The Ashes of London

by Andrew Taylor

  Gradually I pieced together a story. The unknown comrade had sent a message near the end of August, asking her husband to meet him one evening. Master Sneyd had returned from the meeting, full of mysterious excitement, but he would tell his wife nothing of what had transpired. There had been other meetings, she thought, and her husband had seemed happier in himself than she had seen him for a long time.

  ‘Not since Oliver seized power. Fifteen years or more. God forgive me, I rejoiced to see him so cheerful.’

  I understood the timing of that all too well, for as a child I had seen a similar pattern in my father. After the execution of the King, the Fifth Monarchists had nursed high hopes that theirs would be the dominant voice in government, and that they would make England a godly country, fit for Christ’s return. But Oliver Cromwell had had a different idea of God and other plans for England. He had swiftly destroyed their hopes and consolidated his own power.

  ‘This man, this comrade,’ I said. ‘Do you—’

  ‘Master Coldridge?’ she interrupted.

  ‘What? I thought you didn’t know his name.’

  ‘Then you didn’t listen properly. How like a man.’ Anger revitalized her, and I glimpsed the woman she usually was, without this load of grief weighing her down. ‘I said he wouldn’t tell me. But I knew. I knew by the letters he sent on. They went to Master Coldridge.’

  The flare of vitality died away. She wiped her eyes with her apron.

  ‘Letters? What letters?’

  ‘He’d been taking them down to the letter office for years. He thought I didn’t know.’

  ‘Where did they come from?’

  ‘How should I know? It must have been when he was out at work or with his friends. He made money by it, I know that. Not much but something.’ Her voice trailed away. Her fingers plucked at her apron.

  I was losing her. I tried one last question: ‘This Coldridge: do you think he served with your husband in the late war? What was your husband’s regiment?’

  Mistress Sneyd looked wildly at me. ‘Colonel Harrison’s.’

  That answered more than one question. Harrison had been another Fifth Monarchist. He had commanded the escort that brought the captured King to Windsor not long before his execution. The son of a butcher, he had been a brutal and notably efficient officer; he had also been named as a Regicide, and had been the first man to be hanged, drawn and quartered after the King’s return.

  ‘But why do you want to know this?’ Her voice was thick with suspicion. ‘Are you one of them, another dangerous dreamer from the old days? Or are you a spy?’

  ‘I’m a friend, mistress. I cannot say more.’

  ‘You foolish men,’ she said. ‘With your secrets and your spies and your killing and your burning. You cannot truly believe that God wants such things of his creatures? Can you not let us live in peace?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  AFTER I LEFT Mistress Sneyd, I should have gone back to Whitehall and talked to Williamson. But I needed to think about what I had learned.

  I walked up past Staples Inn and into Holborn. My head churned with uncomfortable thoughts. Mistress Sneyd had ordered me from her sight, cursing me for the news I had brought her. The best she could hope for now was a life of drudgery. As for the worst, that depended on Master Williamson and his masters.

  It was possible that the government would order Mistress Sneyd’s arrest after I had made my report. If the worst came to the worst, I thought, they might also think it prudent to place my father in custody again. I had little doubt that another dose of confinement would kill him. But he was an obvious target for their suspicion. He was not only a Fifth Monarchy man but he had also known Sneyd.

  Anything to do with Fifth Monarchists concerned the authorities. They must be aware as well as I was that Fifth Monarchy men had always held 1666 to be a year of great importance, for 666 was the number of the Great Beast in the Book of Revelation. Besides, when all the numeral letters in the Latin tongue were written down in diminishing numerical value, they made MDCLXVI, which was 1666. My father was quite sure that this extraordinary numerological phenomenon must portend some great event in that year. He was also certain about the form this would take: after the Beast would be the Second Coming of the Messiah, and King Jesus would reign over us all for ever and ever.

  Which meant, of course, our sovereign lord King Charles II must be none other than the Great Beast. And, to make way for King Jesus, he must, like his father, be killed.

  At the end of Fetter Lane, I waited at the crossing for a break in the traffic. The rain was heavier than it had been. I needed to find shelter and something to eat. An empty stomach wouldn’t help me think.

  It struck me then that I wasn’t far from Barnabas Place. It lay a little further eastwards, north of Holborn. The image of Olivia Alderley’s face swam into my mind. I had a sudden urge to see her, or at least to be near her. More to the point, I remembered a tavern outside the gates of the house. I might as well take shelter there as anywhere and combine food for the soul with food for the belly.

  The tavern was at the sign of the Three Feathers. I took a seat near the end of the long table and ordered ale and soup. I had a view through the tavern window of the closed gates of Barnabas Place. I watched the rain splashing into the puddles among the cobbles in front of the gateway. Half a dozen beggars were finding partial shelter under the great arch. I thought about Olivia Alderley, my father and the Great Beast until my head began to hurt.

  I had almost finished eating when there was a commotion across the road in front of Barnabas Place. One leaf of the great gates opened. Two servants shouted at the beggars and shook their fists.

  In the middle of this confusion, a large, red-headed man trundled a barrow under the arch and pushed it in the direction of Holborn. He was easy to see partly because of his size – well over six foot. His hair was loose, and spread below the brim of the brown hat and over his shoulders. The jolting of the cobbles made his progress slow. He stared about him as he went, like a countryman new to town.

  He passed close to the window where I sat. He was wheeling a box on the barrow. A servant’s box by the look of it, and unexpectedly familiar. Below the lock, two neatly formed capital letters had been burned into the wood.

  I had seen the box in Barnabas Place with Master Mundy at my shoulder. It had belonged to Jem, the servant who had attacked his master’s son and been flogged to death before my very eyes. Mistress Alderley had told me that her husband had written to Jem’s relation, asking her to remove the box. So, on the face of it, there was nothing strange about this.

  Nevertheless, on impulse I threw down the money to pay my score and went out of the tavern. Keeping well back, I followed the red-headed man. He crossed Holborn, pushing his barrow briskly over the road with a confidence that suggested he was more used to London than he had at first appeared, and turned into Fetter Lane.

  The box was the last trace of the man who had attacked Edward Alderley. There had been a poignancy about its contents – the silver cup, the doll and unreadable Bible – but nothing among them to suggest that Jem had nursed murderous inclinations towards his employers.

  Fetter Lane ran southwards to Fleet Street. The first half was much as it had always been, though sootier than before. But the Fire had reached the southern half of the lane and wrought its dark transformations on the buildings there. To the right, undamaged London continued westwards into the suburbs. But to the left there opened a prospect of the blackened City wall, with the ruins of St Paul’s rising starkly on its hill beyond Ludgate.

  To the east, there was nothing but ashes and ruins for nearly a mile and a half – from here in Fetter Lane, west of the City boundary, to the Tower of London.

  The desolation struck me like a blow, fresh and painful, as if all this destruction had been newly made yesterday, and as if this were my first sight of it. It was grief, I think, nothing more or less. I knew it was absurd. But I had noticed this reaction in others as well as in
myself: that we mourned for our ravaged city as if for a mother; or as Mistress Sneyd grieved for her husband. The sorrow came in waves, just as it had when my own mother died.

  Ashes and ruins. Tears pricked my eyelids. I swore aloud, for such grief was of no earthly use to me, and two clergymen, passing in the opposite direction, gave me disapproving looks.

  ‘Drunk,’ said one, speaking in a normal voice as though I were a block of wood incapable of hearing anything, let alone understanding it.

  ‘Or mazed,’ said the other.

  ‘Or both,’ said the first, with the air of one covering all eventualities.

  Ashes and ruins? Nothing left from here to the Tower?

  I stopped so abruptly that one of the clergymen almost bumped into me. Before the Fire, most of the principal carriers had been based at one or other of the City inns, where the wagons left almost daily for all parts of the kingdom. I was sure that Mistress Alderley had said that Jem’s relation was a woman living in Oxford. The Oxford route was exceptionally busy – the court had moved there last year because of the plague and stayed there for months; it had returned to London only a month or two after Christmas. The wagons left the City by Newgate, crossed Holborn Bridge, and travelled westwards into the Oxford road.

  But most of the City’s inns were no longer there.

  At the foot of Fetter Lane, the red-headed man was turning right in the direction of Temple Bar and the Strand.

  So where the devil was he going? It was possible that an Oxford carrier now left from somewhere in Fleet Street, say, or the Strand. Possible, but scarcely convenient. A set of stables in Holborn would have made much more sense, or even further west, and there were plenty of inns that would have welcomed the business. Or perhaps Jem’s box was to be stored somewhere in London before it went to the carrier.

  Possible, yes, but not what I had expected. It was a kink in the probable, like a break in the pattern of one of the Alderleys’ Turkey carpets.

  At the bottom of the lane, I crossed to the other side and turned into Fleet Street. It was more crowded here and the red-headed man wheeled his barrow in the direction of Temple Bar. He was now nearly a hundred yards ahead, but it was easy to keep him in sight because of his hair and his height.

  A small, ragged boy collided with me, as if by accident. I swore. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed movement on my other side. A second boy was approaching, keeping well back.

  I snarled at them. I reached for my purse with one hand and the hilt of my dagger with the other.

  The pickpockets sheered away like startled magpies rising from carrion. They darted across the roadway, narrowly escaping collision with the horses of a wagon lumbering towards the City.

  My hand still on my dagger, I backed against the wall while my breathing returned to normal. Sometimes the pickpockets operated in packs, and a second attempt would be made on a potential victim while he was recovering from the first. I glanced westward down Fleet Street.

  The man was gone.

  I swore again. The incident with the boys must have taken less than a minute. The man and the barrow could not have gone far. I started walking again, more quickly this time. I looked into shops, into taverns, and into the mouths of alleys.

  I asked two people, a manservant and a cook boy, whether they had seen a red-headed man with a barrow. The servant ignored me, for he saw my hand on my dagger, and hurried past. The cook boy shook his head, waited in vain for a penny and spat on the ground to relieve his feelings.

  The best possibility, I decided, was a lane scarcely wide enough to take a cart. It led to a paved court with a pump in the corner. It was a modestly prosperous enclave. The houses formed a terrace; they were not large, but they were newly built and with brick frontages. One had an apothecary’s shop on the ground floor, another a jeweller’s, and a third a superior establishment selling china imported from France and Germany. I paused by the pump and pretended to be making a note in my pocketbook.

  In the centre of the terrace was a gate which led, no doubt, to the private yards and cesspools behind the houses. If the man had gone anywhere in this court, it was probably through that gate. I looked up at the windows, which looked blankly back at me.

  After a moment, I returned to Fleet Street, crossed the road and went into a tavern. When the waiter came, I threw caution to the winds and ordered a jug of wine. As soon as the waiter returned, I asked the name of the court opposite.

  ‘Why, sir,’ he said, wiping greasy hands on a greasy apron. ‘That’s Three Cocks Yard.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I HAD NOT been inside St Paul’s since the Fire. Now, when I left the tavern, I knew it was time to go there. Perhaps it was because I was now a little drunk. Perhaps it was because I wanted to postpone my interview with Master Williamson.

  I had not made a conscious decision to avoid the place. My reluctance was instinctive, unexamined and unexplained, part and parcel of the mysterious grief for my lost London.

  The closer I came to the cathedral, the more ruinous it looked. Convocation House Yard had been fenced off, as had the remains of the cloisters and Chapter House. Carpenters had sealed the doorways and the Dean and Chapter had appointed watchmen to patrol the exterior by day and night. There had been attempts to loot graves in the first day or two, and the authorities were doing their best to put a stop to it.

  A stonemason’s boy directed me to the cathedral’s office of works. Here I negotiated with the watchman guarding the entrance to a temporary enclosure between cloister and nave, within the wider enclosure of the yard. Williamson had given me a general pass that vouched for me as a clerk attached to Lord Arlington’s office. Eventually this proved powerful enough to persuade the watchman to send for the Clerk to the Chapter.

  Master Frewin, an anxious-looking gentleman in his fifties, eyed me with a frown. ‘You want to go into the cathedral? But why?’

  When in doubt, a bare-faced but unassailable lie was the simplest policy. ‘My Lord Arlington wishes me to make an inspection, sir.’

  ‘But God knows, there have been inspections enough. And Dr Wren and his colleagues have advised His Majesty of the condition of the fabric.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. But now his lordship has commanded me to make notes on one or two particular points.’

  ‘Such as?’

  I stared at Master Frewin. ‘He does not wish me to discuss that.’

  I knew that my damp and shabby clothes did not inspire respect. But a confident manner and an air of borrowed authority had served me well in the past. I watched the emotions chase over the clerk’s face – irritation, doubt, calculation and even a touch of fear.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at length. ‘But I warn you, it’s dangerous. Walls collapse without warning. The floor is treacherous in many places. We’ve lost several men already. If you venture in there, you take your life in your own hands – you understand that?’

  I bowed. ‘Are there men working in there now?’

  ‘Of course.’ Master Frewin rubbed his forehead. Now he had decided to capitulate, his manner became almost confidential. ‘Come this way, and mind where you tread. We are trying to clear the rubble away, for we cannot do anything with that there. We are still waiting to hear whether they will repair or rebuild. It is a perfect nightmare.’

  ‘You are to be pitied, sir.’

  Frewin’s voice rose to a wail. ‘The King says one thing, the Dean another, and God knows what goes on in the Lord Mayor’s head, if anything. Dr Wren would build a new Jerusalem if he had the chance, but where’s the money to come from? And all the time I’m obliged to do what I can to keep the place safe.’

  ‘One thing first, sir. I am commanded to enquire about the body that was found in Bishop Kempe’s chantry after the Fire.’

  ‘Layne? Master Alderley’s manservant? Poor devil.’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Oh yes. I saw all the dead. It was often hard to know whether the Fire killed them or whether they were centuries old.�
��

  ‘Had you seen Layne before?’ I asked. ‘In life?’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know him from Adam. Master Alderley asked me the same question when he came here the other day with Dr Wren.’

  While we were talking, Frewin had led me across the yard piled high with salvaged stones to a large shed built against the cloister wall, where a number of men were at work sorting and recording salvaged materials. He pulled aside a heavy leather curtain on the back wall. An opening had been punched through the masonry, and a new door inserted in the opening. Beyond it were the remains of the north walk of the cloister. The ruins of the Chapter House were visible through the windows on the right, which had lost their glass.

  ‘This way, sir. On the left at the end. That was once the cathedral’s south door.’

  Part of the door, a blackened mass of wood and iron, still hung on its hinges. It had been propped open with a baulk of timber. Beyond it was the long, roofless nave.

  I paused in the doorway, assaulted by the din. Three labourers with hammers and chisels were at work nearby, shearing away blocks of dressed stone from the rubble core of fallen walls. Under the crossing, a gang of labourers was singing a drinking song in time with the scrapes of their shovels. Someone was shouting near the west end of the nave, where the modern portico had been attached to the main body of the church in the previous reign.

  A network of paths had been cleared through the rubble. Men dragged barrows laden with stones and other debris. Each barrow required two or three men to move it, and their iron-shod wheels grated on the ground. The air was full of swearing and grunting and groaning.

  ‘Bedlam, sir,’ Master Frewin said. ‘I never thought I should live to see such a thing in St Paul’s. God knows, it was bad enough under Oliver, but when the King came into his own again, we hoped the good times had returned with him. What fools we were.’

  There were tears in the man’s eyes. More grief. I looked up, to avoid his face. The blackened pillars and crumbling walls rose to the open sky, heavy with rain clouds.