Plague Child (6 page)

‘Damn you!’ he panted, gasping for breath. ‘Would you –’

I thought his grip would break my wrist. He pressed his other hand on the floor to push himself up. Another moment and I would have fallen. I brought my boot down on the hand he was using as a lever at the same time as I saw Anne returning down the stairs into the kitchen, as if she had just awoken. A look of horror crossed her face as her father yelled in pain and released me. I tried to say something to her, but her father made another enraged grab at me and I ran for the door, pulling at the latch and was into Half Moon Court before he reached the door shouting after me.

‘Stop, you little fool – you’re in great danger! Come back! I must speak to you!’

I was about to run into Cloth Fair. I stopped and turned. I nearly went back. I wish I had. I hesitated, not because of what he shouted at me, for I took his warning to be yet more claptrap about the danger to my soul, and since hell could not be worse than that dark, rat-infested cellar I decided there and then I would take care of my own soul in future.

No, it was the look of horror on Anne’s face when I stamped on her father’s hand that cut me to the heart and made me hesitate. Mr Black walked towards me. The anger had left his face. On it was that troubled expression I had seen when, only a few hours ago, he had praised me.

I continued to hesitate as he approached. If I returned, what would I say to Anne? Explain? Explain what? Apologise? Why should I apologise? I had taken so many beatings and I was taking no more. Even so, I stood there, until he was nearly on me, for he was my master, and I respected him and thought him a good man. Unlike George, there was never malice in his beatings, which were done only to bend me to what he thought was right.

So I stood there, hypnotised by the dark eyes set among the powerful lines of his face. He was almost close enough to touch me when I saw, above the crooked jetty of the house, the first chinks of light in the night sky.

And in a rush it brought back that dark cellar, that terrified longing to see the first fissures of light in the plaster with such force I wrenched my gaze away from him and turned and ran.

He shouted something else, but I could no longer hear him. I ran down Cloth Fair and into Smithfield, where the first cattle were being driven into market. I threw away my apprentice’s blue hat, which would have marked me, and it was immediately lost among the trampling hooves. There were two herdsmen. I picked up a stick and became a third, as I had sometimes done as a small boy in Poplar.

And that stick with which I prodded the cattle’s swaying rumps, and the light edging into the night sky over the great open space of the market, as I had so often seen it over the docks with half-open eyes as Matthew and I stumbled down to the yard, filled me with an overwhelming, aching desire to go home.

Chapter 5

I wish with all my heart I had got back sooner to Poplar, but I dared not go the direct way through Aldgate for fear it would be watched.

I was not only breaking my bond; the very clothes on my back and the boots on my feet belonged to Mr Black. The first time I had run away, a month after I had been there, I had been swiftly caught and it had been dinned into me that I was stealing the clothes I wore, for which I could be thrown into Newgate.

Instead of going east, which I am sure they expected, I struck out for the river, with the vague hope of persuading a waterman to take me. At Blackfriars Stairs they laughed or shook their heads. But further downstream a waterman was repairing his boat, which was badly holed. I helped him, boiling pitch as I used to and caulking the boat. I slept in his hut where the fog crept in like an old friend, for I was used to it at home, rising from the marsh and making the opposite river bank disappear.

He paid me in bread, dried ling and eel, and a seaman’s cap and torn jacket with which he had plugged one of the holes in his boat. The cap and tattered jacket helped conceal my uniform until I eventually made my way to Poplar High Street. The fog blurred the houses into soft, indistinct shapes, and deadened footsteps so, as with increasing excitement I neared our old house, I almost walked into a woman, mumbling an apology as I skirted past her.

‘Tom!’

She was so swathed in clothes, with a scarf round her face, it was her voice I identified as that of our neighbour. ‘Mother Banks –’

I went to embrace her but her tone of voice stopped me. ‘I prayed you would come!’

‘Why? Is my mother not well?’

‘Don’t you know? Dear Lord help us!’

She looked down the street. Following her gaze I saw, among the blurred line of houses, one that stuck out like a broken tooth. I ran. The door hung open. The houses next to it appeared to have suffered little damage.

The roof of our house was still intact, but the windows were gaping holes, the wood round them blackened. I pushed at the partly open door, and an acrid, damp smell filled my nose. Timber from a half-burned beam crumbled under my feet as I went into Susannah’s room where she lived and slept. I heard Mother Banks behind me.

‘I’m sorry, Tom. She died in the fire.’

I turned and she held me close to her.

‘What happened?

She told me that, in the middle of the night, she had been awaken ed by shouting and had smelt smoke. By the time Mother Banks got there, neighbours had managed to get water to it, for the streets were so ramshackle there had been several fires and they had butts of water in the alley. People thought it was a candle Susannah had left burning when she went to sleep. The fire must have been going for some time before the neighbours awoke, for Susannah was overcome by the smoke.

I found the iron kettle she always had on the fire, and a twisted pewter candlestick that she had been proud of, for no reason I could think of.

‘If it was not for the men staying here, it would have been much worse.’

I dropped the candlestick. ‘Men? What men?’

‘Lodgers.’

‘Sailors?’

‘Susannah said they were from the docks. They said the shipwright sent them.’

‘What were they like?’

‘I never saw them, what with the smoke and everything. They were there just for that night. They dragged Susannah out. They went as soon as the fire was put out.’

‘When was this?’

‘Wednesday.’

The day after I ran from Half Moon Court. I scrambled up what remained of the stairs. The landing where I used to sleep was secure, the room Susannah rented out scorched but relatively undamaged. And the roof, which normally caught quickly in these fires, spreading them rapidly, was scarcely touched.

I returned downstairs.

‘It looks as though it started down here. You were lucky.’

‘Yes. I thanked the Lord.’ Mother Banks clasped her hands. ‘Near the church, two whole streets went up recently. We were lucky the men acted so quickly.’

I walked round the room where Susannah had slept, and where most of the damage was. King James had said he found London ‘built of sticks’ and wanted to leave it ‘built of bricks’, but had stopped at the eastern suburbs where the marsh would not support such houses. The builders rushing up the houses for new dock workers had daubed between the timbers a mess of mortar and rags that in a fire rapidly crumbled away. The debris crunched beneath our feet as the damp fog swirled round us from the street.

I picked up the candlestick again, turning the twisted stem round and round in my fingers. I remembered once trying to sneak upstairs with it so I could read after everyone had gone to sleep. It was the only time I had ever seen her angry.

I shook my head. ‘Susannah wouldn’t have left the candle alight.’

She pressed my hand gently. ‘She must have done, Tom.’

I pulled away from her, flinging the candlestick away. ‘I don’t believe it!’

She was frightened by the sudden violence, exploding out of a mixture of anger, bewilderment and grief. So was I. I couldn’t stop shaking. Two men. The day after I had run away. Thinking the obvious thing, that I would come straight to Poplar. Finding not me, but my mother.

‘Where is she?’

‘Buried. Yesterday. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Come with me.’

I was like a child again, going from sudden violence to uncontrollable weeping. She led me to her house, murmuring that weeping would make me feel better, but I did not believe it, did not believe it would ever be so. First to lose Matthew, for I was convinced then I would never see him again, and now Susannah . . .

Mother Banks had little coal so I went back to the wreckage of our house and foraged for pieces of half-burnt timber. Outside, the clinging, yellow fog was now so thick a muffled ship’s bell rang insistently, for any ship which had not sought shelter must be travelling dead slow. She built up the fire and heated up some pottage, which first I refused to eat, but once I started swallowed greedily.

The empty plate was slipping from my fingers. I felt her gently taking it from me.

‘She would not . . . leave a . . . candle lit . . .’ I muttered stubbornly.

‘Susannah had changed. She was not as you knew her.’

‘Changed?’

‘Ssshh. Go to sleep.’

‘How changed?’ I mumbled.

‘She turned preacher.’

‘A woman preacher!’

I smiled. This was the sort of story I loved in pamphlets, the sort you knew could not be true but wanted to be true, the sort that people bought for a penny or two and repeated over fires like this until many people believed it. The sort of story to fall asleep over. But this one jerked me awake, staring at Mother Banks with amazement.

Susannah had stopped going to Mr Ingram at St Dunstan’s, going instead to an independent minister where they prayed in silence until a person was inspired to speak. Most of the women were short on words, and looked to the minister, as a man, for guidance; but it appeared that Susannah had what he said was the gift of tongues. She rose to her feet and held the room spellbound as her words rang round it.

She said the great tumult in London stirred up by Parliament was the Second Coming. Christ had been born again, not in a stable this time, but in a plague pit. She claimed to have been a witness to it, speaking in a strange muddle of Bible stories and things that she claimed had happened to her. Oxford became Bethlehem and King Charles Herod.

People began to come from the surrounding parishes to hear her, even those who thought she was mad, for a strange voice came out of her, and some actually believed her prophecies, that Christ was being plotted against all over again.

‘What did you think of what she said, Mother?’ I asked.

She hesitated. ‘At first I thought it was hunger.’

‘Hunger?’

‘She fasted. She took nothing for days but small beer. Then . . .’ She hesitated again. A log settled and threw a flickering light on her face. ‘She spoke in riddles, like the Bible. She said you be her child, and not her child.’

I laughed. ‘What does that mean?’

The flickering flame died and her face was in darkness. ‘There was one child who was his mother’s, and not his mother’s,’ she said.

I stopped laughing and stared at her. Her hands were clasped together and her face came into the light again. ‘I prayed so much for you to come! And when you came out of the fog like that . . . I thought . . . for a moment . . .’

I took her hands and shook my head, unable to speak for I was so overwhelmed by the faith and the hope in her face.

‘You are not . . . He that is to come?’

She stretched out a hand to touch my face, and I took it and kissed it and now I could not help smiling and laughing.

‘No, no, Mother Banks, I’m sorry, but thank you – I am much more often mistook for the devil! But I’m neither, I hope. I am the same old Tom, Tom Neave, hands black as ever, look – but with ink now, not pitch!’

I hugged her and she laughed with me, for we both needed some laughter on that gloomy day. She laughed with relief as much as anything else, for she had a practical bent like me; yet I felt there was a tinge of regret and I saw again the narrow line between the stories we tell one another and believing them to be true.

When I finally fell asleep that night in front of the dying fire, Susannah’s riddle spun round and round in my head. Her child and not her child. For the first time I began to ask questions I should have put to myself long before.

Had I not too easily believed stories I had told myself? That Mr Black, for instance, had apprenticed me for no other reason than that he had heard of my miraculous gift for reading?

A bitter eastern wind sprang up during the night and cleared the fog. Mother Banks took me to St Dunstan’s and showed me the unmarked plot where Susannah was buried. It was in a neglected corner where the wind cut across the marsh. It bent the trees in one direction while the church, from the settlement of the land, leaned in the other. There were no stones and the grass was rank and uncut, except for the new grave.

At least it had the open view of the marsh which I loved, where the land, patches of flood water gleaming, mingled with the tumbling grey sky. I felt tears coming again and fell on my knees and tried to pray, but kept thinking about the two men and the fire.

We marked the spot with a little cairn of stones, and I vowed to return one day and have a proper stone made.

‘Did anything happen that evening before the fire?’ I asked, as we walked back.

‘Nothing. Well . . .’ She hesitated.

‘Go on.’

‘When I went out to the privy, I heard Susannah shouting and screaming.’

‘Did you knock on her door?’

‘No.’ She swallowed nervously. ‘I was frightened. You don’t know what she was like, Tom. She would stand up at a meeting and shout that the Lord had come to her!’

‘Is that what she was shouting then?’

‘No, no, no. I can’t remember. Well, I heard her shout, “God knows I don’t know where he is!” Then there was silence. I thought she was calling out in her sleep.’

There was the skeleton of a new ship in the dry dock, but no men working on it when I went there after leaving the graveyard. I passed some pitch, frozen in a bucket, on my way to the shipwright’s office.

He exclaimed at the size of me, saying he used to look down at me and now had to look up; and would not have recognised me but for my red flare of hair and the jutting prow of my nose. He took it I had returned because of the death of Susannah and I said nothing about the breaking of my bond, but there was an edginess about his greeting, as if he suspected something. He had a bad leg, and at the sound of a footfall outside from one of the few workers in the yard, he limped quickly to the door to see who it was, as though he was afraid of some unwelcome visitor.

Most of the workers had drifted away to find other work, he told me. After the keel of the ship outside had been laid down, the money had run out. Three gentlemen had shares in the boat. When one had been imprisoned for debt, the others had refused to pay until they could replace the shareholder. Until the arguments between King and Parliament were settled, he said, all business was marooned, like the skeleton of the ship which was slowly beginning to rot.

I asked him who the sailors were who had stayed with Susannah that night.

‘Sailors?’ He shook his head. ‘Weren’t sailors. Boatman brought them from the City. They said they were friends of yours. Hoped they might find you here.’

‘Did you believe them?’

He spat and went to the window again. ‘Wouldn’t have them aboard ship,’ he said. ‘One looked like a soldier.’ He spat again. ‘Or had been. He had a long face. Wore a beaver hat. The other I wouldn’t like to argue with. Said they were helping you find your father.’

‘Matthew? What did you tell them?’

‘Same as I told the other man that came looking for him, soon after he vanished.’

‘What other man?’

For the first time he looked at me directly. ‘In trouble, are you?’

I said nothing.

He hesitated, then went on. ‘I told them and the other man that Matthew was looking for a berth on a boat to Hull, or maybe a coal boat back to Newcastle.’

‘Is that where he went?’

He looked at me searchingly, spat again, then moved some charts from a stool and told me to sit down. He took down a flask from the same shelf on which stood the bottle of London Treacle they gave me the day I burnt myself with pitch, and I remembered the strange dream of the old gentleman bending over me that day as I slept in this very room.

‘How’s your scar?’ he asked.

I showed him the discoloured, slightly puckered flesh. He looked at it almost approvingly as he shoved to one side of his desk drawings of ships that might be, or might never be, and poured a dark brown liquid from the flask.

‘You’ll have a few of those before you’re done.’

I coughed as I swallowed the fiery brown liquid and tears came to my eyes. This seemed to put him in better humour.

‘And a few of those.’

He swallowed what he said was the best Dutch brandy-wine, duty paid (a wink), poured himself another and stared out at the half-finished boat in the silent dock.