The Ashes of London (14 page)

‘Could the man have wandered there without knowing its reputation?’ I said.

‘Unlikely, unless he was a stranger.’

‘Any wound?’

‘Not that I saw.’

‘A drunk taking a shortcut home? Perhaps he slipped, hit his head and fell in the Fleet.’

‘I suppose it’s possible he was after a Bridewell Bird,’ Thurloe said, picking at the question as if it were a scab, despite his reluctance to indulge in conjecture. ‘That could have brought him there.’ A note of disapproval entered his voice, a hint of the Puritan. ‘He didn’t look that sort of a man, but you can never tell. Lust is universal. The Devil makes sure of that.’

My mind filled with an image of Olivia Alderley. A married woman I hardly knew, and so far above me in station that she might as well have been living on the moon. I told myself not to be a fool and pinched my thigh as hard as I could to distract my wandering thoughts.

‘But I don’t think he was alone, sir.’ Thurloe gave me a sardonic smile. ‘Because his thumbs were tied together.’

Bridewell Dock came into sight. It was here that the Fleet flowed into the Thames. The battlemented walls of Bridewell reared up in front of us, set a little back from the sloping bank of the river on the left side of the lane running down to the dock.

Once a royal palace, it now housed vagrants, foundlings and women of the streets, known collectively as Bridewell Birds. Their sexual favours came cheap. The Fire had coated the pink brick of the buildings with a patchwork of grey and sooty black; most of the roofs had fallen in. Some of the former inhabitants still clung to the shell of the place, for they had nowhere else to go.

We disembarked and walked up the lane. The guards followed us at a distance with the bier. Immediately opposite Bridewell, at its northern end, was the bridge over the Fleet. On the other side was the postern through the wall of the City. The fire had destroyed the gate itself but the postern’s stone archway remained, framing the lane beyond. The two soldiers whom Thurloe had left to guard the body were leaning against a wall. They straightened when they saw us. One of them pushed a small earthenware bottle into his pocket.

The soldiers were standing in the angle where a house met the wall of a yard. Behind them, on the ground in the corner, was a long bundle covered with a patched sail. A dozen bystanders watched from a distance, drawn by the combination of red coats and a dead body.

‘Uncover him,’ Thurloe ordered. ‘And shield us from those vultures.’

The soldiers peeled away the sail and held it up as a makeshift curtain. It swayed in the breeze. I stared at the body. The man was lying on his side, facing us, with his arms wrenched behind him. He was short and skinny, with unexpectedly fleshy lips around a large mouth, much like a frog’s. He wore his own hair, which was thin and grey. His chin was thick with stubble. There was bruising on the temple.

I pushed aside the flap of his grey coat with the toe of my shoe. The breeches were held up with a broad belt.

‘Papist!’ one of the bystanders yelled. ‘Damned French Papist.’

At a sign from Thurloe, the bier was placed on the ground beside the body. The guardsmen lifted the dead man by his shoulders and knees. The bound arms made it difficult for them. The soldier at the head lost his grip. The corpse’s head smacked on the wet cobbles.

The soldier carrying the legs gave a yell and jumped back. The lower half of the body tumbled off the bier. The canvas curtain fell to the ground. The corpse’s mouth gaped in a pink and foolish grin.

Thurloe swore. ‘Free his arms,’ he said. ‘Get him on the bier.’

‘He’s not dead!’ someone shouted from the little crowd, which was growing larger. ‘Hang him!’

A soldier cut the strip of leather that tied the thumbs. He and the comrade dragged the body onto the bier as if it had been a sack of carrots.

‘Kill him!’ cried another. ‘Kill them all.’

Thurloe glanced over his shoulder. His men were already turning towards the crowd and drawing into a knot to protect the corner where the body lay. Their hands rested on the hilts of their heavy swords.

For the first time I felt a frisson of fear running up my spine. The crowd had swollen to almost twenty people, most of them young men. The larger the crowd, the more stupid it became.

Thurloe turned his head and spat at them.

I looked down at the body. Its head had been thrown to one side when it was tossed on the bier. The face was on its side, looking away from me.

‘Are they right?’ I said. ‘Is he a Papist?’

‘No sign of it if he is. Anyway, those scum don’t think, damn them. They don’t think anything at all.’

The sparse hair of the dead man had rearranged itself so the back of the neck was visible. There was a line of blood on the skin.

‘A moment, sir.’

I knelt by the body and probed the back of the skull with my fingers.

‘Best not to linger,’ Thurloe said. ‘Come on.’

‘He wasn’t drowned. Look.’

There was a wound in the back of the neck, just below the skull. The man had been stabbed, the blade driving up into the skull. If there had been much blood, the water had washed it away.

‘Your eyes are sharp, sir,’ Thurloe said. ‘Now let us be off.’

Whoever did this thing, I thought, he knew what he was doing, and his method was the same as that of Layne’s killer. So were the bound thumbs. I noticed something else – a row of pins, four of them, stuck in the collar of the coat so that only their heads were visible.

Thurloe looked at the crowd and lost patience with me. ‘You can stay if you want, sir. At your peril. You two. Take the bier in front. The rest of you behind – down to the dock.’

Nobody said anything as we crossed the footbridge, marched down to the dock and loaded the bier onto the barge. The bystanders kept their distance. Once we were over the bridge, they dropped away, one by one.

Thurloe and I took the stern seat under the awning.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said. ‘But there comes a point with a crowd like that when a man must fight or go.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. There was no point in quarrelling with him. The oarsmen pulled out into the river. ‘I wish we knew who he was,’ I went on. ‘Someone must know.’

‘There’s a good chance you do, isn’t there?’

The barge rocked slightly as the bier was manoeuvred aboard.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s in my report,’ Thurloe said, as if I were to blame for not having had a sight of it beforehand. ‘There was a name in the Bible. The ink had run but you could still read it: Jeremiah Sneyd.’

Sneyd. The name was very faintly familiar to me, and I knew the memory of it was lodged somewhere in my childhood.

‘Were the bound thumbs in the report as well?’ I asked, suddenly wary.

‘Of course they were.’

‘Who did you report to?’

‘My captain. Then I was brought before a man called Master Williamson.’

I
T WAS DARK
before I returned to Chelsea, to our lodgings with the Ralstons. Now the nights were growing longer, I found it harder to ignore the inconveniences of living so far from London. The roads were dangerous. The watermen were reluctant to venture this far upstream after nightfall. Those who would, charged accordingly.

Much of the day had been taken up with conveying the body to Whitehall and arranging to have it lodged in the cellar of Scotland Yard. If Williamson had been there when the barge had reached Whitehall, the job could have been done in half the time.

In Chelsea, I found my father dozing by the fire in the kitchen.

Mistress Ralston jerked her head at him. ‘He’s not been himself today.’

I shrugged. My father hadn’t been himself for five years or more.

‘Look at him, twitching like that. He mutters to himself like a cage full of monkeys.’

‘He’s old, mistress. We shall be the same one day, no doubt. If we’re spared that long.’

‘He was crying earlier. Master Ralston said it put him off his meat.’

‘I’m sorry for it,’ I said.

‘And he was going on and on about walking to Whitehall with you. But saying it was winter. The Thames was frozen over.’

Oh no, I thought. Not this.

‘Someone was crying fit to burst, he said, and you started crying too.’

Yes, I thought, I remember it all too well. I was a child again, holding my father’s hand and on our way to Whitehall. The sky had been as mottled and grey as a piece of ageing meat on a butcher’s stall. There had been little noise apart from the keening of the gulls, the shuffling of feet, the jingle of harness and a low rumble of deep voices like distant thunder.

‘And all the time, he was weeping fit to burst,’ Mistress Ralston went on. ‘It’s not a comfortable thing to have in a respectable house.’

It hadn’t been comfortable at the time, I wanted to say, so why should it be comfortable now? In Whitehall, there had been soldiers, both cavalry and foot. The nearer we had come to the palace itself, the denser the crush of people. But the crowd had not been merry like townsfolk on a holiday or restless and loud like apprentices on the rampage or even sombre like a congregation around a preacher.

Mistress Ralston worked herself into a passion of righteousness. ‘I tell you what, sir, my husband’s had enough. That’s what he said to me. He’s a fair man but there’s only so much that flesh and blood can bear.’ She sniffed. ‘In particular when it’s not your own flesh and blood.’

I knew that Master Ralston was no more than a convenient mouthpiece for Mistress Ralston in these matters. I said, ‘My father’s not usually so bad. I’ll help him upstairs.’

But Mistress Ralston wasn’t finished. She drew me away from the fire. ‘He was praying aloud in the middle of the garden this afternoon. Bareheaded, and no coat. It was raining.’

‘His wits wander. But there’s no harm in him.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ Mistress Ralston lowered her voice still further. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t just prayers. It sounded next best thing to treason, what he was saying. I can’t have that sort of loose talk, not in my house. It sets tongues wagging, and you know it does. I’d be sorry to lose you, but Master Ralston says the pair of you will have to go if it continues.’

She wasn’t sorry at all. She was probably looking for an excuse to get rid of us. Since the Fire, there was a shortage of accommodation even this far from London, and she would be able to charge a new tenant far more than we were paying her.

I woke my father, took him outside to relieve himself and then helped him up the steep stairs to the chamber we shared.

Movement and fresh air temporarily revived the old man. ‘Babylon,’ he murmured as he climbed, hauling himself up by the rail fixed to the side of the stairs. With each stair he reached, he produced another name. ‘Persia. Greece. Rome.’

‘Yes, Father.’ I had heard these words often before. ‘Hush. Save your breath for climbing.’

‘And then at last the Fifth Empire, thank the Lord.’ He raised his voice. ‘The mighty shall be cast down, and become as dust at the feet of the righteous. Praise the Lord.’

‘What did I tell you?’ Mistress Ralston called up from the kitchen.

I persuaded my father out of his clothes and into his nightgown. The old man knelt to say his prayers, insisting that I join him. Once in bed, he looked up at me.

‘Shall we sing a Psalm, James?’

‘No, not tonight,’ I said quickly.

My father had an unexpectedly high voice. Once it had been sweet and true, but now he could not hold a note. When he sang, he sang so fervently that his voice was audible at the far end of the orchard.

He opened his mouth.

‘Tell me, sir,’ I said. ‘Did you know a man named Sneyd?’

The question distracted him. He shook his head violently, rolling it to and fro on the pillow. ‘No, no. I know no one.’

‘Hush.’

‘Except my God. And you. I don’t know Jeremiah Sneyd, I’m quite sure of that.’ Master Marwood’s eyelids fluttered. ‘Perhaps I used to, but I can’t remember, not at present. I can’t remember anything now, my dear.’ He closed his eyes, screwing them tightly shut as a child does. ‘Except that Jesus will save me, praise be to God.’

I kissed my father’s forehead, picked up the candle and tiptoed from the chamber.

Sneyd, I thought. Jeremiah Sneyd. He knew the man’s name was Jeremiah.

I
LISTENED TO
the rain on the window and wished that someone would give me a cup of warmed wine or at least stand me by a fire. After months of near-drought, the rain had fallen almost unceasingly for the last week. I had walked from Chelsea to Whitehall and my clothes were damp. My left shoe had sprung a leak. My stockings were streaked with mud and ash.

‘You were late again,’ Williamson said.

‘Your pardon, sir. I came by the road, and the way was difficult because of the rain.’

‘Then come by river. Or move closer to Whitehall.’ Master Williamson paused to gather his thoughts. ‘What is it, Marwood?’ he said in a quieter voice. ‘You look more like death than a head on a spike.’

‘My father was restless last night, sir, and I had no sleep.’

‘You know that’s nothing to me. He’s lucky to be alive and in his own bed. How is he?’

‘His own wits wander a little further every day, and every day they take longer to return. He’s harmless enough but our landlady doesn’t like it.’

‘Then find other lodgings.’

‘It won’t be easy. Especially now, because of the Fire. Would you, sir, be so kind as to …?’

‘If I have time, and if I think you deserve it, I may consider the matter.’ Williamson pushed back his chair and gathered together the papers on his desk. ‘Now – I can spare you only a moment – my Lord Arlington is waiting, so we must be brief. This man from the Fleet.’

‘Sneyd, sir,’ I said softly. ‘Jeremiah Sneyd.’

‘Perhaps. If the Bible was his. There’s a Sneyd who used to live with his wife near Cursitor Street. He was once recorded as a Fifth Monarchist. It’s not a common name. Go and see if it was him that turned up in the river. Don’t say you’ve come from here, of course – say your father was asking after them.’