Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  Even Luke had lost his coolness and was shoving his way through the crowd. He yelled at me, but I could not hear a word. The bells near us stopped, others petering away, and Luke’s voice boomed into my ear.

  ‘Drink to the King! And damn his bad advisers!’

  He vanished among the heaving mass, reappearing with his fine lace collar stained with crimson, his hands running red.

  ‘The best Bordeaux!’ he yelled. ‘When the King favours you – you’re all for him!’

  I could not believe it. The fountain was running with wine. A woman carried away a pot of it. Most held out their hands and slurped it into their mouths before it dribbled away then, having lost their places, fought to get back for more before the casks that were supplying it ran out. I wriggled on my hands and knees under a drayman’s apron, catching the wine that ran through his fingers, sucking it up then turning my head to the sky to catch the red rain until I lost my balance and was in danger of being trampled into the crimson mud. Whether it was the best Bordeaux or vinegar I did not know, and I did not manage to swallow very much of it, but I was certainly drunk. Drunk on the press around me, then, turning like one towards Cornhill, on the thunderous roar of the crowd coming from there. He had arrived! We were missing him! The thought was on everyone’s faces as they pushed and elbowed past Leadenhall Market.

  People must have been in their places for hours. The route for royal entries to the City had been the same for over a hundred years. The King had entered at Moorgate, the procession doubling back on the route of the old Roman wall, turned again at Bishopsgate and was now approaching Merchant Taylors’ Hall, rising in front of us. Spectators were pressed together as solidly as a brick wall and no matter how I dodged and jumped I could see little but fluttering banners brightening the grey November day and people leaning perilously from windows shouting with one voice:

  ‘Long live the King! Long live the King!’

  Tall as he was, Will had to stretch on his toes to see. He was flinging his hands in the air, shouting with the rest of the crowd. I was pressed against a half-timbered house. Above me was a cross-beam beneath the upper-storey windows where people were leaning out. Later I heard they had paid an angel for the privilege.

  ‘Will, for the Lord’s sake – give me a step.’

  He linked his hands together. I slotted my foot into them, swung my other foot on to a stud, scrabbling for a hold in the loose herringbone brickwork. Plaster dribbled on me as a hand above grabbed me and pulled me up. I clung on to a cross-beam to cheers from the people round me. When I took in the sight below me, I nearly fell back again. The streets were lined with City liverymen. A great rainbow of colour made it as bright as midsummer as another entourage passed down Cornhill, followed by the City Artillery Company, pennants flying from their pikes, pistols at their saddles. I had thought them radical, but it seemed that they had joined the crowds in succumbing to the King.

  Two by two on magnificent horses, which trod so exactly to the beat of the drums it looked as though they too were awestruck by the occasion, came the great peers. Constantly in danger of falling, I kept calling out like a small child: ‘Who’s that, who’s that with the sword?’ and someone from the window, or more often Luke, who had managed to worm his way to the front, shouted the answer.

  ‘That’s the Marquess of Hertford with the Sword of State . . .’

  He seemed to know who everybody was, and the significance of who had been chosen and of his position in relation to the King.

  ‘That’s Manchester . . . Lord Privy Seal . . . and that’s the Marquess of Hamilton . . . fancy choosing him to be Master of the Horse . . . they’re all moderate reformers . . . You see? You see?’ he yelled at Will. ‘The King is sending a message – he’s got rid of his evil counsellors!’

  I thought that wonderful news. Then I had to cling to the cross-beam as the crowd below me flung up hats and the people in the room above drummed with their feet on the floor so that the whole house shook. There he was!

  ‘The King! The King!’ the crowd roared.

  I never again in my life used a woodblock of that oval face, long curling hair and pointed beard without thinking how totally inadequate it was, and without remembering that moment. He seemed to float rather than ride on his magnificent black horse, saddle embroidered in silver and gold, his gossamer-light riding cloak fluttering like wings behind him, embroidered with the insignia of the Garter, a star emitting silver rays.

  Every time he raised his hand or smiled, the crowd erupted. Already from mouth to mouth the word had spread that at Hoxton he had vowed not to be swayed by popery but to protect the Protestant religion of Elizabeth and James. He looked up as he passed. He seemed to smile and lift his hand directly at me. I was near to fainting, my fingernails scrabbling as I hung on, the crowd a continuous roar in my ears. I loved him. There is no other word. The Divine Right of Kings? Of course he was divine! Were not people all along the route struggling to get close to him, held back by the liverymen – the halt, the lame, beggars trying to get relief from their sores? A woman pressed forward, holding up her blind child in the hope that for a moment he would breathe the same air.

  I twisted round to follow the King as long as possible as he disappeared towards Cheapside. When I reluctantly turned back I was immediately transfixed by the woman in the carriage below. Anne was beautiful, but in a fresh and simple way. This woman was beautiful by art. Pearls glittered in her hair. Her skin was like thin porcelain, marred cunningly with a beauty spot on her cheek. Her dress was cut low and, because of my elevated position, I glimpsed more of a woman than I had ever seen before. I had no doubt in my mind who she was.

  ‘The Queen!’ I shouted. ‘Long live the Queen!’

  The woman looked up and smiled. The eyes were not artifice. You could not paint them. They were such deep blue they were almost black, and full of humour. The porcelain round them cracked with tiny laughter lines before she was whisked away and it was a moment before I realised that people round me were howling with laughter.

  ‘The Queen has been and gone, you idiot!’

  ‘That’s Lucy Hay!’

  ‘Countess of Carlisle.’

  ‘Strafford’s whore!’

  The Earl of Strafford had been one of the royal advisers hated not only by Parliament but by many on the King’s side for his ruthless, near lawless, drive for power. There was so much feeling against him the King had been unable to prevent his impeachment. With great reluctance, he had signed the death warrant for his execution in May that year.

  ‘Now Strafford’s gone, she’s John Pym’s whore!’

  ‘Changes beds as she changes sides!’

  There was more laughter and a fight broke out below. I took no notice of the vile accusations made about such a beautiful woman, who, because she was at court, must I thought have attracted to her some of the spirituality of the King. I was overwhelmed by the thought that I had been to her house, even if it was little nearer than her shit heap, and that, if I ever delivered letters again for Mr Pym, I might catch a glimpse of Lucy Hay.

  ‘Look at him!’

  ‘He’s in love.’

  ‘Come and join us!’

  Drunken hands stretched out for me. I realised how much my arms were aching and gladly let go of the cross-beam, whipping up my hand to be caught by someone above me. Another hand grabbed me by the collar. It was as I thrust upwards from the stud I was standing on and grabbed for the sill above me that I saw the pennant. It fluttered from the guard of one of the out-of-favour peers, judging by the distance he was behind his King. Inscribed on the pennant was some kind of bird, I knew not what, but I felt I had seen it before. It appeared and reappeared as the wind caught it, as if the bird was really flying. A falcon. I had seen it before! As though it were yesterday, I was back in the dockyard with Matthew, carrying pitch to the Resolution, which was flying the same flag, the falcon, in honour of the great gentleman who commissioned it.

  There he was! Stiff on a horse, as i
f he rode little these days. He winced as he stared round at the crowd and I saw that face. That beard. That kindly look. No, not so kindly now, screwed up like crumpled paper, greying eyebrows knotted together in a frown but there was no doubt in my mind he was the gentleman who had bent over me while I slept after I burned myself with pitch. The gentleman Matthew had been frightened of, and after whose visit Mr Black had apprenticed me.

  ‘That’s him! That’s the man!’

  I must have been out of my wits. I pointed. Saw the gentleman crick his face upwards, staring at me as I hung for a moment by one hand. They tried to grab me but the man holding me lost his grip and I fell on to the people below. A man went sprawling, cursing. Others cheered. Luke shouted something. Will and Ben were coming towards me but I pushed and shoved and wriggled and fought my way through the crowd to get to the man before he passed. I reached the liverymen, barring the way with staves. I seized the stave of one of them and threw him off balance. What drove me forward were the words in that scrap of a letter I had found in Mr Black’s office: ‘he now looks at the boy in a different way’.

  It must have been written by the man with a scar, on the old gentleman’s instructions. I had one object and that was to reach the gentleman who had, for some reason, decided to make something of me then, like a potter discarding a faulty vessel, determined I was ‘a great Folie’ who must be got rid of.

  Why? That was the question I wanted to hurl in his face: Why?

  Perhaps I even shouted the word. In the blur of what happened I cannot remember. The procession had come to a stop. I ducked round one reined-in horse and was a few feet from the gentleman staring down at me. I appeared so suddenly his horse reared. I tried to catch its reins as the gentleman slipped in his saddle. All around me people were shouting. Riders were fighting to control their bucking horses. I felt the stinging cut of a whip.

  ‘Make way! See to my father!’

  The voice was that of a rider who had his horse under perfect control. I caught a glimpse of the falcon emblazoned on his cloak as he urged his horse towards me. His face was like the old man’s but smoothed out, with a neat, spade-like beard. His sharp grey eyes were those of a man of action who is brought to life by other people’s panic and disorder. He broke through the press of people and bore down on me, his head low over his horse, his eyes narrowed along the sight of his down-pointed sword. To him I must have looked like the game he hunted on his estate. Or vermin, more like. Someone was shouting in my ear but I was like one of the rats in the dockyard, hypnotised by a stray dog which had trapped it. The point was inches from me when a stave knocked it away. The sword ripped through the shoulder of my coat, spinning me round. The rider’s horse bucked, but he controlled it, and turned the horse towards me again.

  ‘Run!’ the voice yelled.

  It was Luke. He dragged me through the confused mêlée and shoved me towards Will. ‘Run, you little fool! Run!’

  Chapter 9

  They took me back to the warehouse, where Mrs Ormonde insisted on giving me a bed in Will’s room. Ben rubbed a cool salve into my shoulder. He reminded me of Matthew, except there was a sense of order in the herbal cures he carried in a battered leather satchel. Luke watched, sitting on the end of the bed. ‘What on earth were you doing?’

  I did not answer, determined to say nothing more, since he had ridiculed my story. I had thanked him for saving my life, but being so indebted to him made it all the harder to stand his patronising manner.

  The throbbing in my shoulder was already going down as Ben put the salve back in his satchel. ‘You shouted “That’s him.” Who did you think the old gentleman was?’

  ‘Were you trying to prove your story?’ Luke persisted. ‘The pitch boy and the peer?’ I tried not to listen to him, turning my face into the pillow, but then his tone changed. ‘Risky way of proving it, but effective. I saw him looking at you, and I’m sure he knew who you were.’

  I sat up, staring at him, but in that irritating way of his he went off at a bewildering tangent. ‘It looked as if the younger one just took you for a madman. But he wasn’t properly dressed. He should have been wearing a ceremonial sword, not a rapier.’

  He wrinkled his nose, in that fastidious way he had, as if he had smelt something bad. He had taken off the lace collar, stained with wine. He brushed some speck from his breeches. Alone amongst us, he looked almost as pristine as when we had set out for the procession, and, unlike Ben, totally out of place in such a Puritan household.

  He sighted down an imaginary rapier and lunged towards me. He smiled, but a shiver went down me. Perversely, part of me didn’t want to hear what he was going to say. The salve was working and the bed, which had the first feather mattress I ever slept on, made me realise how achingly tired I was. Now all I wanted was for it to be a story and to doze off into sleep; but he brought me fully awake. His matter-of-fact tone became more chilling.

  ‘It was an Italian rapier. Bologna, at a guess. He should have been wearing a good old English broadsword and cut his man down. But that’s clumsy and much less effective. It’s the thrust, the stoccata lunga, not the cut . . . the point, not the blade – if you really want to kill a man.’

  There was a relish, a ghoulish intensity in Luke’s voice that brought back with sickening clarity the smell of the horse and the young man’s eyes, one almost closed, the other focused along the rapier, as if his eye were part of the blade.

  ‘You mean he was prepared?’ Will put in.

  ‘Yes. Apart from the rapier, he was dressed perfectly. I should know whose coat of arms that is . . . The falcon . . . it’s on the tip of my tongue . . .’

  ‘Was he one of the people in the Pot?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No. They were low-pads,’ Will said.

  ‘The man in a beaver hat looked like a soldier down on his luck,’ Luke put in. ‘Did you hear what they said at the bar?’

  ‘They said they were from the Stationery Office. The soldier asked the landlord to contact him . . .’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Hen . . . No, the Cock and Hen in Holborn . . .’

  ‘Mercenary inn,’ Will said. ‘Where they’re recruiting for the war.’

  ‘There isn’t going to be a war,’ Ben said.

  Unlike the others, he refused to believe that people here would destroy their own country as they had done in Europe. The English were not that stupid. King and Parliament had patched up their quarrels for fifteen years, so Ben said, and would continue to do so. He had joined the Trained Band because of an interest in treating wounds, which he was convinced were much more likely to happen in exercises in Artillery Fields than in some mythical war.

  Will’s sister Charity, who was about Anne’s age, brought me a posset. Her black dress had a starched cotton collar and she had the simplicity of those Dutch portraits which their artists did before they came to London and burst into colour when they painted for the court.

  Astonishingly, Luke took on some of that simplicity as soon as she entered the room. His wit deserted him as she talked to him with a directness that cut through his diversions and flippancy. He was modest where he had been arrogant, listened where he had interrupted, bending with a sober face as Charity expressed her concern.

  ‘I put your lace collar into water, Mr Ansell. There was blood on it.’

  ‘Blood?’ he said, startled.

  I remembered the fountain of wine and could scarce check a smile. There was no drink in that Puritan house except a bottle of Dutch schnapps for use as a physic.

  ‘Oh yes . . . blood,’ Luke said, attempting a dismissive wave.

  She came close to him, staring anxiously at the stain on the top of his doublet. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Hurt? No no no . . .’ he stammered. ‘It was n-nothing . . .’

  He caught my smile, gave me a savage look, half warning, half pleading, tried to recover his composure, stumbled against the foot of the bed, and hurried to open the door for Charity as she left to go to prayers. He returned a
lmost immediately, his face flooded with excitement, snapping his fingers in triumph.

  ‘Falcon! Lord Stonehouse, third Earl. Seat Highpoint House, in extensive lands near Oxford. King Charles’s Master of the Court of Wards until about five years ago, when he fell from favour for dragging his feet paying Ship Money. That’s who the old gentleman is!’

  Chapter 10

  I slept late next day, and would have slept later, if it was not for Luke and Will dangling a bag with the stench of a neglected stable before my nose.

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘Raven’s wing,’ said Luke solemnly.

  ‘Approved by the Queen to remove the curse of red hair and turn it into fashionable black.’ Will spoke like the hawker in Cheapside from whom they’d clearly bought it.

  ‘Suitable for court.’ Luke gave me a small bow.

  I was suddenly very fond of the red hair I had hated all my life. ‘You’re not putting that on me!’ I grabbed the canvas bag from Luke, peering at the evil-smelling black slime which had the consistency of loose turds, before jerking my head away. Luke tried to seize the bag. I dodged, drawing back my hand to hurl the bag at him.

  ‘Do you want to be killed?’ Will snapped.

  He had an authority which Luke, with all his clowning, lacked. Slowly I lowered the bag. They told me they had been to the Cock and Hen in search of the man with a beaver hat. It was, as Will had told me, a recruiting centre for mercenaries. The religious wars which had devastated Europe for thirty years were petering out, and every other ship coming into London brought soldiers of fortune, looking for the highest bidder. One of them was the man in the beaver hat.

  ‘His name is Captain Gardiner,’ Luke said. ‘He’s a distant cousin, a poor relation of Lord Stonehouse.’

  I took one last feel of my red hair and silently handed the revolting mess to Will. In the yard I dipped my head in a freezing pail of water, shook myself like a dog, and shut my eyes.