The Sweet Smell of Decay (5 page)

‘I call it one,’ I answered her. ‘Some knave has painted a red cross on my door!’ Looking up and down the street again, I checked. Sure enough mine was the only door painted. ‘Was it you?’

Jane looked at the door and dabbed at the paint with her finger. ‘Fie to you! What a foolish question.’ She knelt down. ‘There are words too.’

Crouching next to her I had a closer look. ‘
To the pest-house
,’ I read. Very strange. It was what they used to write on the doors of those infected during the days of the plagues. ‘You haven’t got the plague have you?’

‘No, of course I haven’t got the plague.’

‘Well it must be the wrong door, then. What about next door? Do they have the plague?’

‘There hasn’t been a plague in London for forty years, and there isn’t a plague tonight. If there were, then I would know it, even if you didn’t.’ She seized me by the lapel of my poor fine jacket and manhandled me over the threshold. My hand brushed against her breast. It was warm and soft.

‘Someone’s idea of a jest, then.’

‘All the children are in bed well before one o’clock at night and this paint is still wet. Strange foolery for a grown man to play.’ She bundled me into the kitchen and sat me down at the table upon which stood a plate of cold meats and a cup of hypocras.

My stomach now declared itself to be very hungry. I smiled blearily.

‘I have enquired of my colleagues about the town. They tell me that they allow themselves to be merry with their servants and their servants do not object. They may run their hands where their hands do please.’ I had been thinking on it a while.

‘These colleagues of yours are gentlemen, I suppose?’ Jane snorted before turning on her heel and disappearing, only to reappear a minute later with a bucket and scrubbing brush, face taut and pale.

‘Is your rhubarb up, old woman?’ I felt myself stiffening.

‘My rhubarb?’ Jane exclaimed. ‘You run your hands where you fancy, Lytle. You may place them where you please, but when you wake in the morning you will find them nailed to the bedpost.’

I thought about it for a moment. ‘That sounds like a reasonable proposition.’ She glared furiously. Time to put her in her place. ‘God created Adam. Then later he created Eve, that man might be satisfied.’

‘God created animals before he created Adam. Was that so that Adam might satisfy the animals?’ I felt her slap me hard somewhere proximate to the top of my head. My eyelids fell down over my eyes and the muscle that could have lifted them fell asleep.

My eyes gave up and I let my head fall back. ‘You are right. I will not run my hands where I please.’

‘God save us both.’ Picking up the bucket and brush, she headed back out towards the street.

I felt guilty. ‘You don’t need to do that now, do it tomorrow instead,’ I called after her as she marched out.

‘Oh aye, what wit!’ She stopped, turned, and stamped back into the kitchen. ‘Have the whole of London town saying that we have the plague in our house. Word would be all over the country by lunchtime.’

‘Oh aye. Best do it now then,’ I muttered. The door opened and that was that.

Dowling danced like a dervish, all fingers and fairy steps, eyes blinking like a big green frog. Then he started stomping his left leg on the floor like a wormy horse. Jane lingered, fascinated, until she noticed what looked like a piece of gizzard stuck to his shirt, whereupon she left us to it. Mercifully, for else I think Dowling would have eaten his arm.

‘We have a man locked up at Newgate,’ he declared. ‘They say he is the man that killed Anne Giles. A multitude of witnesses saw him running out of the church the night that she was killed with blood dripping from his hands.’

‘Praise the Lord!’ I exclaimed. The answer to all my prayers. ‘So they will hang him, I suppose?’ Would Shrewsbury be at Westminster today, or ought I visit his house to deliver the good news?

Dowling shook his head. ‘He hasn’t confessed it. The mob swears in God’s name it’s him, but we cannot take the word
of the mob.’ The mob usually meant apprentices, groups of inarticulate ne’er-do-wells that spoke with one voice and followed each other like newborn chickens. The mob would swear that the King was a horse if it meant a poke full of plums. Staring down at my feet, brown eyes unfocussed, Dowling’s mind was clearly wandering. ‘What perplexes me is that they brought him to my shop. Their usual inclination would be to beat him with sticks and hang him themselves at Cheapside.’

‘They reckon he’ll be hung anyway.’ I pulled on my stockings and put on my shoes. ‘Let’s go and get that confession.’

Newgate gaol was another place I had not anticipated becoming acquainted with. It consisted of two square straight towers, sixty feet tall, on either side of the gateway in and out of the City. Three wenches without clothes stood over the gate draped with flimsy pieces of fabric, very yardy. All I could see that day, though, was the portcullis, with its sharp pointy teeth and eleven black windows, each one covered with a tight lattice of bars. I followed Dowling up five flat steps at the base of the left-hand tower into a gloomy little room. Two scabby-looking wastrels sat in the anteroom drinking and trying to play cards. They looked up as we entered, all lolly headed and winey. Their shoes were a disgrace; battered and uncared for, leather peeling off in torn patches. One of them nodded at Dowling as we entered, our permission to pass deeper into the prison, it seemed. We left behind a thick fug of cheap wine and walked into a mist of old sweat and stinking shit.

‘This floor isn’t too bad.’ Dowling led us across large square flagstones. Not bad? The air was so thick you could feel it cling to the inside of your nostrils, greasy brown and sticky. It clogged your lungs and made your eyes water. Worse
than anything I had ever experienced, though it was true that – unlike him – I did not spend my days in a merry slaughterhouse soaking in the spirit of dismembered bodies.

I peered through a barred window into the room beyond. It was large and very dark with just one small window set at the top of the far wall. Once my eyes got used to the gloom I saw movement, lots of movement, like a sea of maggots in an open wound. The room was full of men, forty or fifty of them, lying on pallets on the floor, all lined up next to each other. A bucket stood by each pallet, used to piss in and shit in, no doubt. Every man was chained. I had seen chickens boxed up like this, but never men. Chickens pecked each other’s eyes out and started to eat each other. What would men do? It was a foul disgrace. Dowling drew up beside me.

‘They pay for fire, candles, clothes and food. They can be rid of those chains if they want, but again they must pay for the privilege. Given that most of them are in here for stealing or for not paying their debts …’

Torture of the mind. ‘Is our man in there?’

‘Our man is downstairs in the stone hold, God have mercy on his soul.’

Worse. The stone hold was notorious. Tiny underground cells with no windows where they locked men up alone in the dark. My head was so giddy with the stench of shit that I could hardly stand. I tried to breathe shallow. Dowling took a deep breath and pulled a face like he was tasting fine wine. ‘This way.’

I followed him to the end of the corridor towards a small door. He pulled it open and we peered into the darkness below. A cesspit.

He shuddered. ‘I don’t think they post a guard down there
any more, don’t think any will stand for it. We’ll need a flame.’ Taking a torch from the wall, he stepped forward tentatively. Tasting the bile in my mouth I resigned myself to follow him.

The walls were damp and covered in a thin slime. All we could hear was the sound of our own steps and the occasional moaning above. Otherwise the silence was like a dirty wet blanket, the sound of a man’s heartbeat in his own ears. The smell was no longer just a smell, but a foreign body that displaced the air with something foul and evil. It was only the knowledge that men were living down here, and the impossibility of it, that stopped me from emptying my guts and hurrying back into the daylight.

‘Marry!’ a voice shouted from behind us. ‘You can’t go down there by yourself!’ One of the drunken gaolers staggered down the corridor carrying a torch of his own. ‘You follow me!’ Pushing past us, he almost lost his balance as he missed the first step. He led us the rest of the way down the twisted narrow staircase, the ceiling so low that we had to walk with bent backs. ‘He has his own room, just like you said,’ the gaoler leered at Dowling with rotten discoloured teeth.

I watched Dowling’s jaw clench. He wasn’t smiling. ‘I didn’t mean the hold.’

‘I know you didn’t,’ laughed the gaoler with his mouth wide open. The stair took us to a small square anteroom just two foot wide by six feet long. At the end was a door and two more on either side. Floors, walls and ceiling were all made of cold, damp stone.

‘The sorrows of hell got hold upon me,’ Dowling whispered. I knew what he meant for they had got a hold of me too. It was silent.

The gaoler pointed to the cell on the left. Inside there wasn’t
enough room to move, let alone hide, but it still took me a while to make out the figure squatted on the floor of the cell, squeezed into a corner. Sitting with his heels dug into the stone floor, his body was pressed into the wall. Squinting, I tried to find form in the shadowed bundle of rags and pale skin. A red scabby head, translucent arms, white and rotten. He sat in a pool of his own piss and the smell was choking.

‘Open the door,’ I said aloud, staring up into the gaoler’s bleary white face, red-lined and greasy. I could see fat lice walking about his hair in the light of the flame. His eyes wandered, drunk.

Out stretched a hand. ‘Shilling.’

‘If you let us take him upstairs.’

‘Two shilling.’

I was about to argue, but then he belched in my face a cloud that stank of pig fat and vomit, foul beyond description. I gave him the money. Then he put a big iron key into the lock, and as the door opened I saw bright green eyes lit up by the light of the torch. The rest of his face twitched. He wriggled and squirmed away from the gaoler as far as his chains would allow. Eyes shone out brightly from above a large angular nose. The stubbly head stilled, motionless above quivering body. As he becalmed, his eyes stopped flitting and fixed on us. Watching us, wide-eyed and alert, his head craned slowly forward. Then the gaoler elbowed him in the head so hard you could hear the crack.

Dowling erupted, pushing the gaoler hard against the wall with both hands. ‘God have mercy, you drivelling rogue!’

The gaoler dropped the torch on the floor so that all I could see was the stone flags, but I could hear the sound of two men breathing heavily and the sound of a man being struck solidly in the guts. Then I heard the sound of a man losing his guts
and smelt it too. The torch rose, held now by Dowling, who stood over the lumpen figure of the gaoler kneeling on the floor, his head touching the stones.

‘Unlock that chain,’ Dowling commanded. I wondered if the gaoler would plead incapacitation. Wisely he did not. Instead he staggered to his feet, reached clumsily for his key and did as he was told. Dowling took the prisoner by the arm, then wound his thick, burly right arm around the man’s chest and sort of carried him back up the stairs and out of the hold. I followed as close as I could. The gaoler made a wheezing noise that might have been a plea for his torch but Dowling ignored him. So the butcher that could read and write had a short wick. I followed him to an empty cell, one with light and space and even a table and chair.

‘This must be where they put the King when he doesn’t pay his debts,’ I remarked. It was supposed to be a joke, but none laughed. Dowling’s face was set grim.

‘That was a foolish thing for me to do,’ he said in a whisper. ‘They will take their revenge upon him when we are gone.’

True, I supposed, but if he was to be hung, probably drawn and quartered too, then all was pretty much lost anyway. I didn’t share the thought with Dowling, who was busy propping up our man on a chair. Then he was gone, his footsteps ringing out down the corridor. Soon he was back with a bowl of thin mutton soup and a hunk of bread. The prisoner licked his lips and drew his shredded jacket about his narrow shoulders. His breathing steadied and the shaking diminished.

‘What is his name, do we know?’ I asked.

‘Richard Joyce,’ the man himself answered, his voice calm and melodious, the least likely voice you would have imagined from his appearance.

‘Well, Mr Joyce. Is it true that you killed Anne Giles?’ I asked. ‘She was my cousin, you know.’ Not that it mattered, but I hoped that he might be shamed into confessing. Murderers and thieves had a habit of denying their crimes and I didn’t want to spend all day listening to fantastic stories or tales of incredible hardship.

‘No,’ he replied before picking up the bowl with two hands and sipping quietly.

We waited, Dowling patiently, me less so, but every time I cleared my throat to speak he put a hand on my shoulder. When Joyce had finished eating, Dowling sat himself on the second chair, leaving me to perch on a small three-legged stool.

‘Tell us something about yourself, Joyce.’ Dowling leant back as if he was planning to spend all morning there. Straw moved in a dark corner of the room and there were sounds of rustling. Rats.

Joyce sat back and met Dowling’s gaze. ‘I was a soldier. I fought for the Republic. Paid for it ever since.’

‘Not
just
a Republican, though – is that not right, Joyce?’ What was the butcher talking about now?

‘No,’ Joyce replied after a lengthy pause, ‘I was a Leveller besides.’ A Leveller?

‘God has revealed the way of eternal salvation, only to the individual faith of each man, and demands that any man who wishes to be saved should work out his beliefs for himself,’ Dowling recited. These words were written by Milton, and reflected a philosophy that had been outlawed after the Restoration. Milton was still in prison somewhere.

Joyce smiled, his head leaning back against the cradle of the chair. Still he held the bread in his lap. ‘Abel’s art made the earth more fruitful than Cain, thereupon Cain would
take Abel’s labour away from him by force.’

‘Kingly government may well be called the government of highwaymen.’ Dowling leant forward speaking the words carefully. I listened hard to see if any were close that might hear – this was treasonous talk and I rather wished Dowling would show more discretion. The Levellers were a raggedy bunch of fanatics that had been led by a man called John Lilburne, another extreme lunatic, a dangerous man whose views were rejected even by Cromwell. After many years in prison, he died in poverty seven years before. Pity. He would have got on well with Prynne.

‘Aye, I was one of Lilburne’s men. And I still believe that every man should be free and that he has no need of a King.’ Joyce stuck out his chin defiantly. As if I cared what he believed. Then he grimaced and looked out the window at the cold grey sky. He shook his head and wiped at his eye. ‘I was a fine man once. Had a house and land and a fine wife.’

Now he was levelled. ‘Where is she now?’

He bowed his head. ‘She fell when carrying a child. They say her blood went bad and poisoned the baby. She was ill for a while with wandering womb and died when it got to her head. That was twenty years ago.’ We let him reflect in silence for a while. ‘A long time ago.’

‘You fought for Cromwell, sir,’ said Dowling.

‘I fought for England and for God,’ Joyce corrected him, ‘against the man of blood.’ The man of blood was a name that some had bestowed upon Charles I before they chopped his head off to prove the point.

‘I fought at Stamford, Gainsborough and Winceby. And Marston Moor. It was at Marston Moor I was wounded.’ He leant forward and pointed to the back of his head. There was a
bare patch of skin about the size of a man’s hand with no hair growing on it. The skin was ridged and red like the surface of an angry sea at dusk. ‘I should have died at Marston Moor.’ He hawked and spat into the sawdust. ‘It was summer, though ye wouldn’t know it for all the rain that fell. The rye fields were like bogs, the water filled our shoes and sat next to our skin. We stood on the left of Marston Field with Manchester’s footmen to the right of us, and the Scots on horses behind. We stood there shivering for hours, thinking of putting up camp, when the heavens opened up again, buckets of black water pouring on our heads. We were sure that all would stand down until the next day. Then late in the evening while there was still light, the Protector led us in a charge. Cavaliers met us halfway, but we went through them like blades. Then they had us from the flank but we beat them away besides, then went back and rescued Fairfax. It was a great victory for us. Near seven thousand of them were fallen, so it is said, less than three hundred of us. But numbers don’t tell all.’

‘What else, sir?’

‘My horse was shot away with a bullet, and it fell onto me. They took me off the field and carried me back home. They made two holes in my head, but it didn’t do no good.’ He sighed. ‘I was ill for a very long time, and good for nothing when I did recover.’