Plague Child (11 page)

Chapter 11

That December, that Christmas is a total blank to me. I cared about nothing: life, politics, words – everything had the taste of dry bread. I joined the All Hallows Trained Band and went with Will, Luke and Ben to Moorfields for what I thought senseless drilling practice. But I needed something senseless: ‘Trail your pike . . . Palm . . . Charge your pike!’ Or, with a musket: ‘Put in bullet and ram home! Remove scouring stick!’

The pikemaster, Big Jed, was a coal heaver, a huge man whose gentle manner belied his words. His mood fitted mine. He was a veteran of the London riots who declared the pike manual had been written by gentlemen who liked pretty pictures. He took the smiles from our faces and the jokes from our mouths with two short, chilling sentences: ‘This is a pike,’ he said. ‘It kills people.’

I thought my love for Anne would fade eventually. I prayed for this to happen, but it only seemed to grow stronger. Evenings were worst, when I saw the red kites floating above Smithfield and longed to walk down Cloth Fair, just for a sight of her.

Just before Christmas the City’s Common Council elections were held. The King’s supporters lost their majority, George’s friend Benyon losing his seat to Will’s father, John Ormonde, but even that did little to lift my spirits.

I earned my keep at the Ormondes by running messages for Mr Pym. The riots grew worse. Apprentices – now being called Roundheads, because of their close-cropped hair – responded by taunting the Royalists as ‘Caballeros’, after the despised Spanish troops, a word which became on Londoners’ tongues ‘Cavaliers’. Throwing myself into politics was one way of trying to forget Anne. I helped organise demonstrations preventing bishops from entering the House of Lords, removing the King’s majority that had becalmed the Commons’ reformist legislation. The Lords were now approving legislation, reported a gleeful Mr Ink, at an unprecedented, most unparliamentary speed.

Even a move by the King to prosecute him for treason did not seem to concern Mr Pym, for that would take time, and time was now on Mr Pym’s side. Splashed with ink, shaking his cramped fingers, Mr Ink told me there was a Bill to deprive the bishops of their seats permanently. Second reading. A Bill to remove the King’s power to raise an army without Parliament’s consent. Third reading. A Bill . . . He pressed a letter in my hand to be urgently delivered to the Countess of Carlisle and rushed back to transcribe yet more Bills. As I was crossing Bedford Square, a coach approached at such speed I was forced to dive to the pavement, falling and losing the letter in a pile of swept-up snow. By the time I had picked myself up and retrieved it the coach had jerked to a stop outside her house and the Countess was coming down the steps. I was as transfixed as when I had mistaken her for the Queen in the royal procession. She had no need for a queen’s jewels. Her eyes glittered and her cheeks glowed in the sharp air. She wore a fur cloak over an embroidered dress of green silk. Her tight ringlets of hair quivered as she berated a footman who was ordering a boy to clear scraps of snow from the steps.

‘For the Lord’s sake, Jenkins, let me pass! If I don’t hurry it’ll be more than my leg that’s broken!’ She slipped at the bottom of the steps, righted herself and turned to him. ‘Can you do it?’

‘I’ll try, ma’am.’

‘I’m not interested in trying! You must!’

He gave a little bow. As his head dipped I saw him shut his eyes briefly and clench his teeth as he kept his feelings under control. She took a letter from her cloak to give to him, and in the same moment saw me, letter in hand, gaping. So did Jenkins. He vented his pent-up feelings on me, snatching my letter and shoving me away.

‘Off!’

I slid, found my balance, and as he went back to her, gave him the apprentice’s finger and slouched away.

‘Wait!’

Thinking she could not possibly be addressing me, I trudged on, until Jenkins grabbed me by the arm.

‘You – boy! Come here.’ She beckoned me impatiently. ‘Yes – you!’

I went reluctantly, so reluctantly that Jenkins gave me a couple of shoves to propel my progress. I skated towards her, only just stopping in front of her, gazing at the ground, convinced she recognised me as the boy who, clinging on to the window ledge at the royal procession, had looked down her low-cut dress.

‘Look at me.’

It was like being asked to look at the sun. She had that kind of brightness, that kind of perfection that belonged in imagination, hinted at inadequately in battered woodcuts of goddesses, but was now before me in full glory. She was supposed to have had smallpox but I could not believe it. There was not a pit, not a blemish in the perfect white skin of her neck, in her cheeks pinked by the cold. She was supposed to be old, all of thirty, but I could not believe her to be much over twenty. She was supposed to be in love with Mr Pym, but much as I revered his words and his courage, I refused to believe such a divine woman could love old bones.

She was staring at me inquiringly. I realised in a panic she had said something to me, and I had not heard a word.

‘Has he a voice?’ she said to Jenkins, who gave me a sharp prod.

‘Yes,’ I said, finding it, but barely.

‘Can you take this letter to Mr Pym?’ As I opened my mouth she anticipated my reply, waving it away impatiently. ‘I mean now, during the debate, interrupting him?’

It was impossible for strangers to enter the House during debates, but it seemed equally impossible to say that to her.

‘Yes.’

Another savage prod from Jenkins. ‘Yes, ma’am!’ he said. ‘Don’t you know how to speak to your betters?’ He turned, unctuously apologetic to the Countess. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s the times, the rabble –’

‘Oh, do be quiet, Jenkins!’ She gave the footman the letter. ‘Give it to him,’ she said, as if it was not quite safe to move close enough to hand it to me direct.

Jenkins gave me the letter with a look of pure hate, and I added him to my lengthening list of my enemies in this world. I took the letter, but still stood there, unable to stop gazing at her.

‘Go on,’ she shouted. ‘Mr Pym’s life depends on it! Run!’

I ran. For her I would do anything. Fly like Mercury, who should be the messenger of such a goddess.

‘Stop! Wait.’

I jerked to a halt, almost falling in the snow again. She was running to the coach. She was a woman who expected everyone to keep up with her rapidly changing thoughts.

‘Come on! Don’t just stand there!’

I had no idea then that she had the reputation for doing the unbelievable, the unthinkable. I ran back, watching her as she got in the coach, her dress lifting, petticoats momentarily frothing round her galoshes.

‘Get in.’

I stood there dumbly, frozen as the snow. She lifted her eyes to heaven, as if asking God why she had to deal with nothing but imbeciles. ‘You’ll never get there in time! Jenkins –’

An appalled Jenkins sprang forward, slipped, saved himself by clutching at the open coach door, gave me another look of hatred, this one shot with disbelief, shoved me in and slammed the door. She rapped on the panel and the coach jerked away, throwing me against her. Her face flickered with disgust at the contact. I grabbed for a swaying strap like a man drowning, heaving myself into the opposite corner. I hung on to the strap as the coach rattled out of the square into Bow Street, dizzy with her scent, which clung heavily round me. In the great stink of London I had grown so used to taking short, exploratory breaths that it was a novel sensation to breath in so deeply, to abandon myself to breathing. I was amazed to find there was not one scent but many; jasmine and lavender that intoxicated the senses, only to be stimulated again by a sharp whiff of cinnamon.

There was a screech of brakes and I lost my strap, banging my head against the front of the coach and losing my hat. Carts and coaches going into the Strand were jammed in front of us as tight as mutton pies in a cook’s oven. A carter and the driver of a Hackney hell-cart were yelling at one another.

‘London is getting impossible – you’d be better running,’ she commanded.

As I fumbled for the door latch, she saw a gap open up between two carts. Snatching up a stick with a silver knob, she hammered on the partition, shouting: ‘Go through the Piazza, Alfred!’

The door flew open as the horses veered sharply left and I was thrown out, half-hanging from the coach. I hung on to the door desperately, the cobbles a speeding blur below me, before the horses jerked sharply right into the Piazza, flinging me back inside. Dazed by her scent and the blow to my head, I managed to shut the door again and dropped back in my seat. She was so intent on the driver getting through she was either unaware or unconcerned about this, but as we made good progress along the Piazza I felt her eyes on me.

‘You have red hair.’

Convinced she had recognised me as the youth hanging from the window, gazing down at her breasts, I felt blood rushing up my neck, burning my cheeks, tingling in my cursed hair.

‘Black . . . black, ma’am,’ I stammered.

‘Do not correct me,’ she said sharply. ‘It is red at the roots. You have dyed it. Extremely badly. Why?’

‘It is the fashion, ma’am,’ I tried, as the coach careered down St Martin’s Lane, pedestrians diving for the safety of the posts that lined the narrow sidewalk.

‘Fashion? Nonsense. Look at me.’

A new note had crept into the sharp command, one of curiosity, perhaps even of interest. Reluctantly I turned my head. I have no idea what she was going to say because I was so transfixed by what I saw I moved impulsively towards her, a movement that silenced her. I had last seen it in the docks in Poplar, glinting in the evening firelight when my father had told me my fortune. The jolting of the coach had parted her cloak, exposing the pendant between her breasts which in the dark of the coach seemed to carry some of the glitter of that firelight in the jewels that formed the bird’s eyes as it stared at me, grasping a pearl in its talons.

Unable to stop myself, I parted her cloak to see the jewel more clearly. With the flat of her hand she gave me a stunning blow on the ear.

I fell back in the seat, reeling from the blow. In that brief, closer look, I had seen it was not the same pendant at all, although it was very like. The bird in my father’s pendant was a falcon, with rubies for eyes. This bird was a magpie, with diamonds for eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, ‘ma’am. I – I forgot myself. My father –’

I huddled into the corner, feeling sick from nearly giving him away, and from the swaying coach, which was fighting its way past Charing Cross.

‘You were looking at the pendant. There’s only one other like it. Have you seen it?’

‘No. No.’

‘You’re
his
boy, aren’t you?’ She was leaning closer, eyes bright with curiosity, like the magpie in her pendant.

I stared up at her. I had suddenly changed from being the meaner sort of person, or not even that, merely a pair of legs that ran messages, to becoming a real person.
His
boy? Did she know who my father was? Older and wiser, I might have pretended I
did
know, in the hope of drawing the information from her. But raw as I was, my reactions so close to my skin, I responded with such ferocity she pulled back.

‘Whose? Whose boy? Tell me!’

‘Whose? Why . . . Mr Pym’s, of course!’ She smiled, but only after I caught the vexed bite of her teeth on her full lip, and something I did not expect to see in her eyes: apprehension. It was nothing as naked as Matthew’s fear when he showed me the near relation of this pendant, more a cautious, civilised version of it, but it gave me courage.

‘You didn’t mean Mr Pym’s boy. What did you mean?’

‘Don’t be impertinent!’

She picked up the stick with the silver knob. Whether she would have struck me or had me thrown out of the coach, letter or no letter, I did not discover; for outside Whitehall a guard in livery stepped out into the street, holding up a pike, bellowing for the coach to stop. Alfred jerked back the reins. Through the Palace Gate I glimpsed a large group of armed men. Some were in court dress – bright slashed doublets and wide-brimmed feathered hats – some in the sober Dutch jerkins mercenaries wore; all had swords and some wore pistols. Before I could see more, the Countess was hammering with her stick on the partition.

‘Drive on, drive on!’

The coach lurched forward, the guard jumping to one side with an outraged yell: ‘Stop! In the King’s name!’

‘Drive! Drive!’ the Countess hammered. ‘Drive, you fool!’

The confused and terrified horses reared, then leapt forward. Fleetingly I saw the guard behind us commandeering another coach, with better results. Alfred hung grimly on to the reins rather than guiding them. At any moment I thought he must be flung from his seat. In the coach it was impossible to hold on. My strap broke. We cannoned into one another, then were immediately thrown against the sides of the coach. Shouts from pedestrians, from a carter pulling out of the way were lost in the drumming of the wheels, in the creaks and groans of the coach, which seemed about to part from its harness.

Another coach approached and would not give way. Alfred pulled at the reins. Half lost them. It seemed we must collide. He cracked his whip at the oncoming horses. As they reared, he yanked his horses away from them. The Countess shut her eyes. The collision flung her against me. She clutched my arm. There was a drawn-out and horrible grating sound which made me wince and shut my eyes. The coachmen were yelling at one another but our coach was still moving. Alfred had steered it into the narrow gap between the other coach and the posts that bordered the sidewalk. They ripped into the side of our carriage, slowing it sufficiently for him to get the horses back under control.

She opened her eyes. There was a look on her face not of fear, or even anger at the damage to the coach, but exhilaration. We collapsed back in our seats, saying nothing as, a broken wheel clacking at intervals, the coach limped into Westminster. I had already snatched up the letter from the floor and was struggling to open the jammed door when she seized my hand impulsively. ‘Run, Tom, run! Get this letter to him before those men come for him!’