Goldsmith's Row (3 page)

A freezing wind was blowing from the direction of the North Sea and there was not a soul in sight. Joel supposed the inhabitants were all huddling inside their hovels to keep warm, for there was no one working in the common field—perhaps January was not the season for husbandry or any of their nasty occupations? Joel was a true Londoner, he hated the country and despised countrymen.

The first house he approached, they set the dog on him, and he had to fly for his life. He was hurrying away when he met a man plodding along with a sack wrapped round his head and shoulders like a kind of hood, whom he had now identified as the village idiot. (No one except the village idiot would have been out in such weather.)

Foolishly, Joel had asked this individual whether he knew Cicely Fox. The idiot had answered him with beaming smiles and sent him along a very dirty lane to the house which stood right at the end of it.

And here he was, faced with the dumb indifference of a deserted ruin.

Unless it was the wrong cottage after all? That fellow under the sack must be clean out of his wits. Reviving a little, Joel turned and rode back along the lane. Presently he came to a small homestead with a duck pond and a few apple trees, and here there was a blessed sign of life: a woman fetching a bucket of water from the well.

Joel hailed her. "Can you tell me, mistress—the empty cottage down the lane, was there once a family called Fox living there?"

"Foxes ha' been gone many a long day." She was a fat, comfortable body and at least she was not hostile.

"Are they still living in these parts?"

She shook her head and muttered something about Dan going for to make his fortune.

She had pushed open the door by now, and a thin crabbed voice came from inside the house. "Nan! Nan! Who are you gossiping with out there? Bring the fellow in here, you silly wench."

"It's my father," explained Nan. "Best you come in. He's uncommon fratchety."

Joel was thankful for a chance to get out of the wind. He dismounted, hitched his horse's reins over the pump-handle, and stepped into the warm, cramped kitchen in which the smell of rabbit stew made him feel almost faint with hunger. The cooked rabbit and onions also helped to obliterate the other prevailing smells of tallow grease and old man.

The old man in question was crouched on a stool by the hearth, a desiccated gnome with a still fiery eye. He immediately wanted to know what Joel was after, accosting honest women and taking them from their work.

"He wants to find Dan Fox, Father."

"Not Dan," put in Joel. "A woman called Cicely Fox, whom I suppose to be his sister."

"And what's your purpose with that light-skirt? Not that it needs any guessing," added the gnome with a leer.

"Father, do mind your tongue."

Joel said with dignity, "It's a matter of business. She was once a maidservant in the household of a wealthy Cheap-side merchant, and her evidence is needed in a matter of some concern."

The gnome gave a malignant cackle. "Reckon it was from that same merchant's house she came home with a lusty bastard for her wages. Came back as bold as brass, she did, the impudent strumpet."

"Now, Father—you know that all happened a dozen years ago and more. And Cicely always denied the child was hers.

She said the mother was her poor young mistress who died of grief because her sweetheart deserted her."

"More fool you, for believing such a tale."

Joel heard these exchanges with a certain relief. All through this uncomfortable odyssey he had been haunted by the thought that perhaps he ought to have gone first to Enfield, because it was quite possible that Frances Tabor's daughter had not survived her infancy. Now he knew that he was hunting the right line, at least Cicely had brought her as far as Cobchurch.

"What's become of these Foxes now?" he demanded.

Daniel had gone to work for his father-in-law, they told him, somewhere on the other side of the county. He had never been able to support his family on that sour land of his, let alone provide for Cicely and her brat. Not that Cicely had battened on him for long, she'd up and married Abel Perry that was tapster at the King's Head in Milstock.

"I came through Milstock this morning. Are the Perrys still there?"

"Not they. You wouldn't get that red-headed doxy to stay down here in the country. She nagged at Abel till he got work at a tavern in Southwark. Fox by name and vixen by nature, she was."

Joel's heart sank. Southwark was full of taverns. He asked, without much hope, whether they remembered where the Perrys had gone.

To his surprise, the old man did remember. He disliked the red-headed Cicely, it was ten years since she had left the district and nothing had been heard of her since, yet his mind was so starved of variety that he could still recall that Abel Perry had gone to an inn called the Rose of York. Joel paid him suitably for this information, and was given a helping of Nan's rabbit-stew, which revived him for his journey back to town. He devoured every morsel, cleaning the gravy off his trencher with hunks of dark bread, while the old cottager recited the sins and temptations of We in the suburbs of a great city. He seemed to know a surprising number of them.

By the time Joel reached Southwark, it was too late to continue his search; he wasted no time looking for the Rose of York, but installed himself at a more celebrated tavern, ordered a good supper, and then sallied out to commit a few of those sins so lovingly specified by the Cobchurch gnome.

Next morning he woke with a foreboding of failure. It was true that he had escaped from the horrors of the countryside, but his chances of finding the Tabor grandchild were much diminished. In their native towns and villages even humble people like the Foxes and Perrys were known to everyone; once they came to a place like Southwark, they were just ants on a teeming anthill, and unless the tapster had stayed ten years at the same inn, it might be very difficult to trace him.

Southwark was a busy, sprawling borough, continually full of strangers and with three quite separate communities. The first and most notorious, established on Bankside and facing towards London across the Thames, were the providers of pleasure, safely settled outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor: the people from the theatres and the Paris Garden, the whores and gamesters, orange girls and bear-wards. Then there were those who catered for the constant stream of travelers between London and the Channel Ports: innkeepers, horse-keepers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and all their fraternity. Finally, the largest group, the very poor artisans who did not belong to any of the Livery Companies and worked for a pittance outside the City bounds. A great many of them were foreigners; skinners, silk-weavers, glovers and particularly stone-masons.

Joel soon found that the Rose of York was a simple tavern in a back-street, whose patrons were chiefly shopkeepers and craftsmen.

There were no customers about so early in the morning, and he was able to question the landlord and his wife without interruption. Their name was Hodges and they were young people with their way to make; as soon as he saw them he knew they could not have been there long, and he was prepared for their answer; they had never heard of Abel Perry.

"Can you tell me who had the Rose of York before you?"

"An old couple of the name of Williams, been here for ever they had, until in the end the old fellow's aches and agues made his life such a burden that they gave up the Rose five years ago come Michaelmas, and went to live with a married daughter. Somewhere in the North Country, wasn't it, Meg?"

"Hundreds of miles away, that I do remember."

Joel groaned inwardly. Why did all these people keep moving about? Why couldn't they stay in one place?

"It's a fact," said the landlord, thoughtfully polishing a pewter jug, "that old Williams did employ a tapster after he began to fail, even though the takings here at the Rose don't warrant a servant's wages. But Perry? No, I never heard of a Perry, and I know most of the fellows in our trade. What did you want with him, sir?"

"It's a matter of inheritance."

They looked at him with respect, and Mrs. Hodges said suddenly, "It couldn't have been the poor souls that died, Jem? They that left the little orphan?"

"There was a child," said Joel, eagerly. "Go on, mistress, tell me more. Who were these people? What did they die of?"

"I had the story from some of the neighbors when we first came, sir. How old Jack Williams engaged a new tapster he met at a fair, a countryman who wanted to try his luck in Southwark. They didn't know much else about him or where he came from. He brought his wife and child with him and Williams gave them a lodging up in the attic. Well, it was a hot summer and the plague season in full spate, and these poor country folk not being so sturdy as we are, man and wife both took the disease and died the same night. And there was the child left with not a soul in the world to care for it."

"Do you know if it was a boy or a girl?"

Mrs. Hodges clearly did not know; she was repeating her dramatic story at third or fourth hand.

"It was a boy, I think. No, wait—it was a little girl, and crying pitifully, poor mite, but too young to tell where she had come from, or whether she had any kinfolk that would claim her. So what do you think Mrs. Williams did with her? Carried her round to the Charity Hospital and left her on the doorstep,
and how any woman could be so wicked and heartless is more than I can tell."

"You are too hard on her, love," said Hodges. "She couldn't keep the child herself, she and her good man being old and sick, with enough troubles of their own. And as for leaving it on the doorstep, there's no doubt why she did that. If she'd gone to the Hospital openly and given them the whole history, the child might have been turned away because she wasn't born in Southwark."

"Never mind the rights and wrongs," said Joel. "You are telling me this tapster's infant was put into an asylum for orphan children."

"Yes, but whether the tapster was the man you want…"

"I'll have to look at the registers. Ten years ago—either seventy-eight or seventy-nine. What parish are you in?"

"St. Olave's," said Hodges. "That's a good notion of yours, sir. If it was the Perrys, you'll find their name among the burials."

And sure enough, as he pored over the parish register an hour later in the vestry of St. Olave's Church, and read through the long and melancholy list of deaths for the summer of 1579, he came across the entry he was looking for. "27th July. Abel Perry. Cicely Perry. Strangers."

Joel felt a prickle of triumphant anticipation because he seemed to be nearing the end of his search.

Hodges had told him how to get to Webster's Charity Hospital, a foundation which had been endowed some thirty years ago by a pious old bachelor so that homeless children could be "brought up in strict obedience, humble diligence, and the fear of the Lord," according to a carved inscription over the door. The hospital consisted of three or four low brick houses built round their own courtyard. Joel was just about to knock on the main door when it opened, and a man came out. He was a severe, thin-lipped personage, plainly dressed in black and decidedly intimidating, though he addressed Joel pleasantly enough.

"What can I do for you, friend? I'm the Master of the Hospital."

Joel explained his errand.

"Frances Perry? I don't recall the name. But she must be past fifteen years by now, and no doubt she's been sent out to work as a serving maid or in some other lawful occupation. So I may never have seen her myself, for I've been here only a twelve-month."

(Like all the rest of them, thought Joel irritably. Jaunting about, never staying in one place.)

"However," continued the Master, "Mrs. Bullace will be able to help you. She's served the Lord in this place for more than twenty years, and has complete care of the girls. If this child has ever been through our hands, Mrs. Bullace will know where she is now."

These were cheering words. The Master then handed Joel over to a small orphan called Giles, who was commanded to take him straight to the Dame.

As he was led through various rooms of the Hospital, Joel stared  around him  with  some  curiosity.   Though  the whole place was solid and excessively clean, it was entirely without comfort. The stone floors were bare of rushes, and there were no fires. The girls who were sewing seams in one of the rooms were swaddled in scarves to keep warm; then-hands were chapped and red. Joel's arrival was greeted with a chorus of high-pitched whispers, like the faint squeaking of mice. Then they all relapsed into a guilty silence. There were a few children skipping in the yard; even they were inordinately quiet. He supposed they must be in the female part of the Hospital, but just before the Dame's room they passed through one where there were some very small children, boys as well as girls, some in cradles, and one or two crawling about the floor. Sitting among them and rocking a tiny boy on her lap, was one of the most beautiful creatures Joel had ever seen.

She was about fifteen, her body rounded under
a
hideous drab smock; her hair was scraped back and hidden by a cap, but a few fronds had strayed over her forehead, and they were the color of white gold. She had an exquisitely heart-shaped face, and the drenching blue of her eyes was so brilliant that he was spellbound by her glance.

Then she flushed furiously, and turned away.

Joel was not a man who felt much drawn by virginal innocence, but he was strangely affected by this vision. He had heard a good deal about the fairy-tale beauty of the runaway Frances Tabor; surely this must be her daughter, the girl he had come to find.

He was taken in to meet Mrs. Bullace.

The Dame was a heavy, red-faced, elderly
woman
who looked more good-natured than the man Joel had encountered at the door. There was a hobby-horse and
a
Bartholomew lamb in one corner of the room, perhaps to be lent out as a special treat, and in front of a frugal fire a little girl with a cold was stroking a tabby kitten.

"You must go now, Deborah," said Mrs. Bullace, "for you see I have a visitor. Tell Grace that I said you might keep warm in the kitchen. And you may take Thomas Kitten with you."