# The Fire Court

Andrew Taylor

From No.1 bestselling author Andrew Taylor comes the sequel to the phenomenally successful The Ashes of LondonA time of terrible danger… The Great Fire has ravaged London. Now, guided by the Fire Court, the city is rebuilding, but times are volatile and danger is only ever a heartbeat away.Two mysterious deaths… James Marwood, a traitor’s son, is thrust into this treacherous environment when his father discovers a dead woman in the very place where the Fire Court sits. The next day his father is run down. Accident? Or another murder…?A race to stop a murderer… Determined to uncover the truth, Marwood turns to the one person he can trust – Cat Lovett, the daughter of a despised regicide. Then comes a third death… and Marwood and Cat are forced to confront a vicious killer who threatens the future of the city itself.

## Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2018

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover illustration Old London Bridge (engraving), Jongh, Claude de (fl.1610-1663) / Private Collection © Look and Learn / Illustrated Papers Collection / Bridgeman Images

Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Prelims show ‘A map of the area of London affected by the Great Fire of London in 1666’ © The British Library

A catalogue copy of 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 e-book 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.

Source ISBN: 9780008119133

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008119126

Version: 2020-01-06

## Dedication

For Caroline

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

The People

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher


### THE PEOPLE. Infirmary Close, The Savoy

James Marwood, clerk to Joseph Williamson, and to the Board of Red Cloth

Nathaniel Marwood, his father, widowed husband of Rachel; formerly a printer

Margaret and Sam Witherdine, their servants

### The Drawing Office, Henrietta Street

Simon Hakesby, surveyor and architect

‘Jane Hakesby’, his maid, formerly known as Catherine Lovett

Brennan, his draughtsman

### Clifford’s Inn and the Fire Court

Lucius Gromwell, antiquary

Theophilus Chelling, clerk to the Fire Court

Sir Thomas Twisden, a judge at the Fire Court

Miriam, a servant at Clifford’s Inn

### Pall Mall

Sir Philip Limbury

Jemima, Lady Limbury, daughter of Sir George Syre

Mary, her maid

Richard, Sir Philip’s manservant; also known as Sourface

Hester, a maid

### Whitehall

Joseph Williamson, Under-Secretary of State to Lord Arlington

William Chiffinch, Keeper of the King’s Private Closet

### Others

Roger Poulton, retired cloth merchant; late of Dragon Yard

Elizabeth Lee, his housekeeper

Celia Hampney, his widowed niece

Tabitha, Mistress Hampney’s maid

Mistress Grove, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; who lets lodgings to Mistress Hampney

Barty, a crossing-sweeper in Fleet Street, by Temple Bar

## CHAPTER ONE

Rachel. There you are.

She hesitated in the doorway that led from the Savoy Stairs and the river. She wore a long blue cloak over a grey dress he did not recognize. In her hand was a covered basket. She walked across the garden to the archway in the opposite corner. Her pattens clacked on the flagged path.

That’s my Rachel, he thought. Always busy. But why did she not greet him?

You are like the river, my love, he had told her once, always moving and always the same.

They had been sitting by the Thames in Barnes Wood. She had let down her hair, which was brown but shot through with golden threads that glowed in the sunlight.

She had looked like a whore, with her loose, glorious hair.

He felt a pang of repulsion. Then he rallied. A woman’s hair encouraged lustful thoughts, he argued with himself, but it could not be sinful when the woman was your wife, joined to you in the sight of God, flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone.

Now the garden was empty. There was no reason why he should not go after her. Indeed, it was his duty. Was not woman the weaker vessel?

He used his stick as a prop to help him rise. He was still hale and hearty, thank God, but his limbs grew stiff if he did not move them for a while.

He walked towards the archway. The path beyond made a turn to the right, rounding the corner of one of the old hospital buildings of the Savoy. He glimpsed Rachel ahead, passing through the gate that led up to the Strand. She paused to look at something – a piece of paper? – in her hand. Then she was gone.

She must be going shopping. A harmless pleasure, but only as long as it did not encourage vanity, a woman’s besetting sin. Women were weak, women were sinful, which was why God had placed men to watch over them and to correct them when they erred.

The porter in his lodge took no notice of him. A cobbled path led up to the south side of the Strand. The traffic roared and clattered along the roadway.

He looked towards Charing Cross, thinking that the shops of the New Exchange would have drawn her like a moth to a blaze of candles. No sign of her. Could he have lost her already? He looked the other way, and there she was, walking towards the ruins of the City.

He waved his stick. ‘Rachel,’ he cried. ‘Come here.’

The racket and clatter of the Strand drowned his words.

He followed her, the stiffness dropping from his limbs, his legs gathering strength and momentum with the exercise. On and on she walked, past Somerset House and Arundel House, past St Clement’s and under Temple Bar into Fleet Street and the Liberties of the City.

He kept his eyes fixed on the cloak, and the rhythm of his walking lulled his mind until he almost forgot why he was here. By the Temple, Rachel hesitated, turning towards the roadway with its sluggish currents of vehicles and animals. She looked down at the paper in her hand. A painted coach lumbered to a halt on the opposite side of the road. At that moment, a brewer’s dray, coming from the other direction and laden with barrels, drew up beside it. Between them, they blocked the street.

Rachel slipped among the traffic and threaded her way across the street.

The brewer’s men were unloading the dray outside the Devil Tavern. A barrel broke free and crashed into the roadway. The impact shattered the staves on one side. Beer spurted into the street. Two beggars ran whooping towards the growing puddle. They crouched and lapped like dogs. The traffic came to a complete halt, jammed solid by its own weight pressing from either side.

A sign, he thought, a sign from God. He has parted this river of traffic for me just as it had pleased Him to part the Red Sea before Moses and the Chosen People.

He walked across the street, his eyes fixed on Rachel’s cloak. She turned to the left in the shadow of the square tower of St Dunstan-in-the-West.

Why was she leading him such a merry dance? Suspicion writhed within him. Had the serpent tempted her? Had she succumbed to the devil’s wiles?

An alley ran past the west side of the church to a line of iron railings with a gateway in the middle. Beside it, a porter’s lodge guarded the entrance to a cramped court. Men were milling around the doorway of a stone-faced building with high, pointed windows.

Rachel was there too, looking once again at the paper in her hand. She passed through the doorway. He followed, but the crowd held him back.

‘By your leave, sirs, by your leave,’ he cried. ‘Pray, sirs, by your leave.’

‘Hush, moderate your voice,’ hissed a plump clerk dressed in black. ‘Stand back, the judges are coming through.’

He stared stupidly at the clerk. ‘The judges?’

‘The Fire Court, of course. The judges are sitting this afternoon.’

Three gentlemen came in procession, attended by their clerks and servants. They were conducted through the archway.

He pressed after them. The doorway led to a passage. At the other end of it a second doorway gave on to a larger courtyard, irregular in shape. Beyond it was a garden, a green square among the soot-stained buildings.

Was that Rachel over there by the garden?

He called her name. His voice was thin and reedy, as it was in dreams. She did not hear him, though two men in black gowns stared curiously at him.

How dared she ignore him? What was this place full of men? Why had she not told him she was coming here? Surely, please God, she did not intend to betray him?

On the first floor of the building to the right of the garden, a tall man stood at one of the nearer windows, looking down on the court below. The panes of glass reduced him to little more than a shadow. Rachel turned into a doorway at the nearer end of a building to the right of the garden, next to a fire-damaged ruin.

His breath heaved in his chest. He had the strangest feeling that the man had seen Rachel, and perhaps himself as well.

The man had gone. This was Rachel’s lover. He had been watching for her, and now she was come.

His own duty was plain. He crossed the court to the doorway. The door was ajar. On the wall to one side, sheltered by the overhang of the porch, was a painted board. White letters marched, or rather staggered, across a black background:

XIV

6 Mr Harrison

5 Mr Moran

4 Mr Gorvin

3 Mr Gromwell

2 Mr Drury

1 Mr Bews

Distracted, he frowned. Taken as a whole, the board was an offence to a man’s finer feelings and displeasing to God. The letters varied in size, and their spacing was irregular. In particular, the lettering of Mr Gromwell’s name had been quite barbarously executed. It was clearly a later addition, obliterating the original name that had been there. A trickle of paint trailed from the final ‘l’ of Gromwell. The sign-painter had tried ineffectually to brush it away, probably with his finger, and had succeeded only in leaving the corpse of a small insect attached to it.

Perhaps, he thought, fumbling in his pocket, temporarily diverted from Rachel, a man might scrape away the worst of the drip with the blade of a pocket knife. If only—

He heard sounds within. And a man’s voice. Then a second voice – a woman’s.

Oh, Rachel, how could you?

He pushed the door wide and crossed the threshold. Two doors faced each other across a small lobby. At the back, a staircase rose into the shadows.

He listened, but heard only silence. He caught sight of something gleaming on the second step of the stairs. He stepped closer and peered at it.

A speck of damp mud. The moisture caught the light from the open door behind him.

‘Rachel?’ he called.

There was no reply. His mind conjured up a vision of her in a man’s chamber, her skirts thrown up, making the two-backed beast with him. He shook his head violently, trying to shake the foul images out of it.

He climbed the stairs. On the next landing, two more doors faced each other, number three on the right and number four on the left. Another, smaller door had been squeezed into the space between the staircase and the back of the landing.

Number three. Three was a number of great importance. There were three doors and three Christian virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity. Man has three enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil. Mr Gromwell’s number was three, whoever Gromwell was.

In God’s creation, everything had meaning, nothing was by chance, all was pre-ordained, even the insect trapped in the paint, placed there to show him the way.

He raised the latch. The door swung slowly backwards, revealing a square sitting room. Late afternoon sunshine filled the chamber, and for a moment he was transfixed by the loveliness of the light.

A window to God …

He blinked, and loveliness became mere sunshine. The light caught on a picture in a carved gilt frame, which hung over the mantelpiece. He stared at it, at the women it portrayed, who were engaged in a scene of such wickedness that it took his breath away. He forced himself to look away and the rest of the room came slowly to his attention: a press of blackened oak; chair and stools; a richly coloured carpet; a table on which were papers, wine, sweetmeats and two glasses; and a couch strewn with velvet cushions the colour of leaves in spring.

And on the couch—

Inside his belly, the serpent twisted and sunk its teeth.

Something did not fit, something was wrong—

The woman lay sleeping on the couch, her head turned away from him. Her hair was loose – dark ringlets draped over white skin. Her silk gown was designed to reveal her breasts rather than conceal them. The gown was yellow, and also red in places.

She had kicked off her shoes before falling asleep, and they lay beside the couch. They were silly, feminine things with high heels and silver buckles. The hem of the gown had risen almost to the knees, revealing a froth of lace beneath. One hand lay carelessly on her bosom. She wore a ring with a sapphire.

But she wasn’t Rachel. She didn’t resemble Rachel in the slightest. She was older, for a start, thinner, smaller, and less well-favoured.

His mind whirred, useless as a child’s spinning top. He had a sudden, shameful urge to touch the woman’s breast.

‘Mistress,’ he said. ‘Mistress? Are you unwell?’

She did not reply.

‘Mistress,’ he said sharply, angry with himself as well as with her for leading him into temptation. ‘Are you drunk? Wake up.’

He drew closer, and stooped over her. Such a wanton, sinful display of flesh. The devil’s work to lead mankind astray. He stared at the breasts, unable to look away. They were quite still. The woman might have been a painted statue in a Popish church.

She had a foolish face, of course. Her mouth was open, which showed her teeth; some were missing, and the rest were stained. Dull, sad eyes stared at him.

Oh God, he thought, and for a moment the fog in his mind cleared and he saw the wretch for what she truly was.

Merciful father, here are the wages of sin, for me as well as for her. God had punished his lust, and this poor woman’s. God be blessed in his infinite wisdom.

And yet – what if there were still life in this fallen woman? Would not God wish him to urge her to repent?

Her complexion was unnaturally white. There was a velvet beauty patch at the corner of her left eye in the shape of a coach and horses, and another on her cheek in the form of a heart. The poor vain woman, tricking herself out with her powders and patches, and for what? To entice men into her sinful embrace.

He knelt beside her and rested his ear against the left side of her breast, hoping to hear or feel through the thickness of the gown and the shift beneath the beating of a heart. Nothing. He shifted his fingers to one side. He could not find a heartbeat.

His fingertips touched something damp, a stickiness. He smelled iron. He was reminded of the butcher’s shop beside his old premises in Pater Noster Row.

Was that another sound? On the landing? On the stairs.

He withdrew his hand. The fingers were red with blood. Like the butcher’s fingers when he had killed a pig on the step, and the blood drained down to the gutter, a feast for flies. Why was there so much blood? It was blood on the yellow gown: that was why some of it was red.

Thank God it was not Rachel. He sighed and drew down the lids over the sightless eyes. He knew what was due to death. When Rachel had drawn her last labouring breath—

The cuff of his shirt had trailed across the blood. He blinked, his train of thought broken. There was blood on his sleeve. They would be angry with him for fouling his linen.

He took a paper from the table and wiped his hand and the cuff as best he could. He stuffed the paper in his pocket to tidy it away and rose slowly to his feet.

Rachel – how in God’s name could he have forgotten her? Perhaps she had gone outside while he was distracted.

In his haste, he collided with a chair and knocked it over. On the landing, he closed the door behind him. He went downstairs. As he came out into the sunshine, something shifted in his memory and suddenly he knew this place for what it was: one of those nests of lawyers that had grown up outside the old city walls, as nests of rooks cluster in garden trees about a house.

Lawyers. The devil’s spawn. They argued white into black with their lies and their Latin, and they sent innocent, God-fearing men to prison, as he knew to his cost.

Birds sang in the garden. The courtyard was full of people, mainly men, mainly dressed in lawyers’ black which reminded him again of rooks, talking among themselves. Caw, caw, he murmured to himself, caw, caw.

He walked stiffly towards the hall with its high, pointed windows. At the door, he paused, and looked back. His eyes travelled up the building he had just left. The shadowy man was back at the first-floor window. He raised his arm at the shadow, partly in accusation and partly in triumph: there, see the rewards of sin. Fall on your knees and repent.

Suddenly, there was Rachel herself. She was coming out of the doorway of the blackened ruin next to Staircase XIV. She had pulled her cloak over her face to cover her shame. She was trying to hide from him. She was trying to hide from God.

Caw, caw, said the rooks.

‘Rachel,’ he said, or perhaps he only thought it. ‘Rachel.’

A lawyer passed her, jostling her shoulder, and for a moment the cloak slipped. To his astonishment, he saw that the woman was not Rachel, after all. This woman wore the mark of Cain on her face. Cain was jealous of his brother Abel, so he slew him.

Not Rachel. His wife was dead, rotting in her grave, waiting among the worms for the Second Coming of the Lord and the everlasting reign of King Jesus. Nor had Rachel borne the mark of Cain.

‘Sinner!’ he cried, shaking his fist. ‘Sinner!’

The bite of the serpent endured beyond death. Perhaps he had been wrong about Rachel. Had she been a whore too, like Eve a temptress of men, destined to writhe for all eternity in the flames of hell?

Caw, caw, said the rooks. Caw, caw.

## CHAPTER TWO

It is marvellous what money in your pocket and a toehold in the world will do for a man’s self-esteem.

There I was, James Marwood. Sleeker of face and more prosperous of purse than I had been six months earlier. Clerk to Mr Williamson, the Under-Secretary of State to my Lord Arlington himself. Clerk to the Board of Red Cloth, which was attached to the Groom of the Stool’s department. James Marwood – altogether a rising man, if only in my own estimation.

That evening, Thursday, 2 May, I set out by water from the Tower, where I had been a witness on Mr Williamson’s behalf at the interrogation of certain prisoners. The tide was with us, though only recently on the turn. The ruins of the city lay on my right – the roofless churches, the tottering chimney stacks, the gutted warehouses, the heaps of ash – but distance and sunlight lent them a strange beauty, touching with the colours of paradise. On my left, on the Surrey side, Southwark lay undamaged, and before me the lofty buildings on London Bridge towered across the river with the traffic passing to and fro between them.

The waterman judged it safe for us to pass beneath the bridge. A few hours later, when the tide would be running faster, the currents would be too turbulent for safety. Even so, he took us through Chapel Lock, one of the wider arches. It was a relief to reach open water at the cost of only a little spray on my cloak.

London opened up before me again, still dominated by the blackened hulk of St Paul’s on its hill. It was eight months since the Great Fire. Though the streets had been cleared and the ruins surveyed, the reconstruction had barely begun.

My mind was full of the evening that lay ahead – the agreeable prospect of a supper with two fellow clerks in a Westminster tavern where there would be music, and where there was a pretty barmaid who would be obliging if you promised her a scrap of lace or some other trifle. Before that, however, I needed to return to my house to change my clothes and make my notes for Mr Williamson.

I had the waterman set me down at the Savoy Stairs. My new lodgings were nearby in the old palace. I had moved there less than three weeks ago from the house of Mr Newcomb, the King’s Printer. Since my good fortune, I deserved better and I could afford to pay for it.

In the later wars, the Savoy had been used to house the wounded. Now its rambling premises near the river were used mainly for ageing soldiers and sailors, and also for private lodgings. The latter were much sought after since the Fire – accommodation of all sorts was still in short supply. It was crown property and Mr Williamson had dropped a word on my behalf into the right ear.

Infirmary Close, my new house, was one of four that had been created by subdividing a much larger building. I had the smallest and cheapest of them. At the back it overlooked the graveyard attached to the Savoy chapel. It was an inconvenience which was likely to grow worse as the weather became warmer, but it was also the reason why the rent was low.

My cheerfulness dropped away from me in a moment when Margaret opened the door to me. I knew something was amiss as soon as I saw her face.

I passed her my damp cloak. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m sorry, master – your father went wandering today. I was only gone for a while – the night-soil man came to the door, and he does talk, sir, a perfect downpour of words, you cannot—’

‘Is he safe?’

‘Safe? Yes, sir.’ She draped the cloak over the chest, her hands smoothing its folds automatically. ‘He’s by the parlour fire. I’d left him in the courtyard on his usual bench. The sun was out, and he was asleep. And I thought, if I was only gone a moment, he—’

‘When was this?’ I snapped.

She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know. Upward of an hour? We couldn’t find him. Then suddenly he was back – the kitchen yard. Barty brought him.’

‘Who?’

‘Barty, sir. The crossing-sweeper by Temple Bar. He knows your father wanders sometimes.’

I didn’t know Barty from Adam, but I made a mental note to give him something for his pains.

‘Sir,’ Margaret said in a lower voice. ‘He was weeping. Like a child.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Had someone hurt him?’

‘No.’

‘Has he said anything?’

Margaret rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Rachel.’

I felt as if someone had kicked me. ‘What?’

‘Rachel, sir. That’s what he said when he came in. Over and over again. Just the name. Rachel.’ She stared up at me, twisting a fold of her dress in her hands. ‘Who’s Rachel, sir? Do you know?’

I didn’t answer her. Of course I knew who Rachel was. She was my mother, dead these six long years, but not always dead to my father.

I went into the parlour. The old man was sitting by the fire and spooning the contents of a bowl of posset into his mouth. Margaret or someone had laid a large napkin across his lap. But it had not been large enough to catch all the drops of posset that had missed his mouth. He did not look up as I entered the room.

Anger ran through me, fuelled by love and relief, those most combustible ingredients, and heating my blood like wine. Where was my father in this wreck of a human being? Where was Nathaniel Marwood, the man who had ruled his family and his business with the authority of God’s Viceroy, and who had earned the universal respect of his friends? He had been a printer once, as good as any in Pater Noster Row, a man of substance. Politics and religion had led him down dangerous paths to his ruin, but no one had ever doubted his honesty or his skill. Now, after his years in prison, only fragments of him were left.

The spoon scraped around the side of the empty bowl. I took the bowl from him, meeting only the slightest resistance, and then the spoon. I placed them both on the table and considered whether to remove the soiled napkin. On reflection, it seemed wiser to leave it to Margaret.

Eating and the afternoon’s unaccustomed exercise had tired him. His eyes closed. His hands were in his lap. The right hand was grimy. The cuff of his shirt protruded from the sleeve of his coat. The underside of the cuff was stained reddish-brown like ageing meat.

My anger evaporated. I leaned forward and pushed up the cuff. There was no sign of a cut or graze on his wrist or his hand.

I shook him gently. ‘Sir? Margaret tells me you went abroad this afternoon. Why?’

The only answer was a gentle snore.

Four hours later, by suppertime, the posset was merely a memory and my father was hungry again. Hunger made him briefly lucid, or as near to that state as he was ever likely to come.

‘Why did you go out, sir?’ I asked him, keeping my voice gentle because it upset him if I spoke roughly to him. ‘You know it worries Margaret when she cannot find you.’

‘Rachel.’ He was looking into the fire, and God alone knew what he saw there. ‘I cannot allow my wife to walk the town without knowing where she is. It is not fitting, so I followed her to remonstrate with her. Did she not promise to obey me in all things? She was wearing her best cloak, too, her Sunday cloak. It is most becoming.’ He frowned. ‘Perhaps it is too becoming. The devil lays his traps so cunningly. I must speak to her, indeed I must. Why did she bear the mark of Cain? I shall find out the truth of the matter.’

‘Rachel …? My mother?’

He glanced at me. ‘Who else?’ Even as he spoke, he looked bewildered. ‘But you were not born. You were in her belly.’

‘And now I am here before you, sir,’ I said, as if this double time my father inhabited, this shifting confluence of now and then, were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Where did my mother go?’

‘Where the lawyers are. Those sucklings of the devil.’

‘Where, exactly?’ The lawyers congregated in many places.

He smiled. ‘You should have seen her, James,’ he said. ‘Always neat in her movements. She loves to dance, though of course I do not allow it. It is not seemly for a married woman. But … but how graceful she is, James, even in her kitchen. Why, she is as graceful as a deer.’

‘Which lawyers were these, sir?’

‘Have you ever remarked how lawyers are like rooks? They cling together and go caw-caw-caw. They all look the same. And they go to hell when they die. Did you know that? Moreover—’

‘Rachel, sir. Where did she go?’

‘Why, into the heart of a rookery. There was a courtyard where there was a parliament of these evil birds. And I followed her by a garden to a doorway in a building of brick … and the letters of one name were most ill-painted, James, and ill-formed as well. There was a great drip attached to it, and a poor creature had drowned therein, and I could have scraped it away but there was not time.’

‘A creature …?’

‘Even ants are God’s creatures, are they not? He brought two of them into the ark, so he must have decided they should be saved from the Flood. Ah—’

My father broke off as Margaret came into the room bearing bread. She laid the table for supper. His eyes followed her movements.

‘And then, sir?’ I said. ‘Where did she go?’

‘I thought to find her in the chamber with the ant. Up the stairs.’ He spoke absently, his attention still on Margaret. ‘But she wasn’t there. No one was, only the woman on the couch. The poor, abandoned wretch. Her sins found her out, and she suffered the punishment for them.’

The fingers of his left hand played with the soiled shirt cuff. He rubbed the stiff linen where the blood had dried.

Margaret left the room.

‘Who was this woman?’ I said.

‘Not Rachel, thanks be to God. No, no.’ He frowned. ‘Such a sinfully luxurious chamber. It had a carpet on the floor that was so bright it hurt the eyes. And there was a painting over the fireplace … its lewdness was an offence in the eyes of God and man.’

‘But the woman, sir?’ I knew he must have wandered into one of his waking dreams, but it was wise to make sure he was calm now, that he would not wake screaming in the night and wake the whole household, as he sometimes did. ‘This woman on the couch, I mean. What was she doing there?’

‘She was a sinner, poor fool. Displaying herself like a wanton for all the world to see. Tricked out in her finery, yellow as the sun, red as fire. With a coach and horses too. Oh, vanity, vanity. And all for nothing. I closed her eyes, I owed her that at least.’

Margaret’s footsteps were approaching.

My father’s face changed, scrubbed clean of every expression but greed. He turned his head to the door. Margaret stood there with a platter in her hand. ‘Come, James, to table,’ he said. ‘Supper is served. Can’t you see?’

I learned nothing more from my father that day. Experience had taught me that there was little purpose in talking to him after supper, not if you expected replies that made much sense. Nor was I convinced that there was anything more to learn.

Besides, why bother? My father’s memory was unpredictable in its workings and, by and large, he was now more likely to recall events from the remote past than more recent ones. If he remembered anything at all. For much of the time he lived among his dreams.

‘Come to me later in my chamber,’ he mumbled, when he had finished eating. ‘We must pray together, my son.’

‘Perhaps, sir.’ I did not like to look at him. There was a trickle of dribble at the corner of his mouth and his coat was speckled with crumbs. He was my father. I loved and honoured him. But sometimes the sight of him disgusted me. ‘I have business to attend to.’

My mind was busy elsewhere. Something might be salvaged from my plans for the evening. I calculated that if I took a boat from the Savoy Stairs, my friends should still be at the tavern. And, if fortune smiled on me, so would the pretty barmaid.

Accordingly, after supper, I left Margaret to deal with my father. I had grown prosperous enough to keep two servants – Margaret Witherdine and her husband Samuel, a discharged sailor who had suffered the misfortune of losing part of a leg in his country’s wars against the Dutch. Samuel had fallen into poverty and then into debt, partly because of his country’s inability to pay him what he was owed. Nevertheless he had done me a great service, and I had discharged his debt. In return, I believed, Sam and Margaret served my father and me from loyalty as well as for their board and lodging and a little money.

All this was agreeable to me. God help me, it gave me a good opinion of myself. I was as smug as the cat who has found the larder door open and eaten and drunk his fill. And like the cat, sitting afterwards and cleaning his whiskers in the sunshine, I assumed this happy state of affairs would last for ever.

So I did not see my father after supper that day. Sometimes I went into his chamber when he was ready for bed, even if I had been out late. But not that night. I did not admit it to myself but I was irritated with him. Because of his folly, I had been obliged to forgo my evening on the river. To make matters worse, when I had reached the tavern, my friends were not there and the pretty barmaid had left to be married.

So Margaret must have settled him in his bed, listened to the mumbled nonsense that he believed to be his prayers and blown out his candle. She must have sat with him in the dark, holding his hand, until he fell asleep. I knew that would have happened because that was what she always did. I also knew that my father would have preferred his son beside him when he said his prayers, and that he would have liked his own flesh and blood to hold his hand, rather than a servant.

The following morning, I had arranged to go into the office at an earlier hour than usual. Mr Williamson wanted my notes from the Tower interrogations as soon as possible. Besides, I was behind in my task of copying his correspondence into his letter book, and there was also my regular work for the Gazette. The press of business was very great – the London Gazette, the twice-weekly government newspaper which Mr Newcomb printed here in the Savoy, was another of Williamson’s responsibilities, and he delegated much of its day-to-day administration to me.

My father was already awake. He was in his chamber, where Margaret was helping him dress. As I left the parlour, I heard his voice, deep and resonant, booming in the distance; like his body, his voice belonged to a healthier, stronger man, a man who still had his wits about him. I persuaded myself that I could not spare the time to wish him good morning before I left.

I did not give my father another thought until after dinner, when my servant Samuel Witherdine came to Whitehall and knocked on the door of Mr Williamson’s office. Sam was a wiry man with a weathered face and very bright blue eyes, which at present were surrounded by puffy eyelids. He wore a wooden leg below his right knee and supported himself with a crutch.

Something was amiss. It was unheard of for him to come to the office of his own accord. I thought the puffy eyes meant he was hungover. I was wrong.

## CHAPTER THREE

The door opened.

‘Mistress?’

On Friday morning, a woman lay on her bed in a new house on the north side of Pall Mall. She clung to the shreds of sleep that swirled like seaweed around her. Drown me in sleep, she thought, six fathoms deep, and let the fish nibble me into a million pieces.

The door closed, and was softly latched. Footsteps crossed the floor. Light and quick and familiar.

‘Are you awake?’

No, Jemima thought, I am not. She fought the creeping tide of consciousness every inch of the way. To be conscious was to remember.

She had been dreaming of Syre Place, where she had grown up. It was strange that she knew it to be Syre Place because it had seemed not to resemble the real house. The real Syre Place was built of brick, of a russet colour like a certain apple that her father was fond of. As a child, she had assumed that the house had somehow been built to match the apples, which was all part of the rightness of things, of the patterns that ran through everything.

But the Syre Place in her dreams was all wrong. It was faced with stone, for a start, and designed after the modern fashion that Philip liked. (Philip? Philip? Her mind shied away from the thought of Philip.) It was a house in the modern fashion, a neat box, with everything tidy and clean both within and without, and a roof whose overhanging eaves made it look as if the building were wearing a hat.

‘My lady? My lady?’

In Syre Place, the real one, there was a park where her father used to hunt before he lost his good humour and the use of his legs. Down the lane was the farm, whose smells and sounds were part of life, running through every hour of every day. In this Syre Place, however, the park was gone, and so was the farm. Instead there was a garden with gravel paths and parterres and shrubs, arranged symmetrically like the house. But – now she looked more closely at it – there was nothing neat about the garden in the dream because weeds had sprung up everywhere, and brambles criss-crossed the paths and arched overhead.

Nettles stood in great clumps, their leaves twitching, desperate to sting her. Her brother had thrown her into a bed of nettles when she was scarcely out of leading strings, and she still remembered the agonizing, unfair pain of it. How strange and unnatural it was, she thought, that a plant should be so nasty, so hostile. God had made the plants and the animals to serve man, not to attack him.

Nature was unnatural. It was full of monstrous tricks. Perhaps it was the work of the devil, not God.

‘Come now, madam. It’s past eleven o’clock.’

Time? What time of year could it be? In the garden at Syre Place, the gravel paths were carpeted with spoiled fruit. Brown apples and pears, and yellow raspberries, and red strawberries and green plums, as if all fruitful seasons existed at once. They lay so thickly on the ground that she could no longer see the gravel. The smell of decay was everywhere. Jemima raised her skirts – good God, what was she wearing? just her shift? But she was outside and in broad daylight, where anyone might see her – but the pulpy fruit splashed stickily against the linen and spattered the skin of her bare legs.

There were wasps, too, she saw, fat-bellied things cruising a few inches above the ground and feeding on the rottenness. What if one of them flew up inside her shift and stung her in her most private and intimate place?

In her fear, she cried out.

‘Hush now,’ Mary murmured, the voice floating above her. ‘It’s all right. Time to wake up.’

No, no, no, Jemima thought. Despite the wasps, despite everything, it was better to stay asleep, her eyes screwed shut against the daylight. She wanted to stay for ever in Syre Place where once, she thought, she had been happy.

What was happiness? Rocking in Nurse’s lap as she sang. Sitting beside her brother Henry when, greatly condescending, he guided her as she stumbled through her hornbook. Or, better still, when he perched her up before him on the new brown mare, with the ground so far beneath that she had to close her eyes so she wouldn’t see it.

‘I’ll drop you, Jemima,’ her brother had said, his arms tightening around her. ‘Your skull will crack like an eggshell.’

Oh, the sweet, delicious terror of it.

Someone she could not see called her name.

No. No. Go to sleep, she ordered herself: down, down, down into the deep, dark depths where no one can see me. To the time before that fatal letter, before the Fire Court, before she had even known where Clifford’s Inn was.

Something was buzzing. It must be a wasp. She moaned with fear.

There was a sudden rattle of curtain rings, brutally unexpected, and she was bathed in brilliance. The bed curtains had been thrown open. It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of light over her. She squeezed her eyelids together but the light glowed pinkly outside them. A current of cool air swept over her, bringing the scents of the garden.

‘Close the curtains, you fool,’ she wanted to say, ‘shut out the light.’ But she couldn’t, wouldn’t speak.

She was lying on her back, she knew, on her own bed in her own bedchamber. If she opened her eyes she would see the canopy above her, blue and silver, silk embroidery; the bed was in its summer clothing; the winter curtains and canopy were made of much heavier material, and their embroidery was predominantly red and gold, the colours of fire. The curtains were hers, part of her dowry. Almost everything was hers. Everything except Dragon Yard.

She didn’t want to know all this. She wanted to be asleep in the dark, in a place too deep for dreaming, too deep for knowledge.

‘Master’s coming,’ said the voice. A woman’s. Her woman’s. Mary’s.

A wasp. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Why can’t it go away?

‘Any moment he’ll be here. I can’t put him off.’

Her brother Henry had had a waistcoat like a wasp: all yellow and black. Jemima wondered what had happened to it. Perhaps it had been lost in the fire. Or perhaps it was down, down in the deep, dark depths, where Henry was presumably lying himself. Anything the fishes had left. Philip had served with Henry in the Navy in the Dutch wars. That was how she had met her husband, as her brother’s friend.

The latch rattled again, shockingly loud. The buzzing stopped.

‘Isn’t she awake yet?’

Philip’s voice, achingly familiar, and horribly strange.

‘No, master.’

‘She should be awake by now. Surely?’

‘The draught lasts longer for some people than for others.’

Heavy footsteps drew closer to the bed, closer to her. She could smell Philip now. Sweat, a trace of the perfume he sometimes wore, the hint of last night’s wine.

‘Madam,’ he said. Then, more loudly: ‘Madam?’

The voice made something inside her answer to it. Her body’s response was involuntary, beyond control or desire. She knew she must continue to breathe, and that she must give no sign that she was not deeply asleep. Yet she wanted to cry out, to scream at him, to howl in agony and rage.

‘Hush, sir. It’s better to let her be.’

‘Hold your tongue, woman,’ he shouted. ‘She’s pale as a ghost. I’ll send for the doctor.’

The buzzing returned. To and fro, it went, nearer and further. She focused her attention on it. A distraction. She hoped it was not a wasp.

‘She’s always pale, sir,’ Mary said, almost in a whisper. ‘You know that.’

‘But she’s slept for hours.’

‘Sleep’s the best cure. There’s no physic can mend her faster. It’s always been the way with her. I went out this morning and fetched another draught from the apothecary in case she needs it tonight.’

‘You left her alone? Like this?’

‘No, no, master. Hester was watching over her. I wasn’t gone long, in any case.’

‘Devil take that fly,’ Philip muttered, his attention fastening on another irritation.

The buzzing stopped abruptly. There was the sound of a slap, followed by a muffled oath.

‘Hush, sir,’ Mary said. ‘You’ll wake her.’

‘Hold your tongue. Or I’ll put you out on the street with nothing but a shift to cover your nakedness. Has she said anything yet?’

‘No, sir. Not a word.’

‘Stand over there. By the door.’

The heavy footsteps drew nearer. She kept her eyelids tightly closed. She heard the sound of his breathing and knew he must be stooping above the bed, bringing his face close to hers.

‘Jemima.’ His voice was a whisper, and his breath touched her cheek. ‘Can you hear me?’ When she said nothing in reply, he went on, ‘Where were you yesterday afternoon? Where did you go?’

Philip paused. She heard his breathing, and a creaking floorboard, the one near the door, where Mary must be standing.

‘What made you so distressed?’ he said. ‘What did you see?’

After a few seconds, he let out his breath in a sigh of exasperation. He walked away from the bed. ‘Mary? Are you sure you know nothing?’

‘No, sir. I told you – she left me in the hackney.’

‘I’ll whip the truth out of you.’

‘That is the truth.’

The door latch rattled. ‘Send for me as soon as your mistress wakes. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, master.’

‘Don’t let anyone else talk to her until I have. Not Hester, not anyone. And not you, either. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The door closed. The footsteps clattered down the stairs.

She listened to Mary moving around the room and the buzzing of the fly. After a moment she opened her eyes. Daylight dazzled her. ‘I thought he would never go,’ she said.

Jemima spent Saturday and Sunday in bed. Mary tended to her needs. Mary was her maid. She had come with her from Syre Place. Her father was a tenant farmer on the estate, a man with too many daughters. Sir George had charged Mary to take special care of her mistress when she married Philip, and to obey her in all things, not Philip.

Mary sometimes slept with her when Philip did not come to her bed, especially in winter.

When Mary wasn’t in the room, she sent Hester in her place. Hester was a stupid little girl, fresh from the country. When she was obliged to speak to her mistress, she blushed a cruel and unforgiving red that spread over her face like a stain. She blushed when her master was in the room too, but he never spoke to her.

‘My lady?’ Mary said on Monday afternoon. ‘We need to change the sheets.’

She opened her eyes and saw Mary standing over her with an armful of bedlinen. She allowed herself to be helped out of bed and placed in an armchair by the window. It was a fresh, clear afternoon. Her bedchamber was at the back of the house. The trees at the bottom of the garden shielded the brick wall behind them and the fields stretching up to Piccadilly.

The window was open, and she heard hooves, hammering and sometimes distant voices. The trees blocked out most of the view, but occasionally she glimpsed a flash of colour through the leaves or wisps of smoke, rising higher into the empty sky until they dissipated themselves in the empty blue of heaven.

If one went to heaven after death, Jemima thought, how eternally tedious it would be if it were nothing but blue and infinitely empty. Better to be nothing at all oneself. Which was blasphemy.

Philip came up to see her while she was sitting there.

‘Madam,’ he said, bowing. ‘I’m rejoiced to see you out of your bed at last.’

He glanced at the maids, who had continued at their work but were making themselves as unobtrusive as possible, as servants should. ‘Mary says you remember nothing of your – your illness.’

‘No, sir.’ She and Mary had agreed it was wiser this way, wiser to bide one’s time. ‘I had pains in my head when I woke up.’

‘The doctor called it a sudden inflammation of the brain. Thanks to his treatment, it came and went like an April shower. Can you remember how it happened?’

‘No. It is all a perfect blank to me until I woke up in my bed.’

‘You and Mary went out for a drive in a hackney coach,’ he said slowly, as if teaching a child a lesson. ‘After you’d dined – on Thursday. Remember?’

‘No.’

‘The fever came on suddenly. You were insensible, or very near to it, when Mary brought you home.’

‘I remember nothing,’ she said, though she remembered everything that mattered. She remembered every inch of the way to Clifford’s Inn, every step up the stairs of Staircase XIV. For now, however, it was better to pretend to forget.

Philip’s hand touched her arm. ‘The doctor said that sometimes sufferers are much troubled by dreams when the fever is at its height, and believe all sorts of strange fancies. But thank God all that is passed now.’

‘I am much better, sir,’ she said. ‘I feel quite refreshed.’

‘Good. In that case, will you join me at supper?’

‘I think not. I will take something here instead.’

Jemima watched him as she spoke, but his expression told her nothing. Her husband was tall, lean and dark-complexioned – like the King himself. He was not a handsome man but usually she found his face good to look at, because it was his. But now his face had become a mere arrangement of features, an array of hollows, projections, planes, textures, colours. He was a stranger to her.

A familiar stranger. A treacherous stranger, and that was the very worst sort of stranger.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said, smiling. ‘For dinner. We shall have guests, by the way – a brace of lawyers. One of them’s Sir Thomas Twisden, the judge.’

It seemed to her that he spoke more deliberately than usual, enunciating the words with precision as if they were especially significant. He paused – only for a second, but she knew that the pause meant something, too. He knew that she didn’t like people to come to the house.

The maids had finished making the bed. Hester left the room, her arms full of dirty linen. Mary remained, tidying the pots and bottles on the dressing table.

‘And I’ve asked Lucius Gromwell to join us,’ Philip said.

Jemima caught her breath, and hoped he hadn’t noticed. Gromwell, of all people. The sly, twice-damned, whoreson devil. How dared they? She stared at her lap. She sensed he was looking at her, gauging her reaction to Gromwell’s name. She was aware as well that, on the very edge of her range of vision, Mary’s hands were no longer moving among the litter on the dressing table.

‘It will be good to have you at the table,’ he went on. ‘You must make sure they send up something worth eating. We must do our best to keep Sir Thomas amused. We want him to look kindly on us, after all, don’t we?’

His voice sharpened towards the end, and she looked up. He wants me to twitch like a hound bitch, she thought, to the sound of her master’s voice.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘He’s a Fire Court judge,’ Philip reminded her. ‘He’s down for the Dragon Yard case.’

He smiled at her and made his way towards the door. He paused, his hand on the latch.

‘Lucius is writing a book, by the way. He is mad for it. It’s called The Natural Curiosities of Gloucestershire, and it will have many plates and maps, so it will cost a great deal to produce. I promised him I would pay for the publication, and he assures me it will make me a handsome profit when the edition sells out, as well as enshrine my name for posterity.’

Gromwell, she thought. I hate him.

‘You remember him, don’t you? My old friend from school and Oxford.’

She nodded. Gromwell will look at me tomorrow and know my shame, she thought, and I shall look at him and know that he knows it. He arranged it all. None of this would have happened without him. Gromwell, who dared to stand in my way at Clifford’s Inn.

‘Poor Lucius, eh?’ Her husband lifted the latch and laughed with what seemed like genuine amusement. ‘I doubt he’ll ever finish the book. He is a man of many parts but he finishes nothing he begins. He was like that at school, and he’s never changed.’

## CHAPTER FOUR

My father had been run over in Fleet Street by a wagon bearing rubble removed from the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. The weight had broken his spine, killing him instantly. It was a miracle that the pressure had not cut him in half.

Infirmary Close was full of wailing women. Margaret persuaded herself that his death had been her fault, for she had left him in the parlour while she was making dinner, believing he was no longer capable of managing the locks and bolts of the door into the lane. The neighbours’ maids wept in sympathy. The laundry woman came to the house to collect the washing; she wept too, because tears are catching and death is frightening.

After he brought me home in the hackney coach, Sam went into the kitchen yard and chopped wood as if he were chopping down his enemies: one by one, with deliberation and satisfaction.

As for me, I went into my father’s bedchamber and sat beside him, as I should have done last night. He lay with his eyes closed and his hands folded over his chest. Someone had covered the great wound with a sheet and bound up his jaw. His face appeared unmarked. Sometimes the dead look peaceful. He did not.

I could not pray. I did not weep. The weight of his disapproval bore down on me, for I had strayed from the godly path he had ordained for me, and now it could never be put right. Worse still was the shame I felt about how I had behaved to him and how I had felt about him during the last few months, when he had become as vulnerable as a child.

Something shifted inside me, as an earthquake ripples and rumbles through solid earth and rock, bringing floods and ruin in its wake. Nothing would be the same again.

That was when the memory of Catherine Lovett came into my mind. She was a young woman with a strange and independent cast of mind. I had done her a service at the time of the Fire, though I had not seen her since; she was living in retirement and under an assumed name. As it happened, I had been with her when her father died, and I had seen what she had done. She had taken his hand and raised it to her lips.

I looked at my father’s hand. Flesh, skin and bone. The fingers twisted like roots. The nails discoloured and in need of trimming. Death had robbed his hand of its familiarity and made it strange.

I lifted the hand and kissed it. The weight of it took me by surprise. The dead are heavier than the living.

‘I am truly sorry for your loss,’ Mr Williamson said the following morning.

I thanked him and requested leave of absence to bury my father and settle his affairs.

‘Of course.’ Williamson turned away and busied himself with the papers on his desk. ‘Where will you lay him to rest?’

‘Bunhill Fields, sir.’

Williamson grunted. ‘Not an Anglican burial ground?’

‘I think not. He would not have wished it.’

Bunhill Fields was where the Dissenters lay, and where my father belonged. Williamson returned to reading letters, occasionally annotating them. The two of us were alone in the Scotland Yard office, which lay just to the north of the Whitehall Palace itself. Williamson had two offices, one close to my Lord Arlington’s, and this one, which he used for the Gazette and for other concerns that required more privacy.

A few minutes later, he spoke again, and his voice sounded harder than before, closer to his northern roots, which was often a sign of irritation in him. ‘You must look to the living, Marwood, as well as the dead.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You would not wish anything to reflect ill on this office. Nor would I.’

I bowed my head. I knew what Williamson intended me to understand. Before his mind lost its bearings, my father, Nathaniel Marwood, had been a Fifth Monarchist. As a result of his allegiance to that dangerous sect, he had been imprisoned for treason. He had considered the Church of England as the next best thing to the Church of Rome with its Papist ways and its foul plots against honest men. He had hated all kings except King Jesus, whose coming he had devoutly waited for.

‘After all,’ Williamson said, staring grimly at me, ‘you would not want to lie in Bunhill Fields yourself when your time comes. At least, I hope you would not.’

‘Of course not, sir.’

Nowadays I served the King; and it was politic for me to have a care for what I did and said, and to choose wisely whom I associated with. I made sure the world knew that I went to church regularly and that I took communion when it was fitting to do so, according to the rites of the Established Church and the instruction of its bishops. But there was always the danger that, through my father, I might be considered guilty by association, by blood.

‘So you will change your mind, Marwood? No doubt your father would have wished you to think of your best interests in these changed times.’

‘Yes, sir. But I must also think of his.’

Williamson gave a laugh – short, sharp and mirthless, like the bark of a dog. ‘You’re obstinate in your folly.’ He lowered his head over his papers. ‘Like father, like son, I suppose.’

For some reason, that last remark comforted me as nothing else did.

Two days later, on Monday, we laid Nathaniel Marwood in his grave. There was no reason for delay – the death had been an accident; it was easy enough for an old man to stagger on the crowded pavement and fall under the wagon. He had been notably infirm in mind, if not in body, and quite possibly did not even know where he was. Such deaths happen every day.

We took the body to Bunhill Fields. Apart from the minister, the bearers and the diggers, the only mourners were Sam and myself. Margaret was debarred by her sex from coming, which was unkind, for her grief was in its way deeper and truer than my own. She still wept for my father at the slightest provocation, despite the fact that in life he had been a burden to her.

After the interment, Sam and I took a hackney coach around the walls of the ruined city, a wasteland of blackened chimney stacks, roofless churches and sodden ashes. I told the driver to set us down in Fleet Street. We went to the Devil, the big tavern between Temple Bar and Middle Temple Gate, where Sam stuffed himself with as much as he could eat and I made myself swiftly and relentlessly drunk.

Memory is a strange thing, fickle and misleading, as treacherous as water. My memories of the rest of the day are like broken glass – jumbled, largely meaningless and with sharp edges liable to wound. But I remember perfectly one snatch of conversation between us, partly because it happened early on, and partly because of what was said.

‘Do you know the crossing-sweeper here, master?’

I was too busy drinking to reply.

‘He knows you,’ Sam went on.

‘Do I?’ Of course I gave the sweeper a penny occasionally. If you used a crossing regularly, you would be a fool not to. But I could not for the life of me remember what the man looked like.

‘His name’s Bartholomew,’ Sam said. ‘Like the prophet. Barty.’

I was not attending to what he was saying. I was trying to attract the attention of the waiter and order more wine.

‘He’s the one who brought your father home. The day before he died.’

I forgot the waiter and looked at Sam. ‘Yes – I remember. Margaret told me. I should give him something for his trouble.’

Sam touched the side of his head with his forefinger. ‘Barty said he didn’t know the old man’s wits were wandering. Not at first. I mean, seeing him from the outside, who would? He didn’t look as if he had an addled brain.’

It was a fair point. Nathaniel Marwood had looked what he was – an old man in his sixties, but hale enough. It was only if you tried to talk to him, and you heard the nonsense that poured out of his mouth, making little more sense than the babble of an infant, that you realized his infirmity.

‘There’s an archway up beyond the church, sir. Barty said that was the way your father came.’

‘An archway?’ I thought he meant the great gateway that divided the City from Westminster, and Fleet Street from the Strand. ‘You mean he came through Temple Bar?’

‘No, no. This archway’s off the street. To the north, by St Dunstan-in-the-West.’ Sam leaned forward. ‘It’s the way into one of these lawyers’ colleges. Clifford’s Inn.’

Suddenly my father’s words were in my mind. The last words, nearly, that I had heard from him, and possibly the last words that contained some fragmentary elements of lucidity. ‘Where the lawyers are. Those creatures of the devil.’ He had hated and feared lawyers since they helped to put him in prison and take away his property.

‘Isn’t that where the Fire Court is sitting? Why would he go there?’

Sam shrugged.

Have you ever remarked how lawyers are like rooks? They cling together and go caw-caw-caw … And they go to hell when they die.

So there had been, after all, a single fragment of fact among my father’s ramblings, buried in all the nonsense about my mother. He had been to Clifford’s Inn, among the lawyers.

‘Did Barty say more?’

‘He was weeping,’ Sam said. ‘Barty told me that. So he walked him home, but he couldn’t make head nor sense of what your father was saying.’

I hammered my fist on the table. ‘Then I shall go to Clifford’s Inn and find out.’

The waiter mistook the gesture and was at my elbow in a trice. ‘Beg pardon, master, didn’t mean to keep you waiting. Another quart of sack, is it? You will have it directly.’

‘Yes,’ I said, frowning at him. ‘Very well, a drink before we go, to godspeed us and drink to my father’s memory.’ I glared at Sam. ‘He should not have been weeping. He should not have been unhappy.’

Sam stared at the table. ‘No, sir.’

‘And why in God’s name did he go to Clifford’s Inn? Did someone drag him there?’ All my guilt, all my sorrow, had at last found an outlet. ‘I shall have the truth of it, do you hear, and I shall have it now. Find me this Barty and I shall question him.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sam said.

There was the waiter again, back already. Before I was an hour older, I was too drunk to have the truth of anything.

## CHAPTER FIVE

The day after the funeral I woke with a headache that cut my skull in two.

My mouth tasted as it had in the first few weeks after the Great Fire when everything had turned to ashes, from the air we breathed to the water we drank. Every breath and every mouthful was a reminder of what had happened. Every footstep raised a grey cloud that powdered our clothes and our hair. The destruction of a city and the death of an old man tasted the same: ashes to ashes.

It was early. I wrapped myself in my gown and went down to the kitchen, tottering like an old man myself: in fact just as my father used to do when his limbs were stiff after sleep. Death, I think, must have a sense of humour.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, a gloomy room partly lit by a leaded casement which looked over the graveyard. Margaret was already there. She had lit the fire and was busying herself with the preparations for dinner. She took one look at me, pointed at the bench by the table and went into the pantry.

The kitchen smelled of smoke and old meat. Now I was here, I wanted to leave, but I lacked the strength. In a moment Margaret returned with a jug of small beer and a pot to put it in. Without speaking, she poured a morning draught and handed it to me.

The first mouthful made me retch. I fought back the rising nausea and took a second mouthful. I kept that down and ventured cautiously on a third.

‘I put juice of the cabbage in there too,’ Margaret said. ‘A sovereign remedy.’

I retched again. She went back to stirring the pot over the fire, the source of another smell. I watched a rat skim along the bottom of the wall from the larder and slip through the crack below the back door. I lacked the energy to throw something at it.

Taking my time, I drank the rest of the pot and let it settle. I felt no worse for it. At least my mouth was less dry.

Margaret refilled the pot without my asking. Sam had a tendency to take too much drink, and she knew how to deal with it.

I closed my eyes. When I next opened them, Margaret was standing over me. She was a short, sturdy woman with black hair, dark eyes and a high colour. When hot or angry, she looked as if she might explode. She looked like that now but I wasn’t sure why. My memory of the later part of yesterday was blurred. Clearly, I had been very drunk. That probably meant that Sam had been very drunk too.

‘Master,’ she said. ‘Can I speak to you?’

‘Later,’ I said.

She ignored that. ‘Your father’s clothes, sir. I—’

‘Give them to the poor,’ I croaked. ‘Sell them. I don’t care a fig what you do with them.’

‘It’s not that, sir. I tried to clean his coat yesterday. The one he was wearing.’

I winced and looked away, reaching for the pot.

‘It’s a good coat,’ she said. ‘There’s a deal of use left in it.’

‘Then get rid of it somehow. Don’t bother me with it, woman.’

‘I emptied the pockets.’

Something in her voice made me look up. ‘What is it?’

For answer, she went to the shelves on the wall opposite the fireplace and took down a small box without a lid. She set it on the table.

Inside was my father’s frayed purse and a piece of rag. The purse contained two pennies – we had never given him more because his money tended to be stolen or lost, if he had not given it away first – and four pieces of type, the only surviving relics of his press in Pater Noster Row. His folding knife was there too, with its handle of wood, worn and stained with constant use. At the bottom was a crumpled sheet of paper, smeared with rust.

Not rust, of course. Dried blood. Just as there had been dried blood on the cuff of his shirt.

Yesterday’s conversation with Sam flooded into my mind. The crossing-sweeper. Clifford’s Inn. Where the lawyers are. Those creatures of the devil. And, before that, my father talking deluded nonsense about my mother, and the woman on the couch, and closing her eyes.

I picked up the paper and smoothed it out. It was a strip torn from a larger sheet. Written on it were the words ‘Twisden, Wyndham, Rainsford, DY’.

Margaret refilled my pot. ‘It wasn’t there last week, master.’

‘Are you sure?’

She ignored the question, treating it with the contempt it deserved.

My brain was still fighting yesterday’s fumes. I screwed up my eyes and tried to focus on the words. First, the three names. Then two initials. DY – a name so well known that initials sufficed for it?

‘Bring me a roll and some butter.’

She went away. I sat there, staring into nothing. Clifford’s Inn. A scrap of paper stained with blood. A few names. It unsettled me that my father’s ramblings had contained a grain of sense. He really had strayed into a place of lawyers. But he could have picked the paper up anywhere.

The door from the yard opened and closed. There were footsteps in the scullery passage, and the tap of a crutch on the flagged floor.

Sam appeared in the kitchen doorway. He jerked his head towards the scullery passage and the back door. ‘Barty’s in the yard.’

I stared at him.

‘He won’t get any scraps out of me at this hour,’ Margaret said tartly. ‘Tell him to come back after dinner.’

‘Hold your tongue, woman.’ Sam looked at me. ‘Barty, master. The crossing-sweeper who saw your father. You told me to find him for you. Do you remember? In the Devil?’

Suddenly I was sober, or I felt I was. I stood up, knocking over the bench. ‘Bring him in.’

‘Best that you go out to him, master.’ Margaret wrinkled her nose. ‘If you’d be so kind. He stinks.’

‘You’ll give him something to eat,’ I said. ‘Take it out to him.’

‘Something you should know, sir,’ Sam said. ‘Barty says he saw your father again.’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’

Sam’s voice was gentle. ‘On Friday morning. As well as on Thursday.’

There was a moment of silence. My mouth was open. Margaret stood with a pan in her hand, leaning forward to put it on the fire, as still as a statue.

I swallowed. I said slowly, ‘Last Friday, you mean? The day my father died?’

Sam nodded.

‘Did he see what happened?’

‘He’ll only speak to you. I’m no use to him. You’re the one with the purse.’

Margaret whimpered softly. She set the pan on the fire.

‘Why didn’t he tell us sooner?’

‘He was taken up for debt that very afternoon. It’s only yesterday evening his mother raised the money to get him out of prison.’

Sam hopped down the passage and into the yard. I followed. Over his shoulder, I saw the crossing-sweeper sitting on the side of the trough that caught the rainwater. He was huddled in a filthy cloak with his hat drawn low over his ears. He was a crooked man with a sallow countenance.

When he saw us, he sprang up and executed a clumsy bow. Then he shrank back into his cloak as if he wanted to make himself as small as possible.

‘Sam says you saw my father on the day he died,’ I said. ‘As well as the day before, when you brought him back here.’

Barty nodded so violently that his hat fell off, exposing a bald patch covered in scabs, below which a fringe of greasy hair straggled towards his shoulders. He licked his lips. ‘You won’t make me go before a justice, master? Please, sir.’

‘Not if you tell me the truth.’

‘I done nothing wrong.’ He looked from me to Sam with the eyes of a dog that fears a beating.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You won’t be the poorer for it.’

‘It was like Thursday, master. He came out of Clifford’s Inn again, down to Fleet Street. He was in a terrible hurry, and he knocked against a bookstall there, and the bookseller swore at him …’

Sam nudged him with his elbow. ‘Tell his honour the rest.’

Barty screwed up his face. ‘He was looking back over his shoulder. As if someone was chasing him.’

‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Who?’

‘Couldn’t see, sir. There was a wagon coming down from St Paul’s, and a coach coming the other way, under the Bar. But I thought I’d go over and give the old fellow a helping hand, like I done the other day.’

‘Hoping it would be worth your while,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t have to tell us all that. Go on.’

‘Well …’ Barty looked at me, and then away. ‘That’s when it happened. The old man tripped – fell into the road – in front of the wagon. But I heard …’

I seized his collar and dragged him towards me. Part of me wanted to shake the life out of him. ‘What did you hear?’

‘His screams, master. His screams.’

I let the wretch go. He fell back against the trough. I was trembling.

‘And next?’ I said.

‘All the traffic stopped. I went over the road to see if …’

‘If there were pickings to be had?’

He tried to give me an ingratiating smile. ‘He was alive still, sir. Just. There was a crowd around him. But he looked up and he saw me there among them. I swear he saw me, master, I swear he did. He knew me. I know he did. He said … Rook. Where’s the rook?’

‘Rook,’ I said. ‘Rook? What rook?’

Barty stared up at me. ‘I don’t know what he meant, master. But I know he was scared of something.’

‘What else?’ I demanded.

‘That’s all he said, master. Then he was gone.’

Later that morning there was a knocking at the door. Sam announced that the tailor had come to wait on me.

I had quite forgotten the appointment, perhaps because I did not want to remember it. Death is a dreary business, time-consuming and expensive, and so is its aftermath. But it would not be right in the eyes of the world if I went abroad without visible signs of my bereavement.

Some of these signs were cheap enough to arrange – before the funeral, I had ordered Margaret to dull the metal of my buckles, attach black silk weepers to my hatband, and blacken my best brown shoes – including the soles, on Margaret’s advice, for they would be visible when I knelt to pray.

I had borrowed a suit of mourning for the funeral but I needed to have my own. On Saturday, I had visited the tailor’s shop to be measured, and to choose the material and discuss the pattern. Now the man had come to fit the suit and to try to persuade me to buy a black silk sash to set off the new clothes.

By the time all this was done, my head was clearer, and my stomach had returned to something approaching normality, though the very thought of sack made me feel queasy.

Death has this consequence: it jerks a man from the rut of routine: it throws him back on his own company at a time when he wants it least. All this time, as the tailor prattled away and my mind became my own again, I could not concentrate on anything but the one word: ‘rook’. There was nothing to distract me from it.

But what could I do? Find the nearest justice and lay the information before him? What was there to say? That a foolish old man had strayed into Clifford’s Inn, and afterwards he had fallen under the wheels of a wagon in Fleet Street. A crossing-sweeper had told me that his last words had been to ask where the rook was.

What crime had been committed? Whom could I lay information against? But I had to do something, for my father’s sake.

No. That was a lie. I had to do something for my own sake as much as his. In the hope of easing the grief, the guilt.

When the tailor was gone, I took the tray of my father’s possessions upstairs to his chamber. The bed had already been stripped to its mattress and the curtains removed. The floor had been scrubbed and the room aired; Margaret was a vigorous housekeeper.

My father’s clothes, such as they were, lay folded in the press. His smell clung to them, faint and unsettling. An old man’s smell, musty and familiar. He had left little else behind him apart from his Bible and the contents of his pockets.

He had had the Bible as long as I could remember. It was a Geneva Bible, the old translation favoured by those of a Puritan persuasion. When he had been taken up for treason, he had had the book in prison with him and he read it over and over. When I was a child, he had ordered me never to touch it in case I sullied the sacred volume with the sinful touch of my grubby fingers. Until now, I had obeyed him.

Now the Bible was mine. I took it down to the parlour and laid it on the table, where the light fell on it from the window. I turned the pages, which were brittle and torn. Without my father there, the book had lost its significance. It was still a Bible, of course – the Holy Book, more precious than all the world. The Word of God. I did not dispute that. The volume was dense with wisdom, crammed with essence of holiness. But at the same time it was just a book, a small, shabby copy of something available in its tens of thousands across the country. It needed my father to lend it weight and value.

Fixed with a rusty pin to the back cover was a fold of paper. Inside, I found a lock of light brown hair, the strands twisted together and held in place with a knotted red thread.

Memory ambushed me, swift and vicious as a footpad. ‘Rachel … how graceful she is, James, even in her kitchen. Why, she is as graceful as a deer.’

I touched the curl of hair, the fragment of my mother, a relic of someone who had been alive, whom my father had once loved and desired. I could not imagine him courting her. I could not imagine my parents being young together, younger than I was. But it seemed that her youthful self had remained so vividly alive in his memory that the image of her had lured him into Clifford’s Inn, had lured him among the lawyers.

My father hated them. Lawyers were agents of Satan, servants of the Antichrist. They had helped to put him in prison. Yet desire for his dead wife had cast out all fear of them.

## CHAPTER SIX

St Dunstan-in-the-West was partly clothed in scaffolding. The church projected into the street, forcing the roadway into a bottleneck before it passed under the Bar into the Strand. Shops and booths huddled as if for protection against the south aisle wall, blocking more of the pavement and constricting the foot traffic. Though the Fire had not destroyed the church, it had come close enough to cause minor damage and blacken the stonework, particularly at the east end.

The entrance to Clifford’s Inn lay at the west end of the nave, squeezed between the square tower of the church and the wall of the neighbouring building. I walked along a flagged passage that took me past the churchyard to a gate. A small, dingy courtyard lay beyond, much wider than it was deep, surrounded by a series of buildings of different sizes and ages.

The hall was directly opposite, filling the right-hand half of the northern range. I followed the path to the doorway at its left-hand end, where people were standing and talking in low voices. Some were lawyers and their clerks. Others were ordinary citizens, both men and women.

They ignored me as I passed like a ghost among them, through the doorway and into the passage that ran through the range to another doorway. The passage was crowded too, though the people were much quieter than those in the courtyard. The door to the hall itself was on the right. It was closed. A porter with his staff stood in front of it.

‘Hush, sir,’ he said in a savage whisper. ‘The court’s in session.’

I went out by the further door. I found myself in a much larger courtyard, which had a garden beyond. Over to the left, through another gateway, was Serjeant’s Inn, with Chancery Lane beyond, running north from the Strand. To the right was an irregular range of buildings, leading to a further court and then another gate, which gave on to an alley off Fetter Lane. The lane had marked the western boundary of the Fire last September, but the flames had left their mark on both sides of the road. One of the Inn’s buildings had been gutted – a block just inside the gate on the north side of the court. The roof was gone and the upper storeys had been partly destroyed.

Clifford’s Inn as a whole had an air of dilapidation like an elderly relation in reduced circumstances left unattended in the chimney corner. There was one exception to the general neglect: a brick range facing the garden, on the far side of the blackened ruin.

What had my father said?

‘I followed her by a garden to a doorway in a building of brick.’

It was strange indeed. Here was another grain of truth among my father’s ramblings on his last evening. First a place full of lawyers, and now a building of brick beside a garden.

The building had four doors at regular intervals along its length, with a pair of windows on either side overlooking the garden. I sauntered across the courtyard towards it in an elaborately casual manner. Each doorway led to a staircase, on either side of which were sets of chambers. The names of the occupants had been painted on a board beside each doorway.

I paused to examine the nearest one. There was something amiss with the lettering. I had spent my early life in the printing house, and I noticed such things. My father had made sure of that.

XIV

6 Mr Harrison

5 Mr Moran

4 Mr Gorvin

3 Mr Gromwell

2 Mr Drury

1 Mr Bews

‘The letters of a name were most ill-painted, James, and ill-formed as well.’

My skin prickled at the back of my neck. It was extraordinary. The board was just as he had described it. One name had obviously been added more recently than the others, and by a painter with little skill, and with no inclination to make the best of what skill he had. Gromwell.

‘There was a great drip attached to it, and a poor creature had drowned therein.’

It was as if my father’s ghost were beside me, murmuring the words into my ear. Yes, there was the ant, trapped below the last ‘l’ of ‘Gromwell’, decaying within its rigid shroud of white paint.

Horror gripped me. If my father had been right about all this, then what about the woman he had seen displaying herself like a wanton in a chamber above? The woman with her coach and horses. The woman whose eyes he had closed in the chamber with the ant.

Gromwell’s chamber?

I opened the door and climbed the stairs. I did not hurry, partly because I was scared of what I would find. On the first landing, two doors faced each other, numbers 3 and 4. I waited a moment, listening.

‘I thought to find her in the chamber with the ant … up the stairs …’

I knocked on number 3. I heard movement in the room beyond. A tall, florid-faced man opened the door. He wore a morning gown of dark blue plush and a velvet cap. There was a book in his hand, with a finger marking his place. He frowned at me, raised his eyebrows and waited.

‘Mr Gromwell?’ I said.

It must have sounded like ‘Cromwell’ to the man’s ears. Or perhaps he was merely oversensitive, which was understandable as Oliver Cromwell’s head was displayed as a dreadful warning to traitors on a twenty-foot-high spike over Westminster Hall.

‘It’s Gromwell,’ he said, drawing out the syllables. ‘G-r-r-romwell with a G. I have no connection with a certain Huntingdonshire family named Cromwell. The G-r-r-romwells have been long established in Gloucestershire. G-r-r-romwell, sir, as in the plant.’

‘Whose seeds are used to treat the stone, sir?’ I said, remembering a herbal my father had printed.

The eyebrows rose again. ‘Indeed. A thing of beauty, too. As Pliny says, it is as if the jeweller’s art has arranged the gromwell’s gleaming white pearls so symmetrically among the leaves. Sir Thomas Browne calls it lithospermon in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica.’

I bowed in the face of so much learning. Behind Mr Gromwell was a table piled high with books.

‘Forgive me for disturbing your studies.’ I shifted my stance, so I could see further to the left. I couldn’t see a carpet. All I could make out was an expanse of bare boards and a grubby rush mat. ‘My name is Marwood. I wonder if my late father called on you last week.’

Gromwell frowned, and I guessed he was taking account of my mourning clothes for the first time. ‘Your late father?’

Over the fireplace was a dusty mirror in a gilt frame that had seen better times, but no trace of a painting, lewd or otherwise.

‘He died the day after he came here.’

‘I am sorry to hear it.’ Mr Gromwell did not look prosperous but he had a gentleman’s manners. ‘But I have been away. My rooms were locked up.’

He took a step back. His arm nudged the door, which swung further open, revealing most of the room. There wasn’t a couch of any description, let alone one with a body on it. None of the furnishings could be called luxurious. I felt both relieved and disappointed. It was remarkable that my father had recalled so much. Once he had entered the building, his imagination must have taken over. But I persevered.

‘I am much occupied with business at present,’ Gromwell said in a stately fashion. ‘I bid you good day, sir.

‘Does the name Twisden mean anything to you, sir?’ I asked. ‘Or Wyndham? Or Rainsford?’

He shook his head. ‘Forgive me, sir, my studies—’

‘Or the initials DY?’

Gromwell’s face changed. For an instant, he looked surprised, jolted out of his stateliness. His features sharpened, which made them look briefly younger. ‘No,’ he said, more firmly than he had said anything yet. ‘Good day to you.’

He closed the door in my face. I knocked on it. The only answer was the sound of a bolt being driven home.

## CHAPTER SEVEN

The young woman sat in the gallery taking shorthand. Her real name was Catherine Lovett, but most of the time she tried very hard to forget that inconvenient fact. Now she was Jane Hakesby, a maidservant attending the Fire Court at Clifford’s Inn to serve her master, Simon Hakesby, who was also a second cousin of her father’s. She was a maidservant with accomplishments, equipped with some of the advantages of gentle breeding, though few of them were much use to her at present. In her new life, only Mr Hakesby knew her true identity.

She did not intend to be a maidservant for ever. On her knee was a notebook held flat with the palm of her left hand. A steadily lengthening procession of pencilled marks marched across the open page, meaningless except to the initiated.

In the hall below, the court was in session, dealing with the last of the day’s cases. There were three judges at the round table on the low dais at the east end. The clerks and ushers clustered to one side, making notes of the proceedings and scuttling forward when a judge beckoned, bringing a book or a letter or a fresh pen. The petitioner and the defendants, together with their representatives, stood in the space immediately in front of the dais.

There was a lull in the proceedings – perhaps five seconds – during which no one spoke, and the court seemed to pause to draw breath. Her mind wandered. Her pencil followed. His wig’s crooked, she wrote. Judge on left. Then a lawyer cleared his throat and the talking and arguing began again.

The hall was cramped and shabby. Clifford’s Inn was not a grand establishment on the scale of the Temple, its stately colleague on the other side of the Fleet Street. Even in May, the air was chilly and damp. In the middle of the floor, a brazier of coal smouldered in the square hearth. The heat rose with the smoke to the blackened roof timbers and drifted uselessly through the louvred chimney into the ungrateful sky.

Jane Hakesby was sitting in the gallery at the west end, though a little apart from the other women. Her notebook rested on a copy of Shelton’s Tachygraphy. She was in the process of teaching herself shorthand, and the Fire Court provided her with useful practice. Most of the women were in a whispering huddle at the back, where the judges could not see them. Sometimes they glanced at her, their faces blank, their eyes hard. She knew why. She did not belong among them so they disliked her automatically.

‘All rise,’ cried the clerk. ‘All rise.’

The court rose to its feet as the judges retired to their parlour to confer on their verdict. Jane Hakesby looked down at the floor of the hall. Below her was a bobbing pool of men’s hats. Benches had been fixed along the side walls, and it was here that the elderly and the infirm sat. From her vantage point at the front of the gallery, she saw the brim of Mr Hakesby’s best hat and the folds of the dark wool cloak he usually reserved for church and high days and holidays. Even his best cloak was shabby.

Hakesby did not have a direct interest in the case under consideration. He was here on behalf of the freeholder to keep watch over his interests. The dispute itself was an involved and bad-tempered affair between the leaseholder and three of his subtenants about which of them would be responsible for rebuilding their houses after the Fire, and how the cost of doing so would affect the terms of their leases and sub-leases. The Government had set up the court solely for the purpose of settling such disputes, with the aim of encouraging the rebuilding of the city as soon as possible.

Mr Hakesby’s white hand rested on his leg. Even at this distance, she made out that the fingers were trembling. A familiar sense of dread crept through her, and settled in her stomach. She had hoped that as the weather improved, his health would improve with it. But if anything his ague grew worse.

And if it grew so bad he could not work, what would become of her?

In a while the judges returned with their verdict, which found in favour of the subtenants but varied the terms of their leases in the leaseholder’s favour. The judges departed and the hall began to empty.

Jane Hakesby allowed the other women to leave before her. She kept her head down as they filed past her to the stairs, pretending to study a page of Tachygraphy. It was improbable that any of them would recognize her, or rather recognize her as who she had been, but old habits died hard. In a moment she followed them down to the passage at the end of the hall.

There were doors at either end of the passage, one to the small court bounded by the Fleet Street gate, the other to the garden court that contained most of the other buildings of Clifford’s Inn. Mr Hakesby emerged from the hall and touched her arm. She took his folder of papers and offered him her arm. He pretended not to see it. Leaning on his stick, he made his way slowly towards the north doorway, leaving her to trail behind him.

He was a proud man. It was one thing to show weakness to his maidservant, but quite another to show it to the world, especially to that part of the world that knew him. But she was learning how to manage him.

‘The sun is out, sir,’ she said. ‘I found it so cold in the hall. Would you permit me to sit in the garden for a moment?’

But he wasn’t attending to her. He stopped suddenly. ‘Good God,’ she heard him say.

She looked past him. Her eyes widened. Without thinking, she took a step backwards, ready for flight. Here was someone who belonged to her old life.

‘Mr Marwood,’ Hakesby said, his voice trembling. ‘Your servant, sir.’

She recognized him at once, which was strange. James Marwood looked different from before – he seemed taller, and he was dressed in mourning. He was also out of place at Clifford’s Inn. He belonged among the clerks of Whitehall, not here among the lawyers. Most of all, though, her instant recognition was strange because she had seen him properly only once, and then by the light of candles and lanterns, and at a time when she had other things on her mind. She wondered who was dead.

Mr Hakesby glanced over his shoulder at her. He turned back.

‘Good day to you, sir,’ Marwood said, his voice cautious as though he was uncertain of his welcome. His eyes slid towards her but he did not greet her.

‘And to you …’ Hakesby hesitated and then went on in haste, as if to have the information off his chest as soon as possible. ‘And here is my cousin Jane. Jane,’ he repeated with emphasis, as if teaching a lesson, ‘Jane Hakesby. She’s come up to London to be my servant at the drawing office.’

She dropped a token curtsy. Four months earlier, Marwood had saved her life in the ruins of St Paul’s. Apart from Hakesby himself, only Marwood knew that Jane Hakesby was really Catherine Lovett, the daughter of a Regicide who had died last year while plotting against the King.

‘And what brings you here, sir?’ Hakesby asked.

‘An enquiry, sir. And you?’

Hakesby nodded towards the hall. ‘The Fire Court has been in session.’

‘Do you often attend?’

‘As occasion requires. When I have clients whose interests are concerned.’

Marwood drew closer. ‘I wonder – indulge me a moment, pray – do the names Twisden, Wyndham or Rainsford mean anything to you?’

‘There’s Sir Wadham Wyndham – he’s a justice of the King’s Bench, and he sits sometimes at the Fire Court. In fact, he was one of the judges sitting there today. Could it be him?’

‘Perhaps. And the others?’

‘I don’t know the names. Could they be connected with the Fire Court as well? You should ask Theophilus Chelling. He’s the Fire Court’s assistant clerk. He will know if anyone does.’

‘I’m not acquainted with him.’

‘I’ll introduce you now, if you wish.’ Hakesby’s eyes moved to his maid and then back to Marwood. ‘I believe there can’t be any harm in it.’

Marwood murmured his thanks, and Hakesby led the way to a doorway in the building that joined the hall range at a right angle. Marwood walked by his side. Jane Hakesby trailed after them, as a servant should.

They climbed stairs of dark wood rising into the gloom of the upper floors. Hakesby’s trembling increased as they climbed, and he was obliged to take Marwood’s arm. The two doors leading to the first-floor apartments were tall and handsome modern additions. On the second floor, the ceilings were lower, the doorways narrower, and the doors themselves were blackened oak as old as the stone that framed them.

Hakesby knocked on the door to the right, and a booming voice commanded them to enter. Mr Chelling rose as they entered. His body and head belonged to a tall man, but nature had seen fit to equip him with very short arms and legs. Grey hair framed a face that was itself on a larger scale than the features that adorned it. The top of his head was on a level with Jane Hakesby’s shoulders.

‘Mr Hakesby – how do you do, sir?’

Hakesby said he was very well, which was palpably untrue, and asked how Chelling did.

Chelling threw up his arms. ‘I wish I could say the same.’

‘Allow me to introduce Mr Marwood.’

‘Your servant, sir.’ Chelling sketched a bow.

‘I am sorry to hear that you’re not well, sir,’ Marwood said.

‘I am well enough in my body.’ Chelling puffed out his chest. ‘It’s the fools I deal with every day that make me unwell. Not the judges, sir, oh no – they are perfect lambs. It’s the authorities at Clifford’s Inn that hamper my work. And then there’s the Court of Aldermen – they will not provide us with the funds we need for the day-to-day administration of the Fire Court, which makes matters so much worse.’

Uninvited, Hakesby sank on to a stool. His maid and Marwood remained standing.

Chelling wagged a plump finger at them. ‘You will be surprised to hear that we have already used ten skins of parchment, sir, for the fair copies of the judgements, together with a ream of finest Amsterdam paper. Scores of quills, too – and sand, naturally, for blotting, and a quart or so of ink. I say nothing of the carpenter’s bill and the tallow-chandler’s, and the cost of charcoal – I assure you, sir, the expense is considerable.’

Hakesby nodded. ‘Indeed, it is quite beyond belief, sir.’

‘It’s not as if we waste money here. All of us recognize the need to be prudent. The judges give their time without charge, for the good of the country. But we must have ready money, sir – you would grant me that, I think? With the best will in the world, the court cannot run itself on air.’

Chelling paused to draw breath. Before he could speak, Hakesby plunged in.

‘Mr Marwood and I had dealings with each other over St Paul’s just after the Fire. I was working with Dr Wren, assessing the damage to the fabric, while my Lord Arlington sent Marwood there to gather information from us.’ When he had a mind to it, Hakesby was almost as unstoppable as Mr Chelling himself. ‘I met him as I was coming out of court just now. He has a question about the judges, and I said I know just the man to ask. So here we are, sir, here we are.’

‘Whitehall, eh?’ Chelling said, turning back to Marwood. ‘Under my Lord Arlington?’

Marwood bowed. ‘Yes, sir. I’m clerk to his under-secretary, Mr Williamson. I’m also the clerk of the Board of Red Cloth, when it meets.’

‘Red Cloth? I don’t think I know it.’

‘It’s in the Groom of the Stool’s department, sir. The King’s Bedchamber.’

Mr Chelling cocked his head, and his manner became markedly more deferential. ‘How interesting, sir. The King’s Bedchamber? A word in the right ear would work wonders for us here. It’s not just money, you see. I meet obstructions at every turn from the governors of this Inn. That’s even worse.’

Marwood bowed again, implying his willingness to help without actually committing himself. There was a hint of the courtier about him now, Jane Hakesby thought, or at least of a man privy to Government secrets. She did not much care for it. He moved his head slightly and the light fell on his face. He no longer looked like a courtier. He looked ill.

She wondered who was dead. Had there been a mother? A father? She could not remember – she had probably never known. For a man who had changed her life, she knew remarkably little about James Marwood. Only that without him she might well be dead or in prison.

‘Mr Marwood has a question for you, sir,’ Hakesby said.

Marwood nodded. ‘It’s a trifling matter. I came across three names – Twisden, Wyndham and Rainsford. I understand there is a Sir Wadham Wyndham, who is one of the Fire Court judges, and—’

‘Ah, sir, the judges.’ Chelling rapped the table beside him for emphasis. ‘Mr Hakesby has brought you to the right man. I know Sir Wadham well. Indeed, I’m acquainted with all the judges. We have a score or so of them. They use the set of chambers below these, the ones on the first floor, which are larger than ours. We have given them a remarkably airy sitting room, though I say it myself who had it prepared for them, and also a retiring room and a closet. Only the other day, the Lord Chief Justice was kind enough to say to me how commodious the chambers were, and how convenient for the Fire Court.’

‘And do the judges include—’

‘Oh yes – Sir Wadham is one, as I said, and so is Sir Thomas Twisden. Sir Thomas has been most assiduous in his attendance. A most distinguished man. I remember—’

‘And Rainsford?’ Marwood put in.

‘Why yes, Sir Richard, but—’

‘Forgive me, sir, one last question. Do any of the other judges have the initials DY?’

Chelling frowned, and considered. ‘I cannot recall. Wait, I have a list here.’ He shuffled the documents on his table and produced a paper which he studied for a moment. ‘No – no one.’ He looked up, and his small, bloodshot eyes stared directly at Marwood. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I regret, sir, I am not at liberty to say.’

Chelling winked. ‘Say no more, sir. Whitehall business, perhaps, but I ask no questions. Discretion is our watchword.’

Marwood bowed. ‘Thank you for your help, sir. I mustn’t keep you any longer.’

‘You must let me know if there is any other way I can oblige you.’ Chelling tried to smile but his face refused to cooperate fully. ‘And if the opportunity arises, I hope you will not forget us.’

‘You may be sure of it, sir.’

‘If the King but knew of our difficulties, especially with our governors who—’

‘Mr Gromwell, is it?’ Hakesby interrupted, beginning to rise to his feet. ‘Is he still putting obstacles in your way?’

‘Gromwell, sir?’ Marwood said. ‘The name is familiar.’

‘Then I pity you, sir.’ Chelling waved his hand, as if consigning Gromwell to a place of outer darkness. ‘It would be better for the world if he were entirely unknown.’

‘Why? What has he done?’

‘He is one of our Rules – that is to say, the members who are elected to govern the affairs of Clifford’s Inn. He is particularly charged with overseeing the fabric of the place, and its maintenance. I regret to say that he’s no friend to the Fire Court.’

‘But you are paying something for the use of the hall, I suppose?’

‘Of course we are – and for these chambers – but he thinks we do not pay enough for the privilege. He ignores entirely the pro bono aspect of the matter.’ Chelling pointed out of the window. ‘The other day I asked if we could use the fire-damaged staircase over there for storage. It would ease our lives considerably, and cost him absolutely nothing. It’s no use to anyone else at present. But he refused point-blank.’

Marwood bowed again. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, sir.’

Chelling returned the bow, and almost toppled over. ‘If only the King were aware …’

By this time, Hakesby had managed to stand up. She came forward to offer her arm – he was often unsteady when he had been sitting down – but Marwood was before her. The three of them said goodbye to Mr Chelling and went slowly downstairs.

‘Poor man,’ Hakesby murmured. ‘Clinging to his duties at the Fire Court as a drowning man clings to a straw. Chelling has many excellent qualities, but he’s been unfortunate all his life, partly because of his stature.’

They emerged into the sunlight. Marwood looked at Jane Hakesby and, she knew, saw Catherine Lovett.

She stared back at him, hoping he would leave them.

Hakesby turned towards them. ‘Will you dine with us, sir?’

## CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lamb was in Wych Street, just to the north of the Strand and set back in a court. It was an aged building with blurred, blackened carvings along the bressumers supporting the upper storeys. It lay conveniently between Mr Hakesby’s drawing office at the sign of the Rose in Henrietta Street and the house where he lodged in Three Cocks Yard. Shops lined the ground floor, and the tavern was above.

The landlord conducted them to a small chamber, poorly lit by a mullioned window overlooking a yard. Hakesby ordered their dinner, with wine and biscuits to be brought while they waited. Jane Hakesby worried about the cost.

Marwood slipped on to a bench that faced away from the light. She set down her basket and sat opposite, beside Mr Hakesby who took the only chair. She examined him covertly. His face was pale, the skin stretched tight over the high cheekbones and smudged with tiredness beneath the eyes.

He had agreed to come with them, but without much enthusiasm. It was as if it didn’t really matter what he did. He ate a biscuit, and then another, which brought some of the colour back to his face.

He caught her looking at him. ‘How do you do, mistress?’ He left the briefest of pauses and added with a slight emphasis, ‘Hakesby.’

The ‘mistress’ pleased her, however foolish of her that was. ‘I do very well, thank you, sir.’

He turned to Hakesby. ‘I don’t wish to cause trouble. You don’t mind being seen with me?’

‘We’ve heard nothing to alarm us, sir,’ Hakesby murmured. ‘About the other matter.’ They were quite alone but he shifted uneasily and leaned closer. ‘I have no idea if Mr Alderley is still looking for Catherine Lovett.’

The men exchanged glances. The Alderleys were her cousins. She hated her cousin Edward more than anyone in the world.

‘I’ve heard nothing either,’ Marwood said. ‘Nothing of any moment.’

‘Catherine Lovett has become Jane Hakesby,’ Hakesby said. ‘Why, I almost believe it myself. She makes herself useful at the drawing office.’

‘I am still myself, sir,’ she said sharply. ‘And I am here beside you. I do not forget who I am and what is owed me. Nor do I forget who has harmed me.’ She glared impartially at them. ‘In this company at least, I am Catherine Lovett.’

Hakesby shied away. ‘Pray don’t upset yourself.’

She saw the alarm in his face. ‘You mustn’t mind me, sir. When I was a child, they called me Cat. I have claws.’

Marwood said, ‘Are you content?’

‘I am a maidservant, sir. I assist Mr Hakesby in his business. I live a quiet life. What more could I possibly want?’ She heard the bitterness in her voice and abruptly changed the subject. ‘Who are you in mourning for?’

Marwood seemed to huddle into his black cloak like a tortoise retiring into his shell. Hakesby cleared his throat, filling the silence. Her abrupt, unwomanly behaviour made him uneasy. He had grown used to it in private, but he did not like it when she spoke so directly to others.

‘My father. On Friday.’ Marwood finished his second glass of wine. ‘He was run over by a wagon in Fleet Street.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it, sir,’ Hakesby said.

‘I mustn’t bore you with my troubles. Tell me about the Court where these three judges sit. Why would they be listed together?’

‘Because the Fire Court usually consists of three judges to hear each case,’ Hakesby said, a little stiffly because Marwood had rebuffed his attempt at sympathy. ‘Perhaps there was a particular case that came before these three. Or there will be.’

‘Three judges for a trial?’

‘Not a trial, sir. The Court exists to resolve disputes arising from the Fire. Parliament and the City are anxious that rebuilding should begin as soon as possible, and that the costs should be shared fairly among all the concerned parties. In many cases the tenants and so forth are still liable to pay rent for properties that no longer exist. Not only that, the terms of their leases make them responsible for the rebuilding. Often, of course, they lack the means to do so because they lost everything in the Fire. So Parliament set up the Fire Court, and gave it exceptional powers to settle such disputes and set its own precedents.’

‘There must be a list of forthcoming cases,’ Marwood said. ‘If I knew which ones were coming up before those three …’

Hakesby said: ‘It depends which judges are available.’

‘Mr Chelling would know,’ Cat said. ‘As far as anyone does.’

‘Yes, but the selection is not usually made public until the last moment. To prevent annoyance to the judges. They don’t want to be pestered.’

Marwood hesitated. ‘I’d rather not trouble Mr Chelling again.’

Hakesby smiled. ‘He has a loose tongue. And your … your connections impressed him mightily. He will try to make use of you if he can. He will tell the world you’re his friend.’

‘But if you were to make the enquiries, sir,’ Cat said to Hakesby, ‘and in a fashion that suggested the matter had to do with something quite different, one of your own clients …’

‘Would you, sir?’ Marwood said, his face sharp and hungry.

Hakesby hesitated. ‘I am pressed for business at present, and I—’

‘He means, sir,’ Cat interrupted, impatient with this unnecessary playacting, ‘would you do something for us in return?’

‘Jane!’ Hakesby said. ‘This is not polite.’

‘I don’t care much about being polite, sir.’

‘What do you want?’ Marwood said, returning bluntness for bluntness.

‘Would you lend Mr Hakesby some money?’

‘Jane!’

Cat and Marwood stared at each other. Perhaps, she thought, she had made him angry by asking him a favour at such a time. But he looked prosperous enough. And there was no room for sentiment. Didn’t one good turn deserve another? This was a matter of business, after all, an exchange of services.

‘Well,’ Mr Hakesby said uncertainly. ‘Taken all in all, I can’t deny that a loan would be most welcome.’

After dinner, Hakesby and Cat took a hackney back to Henrietta Street.

To be Jane Hakesby in Henrietta Street was Cat’s refuge, for the Government did not care for her. The reputation of her dead father and her dead uncle clung to her like a bad smell, and her living cousin wished her harm.

But Mr Hakesby’s drawing office was more than a refuge: it was a place where, if she were fortunate, she could pursue the one occupation she preferred above all others: like the great Roman architect Vitruvius, she dreamed of designing buildings that would be solid, beautiful and useful, ‘like the nests of birds and bees’.

The hackney meant more expense, Cat thought, but it could not be helped. They did not speak during the journey until the end, when Hakesby turned to Cat.

‘I wish you had not asked Marwood for money. And so bluntly.’

‘Do we have a choice, sir?’

As they climbed the stairs, Hakesby reached for Cat’s arm. Floor after floor they climbed, and the higher they rose, the tighter his grip and the slower his step.

The drawing office was on the top floor. It was a converted attic that stretched the width of the house, with wide dormer windows to make the most of the light. Two drawing slopes were set up at an angle to the windows, each one separate from the others, so they could be turned individually to increase or occasionally reduce the light that fell on them from the windows.

As Mr Hakesby and Cat entered the room, Brennan laid down his pen, rose from his stool and bowed to his master.

‘Any callers?’ Hakesby said, making his way to his chair.

‘No, master.’ Brennan’s eyes strayed towards Cat. ‘I’ve finished inking the north elevation if you care to inspect it.’

Hakesby lowered himself into his chair. ‘Good. Bring it here.’ His finger flicked towards Cat. ‘Then I shall dictate a note to my lord.’

Cat hung up her cloak. In this case, my lord was the freeholder for whom Hakesby had held a watching brief at the Fire Court this morning. While she gathered her writing materials together, she watched the two men studying the elevation. Or rather she watched Brennan. He watched her so she watched him.

Brennan had been working here for less than three weeks. He had come with a letter of recommendation from none other than Dr Wren himself, with whom Hakesby had worked on several projects. He had been one of the men working on the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, helping to adjust the designs after discussions with the masons employed on building the theatre. He was certainly a good draughtsman, Cat gave him that, and a fast worker too.

In this next hour, Cat took dictation from Mr Hakesby for the letters, wrote a fair copy for him to sign, and copied it again into the letter book as a record. It was not work she enjoyed but it was work she could do. Afterwards her reward came: she was allowed to work on the plans for a house and yard in Throgmorton Street – routine work, but with details she could make her own, subject to Mr Hakesby’s approval.

Brennan was behind her, and she felt his eyes on her. Her skin crawled. She twisted on her stool, presenting him with a view of her shoulder. The afternoon was drawing towards its end, and the light was changing. She took her dividers and pricked first one hole in the paper before her and then another. She laid the steel rule between them and, frowning with concentration, pencilled a line, a mere shadow, on the paper.

There. The base of the architrave. And now, at an angle of twenty degrees—

Her irritation faded as the lines of the east façade spread across the paper. In her mind, the same lines sprang up, newly translated from two dimensions to three, acquiring solidity as well as depth, existing in space and time. The miracle was familiar but no less astonishing for that.

While the two of them worked at their slopes, Mr Hakesby sat by the fire, reading and occasionally making notes in his crabbed hand. At present he was checking accounts and invoices, and scribbling notes on the margins of letters. He had caused a carpenter to fix a board to each arm of his chair, and these he used as a desk. His handwriting was now almost illegible, because of the ague. On a bad day, even Cat found it hard to read.

Time passed. The light faded. The bells of surrounding churches chimed seven o’clock, though not quite at the same time.

Mr Hakesby dismissed Brennan for the day. The draughts- man was due an extra fee for a piece of work he had done at home. Hakesby found the money in his purse himself and told Cat to make a note of the payment. She added it to the current sheet of sundry expenses. Glancing back, she saw an alarming number of entries already. She drew up a rough total in her head, and the amount staggered her. There were two months to go until the quarterly rent on the drawing office was due at midsummer.

The draughtsman came over to where she was sitting so she could pay him the money and initial the entry as a receipt. At that moment, Mr Hakesby retired to his closet to answer a call of nature.

Brennan took his time. He stood very close to Cat’s stool. He was fair complexioned, with pink cheeks and a sprinkling of freckles on his nose. He wore his own hair, which was sandy in colour. Cat saw two grey lice squatting among the roots where it fell into a parting on the left-hand side of his scalp.

He laid down the pen and blew on his initials to dry them. Cat felt his breath touch her cheek. Involuntarily, she turned her head. He took up the paper. He stared at her with pale eyes, neither blue nor grey, that made her think of pebbles on a shingle beach.

She held out her hand for the paper, anxious for him to be gone. His hand touched hers. She snatched it away.

‘Less haste,’ he said, smiling, ‘more speed. What’s the hurry?’

He leaned on the table, resting on his right hand. His left hand touched her neck in a caress which was as light as a feather. She seized her dividers and jabbed them between his index and middle fingers, missing them by a fraction of an inch on either side. He snatched his hand away. The points of the dividers had passed through the expenses sheet and dug into the wood of the table.

He raised his hand. ‘God damn you, you could have stabbed me. My right hand, too.’

‘Next time I will stab you.’ Cat tugged the dividers free from the table and turned the points towards him. ‘And it won’t be your hand.’

‘Ah.’ He lowered his arm and grinned at her, exposing long, yellow canines. ‘A vixen. I like a woman with spirit.’

The closet door opened. Brennan sauntered over to the peg where his cloak was hanging.

‘Why are you still here, Brennan?’ Hakesby said. ‘I thought you’d be gone by now.’

The draughtsman had recovered his composure. ‘Talking to Jane, sir.’ He bowed low. ‘I wish you goodnight.’

‘He promises well,’ Mr Hakesby said as his footsteps sounded on the stairs. ‘Particularly on the fine detail. Dr Wren was right.’

Cat busied herself with throwing another shovel of coals on the fire, keeping her face averted to conceal her rising colour. The fire was a luxury at this time of year. More expense. Hakesby craved warmth, a symptom of his illness. His blood ran cold nowadays, he said. Colder and colder. She stood up and looked at him.

‘Come here,’ he said.

She put down the shovel and stood beside his chair.

‘This damnable question of money,’ he said. ‘I wish I had not taken yours.’

‘Sir, you had no choice in the matter. Neither of us did. If you hadn’t taken it, both of us would have starved.’

Cat had lent him sixty pounds in gold on Lady Day, all the money she had in the world, taken from her dead father’s body. Hakesby had been behindhand last quarter’s rent and the wages for his employees. He had owed his own landlady for two months’ board, and there had been a host of other debts. The commissions were flowing in but few clients paid promptly for the work. With luck, most of the money would come in its own good time, and they would be more comfortable, but in the meantime they all had to live.

‘Money confers an obligation,’ he said. ‘I’m worried I may not be able to discharge it.’

‘Of course you will. But at present we need ready money. Which is why Marwood was a gift from heaven, sir. If you go to a moneylender, they would rob you.’

‘I can’t get reasonable terms.’ Hakesby held up his right hand. The bony fingers fluttered. ‘This grows worse.’

‘It’s been a hard winter, sir. Everyone says so. But now summer is here, the warmth will soon—’

‘I have seen the doctors. This ague of mine will not get better. In time, it may touch the mind, as well as the body. With your help, and Brennan’s, and perhaps another draughtsman’s, we shall manage for a few months, perhaps a few years. But then …’

‘We shall contrive somehow,’ Cat said. ‘If you rest more and worry less, the ague will progress more slowly.’

‘And how will I pay you back if I cannot work? Or Marwood?’

‘You give me shelter, sir, and you give me work. That is repayment. We’ll manage with Marwood. He looks prosperous enough to be kept waiting a little.’

After a pause, he said: ‘What will become of you if I’m not here?’

A silence spread between them. Cat did not want to think about the possibility of Hakesby’s death. It was not just the trembling that was growing worse, it was the depression of his spirits.

Hakesby straightened in his chair, squaring his shoulders as if for a fight. ‘Fetch me the ledger, Jane. We shall reckon up the accounts. Let us find out how bad matters really are.’

## CHAPTER NINE

‘My husband,’ Jemima said, sitting at her dressing table in Pall Mall and staring sideways at her reflection in the mirror, ‘is a fortunate man.’

And Mary, whose own reflection shimmered and shifted behind her mistress’s, murmured like a mangled echo, ‘Yes, my lady, the master is very fortunate. I’m sure he knows it too.’

Yes, Jemima thought, and when my father dies and Syre Place and everything else is mine, he will be even more fortunate. Because of me. When her father died, her husband would have the management of Syre Place and everything that went with it. Including herself – unless she could learn the art of managing him.

When she was ready, she descended the stairs, one hand on the rail of the bannisters, the other clutching Mary’s arm. She wore her grey taffeta, sombre yet elegant, and a pendant with a diamond the size of a pigeon’s egg. Mary had dressed her hair and applied the patches and powders to her face.

Rather than go directly to the dining room, where there was already a murmur of voices, she went halfway down the stairs to the kitchen. The smells of their dinner came up to meet her, and made her feel queasy. For a moment her hand touched her belly. Was it possible she could be pregnant?

In the kitchen, the birds were turning on the spit over the fire, the fat sizzling as it dropped on to the hungry flames. The cook and the scullery maid curtsied, Hal the coachman doffed his hat and made his obedience, and the boy, Hal’s son, tried to hide behind the scullery door until Hal dragged him into the open and cuffed him so hard he fell against the wall. The Limburys did not maintain a large establishment in London – all of their servants were in the kitchen, apart from Richard and Hester, who were serving at table upstairs, and the gardener.

Without speaking, Jemima stared at them. She had sent Mary down with her orders. But it was good to show oneself in the kitchen too, even if one didn’t want to. Marriage was a contract, her father had told her, and she would fulfil her part of it, to the letter, even if her husband faltered in his.

Faltered. What a puny, insignificant, inadequate word.

‘Well?’ she said.

The cook curtsied again. ‘Yes, my lady. Everything as it should be.’

She held the cook’s eye for a moment, as her mother had taught her to do all those years ago at Syre Place, and then let her eyes drift over the other upturned faces, from one to the next.

‘The guinea fowl will turn to cinders if you don’t have a care.’

The cook gave a strangled yelp and dived towards the fireplace. Without a word, Jemima tightened her hold on Mary’s arm and turned. As they climbed the stairs to the hall, she felt as much as heard the rush of pent-up breaths escaping in the kitchen below.

In the hall, she hesitated. She had not seen Philip since he had come to her chamber the previous afternoon, though this morning he had sent up to make sure that she would dine with them today. She did not like meeting strangers, even in her own house. She did not want to see Philip, either.

As if sensing her mistress’s anxiety, Mary touched her hand and murmured: ‘You look very fine, my lady. I’ve never seen you look better.’

In the dining room, the gentlemen rose and bowed as she entered, and Richard moved forward at once to help her. Richard was Philip’s servant, brought with him from his other life before their marriage. He wore his livery and had his teeth in, so he made a respectable show. Mary said he hated to wear his teeth because they hurt his gums.

Jemima curtsied to the gentlemen and allowed herself to be assisted to her chair.

‘My wife has not been well these last few days,’ Philip said, ‘but she would not keep to her bed when she knew you would be dining with us, Sir Thomas. And our old friend Gromwell too.’

‘What a charming diamond,’ Gromwell said, staring admiringly but respectfully in the direction of Jemima’s bosom. For all her dislike of him, she was forced to concede that he was a tall, fine-looking gentleman. He had once known great prosperity but his fortunes were now much reduced. ‘My Lady Castlemaine was wearing one that was very like, only the other day, but it wasn’t nearly so fine. Smaller, too.’

‘It was my mother’s,’ Jemima said coolly, impervious to his attempt to charm her. The last time they had met, at Clifford’s Inn, his charm had been in short supply.

‘Quite outstanding,’ he murmured, leaving it discreetly ambiguous whether the compliment referred to her diamond or her bosom.

Sir Thomas cleared his throat and ventured into a complex and finely nuanced expression of opinion, which, though initially obscure, seemed to suggest that in this case the wearer adorned the diamond, rather than the other way round.

Philip smiled down the table at her, his brown eyes soft and adoring. It was a smile designed to melt the heart and during their courtship it had melted hers, against her better judgement. ‘Lucius is right, my love,’ he said, ‘and Sir Thomas too – you look very well today, better than ever perhaps, if that can be possible.’

‘How can one improve upon perfection?’ Gromwell enquired; his manners were courtly though, like his yellow suit, they were a trifle old-fashioned. ‘But my lady has. Behold, a double miracle, a miracle of both nature and logic.’

‘You are pleased to jest, sir,’ she said automatically, and twitched her lips into what could pass as a smile.

‘I never jest on sacred matters, madam.’

You parasite, she thought, and smiled and nodded her head while the gentlemen laughed and toasted her. Duty done, they went back to their conversation.

‘I had no idea you would be sitting on the Dragon Yard petition,’ Philip said to Sir Thomas. ‘What a coincidence.’ As Jemima knew to her cost, he had the knack of speaking the clumsiest, crudest lie with such assurance that it became a self-evident truth. ‘It is so truly admirable that you judges sit for love of country, and for the city, and not for gold. You will be a pattern for future generations.’ He raised his glass. ‘A toast. Good health and prosperity to our Fire Court judges.’

They drank solemnly, and Hester came to the door with the guinea fowl, now dressed for table in their sauce. Jemima tasted a morsel and found the dish perfectly cooked, which pleased her, for she had pride in the food served at her table, as in other matters that belonged to her.

‘I sometimes attend these hearings myself, sir,’ Gromwell said. ‘Not that I have a pecuniary interest in them, you understand, but for the sheer quality of the judgements.’

‘You’re a lawyer, sir?’ Sir Thomas asked. ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you in court.’

‘I’ve never practised, sir. As a young man, however, I passed many profitable hours in the study of the law, and I believe I retain the ability to appreciate a well-argued case’ – he bowed towards Sir Thomas – ‘and a well-considered verdict.’

The gentlemen ate, and drank, and drank again. The room grew warmer. Sir Thomas was obliged to retire behind the screen to relieve himself. Jemima wanted to laugh at them, at their mockery of good fellowship, but instead she picked at her food and smiled at the compliments which were thrown her way like scraps to the bitch under the table; occasionally, as a well-bred hostess should, she threw in the sort of question designed less to elicit information than to allow the hearer to shine in his answer. But she said nothing to Gromwell.

Later – half an hour? an hour? – the conversation returned to the subject of the Fire Court. ‘It is not a court of law,’ Sir Thomas was saying, apparently to herself, ‘though our judgements have the force of law, and have the ability to override such things that are usually considered sacrosanct. Leases, for example, and contracts relating to property.’

‘And if I understand you correctly, sir,’ Gromwell put in with the air of an eager student, ‘your judgements do not set a precedent, but apply only to the petition under consideration.’

‘Precisely.’ Sir Thomas nodded vigorously and held out his glass for more. ‘You have understood me perfectly, sir.’ He beamed at Gromwell. ‘If I may say so, it is the law’s loss that you decided to apply your energies in other fields of knowledge. Our powers are intended simply to help London return to its former glory as soon as possible, for the good of the City and the Kingdom as a whole.’ He hammered his fist on the table. ‘And indeed the world. For does not our trade encircle the entire globe and enrich all it touches?’

This led to another toast, after which Philip said, smiling, ‘And if all goes well, sir, with the wise help of the judges, we shall do more than restore London. We shall increase its glories for centuries to come.’

‘I suppose Dragon Yard will be a case in point,’ Gromwell said. ‘Eh, Philip? If the decision next week goes in your favour, that is.’

Here we are, Jemima thought, we have come at last to the point of this tedious meal.

Gromwell turned to the judge. ‘I’ve studied the plans. It’s a most noble development, sir, with houses of the first class, laid out and built in a way that will make them proof against future fires. Safe, commodious and an ornament to the City. And also to the benefit of the public and of trade, I understand. It will provide another way to Cheapside, thereby easing the congestion of traffic there.’

Twisden’s face became serious; he looked like a flushed owl. ‘No doubt, sir, no doubt. Though all that would require considerable investment.’

‘We must not weary Sir Thomas with talk of business.’ Philip smiled round the table. ‘Would you care for a hand or two of cards, sir?’

The judge brightened. ‘If her ladyship would not object. And Gromwell too, of course.’

‘I should like it above everything,’ Gromwell said, smiling. ‘What would you say to lanterloo? And perhaps a shilling or two on the outcome?’

‘Why not? It adds a certain spice, does it not?’

‘I think, sir,’ Jemima said, ‘if you would not object, and if Sir Thomas and Mr Gromwell would not think me discourteous, I shall leave you to your play.’

‘Of course they will excuse you, my love,’ Philip said. ‘You are not fully yourself yet, and you must not overtire yourself. We can play with three as well as four. Richard? Send for Mary to help her mistress upstairs.’

A moment or two later, she withdrew. Sir Thomas bowed so deeply he stumbled against a chair and almost fell.

‘All well, my lady?’ Mary said softly as they climbed the stairs.

‘Well enough.’

Jemima was tempted to add ‘for your master’, but held her peace. She would lay good money that Philip would have known beforehand of Twisden’s taste for lanterloo, and that he would have arranged with Gromwell for the judge to win a pound or two from each of them.

When he was courting her, Sir Philip Limbury had seemed a creature of impulse, and his love for her had seemed as open and sincere as the sun itself. After their marriage, however, it had not taken her long to learn that he did little or nothing by chance. There was a purpose in almost everything he said and did. Sometimes more than one purpose.

When she was back in her chair by the window, and the chamber door was closed, she called Mary to her. ‘The other matter. There’s nothing? You’re sure?’

‘Yes, my lady.’

‘The servants will know. They always do. Richard? Hal?’

‘Hal Coachman would blab, madam. Richard, maybe.’

Jemima looked up at Mary. ‘Talk to Richard. See if he will let slip anything about Thursday.’

‘That one gives nothing for nothing, madam. He serves the master and himself. No one else.’

Jemima ran her tongue over her lips. ‘Then make him desire you. See if that will open his toothless mouth. I must know who the woman was.’

Mary stared down at her mistress. ‘Are you sure you want me to …?’

Jemima stared back. ‘Yes.’