The Ashes of London (16 page)

Ashes and ruins. Tears pricked my eyelids. I swore aloud, for such grief was of no earthly use to me, and two clergymen, passing in the opposite direction, gave me disapproving looks.

‘Drunk,’ said one, speaking in a normal voice as though I were a block of wood incapable of hearing anything, let alone understanding it.

‘Or mazed,’ said the other.

‘Or both,’ said the first, with the air of one covering all eventualities.

Ashes and ruins? Nothing left from here to the Tower?

I stopped so abruptly that one of the clergymen almost bumped into me. Before the Fire, most of the principal carriers had been based at one or other of the City inns, where the wagons left almost daily for all parts of the kingdom. I was sure that Mistress Alderley had said that Jem’s relation was a woman living in Oxford. The Oxford route was exceptionally busy – the court had moved there last year because of the plague and stayed there for months; it had returned to London only a month or two after Christmas. The wagons left the City by Newgate, crossed Holborn Bridge, and travelled westwards into the Oxford road.

But most of the City’s inns were no longer there.

At the foot of Fetter Lane, the red-headed man was turning right in the direction of Temple Bar and the Strand.

So where the devil was he going? It was possible that an Oxford carrier now left from somewhere in Fleet Street, say, or the Strand. Possible, but scarcely convenient. A set of stables in Holborn would have made much more sense, or even further west, and there were plenty of inns that would have welcomed the business. Or perhaps Jem’s box was to be stored somewhere in London before it went to the carrier.

Possible, yes, but not what I had expected. It was a kink in the probable, like a break in the pattern of one of the Alderleys’ Turkey carpets.

At the bottom of the lane, I crossed to the other side and turned into Fleet Street. It was more crowded here and the red-headed man wheeled his barrow in the direction of Temple Bar. He was now nearly a hundred yards ahead, but it was easy to keep him in sight because of his hair and his height.

A small, ragged boy collided with me, as if by accident. I swore. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed movement on my other side. A second boy was approaching, keeping well back.

I snarled at them. I reached for my purse with one hand and the hilt of my dagger with the other.

The pickpockets sheered away like startled magpies rising from carrion. They darted across the roadway, narrowly escaping collision with the horses of a wagon lumbering towards the City.

My hand still on my dagger, I backed against the wall while my breathing returned to normal. Sometimes the pickpockets operated in packs, and a second attempt would be made on a potential victim while he was recovering from the first. I glanced westward down Fleet Street.

The man was gone.

I swore again. The incident with the boys must have taken less than a minute. The man and the barrow could not have gone far. I started walking again, more quickly this time. I looked into shops, into taverns, and into the mouths of alleys.

I asked two people, a manservant and a cook boy, whether they had seen a red-headed man with a barrow. The servant ignored me, for he saw my hand on my dagger, and hurried past. The cook boy shook his head, waited in vain for a penny and spat on the ground to relieve his feelings.

The best possibility, I decided, was a lane scarcely wide enough to take a cart. It led to a paved court with a pump in the corner. It was a modestly prosperous enclave. The houses formed a terrace; they were not large, but they were newly built and with brick frontages. One had an apothecary’s shop on the ground floor, another a jeweller’s, and a third a superior establishment selling china imported from France and Germany. I paused by the pump and pretended to be making a note in my pocketbook.

In the centre of the terrace was a gate which led, no doubt, to the private yards and cesspools behind the houses. If the man had gone anywhere in this court, it was probably through that gate. I looked up at the windows, which looked blankly back at me.

After a moment, I returned to Fleet Street, crossed the road and went into a tavern. When the waiter came, I threw caution to the winds and ordered a jug of wine. As soon as the waiter returned, I asked the name of the court opposite.

‘Why, sir,’ he said, wiping greasy hands on a greasy apron. ‘That’s Three Cocks Yard.’

I
HAD NOT
been inside St Paul’s since the Fire. Now, when I left the tavern, I knew it was time to go there. Perhaps it was because I was now a little drunk. Perhaps it was because I wanted to postpone my interview with Master Williamson.

I had not made a conscious decision to avoid the place. My reluctance was instinctive, unexamined and unexplained, part and parcel of the mysterious grief for my lost London.

The closer I came to the cathedral, the more ruinous it looked. Convocation House Yard had been fenced off, as had the remains of the cloisters and Chapter House. Carpenters had sealed the doorways and the Dean and Chapter had appointed watchmen to patrol the exterior by day and night. There had been attempts to loot graves in the first day or two, and the authorities were doing their best to put a stop to it.

A stonemason’s boy directed me to the cathedral’s office of works. Here I negotiated with the watchman guarding the entrance to a temporary enclosure between cloister and nave, within the wider enclosure of the yard. Williamson had given me a general pass that vouched for me as a clerk attached to Lord Arlington’s office. Eventually this proved powerful enough to persuade the watchman to send for the Clerk to the Chapter.

Master Frewin, an anxious-looking gentleman in his fifties, eyed me with a frown. ‘You want to go into the cathedral? But why?’

When in doubt, a bare-faced but unassailable lie was the simplest policy. ‘My Lord Arlington wishes me to make an inspection, sir.’

‘But God knows, there have been inspections enough. And Dr Wren and his colleagues have advised His Majesty of the condition of the fabric.’

‘Indeed, sir. But now his lordship has commanded me to make notes on one or two particular points.’

‘Such as?’

I stared at Master Frewin. ‘He does not wish me to discuss that.’

I knew that my damp and shabby clothes did not inspire respect. But a confident manner and an air of borrowed authority had served me well in the past. I watched the emotions chase over the clerk’s face – irritation, doubt, calculation and even a touch of fear.

‘Very well,’ he said at length. ‘But I warn you, it’s dangerous. Walls collapse without warning. The floor is treacherous in many places. We’ve lost several men already. If you venture in there, you take your life in your own hands – you understand that?’

I bowed. ‘Are there men working in there now?’

‘Of course.’ Master Frewin rubbed his forehead. Now he had decided to capitulate, his manner became almost confidential. ‘Come this way, and mind where you tread. We are trying to clear the rubble away, for we cannot do anything with that there. We are still waiting to hear whether they will repair or rebuild. It is a perfect nightmare.’

‘You are to be pitied, sir.’

Frewin’s voice rose to a wail. ‘The King says one thing, the Dean another, and God knows what goes on in the Lord Mayor’s head, if anything. Dr Wren would build a new Jerusalem if he had the chance, but where’s the money to come from? And all the time I’m obliged to do what I can to keep the place safe.’

‘One thing first, sir. I am commanded to enquire about the body that was found in Bishop Kempe’s chantry after the Fire.’

‘Layne? Master Alderley’s manservant? Poor devil.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘Oh yes. I saw all the dead. It was often hard to know whether the Fire killed them or whether they were centuries old.’

‘Had you seen Layne before?’ I asked. ‘In life?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know him from Adam. Master Alderley asked me the same question when he came here the other day with Dr Wren.’

While we were talking, Frewin had led me across the yard piled high with salvaged stones to a large shed built against the cloister wall, where a number of men were at work sorting and recording salvaged materials. He pulled aside a heavy leather curtain on the back wall. An opening had been punched through the masonry, and a new door inserted in the opening. Beyond it were the remains of the north walk of the cloister. The ruins of the Chapter House were visible through the windows on the right, which had lost their glass.

‘This way, sir. On the left at the end. That was once the cathedral’s south door.’

Part of the door, a blackened mass of wood and iron, still hung on its hinges. It had been propped open with a baulk of timber. Beyond it was the long, roofless nave.

I paused in the doorway, assaulted by the din. Three labourers with hammers and chisels were at work nearby, shearing away blocks of dressed stone from the rubble core of fallen walls. Under the crossing, a gang of labourers was singing a drinking song in time with the scrapes of their shovels. Someone was shouting near the west end of the nave, where the modern portico had been attached to the main body of the church in the previous reign.

A network of paths had been cleared through the rubble. Men dragged barrows laden with stones and other debris. Each barrow required two or three men to move it, and their iron-shod wheels grated on the ground. The air was full of swearing and grunting and groaning.

‘Bedlam, sir,’ Master Frewin said. ‘I never thought I should live to see such a thing in St Paul’s. God knows, it was bad enough under Oliver, but when the King came into his own again, we hoped the good times had returned with him. What fools we were.’

There were tears in the man’s eyes. More grief. I looked up, to avoid his face. The blackened pillars and crumbling walls rose to the open sky, heavy with rain clouds.

‘Why?’ Master Frewin said. ‘What’s it all for?’ He turned and stumbled along the cloister walk, leaving me in the doorway.

Now I was here, I had to force myself to enter the church. I walked up to the crossing. The great pillars that held up the tower were cracked and leaning. The roof remained over the high altar at the east end, but it was particularly dangerous in that part of the building because of the collapse of the choir floor into St Faith’s in the crypt below.

Surely they could not rebuild this? The Fire’s destruction had ravaged a building that had already been tottering. During the war and under the Commonwealth, the authorities had encouraged the physical decay of the cathedral, as well as challenging its sanctity. Cromwell had stabled a regiment of cavalry in the cathedral, and the troopers had ridden their horses up and down the steps to the choir. My father had cheered.

Huge though the cathedral was, it was difficult to move around it easily – partly because of the rubble, and partly because the workmen filled what open space there was. I zigzagged through the ruins to what was left of Bishop Kempe’s chapel in Paul’s Walk. This was just west of the crossing, on the north side of the nave. Even before the Fire, the chantry had been in a decayed condition. Some of its stones had been stolen. The statues that had filled the niches had been decapitated or entirely destroyed.

Little was now left of the chapel or its past history. I scrambled over a heap of stones to reach it. There were still fragments of carving, some with traces of faded paint attached to them. The altar block was there, though it had been thrown off its dais. The heat had cracked it in two. I wondered whether the pimp and his ballads had survived the Fire.

This was where Layne’s body had been found, his thumbs tied behind his back, squeezed between the altar and the chantry wall.

Someone was shouting behind me, near to the temporary screen at the west end of the nave. One of the workmen was ordering his dinner.

The manservant must have been killed on the very night that the Fire had destroyed St Paul’s. Otherwise the corpse would have been found sooner. The church had been full of people seeking refuge before that for both themselves and their possessions.

‘And a jug of ale,’ the workman shouted, his voice hoarse. ‘Make sure it’s cold, Richard. None of your lukewarm slop like last time.’

I wasn’t listening to what the labourer was shouting. My mind was concentrating on Layne’s murder and the night of the Fire in Paul’s Walk. But I heard the sounds of his words, and some part of my mind imposed a meaning on them.

Make sure it’s cold, Richard. Cold, Rich. Coldridge.

I looked down Paul’s Walk at the man who wanted his dinner.

Words made patterns.

Coldridge PW, I thought. Coldridge, Paul’s Walk.

I walked back through the cloister ruins and pushed aside the leather curtain. I was in a hurry to be gone – I needed to report to Master Williamson at Whitehall, and I had already lingered here too long.

Master Frewin was nowhere to be seen in the shed that served as a workshop. I approached an elderly draughtsman stooping over his board, and asked where the Chapter Clerk might be found.

He straightened his spine and rubbed his eyes. ‘He’s probably in his private room.’

‘Then would you say farewell to him, sir, on my behalf and give him my thanks? My name is Marwood, on business from Whitehall.’

‘He’ll not be long, if you care to wait.’ The draughtsman waved a bony finger with an untrimmed nail at the end of it. ‘He works over there, and his inkpot is still uncovered.’

I followed the direction of the finger. I saw Master Frewin’s stool and desk, not five yards away, with a flight of wooden steps rising up the wall behind it. At the top of the steps was a door, which I assumed led to Master Frewin’s private room.

I also saw a cloak. It was hanging on a rusty nail that had been hammered between two stone blocks of the wall between the draughtsman’s stool and Master Frewin’s. The cloak was grey, made of wool but lightweight – not for winter use. It was on the shabby side.