The Ashes of London

Edward was standing almost at her shoulder. For a moment it was as if he had materialized from nothing, like the evil spirit he was. Chasing after that came the realization that he must have been waiting for her in the gap between the side of the big press and the corner of the wall.

He smiled at her. He wore his bedgown of padded silk trimmed with fur. Around his head he had wound a silk kerchief. He looked younger without his periwig, more like a bloated version of the boy he had once been.

The boy who had pulled her hair and put a dead crow in her bed.

‘Go away,’ she said, retreating. ‘I shall scream.’

‘Scream all you like, my love. No one will hear.’

He seized her as he spoke. His left arm circled her head and the hand clamped over her mouth and nostrils as he pulled her towards him. His right arm wrapped itself around her waist.

She struggled for breath. She kicked his shins but her soft indoor shoes made no impression on him.

Her left hand swept over the table and touched the candlestick. She picked it and jabbed the flame of the candle into his cheek. The light died. He swore. His grip tightened.

‘Hellcat,’ he whispered.

Darkness came. And pain.

CHAPTER SEVEN

NOTHING LASTS FOR ever, Cat thought, for was there not always death to make an end of it?

She lay in the darkness. She was on her back still, her legs apart, her dress rucked up, for what was there to be modest about any more? The pain in her body was acute but strangely remote, as if it belonged to someone else, someone she had once known well and now was a stranger.

Sometimes a church clock struck the hour. That was strange too, the very idea that this devastated city still contained churches with clocks and bells that told the time.

Churches among the ashes of the dead.

Gradually other thoughts drifted into her mind. She could go to Aunt Olivia, praying to God she would not find Uncle Alderley tossing on top of her in the canopied bed.

But Olivia would say that those things were only to be expected, that this was what gentlemen always tried to do to pretty maids, and even to less pretty ones. She would say that Cat should have taken better care of herself, and above all she would say that it was Cat’s fault.

It was the way of the world. Men always tried to make love to women. That was what Olivia had said in the spring, when she had turned away a servant who had got herself with child. Cat had argued that the man should bear at least some of the blame.

‘But it was her fault, Catherine,’ Olivia had said, ‘just as it was Eve’s. A woman leads a man into sin, that’s what your uncle says, and of course he is right. The girl should have managed it better, and now she must live with the consequences. And there’s an end to it.’

Would they throw Cat into the streets, a defiled woman to live in the gutter as best she could? Probably not – they would simply pretend it had not happened. Master Alderley had his heart set on her marrying Sir Denzil, and Master Alderley was not a man who changed his mind once it was made up.

Another thought struck her. If she told her uncle and aunt, would they even believe her?

As a child Cat had been thrown from a horse and landed awkwardly on a heap of stones. This had been almost a year before she first had her courses and her body began to change. But after the fall, she had bled from the place where women bleed at that time of the month.

Cat felt herself but could not feel anything except pain. If there were no token of blood to show that she had lost her virginity, then why indeed should they believe her? In that case, it would be her word against Edward’s. Her word was worth nothing. But in his father’s eyes, Edward could do no wrong. She was merely the unwanted niece, a relation by law but not by blood, the child of a man whose name was not mentioned. To the Alderleys, her only value was as something to be traded, bought and sold.

Something to be robbed. Something to be defiled.

Even Jem had abandoned her. He would not help her – besides what could a crippled servant do? He would argue caution in all things, just as the foolish old man always did.

Time passed.

Never forget, never forgive.

Quite suddenly she knew what she would do. The decision arrived ready-made, needing no thought. It was there because nothing else was left to her.

The click of the latch made Cat catch her breath. She opened the door and listened.

The sounds of Barnabas Place settled around her – the creaks, the pattering of rodents, the whispering of draughts. The air was stuffy and still very warm.

She held up the candle, which accentuated the gloom. Her eyes adjusted slowly. This was the darkest hour before dawn. But the Fire still tainted the night sky. An uncurtained window at the end of the landing framed a sullen red glow.

With the bundle under her arm, she stepped from her room and closed the door. She wore her plainest dress. Her shoes were in the bundle, together with a leather bag containing a few small possessions, among them her box of drawing instruments.

Over her shoulders was the grey cloak she had stolen last night from the young man at St Paul’s. She felt a momentary pang of guilt. He had tried to help her, after all – had perhaps saved her life when she had panicked and run towards the cathedral in search of her father. She couldn’t remember much of what he had looked like, apart from the fact that he had been so thin you could see the skull beneath the skin. Also, he had heavy, dark eyebrows that belonged on a larger, older face.

Movement sent spikes of pain deep inside her body. She passed under an archway, turned right and hesitated at the head of the main staircase. Her candle was the only light.

These stairs led down to the balustraded landing, with rugs on the floor and sconces on the polished wood of the panelling, and with ornate plaster mouldings on the ceiling. All the magnificence was invisible.

Olivia’s chamber was down there, with the canopied bedstead. Beside it was Master Alderley’s closet, which had a bed in it, as well as a table, a large inlaid cabinet of Dutch manufacture and a number of presses. The third chamber was empty.

She listened, but all was quiet.

Cat continued down the landing to the archway to the spiral staircase. She found her way by touch, by memory, and by the variations in the darkness of shadows beyond the candlelight. She paused at every step and listened, though she desperately wanted to hurry. This, in reverse, was the route she had used last night, when Jem had brought her up to her chamber.

On the floor below, a door led to the side landing beyond. Unlike the main landing, which was within the shell of what had been the prior’s lodging in the days when the old monks had lived at Barnabas Place, this landing gave access to a different range at right angles to it. Her own chamber was in the upper floor of this building.

The landing took the form of a passage running along its outside wall, with four doors at intervals on the right-hand side. All these doors were closed. She slipped down the passage to the third door. Here she paused, and listened.

The sound of deep, rhythmic snoring reached her. She put down the bundle. She crouched until her cheek touched the ground. A current of air flowed through the gap under the door. But there was no light in the chamber beyond.

Cat stood up, wincing as another spike of pain stabbed her. The other rooms on this landing were unoccupied; they were furnished as bedchambers for the guests that so rarely came. At one time, Edward had slept in the third bedchamber in the main range, but his habit of returning in the early hours, usually drunk, had irritated Master Alderley beyond endurance; and in the end he had ordered his son to move into this wing.

She pushed her hand into her dress and took the knife from her pocket. She raised the latch.

The door opened silently – Olivia would not tolerate a squeaking hinge in any house of hers. The snoring increased in volume. Cat became unpleasantly aware of a fetid smell that reminded her of the wild beasts in the menagerie at the Tower.

Shielding the candle flame, Cat advanced into the darkness beyond. What little light there was showed her the curtains drawn about the bed. It also caught on someone standing beside it in the dark – a dwarf-like man with a great wig; and for a nightmarish instant she thought that Sir Denzil Croughton was waiting for her. The candlestick dipped in her hand, and she almost let it fall. Then reason reasserted herself: what she saw was Edward’s periwig on its stand.

The snoring continued. Cat drew back the curtain and held up the candle so its light shone into the bed.

Edward was lying on his back. For an instant she didn’t recognize him: he had taken off the silk handkerchief he wore at home when he was not wearing his wig. His naked scalp was as bald as a newly peeled potato and not unlike one in shape. He had thrown off the covers in the heat. He wore a white linen nightgown, open at the neck.

The snoring stopped without warning. In the sudden, dreadful silence, Edward was looking at her. She saw his eyes, with twin flames burning in them, one for each pupil, reflecting the candle.

Cat did not think. She jabbed the knife at the nearer eye. The tip snagged for a moment when it touched him, then it dug into the eyeball, which wobbled beneath the pressure like a boiled egg without its shell when you speared it with a knife.

His body bucked in the bed and he let out a scream as high-pitched as a girl’s. His arm swung up towards her. She reared back. The candle tilted in her hand. The flame caught the edge of the bed curtain.

The blood looked black in this light. It gleamed like liquid ebony.

The flame ran up the side of the curtain and gave birth to another flame, and then to a third.

Edward writhed on the mattress, wailing and crying, his hands covering his face.

Cat turned and ran. The candle was in her hand, by some miracle still alight, though the flame was dancing and ducking like a wild thing.

Behind her, the screams continued, the flames rose higher, and the chamber grew brighter and brighter.

‘Mistress …’

She gasped and dropped the bundle.

The whisper came from her left. She heard the laboured breathing mingling with her own. Down here in the cellar, with the stench from the cesspit oozing through the wall, it was very quiet. You could hear and see nothing of what might be going on in the rest of the house. The screams. The flames.

‘Jem.’ She was panting, and the words came singly, in fits and starts. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Waiting for you, mistress.’

He stirred beside her in the darkness. She raised the candle. His pale face was at her elbow.

‘You said you wouldn’t help me,’ she said.

‘I am not here to help.’ His breath wheezed. ‘I feared you would come. I’m here to stop you. Have you not thought? Your father may well be dead.’

She stooped for her bundle. ‘Something’s happened. It changes everything.’

‘Nothing’s changed outside. It’s as dangerous as ever.’

She said bluntly, ‘It’s more dangerous here. Edward took me by force.’

‘Took you …?’

The horror in the old man’s voice gave her a perverse pleasure. She said, ‘He was waiting in my bedchamber tonight. He raped me.’

‘But you’re still a child.’

‘Not any more, you fool,’ she snapped, forgetting in her anger to lower her voice. ‘And so I went to him as he slept and I stabbed him in the eye.’

She felt his hand on her arm. A sob rose from her throat.

‘Is he dead?’ he asked.

‘I hope so.’ She took a deep breath and said in a rush, ‘I must go – go anywhere, anywhere but here.’

‘Then I’ll help you.’

‘There’s nowhere. Nowhere safe.’

‘But there is.’

She turned and blundered against him. His arms went around her. She was trembling but she did not cry.

‘Child,’ he said. ‘Child. You must go alone. I would slow you down. Go to Three Cocks Yard, off the Strand. The house to the left of the sign of the green pestle. Ask for Mistress Martha Noxon. She’s my niece, and they have no knowledge of her here. Give her this, and she will know you. Perhaps your father will find you there.’

Jem pressed something into her hand. It was small and smooth, curved, cold and hard.

‘Put it in your pocket.’ He gave her a little push. ‘And go. Go now.’

Somewhere in the distance was a faint, ragged baying, growing in volume. Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse were giving tongue.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I COULD NOT afford to anger Williamson any more than I had already done. I worked late that day and made sure I was at Whitehall early on the following morning, which was Thursday, the fifth day of the Fire.

The news was good. The wind had slackened and veered north, which made it easier for those fighting the Fire. There were reports that the Duke of York had halted the westward march of the flames at the Temple. God willing, the mansions of the Strand would be spared, and so would Whitehall itself. The fires were still burning vigorously elsewhere, but their relentless advance had been largely stopped.

I was already at work when Williamson came up to the office in Scotland Yard. I knew he was on his way for I had seen him from the window in the court below, deep in conversation with the portly gentleman with the wart on his chin. I expected him to be in a good humour because of the news about the Fire, but his face was grim and preoccupied. As soon as he came in, he called me over, commanding me to bring him the list of fatalities.

He scanned it quickly. ‘Good. No new ones overnight. God has been merciful.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But talking of death, Marwood, there’s one that isn’t recorded here.’

He paused, as if to consider some weighty aspect of the matter far beyond my understanding. I was used to that, for Williamson employed such tactics to build a sense of his own importance – in his own mind, perhaps, as much as in the minds of others.

‘We have a body,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better see it now.’

We clattered down the stone stairs, setting off a crowd of echoes, with Williamson leading the way. On the ground floor, he demanded a lantern from the porter. While we waited he turned to me.

‘A patrol went up to St Paul’s at dawn,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s like an oven in there, even now. A beggar told them there was a body in Paul’s Walk. In what’s left of a chantry chapel on the north side.’

‘Where the ballad-seller used to have a stall?’ I asked.

The cathedral’s nave, Paul’s Walk, had become a cross between a market, a public resort and a place of assignation in recent years. The ballad-seller made most of his income from his secondary trade, which was pimping.

Williamson nodded. ‘Two of the guards left their powder behind and went in and pulled him out.’

‘A victim of the Fire, sir?’

‘He’s definitely not the stallholder. And he can’t have been there long. Someone would have noticed him before the Fire.’

‘But why’s he here, sir?’ Surprise stripped the appropriate respect from my voice. ‘At Whitehall?’

The question earned a scowl. The porter brought the lantern. Williamson gestured to me, indicating that I should light the way for him.

We descended by another staircase into the cellarage. I had never been here before – the palace was so vast and so rambling that I knew only a fraction of it, and none of it well. A low passage stretched the length of the range. Small gratings were set high in the left-hand wall to let in a modicum of light and air. On the right was a row of doors, all closed.

Williamson took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door at the far end. We entered a windowless chamber with a low barrel-vault of bricks. It contained no furniture apart from a heavy table in the centre of the room. The cellar smelled strongly of burning, as everywhere did now, as well as of sewage and damp.

On the table lay a large, untidy bundle draped with a sheet.

‘Uncover it,’ Williamson said.

I set down the lantern and obeyed. The man was naked. He was on his side, facing me.

‘God in heaven,’ I said.

He lay awkwardly on the table, for his arms were behind his back, which pushed his shoulders forward and twisted his body to one side. It was as if he had been frozen in the act of trying to roll off the table.

He had matted, shoulder-length hair, which was grey with ash and perhaps with age as well. There wasn’t much flesh on him. His head poked up and forward like the prow of a barge.

‘Who is he, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

Williamson took up the lantern and directed its light towards the body. The skin was powdered with ash. Seen from close to, it looked yellow beneath the dirt, like parchment. It was shrivelled and blistered. The heat would have done that. The body didn’t stink. But that didn’t necessarily mean the death was recent, I thought, because the heat would have mummified it.

The man’s chin had caught on the table, and his mouth was open, which gave him the air of surprise. His lips were pulled back, exposing the remaining teeth. A bruise on the temple had grazed the skin.

‘Was he naked when he was found?’ I asked, for it seemed to be my place to ask questions.

‘No. His clothes are there.’ Williamson nodded at a bundle on a bench that stood by the wall.

‘Perhaps he was trapped inside when the cathedral caught fire.’

Williamson shrugged. ‘Turn him over,’ he ordered in a casual voice, as if telling me to turn a page or a key.

I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that the soul of the dead man was floating about the roof of the cellar and watching us. I gripped the corpse’s shoulder with one hand and his hip with the other. The flesh was cool and yielded slightly to my touch. It felt like a slab of boiled brawn. I pulled the body towards me, gradually increasing the pressure.

The corpse lacked the rigidity of the recently dead, which made it unnervingly unpredictable. It was also much heavier than I expected. It reached its tipping point and fell with a thump on to its front.

The arms poked up.

‘You see?’ Williamson said softly.

We stood side by side, staring at the hands of the dead man in the light of the lantern. The thumbs were tied together with a length of cord, so tightly tied that they had turned black.

‘Why just the thumbs?’ I said. ‘Why not tie the wrists?’

‘I don’t know. But look there, Marwood. The back of the head.’

There was a small wound in the neck, just below the skull.

‘Stabbed from behind,’ Williamson said. ‘Up into the brain. By someone who knew what he was about.’

I held my peace. So it was murder, that much was clear. The Fire acted as a cover for many crimes, so why not murder among them? What wasn’t clear to me was why Williamson was so interested and, above all, why he had brought me here to see the body.

‘It’s the clothes that matter,’ Williamson said abruptly.

He had wandered over to the bench. He held up a torn shirt, then a coat and a pair of breeches with the same pattern. I joined him. The heat had darkened the material, charring it in places, but it was still possible to make out the broad vertical stripes on the material of both coat and breeches. Black, perhaps, and yellow.

‘A suit of livery?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

A badge was fixed to the collar. Williamson rubbed it with his fingertip. I peered at it. A pelican was feeding her young with flesh plucked from her own breast.

‘He’s one of Henry Alderley’s men,’ Williamson said. ‘The goldsmith – you must know of the man. That’s his device, and his livery. That’s why the body has been brought here. That’s why we must know who killed him. And above all that’s why we must go carefully.’

The King had gone by barge to the Tower, inspecting his ruined capital on the way. From there he intended to ride to Moorfields, to address the crowds of refugees. Master Williamson would have liked to go with him.

Instead, he was obliged to walk to Barnabas Place in Holborn to see Henry Alderley about a dead servant, with me in attendance on him. It was much hotter here, even in the unburned streets, than it had been by the river. In the normal run of things, he would have taken a coach, but the streets were so congested with traffic that this was impracticable. He was not habitually an active man and his face was soon shiny with perspiration.

These were strange times. There had been riots last night, and rumours of food shortages. Foreigners had been attacked on the assumption that they had been responsible for the destruction of London, purely by virtue of their being foreign. The King had summoned the militias of neighbouring counties, ostensibly to help fight the Fire but also to keep order if the riots spiralled out of control.

But even in the middle of this crisis in the nation’s capital, Master Alderley was still a man of importance, not just a goldsmith and an alderman of the City. His wealth was enormous, and the King himself was said to be one of his principal debtors.

So Williamson naturally wished to treat Master Alderley with due respect. But I was puzzled, all the same. Why come himself at a time like this? He was not a justice. He was not a lawyer. He was not a courtier.

Williamson frequently glanced over his shoulder, as if worried that I might slip away, leaving him alone among the refugees and the desolation. This was probably the first time that he had left Whitehall since last week. He must have known in theory what the Fire had done to London, but the reality of it took him by surprise.

We skirted the remains of the City, avoiding the worst of the destruction. He was visibly shocked by what he saw: the smoking ruins, the blackened chimneystacks rearing out of the ashes, and the sluggishly moving crowds of homeless people encumbered with possessions and with the weaker members of their families.

These horrors affected me, too, but I had my own worries to distract me. Williamson had no reason to trust me, let alone like me. I had worked for him only since the beginning of the summer. The connection between us had come about in a most unexpected way, and he could not have welcomed it.

In May, I had petitioned the King for the third time, begging that His Majesty might in his infinite mercy see fit to release my father from the Tower. He had been imprisoned since the suppression of Venner’s Rising in 1661. Though my father had not taken part himself in this abortive attempt to seize London on behalf of King Jesus, he had been a known Fifth Monarchist before the Restoration, and the authorities had seized treasonable correspondence that implicated him in this new rebellion. Since my father was a printer by trade, the conspirators had asked him to print a proclamation announcing the change of monarchy from the terrestrial to the divine. Fool that he was, he had agreed.

The Fifth Monarchists took their beliefs from the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, in which the prophet interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a great image made of gold, silver, brass, iron and clay. Daniel prophesied on this evidence that four kingdoms would rise: and that then would come a fifth kingdom, which would break into pieces and consume all the others, and that this kingdom would last for ever. My father and his friends had had no doubt whatsoever that this fifth monarchy would be that of King Jesus. To bring this about they had been the implacable foes of the King in the late civil wars, and had done much to bring about the execution of Charles I.

Unfortunately the King’s death had not ushered in the reign of King Jesus after all. Instead it had led to the Commonwealth, which had soon become a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, a king in all but name, grew increasingly hostile towards his former allies among the Fifth Monarchists. A year or two after his death, the monarchy was restored amid great popular acclamation in the person of Charles II.

My father had not given up hope, and the burning of London could only encourage this. Despite everything, he was still waiting for the destruction of terrestrial empires, still waiting for King Jesus and the reign of heaven on earth. And I was still trying to keep his mouth shut about it.

The King had not responded to my petition for clemency, which had come as no surprise since he hadn’t responded to the other two. But, ten days later, Master Williamson had written to me and commanded me to wait on him at Scotland Yard.

Yes, he said, His Majesty in his infinite mercy had decided that my father could, on conditions, be released into my custody. The first of these was that he should live in retirement and undertake not to meet those of his former associates still at large. There was no question, of course, of his house, business and possessions being restored to him. The second condition was that I should stand surety for his good conduct.

The third condition was that I should enter the employment of Master Williamson, and undertake any tasks that he might see fit to give me.

When disgrace had fallen on us after Venner’s Rising, I had been nearing the end of my apprenticeship to my father. In other words, I had the knowledge and the skills of the trade. That was one reason why Williamson wanted me to liaise with Master Newcomb, the printer of the Gazette, to make sure that he did not cheat the government.

He had given me other tasks, however, from the very beginning. My years at St Paul’s School had not been altogether wasted – I had an education that most other apprentices lacked. So he set me to copying letters. Taking notes. Running errands. Even talking to people on his behalf, sometimes when he did not wish his interest in them to be known.

But why take me with him now, when he went to call on one of the richest men in the kingdom?

Why me?