Plague Child (4 page)

Various members strode about dictating to scriveners. Some, like Mr Ink, had portable writing tables strapped to their waists.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

At first he made no answer. He was writing a clear copy from notes which, I knew, came from Mr Pym, threaded through with spidery scribbles of his own. His quill dipped. The ink flew.

Then, scarcely pausing in his transcription he said: ‘The Grand . . . Remonstrance!’

Even in his haste, he uttered the words with a flourish, like that of a gauntlet being flung down.

‘The Grand – what? What does it mean?’

He flung his hands to his head in frustration, tried to continue, but had lost his train of thought. He turned on me. For a moment I thought he was going to throw his dripping quill at me. Then, although he had long made it plain he thought me a miserable, unintelligent wretch, his long gloomy face relented a little.

‘It is a plea to the King,’ he said, ‘from his humble servants to leave our reformed religion alone and not listen to malignant advisers –’

‘Like his Catholic Queen Henrietta?’ I broke in.

He clapped an ink-stained hand over my mouth and looked nervously around. But I thought that for the first time he looked approvingly at me.

‘And a plea to listen to our humble opinions, not to dismiss Parliament when he chooses and to take money from his humble servants by taxing everything in sight: bricks, salt, even the humble bar of soap we wash with.’

Since he looked as if he washed in ink and I scarcely washed at all in winter, avoiding the freezing pail in the yard, I thought soap unimportant and the whole Remonstrance thing sounded a good deal too humble for the King to care a jot about.

Perhaps that showed in my face. His face flushed. For the first time he looked as if he had blood, rather than ink in his veins.

‘But the plea is really to you,’ he said.

‘To me?’ I said, amazed.

‘To the people. This will change the world.’

This? What did he mean? Not taxing soap? I thought him a magician as his writing table bounced and the words in his head, now unknotted, flew on to the paper. He spoke as he wrote, the sonorous cadences of Mr Pym entering his voice and some of his phrases, such as ‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth . . .’ , echoing in my mind.

It was as if he had cast a magic spell over me. The spell was in the words drying in my hand. They would change the world. I believed it utterly. I would change myself. As I ran out into the dark night, I determined to be a reformed character, and not stop at the Pot Upside Down for a beer and a game of pass-dice with the other apprentices. Alehouses and dice were near the top of the list of the thousand things apprentices were forbidden to do.

But I must admit my pace slackened as I reached the alehouse. Although it was so late, excitement and rumours about the debate spilled out of the doors. One tankard, I persuaded myself, would help me run all the faster.

There was a stranger near the bar, a gentleman in a beaver hat and a fashionable short cloak, questioning regulars. I heard him say ‘red’. My ears are sharp, particularly for that word. My hair, red as fire and just as unruly, is a curse to me. My master could spot me in an alehouse however dim the light and thick the smoke. People thought I had Scottish blood, or even worse, Irish, and, since the papists were in rebellion over there, twitted me for being a spy. I had the hot temper supposed to go with the hair and got into several fights over it.

I caught the man in the beaver hat staring at me. He turned quickly away, to address a man I took to be his servant, who had the thick neck and shoulders of a bulldog, and a face pitted with smallpox.

Sometimes the Guild used the Watch to catch apprentices in alehouses. I suddenly remembered that I was a reformed character and had sworn never to go into an alehouse again. I wriggled my way through the crowd and out of the alehouse, gripping the precious words Mr Ink had given me tightly in my hand. I really believed that those words, although I did not understand them (perhaps because of that), had changed me for good.

As I ran, I imagined how being a reformed character would turn me into a good apprentice. I would become a Freeman of the City, marry Anne, in spite of my feet, have my own printing and book-seller’s shop by St Paul’s Churchyard and, after a few years, become Lord Mayor of London.

So I flew down the sweet street of dreams, so deep in them I was scarcely aware of the stench (ten times worse than that of the ordinary streets) of Smithfield Market. The stink hit my nostrils at the same moment as I realised someone or something was behind me.

I dived down a dark alley, my footsteps echoing. I stopped abruptly. Was that the echo, or someone’s footsteps stopping shortly after mine? I stuffed the precious papers in my pouch.

‘Who’s there?’

There was a shuffling whisper of a sound and I kicked out at the rat scuttering past my feet. I had been a fool to come this way. I should have gone the long way up the Old Bailey. There were vagrants here, come to fight the red kites and the ravens for what offal they could find. London, I knew, because it was on one of the pamphlets I sold, had grown bigger than Paris and so was now the biggest city in the world, attracting thousands of the poor and desperate who would kill me for the flat cap on my head.

Out of breath, I hurried into the market itself, clapping my hand to my nose. The air reeked of stale blood and urine. I jumped as ravens lumbered up from a yellow mess of intestines. The moon was up, casting long black shadows in the stalls into which the cattle were driven at dawn to be sold and slaughtered.

The whole place was deserted and silent, except for the hovering, cawing ravens. A kite swooped. He was after the rats which came out at night to grow fat in the market. Behind the barn where the hay was stored there was a clatter, like a pail going over. I saw the man’s shadow before I saw him. I scrambled over a stall, and, in sheer terror, vaulted over another, a thing I’d never been able to do before. I heard him curse as he slipped in some cow-clap.

He was two stalls behind. Another stall and I would reach Cloth Fair, and the twisting closes and passages which were home to me, where he would never catch me. I jeered as I prepared to jump down from the last stall. Then the sound stuck in my throat as I saw a glint of metal in front of me. Another man came out of the shadow of the wall, blocking my way to Cloth Fair. It was the man in the beaver hat from the alehouse.

I took out the dagger from my belt, the only weapon an apprentice was allowed to carry. It was next to useless against the sword he had drawn, but he hesitated – not because of the puny dagger, but because of the ditch in the centre of the street in which a dead dog floated, and into which I was retreating.

In those streets you had to sum up a man in an instant. The indigo doublet he wore was splashed from recent meals. His cloak was patched. His face, too, bearded in imitation of his King’s, pouched and veined, had seen better days. But it was the look in his eyes that told me how I might escape him. The look was a mixture of arrogance and aversion that signalled he was what we apprentices called a wall man. In the narrow streets he would, come what may, stick close to the wall, rudely facing-off approaching passers-by, forcing them into the ditch.

I made to come at him, then, as his sword came up, ducked under it and ran through the ditch to the opposite wall. I was right. He would not cross the ditch but slashed from a distance. He cut at me. The blow sliced my hat askew. I staggered but ran on and would have got away but the other man, who had no such aversion for the ditch, grabbed me from behind.

He had a grip like the jaws of a bulldog. The knife fell from my hand.

‘Did you see that, Crow?’ said the other man.

‘Went for you with a knife, sir.’

‘The little wretch insulted me.’

He taunted me, demanding satisfaction, putting the point of the sword close to my eyes then, in a whirl of movement, cutting my belt and pouch away from my waist.

I kicked and struggled but then, I am ashamed to say, I broke down. It was the sight of the papers, lying in my pouch at the edge of the ditch. One sheet was floating in a filthy pool, those precious words, which were going to change the world, shivering and leaking away.

‘Please, please let me go. Take my belt, my pouch, what you like, but let me have my papers!’

Grimacing, the man picked up the pouch floating in the sewer with the point of his sword. ‘Item – one pouch. Pig’s-arse leather. Value?’

Crow grinned. ‘Half a groat.’

I felt the wind from the sword, the point of which grazed my head as he flicked off my hat, spinning it around before dropping it with distaste into his hand.

‘Item – one hat, London Apprentice’s thereof. Slightly damaged.’

‘One farthing.’

‘Half a groat and one farthing!’ he cried in mock amazement, then drew his hand across his throat, which I took to be part of the same jest until he abruptly turned away and Crow grabbed me by the hair and jerked my head back.

I hung like a chicken that has had its neck wrenched, too paralysed with fear to kick or struggle. I heard the clink and slither of a knife being unsheathed. The sound drove me to struggle and kick, trying to twist my neck away as I glimpsed the glint of the knife, but he was far too strong for me and yanked my head further back. There was a sudden flutter of sound in my ears, a blur across the patch of sky.

Crow jumped as a kite rose from his dive near us, a rat squealing briefly between its talons as the life was squeezed out of it. The rat losing its senses made me find mine.

Distracted for a moment, Crow had relaxed his grip, instinctively turning the knife towards the kite. I jerked my head out of his grip and bit his hand so savagely I felt a tooth judder and loosen. He yelled, dropping the knife. The other man was bending to pick up the pouch. He grabbed at me but I head-butted him again and again in a frenzy. He slipped on some cow-clap and fell in the ditch, his shouts choked off as he took a mouthful of it.

I grabbed the pouch with the precious words and ran as I had never run in my life before, almost knocking over the Bellman and the man who should have been watching the barn.

There were cries of ‘stop thief’ from behind me. The Bellman tried to grab me but I pulled away – it is always the apprentice who is guilty – running into the maze of courts, alleys and twisting passageways off Cloth Fair.

Chapter 3

My master’s concern was so entirely bent on the dishevelled pottage of words I unpeeled from my pouch he seemed scarcely to notice the mess I was in.

The cold, God-like fury which I had expected to fall on me fell instead on the task of turning the chaos of smeared sentences into ordered Octavo newssheets. He would have failed his God and Mr Pym (and his purse) if the speech was not circulating round the inns and the taverns where the respectable gathered that week.

Who were Crow and the man in the beaver hat? They were not common cutpurses. Nor were they from the Guild. They had been told I frequented the Pot, and that I had red hair. All I could conclude was that the words I carried really were important, perhaps they
would
change the world, and they had hunted me and sought to kill me to get them.

My guilt and misery increased as Mr Black struggled to make sense of one ink-stained page after another. At that time we all thought that the end of the world was close – George was convinced the Last Judgement was due in 1666, because, in Revelation, 666 was the number of the first beast to be overthrown. For myself, I thought it had started that night. I had had the words in my hand that would save the world, and I had lost them.

My thoughts grew so crazy I even wished they would beat me rather than ignoring me, until Mr Black came to a page which completely defeated him.

‘Parliament is . . .’ he began. His eyes bulged as he struggled to decipher the words. He flung the sheet from him. ‘Damn the speech! Damn the boy!’ he yelled.

I picked up the sheet, clutching at a word I saw in the dark grey smudge as a drowning man clutches at a spar. The word, in a mess of obliterated ones, was ‘soul’. Other words, miraculously, seemed to form before me in the smear of ink, as I remembered what Mr Ink had declaimed.

‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth,’ I said.

They stared at me in astonishment, waiting for me to go on, but I could not. The spar was slipping from me and I was about to drown. Then Mr Black snatched the paper back and was able to de cipher the next few words:

‘. . . the Commonwealth that alone is able to understand the . . . the . . .’

Again we came to a dead halt. In desperation I took the sheet from him and stared at the smudged word. I may have deciphered it, but I rather think that, grabbing into my memory, I somehow retrieved it.

‘Diseases!’ I said triumphantly.

Mr Black seized the sheet as again I came to a full stop. The following words were indecipherable, both to his eyes and my memory; but a politician’s phrases and arguments become as familiar as his face, and Mr Black knew Mr Pym’s backwards.

‘Diseases that strike at the heart of the body politic!’ he cried.

No poetry has ever moved me as much as that bedraggled line of political rhetoric, for it was uttered with such a religious fervour, and a look at me that was a second cousin of the look I got from Susannah when she thought that I read the Bible; while, in truth, I was piecing it together from my memory of her readings and her promptings.

‘God is with us!’ he exclaimed exultantly.

Gloomy George, left out of this totally unexpected communion between us, scowled at me.

‘Compose!’ Mr Black shouted at him. ‘Don’t just stand there, man – compose!’

The scowl became a look of pure malevolence as George seized his composing stick. Before, I had simply been someone to chastise and, however hopeless the task, save from sin; now I was unredeemable, his sworn enemy. The devil was a very subtle creature, who had somehow slithered and slived me into Mr Black’s favours, and must, at all costs, be rooted out. That was how George’s mind worked.

Even George, however, got swept up in the desire to catch Mr Pym’s words and have them all over town as soon as possible. There was no faster typesetter in the City of London. If Mr Ink’s fingers had flown, George’s were a scarcely visible blur, dipping from case to stick and back to case again, working his own magic, reproducing the words backwards as between us Mr Black and I excavated John Pym’s fine phrases.

As the night wore on we ceased to care about the increasing gap between what he had actually said, and what we invented. For the first time I had a glimmer of understanding about the power of the words we were handling. They were as explosive as gunpowder. All that was wanted was a fuse. Parliament had the right to approve the King’s ministers. The right? The King chose his own ministers, by Divine Right. Parliament alone had the right to make laws. Alone? Without the King?

And there, by a miracle unsmeared, unequivocal, in Mr Ink’s flowing, cursive hand was the biggest keg of gunpowder of all: Parliament had the right to control the army.

Mrs Black stumbled downstairs to see what was happening, awakening her daughter. I caught a glimpse of Anne in her nightgown at the foot of the stairs, hoping she would see from the excited chatter between me and her father that he was looking at me in a different light. But she merely wished her father goodnight, turning away from me with a wrinkle of distaste. The flicker of that nose, with its tiny upturn I thought no sculptor could copy, made me miserably, hopelessly aware of the stink and grime of Smithfield on me, to which was being added the ink I was coating on the formes, now locked together for printing.

I heard her laughter on the stair, and the hated word ‘monkey’. I was too fearful to curse her again. I hated her then. I hated the whole Black family. I hated being an apprentice. I wanted, above anything else in the world, to kick my boots off and be in the shipyard with Matthew again.

After we had proofed and printed, I broke the ice in the pail in the yard, washed what dirt I could from my face and hands, and began to eat the cold pottage and drink the beer Sarah had left out. Mr Black took some wine for himself, gazing with pride at the newssheets, gleaming wet in the candlelight. There was a fine portrait of the King, hair curling luxuriously to his shoulders from his hat cocked at the front, and a more modest one of Mr Pym, his pointed beard chipped because we had used the block so many times.

Mr Black’s idea was to put Parliament’s explosive demands in a respectful wrapping, viz:

I had swallowed my beer in two draughts when Mr Black said to George: ‘Take some wine yourself and pour Tom some.’

George’s eyebrows lifted and looked as if they would never come down again. He was only offered wine on his name day, and Mr Black had never offered me it before; rarely had he called me Tom. I had always been ‘that boy’, ‘sinning wretch’ or ‘little devil’; only lately, as I had grown almost as tall as he was, kept my boots on regular, and was suddenly useful to him had he begun to call me, albeit with heavy sarcasm, ‘Mr Neave’.

Mr Black took some wine, cleared his throat, and gave me a long stare. My stomach churned. Now he was going to question me about how the papers and myself had got into such a dishevelled state. His eyes, however, were drawn back by the drying newssheets, still shining with ink in the candlelight, and his face filled with the triumph of getting the speech on the streets next day.

‘Well done, Tom,’ he said.

The words came stiffly and awkwardly from his mouth, for he was as unused to saying them as I was to hearing them. In fact it took a moment – several moments – before I was sure there was no hidden sarcasm signalling the reproof to come. It was only when he put more wine in my tankard and raised his glass, his face coming out of the shadows with a smile on it, that I knew he meant it.

The smile was as much a stranger to me as the words. Without warning, tears pricked my eyes. I had cried myself to sleep often enough in that place, but I had never cried in their presence. The more I was beaten, the more I resolved never to cry in front of them.

‘Come, Tom,’ he said, ‘are those tears?’

‘No, sir,’ I stammered, ‘no, sir,’ pulling away into the shadows and drawing my sleeve over my face.

‘Thou art a curious child, is he not, George?’

‘Aye, sir,’ said George, with a vehement look at me.

‘Hard as stone when chastised, and cries when praised!’

‘I am not used to it, sir,’ I said.

‘Ah well, Tom, that’s as maybe. You were very rough when we took you, was he not, George?’

George looked as if the end of the world was not merely imminent, but had come. ‘He was, sir. The roughest ’prentice in the City. And if I may venture an opinion, still is.’

‘But improving, George, improving.’

George said nothing, but Mr Black was not waiting for an answer. ‘There was much to do and too little time.’

He poked the dull red coals of the fire until a few flames appeared, lighting up his face. He was not yet forty, but the flickering light threw up the furrows in his face of a much older man, etched deeply into his forehead and cheeks like the lines of a finely cut woodblock. He stared into the flames as if he had forgotten we were there. I crept closer. When he had said I was a curious child I was minded of Matthew; now I was took back to the time when Matthew gazed into the fire and drew out the pendant, and I wondered how such a devious cunning man and a straight-backed religious man could stare into the fire in an exactly similar way, even though one was looking into the future, and the other into the past.

‘You do not know how much evil there was in your soul, Tom,’ he said.

I shuddered. At that moment I utterly believed in the evil he had found in me: Susannah only thought me good because of my trick with the Bible.

‘We prayed to God we could root it out, did we not?’ he said to George.

‘Aye,’ George replied, clasping his hands together, speaking with an irony that seemed to be lost on Mr Black. ‘We are still praying.’

‘More evil than you know. More than you can possibly imagine!’

He swung round as he said this, his face moving into shadow, his voice suddenly harsh. The change from a tone of reverie was so abrupt it shook not only me, but took George aback. George unclasped his hands, took his brooding attention from me and stared at his master with the avid expression I had once caught on his face when he was listening at the door to some quarrel between Mr Black and his wife.

‘I would never have taken you, never, if the business had not been bad. Bad? About to go under!’

He finished his wine, poured more, drank half of that and then walked about the room.

‘Even then I would not have done it, I would have gone home to Oxford with my tail between my legs if Merrick had not offered to buy me out. Merrick!’

He spat the word out. Merrick was the printer at The Star, in Little Britain. He finished his wine with a gulp, as if he wanted to wash away the taste of his rival’s name. George nodded slowly, looking at me, as if he was understanding something for the first time, though I had no idea what it was.

‘That was about the time, master, you . . . er, found the money to buy the new press, the new type from Amsterdam –’

‘Borrowed it!’ Mr Black said sharply, as though regretting these disclosures. ‘Just so! Borrowed the money!’

He half moved his glass to his lips, realised it was empty, and had a little argument between himself and the bottle. He put his glass down with resolution, then looked at the drying newssheets, his eyes gleaming with pleasure, turned back to the bottle, hesitated, turned regretfully away, then saw me, with a smile on my face at this little dance and, before I could remove it, to my utmost surprise smiled back. He poured more wine and pointed at me.

‘I thought I had brought the very devil into this place, the printer’s devil, did I not, George?’

‘A most subtle devil,’ said George, looking steadily at me.

‘Oh, come, George!’ His gesture included not only the well-equipped workshop, but the new cedar chest in the room where we ate, with its flagons and candlesticks – not silver, but the most expensive pewter, polished to look very like. ‘Is not all this a sign of God’s favour?’

George turned his steady, unblinking gaze on his master. ‘“Prosperity will not show you who are your friends. Or good servants.” Ecclesiasticus, twelve eight.’

The drink brought out a totally different side of Mr Black. He looked as solemn as ever, but I swear there was a twinkle in his eye.

‘Come, George. “Whose friend is he that is his own enemy, and leaves his own cheer untasted?” Ecclesiasticus, fourteen five.’

I had never heard Mr Black trump one of George’s quotations before. George looked completely put out. Mr Black clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Come, gentlemen – drink up!’

George refused, and when Mr Black moved to my tankard, said: ‘The boy has had enough, sir.’

Mr Black waved him away. ‘He has had but little.’

‘Aye, plus what he took at the alehouse,’ George said.

I jumped up. ‘I did not go to the alehouse!’

‘You stank of it when you came in!’

‘I was in a fight!’

‘A tavern brawl!’

‘Stop this! You will wake the house!’

For the first time, the rebuke from Mr Black was for both of us, not just me. And, for the first time, he questioned me without automatically assuming my guilt.

‘Did you go into an alehouse?’

I hesitated. Going into an alehouse had led to some of my worst beatings, and was the main reason why apprentices were thrown out of their Guilds. But that was because they drank, diced and whored. I had not even had one drink, or one pass of the dice.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘Mark the hesitation,’ said George.

‘Are you speaking the truth?’ The sternness reappeared in Mr Black’s speech, beginning to fight with his conviviality.

‘Yes, sir.’

George’s lips moved quietly, but I caught the prayer on his lips. ‘Oh Lord, guide him, let him see the error –’

‘Stop that, George!’

George did so, abruptly. His pale face seemed to twist and shrink, his lips still moving but no words coming out. Mr Black turned sharply, almost knocking a chair over. He sat heavily at the head of the table, in the leather seated, high-backed chair he had recently bought, looking like a judge.