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

That was when the memory of Catherine Lovett came into my mind. She was a young woman with a strange and independent cast of mind. I had done her a service at the time of the Fire, though I had not seen her since; she was living in retirement and under an assumed name. As it happened, I had been with her when her father died, and I had seen what she had done. She had taken his hand and raised it to her lips.

I looked at my father’s hand. Flesh, skin and bone. The fingers twisted like roots. The nails discoloured and in need of trimming. Death had robbed his hand of its familiarity and made it strange.

I lifted the hand and kissed it. The weight of it took me by surprise. The dead are heavier than the living.

‘I am truly sorry for your loss,’ Mr Williamson said the following morning.

I thanked him and requested leave of absence to bury my father and settle his affairs.

‘Of course.’ Williamson turned away and busied himself with the papers on his desk. ‘Where will you lay him to rest?’

‘Bunhill Fields, sir.’

Williamson grunted. ‘Not an Anglican burial ground?’

‘I think not. He would not have wished it.’

Bunhill Fields was where the Dissenters lay, and where my father belonged. Williamson returned to reading letters, occasionally annotating them. The two of us were alone in the Scotland Yard office, which lay just to the north of the Whitehall Palace itself. Williamson had two offices, one close to my Lord Arlington’s, and this one, which he used for the Gazette and for other concerns that required more privacy.

A few minutes later, he spoke again, and his voice sounded harder than before, closer to his northern roots, which was often a sign of irritation in him. ‘You must look to the living, Marwood, as well as the dead.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You would not wish anything to reflect ill on this office. Nor would I.’

I bowed my head. I knew what Williamson intended me to understand. Before his mind lost its bearings, my father, Nathaniel Marwood, had been a Fifth Monarchist. As a result of his allegiance to that dangerous sect, he had been imprisoned for treason. He had considered the Church of England as the next best thing to the Church of Rome with its Papist ways and its foul plots against honest men. He had hated all kings except King Jesus, whose coming he had devoutly waited for.

‘After all,’ Williamson said, staring grimly at me, ‘you would not want to lie in Bunhill Fields yourself when your time comes. At least, I hope you would not.’

‘Of course not, sir.’

Nowadays I served the King; and it was politic for me to have a care for what I did and said, and to choose wisely whom I associated with. I made sure the world knew that I went to church regularly and that I took communion when it was fitting to do so, according to the rites of the Established Church and the instruction of its bishops. But there was always the danger that, through my father, I might be considered guilty by association, by blood.

‘So you will change your mind, Marwood? No doubt your father would have wished you to think of your best interests in these changed times.’

‘Yes, sir. But I must also think of his.’

Williamson gave a laugh – short, sharp and mirthless, like the bark of a dog. ‘You’re obstinate in your folly.’ He lowered his head over his papers. ‘Like father, like son, I suppose.’

For some reason, that last remark comforted me as nothing else did.

Two days later, on Monday, we laid Nathaniel Marwood in his grave. There was no reason for delay – the death had been an accident; it was easy enough for an old man to stagger on the crowded pavement and fall under the wagon. He had been notably infirm in mind, if not in body, and quite possibly did not even know where he was. Such deaths happen every day.

We took the body to Bunhill Fields. Apart from the minister, the bearers and the diggers, the only mourners were Sam and myself. Margaret was debarred by her sex from coming, which was unkind, for her grief was in its way deeper and truer than my own. She still wept for my father at the slightest provocation, despite the fact that in life he had been a burden to her.

After the interment, Sam and I took a hackney coach around the walls of the ruined city, a wasteland of blackened chimney stacks, roofless churches and sodden ashes. I told the driver to set us down in Fleet Street. We went to the Devil, the big tavern between Temple Bar and Middle Temple Gate, where Sam stuffed himself with as much as he could eat and I made myself swiftly and relentlessly drunk.

Memory is a strange thing, fickle and misleading, as treacherous as water. My memories of the rest of the day are like broken glass – jumbled, largely meaningless and with sharp edges liable to wound. But I remember perfectly one snatch of conversation between us, partly because it happened early on, and partly because of what was said.

‘Do you know the crossing-sweeper here, master?’

I was too busy drinking to reply.

‘He knows you,’ Sam went on.

‘Do I?’ Of course I gave the sweeper a penny occasionally. If you used a crossing regularly, you would be a fool not to. But I could not for the life of me remember what the man looked like.

‘His name’s Bartholomew,’ Sam said. ‘Like the prophet. Barty.’

I was not attending to what he was saying. I was trying to attract the attention of the waiter and order more wine.

‘He’s the one who brought your father home. The day before he died.’

I forgot the waiter and looked at Sam. ‘Yes – I remember. Margaret told me. I should give him something for his trouble.’

Sam touched the side of his head with his forefinger. ‘Barty said he didn’t know the old man’s wits were wandering. Not at first. I mean, seeing him from the outside, who would? He didn’t look as if he had an addled brain.’

It was a fair point. Nathaniel Marwood had looked what he was – an old man in his sixties, but hale enough. It was only if you tried to talk to him, and you heard the nonsense that poured out of his mouth, making little more sense than the babble of an infant, that you realized his infirmity.

‘There’s an archway up beyond the church, sir. Barty said that was the way your father came.’

‘An archway?’ I thought he meant the great gateway that divided the City from Westminster, and Fleet Street from the Strand. ‘You mean he came through Temple Bar?’

‘No, no. This archway’s off the street. To the north, by St Dunstan-in-the-West.’ Sam leaned forward. ‘It’s the way into one of these lawyers’ colleges. Clifford’s Inn.’

Suddenly my father’s words were in my mind. The last words, nearly, that I had heard from him, and possibly the last words that contained some fragmentary elements of lucidity. ‘Where the lawyers are. Those creatures of the devil.’ He had hated and feared lawyers since they helped to put him in prison and take away his property.

‘Isn’t that where the Fire Court is sitting? Why would he go there?’

Sam shrugged.

Have you ever remarked how lawyers are like rooks? They cling together and go caw-caw-caw … And they go to hell when they die.

So there had been, after all, a single fragment of fact among my father’s ramblings, buried in all the nonsense about my mother. He had been to Clifford’s Inn, among the lawyers.

‘Did Barty say more?’

‘He was weeping,’ Sam said. ‘Barty told me that. So he walked him home, but he couldn’t make head nor sense of what your father was saying.’

I hammered my fist on the table. ‘Then I shall go to Clifford’s Inn and find out.’

The waiter mistook the gesture and was at my elbow in a trice. ‘Beg pardon, master, didn’t mean to keep you waiting. Another quart of sack, is it? You will have it directly.’

‘Yes,’ I said, frowning at him. ‘Very well, a drink before we go, to godspeed us and drink to my father’s memory.’ I glared at Sam. ‘He should not have been weeping. He should not have been unhappy.’

Sam stared at the table. ‘No, sir.’

‘And why in God’s name did he go to Clifford’s Inn? Did someone drag him there?’ All my guilt, all my sorrow, had at last found an outlet. ‘I shall have the truth of it, do you hear, and I shall have it now. Find me this Barty and I shall question him.’