Plague

by C. C. Humphreys

  “ ‘In my father’s house are many mansions,’ ” the other man quoted. “ ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’ ” He stepped close, took Garnthorpe’s elbow. “We have been preparing many places, Brother. There is still so much to ready for what is nearing. Yet we have not seen you these several weeks. At prayer. At meetings. After that Judas was dealt with, you were meant to come to me. To take your place among the six on the Council of the Great Ones. You did not come.” He gently shook the arm he held. “What have you been about?”

  “Matters of my own.”

  “Your own?” Suddenly he gripped Garnthorpe above the elbow, his voice no longer gentle. “There are no matters beyond the one great matter: that the End of Days is nigh! That Jesus is coming to be our King! He himself in the flesh!” His fingers bore in and Garnthorpe cried out. “You know this—and yet you speak of your own matters?”

  Garnthorpe jerked his arm free. “I do know this, Brother. And I have been remiss. But I am the Lord’s sheathed sword still, believe me. Draw me when you will.”

  Brother Simeon stared at him, silent. Garnthorpe saw the scar across his nose pulse with fire, though he knew flame had not laid it open but a cavalier’s blade; knew because it had happened right beside him when the king’s cavalry had charged Parliament’s lines at Naseby. For the first and only time, over years of battle, Simeon Critchollow had dropped the regiment’s banner. But two very different men had picked it up: the nobleman Lord Garnthorpe and the butcher Abel Strong. Rallying the regiment, driving off the royal horse, helping turn defeat into the most famous of victories.

  Perhaps this close the other man saw what he was seeing. For the darkness in his gaze lifted. Simeon smiled, and when that powerful voice sounded again, it was as smooth as before. “You ever were the Lord’s weapon, his fine shining blade. And is our old comrade as apt? Or is Abel Strong also about matters of his own?”

  Looking down, Garnthorpe murmured, “I have not seen him these three weeks. Since he dealt with the Judas. Yet I believe—nay, I know—he is ready.”

  “Praise God.” The pleasure in the voice made Garnthorpe look up as the man continued, “I was thinking of when and where we were reunited, you and I. Long after the wars. Do you remember?”

  It was not a time he ever chose to think about. Though this man sometimes made him. “And do you remember,” Simeon went on as if the answer had been yes, “the verse you were reciting that day in Bethlehem Hospital? The one that made me stop, before I even recognized your voice. It was as if—” he gazed at the ceiling “—as if an angel spoke to me out of heaven. Which in a way one did. For you revealed yourself with that verse, did you not? It enabled me to raise you from the pit. To release you and then with your help release our brother Abel Strong.” He smiled. “Say it with me now.” He reached out, placed the other’s hands in a position of prayer, his own wrapped outside them. Their two voices rose together: “ ‘But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.’ ”

  “Yes,” continued Brother S. “I knew you then, even in the disguise of your filth, your degradation. Knew you not simply as my old comrade but as a brother Saint, a Fifth Monarchist man, even though you were little acquainted with them. But I taught you about them, did I not? Brought you into that light?”

  “You did.” Garnthorpe swayed. The verse they’d spoken, this man’s presence—they always made him weak for a while. Until they made him strong.

  “Good. Perhaps now I will take that drink. Do I espy some sack?” He went to the table, uncorked a bottle. “There is something I need you to do for us. Both of you.” He lifted an eyebrow—Garnthorpe shook his head. He poured a tot into a crystal glass. “And you will have time for your own matters also. The gathering does not happen for a week.”

  “What gathering?”

  Simeon sipped, regarding the other man for a long moment. “You understand this plague that kills so many is an instrument of the Lord’s wrath. A sign of the coming end, though not the end in itself. That the mark of the beast will not be upon us till the year of his number, next year, 1666.”

  “I understand this.”

  “More must happen before the Ancient of Days comes and the Saints possess the kingdom, as written of so gloriously in the Book of Daniel. Yet there is much we can still do to prepare for that glory—the most important being to strike at the heart of the Fourth Monarchy that yet rules over us.”

  “How?”

  “By killing one close to it.”

  Garnthorpe gasped. “The king?”

  “Nay. He is too well guarded. And a chance to kill a king does not happen more than once a century, I fear.” Brother S. smiled. “Not him. Someone close, though.”

  “The Duke of York?”

  “You have him. And he is not so closely protected.”

  Garnthorpe frowned. “But is he not with the court in Oxford, fled this plague like all the coward Stuarts?”

  “He is. Except for one night next week. Next Tuesday he attends a meeting at Whitehall. Some fellow in the navy office, name of Pepys, arranges it. We have a brother in that same office who tells us all the details.” He raised the crystal into the sunlight at the window. Rainbow shafts lit his face. “Many forget, with all this death on land, that there is also death at sea. That the war with the Dutch continues. The duke is head of the navy, so—” he lowered the glass, sipped “—he comes to give them their orders. By boat on the Thames to Whitehall Palace, meet, then return on the next morn’s tide.” He drained the glass, placed it on the table. “Do you attend the meeting at All Hallows this Sunday. We will pray. And then talk of ways and means.”

  He moved to the door. “Ah! I almost forgot. You will need this. Or rather, our friend Strong will. You must give it to him.” He returned to the table and laid a velvet purse beside his empty glass. “Till Sunday, then. Peace be with you.”

  “Praise God.”

  Simeon left. Lord Garnthorpe heard the front door slam after him, Maggs’s uncorrectable fault. Next Tuesday we are called, he thought. That’s seven days about my own affairs. Will that be time enough to bring the sinner to God? And then to myself?

  He picked up the velvet pouch, put it into a doublet pocket. He did not need to look at the stone to know it would gleam, greener than crystal, in the sunlight.

  The walk from St. James’s to Simeon’s destination near Charing Cross took little time with the streets so empty, which was unusual at this time of a weekday, usual at this time of the plague. There were still some hawkers about but far fewer than normal, their customers gone, one way or another.

  Beggars, though, had multiplied. Many were new to the trade, their clothes a little less torn than the experienced ones, the wounds some had given themselves a little less well done. Many wore the last castoffs they’d received before their employers, fine lords and ladies, fled because they could afford to. One servant might be retained to brave the city and guard the house. The rest were thrown onto the streets.

  It is the poor’s plague, sure, Simeon thought, as he pushed past another set of reaching hands, hearing the mumbled cuss as he did, seeing the dull hatred in so many eyes. The poor who starve and sicken, the rich who, in the main, survive. But that very hatred was a force to be harnessed, he knew, like Thames water driving the wheels in the arches of London Bridge. Channelled like that water, it would power the second revolution in England in twenty years. They had come close, so close, to establishing a truly godly republic, only to be betrayed by those who led, who had not the faith nor the will to go as far as was required. This time they would not let it slip. This time, they would set a flame that would bring Christ’s fiery cross, his everlasting kingdom. On the ashes of Babylon, Jerusalem would rise.

  He was passing the Eleanor Cross on the Strand, a spluttering torch upon it, when yet another hand tugged at his coat. He was about to thrust it aside like all the others but glanced up—and was startled by eyes as green as the emerald he had just l
eft behind in St. James’s. They belonged to a youth scarce twenty, whose face would have been handsome had not hunger and shame so reduced it, and whose big frame in better days could have hefted a pike. Halting, Simeon reached into a pocket, pulled out a shilling. Yet he did not hand it over straightaway.

  “What is your name, my young man?” he asked.

  “Daniel, sir, and it please you.”

  Oh, how it did! Daniel, the prophet he had only just been quoting to Lord Garnthorpe. The holiest of flames that guided the Saints. “Your voice sounds gentle. Where are you from?”

  “Aylesbury, sir.”

  “And your station?”

  “I was a servant in a rich house. Mostly, I played the flute for them but they—” the youth gave a little sob, swallowed it down, “—they abandoned me when they fled for the country.”

  Simeon smiled. There was no coincidence in the holy plan, no thread astray in God’s exquisite tapestry. “Have you heard the good word, my son?” he asked. “Have you heard that King Jesus is coming in the flesh to rule us all?”

  “I, uh, I have not, sir.”

  “Then attend ye All Hallows the Great this Sunday. There to hear the word. There to receive blessing—and bread too.” He pulled out another shilling, then put both coins in the youth’s hand, closed his own over it and pressed. “Will you join us there, Daniel? Will you be saved?”

  The beautiful eyes brimmed. “I will. God bless you, sir, but I will.”

  “Praise be.” With a last squeeze, Simeon moved away, pushing through others who had noticed him stop, who quickly arrived to beg a share. Another recruit, with something special about him. Simeon could see that, and something else too. What he himself had once found: light in the dark.

  They had already gathered in the underground room, their murmurs fuelled by liquor and impatience. “Where have you been?” demanded the landlord, keeping his voice low as well. The large inn he ran was shut up like all gathering places. But the cellar beneath it was crammed. “I’ve already taken their coin, sold them drink. They grow restless, and the watchman I bribed has been asking for more. They expected you an hour since.”

  “Other business,” Simeon Critchhollow answered. “I am here now.”

  He elbowed through the crowd to the last arch of the long cellar, edged behind the drapes there, climbed the five stairs to the platform. A lantern’s light showed him that all was as he’d left it. It may not have been as well appointed as his usual place of trade, but it would do. Even Saints had to eat.

  When the landlord thrust his head through, he nodded, then reached. The drapes below him were pulled back. He blew a long vibrating blast on the small trumpet fixed on the frame before him. Whistles, a few claps; then they, along with all murmurs, ceased as he lifted the marionette from its stand and walked it to the middle of the small stage.

  “ ‘Eh! Eh! Eh! Here am I, Punchinello!’ ” he cried, his voice high-pitched, his accent an exaggerated Italian. “ ‘Eh! Eh! Eh! ’as any one seen thata fatta beetch, my wife, eh?’ ”

  Laughter filled the cellar. Simeon smiled too as he reached for another set of strings.

  It was plain, the room Rochester’s servant showed her into, in the house on Priest’s Alley. Woven brown hangings covered the walls, no decoration upon them save a portrait of some half-clad female saint gazing heavenward, some devilish shapes lurking nearby. That and a simple wooden cross were all the adornments—save for the flowers, oxlips and violets in the main—that the room possessed.

  She was surprised—Rochester had a reputation as a man of gaudy tastes. Then she realized that he’d probably rented this house for his leaving of the Tower, only a few streets away; that it could belong to merchants who had fled the plague, foreign maybe, sober, religious folk. She doubted he planned to stay in it long before he joined the court in Oxford. Or maybe he meant it for Lucy. He would not be aware of her going to Cornwall. Perhaps he intended more than just paying her off. Perhaps he was truly penitent, and this place was a haven he intended for his mistress and their child.

  As she bent to study the painting more closely, from somewhere nearby she thought she heard a sob. It was ever so faint, yet it made her reach to her hip to touch the knife that rested against it.

  John Chalker’s knife. That and Dickon in the churchyard opposite the house her twin comforts.

  Footsteps were descending the stairs from the upper storey. Her answer approached. “My Lord Roch—” she began, even as she started to curtsy, stopping both words and movement when the man who entered was not John Wilmot. She didn’t see his face clearly at first because he was already sweeping into a bow and his hat obscured it, an expensive beaver, with an outsize blue ostrich feather curled into the crown, a vivid contrast to him and this setting, a dazzle of colour against the drab.

  He straightened. “Come, don’t you know me, Mrs. Chalker?” he said, after a moment. “Nay, you are being coy with me.” He smiled. “For how can you not know the man whom you have secretly loved this many a day?”

  She did know him, of course, and everything that had been murky in her mind came clear. Her husband had not told her what he was about the day he disappeared. But it was only days after she had confessed her fear … of the man who stood before her now. John had vowed to deal with this lord who so disturbed her in the theatre, who’d gripped and bruised her wrist. But her John was the one dealt with. By this man. Never in her life of seeing things that were there, and those that were not, had she been more certain of anything.

  All this thought flashed in near a second; the same one that had her snatching out the knife, driving it at his face so fast that only a jerk of his head saved his eye, at the cost of a cut along his temple. She pulled the blade back, but his hand fell upon her, fingers like metal wrapping around her wrist, instantly squeezed so hard she had no choice but to drop the weapon. She shot her left hand up, fingernails reaching, but his other gripped her as she struggled, jerked, kicked, could not break free. The man was as strong as she’d ever known. Stronger even than John Chalker.

  The memory of her husband, how she’d last seen him, took her strength; she sagged, ceasing her struggles. He dragged her across the room, dropped her onto the one chair. As she rubbed her agonized wrists, he stooped to pick up her knife, at the same time pulling a square of linen from a sleeve to press against his temple. The white mouchoir crimsoned immediately. “Well,” he said, “I do not blame you for this. You were startled, that is all. And it shows you are a woman of courage, of spirit. That is good. You will need spirit for the week we will have together in this house—” he dabbed at the gash “—and for the time beyond its walls. You will need it to survive the End of Days that is so swiftly approaching. Which you and I shall face hand in hand.”

  He crossed to the table, placed his fingers on the book that lay open there, beneath the martyred saint, leaving a trace of blood on the paper. “Spirit, and faith also,” he continued. “I suspect you have not been instructed in the truest words of God, those found mainly in the prophecies of Revelation and of Daniel, have you?” That half smile again. “No matter. It will give me the greatest pleasure to instruct you.”

  She’d regained enough breath to propel herself to the door. It was not locked. She flung it open. Maggs stood on the other side. When she tried to push past him, he seized her arms, shoved her back into the room.

  “There is something else,” Lord Garnthorpe continued, as if she had not moved. “Someone else. A great sinner, full of filth and degradation. Yet one who was corrupted by a devil in the guise of a lord. It is our duty to King Jesus to save them. Just as I shall save you.”

  He left the room. Maggs stared down, his face blank. She heard Garnthorpe cross the hall, a second door open, feet descending. That sob came again, louder, then it stopped. Sarah heard Garnthorpe returning and the sound of something being dragged.

  He entered, hauling someone behind him. “Behold,” he said, “the mother of harlots.”

  And he threw Lucy Ab
solute onto the floor.

  28

  LEVELS OF HELL

  One week later

  “Coke? Captain Coke? Are you awake?”

  The whisper entered his dream. It was not welcome.

  He was in a bath, the one his sisters had drawn for him when he’d visited home after three months in the field. They’d teased him for the colour he’d turned the water. Murkier than a pond, they said. A habitation for frogs, they said. He told them he’d eaten frogs when he’d followed the prince to France, though he thought that strange, since he’d only gone to France after his sisters were dead. Still, he began casting around in the warm murk for anything living. Right now, a frog fried in a parsleyed butter would be the best thing he’d ever tasted. A raw one would do near as well.

  “Wake, Captain. ’Tis time.”

  Captain? Hadn’t he asked her to call him Will?

  “Sarah,” he said loudly.

  “Hush, man!” A finger was placed on his mouth. “You’ll rouse them all.”

  He brushed Pitman’s hand from his face. “Leave me be.”

  “Then I would also have to leave you in Limbo. Rise. Macready’s here.”

  “I am. Still alive! Still alive!”

  There was little light there during the day, just what the cracks in the stones of the gatehouse floor, directly above, admitted. The only way to tell day from night was when there was no light at all—as now. But Coke heard the distinctive huh-huh-huh wheeze of the Scotsman, like a magpie’s mocking laugh, could picture his ragged face. The nose half gone, bitten off in a fight, he said. The black crossed eyes. The toad skin he wore on a string around his neck as a ward against the plague. Perhaps the talisman had worked, for Macready was most distinctive in this: he had survived in Limbo for nearly six months. Three months longer than any in living memory. The guards made bets on his longevity, and many were happy to hear that wheeze each morning. Some fed him a little better, like a fighting cock they kept alive for sport.