Plague Child Read online

  With fires going on through the night when a ship had to be finished, no wonder it looked like hell on earth to the wealthy City people who commissioned the ships. And smelt like it. When an east wind blew, smoke from the lime pits of Limehouse combined with that given off by the coal to make a choking, noxious brew.

  We lived in hovels and many were miserable, but I was happy. Unlike my fellows, I was not beaten. Matthew beat Susannah sometimes, particularly when his wages were paid and he had been to the Black Boy or the Green Dragon; but he never beat me. He would shout at me and curse me, and his hand would go to his belt or pick up a piece of wood, but at the last moment he would stop himself, give me a strange look and walk away muttering.

  Once I asked him why he never beat me.

  He laughed as if he was never going to stop. ‘Dost thou want to be beaten?’

  ‘No, no, Father, but everyone else is.’

  He hit me on the head, knocking my hat off, but it had no more force than the slaps Susannah gave me.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Dost like it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but that was no beating.’

  He stopped laughing. ‘Thou art a curious child,’ he said.

  I did not think I was curious, but curious things happened to me. Most of the children I knew had only a vague idea when they were born, or how old they were. There were too many of them. But I knew I was born in the year King Charles was crowned, towards the end of September. I say towards the end, because the day seemed to vary. It was always when the weather grew chill, the mist clung to the marsh and the dry seed pods of bog plants rattled in the wind. I would be up at first light, my lids gummed to my eyes, taking the snap of bread and cheese from Susannah when she would say: ‘The will o’ the wisps have been, Tom.’

  My eyelids would fly open, I would drop my snap and rush to the front doorstep. There was a cake with icing on which TOM was written, in bold letters of yellow marchpane. It was the most delicious cake – I have to say the only cake – we ever ate. The inside was bright yellow, and full of fruit. We had no oven and the baker in the High Street sold only bread and pies. I searched on the marsh, but never could find the will o’ the wisps’ oven. Matthew warned me never to catch them, or even see them, or they would bake me as well, and TOM would be inside as well as outside the cake.

  But I was determined to catch them and, one foggy September, real will o’ the wisp weather, I begged Susannah to wake me. I must have been five or six and all that week I rose shivering and stared bleary-eyed through the holes in the oiled paper of the window.

  On the fifth morning I dozed off, waking with a start. I leaned out of the window. The cake was there – I had missed them! The street was empty, except for a woman in a hooded, grey cloak and a peaked stove hat like a witch’s. She must have heard me, for she stopped and began to turn. At the last moment I ducked away trembling, afraid she was a will o’ the wisp in disguise, and would turn me into a cake. By the time I told myself this was stupid (I was always having such conversations with myself, as lonely children will) and looked again, she was disappearing into the swirling mist.

  One Easter Sunday after the service I saw the cake in the church hall. It looked exactly the same, the marchpane glittering, but they had made a mistake with the name. Instead of my name it said GLORIA. I picked up a knife by it. Whether I was going to put my name on it, or cut a slice, I cannot remember, but the knife was twisted from my hand by the minister, Mr Ingram, who proceeded to thrash me. Susannah heard the noise and pleaded for me.

  ‘This is Tom.’

  ‘Ah. Tom. Yes. I remember.’

  What he remembered I was not to learn for a long time but, again, I got that curious look. Through my tears I tried to tell him it was my cake, not Gloria’s. He was startled I could read, and it happened like this:

  Susannah’s great treasure – practically her only possession – was her Bible. She could not read, but knew whole passages by heart from the services at the church and where to find them.

  ‘Blessed are the poor and meek,’ she would say, tracing her finger over the passage, ‘for they shall see God.’

  I would stare in wonder at the passage, knowing we must be blessed for I could see well enough how mean was the tiny room where the wind blew through gaps in the oiled paper at the window, even though I could not see God.

  I thought if I could only understand the words, I would see Him. One day I pointed to a passage and said to Susannah: ‘I . . . am . . . the . . . good . . . sh-sh—’

  ‘Shepherd!’ she cried out.

  She was so steeped in parables she thought it was a miracle. I had suddenly been given the gift of reading. Shaking, tears of joy glistening in her eyes, she pulled me into the street for the neighbours to hear.

  A sceptical woman opened the book at a passage Susannah had never recited. When I looked dumbly at the page, Susannah first thought I was being stubborn, then that she had done wrong by making a show of me like a travelling bear and God had taken His words back as a punishment.

  She was so stricken by this and by the grins and jokes of the neighbours that I went to the passages she had so often recited to me that I knew by heart, and pretended to read them. I even put in stumbles and hesitations so that Susannah, with joy on her face again, could correct me.

  The neighbours were awestruck and, not wishing to lose this reputation, I applied myself diligently to try and make the pretence real. And on that day, when I thought my cake had been stolen, Mr Ingram began to teach me himself. He explained that the cake was a simnel cake, with saffron and fruits of the East, a symbol of resurrection, of rebirth. I could not understand what this had to do with the cake on my doorstep, nor who Gloria was, unless it was one of the will o’ the wisps. He laughed and said it was not a name at all – it was short for Gloria in Excelcis Deo – Glory be to God on High.

  And that was my first lesson in Latin.

  One day, when I was ten, a great gentleman came to inspect the Resolution, a five hundred-ton armed merchantman in which he had an interest. It had his flag fluttering from the mast; a falcon with an upraised claw. I saw the gentleman staring at me as I put down a bucket of boiling pitch and went off to collect another. He said something to the shipwright, who called over Matthew. Curious, I took my eye off the pitch I was tapping, which splashed over my bare leg. I had been burned before, but never as badly as this.

  Yelling and screaming I ran to the pump to douse it, but the gentleman had me see the barber-surgeon who dressed the wound and gave me a cordial, London Treacle, a mixture of herbs and honey dissolved in wine, which some of the men said they would wound themselves to have. It was the first wine I ever drank, and I lay in the shipwright’s office, among the drawings and the model ships they made before they built the real thing, and fell asleep.

  Did I dream of the gentleman because he had been kind to me? Or was it real? I do not know, but I have a shifting memory of an old man’s face bending over me, a wispy tuft of hair rather than a beard below his lips, which smiled one moment and tightened the next, just as his dark eyes looked cloudy and troubled, then stared down at me with penetrating, frightening shrewdness as though they could cut right into my heart and soul, like a surgeon’s knife.

  When I questioned Matthew about him as we prepared to go home, saying he looked concerned and kind, Matthew laughed bitterly.

  ‘Kind? Aye, he’s kind all right. One of those gentry-coves who would be kind enough to send you to Paddington Fair.’

  He was not looking at me but staring towards the river, where the tide was on the turn and a boat was being cast off. Often in his stories he told me that one day we would leave on the tide to a distant land, and I thought they were just stories, but now there was something in his voice that told me he wanted to be on that boat, and made me clutch at his hand.

  ‘Paddington Fair – send me to Tyburn? He wouldn’t! Why? What have I done?’

  He laughed. ‘Nay, do you not know when I’m joking?’

&n
bsp; Still in the manner of a joke, he took me to a fire on the edge of the yard where there were few people.

  Some in the yard said Matthew was a cunning man, because he polished their thumbnails until they gleamed in the firelight, and saw their future in them. I had often begged him to tell mine, but he had always refused. Now he built up the fire, squatted by it, and stared into the flames.

  I had seen him do this with the others. ‘Are you going to tell me my future?’ I said, polishing my nail in great excitement.

  He grinned. ‘Nay, Tom. I shall need more than a nail for thy future.’

  His face, lit by the fire, seemed all eyes. The dock was quiet. The frantic hammering and sawing and shouting and swinging of timber was over. The gentleman was pleased with the ship, and they were taking on board canvas, ready to run up sails. Two men approached, arguing. Matthew waited until they passed, then undid his jerkin, then his shirt, which he never took off in winter. Under that was a belt, attached to which was a pouch. He started to take something from the pouch, then thrust it back.

  ‘Say nothing about this, or I’m a dead man!’

  I can now see that many of his jokes were made to ward off the fear which, at some level, was always with him. Back then I understood nothing but the sheer naked force of that fear, all the more terrible since it came so unexpectedly from someone who had always seemed, to me at any rate, a simple, jovial man.

  Constantly looking about him, he took something from his pouch which seemed to have a fire of its own. It was a pendant, with a falcon staring so furiously from its enamelled nest I ducked back instinctively, for fear it would fly at me. Its eyes, Matthew said, were rubies and in one of its talons it gripped a pearl, irregularly shaped, as if it had just been torn from the earth.

  I reached out my hand for it, but he cuffed it away. ‘Ah ah!’

  His fear seemed to recede as he gazed at it. He smiled, caressed it almost, murmuring to himself. A log settled and the gold chain glittered in the spurting flames. He addressed the pendant rather than me, seeming to enter into some kind of a trance with the red-eyed falcon. He saw a lady, he said, a real lady, with hair as bright red as mine.

  ‘Will I marry her?’

  ‘Nay, nay. Not her. You will make a great fortune. And lose it.’

  ‘A crown?’

  He shook with laughter. He seemed to have returned to his normal self. I loved his laughter, which made his cheeks and his belly shake, for, although he was always making fun of me, there was kindness in it.

  ‘Rather more than a crown, boy.’

  He put the pendant in the pouch, and pulled down his shirt and jerkin. The falcon seemed to flutter as it disappeared, reminding me of the bird on the flag flying on the old gentleman’s ship.

  ‘Is the pendant something to do with the old gentleman?’ I said.

  He seized me by the throat. For a moment I thought he was going to make up for never beating me by throttling the life out of me. ‘Who told you that? Who told you? Answer me!’

  ‘No one!’ I choked. ‘The bird is like the one on the ship’s flag.’

  He laughed, releasing me. ‘Nothing like! Nothing like at all.’

  I thought he was lying. He whirled round at a movement in the shadows, but it was only a dog searching for scraps.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if you ever see a man – he calls himself a gentleman these days – with a scar on his face.’ He pulled his face into a smile that was not a smile, and drew his finger down the line of it, on his right cheek, down to his neck. ‘He works for the old gentleman. Meet him, and you wouldn’t think the old gentleman so kind.’ When I said nothing, he pushed his face into mine with such a sudden ferocity I jumped in fright.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  I nodded dumbly. I understood that the old gentleman, the man with a scar and the pendant were somehow connected. And I understood that Matthew was a thief, for how else would he have got the pendant? I did not mind that, for Poplar was full of people running away from something: cutpurses, refugees, apprentices, debtors, whores. But I thought it was something more than being a thief he was running from, and I minded very much not knowing what it was.

  ‘I don’t understand what is story and what is truth,’ I said.

  He roared with laughter. ‘If people ever knew the difference between those two,’ he said, ‘the world would be a very different place.’

  He would say no more, except, ‘You’re a strange boy, a very particular boy,’ as he took me home, all kindness again.

  That night I woke up hearing him arguing with Susannah downstairs, where they slept. I slept upstairs with sailors they took in as lodgers.

  ‘A boat?’ she shouted. ‘I’ve never been on a boat in my life! Where would we go?’

  I heard no more because he beat her. The next day he told me we were going on a boat to Hull. I had seen so many built I was passionate to go out to sea and bombarded him with questions about what part of the Indies Hull was in and were there parrots and elephants?

  But before the boat sailed, they came. A waterman brought them, and a shipwright took me to them. Matthew was nowhere to be found. Fearfully I looked up at the faces of both of them, but there was no scar that I could see.

  Master Black was dressed to suit his name, in sober black, brightened only by a froth of fine linen at the cuffs and collar. He had a cane, and walked with a slight limp. The man whom I came to call Gloomy George was a thin man with narrow suspicious eyes, always looking about him as if he was afraid his pocket was about to be picked.

  Susannah went into one of her trembling fits when I was took home, but instead of the words pouring out of her, she seemed scarce able to speak. The two men almost filled our tiny room. Susannah ran to a neighbour, Mother Banks, for weak beer, but Mr Black took one look at the pitcher and refused it curtly.

  Gloomy George brought out a Bible from the case he carried. I thought then they were from the Church, come to test the truth of me being a miracle, because I had been given the gift of reading. He opened the book at Ecclesiasticus. My heart would have sunk into my boots if I had had any boots; for though I loved the New Testament, which is about love, I hated the Old for it is as full of revenge and hatred as it is of long words. I stared with mounting panic at the passage, which was about wisdom.

  ‘My son, learn the lessons of youth,’ I managed well enough; stumbled at ‘garnering wisdom’, then, at ‘Only to undisciplined minds she seems an over-hard task mistress’, the words fell about me like so many pieces of ship’s timber when a lifting tackle breaks.

  ‘Wisdom is an over-hard task mistress to you, is she Tom?’ Mr Black said.

  ‘No, sir,’ I mumbled, I think truthfully, for I liked wisdom, what little I knew of it; although perhaps I also said it because I thought it was the answer he expected.

  ‘Then what do the words mean?’

  I stared into his eyes, as black as his garments and as cold as frost. I shook my head, sick and ashamed. I had been found out. Not only was I not a miracle, I was a cheat and a fraud. I can still see Susannah’s wringing hands and downcast eyes. She began to say that it was her fault, she had boasted too much to the neighbours and God had punished her by taking the words away, but Mr Black silenced her by snapping the book shut.

  From the case, Gloomy George took out a writing table, a quill, ink and paper. He dipped the quill in the ink and handed it to me.

  ‘Perhaps you can write better than you can read.’

  I stared at the blank sheet of paper, as I now stare at the sheet in front of me, scarce able to believe I acted as I did.

  ‘Come now, you can write your name, child.’

  I could, in a laboured scrawl I was proud of; but I could see their sneers and hear the contempt in their voices. I would not give them that satisfaction. The blood burned in my cheeks and I flung the quill from me. A spray of ink peppered the fine linen of Mr Black’s cuff. I saw the horror on Gloomy George’s face an instant before I felt the blow of Mr Black’s cane a
cross my shoulders.

  I reeled forward, knocking over the writing table, ink spilling from the horn. Another blow struck me across the head and I fell to the floor. Susannah was screaming. Above me was a blur of boots and the metal tip of the cane rising and falling. I flung my hands about my head and rolled away among the mess of paper and ink. As the cane hit the floor near me I grabbed at it and held on. To avoid falling over, Mr Black was forced to release it.

  I scrambled up, gripping the cane. If he was angry when I flung the quill, he was now astonished. He backed away, almost knocking over Gloomy George in his haste. Susannah stared, her mouth open. Smeared with ink, as well as with the blood now trickling down my face, I must have looked to the two men like a wild animal. Children did not seize canes. They did not beat, they were beaten.

  I was wild, but I was not an animal. The great difference between me and my fellows was that I was loved.

  In families with ten or eleven children love was in short supply. Children died too often to risk love. They were wet-nursed, lost amongst the others. Susannah had had other babies, but they were dead when they came out of her, or after a cry or two at her breast. I never thought to ask why I alone was so strong and vigorous, so determined to live.

  So they cared for me too much because I was all they had; and that made me selfish and bold as I gripped Mr Black’s cane, feeling a strange sense of power as I looked at the expressions on their faces. I do not know what I would have done if there had not been at that moment a hammering at the door.

  My boldness left me. I thought it the constable, come to take me to Paddington Fair. My mouth went dry and the cane slipped from me. Mr Black seized it as George answered the door. It was not the constable, but the waterman’s boy.

  The boat had to leave in half an hour to catch the evening tide. Mr Black said curtly he would take it. His rage seemed to be spent and he did not look at me as George packed the case and Susannah wiped my face and tearfully whispered to me to apologise to the gentlemen, but I would not. Apologise to him for beating me?

  ‘I told you it would be a waste of time coming here, master,’ George grumbled. ‘The boy has the devil in him!’