The Ashes of London (28 page)

The third was Margaret Witherdine, the servant whom Mistress Newcomb employed for the heavy work of the house, to be the butt of her own ill humour, and to help with the younger children. Margaret did not live in, because she had a husband and home of her own. She found time enough to increase her earnings by distributing the
Gazette
in the area around Smithfield. It was a tavern-keeper there who laid the complaint against her. I found she was innocent – she had repulsed the man’s amorous attentions and he had complained by way of revenge.

Williamson was not a forgiving man. The first two women lost their jobs. He was ready enough to do the same to Margaret, on the grounds she must have flaunted her charms, so the episode was her fault; his real reason was that he did not want to alienate the tavern-keeper. I asked him to reconsider – partly, I am afraid, for the selfish reason of maintaining domestic harmony at the Newcombs. In the end, she was allowed to retain the contract and I arranged for her to be given a different round.

Margaret was not, on the surface, an obvious target for anyone’s amorous attentions. She was a thickset woman, broad in the beam but short, with a high colour and black, curly hair. She was grateful for my help – her husband was no longer capable of earning his living, being a sailor invalided out of the Navy and still waiting, after seven months, for his back pay. He had been badly wounded while fighting the Dutch.

Margaret was as kind and honest as a woman could be in her position. The better I knew her, the more I liked her. She was good with my father, too, and so I paid her to take him for an excursion for the good of his health.

My father loved to go along the riverside. When he walked towards the City, he looked about him in amazement, wondering with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child what this ruined place might be, and why its inhabitants did not build it up anew from its ashes.

On this occasion, however, he wanted to walk towards Whitehall. He grew increasingly excited, Margaret told me afterwards, like a child on a holiday. He pointed out to her the square bulk of the Banqueting House, rising among the chimneys and battlements of the lesser buildings that clustered around it.

‘That’s where we killed the man of blood, my dear,’ he had said to her with a smile. ‘And made England ready for King Jesus.’

Margaret lived with her husband in Alsatia.

That was the name they gave to Whitefriars, for the area was in constant turmoil, as was the real Alsatia, that troubled province on the borders of Germany and France. London’s Alsatia was on the site of a former friary and its environs. It lay to the east of the lawyers in the Temple and to the west of the whores in Bridewell. To the north was Fleet Street, and to the south the Thames. The Newcombs’ lodgings in the Savoy were only a few minutes’ walk away.

The Fire had passed over the area, reducing many of its buildings to ashes and ruins. But some few remained, for the monastery had been built mainly of brick and stone. Despite the destruction, Alsatia was almost as well populated as it had been before the flames had passed over it. People camped in the ruins, inhabited holes in cellars that were open to the sky, and squeezed themselves even more tightly than before into the remaining buildings.

Alsatia held a particular attraction for its inhabitants that pushed all its drawbacks into insignificance. The entire precinct had been declared a sanctuary in the Middle Ages. Though the monastery had long gone, the right of sanctuary remained. It was a liberty, which meant that in legal terms it was quite separate from the great city that surrounded it.

The inhabitants were rogues, murderers, thieves, beggars, and whores. They united against intruders, fighting off any attempt to infringe the ancient right of sanctuary. No magistrates dared to go there, for they would be beaten or even murdered if they did. Even the King’s guards were wary of entering Whitefriars.

Margaret’s husband was not a rogue, only a man who had had the misfortune to lose part of a leg in the defence of his country. But he was also a bankrupt, because the Navy owed him eighteen months’ worth of back pay, and as such he was liable to arrest if he ventured abroad. That was why they lived in Alsatia, where he was out of the bailiffs’ reach.

‘People leave us alone now,’ she said to me, and there was a note of pride in her voice. ‘Alsatia’s not so bad when you get used to it. Sam may only have one leg now, but he has a dagger and a pistol. He cut off a man’s finger just after we moved there.’

So that was Margaret Witherdine. If I had thought about her, I would have thought her a woman of no importance to me, unless her cooperation were for some reason temporarily convenient for the discharge of my duties. In the same way, I’m sure, I was a man of no importance to her, except insofar as I could help her to earn the few weekly pennies that she took back to her feckless husband.

All that changed when my father went missing.

M
Y FATHER WENT
missing on Wednesday, just over a week after my return from Coldridge.

Mistress Newcomb gave me the news when I brought the latest batch of corrected proofs to her husband. My father had settled in the parlour after dinner, she told me, as he usually did, and she had left him to sleep. But when she looked in an hour later, she found he had gone.

Her fingers screwed up her apron. ‘What could I do, sir? I couldn’t stay with him. The children were in a pickle and the maid’s ill. Margaret’s not here today and the scullery girl’s a fool.’

The door had been bolted, but my father had undone it and gone out. Mistress Newcomb had sent the scullery maid and her husband’s labourer to scour the streets, but they had found nothing. She had sent them out again, and they were still looking.

I bit back my anger. I knew it was unjust to blame her. The poor woman had enough to do without keeping watch over my father. She was kinder to him than Mistress Ralston had been in Chelsea, more willing to endure his frailties. But there was a limit to her patience, and I did not want to cross it, for then my father and I would be homeless again. On the other hand, I could not place him in confinement in his own home. After his long years in prison, he hated above all things to be locked in.

‘I’ll search for him myself,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, he can’t be far.’

I tried to speak cheerfully but I was full of foreboding. My father had the body of an old man and the mind of a child. He would fall easy prey to malice or accident. To make matters worse, I was in a hurry, for Master Williamson wanted to dictate some letters, and he was determined that we should do them this afternoon.

I walked up to the Strand and paused on the corner, where the alley from the Savoy met the main road. The rain drizzled from a grey sky. Traffic roared and clattered past me in either direction, the wheels and hooves throwing a spray of mud and water over the foot passengers.

A cutting wind was coming up from the river, growing more vicious and forceful as the alley funnelled it up to the road. It snatched at men’s hats and wigs, and sent women’s skirts twitching and flying as if each of them contained a small, manic creature frolicking in the darkness within.

Which way would my father go? I tried to put myself into his poor confused mind. This part of London had been untouched by the Fire. The buildings were much the same as they had been in Cromwell’s time. True, there were more people about; their clothes were gaudier; their voices louder. And the women adorned themselves and displayed their charms in a way they would not have dared to ten years earlier. There were more shops as well, and more bustle and excitement.

But the Strand was still recognizable, still part of his London. If he had set out towards Whitehall, to the Banqueting House, I might well have seen him on my way from there. On balance, I thought it more likely he would have followed the long-entrenched geography of habit, and set out for home.

Or rather where his home had been – the house and workshop in Pater Noster Row. It had not been his for six years. After my father’s arrest, his landlord, a merchant in Leadenhall, had leased it to another printer, a man who handled broadsides and bawdy ballads. The new tenant had bought from the Crown the confiscated tools and materials of my father’s trade – his cases of type, his inks and his stocks of paper.

So I walked eastwards along the south side of the Strand towards the City, shouldering my way through the throng. If I were right, and he had gone there, God alone knew what he would make of the place where he had lived and worked. The flames had burned with particular fury in Pater Noster Row, for it was close to the inferno of St Paul’s.

I passed under Temple Bar and entered the territory of the Fire. The ruins stretched away from me almost as far as I could see. Pushing through the crowd, I walked at a fast pace, almost a run, following the slope of Fleet Street down towards the Fleet Ditch and Bridewell.

I felt a hand on my arm. I spun round, my back to the wall, my free hand diving for my dagger.

‘Master—’

I let my hand fall to my side. ‘Margaret – what the devil are you doing here?’

Her face was red, bathed with sweat. ‘Thank God you’re come, sir.’

‘What is it?’ I snapped.

‘Your father.’ Her hand tightened on my arm. ‘He’s here.’

‘Where?’

She waved at the ruins behind her.

It was only then that I realized where we were standing. ‘Ram Alley?’

It was one of the most notorious thoroughfares of Alsatia. It lay on the western side of Whitefriars, near to the Temple where the lawyers nested like magpies and grew rich from the follies of men. We were standing at its mouth, where its northern end met Fleet Street.

Margaret caught her breath. Two men were waiting in a doorway not fifty yards away. At that point Ram Alley was barely a couple of paces wide. The doorway lacked a door and the house behind it lacked a roof. The men were dressed in rusty black and armed with long swords. They were tall, with great bellies drooping over their belts, and slightly bow-legged. Former Ironsides, I guessed, run to seed and as vicious as scalded rats.

‘Is my father … safe?’

She touched my arm again, but gently this time, for reassurance. ‘He’s all right, sir, as God’s my witness. At least he was. I left him with my Sam, and he’ll deal with anyone who comes close. But Master Marwood can’t walk too well. He’s hurt his ankle.’

‘What happened?’

‘He came here to look for me, sir. He … he wanted us to go for a walk.’ Margaret swallowed. ‘To Whitehall again.’

To the Banqueting House, she meant. To the place of blood and ashes where they had made England ready for King Jesus.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re not to blame,’ I said. No one was to blame, not even my poor father. ‘We must bring him home. Was he attacked?’ I glanced up the alley, at the waiting men. ‘By them?’

She shook her head. ‘I think not. Someone picked his pocket, I expect, but that’s all.’

They would have found precious little there. ‘He probably didn’t notice,’ I said. ‘How did he hurt himself?’

‘A boy said he was lying in the gutter. He was calling my name. So the boy came for me, thinking he was my father.’ She sniffed. ‘So I said he was. Safer.’

I took a couple of steps into the alley, but she pulled me back.

‘Oh, dear God, please be careful, sir.’

The two men ahead were staring at us, their thumbs hooked in their belts. I said, ‘Shall I fetch help?’

‘Better not. They might let you in, as you’re with me, but if you bring others with you, they’ll take you for bailiffs or constables and rouse the neighbourhood.’ She lowered her voice. ‘They killed a man last week. The body went out with the tide.’ She looked up at me. ‘I’ll tell them that you’re my brother, sir. If you don’t object.’

As far as I was concerned, she could have said I was the Bishop of Rome if it stood a chance of making those two bullies look kindly on me. ‘I must find my father. Then we’ll decide what to do.’

‘Your pardon, sir, but it will be better if I take your arm. To make us seem friendly. Otherwise they might take you for a law officer.’

Margaret’s hand gripped my arm. We walked into Ram Alley. Her arm trembled against mine, but she marched forward, drawing me with her, as if she owned the whole of Alsatia.

There was a screech of metal. One of the two men had drawn his sword. He touched the tip of the long, heavy blade against the wall of the house opposite him, blocking our path. It was an old cavalryman’s broadsword with a basket hilt.

‘And what have we here?’ he asked. His hat was tilted to the left. His right ear had been reduced to a stump.

Margaret dipped in a curtsy. ‘This is my brother, sir.’

‘We want no riff-raff here,’ the other said, fingering the hilt of his dagger. ‘We’re very particular.’

‘He’s come to fetch my poor father. He’s been taken ill.’

They looked at me with disdain.

‘Indeed, sirs,’ I said. ‘He is not well.’

The second man took the edge of my cloak between finger and thumb and rubbed it, assessing the cloth. It was the one that smelled of fish. ‘Poor stuff,’ he said, and I could not disagree with him.

‘Ill, eh?’ the man with the sword said. ‘Then we must drink the old gentleman’s health. It is our Christian duty to aid the sick. By a lucky chance, young sir, the Blood-Bowl Tavern is but a hop and skip away. We shall be there in a flash.’

‘Of course.’ I reached for my purse. ‘But my father is so ill I must go to him at once, sir. I beg you to excuse me. But would you do me the honour to drink his health on my behalf and my sister’s as well as your own?’

It was no time for half measures. I unlaced the purse and held it out to them. The swordsman’s friend took it and upturned it over his outstretched hand. I watched in silent agony as my entire stock of ready money – almost thirty shillings in all, more than I had had for months – fell chinking into his palm.

‘A pleasure to deal with such an open-handed gentleman.’ The swordsman dropped the blade and thrust it into its long scabbard. He swept off his greasy hat and bowed to Margaret with the careful precision of the moderately drunk. ‘My compliments to Captain Pegleg, mistress,’ he said.