Plague Child. Peter Ransley

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СКАЧАТЬ was staring at me. All I could do was shake my head numbly at him. When the man in the beaver hat spoke to him, Will shook his head and pointed to the door where Crow was standing.

      ‘He’s run for it!’ the man in the beaver hat shouted to Crow, who dived out into the street, the other man following.

      I picked up the knife, staring at its blade as Will pushed his way through to me with another, older man, who wore a jump jacket, Dutch style, with a square linen collar.

      ‘I was going to kill him,’ I said stupidly.

      The older man shook his head. ‘You were wrongly positioned,’ he said, in an educated drawl. ‘You would only have wounded him. He would have turned and killed you.’ He drew his finger across his throat.

      Will cut across him sharply, seeing the landlord say something to the pot girl. ‘Get him out of here, Luke!’

      He grabbed me by one elbow and the man called Luke took me by the other and they hustled me into the night.

       Chapter 8

      That night I slept curled up in my Joseph coat on bales of the best Virginia tobacco, in the warehouse of Will’s father. Ever since then the smell of Virginia curling up from a clay pipe has meant the smell of rebellion to me. It rose from the pipes of Will and Luke when they woke me next morning. They took me through to the counting house, where there was a third man, Ben. What followed was a counting, not of money, but of me – an interrogation.

      All three were members of the All Hallows Trained Band. Will and Ben were typical of many of the City’s part-time soldiers: middling men fighting against the City’s richest merchants, who generally supported the King. Will’s father, like many tobacco merchants, was struggling to break the monopolies of fabulously wealthy spice merchants such as Benyon, his opponent in the City elections the following month.

      Ben was an apothecary. Prevented from working in the City by another monopoly, the doctors, he practised medicine in Spitalfields outside the walls, dispensing herbal cures to the London poor. Ben was as quiet and diffident as his grey jacket and hose, but there was a stubbornness in his silences, a refusal to take anything for granted, that I liked.

      Luke was totally different. He seemed to have only one aim in joining the militia, and that was to fight. He had just come from fencing practice, and propped his sword against a rickety table in the counting house. A pupil to a lawyer in Gray’s Inn, he was the second son of a gentleman, and looked it. The achingly soft leather of his funnel boots ridiculed my shoes ‘as worn at court’. I hid them under the table, my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but could not hide the shabbiness of my breeches, the stink and stains of my Joseph coat, at which he wrinkled his nose. He stared at me quizzically, as if I was one of those curiosities exhibited at a travelling fair.

      ‘You’re on the run,’ he drawled.

      ‘Yes,’ I said defiantly. ‘Are you going to take me to Newgate?’

      ‘Bridewell,’ he corrected, ‘for petty offenders like you – unless you’ve actually murdered someone?’

      He was looking meaningly at the knife in my belt. I jumped up, rocking the table. A week on the run had already changed me. Acting first had become a way of life. Another moment and I would have been on my way to the door, prepared to shove Luke from his stool if he tried to stop me. ‘What happened, Tom?’

      Ben’s voice was soft, his concern calming. Ashamed now at my over-reaction, I dropped back on my stool. I told them everything, from Mr Black first taking me to Poplar, to the attempt on my life and the receipts and notes on me I had discovered in Mr Black’s office.

      When I had finished there was a silence, except for the clang of bells from barges on the river. Will puffed at a clay pipe of his father’s best Virginia, which had gone from the ‘foul stinking novelty’ derided by King James to a soothing cure for all illnesses, from cholic to bladder stones.

      ‘Is this a pamphlet you’re writing?’ Luke said sceptically.

      ‘It’s true!’ I banged my fist down on the table, but then over the ships’ bells came the much deeper sound of a church bell.

      ‘St Mary-le-Bow,’ Will said. ‘It means –’

      The end of his sentence was drowned by a great tumult of bells, spreading through the City from the east. Like a fire leaping from roof to roof the noise swelled, the deep-throated boom of St Katharine by the Tower, the clangour of St Dunstan-in-the-East, sparking into life the carillons of St Lawrence Jewry and St Giles’ Cripplegate, St Paul’s, St Martin’s, St Dunstan-in-the-West and St Clement Danes until the whole warehouse shook in one huge cauldron of sound.

      Luke was inaudible, but no one needed to hear him. ‘The King,’ were the words he formed.

      The King had arrived to talk to Parliament! All our arguments were forgotten as we joined the great crowds pouring along Thames Street, past Fishmongers’ Hall and up Fish Street Hill. Shouting questions and holding our ears close to people’s mouths, we gradually made out that the King had met the Lord Mayor and aldermen at Hoxton, in fields just beyond the sprawl of new building, which (if it was anything like Poplar) had come to an abrupt halt in the present crisis with half-built houses and littered wood left in muddy pools.

      ‘The King knighted the Lord Mayor on the spot,’ someone told Will.

      Will groaned. ‘Knighthoods for gold – the King wants the City to buy him an army!’

      A burst of cheering silenced him. I wondered why the crowd, after the demonstrations last night, could be so happy about it until we reached the corner of Gracious Street. We could not move for the press of people round the fountain. Men and women staggered from it with what looked like blood on their hands and clothes.

      Even Luke had lost his coolness and was shoving his way through the crowd. He yelled at me, but I could not hear a word. The bells near us stopped, others petering away, and Luke’s voice boomed into my ear.

      ‘Drink to the King! And damn his bad advisers!’

      He vanished among the heaving mass, reappearing with his fine lace collar stained with crimson, his hands running red.

      ‘The best Bordeaux!’ he yelled. ‘When the King favours you – you’re all for him!’

      I could not believe it. The fountain was running with wine. A woman carried away a pot of it. Most held out their hands and slurped it into their mouths before it dribbled away then, having lost their places, fought to get back for more before the casks that were supplying it ran out. I wriggled on my hands and knees under a drayman’s apron, catching the wine that ran through his fingers, sucking it up then turning my head to the sky to catch the red rain until I lost my balance and was in danger of being trampled into the crimson mud. Whether it was the best Bordeaux or vinegar I did not know, and I did not manage to swallow very much of it, but I was certainly drunk. Drunk on the press around me, then, turning like one towards Cornhill, on the thunderous roar of the crowd coming from there. He had arrived! We were missing him! The thought was on everyone’s faces as they pushed and elbowed past Leadenhall Market.

      People must have been in their places for hours. The route for royal entries to the City had been the same for over a hundred years. The King had entered at Moorgate, the procession doubling back on the route of the old Roman wall, turned again at Bishopsgate and was now approaching Merchant Taylors’ Hall, СКАЧАТЬ