Plague (16 page)

After scratching a cross on the arch’s lintel with his dagger to make sure he could find the court again, he walked swiftly out the alley and back up Maidenhead Lane to Holborn. Better dressed people walked there. “Link boy!” he called when he saw the shimmering torchlight.

The lad came running fast on bare feet; he was younger than Dickon, as thin. “Light your way ’ome, sir?” he cried.

“Nay. But how much for a link?”

Coke did not bargain much, merely parted with near his last sixpence. The boy maintained he was giving up a portion of his stock in selling the link, though truly a willow wand with some wax-impregnated wool wadded at one end was scarce worth tuppence. Coke was allowed to choose and chose the thickest waxed. A light from the boy’s, and he was on his way back, down the same lane, threading the same alley, to stand at last before the same entrance, the rough-etched cross marking it.

The children had not returned to the courtyard. Crossing it, he halted at the head of the stairwell, where the stench had not diminished a jot. If anything …

Gagging, pulling the cloak again before his face, he descended.

There were three flights, any trace of moonlight gone after the first one, his own paltry flame enclosing him in its flickering pool. At the bottom of the second flight was a door, old and rusted, which nonetheless opened almost noiselessly to his push. Another stair led to another door. This one was heavier, thicker,
but its weight was not why the captain paused so long before it. The smell made him pause, its source a shove away. Taking a deep breath through his mouth, nosing deeper into a fold of cloak, he shoved the door open.

It gave onto the centre of all foulness.

His light glimmered upon the stone of an old cellar—and upon shackles on one wall, loose and opened. It also shone on a sconce, a rush torch in it, which, on closer examination, was scorched but not burned out. Holding his link carefully to it, Coke let the pitch catch, then blew the flame gently to life. It flared suddenly, a sun compared to the moon he carried, which he now snuffed out with licked fingers, saving the remaining wax for his return.

He didn’t see the body at first because it was tucked into the corner, blending with the shadows at the base of the wall. When he did, he knew that it was a man. What had once been a man. Naked, he was curled up like a child, knees to chest. The face was to the wall, though the rest of the body was turned into the room. Torchlight revealed what metal and flame had done to flesh. But it was the head Coke focused on. He knew, by sight and by description, that John Chalker had long, curly, black hair—rivalling, it was reputed, the finest wig that His Majesty ever laid upon his dummy at night. For a moment, Coke felt relief—for this hair was not curly, but straight, hanging lank down the back. Then, as he stooped, as he touched, he realized the hair was indeed thick and would indeed be curly, if blood had not so soaked it and laid it flat.

He had one more thing to do, for himself, for Mrs. Chalker. He turned the head from the wall.

There was not a face to be recognized, only a mass of blood, cut and scab. Yet in its nothingness, he saw the face that case shot had scoured away on Lansdown field. Even in the one eye that stared at
him—stared because the eyelid had been cut away and so could not help its gaze.

This is not John Chalker, he thought, though somewhere inside him he knew it was.

No. What Coke saw was Quentin Absolute.

So it was his friend’s ruined face that drove the captain from his knees, lurching to the reed torch to smother it in his cloak, to put out the light on this abomination; his friend who drove him out of the cellar, slamming the door behind him, slamming the next one, tripping and stumbling in the darkness because he’d forgotten to grab either link or torch to light his way.

The children had returned to the courtyard. They were moving hand in hand around the well again, but slowly, and wordlessly now. This time they did not scatter at the sight of him, as he burst from the stairs and ran past them. Perhaps the game, their quiet attention to it, was simply more important than a running, vomiting man.

Pitman rubbed his eyes. He’d dozed off. Then he rubbed the alehouse window, where his breath had fogged the glass. Its thickness did not give him more than blurry sight. Still, it was clear enough to note the figure that twitched for several moments at the goldsmith’s door before pushing it in. The tinkle of the bell above it came faint to his ears, though it was like his regiment’s trumpet calling him to battle, for he was on his feet in an instant. “Keep it,” he said, spinning his last florin to the alehouse keeper at his trestle. It was a shilling more than he owed; but he or Josiah had sat there for five days and nights nursing the execrable beer, picking at the mouldy cheese. Also, he was certain now that his pocket would soon be filled with coin again, because although Captain Cock had not come, his boy had.

The boy, Pitman thought, blessing his five wits as he crossed to the door, hefting his dagger stick, feeling for the weight of his cosh, hearing the clink of his manacles. He’d only thought of the
boy two days earlier, as he went over yet again all he knew of the captain, especially as he thought back to the conversation he’d had with Maclean, the accomplice. The Irishman had said that he and his countryman O’Toole had held guns on Lord Carnarvon’s coachman and footmen, front and rear, letting Cock handle the niceties of the actual robbery with his polite demand for all they had—gold, gems, fobs and watches—“while his idiot boy held the bridles and spat nut shells at the horses.” Pitman had been too busy questioning the highwayman as to his leader’s accent, his manner, and had forgotten to return to the bridles, and their holding, and the nut spitting. By the time he’d remembered, the man was gone, eager to use every minute of the two-day head start he’d been granted.

Pitman half-opened the door, keeping in its lee, until he saw the blind on the Jew’s door come down, heard the bolt shot, distinct despite the vendor crying, “Buy my fat chickens, alive-alive oh!” in the ashes of the burned-out building beside the tavern. Isaac ben Judah was closing for a special customer, unusual for a man of trade in the middle of a busy day. More unusual that he closed for a boy of around eleven years, full of the jerks and shuffles of one plagued by his own demons.

Pitman waited till a group was passing, stooped into it, merged into another about the chicken seller, from where he could observe. He even started bargaining. They looked like plump and healthy pullets. If the afternoon went as expected, he would receive an advance from the constable of Newgate prison when he dropped Coke off, then return and buy the plumpest. Bettina had been craving roasted bird, and the pigeons Josiah had trapped of late had been scrawny.

The transaction between boy and Jew did not take long. Blind up, door ajar, the goldsmith glancing up and down the street before the boy slipped out. He stood for a moment at the door, threw
something in the air, caught it in his mouth and then began to gambol away. As Pitman passed the door, he glanced down: some hazelnut shells lay before it. Coke’s boy, certain.

Pitman followed. His quarry walked briskly down Buttolph Lane, making for the Thames. Pray God, not the bridge, Pitman thought. Let his rendezvous with the captain not be in Southwark. He was a north-of-the-river man entirely, and considered most who lived on the other bank barbarians. Not the foreigners who clustered there, who were mostly French or Dutch fleeing their homelands’ oppressions; they were sober and religious in the main. It was the native southerner, corrupted by the liberty of Southwark, which housed more sin within it than the rest of London combined. Cockpits, the lowest taverns, bear baiting, bull fighting, and a brothel beside each one. First a man wanted booze, then blood, then—Pitman shuddered. He could deposit Coke in the Clink jail, but the jailer was a sot. Besides, Pitman preferred Newgate prison and the men he always dealt with there. He also didn’t fancy dragging the Monstrous Cock through half of London; for although he’d told Bettina that the thieves he took usually came as gentle as lambs, he knew it was not a lamb that had wrought such slaughter in Finchley but a wolf.

Pitman clutched his weapons a little more tightly and held his breath when the boy reached the corner of Thames Street. If he turned right, he’d be heading for the bridge and all the trouble that would yield.

The boy turned left, cutting sharp right down an alley, entering a maze of them, bearing east and south. Smiling, Pitman closed the gap between the boy and him to fifteen paces, for the crowd was growing ever thicker as it neared the river, its warehouses, its traffic, all its trade.

That was when Pitman caught the first good reek of fish, fresh and not so, and realized where the rendezvous would take place. A place where ships called all the time and a man seeking to flee the country could find passage out.

“Billingsgate,” he murmured. “Easy, Captain. Come easy, I pray you.”

Coke waited on the dock at Flounder Stairs, rope in one hand, holding the skiff against the pull of the tide, the skiff man in the stern of the vessel, splicing rope and softly singing some song in whatever language a black man sang. The captain would have preferred it if the man he’d hired for two hours rather than a single trip had his hands poised on oars and was not about his weaving. Still, he was big-shouldered, his forearms were braided steel, he had the cross-brand of a former slave upon his forehead and so a legacy of labour. He would get them away speedily enough. And speed, Coke thought for the umpteenth time that day, was required.

Why was he so unnerved? He’d tried to convince himself that it was still the shock of Chalker’s body from the previous night. But he had seen such grisly sights before. Was it because it had so utterly taken him back to the—
destruction
, it was the only word for it—of Quentin Absolute? He shook his head. No. Though it had ravaged his night with foul dreams, nightmares and exhaustion could not account for the heaviness about his heart. Something was going to happen this day; he simply knew it. Something to do with the man Isaac had warned him off with gunfire. The note he’d finally received from the goldsmith had been a summons, short on detail. His cousin had returned. The offer was fair. Be cautious on collection. That was why he’d sent Dickon, who, despite his failings, was also steady in the breach. Yet …

Coke placed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. I’m tired, he thought, tired from too much scanning through this frantic mob of Billingsgate market. Through crowds of porters unloading the fishing boats, silver mackerel flashing in the sunlight as hoisted nets were emptied into barrels, as baskets brimming with sardine, sprat and eel were lifted onto shoulders—or onto heads, the fishwives of the market sporting their famous flat caps to accommodate the loads. Fishermen endlessly split, salted, trayed and shoved herring into smoky ovens; tossed larger skate, salmon, pollack and codfish onto fishmongers’ slabs to auction away. The noise tired him too, the constant roar, the bargaining, the selling, the shrieks of “Clear away! Clear away!” the insults when they didn’t, the laughter when one fell attempting it.

He’d booked passage for Dickon and him on a boat at Gravesend. France first and then who knew? He did not like sea voyages, but this one he was looking forward to. To be in silence for a while. To sleep.

He took his hands from his eyes, focused, and saw him: Dickon, fifty paces away, gliding through the mob, agile as a sardine in a sea. But Coke saw too, and immediately, a different kind of fish following—large, no less fast, with no need to dart or shift, clearing the way with his bulk, undeviating as a tunny.

“To oar,” he cried, and the black man laid down his rope and slid oars into the rowlocks. Coke put one leg upon the skiff, dropped in the rope, turned and shouted, “Run!”

Despite the tumult, Dickon heard him and sped up. But so did the giant behind him, his stride doubling in length, his mouth wide to bellow, “A thief! A thief! Make way!” Some did not hear, nor clear; others froze. One porter stopped directly in the path and Dickon slid under his arms, skating, barely breaking step. His pursuer could not duck so low, nor slip around, and his velocity was
too great on a slope slick with scales and guts. He smashed into the porter and both went down.

Dickon ran into his captain’s arms. “Fish! Fish! Fish! Whish!” he cried, laughing.

In a moment Coke had him swung into the skiff. The next he followed, and shoved them off from the dock, nearly capsizing the boat as he leaped in. “Heh,” yelped the rower, struggling with his oars. Then he had them right, and a few strokes pushed them away.

Not too soon. Heavy boots thumped onto the jetty. Coke looked at the man, even larger now he was so close, anguish on his heavily bearded face as he stretched an arm out at them. But he said nothing, just wheeled and began seeking something. A skiff himself, Coke suspected, but did not see as they steered around a fishing boat coming in and the market was lost to his sight. Indeed, it was frustrating what a devious route they were forced to take, swirling around vessels swirling in, others of every shape and size also heading out, his boatman in constant argument for right of way. At last they emerged from the chaos, his man pulling strongly for the centre stream, and Coke could look back. Criss-crossing traffic still obscured everything. Then it cleared, and he saw a wherry shoot out between other boats. There were two men rowing it, and when one turned for direction, Coke saw again the bearded face of his pursuer.

He regarded the blackamoor. Gravesend was a two-hour row at the least. They would be overtaken, undoubtedly. Overtaken before they reached the Surrey shore! Cursing, he looked the other way to the bridge. He could see the turbulent water between its piers. London beyond. His streets. “There!” he shouted, pointing.

The oarsman, in the midst of swinging the stern downriver, glanced where Coke pointed, then jerked his head the opposite way. “Grave-es-end,” he said, his voice a bass rumble.