The Fire Court

by Andrew Taylor

  The trouble with the bandages was that they concealed so much of Marwood’s face that Cat could read nothing from it. He turned his head, very slowly as though even the slightest movement required careful monitoring to lessen the pain, and looked out of the window. It was a bright day and the sky was blue beyond the smudges of smoke rising from the south bank of the Thames. The river sent its smell into the room, where it mingled with the darker, more disagreeable odours from the Savoy’s graveyard.

  ‘Have you any word of what’s happening?’ he said. ‘Is anyone looking for you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Sam says he’s heard nothing. I think Limbury and Gromwell wouldn’t want to let the world know their business.’

  ‘But privately? Have they made enquiries?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably. They might send one of their creatures to Henrietta Street. But they can learn nothing there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marwood said. ‘I have brought you and Hakesby into this affair, and now you cannot escape the consequences. Will they threaten him?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘But he’s not alone in the house, and he has powerful friends. And they must fear publicity.’

  ‘If I had known, I would—’

  ‘You can’t undo what is done,’ Cat said. ‘Besides …’

  Besides, she thought, Marwood had helped her at the time of her father’s death; she owed him for that, and she always would.

  After a pause, he said, ‘Does he know where you are?’

  ‘Hakesby? No.’ She imagined the distress that he must be feeling but did not allow herself to dwell on it. ‘There was no time. Besides, it’s better that he doesn’t know. I didn’t want to risk Brennan finding out where I was. I don’t trust Brennan. He’s up to something.’

  Brennan, she thought. Who stinks like a fox. Who may be even worse than he seems.

  ‘Brennan,’ Marwood said. ‘The draughtsman … Did I tell you that I saw him when I left you and Mr Hakesby? I can’t remember.’

  For a moment her courage failed her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last Friday. When I left you on my way to Clifford’s Inn. He was waiting outside the Lamb.’

  ‘So he followed us there,’ Cat said. ‘He saw us together that evening when you came to the Drawing Office. And he knows about the Fire Court case and Dragon Yard, of course, and Mr Poulton and Sir Philip Limbury. And God knows what else. Is he working for—’

  ‘Limbury,’ Marwood said. ‘He must be the key to all this.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Who else could it be? Celia’s lover …’ Cat paused, and out of nowhere came a bitter anger that filled her so completely she found it hard to breathe. ‘The man she made herself beautiful for.’

  ‘So.’ Marwood’s fingers tightened on the back of the chair, and the knuckles whitened. But when he next spoke his voice was level. ‘Limbury needed Celia Hampney’s support to ensure he gained the outcome he wanted for Dragon Yard. He sought out her acquaintance at Madam Grove’s, and he wooed her. Did she even know who he is? Or that he’s married? Perhaps she was so hot for him, she didn’t care.’

  ‘Of course she cared,’ Cat said. ‘Perhaps he gave her a verbal contract of betrothal. Who knows? Perhaps …’

  He looked at her in silence, and she was aware that she had aroused his curiosity. Why did she care? She hardly knew the answer herself. Only that she did care.

  ‘And then,’ Marwood went on, ‘did she refuse to do what Limbury wanted about her Dragon Yard leasehold?’

  Cat stared at him, almost rejoicing in the vicarious anger that possessed her. ‘So he flew into a passion and stabbed her.’

  ‘In which case,’ Marwood said, ‘who was the other woman? The one my father followed? Did he have to die because he had seen a dead woman or a living one?’

  ‘There’s no one to ask,’ Cat said. ‘No one who will speak to us.’

  Even as she was speaking, it occurred to her that there was someone who might talk, if she could be discovered.

  ‘Speak to us?’ He rubbed the bandage on his left hand. ‘You must not do anything. I’ll brook no argument. I’ve harmed you enough already.’

  She curtsied, mocking his tone.

  ‘I want a mirror,’ he said.

  When Cat went down to the kitchen, she found Sam at the table cleaning a pistol and whistling almost soundlessly between his teeth. Beside the pistol was a long, thin dagger, its blade recently silver-edged by the whetstone.

  He was sitting on the bench with his back to the wall. Propped within easy reach was a heavy stick. Margaret was tending a pot over the fire. She had her back to the room. Backs cannot speak, but sometimes they may betray emotion: Margaret’s showed fury.

  Sam glanced up at Cat. ‘How’s master?’

  ‘Out of bed.’

  ‘More fool him,’ Margaret said without turning round.

  ‘He wants a mirror,’ Cat said. ‘He wants to see what he’s become.’

  ‘Better not. Not yet.’

  Sam squinted down the barrel of the pistol. ‘Be careful what you wish for. That’s what I say.’

  Margaret threw him a look. ‘I wish you’d put that thing away. And the dagger.’

  Cat said, ‘I want to go out. Will you help me?’

  Sam set down the pistol. ‘How?’

  ‘Hire a pair of oars to wait for me at the Savoy Stairs. And make sure that no one’s watching out for me. I want to go into the City.’

  ‘Does master know?’ Margaret said bluntly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you tell him?’

  Cat thought of the poor apology for a man in the bedchamber upstairs, half desiring and half fearing to see his own face. ‘No,’ she said.

  Long shadows danced among the ruins. Soon it would be midsummer, and there would be madness in the air, even more than there seemed to be now.

  The boatman had dropped her at the stairs by the ruins of Barnard’s Castle. Cat walked up to St Paul’s, skirted the fence around it and turned into Cheapside. She threaded her way through the crowd, heading east.

  The street bustled with life, albeit life of a makeshift kind. People clustered round the booths and shanties, following the old rituals of buying and selling, looking and wanting. In the surrounding alleys and lanes, it was a different story. Life was scantier here, more furtive, more precarious. Few people went there after dark unless they had no choice in the matter.

  To the north of Cheapside, the Dragon Yard site was in a happier condition. Since Cat had last been here, the posts on the site’s boundary had been replaced with a whitewashed fence designed to mark out the extent of Poulton’s territory beyond dispute. The pathways were wider than they had been when she was last here, and some of the chimney stacks remaining from the former buildings had been taken down.

  Four labourers, working in pairs, were shovelling debris into barrows and wheeling them into the north-west corner of the site, where there was already a great heap of spoil – stone, ashes, fragments of tile and timber, and broken bricks. Among them were clumps of green, for the weeds were colonizing the ruins.

  Mr Poulton’s angular figure was propped against the side of a horse trough. He was still wearing his skullcap, and his clothes seemed shabbier than before. He was talking urgently to a fifth workman, older and better dressed than the others. But when he saw Cat approaching, he dismissed the man and beckoned her to approach.

  ‘I had Mr Hakesby’s letter this morning,’ he said without preamble. His cheeks were flushed. His face was more haggard than before, and he spoke rapidly. ‘He thinks I should stop the work until the Fire Court reconvenes. Tell him I will not wait. Why should I?’

  ‘Sir, I haven’t—’

  Poulton cut her off. ‘Why should I waste time because Limbury chooses to make a fool of himself? My foreman can’t keep his men waiting indefinitely, unless I pay them for doing nothing. Good workmen can go where they please at present, there’s such a demand for them. No, the sooner we s
tart, the better for everyone. And we can’t rebuild before the site is cleared.’

  ‘But if the Fire Court decides for Sir Philip?’

  ‘It won’t. They are men of sense. He has Court connections, of course, and that’s a worry, I won’t deny it. But I have my own friends here in the City, and I have made sure they will speak for me in the right ears. Even in Whitehall.’

  If the contents of Mistress Hampney’s will went against Poulton, all this expense, all this effort, would be for nothing. But there was something admirable about Poulton’s obstinacy. And something foolish too.

  ‘Thank your master for his advice,’ he went on, ‘but say I will not let my men stand idle. Was this why he sent you? To see if I had heeded what he said?’

  ‘I don’t come from him, sir.’

  Poulton overrode her, his mind running ahead with feverish speed. ‘He promised me a copy of the plans for one of my subtenants, and I told him he would find me here. Have you got it?’ He seemed to see her properly for the first time, to realize that she had come empty-handed. He frowned. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I don’t have it. I don’t come from Mr Hakesby.’

  That caught his attention at last. He glanced at Cat, and the skin tightened over his face. ‘What is all this? Is something amiss? Have you run away from your master?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Cat hesitated, for she had in fact done precisely that. ‘Pray, may I ask you something? About Mistress Hampney.’

  He frowned at her, and in that moment she saw herself through his eyes: a maidservant betraying an impudent and inexplicable curiosity.

  She hurried on, ‘Forgive me, sir, it’s your niece’s maid I’m looking for. Tabitha.’

  Poulton’s lips twisted and his face puckered, as if he had eaten something bitter. ‘If your master’s looking for a servant, I wouldn’t advise looking in that direction. She’s a lying jade.’

  ‘It’s not for Mr Hakesby.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘For the sake of your niece’s reputation, sir.’ In for a penny, Cat thought, in for a pound. ‘And to do you a service.’

  ‘How can you help poor Celia now?’

  ‘As you said yourself, master, Tabitha is a lying jade. What if she told Mistress Lee a pack of lies about her mistress?’

  ‘If she wouldn’t tell the truth to Mistress Lee,’ the old man said, ‘why should she talk to you? A stranger.’

  ‘That’s exactly the reason. I’m a stranger to her. She has no reason to fear me. More than that, I’m just a servant, as she is, and servants like nothing better than boasting about how they cheated their masters.’

  Poulton snorted. ‘True enough.’

  ‘Then where may I find her, sir?’

  He hesitated. One of the workmen dropped his shovel with a clatter. Cat looked towards the sound. In the distance, a man was walking towards Dragon Yard – not from Cheapside but from the west, through the ruins. He was too far away for Cat to see his face, but she was almost sure she recognized the shape of him, and the way he walked, head down, swinging from side to side as if sniffing for a scent.

  Brennan. The eternal fox. He was carrying something under his arm, perhaps the folder containing the copy of the Dragon Yard plans.

  ‘Your pardon, sir,’ Cat said rapidly. ‘Tabitha?’

  ‘Eh? Yes. With her mother, I suppose. That’s why the girl came to Celia. Her mother had been our laundry maid before she married.’

  ‘Where does the mother live?’

  ‘On the Surrey side. Lambeth? I remember Mistress Lee saying there was a tavern nearby called the Cardinal’s Hat, because we wondered if it had once belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, or to some other Papist. I wouldn’t put it past the girl to be a secret Papist herself. She would murder us all in our beds, given half a chance.’

  Brennan was walking more quickly now. He was looking towards them, shading his eyes.

  Poulton was frowning at her. ‘What ails you now, girl?’

  Brennan shouted something, perhaps Cat’s name, but the word was snatched away by the wind blowing off the river. She turned and ran.

  Brennan cornered her in a ruined bakehouse somewhere between Walbrook and St Swithin’s Lane. Cat had tried to throw him off her scent by ducking and diving among the ruins, on the assumption that she must know London better than a man from Oxford would do. But she had reckoned without his determination, his longer legs and, most of all, the fact that the London she had known before the Fire was gone for ever. In this wasteland, among the ash heaps and broken buildings, she was as much a stranger as he was.

  No one else was in sight. They were alone in the heart of the City. The bakehouse floor was three feet below the ground level, and its brick walls were still high enough to prevent a quick escape. Brennan had stopped in the doorless doorway. He was panting. His face was red with the effort of running. He had lost the portfolio in the chase, and his hat as well. His pale eyes darted to and fro, assessing the nature of the trap he had driven her into.

  Cat’s hand slipped through her skirt and into her pocket. Her heart was beating wildly. Her fingers wrapped themselves around the handle of the knife. She backed against the curving breastwork of the oven. She drew out the knife, holding it so he could see the blade. She readied herself to duck, to dive, to spring.

  ‘Don’t. Pray don’t, Jane. I beg you.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, her voice as ragged as his with lack of breath. ‘I – I’ll kill you.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said – almost wailed. ‘You don’t understand.’

  Her fingers tightened around the knife. ‘Understand what?’

  ‘I wish you no harm. I swear it on my mother’s grave.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’ve no skill with women. I thought you would like a man to be masterful—’

  ‘You? Masterful?’

  ‘I don’t know how to say sweet words, how to court a girl. But I – I admire you. Truly. From the bottom of my heart. And now you will hate me for ever.’

  Cat stared at him, temporarily robbed of words. She was small, and she made nothing of herself; she knew that, thank God, she lacked the voluptuous charms that made men lust after a woman; nor did she smile at them and flutter and seek to trap their attention: yet Brennan had tried to woo her. It was beyond understanding.

  And it disgusted her. What he could not have known was that, however he had approached her, she would have hated him for the very fact of his trying to court her. The last time a man had spoken such words to her, he had ended by raping her. Then her only resource had been to use her knife on him. So naturally she had been prepared to use her knife on Brennan now. Or, to put it more plainly, she had wanted to use her knife on him.

  Neither of them moved. The light was softening and fading. Slowly she lowered the blade.

  ‘Why did you run away?’ he said. ‘Old Hakesby’s beside himself with worry. Someone was asking for you at the drawing office this morning.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A man. Said he used to know you.’

  Cat frowned. ‘What was he like?’

  ‘In his middle years.’

  ‘You must have noticed more than that.’

  Brennan shrugged. ‘He was tall,’ he said. ‘No flesh on him, thin as a pole.’ He paused for thought. ‘Not many teeth in his mouth.’

  Was that the man that Marwood had seen watching them from Fetter Lane when they were in the ruins with the body of Celia Hampney? Sourface, Sam called him.

  ‘Looked as if he had a mouthful of vinegar?’

  ‘Yes. He said he was in a hurry. He didn’t leave a name.’

  ‘What condition?’

  ‘Respectable. Well-dressed, even. Could have been a clerk or a shopkeeper or even a servant – a servant like you, I mean.’

  He coloured again, the blood beneath the skin drowning the freckles. It was in its way a compliment that Brennan thought of her as a superior sort of maid, the sort with accomplishments.


  ‘Was it you who talked to him?’

  Brennan nodded.

  ‘What did you say about me?’

  ‘I told him you were away, and I wasn’t sure when you’d be back.’ He came a step closer to her. ‘What’s happened? Why did you run away? I don’t understand. Nor does the master.’

  ‘There are men who wish me harm,’ she said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘Are you with that man?’ Brennan demanded, taking a step towards her. His voice had acquired a surly edge. ‘Is that where you went? To him.’

  It was her turn to colour. ‘What man?’

  ‘The one I saw you with last Friday. He came to the office, and then you and Hakesby went to the Lamb in Wych Street with him. What is he to you?’

  ‘You followed us,’ she snapped. ‘How dare you?’

  He took a step backwards. ‘I wanted to know if I had a rival.’

  ‘A rival? Dear God, you give yourself airs. You’re nothing to me.’ She saw Brennan’s face crumple. ‘That man saw Mr Hakesby on a matter of business, and I chanced to be there.’

  ‘I followed him,’ Brennan said. ‘I know all about him. After he left the Lamb, he went to Clifford’s Inn, where the Fire Court is. Did you know that? They had a fire that night and he was badly hurt in it. I was there – they were shouting in Fleet Street for volunteers to help put out the flames. Another man was killed, burned to death. It’s to do with the Fire Court, isn’t it? The Dragon Yard case? And Marwood’s lending master money, isn’t he?’

  Her old suspicions revived. ‘How do you know his name?’

  ‘Marwood,’ Brennan said, as if the name were a curse. ‘Marwood. The Temple Bar crossing-sweeper recognized him. I made enquiries. Nice little clerkship at Whitehall, eh? All perquisites and fees, I’ll be bound, and not much work. How did he get it? Did his father make interest with someone? I bet he can afford a wife if he wants one. Burns and all. Do you know they’re after him too?’

  She heard the pleasure in his voice. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I followed them when they took him home that night, to his lodgings in the Savoy. I thought he was dead at first. I wasn’t the only one who was following him, either. That man was as well. I saw him that night.’