Plague (37 page)

“Maybe the riverside will be our only way in. Unless … Ah!”

As Coke looked out again, the lightning moved north; the thunder followed it and the torrent ceased as swiftly as it had arrived. Immediately people who’d taken shelter like them in portico and alcove ran again to the gate of the Banqueting House.

Even in the small time they’d stood before the palace, trying to figure a way in, a crowd had formed. Londoners drawn by sudden rumour; sick Londoners in the main, men and women with grossly
distended necks. “Of course!” he said, clasping Pitman’s arm, who yelped in pain. “My apologies. But come. These people may force the gate. They must have heard that the king is here. They have gathered for him to heal them.”

“Can he do anything for my shoulder?” Pitman moaned, and followed.

They joined the rear of a mob that had swelled to at least fifty. A youthful officer stood before the gates, arms raised, palms out, at his back four nervous pike men. “I tell you His Majesty is not here,” the young man was saying. “You must disperse. You all know the dangers of gathering at this time. It is prohibited.”

“He is here!” a man, his face a mass of boils, shouted. “Else why the royal guards? I know your coats!”

Others in the crowd began to shout too, pressing forward. “He’s here! Charles is here! There’s only a few of us. Let us in. Let him touch us! Heal us!”

“It is just the Duke of York!” the young officer blurted out. “He does not have the healing touch.”

“Blood royal, ain’t ’e?” the man with the boils yelled. “Touch me! Heal me!”

The mob pressed closer. The officer drew his sword. “More guards!” he screeched, while his soldiers put their pikes at port and attempted to shove back the crowd.

“Look.” Pitman pointed toward the royal apartments to the north. The four sentries were running from there to their fellows’ aid. “Holbein Gate’s unguarded.”

Waiting only for the reinforcements to rush past, Coke and Pitman ran the other way. The abandoned gates were still closed, but were no taller than the captain, and he was up and over fast. He turned straight, shot the bolts. Pitman was through and the gates
reclosed and rebolted again in moments.

“Now where?” asked Coke.

“Everything to the south appears to be most guarded. So thither we go.”

They splashed through puddles, gardens to their right, lawns and parterres stretching into the dark. A statue gleamed in the moonlight. Ahead, a brick passageway brought a waft of river to their nostrils. To their left, a passage opened onto a larger space beyond. Along it, light spilled from glass onto cobbles. “There, think you?” asked Coke, leaning on his knees.

A distinct pop came abruptly from where they looked. “Gunshot!” gasped Pitman.

“Champagne,” said Coke. “I suspect there’s only one who would be drinking that this night.” Pitman made to go, but Coke took his arm. “Wait.”

There appeared another glow ahead, a trace of smoke, rising into the lantern spill. “Guards, smoking their pipes,” whispered Coke, pulling the larger man back into the shadows. “If we both charge forward here, we both could be taken. And our quarry may have preceded us. Or may still be approaching. Do you take this passage and come up from the river. I’ll go in the front.”

“Nay,” said Pitman, restraining in his turn. “There might be more gates to climb down there and I cannot do it with this.” He lifted the arm in the sling. “So leave me the front.”

“Fair enough. But be wary, Pitman. According to Mrs. Chalker there may be two of them, and one at least the real Monstrous Cock. So I’ll only say this: if you get the chance, kill both the bastards straight.”

“And you the same, Captain,” replied Pitman. “Go with God.”

As Coke ran off down the passage, Pitman watched from the
shadows. Then, at the first screech of the fiddle, the guards tapped out their pipes upon their boot heels, and stepped inside. They stayed close to the door, so when Pitman came up to it, he was able to see, through the expensive glass and between their shoulders, near everyone in the room.

He shut his eyes, drew a deep breath, looked again. The room no longer appeared to him as a muddle of people, but of individuals. He could tell by the cut of their clothes who were the secretaries, who the noble advisers. Watch the servants enter from the opposite side of the hall pause and wipe their feet before crossing to the table to lay down jugs and platters. Note the fiddle player who’d begun to play, even see the annoyance of the other fiddler with his ear to his strings, still trying to tune. Finally see the one man moving away from the table toward a small door near the hall’s main one, as he turned to call something back.

Recognize him. Not because he’d ever seen him before. But because he’d watched Charles I, the father of this man—now stepping through the door, now closing it behind him—have his head chopped off before the Banqueting House not two hundred paces from where he now stood.

The Duke of York, with his father’s gait, his hair, his eyes, had just left the room—though not by the door. Pitman would have given short odds that he’d gone, in fact, into a privy closet.

With the duke safe, Pitman scanned again the others in the hall, the servants especially. If you were going to assassinate a royal, surely posing as a scullion would be the best way to achieve it.

He’d missed something. He looked back to the privy. Lamplight from above its door glimmered on some wetness on the floor before it. It was a boot print. Its toe pointed toward the door.

As he burst into the hall, Pitman was quite sure that the boot
print would be red with the clay of the path outside, and that it had been left by a man too hurried to wipe his feet.

For a long moment, save for the fiddler still plying his horsehair, he was the only one moving. Indeed the first shout did not come until Pitman was halfway across the hall.

“Stop there!” a guard screamed.

But he couldn’t, and the one thing that slowed him was his need to use his injured arm to jerk open the privy door.

“What this?” snarled the duke, his hands at his hips, pushing down his breeches.

Candlelight reflected on rising steel just behind the duke’s head. “Aside!” Pitman shouted as he threw his cudgel.

It missed the royal scalp by one of its hairs, striking the man behind, not on his head but on the hand that grasped a cleaver. Howling, he dropped it, raised a knife. Pitman, seizing the duke by his shoulder, hurled him from the privy. There he impeded, for just a moment, the guards for whom he was now screaming.

Pitman lunged, grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted the knife down. The movement brought them close, their faces near touching. In that moment the cloud that had held him was swept away and he recognized the man who’d hit him in All Hallows.

Then all was a jumble of limbs, and yells, and blows, as the guards fell on Pitman and dragged him from the closet. The wrenching pulled away Pitman’s hand; he saw the blade raised once more. “Protect the duke!” he cried, reaching again to block the strike down with his forearm. Then a blow struck hard across his head. He fell. Yet even as he did, and just before all went as dark as Limbo, he glimpsed the killer leap the struggling mass of bodies and run from the hall.

—

Coke was glad that Pitman had not come along the river path. The wounded bird would not have been able to handle the gates and walls Coke had been obliged to scramble over. He was less glad that he had, for he was filthy now, his hands scraped and bleeding. He had found the river and been forced east along it. Now he’d come to what he assumed were the palace water stairs, with several skiffs and one larger, finer wherry tied up at them. It had all taken too much time. But at least he’d found a passage heading back to the hall. Shouts had come faintly over the walls as Coke approached its entrance, and the music of fiddles had suddenly ceased.

“Now, then,” he said, and had taken a step along the path, when a noise behind him had him wheeling, knife in hand. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

“M-me, Cap’n,” said Dickon, rising from the water like a wraith. Or so it seemed to Coke at first, till he drew closer and saw the boy was standing in a skiff.

“Jesu mercy, boy, but you frighted me. How come you there?” Dickon put one foot on the dock. His master’s sword was in his hand, still sheathed. “You told me to find an entrance from the r-riverbank, so I did.”

“Good. Stay here. I go in search of Pitman.”

“I go too.”

“I need you here. This boat is our escape, you see?” The boy looked at him suspiciously, so Coke added, “It is like when we are about our business. I hold the gun—you keep the horses, yes?”

“Awright, Cap’n,” he said. He loosed the rope. “I keep the horses.”

“Good lad.” Coke turned, then remembered and turned back. “Dickon, if I do not return by the next bell—” He broke off, as Dickon started. Both had heard the same noise: someone was approaching fast toward them along the walled passage from the
palace. “Be still,” the captain hissed, and placed himself on guard, dagger out before him.

The man who burst out of the passage’s entrance didn’t look like a lord. He had no wig but a stubble of greying hair; no fine clothes but a stained butcher’s apron. Garnthorpe’s accomplice, then; the second man Mrs. Chalker had talked of.

“Hold there!” Coke cried. “Stand and deliver yourself to me.”

The man stopped, blinked. Then with a roar ran at Coke.

The captain wished he had his sword, still in Dickon’s hand in the boat. But he had his dagger, and God forgive him, he’d killed with it before. He saw a dagger also in the other’s hand, his left, and in an overhand grip. So as the man came, his blade striking down, Coke stepped hard in, throwing up his own left arm, catching the blow forearm to forearm before it could descend, twisting his fingers to clamp around the wrist, pulling the body down, then punching with his dagger at the man’s exposed side.

But his attacker had followed the pull, so the blade, instead of driving full into him, slipped along his leather apron. Continuing his half fall, the man used his weight to jerk himself free.

Coke kicked, missing the groin, the toe of his boot driving instead into the thigh. The man howled, slashed his knife before him, near enough to force Coke to leap back. Immediately the captain lunged again. His opponent brought his dagger hard across to parry the thrust, steel ringing.

Now, thought Coke, withdrawing his feint, dropping lower, thrusting for the gap between the front of the apron and its back. The blade entered his opponent’s side … but only a half finger deep, for the captain’s rear foot had slipped on the dock’s rainslick wood, shortening his lunge. Still, the man cried out, and staggered toward the water.

Lights glimmered along the path, voices there calling the hunt. “No!” the man roared, and ran down the jetty to where Dickon in the skiff now raised, too late, the sword he’d partly unsheathed. Coke, following fast, was not there in time to prevent the man snatching the weapon, stepping behind the boy into the boat, pressing the half-drawn blade to his throat.

“No closer,” he called, “or he dies.”

Dickon dropped the rope. They started drifting into the current. The skiff was yet a short leap away that Coke could have made and almost did—but for the line of blood that now appeared at his ward’s throat. Then the moment was gone, the boat too far, and the man hurled both sword and Dickon into the water. Coke threw his knife; it missed, though not by much. But skiff and man were gone, taken by the swift current, blended into darkness.

Dickon clung to another boat. Untying it, Coke pushed it out as he leaped in, and managed to haul up the boy without capsizing them. Grabbing the oars, he pulled hard, just as the royal guards ran shouting from the passage.

The dizziness had increased from the time he landed at Essex House Stairs to his dropping off at Billingsgate. A fast tide had taken him and for most of the way he only had to steer, which was as well, with one hand broken. But he’d been clearer in his mind when he was alone so it was only after he’d persuaded the wherryman—with a gold guinea, twenty times the usual fare—to shoot the race under London Bridge by moonlight and he had leaned back into the prow of the vessel that his mind clouded, and he’d dozed. The wherryman had woken him when they ground against the fish market’s dock. He limped along Thames Street, up Idle Lane, into St. Dunstan’s Churchyard. He could see the house. Yet here, so
close to his desire, he lurched off the path. He needed to gather himself before he saw her, before his dreams were realized.

Amid the muddle of gravestones, there was one by the path he would come to sometimes, to think, to remember, to be inspired. He found it now, sank before it. Flowers lay strewn upon it, recent but past their prime. Though the moon was bright, he still had to blink several times before he could read the inscription. He knew it by heart, of course. He said it now, for it always renewed him:

He touched the stone. Moss had grown in the letters. Damn Maggs, he thought. Did I not order him to clean this?

Garnthorpe rose as the church bells tolled. Renewed. Changed. He saw the house ahead. Within it, his bride awaited him.

Sarah sat in the chair of the bedchamber, gazing at the swaddled bundle in her arms. He had slept well, John Edward Rombaud Absolute, as his mother had named him just before she died. For the boy’s father and grandfather, Lucy had whispered, and for another ancestor too. Now he stirred, his dark eyes blinking; perhaps the bells of St. Dunstan’s tolling midnight had awoken him. Soon he would soon be hungry. Then what would she do?

She tried a lullaby: “ ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly, lavender’s green …’ ”

Her song stilled the earl’s son for a while but did not hold him long past its ending. When he cried, she rose and set him upon the
bed. He protested, but she only left him long enough to lower her blouse and take him to her breast.