The Last Protector

by Andrew Taylor

  With a clatter of claws, a spaniel trotted round the end of the screen and saw Cat. It barked, shrill and excited, and poked its nose into her face. Its collar was made of velvet, decorated by what looked like semi-precious stones.

  ‘Go away,’ she hissed.

  ‘They’ve found a rat or something. We’ll never get them out at this rate. Call a servant.’

  The spaniel sniffed at her and licked her cheek with enthusiasm. Cat climbed lower. Her head was still above the floor of the cellar. The dog whined softly and rested its front paws on her shoulders so it could continue to nuzzle her face. She heard footsteps on the far side of the screen and the yapping of the other dogs, who appeared to have found something else to interest them.

  ‘Here, Jollyboy!’ roared the man. His voice switched abruptly and became caressing. ‘Good dog, good dog.’ It hardened again. ‘Now you, sir – come, Flurry, come – come to your master.’

  ‘At last, sir, a servant,’ the woman called, sounding distinctly pettish.

  ‘Damn it, I might have known it would be Dido.’ The man raised his voice. ‘Dido, you naughty little minx. Come here at once.’

  There were running footsteps and another male voice, the footman’s: ‘Your Majesty. Forgive me, I had—’

  ‘Quick, man – there’s a dog somewhere in this rubbish. She could have hurt herself.’

  Cat swore under her breath and climbed down to the floor of the sewer. Dido came too, tumbling the length of Cat’s body, her paws scrabbling for purchase. Cat’s shoes sank into something moist and yielding, and liquid lapped at her ankles. The dog yelped with surprise as it landed.

  The stench was suddenly much worse. Cat covered her nose with her cloak. She felt the walls of the sewer with her free hand. They were about two feet apart, rising to a barrel vault, also of brick, about four feet high. The bricks felt old and damp.

  She crouched down into the sewer, bringing her head below the level of the vault.

  ‘Hush,’ Cat whispered. ‘Hush now.’

  To her surprise, Dido fell silent. She nuzzled at Cat’s hand. Further down the run of the sewer was a faint glow of light, which must come from Ferrus’s lantern. Voices filtered down from the cellar above, but she could no longer distinguish the words. In a moment, someone would find the opening of the shaft.

  Cat turned awkwardly in the confined space and, crouching, moved as fast as she could towards the light in the distance. The further away from the shaft she was, the less likely she would be seen. The surface beneath her feet was firm, and fortunately the sewage seemed not to be more than an inch or two deep.

  The light ahead vanished. ‘Ferrus,’ she whispered, not daring to raise her voice. ‘Ferrus.’

  Something brushed her ankles. She prayed it was Dido. There must be legions of rats down here, she thought, but perhaps the dog would scare them away. Thank God for small mercies. The trouble was, they were looking for Dido, and Dido could lead them to Cat: so Dido was a curse as well as a mercy.

  ‘God’s fish, man, there’s a sewer here.’ The King’s voice was muffled but still audible. ‘Some booby’s left the hatch off.’ The voice was suddenly louder. ‘Dido! Come here, you wretch! Come here at once.’

  It was unfortunate that the dog caught sight of something, probably a rat, and shot off into the gloom ahead of them, barking frantically. Cat stayed still, in case her movements betrayed her.

  ‘Damnation, she’s down there. I can hear her. You there. Fetch a mazer scourer.’ There was a pause. ‘A holiday? There must be somebody here who knows the sewers. Find them.’

  The King was still talking, but Cat could no longer make out the words. After a moment or two, she couldn’t hear him at all. The dog had fallen silent. She must be somewhere ahead.

  Cat edged forward again. ‘Ferrus?’ she said, more loudly than before. ‘Ferrus? Are you there?’

  The light glimmered again. It was nearer than she had expected. Dido whined. It sounded as if the dog was close to the light, which must mean close to Ferrus.

  Suddenly a glistening eye appeared in the darkness. For an instant, Cat’s stomach lurched with fear. Then: ‘Ferrus,’ she said. ‘Thank God it’s you.’

  The eye vanished as Ferrus lowered the lantern. She hobbled closer until they were within touching distance of each other. Ferrus was crouching in an alcove in the right-hand wall, with his knees at the level of his chin. He was framed in the bricks, like a sinister saint in a papist chapel. Dido had squeezed herself between him and the brickwork; she pressed herself against his side.

  ‘We have to get out,’ Cat whispered. ‘They’ll send people down to look for the dog.’

  The lantern dipped, and its glow revealed the dim outlines of a rat lying between Dido’s paws. Ferrus raised the lantern up to the level of his shoulder, so its faint radiance shone on what was behind him. It was more than an alcove. Another sewer ran upwards, on a slight slope, from the one in which Cat stood. It was of a similar pattern, but it looked narrower and lower.

  The lantern swayed. Ferrus wriggled, turning 180 degrees. Dido gave a protesting yelp. Ferrus began to crawl up the branch sewer, placing the lantern in front of him and moving it further ahead every foot or so. The dog followed. Cat glanced up and down the main sewer. There was no sign of light in either direction. Not yet, apart from the faint radiance that marked where the shaft came down from the cellar.

  To go forward meant, if she was lucky, crawling for hundreds of yards underground and, if the run of the main sewer were clear enough, and if the rats or bad air didn’t kill her first, she would find herself staring through one of the gratings that belched out Whitehall’s sewage on to the foreshore of the Thames. But to go back the way she had come meant certain capture.

  She closed her eyes and tried to visualize Hakesby’s survey of the Cockpit and its sewers. After a hundred and fifty years of rebuilding and extensions, the palace of Whitehall was a warren below the ground as well as a warren above it. She could not remember seeing this side passage marked on the old plan. Could it have been dug after the survey had been made? She ran her fingers over the bricks. These weren’t the crumbling Tudor bricks of the main sewer. These were larger and smoother, and the mortar between them was hard. This was new work.

  She touched the floor of the sewer. It was dry.

  It was this that decided her. Anything with a dry floor was better than being ankle-deep in shit and piss in the main sewer. Cat wriggled into the side passage and followed Ferrus and Dido.

  She heard them scrabbling ahead of her, but could not see them. Dido whined, and then fell silent. Apart from the noises that the three of them were making, it was very quiet, and increasingly warm. The sewer ran straight. She calculated that they were probably moving west, more or less, which meant away from the river and towards the Park.

  As she crawled, she realized that the air was growing steadily less foetid. It was cooler, too, and once she felt it moving against her skin. There must be at least one ventilation shaft.

  But darkness still blanketed everything. If the candle in the lantern was still alight, its flame must be completely shielded by Ferrus’s body.

  The scrabbling ahead stopped. There were quiet, irregular noises instead. A scratching. A scraping, followed by iron clanging on stone, the sound sudden and shocking, painfully loud in the confined and silent space of the sewer. More shocking still was the narrow column of white light that poured into the sewer twenty yards ahead. Ferrus was crouching in the light, transfigured by its radiance into a bright, unearthly being.

  Dido barked, high and excited. Cat crawled towards the light.

  Ferrus was looking at her. A few feet away from him, she stopped. She saw him smile – a flicker of the lips; a glimpse of brown, rotten teeth.

  ‘Where are we?’ she said. ‘Can we get out this way?’

  The smile vanished. He tilted his head, so the daylight shone directly on his upturned face. Dido licked his left hand, which was dangling by his side. He beckoned to he
r with his right hand, urging her closer.

  He opened his mouth as widely as he could. He pointed into the pink cavern within. She looked inside. He had no tongue.

  ‘And who the devil is this?’

  Reeves, still on his knees, looked up at the King, who was standing in a doorway that lacked a door. ‘No one, Majesty. Just poor Ferrus.’ He tapped his own head. ‘He’s dumb, sir, and a simpleton. I gave him a job as a labourer out of pure charity.’

  Ferrus was kneeling next to his master, his head and shoulders drooping as if his slender body was unable to bear their weight any longer.

  ‘I’m like a father to him,’ Reeves said.

  Dido barked, reminding her master of her presence. The King stooped and caressed her ears.

  ‘You stink, my love,’ he said, and scratched the top of her head. He glanced over his shoulder at the Duke of Albemarle’s servant, the man Reeves had bribed to let them into the garden. ‘You. Take Dido away. Give her a bath in the fountain. The other two are tied up outside. Keep her away from them. Mind you be gentle. Bring her back to me at once.’

  The footman, pale and sweating, stepped warily around the King and took hold of the spaniel’s jewelled collar. Dido barked at him.

  ‘Hush now, dearest,’ said the King. ‘We’ll soon have you smelling sweet again.’

  The servant dragged the spaniel away. Somewhere out of sight, Jollyboy and Flurry burst into a volley of barking.

  A few minutes earlier, the service shaft from the new sewer had brought Cat and Ferrus into a building site. They were in a room intended as a scullery or a kitchen, if the drain in the corner was any guide. It belonged to a half-built range of apartments between the Great Garden and the Park, yet another of the seemingly endless alterations required by the Duke of Albemarle.

  There was nothing above them apart from a blue and cloudless sky. The brick walls had reached about eight feet in height. The tops of scaffolding poles rose above the bricks. Cat had pressed herself against the back wall of a recess; a future fireplace, perhaps, or the site of an oven.

  There was no sign of Lady Castlemaine, or of Hakesby and Veal. Everything had happened so quickly that Cat was still trying to untangle it. When they had come out of the sewer, Cat had sent Ferrus to look for Reeves or the footman who had admitted them, in the hope they would let her out into the Park without anyone’s being the wiser. In the meantime, she held on to Dido by her collar and tried to stop her barking.

  Ferrus had stumbled out of the scullery, through the unpaved yard beyond and into the Great Garden. He had found Reeves and the footman, but unfortunately the King had been with them; he had been on the verge of sending them, both in their holiday finery, down the sewer to search for Dido. Ferrus had brought all three of them back with him. If Cat hadn’t had the presence of mind to release Dido before they entered the scullery, she would have been discovered.

  The King was now talking to Reeves. ‘Are you telling me that you’d lifted the hatch to the old sewer to check for a blockage?’

  ‘Yes, Majesty. There was a report of one earlier. So I sent Ferrus down to have a look, and I went off to change into my working clothes and get some tools. The poor dog must have rushed in and fallen down the shaft somehow. Luckily Ferrus found him down there, and managed to get him out by the sewer they laid for this building here. We’ll have to check for the blockage. That’s probably where the poor dog got stuck.’

  It was a good performance, in its way. Cat would not have believed that Reeves could speak so humbly and with such an oily air of sincerity. If only they could keep the King in the doorway: if he came into the scullery, he could hardly help seeing her. Perhaps that was the reason Reeves and Ferrus were still on their knees: they formed a human wall, protecting themselves by protecting her from discovery.

  There was a stir behind them, and Dido shot between her master’s legs into the scullery. She shook herself vigorously, throwing drops of water over the King, Ferrus and Reeves.

  ‘Your pardon, Your Majesty,’ the footman said, sounding out of breath, ‘she wriggled out of my arms, I couldn’t hold her, I—’

  ‘Peace, fellow,’ the King said. ‘Be off with you. Dido, come here.’ His voice changed, becoming softer, the sort of voice a man uses to woo a woman. ‘What shall I give your rescuers as a token of my gratitude?’ The voice sharpened abruptly. ‘You there. What’s your name?’

  ‘Reeves, Majesty.’

  ‘Go to the Back Stairs and ask for Mr Chiffinch. He’ll give you something for your trouble, and you can share it with your labourer.’

  Cat heard the King’s footsteps walking away. Reeves and Ferrus stayed where they were, silent and on their knees.

  ‘Come, Flurry!’ called the King. ‘Come, Jollyboy! Here’s Dido again.’

  In St James’s Park, everything was the same and everything had changed.

  The crowds were still there: the strollers, gentlemen arm-in-arm, swaying after a good dinner; the ladies parading their charms with varying degrees of discretion; the ducks on the canal pursuing their own mysterious lives; and the people, ebbing and flowing in choppy, brightly coloured currents of movement.

  Behind Cat, the private gate to Cockpit’s Great Garden closed with a clatter. She heard the bolts being driven home.

  ‘Tell Mr Hakesby,’ Reeves had said to her as she left the garden, ‘that enough’s enough. If it had gone much worse today, I’d have had a rope around my neck.’

  Cat walked away, skirting the end of the canal and making for the gate beyond Wallingford House, which would bring her to Charing Cross. People stared at her. She was respectably dressed, but the sewers had left her damp, stained and evil-smelling.

  The wet material of her skirt and shift slapped against her calves at every step. The hem of her skirt, the bottom of her cloak, her shoes and stockings were still soaked. It seemed to her that the filth of the sewers had saturated the very pores of her skin. She wanted to be at home. Above all, she wanted desperately to be clean again.

  She would have nothing more to do with this foolish and dangerous business. It was more than likely that Reeves would go in search of whatever old Mistress Cromwell had hidden down there. What did it matter if he did? The Cromwells could fend for themselves in future.

  ‘Fell in your pisspot, did you?’

  She glanced to her left. Two page boys were pointing at her, their faces twisted with derision.

  ‘Nah,’ said the other. ‘Couldn’t find the pot in time, more like.’

  ‘It’s Mistress Shit! Mistress Shit!’

  Cat hurried on, but they kept pace, enjoying the sport of jeering at her, but careful not to come within range of her arm. After a moment, though, they sheered away, their faces alarmed. They separated as they went and darted for cover into the crowds.

  There were running footsteps. Ferrus appeared beside her. She stopped in surprise. He was carrying a stick, which he shook in the direction of the fleeing boys.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  He thrust his hand into the front of his filthy smock and drew out a blackened package about nine inches long. He held it out to her.

  She stared at it.

  With his mouth closed, Ferrus gave a high wordless cry, like the mewing of a cat or a bird or a small child. He thrust the package at her again.

  In a rush, Cat understood. She took it from him and weighed it in her hands. It was filthy and heavy. She looked from it to his face.

  ‘Thank you.’ She felt in her pocket. ‘Here. This is for you.’

  She held out a penny to him. She wished she had a crown piece to give him. Ferrus did not take the coin. He smiled again. He looks happy, Cat thought, if a fish can look happy, and – this next thought ambushed her – made almost beautiful by joy.

  ‘Take it,’ she said. ‘It’s for you.’

  The expression vanished, as if wiped by a sponge. He snatched the penny from her fingers. Turning, he stumbled away, lurching at once into a clumsy, hobbling run and waving hi
s stick from side to side. People scattered before him as though he were mad.

  Perhaps he was. Perhaps they all were.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As Sure as the Coat on Your Back

  Easter Monday, 23 March 1668

  MASTER DON’T GET no reward. Man says he don’t know who Master is. Tells Master go away and not come back if he knows what’s good for him.

  Ferrus hears Master telling the servant about it, the one who let them in the garden. Him and Master drink and smoke and curse. Ferrus lies quiet as any mouse next to Windy in his kennel.

  Anyway Master didn’t save little dog. Lady did. Ferrus did.

  By God, says Master, I’ll drown his poxy carcase in a cesspit.

  He says more, much more, but Ferrus wraps himself in memories warm as a blanket and shuts him out.

  Ferrus has reward on this day of wonders and joy.

  Inside his head she smiles at him. She says thank you. She gives him his reward. She gives him his penny.

  Again and again and again.

  After the attack, I don’t know how long I lay in a faint. Not long, I think, half an hour at most, judging by the glimpses of the sun.

  Consciousness had returned gradually, by fits and starts. I was aware first of a pain in my shoulder. Then, I thought someone was jolting and shaking me. I moaned that he should stop. A little later, I discovered that I had a severe headache. I was also thirsty. The gag in my mouth had something to do with that.

  The sounds of many hooves and the grating of many wheels filled my head. I was in a moving vehicle. I opened my eyes. Above me was a sheet of canvas. The sun sent splinters of light through the patched and coarsely woven fabric.

  I was lying upon planks of crudely planed wood that smelled unpleasantly of fish. My wrists and ankles were tied with rope drawn so tight it chafed the skin. After a few minutes I worked out that my arms and legs were also attached to something, perhaps the side of the cart, which limited my range of movement.

  Two men were talking nearby in the leisurely, laconic way of old acquaintances. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they sounded calm. I closed my eyes.