The Fire Court Read online

  ‘I am truly sorry for your loss,’ Mr Williamson said the following morning.

  I thanked him and requested leave of absence to bury my father and settle his affairs.

  ‘Of course.’ Williamson turned away and busied himself with the papers on his desk. ‘Where will you lay him to rest?’

  ‘Bunhill Fields, sir.’

  Williamson grunted. ‘Not an Anglican burial ground?’

  ‘I think not. He would not have wished it.’

  Bunhill Fields was where the Dissenters lay, and where my father belonged. Williamson returned to reading letters, occasionally annotating them. The two of us were alone in the Scotland Yard office, which lay just to the north of the Whitehall Palace itself. Williamson had two offices, one close to my Lord Arlington’s, and this one, which he used for the Gazette and for other concerns that required more privacy.

  A few minutes later, he spoke again, and his voice sounded harder than before, closer to his northern roots, which was often a sign of irritation in him. ‘You must look to the living, Marwood, as well as the dead.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You would not wish anything to reflect ill on this office. Nor would I.’

  I bowed my head. I knew what Williamson intended me to understand. Before his mind lost its bearings, my father, Nathaniel Marwood, had been a Fifth Monarchist. As a result of his allegiance to that dangerous sect, he had been imprisoned for treason. He had considered the Church of England as the next best thing to the Church of Rome with its Papist ways and its foul plots against honest men. He had hated all kings except King Jesus, whose coming he had devoutly waited for.

  ‘After all,’ Williamson said, staring grimly at me, ‘you would not want to lie in Bunhill Fields yourself when your time comes. At least, I hope you would not.’

  ‘Of course not, sir.’

  Nowadays I served the King; and it was politic for me to have a care for what I did and said, and to choose wisely whom I associated with. I made sure the world knew that I went to church regularly and that I took communion when it was fitting to do so, according to the rites of the Established Church and the instruction of its bishops. But there was always the danger that, through my father, I might be considered guilty by association, by blood.

  ‘So you will change your mind, Marwood? No doubt your father would have wished you to think of your best interests in these changed times.’

  ‘Yes, sir. But I must also think of his.’

  Williamson gave a laugh – short, sharp and mirthless, like the bark of a dog. ‘You’re obstinate in your folly.’ He lowered his head over his papers. ‘Like father, like son, I suppose.’

  For some reason, that last remark comforted me as nothing else did.

  Two days later, on Monday, we laid Nathaniel Marwood in his grave. There was no reason for delay – the death had been an accident; it was easy enough for an old man to stagger on the crowded pavement and fall under the wagon. He had been notably infirm in mind, if not in body, and quite possibly did not even know where he was. Such deaths happen every day.

  We took the body to Bunhill Fields. Apart from the minister, the bearers and the diggers, the only mourners were Sam and myself. Margaret was debarred by her sex from coming, which was unkind, for her grief was in its way deeper and truer than my own. She still wept for my father at the slightest provocation, despite the fact that in life he had been a burden to her.

  After the interment, Sam and I took a hackney coach around the walls of the ruined city, a wasteland of blackened chimney stacks, roofless churches and sodden ashes. I told the driver to set us down in Fleet Street. We went to the Devil, the big tavern between Temple Bar and Middle Temple Gate, where Sam stuffed himself with as much as he could eat and I made myself swiftly and relentlessly drunk.

  Memory is a strange thing, fickle and misleading, as treacherous as water. My memories of the rest of the day are like broken glass – jumbled, largely meaningless and with sharp edges liable to wound. But I remember perfectly one snatch of conversation between us, partly because it happened early on, and partly because of what was said.

  ‘Do you know the crossing-sweeper here, master?’

  I was too busy drinking to reply.

  ‘He knows you,’ Sam went on.

  ‘Do I?’ Of course I gave the sweeper a penny occasionally. If you used a crossing regularly, you would be a fool not to. But I could not for the life of me remember what the man looked like.

  ‘His name’s Bartholomew,’ Sam said. ‘Like the prophet. Barty.’

  I was not attending to what he was saying. I was trying to attract the attention of the waiter and order more wine.

  ‘He’s the one who brought your father home. The day before he died.’

  I forgot the waiter and looked at Sam. ‘Yes – I remember. Margaret told me. I should give him something for his trouble.’

  Sam touched the side of his head with his forefinger. ‘Barty said he didn’t know the old man’s wits were wandering. Not at first. I mean, seeing him from the outside, who would? He didn’t look as if he had an addled brain.’

  It was a fair point. Nathaniel Marwood had looked what he was – an old man in his sixties, but hale enough. It was only if you tried to talk to him, and you heard the nonsense that poured out of his mouth, making little more sense than the babble of an infant, that you realized his infirmity.

  ‘There’s an archway up beyond the church, sir. Barty said that was the way your father came.’

  ‘An archway?’ I thought he meant the great gateway that divided the City from Westminster, and Fleet Street from the Strand. ‘You mean he came through Temple Bar?’

  ‘No, no. This archway’s off the street. To the north, by St Dunstan-in-the-West.’ Sam leaned forward. ‘It’s the way into one of these lawyers’ colleges. Clifford’s Inn.’

  Suddenly my father’s words were in my mind. The last words, nearly, that I had heard from him, and possibly the last words that contained some fragmentary elements of lucidity. ‘Where the lawyers are. Those creatures of the devil.’ He had hated and feared lawyers since they helped to put him in prison and take away his property.

  ‘Isn’t that where the Fire Court is sitting? Why would he go there?’

  Sam shrugged.

  Have you ever remarked how lawyers are like rooks? They cling together and go caw-caw-caw … And they go to hell when they die.

  So there had been, after all, a single fragment of fact among my father’s ramblings, buried in all the nonsense about my mother. He had been to Clifford’s Inn, among the lawyers.

  ‘Did Barty say more?’

  ‘He was weeping,’ Sam said. ‘Barty told me that. So he walked him home, but he couldn’t make head nor sense of what your father was saying.’

  I hammered my fist on the table. ‘Then I shall go to Clifford’s Inn and find out.’

  The waiter mistook the gesture and was at my elbow in a trice. ‘Beg pardon, master, didn’t mean to keep you waiting. Another quart of sack, is it? You will have it directly.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, frowning at him. ‘Very well, a drink before we go, to godspeed us and drink to my father’s memory.’ I glared at Sam. ‘He should not have been weeping. He should not have been unhappy.’

  Sam stared at the table. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And why in God’s name did he go to Clifford’s Inn? Did someone drag him there?’ All my guilt, all my sorrow, had at last found an outlet. ‘I shall have the truth of it, do you hear, and I shall have it now. Find me this Barty and I shall question him.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sam said.

  There was the waiter again, back already. Before I was an hour older, I was too drunk to have the truth of anything.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The day after the funeral I woke with a headache that cut my skull in two.

  My mouth tasted as it had in the first few weeks after the Great Fire when everything had turned to ashes, from the air we breathed to the water we drank. Every breath and
every mouthful was a reminder of what had happened. Every footstep raised a grey cloud that powdered our clothes and our hair. The destruction of a city and the death of an old man tasted the same: ashes to ashes.

  It was early. I wrapped myself in my gown and went down to the kitchen, tottering like an old man myself: in fact just as my father used to do when his limbs were stiff after sleep. Death, I think, must have a sense of humour.

  The kitchen was at the back of the house, a gloomy room partly lit by a leaded casement which looked over the graveyard. Margaret was already there. She had lit the fire and was busying herself with the preparations for dinner. She took one look at me, pointed at the bench by the table and went into the pantry.

  The kitchen smelled of smoke and old meat. Now I was here, I wanted to leave, but I lacked the strength. In a moment Margaret returned with a jug of small beer and a pot to put it in. Without speaking, she poured a morning draught and handed it to me.

  The first mouthful made me retch. I fought back the rising nausea and took a second mouthful. I kept that down and ventured cautiously on a third.

  ‘I put juice of the cabbage in there too,’ Margaret said. ‘A sovereign remedy.’

  I retched again. She went back to stirring the pot over the fire, the source of another smell. I watched a rat skim along the bottom of the wall from the larder and slip through the crack below the back door. I lacked the energy to throw something at it.

  Taking my time, I drank the rest of the pot and let it settle. I felt no worse for it. At least my mouth was less dry.

  Margaret refilled the pot without my asking. Sam had a tendency to take too much drink, and she knew how to deal with it.

  I closed my eyes. When I next opened them, Margaret was standing over me. She was a short, sturdy woman with black hair, dark eyes and a high colour. When hot or angry, she looked as if she might explode. She looked like that now but I wasn’t sure why. My memory of the later part of yesterday was blurred. Clearly, I had been very drunk. That probably meant that Sam had been very drunk too.

  ‘Master,’ she said. ‘Can I speak to you?’

  ‘Later,’ I said.

  She ignored that. ‘Your father’s clothes, sir. I—’

  ‘Give them to the poor,’ I croaked. ‘Sell them. I don’t care a fig what you do with them.’

  ‘It’s not that, sir. I tried to clean his coat yesterday. The one he was wearing.’

  I winced and looked away, reaching for the pot.

  ‘It’s a good coat,’ she said. ‘There’s a deal of use left in it.’

  ‘Then get rid of it somehow. Don’t bother me with it, woman.’

  ‘I emptied the pockets.’

  Something in her voice made me look up. ‘What is it?’

  For answer, she went to the shelves on the wall opposite the fireplace and took down a small box without a lid. She set it on the table.

  Inside was my father’s frayed purse and a piece of rag. The purse contained two pennies – we had never given him more because his money tended to be stolen or lost, if he had not given it away first – and four pieces of type, the only surviving relics of his press in Pater Noster Row. His folding knife was there too, with its handle of wood, worn and stained with constant use. At the bottom was a crumpled sheet of paper, smeared with rust.

  Not rust, of course. Dried blood. Just as there had been dried blood on the cuff of his shirt.

  Yesterday’s conversation with Sam flooded into my mind. The crossing-sweeper. Clifford’s Inn. Where the lawyers are. Those creatures of the devil. And, before that, my father talking deluded nonsense about my mother, and the woman on the couch, and closing her eyes.

  I picked up the paper and smoothed it out. It was a strip torn from a larger sheet. Written on it were the words ‘Twisden, Wyndham, Rainsford, DY’.

  Margaret refilled my pot. ‘It wasn’t there last week, master.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She ignored the question, treating it with the contempt it deserved.

  My brain was still fighting yesterday’s fumes. I screwed up my eyes and tried to focus on the words. First, the three names. Then two initials. DY – a name so well known that initials sufficed for it?

  ‘Bring me a roll and some butter.’

  She went away. I sat there, staring into nothing. Clifford’s Inn. A scrap of paper stained with blood. A few names. It unsettled me that my father’s ramblings had contained a grain of sense. He really had strayed into a place of lawyers. But he could have picked the paper up anywhere.

  The door from the yard opened and closed. There were footsteps in the scullery passage, and the tap of a crutch on the flagged floor.

  Sam appeared in the kitchen doorway. He jerked his head towards the scullery passage and the back door. ‘Barty’s in the yard.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘He won’t get any scraps out of me at this hour,’ Margaret said tartly. ‘Tell him to come back after dinner.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, woman.’ Sam looked at me. ‘Barty, master. The crossing-sweeper who saw your father. You told me to find him for you. Do you remember? In the Devil?’

  Suddenly I was sober, or I felt I was. I stood up, knocking over the bench. ‘Bring him in.’

  ‘Best that you go out to him, master.’ Margaret wrinkled her nose. ‘If you’d be so kind. He stinks.’

  ‘You’ll give him something to eat,’ I said. ‘Take it out to him.’

  ‘Something you should know, sir,’ Sam said. ‘Barty says he saw your father again.’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

  Sam’s voice was gentle. ‘On Friday morning. As well as on Thursday.’

  There was a moment of silence. My mouth was open. Margaret stood with a pan in her hand, leaning forward to put it on the fire, as still as a statue.

  I swallowed. I said slowly, ‘Last Friday, you mean? The day my father died?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘Did he see what happened?’

  ‘He’ll only speak to you. I’m no use to him. You’re the one with the purse.’

  Margaret whimpered softly. She set the pan on the fire.

  ‘Why didn’t he tell us sooner?’

  ‘He was taken up for debt that very afternoon. It’s only yesterday evening his mother raised the money to get him out of prison.’

  Sam hopped down the passage and into the yard. I followed. Over his shoulder, I saw the crossing-sweeper sitting on the side of the trough that caught the rainwater. He was huddled in a filthy cloak with his hat drawn low over his ears. He was a crooked man with a sallow countenance.

  When he saw us, he sprang up and executed a clumsy bow. Then he shrank back into his cloak as if he wanted to make himself as small as possible.

  ‘Sam says you saw my father on the day he died,’ I said. ‘As well as the day before, when you brought him back here.’

  Barty nodded so violently that his hat fell off, exposing a bald patch covered in scabs, below which a fringe of greasy hair straggled towards his shoulders. He licked his lips. ‘You won’t make me go before a justice, master? Please, sir.’

  ‘Not if you tell me the truth.’

  ‘I done nothing wrong.’ He looked from me to Sam with the eyes of a dog that fears a beating.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You won’t be the poorer for it.’

  ‘It was like Thursday, master. He came out of Clifford’s Inn again, down to Fleet Street. He was in a terrible hurry, and he knocked against a bookstall there, and the bookseller swore at him …’

  Sam nudged him with his elbow. ‘Tell his honour the rest.’

  Barty screwed up his face. ‘He was looking back over his shoulder. As if someone was chasing him.’

  ‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Who?’

  ‘Couldn’t see, sir. There was a wagon coming down from St Paul’s, and a coach coming the other way, under the Bar. But I thought I’d go over and give the old fellow a helping hand, like I done the other day.’

  ‘Ho
ping it would be worth your while,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t have to tell us all that. Go on.’

  ‘Well …’ Barty looked at me, and then away. ‘That’s when it happened. The old man tripped – fell into the road – in front of the wagon. But I heard …’

  I seized his collar and dragged him towards me. Part of me wanted to shake the life out of him. ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘His screams, master. His screams.’

  I let the wretch go. He fell back against the trough. I was trembling.

  ‘And next?’ I said.

  ‘All the traffic stopped. I went over the road to see if …’

  ‘If there were pickings to be had?’

  He tried to give me an ingratiating smile. ‘He was alive still, sir. Just. There was a crowd around him. But he looked up and he saw me there among them. I swear he saw me, master, I swear he did. He knew me. I know he did. He said … Rook. Where’s the rook?’

  ‘Rook,’ I said. ‘Rook? What rook?’

  Barty stared up at me. ‘I don’t know what he meant, master. But I know he was scared of something.’

  ‘What else?’ I demanded.

  ‘That’s all he said, master. Then he was gone.’

  Later that morning there was a knocking at the door. Sam announced that the tailor had come to wait on me.

  I had quite forgotten the appointment, perhaps because I did not want to remember it. Death is a dreary business, time-consuming and expensive, and so is its aftermath. But it would not be right in the eyes of the world if I went abroad without visible signs of my bereavement.

  Some of these signs were cheap enough to arrange – before the funeral, I had ordered Margaret to dull the metal of my buckles, attach black silk weepers to my hatband, and blacken my best brown shoes – including the soles, on Margaret’s advice, for they would be visible when I knelt to pray.

  I had borrowed a suit of mourning for the funeral but I needed to have my own. On Saturday, I had visited the tailor’s shop to be measured, and to choose the material and discuss the pattern. Now the man had come to fit the suit and to try to persuade me to buy a black silk sash to set off the new clothes.

  By the time all this was done, my head was clearer, and my stomach had returned to something approaching normality, though the very thought of sack made me feel queasy.