He took a narrow alley to his right, the next right again; followed a twisting route that would lead him to the house directly behind his own, with which it shared a wall.
I will not join them. Not yet. Not unless Bettina tells me to.
Words came again; the next verse to the one he’d spoken just before he’d seen the horror: “ ‘For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.’ ”
Keep me, angels, he prayed.
“Pitman, do not be more of a fool than the Almighty made you.”
He could see only part of her face in the hole he’d gouged in the attic wall of the house that backed onto his own. Bettina’s eyes were bright with both her fear and her certainty. “What good can you do for us in here eating twice your weight in food each day? Out there you can help us.”
“I can try,” he said, “though they will be looking for me as well. I cannot—”
“Then,” she interrupted sharply, “you must avoid them.” Her tone softened. “Pitman, love, I know you fear for us. I fear too. But we will put our faith in God.”
“Amen.”
“And in you free. You are a clever fellow, chuck, for all your lack of reading. You will find ways to aid us, I am sure. Better food, ingredients for my plague water.”
“Who is’t that’s sick?”
“The Dutch family, in the basement. Mother and son, I hear. But two floors below us.” She placed her fingers on the edge of the hole. “Listen, Pitman. We are shut up, but we can also shut out. The only thing getting into our rooms will be the bucket of supplies hoisted from the street—and I’ll wash everything in vinegar before I admit it. We will keep what’s left of our plague water for ourselves, till we brew another batch, whose remaining ingredients you’ll fetch us.”
“Have you any money left?”
“Maybe four crowns. You?”
“Three shillings. We’ll need more, for my wages will be stopped.” He laughed without humour. “They pay us to halt the plague, not carry it.”
“Which you do not, Pitman,” she said fiercely. “Not a member of my brood does.” She shook her head. “But we could use more money, sure. Forty days is a long time to be quarantined without it, no matter how generous your fellow constables might be.”
“There is—” He stopped himself. He did not tell Bettina much of his other trade. She’d only fear for the danger of it. And she had enough to fear now.
But she had heard the hope in his voice. “You have a mark?”
“I think so. That same murderer. Maybe e’en tonight. And he’s worth forty guineas now.”
She whistled. “Then you do the Lord’s work, as well as ours.” He reached his fingers up to hers as she continued, “If you are successful in that, why—” he could not truly see, but could hear the smile in her voice “—I may even let you dig out this wall, come in and stay awhile.” She looked away. “Josiah is calling from below. The babes are crying again.” She pressed her fingertips against his. “Take care, chuck,” she said, then moved away.
He listened till the attic ladder in the other house ceased creaking, wanting that much of her. Then for another moment, he did not move. How can I take care? he wondered. He was the tallest man in the parish.
There were different ways of hiding, though. His bulk might be hard to conceal, but if people looked directly at you, they often mistook you, howsoever tall. If you walked differently. If …
By the time he’d descended to the ground floor, he had his plan. He knew the man whose shop occupied the street level of this house. A seller of metal goods, pots, pans. Blades.
“All well?” the man inquired when Pitman entered the small room behind the shop.
He had not told the fellow why he wished to visit his attic. As a constable of the parish, he did not need to. “All well, Mr. Tombes. I wonder, could I borrow some shears and your razor?”
The man went to fetch them and some water. While Pitman waited, he stroked the thick hair that ran far beneath his chin and all around his face, even up to his cheekbones. The fashion was against it, but he had had a beard ever since he could grow one. He wouldn’t recognize himself without one. He doubted anyone else would.
The man returned with all Pitman had asked for, and left him to it. He’d brought no mirror, few could afford one, but he’d polished some of his trays to a brilliant shine and Pitman could see enough of his face to get by. Placing the shears into the knotted hedgerow that was his beard, he started to cut.
23
THE MURDERER
He didn’t notice him at first. He’d been looking for a tall man ever since the Judas had told him, reluctantly at first, soon not reluctantly at all, everything; volunteering a babble of words, mostly pathetic pleading but some of it interesting. Including the name of someone who was hunting a murderer among the Saints—a man who could be a butcher or a surgeon.
Then he’d realized that the fellow lurching along Thames Street to All Hallows was tall, indeed very tall, but only when he’d noticed how contorted the man had made himself, bending so at the middle that his nose was close to the cobbles, at which he shouted every few paces. Indeed, like most other good citizens, he’d immediately glanced away from the ranting drunk in distaste. Besides the height, the traitor had told him that his pursuer had a heavy beard and this piece of human filth did not. In fact, his face was as smooth as a Pell Mell ball. And that was what made Strong look sharply back. He had his spectacles on, which helped him see the rawness of the cheek skin, a startling white compared with the man’s forehead; see the little flecks of red where a razor had recently nicked. And seeing that piece, Abel Strong saw the whole.
“Pitman,” he whispered, withdrawing deeper into the shadows of the church portico. He’d noticed him before, couldn’t remember where. The man glanced up as he passed, shouted something, shambled on. He himself was invisible, Strong felt sure. Yet since this was the thief-taker—come to take a man who was not a thief!—he knew he should not remain there. Pitman would return soon enough. And it was too early and people too much about for their encounter to happen outside.
He pushed the door open behind him and silently slipped back into the church.
Soft summer sunlight poured in through the glass cupola in the ceiling, burnishing the tall cedar cross upon the simple altar. The Saints had brought the crucifix; for the Anglican incumbent, when he’d fled, had removed all that was valuable: altar cloths, communion vessels, the bronze cross. Wise, for the godly would have sold any trappings left behind. They required no luxury to mediate between themselves and the Almighty; needed only their faith, their prayers and some rough wood. Strong found it strange to be back inside a church that had the remnants of the established faith. He’d been raised in one, of course. But All Hallows was older even than the Reformation chapel he’d first worshipped in. And the way the sun fell now, so directly onto the wall behind the pulpit, he could see those ancient papist paintings that whitewash could not entirely conceal. Faint, but distinct still, the stations of the cross. And he could not help but reverence the Christ who had walked to Golgotha under his burden of wood, the blood that ran from his crown, the blood that marked in lines the scourging of his near-naked body. Yet even as Strong admired, the sun sank a hair, the picture faded, then vanished entirely, as if by a magus’s trick. Or by a miracle.
He climbed the stairs of the pulpit. They were wood within stone and they curved, so he could not see the body till he was near the top. As scourged as Christ’s was. As crowned with blood.
He’d forgotten, when he’d finally killed him, to do the last that he always did. He’d had to get outside in case this Pitman arrived early. He knew he had but a little time now. However, this part, unlike the killing, never took long.
“ ‘The first foundation was jasper,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘the second, sapphire; the third—’ ” He dug beneath his apron, to a pocket in his smock, his finger closing over what he wanted. “ ‘The third, a chalcedony.’ ”
He turned it several ways, admired its striping of brown, yellow and green, the flash of the “eye” in its centre. “Tiger’s eye,” he murmured, pleased with the stone’s other name. “And that’s for you.” He shoved it between Tobias Sym’s torn lips. “That’ll stop your babbling.”
He laughed, then sat, his back to the pulpit’s inner wall, his legs straddling the body. I’ll need an emerald next, he thought. Expensive. Perhaps my noble lord will get us one. Perhaps he’d be so generous.
He did not even hear the door. But there was the faintest creak of floorboard.
Yet you do not need it now, Abel Strong, he thought, as he reached for his walking stick. You do not need it for the thief-taker. No, indeed. You have something different in mind for him.
Pitman paused just inside the entrance of the church. His one footfall had sounded like musket shot to him. While he waited, he considered. The man who had approached him when he’d returned to the front of the church had thought him a fellow Saint and had told him that the meeting was postponed a day. He was there to wait and tell the others, though he was an hour early for his task. Pitman had said he would assume that role and the man had departed happy. Not so Pitman. He’d felt relief: did he not now have an excuse to shamble away, keep on playing the stooped and shouting drunk, reappear on the morrow? The relief lasted until he thought of Bettina, their children, about to spend their first night in a shut-up house that the monster had touched with its blackening claw. He needed his reward—and he would get it. For when he’d passed the church’s shadowed porch the first time, he’d noted a faint light reflected in glass, and the scent of fresh blood on cloth, not faint at all.
He could smell it now, mixed with the incense that impregnated the walls, the smoke of ten thousand candles burned over centuries. There was the sweet smell of bird too, which he noted even as he heard one begin to coo softly—a pigeon that had made a nest up in the cupola.
A party of men singing drunkenly passed outside. He used their noise to move up the nave toward the altar. When their song began to fade, he stopped, steadying himself against the pillar of the pulpit stair, then frowned, withdrew his hand, rubbed fingers and thumb together.
They were sticky wet.
The noise came sudden from behind him. He swivelled just in time to see the walking stick falling from the ceiling and the pigeon, at whose roost it must have been thrown, bursting out of the cupola with a fast flapping of wings. And it was these two things he realized he should not be looking at, when the cudgel hit him, wielded by the man who’d silently and swiftly descended the pulpit stair, a man whose face he glimpsed even as the blow caught him beside the right ear, full force. His legs gave and he sank to the floor, unconscious before he reached it.
The flaring light woke him, its flames reddened by eyelids that would not open at his bidding. While he struggled to see, he listened to the voices that jabbered nearby.
“He holds it still!”
“Aye. The blade as wet with blood as ’is ’ands are.”
“Christ! The stench!”
“Gutted ’im. That’s the fellow’s guts you’re stepping in now.”
“Shite! Oh Jesus, a church! Forgive me, Lord, but ’ow—’ow come ’e lies there still? Can a man with his belly slit still strike a blow?”
“Must ’ave. There’s ’is cosh. Took the knife in the belly and struck back e’en as ’e did.”
Pitman groaned. He heard the men scramble back. “Careful now,” the one with the deepest voice called, “stand ready with your staffs. He’s a big bastard.”
Pitman reached a hand to unstick his eyes. There was something in it, which he let go.
“ ’E’s dropped the knife!”
“Kick it away!”
“You kick it. I ain’t goin’ near the brute.”
As Pitman put fingers into his eye sockets and wiped off the blood, someone nearby toed the dagger away, at the same time shoving a stick into Pitman’s chest. He batted it off, looked up in time to see the stick withdrawn—only to be brought down hard. He deflected it from his head at the cost of pain in his wrist.
“Are you going to fight us, bastard?” said the deep voice again. “We’ll beat you if you try. There’s six of us here, constables all.”
Pitman raised a hand, partly in peace, partly to block out the flaring light that probed his head like a blade. “No fight,” he groaned. “Nothing. Done nothing.”
Someone laughed. “ ’E’s denying it!” another man said. “Found ’im with his blade in someone’s guts and ’e says, ‘Not me, friend!’ ”
Other laughs, until the deep-voiced man cut them off. “Quiet!” he commanded. “Respect for the dead.”
The dead. Until now Pitman had tried only to fend off his persecutors, to clear his eyes, to not vomit. But now he felt something other than his pain. He looked down—at his other hand, resting against a corpse’s chest. At the corpse’s eyes, Tobias Sym’s eyes, staring somewhere above him, glazed in death.
He cried out, used his feet to drive himself away, not halting until his spine hit the pulpit stair. The six men—he could see six now—followed him, sticks raised. “Now, you can come easy or you can come hard,” said the man with the deep voice, better spoken than the others. When Pitman continued to just stare up, he demanded, “Where’s that fellow who found him?”
“Went outside to puke. Not come back.”
“We don’t need him anyway. I’ve never seen anything more obvious in my life. One of you, pick up the knife. Two more, get this body down to the mortuary. And you—” he jabbed Pitman with his stick “—I ask you again, you coming easy or are you coming hard?”
“Where—” He had to spit, clear his throat before he could respond. His voice came in a rasp. “Where are you taking me?”
“Where murderers go, of course. Newgate.”
No. He could not go to Newgate, the place where he had delivered so many to justice. People died in that fetid prison long before they saw a length of hemp. Especially now. The prison stood in the very centre of the labyrinth that was London. In its dank foulness, the monstrous plague ruled entirely. And what of his family if he was lost?
“No!” he roared. But his head burst with pain, his eyes filmed and he couldn’t get off his knees. So not many blows of the constables’ staffs were needed to tumble him back into unconsciousness.
He did not, however, fall into it alone. Someone came with him.
The man was not one of these who wielded their sticks with more enthusiasm than skill. This man had hit him but once and had a face Pitman had seen before.
The dark took him before he could remember where.
24
THE RETURN
July 20, 1665
The shrieking had risen to a still higher pitch. To Coke, lying with his sore feet in the Thames, where they awaited the barge that would carry them the last stage back to London, it seemed that they were competing in this too. Striving for the highest note. The boy had the advantage of fewer years, the actress her trained voice. Yet the noise was incidental to the main event: the height that each would reach while vaulting. The lowest branch of the oak beneath which they leaped provided evidence of success in snatched leaves. But most had been cleared in the ten minutes they’d been at it. They needed to reach higher. And surely, Coke thought, they must be tiring.
Evidence for this appeared with Dickon’s next leap. His hands slapped lower on Sarah’s back, pushing up her skirt and revealing a flash of calf muscles that had browned considerably during this month of journeying in the sun—instantly hidden as youth and lady collapsed, both screaming with laughter.
Sarah dug herself out from under and then strode over to Coke at his tree, planted herself before him, hands on hips. “Truly, sir,” she gasped, “Leap the Frog is better played when there is more than one frog to leap.”
“Kiss the Frog is more my game, mistress,” he replied. “It can be done without much movement on my part.” He stretched his arms and leaned fa
rther back against the willow. “And who knows? It could turn even me into a prince.”
He raised his face, puckered his lips. But her lips never touched them. All that came was her throaty laugh, followed by renewed shrieking. Sarah was shoving Dickon to a position beneath a branch they had not yet attempted to reach; then she walked a dozen paces back. What would I have done had she kissed me? Coke wondered. Kissed in return? Retreated as I have ever done with any slight advance from her, as she has done whenever I casually ventured?
There had been moments—few enough, and so distinct in his memory—when the ease that they felt with each other could have tipped into something more, perhaps. These had mainly been on the way down to Cornwall, when they all had, with unspoken agreement, decided that plague, pregnancy, vengeance and all things awful should be put aside and they should enjoy this journey through an England now in full bloom. Lucy had led, a wildness to her gaiety, drawing Sarah, Dickon and him in. If she could forget her situation, her swelling belly, the greeting that awaited her at home, could they not forget theirs: a husband murdered and unavenged; the gallows that threatened him for ghastly crimes that he did not commit?
No, he thought, tipping his head to the faintest of breezes from off the river. Not forget, not entirely; never that. All was ever there. Intruding most in those moments that could have moved onto something more—a hand snatched as it aimed a reproving slap, held a second too long. An amused look in sky-blue eyes, sliding into a question neither he nor she dared to study, let alone answer.
The journey down had taken two weeks, near half of that on the rougher tracks that passed for roads into the Cornish wilderness, and Lucy slowing, her laughter fading, the nearer she got to Zennor, the place she’d left as a girl and to which she’d vowed never to return—especially in disgrace. But the greeting was not as she’d feared. True there had been many oaths, much vowing and clashing of steel from an assortment of uncles and cousins, determined to ride forthwith to London and spit the seducer on their swords. Thwarted by her silence, the one she’d also sworn them to, never naming the man who’d corrupted her. The women, her grandmother, her two elder sisters, had said little. Simply led her away from the bravado and set about the plans for her delivery.
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