The Ashes of London. Andrew Taylor

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      She left Mistress Noxon laying the tray for her to take upstairs. She had often felt the rough edge of Mistress Noxon’s tongue. At first, it had made Cat furious – how dare the woman speak to her in that way, especially when they were alone? Later, she accepted it as necessary.

      Her circumstances had changed and so must she. In time, she learned to distinguish when Mistress Noxon was truly angry, when she was irritable for a reason that had nothing to do with Cat, and when her anger was entirely mechanical, administered for Cat’s good, in the same way that Cat’s nurse used to administer a regular purge to her.

      She filled the beer jugs from the barrel in the scullery and took them back to the kitchen.

      ‘Take the tray now. Master Hakesby’s up. The barber’s coming to shave him, and he’ll want his breakfast before that.’

      Cat tapped on Master Hakesby’s door, and he told her to enter. He was partly dressed and in his gown, a handkerchief around his shaven head. He was seated at the table by the window and already at work.

      ‘Put it on the chest,’ he said without looking up. ‘And pour some beer, will you?’

      She obeyed and brought the cup over to him. He took it without looking at her. She strained to see what he was working on. There was a small sheet of paper before him. He was using ink but not a ruler or compasses.

      This is an idea, Cat thought, something that comes in the night and needs to be pinned down before it vanishes in the daylight.

      A cruciform shape. A church, then. An octagon where the four arms meet: probably a great dome, like St Peter’s in Rome. And, from the transepts, curving outer lines stretching to nave and choir, softening the right angles where the transepts meet with the long axis of the church.

      Was it St Paul’s? A new St Paul’s?

      Master Hakesby took a mouthful of beer. He spilled a few drops on the table and dabbed at it with a handkerchief. He looked up but she didn’t think he saw her, not properly. ‘What is it, Jane?’

      ‘Nothing, sir.’

      ‘Then go away.’

      The next day, after the great rainstorm, was a Tuesday. In the afternoon, Cat was set to washing and waxing the floor and panelling of the parlour. Mistress Noxon came into the room before the task was half done.

      ‘You’re to go to St Paul’s,’ she said. ‘For Master Hakesby. It’s urgent.’

      Cat stared at her. Since her arrival here she had not gone further than the Strand.

      ‘There’s no one else to send.’ Mistress Noxon ran her finger along the curved mouldings of the door panels, automatically checking for dust. ‘You know the way?’

      Cat nodded. She had grown up in Bow Lane, east of St Paul’s, and the streets from Charing Cross to the Tower had been part of her childhood.

      ‘John’s in Westminster or I’d send him. Margery gets lost if she pokes her head out of the door. So that leaves you.’ There was no need to add that the kitchen boy couldn’t be sent because he was a halfwit, and Mistress Noxon wouldn’t go herself because it would be beneath her dignity. ‘Besides, it’s time you went further abroad. You need air. You’re as pale as a death’s head.’

      ‘What am I to do?’

      ‘Master Hakesby wants a portfolio. It’s the small green one on the table in his chamber.’

      ‘I know.’ Cat knew everything there was to know about Master Hakesby’s chamber.

      ‘You’ll find him in Convocation House Yard. Do you know where that is?’

      ‘Yes, mistress.’

      ‘Show this paper to the men on the gate, and they will let you in. Give the portfolio into his own hands, mind – he was most particular about that – and take care to keep it clean. Be off with you. And keep it dry. Hold it under your cloak.’

      It was still raining, though less heavily than before. Wrapped in the grey cloak she had stolen from the man at St Paul’s, Cat walked through the ruins of London. After Temple Bar and the first few houses of Fleet Street, there was nothing to be seen but devastation.

      Even now, six weeks afterwards, London was a desert from the Temple to the Tower. You could see from one end of the City to the other. All that was left of the greatest city in the country, apart from mounds of ash and rubble, were gutted churches and blackened spires, fragments of stone and thickets of unstable chimneystacks. In places the heat had been so intense that stones had calcined and become an unnatural white in colour.

      The change in the weather had affected everything, and not on the whole for the better. The rain had turned the pale ashes into a dark grey sludge that clung to your shoes and pattens and stained your clothes. It was growing colder, too. Everyone said it was going to be a bad winter.

      Cat crossed the Fleet Ditch, which was choked with sooty debris. Tendrils of smoke rose up from the labyrinth of ruins on either side of Ludgate Hill, for rubbish still smouldered, and fires burned slowly in deep, almost airless cellars.

      At Ludgate, the mounting block was still there, marked by the flames, but one of the few features recognizable from before the Fire. She supposed she should feel guilty about the thin young man for repaying his attempt to help her by biting his hand and stealing his cloak; but a sense of guilt was one of the luxuries she could no longer afford.

      In a moment Cat reached the spot where she had stood on the night of St Paul’s destruction. Had her father been inside? Had he been among the nameless dead? She wanted to know, one way or the other. Her lack of knowledge unsettled her. Even after he had fled abroad at the Restoration, she had known he was living somewhere beyond the Channel. Occasionally letters from him would come, sent care of an unknown friend and then passed to Jem, who would slip them into her hand.

      She paused to look at the ruined portico. By a strange paradox, it had been her father’s pride. He had been a mason by trade. Before the war he had worked on the cathedral under the direction of Master Inigo Jones. True, Master Lovett hated the Church of England and all its works, including St Paul’s. But she had seen him stroke the stones of one of the columns as a man strokes a favourite dog. He had talked, almost against his will, of the novelty and the elegance of the portico’s design.

      A porter passed close to her, brushing his hand over her hip. She moved quickly away. In the old days, she had not been a servant and she had never walked alone in the streets. Now she had become a target for passing men of all ages, for their touches, squeezes, attempted kisses and lewd suggestions. She wondered at this, at the curious lack of discrimination that men showed in their lusts.

      In Convocation House Yard, a crowd was gawping at the bodies propped against the wall. St Paul’s had given up a number of its dead because of the Fire, for tombs had burst open in the heat and flagstones cracked apart. Some corpses were little more than skeletons. Others were clothed in dried flesh in various stages of decay, a few with fragments of clothing and shrouds clinging to them. The souvenir hunters had been at work, and there were bodies that had lost fingers, toes, hands or feet; one lacked a skull.

      Pride of place, according to Mistress Noxon, went to Bishop Braybrooke, who hadn’t been seen in public since 1404. His mummified СКАЧАТЬ