The Ashes of London (32 page)

The bell continued its frenzied tolling. Trumpets were sounding outside. Someone was shouting orders in a voice more like a bull’s than a man’s. Underneath everything was the steady thump of drums.

The King paused at a window. ‘There is no call for panic,’ he said in a loud, carrying voice to one of the officers. ‘Go down to keep them calm. There will be plenty of time if we need to evacuate. Is my brother here? Send to him to join us.’

Despite the King’s orders, you could almost smell the panic in the air. Outside, men and women were scurrying along the paths of the Privy Garden below, many of them burdened with possessions.

The truth was, we were all afraid of fire. How could we not be after what had happened in September? I still dreamed of crackling flames, houses crashing to the ground, heaps of smouldering ashes, and rats squealing and shrivelling in silver puddles of molten lead. If Whitehall were destroyed as well as the City, what would be left of London?

‘Have the pumps been ordered up?’ the King asked the officer. ‘No? God’s body, someone will suffer if they’re not outside the Horse Guards Yard by the time we are.’

‘If the Court Gate catches, sir, the whole palace will be at risk,’ an elderly gentleman said. ‘Or if the Banqueting House—’

‘The weather is not as before,’ the King snapped. ‘There’s little wind, and this rain must surely help us.’

I followed the others down a wider spiral staircase, with cold air rushing up to meet us. By this time I had lost my sense of direction again, though it was clear that we were in one of the older parts of Whitehall. Sure enough, when I emerged into the open air, the Holbein Gate towered up on my left, an orange glow flickering on its chequered brickwork. To the right was the Banqueting House, whose bulk hid the Court Gate beyond.

Flames were rising above the roofs of the Horse Guards barracks on the other side of the road. As far as I could judge, the wind, such as it was, was blowing off the river. The fire had not reached the Foot Guards House, let alone the Tiltyard to the south or the Duke of Ormonde’s lodgings beyond. The flames were curling away from the palace, towards the tops of the trees in the Park further to the west.

The bell rang on and on, while trumpets brayed over the steady pulse of the drums. The roadway was crowded with soldiers and servants. Two engines were already in position, and men were directing thin jets of water into the flames.

The King went as close to the flames as he could manage. The rest of us scurried after him.

‘Bring up gunpowder,’ he said to one of the officers, raising his voice to be heard over the flames. ‘Blow up the south end of the Horse Guards and pray the wind doesn’t change. If we’re lucky, we’ll save the Tiltyard and Foot Guards.’

The commotion continued but there was soon a sense of purpose about it. More pumps appeared. I joined a chain of men passing buckets of water to refill their reservoirs. Soldiers cleared the area in front of the wall of the Horse Guards and pushed back the crowd towards Charing Cross. The gunpowder arrived in a small wagon, the kegs shielded with canvas sails saturated with water to discourage stray sparks.

I was soon hot and filthy, my muscles aching from the unaccustomed labour. I knew I must be weary and hungry. Nevertheless, I was tireless, working in a trance-like state that made everything, myself included, seem unreal.

Every now and then I glimpsed the tall figure of the King moving among the soldiers and the men manning the pumps. He himself supervised the laying of the charges and gave the order to light the fuses. Four explosions blew up the end of the building, damaging part of the Foot Guards House in the process. The crashes ripped through the air like the worst thunderclaps I had ever heard, quite outstripping the explosion in the King’s laboratory earlier in the evening.

By now I had lost all track of time. All I knew was that the fire had been contained and was gradually diminishing. As the flames died, the order was given to rest, though we were not to leave. Other men took our places. We joined the lines of men waiting to be served from the barrels of small beer that had been brought up in a cart. There were still cinders floating in the air, turning to specks of ash as they drifted downwards.

When I had my mug, I took it aside to drink in peace. I leaned against a wall and felt the beer running down my parched throat. My knees buckled. I slid down until I was sitting on the ground and leaning against the wall. There were lanterns nearby, which gave enough light for me to notice that I had grazed myself. Drops of blood oozed from a shallow wound near the knuckle at the base of my right thumb.

In the ruddy half-light, the blood looked black. I stared at it, so weary that I could not drag my eyes away. A flake of ash floated down to my hand and landed beside the blood. I put down the mug and brushed them both away. They left a smear of blood and ash on the hand.

Blood and ash. I realized only then that I was leaning against the outer wall of the Banqueting House, a few yards from the spot where the scaffold had stood. It was here that I had waited on my father’s shoulders all those years ago, waiting for them to chop off the head of the old King. Perhaps it was hunger but suddenly I felt faint, my head turning and spinning like a ball gathering speed as it rolled down an infinite slope.

Ashes and blood. The King’s nightcap, a scrap of white, falling to the floor of the scaffold. The man in the crowd who wailed and rubbed ashes in his hair. The tall figure of the second executioner wrapping the long hair around his fingers, holding up the severed head to show the crowd. To show me.

‘Master Marwood?’

Startled, I looked up, blinking. A soldier was in front of me.

‘His Majesty wants you.’

I swallowed the rest of the beer and scrambled up. I followed the man through the crowd to the Court Gate beyond the Banqueting House. The King was outside it, standing at the centre of a knot of gentlemen and talking confidentially to a captain in the Foot Guards. After a few minutes he looked up and saw me.

‘Attend me, Marwood,’ he said. ‘You too, Chiffinch.’ He turned to the officer. ‘You have your orders. As soon as you have intelligence, bring it to me. But keep it close to yourself until you have seen me.’

The three of us returned the way we had come, up the staircase to the gallery overlooking the Privy Garden. We followed the King to an apartment beside the laboratory. It was modest in size and furnished as a sitting room.

The King flung himself into a chair and ordered wine to be brought, a bowl of water to wash in, and a bath to be prepared for when he was at leisure. Chiffinch stood in the shadows by the door, part watcher, part guard, part confidante.

The King had been dirty before but now he was filthy, his face black from the fire. When the bowl of water came, he washed his face and hands. After he was done, he threw aside the towel and sat back. He drank some wine and ate a biscuit. Only then did he beckon me towards him.

‘Your father was a traitor,’ he said softly, staring at me with his sad, dark eyes. ‘He aided my enemies even after my return. And I have shown him mercy.’

I bowed. Up to a point, I thought. The King or those acting in his name had also imprisoned him for five years, deprived him of his assets and stripped him of much of his reason.

‘So now,’ he went on, ‘you will help me. You have my word that neither you nor your father will be the loser by it.’

He paused to take more wine. Men said that the King’s word was a slippery, negotiable thing, not to be relied on.

There was a knock at the door. Chiffinch stirred. The King looked up and nodded. I was beginning to learn that these two men knew each other so well that much of the communication between them took place without words.

Chiffinch admitted the Captain of the Foot Guards. He saluted the King, who gave him permission to come forward and speak.

‘Your Majesty, the fire may have been caused by a groom oversetting a candle in the hayloft above the stables. We have the man in custody.’

The King frowned. ‘May?’

‘The fire certainly started there, probably at three or four of the clock. But it took a while to establish itself. The groom was drunk and had fallen asleep. He thinks it must have been so.’

A lighted candle, I thought – in the afternoon?

‘A candle?’ the King said. ‘In the afternoon?’

The Captain said eagerly, ‘I asked him that, sir, indeed I did. He said there is no window to the loft. On the other hand, he had no memory of lighting a candle and he knows the way up blindfolded. But he cannot think of any other reason for there to have been a flame up there.’

‘He would say that,’ Chiffinch put in. ‘Wouldn’t he? What’s his name?’

‘Pearson, sir.’

‘Then what did he remember?’ the King asked. ‘Or what did he say he remembered?’

‘That he dined at the Blue Posts, where he fell in with a stranger, a man who desired his advice on a lame horse he had in his stable. He was an open-handed gentleman, and Pearson drank a good deal at his expense. He says he recalls feeling sleepy, and the gentleman saying that he would see him safely back to where he lodged.’

The King glanced at me, raising one eyebrow.

Taking this as an invitation to speak, I said, ‘Did you ask Pearson what this gentleman was like?’

‘Of course I did.’ The Captain was clearly puzzled by my presence and irritated by my asking him a question. ‘A plain, neat man in middle life. Tall, rather than short. The groom thought his name was Master Coleford. Something like that. He did not quite catch it.’

‘Coldridge,’ the King murmured, so faintly that only I could hear. ‘Damn his insolence. He wanted me to know.’

His heavy eyelids drooped over his eyes. The rest of us waited in a silence broken only by the coals settling in the fire and the muffled sounds from outside. Suddenly he flicked his fingers and looked up.

‘Captain, who knows what you’ve told me?’

‘My lieutenant, sir, and my sergeant.’

‘It must go no further. Put Pearson under lock and key, and keep him by himself. He’ll be questioned again later. Let it be known that the Horse Guards fire was an accident, as indeed it probably was. It is now quite put out, thanks to the prompt actions of my soldiers and servants.’

The King dismissed the Captain. He stared into the fire, occasionally sipping at his wine. The minutes lengthened. From where I stood I saw his face in profile by the light from the candles on the table by his glass. His cheek was like a flap of old pigskin, scratched and red-brown in colour.

‘Marwood.’ He gestured me to stoop down to him. ‘I do not wish it known that Thomas Lovett had a hand in setting this fire. I want to lay him privately by the heels. You are in a position to help me.’

‘Your Majesty has only to command,’ I blurted out.

‘Really?’ The eyelids flickered and I saw that he was looking at me. ‘Why do you think you are here?’

‘Because – because I may do Your Majesty some service?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t mean now, in this room, though there is a service I have in mind. I mean why do you think you have been here at Whitehall these last few months? You cannot imagine it happened by accident. Why did Master Williamson favour you with employment? Why did Chiffinch seek you out? You – the son of a traitor, who is only allowed his liberty through my clemency? A traitor who even took his infant son to gloat over the murder of my own father, the late martyred King.’

These last words threw me into confusion. I jerked myself upwards, away from him. I heard movement behind me as Chiffinch stirred. The King raised his hand and the movement stopped.

‘Remember?’ he said. ‘Do you remember, Marwood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

In that instant I understood that I had been living for months in a bubble of illusion. The King had pricked it. Nothing had been quite as I had thought it was. My father’s unexpected release, Master Williamson’s favour, his choice of me to accompany him to Barnabas Place after the first murder, Mistress Alderley’s attentions to me, the provision of lodgings in the Savoy – it was all of a piece. Nothing had been by chance. It had been by the King’s design. He had known everything, arranged everything.

Everything? Did he know about my father’s abortive expedition into Alsatia? About my father’s meeting – so far as I could trust the old man’s muddled testimony – with Thomas Lovett?

‘You are here,’ the King said, ‘because Thomas Lovett will trust a man called Marwood.’

Afterwards, when I walked back to the Savoy, it wasn’t my meeting with the King that filled my mind, or even the Horse Guards fire. It was what I had seen, nearly eighteen years earlier, on precisely the same spot, between the Horse Guards and the Banqueting House.

I remembered the man on the scaffold. The man of blood. Who was also the little gentleman who tucked his long hair under the nightcap with the help of the clergyman and one of the two masked executioners. Who worried about the keenness of the blade, for he had known how much that could contribute to a swift, clean death. Who had stood before a hostile world in his waistcoat with a nightcap on his head.

The little gentleman should have looked foolish. But he hadn’t. He had looked sad.

He knelt and placed his neck on the block, which was no more than six inches high. He said something inaudible. The first executioner raised the axe. The gentleman stretched out his hands before him, as if diving into the air.

The axe descended in a silver arc.

The head parted from the body, fell forward and rolled a few inches towards the edge of the platform. Blood sprayed from both the trunk and the head. The nearest soldier stepped swiftly back, but not swiftly enough: drops of blood spattered his boots and breeches. The body shuddered and slumped to the ground.

The first executioner stood beside it, his head bowed, the axe resting on the block but now held slackly in his hands.

The second executioner had stepped forward. He pushed his colleague briskly aside and picked up the severed head. He tugged off the nightcap and tossed it aside. The long hair spread out, as if full of life. He wrapped the hair around his right hand. He lifted the head high. Slowly he turned, first to one side and then to the other. Blood dripped from the neck.