The Fire Court: A gripping historical thriller from the bestselling author of The Ashes of London. Andrew Taylor

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ he safe?’

      ‘Safe? Yes, sir.’ She draped the cloak over the chest, her hands smoothing its folds automatically. ‘He’s by the parlour fire. I’d left him in the courtyard on his usual bench. The sun was out, and he was asleep. And I thought, if I was only gone a moment, he—’

      ‘When was this?’ I snapped.

      She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know. Upward of an hour? We couldn’t find him. Then suddenly he was back – the kitchen yard. Barty brought him.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Barty, sir. The crossing-sweeper by Temple Bar. He knows your father wanders sometimes.’

      I didn’t know Barty from Adam, but I made a mental note to give him something for his pains.

      ‘Sir,’ Margaret said in a lower voice. ‘He was weeping. Like a child.’

      ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Had someone hurt him?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Has he said anything?’

      Margaret rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Rachel.’

      I felt as if someone had kicked me. ‘What?’

      ‘Rachel, sir. That’s what he said when he came in. Over and over again. Just the name. Rachel.’ She stared up at me, twisting a fold of her dress in her hands. ‘Who’s Rachel, sir? Do you know?’

      I didn’t answer her. Of course I knew who Rachel was. She was my mother, dead these six long years, but not always dead to my father.

      I went into the parlour. The old man was sitting by the fire and spooning the contents of a bowl of posset into his mouth. Margaret or someone had laid a large napkin across his lap. But it had not been large enough to catch all the drops of posset that had missed his mouth. He did not look up as I entered the room.

      Anger ran through me, fuelled by love and relief, those most combustible ingredients, and heating my blood like wine. Where was my father in this wreck of a human being? Where was Nathaniel Marwood, the man who had ruled his family and his business with the authority of God’s Viceroy, and who had earned the universal respect of his friends? He had been a printer once, as good as any in Pater Noster Row, a man of substance. Politics and religion had led him down dangerous paths to his ruin, but no one had ever doubted his honesty or his skill. Now, after his years in prison, only fragments of him were left.

      The spoon scraped around the side of the empty bowl. I took the bowl from him, meeting only the slightest resistance, and then the spoon. I placed them both on the table and considered whether to remove the soiled napkin. On reflection, it seemed wiser to leave it to Margaret.

      Eating and the afternoon’s unaccustomed exercise had tired him. His eyes closed. His hands were in his lap. The right hand was grimy. The cuff of his shirt protruded from the sleeve of his coat. The underside of the cuff was stained reddish-brown like ageing meat.

      My anger evaporated. I leaned forward and pushed up the cuff. There was no sign of a cut or graze on his wrist or his hand.

      I shook him gently. ‘Sir? Margaret tells me you went abroad this afternoon. Why?’

      The only answer was a gentle snore.

      Four hours later, by suppertime, the posset was merely a memory and my father was hungry again. Hunger made him briefly lucid, or as near to that state as he was ever likely to come.

      ‘Why did you go out, sir?’ I asked him, keeping my voice gentle because it upset him if I spoke roughly to him. ‘You know it worries Margaret when she cannot find you.’

      ‘Rachel.’ He was looking into the fire, and God alone knew what he saw there. ‘I cannot allow my wife to walk the town without knowing where she is. It is not fitting, so I followed her to remonstrate with her. Did she not promise to obey me in all things? She was wearing her best cloak, too, her Sunday cloak. It is most becoming.’ He frowned. ‘Perhaps it is too becoming. The devil lays his traps so cunningly. I must speak to her, indeed I must. Why did she bear the mark of Cain? I shall find out the truth of the matter.’

      ‘Rachel …? My mother?’

      He glanced at me. ‘Who else?’ Even as he spoke, he looked bewildered. ‘But you were not born. You were in her belly.’

      ‘And now I am here before you, sir,’ I said, as if this double time my father inhabited, this shifting confluence of now and then, were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Where did my mother go?’

      ‘Where the lawyers are. Those sucklings of the devil.’

      ‘Where, exactly?’ The lawyers congregated in many places.

      He smiled. ‘You should have seen her, James,’ he said. ‘Always neat in her movements. She loves to dance, though of course I do not allow it. It is not seemly for a married woman. But … but how graceful she is, James, even in her kitchen. Why, she is as graceful as a deer.’

      ‘Which lawyers were these, sir?’

      ‘Have you ever remarked how lawyers are like rooks? They cling together and go caw-caw-caw. They all look the same. And they go to hell when they die. Did you know that? Moreover—’

      ‘Rachel, sir. Where did she go?’

      ‘Why, into the heart of a rookery. There was a courtyard where there was a parliament of these evil birds. And I followed her by a garden to a doorway in a building of brick … and the letters of one name were most ill-painted, James, and ill-formed as well. There was a great drip attached to it, and a poor creature had drowned therein, and I could have scraped it away but there was not time.’

      ‘A creature …?’

      ‘Even ants are God’s creatures, are they not? He brought two of them into the ark, so he must have decided they should be saved from the Flood. Ah—’

      My father broke off as Margaret came into the room bearing bread. She laid the table for supper. His eyes followed her movements.

      ‘And then, sir?’ I said. ‘Where did she go?’

      ‘I thought to find her in the chamber with the ant. Up the stairs.’ He spoke absently, his attention still on Margaret. ‘But she wasn’t there. No one was, only the woman on the couch. The poor, abandoned wretch. Her sins found her out, and she suffered the punishment for them.’

      The fingers of his left hand played with the soiled shirt cuff. He rubbed the stiff linen where the blood had dried.

      Margaret left the room.

      ‘Who was this woman?’ I said.

      ‘Not Rachel, thanks be to God. No, no.’ He frowned. ‘Such a sinfully luxurious chamber. It had a carpet on the floor that was so bright it hurt the eyes. And there was a painting over the fireplace … its lewdness was an offence in the eyes of God and man.’

      ‘But the woman, sir?’ I knew he must have wandered into one of his waking dreams, but it was wise to make sure he was calm now, that СКАЧАТЬ