The Flame Eater

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  The squire sighed. “His lordship also forbade such a move,” he explained apologetically. “My master has informed me that no single building ever absorbs the pestilence alone. Death spreads, my lady, and will be raging throughout Nottingham in a day or less. They will either bar the gates to us, or welcome us in to share their burden and their graves. His lordship’s cousins, having been previously in close contact with the miasma of the disease, may already be sickening. If not, they will understand what is happening around them, and will leave. Forgive me, my lady but I will carry out his lordship’s orders. We depart for Gloucestershire at first light tomorrow.”

  “Without me,” said Emeline, standing and glaring at him. “You have no power to force me, and I choose not to return to my parents. I will go where I wish.”

  “You will not, my dearest,” said another voice behind her. “You will ride with us to safety on the morrow,” Martha said, “as his lordship has instructed. It is right and proper, and you know it and will not argue, not with me nor with those who love you. And now, my own precious, you will eat a little, and cry a little if you must, and then come upstairs with me while I dress your hair and sing to you.”

  White lipped, Emeline gazed back down at the scribbled message in her hand. “He says he’ll come and get me when he’s sure he’s all right,” she mumbled. “But what am I to do if he doesn’t come? Believe him dead in a gutter? Will I never know?”

  “He has promised to send regular messages,” David said.

  “Promised? I don’t believe his promises anymore.” Her fingers curled around the screwed paper. “If he can lie about this – of all things. So his mother died, and the other children. So he has terrible memories. But he didn’t die. He was there, but he survived. And so, I suppose, did Peter.”

  “I understand, being the eldest son,” the squire answered, “the young Lord Peter was sent away at the first signs and went to stay with his father at Westminster. But it is true, Lord Nicholas remained and survived. I am told he was a little unwell but not for long. Then the pestilence moved on, leaving the child alone to mourn the passing of his family.”

  “If he dies this time,” Emeline whispered, “I will never, ever forgive him.”

  The journey west, laborious through mud and overflowing fords, improved a little as they headed into the setting sun and its steadily later hour. Finally the weather brightened and a mild spring breeze bundled the clouds into small fluff puffs across the blue.

  It was Avice who first ran from the house to the busy stables, grabbing at her sister’s arm. “I heard you were coming, but I didn’t believe it at first. Then Papa said you were just hours away, so of course I knew it was true. So why did you leave the castle? He’s got rid of you already?”

  The baroness stood at the doorway. “Avice, be quiet. Come indoors at once, Emma. Hippocras and oat cakes will be served in my chambers. Avice, you may come up too, but only if you promise to behave with dignity.”

  “I don’t believe in promises anymore,” muttered Emeline.

  “Which is just as well,” said Avice, dancing alongside. “Since I have a great deal to say, and keeping dignified and quiet would be quite beyond my power.”

  Emeline stood gazing at her mother and sister, and knew she was crying when her mother stepped immediately forwards and embraced her. “My dearest, has it been so hard? Whatever has happened, remember this is your sanctuary and you are safe with us. At this very moment, your Papa is in the chapel, praying for you.”

  “Praying I won’t stay too long.”

  The baroness sniffed. “There’s no need for childish retorts, my dear, whatever problems you have been facing. You are not the only one to suffer you know. We have recently heard the most terrible news, for her sovereign highness the queen is dead these several days gone, and the court is deep in mourning.”

  Emeline blinked. “Of the pestilence?”

  “Oh, good gracious no,” her mother said, pulling away. “I believe it was the bloody cough, although we have not heard all the details of course and rumour rides a faster horse than truth. I met the dear lady on only two occasions, but she was most beautiful, and most gracious. I hear the king is devastated.”

  “It is a cruel and wretched world,” said Emeline.

  She was bustled indoors, her cloak taken, and led up the staircase, Martha close behind, and Avice calling, “If you shut the door against me, I will scream.”

  Then the baroness, turning aside, said, “I must see to the arrangements first, my dear, and will be with you shortly. Wait for me upstairs, drink some spiced wine while it is still warm, and please rest.” There was a small fire lit and hippocras steamed in its earthenware jug, the shutters were down, a bleary sunshine searched the chamber’s distant corners, and Emeline sat on the padded settle close to the hearth, wiping her eyes on her sister’s proffered kerchief. She could not rest, but resisted Avice’s questions until finally her mother reappeared, and sat beside her. Clearly the baroness had been informed by the servants something of what had happened.

  It was after a long but erratic explanation that the baroness leaned back in her chair and sighed. “A sad tale, my dear, but it seems young Nicholas has behaved with chivalry as he should. To bring you into danger would have been wicked. I trust we see him again soon.”

  “But he wasn’t right, Maman. Everything was wrong.” Emeline shook her head a little wildly. “He was the one who explained the terrible danger and insisted on running away. Then he contradicts himself and insists on looking after two children he’d never seen in his life before.”

  “Saving sick children! How noble,” breathed Avice. “Just like Sir Lancelot.”

  “I’m sure Lancelot never did anything so silly,” sniffed Emeline. “Certainly not in the stories I’ve read. And anyway, Nicholas never saved anyone either. The children died. And now perhaps he will too.”

  “Now use a little common sense, my dear,” said her mother, refilling Emeline’s cup. “You say the poor boy’s mother and siblings died right in front of him, and him just a child himself. The horror of that would certainly make him decide flight was the only solution when faced with the disease once again. Confronted with the pestilence, every man flees. But then to be confronted with two little children in such pain, and of course to remember his young brother and sister who he was unable to help at the time. It must have been a bitter test, Emma.”

  “If you stop crying,” complained Avice, “you could come to my bedchamber and tell me everything. It all sounds like such an adventure.”

  “I think I am going to cry forever,” sobbed Emeline.

  “But I am certainly comforted,” her mother continued, once again taking her in her arms, “to hear how well you’ve accustomed yourself to marriage at last, just as you should. Now you must pray for young Nicholas to be saved. Besides, your father will wish to hear your story.”

  “I don’t want to see Father Godwin.” She shook her head, laying it against her mother’s shoulder. “He’ll lecture me for hours. And I don’t want to see Papa either. He’ll lecture me too and I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m horribly miserable and I want sympathy, not lectures on doing my duty. If Papa needs explanations he can ask Nicholas’s body squire instead. David Witton is very self-righteous, but he’s incredibly loyal to Nicholas. I saw nothing of him on the journey, but he must be around somewhere.”

  “Mister Witton never arrived, my dear,” her mother told her. “Indeed, I have been informed that once he saw you safely on your way, he left the party. Still following your husband’s instructions, I presume, and I imagine he set off at once for whatever meeting place was previously arranged. He might also carry the seeds of the illness I suppose, so could not come here. He must be staying with your husband, either to look after him while he is ill, or to accompany him back here when free to do so.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Earl of Chatwyn’s heir entered London through the Moorgate shortly before midday. Mounted, and his squire c
lose behind, he pushed through the squash, threw a halfpenny to the suddenly cooperative gatekeeper, avoided the young woman leading two bleating heifers down to the Shambles, nodded to a twittering bustle of frocked priests as they elbowed their way under the low gateway, breathed a small sigh of relief, and finally followed the road leading through the city, trotting down Broad Street towards the strident excitement of the markets easily heard three lanes back. But once into the wide glow of welcoming bustle, Nicholas did not dismount, nor take interest in the stalls and their clamorous barter. His horse trotted on, keeping to the central gulley. David Witton rode just a half pace behind, with more of an eye to the shine and glamour of London’s thoroughfares than his master.

  It was as they approached the northern shadows of The Tower that Nicholas slowed, almost ambling, the horse’s hooves echoing on the damp cobbles. Along Seethinge Lane and immediately to his left was a sharp angled alleyway where he turned abruptly, dismounted almost at once, and then led his bay to the back entrance of a tenement building sharing its stables with two others almost identical. He and David stabled their horses and paid the keeper for three days in advance, hauled the stuffed saddle bags over their shoulders, entered the immediate bleak darkness of the open doorway beyond, and mounted the stairs.

  There was a low planked wooden door to the tiny occupancy on the third floor where they stopped, and stooped to enter. Most others of the dwellings within were simply curtained, loose screened or open to each other, and so unintentionally communal. Without greater division than a threadbare drop of unbleached hessian long turned stiff and black, or the unwieldy swing of an old leather blind, the oppressive dark was the only form of privacy. Families led their lives in permanent struggling enmity, one encroaching neighbour to the next. The weary insults and squabbles wove mutter and complaint into a constant chant, soon sufficiently familiar to fade into unnoticeable inconsequence, as does the sound of water flowing continuously over pebbles, becoming finally unheard.

  Few dwellings boasted the status of the privacy which a solid barrier brought, and as Nicholas closed the little door behind him and slammed home the heavy wooden bar on the inside, so the murmur of discontent was blocked. David Witton sighed, leaning back against the flaking plaster. He said, “I never thought to come back here, my lord, and never wished it. Yet now it’s the fourth time. I pray it will be the last.”

  Nicholas smiled. “Not the right prayer, my friend. You wish us dead so soon? The prayer I’d suggest is for living long enough to return a hundred times, and on into the future.”

  “If we live at all, my lord,” David objected, “I mean to give this place away to some other family in need.”

  “Then let us clean it up, worthy of the gift to be,” Nicholas said. “There are cobwebs, ashes, old candlewax, mouse shit and dirt of every kind. Did we leave it last time in such squalor? But the small comforts I remember supplying, have disappeared beneath the grime.”

  “The stools are stacked beneath the back window, my lord.” David whipped the oiled rag from the wall, revealing the window beneath, and the stools beside it. The draught immediately whistled through the loose parchment covering the unglazed opening. “Platters, cups, jugs and pans on the shelves over there. The three pallet beds are heaped next to the hearth. The cauldron is still hanging on its chain, and, as far as I can see in this wretched gloom, a small pile of faggots is ready for your tinder box, my lord.”

  “Candles?”

  “Some were left, as far as I remember.” David crossed to the shelves he had indicated and returned, holding two candles and a handful of burned out stubs. “If you see to the fire and the light, I’ll unpack our saddle bags.”

  “Unpack the food first.”

  “A pottage then, my lord? Shall I use the pork scraps and leeks you bought in Hendon Village?”

  “No, you won’t,” said Nicholas. “But I will. I’ll do the cooking myself. As I remember, your cooking is bad enough to frighten a starving rat. Which is near enough to how I feel.”

  “No rats here, my lord. In this tenement, they’d be eaten themselves before twitching a whisker.”

  He smiled. “Light the fire then, David. We need comfort, not talk.”

  David looked down sheepishly at the empty grate. “If you wish it my lord, but you know I have trouble ever getting a flame to spark, and all my attempts end in shame.”

  Nicholas laughed, knelt and reached for the faggots, twigs and tinderbox. The first tiny flames sent the shadows flying. There was just one chamber, thin plank walls held together with iron nails, gaps stuffed with rags, and the space within little larger than a public privy. The old door and the doorway it closed were low, far lower than most men’s heads, cheaper to build and helpful for conserving heat. This was the corner of the tenement building where the third floor quarters huddled around the central and roofless staircase, its iron steps open to the sky above, its sides flanked by the desperation of London’s poor. Nicholas spread two pallet beds against the walls and dragged one of the stools closer to the little hearth. The chimney, rising through all floors above and below, had neither flue nor draw, so smoked with a dry persistency which blew back and coloured everything drab, but warmed the room, and also helped warm those above where families who had nothing to burn could still huddle close to the chimney breast where the smoking heat of flame swirled up from below.

  David brought water from the butt outside the door, which caught rain from the roofless square above the stairs. “There’s a toad in the barrel,” he said, “and not much water. No doubt the neighbours have been helping themselves.”

  “Having been months since anyone lived here, they’d be mad not to. Unless the toad drank it. But I doubt stewed toad would add much flavour to the pottage.” David was scrubbing the leeks as Nicholas prepared the pork rind. “So I intend eating what I can first, at least sufficient to keep myself alive until I die of the Pestilence. After dinner I shall dutifully examine my groin for signs of buboes, bed myself down on that flea ridden straw, and sleep for a week.”

  “I suggest sleeping for just two more days, my lord.” David brought the wooden ladle from the top shelf. “In two days or less we will know the truth. In three days, if God is good, we can go home.”

  “Home? I no longer know where that is. But we can go to Gloucestershire to collect my wife,” Nicholas sighed, “if she will still speak to me by then. Wives – duties – families – and all the paraphernalia of responsibility which I once thought to ignore forever, is now mine after all, and I must remember to remember it, if I live. In the meantime, once I know I won’t spread enough contagion to slaughter every lord from monarch to mayor, I intend visiting my father.”

  “Your father?”

  Nicholas chuckled. “I’ve avoided the man for most of my life. Times change, David.”

  “You’ve taken a new interest in family loyalties, my lord?”

  “I’ve taken a rather sudden interest in power, wealth and position.” Nicholas sat back on the settle, leaving the ladle resting in the cauldron of slowly simmering pottage. “And there’s no other way to get it than through the Westminster Court and that parcel of self-serving hypocrites, and my father in particular. Unless I decide to horrify the old sot and take up trade. I suppose I could always go to Flanders and trade in best Burgundy. If I brought plenty back, he’d forgive me.”

  “My lord, pardon me,” David said, taking up the broom again. “But I, more than most, know full well how involved in politics you have been in the past, but always in secret and never for profit. Surely your great family wealth, the property and lands, and the power of your esteemed father, are already –”

  “Enough for any sane man, but not for me,” Nicholas interrupted. “Since I have never been sane, as you’re very well aware, David. But the marital status changes a good deal, and my virtuous wife is not the woman I once thought her. She deserves better than me, but since she can’t have it, deserves a better me than I have attempted to be so far. So although
staring death in the face yet again, and through my own fault as usual, it now occurs to me that since I have hopes of becoming a family man after all, duty looms.”

  David’s mouth twitched slightly. “A dastardly prospect I presume, my lord?”

  Nicholas smiled, once again peering into the cauldron. “I’m a changed man, David. That is – either a reformed one – or a dead one. Either way, the change will presumably be noticeable. His highness, being a man of honour and justice, will supply what I’m after. He knows exactly what I’ve done for him in the past, though always incognito. This time I need the recognition. And dearest Papa will either be invited to my funeral – or to celebrate my knighthood.”

  “You don’t seem particularly fearful of death, my lord,” David said, sweeping the dirt and ashes out through the crack beneath the door. “Nor for the first time. Yet most men fear death above all else.”

  Nicholas looked around at his squire, and his smile faded. “I should fear facing hell’s fires, or Purgatory for eternity, perhaps? No – I’ve never much valued life before and therefore saw no point in fearing death. Now – perhaps – that’s changing too.” He sighed. “She should have a husband to respect, not despise,” he murmured, although more to himself than to his squire. “And for once I should like to live, and earn that respect.”

  As twilight thickened, the narrow window slit, sealed in old parchment, remained unshuttered, but a rag, hooked to the protruding nails of the frame, kept out the threat of moonlight. The darkness was complete once past sundown, and not wasting their candles, both men slept before evening was through. Curled tight to the straw, Nicholas scratched vaguely, turned, sighed, heard the faint snores from his squire’s pallet, turned again and slept.

  They were both awakened, not by dawn, but by a violent vibration against the door, the rattling thump of bodies hurtling, falling and finally kicking. Someone called, “By thunder and blight, won’t no bugger have pity?”