Plague Child. Peter Ransley

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СКАЧАТЬ I dream of the gentleman because he had been kind to me? Or was it real? I do not know, but I have a shifting memory of an old man’s face bending over me, a wispy tuft of hair rather than a beard below his lips, which smiled one moment and tightened the next, just as his dark eyes looked cloudy and troubled, then stared down at me with penetrating, frightening shrewdness as though they could cut right into my heart and soul, like a surgeon’s knife.

      When I questioned Matthew about him as we prepared to go home, saying he looked concerned and kind, Matthew laughed bitterly.

      ‘Kind? Aye, he’s kind all right. One of those gentry-coves who would be kind enough to send you to Paddington Fair.’

      He was not looking at me but staring towards the river, where the tide was on the turn and a boat was being cast off. Often in his stories he told me that one day we would leave on the tide to a distant land, and I thought they were just stories, but now there was something in his voice that told me he wanted to be on that boat, and made me clutch at his hand.

      ‘Paddington Fair – send me to Tyburn? He wouldn’t! Why? What have I done?’

      He laughed. ‘Nay, do you not know when I’m joking?’

      Still in the manner of a joke, he took me to a fire on the edge of the yard where there were few people.

      Some in the yard said Matthew was a cunning man, because he polished their thumbnails until they gleamed in the firelight, and saw their future in them. I had often begged him to tell mine, but he had always refused. Now he built up the fire, squatted by it, and stared into the flames.

      I had seen him do this with the others. ‘Are you going to tell me my future?’ I said, polishing my nail in great excitement.

      He grinned. ‘Nay, Tom. I shall need more than a nail for thy future.’

      His face, lit by the fire, seemed all eyes. The dock was quiet. The frantic hammering and sawing and shouting and swinging of timber was over. The gentleman was pleased with the ship, and they were taking on board canvas, ready to run up sails. Two men approached, arguing. Matthew waited until they passed, then undid his jerkin, then his shirt, which he never took off in winter. Under that was a belt, attached to which was a pouch. He started to take something from the pouch, then thrust it back.

      ‘Say nothing about this, or I’m a dead man!’

      I can now see that many of his jokes were made to ward off the fear which, at some level, was always with him. Back then I understood nothing but the sheer naked force of that fear, all the more terrible since it came so unexpectedly from someone who had always seemed, to me at any rate, a simple, jovial man.

      Constantly looking about him, he took something from his pouch which seemed to have a fire of its own. It was a pendant, with a falcon staring so furiously from its enamelled nest I ducked back instinctively, for fear it would fly at me. Its eyes, Matthew said, were rubies and in one of its talons it gripped a pearl, irregularly shaped, as if it had just been torn from the earth.

      I reached out my hand for it, but he cuffed it away. ‘Ah ah!’

      His fear seemed to recede as he gazed at it. He smiled, caressed it almost, murmuring to himself. A log settled and the gold chain glittered in the spurting flames. He addressed the pendant rather than me, seeming to enter into some kind of a trance with the red-eyed falcon. He saw a lady, he said, a real lady, with hair as bright red as mine.

      ‘Will I marry her?’

      ‘Nay, nay. Not her. You will make a great fortune. And lose it.’

      ‘A crown?’

      He shook with laughter. He seemed to have returned to his normal self. I loved his laughter, which made his cheeks and his belly shake, for, although he was always making fun of me, there was kindness in it.

      ‘Rather more than a crown, boy.’

      He put the pendant in the pouch, and pulled down his shirt and jerkin. The falcon seemed to flutter as it disappeared, reminding me of the bird on the flag flying on the old gentleman’s ship.

      ‘Is the pendant something to do with the old gentleman?’ I said.

      He seized me by the throat. For a moment I thought he was going to make up for never beating me by throttling the life out of me. ‘Who told you that? Who told you? Answer me!’

      ‘No one!’ I choked. ‘The bird is like the one on the ship’s flag.’

      He laughed, releasing me. ‘Nothing like! Nothing like at all.’

      I thought he was lying. He whirled round at a movement in the shadows, but it was only a dog searching for scraps.

      ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if you ever see a man – he calls himself a gentleman these days – with a scar on his face.’ He pulled his face into a smile that was not a smile, and drew his finger down the line of it, on his right cheek, down to his neck. ‘He works for the old gentleman. Meet him, and you wouldn’t think the old gentleman so kind.’ When I said nothing, he pushed his face into mine with such a sudden ferocity I jumped in fright.

      ‘Do you understand?’

      I nodded dumbly. I understood that the old gentleman, the man with a scar and the pendant were somehow connected. And I understood that Matthew was a thief, for how else would he have got the pendant? I did not mind that, for Poplar was full of people running away from something: cutpurses, refugees, apprentices, debtors, whores. But I thought it was something more than being a thief he was running from, and I minded very much not knowing what it was.

      ‘I don’t understand what is story and what is truth,’ I said.

      He roared with laughter. ‘If people ever knew the difference between those two,’ he said, ‘the world would be a very different place.’

      He would say no more, except, ‘You’re a strange boy, a very particular boy,’ as he took me home, all kindness again.

      That night I woke up hearing him arguing with Susannah downstairs, where they slept. I slept upstairs with sailors they took in as lodgers.

      ‘A boat?’ she shouted. ‘I’ve never been on a boat in my life! Where would we go?’

      I heard no more because he beat her. The next day he told me we were going on a boat to Hull. I had seen so many built I was passionate to go out to sea and bombarded him with questions about what part of the Indies Hull was in and were there parrots and elephants?

      But before the boat sailed, they came. A waterman brought them, and a shipwright took me to them. Matthew was nowhere to be found. Fearfully I looked up at the faces of both of them, but there was no scar that I could see.

      Master Black was dressed to suit his name, in sober black, brightened only by a froth of fine linen at the cuffs and collar. He had a cane, and walked with a slight limp. The man whom I came to call Gloomy George was a thin man with narrow suspicious eyes, always looking about him as if he was afraid his pocket was about to be picked.

      Susannah went into one of her trembling fits when I was took home, but instead of the words pouring out of her, she seemed scarce able to speak. The two men almost filled our tiny room. Susannah ran to a neighbour, Mother Banks, for weak beer, but Mr Black took one СКАЧАТЬ