The Ashes of London (47 page)

I tiptoed to the table, set down the candle and spread out the contents of the portfolio. There were three letters and a bill of credit addressed to a goldsmith in Norwich.

The bill of credit was not negotiable, and so could have no value to Lovett’s daughter. That left the letters. Two were written in a cipher or shorthand consisting of characters of the alphabet, numbers and symbols. I knew them as letters only because they were both addressed to Giles Coldridge.

The third letter was clearly older than the others, for the paper was yellowing and brittle to the touch; one corner had crumbled away. This letter was the only one in plain English.

To Master Alderley,

of Leadenhall: London,

31 January 1648/9

Sir, You did this country a great service yesterday, when Thos Lovett fell ill, by taking his part. For all his skill with an axe, Brandon is a mean and cowardly fellow. Yesterday’s affair could not have been dispatched without a man of resolution beside him to keep him up to the mark. You cannot receive the public thanks you merit but be assured of my private gratitude. The Lord has directed all to His glory. I rest,

Sir,                            

Your servant,        

Oliver Cromwell

The snoring behind me changed its rhythm. I had a headache. Why in God’s name this, on top of everything else? I desperately wanted time to think through the implications of what I had found. How had the letter come into Lovett’s possession?

The obvious answer leapt out of the dark at me: Jem Brockhurst. Jem had been loyal to the Lovetts. He had been living at Barnabas Place, so lowly in the household hierarchy that he must have crept about almost unnoticed.

Had Jem been Lovett’s spy as well as his messenger boy and his daughter’s guardian? I had no proof, but the facts and the possibilities clustered around the speculation, clinging like a cluster of iron nails to a magnet. Suppose Jem had ferreted out the letter and—

But why in God’s name had Alderley taken the risk of keeping such a letter, which was as good as a death warrant for him if it fell into the wrong hands? Because he was a prudent man, I thought, and also an arrogant one. Perhaps he had not ruled out the possibility that one day the King would lose his throne and the Commonwealth return. In that case a man with such a letter might turn a profit by it.

Suppose—

The snoring stopped.

I carried the candle and the papers to the fireplace. Suppose that was the reason, the trigger, for Lovett’s return to England now, after all these years – the knowledge that he had in his possession the means utterly to ruin Alderley and his family. Suppose Jem had handed over the letter – too precious to be trusted to a third party – on the night before St Paul’s burned down. Suppose that was when Lovett had told Jem to send his daughter out to meet him. Suppose—

One by one, I burned the papers – the bill of credit and the two cipher letters. The secrets darkened and disintegrated into fragments on the hearth. I ground them to ash with the poker.

But I kept back Cromwell’s letter. Suppose I gave it to Chiffinch and asked him to show it to the King. What would it mean for all of us – for Mistress Lovett, for Edward Alderley, for Olivia Alderley, and most of all for my father and me?

Or suppose I burned the letter with the rest?

My father broke wind. I heard the rattle of curtain rings behind me. I folded Cromwell’s letter and pushed it into a crack in the side of the press that held our clothes.

‘Who’s there?’ My father’s voice sounded tremulous and full of fear. He broke wind again. ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s James, sir, your son.’

‘I was dreaming. I was young again, and you were a little child. I dreamed I was carrying you on my shoulders.’

‘I remember, sir. I remember it well. But it’s early yet, still dark. Sleep on.’

As I closed the bed curtains again, I held up the candle so the light fell for a moment on my father’s face. His eyes were already closed and he was smiling.

Before I left, I threw the bloodstained portfolio on the kitchen fire. Margaret gave me one of this morning’s rolls and a mug of small beer. Afterwards, she came with me to the door.

‘You’re troubled, sir,’ she said, in the casual voice of someone commenting on the weather.

‘These are troubling times. Tell Samuel I asked after him.’

I took the familiar road to Charing Cross, and down to Whitehall. The Banqueting House rose before me, its windows already alight.

Ashes and blood. How I disliked that slab of stone and glass. It made me a child again, with a child’s terrors, sitting on my father’s shoulders and watching them kill a king on a stage. Blood and ashes.

Early though it still was, the palace was stirring. There was to be a ball for the Queen’s birthday in the evening. The Great Court was seething with servants and tradesmen. There was a sound of hammering from the Great Hall.

At Master Chiffinch’s private lodgings, I knocked long and hard until at last a sleepy servant opened the door. I begged him to wake his master and give him a message from me. The knave was puffed up and obstinate, like so many Whitehall servants, and he refused, saying I must wait outside until the house was astir and call again at a more Christian hour. I argued with him, and he threatened to have me beaten about the ears and thrown into the street.

Then I saw Chiffinch himself descending the stairs, candle in hand and arrayed in a splendid bedgown of figured silk and beturbanned like the Turk. ‘What’s this damned racket, Martin?’ he bellowed. ‘Who is it? It’s the middle of the night. Have you all gone stark crazy?’

‘Sir,’ I said. ‘I must speak to you.’

‘What?’ He peered through the gloom, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. ‘Marwood? Is that you?’

‘I’ve news, sir. It won’t wait. For your private ear.’

‘If you’re wrong, I’ll see you both suffer for it.’

I glanced at the servant, who scowled at me. Chiffinch ordered the man to kindle a fire in the parlour and set water to boil. He led me upstairs to his closet, which was well sealed against the draughts and still held a little warmth from last night’s fire. He told me to light more candles, took up a blanket and sat in his chair.

‘Well? Have you found Alderley?’

‘Yes, sir. But he’s dead. And so’s Lovett.’

Chiffinch whistled, soft and low. ‘Are you sure? How? Where?’

‘At St Paul’s. Lovett had smuggled him into the ruins and forced him up the tower at knifepoint. There must have been a struggle. They had fallen from the top, inside the tower, right down to the floor of the crossing. Lovett’s dead as well.’

‘’Sblood.’ Chiffinch scratched his scalp under the turban. ‘You’ve seen them? You’re absolutely sure they’re dead? Both of them.’

‘Yes, sir. Lovett had stabbed him before they fell. I don’t know if that killed Master Alderley, or if it was the fall. As for Lovett, the back of his head is quite broken apart.’

‘The King won’t like it,’ Chiffinch said. ‘He wanted Lovett to himself. He wanted to look the man in the face. When did you discover this?’

‘Last night. I fell in with Master Hakesby—’

‘Who?’

‘The draughtsman who works with Dr Wren. He lodges at Three Cocks Yard, off the Strand.’

Chiffinch nodded. ‘I remember.’

‘He offered one of the house’s servants employment as a maid in his new office because she seemed clean and to have her wits about her. It was Mistress Lovett, though of course he did not know that.’

‘Why did you not come to me sooner with the news?’

‘Because I had to search the rest of the cathedral, sir. And then Master Hakesby was taken ill, so I took him home.’

He sat in silence for a moment, staring at the ashes in the fireplace. I waited, still wrapped in my cloak but shivering nevertheless. I felt suddenly exhausted, now I had told my news. For good or ill, I had surrendered any power I had. It was out of my hands.

Apart from the Cromwell letter.

Chiffinch looked up. His scratching had pushed the turban to one side, giving him an unexpectedly jaunty air. Stranger still, he was smiling at me. ‘Well, Marwood,’ he said. ‘I always say it’s an ill wind that blows no man good.’

A
ND THEN – NOTHING
.

When I was young, after the King came back but before my father’s disgrace, we apprentices would sometimes kick a ball about the streets on public holidays, to the great peril of ourselves and any bystanders foolish enough to get in our way. These were brawls by any other name, wars between factions, the printers against the cordwainers, or the haberdashers against the glovers. There were broken bones in our bodies and splashes of blood on the cobbles. But it was a game.

What made it a game was the existence of a pig’s bladder inflated with air.

This unlovely object was the prize we fought for with such vigour, and at such a danger to ourselves. Once, however, a group of us strayed into the path of a drunken gallant, who drew his sword and stabbed the pig’s bladder repeatedly. He was under the illusion that he was killing a New Model Army trooper because all the while he was shrieking, ‘Die, foul lobster! Rot in hell!’

The ball deflated and became nothing worth kicking, let alone fighting for. Later I saw it tossed aside in the kennel, along with all the stinking refuse of the street. Naturally we attacked the gallant instead, but it was not the same.

When Master Chiffinch sent me away that morning, I felt like that pig’s bladder – deflated, useless, without a purpose in life. I had hated the fear and worry of the last few weeks. I had also hated the strange excitement that possessed me. I didn’t want that sort of excitement back. But I found that I craved it as a drunkard craves wine.

Chiffinch warned me to keep my mouth shut about what had happened in St Paul’s on pain of severe punishment. After I had left him, I went to Master Williamson’s office, where the servants were lighting the fires, and I waited for the other clerks to arrive. I didn’t know what else to do.

I waited all day for Master Chiffinch to send for me. I tried to foretell the questions he would ask me and to work out the answers I should give. I even imagined that the King himself might summon me. Sometimes my expectations were gloomier – at every step on the stairs I heard soldiers coming to arrest me. My mind leapt ahead to an even darker future, with myself rotting in prison and my father dead.

At dinner, I heard a story circulating that a gentleman had died of a fall in the ruins of St Paul’s, and that a workman had been killed with him. No one knew the gentleman’s name.

I heard nothing from Chiffinch or anyone else that day. Or the next, though by then the gentleman had been identified as Master Alderley, the goldsmith, who was known to be a friend of Dr Wren’s and a man with an interest in the rebuilding of the cathedral; the King was said to be much grieved at his death.

Nobody summoned me on Saturday. Or Sunday.

I didn’t call on Master Hakesby, either in Three Cocks Yard or at St Paul’s. It was safer to pretend our brief acquaintance had never happened. As for Mistress Lovett, there was no news of her at all, and I sought none. A few days later, Master Alderley was buried with much pomp. I heard a rumour at Whitehall that he had not been as rich as the world had believed, and his affairs were much entangled.

As the days of silence became weeks, I grew increasingly fearful. Fear is an anticipation of evil, akin to a pain of the spirit. Or an emptiness so deep and all-embracing that it sucks your soul into it and leaves you a mere husk of your former self, fit for nothing that matters.

Like the pig’s bladder that was once a ball.

Christmas was approaching.

It was already very cold. Everyone said it would be an exceptionally hard winter, which always hurt the poor worst of all. This year, it would be even crueller than usual, for so many people were still refugees from the Fire.

Perhaps it was worst of all for those who had returned to the ruins of their former homes. Here, they lived miserably in the corners of cellars littered with debris and open to the sky. They built sheds and shelters among the frozen ashes, where they waited for spring and hoped that God would smile on them again one day.

On St Lucy’s Day, the shortest of the year, I walked past St Paul’s on my way to Whitehall. The government and the City were still arguing about what to do with the cathedral – whether to restore or to rebuild – and in the meantime it grew increasingly decayed and forlorn. The roads around it were now cleared of rubble, and there was far more traffic on them during the day than there had been even a month earlier.

At Whitehall, there was a message for me at Master Williamson’s office: I was to wait on Master Chiffinch at his lodgings.

I found him swathed in furs and huddled over the fire in his study. He looked unwell, perhaps from too much wine, for his eyes were mere slits and his plump cheeks were pink with sallow patches. He was reading a letter, and he kept me standing before him until he had finished.

‘Master Williamson speaks satisfactorily of you,’ he said at last, laying aside the letter. ‘All in all. A discreet young man, he says, who applies himself to his work with diligence and keeps his own counsel.’

I said nothing.

‘He tells me he intends to offer you a permanent clerkship after Christmas. A junior position, of course – he will have a vacancy that needs filling. Perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds a year.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ I spoke softly but inside I was shouting with joy. This was preferment that meant something – not just for the income, of course, but also for the other emoluments that would come with the position, and the status it would give me among my fellows.