Plague (10 page)

Is this my chance to make my peace with God? To ask his forgiveness for my trespasses to come? He fingered his razor. “Thy will be done,” he murmured.

Brothers were hushing one another as a Saint stepped into the pulpit. John looked at the man—who seemed for a moment to be looking right back at him. He had cropped hair the colour of autumn straw, and thin eyebrows visible only where they were slashed through with white. His nose had been violently broken at some stage, a scar across the bridge. Even at that distance, his eyes appeared pale. I know you, thought John, slipping into the shadows by a pillar. But where from? When he looked up again, the man had raised his arms and his gaze was above the congregation.

“ ‘Our Father,’ ” the man began, “ ‘who art in heaven …’ ”

The words were universal and John spoke his lines with passion, joined in the amens as loud as any. As the chorus of them faded, the man in the pulpit spoke on. “Brothers,” he intoned, “today, this fifteenth day of the fifth month, I will recount to you a dream I had last night.”

“Say it, Brother!” implored one Saint. “Testify!” called others.

“I will.”

The man’s voice lowered but still carried. An actor’s delivery, John decided.

“I was alone in a great field of corn, without the walls of a magnificent city filled with many tall towers and great gates. I desired to see more clearly this shining place. So I climbed a tree that stood nearby, a mighty English oak, in full leaf, and through its canopy did I peer over the walls. There I beheld …” He paused, gazing over the upturned faces. “Streets filled with sinners. Heard voices raised in lamentation. But even as I watched, the gates were opened. First a huge pack of dogs came baying, and on their tails, sinners flooding out. Those sinners were a great multitude and all—all, each and every one!—did fall down beneath the tree in which I sat. Yet even as their bodies touched the ground …” Another pause, held longer. “They did vanish.”

A sigh ran through the congregation, like a shiver of wind stirring that cornfield. The man next to him, staring up, whispered, “Is that Revelation?” John nodded. What else would the passage be? His former comrade, Blenkinsop, had told him a lot about these so-called “Saints” in which he was numbered. Their obsession with the Bible, especially that book of Revelation. Their rejection of “pagan” names for days and months. Their lack of prayers, saving only the Lord’s. They awaited the imminent return of King Jesus. He would bring the Fifth Monarchy, the End of Days—which they would hasten, John reminded himself. Though they believed that this end was inevitable, they did not merely sit and pray for it. Since the king’s restoration five years earlier, scarce a year had passed undisrupted by riot or even attempted revolt, these Saints ever in the vanguard.

The man in the pulpit spoke again. “Do you wish to hear, Brothers, the verses I found after my dream, opening my Bible at random, that no man could have predicted?”

“Read them!” the faithful shouted.

“I do not need to read them, burned as they are into my soul. Revelation. Chapter twenty-two. Verses fourteen and fifteen.”

Nearby a church’s bell tolled the hour. The man paused, all listened to this mark of time’s passing. Then hard on the bell’s eighth and final toll came another sound: a bugle. The congregation began to mutter and a moment later the man who’d admitted John to the chapel cried out, “ ’Tis Magistrate Chalmers! The militia’s at his back. Come to arrest us!”

“Betrayal!” someone yelled. “There’s a traitor among us!”

“Let’s fight!” shouted another.

“Aye! Fight ’em!”

There were more shouts in favour than in dissent. From beneath coats, pistols appeared and men began to prime.

“No!”

The voice was from the pulpit. It rose above the shouts, and once more John thought, He’s either commanded a playhouse, sergeanted a regiment—or both, as I have done.

“Do not fight, Brothers! Not now, when we have been betrayed and are in choler. We were called today to hear that the hour to rise is at hand, when the seventh seal, as prophesied, will be opened.”

The horn sounded again, a drum joining it. The man at the pulpit raised his voice still louder: “It is soon—but it is not today. Too many of our brethren are in their foul dungeons—we need all to be free and ready. Oh, most ready in arms. For is it not also said, ‘A man may as well go into the harvest without his sickle, as to this work without his sword.’ ”

He looked down—and John felt again that the man’s gaze sought him out alone. “As for the Judas among us, know this: You will be discovered. You will be punished, even in the manner described
in Holy Testament.” Trumpet and drum sounded ever nearer. He raised his hands. “Go by separate ways, each to his home. Keep your powder dry and await the summons of King Jesus to the harvest!”

With this, the man leaped from the pulpit and ran to the back of the chapel. Other doors were opened, at the side as well as the front—through which was heard again and louder the strike of drum. John was about to run out this nearest exit—he had no wish to be mistaken by the local magistrate as a Monarchist man—when he glimpsed Garnthorpe rushing out a side doorway. Pushing back against the throng, he gained that same door and followed. Maybe he would get his chance for a word after all.

The congregation did not linger. By the drums, the militia was approaching from the north-east, so the Saints scattered in pairs, foursomes, all heading south and west, avoiding the direct road, taking to the fields. Ahead, alone, Garnthorpe crossed to Hollow Way, there joining the main highway down to the City. John, keeping his quarry ever in his sight as the bugles faded behind him, fell in with three hat makers, who shared some wine and bread with him. His lordship’s pace did not slacken, neither for refreshment nor rest, bearing ever westward.

John parted from the hat makers near Clerkenwell. Yet Garnthorpe, instead of continuing south to Fleet Street and then on to the Strand—roads where householders observed the ordinances to keep a light before their door after dusk—cut west. And in a short time, John heard a sound he knew well. He smiled, for he had grown up within the clamour of the bell of St. Giles in the Fields.

He quickened his pace. Why did you choose this byway to your home? This is my world, not yours, my lord. As far from the splendour of St. James’s as you can get, even if less than a mile
apart. John did not come here often anymore. Why would he? He and Sarah had taken rooms—two of them, with their own privy, no less—in a house shared with only three other families, nearer Lincoln’s Inn and the theatre. But the smell took him straight back to his childhood, a compound of stench found nowhere else in London—perhaps nowhere on earth. Like the waters Sarah concocted to freshen their rooms, it had a base note of something, other notes above it. Her base could be essence of orange, or ambergris, or lavender.

In St. Giles the base note was shit.

That sweet-sick smell was everywhere—for the people dwelt in houses built for one family, housing ten, twenty, with maybe one privy office between them. Maybe not, and if not—well, there were marshes on the outskirts where one did not tread without boots or iron pattens to raise up your shoes. Through these marshes conduits ran, though “ran” was not a term he’d use for creeks so thick with filth. The parishioners of St. Giles added other notes, their clothes and bodies rarely washed. Animals were kept in pens or wandered loose—dogs, chickens, pigs, sheep. Rats and cats. Fires burned everywhere, burned everything. Offal boiled in pots.

St. Giles in the Fields, John thought, breathing deep. It was good to recall the scent now and again; it made Sarah’s orange water all the sweeter.

These inhabitants did not spend money on lights before their dwellings. The little that lit the alleys seeped through skins stretched over windows, or from open doors—and most doors were open, to let out the stench. Every seventh house appeared to be an alehouse, varying from a single room with nothing but a trestle and a cask within to larger taverns crammed with men and women. Before each, children begged for the coins that their parents would
turn into liquor. Hands thrust at John, which he ignored; others grasped his coat, and were cast off. Behind the singsong of their plaints came other music: fiddles, and flageolets. Clogs stomped on wooden floors. People sang, out of tune and in.

He had done it himself, he and Sarah—played and sung in these taverns for small change. Unlike most, they had used the skills they’d acquired here to fight their way from these streets to others that did not stink so.

He had closed the gap with Garnthorpe to twenty paces, always keeping some bodies between them. It was too crowded to pull the man aside, but John knew he’d get his chance—especially as, for the first time, his prey was showing signs of distress, pausing at corners, looking about, shaking his head, taking longer to swipe off the scabbed hands of beggars. It was just as John’s grandfather, who had come from the country and been a great poacher in his youth, had told him: “The trick with a deer,” he’d said, “is not to run at ’im, for ’e will always run faster away. What you do, see, is sight one, leave ’im know ’e’s sighted, then follow ’im, walking, walking, all day. ’E’ll take you far, but by the end ’e’ll be so dogged by terror ’e’ll lie down and offer his throat to your blade.”

John looked forward to laying his own blade to Garnthorpe’s throat. He would not kill him. But perhaps a scar for him to see in his mirror when his servant shaved him? Or a sharp tap from his cudgel, leaving a bruise to match the one his lordship had left on Sarah’s wrist? Warnings to remember.

Garnthorpe stumbled as he flung off some clinging urchins. Then, just past doors John remembered well, for they opened onto the Maidenhead Lane cockpit, the man lurched right and disappeared around the corner. His quarry had entered some especially noxious, ill-lit alleys—the perfect place to lay this deer low.

“John Chalker! Begod!”

The voice came sudden and loud from his right. He started, gripped his cudgel but then eased when he saw who had spoken.

“Clancy.”

A big man detached himself from the doorpost that was holding him up. John could smell the whisky on him, and the light spill showed a nose as splayed and bulbous as a red cauliflower. “It’s been years, John lad. Look at you in your fancy garb. What brings ye back to paradise?”

“Business, Clancy. You’ll excuse me.”

A hand caught his sleeve. “Come, Johnnie. Let’s nip along to the Cradle and Coffin. The Maiden’s divils should stick together, eh? Yer buyin’.”

He and Clancy had run in the same filcher’s gang for a few years. He was everything John had left behind. Pulling a shilling from his pocket, John said, “You start,” and placed the coin in Clancy’s palm. “I’ll take care of me business and return to join you.”

He stepped away, Clancy’s rough voice following him. “A shillin’? After all this time? You cheap whore stabber. See you return or yer name will be—”

John turned the corner. Clancy’s voice faded and sudden darkness took his eyesight. He halted. Soon he saw just another shit-strewn alley, from the gloom of which came the sound of some object being kicked, a stumble, a low curse. He moved faster on.

The way twisted, circled back, into a deeper darkness. Then there was an archway to his right. He heard a noise beyond it, ducked through and was in a courtyard, open to the sky, a well at its centre, lit by fleeting moonlight. And no one there.

He pulled out his blade and cudgel, then stood unmoving in the shadows near the archway. It was quiet. Had he taken a wrong turn?
Had Garnthorpe given him the slip? Should he go back? Then, as he was turning, he heard a sound. And even though it was not the person he was pursuing, he could not help but listen.

It was a child. A girl. She was singing, her voice thin and high:

He’d sung this song in his childhood, not three alleys from here. He could not tell where in the yard it came from. The gloom did not help him, pierced only sometimes by the beams from that waxing moon, which revealed a broken wheel here, a cracked jug there, the entrance to a stairwell, the cloud-wrack swallowing everything again the next moment.

“Hallo?” His own voice echoed, but no reply came; only, after several of his heartbeats, a childish giggle.

He took a step, but the moonbeam he was following vanished, and he barked his shin on some wooden thing. He cursed; the giggle came again, not where she’d been, behind him now:

She dragged the last words out, not singing them, whispering them. And at their conclusion she grunted in a way that did not sound like a girl at all.

“You,” he called. “I’ve a groat for you here, sweets. For you and your pretty song.”

Silence. Beyond the quiet courtyard, he could hear the roar of St. Giles, and especially the roars from within the Maidenhead Lane cockpit, with which perhaps this yard shared a wall. He had begun his cock-fighting career there. Perhaps he should go there now, to light, to people.

Then he heard the footfall. It came from the doorway straight ahead, suddenly gilded by silver as the clouds parted again. He heard a man muttering. There was fear in the voice and, hearing it, John’s own vanished. I have stormed breaches, he thought. I have stood in a field while Cromwell’s guns plucked the man from my left and the man from my right, vanished them as if snatched up by the hand of God. I have been so drenched in blood it looked like I was playing Fallen Satan in the
Mysteries
. What am I afraid of? An effete lord? In my streets?

“Sir,” he called, “are you there?”

The only reply was the sound of footsteps on a stair. He followed, through the doorway, into a dark that deepened with the next flight down, total and thick about him. He halted on a landing—then had a thought and straightaway … 
acted
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