Plague Child Read online

  PETER RANSLEY

  PLAGUE CHILD

  For Cynthia, Nicholas, Imogen, Rebecca and Lochlinn

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One - At the Half-Moon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Two - Highpoint

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part Three - Edgehill

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  CONSTRUCTION AND CREATION

  AN IDEA, LIKE A GHOST

  UNOPENED ON A SHELF

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  One cloudy September evening in 1625 Matthew Neave drove the cart, loaded with the bodies he had collected, to the edge of the River Cherwell. Seven bodies: they would not pay him much for that.

  While the horses drank he finished off the last of his bread and cheese. The bread was hard and dry and he softened it from his flask of beer as he waited for the light to go. He never went near the plague pit before dark.

  In early summer, at the start of the plague in Oxford, relatives would lie in wait for the cart. Fear of the disease was overcome by the fear of hell that their loved ones (and they later) would suffer if they did not get a Christian burial in sanctified ground. Matthew was stabbed and nearly thrown into the pit in one fight before the watch was called.

  But as people died or fled, and that remorseless hot summer reduced the remainder to a numb apathy, the disturbances petered out. Nevertheless, when he heard the sound of a galloping horse, Matthew put down his flask. Beer dribbled unnoticed down his stained fustian jacket as he stared over Christchurch Meadow.

  He couldn’t make out the rider at first for the trees, but the horse was a black gelding, a gentleman’s horse. The horse cleared the trees. The rider was dressed in black. He was masked, although the day had not been hot. The mask might hold a nosegay of herbs to protect against the plague, but Matthew was taking no chances.

  He picked up the knife with which he had cut the cheese and retreated to the cart – the stench of its rotting bodies better protection than any weapon.

  The man reined in the horse well short of him.

  ‘Matthew Neave?’

  ‘Who wants him?’

  The man took off his mask, but kept the herbs it contained to his face. Matthew dropped his knife and pulled off his hat, words drying in his throat. This was no gentleman. The horse was better bred than the man riding it, but for Matthew Mr Ralph was of much more immediate concern than any gentleman.

  Mr Ralph was Lord Stonehouse’s steward. A yeoman’s son, he had acquired a small estate in his own right, field by field, the painful struggle to build it showing in the deep seams of his face. The deepest seam was a jagged scar running from his right cheek to his neck.

  ‘There’s a dead child at Horseborne. Bennet’s farm.’

  Several miles away, over Shotover Hill, on the edge of Lord Stonehouse’s estate.

  ‘A plague child, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Matthew knew this was wrong, knew this was trouble. He had caught the disease when he was six. The agonising black boils under his arms burst and he had survived. They threw the rest of his family in the cart and left him locked in the house alone.

  The Plague Orders, no doubt reflecting most people’s conviction that the disease was God’s punishment, specified that victims should be quarantined for forty days and forty nights. For over a month Matthew had been locked in alone, kept alive by the pottage and weak beer passed to him through a window by the only neighbour who would go near him.

  Since the few who survived did not catch the plague again, what had nearly killed Matthew now provided him with his bread and, in a plague year like this, meat. Some people thought Matthew a cunning man because it was said he could predict who was going to die of the disease and who was going to live. Perhaps the steward kept his distance now not just because of the bodies, but because he had heard these stories.

  Matthew scratched his head. He knew every case for twenty miles around. Someone might have escaped from quarantine, but that was unlikely. It was even less likely that the disease was still spreading. The cold sharpness in the air, the dwindling number of bodies, told him the outbreak was practically over.

  Matthew shook his head slowly. ‘Horseborne, sir? Can’t be.’

  As painstakingly as he had built his small estate, Mr Ralph had built his voice, away from Matthew’s slow burr, mimicking the cool mockery of his betters.

  ‘I’m afraid it can. It’s still spreading.’

  The clouds were now edged with black and the wind freshening. As if aware that the evening would be a short one, swifts were diving, skimming above the water catching flies. Soon they would go, swarms of them, vanishing into the sky. Just as the swifts knew when there would be no more flies, so Matthew knew there was no plague at Horseborne.

  ‘I’ll collect he tomorrow.’

  In spite of the steward’s fear, both of the bodies in the cart and the curse Matthew might put on him, Mr Ralph pulled his horse closer. His voice reverted to a country, flint-edged burr.

  ‘You’ll collect he tonight.’

  ‘There’s no papers,’ Matthew answered stubbornly.

  Not all the people ending up in the pit had been plague victims. Nobody worried overmuch about the poor, but when a farmer was murdered and dumped in the pit, the watch had dinned into Matthew the importance of papers which they flourished in front of him before unsealing a plague house. And Susannah, who lived with him, had dinned into Matthew the evil of denying anyone a Christian burial whom God had not touched with the plague.

  From a pouch on his saddle Mr Ralph produced an order. He did not bother to move any closer, for he did not expect Matthew to be able to read it. The paper was enough. Afterwards, Matthew could not remember whether there was a signature, but burned in his mind was the falcon’s talons clutching a shield, the seal of Lord Stonehouse, whose word was law.

  The wind was bending the trees above Matthew and what was left of the sun was buried in dark clouds. It would take him an hour to get over Shotover Hill. He would set off in that direction and then turn back to Oxford, pleading the next day a broken wheel, or a lame horse. He went to his horses.

  ‘I’d best go now,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll do it – no excuses!’

  Matthew stared at him. The steward had a reputation of being afraid of nothing, but something had frightened him. His words came out so violently the nosegay he was holding over his mouth dropped from his ha
nd but still he pulled his horse closer.

  ‘Here –’

  There was a glint of silver in the air. Matthew caught the coin as deftly as the swifts catching the flies. His manner changed.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I will give you another at the pit. Say nothing – do you understand?’

  Matthew understood that two half crowns were a crown. And that Mr Ralph would be waiting for him at the pit to make sure he finished the job.

  The rain began shortly after Matthew left the meadow. It swept at him in great gusts as he swore and cut at the horses, struggling and sliding to climb up Shotover. At the top of the hill, to lift his spirits he took out the silver coin. A half crown. Newly minted that year for the coronation of Charles I.

  It helped Matthew forget he was soaked to the skin. A half crown! More than a labourer’s wages for a month. And another at the pit!

  He was so intent on the coin that he was only dimly aware of the approaching coach, the driver lashing the horses to pick up speed at the start of the hill. The cart, rattling and bumping down the incline, had drifted into the centre of the road. He yanked at the reins and sparks flew as he pulled ineffectively at the brake.

  The horses of the approaching coach reared. Matthew glimpsed the driver’s angry face and felt the sting of a whip across his cheek. He lost the reins and the cart lurched, with a grinding of wood against stone, into the ditch.

  He shouted and cursed after it, then searched for the coin, which had jumped from his hand. He shoved aside one of the bodies which had been thrown from the cart, before giving up, dropping his head in despair. Then he thought of the other silver coin, waiting for him at the pit. He flung the body back in the cart with the others and covered them with the thick bundles of hay with which he disguised his cargo.

  The near-side wheel was buckled and grating against the side as, just before Horseborne, he found the track to Bennet’s farm. The name meant something to him, but he couldn’t remember what.

  The track was a thick, gluey pottage of mud, leaves and dung, pockmarked by cattle and horses. Overlaying them were the recent, deep ruts of a coach.

  It was now almost dark and the rain, which had slackened, dripped steadily through the trees. The cart rattled and jerked through a small copse, a branch wrenching at Matthew’s hat before the open gate of the farmyard.

  He stopped at the door of a prosperous-looking wattle-and-daub farmhouse. There was no red cross on the door. And something else was wrong.

  There was no dog. Who had ever heard of a farm without dogs? Then he remembered. Bennet was a farmer who, returning from market drunk, had been murdered. The farm had been bought by Mr Ralph to add to his nearby lands, and was not yet tenanted.

  Feeling increasingly uneasy, he approached the door, stopping abruptly. A pair of eyes glittered at him from the bushes. He was about to run when he realised the gaze was unblinking. They were jewelled eyes, set in the head of a falcon, the centrepiece of a magnificent pendant whose gold chain was entangled in the bushes. He knew where it came from. There would be a reward for it – a substantial one. He had lost silver, but found gold. He stuffed it inside his jacket and knocked at the door.

  He expected Widow Martin, or some other fuddled midwife, but the woman who answered the door was another shock. Like Mr Ralph, she was not quite gentry. Kate Beaumann was a gentlewoman’s lady, as God-fearing as her sober black indicated, and she was plainly as shocked to see him as he was to see her. They knew each other, for it is surprising how many people, from all walks of life, will seek out the services of a cunning man. She had a warm, kindly face, which reminded Matthew of the good neighbour who had kept him alive during the plague. She was in her mid-twenties, but there were already streaks of grey in her hair, and her eyes were red with weeping. Her dress, like her pattens, was splashed with mud.

  He touched his dripping hat. ‘Evening, Miss Beaumann.’

  Without a word she beckoned him to follow her, shutting an inside door quickly, but not before he glimpsed a weakly guttering fire, a birthing stool, and a spattering of blood on the rush-covered floor. She led him into a stall where the farmer would have kept a sick animal. On the straw was a small shape wrapped in a linen apron.

  ‘Take him.’

  When he didn’t move she picked up the object and thrust it into his arms. The little bundle was cold and wet. Part of the covering fell away from the baby’s face, which carried none of the telltale plague spots or scars. The child looked to Matthew to be stillborn, or to have died shortly after birth.

  ‘He don’t look no plague child,’ he said.

  The harshness in Kate Beaumann’s voice was as unexpected as her kindly face. ‘He was a plague to us,’ she said.

  Without another word Matthew left, half-running to the cart. He took off the apron before dropping the baby on the cart and covering it with the bundles of straw. The apron was fine linen, Flemish possibly. Kate Beaumann’s muddy skirt suggested she had dumped the child in the fields to die. That was as common as death itself.

  The mystery was why Kate did not leave the child there. Or bury it. Or throw it in the river. One baby was much like another. But bodies could be found.

  Mr Ralph’s urgency and fear all but spoke out loud there must be no risk of that. Perhaps the child had some special feature, or birthmark. If that was the case, the pit was the ideal solution to the problem.

  Put there to destroy the plague, lime ate quickly into bodies and faces, dissolving them in a few days into an unrecognisable slime. No one would go near the pit, let alone lift a body from it. Someone wanted to prevent anyone from recognising, or claiming he recognised, the features of the child at the bottom of his cart.

  Matthew shrugged. His hand closed round the pendant, feeling the outline of the jewelled bird and the links of the chain, one by one. Then his hand stopped stroking it. Suppose he was accused of stealing it? It was risky, far too risky to return it. The horses, which were dragging the cart more and more slowly, needed shoeing and the blacksmith would melt the gold down. Broken up, the stones he could sell one by one at Witney Fair, or Oxford, with the linen apron, which Susannah would wash and press.

  He was musing like this, the rocking of the cart sending him into a half-sleep, the reins slipping gradually from his fingers, when he first heard the stuttering cry.

  He had been asleep. Dreaming. There was nothing but the wind, the weary stumble of the hooves and the creak of the cart. But there it was again. Unmistakable. A baby’s cry.

  Hadn’t he feared, from the very beginning, that this was wrong? Hadn’t Susannah warned him, time and again, of the evil of throwing someone who had not died of plague into the pit? The baby had been clap-cold dead – now it had come back to haunt him.

  As the cry increased into a pitiful wail, he crossed himself in terror, lashing the horses in an attempt to escape from the spirit that he believed was pursuing him, he was now convinced, into hell. It was the hell he had somehow escaped as a child, but knew he had always been destined for; a pit, not of fire, but of bodies slowly eaten, burned, then re-formed, only to be eaten and burned again, forever being consumed, writhing in lime.

  Part One

  At the Half-Moon

  November 1641–September 1642

  Chapter 1

  That was the story which I eventually got out of the man I believed to be my father, Matthew Neave. There were various versions, each more colourful than the last and, of course, there was what happened next, but that has to come in its proper place.

  We lived in Poplar, which some people said was a land of heathens and barbarians, because we were outside the walls of the great City of London and were not freemen. I could not understand that because in Poplar Without, as it was sniffily called, we had much more freedom. There were few laws, and I never saw a constable. I loved it there. Named after the tall, shapely trees that lined the High Street and the marsh, it was still half farming land, breeding cattle that lost little fat on the short drover�
�s road to Smithfield. But the farmers were being pushed back by the huddling mass of small houses being knocked up every day.

  These houses were unlike the tall buildings of the City, which struck awe in me when I first saw them. Rackety, timber-framed houses with narrow, gabled fronts, they were home to some of the first Huguenot refugees who had fled from France and taught me to call my hat a shappo and swear about the Pope in French. But the houses were mainly run up for shipyard workers like Matthew.

  Visitors from the City called the shipwrights a canting crew because, they said, they were rogue builders, outside the Company of Shipwrights and the law of the City. But to me they were magicians who carried great ships in their heads. In the yard at Blackwell I watched these visions become hulls, then skeletons, growing prows and masts, as I ran for buckets of pitch or an adze for Matthew in his sawpit.

  When snow covered the Isle of Dogs and ice gradually thickened over the Thames it was always warm here. With bare feet and wearing nothing but breeches I filled and carried baskets of wood and coal for fires to melt the pitch, mould the iron and make the steam that would bend the wood, miraculously to me, into the shape of the shipwrights’ drawings.