The Ashes of London

The house in Three Cocks Yard had been bought as a speculation by a wealthy Oxford haberdasher. It stood with three neighbours in a flagged court, from which a narrow alley led down to the Strand on the northern side, not far from Temple Bar.

The principal apartments were let to single gentlemen. There were three lodgers. At present, only Master Hakesby was in residence. He was a draughtsman, an elderly man of uncertain temper. He was working on a design with Dr Wren, the architect and mathematician whom the King had appointed as one of his Commissioners for the rebuilding of London, which made him automatically an object of fascination to Cat.

The haberdasher had installed Mistress Martha Noxon as housekeeper. She had formerly been in his service as his wife’s chambermaid and, if Margery’s insinuations were to be believed, as his own paramour. Margery did most of the cooking but Mistress Noxon considered her too slatternly to wait at table. There was also a manservant named John and a ten-year-old boy, who was more trouble than he was worth and slept in a sort of kennel by the kitchen chimneystack.

The servants were told that Jane was a stranger from a village near Oxford, and that she was a remote connection of Mistress Noxon’s. They knew that this was probably a lie, and that the young woman called Jane was a mysterious intruder in their world, but they were too afraid of Mistress Noxon to ask questions or tell tales.

Cat did the work she was given. She kept her mouth shut when she could. When she couldn’t, she roughened her voice and tried to imitate the inflections and turns of phrase that the other servants used. They thought she gave herself airs, but they left her alone for fear of Mistress Noxon. There was even an unexpected pleasure in being Jane, not Cat: in being someone else.

The work was often hard but it was not strange to her. She had been brought up not only to run a household but to do the various tasks, from cooking to cleaning and beyond, that she might set a servant to do; this was good for the soul, for it kept a woman humble, which was pleasing in the eyes of God and man; it was also prudent, for it enabled one better to direct and instruct one’s own servants.

For Cat, what was strange and unpleasant was not so much the work itself but to learn how a servant felt as she scrubbed a floor that belonged to someone else. It was a different feeling from that of someone whose family owned the floor.

When Cat thought about her former life it seemed remote and somehow foreign to her, as if it belonged to a different person. But she was too tired to do much thinking. The work was exhausting, but that was good because sometimes it stopped Cat from remembering what she had done to Edward, what he had done to her, and what her life had now become.

She was so heavy with weariness that she usually fell asleep as soon as she climbed into bed in the attic she shared with Margery. But she had bad dreams, haunted by Cousin Edward, and by the fear that she was carrying his child. On the first night, she woke both herself and Margery with her screams.

Two days after Cat’s arrival, Mistress Noxon summoned her to her little room by the kitchen. The skin around her eyes was pink and puffy.

‘You should know that he’s dead. My uncle.’

‘Oh mistress.’ Cat’s eyes filled with tears. Jem.

‘Tell no one. There will be no mourning. We don’t know him, and we never did. You understand? The man was such a fool. I never met such a one in all my days.’

But Mistress Noxon kept the stone that Jem had sent her by Cat in her pocket, together with her money, her keys, her rings, and other precious things.

Cat wept herself to sleep that night – as quietly as possible, for fear of waking Margery again. Without Jem, she had no one who cared for her unconditionally and completely. Without Jem, she was alone. Unless her father found her.

According to the gossip of servants, if a woman did not take pleasure in an act of copulation, she could not become pregnant by it. Cat did not believe this, not least because she could not understand how any woman could take any pleasure whatsoever from such an assault on her body even if it were not forced on her.

Besides, she had seen animals about the business in the farmyard and fields of Coldridge. For females at least, copulation had more to do with grim necessity than pleasure.

The fear that she might be pregnant remained. She could think of nothing worse than carrying Edward’s ill-begotten child. She became even more afraid of this than of being taken up for Edward’s murder.

She had made her calculations. She thought it probable that Edward was still alive. Had he been killed, the news would surely have penetrated even to Three Cocks Yard by now, even to the basement kitchen that was the centre of her life. The Alderleys were such a prominent family that the intelligence would have spread throughout the town faster than the Fire itself.

You could not hide a murder, even in a house like Barnabas Place with high, thick walls, though you could hide lesser crimes. Assault and battery, for example. Or rape.

At the beginning of her fourth week at the beck and call of Mistress Noxon, she had pains in her groin and the blood began to flow. Some men believed that a woman’s monthly courses were full of evil humours, that they blackened sugar, made wine sour and turned pickled meat rancid. Men, Cat thought, were such fools that they would believe anything. Mistress Noxon provided the necessary cloths to deal with the blood, and even an infusion of valerian and fleur-de-luce to ease the pain.

Cat welcomed the discomfort and inconvenience. If she had fallen pregnant, it would have been necessary to find a way to kill the baby.

Gradually, Cat became aware that there was another difficulty in the shape of John, the manservant. He was a tall, broad-shouldered lad, a country boy at heart, with red hair, bright blue eyes and a slab-like face whose colour and approximate shape made Cat think of a leg of mutton before it had gone in the oven. Margery, the cook, thought he was the finest young man that the world, let alone London, had to offer. John had been quite happy to accept this adoration and even to repay it at his convenience with small doses of affection.

But then Cat had come to Three Cocks Yard and, despite her best efforts to be plain Jane, to be colourless and dull in every particular, John found her of absorbing interest. He was not a man to whom words came easily, but he had other ways of making his feelings known. He blushed when she came into the room. He would appear at her shoulder when she was emptying the slops and take the pots from her in his enormous hands. Once, when the kitchen boy showed a tendency to be impudent to her, John clouted his ear with such force that the boy’s feet lost contact with the ground.

One consequence of this undesired and unrequited devotion was that Margery hated Cat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

AT LAST, NEARLY six weeks after the Fire, the rain came.

Cat stood by the attic window of the house and squinted over the surviving rooftops and the jagged outline of the ruins at the stump of St Paul’s tower.

There had been showers since the Fire, and dull days with heavy grey skies, but the heat of summer had mingled with the heat of the Fire and lingered long after it should have ended. This rain was different. It poured from the sky in thick silver rods like water through a colander.

It was much colder, too. That was less welcome. Cat went down the steep stairs, little better than a ladder, to the second floor, and worked her way down to the basement. The kitchen was full of the smell of bread. The baker’s boy had called in her absence.

‘What kept you?’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘Daydreaming again? It won’t do. Not in this house. I had to open the door myself to the boy.’

Cat curtsied and apologized. She had learned humility lately, along with her new name, which she answered to like a dog. A dog called Jane. They had not been easy lessons.

‘Draw the beer now.’

She left Mistress Noxon laying the tray for her to take upstairs. She had often felt the rough edge of Mistress Noxon’s tongue. At first, it had made Cat furious – how dare the woman speak to her in that way, especially when they were alone? Later, she accepted it as necessary.

Her circumstances had changed and so must she. In time, she learned to distinguish when Mistress Noxon was truly angry, when she was irritable for a reason that had nothing to do with Cat, and when her anger was entirely mechanical, administered for Cat’s good, in the same way that Cat’s nurse used to administer a regular purge to her.

She filled the beer jugs from the barrel in the scullery and took them back to the kitchen.

‘Take the tray now. Master Hakesby’s up. The barber’s coming to shave him, and he’ll want his breakfast before that.’

Cat tapped on Master Hakesby’s door, and he told her to enter. He was partly dressed and in his gown, a handkerchief around his shaven head. He was seated at the table by the window and already at work.

‘Put it on the chest,’ he said without looking up. ‘And pour some beer, will you?’

She obeyed and brought the cup over to him. He took it without looking at her. She strained to see what he was working on. There was a small sheet of paper before him. He was using ink but not a ruler or compasses.

This is an idea, Cat thought, something that comes in the night and needs to be pinned down before it vanishes in the daylight.

A cruciform shape. A church, then. An octagon where the four arms meet: probably a great dome, like St Peter’s in Rome. And, from the transepts, curving outer lines stretching to nave and choir, softening the right angles where the transepts meet with the long axis of the church.

Was it St Paul’s? A new St Paul’s?

Master Hakesby took a mouthful of beer. He spilled a few drops on the table and dabbed at it with a handkerchief. He looked up but she didn’t think he saw her, not properly. ‘What is it, Jane?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Then go away.’

The next day, after the great rainstorm, was a Tuesday. In the afternoon, Cat was set to washing and waxing the floor and panelling of the parlour. Mistress Noxon came into the room before the task was half done.

‘You’re to go to St Paul’s,’ she said. ‘For Master Hakesby. It’s urgent.’

Cat stared at her. Since her arrival here she had not gone further than the Strand.

‘There’s no one else to send.’ Mistress Noxon ran her finger along the curved mouldings of the door panels, automatically checking for dust. ‘You know the way?’

Cat nodded. She had grown up in Bow Lane, east of St Paul’s, and the streets from Charing Cross to the Tower had been part of her childhood.

‘John’s in Westminster or I’d send him. Margery gets lost if she pokes her head out of the door. So that leaves you.’ There was no need to add that the kitchen boy couldn’t be sent because he was a halfwit, and Mistress Noxon wouldn’t go herself because it would be beneath her dignity. ‘Besides, it’s time you went further abroad. You need air. You’re as pale as a death’s head.’

‘What am I to do?’

‘Master Hakesby wants a portfolio. It’s the small green one on the table in his chamber.’

‘I know.’ Cat knew everything there was to know about Master Hakesby’s chamber.

‘You’ll find him in Convocation House Yard. Do you know where that is?’

‘Yes, mistress.’

‘Show this paper to the men on the gate, and they will let you in. Give the portfolio into his own hands, mind – he was most particular about that – and take care to keep it clean. Be off with you. And keep it dry. Hold it under your cloak.’

It was still raining, though less heavily than before. Wrapped in the grey cloak she had stolen from the man at St Paul’s, Cat walked through the ruins of London. After Temple Bar and the first few houses of Fleet Street, there was nothing to be seen but devastation.

Even now, six weeks afterwards, London was a desert from the Temple to the Tower. You could see from one end of the City to the other. All that was left of the greatest city in the country, apart from mounds of ash and rubble, were gutted churches and blackened spires, fragments of stone and thickets of unstable chimneystacks. In places the heat had been so intense that stones had calcined and become an unnatural white in colour.

The change in the weather had affected everything, and not on the whole for the better. The rain had turned the pale ashes into a dark grey sludge that clung to your shoes and pattens and stained your clothes. It was growing colder, too. Everyone said it was going to be a bad winter.

Cat crossed the Fleet Ditch, which was choked with sooty debris. Tendrils of smoke rose up from the labyrinth of ruins on either side of Ludgate Hill, for rubbish still smouldered, and fires burned slowly in deep, almost airless cellars.

At Ludgate, the mounting block was still there, marked by the flames, but one of the few features recognizable from before the Fire. She supposed she should feel guilty about the thin young man for repaying his attempt to help her by biting his hand and stealing his cloak; but a sense of guilt was one of the luxuries she could no longer afford.

In a moment Cat reached the spot where she had stood on the night of St Paul’s destruction. Had her father been inside? Had he been among the nameless dead? She wanted to know, one way or the other. Her lack of knowledge unsettled her. Even after he had fled abroad at the Restoration, she had known he was living somewhere beyond the Channel. Occasionally letters from him would come, sent care of an unknown friend and then passed to Jem, who would slip them into her hand.

She paused to look at the ruined portico. By a strange paradox, it had been her father’s pride. He had been a mason by trade. Before the war he had worked on the cathedral under the direction of Master Inigo Jones. True, Master Lovett hated the Church of England and all its works, including St Paul’s. But she had seen him stroke the stones of one of the columns as a man strokes a favourite dog. He had talked, almost against his will, of the novelty and the elegance of the portico’s design.

A porter passed close to her, brushing his hand over her hip. She moved quickly away. In the old days, she had not been a servant and she had never walked alone in the streets. Now she had become a target for passing men of all ages, for their touches, squeezes, attempted kisses and lewd suggestions. She wondered at this, at the curious lack of discrimination that men showed in their lusts.

In Convocation House Yard, a crowd was gawping at the bodies propped against the wall. St Paul’s had given up a number of its dead because of the Fire, for tombs had burst open in the heat and flagstones cracked apart. Some corpses were little more than skeletons. Others were clothed in dried flesh in various stages of decay, a few with fragments of clothing and shrouds clinging to them. The souvenir hunters had been at work, and there were bodies that had lost fingers, toes, hands or feet; one lacked a skull.

Pride of place, according to Mistress Noxon, went to Bishop Braybrooke, who hadn’t been seen in public since 1404. His mummified corpse had tumbled down to St Faith’s in the crypt underneath the choir. Here he was in person, propped on his feet against a blackened wall to await his second resurrection: he was quite intact, with many of his teeth, a red beard and hair, though his skin was like leather.

A fence had been erected in the angle between the cloister containing the ruined Chapter House and the south wall of the nave. Its gate was guarded by a watchman with a large dog. He took Cat’s paper and peered at it, his lips moving. She had already examined it – it was a general pass, signed by Master Frewin, the Chapter Clerk, and was so thumbed and greasy that it had clearly been used many times before.

Even with the pass, however, the watchman did not let her in. He made her state her business and told her to wait. He sent a boy to fetch Master Hakesby. The dog, which was chained to one of the gateposts, strained towards her and forced her to recoil, to the obvious entertainment of its master.

With a sudden stab of loss she thought of the mastiffs she had left behind her. Now Jem was dead, she missed none of the human inhabitants of Barnabas Place, with the possible exception of Aunt Olivia, but she yearned for the dogs, for their protection and their uncritical affection.

Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse. Especially Bare-Arse.

The boy returned. With him came Master Hakesby. He was a tall, shabbily dressed man with his own grey hair. Everything about him was thin, from his long feet to his head, a distorted cylinder of bone perched on narrow shoulders. Cat curtsied. He held out his hand for the portfolio.

‘Come with me,’ he ordered. ‘I may need other drawings as well, and you can fetch them. I shall enquire of Dr Wren when he comes.’

The watchman pulled on the dog’s chain, drawing him to one side so Cat could pass through the gateway. She followed Master Hakesby across a yard that stretched from the outer wall of the cloister towards the west end of the cathedral.

An open tent stood to one side of the yard. Workmen were sorting a miscellany of objects heaped against the wall at the back. Cat glimpsed an iron-bound chest with a curving lid. Propped against it was a marble bust of a periwigged gentleman that could not have been long from the sculptor’s chisel. There was a blackened memorial brass of a dead cleric and a carved throne of painted wood surmounted by an episcopal mitre.

‘Come along,’ Master Hakesby said over his shoulder. ‘Dr Wren is away, but he sent word he will be here at any moment and he wishes to see this most particularly.’

Blocks of stone stood in the open air, some of them carved. It occurred to Cat that, if they did not repair St Paul’s, the ruins would become, if nothing else, a vast quarry.

Master Hakesby led her into a shed, about fifty feet long, which had been built against the exterior of the cloister. Two clerks were standing at a long, high desk and entering items into ledgers that lay open before them. Behind them was a ledge with a jumble of boxes and books on it. At the other end of the shed was a table to which a sloping surface had been attached with iron clamps. Hakesby walked over to it.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Stand over there and dry yourself by the brazier.’

Two plans were laid out on the slope, their corners held down with fragments of fire-burned stone. There were pens and ink laid out beside it, together with the tools of a draughtsman’s trade – compasses and rulers, set squares and dividers, pencils and pens.

Master Hakesby set down the portfolio and examined the contents. Afterwards he returned to his drawing board. She watched him, straining her eyes to see what he was working on. Not St Paul’s, she thought. This was more than any church. She made out lines that crossed each other in a pattern. Not a grid: more complicated than that. Streets? A city? London itself?

Was it his own design or one of Dr Wren’s? Or both? She had heard Master Hakesby say that Wren had too much work to handle all the detail himself, and besides he frittered away too much of his time in Oxford or in meetings at Whitehall or with prospective clients. Master Hakesby was his draughtsman, almost his partner, though the designs were usually in Dr Wren’s name.

The hand holding the pen trembled. Hakesby steadied it with his left hand. He paused, took a deep breath, and continued his work.

Cat was growing uncomfortably hot by the brazier. She loosened the cloak about her shoulders.

At the same moment, Master Hakesby’s hand twitched, seemingly of its own volition. The side of it brushed the inkpot, which toppled over. Ink glided towards the portfolio. He swore. The inkpot rolled over the edge of the table and fell to the floor, leaving a trail of drops to mark its passage.

Cat darted forward. The cloak fell from her shoulders. She scooped up the portfolio and the sheets of paper lying beside it.

Master Hakesby looked at her. His lips worked but no words came out. Cat put the portfolio on a stool and crouched to pick up the inkpot. There was a rag on the table, which she used as best she could to wipe up the spilled ink.

Hakesby was still staring at her.

‘Sir,’ she said, softly so the other men would not hear her. ‘What is it? Are you ill? Shall I—’

‘Be silent.’ His lips twisted into a scowl.

She was looking at the plans, which were similar to each other. ‘It’s London, sir, isn’t it? Or part of it. But – but a different London.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘How do you know that?’

She nodded at the geometric mass of fortifications in the lower right-hand corner, by the north bank of the river. ‘Because that’s the Tower, sir – it says so. And the Thames, from there to London Bridge, and—’

‘You can read?’

‘Yes, sir, and write a fair hand.’

She had known serving women who could do both, there was no reason why she should not be one of them. She came a step nearer, and still holding the inkpot.

‘But all this is different, sir. The Tower’s not that shape. And that space to the west, where eight roads meet – what is that?’

‘It is a plan of London as it might be. Not London as it is.’

‘Dr Wren’s London?’

‘And mine, as well,’ Master Hakesby said, scowling. ‘Indeed, as much mine as his, if the truth be known. A vision of what this city might be.’

His right hand, which was resting on the table, began to tremble again. He covered it with his left hand, pressing it down. He glanced at Cat and saw the curiosity in her face.

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