Plague Child

The light, the blessed light under the door grew stronger. Prone on the floor, I could see the flame, tallow dribbling, glimpse her thin delicate fingers. The flame wavered and almost went out. She gave a little cry and I could hear her scrambling up, waiting until the flame grew again.

‘I cannot. There is a draught – it will go out.’

‘Are you afraid?’ I mocked, then quickly, as I heard her step away: ‘I’m sorry, Miss Black. Miss Black – is there a key in the lock?’

There was a silence. I felt I could see her there in a long willow-green nightgown which I had glimpsed before, a shawl wrapped round her shoulders, those thin fingers cupped round the flickering flame.

I tried to make my voice sound as weak and humble as possible. ‘Miss Black . . . it would be easier if you were to open the door a little.’

She laughed, the contempt coming back into her voice again. ‘Do you think I’m such a fool, Monkey?’

Now the word had its old, hateful ring. I only just stopped myself from flinging myself at the door in anger and frustration. I clapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from shouting.

I did not understand how I could love her one moment and hate her so much the next. My hopes for her were as much a fable as looking in a mirror and pretending I was handsome. Add to the feet and the red hair my nose, sharp and inquisitive as a bird’s beak, and you have a pretty full picture. Only my eyes, large and black as ink, drew me any kind of attention – that and my use of words which, from hating when they tried to drum rhetoric and writing into me, I had grown to love.

‘Open the door?’ she mocked. ‘You’ve run away before.’

‘I will not!’ I cried out with a sudden passion which must have taken her with as much surprise as it took me. ‘I want to run away, but I cannot run away from you!’

‘What rubbish! What nonsense! How can I trust you? No one can trust you! My father says you have the devil in you. I pray for you every day.’

‘Do you?’

‘Ssshh.’

‘What is it?’

‘Be quiet!’

I became as still as the stone flags under my feet. I could hear nothing but the shuffling of rats and, distantly, the wind rattling the panes and the crack and creak of wood; the house, like the ships in the docks, always seemed to talk to itself at night.

‘Do you?’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘Pray for me.’

‘It is only Christian charity to do so,’ she said, quietly, earnestly. ‘To pray for a lost soul. To stop you from doing such things. Writing such things.’

Writing? She must mean a poem I had once dared to write to her. Had she read it? The thought, as unexpected as Mr Black’s praise, pricked my eyes with tears. The idea that she had taken any notice of me at all, except as a figure of fun and mockery, was a revelation.

‘Are you crying?’

‘No. Yes.’

‘Perhaps you are not quite lost, Monkey.’

Was there something softer in the mockery, or was it just my hope? There was no doubt about the sweetness of the next sound: the key turning in the lock. I sprang to open the door, but before I could do so the key turned back.

‘How can I open the door when you wrote such a poem to me?’

‘Did you read it?’

‘Indeed I did not. My father said it was full of such vileness –’

‘Vileness?’ I said hotly. ‘You think it’s vile to write: “The windows of thy soule –”’

‘Stop it!’

‘“That when they gaze, see not me –”’

‘I will not listen!’

I heard her going. The yellow glow from her candle under the door wavered and went. In that moment I did not care. It was the first thing I had ever written that said truly what I felt, and the words kept coming from my lips as though they had a life of their own.

‘“I know the windows of thy soule

That when they gaze see not me

but some strange Satyre. Perchance

One idle day, they may see

These stumbling lines of poetry.

And, from these clumsy words know

I have no hope of your love, only

Hope that my love for thee

May make your eyes see me.”’

The words had calmed me. Now the sounds, the shuffling of the rats, the drip of water crept back. And with them another sound, but outside. The barest glimmer of yellow light had reappeared under the door.

‘Anne? Miss Black?’

‘They were not the words my father said.’

‘I will show you them – you should have read them.’

‘I cannot read, you know that!’ There was anger and humiliation in her voice.

I did not know. I had often seen her with her Bible, going to church, or opening one of the books of Lovelace’s poetry we printed.

‘I will teach you.’

‘You!’ Now there was no mistaking the total contempt in her voice. ‘You copied that poem. You did not write that stupid jingle.’

‘I did!’

‘Liar,’ she mocked.

My anger burst out uncontrollably and I hammered wildly on the door. ‘I did and it’s not stupid and I love you and always will – God knows why!’

During this she tried to silence me, but it was only when I stopped I heard Mr Black’s grumbling distant voice followed by Mrs Black’s high-pitched tones.

‘There is someone!’

I heard him say, ‘It’s Tom. Let him hammer away,’ then mutter something. Mrs Black’s voice grew louder, sharper and more urgent. ‘I can hear people talking.’

Whatever Mr Black said was drowned in bad-tempered thumps and creaking of boards.

I had heard nothing in Anne’s voice before but lightness and mockery. Now her whisper was panic-stricken. ‘Oh God! He must not find me here.’

‘Go! Go now,’ I urged.

Her bedroom was off a landing one floor above Mr and Mrs Black’s. She might just make it. As the light of her candle vanished I heard a door open upstairs and a moment later she returned.

‘It’s too late. He’s coming downstairs.’

‘Open the door.’

She gave a little moan of fear. ‘No.’

‘Open it!’

I heard the key turn and pulled open the door. She was in her green nightgown, as I had pictured it. The rest I had never imagined. That wonderful hair was locked up in some loathsome nightcap. All her haughtiness and mockery had vanished and been replaced by this shivering drab, face as pale as the candle she was holding. I thought, when I wrote that poem, as youth does think, that I knew everything about love. I looked into her eyes, wild, darting like a fearful animal, and realised that I knew nothing, except that I loved her even more.

She looked more frightened than ever at the sight of me, and backed up the steps. I snatched the key out of the lock.

‘Who’s that?’ Mr Black called out. ‘Who’s there?’

Anne retreated back. I pulled her to me, clapping a hand over her mouth, afraid she would cry out. I whispered into her ear. ‘Stay – when you hear a noise in the shop, run back to your room.’

I snuffed her candle out, stifling her little cry of fear, and crept up the steps.

‘Who’s that?’ Mr Black repeated.

I heard the crack of a stair that was rotten, followed by Mr Black’s muttered curse, and knew he was nearly downstairs. I slipped into the kitchen as he entered the room, holding up his candle. Its light flickered towards me. I ducked behind a chair. From there I could see into the printing shop.

As Mr Black, candle in one hand, stick in the other, approached the stairs that led to the cellar, I flung the key into the shop. It hit the press and, by great good fortune, dislodged some of the drying pamphlets, the clips holding them clattering down.

‘Thieves!’ he yelled, setting the candle down and running into the shop. I went after him, ducking round the press, trying to get to the door, but he saw me and blocked my way. He drew back his stick. Whatever vague plan I had formed deserted me.

‘It’s you!’ he said. ‘How did you get out?’

‘Run!’ I shouted. ‘Run!’

‘Two of you are there!’

I dodged the first blow. He had his back to the kitchen and I glimpsed Anne’s petrified face as she emerged from the cellar steps.

‘I can handle two of you!’

Distracted by the sight of Anne, the next blow caught me and a third sent me to the floor.

‘Where’s the other? Who let you out?’

I flung my hands round my head, curling up into a submissive ball as I had done so many times before to receive his blows. Then the thought of him seeing Anne drove me to fight in a way I had not done since they first took me from Poplar. Through an aching, blurred mist I saw his legs, inches from me, grabbed them, and pulled. Off balance as he swung back his stick, he went down easily, a look of great astonishment on his face, hitting the floor with such a thud I thought the house must fall down.

I was at the door, fumbling with the key, before I realised he hadn’t moved, and there was no sound from him. I went back to him. Mr Black was still, his eyes closed. One wild thought after another chased through my head. I was in love. I had told her I loved her. And moments afterwards I had killed her father!

As I bent over him, his eyes shot open and he grabbed my wrist. He was a powerful man and I could not wrench away. I grabbed hold of the table to stop him from pulling me down. A chair clattered down.

‘Damn you!’ he panted, gasping for breath. ‘Would you –’

I thought his grip would break my wrist. He pressed his other hand on the floor to push himself up. Another moment and I would have fallen. I brought my boot down on the hand he was using as a lever at the same time as I saw Anne returning down the stairs into the kitchen, as if she had just awoken. A look of horror crossed her face as her father yelled in pain and released me. I tried to say something to her, but her father made another enraged grab at me and I ran for the door, pulling at the latch and was into Half Moon Court before he reached the door shouting after me.

‘Stop, you little fool – you’re in great danger! Come back! I must speak to you!’

I was about to run into Cloth Fair. I stopped and turned. I nearly went back. I wish I had. I hesitated, not because of what he shouted at me, for I took his warning to be yet more claptrap about the danger to my soul, and since hell could not be worse than that dark, rat-infested cellar I decided there and then I would take care of my own soul in future.

No, it was the look of horror on Anne’s face when I stamped on her father’s hand that cut me to the heart and made me hesitate. Mr Black walked towards me. The anger had left his face. On it was that troubled expression I had seen when, only a few hours ago, he had praised me.

I continued to hesitate as he approached. If I returned, what would I say to Anne? Explain? Explain what? Apologise? Why should I apologise? I had taken so many beatings and I was taking no more. Even so, I stood there, until he was nearly on me, for he was my master, and I respected him and thought him a good man. Unlike George, there was never malice in his beatings, which were done only to bend me to what he thought was right.

So I stood there, hypnotised by the dark eyes set among the powerful lines of his face. He was almost close enough to touch me when I saw, above the crooked jetty of the house, the first chinks of light in the night sky.

And in a rush it brought back that dark cellar, that terrified longing to see the first fissures of light in the plaster with such force I wrenched my gaze away from him and turned and ran.

He shouted something else, but I could no longer hear him. I ran down Cloth Fair and into Smithfield, where the first cattle were being driven into market. I threw away my apprentice’s blue hat, which would have marked me, and it was immediately lost among the trampling hooves. There were two herdsmen. I picked up a stick and became a third, as I had sometimes done as a small boy in Poplar.

And that stick with which I prodded the cattle’s swaying rumps, and the light edging into the night sky over the great open space of the market, as I had so often seen it over the docks with half-open eyes as Matthew and I stumbled down to the yard, filled me with an overwhelming, aching desire to go home.

Chapter 5

I wish with all my heart I had got back sooner to Poplar, but I dared not go the direct way through Aldgate for fear it would be watched.

I was not only breaking my bond; the very clothes on my back and the boots on my feet belonged to Mr Black. The first time I had run away, a month after I had been there, I had been swiftly caught and it had been dinned into me that I was stealing the clothes I wore, for which I could be thrown into Newgate.

Instead of going east, which I am sure they expected, I struck out for the river, with the vague hope of persuading a waterman to take me. At Blackfriars Stairs they laughed or shook their heads. But further downstream a waterman was repairing his boat, which was badly holed. I helped him, boiling pitch as I used to and caulking the boat. I slept in his hut where the fog crept in like an old friend, for I was used to it at home, rising from the marsh and making the opposite river bank disappear.

He paid me in bread, dried ling and eel, and a seaman’s cap and torn jacket with which he had plugged one of the holes in his boat. The cap and tattered jacket helped conceal my uniform until I eventually made my way to Poplar High Street. The fog blurred the houses into soft, indistinct shapes, and deadened footsteps so, as with increasing excitement I neared our old house, I almost walked into a woman, mumbling an apology as I skirted past her.

‘Tom!’

She was so swathed in clothes, with a scarf round her face, it was her voice I identified as that of our neighbour. ‘Mother Banks –’

I went to embrace her but her tone of voice stopped me. ‘I prayed you would come!’

‘Why? Is my mother not well?’

‘Don’t you know? Dear Lord help us!’

She looked down the street. Following her gaze I saw, among the blurred line of houses, one that stuck out like a broken tooth. I ran. The door hung open. The houses next to it appeared to have suffered little damage.

The roof of our house was still intact, but the windows were gaping holes, the wood round them blackened. I pushed at the partly open door, and an acrid, damp smell filled my nose. Timber from a half-burned beam crumbled under my feet as I went into Susannah’s room where she lived and slept. I heard Mother Banks behind me.

‘I’m sorry, Tom. She died in the fire.’

I turned and she held me close to her.

‘What happened?

She told me that, in the middle of the night, she had been awaken ed by shouting and had smelt smoke. By the time Mother Banks got there, neighbours had managed to get water to it, for the streets were so ramshackle there had been several fires and they had butts of water in the alley. People thought it was a candle Susannah had left burning when she went to sleep. The fire must have been going for some time before the neighbours awoke, for Susannah was overcome by the smoke.

I found the iron kettle she always had on the fire, and a twisted pewter candlestick that she had been proud of, for no reason I could think of.

‘If it was not for the men staying here, it would have been much worse.’

I dropped the candlestick. ‘Men? What men?’

‘Lodgers.’

‘Sailors?’

‘Susannah said they were from the docks. They said the shipwright sent them.’

‘What were they like?’

‘I never saw them, what with the smoke and everything. They were there just for that night. They dragged Susannah out. They went as soon as the fire was put out.’

‘When was this?’

‘Wednesday.’

The day after I ran from Half Moon Court. I scrambled up what remained of the stairs. The landing where I used to sleep was secure, the room Susannah rented out scorched but relatively undamaged. And the roof, which normally caught quickly in these fires, spreading them rapidly, was scarcely touched.

I returned downstairs.

‘It looks as though it started down here. You were lucky.’

‘Yes. I thanked the Lord.’ Mother Banks clasped her hands. ‘Near the church, two whole streets went up recently. We were lucky the men acted so quickly.’

I walked round the room where Susannah had slept, and where most of the damage was. King James had said he found London ‘built of sticks’ and wanted to leave it ‘built of bricks’, but had stopped at the eastern suburbs where the marsh would not support such houses. The builders rushing up the houses for new dock workers had daubed between the timbers a mess of mortar and rags that in a fire rapidly crumbled away. The debris crunched beneath our feet as the damp fog swirled round us from the street.

I picked up the candlestick again, turning the twisted stem round and round in my fingers. I remembered once trying to sneak upstairs with it so I could read after everyone had gone to sleep. It was the only time I had ever seen her angry.

I shook my head. ‘Susannah wouldn’t have left the candle alight.’

She pressed my hand gently. ‘She must have done, Tom.’

I pulled away from her, flinging the candlestick away. ‘I don’t believe it!’

She was frightened by the sudden violence, exploding out of a mixture of anger, bewilderment and grief. So was I. I couldn’t stop shaking. Two men. The day after I had run away. Thinking the obvious thing, that I would come straight to Poplar. Finding not me, but my mother.

‘Where is she?’

‘Buried. Yesterday. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Come with me.’

I was like a child again, going from sudden violence to uncontrollable weeping. She led me to her house, murmuring that weeping would make me feel better, but I did not believe it, did not believe it would ever be so. First to lose Matthew, for I was convinced then I would never see him again, and now Susannah . . .

Mother Banks had little coal so I went back to the wreckage of our house and foraged for pieces of half-burnt timber. Outside, the clinging, yellow fog was now so thick a muffled ship’s bell rang insistently, for any ship which had not sought shelter must be travelling dead slow. She built up the fire and heated up some pottage, which first I refused to eat, but once I started swallowed greedily.

The empty plate was slipping from my fingers. I felt her gently taking it from me.

‘She would not . . . leave a . . . candle lit . . .’ I muttered stubbornly.

‘Susannah had changed. She was not as you knew her.’

‘Changed?’

‘Ssshh. Go to sleep.’

‘How changed?’ I mumbled.

‘She turned preacher.’

‘A woman preacher!’

I smiled. This was the sort of story I loved in pamphlets, the sort you knew could not be true but wanted to be true, the sort that people bought for a penny or two and repeated over fires like this until many people believed it. The sort of story to fall asleep over. But this one jerked me awake, staring at Mother Banks with amazement.

Susannah had stopped going to Mr Ingram at St Dunstan’s, going instead to an independent minister where they prayed in silence until a person was inspired to speak. Most of the women were short on words, and looked to the minister, as a man, for guidance; but it appeared that Susannah had what he said was the gift of tongues. She rose to her feet and held the room spellbound as her words rang round it.

She said the great tumult in London stirred up by Parliament was the Second Coming. Christ had been born again, not in a stable this time, but in a plague pit. She claimed to have been a witness to it, speaking in a strange muddle of Bible stories and things that she claimed had happened to her. Oxford became Bethlehem and King Charles Herod.

People began to come from the surrounding parishes to hear her, even those who thought she was mad, for a strange voice came out of her, and some actually believed her prophecies, that Christ was being plotted against all over again.

‘What did you think of what she said, Mother?’ I asked.

She hesitated. ‘At first I thought it was hunger.’

‘Hunger?’

‘She fasted. She took nothing for days but small beer. Then . . .’ She hesitated again. A log settled and threw a flickering light on her face. ‘She spoke in riddles, like the Bible. She said you be her child, and not her child.’

I laughed. ‘What does that mean?’

The flickering flame died and her face was in darkness. ‘There was one child who was his mother’s, and not his mother’s,’ she said.

I stopped laughing and stared at her. Her hands were clasped together and her face came into the light again. ‘I prayed so much for you to come! And when you came out of the fog like that . . . I thought . . . for a moment . . .’

I took her hands and shook my head, unable to speak for I was so overwhelmed by the faith and the hope in her face.

‘You are not . . . He that is to come?’

She stretched out a hand to touch my face, and I took it and kissed it and now I could not help smiling and laughing.

‘No, no, Mother Banks, I’m sorry, but thank you – I am much more often mistook for the devil! But I’m neither, I hope. I am the same old Tom, Tom Neave, hands black as ever, look – but with ink now, not pitch!’

I hugged her and she laughed with me, for we both needed some laughter on that gloomy day. She laughed with relief as much as anything else, for she had a practical bent like me; yet I felt there was a tinge of regret and I saw again the narrow line between the stories we tell one another and believing them to be true.

When I finally fell asleep that night in front of the dying fire, Susannah’s riddle spun round and round in my head. Her child and not her child. For the first time I began to ask questions I should have put to myself long before.

Had I not too easily believed stories I had told myself? That Mr Black, for instance, had apprenticed me for no other reason than that he had heard of my miraculous gift for reading?

A bitter eastern wind sprang up during the night and cleared the fog. Mother Banks took me to St Dunstan’s and showed me the unmarked plot where Susannah was buried. It was in a neglected corner where the wind cut across the marsh. It bent the trees in one direction while the church, from the settlement of the land, leaned in the other. There were no stones and the grass was rank and uncut, except for the new grave.

At least it had the open view of the marsh which I loved, where the land, patches of flood water gleaming, mingled with the tumbling grey sky. I felt tears coming again and fell on my knees and tried to pray, but kept thinking about the two men and the fire.

We marked the spot with a little cairn of stones, and I vowed to return one day and have a proper stone made.

‘Did anything happen that evening before the fire?’ I asked, as we walked back.

‘Nothing. Well . . .’ She hesitated.

‘Go on.’

‘When I went out to the privy, I heard Susannah shouting and screaming.’

‘Did you knock on her door?’

‘No.’ She swallowed nervously. ‘I was frightened. You don’t know what she was like, Tom. She would stand up at a meeting and shout that the Lord had come to her!’

‘Is that what she was shouting then?’

‘No, no, no. I can’t remember. Well, I heard her shout, “God knows I don’t know where he is!” Then there was silence. I thought she was calling out in her sleep.’

There was the skeleton of a new ship in the dry dock, but no men working on it when I went there after leaving the graveyard. I passed some pitch, frozen in a bucket, on my way to the shipwright’s office.

He exclaimed at the size of me, saying he used to look down at me and now had to look up; and would not have recognised me but for my red flare of hair and the jutting prow of my nose. He took it I had returned because of the death of Susannah and I said nothing about the breaking of my bond, but there was an edginess about his greeting, as if he suspected something. He had a bad leg, and at the sound of a footfall outside from one of the few workers in the yard, he limped quickly to the door to see who it was, as though he was afraid of some unwelcome visitor.