PETER RANSLEY

PLAGUE CHILD

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Peter Ransley 2011

Peter Ransley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007312351

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007357208

Version: 2017-09-05

For Cynthia, Nicholas, Imogen, Rebecca and Lochlinn

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Part One - At the Half-Moon

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Part Two - Highpoint

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Part Three - Edgehill

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Keep Reading

Historical Note

Acknowledgements

BEHIND THE SCENES

CONSTRUCTION AND CREATION

AN IDEA, LIKE A GHOST

UNOPENED ON A SHELF

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

One cloudy September evening in 1625 Matthew Neave drove the cart, loaded with the bodies he had collected, to the edge of the River Cherwell. Seven bodies: they would not pay him much for that.

While the horses drank he finished off the last of his bread and cheese. The bread was hard and dry and he softened it from his flask of beer as he waited for the light to go. He never went near the plague pit before dark.

In early summer, at the start of the plague in Oxford, relatives would lie in wait for the cart. Fear of the disease was overcome by the fear of hell that their loved ones (and they later) would suffer if they did not get a Christian burial in sanctified ground. Matthew was stabbed and nearly thrown into the pit in one fight before the watch was called.

But as people died or fled, and that remorseless hot summer reduced the remainder to a numb apathy, the disturbances petered out. Nevertheless, when he heard the sound of a galloping horse, Matthew put down his flask. Beer dribbled unnoticed down his stained fustian jacket as he stared over Christchurch Meadow.

He couldn’t make out the rider at first for the trees, but the horse was a black gelding, a gentleman’s horse. The horse cleared the trees. The rider was dressed in black. He was masked, although the day had not been hot. The mask might hold a nosegay of herbs to protect against the plague, but Matthew was taking no chances.

He picked up the knife with which he had cut the cheese and retreated to the cart – the stench of its rotting bodies better protection than any weapon.

The man reined in the horse well short of him.

‘Matthew Neave?’

‘Who wants him?’

The man took off his mask, but kept the herbs it contained to his face. Matthew dropped his knife and pulled off his hat, words drying in his throat. This was no gentleman. The horse was better bred than the man riding it, but for Matthew Mr Ralph was of much more immediate concern than any gentleman.

Mr Ralph was Lord Stonehouse’s steward. A yeoman’s son, he had acquired a small estate in his own right, field by field, the painful struggle to build it showing in the deep seams of his face. The deepest seam was a jagged scar running from his right cheek to his neck.

‘There’s a dead child at Horseborne. Bennet’s farm.’

Several miles away, over Shotover Hill, on the edge of Lord Stonehouse’s estate.

‘A plague child, sir?’

‘Yes.’

Matthew knew this was wrong, knew this was trouble. He had caught the disease when he was six. The agonising black boils under his arms burst and he had survived. They threw the rest of his family in the cart and left him locked in the house alone.

The Plague Orders, no doubt reflecting most people’s conviction that the disease was God’s punishment, specified that victims should be quarantined for forty days and forty nights. For over a month Matthew had been locked in alone, kept alive by the pottage and weak beer passed to him through a window by the only neighbour who would go near him.

Since the few who survived did not catch the plague again, what had nearly killed Matthew now provided him with his bread and, in a plague year like this, meat. Some people thought Matthew a cunning man because it was said he could predict who was going to die of the disease and who was going to live. Perhaps the steward kept his distance now not just because of the bodies, but because he had heard these stories.

Matthew scratched his head. He knew every case for twenty miles around. Someone might have escaped from quarantine, but that was unlikely. It was even less likely that the disease was still spreading. The cold sharpness in the air, the dwindling number of bodies, told him the outbreak was practically over.

Matthew shook his head slowly. ‘Horseborne, sir? Can’t be.’

As painstakingly as he had built his small estate, Mr Ralph had built his voice, away from Matthew’s slow burr, mimicking the cool mockery of his betters.

‘I’m afraid it can. It’s still spreading.’

The clouds were now edged with black and the wind freshening. As if aware that the evening would be a short one, swifts were diving, skimming above the water catching flies. Soon they would go, swarms of them, vanishing into the sky. Just as the swifts knew when there would be no more flies, so Matthew knew there was no plague at Horseborne.

‘I’ll collect he tomorrow.’

In spite of the steward’s fear, both of the bodies in the cart and the curse Matthew might put on him, Mr Ralph pulled his horse closer. His voice reverted to a country, flint-edged burr.

‘You’ll collect he tonight.’

‘There’s no papers,’ Matthew answered stubbornly.

Not all the people ending up in the pit had been plague victims. Nobody worried overmuch about the poor, but when a farmer was murdered and dumped in the pit, the watch had dinned into Matthew the importance of papers which they flourished in front of him before unsealing a plague house. And Susannah, who lived with him, had dinned into Matthew the evil of denying anyone a Christian burial whom God had not touched with the plague.

From a pouch on his saddle Mr Ralph produced an order. He did not bother to move any closer, for he did not expect Matthew to be able to read it. The paper was enough. Afterwards, Matthew could not remember whether there was a signature, but burned in his mind was the falcon’s talons clutching a shield, the seal of Lord Stonehouse, whose word was law.

The wind was bending the trees above Matthew and what was left of the sun was buried in dark clouds. It would take him an hour to get over Shotover Hill. He would set off in that direction and then turn back to Oxford, pleading the next day a broken wheel, or a lame horse. He went to his horses.

‘I’d best go now,’ he said.

‘You’ll do it – no excuses!’

Matthew stared at him. The steward had a reputation of being afraid of nothing, but something had frightened him. His words came out so violently the nosegay he was holding over his mouth dropped from his hand but still he pulled his horse closer.

‘Here –’

There was a glint of silver in the air. Matthew caught the coin as deftly as the swifts catching the flies. His manner changed.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I will give you another at the pit. Say nothing – do you understand?’

Matthew understood that two half crowns were a crown. And that Mr Ralph would be waiting for him at the pit to make sure he finished the job.

The rain began shortly after Matthew left the meadow. It swept at him in great gusts as he swore and cut at the horses, struggling and sliding to climb up Shotover. At the top of the hill, to lift his spirits he took out the silver coin. A half crown. Newly minted that year for the coronation of Charles I.

It helped Matthew forget he was soaked to the skin. A half crown! More than a labourer’s wages for a month. And another at the pit!

He was so intent on the coin that he was only dimly aware of the approaching coach, the driver lashing the horses to pick up speed at the start of the hill. The cart, rattling and bumping down the incline, had drifted into the centre of the road. He yanked at the reins and sparks flew as he pulled ineffectively at the brake.

The horses of the approaching coach reared. Matthew glimpsed the driver’s angry face and felt the sting of a whip across his cheek. He lost the reins and the cart lurched, with a grinding of wood against stone, into the ditch.

He shouted and cursed after it, then searched for the coin, which had jumped from his hand. He shoved aside one of the bodies which had been thrown from the cart, before giving up, dropping his head in despair. Then he thought of the other silver coin, waiting for him at the pit. He flung the body back in the cart with the others and covered them with the thick bundles of hay with which he disguised his cargo.

The near-side wheel was buckled and grating against the side as, just before Horseborne, he found the track to Bennet’s farm. The name meant something to him, but he couldn’t remember what.

The track was a thick, gluey pottage of mud, leaves and dung, pockmarked by cattle and horses. Overlaying them were the recent, deep ruts of a coach.

It was now almost dark and the rain, which had slackened, dripped steadily through the trees. The cart rattled and jerked through a small copse, a branch wrenching at Matthew’s hat before the open gate of the farmyard.

He stopped at the door of a prosperous-looking wattle-and-daub farmhouse. There was no red cross on the door. And something else was wrong.

There was no dog. Who had ever heard of a farm without dogs? Then he remembered. Bennet was a farmer who, returning from market drunk, had been murdered. The farm had been bought by Mr Ralph to add to his nearby lands, and was not yet tenanted.

Feeling increasingly uneasy, he approached the door, stopping abruptly. A pair of eyes glittered at him from the bushes. He was about to run when he realised the gaze was unblinking. They were jewelled eyes, set in the head of a falcon, the centrepiece of a magnificent pendant whose gold chain was entangled in the bushes. He knew where it came from. There would be a reward for it – a substantial one. He had lost silver, but found gold. He stuffed it inside his jacket and knocked at the door.

He expected Widow Martin, or some other fuddled midwife, but the woman who answered the door was another shock. Like Mr Ralph, she was not quite gentry. Kate Beaumann was a gentlewoman’s lady, as God-fearing as her sober black indicated, and she was plainly as shocked to see him as he was to see her. They knew each other, for it is surprising how many people, from all walks of life, will seek out the services of a cunning man. She had a warm, kindly face, which reminded Matthew of the good neighbour who had kept him alive during the plague. She was in her mid-twenties, but there were already streaks of grey in her hair, and her eyes were red with weeping. Her dress, like her pattens, was splashed with mud.

He touched his dripping hat. ‘Evening, Miss Beaumann.’

Without a word she beckoned him to follow her, shutting an inside door quickly, but not before he glimpsed a weakly guttering fire, a birthing stool, and a spattering of blood on the rush-covered floor. She led him into a stall where the farmer would have kept a sick animal. On the straw was a small shape wrapped in a linen apron.

‘Take him.’

When he didn’t move she picked up the object and thrust it into his arms. The little bundle was cold and wet. Part of the covering fell away from the baby’s face, which carried none of the telltale plague spots or scars. The child looked to Matthew to be stillborn, or to have died shortly after birth.

‘He don’t look no plague child,’ he said.

The harshness in Kate Beaumann’s voice was as unexpected as her kindly face. ‘He was a plague to us,’ she said.

Without another word Matthew left, half-running to the cart. He took off the apron before dropping the baby on the cart and covering it with the bundles of straw. The apron was fine linen, Flemish possibly. Kate Beaumann’s muddy skirt suggested she had dumped the child in the fields to die. That was as common as death itself.

The mystery was why Kate did not leave the child there. Or bury it. Or throw it in the river. One baby was much like another. But bodies could be found.

Mr Ralph’s urgency and fear all but spoke out loud there must be no risk of that. Perhaps the child had some special feature, or birthmark. If that was the case, the pit was the ideal solution to the problem.

Put there to destroy the plague, lime ate quickly into bodies and faces, dissolving them in a few days into an unrecognisable slime. No one would go near the pit, let alone lift a body from it. Someone wanted to prevent anyone from recognising, or claiming he recognised, the features of the child at the bottom of his cart.

Matthew shrugged. His hand closed round the pendant, feeling the outline of the jewelled bird and the links of the chain, one by one. Then his hand stopped stroking it. Suppose he was accused of stealing it? It was risky, far too risky to return it. The horses, which were dragging the cart more and more slowly, needed shoeing and the blacksmith would melt the gold down. Broken up, the stones he could sell one by one at Witney Fair, or Oxford, with the linen apron, which Susannah would wash and press.

He was musing like this, the rocking of the cart sending him into a half-sleep, the reins slipping gradually from his fingers, when he first heard the stuttering cry.

He had been asleep. Dreaming. There was nothing but the wind, the weary stumble of the hooves and the creak of the cart. But there it was again. Unmistakable. A baby’s cry.

Hadn’t he feared, from the very beginning, that this was wrong? Hadn’t Susannah warned him, time and again, of the evil of throwing someone who had not died of plague into the pit? The baby had been clap-cold dead – now it had come back to haunt him.

As the cry increased into a pitiful wail, he crossed himself in terror, lashing the horses in an attempt to escape from the spirit that he believed was pursuing him, he was now convinced, into hell. It was the hell he had somehow escaped as a child, but knew he had always been destined for; a pit, not of fire, but of bodies slowly eaten, burned, then re-formed, only to be eaten and burned again, forever being consumed, writhing in lime.

Part One At the Half-Moon

November 1641–September 1642

Chapter 1

That was the story which I eventually got out of the man I believed to be my father, Matthew Neave. There were various versions, each more colourful than the last and, of course, there was what happened next, but that has to come in its proper place.

We lived in Poplar, which some people said was a land of heathens and barbarians, because we were outside the walls of the great City of London and were not freemen. I could not understand that because in Poplar Without, as it was sniffily called, we had much more freedom. There were few laws, and I never saw a constable. I loved it there. Named after the tall, shapely trees that lined the High Street and the marsh, it was still half farming land, breeding cattle that lost little fat on the short drover’s road to Smithfield. But the farmers were being pushed back by the huddling mass of small houses being knocked up every day.

These houses were unlike the tall buildings of the City, which struck awe in me when I first saw them. Rackety, timber-framed houses with narrow, gabled fronts, they were home to some of the first Huguenot refugees who had fled from France and taught me to call my hat a shappo and swear about the Pope in French. But the houses were mainly run up for shipyard workers like Matthew.

Visitors from the City called the shipwrights a canting crew because, they said, they were rogue builders, outside the Company of Shipwrights and the law of the City. But to me they were magicians who carried great ships in their heads. In the yard at Blackwell I watched these visions become hulls, then skeletons, growing prows and masts, as I ran for buckets of pitch or an adze for Matthew in his sawpit.

When snow covered the Isle of Dogs and ice gradually thickened over the Thames it was always warm here. With bare feet and wearing nothing but breeches I filled and carried baskets of wood and coal for fires to melt the pitch, mould the iron and make the steam that would bend the wood, miraculously to me, into the shape of the shipwrights’ drawings.

With fires going on through the night when a ship had to be finished, no wonder it looked like hell on earth to the wealthy City people who commissioned the ships. And smelt like it. When an east wind blew, smoke from the lime pits of Limehouse combined with that given off by the coal to make a choking, noxious brew.

We lived in hovels and many were miserable, but I was happy. Unlike my fellows, I was not beaten. Matthew beat Susannah sometimes, particularly when his wages were paid and he had been to the Black Boy or the Green Dragon; but he never beat me. He would shout at me and curse me, and his hand would go to his belt or pick up a piece of wood, but at the last moment he would stop himself, give me a strange look and walk away muttering.

Once I asked him why he never beat me.

He laughed as if he was never going to stop. ‘Dost thou want to be beaten?’

‘No, no, Father, but everyone else is.’

He hit me on the head, knocking my hat off, but it had no more force than the slaps Susannah gave me.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Dost like it?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but that was no beating.’

He stopped laughing. ‘Thou art a curious child,’ he said.

I did not think I was curious, but curious things happened to me. Most of the children I knew had only a vague idea when they were born, or how old they were. There were too many of them. But I knew I was born in the year King Charles was crowned, towards the end of September. I say towards the end, because the day seemed to vary. It was always when the weather grew chill, the mist clung to the marsh and the dry seed pods of bog plants rattled in the wind. I would be up at first light, my lids gummed to my eyes, taking the snap of bread and cheese from Susannah when she would say: ‘The will o’ the wisps have been, Tom.’

My eyelids would fly open, I would drop my snap and rush to the front doorstep. There was a cake with icing on which TOM was written, in bold letters of yellow marchpane. It was the most delicious cake – I have to say the only cake – we ever ate. The inside was bright yellow, and full of fruit. We had no oven and the baker in the High Street sold only bread and pies. I searched on the marsh, but never could find the will o’ the wisps’ oven. Matthew warned me never to catch them, or even see them, or they would bake me as well, and TOM would be inside as well as outside the cake.

But I was determined to catch them and, one foggy September, real will o’ the wisp weather, I begged Susannah to wake me. I must have been five or six and all that week I rose shivering and stared bleary-eyed through the holes in the oiled paper of the window.

On the fifth morning I dozed off, waking with a start. I leaned out of the window. The cake was there – I had missed them! The street was empty, except for a woman in a hooded, grey cloak and a peaked stove hat like a witch’s. She must have heard me, for she stopped and began to turn. At the last moment I ducked away trembling, afraid she was a will o’ the wisp in disguise, and would turn me into a cake. By the time I told myself this was stupid (I was always having such conversations with myself, as lonely children will) and looked again, she was disappearing into the swirling mist.

One Easter Sunday after the service I saw the cake in the church hall. It looked exactly the same, the marchpane glittering, but they had made a mistake with the name. Instead of my name it said GLORIA. I picked up a knife by it. Whether I was going to put my name on it, or cut a slice, I cannot remember, but the knife was twisted from my hand by the minister, Mr Ingram, who proceeded to thrash me. Susannah heard the noise and pleaded for me.

‘This is Tom.’

‘Ah. Tom. Yes. I remember.’

What he remembered I was not to learn for a long time but, again, I got that curious look. Through my tears I tried to tell him it was my cake, not Gloria’s. He was startled I could read, and it happened like this:

Susannah’s great treasure – practically her only possession – was her Bible. She could not read, but knew whole passages by heart from the services at the church and where to find them.

‘Blessed are the poor and meek,’ she would say, tracing her finger over the passage, ‘for they shall see God.’

I would stare in wonder at the passage, knowing we must be blessed for I could see well enough how mean was the tiny room where the wind blew through gaps in the oiled paper at the window, even though I could not see God.

I thought if I could only understand the words, I would see Him. One day I pointed to a passage and said to Susannah: ‘I . . . am . . . the . . . good . . . sh-sh—’

‘Shepherd!’ she cried out.

She was so steeped in parables she thought it was a miracle. I had suddenly been given the gift of reading. Shaking, tears of joy glistening in her eyes, she pulled me into the street for the neighbours to hear.

A sceptical woman opened the book at a passage Susannah had never recited. When I looked dumbly at the page, Susannah first thought I was being stubborn, then that she had done wrong by making a show of me like a travelling bear and God had taken His words back as a punishment.

She was so stricken by this and by the grins and jokes of the neighbours that I went to the passages she had so often recited to me that I knew by heart, and pretended to read them. I even put in stumbles and hesitations so that Susannah, with joy on her face again, could correct me.

The neighbours were awestruck and, not wishing to lose this reputation, I applied myself diligently to try and make the pretence real. And on that day, when I thought my cake had been stolen, Mr Ingram began to teach me himself. He explained that the cake was a simnel cake, with saffron and fruits of the East, a symbol of resurrection, of rebirth. I could not understand what this had to do with the cake on my doorstep, nor who Gloria was, unless it was one of the will o’ the wisps. He laughed and said it was not a name at all – it was short for Gloria in Excelcis Deo – Glory be to God on High.

And that was my first lesson in Latin.

One day, when I was ten, a great gentleman came to inspect the Resolution, a five hundred-ton armed merchantman in which he had an interest. It had his flag fluttering from the mast; a falcon with an upraised claw. I saw the gentleman staring at me as I put down a bucket of boiling pitch and went off to collect another. He said something to the shipwright, who called over Matthew. Curious, I took my eye off the pitch I was tapping, which splashed over my bare leg. I had been burned before, but never as badly as this.

Yelling and screaming I ran to the pump to douse it, but the gentleman had me see the barber-surgeon who dressed the wound and gave me a cordial, London Treacle, a mixture of herbs and honey dissolved in wine, which some of the men said they would wound themselves to have. It was the first wine I ever drank, and I lay in the shipwright’s office, among the drawings and the model ships they made before they built the real thing, and fell asleep.

Did I dream of the gentleman because he had been kind to me? Or was it real? I do not know, but I have a shifting memory of an old man’s face bending over me, a wispy tuft of hair rather than a beard below his lips, which smiled one moment and tightened the next, just as his dark eyes looked cloudy and troubled, then stared down at me with penetrating, frightening shrewdness as though they could cut right into my heart and soul, like a surgeon’s knife.

When I questioned Matthew about him as we prepared to go home, saying he looked concerned and kind, Matthew laughed bitterly.

‘Kind? Aye, he’s kind all right. One of those gentry-coves who would be kind enough to send you to Paddington Fair.’

He was not looking at me but staring towards the river, where the tide was on the turn and a boat was being cast off. Often in his stories he told me that one day we would leave on the tide to a distant land, and I thought they were just stories, but now there was something in his voice that told me he wanted to be on that boat, and made me clutch at his hand.

‘Paddington Fair – send me to Tyburn? He wouldn’t! Why? What have I done?’

He laughed. ‘Nay, do you not know when I’m joking?’

Still in the manner of a joke, he took me to a fire on the edge of the yard where there were few people.

Some in the yard said Matthew was a cunning man, because he polished their thumbnails until they gleamed in the firelight, and saw their future in them. I had often begged him to tell mine, but he had always refused. Now he built up the fire, squatted by it, and stared into the flames.

I had seen him do this with the others. ‘Are you going to tell me my future?’ I said, polishing my nail in great excitement.

He grinned. ‘Nay, Tom. I shall need more than a nail for thy future.’

His face, lit by the fire, seemed all eyes. The dock was quiet. The frantic hammering and sawing and shouting and swinging of timber was over. The gentleman was pleased with the ship, and they were taking on board canvas, ready to run up sails. Two men approached, arguing. Matthew waited until they passed, then undid his jerkin, then his shirt, which he never took off in winter. Under that was a belt, attached to which was a pouch. He started to take something from the pouch, then thrust it back.

‘Say nothing about this, or I’m a dead man!’

I can now see that many of his jokes were made to ward off the fear which, at some level, was always with him. Back then I understood nothing but the sheer naked force of that fear, all the more terrible since it came so unexpectedly from someone who had always seemed, to me at any rate, a simple, jovial man.

Constantly looking about him, he took something from his pouch which seemed to have a fire of its own. It was a pendant, with a falcon staring so furiously from its enamelled nest I ducked back instinctively, for fear it would fly at me. Its eyes, Matthew said, were rubies and in one of its talons it gripped a pearl, irregularly shaped, as if it had just been torn from the earth.

I reached out my hand for it, but he cuffed it away. ‘Ah ah!’

His fear seemed to recede as he gazed at it. He smiled, caressed it almost, murmuring to himself. A log settled and the gold chain glittered in the spurting flames. He addressed the pendant rather than me, seeming to enter into some kind of a trance with the red-eyed falcon. He saw a lady, he said, a real lady, with hair as bright red as mine.

‘Will I marry her?’

‘Nay, nay. Not her. You will make a great fortune. And lose it.’

‘A crown?’

He shook with laughter. He seemed to have returned to his normal self. I loved his laughter, which made his cheeks and his belly shake, for, although he was always making fun of me, there was kindness in it.

‘Rather more than a crown, boy.’

He put the pendant in the pouch, and pulled down his shirt and jerkin. The falcon seemed to flutter as it disappeared, reminding me of the bird on the flag flying on the old gentleman’s ship.

‘Is the pendant something to do with the old gentleman?’ I said.

He seized me by the throat. For a moment I thought he was going to make up for never beating me by throttling the life out of me. ‘Who told you that? Who told you? Answer me!’

‘No one!’ I choked. ‘The bird is like the one on the ship’s flag.’

He laughed, releasing me. ‘Nothing like! Nothing like at all.’

I thought he was lying. He whirled round at a movement in the shadows, but it was only a dog searching for scraps.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if you ever see a man – he calls himself a gentleman these days – with a scar on his face.’ He pulled his face into a smile that was not a smile, and drew his finger down the line of it, on his right cheek, down to his neck. ‘He works for the old gentleman. Meet him, and you wouldn’t think the old gentleman so kind.’ When I said nothing, he pushed his face into mine with such a sudden ferocity I jumped in fright.

‘Do you understand?’

I nodded dumbly. I understood that the old gentleman, the man with a scar and the pendant were somehow connected. And I understood that Matthew was a thief, for how else would he have got the pendant? I did not mind that, for Poplar was full of people running away from something: cutpurses, refugees, apprentices, debtors, whores. But I thought it was something more than being a thief he was running from, and I minded very much not knowing what it was.

‘I don’t understand what is story and what is truth,’ I said.

He roared with laughter. ‘If people ever knew the difference between those two,’ he said, ‘the world would be a very different place.’

He would say no more, except, ‘You’re a strange boy, a very particular boy,’ as he took me home, all kindness again.

That night I woke up hearing him arguing with Susannah downstairs, where they slept. I slept upstairs with sailors they took in as lodgers.

‘A boat?’ she shouted. ‘I’ve never been on a boat in my life! Where would we go?’

I heard no more because he beat her. The next day he told me we were going on a boat to Hull. I had seen so many built I was passionate to go out to sea and bombarded him with questions about what part of the Indies Hull was in and were there parrots and elephants?

But before the boat sailed, they came. A waterman brought them, and a shipwright took me to them. Matthew was nowhere to be found. Fearfully I looked up at the faces of both of them, but there was no scar that I could see.

Master Black was dressed to suit his name, in sober black, brightened only by a froth of fine linen at the cuffs and collar. He had a cane, and walked with a slight limp. The man whom I came to call Gloomy George was a thin man with narrow suspicious eyes, always looking about him as if he was afraid his pocket was about to be picked.

Susannah went into one of her trembling fits when I was took home, but instead of the words pouring out of her, she seemed scarce able to speak. The two men almost filled our tiny room. Susannah ran to a neighbour, Mother Banks, for weak beer, but Mr Black took one look at the pitcher and refused it curtly.

Gloomy George brought out a Bible from the case he carried. I thought then they were from the Church, come to test the truth of me being a miracle, because I had been given the gift of reading. He opened the book at Ecclesiasticus. My heart would have sunk into my boots if I had had any boots; for though I loved the New Testament, which is about love, I hated the Old for it is as full of revenge and hatred as it is of long words. I stared with mounting panic at the passage, which was about wisdom.

‘My son, learn the lessons of youth,’ I managed well enough; stumbled at ‘garnering wisdom’, then, at ‘Only to undisciplined minds she seems an over-hard task mistress’, the words fell about me like so many pieces of ship’s timber when a lifting tackle breaks.

‘Wisdom is an over-hard task mistress to you, is she Tom?’ Mr Black said.

‘No, sir,’ I mumbled, I think truthfully, for I liked wisdom, what little I knew of it; although perhaps I also said it because I thought it was the answer he expected.

‘Then what do the words mean?’

I stared into his eyes, as black as his garments and as cold as frost. I shook my head, sick and ashamed. I had been found out. Not only was I not a miracle, I was a cheat and a fraud. I can still see Susannah’s wringing hands and downcast eyes. She began to say that it was her fault, she had boasted too much to the neighbours and God had punished her by taking the words away, but Mr Black silenced her by snapping the book shut.

From the case, Gloomy George took out a writing table, a quill, ink and paper. He dipped the quill in the ink and handed it to me.

‘Perhaps you can write better than you can read.’

I stared at the blank sheet of paper, as I now stare at the sheet in front of me, scarce able to believe I acted as I did.

‘Come now, you can write your name, child.’

I could, in a laboured scrawl I was proud of; but I could see their sneers and hear the contempt in their voices. I would not give them that satisfaction. The blood burned in my cheeks and I flung the quill from me. A spray of ink peppered the fine linen of Mr Black’s cuff. I saw the horror on Gloomy George’s face an instant before I felt the blow of Mr Black’s cane across my shoulders.

I reeled forward, knocking over the writing table, ink spilling from the horn. Another blow struck me across the head and I fell to the floor. Susannah was screaming. Above me was a blur of boots and the metal tip of the cane rising and falling. I flung my hands about my head and rolled away among the mess of paper and ink. As the cane hit the floor near me I grabbed at it and held on. To avoid falling over, Mr Black was forced to release it.

I scrambled up, gripping the cane. If he was angry when I flung the quill, he was now astonished. He backed away, almost knocking over Gloomy George in his haste. Susannah stared, her mouth open. Smeared with ink, as well as with the blood now trickling down my face, I must have looked to the two men like a wild animal. Children did not seize canes. They did not beat, they were beaten.

I was wild, but I was not an animal. The great difference between me and my fellows was that I was loved.

In families with ten or eleven children love was in short supply. Children died too often to risk love. They were wet-nursed, lost amongst the others. Susannah had had other babies, but they were dead when they came out of her, or after a cry or two at her breast. I never thought to ask why I alone was so strong and vigorous, so determined to live.

So they cared for me too much because I was all they had; and that made me selfish and bold as I gripped Mr Black’s cane, feeling a strange sense of power as I looked at the expressions on their faces. I do not know what I would have done if there had not been at that moment a hammering at the door.

My boldness left me. I thought it the constable, come to take me to Paddington Fair. My mouth went dry and the cane slipped from me. Mr Black seized it as George answered the door. It was not the constable, but the waterman’s boy.

The boat had to leave in half an hour to catch the evening tide. Mr Black said curtly he would take it. His rage seemed to be spent and he did not look at me as George packed the case and Susannah wiped my face and tearfully whispered to me to apologise to the gentlemen, but I would not. Apologise to him for beating me?

‘I told you it would be a waste of time coming here, master,’ George grumbled. ‘The boy has the devil in him!’

When Mr Black, sitting broodingly, said nothing, George rounded on Susannah in bitter reproof. ‘Kindness to the body, madam, is cruelty to the soul.’

‘I am sorry, sir,’ she replied falteringly. ‘I do not know what happened – he is normally such a good child.’

He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘No, madam. You are too good to him. Every coddle you give him takes him one step nearer to hell.’

Susannah pushed me away as if I was already burning. George gave me a final, dismissive shake of the head, picked up the case and opened the door, but Mr Black did not move.

‘Master – the boat.’

Still he did not answer but looked at me, his eyes seeming to bore into my very soul. Then he looked at his ink-spattered cuff and jumped up as if he was going to beat me again. In spite of the danger to my soul, Susannah drew me to her.

‘Sir, there is a washerwoman here who has a most rare soap –’ ‘Be quiet!’ he shouted, so loud that soot pattered from the chimney. ‘The boy has spirit,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ George said. ‘An evil spirit.’

Mr Black gave him a chilling look that silenced him. ‘I will take him,’ he said.

It was a long moment before George recovered from his amazement and found his voice. ‘Master! His temper is as ill as his reading.’

‘Both can be taught,’ he said, prodding me with his cane, as if I was one of the calves at Smithfield. ‘Come – the tide will not wait.’

I was later to discover that Mr Black took for ever to come to a decision, but then demanded it be carried out immediately.

‘Has he any other clothes until he is fitted?’ he snapped to Susannah.

‘Only what he stands in, sir.’

‘No boots?’

‘Boots? As to boots, sir,’ she stammered, ‘I was always meaning to get –’

‘No boots, no matter. Hurry, woman, for God’s sake!’ We were already in Poplar High Street, and Susannah had run back for something, which she carried wrapped in a handkerchief. ‘Order boots, two pair, when you order the uniform from Mr Pepys,’ he rapped out at George.

It was not until we were at the quayside that I began to realise what was happening. Susannah was delirious with joy, which confused me utterly for I thought – no, I knew – she loved me and I could not believe she was giving me, like a badly wrapped parcel, to this brute, however fine his clothes were.

‘Thou art to be indentured,’ she said proudly. ‘An apprentice to a printer. With boots.’

The waterman’s boy prepared to cast off. The light was going, the soft, magical evening light over the water which I loved, and they had lit flares in whose flickering light men moved like shadows, stitching the sails which would be run up on the Resolution tomorrow.

As if she knew my soul was going to be in very little danger from coddles in future, Susannah gave me one last enveloping hug and it only struck me then that I was leaving her. I clung to her, to her smells of beer, of her herb pottage in which, however bad the times, she always managed to find me a little meat. Leaving the yard. Leaving the great boats, with their promise of freedom.

Now I would never hear the creak and groan and shudder as the Resolution left the dock, see her stagger, then find her sea-legs as the sails snapped taut, took the wind, and she headed out to the open sea. Now I would never go the Indies, gaze in wonder at parrots, ride an elephant, and listen to Matthew’s stories.

Matthew!

I cried out for him.

‘Father! Father!’

I think Mr Black was not without feeling then, for he asked a shipwright to find him. No one had seen him all day. That increased my distress. He had gone to the Indies without me. But the boatman was muttering and cursing and Mr Black gave him a curt signal to leave. He prodded at the bank with an oar and the boat began to drift out into the current.

‘Wait! Wait! Dear God Almighty, I almost forgot!’

Susannah flung at me what she had carried in the handkerchief. The handkerchief fluttered into the water but what was in it landed at my feet with a thump. Her Bible. It was all she had. All? It was her greatest treasure. She stood there, waving and waving, growing smaller, dimmer, as the boatman pulled at the oars.

Tears stung my eyes but then I saw the sour smile on George’s face and blinked them back. No doubt he thought this was good for my soul, but what he thought good I thought a great evil.

I glared sullenly back at George. I swore then, silently to myself, on the Bible I gripped, that I would be as evil as possible. I remembered the pendant that Matthew had stolen, the future he had seen through it in the flickering firelight of the yard, and I was determined that wherever this boat was taking me, I would end the journey either with great treasure in the Indies, or at Paddington Fair.

Chapter 2

They beat it out of me. That evil. Or, if you like, those childhood fancies. Mr Black thrashed me with his cane until it broke, for which offence I was thrashed all the more with the new one. Gloomy George knocked the evil out of my head with his composing stick. But worst of all was Dr Gill, the tutor hired from St Paul’s, so I could learn to compose print for textbooks on nature and the physical world, which were in Latin.

As George knocked the evil out of me, Dr Gill knocked what Latin he could into me with a ferula. This was a flat piece of wood expanding at the end to a pear shape with a hole in the middle, guaranteed to raise a painful blister at one blow.

Worse than the beating was the cellar, which I thought the coldest, dampest, darkest hole on God’s earth. Even now I cannot recall it without a shudder, although I was only locked in there once before – well, I will come to that. That first time I believe I had some kind of fit in there; at any rate, Mr Black said I was not to be locked in there again, and George had to make do with thrashing me.

My only comfort was Sarah, the maid of all work, with whom I shared the garret, although at first she seemed another enemy, who spoke with an accent so thick I thought she was from a foreign country like Scotland.

‘Sitha – that’s thy place – that side o’ beam – and this be mine All reet?’ That beam! It was so placed and so crooked that at whatever angle I got out of bed it seemed to strike my head. ‘Clodpole! Some people never learn,’ she invariably said, until I yelled at her, calling her a Scottish whore. She seemed more upset by the first epithet than the second, saying she would rather be dead than Scottish. She came from Hull. From the Indies? I cried, asking her if there really were parrots and elephants there.

‘Oh, aye,’ she said. ‘And birds that fly backwards. Come here, clothhead. Mind beam.’

She rubbed some pig’s fat in the bruise, which she used for her own knocks and cuts, and from that moment, however bad the beatings were, there was always the pig-fat to take the sting out of them. While she rubbed, I read to her from Susannah’s Bible. I wrote to Susannah through the minister, Mr Ingram, and got messages back carried by drovers taking cattle to Smithfield.

One of them told me Matthew disappeared shortly after I left the shipyard. I never heard from him. If Susannah did, she never told me. That cut me most of all. I never forgot them, but my memory of them gradually faded as I changed from a barefoot pitch boy into a London apprentice.

For five years I was flogged regular for construing Latin, misconstruing Latin (it seemed to make little difference whether or not I got it right), for not wearing my flat cap, for losing it, for dicing, swearing, blaspheming, going into alehouses, fornicating (talking to a bawd outside the Pot Upside Down), losing my boots (I confess I put them on the throw of a dice), attempting to corrupt (a love poem to Mr Black’s daughter, Anne, of which more anon) until, in 1640, Parliament was recalled and they were suddenly too busy to beat me.

Parliament? I had scarce ever heard of it. The King had got rid of it and ruled with his own personal advisers. He had also got rid of news, which his advisers called lies and rumours, and with it a great deal of his business, complained Mr Black. Robert Black, at the sign of the Half-Moon, used to publish corantos with news of the wars in Europe, shipwrecks and the like, but the King had banned them, with threats of the Star Chamber. But now Parliament was back and London so hungry for news that printers were prepared to take risks to provide it.

The only debating chamber I knew before Parliament was the Pot Upside Down. The view of my friend Will, who chaired the debates there, was simple. Good Queen Bess (as we still called her) had won all her wars against the Spanish, the French and the Dutch. Charles had lost his. He was in debt, and needed to call Parliament to get more money. But Parliament would not raise funds until the King paid heed to its grievances on religion and taxes.

I was for Parliament – most of the London apprentices were. Our hero was Mr John Pym, leader of the opposition to the King. Mr Black printed his speeches, which breathed fire on the King’s advisers for drawing him into popery, even persuading him to sell forests to papists: the very wooden walls of our ships that protected us from Spain.

How we got hold of the speeches is a story in itself; very like old Matthew’s story of the plague child in its muddle of right and wrong. Reporting of Parliament was strictly forbidden. Allowed in as a messenger, I heard Mr Pym himself rail bitterly against the rogue printers who stole his speeches for money. For this abuse of privilege, he thundered, they should be clapped in the Tower.

An hour later Mr Ink (as I called the scrivener, for his fingers were always black with it), whom I knew worked closely with Mr Pym, was slipping that very same speech into my hands.

Yet Mr Pym, like my master, was a very godly man. They looked similar, with their stiff pointed beards, dressed in sober black, topped with starched white linen collars, except my master’s collar was plain, and Mr Pym’s finely decorated lawn. One day he called me over, staring down at me, his beard as immaculate as his linen, every hair in place as though engraved there.

‘You are fortunate to work for such a godly man as Mr Black,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I stammered, although the bruising and the blisters had scarcely faded and fortunate was not the word I would have chosen.

He took a shilling from his pocket and held out an envelope. ‘Do you know that address?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I lied.

I would have known any address for that money, even one in the foreign country of the West End, beyond the walls of the City.

‘Are you discreet?’

I did not know the meaning of the word, but again was willing to be anything for a shilling and nodded my head vigorously. Not willing to risk that the nod meant understanding, he barked: ‘Can you keep your mouth shut?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do not say anything, even to your master. Is that clear?’

I was only too happy to comply. My wages were bread and cheese, my uniform and bed; the only money I ever got was from errands like this.

The letter was addressed to the Countess of Carlisle in Bedford Square, near the new Covent Garden. It was then London’s first public square. After the huddle of the City I was amazed by the spacious new brick-built houses with their porches and columns. I delivered the letter to a contemptuous footman called Jenkins who left me round the back, next to the shit heap, waiting for a reply. The heap smelt sweeter than ours, I believed then, for in it was the shit of a real Countess. Now I rather think that, unlike ours, the scavengers cleared it regular.

From Will in the Pot I learned that the Countess of Carlisle had been the mistress of the Earl of Strafford, a one-time favourite of the King, who had been executed earlier that year. She was a close friend of the Queen. So what was she doing corresponding with Mr Pym? I imagined this was a love letter I was carrying, for I was in love myself – deeply, hopelessly, with Mr Black’s daughter, Anne.

Anne laughed at my bare feet when I first came to Half Moon Court. They were big and dark as the pitch that was engrained into the skin. I flexed the huge, knobbly toes like fingers. She howled with laughter when she saw me pick up a quill between my toes, and said I was like a monkey she had seen on a gentlewoman’s shoulders. Ever after that she called me Monkey.

I tried to hate her. To my shame I cursed her, not a curse like smallpox, for I could not bear anything to happen to her skin, which was like milk and honey. The curse, Matthew had told me, must be related to the injustice, and so I cursed her feet, which were like tiny mice, scuttling in and out of her skirt, bidding them to grow even larger than mine. I scraped some dead skin from the soles of my feet and put it in her favourite shoes.

When she complained that they pinched, and her mother said she had grown out of them, I immediately regretted what I had done and spent a tortured, sleepless night praying to undo the curse. To my relief that must have worked, for, as the days passed, she made no complaints about the new shoes.

Her laughter and, even worse, her ignoring me, hurt me more than any blow I ever received in that place. According to Will in the Pot, who was an expert in such matters, I was suffering from the very worst type of love: unrequited love.

Yet it was not always so. There was a time, the first autumn I was there, when we became as close as two children ever could be. In September, towards the end of the third week, my simnel cake appeared on the doorstep. It seemed to everyone a most mysterious thing, but, of course, it was no surprise to me. The will o’ the wisps could transport such a cake in a trice. For George, it confirmed I had a pact with the devil and he would not touch a crumb. Sarah said there were good will o’ the wisps and bad, and the cake was so delicious it had been baked by good ones. I believe she began to rub pig-fat in my bruises from the moment she licked the last crumbs from her fingers. Mrs Black consulted her astrologer, who told her the cake had been stolen, and she looked at me with deep suspicion. Mr Black, whose common sense contrasted starkly with his wife’s superstition, boomed irritably: ‘How can it be stolen, Elizabeth, when the boy’s name is on it?’

Anne was first jealous – she never had such a cake – then intrigued. We began to play together. It started as mockery, but when she found I could tell the stories Matthew had told me of foreign lands, great ships and elephants and parrots, we used to hide together behind the apple tree in the centre of the court, or in the paper store. This went on for two idyllic months until, one misty autumn day we heard the rattle and braking squeal of a Hackney hell-cart stopping in the court. We ran out of the shop to gape at it. I took Anne’s hand, with a shiver of apprehension.

Out of the coach stepped a gentleman. Through the swirling fog I saw a livid scar, running from the top of his cheek and down his neck to bury itself under his collar. He stopped to glare at us. Mr Black came out and shouted to us to come in immediately. Anne ran to him but, remembering Matthew’s warning, and fearing the man with the scar had come to me for the pendant my father had stolen, I fled out of the court and hid the rest of the day in Smithfield, among the poor searching for offal discarded by the butchers.

I was flogged for that and told not to play with Anne. That only increased my desire to see her, but it was then that her haughtiness and her cruel jokes really began. I still kept the memory of that autumn, but as the years passed and she became more and more beautiful, like a gradually opening flower, and more and more distant, the memory faded until I began to wonder if it had ever happened, or whether it was just a story I was making up to comfort myself.

So there I was at sixteen, hopelessly in love, knowing nothing and caring less about the speeches I was carrying, except that I must beat the other messengers at the same game. Flapping the speech to dry it, I would run from Westminster, through the narrow streets, past the grim shape of Newgate Prison until, panting for breath through the stink of Smithfield, I would at last reach Half Moon Court where we all lived and worked in the narrow Flemish wall house with its jutting gable and creaking sign: RB with a yellow half-moon. My master would seize the copy and George his composing stick and I would prepare the press. So it was and seemed it always would be, until one momentous day.

It was November, dark as pitch, the air a fine drizzle carrying the smell of the coal clouds that hung over London when people began to stoke their winter fires in earnest. The shops and stalls in Westminster Hall, where they jostled for trade next to the law courts, were long closed. I hung about with other messengers, waiting for the House to finish its day’s business. Unusually, no Members had gone home. Some of the messengers did, or repaired to the Pot. I crawled into a corner, pulled a discarded sack over myself and dozed. Distant shouting woke me. A watchman was calling the hour of midnight. The shouting was coming from the House. There was no official on the door, and I crept into the lobby.

Even I, for whom the words echoing round the chamber of the House meant as much as most of the Latin my tutor tried to drum into me, knew something extraordinary was happening. Mr Lenthall, the Speaker, had to keep calling order. There was a silence so deep my boots sounded like the crack of doom. My old enemy, the Serjeant, at the door of the chamber turned, but I slipped behind a pillar.

‘The Ayes have it!’ Mr Lenthall called.

What the Ayes had I neither knew nor cared, except that Mr Pym’s speech would soon be in my hand and I could go. There was a tremendous uproar, more shouting and banging of feet and cries for order, before Members came out, still arguing fiercely.

Mr Pym was with an MP of about forty, with a brooding, long-nosed face and an untidy beard. I knew him only from scowling me away if I scuttled too near his feet. Normally he made long-winded speeches about draining the fens, looking as if he had just ridden up from doing so. Now there was a look of almost religious exultation on his face as he came out of the chamber with Mr Pym.

‘If this had not been passed, John, I would have sold up everything and gone to Massachusetts.’

Pym smiled at the younger man, but as usual there was a look of caution on his exhausted face. ‘We haven’t got the new world here yet, Oliver. They’re already trying to wreck it.’

He looked towards another group, in the middle of which George Goring, handsome and wild-eyed, was gesticulating fiercely.

It? New world?

Goring shouted: ‘You cannot make such demands of the King!’

His hand went to his waist, and if swords had been allowed in the chamber, he would have drawn his. He moved towards John Pym, but he was already disappearing with others into a meeting room. I heard Goring mutter that there had been enough words and it was now too late for meetings.

Another group round Sir Simon D’Ewes, who in any debate found one side totally convincing until he heard the arguments of the other, were finding they had urgent business in the shires and were sending out servants to prepare the horses.

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:

a Grand Remonstrance of PARLIAMENT to his MAJESTY THE KINGBeing the onlye true & faithful reporte of theproceedings of Parliament praying His Majesty toadresse the most humble supplications of his subjects

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.

George found his voice. ‘Ask him how he got into the fight.’

‘I was attacked. Thieves who tried to get the speech.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us all this before?’ George’s voice was acid with scepticism.

‘There has been no time!’

‘Apprentices from Merrick?’ said Mr Black.

‘No, sir. I never saw them before. One had a sword.’

George looked up at the ceiling in disbelief, but Mr Black leaned forward sharply.

‘A gentleman?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps once was?’

‘Yes.’

‘Describe him.’

‘A thin face. A beard like the King. He was wearing a beaver hat.’

‘Like half London,’ said George.

‘The other?’

‘A lowpad. Shoulders like a bull.’

George laughed. ‘It’s a tale from a halfpenny broadsheet! He’s lying.’

Mr Black jumped up. His good mood had disappeared as quickly as it came. He seized his cane, which had become a stranger to me in recent months. ‘Are you?’

‘No, sir!’

I ducked as I saw the cane move and flung my hands round my head, wincing in anticipation. But the blow never came. The cane clattered as he flung it on the stone flags. His face looked tortured. I feared he had been struck by the strange ailment that affected him at times when he would stand quite still, as if struck by some vision others could not see.

George backed away, muttering. ‘The boy has cursed you. I saw his lips move.’

Mr Black shook his head, as if he was shaking off the vision, like a dog shaking off water. He seized me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘Are you lying?’

‘No, sir!’ I sobbed, more frightened by the strange contortions of his face than the violence.

He shook me again, and pushed his face into mine. ‘It’s as import ant for you as it is for me that you tell me the truth! Do you understand, you little fool?’

I pulled away from him with a rush of anger that overcame my tears. I did not consider myself a fool and I was certainly no longer little.

‘It’s true – I heard one of the men asking another ’prentice about a boy with red hair and then the man turned round and saw me and I ran and then –’

‘Where was this?’

The words dried up in my mouth. Normally I would have lied. Told him the street, anywhere, but the look on his face was so alarmed, so urgent, I felt compelled to tell the truth.

‘The Pot.’

A sad smile played round George’s mouth. ‘Now we have it, sir, now we have it.’

I expected to be given the beating then. I wish they had. George was clearly relishing the thought. He picked up his old composing stick with the rusty metal end from which I still bear a mark on my left temple. But Mr Black waved him away. He gave me a look of such sadness it cut me more sharply than any whip or stick.

‘Oh, Tom, Tom, I was beginning to trust you.’

Now I could not stop the tears bursting out of me and with them a torrent of words. He must have beaten more of his obsession with sin into me than I realised, but it had all been concealed from me until a little kindness let it out. That, and my realisation that the words that were going to change the world could have been lost because of my desire for a drink.

I confessed drink. I confessed pass dice. I confessed lusting after Mary, the pot girl. I confessed cursing his daughter. I confessed, although I feared it would be the greatest sin of all in Mr Black’s eyes, drinking and getting into debt with Henry, Merrick’s apprentice.

George was hovering, testing the position of the stick in his hand. I wanted him to beat me. I needed his savagery. But as I moved like a sacrificial lamb towards him, Mr Black stopped him. He was berating himself under his breath for not having written to someone. He picked up pen and ink as if he would write a letter there and then, then set it down and paced again.

Waiting for my punishment made it ten times worse. I felt so wretched I begged him to cancel my indentures and send me home. I would return my uniform and boots, get some clothes from the rag woman at Tower Hill and go back to my father.

He came to a full halt, staring at me as if I had said something that first of all shocked, then amused him. ‘Your father? No, no, that won’t do, that won’t do at all. It’s far too late for that. As for the boots . . .’ He gave me one of his rare, dry, mirthless smiles. ‘I doubt anyone else would fit them.’

The touch of levity left him. ‘You are not to leave this house until I give you permission. Is that clear?’

No. Nothing was clear. Not the evil that he said was in my soul, nor the man in the beaver hat who had suddenly come into my life, causing him such consternation. But I promised to obey him.

He hesitated. ‘No, I can’t trust you. I can’t afford to trust you.’ He turned to George. ‘Lock him in the cellar.’

George gripped me by the arm, nodding his head in approval at the gravity and the justice of the punishment. My tongue and limbs were so paralysed with fear at the thought of being locked in there at night that George got me halfway to the door before I anchored myself to the table.

‘Not in the dark, sir,’ I pleaded. ‘Please don’t lock me in there in the dark!’

‘Why, Tom,’ Mr Black said, an amused look on his face, ‘I thought you were grown up now and afraid of nothing. Are you still afraid of the dark?’

I had made my confessions with the reason of a man, but now all reason deserted me and I whimpered my plea again like a child.

‘Let him have a candle,’ Mr Black said curtly.

I made no further resistance. In the early days I had learned, painfully, that it was useless and only gave George more satisfaction. George lit a candle and with the composing stick in his other hand led me down the stairs, his shadow splayed out over the low ceiling. As he opened the door of the cellar the dank rotting smell brought back to me the terror of the first time they brought me here, but I stifled it, determined not to show any more fear to George. It was very late, and the candle would last me until first light filtered through the broken plaster.

It is only when you have been punished regular that you learn instinctively to recognise refinements of such punishments. As George began to close the door on me I realised he was not going to give me the candle.

I put my boot in the door and struggled to pull it further open. The composing stick fell on my fingers with agonising force. For a moment I could not move for the pain, but the rattle of the key drove me to wrench at the door. I got it half open and grabbed for the candle. He pulled back but hot wax spilled on his hand. He yelled, dropping the candle, which went out.

There was now only a dim, flickering light from the room above. I glimpsed him coming for me with the stick. I ducked and, as he crashed into the wall, grabbed him from behind and shoved him into the plaster with such force I thought the wall was coming down. He groped feebly for the stick he had dropped but I saw it on the stair and grabbed it.

I was familiar with that stick on every inch of my body, except in the palm of my hand. The feel of it there, my fingers gripping it, that hated stick, and the fear of the dark in that stinking cell drove me into such a frenzy I lashed out at George. He ducked, but I caught him a glancing blow on the temple and the thought that I had scarred him as he had scarred me let loose such a rush of savagery it felt as if the devil George always claimed was in me was released, urging me to beat him and beat him as he had beaten me.

George slipped and fell and God knows what I would have done if I had heard Mr Black coming down the stairs sooner, but by the time I turned and saw him, he was bringing his stick down on my head.

Chapter 4

I thought it was a louse. Pediculus Humanus Corporis, my Latin tutor Dr Gill had drummed into me, as he triumphantly plucked a particularly fat specimen from my clothes. They came out to feed at night. We were used to one another, and, unless they ventured to a particularly sensitive spot like my groin, they rarely woke me. Even then, it was more my finger and thumb the creature aroused, which hovered, waiting for it settling to feed before closing round it with a satisfying snap, at which I would instantly sink back into sleep.

But this creature was on my face, normally considered too leathery for a decent meal. My finger and thumb were throbbing, stabbing with pain as I instinctively tried to crook them to catch the louse. My head thumped like the big drum in the Lord Mayor’s show. Something terrible had happened but I did not want to remember, I just wanted to catch the louse and fall back to sleep. My finger and thumb crept stealthily up to my face. They touched a sticky, glutinous mass, pausing in bewilderment before closing round the object of irritation.

All in the same instant I felt a sharp, needle-like pain and sprang up yelling, Mr Black’s angry face and descending stick jumping back to me as I realised that I clutched not a dead louse but a live rat which, attracted by the drying blood on my face, was squealing and biting in my hand.

I threw it from me, screaming. I could see nothing. I blundered into one wall, cold and greasy with damp, then another before I found the door, hammering and shouting until I dropped to the floor with exhaustion.

The last time they locked me in, when I first came here, I had been playing dumb, pretending I had lost my reading. I hoped in my confused way that they would believe that, just as I had been given the gift of reading, so it had been taken away. Finding me useless, they would send me home. George, however, was far subtler than me in the twisting and turning of such beliefs.

If it was a gift, he said, and I did not use it, God would punish me by taking my sight away. Still I was stubborn and when they gave me the Bible, nonsense came out of my mouth. So they locked me in and, as the light faded, so did my stubbornness. There had always been the light of stars and the moon in Poplar, however cloudy and dim.

As the dimness in the cellar faded to black, I believed I had gone blind. I screamed and yelled and threw myself about the cellar until they released me. Mr Black had forbidden George to lock me in again. Until now.

Now, exhausted, I tried to thrust what had happened then from my mind. I was a man now, I told myself. Had not Mr Black said so? I took some courage from his unexpected praise, going over and over it in my mind. The light would eventually come, filtering through the cracks in the ceiling.

I buried my face in my hands for what seemed an age. Rats whispered and scuttled. I opened my eyes, but it was still dark as pitch. We had worked long into the night. Surely the sun should have risen by now? Perhaps it had already risen! Nonsense, I told myself. God could scarcely be punishing me now for not reading – I read all the time. But then I was struck by a fresh panic. George had wished the same punishment on me for striking him. The panic mounted. Perhaps George was dead. Whatever there was of a man in me fled and I became that screaming child again, jumping up at the ceiling, tearing at the plaster with my nails.

The cellar was under the printing shop, thus isolated from the bedrooms. Even so, I thought Mr Black must hear me, however muffled. As I clenched my fists to hammer on the door, I heard a scratching sound. It came from under the door. More rats. Trying to get into the room. I stamped my foot down. There was a cry. I jumped back in terror. Not a rat – some kind of spirit, George’s spirit, muttering behind the door. Then the muttering became words.

‘Stupid Monkey!’

Never had that hateful word sounded so beautiful. ‘Anne?’

‘Be quiet, for God’s sake!’

‘Is George alive?’

‘Of course he’s alive – no thanks to you.’

‘Is it light?’

‘Can’t you see it’s not light, stupid? Why do you think I’ve brought you a candle?’

I thanked God as I caught the acrid smell of tallow. Bending low, I could just glimpse the faintest glimmer of yellow from a candle which she must have set down on the steps. She told me George had been bandaged and given a cordial to help him sleep as she pushed another unlit candle under the door. She followed this with a flint.

‘Thank you, Anne.’

‘Miss Black. And don’t thank me.’ Her voice was cold and brusque. ‘I only did it to stop you making such a row. Crying out like a baby in the dark.’

‘You would cry here.’

‘Indeed I would not!’ she said, with such contempt ringing in her whispered voice my cheeks burned.

The thin band of light under the door began to waver and disappear, like the will o’ the wisps dancing away on the marsh. My panic rushed back.

‘Wait – the flint is damp!’

‘You haven’t tried it.’

I scraped my boot against the wall. ‘Not a spark! Please, An— Miss Black. Give me a light from your candle. Under the door.’

The light, the blessed light under the door grew stronger. Prone on the floor, I could see the flame, tallow dribbling, glimpse her thin delicate fingers. The flame wavered and almost went out. She gave a little cry and I could hear her scrambling up, waiting until the flame grew again.

‘I cannot. There is a draught – it will go out.’

‘Are you afraid?’ I mocked, then quickly, as I heard her step away: ‘I’m sorry, Miss Black. Miss Black – is there a key in the lock?’

There was a silence. I felt I could see her there in a long willow-green nightgown which I had glimpsed before, a shawl wrapped round her shoulders, those thin fingers cupped round the flickering flame.

I tried to make my voice sound as weak and humble as possible. ‘Miss Black . . . it would be easier if you were to open the door a little.’

She laughed, the contempt coming back into her voice again. ‘Do you think I’m such a fool, Monkey?’

Now the word had its old, hateful ring. I only just stopped myself from flinging myself at the door in anger and frustration. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from shouting.

I did not understand how I could love her one moment and hate her so much the next. My hopes for her were as much a fable as looking in a mirror and pretending I was handsome. Add to the feet and the red hair my nose, sharp and inquisitive as a bird’s beak, and you have a pretty full picture. Only my eyes, large and black as ink, drew me any kind of attention – that and my use of words which, from hating when they tried to drum rhetoric and writing into me, I had grown to love.

‘Open the door?’ she mocked. ‘You’ve run away before.’

‘I will not!’ I cried out with a sudden passion which must have taken her with as much surprise as it took me. ‘I want to run away, but I cannot run away from you!’

‘What rubbish! What nonsense! How can I trust you? No one can trust you! My father says you have the devil in you. I pray for you every day.’

‘Do you?’

‘Ssshh.’

‘What is it?’

‘Be quiet!’

I became as still as the stone flags under my feet. I could hear nothing but the shuffling of rats and, distantly, the wind rattling the panes and the crack and creak of wood; the house, like the ships in the docks, always seemed to talk to itself at night.

‘Do you?’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘Pray for me.’

‘It is only Christian charity to do so,’ she said, quietly, earnestly. ‘To pray for a lost soul. To stop you from doing such things. Writing such things.’

Writing? She must mean a poem I had once dared to write to her. Had she read it? The thought, as unexpected as Mr Black’s praise, pricked my eyes with tears. The idea that she had taken any notice of me at all, except as a figure of fun and mockery, was a revelation.

‘Are you crying?’

‘No. Yes.’

‘Perhaps you are not quite lost, Monkey.’

Was there something softer in the mockery, or was it just my hope? There was no doubt about the sweetness of the next sound: the key turning in the lock. I sprang to open the door, but before I could do so the key turned back.

‘How can I open the door when you wrote such a poem to me?’

‘Did you read it?’

‘Indeed I did not. My father said it was full of such vileness –’

‘Vileness?’ I said hotly. ‘You think it’s vile to write: “The windows of thy soule –”’

‘Stop it!’

‘“That when they gaze, see not me –”’

‘I will not listen!’

I heard her going. The yellow glow from her candle under the door wavered and went. In that moment I did not care. It was the first thing I had ever written that said truly what I felt, and the words kept coming from my lips as though they had a life of their own.

‘“I know the windows of thy soule

That when they gaze see not me

but some strange Satyre. Perchance

One idle day, they may see

These stumbling lines of poetry.

And, from these clumsy words know

I have no hope of your love, only

Hope that my love for thee

May make your eyes see me.”’

The words had calmed me. Now the sounds, the shuffling of the rats, the drip of water crept back. And with them another sound, but outside. The barest glimmer of yellow light had reappeared under the door.

‘Anne? Miss Black?’

‘They were not the words my father said.’

‘I will show you them – you should have read them.’

‘I cannot read, you know that!’ There was anger and humiliation in her voice.

I did not know. I had often seen her with her Bible, going to church, or opening one of the books of Lovelace’s poetry we printed.

‘I will teach you.’

‘You!’ Now there was no mistaking the total contempt in her voice. ‘You copied that poem. You did not write that stupid jingle.’

‘I did!’

‘Liar,’ she mocked.

My anger burst out uncontrollably and I hammered wildly on the door. ‘I did and it’s not stupid and I love you and always will – God knows why!’

During this she tried to silence me, but it was only when I stopped I heard Mr Black’s grumbling distant voice followed by Mrs Black’s high-pitched tones.

‘There is someone!’

I heard him say, ‘It’s Tom. Let him hammer away,’ then mutter something. Mrs Black’s voice grew louder, sharper and more urgent. ‘I can hear people talking.’

Whatever Mr Black said was drowned in bad-tempered thumps and creaking of boards.

I had heard nothing in Anne’s voice before but lightness and mockery. Now her whisper was panic-stricken. ‘Oh God! He must not find me here.’

‘Go! Go now,’ I urged.

Her bedroom was off a landing one floor above Mr and Mrs Black’s. She might just make it. As the light of her candle vanished I heard a door open upstairs and a moment later she returned.

‘It’s too late. He’s coming downstairs.’

‘Open the door.’

She gave a little moan of fear. ‘No.’

‘Open it!’

I heard the key turn and pulled open the door. She was in her green nightgown, as I had pictured it. The rest I had never imagined. That wonderful hair was locked up in some loathsome nightcap. All her haughtiness and mockery had vanished and been replaced by this shivering drab, face as pale as the candle she was holding. I thought, when I wrote that poem, as youth does think, that I knew everything about love. I looked into her eyes, wild, darting like a fearful animal, and realised that I knew nothing, except that I loved her even more.

She looked more frightened than ever at the sight of me, and backed up the steps. I snatched the key out of the lock.

‘Who’s that?’ Mr Black called out. ‘Who’s there?’

Anne retreated back. I pulled her to me, clapping a hand over her mouth, afraid she would cry out. I whispered into her ear. ‘Stay – when you hear a noise in the shop, run back to your room.’

I snuffed her candle out, stifling her little cry of fear, and crept up the steps.

‘Who’s that?’ Mr Black repeated.

I heard the crack of a stair that was rotten, followed by Mr Black’s muttered curse, and knew he was nearly downstairs. I slipped into the kitchen as he entered the room, holding up his candle. Its light flickered towards me. I ducked behind a chair. From there I could see into the printing shop.

As Mr Black, candle in one hand, stick in the other, approached the stairs that led to the cellar, I flung the key into the shop. It hit the press and, by great good fortune, dislodged some of the drying pamphlets, the clips holding them clattering down.

‘Thieves!’ he yelled, setting the candle down and running into the shop. I went after him, ducking round the press, trying to get to the door, but he saw me and blocked my way. He drew back his stick. Whatever vague plan I had formed deserted me.

‘It’s you!’ he said. ‘How did you get out?’

‘Run!’ I shouted. ‘Run!’

‘Two of you are there!’

I dodged the first blow. He had his back to the kitchen and I glimpsed Anne’s petrified face as she emerged from the cellar steps.

‘I can handle two of you!’

Distracted by the sight of Anne, the next blow caught me and a third sent me to the floor.

‘Where’s the other? Who let you out?’

I flung my hands round my head, curling up into a submissive ball as I had done so many times before to receive his blows. Then the thought of him seeing Anne drove me to fight in a way I had not done since they first took me from Poplar. Through an aching, blurred mist I saw his legs, inches from me, grabbed them, and pulled. Off balance as he swung back his stick, he went down easily, a look of great astonishment on his face, hitting the floor with such a thud I thought the house must fall down.

I was at the door, fumbling with the key, before I realised he hadn’t moved, and there was no sound from him. I went back to him. Mr Black was still, his eyes closed. One wild thought after another chased through my head. I was in love. I had told her I loved her. And moments afterwards I had killed her father!

As I bent over him, his eyes shot open and he grabbed my wrist. He was a powerful man and I could not wrench away. I grabbed hold of the table to stop him from pulling me down. A chair clattered down.

‘Damn you!’ he panted, gasping for breath. ‘Would you –’

I thought his grip would break my wrist. He pressed his other hand on the floor to push himself up. Another moment and I would have fallen. I brought my boot down on the hand he was using as a lever at the same time as I saw Anne returning down the stairs into the kitchen, as if she had just awoken. A look of horror crossed her face as her father yelled in pain and released me. I tried to say something to her, but her father made another enraged grab at me and I ran for the door, pulling at the latch and was into Half Moon Court before he reached the door shouting after me.

‘Stop, you little fool – you’re in great danger! Come back! I must speak to you!’

I was about to run into Cloth Fair. I stopped and turned. I nearly went back. I wish I had. I hesitated, not because of what he shouted at me, for I took his warning to be yet more claptrap about the danger to my soul, and since hell could not be worse than that dark, rat-infested cellar I decided there and then I would take care of my own soul in future.

No, it was the look of horror on Anne’s face when I stamped on her father’s hand that cut me to the heart and made me hesitate. Mr Black walked towards me. The anger had left his face. On it was that troubled expression I had seen when, only a few hours ago, he had praised me.

I continued to hesitate as he approached. If I returned, what would I say to Anne? Explain? Explain what? Apologise? Why should I apologise? I had taken so many beatings and I was taking no more. Even so, I stood there, until he was nearly on me, for he was my master, and I respected him and thought him a good man. Unlike George, there was never malice in his beatings, which were done only to bend me to what he thought was right.

So I stood there, hypnotised by the dark eyes set among the powerful lines of his face. He was almost close enough to touch me when I saw, above the crooked jetty of the house, the first chinks of light in the night sky.

And in a rush it brought back that dark cellar, that terrified longing to see the first fissures of light in the plaster with such force I wrenched my gaze away from him and turned and ran.

He shouted something else, but I could no longer hear him. I ran down Cloth Fair and into Smithfield, where the first cattle were being driven into market. I threw away my apprentice’s blue hat, which would have marked me, and it was immediately lost among the trampling hooves. There were two herdsmen. I picked up a stick and became a third, as I had sometimes done as a small boy in Poplar.

And that stick with which I prodded the cattle’s swaying rumps, and the light edging into the night sky over the great open space of the market, as I had so often seen it over the docks with half-open eyes as Matthew and I stumbled down to the yard, filled me with an overwhelming, aching desire to go home.

Chapter 5

I wish with all my heart I had got back sooner to Poplar, but I dared not go the direct way through Aldgate for fear it would be watched.

I was not only breaking my bond; the very clothes on my back and the boots on my feet belonged to Mr Black. The first time I had run away, a month after I had been there, I had been swiftly caught and it had been dinned into me that I was stealing the clothes I wore, for which I could be thrown into Newgate.

Instead of going east, which I am sure they expected, I struck out for the river, with the vague hope of persuading a waterman to take me. At Blackfriars Stairs they laughed or shook their heads. But further downstream a waterman was repairing his boat, which was badly holed. I helped him, boiling pitch as I used to and caulking the boat. I slept in his hut where the fog crept in like an old friend, for I was used to it at home, rising from the marsh and making the opposite river bank disappear.

He paid me in bread, dried ling and eel, and a seaman’s cap and torn jacket with which he had plugged one of the holes in his boat. The cap and tattered jacket helped conceal my uniform until I eventually made my way to Poplar High Street. The fog blurred the houses into soft, indistinct shapes, and deadened footsteps so, as with increasing excitement I neared our old house, I almost walked into a woman, mumbling an apology as I skirted past her.

‘Tom!’

She was so swathed in clothes, with a scarf round her face, it was her voice I identified as that of our neighbour. ‘Mother Banks –’

I went to embrace her but her tone of voice stopped me. ‘I prayed you would come!’

‘Why? Is my mother not well?’

‘Don’t you know? Dear Lord help us!’

She looked down the street. Following her gaze I saw, among the blurred line of houses, one that stuck out like a broken tooth. I ran. The door hung open. The houses next to it appeared to have suffered little damage.

The roof of our house was still intact, but the windows were gaping holes, the wood round them blackened. I pushed at the partly open door, and an acrid, damp smell filled my nose. Timber from a half-burned beam crumbled under my feet as I went into Susannah’s room where she lived and slept. I heard Mother Banks behind me.

‘I’m sorry, Tom. She died in the fire.’

I turned and she held me close to her.

‘What happened?

She told me that, in the middle of the night, she had been awaken ed by shouting and had smelt smoke. By the time Mother Banks got there, neighbours had managed to get water to it, for the streets were so ramshackle there had been several fires and they had butts of water in the alley. People thought it was a candle Susannah had left burning when she went to sleep. The fire must have been going for some time before the neighbours awoke, for Susannah was overcome by the smoke.

I found the iron kettle she always had on the fire, and a twisted pewter candlestick that she had been proud of, for no reason I could think of.

‘If it was not for the men staying here, it would have been much worse.’

I dropped the candlestick. ‘Men? What men?’

‘Lodgers.’

‘Sailors?’

‘Susannah said they were from the docks. They said the shipwright sent them.’

‘What were they like?’

‘I never saw them, what with the smoke and everything. They were there just for that night. They dragged Susannah out. They went as soon as the fire was put out.’

‘When was this?’

‘Wednesday.’

The day after I ran from Half Moon Court. I scrambled up what remained of the stairs. The landing where I used to sleep was secure, the room Susannah rented out scorched but relatively undamaged. And the roof, which normally caught quickly in these fires, spreading them rapidly, was scarcely touched.

I returned downstairs.

‘It looks as though it started down here. You were lucky.’

‘Yes. I thanked the Lord.’ Mother Banks clasped her hands. ‘Near the church, two whole streets went up recently. We were lucky the men acted so quickly.’

I walked round the room where Susannah had slept, and where most of the damage was. King James had said he found London ‘built of sticks’ and wanted to leave it ‘built of bricks’, but had stopped at the eastern suburbs where the marsh would not support such houses. The builders rushing up the houses for new dock workers had daubed between the timbers a mess of mortar and rags that in a fire rapidly crumbled away. The debris crunched beneath our feet as the damp fog swirled round us from the street.

I picked up the candlestick again, turning the twisted stem round and round in my fingers. I remembered once trying to sneak upstairs with it so I could read after everyone had gone to sleep. It was the only time I had ever seen her angry.

I shook my head. ‘Susannah wouldn’t have left the candle alight.’

She pressed my hand gently. ‘She must have done, Tom.’

I pulled away from her, flinging the candlestick away. ‘I don’t believe it!’

She was frightened by the sudden violence, exploding out of a mixture of anger, bewilderment and grief. So was I. I couldn’t stop shaking. Two men. The day after I had run away. Thinking the obvious thing, that I would come straight to Poplar. Finding not me, but my mother.

‘Where is she?’

‘Buried. Yesterday. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Come with me.’

I was like a child again, going from sudden violence to uncontrollable weeping. She led me to her house, murmuring that weeping would make me feel better, but I did not believe it, did not believe it would ever be so. First to lose Matthew, for I was convinced then I would never see him again, and now Susannah . . .

Mother Banks had little coal so I went back to the wreckage of our house and foraged for pieces of half-burnt timber. Outside, the clinging, yellow fog was now so thick a muffled ship’s bell rang insistently, for any ship which had not sought shelter must be travelling dead slow. She built up the fire and heated up some pottage, which first I refused to eat, but once I started swallowed greedily.

The empty plate was slipping from my fingers. I felt her gently taking it from me.

‘She would not . . . leave a . . . candle lit . . .’ I muttered stubbornly.

‘Susannah had changed. She was not as you knew her.’

‘Changed?’

‘Ssshh. Go to sleep.’

‘How changed?’ I mumbled.

‘She turned preacher.’

‘A woman preacher!’

I smiled. This was the sort of story I loved in pamphlets, the sort you knew could not be true but wanted to be true, the sort that people bought for a penny or two and repeated over fires like this until many people believed it. The sort of story to fall asleep over. But this one jerked me awake, staring at Mother Banks with amazement.

Susannah had stopped going to Mr Ingram at St Dunstan’s, going instead to an independent minister where they prayed in silence until a person was inspired to speak. Most of the women were short on words, and looked to the minister, as a man, for guidance; but it appeared that Susannah had what he said was the gift of tongues. She rose to her feet and held the room spellbound as her words rang round it.

She said the great tumult in London stirred up by Parliament was the Second Coming. Christ had been born again, not in a stable this time, but in a plague pit. She claimed to have been a witness to it, speaking in a strange muddle of Bible stories and things that she claimed had happened to her. Oxford became Bethlehem and King Charles Herod.

People began to come from the surrounding parishes to hear her, even those who thought she was mad, for a strange voice came out of her, and some actually believed her prophecies, that Christ was being plotted against all over again.

‘What did you think of what she said, Mother?’ I asked.

She hesitated. ‘At first I thought it was hunger.’

‘Hunger?’

‘She fasted. She took nothing for days but small beer. Then . . .’ She hesitated again. A log settled and threw a flickering light on her face. ‘She spoke in riddles, like the Bible. She said you be her child, and not her child.’

I laughed. ‘What does that mean?’

The flickering flame died and her face was in darkness. ‘There was one child who was his mother’s, and not his mother’s,’ she said.

I stopped laughing and stared at her. Her hands were clasped together and her face came into the light again. ‘I prayed so much for you to come! And when you came out of the fog like that . . . I thought . . . for a moment . . .’

I took her hands and shook my head, unable to speak for I was so overwhelmed by the faith and the hope in her face.

‘You are not . . . He that is to come?’

She stretched out a hand to touch my face, and I took it and kissed it and now I could not help smiling and laughing.

‘No, no, Mother Banks, I’m sorry, but thank you – I am much more often mistook for the devil! But I’m neither, I hope. I am the same old Tom, Tom Neave, hands black as ever, look – but with ink now, not pitch!’

I hugged her and she laughed with me, for we both needed some laughter on that gloomy day. She laughed with relief as much as anything else, for she had a practical bent like me; yet I felt there was a tinge of regret and I saw again the narrow line between the stories we tell one another and believing them to be true.

When I finally fell asleep that night in front of the dying fire, Susannah’s riddle spun round and round in my head. Her child and not her child. For the first time I began to ask questions I should have put to myself long before.

Had I not too easily believed stories I had told myself? That Mr Black, for instance, had apprenticed me for no other reason than that he had heard of my miraculous gift for reading?

A bitter eastern wind sprang up during the night and cleared the fog. Mother Banks took me to St Dunstan’s and showed me the unmarked plot where Susannah was buried. It was in a neglected corner where the wind cut across the marsh. It bent the trees in one direction while the church, from the settlement of the land, leaned in the other. There were no stones and the grass was rank and uncut, except for the new grave.

At least it had the open view of the marsh which I loved, where the land, patches of flood water gleaming, mingled with the tumbling grey sky. I felt tears coming again and fell on my knees and tried to pray, but kept thinking about the two men and the fire.

We marked the spot with a little cairn of stones, and I vowed to return one day and have a proper stone made.

‘Did anything happen that evening before the fire?’ I asked, as we walked back.

‘Nothing. Well . . .’ She hesitated.

‘Go on.’

‘When I went out to the privy, I heard Susannah shouting and screaming.’

‘Did you knock on her door?’

‘No.’ She swallowed nervously. ‘I was frightened. You don’t know what she was like, Tom. She would stand up at a meeting and shout that the Lord had come to her!’

‘Is that what she was shouting then?’

‘No, no, no. I can’t remember. Well, I heard her shout, “God knows I don’t know where he is!” Then there was silence. I thought she was calling out in her sleep.’

There was the skeleton of a new ship in the dry dock, but no men working on it when I went there after leaving the graveyard. I passed some pitch, frozen in a bucket, on my way to the shipwright’s office.

He exclaimed at the size of me, saying he used to look down at me and now had to look up; and would not have recognised me but for my red flare of hair and the jutting prow of my nose. He took it I had returned because of the death of Susannah and I said nothing about the breaking of my bond, but there was an edginess about his greeting, as if he suspected something. He had a bad leg, and at the sound of a footfall outside from one of the few workers in the yard, he limped quickly to the door to see who it was, as though he was afraid of some unwelcome visitor.

Most of the workers had drifted away to find other work, he told me. After the keel of the ship outside had been laid down, the money had run out. Three gentlemen had shares in the boat. When one had been imprisoned for debt, the others had refused to pay until they could replace the shareholder. Until the arguments between King and Parliament were settled, he said, all business was marooned, like the skeleton of the ship which was slowly beginning to rot.

I asked him who the sailors were who had stayed with Susannah that night.

‘Sailors?’ He shook his head. ‘Weren’t sailors. Boatman brought them from the City. They said they were friends of yours. Hoped they might find you here.’

‘Did you believe them?’

He spat and went to the window again. ‘Wouldn’t have them aboard ship,’ he said. ‘One looked like a soldier.’ He spat again. ‘Or had been. He had a long face. Wore a beaver hat. The other I wouldn’t like to argue with. Said they were helping you find your father.’

‘Matthew? What did you tell them?’

‘Same as I told the other man that came looking for him, soon after he vanished.’

‘What other man?’

For the first time he looked at me directly. ‘In trouble, are you?’

I said nothing.

He hesitated, then went on. ‘I told them and the other man that Matthew was looking for a berth on a boat to Hull, or maybe a coal boat back to Newcastle.’

‘Is that where he went?’

He looked at me searchingly, spat again, then moved some charts from a stool and told me to sit down. He took down a flask from the same shelf on which stood the bottle of London Treacle they gave me the day I burnt myself with pitch, and I remembered the strange dream of the old gentleman bending over me that day as I slept in this very room.

‘How’s your scar?’ he asked.

I showed him the discoloured, slightly puckered flesh. He looked at it almost approvingly as he shoved to one side of his desk drawings of ships that might be, or might never be, and poured a dark brown liquid from the flask.

‘You’ll have a few of those before you’re done.’

I coughed as I swallowed the fiery brown liquid and tears came to my eyes. This seemed to put him in better humour.

‘And a few of those.’

He swallowed what he said was the best Dutch brandy-wine, duty paid (a wink), poured himself another and stared out at the half-finished boat in the silent dock.

‘Matthew stood here, the day you went. He wanted to go down and say goodbye. He heard you shout “Father” and he very nearly went down then. But he was too frightened.’

‘Where did he go?’

He pointed at the river. ‘He went upstream, not down, the day after you left – the very next tide. I got him a berth in a barge. I heard him say he wanted to be dropped off somewhere between Maidenhead and Reading. I’ve no idea where he was going from there, but he reckoned it was a day’s travel, by the green road, whatever that means.’

I embraced him. ‘Thank you, thank you! You said there was another man came looking for Matthew. Just after he vanished. Who was that?’

The shipwright gave me something between a shake and a shudder. ‘I never seen him before, and I’m not very particular about seeing him again. Told me where to send knowledge of Matthew, but I never had no knowledge to send him, did I?’

During this he rummaged in a drawer amongst old charts and tidal tables until he unearthed a slip of paper. The hand was crabbed and uneven, with short, angry downstrokes that dug into the paper; the hand of a man who had learned to write later in life and with difficulty, and with many loops and flourishes designed to display his status. He had written: R. E. Esq., at Mr Black, Half Moon Court, Farringdon, London.

The shipwright did not know who R.E. Esq was, but said he had a scar on his face, drawing a line from cheek to neck, exactly as Matthew had done when he had warned me about the scarred man over the camp fire six years ago.

Before I was out of the door he was pouring himself another brandy. I was halfway down the steps when he shouted:

‘Wait! All that talk and I nearly forgot . . .’

Again he rummaged in a drawer, then another, muttering to himself before finally unearthing a coin. ‘Matthew said it was yours, not his.’

It touched me to the heart when I thought that my father, even in such a panic, and when he must have needed all the money he had, had left me what he could. ‘Mine?’

‘Belonged to thee. That’s what he said.’

Puzzled, I took the coin from him, turning it over and over, as if I could read some message from the inscriptions. But it was a silver half crown, like any other, showing the King on a charger.

Chapter 6

They – whoever they were – would find me if I stayed in Poplar. So I did what I judged they would not expect. Like Dick Whittington, I turned again, walking back towards the City.

I would find out who they were, the men who, I was convinced, had killed my mother. Try and find the answer to the questions that whirled endlessly in my head like so many angry bees. Why had Mr Black taken me on as an apprentice? What was his connection to the man with the scar?

The man who could answer these questions, or most of them, was Mr Black.

The wind was driving dark, scudding clouds over the marsh when I set off next morning, after spending a second night at Mother Banks’s. I reached the outskirts of the City at midday. There I stopped. I would not get far in my apprentice’s uniform, and the seaman’s jaunty scrap of a cap barely concealed my red hair.

Just inside the City I found the kind of market I needed. From Irish Mary at a second-hand clothing stall I bought thin britches – because they had bows that tied at the knee, which I fondly imagined to be the height of fashion – and traded my give-away apprentice’s boots for a pair of shoes with fancy buckles like those ‘worn at court’, she said. A leather jacket tempted me, and I drew out the coin Matthew had left for me. She bit it, saying it was not only a good one, but one of the first to be minted.

‘How can you tell that?’

‘See? On the rim there – the lys?’

Her long fingernail pointed to a tiny fleur-de-lys, above the King’s head. She said the mint mark showed that it was coined in 1625, the year of the King’s Coronation.

‘About as old as you are,’ she cackled.

An unaccountable shiver ran through me; the sort of shiver that used to make Susannah ask: ‘Has someone walked over thy grave, Tom?’

Matthew had told the shipwright it was mine and I took it back, turning it round and round between my fingers, feeling that perhaps it was a magic coin and, if I spent it, I would be spending part of my past. I reluctantly took off the expensive jacket, and put the coin back in my pocket. Instead I bought what she called a Joseph, perhaps after the coat of many colours, although these colours were those of various leather patches that held it together, larded with grease and other stains I did not care to question. At another stall I exchanged my apprentice’s knife for a saw-tooth dagger. The upper part of the blade was lined with teeth that would catch the tempered blade of any sword and snap it.

The City looked different. Cornhill was swept clean. In spite of drizzling rain, groups of scavengers were out in Poultry, throwing household filth, dead birds and a dead dog into their carts. They did not argue, as they usually did, that a pile of refuse was ‘over the line’ in the other’s ward, or, when the other cart was out of sight, dump it over the boundary. Planks were being laid so that coaches would not get stuck in the muddy streets. A group of men were arguing fiercely outside St Stephen, Walbrook, where the bells were ringing. I asked one man what o’clock it was and what was the service? He told me it was four of the clock and there was no service. They were practising the bells for the King.

‘The King?

I stared at him stupidly. ‘Do you not know? The King has set up a government with the Scots. He arrives tomorrow from Edinburgh to talk to Parliament.’

To talk to Parliament! I stood there, stunned. The King was going to listen to Parliamentary demands! I walked away in a dream. I felt that what Mr Ink had said was coming true, and we were on the brink of a new world.

It was beginning to grow dark, but it was too early to find Will, my drinking companion, in the Pot. I hoped to beg a bed from him. Once, when it had been too late to return to Half Moon Court after a heated debate, I had slept in his father’s tobacco warehouse. I made my way towards the red kites, which always dipped and soared above Smithfield in the evening, searching, like the poor, for what the butchers had thrown away. In Long Lane I stopped. When I ran from Half Moon Court, Mr Black had shouted that I was in great danger. Just words to entice me back? Or a genuine warning? I seemed to recall a note of real desperation in his voice. I still carried my apprentice’s uniform, rolled in a bundle. I turned it over and over in my hands, unable to admit to myself that the bond between us was quite broken.

From Half Moon Court came the sound of horses. A voice I did not recognise was shouting brusque commands.

A woman with a boy and girl running round her skirts came out of the market clutching a bloody bundle in a scarf, full of high spirits at finding their evening meal. The girl had a battered wooden toy and the boy tried to grab it. The girl ran from him into the street just as a Hackney hell-cart came out of Cloth Fair into Long Lane.

The boy stopped short, but the girl stood frozen in front of the approaching cart. The driver, who was riding one of the two horses, pulled frantically at the reins. The horse he was on responded but the other reared, dragging the coach forward at an angle towards the child. The child stared upwards at the rearing horse, wonder rather than fear on her face. The woman was screaming.

A man in the coach shouted, his voice cut off as he was thrown against the side. The flailing hooves were descending towards the child. Only then did she turn to run.

I flung my uniformed bundle at the horse’s head. The horse shied away, whinnying frantically, falling against the other horse, hooves coming down inches from the girl as I snatched her up.

I stood there holding her while the driver struggled to calm the panic-stricken horses. I was shaking, but she seemed unmoved.

‘Horse,’ she said, stretching her hand out to the animal the driver was preparing to remount.

‘Horse,’ I agreed, stroking her hair. ‘Horse.’

Her mother, sobbing with relief, was moving towards us when the curtain in the coach slid back. All I could see was the scar. A livid scar running from cheek to neck. The man had twisted round in his seat, and the scar seemed to be doing the cursing, swearing at me.

Petrified, I gripped the little girl to me. My hat had come off, and it was still light enough for him to see me. But he was righting himself, cursing and rubbing his head where he struck it.

He turned towards me. I glimpsed fine linen and eyes as cold as money. Before he could see my face I lifted the little girl high in the air, dandling her up and down in front of me to conceal my red hair. She squealed in delight.

‘Are you trying to get your children killed? One less mouth to feed?’

I felt all the fear and hatred that I had heard in my father’s voice when he had spoken of the man. And anger that there was not a trace of concern for the child or her mother. An almost uncontrollable urge filled me to pull him from the coach. Then the woman spoke:

‘I am sorry, sir. I am truly sorry. It is my fault.’

Hearing the beseeching, pleading note in her voice, taking all the blame when the coach was travelling so recklessly, I could stand it no longer. I handed her the child and walked up to the coach.

But he had turned away with a grudging satisfaction at her apology and was now shouting at the driver, who, with some difficulty, had quietened the horses. ‘Come on, come on, man! I must get to Westminster before dark.’

He shut the curtain. The driver scuttled for his whip, cracked it and the carriage lurched off. I stood there, staring after it. Although there was a chill in the evening air, my body crawled with sweat at how near I had come to giving myself away. There was a timid touch at my elbow. The woman was holding out the scarf, which wrapped the bloody remains she had scavenged. I felt a double pang: that she should offer me her supper, and that I could look as if I needed it. She whispered something to the little girl.

‘Thank you,’ the girl said.

I smiled, moved to gallantly sweep off my hat and bow, discovered the hat was not there, affected great surprise, which drew a giggle from the girl and a smile from the woman, and could not seem to find it although it lay in front of my eyes, which drew peals of laughter from the girl.

‘It’s there!’

‘Where?’

‘There!’

This welcome little game was interrupted by a familiar voice.

‘What’s going on?’

George had come out of Half Moon Court. He still had a plaster on his head where I had struck him, but his darting eyes seemed as sharp as ever. I turned away, retrieving my hat. The woman told him what had happened. All that seemed to concern him was that the coach and its occupant had gone. I moved to pick up my uniform, torn and muddied by the wheels of the coach. I felt his eyes on me, but then I heard Anne’s voice.

‘George, are you going?’

My heart lifted. If only I could speak to her before her father!

‘I must get my coat,’ George said. ‘It’s a chill evening.’

‘Please hurry!’

‘All right, all right,’ he muttered.

He gave me another curious look. I bent and picked up a rotting apple from the sewer, which seemed to satisfy him I was a beggar, for he went back into the court. Under the overhanging jetties it was darker and easy to follow him, keeping to the shadows of the opposite building. Although my new shoes leaked, they made less noise than the clumsy boots. Candles were lit in the house. The last of the light always came into my window in the evening, and I could see the edge of my mother’s Bible on the sill.

At least, I determined, I would take that away.

Anne came to the doorway. She wore a pale-blue, high-waisted dress which I knew to be her best, presumably for the benefit of the visitor. Over that she had put on an apron. She carried George’s coat. He seemed to take an interminable time putting it on, during which he shook his head gravely before finally coming to a decision to speak.

‘What has happened to Mr Black is God’s visitation on you, Miss Anne,’ he said.

She looked at him in terror. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you know,’ he said steadily.

‘Indeed I do not! Please go for the doctor.’

I stared up at the window of Mr Black’s bedroom. In the wavering candlelight I could just see Mrs Black passing restlessly by the bed, peering out of the window.

George stopped buttoning his coat, glanced up at the window, not speaking until Mrs Black had passed out of sight. ‘You let the devil out of the cellar,’ he said softly.

‘I did no such thing!’ Her voice was equally low, but sharp and contemptuous, as if it was the last thing in the world she would dream of doing.

‘I saw you.’

‘I came down when I heard the disturbance.’

‘I saw you going up.’

There was a trace of uncertainty in his voice which she leapt on. ‘You cannot have done. You make too much of yourself. Get the doctor!’

Perhaps he was lying and merely suspected. Or had seen something, but, groggy after my blow, could not be sure. At any rate, he began to move away reluctantly, and my heart went out to her for standing up to him.

All would have been well, but then she added bitterly: ‘You should have let him have a candle.’

She knew what she had said as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He stopped and turned very slowly. As he did so I caught the smile of satisfaction on his face. It vanished as he looked at her with grave concern.

‘How did you know about the candle?’

She gave a little moan. ‘Please go.’

‘Mr Black needs more than a doctor to cure him. We must root out the cause of the illness: your sin.’

He spoke so solemnly, so gravely, I had to struggle against the feeling that he was right, had been right all the time, and that the devil was within me. When George and Mr Black had first brought me here from Poplar, before the boat bumped against Blackfriars Stairs, had I not sworn a pact with him to be as evil as possible?

‘You must confess,’ George demanded.

She staggered. I thought she was going to faint.

‘I cannot tell my father – it would kill him!’

‘Then you must confess to God.’

‘Yes, yes. You will not tell my father?’

‘If you are good, child, and accept my guidance.’

She nodded perfunctorily, turning away. I could see she was on the edge of tears. ‘Please go now.’

He was insistent. ‘You will? Accept my guidance?’

‘Yes!’

He smiled. ‘God be praised! The sinner repenteth!’

He took her hands and began murmuring a prayer. At first she submitted, head bowed, but when she tried to take her hands away he only held them more tightly, murmuring away. Half a dozen times I nearly broke out of that doorway. Half a dozen times I forced myself back until suddenly I no longer cared whether he was pure good and I was pure evil. I jumped out.

‘Leave her! Leave her alone!’

Nothing George had said could have made his point better. For a moment I must have looked like some foul spirit coming out of the ground. Anne screamed and backed away to the door. George ran. ‘Anne!’ Mrs Black shouted from upstairs. ‘What is it? Has George gone for the doctor?’

There was no sign of him. ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

Guilt drove me: I felt that Mr Black’s illness was my fault. And breaking a bond is not just a matter of throwing away a uniform and selling boots. I went because I could not get out of my head it was no longer my job. Several times a year Mr Black had these strange attacks. He would stop what he was doing and stare at me like a blind man. Once, he dropped back on his chair, missed it, and fell to the floor. The first time I was very frightened, but Mrs Black drummed into me that when he had one of these attacks I must run and fetch Dr Chapman, for my master’s life depended on it.

The doctor practised near St Bartholomew’s in Little Britain but, luckily, was returning from a patient only two streets away. He was a bustling little man, of great good humour.

When I first met him I had told him I hated my hair; he offered to cup me for nothing, in the light of the discoveries of Mr Harvey, who declared that blood circulated and nourished everything. If enough was taken, he said, it might drain the colour from my hair. I thought he was serious and backed away hastily, at which he burst out into roars of laughter.

Now he said slyly, as we hurried back to Half Moon Court: ‘I like your court dress, Tom. Are you to be presented to the King tomorrow?’

He went upstairs laughing, but that soon died. I always knew from the sound of his voice how serious the attack was. Now his greeting and his banter dwindled almost immediately into silence. There was no sign of George or Anne. It was very quiet, apart from the murmurings of the doctor, and the occasional creaks when he moved across the floor above me. There was no chance of my confronting Mr Black, but I might get my Bible.

I opened the door to the kitchen, where a kettle was heating by the side of the fire. I crept to the bottom of the stairs; from there I could see that the door to Mr Black’s bedroom was closed. There was the faint clink of metal against a basin. I had watched Dr Chapman cup him once. After tightening a bandage round Mr Black’s arm he would warm a lancet in the candle flame and draw it across a bulging vein. After a spurt of blood there would be a steady flow. It would take about ten minutes.

I took a step or two up the stairs. A shadow fell across the small landing above. I glimpsed the edge of Mrs Black’s dress and pulled back against the wall. Never able to stand the blood-letting, she had gone into her own room. Anne was probably with her.

I stood indecisively. I could see straight through to the print shop, and beyond that to Mr Black’s small office. The door, normally locked, was open. Papers littered the writing desk and the floor around it. A chair had been knocked over. I took a candle from the kitchen and went past the printing press into the office. Mr Black must have been working here when he had the attack.

As I picked up the chair I saw it: a bound black accounts book, of the type Mr Black used to keep a note of deliveries of ink and paper, and sales of pamphlets. But on the cover of this one was inked a single letter T.

Whatever I hoped to see when I opened it, it was not dull accounts. But there they were in Mr Black’s neat hand, items of purchase and columns of figures.

I flicked through the pages rapidly. There was my life in Half Moon Court, from the cost of the watermen that had brought me here and the tutorials with Dr Gill, down to the very bread and cheese I had eaten, faithfully recorded right to the last halfpenny. I stopped as a word which seemed out of place with the others half-registered in the turning pages: portrait. Portrait?

I turned back, to see an entry whose amount dwarfed all the others.

8 August 1635. Paid to P. Lely. Portrait in oils & frame. £20-0-0.

I had had no portrait done. The very idea was laughable. Only people at court had their pictures painted. No. That was not quite true. Each Lord Mayor had his portrait painted and hung in the Guildhall. I went very still.

The summer of 1635 I had taken a message to the clerk in the Guildhall and been told to wait for a reply. While I was in the waiting room a young man wandered in. His smock and hands were daubed with paint. He spoke with a thick Dutch accent and said the Mayor had gone out to a meeting, and he too was waiting for him.

He pushed my face to one side so he could see the profile and grunted something in Dutch. He said he was tired of painting old men who wanted to look young and dashing, and as an exercise he would really like someone young and dashing to sketch.

I was flattered and amazed by the incredible speed with which he sketched. By the time the clerk came with the reply, and to say that the Mayor was ready again, the painter had caught me like a bird in flight. A grin. A sulk when I grew bored with him. In profile. Staring with wide eyes straight out of the paper.

As the charcoal flew across the paper he grunted, ‘The eyes you have. The nose. Everything but the hair.’

‘What do you mean?’

He seemed too absorbed in the next sketch to answer. ‘Turn. No no – the other way!’

I begged him for a sketch but he said he needed them all. ‘Perhaps the painting you may one day see, mmm?’

He smiled, patting me on the cheek, leaving traces of charcoal and paint which I left there until they disappeared.

Peter – that was his name. I stared at the account book: P. Lely. Peter Lely. Perhaps Mr Black had commissioned him to do a portrait of himself. No. No printer could afford it, and if he could he would surely hang it prominently. Somebody had paid for a picture of me. But who? Why? And where was it?

I heard sounds upstairs; the doctor’s deep voice and Mrs Black’s low murmuring answer. Quickly I riffled through the remaining pages. A folded piece of paper, which I supposed was used as a marker, flew out of the book. I picked it up and placed it on the table. There was nothing of interest in the rest of the accounts, but there was a whole new section at the end. Mr Black had turned the book upside down to start the section on the last page. It was a cross between a diary and a tutor’s report on my progress, or lack of it.

I was ‘obstinate as a mule’. ‘Bright but uncontrollable.’ One day there was ‘a glimmer of hope’, the next total despair – ‘I would have him on the boat back to Poplar if I could.’

It was soon clear that these were notes for more carefully worded reports, for there was the draft of one of them, pulling together various amended notes. Written two months ago, it declared: ‘Mr Tom hath the Latin of a scholar, I have taught him a good Italian hand, he can use a fork at table, but his morality must still be called seriously into question.’

Mr Black got reports from Dr Gill. Why did he need to write these? They must be for the same person who commissioned the portrait. The accounts book answered at least some of the questions that had been plaguing me. Someone had paid Mr Black to have me educated and apprenticed; either the man with the scar, or, more likely, the kindly old gentleman Matthew had told me he represented.

Remembering the piece of paper I had picked up, I unfolded it. It was part of a letter, written on a different paper, a thick quality paper, and the hand was very different. Mr Black was proud of his hand, the simple sloping penmanship of a businessman, without flourishes, essential for something that might have to be read quickly in a dim light or a swaying carriage.

This was written in an erratic, angular hand, liberally sprinkled with capitals and with thick upstrokes and downstrokes that cut into the surrounding lines and made the words so difficult to read I had to move the paper closer to the candle. The paper was that of a gentleman, possibly one who had a scrivener to write his letters for him. I could see why he had not dictated this one.

It was a page from a longer letter:

. . . means that he now looks at the boy in a different way. He sees him as a great Folie who must be got rid of. Perhaps a Taverne brawl or some similar kind of ACCIDENT.

He has men for the purpose, who have been given a likeness and of course the boy’s hair stands out like a beacon.

This matter will bring me to London sooner than I intended, but meanwhile re the accounts you sent me . . .

The page ended with some minute dissections of the cost of paper and ink. I searched frantically among the papers for the preceding page, but could find nothing. In spite of what had happened to me, I could not believe I had read the words right, and, hands trembling so much I almost singed the paper with the candle, began to decipher every word of that page again.

‘What are you doing?’

It was Anne, holding the kettle. I was so still, so intent on those scrawled words, she must have taken the kettle from the fire and been on her way back to the stairs before she saw me.

‘Somebody is trying to kill me.’

The words came out of my mouth lame and halting, marked with disbelief in spite of the evidence in front of me. But I must have looked so rigid with shock that she came up to me, concern on her face.

‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.

‘Look –’

I showed her the letter. I had forgotten she could not read. In a panic I gabbled that somebody had paid to make something of me, and now that I had failed had decided to get rid of me. It must have sounded a great nonsense, for she pulled away with alarm.

‘You’re mad!’

‘Look –’

Even though she could not read them, I tried to show her the patterns the words made, in the vain hope that she would see the madness, the evil, in the blotches, the sword-like downstrokes.

‘Anne!’ Mrs Black called. ‘The water must have boiled by now.’

There was the creak of a door opening upstairs. ‘Get out,’ Anne hissed.

‘I’m not mad,’ I whispered. ‘You must believe me!’

We heard her on the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Is that George?’

‘No, Mother,’ Anne shouted back. ‘The water’s just boiled. I’m coming.’ To me she whispered: ‘George has gone for the constable. Stay – if you want to be arrested.’

It was only when she went that I thought of my Bible. I hurried to call her back, but she was already halfway up the stairs. I folded the letter and put it into my pocket. I went to the door and listened. It was silent in the yard, but towards the river there was the sound of rioting, in the direction of Westminster. I hoped that would make it difficult for George to find his constable.

After a minute or so Anne returned to refill the kettle. The pail in the kitchen was empty. Ignoring me, she went to the pail in the yard we normally washed in. I followed her, taking the pail from her, doing what I had done so many times, drawing my fingers over the water, breaking the thin film of ice already forming on it. I ached for normality, and the everyday action calmed us both. I dipped a jug in the water and poured it into the kettle.

‘How is Mr Black?’

‘He cannot speak.’

I was stunned. Water flowed over the top of the kettle as she pulled it away. I stared up at the window, where I could see the elongated shadow of the doctor move across the wall.

‘I am sorry.’

‘You struck him,’ she said, accusingly.

‘He struck me!’

‘It is his right.’

‘When it is just. George taking the candle was not just.’

We had instinctively drawn away from the house, into the shadows of the tree where, for that brief period, we used to play as children. ‘I should never have let you out! George knows.’

‘Don’t trust him.’

‘I must.’

She began to move back to the house.

‘If he meant well by you, he would tell your father.’

She stopped. She was now in the light, and I could see that her hands, which she twisted together constantly, were white with cold. I longed to touch them, to take them in my hands, but dare not. There was a trace of the old mockery in her voice.

‘And I can trust you?’

‘Yes!’

I spoke with a ferocity that made her jump with fear, but then she gave me back a look of such intensity I wanted to lower my eyes but could not, or dare not. It seemed to go into my very soul in a way no preacher, nor my mother and father had ever done.

‘Did you write that poem?’

‘Yes – and meant every word of it.’

Everything at that moment was as sharp and clear as the moonlight on the splinters of ice I had broken in the pail. She stared back at me, trembling, but before she could speak there was the sound of someone turning into the court from Cloth Fair. At the same time I saw her mother coming to the window. I jumped into the shadows.

It was the pewterer who lived opposite. His clothes were usually dusty with the chalk shed by the plates and mugs when he took them from the mould, but now they were clean. For him, like the shipwright, business had dried up.

His gait was unsteady. He scarcely gave Anne a glance. ‘Goodnight, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Goodnight, Anne.’

Mrs Black had withdrawn from the window. The intensity of the moment had gone. Neither of us spoke. She picked at her apron. Suddenly she put a hand to her mouth to smother laughter.

‘What do you look like!’

‘Well, I think,’ I said stiffly, with a stab of indignation, yet with a feeling of relief that we were back on the familiar ground of mocking banter.

I displayed my shoe. In the dim light the gap where the upper was parting from what was left of the sole could scarcely be seen, and I thought it had a particularly fine buckle.

‘This shoe has been presented at court.’

‘Which court?’ She struggled to stop giggling. ‘James or Elizabeth?’

She could not contain her laughter and I was frightened they would hear her. ‘I had to change my clothes!’

‘As people do in your pamphlets?’ she mocked. ‘Because someone is trying to kill you?’

A movement in the window drew our eyes upwards. The candles in the room threw a wavering silhouette on the wall of Dr Chapman fastening his bag. Time and again, I find, ideas come out of desperation.

‘You know your numbers?’ I whispered urgently.

‘Of course,’ she said indignantly.

Without another word I grabbed her hand and ran her into the house. Water splashed from the kettle and she almost dropped it. I took it from her and put it down. Now she looked convinced I was mad, was ready to scream. I went into the office, picked up the accounts book and pointed out the letter T, which I think she understood.

And, as I whispered the names of the purchases, she with increasing bewilderment in her face scanned the numbers. She knew some of her letters by stitching them and her numbers by shopping. We heard the bedroom door opening upstairs. I almost dropped the book, then could not find what I was looking for. She was begging me silently to go, her hands locked beseechingly.

I found the entry.

8 August 1635. Paid to P. Lely. Portrait in oils & frame. £20-0-0.

She did not understand the words, but stared in such wonderment at the number, she did not react to Dr Chapman’s voice.

‘I will call in tomorrow morning.’

There was no reply from Mr Black, but his wife said: ‘Look – he is writing something!’ I could hear the doctor go back into the room.

‘Twenty pounds!’ Anne exclaimed.

It was as much as a skilled clerk earned in a year. I told her what it was for.

‘A picture! Of you? It must be something to do with the man with the scar.’

‘So I imagine.’

‘I hate him!’ she said vehemently. ‘Shouting at my father when he’s ill; ordering him about. Who is he?’

I shook my head. She kept looking at the entry in the book and then at me. I do not know what she was seeing, but it was no longer a clown, a tumbler, or even an apprentice. She bit her lower lip as she often did when she was vexed or puzzled.

‘Twenty pounds,’ she kept saying with awe. ‘For a picture. Of you.’

‘A monkey.’

‘Don’t joke. Where is it?’

‘How do I know?’

‘I knew it.’ The words came out in a tiny explosion. ‘One day my father –’ She stopped herself.

‘Your father what?’

She shook her head and refused to say more. We heard Dr Chapman saying goodbye and hurried through the darkened print shop to the door. I desperately tried to think of a way of seeing her again.

‘Can you bring me my Bible?’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll write to you. Through Sarah.’ I groaned inwardly again at the frustration of her being unable to read.

‘I will learn,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as though it was something she could do in a day or two. ‘If my father cannot speak, I shall have to read. My mother is no good at business.’

‘Bring the Bible to church. Sunday.’

She stood there, slight, determined, letting me out through the back door, while her mother let the doctor out of the front. There was something about her I had never even guessed at before, behind all the mockery, the trivial games, something that I can only call, even at that age, calculation.

Whatever it was, I leaned forward, before she could close the door, and kissed her.

Chapter 7

I was in a daze, a dream after that kiss. I suppose you could scarce call it a kiss, more a bump of noses, a collision of my lips on her cheek, as cold and splintered as the ice in the bucket, a brief holding of her trembling slightness, as slight as the bird fallen from its nest I had once picked up in Poplar and tried vainly to warm back to life. But it opened up the whole world to me.

I was careless of my safety, oblivious of what was going on around me. All I wanted to think about was that trembling, that cold cheek, that slightness against me. For, however clumsy and brief it had been, her arms had held me.

I could well have walked into George and the constable he sought, but he must have been unsuccessful, for I learned from people streaming away down the streets that there had been a big riot outside Westminster. Mingling with the crowd, I was much more difficult to find.

One man had a pike wound oozing blood. He almost staggered into me. I ducked as he raised his stave at me, but he was only demonstrating exultantly how he had broken the head of the guard who gave him his wound. He said his radical Puritan master had equipped him with the stave and urged him to fight for the Bill.

‘The Bill?’

‘The Grand Remonstrance – the Freedom Bill! The King’s side are trying to stop Mr Pym from publishing it officially because it will give him control of people like me. The army!’

‘Are you a soldier?’

‘No, a weaver.’ He held up his stave proudly. ‘And a member of the All Hallows Trained Band!’

‘You must know Will,’ I said, for Will was an enthusiastic recruiter for the All Hallows.

‘And his father!’ The weaver held up his stave again and yelled: ‘Ormonde! Ormonde!’

‘Ormonde! Ormonde!’ the crowd chanted.

Will’s father was a radical supporter of Mr Pym, standing against an East India merchant, Benyon, in the City elections. Whoever controlled the City, the weaver told me, controlled citizen militias like the All Hallows, which together totalled ten thousand men.

Intoxicated as I was with Anne, I now became drunk at the thought of all this as I approached the Pot, to which many of the demonstrators were repairing. This was what Mr Ink had predicted. The appeal had been made to the people – and the people had responded!

The words he had copied and I had rescued from the dirt had done this. Or so I thought. Now the struggle was to have them officially published. Our pirated copies were in the alehouse, ringed with beer, passed from hand to hand, read out to people who could not read, people who nodded silently.

They were not talking then about rebellion. People talked of Magna Carta. Of old rights to disappearing common land, which had driven them to leave their families and come to London. Of rights to religion. And of the biggest right of all – the right to afford a loaf of bread.

I could not see Will. I was clutching a beer a complete stranger had given me when I glimpsed in the throng something that drove all this from my mind. At the bar was the man in the beaver hat. Anger fought a desire to run. I believed he had killed my mother. I had eaten little and the beer had gone to my head. Anger won and I fought my way through the laughing, shouting crowd. Now I saw the bulky shape of Crow, and felt again the sensation of him wrenching my head back to cut my throat. Crow turned and stared round. I put my hand on my knife, sure he had seen me, but he was the sort of man who habitually glanced about him, watching his back.

‘– last place he’ll come,’ I heard him say.

‘A dog always returns to smell his own shit,’ the man in the beaver hat said.

There were a couple of candles on a table as I got closer to the bar. I snuffed them out with my sleeve. Someone shouted. My approach to the bar was plunged in shadow.

The feel of the knife was quite different from my apprentice’s knife, which was a toy by comparison. This knife was heavier, balanced. I loosened it from my belt. I stopped, inches from their backs. They had caught the landlord’s attention.

‘. . . red hair – Tom Neave,’ the man in the beaver hat was saying. He drew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. As he unfolded it I glimpsed one of the sketches the artist had done of me that summer. In a few lines he had caught my grin, the sharpness of my nose between the dark gleam of my eyes.

I moved closer. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. There was a rent in the back of Crow’s tough leather jerkin like an open mouth, gaping wider as he moved. I became drawn to it, fascinated by it.

The landlord was saying: ‘Haven’t seen him for a week.’

‘We’re working for the Stationers’ Company and Mr Black,’ the man said. His voice was grave and concerned. ‘He’s wanted for breaking his bond, theft . . . You can reach me at the Cock and Hen in Holborn . . . There’s a reward of five crowns.’

The landlord’s eyebrows lifted. I could see that he regarded that as a much more substantial profit than he would ever get from selling beer. But it was not this that made me lose control. It was hearing that Mr Black, whom I thought such a godly man, and who had hypocritically claimed to warn me of danger, was part of this plan to kill me.

The knife seemed to have a life of its own as I drew it from my belt. I could see nothing but the rent in Crow’s jerkin, opening and closing, a perfect target.

‘Tom!’

As God is my witness, I thought it was the Lord’s stern voice stopping me. Crow and the man in the beaver hat whirled round, bumping into a man trying to get to the bar, who knocked into me. My knife spun to the floor.

‘Tom!’

Will was waving near one of the doors. The man in the beaver hat pushed through a group of drinkers towards him. Crow immediately went to cover the other door. I could see his eyes moving meticulously from head to head. Even with my hat firmly wedged on and the dim light I could feel the red hairs crawling on my neck as if they were burning like a beacon.

Will was staring at me. All I could do was shake my head numbly at him. When the man in the beaver hat spoke to him, Will shook his head and pointed to the door where Crow was standing.

‘He’s run for it!’ the man in the beaver hat shouted to Crow, who dived out into the street, the other man following.

I picked up the knife, staring at its blade as Will pushed his way through to me with another, older man, who wore a jump jacket, Dutch style, with a square linen collar.

‘I was going to kill him,’ I said stupidly.

The older man shook his head. ‘You were wrongly positioned,’ he said, in an educated drawl. ‘You would only have wounded him. He would have turned and killed you.’ He drew his finger across his throat.

Will cut across him sharply, seeing the landlord say something to the pot girl. ‘Get him out of here, Luke!’

He grabbed me by one elbow and the man called Luke took me by the other and they hustled me into the night.

Chapter 8

That night I slept curled up in my Joseph coat on bales of the best Virginia tobacco, in the warehouse of Will’s father. Ever since then the smell of Virginia curling up from a clay pipe has meant the smell of rebellion to me. It rose from the pipes of Will and Luke when they woke me next morning. They took me through to the counting house, where there was a third man, Ben. What followed was a counting, not of money, but of me – an interrogation.

All three were members of the All Hallows Trained Band. Will and Ben were typical of many of the City’s part-time soldiers: middling men fighting against the City’s richest merchants, who generally supported the King. Will’s father, like many tobacco merchants, was struggling to break the monopolies of fabulously wealthy spice merchants such as Benyon, his opponent in the City elections the following month.

Ben was an apothecary. Prevented from working in the City by another monopoly, the doctors, he practised medicine in Spitalfields outside the walls, dispensing herbal cures to the London poor. Ben was as quiet and diffident as his grey jacket and hose, but there was a stubbornness in his silences, a refusal to take anything for granted, that I liked.

Luke was totally different. He seemed to have only one aim in joining the militia, and that was to fight. He had just come from fencing practice, and propped his sword against a rickety table in the counting house. A pupil to a lawyer in Gray’s Inn, he was the second son of a gentleman, and looked it. The achingly soft leather of his funnel boots ridiculed my shoes ‘as worn at court’. I hid them under the table, my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but could not hide the shabbiness of my breeches, the stink and stains of my Joseph coat, at which he wrinkled his nose. He stared at me quizzically, as if I was one of those curiosities exhibited at a travelling fair.

‘You’re on the run,’ he drawled.

‘Yes,’ I said defiantly. ‘Are you going to take me to Newgate?’

‘Bridewell,’ he corrected, ‘for petty offenders like you – unless you’ve actually murdered someone?’

He was looking meaningly at the knife in my belt. I jumped up, rocking the table. A week on the run had already changed me. Acting first had become a way of life. Another moment and I would have been on my way to the door, prepared to shove Luke from his stool if he tried to stop me. ‘What happened, Tom?’

Ben’s voice was soft, his concern calming. Ashamed now at my over-reaction, I dropped back on my stool. I told them everything, from Mr Black first taking me to Poplar, to the attempt on my life and the receipts and notes on me I had discovered in Mr Black’s office.

When I had finished there was a silence, except for the clang of bells from barges on the river. Will puffed at a clay pipe of his father’s best Virginia, which had gone from the ‘foul stinking novelty’ derided by King James to a soothing cure for all illnesses, from cholic to bladder stones.

‘Is this a pamphlet you’re writing?’ Luke said sceptically.

‘It’s true!’ I banged my fist down on the table, but then over the ships’ bells came the much deeper sound of a church bell.

‘St Mary-le-Bow,’ Will said. ‘It means –’

The end of his sentence was drowned by a great tumult of bells, spreading through the City from the east. Like a fire leaping from roof to roof the noise swelled, the deep-throated boom of St Katharine by the Tower, the clangour of St Dunstan-in-the-East, sparking into life the carillons of St Lawrence Jewry and St Giles’ Cripplegate, St Paul’s, St Martin’s, St Dunstan-in-the-West and St Clement Danes until the whole warehouse shook in one huge cauldron of sound.

Luke was inaudible, but no one needed to hear him. ‘The King,’ were the words he formed.

The King had arrived to talk to Parliament! All our arguments were forgotten as we joined the great crowds pouring along Thames Street, past Fishmongers’ Hall and up Fish Street Hill. Shouting questions and holding our ears close to people’s mouths, we gradually made out that the King had met the Lord Mayor and aldermen at Hoxton, in fields just beyond the sprawl of new building, which (if it was anything like Poplar) had come to an abrupt halt in the present crisis with half-built houses and littered wood left in muddy pools.

‘The King knighted the Lord Mayor on the spot,’ someone told Will.

Will groaned. ‘Knighthoods for gold – the King wants the City to buy him an army!’

A burst of cheering silenced him. I wondered why the crowd, after the demonstrations last night, could be so happy about it until we reached the corner of Gracious Street. We could not move for the press of people round the fountain. Men and women staggered from it with what looked like blood on their hands and clothes.

Even Luke had lost his coolness and was shoving his way through the crowd. He yelled at me, but I could not hear a word. The bells near us stopped, others petering away, and Luke’s voice boomed into my ear.

‘Drink to the King! And damn his bad advisers!’

He vanished among the heaving mass, reappearing with his fine lace collar stained with crimson, his hands running red.

‘The best Bordeaux!’ he yelled. ‘When the King favours you – you’re all for him!’

I could not believe it. The fountain was running with wine. A woman carried away a pot of it. Most held out their hands and slurped it into their mouths before it dribbled away then, having lost their places, fought to get back for more before the casks that were supplying it ran out. I wriggled on my hands and knees under a drayman’s apron, catching the wine that ran through his fingers, sucking it up then turning my head to the sky to catch the red rain until I lost my balance and was in danger of being trampled into the crimson mud. Whether it was the best Bordeaux or vinegar I did not know, and I did not manage to swallow very much of it, but I was certainly drunk. Drunk on the press around me, then, turning like one towards Cornhill, on the thunderous roar of the crowd coming from there. He had arrived! We were missing him! The thought was on everyone’s faces as they pushed and elbowed past Leadenhall Market.

People must have been in their places for hours. The route for royal entries to the City had been the same for over a hundred years. The King had entered at Moorgate, the procession doubling back on the route of the old Roman wall, turned again at Bishopsgate and was now approaching Merchant Taylors’ Hall, rising in front of us. Spectators were pressed together as solidly as a brick wall and no matter how I dodged and jumped I could see little but fluttering banners brightening the grey November day and people leaning perilously from windows shouting with one voice:

‘Long live the King! Long live the King!’

Tall as he was, Will had to stretch on his toes to see. He was flinging his hands in the air, shouting with the rest of the crowd. I was pressed against a half-timbered house. Above me was a cross-beam beneath the upper-storey windows where people were leaning out. Later I heard they had paid an angel for the privilege.

‘Will, for the Lord’s sake – give me a step.’

He linked his hands together. I slotted my foot into them, swung my other foot on to a stud, scrabbling for a hold in the loose herringbone brickwork. Plaster dribbled on me as a hand above grabbed me and pulled me up. I clung on to a cross-beam to cheers from the people round me. When I took in the sight below me, I nearly fell back again. The streets were lined with City liverymen. A great rainbow of colour made it as bright as midsummer as another entourage passed down Cornhill, followed by the City Artillery Company, pennants flying from their pikes, pistols at their saddles. I had thought them radical, but it seemed that they had joined the crowds in succumbing to the King.

Two by two on magnificent horses, which trod so exactly to the beat of the drums it looked as though they too were awestruck by the occasion, came the great peers. Constantly in danger of falling, I kept calling out like a small child: ‘Who’s that, who’s that with the sword?’ and someone from the window, or more often Luke, who had managed to worm his way to the front, shouted the answer.

‘That’s the Marquess of Hertford with the Sword of State . . .’

He seemed to know who everybody was, and the significance of who had been chosen and of his position in relation to the King.

‘That’s Manchester . . . Lord Privy Seal . . . and that’s the Marquess of Hamilton . . . fancy choosing him to be Master of the Horse . . . they’re all moderate reformers . . . You see? You see?’ he yelled at Will. ‘The King is sending a message – he’s got rid of his evil counsellors!’

I thought that wonderful news. Then I had to cling to the cross-beam as the crowd below me flung up hats and the people in the room above drummed with their feet on the floor so that the whole house shook. There he was!

‘The King! The King!’ the crowd roared.

I never again in my life used a woodblock of that oval face, long curling hair and pointed beard without thinking how totally inadequate it was, and without remembering that moment. He seemed to float rather than ride on his magnificent black horse, saddle embroidered in silver and gold, his gossamer-light riding cloak fluttering like wings behind him, embroidered with the insignia of the Garter, a star emitting silver rays.

Every time he raised his hand or smiled, the crowd erupted. Already from mouth to mouth the word had spread that at Hoxton he had vowed not to be swayed by popery but to protect the Protestant religion of Elizabeth and James. He looked up as he passed. He seemed to smile and lift his hand directly at me. I was near to fainting, my fingernails scrabbling as I hung on, the crowd a continuous roar in my ears. I loved him. There is no other word. The Divine Right of Kings? Of course he was divine! Were not people all along the route struggling to get close to him, held back by the liverymen – the halt, the lame, beggars trying to get relief from their sores? A woman pressed forward, holding up her blind child in the hope that for a moment he would breathe the same air.

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