Plague Child Read online

  When Mr Black, sitting broodingly, said nothing, George rounded on Susannah in bitter reproof. ‘Kindness to the body, madam, is cruelty to the soul.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir,’ she replied falteringly. ‘I do not know what happened – he is normally such a good child.’

  He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘No, madam. You are too good to him. Every coddle you give him takes him one step nearer to hell.’

  Susannah pushed me away as if I was already burning. George gave me a final, dismissive shake of the head, picked up the case and opened the door, but Mr Black did not move.

  ‘Master – the boat.’

  Still he did not answer but looked at me, his eyes seeming to bore into my very soul. Then he looked at his ink-spattered cuff and jumped up as if he was going to beat me again. In spite of the danger to my soul, Susannah drew me to her.

  ‘Sir, there is a washerwoman here who has a most rare soap –’ ‘Be quiet!’ he shouted, so loud that soot pattered from the chimney. ‘The boy has spirit,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ George said. ‘An evil spirit.’

  Mr Black gave him a chilling look that silenced him. ‘I will take him,’ he said.

  It was a long moment before George recovered from his amazement and found his voice. ‘Master! His temper is as ill as his reading.’

  ‘Both can be taught,’ he said, prodding me with his cane, as if I was one of the calves at Smithfield. ‘Come – the tide will not wait.’

  I was later to discover that Mr Black took for ever to come to a decision, but then demanded it be carried out immediately.

  ‘Has he any other clothes until he is fitted?’ he snapped to Susannah.

  ‘Only what he stands in, sir.’

  ‘No boots?’

  ‘Boots? As to boots, sir,’ she stammered, ‘I was always meaning to get –’

  ‘No boots, no matter. Hurry, woman, for God’s sake!’ We were already in Poplar High Street, and Susannah had run back for something, which she carried wrapped in a handkerchief. ‘Order boots, two pair, when you order the uniform from Mr Pepys,’ he rapped out at George.

  It was not until we were at the quayside that I began to realise what was happening. Susannah was delirious with joy, which confused me utterly for I thought – no, I knew – she loved me and I could not believe she was giving me, like a badly wrapped parcel, to this brute, however fine his clothes were.

  ‘Thou art to be indentured,’ she said proudly. ‘An apprentice to a printer. With boots.’

  The waterman’s boy prepared to cast off. The light was going, the soft, magical evening light over the water which I loved, and they had lit flares in whose flickering light men moved like shadows, stitching the sails which would be run up on the Resolution tomorrow.

  As if she knew my soul was going to be in very little danger from coddles in future, Susannah gave me one last enveloping hug and it only struck me then that I was leaving her. I clung to her, to her smells of beer, of her herb pottage in which, however bad the times, she always managed to find me a little meat. Leaving the yard. Leaving the great boats, with their promise of freedom.

  Now I would never hear the creak and groan and shudder as the Resolution left the dock, see her stagger, then find her sea-legs as the sails snapped taut, took the wind, and she headed out to the open sea. Now I would never go the Indies, gaze in wonder at parrots, ride an elephant, and listen to Matthew’s stories.

  Matthew!

  I cried out for him.

  ‘Father! Father!’

  I think Mr Black was not without feeling then, for he asked a shipwright to find him. No one had seen him all day. That increased my distress. He had gone to the Indies without me. But the boatman was muttering and cursing and Mr Black gave him a curt signal to leave. He prodded at the bank with an oar and the boat began to drift out into the current.

  ‘Wait! Wait! Dear God Almighty, I almost forgot!’

  Susannah flung at me what she had carried in the handkerchief. The handkerchief fluttered into the water but what was in it landed at my feet with a thump. Her Bible. It was all she had. All? It was her greatest treasure. She stood there, waving and waving, growing smaller, dimmer, as the boatman pulled at the oars.

  Tears stung my eyes but then I saw the sour smile on George’s face and blinked them back. No doubt he thought this was good for my soul, but what he thought good I thought a great evil.

  I glared sullenly back at George. I swore then, silently to myself, on the Bible I gripped, that I would be as evil as possible. I remembered the pendant that Matthew had stolen, the future he had seen through it in the flickering firelight of the yard, and I was determined that wherever this boat was taking me, I would end the journey either with great treasure in the Indies, or at Paddington Fair.

  Chapter 2

  They beat it out of me. That evil. Or, if you like, those childhood fancies. Mr Black thrashed me with his cane until it broke, for which offence I was thrashed all the more with the new one. Gloomy George knocked the evil out of my head with his composing stick. But worst of all was Dr Gill, the tutor hired from St Paul’s, so I could learn to compose print for textbooks on nature and the physical world, which were in Latin.

  As George knocked the evil out of me, Dr Gill knocked what Latin he could into me with a ferula. This was a flat piece of wood expanding at the end to a pear shape with a hole in the middle, guaranteed to raise a painful blister at one blow.

  Worse than the beating was the cellar, which I thought the coldest, dampest, darkest hole on God’s earth. Even now I cannot recall it without a shudder, although I was only locked in there once before – well, I will come to that. That first time I believe I had some kind of fit in there; at any rate, Mr Black said I was not to be locked in there again, and George had to make do with thrashing me.

  My only comfort was Sarah, the maid of all work, with whom I shared the garret, although at first she seemed another enemy, who spoke with an accent so thick I thought she was from a foreign country like Scotland.

  ‘Sitha – that’s thy place – that side o’ beam – and this be mine All reet?’ That beam! It was so placed and so crooked that at whatever angle I got out of bed it seemed to strike my head. ‘Clodpole! Some people never learn,’ she invariably said, until I yelled at her, calling her a Scottish whore. She seemed more upset by the first epithet than the second, saying she would rather be dead than Scottish. She came from Hull. From the Indies? I cried, asking her if there really were parrots and elephants there.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ she said. ‘And birds that fly backwards. Come here, clothhead. Mind beam.’

  She rubbed some pig’s fat in the bruise, which she used for her own knocks and cuts, and from that moment, however bad the beatings were, there was always the pig-fat to take the sting out of them. While she rubbed, I read to her from Susannah’s Bible. I wrote to Susannah through the minister, Mr Ingram, and got messages back carried by drovers taking cattle to Smithfield.

  One of them told me Matthew disappeared shortly after I left the shipyard. I never heard from him. If Susannah did, she never told me. That cut me most of all. I never forgot them, but my memory of them gradually faded as I changed from a barefoot pitch boy into a London apprentice.

  For five years I was flogged regular for construing Latin, misconstruing Latin (it seemed to make little difference whether or not I got it right), for not wearing my flat cap, for losing it, for dicing, swearing, blaspheming, going into alehouses, fornicating (talking to a bawd outside the Pot Upside Down), losing my boots (I confess I put them on the throw of a dice), attempting to corrupt (a love poem to Mr Black’s daughter, Anne, of which more anon) until, in 1640, Parliament was recalled and they were suddenly too busy to beat me.

  Parliament? I had scarce ever heard of it. The King had got rid of it and ruled with his own personal advisers. He had also got rid of news, which his advisers called lies and rumours, and with it a great deal of his business, complained Mr Black. Robert Black, at the sign of the Half
-Moon, used to publish corantos with news of the wars in Europe, shipwrecks and the like, but the King had banned them, with threats of the Star Chamber. But now Parliament was back and London so hungry for news that printers were prepared to take risks to provide it.

  The only debating chamber I knew before Parliament was the Pot Upside Down. The view of my friend Will, who chaired the debates there, was simple. Good Queen Bess (as we still called her) had won all her wars against the Spanish, the French and the Dutch. Charles had lost his. He was in debt, and needed to call Parliament to get more money. But Parliament would not raise funds until the King paid heed to its grievances on religion and taxes.

  I was for Parliament – most of the London apprentices were. Our hero was Mr John Pym, leader of the opposition to the King. Mr Black printed his speeches, which breathed fire on the King’s advisers for drawing him into popery, even persuading him to sell forests to papists: the very wooden walls of our ships that protected us from Spain.

  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 Nov
ember, 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.’