The Fire Court Read online

  The door closed, and was softly latched. Footsteps crossed the floor. Light and quick and familiar.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  No, Jemima thought, I am not. She fought the creeping tide of consciousness every inch of the way. To be conscious was to remember.

  She had been dreaming of Syre Place, where she had grown up. It was strange that she knew it to be Syre Place because it had seemed not to resemble the real house. The real Syre Place was built of brick, of a russet colour like a certain apple that her father was fond of. As a child, she had assumed that the house had somehow been built to match the apples, which was all part of the rightness of things, of the patterns that ran through everything.

  But the Syre Place in her dreams was all wrong. It was faced with stone, for a start, and designed after the modern fashion that Philip liked. (Philip? Philip? Her mind shied away from the thought of Philip.) It was a house in the modern fashion, a neat box, with everything tidy and clean both within and without, and a roof whose overhanging eaves made it look as if the building were wearing a hat.

  ‘My lady? My lady?’

  In Syre Place, the real one, there was a park where her father used to hunt before he lost his good humour and the use of his legs. Down the lane was the farm, whose smells and sounds were part of life, running through every hour of every day. In this Syre Place, however, the park was gone, and so was the farm. Instead there was a garden with gravel paths and parterres and shrubs, arranged symmetrically like the house. But – now she looked more closely at it – there was nothing neat about the garden in the dream because weeds had sprung up everywhere, and brambles criss-crossed the paths and arched overhead.

  Nettles stood in great clumps, their leaves twitching, desperate to sting her. Her brother had thrown her into a bed of nettles when she was scarcely out of leading strings, and she still remembered the agonizing, unfair pain of it. How strange and unnatural it was, she thought, that a plant should be so nasty, so hostile. God had made the plants and the animals to serve man, not to attack him.

  Nature was unnatural. It was full of monstrous tricks. Perhaps it was the work of the devil, not God.

  ‘Come now, madam. It’s past eleven o’clock.’

  Time? What time of year could it be? In the garden at Syre Place, the gravel paths were carpeted with spoiled fruit. Brown apples and pears, and yellow raspberries, and red strawberries and green plums, as if all fruitful seasons existed at once. They lay so thickly on the ground that she could no longer see the gravel. The smell of decay was everywhere. Jemima raised her skirts – good God, what was she wearing? just her shift? But she was outside and in broad daylight, where anyone might see her – but the pulpy fruit splashed stickily against the linen and spattered the skin of her bare legs.

  There were wasps, too, she saw, fat-bellied things cruising a few inches above the ground and feeding on the rottenness. What if one of them flew up inside her shift and stung her in her most private and intimate place?

  In her fear, she cried out.

  ‘Hush now,’ Mary murmured, the voice floating above her. ‘It’s all right. Time to wake up.’

  No, no, no, Jemima thought. Despite the wasps, despite everything, it was better to stay asleep, her eyes screwed shut against the daylight. She wanted to stay for ever in Syre Place where once, she thought, she had been happy.

  What was happiness? Rocking in Nurse’s lap as she sang. Sitting beside her brother Henry when, greatly condescending, he guided her as she stumbled through her hornbook. Or, better still, when he perched her up before him on the new brown mare, with the ground so far beneath that she had to close her eyes so she wouldn’t see it.

  ‘I’ll drop you, Jemima,’ her brother had said, his arms tightening around her. ‘Your skull will crack like an eggshell.’

  Oh, the sweet, delicious terror of it.

  Someone she could not see called her name.

  No. No. Go to sleep, she ordered herself: down, down, down into the deep, dark depths where no one can see me. To the time before that fatal letter, before the Fire Court, before she had even known where Clifford’s Inn was.

  Something was buzzing. It must be a wasp. She moaned with fear.

  There was a sudden rattle of curtain rings, brutally unexpected, and she was bathed in brilliance. The bed curtains had been thrown open. It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of light over her. She squeezed her eyelids together but the light glowed pinkly outside them. A current of cool air swept over her, bringing the scents of the garden.

  ‘Close the curtains, you fool,’ she wanted to say, ‘shut out the light.’ But she couldn’t, wouldn’t speak.

  She was lying on her back, she knew, on her own bed in her own bedchamber. If she opened her eyes she would see the canopy above her, blue and silver, silk embroidery; the bed was in its summer clothing; the winter curtains and canopy were made of much heavier material, and their embroidery was predominantly red and gold, the colours of fire. The curtains were hers, part of her dowry. Almost everything was hers. Everything except Dragon Yard.

  She didn’t want to know all this. She wanted to be asleep in the dark, in a place too deep for dreaming, too deep for knowledge.

  ‘Master’s coming,’ said the voice. A woman’s. Her woman’s. Mary’s.

  A wasp. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Why can’t it go away?

  ‘Any moment he’ll be here. I can’t put him off.’

  Her brother Henry had had a waistcoat like a wasp: all yellow and black. Jemima wondered what had happened to it. Perhaps it had been lost in the fire. Or perhaps it was down, down in the deep, dark depths, where Henry was presumably lying himself. Anything the fishes had left. Philip had served with Henry in the Navy in the Dutch wars. That was how she had met her husband, as her brother’s friend.

  The latch rattled again, shockingly loud. The buzzing stopped.

  ‘Isn’t she awake yet?’

  Philip’s voice, achingly familiar, and horribly strange.

  ‘No, master.’

  ‘She should be awake by now. Surely?’

  ‘The draught lasts longer for some people than for others.’

  Heavy footsteps drew closer to the bed, closer to her. She could smell Philip now. Sweat, a trace of the perfume he sometimes wore, the hint of last night’s wine.

  ‘Madam,’ he said. Then, more loudly: ‘Madam?’

  The voice made something inside her answer to it. Her body’s response was involuntary, beyond control or desire. She knew she must continue to breathe, and that she must give no sign that she was not deeply asleep. Yet she wanted to cry out, to scream at him, to howl in agony and rage.

  ‘Hush, sir. It’s better to let her be.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, woman,’ he shouted. ‘She’s pale as a ghost. I’ll send for the doctor.’

  The buzzing returned. To and fro, it went, nearer and further. She focused her attention on it. A distraction. She hoped it was not a wasp.

  ‘She’s always pale, sir,’ Mary said, almost in a whisper. ‘You know that.’

  ‘But she’s slept for hours.’

  ‘Sleep’s the best cure. There’s no physic can mend her faster. It’s always been the way with her. I went out this morning and fetched another draught from the apothecary in case she needs it tonight.’

  ‘You left her alone? Like this?’

  ‘No, no, master. Hester was watching over her. I wasn’t gone long, in any case.’

  ‘Devil take that fly,’ Philip muttered, his attention fastening on another irritation.

  The buzzing stopped abruptly. There was the sound of a slap, followed by a muffled oath.

  ‘Hush, sir,’ Mary said. ‘You’ll wake her.’

  ‘Hold your tongue. Or I’ll put you out on the street with nothing but a shift to cover your nakedness. Has she said anything yet?’

  ‘No, sir. Not a word.’

  ‘Stand over there. By the door.’

  The heavy footsteps drew nearer. She kept her eyelids tightly closed. She
heard the sound of his breathing and knew he must be stooping above the bed, bringing his face close to hers.

  ‘Jemima.’ His voice was a whisper, and his breath touched her cheek. ‘Can you hear me?’ When she said nothing in reply, he went on, ‘Where were you yesterday afternoon? Where did you go?’

  Philip paused. She heard his breathing, and a creaking floorboard, the one near the door, where Mary must be standing.

  ‘What made you so distressed?’ he said. ‘What did you see?’

  After a few seconds, he let out his breath in a sigh of exasperation. He walked away from the bed. ‘Mary? Are you sure you know nothing?’

  ‘No, sir. I told you – she left me in the hackney.’

  ‘I’ll whip the truth out of you.’

  ‘That is the truth.’

  The door latch rattled. ‘Send for me as soon as your mistress wakes. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘Don’t let anyone else talk to her until I have. Not Hester, not anyone. And not you, either. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The door closed. The footsteps clattered down the stairs.

  She listened to Mary moving around the room and the buzzing of the fly. After a moment she opened her eyes. Daylight dazzled her. ‘I thought he would never go,’ she said.

  Jemima spent Saturday and Sunday in bed. Mary tended to her needs. Mary was her maid. She had come with her from Syre Place. Her father was a tenant farmer on the estate, a man with too many daughters. Sir George had charged Mary to take special care of her mistress when she married Philip, and to obey her in all things, not Philip.

  Mary sometimes slept with her when Philip did not come to her bed, especially in winter.

  When Mary wasn’t in the room, she sent Hester in her place. Hester was a stupid little girl, fresh from the country. When she was obliged to speak to her mistress, she blushed a cruel and unforgiving red that spread over her face like a stain. She blushed when her master was in the room too, but he never spoke to her.

  ‘My lady?’ Mary said on Monday afternoon. ‘We need to change the sheets.’

  She opened her eyes and saw Mary standing over her with an armful of bedlinen. She allowed herself to be helped out of bed and placed in an armchair by the window. It was a fresh, clear afternoon. Her bedchamber was at the back of the house. The trees at the bottom of the garden shielded the brick wall behind them and the fields stretching up to Piccadilly.

  The window was open, and she heard hooves, hammering and sometimes distant voices. The trees blocked out most of the view, but occasionally she glimpsed a flash of colour through the leaves or wisps of smoke, rising higher into the empty sky until they dissipated themselves in the empty blue of heaven.

  If one went to heaven after death, Jemima thought, how eternally tedious it would be if it were nothing but blue and infinitely empty. Better to be nothing at all oneself. Which was blasphemy.

  Philip came up to see her while she was sitting there.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, bowing. ‘I’m rejoiced to see you out of your bed at last.’

  He glanced at the maids, who had continued at their work but were making themselves as unobtrusive as possible, as servants should. ‘Mary says you remember nothing of your – your illness.’

  ‘No, sir.’ She and Mary had agreed it was wiser this way, wiser to bide one’s time. ‘I had pains in my head when I woke up.’

  ‘The doctor called it a sudden inflammation of the brain. Thanks to his treatment, it came and went like an April shower. Can you remember how it happened?’

  ‘No. It is all a perfect blank to me until I woke up in my bed.’

  ‘You and Mary went out for a drive in a hackney coach,’ he said slowly, as if teaching a child a lesson. ‘After you’d dined – on Thursday. Remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The fever came on suddenly. You were insensible, or very near to it, when Mary brought you home.’

  ‘I remember nothing,’ she said, though she remembered everything that mattered. She remembered every inch of the way to Clifford’s Inn, every step up the stairs of Staircase XIV. For now, however, it was better to pretend to forget.

  Philip’s hand touched her arm. ‘The doctor said that sometimes sufferers are much troubled by dreams when the fever is at its height, and believe all sorts of strange fancies. But thank God all that is passed now.’

  ‘I am much better, sir,’ she said. ‘I feel quite refreshed.’

  ‘Good. In that case, will you join me at supper?’

  ‘I think not. I will take something here instead.’

  Jemima watched him as she spoke, but his expression told her nothing. Her husband was tall, lean and dark-complexioned – like the King himself. He was not a handsome man but usually she found his face good to look at, because it was his. But now his face had become a mere arrangement of features, an array of hollows, projections, planes, textures, colours. He was a stranger to her.

  A familiar stranger. A treacherous stranger, and that was the very worst sort of stranger.

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said, smiling. ‘For dinner. We shall have guests, by the way – a brace of lawyers. One of them’s Sir Thomas Twisden, the judge.’

  It seemed to her that he spoke more deliberately than usual, enunciating the words with precision as if they were especially significant. He paused – only for a second, but she knew that the pause meant something, too. He knew that she didn’t like people to come to the house.

  The maids had finished making the bed. Hester left the room, her arms full of dirty linen. Mary remained, tidying the pots and bottles on the dressing table.

  ‘And I’ve asked Lucius Gromwell to join us,’ Philip said.

  Jemima caught her breath, and hoped he hadn’t noticed. Gromwell, of all people. The sly, twice-damned, whoreson devil. How dared they? She stared at her lap. She sensed he was looking at her, gauging her reaction to Gromwell’s name. She was aware as well that, on the very edge of her range of vision, Mary’s hands were no longer moving among the litter on the dressing table.

  ‘It will be good to have you at the table,’ he went on. ‘You must make sure they send up something worth eating. We must do our best to keep Sir Thomas amused. We want him to look kindly on us, after all, don’t we?’

  His voice sharpened towards the end, and she looked up. He wants me to twitch like a hound bitch, she thought, to the sound of her master’s voice.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

  ‘He’s a Fire Court judge,’ Philip reminded her. ‘He’s down for the Dragon Yard case.’

  He smiled at her and made his way towards the door. He paused, his hand on the latch.

  ‘Lucius is writing a book, by the way. He is mad for it. It’s called The Natural Curiosities of Gloucestershire, and it will have many plates and maps, so it will cost a great deal to produce. I promised him I would pay for the publication, and he assures me it will make me a handsome profit when the edition sells out, as well as enshrine my name for posterity.’

  Gromwell, she thought. I hate him.

  ‘You remember him, don’t you? My old friend from school and Oxford.’

  She nodded. Gromwell will look at me tomorrow and know my shame, she thought, and I shall look at him and know that he knows it. He arranged it all. None of this would have happened without him. Gromwell, who dared to stand in my way at Clifford’s Inn.

  ‘Poor Lucius, eh?’ Her husband lifted the latch and laughed with what seemed like genuine amusement. ‘I doubt he’ll ever finish the book. He is a man of many parts but he finishes nothing he begins. He was like that at school, and he’s never changed.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My father had been run over in Fleet Street by a wagon bearing rubble removed from the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. The weight had broken his spine, killing him instantly. It was a miracle that the pressure had not cut him in half.

  Infirmary Close was full of wailing women. Margaret persuaded herself that
his death had been her fault, for she had left him in the parlour while she was making dinner, believing he was no longer capable of managing the locks and bolts of the door into the lane. The neighbours’ maids wept in sympathy. The laundry woman came to the house to collect the washing; she wept too, because tears are catching and death is frightening.

  After he brought me home in the hackney coach, Sam went into the kitchen yard and chopped wood as if he were chopping down his enemies: one by one, with deliberation and satisfaction.

  As for me, I went into my father’s bedchamber and sat beside him, as I should have done last night. He lay with his eyes closed and his hands folded over his chest. Someone had covered the great wound with a sheet and bound up his jaw. His face appeared unmarked. Sometimes the dead look peaceful. He did not.

  I could not pray. I did not weep. The weight of his disapproval bore down on me, for I had strayed from the godly path he had ordained for me, and now it could never be put right. Worse still was the shame I felt about how I had behaved to him and how I had felt about him during the last few months, when he had become as vulnerable as a child.

  Something shifted inside me, as an earthquake ripples and rumbles through solid earth and rock, bringing floods and ruin in its wake. Nothing would be the same again.

  That was when the memory of Catherine Lovett came into my mind. She was a young woman with a strange and independent cast of mind. I had done her a service at the time of the Fire, though I had not seen her since; she was living in retirement and under an assumed name. As it happened, I had been with her when her father died, and I had seen what she had done. She had taken his hand and raised it to her lips.

  I looked at my father’s hand. Flesh, skin and bone. The fingers twisted like roots. The nails discoloured and in need of trimming. Death had robbed his hand of its familiarity and made it strange.

  I lifted the hand and kissed it. The weight of it took me by surprise. The dead are heavier than the living.