The Ashes of London (11 page)

‘Don’t take that out, John, not until he’s paid his reckoning. Leave it in the back of the hall.’

The servant did as he was told. He saw Cat and stared at her.

‘Don’t stand there dreaming,’ the woman snapped. ‘Bring down something else.’

At last, when the young gentleman had paid his bill and left with his wagon, she came down the steps from the front door and beckoned Cat forward.

‘Who are you?’

‘Mistress Noxon?’

She ran her eyes over Cat, taking in the bundle under her arm. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘Jem sent me.’

‘Oh yes? Jem who?’

Cat fumbled in her pocket and brought out the object that Jem had given her. It turned out to be a dark, smooth, flattish stone in the shape of an oval, which might have been picked up on a shingle beach. There was a white line of another mineral embedded in it, orange in this light. It made a wavering M if you had a mind to see one there.

M for Martha? Mistress Noxon took the stone, stared at it for a moment, and slipped it in her own pocket.

‘Mistress Lovett,’ she said softly.

‘Yes.’

‘You need somewhere to lodge.’ It was not a question. ‘How long?’

‘I don’t know.’ Cat swallowed, for her mouth was terribly dry. ‘I have a little money. Not much.’

Mistress Noxon ran her eyes over Cat, inspecting her as if she were a prospective purchase. ‘Mistress Lovett can’t stay here. Nor can any young lady. This is a house where single gentlemen lodge.’

Cat turned to leave by the street door, which still stood open.

‘You don’t have to go,’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘But if you stay, you stay as a servant and you work for your keep.’

‘I’m not afraid of hard work.’

‘You will be by the time I’ve finished with you. Well? Do you stay as a servant or do you go as a lady?’

‘I stay.’

Mistress Noxon folded her arms across her bosom and stared at her. ‘As a servant.’

Cat dipped a curtsy. ‘If it please you, mistress.’

‘Close the door, then, and come down to the kitchen.’ Mistress Noxon led her into the house, calling up to the manservant, telling him to bar the door. In the kitchen, she said, lowering her voice: ‘In this house, your name’s Jane.’

‘Yes, mistress. Has Jem talked of me? Did he say he might send me to you?’

Mistress Noxon brought down the flat of her hand on the table. ‘You’re not to mention him. If you want to stay, you will be Jane and nothing but Jane and you will do as you’re told and not ask foolish questions.’

‘But I should tell you why I—’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘It’s better not.’

The house in Three Cocks Yard had been bought as a speculation by a wealthy Oxford haberdasher. It stood with three neighbours in a flagged court, from which a narrow alley led down to the Strand on the northern side, not far from Temple Bar.

The principal apartments were let to single gentlemen. There were three lodgers. At present, only Master Hakesby was in residence. He was a draughtsman, an elderly man of uncertain temper. He was working on a design with Dr Wren, the architect and mathematician whom the King had appointed as one of his Commissioners for the rebuilding of London, which made him automatically an object of fascination to Cat.

The haberdasher had installed Mistress Martha Noxon as housekeeper. She had formerly been in his service as his wife’s chambermaid and, if Margery’s insinuations were to be believed, as his own paramour. Margery did most of the cooking but Mistress Noxon considered her too slatternly to wait at table. There was also a manservant named John and a ten-year-old boy, who was more trouble than he was worth and slept in a sort of kennel by the kitchen chimneystack.

The servants were told that Jane was a stranger from a village near Oxford, and that she was a remote connection of Mistress Noxon’s. They knew that this was probably a lie, and that the young woman called Jane was a mysterious intruder in their world, but they were too afraid of Mistress Noxon to ask questions or tell tales.

Cat did the work she was given. She kept her mouth shut when she could. When she couldn’t, she roughened her voice and tried to imitate the inflections and turns of phrase that the other servants used. They thought she gave herself airs, but they left her alone for fear of Mistress Noxon. There was even an unexpected pleasure in being Jane, not Cat: in being someone else.

The work was often hard but it was not strange to her. She had been brought up not only to run a household but to do the various tasks, from cooking to cleaning and beyond, that she might set a servant to do; this was good for the soul, for it kept a woman humble, which was pleasing in the eyes of God and man; it was also prudent, for it enabled one better to direct and instruct one’s own servants.

For Cat, what was strange and unpleasant was not so much the work itself but to learn how a servant felt as she scrubbed a floor that belonged to someone else. It was a different feeling from that of someone whose family owned the floor.

When Cat thought about her former life it seemed remote and somehow foreign to her, as if it belonged to a different person. But she was too tired to do much thinking. The work was exhausting, but that was good because sometimes it stopped Cat from remembering what she had done to Edward, what he had done to her, and what her life had now become.

She was so heavy with weariness that she usually fell asleep as soon as she climbed into bed in the attic she shared with Margery. But she had bad dreams, haunted by Cousin Edward, and by the fear that she was carrying his child. On the first night, she woke both herself and Margery with her screams.

Two days after Cat’s arrival, Mistress Noxon summoned her to her little room by the kitchen. The skin around her eyes was pink and puffy.

‘You should know that he’s dead. My uncle.’

‘Oh mistress.’ Cat’s eyes filled with tears. Jem.

‘Tell no one. There will be no mourning. We don’t know him, and we never did. You understand? The man was such a fool. I never met such a one in all my days.’

But Mistress Noxon kept the stone that Jem had sent her by Cat in her pocket, together with her money, her keys, her rings, and other precious things.

Cat wept herself to sleep that night – as quietly as pos-sible, for fear of waking Margery again. Without Jem, she had no one who cared for her unconditionally and completely. Without Jem, she was alone. Unless her father found her.

According to the gossip of servants, if a woman did not take pleasure in an act of copulation, she could not become pregnant by it. Cat did not believe this, not least because she could not understand how any woman could take any pleasure whatsoever from such an assault on her body even if it were not forced on her.

Besides, she had seen animals about the business in the farmyard and fields of Coldridge. For females at least, copulation had more to do with grim necessity than pleasure.

The fear that she might be pregnant remained. She could think of nothing worse than carrying Edward’s ill-begotten child. She became even more afraid of this than of being taken up for Edward’s murder.

She had made her calculations. She thought it probable that Edward was still alive. Had he been killed, the news would surely have penetrated even to Three Cocks Yard by now, even to the basement kitchen that was the centre of her life. The Alderleys were such a prominent family that the intelligence would have spread throughout the town faster than the Fire itself.

You could not hide a murder, even in a house like Barnabas Place with high, thick walls, though you could hide lesser crimes. Assault and battery, for example. Or rape.

At the beginning of her fourth week at the beck and call of Mistress Noxon, she had pains in her groin and the blood began to flow. Some men believed that a woman’s monthly courses were full of evil humours, that they blackened sugar, made wine sour and turned pickled meat rancid. Men, Cat thought, were such fools that they would believe anything. Mistress Noxon provided the necessary cloths to deal with the blood, and even an infusion of valerian and fleur-de-luce to ease the pain.

Cat welcomed the discomfort and inconvenience. If she had fallen pregnant, it would have been necessary to find a way to kill the baby.

Gradually, Cat became aware that there was another difficulty in the shape of John, the manservant. He was a tall, broad-shouldered lad, a country boy at heart, with red hair, bright blue eyes and a slab-like face whose colour and approximate shape made Cat think of a leg of mutton before it had gone in the oven. Margery, the cook, thought he was the finest young man that the world, let alone London, had to offer. John had been quite happy to accept this adoration and even to repay it at his convenience with small doses of affection.

But then Cat had come to Three Cocks Yard and, despite her best efforts to be plain Jane, to be colourless and dull in every particular, John found her of absorbing interest. He was not a man to whom words came easily, but he had other ways of making his feelings known. He blushed when she came into the room. He would appear at her shoulder when she was emptying the slops and take the pots from her in his enormous hands. Once, when the kitchen boy showed a tendency to be impudent to her, John clouted his ear with such force that the boy’s feet lost contact with the ground.

One consequence of this undesired and unrequited devotion was that Margery hated Cat.

A
T LAST
,
NEARLY
six weeks after the Fire, the rain came.

Cat stood by the attic window of the house and squinted over the surviving rooftops and the jagged outline of the ruins at the stump of St Paul’s tower.

There had been showers since the Fire, and dull days with heavy grey skies, but the heat of summer had mingled with the heat of the Fire and lingered long after it should have ended. This rain was different. It poured from the sky in thick silver rods like water through a colander.

It was much colder, too. That was less welcome. Cat went down the steep stairs, little better than a ladder, to the second floor, and worked her way down to the basement. The kitchen was full of the smell of bread. The baker’s boy had called in her absence.

‘What kept you?’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘Daydreaming again? It won’t do. Not in this house. I had to open the door myself to the boy.’

Cat curtsied and apologized. She had learned humility lately, along with her new name, which she answered to like a dog. A dog called Jane. They had not been easy lessons.

‘Draw the beer now.’

She left Mistress Noxon laying the tray for her to take upstairs. She had often felt the rough edge of Mistress Noxon’s tongue. At first, it had made Cat furious – how dare the woman speak to her in that way, especially when they were alone? Later, she accepted it as necessary.

Her circumstances had changed and so must she. In time, she learned to distinguish when Mistress Noxon was truly angry, when she was irritable for a reason that had nothing to do with Cat, and when her anger was entirely mechanical, administered for Cat’s good, in the same way that Cat’s nurse used to administer a regular purge to her.

She filled the beer jugs from the barrel in the scullery and took them back to the kitchen.

‘Take the tray now. Master Hakesby’s up. The barber’s coming to shave him, and he’ll want his breakfast before that.’

Cat tapped on Master Hakesby’s door, and he told her to enter. He was partly dressed and in his gown, a handkerchief around his shaven head. He was seated at the table by the window and already at work.

‘Put it on the chest,’ he said without looking up. ‘And pour some beer, will you?’

She obeyed and brought the cup over to him. He took it without looking at her. She strained to see what he was working on. There was a small sheet of paper before him. He was using ink but not a ruler or compasses.

This is an idea, Cat thought, something that comes in the night and needs to be pinned down before it vanishes in the daylight.

A cruciform shape. A church, then. An octagon where the four arms meet: probably a great dome, like St Peter’s in Rome. And, from the transepts, curving outer lines stretching to nave and choir, softening the right angles where the transepts meet with the long axis of the church.

Was it St Paul’s? A new St Paul’s?

Master Hakesby took a mouthful of beer. He spilled a few drops on the table and dabbed at it with a handkerchief. He looked up but she didn’t think he saw her, not properly. ‘What is it, Jane?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Then go away.’

The next day, after the great rainstorm, was a Tuesday. In the afternoon, Cat was set to washing and waxing the floor and panelling of the parlour. Mistress Noxon came into the room before the task was half done.

‘You’re to go to St Paul’s,’ she said. ‘For Master Hakesby. It’s urgent.’

Cat stared at her. Since her arrival here she had not gone further than the Strand.

‘There’s no one else to send.’ Mistress Noxon ran her finger along the curved mouldings of the door panels, automatically checking for dust. ‘You know the way?’

Cat nodded. She had grown up in Bow Lane, east of St Paul’s, and the streets from Charing Cross to the Tower had been part of her childhood.

‘John’s in Westminster or I’d send him. Margery gets lost if she pokes her head out of the door. So that leaves you.’ There was no need to add that the kitchen boy couldn’t be sent because he was a halfwit, and Mistress Noxon wouldn’t go herself because it would be beneath her dignity. ‘Besides, it’s time you went further abroad. You need air. You’re as pale as a death’s head.’

‘What am I to do?’

‘Master Hakesby wants a portfolio. It’s the small green one on the table in his chamber.’

‘I know.’ Cat knew everything there was to know about Master Hakesby’s chamber.

‘You’ll find him in Convocation House Yard. Do you know where that is?’

‘Yes, mistress.’

‘Show this paper to the men on the gate, and they will let you in. Give the portfolio into his own hands, mind – he was most particular about that – and take care to keep it clean. Be off with you. And keep it dry. Hold it under your cloak.’