The Ashes of London (7 page)

She held up the candle, which accentuated the gloom. Her eyes adjusted slowly. This was the darkest hour before dawn. But the Fire still tainted the night sky. An uncurtained window at the end of the landing framed a sullen red glow.

With the bundle under her arm, she stepped from her room and closed the door. She wore her plainest dress. Her shoes were in the bundle, together with a leather bag containing a few small possessions, among them her box of drawing instruments.

Over her shoulders was the grey cloak she had stolen last night from the young man at St Paul’s. She felt a momentary pang of guilt. He had tried to help her, after all – had perhaps saved her life when she had panicked and run towards the cathedral in search of her father. She couldn’t remember much of what he had looked like, apart from the fact that he had been so thin you could see the skull beneath the skin. Also, he had heavy, dark eyebrows that belonged on a larger, older face.

Movement sent spikes of pain deep inside her body. She passed under an archway, turned right and hesitated at the head of the main staircase. Her candle was the only light.

These stairs led down to the balustraded landing, with rugs on the floor and sconces on the polished wood of the panelling, and with ornate plaster mouldings on the ceiling. All the magnificence was invisible.

Olivia’s chamber was down there, with the canopied bedstead. Beside it was Master Alderley’s closet, which had a bed in it, as well as a table, a large inlaid cabinet of Dutch manufacture and a number of presses. The third chamber was empty.

She listened, but all was quiet.

Cat continued down the landing to the archway to the spiral staircase. She found her way by touch, by memory, and by the variations in the darkness of shadows beyond the candlelight. She paused at every step and listened, though she desperately wanted to hurry. This, in reverse, was the route she had used last night, when Jem had brought her up to her chamber.

On the floor below, a door led to the side landing beyond. Unlike the main landing, which was within the shell of what had been the prior’s lodging in the days when the old monks had lived at Barnabas Place, this landing gave access to a different range at right angles to it. Her own chamber was in the upper floor of this building.

The landing took the form of a passage running along its outside wall, with four doors at intervals on the right-hand side. All these doors were closed. She slipped down the passage to the third door. Here she paused, and listened.

The sound of deep, rhythmic snoring reached her. She put down the bundle. She crouched until her cheek touched the ground. A current of air flowed through the gap under the door. But there was no light in the chamber beyond.

Cat stood up, wincing as another spike of pain stabbed her. The other rooms on this landing were unoccupied; they were furnished as bedchambers for the guests that so rarely came. At one time, Edward had slept in the third bedchamber in the main range, but his habit of returning in the early hours, usually drunk, had irritated Master Alderley beyond endurance; and in the end he had ordered his son to move into this wing.

She pushed her hand into her dress and took the knife from her pocket. She raised the latch.

The door opened silently – Olivia would not tolerate a squeaking hinge in any house of hers. The snoring increased in volume. Cat became unpleasantly aware of a fetid smell that reminded her of the wild beasts in the menagerie at the Tower.

Shielding the candle flame, Cat advanced into the darkness beyond. What little light there was showed her the curtains drawn about the bed. It also caught on someone standing beside it in the dark – a dwarf-like man with a great wig; and for a nightmarish instant she thought that Sir Denzil Croughton was waiting for her. The candlestick dipped in her hand, and she almost let it fall. Then reason reasserted herself: what she saw was Edward’s periwig on its stand.

The snoring continued. Cat drew back the curtain and held up the candle so its light shone into the bed.

Edward was lying on his back. For an instant she didn’t recognize him: he had taken off the silk handkerchief he wore at home when he was not wearing his wig. His naked scalp was as bald as a newly peeled potato and not unlike one in shape. He had thrown off the covers in the heat. He wore a white linen nightgown, open at the neck.

The snoring stopped without warning. In the sudden, dreadful silence, Edward was looking at her. She saw his eyes, with twin flames burning in them, one for each pupil, reflecting the candle.

Cat did not think. She jabbed the knife at the nearer eye. The tip snagged for a moment when it touched him, then it dug into the eyeball, which wobbled beneath the pressure like a boiled egg without its shell when you speared it with a knife.

His body bucked in the bed and he let out a scream as high-pitched as a girl’s. His arm swung up towards her. She reared back. The candle tilted in her hand. The flame caught the edge of the bed curtain.

The blood looked black in this light. It gleamed like liquid ebony.

The flame ran up the side of the curtain and gave birth to another flame, and then to a third.

Edward writhed on the mattress, wailing and crying, his hands covering his face.

Cat turned and ran. The candle was in her hand, by some miracle still alight, though the flame was dancing and ducking like a wild thing.

Behind her, the screams continued, the flames rose higher, and the chamber grew brighter and brighter.

‘Mistress …’

She gasped and dropped the bundle.

The whisper came from her left. She heard the laboured breathing mingling with her own. Down here in the cellar, with the stench from the cesspit oozing through the wall, it was very quiet. You could hear and see nothing of what might be going on in the rest of the house. The screams. The flames.

‘Jem.’ She was panting, and the words came singly, in fits and starts. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Waiting for you, mistress.’

He stirred beside her in the darkness. She raised the candle. His pale face was at her elbow.

‘You said you wouldn’t help me,’ she said.

‘I am not here to help.’ His breath wheezed. ‘I feared you would come. I’m here to stop you. Have you not thought? Your father may well be dead.’

She stooped for her bundle. ‘Something’s happened. It changes everything.’

‘Nothing’s changed outside. It’s as dangerous as ever.’

She said bluntly, ‘It’s more dangerous here. Edward took me by force.’

‘Took you …?’

The horror in the old man’s voice gave her a perverse pleasure. She said, ‘He was waiting in my bedchamber tonight. He raped me.’

‘But you’re still a child.’

‘Not any more, you fool,’ she snapped, forgetting in her anger to lower her voice. ‘And so I went to him as he slept and I stabbed him in the eye.’

She felt his hand on her arm. A sob rose from her throat.

‘Is he dead?’ he asked.

‘I hope so.’ She took a deep breath and said in a rush, ‘I must go – go anywhere, anywhere but here.’

‘Then I’ll help you.’

‘There’s nowhere. Nowhere safe.’

‘But there is.’

She turned and blundered against him. His arms went around her. She was trembling but she did not cry.

‘Child,’ he said. ‘Child. You must go alone. I would slow you down. Go to Three Cocks Yard, off the Strand. The house to the left of the sign of the green pestle. Ask for Mistress Martha Noxon. She’s my niece, and they have no knowledge of her here. Give her this, and she will know you. Perhaps your father will find you there.’

Jem pressed something into her hand. It was small and smooth, curved, cold and hard.

‘Put it in your pocket.’ He gave her a little push. ‘And go. Go now.’

Somewhere in the distance was a faint, ragged baying, growing in volume. Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse were giving tongue.

I
COULD NOT
afford to anger Williamson any more than I had already done. I worked late that day and made sure I was at Whitehall early on the following morning, which was Thursday, the fifth day of the Fire.

The news was good. The wind had slackened and veered north, which made it easier for those fighting the Fire. There were reports that the Duke of York had halted the westward march of the flames at the Temple. God willing, the mansions of the Strand would be spared, and so would Whitehall itself. The fires were still burning vigorously elsewhere, but their relentless advance had been largely stopped.

I was already at work when Williamson came up to the office in Scotland Yard. I knew he was on his way for I had seen him from the window in the court below, deep in conversation with the portly gentleman with the wart on his chin. I expected him to be in a good humour because of the news about the Fire, but his face was grim and preoccupied. As soon as he came in, he called me over, commanding me to bring him the list of fatalities.

He scanned it quickly. ‘Good. No new ones overnight. God has been merciful.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But talking of death, Marwood, there’s one that isn’t recorded here.’

He paused, as if to consider some weighty aspect of the matter far beyond my understanding. I was used to that, for Williamson employed such tactics to build a sense of his own importance – in his own mind, perhaps, as much as in the minds of others.

‘We have a body,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better see it now.’

We clattered down the stone stairs, setting off a crowd of echoes, with Williamson leading the way. On the ground floor, he demanded a lantern from the porter. While we waited he turned to me.

‘A patrol went up to St Paul’s at dawn,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s like an oven in there, even now. A beggar told them there was a body in Paul’s Walk. In what’s left of a chantry chapel on the north side.’

‘Where the ballad-seller used to have a stall?’ I asked.

The cathedral’s nave, Paul’s Walk, had become a cross between a market, a public resort and a place of assignation in recent years. The ballad-seller made most of his income from his secondary trade, which was pimping.

Williamson nodded. ‘Two of the guards left their powder behind and went in and pulled him out.’

‘A victim of the Fire, sir?’

‘He’s definitely not the stallholder. And he can’t have been there long. Someone would have noticed him before the Fire.’

‘But why’s he here, sir?’ Surprise stripped the appropriate respect from my voice. ‘At Whitehall?’

The question earned a scowl. The porter brought the lantern. Williamson gestured to me, indicating that I should light the way for him.

We descended by another staircase into the cellarage. I had never been here before – the palace was so vast and so rambling that I knew only a fraction of it, and none of it well. A low passage stretched the length of the range. Small gratings were set high in the left-hand wall to let in a modicum of light and air. On the right was a row of doors, all closed.

Williamson took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door at the far end. We entered a windowless chamber with a low barrel-vault of bricks. It contained no furniture apart from a heavy table in the centre of the room. The cellar smelled strongly of burning, as everywhere did now, as well as of sewage and damp.

On the table lay a large, untidy bundle draped with a sheet.

‘Uncover it,’ Williamson said.

I set down the lantern and obeyed. The man was naked. He was on his side, facing me.

‘God in heaven,’ I said.

He lay awkwardly on the table, for his arms were behind his back, which pushed his shoulders forward and twisted his body to one side. It was as if he had been frozen in the act of trying to roll off the table.

He had matted, shoulder-length hair, which was grey with ash and perhaps with age as well. There wasn’t much flesh on him. His head poked up and forward like the prow of a barge.

‘Who is he, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

Williamson took up the lantern and directed its light towards the body. The skin was powdered with ash. Seen from close to, it looked yellow beneath the dirt, like parchment. It was shrivelled and blistered. The heat would have done that. The body didn’t stink. But that didn’t necessarily mean the death was recent, I thought, because the heat would have mummified it.

The man’s chin had caught on the table, and his mouth was open, which gave him the air of surprise. His lips were pulled back, exposing the remaining teeth. A bruise on the temple had grazed the skin.

‘Was he naked when he was found?’ I asked, for it seemed to be my place to ask questions.

‘No. His clothes are there.’ Williamson nodded at a bundle on a bench that stood by the wall.

‘Perhaps he was trapped inside when the cathedral caught fire.’

Williamson shrugged. ‘Turn him over,’ he ordered in a casual voice, as if telling me to turn a page or a key.

I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that the soul of the dead man was floating about the roof of the cellar and watching us. I gripped the corpse’s shoulder with one hand and his hip with the other. The flesh was cool and yielded slightly to my touch. It felt like a slab of boiled brawn. I pulled the body towards me, gradually increasing the pressure.

The corpse lacked the rigidity of the recently dead, which made it unnervingly unpredictable. It was also much heavier than I expected. It reached its tipping point and fell with a thump on to its front.

The arms poked up.

‘You see?’ Williamson said softly.

We stood side by side, staring at the hands of the dead man in the light of the lantern. The thumbs were tied together with a length of cord, so tightly tied that they had turned black.

‘Why just the thumbs?’ I said. ‘Why not tie the wrists?’

‘I don’t know. But look there, Marwood. The back of the head.’

There was a small wound in the neck, just below the skull.

‘Stabbed from behind,’ Williamson said. ‘Up into the brain. By someone who knew what he was about.’

I held my peace. So it was murder, that much was clear. The Fire acted as a cover for many crimes, so why not murder among them? What wasn’t clear to me was why Williamson was so interested and, above all, why he had brought me here to see the body.