Plague (28 page)

“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.

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 farther 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.

A louder shout from Dickon. Coke half opened his eyes. The boy had given up leaping imaginary frogs in the finding of a real one. He held it up by its body, showing it to Sarah, its webbed feet kicking.

She liked the boy, for all his stutterings and shambles—perhaps because of them. He’d told her about Dickon—finding him, saving him—one night in a Wiltshire inn, on the road down.

“You have a kind heart, Captain,” she’d said.

“William,” he’d replied, the first time he’d again offered his given name, though Lucy, asleep at last across the room, used it freely. “Or Will, if you prefer. I haven’t been more than a captain of the highway these many years.”

“But were once, uh, William?”

“Aye.”

“In the late wars? And for the king’s cause like my husband?”

“He fought most gallantly, I heard.”

“He did.” A silence came between them, bringing memories of the mangled corpse of John Chalker. Sarah cleared her throat. “Do you think he was gallant at the end? In that cellar?”

“Bravery needs an opportunity. I doubt the murderer gave him much of one. Yet I suspect that he was.”

She’d nodded. “I suspect you were gallant too, were you not?”

“On occasion. When given little choice.”

“Does a man not always have such a choice?”

“Not really. I know that as often as I chose to stand I often chose to run.”

“But were not, perhaps, the first to run?”

“Marry, perhaps not the
very
first.”

Her face changed utterly when she laughed and he’d thought at that moment—and maybe it was the first time—that he’d like to banish that other face entirely. Then she’d said, “And you knew Lucy’s brother, did you not? Knew him and loved him, I understand.” He’d stared at her, seeking any colour to the word “loved.” Yet in the end, he’d decided it did not matter if there was. He and Quentin just were. He’d loved him, sure, as he had loved Evanline, in Bristol; they’d both died badly, and as he’d looked away from Sarah, he’d thought that it was best for him not to love her either, since loss was the way love ever ended for him.

He glanced back now. She’d hiked up her skirt to wade alongside Dickon in the shallows of the river. The game had changed again; she and the boy were snatching at minnows. Again he noted her brown calf muscles, water drops caught like jewels in the faint down on them. Then beyond Sarah and Dickon he spotted the donkey, the man leading it, the rope that ran from its saddle. The next moment the prow of the barge itself was in view, steadily dragged toward the jetty that thrust into the Thames here
at Sunbury. The others had not noticed it yet, so intent were they on their game, and he did not call. He would let them have their last carefree moments.

The care had been their choice. In Cornwall, Lucy had used all her skills to persuade them to stay, to not risk death in the centre of its domain and return to London. Coke had tried to persuade Sarah, and Sarah had tried to persuade Coke. Neither had succeeded, though they had dallied several days more—for what drew them back was more powerful than any contrary argument: not least a compact made with a thief-taker that justice would be done.

Yet he wondered: if she had been persuaded to stay, would he have too? Was it her determination that drew him back? Or was it, simply, her?

He watched her now, saw her notice the barge, raise a hand against the sun to study it; noted the way her shoulders set. There would be no persuasion that would unset them now. The boy saw the boat also, and took longer to realize what it meant. When he did, he jerked around to seek Coke, and calmed when he found him. Dickon they’d not tried to persuade to stay in Cornwall; they’d simply left in the middle of the night, hoping that Lucy, whom he loved, would manage to keep him there. But Dickon loved his captain more, and he’d run for a day and a night back along the road until he’d caught up with them. It had taken all Coke’s skills and Sarah’s caresses to soothe the lad, together with the vow that he would never be abandoned again. Whatever dangers lay before them, be they plague, murder or the noose, Dickon would face them all at his captain’s side.

She strode from the water to speak to him. “Is this the vessel we await?”

“Aye. This barge will take us to Teddington and we’ll find a boat there for London.”

“Thank the Lord for the river,” she said, dropping her skirt. “I do not think I could walk another ten steps.”

“Yet you can run and leap the frog?”

She pushed loose hair from her face. “The boy wanted it so.”

Coke raised his feet from the water and reluctantly put his boots back on. They were meant for riding, not walking, and because they’d trudged most of the miles from Cornwall, and taken near four weeks to do it, his feet were a sorry affair indeed. His mare, Dapple, had injured a leg running in Cornish fields and had to be left, while their little coin had not run to horses, whose hire had trebled in price since the plague had come, nor coach fares raised for the same reason. There had been an occasional wagon going their way.

“And what awaits us in London?”

Death, he thought, but did not say. “Pitman,” he said instead. “By now the thief-taker will surely have some paths for us to follow. He may have already identified the villain. I would not put it past him, for he seems most able.” Coke tried to smile. “Perhaps we will regret the haste of our return if the murderer already dangles at Tyburn.”

“The only thing I will regret, Captain, is if the words you speak are true. For I will not consider John Chalker avenged until I have looked his killer in the eye. Until I have had some hand in his taking.”

He sighed. She had “captain-ed” him again. And there he was once more, John Chalker, the spectre ever between them. He rose, with nothing else to say save, “Then let us speed you to that, ma’am. To London.”

Even in the short walk from Wood Wharf to Sarah’s lodgings, he could see how the metropolis had changed.

Almost no one walked on the streets, most unusual on Sabbath’s eve. Each tavern, wine-house, alehouse and ordinary they passed was closed, when usually at this hour they would be overflowing. Though some would still be open in the dingier back alleys, despite his thirst Coke did not seek them out. Both Sarah and Dickon were exhausted, while he was determined to get to Pitman before the City gates were locked for the night.

However, it was not just the lack of people, the shuttered inns, the many houses blossoming red crosses like roses, nor the near silence broken only by the bells. “Look,” Sarah said. At first he did not see, until she added, “The grass.”

Then he saw it. Between the always well tended paving stones of the Strand, knee-high plants bent in the wind of their passing.

At her lodgings, they protested when he went to depart by himself. “I go for information alone, not action,” he said. “I will return with the dawn.” He left them fallen together on the one bed as if slain.

He chose to swing slightly from the direct course, crossed the Fleet on Holborn Bridge, bore through the Churchyard of St. Bartholomew the Less rather than enter the City by the gate nearest Pitman’s address. For that entrance was Newgate, and it was part of the prison of the same name. He’d always avoid it if he could, ever since a gypsy had discovered on his palm that he would only see its outside thrice more before he saw it from within. So instead he took lanes and alleys that roughly paralleled the Wall until he reached the next entryway, Aldersgate, the extra distance costing him, for the guards had begun to shut up and only a shilling from his scant supply made them pause to admit him. The steeple of St. Paul’s, the highest spire in London, its tip gilded by the setting sun’s last rays, guided him down St. Martin’s Le Grand.

With few about to ask, and those few scurrying away when he tried, he discovered Cock Alley by sound rather than sight. Around a corner, he found the source of the wailing he’d heard: noise and destination, one. There, before the very house he sought, a hand cart stood with one man carrying a body out the door while another held back a woman on the threshold who was weeping and trying to get to the corpse. A third figure stood by, an older woman in a ragged grey cloak. She was as still as the others were active and to the screams offered a sound more awful: a low laugh.

Fear flushed him; he knew this house was Pitman’s by the distinctive gable the man had described. Still, he advanced, just as the wailing woman was shoved forcefully back inside, the door was slammed upon her and the bolts affixed to its outside were shot into place. “What happens here?” he asked.

The woman jumped two paces back, hands raised against him. “Eh?” she screeched. The man who’d been bolting the door turned fast, hefting a cudgel.

“Peace, friends!” Coke raised empty hands, as the second man finished dumping the body on the cart and turned too, also armed. Seeing she was warded, the old woman stepped back, into the light spill of the lantern above the door.

Dank hair, inexpertly dyed blond, pressed into a brow that was white due to the layers of lead paint plastered onto it. Here, as on the rest of the skin, great fissures had cracked the ceruse, splitting under a single mouse-skin eyebrow; the other eyebrow was absent. A cloud of cochineal reddened each cheek, disappearing into the hollows of skin that folded over a mouth missing most teeth. Beauty patches had been randomly applied over pox scars. Most were plain orbs and half moons, though a cat chased a carriage toward the missing eyebrow.