The Ashes of London (19 page)

‘Beyond all doubt, sir. “Coldridge PW” was written on the paper enclosing the guineas in Layne’s box, though the handwriting was not his.’ I wondered why it was so important for Williamson to check what I had told him yesterday. ‘And Mistress Sneyd certainly told me that her husband’s comrade was called Coldridge.’

‘Did you ask your father about him?’

‘Yes. He didn’t know the name.’

‘Did not?’ Williamson said sharply. ‘Or would not admit it?’

‘I caught him at a lucid moment. I believe I know when he tells me the truth.’

Williamson grunted. ‘And you’ve learned nothing more about this Coldridge?’

‘Only this, sir.’ I decided to tell him of the speculation that had come to me in the cathedral. I had not mentioned it yesterday as it seemed far-fetched. But now I wanted to divert Williamson’s attention from my father. ‘It struck me that “PW” might refer to Paul’s Walk. In which case the paper gave a name and a place. Could that have been the reason Layne went to St Paul’s on the night the Fire destroyed it?’

‘To meet Coldridge?’

‘Or to spy on a meeting between Coldridge and another person – Jem Brockhurst, the servant who was flogged to death?’

Williamson chewed his lower lip. ‘It’s possible,’ he conceded. ‘I’ll turn it over in my mind.’ All of a sudden, he snapped out of his reverie and became his usual self. ‘I’m engaged here, Marwood, but there’s no need for you to be idle. I want you to complete the current list of my news correspondents. It shouldn’t take you long. Then take the
Gazette
proof back to Master Newcomb. Tell him—’ He looked past me, and suddenly his face creased into a smile. ‘Sir Denzil – your servant, sir.’ He swept into a low bow. ‘And yours too, sir.’ Another bow, even lower. ‘What a pleasure to see you at court again.’

I turned. Master Alderley and Sir Denzil Croughton were approaching, arm-in-arm. They separated themselves and bowed to Master Williamson. I bowed as well, but their eyes slid over me, and they did not return my courtesy.

‘We are come to wait on the Duke of York,’ Sir Denzil said in his high, weary voice. ‘By his express command. But my Lord Arlington is with him.’

Williamson bowed again, acknowledging the manifest importance of this. ‘He wishes for your assistance, sir?’ he said to Master Alderley.

‘Yes. A small matter, but urgent. To His Royal Highness, at least.’

‘Small?’ Sir Denzil laughed. ‘Small?’ His voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘By God, sir, there are few people in this gallery – few people in England, indeed – for whom two thousand, four hundred pounds is a small sum. And fewer still who could lay their hands on it at the drop of a hat.’

‘You flatter me, sir.’ Master Alderley smiled. ‘It is not ready money, after all – merely a matter of credit at short notice. A trifle.’

‘Ha!’ Sir Denzil cried. ‘If that’s a trifle, sir, then I’m a poxy Dutch whore, sir, and be damned to me!’

I stared at the muddy matting on the floor, knowing that I was of so little account to these gentlemen that they saw no need to set curbs on their tongues. How strange to lend a man money you did not have. The currency such people dealt in was not gold and silver: it was promises and dreams.

The three gentlemen began to walk slowly down the length of the gallery, with Alderley in the middle. In the absence of any instructions to the contrary, I followed, two paces behind Master Williamson.

Sir Denzil stopped suddenly. ‘Look.’

He pointed towards a door some distance away on the river side of the gallery. It was guarded by two soldiers. One of them had opened it for a gentleman who was about to pass through to the apartments beyond.

The gentleman paused in the doorway and glanced along the gallery. He was a plump, middle-aged man, quietly dressed in dark clothes. I knew him at once by the wart on his chin.

‘Ah,’ Master Williamson said. ‘His master is stirring at last.’

Sir Denzil laughed softly. ‘Stirring, sir? The question is, which part of him is stirring?’

The door closed behind the gentleman. At the same moment, a servant in royal livery cut through the crowd towards us. Sir Denzil and Alderley turned towards him.

The servant came to a halt in front of them and bowed in the arrogant manner of his kind. ‘His Royal Highness is at liberty to receive you now.’

‘At last,’ Master Alderley said.

‘Let us walk together,’ Master Williamson said. ‘Lord Arlington will be at liberty too.’

The three of them left me to consider the riddle of the plump gentleman with the wart on his chin.

‘Pray, sir,’ I asked a servant in livery who was dawdling through the crowd. ‘Do you know where that door goes to?’

The servant laughed in the sneering Whitehall manner that suggested he found my ignorance both irritating and amusing. ‘Don’t you know? You won’t go far in this place if you have to ask something like that,’ he said. ‘It leads to the King’s private apartments.’

‘Master Marwood?’

I came to a halt under the northern gateway from Scotland Yard to the thoroughfare beyond. I was on my way to Master Newcomb, the printer, with the marked-up page proofs for the next
Gazette.

A woman was standing under the outer arch, sheltering from the rain. Most of the light was behind her, and she was reduced to little more than a tall, slender shadow. Her face was partly covered by the collar of her cloak, which muffled her voice.

‘Yes?’

She pushed aside the collar of the cloak, revealing a narrow face and thin-lipped mouth.

‘Don’t I know you?’ I said. ‘Mistress Alderley’s maid?’

‘Yes, sir. She bids me give you a message. She is visiting a friend in the City tomorrow, and if you are at leisure after dinner, she begs you call on her there.’

‘Why? Do you know?’

‘You must ask her that yourself, sir. The house is next door to the sign of the Three Stars in Cradle Alley. Do you know it? Near Moorgate.’

‘I thought Cradle Alley had been burned.’

‘Only the western end. My mistress goes to dine there, and she will stay until master sends the coach for her.’

‘When?’

‘You are to attend her at three o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘Very well. Pray tell her—’

‘It’s a private interview,’ the maid said. ‘She desires you not mention it to anyone.’

Without another word, she walked away in the rain.

Master Newcomb, the printer, was in an affable mood, as he generally was at present.

He had been fortunate. Few of the City’s other printers had managed to save their press and to find themselves new premises since the Fire, let alone to continue to work profitably. Newcomb had lost the greater part of his stock and some of his household goods. But he was still doing steady business.

All in all, the court connection had served him well, and not just in the matter of finding new premises. Master Williamson employed him to print the
Gazette
, six hundred copies twice a week. It was steady, reliable work; it paid the rent, and it also went some way to providing Newcomb and his family with bread and meat.

The printer was in the shop at the front of his premises when I arrived, my hat dripping and my only remaining cloak sodden with rain. He was a bluff, fresh-faced man in early middle age. He looked up at the click of the latch.

‘Why, sir, a pleasure to see you.’ Newcomb waved his apprentice forward. ‘Take Master Marwood’s cloak and hang it by the kitchen fire. Ay, and his hat too.’

I came forward, feeling for the inner pocket of my coat. ‘I have the proof here.’

Newcomb took the two sheets and scanned through the additions and corrections that Williamson had marked up.

‘You’ll stay for a glass of wine, I hope? We’ll have it warmed to keep out the damp.’

He left his apprentice in charge of the shop, gave the proof to his journeyman and led me upstairs to the parlour.

Mistress Newcomb served our wine herself. When she came into the room, I saw that she was with child again. I had lost track of their children, living and dead, but I thought that this was probably her eighth pregnancy.

‘You’re looking thinner every day,’ she said to me as she set the tray on the table. ‘You can’t be eating properly.’

‘Don’t worry him, my dear,’ Master Newcomb said. ‘Let him drink his wine in peace.’

She ignored her husband, as she often did. ‘Come to dinner, sir, and I’ll feed you up. And your father too, if he is well enough. How is the poor man doing?’

‘A little older and a little vaguer, mistress. Otherwise well enough.’

‘I hear you’re living as far from town as Chelsea,’ Mistress Newcomb said. ‘It cannot be convenient.’

I shrugged. ‘The air is better. And it seemed wise when – when he came to live with me.’

The Newcombs exchanged glances. They had known my father before his imprisonment, for he had been a familiar figure among his brother printers and stationers and well known at Stationers’ Hall. He had been surprisingly popular among them, too, despite holding religious views that condemned most of the human race, apart from himself and a few other chosen ones, to an afterlife of eternal damnation. But, religion apart, he had had a reputation as an upright but kindly man, skilled in his trade and happy to help a friend in distress.

‘Does he like living in the country?’ Mistress Newcomb asked.

‘It matters little to him where he lives now, mistress. He rarely leaves the house and garden. He spends most of his time dozing by the kitchen fire.’

‘Will you stay in Chelsea?’

I hesitated. ‘We shall be obliged to move very soon – it is no longer convenient for the people of the house to have us.’

Again, the Newcombs exchanged glances, passing information between them in the swift and silent shorthand of the married.

‘You should find yourselves lodgings nearer Whitehall,’ Master Newcomb said.

Another glance.

‘As it happens,’ Mistress Newcomb said with an air of abstraction, ‘Master Newcomb and I have been discussing the possibility of taking lodgers ourselves. There are two chambers at the side, on the first floor. Not large, but adequate. The apprentice has one of them at present, but he could sleep in the kitchen. And the second one we use only as a store.’

A great wailing of high voices arose from somewhere in the rear of the house.

‘Those wretched children!’ Newcomb said. ‘My dear, can you not make them mute, at least while Master Marwood is here?’

‘Usually they are as quiet as lambs,’ Mistress Newcomb said, smiling sweetly at me as she glided towards the door. ‘But it happens that Mary and Henry both have the toothache, and once one of them starts crying, that sets the other one off.’ She shouted downstairs to an invisible servant. ‘Margaret! Stop those children making that din. At once, do you hear?’

‘The apothecary makes up drops for them,’ their father said. ‘It’s the only way, and the expense of it can go to the devil. A man cannot set a price on domestic peace.’

Mistress Newcomb was lingering in the doorway, her colour high. ‘Margaret lets them run wild, the foolish woman. She’s too kind to them. If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times.’ She moderated her voice and gave me another smile. ‘If you liked, sir, you could come to dinner tomorrow and see if the rooms would suit your purpose.’

The wailing increased, and Mistress Newcomb slipped away.

‘She has it all arranged,’ Master Newcomb said in a low voice. ‘She always does.’ He sipped his wine. ‘Mind you, you could do a lot worse. And it would be a convenient arrangement for all of us. But don’t let our convenience affect how you decide.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ I found myself unexpectedly moved. In the last few years, I had received little kindness from others. The suggestion was kindly meant, even if it was tinged with self-interest.

Newcomb’s eyes considered me over the brim of his glass. ‘And she’s right about the other thing, too, you know. Come to dinner. You look nothing but skin and bone, if you’ll allow me to say so. As if you’re living on air and not much else.’

The rain stopped while I was at the Newcombs’. When I returned to Whitehall, I found a message from Williamson at Scotland Yard, commanding me to attend him at Lord Arlington’s.

He was not there, but I found him taking the air nearby in the Privy Garden. He was pacing along one of the straight paths that ran parallel to the range of buildings containing the Matted Gallery. If he came to a puddle, he walked through it rather than alter his course by a single degree.

He looked up as he heard my footsteps on the gravel. ‘You were a long time with Newcomb.’

I bowed. ‘Your pardon, sir. As it happens, he has two rooms to let above his press.’

Williamson raised his eyebrows. ‘How fortunate. Will you take them?’

‘I haven’t seen them yet. But I am hopeful.’

He walked on. I walked a pace behind, following him to the far side of the garden, to the wall that divided it from the bowling green, and then along another of the paths. He did not speak until he stopped by the King’s great sundial. He looked about him to make sure there was no one in earshot.

‘This business at Barnabas Place,’ he said abruptly. ‘There’s something you’d better know. It may not matter, but I cannot be sure.’

He took a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It contained a list of names, arranged in a column.

John Bradshaw – obit

ord Grey of Groby – obit

Oliver Cromwell – obit

Edward Whalley – fugit

Sir Michael Livesey – fugit

John Okey

The hairs prickled on the back of my neck. I looked up after reading the first six. ‘But these are—’

‘Yes. These are the Regicides. The men who presided over the murder of his late Majesty, and those who assisted them.’

I knew then why Master Williamson preferred to talk to me in the privacy of the garden. At the King’s Restoration, six years ago, Parliament had passed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, a necessary measure to heal the wounds of the long Civil War. It granted a general pardon to those who had taken up arms against the King and his father. The only exceptions to this pardon were the Regicides and their helpers, together with a handful of others whose treason had been considered too foul to excuse.