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

They ignored me as I passed like a ghost among them, through the doorway and into the passage that ran through the range to another doorway. The passage was crowded too, though the people were much quieter than those in the courtyard. The door to the hall itself was on the right. It was closed. A porter with his staff stood in front of it.

‘Hush, sir,’ he said in a savage whisper. ‘The court’s in session.’

I went out by the further door. I found myself in a much larger courtyard, which had a garden beyond. Over to the left, through another gateway, was Serjeant’s Inn, with Chancery Lane beyond, running north from the Strand. To the right was an irregular range of buildings, leading to a further court and then another gate, which gave on to an alley off Fetter Lane. The lane had marked the western boundary of the Fire last September, but the flames had left their mark on both sides of the road. One of the Inn’s buildings had been gutted – a block just inside the gate on the north side of the court. The roof was gone and the upper storeys had been partly destroyed.

Clifford’s Inn as a whole had an air of dilapidation like an elderly relation in reduced circumstances left unattended in the chimney corner. There was one exception to the general neglect: a brick range facing the garden, on the far side of the blackened ruin.

What had my father said?

‘I followed her by a garden to a doorway in a building of brick.’

It was strange indeed. Here was another grain of truth among my father’s ramblings on his last evening. First a place full of lawyers, and now a building of brick beside a garden.

The building had four doors at regular intervals along its length, with a pair of windows on either side overlooking the garden. I sauntered across the courtyard towards it in an elaborately casual manner. Each doorway led to a staircase, on either side of which were sets of chambers. The names of the occupants had been painted on a board beside each doorway.

I paused to examine the nearest one. There was something amiss with the lettering. I had spent my early life in the printing house, and I noticed such things. My father had made sure of that.

XIV

6 Mr Harrison

5 Mr Moran

4 Mr Gorvin

3 Mr Gromwell

2 Mr Drury

1 Mr Bews

‘The letters of a name were most ill-painted, James, and ill-formed as well.’

My skin prickled at the back of my neck. It was extraordinary. The board was just as he had described it. One name had obviously been added more recently than the others, and by a painter with little skill, and with no inclination to make the best of what skill he had. Gromwell.

‘There was a great drip attached to it, and a poor creature had drowned therein.’

It was as if my father’s ghost were beside me, murmuring the words into my ear. Yes, there was the ant, trapped below the last ‘l’ of ‘Gromwell’, decaying within its rigid shroud of white paint.

Horror gripped me. If my father had been right about all this, then what about the woman he had seen displaying herself like a wanton in a chamber above? The woman with her coach and horses. The woman whose eyes he had closed in the chamber with the ant.

Gromwell’s chamber?

I opened the door and climbed the stairs. I did not hurry, partly because I was scared of what I would find. On the first landing, two doors faced each other, numbers 3 and 4. I waited a moment, listening.

‘I thought to find her in the chamber with the ant … up the stairs …’

I knocked on number 3. I heard movement in the room beyond. A tall, florid-faced man opened the door. He wore a morning gown of dark blue plush and a velvet cap. There was a book in his hand, with a finger marking his place. He frowned at me, raised his eyebrows and waited.

‘Mr Gromwell?’ I said.

It must have sounded like ‘Cromwell’ to the man’s ears. Or perhaps he was merely oversensitive, which was understandable as Oliver Cromwell’s head was displayed as a dreadful warning to traitors on a twenty-foot-high spike over Westminster Hall.

‘It’s Gromwell,’ he said, drawing out the syllables. ‘G-r-r-romwell with a G. I have no connection with a certain Huntingdonshire family named Cromwell. The G-r-r-romwells have been long established in Gloucestershire. G-r-r-romwell, sir, as in the plant.’

‘Whose seeds are used to treat the stone, sir?’ I said, remembering a herbal my father had printed.

The eyebrows rose again. ‘Indeed. A thing of beauty, too. As Pliny says, it is as if the jeweller’s art has arranged the gromwell’s gleaming white pearls so symmetrically among the leaves. Sir Thomas Browne calls it lithospermon in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica.’

I bowed in the face of so much learning. Behind Mr Gromwell was a table piled high with books.

‘Forgive me for disturbing your studies.’ I shifted my stance, so I could see further to the left. I couldn’t see a carpet. All I could make out was an expanse of bare boards and a grubby rush mat. ‘My name is Marwood. I wonder if my late father called on you last week.’

Gromwell frowned, and I guessed he was taking account of my mourning clothes for the first time. ‘Your late father?’

Over the fireplace was a dusty mirror in a gilt frame that had seen better times, but no trace of a painting, lewd or otherwise.

‘He died the day after he came here.’

‘I am sorry to hear it.’ Mr Gromwell did not look prosperous but he had a gentleman’s manners. ‘But I have been away. My rooms were locked up.’

He took a step back. His arm nudged the door, which swung further open, revealing most of the room. There wasn’t a couch of any description, let alone one with a body on it. None of the furnishings could be called luxurious. I felt both relieved and disappointed. It was remarkable that my father had recalled so much. Once he had entered the building, his imagination must have taken over. But I persevered.

‘I am much occupied with business at present,’ Gromwell said in a stately fashion. ‘I bid you good day, sir.

‘Does the name Twisden mean anything to you, sir?’ I asked. ‘Or Wyndham? Or Rainsford?’

He shook his head. ‘Forgive me, sir, my studies—’

‘Or the initials DY?’

Gromwell’s face changed. For an instant, he looked surprised, jolted out of his stateliness. His features sharpened, which made them look briefly younger. ‘No,’ he said, more firmly than he had said anything yet. ‘Good day to you.’

He closed the door in my face. I knocked on it. The only answer was the sound of a bolt being driven home.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_688338e4-1e32-5b45-8697-4be26c6c0a4c)

The young woman sat in the gallery taking shorthand. Her real name was Catherine Lovett, but most of the time she tried very hard to forget that inconvenient fact. Now she was Jane Hakesby, a maidservant attending the Fire Court at Clifford’s Inn to serve her master, Simon Hakesby, who was also a second cousin of her father’s. She was a maidservant with accomplishments, equipped with some of the advantages of gentle breeding, though few of them were much use to her at present. In her new life, only Mr Hakesby knew her true identity.

She did not intend to be a maidservant for ever. On her knee was a notebook held flat with the palm of her left hand. A steadily lengthening procession of pencilled marks marched across the open page, meaningless except to the initiated.

In the hall below, the court was in session, dealing with the last of the day’s cases. There were three judges at the round table on the low dais at the east end. The clerks and ushers clustered to one side, making notes of the proceedings and scuttling forward when a judge beckoned, bringing a book or a letter or a fresh pen. The petitioner and the defendants, together with their representatives, stood in the space immediately in front of the dais.

There was a lull in the proceedings – perhaps five seconds – during which no one spoke, and the court seemed to pause to draw breath. Her mind wandered. Her pencil followed. His wig’s crooked, she wrote. Judge on left. Then a lawyer cleared his throat and the talking and arguing began again.

The hall was cramped and shabby. Clifford’s Inn was not a grand establishment on the scale of the Temple, its stately colleague on the other side of the Fleet Street. Even in May, the air was chilly and damp. In the middle of the floor, a brazier of coal smouldered in the square hearth. The heat rose with the smoke to the blackened roof timbers and drifted uselessly through the louvred chimney into the ungrateful sky.

Jane Hakesby was sitting in the gallery at the west end, though a little apart from the other women. Her notebook rested on a copy of Shelton’s Tachygraphy. She was in the process of teaching herself shorthand, and the Fire Court provided her with useful practice. Most of the women were in a whispering huddle at the back, where the judges could not see them. Sometimes they glanced at her, their faces blank, their eyes hard. She knew why. She did not belong among them so they disliked her automatically.