Footsteps! Quiet footsteps, quick but cautious, stopping and starting, like a mouse or rat. Footsteps on the street. I held my breath and waited. The steps stopped. No sound. Slowly, very slowly, I leant forward and looked out through the gap in the shutters. Still I could hear nothing. I looked for shadows, listened for the slight crunch of shoe on dirt. Nothing.
‘There you are,’ said a low voice triumphantly.
Turning round in shock I saw Second Voice walking towards me, through the shops, the passage from one shop to another unbarred. He must have broken in somewhere else. Throwing myself towards him I caught him by surprise. He had expected me to run again. I seized him by the neck with my left hand. He grabbed at me with both of his, leaving me free to punch at his face and ribs with my right, which I did, in panic, with much force. He gasped and fell, losing his balance. I kicked him in the side of the temple, and then kicked him again, before throwing myself back out of the window and onto Godliman Street. Feeling no pain, only the thrill of having escaped and the fear of being chased, I ran east, sprinting, not stopping until I came to the corner of Bread Street. I turned and ran up the middle of the street, not bothering to stay in the shadows, towards home.
My windows were dark and the door was closed. I shook my head and tried to ignore the agonising pain at the back of my skull. Instead I looked to All Hallows, with its broken spire, struck by lightning a century ago. The pain at my temples cut again like a long-bladed knife. I opened my eyes, but couldn’t see properly, just a small bright light, which slowly expanded into a curling whorl with blue and green teeth, pulsating and flashing. My stomach contracted and I thought I was going to shit and vomit at the same time. Couldn’t see, couldn’t walk. Stumbling into the graveyard of All Hallows I prayed that no one was watching me. I made my way slowly to the rear of the graveyard trying to keep my head totally still. There I found a big square gravestone and sat behind it, my back against the stone and my legs out straight in front of me. Closing my eyes, I tipped my head back, waiting grimly for relief from the agony in my head. I stayed in that position for three hours, enduring the pain and the freezing cold, the effort of it exhausting. The pain stayed with me, teasing me, while my joints stiffened, and new pains came. I cannot describe it. At last the cold winter sun rose, casting a red light on the dead morning. My head was still sore, but the sharpest edge of it was dulled. I climbed to my feet gingerly. The streets were still empty, too empty for me to go wandering. Paul’s would be busiest soonest. I walked the short distance to the churchyard there; the biggest open space there was in London, silent and comforting at this time of day. Leafless trees stood like twigs in the long grass, their branches quivering in the gentle morning wind. Standing still, I looked up at the great square Norman tower. God’s house, indeed. And what the boggins was God trying to do to me?
When Dowling saw me he held one hand to his forehead and just stood there in the doorway of his shop. He danced out like a younger version of Harry Hunks and fussed over me like an old woman. Dirt was ingrained into my skin, hair and shoes. I felt like a dug-up corpse. A dug-up corpse in need of a bath, a drink and a soft bed.
‘What happened to you?’ He steered me through his shop and out into a room at the back. ‘I went to your house yesterday night and that Jane was wailing and gnashing her teeth. She found your wig on the floor, with blood on it, no less. I had every butcher’s boy from Newgate searching London for you.’
‘I was apprehended.’ On the back of the head. My head still throbbed inside and outside and I felt like I was going to be violently sick. The soft morning light speared through my eyes like sharp, shiny skewers. I really wasn’t in the mood for talking. ‘Can I go to bed now, please?’
There was a woman out the back cleaning up. She was a little old for my tastes, but her calves were lithe and muscular. When she turned to look at me I saw bright blue eyes and a kind, intelligent face. Aye – I could go for that, I reflected. Not now, though. Now bed.
‘Meet my wife,’ Dowling said proudly. ‘Lucy.’
I waved a hand at her, not wanting to bow my head. The room sort of shimmered, with soft, little white lights glistening where there could be no soft, little white lights. Then it suddenly shot off to the left. When I opened my eyes again I could see both Dowling and his wife staring down at me, the ceiling behind their faces. I had never been in so much pain since about an hour before. I spoke very softly so as not to disturb my eyeballs. ‘May I lie down on a soft bed in a dark room, please?’
The best part of two days I spent lying in a large lumpy bed in a dark room that actually didn’t smell too bad given that it was Dowling’s. The back of my head swelled up to the size of a grapefruit and my right eye was now the size of an apple. My ribs pushed down on my chest like the bars of an iron cage and made it hard to breathe. When I did fall asleep I was plagued by visions of Joyce’s head swaying on the end of a stick on top of Nonsuch; grey, drawn face, white eyes bulging from red-rimmed sockets. A woman with no eyes, grinning and talking, while blood slowly dripped from two bloody sockets. Though it was winter, I lay bathed in my own cold sweat. The only respite was being able to watch Lucy Dowling’s beautifully rounded mature buttocks shift beneath her heavy skirt, imagining my hands stroking them gently.
The third day I woke with a linen bandage wrapped round my head. Dowling sat perched on a tiny three-legged stool next to my head.
‘That’s a fair old hole you got in the back of your head, Harry,’ he said softly. ‘Four inches long and half an inch deep. Reckon I saw the bone. The edges are still blue and puffy, but I think we’ve got the worst out of it.’
‘Thank you.’ My mouth was dry. Dowling handed me a cup of ale.
‘What happened?’
Though my head still throbbed like a ripe maggot I told him my story. Once I’d finished he sat grim-faced.
‘I know Mottram,’ he said at last. ‘He has the brains of a big cow. His usual trade is thieving or cullying. He works with a partner. He stands up and looks big whilst his partner does the talking. He is a menacer. Never heard of him killing. Methinks you had the Lord’s arm about your shoulder, Harry. If it were not Mottram sent to dispatch you, methinks you’d be swinging from that pole as we speak, neck as long as my arm.’
‘Do you know where Mottram lives?’
‘Aye, Shoreditch, but he won’t be there now. He’ll be hidden now that he’s failed, his mate too. In fear of their own lives, if they be sensible. Whoever it was that paid them to kill you will be determined to make them pay for their failure.’
I closed my eyes.
Dowling cleared his throat and sat back up straight, thick lines across his weather-beaten forehead. ‘Harry, you want my wisdom, then I’ll tell you that you was saved for a reason. You didn’t escape out of your own cleverness. It was God’s will. If he saved you then he saved you for a reason. Fear not, saith the Lord, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, and thou art mine.’
‘Aye,’ I muttered.
‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed then ye shall say unto this mountain – remove hence to yonder place – and it shall remove.’
‘It is like a church in here. Ye know I don’t have that faith.’
‘I know that, Harry, one of your many faults. But you need faith now. Think on it. The Lord giveth wisdom.’
I fell asleep – as I always did in church – and dreamt of clerics with big shapely arses, large breasts and, no matter how hard I tried to change it, Dowling’s face.
Chapter Fifteen
Columbines
The leaves of this plant swarm with lice in the month of June, on account of their exceptional sweetness.
Commotion. Dowling talking animatedly with someone in the front room. My name. John Giles’s name. Sitting upright I forced my stiff limbs to lever me up onto my feet. I staggered out towards the noise, the muscles in my legs tight and bruised. Dowling staring at me with his mouth open, already dressed. The door open. Men waiting outside. Th
ey were all about to go somewhere. The look on Dowling’s face said that something important was happening. It was dark and freezing cold – still night.
‘Wait for me,’ I said before returning to my room. All I had to wear was the butcher’s clothes. Never mind – it was dark – none would recognise me. I changed quickly. By the time I made it out the door most of the party were already halfway down the street, impatient. Only Dowling waited for me, shaking his head at my folly.
We hurried across the City towards the river, me shivering. I tried to get Dowling to talk to me, to tell me what was going on, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. I perceived that he was not sure of it himself. We reached the Steelyard – already bustling, merchants trading grain, wheat, tea, rope, masts, linen, wax and other goods demanded by the navy and other seafarers. Candlelight shone softly through the fog and smoke, lending a strange air to the surroundings. I didn’t venture this way often. The soap boilers and brewers were already up and lively, and though we had to push and shove to get through the alleys, and though my feet sank three inches into the mud with every step, it was well lit and busy, safe to walk through. Ten minutes later we passed across the shadow of St Magnus Martyr, a huge square church with an imposing tower, now black against the orange sky.
A figure stepped out of the mists and came towards us. Young, another butcher, judging by his raw scrubbed hands. He gestured towards the Bridge and led us, hurrying. We ran the first hundred yards of the Bridge, bare as it was of houses to protect us from the icy night winds blowing off the river. After Rock Lock and Gut Lock we reached shelter. The houses here were tall and thin, four storeys high on either side, joined across the Bridge by tie beams. These tie beams held everything together, for the houses were only twelve feet wide, and eight of those twelve feet hung over the rapids that crashed through the starlings that supported the Bridge’s stone piers. Every so often, one of these houses crumbled away and dropped off into the river, leaving another gap for the freezing Thames gales to scythe through. There were more than a hundred and fifty shops over the next two hundred yards selling all sorts. The first of them were already open. This was a place to come during the day when the airs were warm; it was not a place for a man to live. The road on the Bridge was just three yards wide and was already congested despite the early hour. The pressure was relieved only at the middle of the Bridge at The Square. The smiths were at work and the first smoke was winding up into the brightening skies.
We emerged onto the south side of the river and traversed the wooden drawbridge passing under the arch of Nonsuch. The man led us to the Bear on the Southwark bank. A sodden dripping bundle lay on the cobbles. It looked like a body, covered with a thin cloth.
‘This is what we came for?’
‘Aye,’ Dowling nodded. He crouched on his haunches and slowly pulled the cloth off the face. John Giles stared up at us.
Huge, white bulging eyes protruded like little bloated guts. The colour in his eyes had dulled, like a new layer of thick white gristle had grown over the top of them. His mouth was pulled tight and wide and his front teeth stuck out – biting into his lower lip. There were deep little stabbing marks all over one cheek. Dowling ran a finger over them.
‘He has been cut about the face, cut before he died, else the skin would not have swelled up like that.’
The cuts were clustered around the middle of his right cheek. They seemed to form a deliberate pattern of some kind. A long cylindrical shape with vertical stripes hanging down from it like the branches of a tree, deep reddish-blue gashes sunk into puffy, white, clammy skin. Dowling touched the marks again. ‘I think it is supposed to be a grasshopper.’
He was right. The cylinder was the insect’s body, and the stripes were its legs. It was a very similar representation to that which sat above the Exchange. The lines were straight and accurate, implying that Giles’s face must have been held in a vice-like grip while his face was cut.
‘I don’t understand.’ I turned away.
‘The knowledge of wickedness is not wisdom.’
That didn’t help. ‘He was hanging off the Bridge?’
‘Aye, hanging upside down, his head touching the water. Looks like they tied his hands behind his back and tied his feet together. Then they put a rope round both bindings and pulled it tight so he was trussed like a chicken. Then they bound another rope around the knot, a long one, exactly the length of the drop between the Bridge and the river. They tied one end to the top of the Bridge and threw him over.’ Dowling gazed up at the Bridge. ‘The fall pulled his shoulders and knees right out of their sockets. The pain must have blown every breath from his body. Then he would have drowned I suppose, his head was found hanging just below the surface of the water.’
Dowling rolled the body over so that the face was mercifully hidden and started to wrestle with the thick knots. The rope was wet and the knots had been pulled very tight. He took a short-bladed knife from his belt and cut through the rope around the knots. Giles’s limbs fell unnaturally about him like they were not his at all. He lay there like an animal on the slab, ready to be chopped up and parcelled.
‘There’s a hook above the middle arch. He was hanging off that.’ Dowling turned, eyes scanning the surrounds. He pointed at a lone figure sat away from everyone else. ‘That man is a boatman. He found the body at dawn.’
He was sat scrunched up on dry frozen mud, knees tucked up against his chest. His shabby wide-brimmed hat was pulled down over his ears, his big red nose stuck out like a lump of raw meat, a drip hanging from its tip over his marbled purple hands. His shoes were sodden and misshapen. We went over.
‘Let me alone,’ he said gruffly, before either of us got the chance to speak, ‘I’ve had a terrible experience.’
‘We work for the Mayor so you have to talk to us,’ I replied without sympathy, ‘else I will throw you into the stone hold.’ It wasn’t he who’d been killed. I had no patience for Thames boatmen, no matter how terrible their experiences. They were a foul breed of mongrel scoundrels and I didn’t doubt that his apparent reluctance to talk belied his objective to get money from us. ‘I’ll give you a shilling if you tell me it all, and tell me it quick.’
He stared at me dejectedly then looked out at the river. He cleared his throat and looked a little happier. ‘I got up early today, this morning, see? I had a booking first thing at Westminster and I was shooting through the arches, riding the torrent. I almost run into it, but couldn’t see what it was, because there was so much fog. I rowed back against the tide so I could see it properly and God’s my witness I nearly fell out my boat when I saw it. His face in the water, bouncing on the waves. A rope from his feet climbing up into the fog. His face all white like a mask, grinning.’ He pulled a face and looked to the floor. ‘Shocking it was. Dropped me oars. Course, I shot off downriver once I’d dropped the oars. Bouncing it was, bouncing on the river.’
I dug out a shilling and dropped it on the cobbles in front of his feet. He picked it up and pocketed it without looking at me. We turned our backs on the wretch and stood in gloomy silence staring out at the Bridge.
‘That’s five dead now,’ I reflected, ‘and poor fellows we be.’
‘Aye, poor fellows, indeed.’
‘Have you heard any news of my father?’ I asked awkwardly.
‘Not yet, Harry.’ He laid a hand on my shoulder before wandering off to speak to his colleagues, about cleaning up, I supposed. I stood with my hands in my pockets looking out over the river. Dowling’s clothes were warmer than mine. The river was busy now. The boatman had vanished.
‘Let me walk you home.’ Dowling returned from his directing. ‘Make sure it’s still there.’
‘Jane!’ I suddenly thought.
‘She went off to stay with her aunt at her house on Little Eastcheap,’ Dowling assured me. ‘Nice woman, her aunt – don’t you think?’
I didn’t even know she had an aunt. No desire to meet her neither. Last thing I needed was Jane soliciting reinforcements.
My front door was wide open. When he saw it Dowling bid me wait and went straight inside. No thought for his own safety, I noted approvingly. His turn, I reckoned. While I waited I tipped my hat to the baker who I didn’t like much.
Dowling reappeared quickly, even paler than he’d been before. ‘Learn to do well. Plead for the widow,’ he whispered. What that meant, I had no idea – but something wasn’t right. I pushed open the door, stepped in and stood in my own front room with my hands on my hips. There was a funny yet familiar smell. I looked to Dowling who flicked a finger in the direction of my kitchen.
The Sweet Smell of Decay Page 17
