A Nest of Vipers

by Catherine Johnson

  ‘The words flowed freely from you, that’s the truth,’ Cato said as they went upstairs.

  Quarmy laughed. ‘I think that I shall prefer playing a prince to actually being one!’

  CHAPTER TEN

  A New Play

  CATO WOKE WITH a start. He’d been dreaming about a dark place, a place where he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face or smell anything other than illness and death. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and shook the thoughts away. Too many of Mother Hopkins’s tales of Newgate Prison, he told himself. He stretched, and on the floor between his bed and Sam’s empty one a shape moved. Cato reminded himself it was Quarmy, who would wake as soon as the bell of St Andrew’s started chiming and complain that he’d had the worst night of his life, worse even than the nights he’d spent in a barn outside Friern Barnet after he’d been sent down from school.

  ‘So this is the day!’ Quarmy said and yawned. ‘I’ll not let you down. I’ll be the best prince yet, and our ship—’

  ‘The Favourite,’ Cato reminded him.

  ‘Yes indeed, that famous vessel loaded down with silks and satins from China and—’

  ‘India!’ Cato said. ‘And woven a thousand times more skilfully than the nimblest Spitalfields weavers.’

  ‘Yes, yes, from the coast of Coro . . . Coro . . .?’

  ‘Coromandel!’ Cato sighed. ‘You are supposed to be a scholar – can you not remember any of it?’

  Last night they had stayed up long after the inn had closed, going over and over the plans for today. Cato shivered. He had worked up a sweat in the night and now the cold settled on him.

  ‘It will come to me, I have no doubt,’ Quarmy reassured him. ‘Just as a violin melody works its way into my fingers before I have to play.’

  ‘I hope so, Quarmy, for both our sakes. Not to mention the wrath of Mother if it doesn’t!’

  Tunnadine had left the keys for Carfax, and Bella and Mother Hopkins had spent the greater part of the previous day arranging a drawing room and dressing it for Elizabeth Stapleton’s visit. Instead of an impromptu meeting with a tobacco grower, there would now be a most entertaining and enlightening morning cup of chocolate with a real African prince in attendance.

  Cato brushed down Quarmy’s jacket and then his own. He would be the prince’s retainer, required to say little, but carrying the important documentation regarding a ship. A special ship, the Favourite, run aground off the prince’s kingdom and being refitted at this very moment.

  The prince would beg Ekaterina, Countess of Pskoff, and Lady Stapleton to help him dispose of her cargo – one of best Indian chintz and the latest Chinese silks, so beautifully woven and dyed that London had yet to see such fabric. And all, of course, at extremely favourable rates.

  Cato took a deep breath. He wished Addy was here – she would tell him not to worry. But he reminded himself he’d rather be a princely retainer than a housemaid. This plan would work.

  The inn was quiet when he left with Quarmy. Sam was out, and Jack, Bella and Ma were gone to Carfax House. The rush in the bar had died down before lunch time and The Vipers seemed unnaturally sad and sullen – like Addy in a sulk, Cato thought.

  Cato had wanted to wear the cutpurse’s jacket. It fitted him so well, but he would have outshone Quarmy. More importantly, they’d needed the money it had made at the second-hand clothes merchant.

  They had reached the Charing Cross Road when suddenly Cato was aware that Quarmy was shaking. He seemed to have frozen in the middle of the road, slack jawed and wide-eyed.

  Cato caught his sleeve. ‘Quarmy, come on,’ he said.

  Quarmy didn’t move.

  ‘We are in the middle of the highway. Christ’s blood, man, move!’

  Cato took his shoulders and had to push him out of the way of the Highgate coach. ‘Quarmy!’

  ‘Ruth,’ Quarmy said, softly the first time; then he shouted, ‘Ruth!’

  Cato followed Quarmy’s eyes and saw a girl in a woollen shawl and a dark red skirt disappear down the alley to St Giles. Suddenly, like a hare zigzagging across a field, Quarmy was off after her. Cato had only seen her face for a second, and he had to admit that against the background of her rather showy red silk dress her face was round and pale. Unremarkable, he thought, and not a face to inspire the passion that seemed to have Quarmy in its grip. Cato took a deep breath and followed fast.

  St Giles’s struck eleven as Cato ran into the alley after Quarmy. They were supposed to be at the house; they were supposed to be there crossing the square right now, ready to knock at the door so that Jack could show them in wearing his Cossack boots.

  ‘Quarmy!’ Cato yelled. The alley was empty. Apart from some builders shivering on a wooden scaffold there was no one. As Cato ran on, the alley opened into the churchyard and he spotted the girl in the shawl hurrying out the other side and into another street.

  Quarmy was catching her up, calling her name, all princely manners forgotten. At one point he slipped on a paving stone and Cato winced, imagining the slush and the dirt splashed down Quarmy’s best coat.

  Cato ran too. He crossed Seven Dials – for a prince, Quarmy had a fair turn of speed – and saw Quarmy’s back disappear into a court off Castle Street. Cato turned the corner and ran slap into the prince, who was standing stock-still in front of a tall, thin, mean-looking house that stuck out like a broken tooth in an otherwise healthy mouth.

  ‘Ruth!’ Quarmy wailed up at the house.

  Cato could see that many of the windows were lacking glass.

  ‘Quarmy.’ He took the prince’s arm. ‘We must get back. We are late!’

  Quarmy pulled away. ‘I must go to her. Ruth!’ He thumped on the door and it fell open. He looked at Cato. ‘I have to go. I have to see her. A few moments. Grant me that, then I will play the prince with all my heart,’ he promised.

  Cato stood aside. There was no point forcing him in this state. Quarmy went into the dark of the hall and vanished inside the house.

  Cato waited. In the house opposite an old woman sat at the window, watching, and he smiled at her. A few moments later there was still nothing. No sound, no word; it was as if the house had eaten up and swallowed both Ruth and Quarmy. Cato stamped his feet with impatience. He should never have let Quarmy out of his sight. With so little time to spare and the prince nowhere to be seen, he approached the house and stepped inside.

  The floor was rotten in places and Cato moved slowly. From the back room he could hear a low whimpering but through the crack in the door he could see nothing. He hesitated before he heard a louder noise, one that sounded like Quarmy. A soft, low ‘No’ came from above.

  Cato would have run upstairs but he could see places where the banister had fallen away so he hugged the wall and took his time. On the first floor a door was hanging open and there was Ruth, silhouetted against a curtainless window, her round moon face defiant and happy, in the embrace of a young man. It took Cato a second look to realize it was not Quarmy.

  Ruth spoke and her voice was hard. ‘If you are some acquaintance of Quarmy, could you take him away and get it into his fat black head that I want no more to do with him?’

  Quarmy was leaning against the wall by the door, out of breath yet strangely still, as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. As if he might cry. All his usual arrogance was gone.

  ‘Quarmy . . .’ Cato tried to lead him away.

  Ruth and the young man were both smiling and Cato could not help but feel deeply for Quarmy. It was like the Fleet wedding all over again, as he had feared. He took Quarmy by the elbow and the prince hardly reacted, only speaking her name once more as a sad whisper: ‘Ruth.’

  ‘She is not worth a half of you. Prince or no, no man deserves that,’ Cato said to him as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I thought she loved me!’ Quarmy sobbed.

  Cato imagined she had loved his money – which must have paid for the dress – rather than anything else. Back out in the street, Quarmy seemed utterl
y deflated.

  Cato tried to steer him into an inn, thinking that maybe a sip of brandy down his throat – better still a half-bottle – would change his spirits.

  ‘I am ruined,’ Quarmy said, and Cato could see the tears welling in his eyes.

  ‘You are a prince!’ Cato tried to buoy him up. ‘You are above such petty vagaries of the heart as love! Think on that!’

  ‘Alas, I can only think of Ruth! I am no use to you now, Cato, no use at all.’ He slumped against a wall and buried his face in his hands.

  ‘Surely not!’ Cato said in as jovial a tone as he could summon up, but inside he was thinking it would take the output of an entire distillery to change Quarmy’s mind.

  The snow started to fall again. Quarmy was right: he was utterly useless in this state. But what could Cato do now? Send Quarmy home and take a message to Mother Hopkins saying the game was up? No.

  ‘Quarmy, Quarmy, man – perhaps you could hold a straight face and say nothing at all?’

  Quarmy sighed deeply. ‘I cannot tell.’ A few tears rolled silently down his face.

  They walked a few steps. The snow was falling harder and the buildings and the city itself was starting to be obscured by a curtain of snowflakes.

  ‘Tell you what then, Quarmy, give me your coat. Your wig and hat too!’

  ‘Pardon?’ said the prince, looking at Cato in confusion.

  ‘Maybe this prince’s servant is now lost, or forgotten – or I will think of it on the way. Just give me your coat and hat and get back to The Vipers.’ Cato took a deep breath. ‘I will be the prince now.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Royalty

  CATO STOOD UP as straight as he could. The jacket was a little large across the shoulders and he was afraid it might make him look somewhat less than princely. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. He had run all the way and he needed to calm down, to think himself royal. His hand paused for a long time over the bell pull. On the far side of the square a girl was selling apples in two languages, one line of her song in English, the next in French. Pomme must mean apple, he thought. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the itch under Quarmy’s powdered white wig. He had never worn one for any length of time before and he hoped this one was free of lice.

  I am a prince, he told himself, and tugged hard on the bell pull.

  Eventually Jack opened the door. He looked past Cato into the street. ‘Where’s His Highness then?’ he hissed.

  ‘Something happened,’ Cato said, stepping inside. ‘Don’t ask! Aren’t you mute? Take my card in. It’s all right, Jack, honest. Pretend I’m him.’

  Cato handed the card to Jack and stepped inside. He waited in the wood-panelled hall, which had been given a Russian touch (with the addition of some huge stuffed animal heads provided by Ezra Spinoza’s brother, who was the best taxidermist in Stepney) and prettified (with a couple of portraits of Bella that Mother Hopkins had had knocked up special) to become the London home of the Countess of Pskoff, while Jack, the mute Cossack, went inside. In a moment he was back with Mother Hopkins, her face set with an emotion Cato pitched between anger and fear. She shut the door behind him.

  ‘Cato! For the angels’ sake!’ Her voice was low. ‘Where is Quarmy?’

  ‘Ma, it was me or nothing! I can’t explain now – it’s all gone head over heels. I can do this, Mother. I can. Watch me.’

  Mother Hopkins looked at Cato hard for what seemed like an eternity. He didn’t flinch. Indeed, he stood more upright and more determined than he had ever done in his life. He met her stare and didn’t look away.

  Suddenly Mother Hopkins stepped back and brushed down his coat where the mud had clung to it, then took her hanky from her sleeve, spat on it and rubbed his cheek as if the smut of the Seven Dials court still clung to him.

  ‘You do me proud, little Cato,’ she said. Cato smiled. She had not called him that for at least two years – it was at least as long as that since he had been any littler than her.

  Jack opened the door to the drawing room and went in, walking just behind Mother Hopkins. She curtsied low to Bella, sitting smart in her countess rig.

  Mother Hopkins mumbled something unintelligible to Ekaterina. Cato supposed it was cod Russian. The countess nodded and Mother Hopkins backed out of the room, her skirts rustling. ‘Oh and, Masha!’ The countess clapped her hands. ‘Please to bring some chocolate for our guests.’

  Inside there was a roaring fire and the smell of rosemary and lavender. Cato felt as if he had been waiting for this all his life.

  ‘My ladies!’ Cato said, bowing low and flourishing Quarmy’s best three-cornered hat.

  Lady Stapleton was a haze of black taffeta. She looked as if solid cloud of black smoke had descended, and sat perched, so that her skirts were in place, on the edge of the chair at the card table opposite Bella. She had been wearing some kind of gauzy veil, which was pulled back, and the effect was of a floating pink and white face in a sea of black. Cato thought of telling Addy and tried hard not to laugh. Prince, he said to himself. I am a prince. I am a prince.

  He looked to Bella first – no, Ekaterina, he told himself – and bowed again.

  ‘Countess!’ He kept his voice low and silky. ‘I did not expect you to have company.’

  Ekaterina smiled. ‘Elizabeth – the Lady Stapleton – is as a sister to me.’

  Cato kept a straight face even though the Russian accent sounded madder than a box of starlings. He wanted so much to look at Lady Stapleton. Was she impressed? What did she think?

  ‘But our business . . .’ Cato said smoothly.

  ‘Do not fret so, my prince,’ Ekaterina said.

  ‘Prince?’ Lady Stapleton looked up. ‘Are you truly a prince, sir?’

  ‘I am Prince Quarmy of Bonny, and I am most charmed.’ He bowed. ‘But I see from your dress that you are in mourning? I trust your Good Lord has your loved one safely in his care.’

  Lady Stapleton gasped. ‘You are so well spoken!’ she said, surprised, and her voice was the same spoiled-little-girl voice Cato remembered from his time in her household at Greenwich. He kept his face smiling and stayed just far enough away so that she could not suddenly on some whim reach out and pinch him.

  ‘I do so hate the mourning. Did I not say, cousin, I am to be in black for half a year! John said a year but I put my foot down. Can you imagine the summer, the parties and dancing, and I am sat in my weeds like a country widow.’ Lady Elizabeth looked at Cato. ‘I told John: “Sir John,” I said, “half a year in black for your father is all I can suffer. Then at least pearl and lilac and lavender, for I must have some relief.” Even the house is all draped in black and the mirrors turned to the wall! It is miserable, quite, quite unutterably miserable!’

  ‘I am most sorry for you, my lady. The custom of mourning here in England seems to be a matter of prohibition in dress above all else,’ Cato said. ‘Has it been long since your father-in-law passed away?’

  Lady Stapleton sighed theatrically. ‘Nearly four days! Don’t tell a soul about the cards.’ She looked at Ekaterina. ‘He won’t tell, will he?’

  Ekaterina laughed a deep un-Bella-like laugh. ‘I do not think so. Quarmy, come, you will be joining us perhaps?’

  ‘Please, ladies, no!’ Cato moved back. ‘Cards are not my strong suit. And I know the Countess Ekaterina of old.’ He looked at Lady Stapleton. ‘I hope our countess has not been leading you astray with those cards, madam.’

  The Lady Elizabeth burst into tinkly aristocratic laughter. Cato sat down, lifting the tails of his princely coat so as not to crease them.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking serious, ‘this is not the time. Countess, I need your answer to my proposition in all haste.’

  Ekaterina turned to Quarmy and smiled. ‘I am sure Lady Elizabeth will not mind listening if you have come to discuss what I think you have come to discuss.’

  Cato coughed and blushed. ‘I did not realize you would have company. And what I have to say is of a most’ – he cough
ed – ‘delicate nature.’

  ‘Ooh, this is too, too, intriguing!’ Lady Elizabeth clapped her hands. ‘I promise, sir, I will say nothing. And why, if I do, you may tell my husband how I am playing at “Laugh and Lie Down” all the day long when I am supposed to be doing nothing but weeping and wailing at the loss of that curmudgeon who was my father-in-law!’

  ‘I have your word then?’ Cato asked. ‘This will go no further?’

  Ekaterina nodded. Lady Elizabeth put down her cards and leaned forward, wide-eyed.

  Cato began. ‘Well then, my tale is like this. My father’s kingdom lies on the coast of West Africa, the Bight of Bonny, where many a ship runs into trouble. You have heard, I expect, of the Bight of Benin?’

  The ladies nodded.

  Cato waited for a few moments until the room was quiet. The only sound was the crackling of the fire in the grate and the rushing of the wind down the chimney. He leaned close and intoned in a slow, deep voice. ‘Beware, all you sailors, the Bight of Benin. Few come out, though many go in!’ Cato paused and took a deep breath before he went on: ‘Well, Bonny is worse. Much worse.’

  Ekaterina gasped, almost a little too theatrically, Cato thought.

  He continued, ‘True, some ships are broken, snapped like matchwood on the rocks, but there is another peril, a peril that causes more misery for the Europeans than the rocks of Benin ever do!’

  Lady Stapleton sighed. ‘My father, Captain Walker – you may have heard of him – indeed, he sailed the African coast many times. He told me so many tales of wrecks and misfortune that they leave me quite cold.’ She turned to Ekaterina. ‘Shall I lay out the cards, cousin?’

  Cato shifted in his seat. It was clearly time to move the tale along. ‘This is not a wreck, not quite, for the ship I speak of is, in fact, quite whole.’

  ‘Oh?’ Lady Stapleton was dealing cards and didn’t look up.

  ‘It was – is – her cargo that is of interest.’ Cato looked from the countess to Lady Stapleton. ‘Some rubies, jade from the east. Bullion stolen from Portuguese privateers in the South China Seas.’ Lady Elizabeth took no notice. ‘And bolts of the finest Indian silks; yards of sateen woven with gold from China, from the ports of Macau and Cochin, en route to the warehouses of Amsterdam. But sadly, their journey fatefully interrupted.’