Fire Catcher

by C. S. Quinn

  Charlie surveyed the asylum, urging his breathing to calm. The lunatics, though wild, didn’t seem aggressive. They’d cowered and cringed away when the door opened.

  He made an assessment of the seven doors. They were looking for a lunatic who’d been here a long time. Charlie’s eyes roved the escaped maniacs, then the nearest cell. None in the first two cells seemed particularly old, but it was difficult to see from the corridor. Perhaps further back into the madhouse. His gaze switched to the other rooms. Closed doors. Inhuman cries and guttural grunts. Smoke was filling the back of the prison.

  ‘We should find a Bedlam physician,’ said Charlie, thinking they needed to move fast.

  ‘They’ve long gone,’ said Lily. ‘Maybe one of these cells is for religious types,’ she added. She was looking warily at the madmen. But after an initial surge of interest in the newcomers, Bedlam’s escaped occupants seemed to be amusing themselves.

  ‘Dissenters,’ she added, ‘Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Levellers. Perhaps they were put in a secret cell?’ Lily was pointing to the back, where some smaller dark doors were ranged.

  ‘Those rooms are treatment cells,’ said Charlie. ‘All the maniacs are housed here.’ He considered. ‘We’ll take a good look in each cell,’ he decided. ‘Move through systematically. Perhaps there’s even someone sane enough to talk to us.’

  They approached the first door. The sewage stink of the Fleet mingled with the oncoming smoke.

  ‘You said the fire goes to Whitehall?’ asked Charlie as they stepped towards the first cell grating.

  Lily nodded.

  ‘I think so too,’ said Charlie. ‘Blackstone moves the flames by firing guilds. Fire shouldn’t be moving west so quickly,’ he added. ‘Even with the high wind.’

  He moved forward to peer through the grating of the cell door. A ghostly face with livid bloody lips appeared suddenly at the bars. Charlie moved back, pushing Lily behind him. The face at the cell gave a ghoulish smile and fell away. Charlie approached the grating again, his heart pounding.

  The red-lipped ghost had retreated to a corner. He knelt and began smearing himself with matter from a dark pile. Another man crawled to join him.

  ‘Too recent,’ Charlie decided, surveying the occupants. A man who moaned and scratched himself looked directly at them. ‘These are too young,’ said Charlie.

  ‘They don’t look young,’ whispered Lily, her face haunted.

  ‘Many start life in the Foundling Home,’ said Charlie grimly. ‘That place makes boys old or dead quickly. Mostly dead,’ he added.

  ‘You were a Foundling,’ said Lily, staring at the raving men. ‘You lived.’

  ‘I had someone to survive for,’ said Charlie. ‘My brother Rowan. I had to keep him fed.’

  ‘You said he was your older brother,’ said Lily, confused.

  ‘Age doesn’t matter. It’s who gives up first,’ said Charlie. He had a sudden memory of Rowan, pale and starving, asking if the game was over yet.

  Lily was staring at an assortment of gruesome-looking tools.

  ‘What do they do to them?’ she asked, appalled.

  ‘Each cell is owned by a different physician,’ said Charlie. ‘They try different things. Most believe that whips and chains help. Some think worse is needed.’

  Charlie was eyeing a bubbling barrel of pitch next to the wicked-looking tools.

  He moved back from the door, raised his hammer and shattered the bolt.

  ‘What are you doing!’ cried Lily as the sounds inside rose in terrible chorus.

  ‘They’ll not harm us,’ said Charlie, throwing back the door. ‘At least I hope not,’ he added. Several of the lunatics had thrown themselves to the ground, gibbering. He left the door wide and moved to the second of the seven cells.

  They could hear the roar of the flames now. Bedlam was catching alight.

  Women populated the second cell. Old whores by the look of them. Some toothless and prattling, others shouting. One had her skirts raised and was chasing a mangy chicken.

  Charlie raised the hammer and smashed it down. When he turned back to Lily she had frozen to the spot. Then he saw she was pointing at a pool of blood.

  It was enormous, fanning out wide along the passage. He drew back his bare feet.

  ‘Looks like we’ve found our man,’ Charlie murmured, looking at the bleeding figure before them.

  Chapter 93

  Jacob and Enoch made it to within a quarter of a mile of Blackstone’s house. It was obvious to both that Enoch was dying.

  Then they saw the flames.

  ‘It’s come faster than Blackstone planned,’ said Jacob, shifting the weight of his half-conscious friend.

  Enoch’s eyes fluttered. ‘Leave me,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Master Blackstone goes to the Palace,’ gasped Enoch. ‘Go to him. Tell him his house is in the path of the fire.’

  Jacob hesitated.

  ‘If you don’t,’ managed Enoch, ‘Blackstone will find you and gut you.’

  Jacob was biting his lip.

  ‘Don’t sacrifice yourself for me,’ urged Enoch. ‘Isn’t that our creed? In St Giles? I can get to the cellar without you.’ Enoch breathed hard and righted himself. Jacob could see how much it pained him to do it.

  ‘I’ll get the Elixir,’ said Enoch. ‘Go to Blackstone.’ He managed a crooked smile. ‘Save both our skins.’

  Jacob let out a breath. ‘Breed not birth right,’ he said, sounding the guildhall motto they’d learned as apprentice boys. ‘I’ll be back for you.’

  ‘Work with honour,’ said Enoch, through gritted teeth, ‘and keep our word.’

  Jacob nodded and sprinted off, leaving Enoch to make the distance alone. The pain was bad enough to make him crawl. But he dragged himself over the threshold of Blackstone’s large half-timbered house.

  The entrance to the cellar was ahead. A trapdoor. He crawled to the opening knowing he didn’t have the strength to break a lock. But he found it opened easily.

  A terrible smell wafted up. Enoch felt his mind swim with the pain. He manoeuvred his body on to the ladder. Partway on, he realised he couldn’t do it. His injuries were too great. Then something lunged into the ladder. His grip jerked free and he pitched down into the dark.

  Enoch lay sweating on the floor of Blackstone’s cellar. The pain had been too much. He’d fainted. There was a noise he couldn’t understand. Loud and terrible. Something brushed past his face and he recoiled.

  His chest had settled to a heavy heat now. It blazed. But the worst had abated. Deep down Enoch thought he knew why. There was nothing left to burn.

  Something flapped against him and he started. A harsh screech sounded.

  Then Enoch realised.

  A bird. He keeps a bird down here.

  He wanted to laugh at his own foolishness. So Blackstone kept a rook or a raven. Squawking and large, but not ghostly or ghoulish. Enoch heard the bird hop away. He groped a hand weakly in the dark. His fingers touched a cold dirt floor.

  Suddenly he was wracked with an agonising surge of heat. He gasped, contorting in pain. The Bringer of Death. It was still working on his body.

  In the light of the open trapdoor his eyes were adjusting. Enoch was seeing things. Feverish horrors. An old woman in a green dress. A crown of leaves on her head. She was propped in a seated position, her head slumped. There was a dark space where her heart should have been.

  He was cold now. A fierce prickling kind of cold. Enoch lay shivering. Parts of his body were numb, floating away.

  Then he heard it. The unmistakable sound of a person breathing in the dark.

  Enoch managed to twist his head and saw her. Blackstone’s wife. Her long hair was white. And her eyes . . . She had eyes that rotted the soul.

  The breathing was faster now, as though she were excited.

  Enoch’s chest contracted for the last time. And a chill moan of horror was the last sound he ever made.

  Chapter 94

  Cha
rlie’s eyes settled on a Bedlam physician dying beneath a bench.

  ‘Is he one of the lunatics?’ asked Lily, peering into the dark corner from where the blood rolled.

  ‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘He’s a physician, Catholic by his clothes. See his key?’

  The man was old, with shoulder-length greasy white hair. A large key lay a few feet away from him and he lolled like a rag doll, arms spread wide. Charlie followed the trail of blood to the man’s left arm. The hand was mostly missing, and blackened as though with gunpowder. What must have once been a torrent of blood had slowed to a trickle.

  The physician looked up at him glassily with a half smile on his face.

  ‘You’re not an inmate.’ He sounded confused.

  Charlie knelt. ‘No,’ he said, assessing the man’s injury. He could see instantly death was at hand. At least four pints of blood had streamed over the stone floor. ‘Did you own the first cell?’ he added.

  The physician’s blue lips parted.

  ‘Until they set on me,’ he said. ‘Such is gratitude.’

  Charlie remembered the starved and frightened inmates loping around the entrance of the asylum.

  The gaoler nodded at the big key lying a few feet away.

  ‘I had that key made by an ironmonger,’ he said, nodding to the abandoned object. ‘It works as a gun of sorts. A little black powder inside. A rudimentary firing mechanism. It was my protection, when I opened the door. If a group of felons chose to run at me.’

  The smile widened.

  ‘Never trust an ironmonger to do a gunsmith’s work,’ he concluded, eyes settling on the scorched remains of his hand.

  Charlie moved forward. He pressed a gentle finger on the stump of the wrist. It was ice-cold.

  ‘Nothing can be done,’ said the physician, seeing Charlie’s expression.

  ‘Too much blood is lost,’ said Charlie bluntly, thinking of the gruesome tools, and the frightened maniacs. He judged the physician in his fifties though. Perhaps he remembered something.

  ‘Where you here when Cromwell ruled?’ asked Charlie.

  The old man nodded and coughed feebly. ‘I was a young man then,’ he said. ‘Thought to stay a year and join a guild. But London is hard for Catholics. And here I am. An old man dying on a piss-soaked floor.’

  He coughed again and a spurt of blood issued from his open wrist.

  ‘There were some faith prisoners brought here,’ said Charlie moving closer. ‘Fifteen men. From a ship.’

  The physician’s dying eyes narrowed. His blue lips set.

  ‘I spent my life under Protestants,’ he replied. ‘Now my faith takes me to heaven. You may go to hell.’

  Lily knelt and put her slim fingers on his uninjured hand. She drew out her rosary and kissed it.

  ‘I’m a Catholic,’ she said. ‘As your fellow, I ask it of you.’

  The man’s face softened.

  ‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘I hope times are less hard for you than for me.’

  ‘Heaven will soothe all injustices,’ said Lily.

  The physician looked at Charlie, then back to Lily.

  ‘Many faith prisoners in those times,’ he said, speaking only to Lily now. ‘Many got loose.’ He tapped his head with difficulty. ‘They were cunning, the dissenters,’ he said. ‘Cleverer than the other lunatics. We had to take measures. Be sure they didn’t escape.’

  ‘These had been held on a ship called the Mermaid,’ said Charlie, eyeing the slowing trickle of blood at the gaoler’s hand. ‘They would likely have been unloaded at the head of the Fleet River.’

  The gaoler looked thoughtful.

  ‘They would have stunk of the ballast,’ suggested Charlie, thinking of where ship prisoners were usually kept – low in the hull where stagnant seawater and sewage of the ship mingled with the sand used to stabilise the keel.

  The gaoler’s nose wrinkled as if in memory.

  ‘There was a group of dissenters,’ he said slowly. ‘Stinking of rotten seawater. Baptists, I believe.’

  ‘Are any still here?’ pressed Charlie, hope bursting in his chest. ‘Did any live?’

  ‘No,’ the gaoler shook his head. ‘Their ship was cursed. It brought a gaol fever.’

  His gaze dropped to his arm again.

  ‘One did live,’ he corrected himself. ‘Only one.’

  ‘Is he here?’ pressed Lily.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the physician. ‘He escaped three times. Might have taken advantage of the fire and confusion. No one to guard him. We put him in the cold cell.’

  ‘The cold cell?’ asked Lily.

  The physician shivered in reply.

  ‘A terrible thing,’ he murmured, ‘to be cold. A terrible thing.’ Something flashed in his face. As though he was sorry for something. Then his eyes grew filmy.

  Lily gripped his hand, but Charlie pulled her back.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘We need to find the cold cell.’

  The physician had a set of keys at his hip, and Charlie knelt to unhook them. There were large ones for the doors and smaller keys for manacles and other restraints.

  Smoke was streaming steadily through the window now. Lunatics had begun venturing free from their cells, eyeing the open door suspiciously. One began shouting about the apocalypse.

  Charlie was taking in the building. Past the seven living cells was a cluster of dark treatment rooms. They skulked at the back, with no grating to peer through.

  ‘What’s a cold cell?’ asked Lily.

  ‘Bedlam’s best treatment,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s a kind of icehouse. Expensive, but Lady Castlemaine gives money for it.’

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘They pull it from the river in winter,’ said Charlie. ‘As long as you keep it layered in straw, store it somewhere deep and cool, it stays frozen most of the year. It cools the blood,’ he added, ‘a kinder way to help lunacy.’

  He scanned the floor, the walls. Then he spotted a thin stream of water running over the stone floor.

  ‘Unless,’ he added, following it, ‘your building sets on fire.’

  The flow of water led to a grimy door at the back of the asylum. There was no hatch, no grating. Charlie bent down and touched the ground.

  ‘Ice cold,’ he said straightening. He examined the lock and held up the bunch of keys he’d taken from the physician. After a moment he selected the right-sized key. Lily hung back as the tumblers clicked open. Ice-cold air rolled out at them. And two blue eyes blinked out from filthy straw.

  Chapter 95

  Amesbury was packing a large cart when Barbara arrived.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said. ‘Mean you to turn coat again?’

  ‘Charles will lose this battle,’ said Amesbury. ‘Whitehall will burn. I go to Oxford. Parliament will find me some position.’

  ‘You underestimate Charles,’ said Barbara.

  Amesbury shook his head. ‘Charles is probably chin-deep in chubby white thighs as we speak.’

  Barbara laughed. ‘Yet we need such a heart in our King,’ she said. ‘For what is England if not the most fickle of mistresses?’

  Amesbury raised his eyebrows.

  ‘England betrayed Charles,’ said Barbara. ‘Exiled him, killed his family. None but the biggest of hearts could forgive it.’

  ‘Certainly,’ she added, ‘loving me seems easy in comparison.’ She treated Amesbury to a disarming smile. ‘And I think Charles loves England. Very much.’

  Amesbury was shaking his head. ‘We cannot save Whitehall with these resources.’

  Barbara put her hand on his.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘You’ve won enough battles. Won’t you stay and lose one? Make all those other poor generals feel better?’

  Amesbury paused.

  ‘You love him too,’ said Barbara, ‘I know you do. We all do. Underneath it all he is a good King. Isn’t that what you always wanted to fight for?’

  ‘And what of you, Lady Castlemaine?’ Amesbury’s dark eyes wer
e on hers.

  ‘What of me?’ Barbara looked uncertain.

  ‘I know you’ve been meeting with Blackstone,’ said Amesbury.

  ‘Blackstone?’ Barbara’s denial was brittle. ‘I’ve nothing to do with that man. Why should I? We’ve not met since he was in Holland.’

  ‘What do you know of him?’ asked Amesbury.

  ‘He was with the Sealed Knot.’ Barbara looked incredulous. ‘They were very religious. Communed with mystics. Alchemists. I hardly saw them.’

  ‘Fireballs,’ said Amesbury, ‘have been turning up all over the Palace. In your apartments. In Queen Catherine’s chambers . . .’

  Barbara was shaking her head.

  ‘It is a nonsense,’ she said. ‘Queen Catherine of Braganza, throwing fireballs?’ she began laughing.

  ‘They were stamped with the sign of the Sealed Knot,’ said Amesbury.

  The laugh died on Barbara’s lips.

  ‘Wait.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I have something to confess.’

  Chapter 96

  The prisoner blinked up at them from the filthy straw. The remains of his clothing was in the old Royalist style. But the colours had long since leached away and his lace collar and cuffs were in grubby tatters. His long white beard and hair were grimed with dirt, making his blue eyes seem particularly vivid as he stared up at them.

  He gave a humourless grin as they entered, revealing speckled brown teeth. A wicked-looking iron manacle sat heavy at his ankle, the skin around it worn to sores.

  ‘He’s not a lunatic,’ whispered Lily, leaning in to Charlie. ‘Look at his eyes.’

  Charlie nodded. The man looked sane enough to him. The prisoner twisted on his straw, wrapping his arms tighter around his scrawny body. Ice blocks were piled to the edges of the damp room and the man’s skin was almost blue.

  Charlie moved closer, taking off his coat and throwing it over the prisoner’s freezing shoulders. The man looked up in confusion. He was staring at Charlie’s face.