The Thief Taker (23 page)

And the sentence was short but unmistakable.

‘London infection will begin on August full moon.’

He checked the date against his own mental lunar calendar.

Full moon was tomorrow.

Chapter Forty-Eight

In the heat of the summer evening Thomas tossed in his bed, the sheets soaked with sweat.

The memories of his time after the war pierced his waking hours and wove into his sleep. The dreams drifted about him, of after the Civil War, when the Royalists were captured.

The Clink prison had been built for forty men. But after
Cromwell’s
victory three hundred Royalists were forced into the confines. Men who had battled the roundheads wrestled each other for a patch of stone floor a foot across.

Those too weak to fight their corner stood for twenty-four hours a day. Whilst the sun was up screams of men being tortured echoed through the gaol, and the body lice writhed and bit in the warm conditions.

After six long months a guard picked out Thomas for a special task for Cromwell. He was to torture confessions from Catholic plotters against the Republic.

Thomas no longer had the heart to refuse or even care.

The eyes of his first victim widened in terror as the implement was drawn out, and his pleading changed to mumblings. And as the first agonised scream lifted Thomas felt something he had not felt in a long time. A tug, a feeling. As though the hunger at the heart of him had finally been fed a single mouthful.

He woke up with a jolt, realising he was not in his own bed. The rough linen sheets were those of the Wapping hostelry where he had bought a room for the night.

Thomas surveyed the unfamiliar room, willing his heartbeat to slow. He had died so many times in his dreams he was sometimes unsure if he were still living.

Through the floorboards of his upstairs room the sound of the landlord’s conversation drifted up.

‘The fat-guts is screaming in his sleep,’ he announced. The
landlord’s
wife sniggered.

Thomas felt a coldness coil around his heart.

The landlord was a fellow ex soldier. They had lasted the starvation of the siege together. And Thomas sought out his old comrade in Wapping now he rented beds to travellers. During plague time it was his only hope of a bed.

The reunion had not gone as Thomas had planned. Striding confidently towards his wartime colleague he had been met with a blank stare.

He doesn’t remember me
, thought Thomas. And then as he introduced himself by name the realisation came.
He doesn’t recognise me
.

His one-time brother-in-arms peered at him, digesting the introduction, and then his face flashed as he fought to disguise the revulsion.

For a sudden, terrible moment, Thomas saw what he had become. The grotesque bulk of his swollen frame. Eyes flattened to reptilian cruelty.

He sees me from before
, Thomas realised, with a jolt.
When there was some feeling left. But he does not see it now. He looks for something in me which is gone.

An image of himself as a boy flashed before him. The straight-backed young man who had gone to battle for King and country. What had become of him? When had he slipped away?

‘Thomas?’ The man was peering intently into his eyes. ‘It has been many years.’

Thomas managed a half smile. His practised emotions were manoeuvring beneath his initial shock. They hardened into place.

The man made a lopsided expression which Thomas was well used to. The mouth which tries to belie the fear in the eyes. He felt relief. This was a situation he was well used to. It had been foolish to try and dredge up some sentimental memory.

‘What brings you back to the town?’ asked the man.

‘Trade I have here,’ said Thomas. ‘One last collection I must bring back to London. You rent these rooms alone?’ he added.

‘I took a wife. Towards the end of the war.’ The man stood a little to the side of the entrance to his lodging as if protecting the unseen woman inside.

Thomas thought carefully. He had only vague memories of their last days in Wapping. The gunshots which echoed through the streets as their commanders were shot without trial and the groans of the prisoners loaded up for torture.

‘Does your wife still live?’ the man asked, his face struggling to decide whether his wife would be more fortunate dead or alive.

‘She lives,’ said Thomas.

The man frowned as if tugging at some distant memory. ‘You married a Catholic heiress did you not?’

Thomas nodded. ‘It was a marriage of convenience for us both, for her dowry would have been forfeit had she not married. But she has been a dutiful wife.’

‘Would I had been so wise,’ said the man, shaking his head. ‘For there were enough dowried Catholic girls during those times to have made us all rich men.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Though my Nancy keeps me happy enough,’ he added, ‘and she is a hard worker.’

‘The dowry was all given up to the war,’ said Thomas, ‘the marriage gained me nothing but an unhappy wife.’

The man nodded sympathetically, having heard similar tales many times before.

‘And do you bring your wife with you?’

‘She . . . is elsewhere in town.’

‘You would not lodge with your wife?’

‘She has particular needs,’ said Thomas. He saw a flash of her sad face as he’d brought her to the dank empty cell in Wapping prison.

The man gave his first easy laugh.

‘Who would have thought it Thomas? You famed for battle and your wife makes you soft-hearted.’

The man shook his head. ‘The young Charles has betrayed us again,’ he said sadly, ‘after all that was promised to us by his father.’ His eyes flicked up suddenly. ‘Did you gain anything back of your old lands when the second King Charles returned?’

Thomas shook his head. ‘None. Though I petitioned for them. The new King Charles scattered a few lands to the highest born and left the rest of us to rot.’

‘Like father like son,’ observed the man.

Thomas nodded, feeling the familiar pang. It was a sensation that he was well used to. No matter how much he ate he could not chase away the pain of the betrayal.
Hunger. Hungry. Starved. Famished
. He found different ways to say it, but they all felt the same.

Thomas suddenly remembered seeing a group of women prostituting themselves as he entered the better part of Wapping.

There had been a tiny girl who was hardly bigger than a ten year old with the lined face of a much older woman. The green dress she wore blazed oddly against the muted colours of the town’s female populace, and she had matched it with an enormous green bonnet which towered above her head in an assortment of ragged ruffles.

The girl had smiled as he passed and raised her skirts. As he walked by she simultaneously lowered her smile and garments
without
a change in emotion.

Something about the image had burned itself on his brain. And it reared up now, demanding to be satisfied.

‘I have business in the village,’ he said shortly, to his new host. Who only nodded in apparent relief at the announced departure.

And so Thomas set out in the direction of the girl in the green bonnet.

Chapter Forty-Nine

As Charlie and Maria trudged the last few miles to Wapping the dirt track was eerily empty. Not even vigilantes, it seemed, dared risk their lives near the plague town.

Charlie had picked up a strange noise in the distance and stopped for a moment, listening.

‘What is it?’ asked Maria.

‘Do you hear that?’ he asked. ‘It has been getting louder this last twenty minutes.

‘Perhaps someone is sawing wood,’ said Maria, stopping to
listen
. ‘That is what it sounds like.’

Charlie let the sound roll around his thoughts. It did remind him of wood-sawing. But he couldn’t imagine this to be an occupation on the plague-road to Wapping.

Uneasily, he signalled they should keep walking.

‘You may leave me here,’ said Maria. ‘I will pay you in any case, for you have more than earned your fee.’

Charlie shook his head. ‘And what will you do then Maria? Stride unprotected into a plague town. Wapping is a port. It is dangerous even without plague. You would not last a single night.’

‘Then what are your plans if not to enter the town and find this Malvern out?’

‘I would find out more about what he is about and where he goes,’ said Charlie. ‘The priest suggested he has some business with the docks.’

‘He travels under high authority,’ said Maria. ‘Do you think this man is known to the King?’

Charlie thought for a moment. ‘The King has enough people close to him who might want to do him harm,’ he said. ‘There is much talk of his mistress Louise Keroulle and her brother – that they spy for the French. And many courtiers fought for his father and have not been rewarded.’

He let his mind range over what else he knew. ‘It is possible he might be a physician,’ he added, ‘he wears their clothes after all. And that status would fit with a man who could afford to buy Antoinette.’

Charlie had a sudden memory of William Lilly, stuffing the documents into his desk. There were so many men like that in the city, who had suffered at the change in regime and might want revenge. And the forged coins. That would suggest a person who did not have the means of a royal consort. He could hardly imagine how Louise Keroulle would grow short of funds.

‘But Malvern is spreading infection,’ mused Maria. ‘That is what you found in the confession.’

‘We do not know that is his plan,’ Charlie replied. ‘The crosses on the map. They do not fit well with a disease. For he does not pick the most populated places.’

‘He marks taverns and markets,’ replied Maria. ‘They have many people.’

‘But no churches and no docks,’ said Charlie. ‘If I wanted to pick an area where many people gathered I should choose St Paul’s Cathedral. Or St Katherine’s dock.’

‘Yet this Malvern deals in bodies and looks to be arming for some uprising,’ said Maria. ‘What dark business can he be doing? Surely he means to spread plague with his spells?’

Charlie shook his head. ‘Such a thing is impossible Maria. None know what it is in the air that causes the plague. Even
if a man wanted to commit such evil the thing could not
be done.’

‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the priest was adamant Malvern was a Catholic of the true faith and would never chance his soul with witchcraft. I think there is something here we do not see. Malvern is clever. Remember the roadways he took so he might not be
easily
followed? I have seen trials of people involved in witching and devil worship and the like . . . They always seem to have a foolishness about them, Maria. This Malvern seems harder, he seems more
careful
than that.’

‘Money then,’ she said, ‘he must look to make money by some illegal means.’

Charlie felt a flare of annoyance.

‘Not everything is to do with money Maria. Some people have a greater purpose in life than securing a rich husband.’

‘Such as sending thieves to the noose?’ She turned on him angrily.

‘I send those as deserve it,’ replied Charlie, ‘but those poor
people
who you would have arrested for no reason, I do not send them to such a fate.’

‘Then you are not even successful at the fool occupation you have carved out for yourself,’ she said with a sniff.

‘And what occupation awaits you?’ He said, the anger rising up. ‘You whose sister is fine enough to prostitute herself.’

Maria turned a deep shade of red. ‘Do you
dare
? You are angry because I would not kiss you in some roadside field. Because I am bred to better than a thief taker.’

‘You think too much of yourself. There are a thousand fairer women with better manners besides who I might consider before I deign to hitch myself to a harpy like you.’

‘And you are the last man in the world. The
last
man. Who I would ever
consider
. . .’ Maria took a breath to deliver the final invective and stopped.

Up ahead the reason for the strange sawing sound had become suddenly apparent.

A black mass of flies, like an unearthly thundercloud, buzzed ahead of them.

The swarming insects covered an area the size of a market square and circled up to the height of a house.

Maria’s mouth dropped open in horror. She quickly clapped both hands over it.

Charlie too, raised his hand to his mouth.

‘It is a plague pit,’ he said. ‘Someone has made a plague pit outside Wapping. But they have not finished it.’

Funeral pits were usually covered with shovels of quicklime for every corpse buried to stop the rot until the earth was put back. But this grave had been abandoned. The pit spanned the same width as the flies spiralling blackly above it, and Charlie estimated that at least a thousand bodies had been thrown to rot in the summer sun.

‘If we mean to get into Wapping we must go past it,’ he said. ‘The town gate is on the other side.’

The summer breeze carried a waft of the putrefying bodies past them. Maria made a retching sound, turning away from the road, her eyes watering.

‘You do not have to go on,’ said Charlie gently. ‘I can go into Wapping alone. I will tell you all I find.’

Behind her hand Maria shook her head.

‘I think I can see a gatehouse of sorts,’ continued Charlie. ‘It may be that it is still manned, even in these times.’

‘We will go then,’ said Maria, taking her hand away from her mouth. She choked for a moment and then steadied herself.
Charlie
felt his own stomach turn as another wave of the foul air swept towards them.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘we will soon be in Wapping.’