Alms for Oblivion (21 page)

Yes, said fear.

Don’t be absurd, said common sense.

What do you know? said fear. Believe me, that was no accident.

I’ll think about it, said common sense.

At last I emerged into Paul’s Yard. The place was full of noise and hubbub, even though no one could see more than a dozen yards in front of their noses. Whatever the season, whatever the
weather, it was always like this, a crackling witch’s cauldron of indiscriminate ingredients, all bubbling and jostling against each other. Nicholson’s was on the far side with the rest
of the booksellers and I bent my steps in that direction. The noise was loudest over here and I soon realized why.

What I’d at first taken for a patch of dense low fog was actually smoke, shot through with little leaping flames. The continuous crackling and snapping which, from a distance, sounded like
the buzz and flurry of human traffic was the noise the flames were making as they ate up timber and lath and plaster. The scurrying figures, the random shouting, the urgent commands, these were not
the ordinary activity of Paul’s Yard but the frantic efforts of shopkeepers and passers-by to control the fire. I felt that little illicit thrill which a fire in a public place always
gives.

The gust from the flames brought a warmth to the winter air. Perhaps this was the reason why so many other citizens were clustering round, ready to help but more ready to watch, their enjoyment
of the scene dependent on whether they had a stake or not in what was being destroyed by the fire. Someone had put himself in charge, possibly a headborough, and a chain of individuals was passing
slopping buckets to the point where the fire seemed most active. A couple of water bearers had been pressed into service and the empty buckets were being filled from the bearers’ wooden
churns. I guessed that in turn they were filling the churns direct from the Little Conduit nearby. Flakes of paper floated down through the air like black snow. One large fragment landed near my
feet. It was not badly burnt and, without bending down, I could make out the words ‘Being the true history of’ but no more than that. It was a title page.

The fire had taken hold in the booksellers’ quarter of the Yard. Some of the stalls usually positioned in front of the shops had been shoved to one side so that the chain of men and women
relaying the water-buckets could get at the flames more easily. Books and pamphlets were strewn across the cobbles. I recognized two or three of the men in the chain as booksellers. I
couldn’t see Master Nicholson. Perhaps he was at the head of the line since it was his shop that was being ravaged by fire. Why didn’t this surprise me, that it was his shop? It seemed
all of a piece with this increasingly fraught day. The stalls were close-packed but they could be shifted. The shops, of which Nicholson’s was one of the largest, weren’t movable of
course, and the risk of the blaze spreading sideways from one to another was considerable. Fortunately there was no wind. The stone wall (part of the Paul’s precinct) which backed the
bookshops would hinder the flames from going up in that direction while the open ground which lay to the front offered little in the way of opportunity for the flames.

There was nothing to do but watch. The heat from the blaze had driven off the fog in the immediate vicinty. Well, I’d come to see Master Nicholson or rather to get another glimpse of
Milford’s play
The World’s Diseas’d
and here I was watching his stock go up to smoky oblivion. I owed him money. I could feel part of the debt weighing down my purse.
I’d thought that Nicholson might be more receptive to selling or loaning me a copy of
The World
, if I came to pay for a few of the poetry books I’d bought. And now I remembered
an occasion when I’d been drawn down a street in Pimlico by a delicious scent of roasting, only to find that it was emanating from a pie-stall on fire. By contrast, burning books give off a
somewhat unappetizing, acrid smell. The water-buckets slopped from hand to hand, the human figures holding those buckets swayed from side to side as if they were engaged in a queer kind of dance,
the flames jumped up and down (but a little less eagerly now). A mixture of steam and smudgy smoke rose from those places where the fire had been quenched.

All at once a cry went up from those closest to the blaze. There was a hurried retreat. I couldn’t see straightaway why they’d stopped battling with the fire, but then a section of
the brick side-wall of the shop seemed to quiver in the warm air before it lost its balance altogether and toppled down with a subdued sigh. Anybody next to it would have been crushed or injured by
flying fragments. But the collapse had a useful effect. The seat of the fire lay underneath the wall. Now it was stifled as the flames disappeared beneath a pile of bricks and dust and mortar and
plaster. I wasn’t surprised that the wall had fallen so rapidly. Probably the timber supports had been chewed away by the fire. These bookshops were more permanent than the book-stalls but
they were not like churches or mansions, not edifices built to last.

When the dust had settled, it became apparent that the fire had largely been extinguished, apart from a handful of scattered outposts which were even now being doused with water or soaking rags.
It did not seem as though much of Master Nicholson’s stock could have survived.

The crowd, realizing that no death or injury was in prospect, gave a kind of communal shrug preparatory to drifting off. Still, we counted ourselves lucky. One fire in a day, even one without
serious harm, is enough to keep us all going.

“How did this happen?” I asked the man nearest to me. He didn’t know and nor did three or four other male bystanders, although the question was passed down the line like the
bucket of water going from hand to hand. Eventually I came across a gaggle of women. Since they are always better informed than men, I was confident of getting the story from them.

“How did this happen?” I repeated. I was told by one that the fire was no accident. In an authoritative tone she informed me that the conflagration had been started deliberately,
that a ‘naughty person’ had walked up to the bookshop entrance with a bucket of smoking coals and tossed them into the interior where, given the combustibleness of the shop’s
contents, the flames had quickly seized control. A second woman supported this account, adding the detail that the ‘naughty person’ had been a lady, as could be seen by her dress. But
this version was straightaway contradicted by a third woman who said, with even more certainty than the first two, that the bookseller himself had been responsible for the destruction of his
premises and his stock. He’d accidentally overturned a chimney, one of those portable fires used for heating open areas like shops. The three women began to quarrel over which of their
versions was correct, and so I left them to it.

My aim in coming to Paul’s Yard was frustrated. I wouldn’t get a glimpse of
The World’s Diseas’d
now. I saw no sign of Benjamin Nicholson either. I would have
commiserated with the bookseller if I had seen him. I regretted not settling a portion of my small debt with him beforehand. Of no use to offer it at this moment; it would be a drop to fill an
empty bucket.

Instead I made my way towards Paul’s and inside to the Walk, the middle aisle of the cathedral. I was searching for some peace and quiet to think in. Paul’s Walk itself was no good
for this purpose. It must be one of the noisiest and most irreligious places in town, with its peacocking gallants and sneaking thieves. But a great palace has many corners and so has a great
church. I knew that I’d be undisturbed by Duke Humphrey’s tomb since this is the spot where, for some reason, the truly hopeless congregate. To dine with Duke Humphrey is to go without
one’s supper. I found myself a bench to sit on close to the tomb. And I thought.

It may have been the accident with the runaway cart which put the idea in my head that the fire at Master Nicholson’s was an accident of a similar stamp. They were ‘accidents’.
If the first two women were right, then a ‘naughty person’ had deliberately fired the shop just as – if my darker imaginings were correct – an equally naughty individual had
pushed a cart downhill into my path. Hardly the same person since, although it was physically possible for one man to have created both ‘accidents’, the fire-raiser couldn’t have
known that I was about to arrive on the northern shore of the river. Couldn’t have arranged for me to be run down by a cart while he was simultaneously firing a bookshop. There was also that
strange detail, insisted on by one of the women, that the individual who’d thrown a bucket of fire into the bookseller was a lady ‘as could be seen by her dress’.

As I’d expected, this corner of Paul’s by Humphrey’s tomb was quiet. A few vagrants paced silently up and down or sat slumped in angles. The truly desperate are mute. In this
place of shadowy silence I constructed a plot which explained everything which had happened so far.

You can probably see where I’m going.

I started by travelling over some old ground.

Take Lord and Lady Venner now. Robert and Virginia. Robbie and Vinnie. The Bumpkins (even though this mocking title no longer amused me). Suppose that, opening up the pages of
The
World’s Diseas’d
, they had discovered that ‘their’ poet and playwright, Richard Milford, was holding them up to ridicule or worse by insinuating that they were not
simply brother and sister, but lover and lover. Their reaction would have been outrage and horror. I’d already considered that they might have disposed of Richard Milford. But what if their
ambition reached beyond one victim?

They knew that I’d read the play. Thought perhaps that I was keeping a copy of it – the ‘foul papers’ – in my lodgings. They knew that I knew their dirty,
incestuous secrets. A different picture began to emerge. A shadowy picture in which a desperate man, or man and woman, set out to retrieve a damaging playscript, which would, if its contents became
known, drive them out of the city in humiliation. Or, since incest is a crime, expose them to the more extreme rigours of the law. My supposition of the previous night returned. That Peter Agate
had been stabbed in mistake for me. Seeking to recover the playscript, Robert Venner had blundered into my friend instead. In the subsequent confusion he had run him through, either because he took
Agate for Revill or in order to silence a potential witness.

I recalled the wary way in which Venner had looked at me after the
Troilus and Cressida
performance in Middle Temple. That piggy gaze. I was not dead but still there to be got rid of. So,
once he had disposed of Richard Milford, he’d decided to finish the job by disposing of Nicholas Revill, only in a more subtle and spontaneous fashion. Not run through with a knife but run
over by the iron wheels of a cart. While his sister, the lady, resorted to her own form of action by heaving a bucket of burning coals into the bookseller’s where that dangerous play, that
slanderous play,
The World’s Diseas’d
, was being prepared for publication. What was the destruction of a shop and a load of books after all, when they’d already killed one
man in error and another one quite deliberately?

My hands clenched tight. Now I held the Venners to account as villains-in-chief. They had killed two friends of mine, they had made one or more attempts on my life, they had fired a
bookshop.

I must have disliked them very much to have thought so ill of them. I did dislike them very much. I wanted them to be guilty.

This was my plot then, the one conceived in the shelter of Duke Humphrey’s tomb. It was that Lord and Lady Bumpkin had done all of these terrible things in order to protect their good
names.

I might not have been altogether convinced by my own story but it would do to be going on with.

I quit Duke Humphrey’s tomb, leaving it to its shadows and vagrants. But it may be that the gloomy air of that corner of Paul’s infected me because I felt very low in spirits as I
made my way through the Walk and out into the open air. Not even the sight of the gallants in the aisle, either flashing their new satins or covering up the holes in their old ones as they vied for
each other’s attention, gave me as much amusement as it usually did. The fire in the bookshop was thoroughly extinguished and a handful of people were picking through the charred remains. If
my notions were correct then that conflagration could be laid at the door of Vinnie Venner, even as her brother had launched a loaded cart at me. It is a lowering experience to believe that someone
is in pursuit of your life. Doubly so, when guilt is added to this, because I held myself responsible in some way for Peter Agate’s death. I was still impelled by the desire to expose his
killer or killers, and not only to save myself from a capital charge.

But every man must have rest from his conscience, relief from his woes.

And so my thoughts now turned towards Nell, the fair lady of Holland’s Leaguer. I remembered that I had earlier determined to see her once more, perhaps for the last time. To see a
friendly face. At this moment, as my other friends were being brutally snatched away from me, Nell stood out in my mind as my original London associate. However much our paths had diverged since,
we had started out at the same point in this city as ignorant, unfledged country creatures.

From Paul’s Yard I decided to make a last pilgrimage to Holland’s Leaguer. If Nell was occupied then so be it. I’d wait until she was finished, or finished with. You may judge
how eager, even desperate, I was to glimpse a friendly face when I say that I checked my purse to see whether I had sufficient to pay her. Four half-crowns was more than enough for the more
exorbitant charges of Holland’s Leaguer. I had all this money in my purse because I’d been intending to settle part of my debt with Nicholson. Now it might go to a whore instead.
I’d never paid (her) before, and had vowed I never would. But if that was the price of seeing her again – and even though it represented a fortnight’s pay to me – so be it.
I could of course present it to her as a gift rather than as a fee. That way, both our faces would be saved and our other parts satisfied.