The Ashes of London

His body bucked in the bed and he let out a scream as high-pitched as a girl’s. His arm swung up towards her. She reared back. The candle tilted in her hand. The flame caught the edge of the bed curtain.

The blood looked black in this light. It gleamed like liquid ebony.

The flame ran up the side of the curtain and gave birth to another flame, and then to a third.

Edward writhed on the mattress, wailing and crying, his hands covering his face.

Cat turned and ran. The candle was in her hand, by some miracle still alight, though the flame was dancing and ducking like a wild thing.

Behind her, the screams continued, the flames rose higher, and the chamber grew brighter and brighter.

‘Mistress …’

She gasped and dropped the bundle.

The whisper came from her left. She heard the laboured breathing mingling with her own. Down here in the cellar, with the stench from the cesspit oozing through the wall, it was very quiet. You could hear and see nothing of what might be going on in the rest of the house. The screams. The flames.

‘Jem.’ She was panting, and the words came singly, in fits and starts. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Waiting for you, mistress.’

He stirred beside her in the darkness. She raised the candle. His pale face was at her elbow.

‘You said you wouldn’t help me,’ she said.

‘I am not here to help.’ His breath wheezed. ‘I feared you would come. I’m here to stop you. Have you not thought? Your father may well be dead.’

She stooped for her bundle. ‘Something’s happened. It changes everything.’

‘Nothing’s changed outside. It’s as dangerous as ever.’

She said bluntly, ‘It’s more dangerous here. Edward took me by force.’

‘Took you …?’

The horror in the old man’s voice gave her a perverse pleasure. She said, ‘He was waiting in my bedchamber tonight. He raped me.’

‘But you’re still a child.’

‘Not any more, you fool,’ she snapped, forgetting in her anger to lower her voice. ‘And so I went to him as he slept and I stabbed him in the eye.’

She felt his hand on her arm. A sob rose from her throat.

‘Is he dead?’ he asked.

‘I hope so.’ She took a deep breath and said in a rush, ‘I must go – go anywhere, anywhere but here.’

‘Then I’ll help you.’

‘There’s nowhere. Nowhere safe.’

‘But there is.’

She turned and blundered against him. His arms went around her. She was trembling but she did not cry.

‘Child,’ he said. ‘Child. You must go alone. I would slow you down. Go to Three Cocks Yard, off the Strand. The house to the left of the sign of the green pestle. Ask for Mistress Martha Noxon. She’s my niece, and they have no knowledge of her here. Give her this, and she will know you. Perhaps your father will find you there.’

Jem pressed something into her hand. It was small and smooth, curved, cold and hard.

‘Put it in your pocket.’ He gave her a little push. ‘And go. Go now.’

Somewhere in the distance was a faint, ragged baying, growing in volume. Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse were giving tongue.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_55236d30-ff75-5c5f-9a27-6dc5ad7cdbb3)

I COULD NOT afford to anger Williamson any more than I had already done. I worked late that day and made sure I was at Whitehall early on the following morning, which was Thursday, the fifth day of the Fire.

The news was good. The wind had slackened and veered north, which made it easier for those fighting the Fire. There were reports that the Duke of York had halted the westward march of the flames at the Temple. God willing, the mansions of the Strand would be spared, and so would Whitehall itself. The fires were still burning vigorously elsewhere, but their relentless advance had been largely stopped.

I was already at work when Williamson came up to the office in Scotland Yard. I knew he was on his way for I had seen him from the window in the court below, deep in conversation with the portly gentleman with the wart on his chin. I expected him to be in a good humour because of the news about the Fire, but his face was grim and preoccupied. As soon as he came in, he called me over, commanding me to bring him the list of fatalities.

He scanned it quickly. ‘Good. No new ones overnight. God has been merciful.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But talking of death, Marwood, there’s one that isn’t recorded here.’

He paused, as if to consider some weighty aspect of the matter far beyond my understanding. I was used to that, for Williamson employed such tactics to build a sense of his own importance – in his own mind, perhaps, as much as in the minds of others.

‘We have a body,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better see it now.’

We clattered down the stone stairs, setting off a crowd of echoes, with Williamson leading the way. On the ground floor, he demanded a lantern from the porter. While we waited he turned to me.

‘A patrol went up to St Paul’s at dawn,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s like an oven in there, even now. A beggar told them there was a body in Paul’s Walk. In what’s left of a chantry chapel on the north side.’

‘Where the ballad-seller used to have a stall?’ I asked.

The cathedral’s nave, Paul’s Walk, had become a cross between a market, a public resort and a place of assignation in recent years. The ballad-seller made most of his income from his secondary trade, which was pimping.

Williamson nodded. ‘Two of the guards left their powder behind and went in and pulled him out.’

‘A victim of the Fire, sir?’

‘He’s definitely not the stallholder. And he can’t have been there long. Someone would have noticed him before the Fire.’

‘But why’s he here, sir?’ Surprise stripped the appropriate respect from my voice. ‘At Whitehall?’

The question earned a scowl. The porter brought the lantern. Williamson gestured to me, indicating that I should light the way for him.

We descended by another staircase into the cellarage. I had never been here before – the palace was so vast and so rambling that I knew only a fraction of it, and none of it well. A low passage stretched the length of the range. Small gratings were set high in the left-hand wall to let in a modicum of light and air. On the right was a row of doors, all closed.

Williamson took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door at the far end. We entered a windowless chamber with a low barrel-vault of bricks. It contained no furniture apart from a heavy table in the centre of the room. The cellar smelled strongly of burning, as everywhere did now, as well as of sewage and damp.