Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  ‘How is Mr Black?’

  ‘He cannot speak.’

  I was stunned. Water flowed over the top of the kettle as she pulled it away. I stared up at the window, where I could see the elongated shadow of the doctor move across the wall.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘You struck him,’ she said, accusingly.

  ‘He struck me!’

  ‘It is his right.’

  ‘When it is just. George taking the candle was not just.’

  We had instinctively drawn away from the house, into the shadows of the tree where, for that brief period, we used to play as children. ‘I should never have let you out! George knows.’

  ‘Don’t trust him.’

  ‘I must.’

  She began to move back to the house.

  ‘If he meant well by you, he would tell your father.’

  She stopped. She was now in the light, and I could see that her hands, which she twisted together constantly, were white with cold. I longed to touch them, to take them in my hands, but dare not. There was a trace of the old mockery in her voice.

  ‘And I can trust you?’

  ‘Yes!’

  I spoke with a ferocity that made her jump with fear, but then she gave me back a look of such intensity I wanted to lower my eyes but could not, or dare not. It seemed to go into my very soul in a way no preacher, nor my mother and father had ever done.

  ‘Did you write that poem?’

  ‘Yes – and meant every word of it.’

  Everything at that moment was as sharp and clear as the moonlight on the splinters of ice I had broken in the pail. She stared back at me, trembling, but before she could speak there was the sound of someone turning into the court from Cloth Fair. At the same time I saw her mother coming to the window. I jumped into the shadows.

  It was the pewterer who lived opposite. His clothes were usually dusty with the chalk shed by the plates and mugs when he took them from the mould, but now they were clean. For him, like the shipwright, business had dried up.

  His gait was unsteady. He scarcely gave Anne a glance. ‘Goodnight, Mr Reynolds.’

  ‘Goodnight, Anne.’

  Mrs Black had withdrawn from the window. The intensity of the moment had gone. Neither of us spoke. She picked at her apron. Suddenly she put a hand to her mouth to smother laughter.

  ‘What do you look like!’

  ‘Well, I think,’ I said stiffly, with a stab of indignation, yet with a feeling of relief that we were back on the familiar ground of mocking banter.

  I displayed my shoe. In the dim light the gap where the upper was parting from what was left of the sole could scarcely be seen, and I thought it had a particularly fine buckle.

  ‘This shoe has been presented at court.’

  ‘Which court?’ She struggled to stop giggling. ‘James or Elizabeth?’

  She could not contain her laughter and I was frightened they would hear her. ‘I had to change my clothes!’

  ‘As people do in your pamphlets?’ she mocked. ‘Because someone is trying to kill you?’

  A movement in the window drew our eyes upwards. The candles in the room threw a wavering silhouette on the wall of Dr Chapman fastening his bag. Time and again, I find, ideas come out of desperation.

  ‘You know your numbers?’ I whispered urgently.

  ‘Of course,’ she said indignantly.

  Without another word I grabbed her hand and ran her into the house. Water splashed from the kettle and she almost dropped it. I took it from her and put it down. Now she looked convinced I was mad, was ready to scream. I went into the office, picked up the accounts book and pointed out the letter T, which I think she understood.

  And, as I whispered the names of the purchases, she with increasing bewilderment in her face scanned the numbers. She knew some of her letters by stitching them and her numbers by shopping. We heard the bedroom door opening upstairs. I almost dropped the book, then could not find what I was looking for. She was begging me silently to go, her hands locked beseechingly.

  I found the entry.

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

  She did not understand the words, but stared in such wonderment at the number, she did not react to Dr Chapman’s voice.

  ‘I will call in tomorrow morning.’

  There was no reply from Mr Black, but his wife said: ‘Look – he is writing something!’ I could hear the doctor go back into the room.

  ‘Twenty pounds!’ Anne exclaimed.

  It was as much as a skilled clerk earned in a year. I told her what it was for.

  ‘A picture! Of you? It must be something to do with the man with the scar.’

  ‘So I imagine.’

  ‘I hate him!’ she said vehemently. ‘Shouting at my father when he’s ill; ordering him about. Who is he?’

  I shook my head. She kept looking at the entry in the book and then at me. I do not know what she was seeing, but it was no longer a clown, a tumbler, or even an apprentice. She bit her lower lip as she often did when she was vexed or puzzled.

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ she kept saying with awe. ‘For a picture. Of you.’

  ‘A monkey.’

  ‘Don’t joke. Where is it?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘I knew it.’ The words came out in a tiny explosion. ‘One day my father –’ She stopped herself.

  ‘Your father what?’

  She shook her head and refused to say more. We heard Dr Chapman saying goodbye and hurried through the darkened print shop to the door. I desperately tried to think of a way of seeing her again.

  ‘Can you bring me my Bible?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ll write to you. Through Sarah.’ I groaned inwardly again at the frustration of her being unable to read.

  ‘I will learn,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as though it was something she could do in a day or two. ‘If my father cannot speak, I shall have to read. My mother is no good at business.’

  ‘Bring the Bible to church. Sunday.’

  She stood there, slight, determined, letting me out through the back door, while her mother let the doctor out of the front. There was something about her I had never even guessed at before, behind all the mockery, the trivial games, something that I can only call, even at that age, calculation.

  Whatever it was, I leaned forward, before she could close the door, and kissed her.

  Chapter 7

  I was in a daze, a dream after that kiss. I suppose you could scarce call it a kiss, more a bump of noses, a collision of my lips on her cheek, as cold and splintered as the ice in the bucket, a brief holding of her trembling slightness, as slight as the bird fallen from its nest I had once picked up in Poplar and tried vainly to warm back to life. But it opened up the whole world to me.

  I was careless of my safety, oblivious of what was going on around me. All I wanted to think about was that trembling, that cold cheek, that slightness against me. For, however clumsy and brief it had been, her arms had held me.

  I could well have walked into George and the constable he sought, but he must have been unsuccessful, for I learned from people streaming away down the streets that there had been a big riot outside Westminster. Mingling with the crowd, I was much more difficult to find.

  One man had a pike wound oozing blood. He almost staggered into me. I ducked as he raised his stave at me, but he was only demonstrating exultantly how he had broken the head of the guard who gave him his wound. He said his radical Puritan master had equipped him with the stave and urged him to fight for the Bill.

  ‘The Bill?’

  ‘The Grand Remonstrance – the Freedom Bill! The King’s side are trying to stop Mr Pym from publishing it officially because it will give him control of people like me. The army!’

  ‘Are you a soldier?’

  ‘No, a weaver.’ He held up his stave proudly. ‘And a member of the All Hallows Trained Band!’

  ‘You must know Will,’ I said
, for Will was an enthusiastic recruiter for the All Hallows.

  ‘And his father!’ The weaver held up his stave again and yelled: ‘Ormonde! Ormonde!’

  ‘Ormonde! Ormonde!’ the crowd chanted.

  Will’s father was a radical supporter of Mr Pym, standing against an East India merchant, Benyon, in the City elections. Whoever controlled the City, the weaver told me, controlled citizen militias like the All Hallows, which together totalled ten thousand men.

  Intoxicated as I was with Anne, I now became drunk at the thought of all this as I approached the Pot, to which many of the demonstrators were repairing. This was what Mr Ink had predicted. The appeal had been made to the people – and the people had responded!

  The words he had copied and I had rescued from the dirt had done this. Or so I thought. Now the struggle was to have them officially published. Our pirated copies were in the alehouse, ringed with beer, passed from hand to hand, read out to people who could not read, people who nodded silently.

  They were not talking then about rebellion. People talked of Magna Carta. Of old rights to disappearing common land, which had driven them to leave their families and come to London. Of rights to religion. And of the biggest right of all – the right to afford a loaf of bread.

  I could not see Will. I was clutching a beer a complete stranger had given me when I glimpsed in the throng something that drove all this from my mind. At the bar was the man in the beaver hat. Anger fought a desire to run. I believed he had killed my mother. I had eaten little and the beer had gone to my head. Anger won and I fought my way through the laughing, shouting crowd. Now I saw the bulky shape of Crow, and felt again the sensation of him wrenching my head back to cut my throat. Crow turned and stared round. I put my hand on my knife, sure he had seen me, but he was the sort of man who habitually glanced about him, watching his back.

  ‘– last place he’ll come,’ I heard him say.

  ‘A dog always returns to smell his own shit,’ the man in the beaver hat said.

  There were a couple of candles on a table as I got closer to the bar. I snuffed them out with my sleeve. Someone shouted. My approach to the bar was plunged in shadow.

  The feel of the knife was quite different from my apprentice’s knife, which was a toy by comparison. This knife was heavier, balanced. I loosened it from my belt. I stopped, inches from their backs. They had caught the landlord’s attention.

  ‘. . . red hair – Tom Neave,’ the man in the beaver hat was saying. He drew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. As he unfolded it I glimpsed one of the sketches the artist had done of me that summer. In a few lines he had caught my grin, the sharpness of my nose between the dark gleam of my eyes.

  I moved closer. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. There was a rent in the back of Crow’s tough leather jerkin like an open mouth, gaping wider as he moved. I became drawn to it, fascinated by it.

  The landlord was saying: ‘Haven’t seen him for a week.’

  ‘We’re working for the Stationers’ Company and Mr Black,’ the man said. His voice was grave and concerned. ‘He’s wanted for breaking his bond, theft . . . You can reach me at the Cock and Hen in Holborn . . . There’s a reward of five crowns.’

  The landlord’s eyebrows lifted. I could see that he regarded that as a much more substantial profit than he would ever get from selling beer. But it was not this that made me lose control. It was hearing that Mr Black, whom I thought such a godly man, and who had hypocritically claimed to warn me of danger, was part of this plan to kill me.

  The knife seemed to have a life of its own as I drew it from my belt. I could see nothing but the rent in Crow’s jerkin, opening and closing, a perfect target.

  ‘Tom!’

  As God is my witness, I thought it was the Lord’s stern voice stopping me. Crow and the man in the beaver hat whirled round, bumping into a man trying to get to the bar, who knocked into me. My knife spun to the floor.

  ‘Tom!’

  Will was waving near one of the doors. The man in the beaver hat pushed through a group of drinkers towards him. Crow immediately went to cover the other door. I could see his eyes moving meticulously from head to head. Even with my hat firmly wedged on and the dim light I could feel the red hairs crawling on my neck as if they were burning like a beacon.

  Will was staring at me. All I could do was shake my head numbly at him. When the man in the beaver hat spoke to him, Will shook his head and pointed to the door where Crow was standing.

  ‘He’s run for it!’ the man in the beaver hat shouted to Crow, who dived out into the street, the other man following.

  I picked up the knife, staring at its blade as Will pushed his way through to me with another, older man, who wore a jump jacket, Dutch style, with a square linen collar.

  ‘I was going to kill him,’ I said stupidly.

  The older man shook his head. ‘You were wrongly positioned,’ he said, in an educated drawl. ‘You would only have wounded him. He would have turned and killed you.’ He drew his finger across his throat.

  Will cut across him sharply, seeing the landlord say something to the pot girl. ‘Get him out of here, Luke!’

  He grabbed me by one elbow and the man called Luke took me by the other and they hustled me into the night.

  Chapter 8

  That night I slept curled up in my Joseph coat on bales of the best Virginia tobacco, in the warehouse of Will’s father. Ever since then the smell of Virginia curling up from a clay pipe has meant the smell of rebellion to me. It rose from the pipes of Will and Luke when they woke me next morning. They took me through to the counting house, where there was a third man, Ben. What followed was a counting, not of money, but of me – an interrogation.

  All three were members of the All Hallows Trained Band. Will and Ben were typical of many of the City’s part-time soldiers: middling men fighting against the City’s richest merchants, who generally supported the King. Will’s father, like many tobacco merchants, was struggling to break the monopolies of fabulously wealthy spice merchants such as Benyon, his opponent in the City elections the following month.

  Ben was an apothecary. Prevented from working in the City by another monopoly, the doctors, he practised medicine in Spitalfields outside the walls, dispensing herbal cures to the London poor. Ben was as quiet and diffident as his grey jacket and hose, but there was a stubbornness in his silences, a refusal to take anything for granted, that I liked.

  Luke was totally different. He seemed to have only one aim in joining the militia, and that was to fight. He had just come from fencing practice, and propped his sword against a rickety table in the counting house. A pupil to a lawyer in Gray’s Inn, he was the second son of a gentleman, and looked it. The achingly soft leather of his funnel boots ridiculed my shoes ‘as worn at court’. I hid them under the table, my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but could not hide the shabbiness of my breeches, the stink and stains of my Joseph coat, at which he wrinkled his nose. He stared at me quizzically, as if I was one of those curiosities exhibited at a travelling fair.

  ‘You’re on the run,’ he drawled.

  ‘Yes,’ I said defiantly. ‘Are you going to take me to Newgate?’

  ‘Bridewell,’ he corrected, ‘for petty offenders like you – unless you’ve actually murdered someone?’

  He was looking meaningly at the knife in my belt. I jumped up, rocking the table. A week on the run had already changed me. Acting first had become a way of life. Another moment and I would have been on my way to the door, prepared to shove Luke from his stool if he tried to stop me. ‘What happened, Tom?’

  Ben’s voice was soft, his concern calming. Ashamed now at my over-reaction, I dropped back on my stool. I told them everything, from Mr Black first taking me to Poplar, to the attempt on my life and the receipts and notes on me I had discovered in Mr Black’s office.

  When I had finished there was a silence, except for the clang of bells from barges on the river. Will puffed at a clay pipe of his f
ather’s best Virginia, which had gone from the ‘foul stinking novelty’ derided by King James to a soothing cure for all illnesses, from cholic to bladder stones.

  ‘Is this a pamphlet you’re writing?’ Luke said sceptically.

  ‘It’s true!’ I banged my fist down on the table, but then over the ships’ bells came the much deeper sound of a church bell.

  ‘St Mary-le-Bow,’ Will said. ‘It means –’

  The end of his sentence was drowned by a great tumult of bells, spreading through the City from the east. Like a fire leaping from roof to roof the noise swelled, the deep-throated boom of St Katharine by the Tower, the clangour of St Dunstan-in-the-East, sparking into life the carillons of St Lawrence Jewry and St Giles’ Cripplegate, St Paul’s, St Martin’s, St Dunstan-in-the-West and St Clement Danes until the whole warehouse shook in one huge cauldron of sound.

  Luke was inaudible, but no one needed to hear him. ‘The King,’ were the words he formed.

  The King had arrived to talk to Parliament! All our arguments were forgotten as we joined the great crowds pouring along Thames Street, past Fishmongers’ Hall and up Fish Street Hill. Shouting questions and holding our ears close to people’s mouths, we gradually made out that the King had met the Lord Mayor and aldermen at Hoxton, in fields just beyond the sprawl of new building, which (if it was anything like Poplar) had come to an abrupt halt in the present crisis with half-built houses and littered wood left in muddy pools.

  ‘The King knighted the Lord Mayor on the spot,’ someone told Will.

  Will groaned. ‘Knighthoods for gold – the King wants the City to buy him an army!’

  A burst of cheering silenced him. I wondered why the crowd, after the demonstrations last night, could be so happy about it until we reached the corner of Gracious Street. We could not move for the press of people round the fountain. Men and women staggered from it with what looked like blood on their hands and clothes.