All this Coke saw in the one swift glance before he retreated. Yet he did not run, with that opportunity soon taken when the crone cried, “Seize him!”
The men grabbed an arm apiece. “Easy, friends,” Coke said, gauging their strength. He would fight if he had to. The reek that rose off them showed that all three were drunk on Guinea rum, which would make any fight easier. But that would not serve his purpose: to find Pitman. Though the plain fact that his house was plagued might mean there was now no Pitman to find.
The old woman smiled toothlessly at him, thrusting her face close. “Well, well,” she breathed, “is this the missing ’usband, then? Shall we unbolt and throw ’im inside?”
Coke, gagging a little at the proximity of her, said, “Madam—” To an immediate chorus of jeers. “Madam,” he continued, “may I know who it is I am addressing?”
“Oh, so polite! What a gennelman!” The woman looked down her nose. “You is ’dressin’ Mistress Proctor. I am the searcher for this parish. I sniffs out the sick. I slams them up in their ’ovels. I carts away their dead.” She slapped the wagon beside her, causing a corpse’s arm to drop and dangle outside the canvas covering. “And who might you be, sir gennelman?” She thrust her face still closer. “Are you the ’usband? Are you this Pitman?”
“I am not.” He let his western accent thicken. “I am a cousin, come from the country to seek his kin.”
“Country cousin?” she shrieked, falling to wheezing laughter, joined by the two men who held him. “Country fool, more like! For who would leave ’is native pure air to breathe pestilence?” Her face was now so close their lips almost met. “I think you’re lyin’, sir gennelman. Not even a fool willingly enters Hades, eh? You’re Pitman!”
The man on his left arm spoke. “Nah,” he mumbled. “That bastard was bigger. Arrested me once, just for the beatin’ of my own daughter on the street.”
“A daughter!” Coke was near enough to see the thought enter the gummy eyes. “ ’Course! One way to find out. Swing ’im over ’ere.” She stepped to the cart and the two men gripped tighter and shoved Coke forward. “For what father will stay as stone when he sees … this!”
As she said the word, she jerked back the canvas. There, on top of two other corpses, lay the latest addition: a girl, perhaps two years old. It was one of her arms that swung over the side of the cart; her other arm was flung back, as if desperately reaching for the house she’d late been ejected from. Even in the poor light of the lamp, Coke could clearly see the distended armpit and the black oval tokens covering her skin.
He could not stop it. Never could. He vomited, partly onto one of the men who held him there and who now threw him off. The other man let go as well, leaving Coke to void bile onto the cobbles.
Fingers like claws dug into his arm. He looked up—into those eyes under their one eyebrow. “Puke tears,” she hissed, “but not sorrowing ones. A father would rage over ’is dead daughter, wouldn’t he?”
“I tell you, s’not ’im.” The man who spoke peered up from his attempts to wipe yellow vomit from his breeches. “Bastard’s covered me, though. I’ll give ’im a beating for that.”
A cudgel was in his hand. Coke, already bent over, reached to the dagger in his boot cuff. But a screech halted them both. “You will not!” shouted the crone. “It’s late, and there’s money to be had of the beadle of St. Leonard’s for these three if we hurry. I wants a drink. You—” she pointed at the man with the vomit “—will stay and keep the watch.” She flicked the canvas back over the corpses,
tucked in the dangling arm. “And you,” she said, pointing now at Coke. “I’d not linger ’ere if I were you. Go ’ome, cuntryman.”
With that, she gestured to the cart’s arse and the other man went to it, heaved. “Bring out yer dead!” she suddenly cried, her voice sharp and clear in the silence. “Bring out yer dead!” The man still wiping away puke followed, whining that it was not his turn.
They’d got to the corner, were just about to turn it, when Coke felt something hit his shoulder. He glanced in time to see a ball of paper fall to the ground. He picked it up, unfolded it. One side was printed, a call to buy the world’s most effective plague water. The other side had words scrawled in charcoal. By the lantern light he could just make them out: “Next street at bak. Empte Ironmongers. Attik.”
The captain went fast, the opposite way to the death cart.
Three houses down there was an alley on the left. He took it, turned left again. Crossed cutlery was nailed above a door. He pushed this, and it gave with a squeal of rusted hinges. “Hallo?” he called, his voice bouncing back from emptiness. There was only one lantern back in this alley. He returned to the house. It was silent, its inhabitants no doubt asleep. He fetched an empty barrel, stood upon it and carefully unhooked the lantern from its spike, then descended and returned to the ironmonger’s.
The little light the lantern gave revealed a room as empty as its echo: a bare counter, some broken pots, a fallen chair. At the rear of this room was a doorway and Coke went through it, climbed the narrow stair beyond. The only memory of life he found was when he stumbled on something, bent to feel what it was, grasped cloth. He lifted the object into his little light, saw the flaxen string hair, the button face of a poppet. He dropped it.
There was a ladder on the last landing, rising into the roof. It
creaked as he climbed it. When he stuck his head into the space above, he heard another sound. A whisper in the dark.
“Do not come any closer, sir.”
He lifted the lantern, placed it on the attic floor before him. It did not light much beyond the trap.
The voice came again from the darkness. “Who are you, sir? Do you know my husband? Do you know Pitman?”
“I do. Let me draw closer.”
He made to push himself up, but her sharp cry stopped him. “Do not! Even there, the sickness may reach out and take you. How do you know my husband?”
“My name is Coke.”
“He told me of you. The captain. You are engaged on an enterprise together.”
“We are. I had hoped to find him to continue our work. I—” He broke off. Pitman had said he recounted little to his wife, to save her from fretting. What could Coke say now?
“If he lives, sir, you will find him in Newgate prison.”
“What? How so? For what offence?”
“Murder.” She continued over his cry. “It’s three weeks since. Caught by the All Hallows watch, his dagger in a man’s guts, they told me. They were happy to tell me.” A sob, restrained, and she went on. “I have not had another word.”
Within this appalling news was something that did not make sense. No one accused of murder remained in Newgate three weeks without a trial. It was usually done within a day or two. “Are you sure he is not …” He stopped.
She must have sensed his doubts. “He is not hanged, sir. He cannot come to trial because the courts are suspended. Prisoners must wait for the plague to pass before they can be brought to
justice. And most will never face it. Because if there is one place in this entire pestilent city that is the very centre of disease, that place is Newgate. Yet I believe he lives. Those who keep us shut in would delight in telling me if he did not.”
She sobbed again, and he bit his lip till blood ran. This was the ruin of all hope. What could have happened? Pitman was not a murderer. Had he come upon the real killer and been forced to kill him? Could that not be proven?
“Madam, what can I do for you? Can I free you? I could cut away the lath in these walls. Your family could escape through.”
He’d half raised himself onto the floor again, when she stopped him with a shout. “And go where? This is a house of the plague, sir. I have lost a daughter this night, a babe last week, have another son sick below.” He heard her choke back her tears. “We must wait for God’s judgment, and pray that he will decide he has punished us enough.”
“Can I at least bring you food? Medicine?”
“Yes, perhaps that. Yet, sir, what would truly sustain us is this: find out if Pitman does still live. Take our prayers to him. Bring him word of us. Tell him that Imogen and Little Jeremiah sleep with the angels.” Another sob, swiftly pulled back. “And tell him that by God’s good grace he will be brought back to us soon.”
“I will. And will return with some food for you on the morrow. Goodbye for now, madam.”
He descended the ladder, passed down the stairs, out onto the street. Without thinking, he remounted the barrel and placed the lantern again upon its hook. As he did so, the stub of candle within it flashed bright, then died.
Newgate, he thought, swaying there. So the place I most avoid is the one I must go to now.
Ignoring the screams from the cellar, Lord Garnthorpe looked around the room.
Is it
too
austere? he wondered again. He had instructed his upholsterer that it be decorated plainly, for the room was to function as much as a place of contemplation as a chamber for daily living. The man had obeyed, whitewashing the walls to obliterate the crude scenes of country life painted on them in case any should lift the woven hangings he then hung from ceiling to floor. However, since their weave was of a uniform brown, they made the room appear even smaller than it was. The only things that relieved the uniformity were the oak door, the window cavity from which all the glass had been removed save one small panel, and the single decoration he had allowed: a painting of some saint in the very moment of her martyrdom, her body still in the grip of her ravishers, her soul already moving to salvation.
If she sits in the single straight-backed chair and contemplates
that, he thought, breaks off only to read from the solitary book upon the table—the Bible, a newish copy purchased that morning from his bookseller’s in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with suitable passages marked—surely her mind will be the more swiftly calmed from her other life’s concerns.
Yet something troubled him. He saw her again in that other life. Such a different world from the one he would bring her to. Perhaps he should ease the transition a little.
“Flowers.”
His body servant, Maggs, was standing silently by the door. “Flowers, my lord?”
“I want some. On the table beneath the saint. Beside the Bible.”
“Yes, my lord. What kind?”
“Nothing gross. White and red roses. Marigolds—” He broke off. “What do I know of flowers, man? Go to Gurle’s nursery in Spitalfields. Buy what you can for a gold guinea.”
“A guinea?” Maggs’s usually immobile face cracked in wonder. “Will that not fill the room, my lord?”
“I do not know, simpleton!” Garnthorpe shouted. “Ask Gurle, not me. If there is excess—” he considered a moment “—then we will put it upon the grave in the churchyard opposite.”
“Which grave?”
“You know which one, dolt. The one I ordered you to clean last week.”
“Oh, that one. Oh yes, indeed, my lord. I’ll be off.” As Garnthorpe’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, Maggs retreated from the room.
Garnthorpe leaned on the straight-backed chair. He felt a little faint. He understood that women liked flowers. His mother had, would pick enough to fill rooms with their scent. Would
she
like them?
Maggs slammed the front door behind him, a habit no amount of curses and blows could make him desist from doing. Immediately the screaming got louder. She had stopped for a while, two hours after he’d locked her in the cellar, her eventual silence achieved by no harsher expedient than ignoring her entirely. It was doubtful her sounds carried much beyond the walls. Even if they did, they would be ignored. London was a city of screams these days.
He crossed to the Bible. It was open to Daniel; one of the texts she must know if she was to stand beside him when King Jesus came. And she did not have much time, judging by the way the world went.
And yet? There was another text, something his mother had read him long ago.
He hunted for it. First the chapter, then the verse. And when he finally placed his fingers upon the passage, a shock went through him. His father had discovered him reading it as a youth and broken two sticks on him for straying from the very few texts the man found acceptable—when he was sober enough to read and guilty enough to pray. But his father was long dead. So he found his voice was calm when he read the words aloud: “ ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.’ ”
He turned the pages back to Daniel, walked out the door, up the stairs. The cries redoubled at his footsteps, but by the time he stood in the bedchamber they were gone.
Yes, he thought, looking about. This room’s beauty will make up for that other’s plainness. The panels of emerald silk, hung from battens to cover the oak walls; the colour picked up in the curtains that close in the bed. The rich linen sheets on that; the coverlet embroidered in silken threads.
What was that other verse, he thought, in the Song of Solomon?
“ ‘By night in my bedchamber I—’ No! ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth,’ ” he declaimed.
He went to the window, pushed it open. A breath of wind came and he closed his eyes to it. That is what she will say, he thought, after she has spent time in the room below. After she has learned the lessons, after she has come to God, then will she come to me. By night will she seek me.
Somewhere near, a hand bell rang, a familiar cry with it: “Bring out your dead!”
The End of Days was fast approaching. He had work to do, God’s work, as Brother Simeon directed him. He would see him shortly for prayer, for instruction. But first, he had a soul to redeem.
In the corner of the room was a table, an inkpot and quill upon it. He sat in the single chair. The paper was already sealed, not with his own crest of Gryphon Rampant but with another he’d had made for the purpose.
He dipped the quill, then wrote the words swiftly, in letters that leaned hard to the left: “To Mrs. Chalker, Percival Buildings, Sheere Street. From John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.” He hesitated, dipped anew and added, “On a matter of great urgency.”