Plague Child

How we got hold of the speeches is a story in itself; very like old Matthew’s story of the plague child in its muddle of right and wrong. Reporting of Parliament was strictly forbidden. Allowed in as a messenger, I heard Mr Pym himself rail bitterly against the rogue printers who stole his speeches for money. For this abuse of privilege, he thundered, they should be clapped in the Tower.

An hour later Mr Ink (as I called the scrivener, for his fingers were always black with it), whom I knew worked closely with Mr Pym, was slipping that very same speech into my hands.

Yet Mr Pym, like my master, was a very godly man. They looked similar, with their stiff pointed beards, dressed in sober black, topped with starched white linen collars, except my master’s collar was plain, and Mr Pym’s finely decorated lawn. One day he called me over, staring down at me, his beard as immaculate as his linen, every hair in place as though engraved there.

‘You are fortunate to work for such a godly man as Mr Black,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I stammered, although the bruising and the blisters had scarcely faded and fortunate was not the word I would have chosen.

He took a shilling from his pocket and held out an envelope. ‘Do you know that address?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I lied.

I would have known any address for that money, even one in the foreign country of the West End, beyond the walls of the City.

‘Are you discreet?’

I did not know the meaning of the word, but again was willing to be anything for a shilling and nodded my head vigorously. Not willing to risk that the nod meant understanding, he barked: ‘Can you keep your mouth shut?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do not say anything, even to your master. Is that clear?’

I was only too happy to comply. My wages were bread and cheese, my uniform and bed; the only money I ever got was from errands like this.

The letter was addressed to the Countess of Carlisle in Bedford Square, near the new Covent Garden. It was then London’s first public square. After the huddle of the City I was amazed by the spacious new brick-built houses with their porches and columns. I delivered the letter to a contemptuous footman called Jenkins who left me round the back, next to the shit heap, waiting for a reply. The heap smelt sweeter than ours, I believed then, for in it was the shit of a real Countess. Now I rather think that, unlike ours, the scavengers cleared it regular.

From Will in the Pot I learned that the Countess of Carlisle had been the mistress of the Earl of Strafford, a one-time favourite of the King, who had been executed earlier that year. She was a close friend of the Queen. So what was she doing corresponding with Mr Pym? I imagined this was a love letter I was carrying, for I was in love myself – deeply, hopelessly, with Mr Black’s daughter, Anne.

Anne laughed at my bare feet when I first came to Half Moon Court. They were big and dark as the pitch that was engrained into the skin. I flexed the huge, knobbly toes like fingers. She howled with laughter when she saw me pick up a quill between my toes, and said I was like a monkey she had seen on a gentlewoman’s shoulders. Ever after that she called me Monkey.

I tried to hate her. To my shame I cursed her, not a curse like smallpox, for I could not bear anything to happen to her skin, which was like milk and honey. The curse, Matthew had told me, must be related to the injustice, and so I cursed her feet, which were like tiny mice, scuttling in and out of her skirt, bidding them to grow even larger than mine. I scraped some dead skin from the soles of my feet and put it in her favourite shoes.

When she complained that they pinched, and her mother said she had grown out of them, I immediately regretted what I had done and spent a tortured, sleepless night praying to undo the curse. To my relief that must have worked, for, as the days passed, she made no complaints about the new shoes.

Her laughter and, even worse, her ignoring me, hurt me more than any blow I ever received in that place. According to Will in the Pot, who was an expert in such matters, I was suffering from the very worst type of love: unrequited love.

Yet it was not always so. There was a time, the first autumn I was there, when we became as close as two children ever could be. In September, towards the end of the third week, my simnel cake appeared on the doorstep. It seemed to everyone a most mysterious thing, but, of course, it was no surprise to me. The will o’ the wisps could transport such a cake in a trice. For George, it confirmed I had a pact with the devil and he would not touch a crumb. Sarah said there were good will o’ the wisps and bad, and the cake was so delicious it had been baked by good ones. I believe she began to rub pig-fat in my bruises from the moment she licked the last crumbs from her fingers. Mrs Black consulted her astrologer, who told her the cake had been stolen, and she looked at me with deep suspicion. Mr Black, whose common sense contrasted starkly with his wife’s superstition, boomed irritably: ‘How can it be stolen, Elizabeth, when the boy’s name is on it?’

Anne was first jealous – she never had such a cake – then intrigued. We began to play together. It started as mockery, but when she found I could tell the stories Matthew had told me of foreign lands, great ships and elephants and parrots, we used to hide together behind the apple tree in the centre of the court, or in the paper store. This went on for two idyllic months until, one misty autumn day we heard the rattle and braking squeal of a Hackney hell-cart stopping in the court. We ran out of the shop to gape at it. I took Anne’s hand, with a shiver of apprehension.

Out of the coach stepped a gentleman. Through the swirling fog I saw a livid scar, running from the top of his cheek and down his neck to bury itself under his collar. He stopped to glare at us. Mr Black came out and shouted to us to come in immediately. Anne ran to him but, remembering Matthew’s warning, and fearing the man with the scar had come to me for the pendant my father had stolen, I fled out of the court and hid the rest of the day in Smithfield, among the poor searching for offal discarded by the butchers.

I was flogged for that and told not to play with Anne. That only increased my desire to see her, but it was then that her haughtiness and her cruel jokes really began. I still kept the memory of that autumn, but as the years passed and she became more and more beautiful, like a gradually opening flower, and more and more distant, the memory faded until I began to wonder if it had ever happened, or whether it was just a story I was making up to comfort myself.

So there I was at sixteen, hopelessly in love, knowing nothing and caring less about the speeches I was carrying, except that I must beat the other messengers at the same game. Flapping the speech to dry it, I would run from Westminster, through the narrow streets, past the grim shape of Newgate Prison until, panting for breath through the stink of Smithfield, I would at last reach Half Moon Court where we all lived and worked in the narrow Flemish wall house with its jutting gable and creaking sign: RB with a yellow half-moon. My master would seize the copy and George his composing stick and I would prepare the press. So it was and seemed it always would be, until one momentous day.

It was November, dark as pitch, the air a fine drizzle carrying the smell of the coal clouds that hung over London when people began to stoke their winter fires in earnest. The shops and stalls in Westminster Hall, where they jostled for trade next to the law courts, were long closed. I hung about with other messengers, waiting for the House to finish its day’s business. Unusually, no Members had gone home. Some of the messengers did, or repaired to the Pot. I crawled into a corner, pulled a discarded sack over myself and dozed. Distant shouting woke me. A watchman was calling the hour of midnight. The shouting was coming from the House. There was no official on the door, and I crept into the lobby.

Even I, for whom the words echoing round the chamber of the House meant as much as most of the Latin my tutor tried to drum into me, knew something extraordinary was happening. Mr Lenthall, the Speaker, had to keep calling order. There was a silence so deep my boots sounded like the crack of doom. My old enemy, the Serjeant, at the door of the chamber turned, but I slipped behind a pillar.

‘The Ayes have it!’ Mr Lenthall called.

What the Ayes had I neither knew nor cared, except that Mr Pym’s speech would soon be in my hand and I could go. There was a tremendous uproar, more shouting and banging of feet and cries for order, before Members came out, still arguing fiercely.

Mr Pym was with an MP of about forty, with a brooding, long-nosed face and an untidy beard. I knew him only from scowling me away if I scuttled too near his feet. Normally he made long-winded speeches about draining the fens, looking as if he had just ridden up from doing so. Now there was a look of almost religious exultation on his face as he came out of the chamber with Mr Pym.

‘If this had not been passed, John, I would have sold up everything and gone to Massachusetts.’

Pym smiled at the younger man, but as usual there was a look of caution on his exhausted face. ‘We haven’t got the new world here yet, Oliver. They’re already trying to wreck it.’

He looked towards another group, in the middle of which George Goring, handsome and wild-eyed, was gesticulating fiercely.

It? New world?

Goring shouted: ‘You cannot make such demands of the King!’

His hand went to his waist, and if swords had been allowed in the chamber, he would have drawn his. He moved towards John Pym, but he was already disappearing with others into a meeting room. I heard Goring mutter that there had been enough words and it was now too late for meetings.

Another group round Sir Simon D’Ewes, who in any debate found one side totally convincing until he heard the arguments of the other, were finding they had urgent business in the shires and were sending out servants to prepare the horses.

Various members strode about dictating to scriveners. Some, like Mr Ink, had portable writing tables strapped to their waists.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

At first he made no answer. He was writing a clear copy from notes which, I knew, came from Mr Pym, threaded through with spidery scribbles of his own. His quill dipped. The ink flew.

Then, scarcely pausing in his transcription he said: ‘The Grand . . . Remonstrance!’

Even in his haste, he uttered the words with a flourish, like that of a gauntlet being flung down.

‘The Grand – what? What does it mean?’

He flung his hands to his head in frustration, tried to continue, but had lost his train of thought. He turned on me. For a moment I thought he was going to throw his dripping quill at me. Then, although he had long made it plain he thought me a miserable, unintelligent wretch, his long gloomy face relented a little.

‘It is a plea to the King,’ he said, ‘from his humble servants to leave our reformed religion alone and not listen to malignant advisers –’

‘Like his Catholic Queen Henrietta?’ I broke in.

He clapped an ink-stained hand over my mouth and looked nervously around. But I thought that for the first time he looked approvingly at me.

‘And a plea to listen to our humble opinions, not to dismiss Parliament when he chooses and to take money from his humble servants by taxing everything in sight: bricks, salt, even the humble bar of soap we wash with.’

Since he looked as if he washed in ink and I scarcely washed at all in winter, avoiding the freezing pail in the yard, I thought soap unimportant and the whole Remonstrance thing sounded a good deal too humble for the King to care a jot about.

Perhaps that showed in my face. His face flushed. For the first time he looked as if he had blood, rather than ink in his veins.

‘But the plea is really to you,’ he said.

‘To me?’ I said, amazed.

‘To the people. This will change the world.’

This? What did he mean? Not taxing soap? I thought him a magician as his writing table bounced and the words in his head, now unknotted, flew on to the paper. He spoke as he wrote, the sonorous cadences of Mr Pym entering his voice and some of his phrases, such as ‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth . . .’ , echoing in my mind.

It was as if he had cast a magic spell over me. The spell was in the words drying in my hand. They would change the world. I believed it utterly. I would change myself. As I ran out into the dark night, I determined to be a reformed character, and not stop at the Pot Upside Down for a beer and a game of pass-dice with the other apprentices. Alehouses and dice were near the top of the list of the thousand things apprentices were forbidden to do.

But I must admit my pace slackened as I reached the alehouse. Although it was so late, excitement and rumours about the debate spilled out of the doors. One tankard, I persuaded myself, would help me run all the faster.

There was a stranger near the bar, a gentleman in a beaver hat and a fashionable short cloak, questioning regulars. I heard him say ‘red’. My ears are sharp, particularly for that word. My hair, red as fire and just as unruly, is a curse to me. My master could spot me in an alehouse however dim the light and thick the smoke. People thought I had Scottish blood, or even worse, Irish, and, since the papists were in rebellion over there, twitted me for being a spy. I had the hot temper supposed to go with the hair and got into several fights over it.

I caught the man in the beaver hat staring at me. He turned quickly away, to address a man I took to be his servant, who had the thick neck and shoulders of a bulldog, and a face pitted with smallpox.

Sometimes the Guild used the Watch to catch apprentices in alehouses. I suddenly remembered that I was a reformed character and had sworn never to go into an alehouse again. I wriggled my way through the crowd and out of the alehouse, gripping the precious words Mr Ink had given me tightly in my hand. I really believed that those words, although I did not understand them (perhaps because of that), had changed me for good.

As I ran, I imagined how being a reformed character would turn me into a good apprentice. I would become a Freeman of the City, marry Anne, in spite of my feet, have my own printing and book-seller’s shop by St Paul’s Churchyard and, after a few years, become Lord Mayor of London.

So I flew down the sweet street of dreams, so deep in them I was scarcely aware of the stench (ten times worse than that of the ordinary streets) of Smithfield Market. The stink hit my nostrils at the same moment as I realised someone or something was behind me.

I dived down a dark alley, my footsteps echoing. I stopped abruptly. Was that the echo, or someone’s footsteps stopping shortly after mine? I stuffed the precious papers in my pouch.

‘Who’s there?’

There was a shuffling whisper of a sound and I kicked out at the rat scuttering past my feet. I had been a fool to come this way. I should have gone the long way up the Old Bailey. There were vagrants here, come to fight the red kites and the ravens for what offal they could find. London, I knew, because it was on one of the pamphlets I sold, had grown bigger than Paris and so was now the biggest city in the world, attracting thousands of the poor and desperate who would kill me for the flat cap on my head.

Out of breath, I hurried into the market itself, clapping my hand to my nose. The air reeked of stale blood and urine. I jumped as ravens lumbered up from a yellow mess of intestines. The moon was up, casting long black shadows in the stalls into which the cattle were driven at dawn to be sold and slaughtered.

The whole place was deserted and silent, except for the hovering, cawing ravens. A kite swooped. He was after the rats which came out at night to grow fat in the market. Behind the barn where the hay was stored there was a clatter, like a pail going over. I saw the man’s shadow before I saw him. I scrambled over a stall, and, in sheer terror, vaulted over another, a thing I’d never been able to do before. I heard him curse as he slipped in some cow-clap.

He was two stalls behind. Another stall and I would reach Cloth Fair, and the twisting closes and passages which were home to me, where he would never catch me. I jeered as I prepared to jump down from the last stall. Then the sound stuck in my throat as I saw a glint of metal in front of me. Another man came out of the shadow of the wall, blocking my way to Cloth Fair. It was the man in the beaver hat from the alehouse.

I took out the dagger from my belt, the only weapon an apprentice was allowed to carry. It was next to useless against the sword he had drawn, but he hesitated – not because of the puny dagger, but because of the ditch in the centre of the street in which a dead dog floated, and into which I was retreating.

In those streets you had to sum up a man in an instant. The indigo doublet he wore was splashed from recent meals. His cloak was patched. His face, too, bearded in imitation of his King’s, pouched and veined, had seen better days. But it was the look in his eyes that told me how I might escape him. The look was a mixture of arrogance and aversion that signalled he was what we apprentices called a wall man. In the narrow streets he would, come what may, stick close to the wall, rudely facing-off approaching passers-by, forcing them into the ditch.

I made to come at him, then, as his sword came up, ducked under it and ran through the ditch to the opposite wall. I was right. He would not cross the ditch but slashed from a distance. He cut at me. The blow sliced my hat askew. I staggered but ran on and would have got away but the other man, who had no such aversion for the ditch, grabbed me from behind.

He had a grip like the jaws of a bulldog. The knife fell from my hand.

‘Did you see that, Crow?’ said the other man.

‘Went for you with a knife, sir.’

‘The little wretch insulted me.’

He taunted me, demanding satisfaction, putting the point of the sword close to my eyes then, in a whirl of movement, cutting my belt and pouch away from my waist.

I kicked and struggled but then, I am ashamed to say, I broke down. It was the sight of the papers, lying in my pouch at the edge of the ditch. One sheet was floating in a filthy pool, those precious words, which were going to change the world, shivering and leaking away.

‘Please, please let me go. Take my belt, my pouch, what you like, but let me have my papers!’

Grimacing, the man picked up the pouch floating in the sewer with the point of his sword. ‘Item – one pouch. Pig’s-arse leather. Value?’

Crow grinned. ‘Half a groat.’

I felt the wind from the sword, the point of which grazed my head as he flicked off my hat, spinning it around before dropping it with distaste into his hand.

‘Item – one hat, London Apprentice’s thereof. Slightly damaged.’

‘One farthing.’

‘Half a groat and one farthing!’ he cried in mock amazement, then drew his hand across his throat, which I took to be part of the same jest until he abruptly turned away and Crow grabbed me by the hair and jerked my head back.

I hung like a chicken that has had its neck wrenched, too paralysed with fear to kick or struggle. I heard the clink and slither of a knife being unsheathed. The sound drove me to struggle and kick, trying to twist my neck away as I glimpsed the glint of the knife, but he was far too strong for me and yanked my head further back. There was a sudden flutter of sound in my ears, a blur across the patch of sky.

Crow jumped as a kite rose from his dive near us, a rat squealing briefly between its talons as the life was squeezed out of it. The rat losing its senses made me find mine.

Distracted for a moment, Crow had relaxed his grip, instinctively turning the knife towards the kite. I jerked my head out of his grip and bit his hand so savagely I felt a tooth judder and loosen. He yelled, dropping the knife. The other man was bending to pick up the pouch. He grabbed at me but I head-butted him again and again in a frenzy. He slipped on some cow-clap and fell in the ditch, his shouts choked off as he took a mouthful of it.

I grabbed the pouch with the precious words and ran as I had never run in my life before, almost knocking over the Bellman and the man who should have been watching the barn.

There were cries of ‘stop thief’ from behind me. The Bellman tried to grab me but I pulled away – it is always the apprentice who is guilty – running into the maze of courts, alleys and twisting passageways off Cloth Fair.

Chapter 3

My master’s concern was so entirely bent on the dishevelled pottage of words I unpeeled from my pouch he seemed scarcely to notice the mess I was in.

The cold, God-like fury which I had expected to fall on me fell instead on the task of turning the chaos of smeared sentences into ordered Octavo newssheets. He would have failed his God and Mr Pym (and his purse) if the speech was not circulating round the inns and the taverns where the respectable gathered that week.

Who were Crow and the man in the beaver hat? They were not common cutpurses. Nor were they from the Guild. They had been told I frequented the Pot, and that I had red hair. All I could conclude was that the words I carried really were important, perhaps they would change the world, and they had hunted me and sought to kill me to get them.

My guilt and misery increased as Mr Black struggled to make sense of one ink-stained page after another. At that time we all thought that the end of the world was close – George was convinced the Last Judgement was due in 1666, because, in Revelation, 666 was the number of the first beast to be overthrown. For myself, I thought it had started that night. I had had the words in my hand that would save the world, and I had lost them.

My thoughts grew so crazy I even wished they would beat me rather than ignoring me, until Mr Black came to a page which completely defeated him.

‘Parliament is . . .’ he began. His eyes bulged as he struggled to decipher the words. He flung the sheet from him. ‘Damn the speech! Damn the boy!’ he yelled.

I picked up the sheet, clutching at a word I saw in the dark grey smudge as a drowning man clutches at a spar. The word, in a mess of obliterated ones, was ‘soul’. Other words, miraculously, seemed to form before me in the smear of ink, as I remembered what Mr Ink had declaimed.

‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth,’ I said.

They stared at me in astonishment, waiting for me to go on, but I could not. The spar was slipping from me and I was about to drown. Then Mr Black snatched the paper back and was able to de cipher the next few words:

‘. . . the Commonwealth that alone is able to understand the . . . the . . .’

Again we came to a dead halt. In desperation I took the sheet from him and stared at the smudged word. I may have deciphered it, but I rather think that, grabbing into my memory, I somehow retrieved it.

‘Diseases!’ I said triumphantly.

Mr Black seized the sheet as again I came to a full stop. The following words were indecipherable, both to his eyes and my memory; but a politician’s phrases and arguments become as familiar as his face, and Mr Black knew Mr Pym’s backwards.

‘Diseases that strike at the heart of the body politic!’ he cried.

No poetry has ever moved me as much as that bedraggled line of political rhetoric, for it was uttered with such a religious fervour, and a look at me that was a second cousin of the look I got from Susannah when she thought that I read the Bible; while, in truth, I was piecing it together from my memory of her readings and her promptings.

‘God is with us!’ he exclaimed exultantly.

Gloomy George, left out of this totally unexpected communion between us, scowled at me.

‘Compose!’ Mr Black shouted at him. ‘Don’t just stand there, man – compose!’