Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  I stood there holding her while the driver struggled to calm the panic-stricken horses. I was shaking, but she seemed unmoved.

  ‘Horse,’ she said, stretching her hand out to the animal the driver was preparing to remount.

  ‘Horse,’ I agreed, stroking her hair. ‘Horse.’

  Her mother, sobbing with relief, was moving towards us when the curtain in the coach slid back. All I could see was the scar. A livid scar running from cheek to neck. The man had twisted round in his seat, and the scar seemed to be doing the cursing, swearing at me.

  Petrified, I gripped the little girl to me. My hat had come off, and it was still light enough for him to see me. But he was righting himself, cursing and rubbing his head where he struck it.

  He turned towards me. I glimpsed fine linen and eyes as cold as money. Before he could see my face I lifted the little girl high in the air, dandling her up and down in front of me to conceal my red hair. She squealed in delight.

  ‘Are you trying to get your children killed? One less mouth to feed?’

  I felt all the fear and hatred that I had heard in my father’s voice when he had spoken of the man. And anger that there was not a trace of concern for the child or her mother. An almost uncontrollable urge filled me to pull him from the coach. Then the woman spoke:

  ‘I am sorry, sir. I am truly sorry. It is my fault.’

  Hearing the beseeching, pleading note in her voice, taking all the blame when the coach was travelling so recklessly, I could stand it no longer. I handed her the child and walked up to the coach.

  But he had turned away with a grudging satisfaction at her apology and was now shouting at the driver, who, with some difficulty, had quietened the horses. ‘Come on, come on, man! I must get to Westminster before dark.’

  He shut the curtain. The driver scuttled for his whip, cracked it and the carriage lurched off. I stood there, staring after it. Although there was a chill in the evening air, my body crawled with sweat at how near I had come to giving myself away. There was a timid touch at my elbow. The woman was holding out the scarf, which wrapped the bloody remains she had scavenged. I felt a double pang: that she should offer me her supper, and that I could look as if I needed it. She whispered something to the little girl.

  ‘Thank you,’ the girl said.

  I smiled, moved to gallantly sweep off my hat and bow, discovered the hat was not there, affected great surprise, which drew a giggle from the girl and a smile from the woman, and could not seem to find it although it lay in front of my eyes, which drew peals of laughter from the girl.

  ‘It’s there!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’

  This welcome little game was interrupted by a familiar voice.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  George had come out of Half Moon Court. He still had a plaster on his head where I had struck him, but his darting eyes seemed as sharp as ever. I turned away, retrieving my hat. The woman told him what had happened. All that seemed to concern him was that the coach and its occupant had gone. I moved to pick up my uniform, torn and muddied by the wheels of the coach. I felt his eyes on me, but then I heard Anne’s voice.

  ‘George, are you going?’

  My heart lifted. If only I could speak to her before her father!

  ‘I must get my coat,’ George said. ‘It’s a chill evening.’

  ‘Please hurry!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he muttered.

  He gave me another curious look. I bent and picked up a rotting apple from the sewer, which seemed to satisfy him I was a beggar, for he went back into the court. Under the overhanging jetties it was darker and easy to follow him, keeping to the shadows of the opposite building. Although my new shoes leaked, they made less noise than the clumsy boots. Candles were lit in the house. The last of the light always came into my window in the evening, and I could see the edge of my mother’s Bible on the sill.

  At least, I determined, I would take that away.

  Anne came to the doorway. She wore a pale-blue, high-waisted dress which I knew to be her best, presumably for the benefit of the visitor. Over that she had put on an apron. She carried George’s coat. He seemed to take an interminable time putting it on, during which he shook his head gravely before finally coming to a decision to speak.

  ‘What has happened to Mr Black is God’s visitation on you, Miss Anne,’ he said.

  She looked at him in terror. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think you know,’ he said steadily.

  ‘Indeed I do not! Please go for the doctor.’

  I stared up at the window of Mr Black’s bedroom. In the wavering candlelight I could just see Mrs Black passing restlessly by the bed, peering out of the window.

  George stopped buttoning his coat, glanced up at the window, not speaking until Mrs Black had passed out of sight. ‘You let the devil out of the cellar,’ he said softly.

  ‘I did no such thing!’ Her voice was equally low, but sharp and contemptuous, as if it was the last thing in the world she would dream of doing.

  ‘I saw you.’

  ‘I came down when I heard the disturbance.’

  ‘I saw you going up.’

  There was a trace of uncertainty in his voice which she leapt on. ‘You cannot have done. You make too much of yourself. Get the doctor!’

  Perhaps he was lying and merely suspected. Or had seen something, but, groggy after my blow, could not be sure. At any rate, he began to move away reluctantly, and my heart went out to her for standing up to him.

  All would have been well, but then she added bitterly: ‘You should have let him have a candle.’

  She knew what she had said as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He stopped and turned very slowly. As he did so I caught the smile of satisfaction on his face. It vanished as he looked at her with grave concern.

  ‘How did you know about the candle?’

  She gave a little moan. ‘Please go.’

  ‘Mr Black needs more than a doctor to cure him. We must root out the cause of the illness: your sin.’

  He spoke so solemnly, so gravely, I had to struggle against the feeling that he was right, had been right all the time, and that the devil was within me. When George and Mr Black had first brought me here from Poplar, before the boat bumped against Blackfriars Stairs, had I not sworn a pact with him to be as evil as possible?

  ‘You must confess,’ George demanded.

  She staggered. I thought she was going to faint.

  ‘I cannot tell my father – it would kill him!’

  ‘Then you must confess to God.’

  ‘Yes, yes. You will not tell my father?’

  ‘If you are good, child, and accept my guidance.’

  She nodded perfunctorily, turning away. I could see she was on the edge of tears. ‘Please go now.’

  He was insistent. ‘You will? Accept my guidance?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He smiled. ‘God be praised! The sinner repenteth!’

  He took her hands and began murmuring a prayer. At first she submitted, head bowed, but when she tried to take her hands away he only held them more tightly, murmuring away. Half a dozen times I nearly broke out of that doorway. Half a dozen times I forced myself back until suddenly I no longer cared whether he was pure good and I was pure evil. I jumped out.

  ‘Leave her! Leave her alone!’

  Nothing George had said could have made his point better. For a moment I must have looked like some foul spirit coming out of the ground. Anne screamed and backed away to the door. George ran. ‘Anne!’ Mrs Black shouted from upstairs. ‘What is it? Has George gone for the doctor?’

  There was no sign of him. ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  Guilt drove me: I felt that Mr Black’s illness was my fault. And breaking a bond is not just a matter of throwing away a uniform and selling boots. I went because I could not get out of my head it was no longer my job. Several times a year Mr Black had these strange attacks. He would stop wha
t he was doing and stare at me like a blind man. Once, he dropped back on his chair, missed it, and fell to the floor. The first time I was very frightened, but Mrs Black drummed into me that when he had one of these attacks I must run and fetch Dr Chapman, for my master’s life depended on it.

  The doctor practised near St Bartholomew’s in Little Britain but, luckily, was returning from a patient only two streets away. He was a bustling little man, of great good humour.

  When I first met him I had told him I hated my hair; he offered to cup me for nothing, in the light of the discoveries of Mr Harvey, who declared that blood circulated and nourished everything. If enough was taken, he said, it might drain the colour from my hair. I thought he was serious and backed away hastily, at which he burst out into roars of laughter.

  Now he said slyly, as we hurried back to Half Moon Court: ‘I like your court dress, Tom. Are you to be presented to the King tomorrow?’

  He went upstairs laughing, but that soon died. I always knew from the sound of his voice how serious the attack was. Now his greeting and his banter dwindled almost immediately into silence. There was no sign of George or Anne. It was very quiet, apart from the murmurings of the doctor, and the occasional creaks when he moved across the floor above me. There was no chance of my confronting Mr Black, but I might get my Bible.

  I opened the door to the kitchen, where a kettle was heating by the side of the fire. I crept to the bottom of the stairs; from there I could see that the door to Mr Black’s bedroom was closed. There was the faint clink of metal against a basin. I had watched Dr Chapman cup him once. After tightening a bandage round Mr Black’s arm he would warm a lancet in the candle flame and draw it across a bulging vein. After a spurt of blood there would be a steady flow. It would take about ten minutes.

  I took a step or two up the stairs. A shadow fell across the small landing above. I glimpsed the edge of Mrs Black’s dress and pulled back against the wall. Never able to stand the blood-letting, she had gone into her own room. Anne was probably with her.

  I stood indecisively. I could see straight through to the print shop, and beyond that to Mr Black’s small office. The door, normally locked, was open. Papers littered the writing desk and the floor around it. A chair had been knocked over. I took a candle from the kitchen and went past the printing press into the office. Mr Black must have been working here when he had the attack.

  As I picked up the chair I saw it: a bound black accounts book, of the type Mr Black used to keep a note of deliveries of ink and paper, and sales of pamphlets. But on the cover of this one was inked a single letter T.

  Whatever I hoped to see when I opened it, it was not dull accounts. But there they were in Mr Black’s neat hand, items of purchase and columns of figures.

  I flicked through the pages rapidly. There was my life in Half Moon Court, from the cost of the watermen that had brought me here and the tutorials with Dr Gill, down to the very bread and cheese I had eaten, faithfully recorded right to the last halfpenny. I stopped as a word which seemed out of place with the others half-registered in the turning pages: portrait. Portrait?

  I turned back, to see an entry whose amount dwarfed all the others.

  8 August 1635. Paid to P. Lely. Portrait in oils & frame. £20-0-0.

  I had had no portrait done. The very idea was laughable. Only people at court had their pictures painted. No. That was not quite true. Each Lord Mayor had his portrait painted and hung in the Guildhall. I went very still.

  The summer of 1635 I had taken a message to the clerk in the Guildhall and been told to wait for a reply. While I was in the waiting room a young man wandered in. His smock and hands were daubed with paint. He spoke with a thick Dutch accent and said the Mayor had gone out to a meeting, and he too was waiting for him.

  He pushed my face to one side so he could see the profile and grunted something in Dutch. He said he was tired of painting old men who wanted to look young and dashing, and as an exercise he would really like someone young and dashing to sketch.

  I was flattered and amazed by the incredible speed with which he sketched. By the time the clerk came with the reply, and to say that the Mayor was ready again, the painter had caught me like a bird in flight. A grin. A sulk when I grew bored with him. In profile. Staring with wide eyes straight out of the paper.

  As the charcoal flew across the paper he grunted, ‘The eyes you have. The nose. Everything but the hair.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He seemed too absorbed in the next sketch to answer. ‘Turn. No no – the other way!’

  I begged him for a sketch but he said he needed them all. ‘Perhaps the painting you may one day see, mmm?’

  He smiled, patting me on the cheek, leaving traces of charcoal and paint which I left there until they disappeared.

  Peter – that was his name. I stared at the account book: P. Lely. Peter Lely. Perhaps Mr Black had commissioned him to do a portrait of himself. No. No printer could afford it, and if he could he would surely hang it prominently. Somebody had paid for a picture of me. But who? Why? And where was it?

  I heard sounds upstairs; the doctor’s deep voice and Mrs Black’s low murmuring answer. Quickly I riffled through the remaining pages. A folded piece of paper, which I supposed was used as a marker, flew out of the book. I picked it up and placed it on the table. There was nothing of interest in the rest of the accounts, but there was a whole new section at the end. Mr Black had turned the book upside down to start the section on the last page. It was a cross between a diary and a tutor’s report on my progress, or lack of it.

  I was ‘obstinate as a mule’. ‘Bright but uncontrollable.’ One day there was ‘a glimmer of hope’, the next total despair – ‘I would have him on the boat back to Poplar if I could.’

  It was soon clear that these were notes for more carefully worded reports, for there was the draft of one of them, pulling together various amended notes. Written two months ago, it declared: ‘Mr Tom hath the Latin of a scholar, I have taught him a good Italian hand, he can use a fork at table, but his morality must still be called seriously into question.’

  Mr Black got reports from Dr Gill. Why did he need to write these? They must be for the same person who commissioned the portrait. The accounts book answered at least some of the questions that had been plaguing me. Someone had paid Mr Black to have me educated and apprenticed; either the man with the scar, or, more likely, the kindly old gentleman Matthew had told me he represented.

  Remembering the piece of paper I had picked up, I unfolded it. It was part of a letter, written on a different paper, a thick quality paper, and the hand was very different. Mr Black was proud of his hand, the simple sloping penmanship of a businessman, without flourishes, essential for something that might have to be read quickly in a dim light or a swaying carriage.

  This was written in an erratic, angular hand, liberally sprinkled with capitals and with thick upstrokes and downstrokes that cut into the surrounding lines and made the words so difficult to read I had to move the paper closer to the candle. The paper was that of a gentleman, possibly one who had a scrivener to write his letters for him. I could see why he had not dictated this one.

  It was a page from a longer letter:

  . . . means that he now looks at the boy in a different way. He sees him as a great Folie who must be got rid of. Perhaps a Taverne brawl or some similar kind of ACCIDENT.

  He has men for the purpose, who have been given a likeness and of course the boy’s hair stands out like a beacon.

  This matter will bring me to London sooner than I intended, but meanwhile re the accounts you sent me . . .

  The page ended with some minute dissections of the cost of paper and ink. I searched frantically among the papers for the preceding page, but could find nothing. In spite of what had happened to me, I could not believe I had read the words right, and, hands trembling so much I almost singed the paper with the candle, began to decipher every word of that page again.

  ‘What are
you doing?’

  It was Anne, holding the kettle. I was so still, so intent on those scrawled words, she must have taken the kettle from the fire and been on her way back to the stairs before she saw me.

  ‘Somebody is trying to kill me.’

  The words came out of my mouth lame and halting, marked with disbelief in spite of the evidence in front of me. But I must have looked so rigid with shock that she came up to me, concern on her face.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.

  ‘Look –’

  I showed her the letter. I had forgotten she could not read. In a panic I gabbled that somebody had paid to make something of me, and now that I had failed had decided to get rid of me. It must have sounded a great nonsense, for she pulled away with alarm.

  ‘You’re mad!’

  ‘Look –’

  Even though she could not read them, I tried to show her the patterns the words made, in the vain hope that she would see the madness, the evil, in the blotches, the sword-like downstrokes.

  ‘Anne!’ Mrs Black called. ‘The water must have boiled by now.’

  There was the creak of a door opening upstairs. ‘Get out,’ Anne hissed.

  ‘I’m not mad,’ I whispered. ‘You must believe me!’

  We heard her on the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Is that George?’

  ‘No, Mother,’ Anne shouted back. ‘The water’s just boiled. I’m coming.’ To me she whispered: ‘George has gone for the constable. Stay – if you want to be arrested.’

  It was only when she went that I thought of my Bible. I hurried to call her back, but she was already halfway up the stairs. I folded the letter and put it into my pocket. I went to the door and listened. It was silent in the yard, but towards the river there was the sound of rioting, in the direction of Westminster. I hoped that would make it difficult for George to find his constable.

  After a minute or so Anne returned to refill the kettle. The pail in the kitchen was empty. Ignoring me, she went to the pail in the yard we normally washed in. I followed her, taking the pail from her, doing what I had done so many times, drawing my fingers over the water, breaking the thin film of ice already forming on it. I ached for normality, and the everyday action calmed us both. I dipped a jug in the water and poured it into the kettle.