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

‘And next?’ I said.

‘All the traffic stopped. I went over the road to see if …’

‘If there were pickings to be had?’

He tried to give me an ingratiating smile. ‘He was alive still, sir. Just. There was a crowd around him. But he looked up and he saw me there among them. I swear he saw me, master, I swear he did. He knew me. I know he did. He said … Rook. Where’s the rook?’

‘Rook,’ I said. ‘Rook? What rook?’

Barty stared up at me. ‘I don’t know what he meant, master. But I know he was scared of something.’

‘What else?’ I demanded.

‘That’s all he said, master. Then he was gone.’

Later that morning there was a knocking at the door. Sam announced that the tailor had come to wait on me.

I had quite forgotten the appointment, perhaps because I did not want to remember it. Death is a dreary business, time-consuming and expensive, and so is its aftermath. But it would not be right in the eyes of the world if I went abroad without visible signs of my bereavement.

Some of these signs were cheap enough to arrange – before the funeral, I had ordered Margaret to dull the metal of my buckles, attach black silk weepers to my hatband, and blacken my best brown shoes – including the soles, on Margaret’s advice, for they would be visible when I knelt to pray.

I had borrowed a suit of mourning for the funeral but I needed to have my own. On Saturday, I had visited the tailor’s shop to be measured, and to choose the material and discuss the pattern. Now the man had come to fit the suit and to try to persuade me to buy a black silk sash to set off the new clothes.

By the time all this was done, my head was clearer, and my stomach had returned to something approaching normality, though the very thought of sack made me feel queasy.

Death has this consequence: it jerks a man from the rut of routine: it throws him back on his own company at a time when he wants it least. All this time, as the tailor prattled away and my mind became my own again, I could not concentrate on anything but the one word: ‘rook’. There was nothing to distract me from it.

But what could I do? Find the nearest justice and lay the information before him? What was there to say? That a foolish old man had strayed into Clifford’s Inn, and afterwards he had fallen under the wheels of a wagon in Fleet Street. A crossing-sweeper had told me that his last words had been to ask where the rook was.

What crime had been committed? Whom could I lay information against? But I had to do something, for my father’s sake.

No. That was a lie. I had to do something for my own sake as much as his. In the hope of easing the grief, the guilt.

When the tailor was gone, I took the tray of my father’s possessions upstairs to his chamber. The bed had already been stripped to its mattress and the curtains removed. The floor had been scrubbed and the room aired; Margaret was a vigorous housekeeper.

My father’s clothes, such as they were, lay folded in the press. His smell clung to them, faint and unsettling. An old man’s smell, musty and familiar. He had left little else behind him apart from his Bible and the contents of his pockets.

He had had the Bible as long as I could remember. It was a Geneva Bible, the old translation favoured by those of a Puritan persuasion. When he had been taken up for treason, he had had the book in prison with him and he read it over and over. When I was a child, he had ordered me never to touch it in case I sullied the sacred volume with the sinful touch of my grubby fingers. Until now, I had obeyed him.

Now the Bible was mine. I took it down to the parlour and laid it on the table, where the light fell on it from the window. I turned the pages, which were brittle and torn. Without my father there, the book had lost its significance. It was still a Bible, of course – the Holy Book, more precious than all the world. The Word of God. I did not dispute that. The volume was dense with wisdom, crammed with essence of holiness. But at the same time it was just a book, a small, shabby copy of something available in its tens of thousands across the country. It needed my father to lend it weight and value.

Fixed with a rusty pin to the back cover was a fold of paper. Inside, I found a lock of light brown hair, the strands twisted together and held in place with a knotted red thread.

Memory ambushed me, swift and vicious as a footpad. ‘Rachel … how graceful she is, James, even in her kitchen. Why, she is as graceful as a deer.’

I touched the curl of hair, the fragment of my mother, a relic of someone who had been alive, whom my father had once loved and desired. I could not imagine him courting her. I could not imagine my parents being young together, younger than I was. But it seemed that her youthful self had remained so vividly alive in his memory that the image of her had lured him into Clifford’s Inn, had lured him among the lawyers.

My father hated them. Lawyers were agents of Satan, servants of the Antichrist. They had helped to put him in prison. Yet desire for his dead wife had cast out all fear of them.

CHAPTER SIX

St Dunstan-in-the-West was partly clothed in scaffolding. The church projected into the street, forcing the roadway into a bottleneck before it passed under the Bar into the Strand. Shops and booths huddled as if for protection against the south aisle wall, blocking more of the pavement and constricting the foot traffic. Though the Fire had not destroyed the church, it had come close enough to cause minor damage and blacken the stonework, particularly at the east end.

The entrance to Clifford’s Inn lay at the west end of the nave, squeezed between the square tower of the church and the wall of the neighbouring building. I walked along a flagged passage that took me past the churchyard to a gate. A small, dingy courtyard lay beyond, much wider than it was deep, surrounded by a series of buildings of different sizes and ages.

The hall was directly opposite, filling the right-hand half of the northern range. I followed the path to the doorway at its left-hand end, where people were standing and talking in low voices. Some were lawyers and their clerks. Others were ordinary citizens, both men and women.

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

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.

‘All rise,’ cried the clerk. ‘All rise.’

The court rose to its feet as the judges retired to their parlour to confer on their verdict. Jane Hakesby looked down at the floor of the hall. Below her was a bobbing pool of men’s hats. Benches had been fixed along the side walls, and it was here that the elderly and the infirm sat. From her vantage point at the front of the gallery, she saw the brim of Mr Hakesby’s best hat and the folds of the dark wool cloak he usually reserved for church and high days and holidays. Even his best cloak was shabby.

Hakesby did not have a direct interest in the case under consideration. He was here on behalf of the freeholder to keep watch over his interests. The dispute itself was an involved and bad-tempered affair between the leaseholder and three of his subtenants about which of them would be responsible for rebuilding their houses after the Fire, and how the cost of doing so would affect the terms of their leases and sub-leases. The Government had set up the court solely for the purpose of settling such disputes, with the aim of encouraging the rebuilding of the city as soon as possible.

Mr Hakesby’s white hand rested on his leg. Even at this distance, she made out that the fingers were trembling. A familiar sense of dread crept through her, and settled in her stomach. She had hoped that as the weather improved, his health would improve with it. But if anything his ague grew worse.

And if it grew so bad he could not work, what would become of her?

In a while the judges returned with their verdict, which found in favour of the subtenants but varied the terms of their leases in the leaseholder’s favour. The judges departed and the hall began to empty.

Jane Hakesby allowed the other women to leave before her. She kept her head down as they filed past her to the stairs, pretending to study a page of Tachygraphy. It was improbable that any of them would recognize her, or rather recognize her as who she had been, but old habits died hard. In a moment she followed them down to the passage at the end of the hall.

There were doors at either end of the passage, one to the small court bounded by the Fleet Street gate, the other to the garden court that contained most of the other buildings of Clifford’s Inn. Mr Hakesby emerged from the hall and touched her arm. She took his folder of papers and offered him her arm. He pretended not to see it. Leaning on his stick, he made his way slowly towards the north doorway, leaving her to trail behind him.

He was a proud man. It was one thing to show weakness to his maidservant, but quite another to show it to the world, especially to that part of the world that knew him. But she was learning how to manage him.

‘The sun is out, sir,’ she said. ‘I found it so cold in the hall. Would you permit me to sit in the garden for a moment?’

But he wasn’t attending to her. He stopped suddenly. ‘Good God,’ she heard him say.

She looked past him. Her eyes widened. Without thinking, she took a step backwards, ready for flight. Here was someone who belonged to her old life.

‘Mr Marwood,’ Hakesby said, his voice trembling. ‘Your servant, sir.’

She recognized him at once, which was strange. James Marwood looked different from before – he seemed taller, and he was dressed in mourning. He was also out of place at Clifford’s Inn. He belonged among the clerks of Whitehall, not here among the lawyers. Most of all, though, her instant recognition was strange because she had seen him properly only once, and then by the light of candles and lanterns, and at a time when she had other things on her mind. She wondered who was dead.

Mr Hakesby glanced over his shoulder at her. He turned back.

‘Good day to you, sir,’ Marwood said, his voice cautious as though he was uncertain of his welcome. His eyes slid towards her but he did not greet her.

‘And to you …’ Hakesby hesitated and then went on in haste, as if to have the information off his chest as soon as possible. ‘And here is my cousin Jane. Jane,’ he repeated with emphasis, as if teaching a lesson, ‘Jane Hakesby. She’s come up to London to be my servant at the drawing office.’

She dropped a token curtsy. Four months earlier, Marwood had saved her life in the ruins of St Paul’s. Apart from Hakesby himself, only Marwood knew that Jane Hakesby was really Catherine Lovett, the daughter of a Regicide who had died last year while plotting against the King.

‘And what brings you here, sir?’ Hakesby asked.

‘An enquiry, sir. And you?’

Hakesby nodded towards the hall. ‘The Fire Court has been in session.’

‘Do you often attend?’

‘As occasion requires. When I have clients whose interests are concerned.’

Marwood drew closer. ‘I wonder – indulge me a moment, pray – do the names Twisden, Wyndham or Rainsford mean anything to you?’

‘There’s Sir Wadham Wyndham – he’s a justice of the King’s Bench, and he sits sometimes at the Fire Court. In fact, he was one of the judges sitting there today. Could it be him?’

‘Perhaps. And the others?’

‘I don’t know the names. Could they be connected with the Fire Court as well? You should ask Theophilus Chelling. He’s the Fire Court’s assistant clerk. He will know if anyone does.’

‘I’m not acquainted with him.’

‘I’ll introduce you now, if you wish.’ Hakesby’s eyes moved to his maid and then back to Marwood. ‘I believe there can’t be any harm in it.’

Marwood murmured his thanks, and Hakesby led the way to a doorway in the building that joined the hall range at a right angle. Marwood walked by his side. Jane Hakesby trailed after them, as a servant should.

They climbed stairs of dark wood rising into the gloom of the upper floors. Hakesby’s trembling increased as they climbed, and he was obliged to take Marwood’s arm. The two doors leading to the first-floor apartments were tall and handsome modern additions. On the second floor, the ceilings were lower, the doorways narrower, and the doors themselves were blackened oak as old as the stone that framed them.

Hakesby knocked on the door to the right, and a booming voice commanded them to enter. Mr Chelling rose as they entered. His body and head belonged to a tall man, but nature had seen fit to equip him with very short arms and legs. Grey hair framed a face that was itself on a larger scale than the features that adorned it. The top of his head was on a level with Jane Hakesby’s shoulders.

‘Mr Hakesby – how do you do, sir?’

Hakesby said he was very well, which was palpably untrue, and asked how Chelling did.

Chelling threw up his arms. ‘I wish I could say the same.’

‘Allow me to introduce Mr Marwood.’

‘Your servant, sir.’ Chelling sketched a bow.

‘I am sorry to hear that you’re not well, sir,’ Marwood said.

‘I am well enough in my body.’ Chelling puffed out his chest. ‘It’s the fools I deal with every day that make me unwell. Not the judges, sir, oh no – they are perfect lambs. It’s the authorities at Clifford’s Inn that hamper my work. And then there’s the Court of Aldermen – they will not provide us with the funds we need for the day-to-day administration of the Fire Court, which makes matters so much worse.’

Uninvited, Hakesby sank on to a stool. His maid and Marwood remained standing.

Chelling wagged a plump finger at them. ‘You will be surprised to hear that we have already used ten skins of parchment, sir, for the fair copies of the judgements, together with a ream of finest Amsterdam paper. Scores of quills, too – and sand, naturally, for blotting, and a quart or so of ink. I say nothing of the carpenter’s bill and the tallow-chandler’s, and the cost of charcoal – I assure you, sir, the expense is considerable.’

Hakesby nodded. ‘Indeed, it is quite beyond belief, sir.’

‘It’s not as if we waste money here. All of us recognize the need to be prudent. The judges give their time without charge, for the good of the country. But we must have ready money, sir – you would grant me that, I think? With the best will in the world, the court cannot run itself on air.’

Chelling paused to draw breath. Before he could speak, Hakesby plunged in.

‘Mr Marwood and I had dealings with each other over St Paul’s just after the Fire. I was working with Dr Wren, assessing the damage to the fabric, while my Lord Arlington sent Marwood there to gather information from us.’ When he had a mind to it, Hakesby was almost as unstoppable as Mr Chelling himself. ‘I met him as I was coming out of court just now. He has a question about the judges, and I said I know just the man to ask. So here we are, sir, here we are.’

‘Whitehall, eh?’ Chelling said, turning back to Marwood. ‘Under my Lord Arlington?’