him, did I?’

  During this he rummaged in a drawer amongst old charts and tidal tables until he unearthed a slip of paper. The hand was crabbed and uneven, with short, angry downstrokes that dug into the paper; the hand of a man who had learned to write later in life and with difficulty, and with many loops and flourishes designed to display his status. He had written: R. E. Esq., at Mr Black, Half Moon Court, Farringdon, London.

  The shipwright did not know who R.E. Esq was, but said he had a scar on his face, drawing a line from cheek to neck, exactly as Matthew had done when he had warned me about the scarred man over the camp fire six years ago.

  Before I was out of the door he was pouring himself another brandy. I was halfway down the steps when he shouted:

  ‘Wait! All that talk and I nearly forgot . . .’

  Again he rummaged in a drawer, then another, muttering to himself before finally unearthing a coin. ‘Matthew said it was yours, not his.’

  It touched me to the heart when I thought that my father, even in such a panic, and when he must have needed all the money he had, had left me what he could. ‘Mine?’

  ‘Belonged to thee. That’s what he said.’

  Puzzled, I took the coin from him, turning it over and over, as if I could read some message from the inscriptions. But it was a silver half crown, like any other, showing the King on a charger.

  Chapter 6

  They – whoever they were – would find me if I stayed in Poplar. So I did what I judged they would not expect. Like Dick Whittington, I turned again, walking back towards the City.

  I would find out who they were, the men who, I was convinced, had killed my mother. Try and find the answer to the questions that whirled endlessly in my head like so many angry bees. Why had Mr Black taken me on as an apprentice? What was his connection to the man with the scar?

  The man who could answer these questions, or most of them, was Mr Black.

  The wind was driving dark, scudding clouds over the marsh when I set off next morning, after spending a second night at Mother Banks’s. I reached the outskirts of the City at midday. There I stopped. I would not get far in my apprentice’s uniform, and the seaman’s jaunty scrap of a cap barely concealed my red hair.

  Just inside the City I found the kind of market I needed. From Irish Mary at a second-hand clothing stall I bought thin britches – because they had bows that tied at the knee, which I fondly imagined to be the height of fashion – and traded my give-away apprentice’s boots for a pair of shoes with fancy buckles like those ‘worn at court’, she said. A leather jacket tempted me, and I drew out the coin Matthew had left for me. She bit it, saying it was not only a good one, but one of the first to be minted.

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘See? On the rim there – the lys?’

  Her long fingernail pointed to a tiny fleur-de-lys, above the King’s head. She said the mint mark showed that it was coined in 1625, the year of the King’s Coronation.

  ‘About as old as you are,’ she cackled.

  An unaccountable shiver ran through me; the sort of shiver that used to make Susannah ask: ‘Has someone walked over thy grave, Tom?’

  Matthew had told the shipwright it was mine and I took it back, turning it round and round between my fingers, feeling that perhaps it was a magic coin and, if I spent it, I would be spending part of my past. I reluctantly took off the expensive jacket, and put the coin back in my pocket. Instead I bought what she called a Joseph, perhaps after the coat of many colours, although these colours were those of various leather patches that held it together, larded with grease and other stains I did not care to question. At another stall I exchanged my apprentice’s knife for a saw-tooth dagger. The upper part of the blade was lined with teeth that would catch the tempered blade of any sword and snap it.

  The City looked different. Cornhill was swept clean. In spite of drizzling rain, groups of scavengers were out in Poultry, throwing household filth, dead birds and a dead dog into their carts. They did not argue, as they usually did, that a pile of refuse was ‘over the line’ in the other’s ward, or, when the other cart was out of sight, dump it over the boundary. Planks were being laid so that coaches would not get stuck in the muddy streets. A group of men were arguing fiercely outside St Stephen, Walbrook, where the bells were ringing. I asked one man what o’clock it was and what was the service? He told me it was four of the clock and there was no service. They were practising the bells for the King.

  ‘The King
?

  I stared at him stupidly. ‘Do you not know? The King has set up a government with the Scots. He arrives tomorrow from Edinburgh to talk to Parliament.’

  To talk to Parliament! I stood there, stunned. The King was going to listen to Parliamentary demands! I walked away in a dream. I felt that what Mr Ink had said was coming true, and we were on the brink of a new world.

  It was beginning to grow dark, but it was too early to find Will, my drinking companion, in the Pot. I hoped to beg a bed from him. Once, when it had been too late to return to Half Moon Court after a heated debate, I had slept in his father’s tobacco warehouse. I made my way towards the red kites, which always dipped and soared above Smithfield in the evening, searching, like the poor, for what the butchers had thrown away. In Long Lane I stopped. When I ran from Half Moon Court, Mr Black had shouted that I was in great danger. Just words to entice me back? Or a genuine warning? I seemed to recall a note of real desperation in his voice. I still carried my apprentice’s uniform, rolled in a bundle. I turned it over and over in my hands, unable to admit to myself that the bond between us was quite broken.

  From Half Moon Court came the sound of horses. A voice I did not recognise was shouting brusque commands.

  A woman with a boy and girl running round her skirts came out of the market clutching a bloody bundle in a scarf, full of high spirits at finding their evening meal. The girl had a battered wooden toy and the boy tried to grab it. The girl ran from him into the street just as a Hackney hell-cart came out of Cloth Fair into Long Lane.

  The boy stopped short, but the girl stood frozen in front of the approaching cart. The driver, who was riding one of the two horses, pulled frantically at the reins. The horse he was on responded but the other reared, dragging the coach forward at an angle towards the child. The child stared upwards at the rearing horse, wonder rather than fear on her face. The woman was screaming.

  A man in the coach shouted, his voice cut off as he was thrown against the side. The flailing hooves were descending towards the child. Only then did she turn to run.

  I flung my uniformed bundle at the horse’s head. The horse shied away, whinnying frantically, falling against the other horse, hooves coming down inches from the girl as I snatched her up.