Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  ‘Good for lice, too,’ said Will.

  ‘Turns them black instead of red,’ spluttered Luke.

  I shuddered and gagged as they rubbed the evil-smelling slime into my hair. ‘It’s foul! How long do I have to stay like this?’

  ‘All night.’

  ‘What?’

  The worst moment was when Ben came next morning to find me propped up in bed, the mixture set into a hard clay on my head. He demanded to know what was in it, for if there was ceruse, a form of white lead, I might not only lose my colour but my hair.

  I stared fearfully at myself in a pewter mirror as Luke, like a sculptor, chipped away at the clay. My hair was still there, not quite black, but a dusty dark brown. The effect was startling. Even Luke was silenced. Then he began laughing again as I touched my face to make sure I was the stranger who faced me in the mirror.

  The bells were ringing as I approached St Mark’s, Mr Black’s local church, the following Sunday. Their sound was recognisable all over the ward and beyond, because one of the bells was slightly cracked and seemed to limp along after the others. I looked like a devout Puritan, with a square white collar and a black jump jacket and breeches of Will’s, cut down by Charity. My darkened hair framed my face under a wide-brimmed felt hat. I looked towards Mr Black’s pew. He was not there, George taking his place with Mrs Black. My heart leapt when I caught sight of Anne – and leapt again when I saw she carried my mother’s Bible, which she had promised to bring me.

  After the service I stayed seated, apparently still in deep prayer. Anne passed me so close her skirts almost touched me, a whiff of damask roses in the pomander she wore reaching me. Behind my hands, raised in prayer, I winked at her. She gave me a startled look, almost dropping the Bible, then slipped it on the bench beside me.

  Outside, Anne dropped back while her mother and George talked to Benyon, the East India merchant standing as a King’s man against Will’s father in the City elections. I was surprised to see him there, for Mr Black despised his politics and his religion – St Mark’s was a ‘halfly reformed’ church and Benyon was always urging a return to sacraments and ceremony – but it gave us the opportunity we needed.

  The same thought in our heads, we went behind a mausoleum dedicated to Samuel Potter & Relic. She kept darting guilty, nervous glances towards her mother and George like a cornered animal. I was afraid to touch her in case she would flee.

  ‘Thank you for the Bible, Miss Black,’ I said.

  She swallowed a smile at the formality. ‘Tom, Tom, I must not see you again.’

  ‘Then you must not call me Tom, surely.’

  ‘Mr Neave.’ Now she could not keep the smile back, although she was near to tears. ‘You fool – what do you look like?’

  ‘I have become a Puritan.’

  I mimicked the stiff dignity of George, who from round the edge of the mausoleum I could see, hands clasped behind his back, nodding gravely to Benyon and the minister, Mr Tooley, who had joined them. She dipped her face into her hands to contain her laughter. As soon as she stopped I doffed my hat, starting her off again when she saw my hair.

  ‘Stop it, you fool, stop it! What on earth have you done with your hair?’

  ‘It’s called Raven’s wing.’

  ‘Raven’s –’

  She clapped her hand over her mouth to curb the laughter. Slipping in her heavy, wood-soled pattens, she clutched at me. I caught her and almost immediately released her, for I was still frightened she would fly off like a bird, but in a sudden movement she held me so tightly I gave a little gasp. She buried her head on my chest. Still apprehensive, I brought my hand tentatively down to smooth the hairs blown from under her hat across her forehead. Her eyes were shut, as if she was asleep. Sunshine briefly lit us and warmed us and she murmured something as if dreaming, and my hand stroked her gently, but otherwise neither of us moved or wanted to move.

  ‘Anne,’ her mother called. We stood motionless, except for my stroking hand.

  ‘Anne?’ Louder and querulous.

  Anne’s eyes shot open. She stared up at me with a fierce, wild, hard, desperate look that softened briefly into one of deep, penetrating tenderness such as I never thought I would see in her grey-flecked eyes.

  ‘Anne?’ Mrs Black’s pattens clacked on the path.

  ‘God forgive me,’ she whispered. ‘I must not see you again. Don’t try and see me, Tom. Please. Please go.’

  She pulled away, waved to her mother and began walking slowly back to her. I followed her, in my devout pose, clasping my Bible. Mrs Black stared at me, then returned to the conversation. I caught a snatch of George saying: ‘The King is right. Pym has gone too far!’ before Anne, fearful I would go right up to them, darted behind an urn, beckoning me frantically.

  ‘Go the back way,’ she hissed.

  ‘Not until you tell me what you feel for me.’

  She picked up a stick and struck at some weeds. ‘I feel nothing – nothing!’

  ‘That’s not true! I saw the look in your eyes.’

  ‘The look in my eyes!’ she mocked, and now the grey eyes held all the cruelty they showed when she used to make fun of my monkey feet as a child. But I met their gaze steadily until finally she turned away with a shrug, giving the weeds another savage blow.

  ‘Tell me you do not love me,’ I said. ‘And I will go. I’ll never try and see you again.’

  She did not seem to hear me. She began to clear the weeds she had cut. I asked her again to say she did not love me, and I would walk away.

  ‘I cannot,’ she muttered. Among the weeds were nettles which must have stung her, but she seemed unaware of them.

  ‘Cannot? What do you mean?’

  She gave a little moan and I thought for a moment she was going to bury her face in the nettles. ‘It is a sin to love you.’

  At first all I heard was that she loved me. I moved to hold her, but her pleading agonised look stopped me and I retreated at once, for I would do anything for her, now that I knew she loved me. I had something that I had to ask her.

  ‘When I found that book in your father’s office, about the money spent on me, and the portrait, you said “I knew it!” What did you mean?’

  ‘I had seen that book before.’

  She was silent for a moment and looked towards the group. It was an unusually mild winter’s day, the sun breaking strongly through the clouds. George was still in full flow, Mrs Benyon was showing Mrs Black the gilded panelling and plump leather upholstery of their coach, while the coachman lit a pipe and turned his face towards the sun.

  It was the autumn day, she told me, when we were playing together as children, and the man with a scar arrived and Mr Black called us in. When I ran away, her father took her into his office, where he was going over the accounts book with the man. She had never seen her father so stern, and yet so frightened.

  ‘Frightened? Mr Black?’ I said.

  ‘So was I.’ She trembled at the memory of the gentleman striking the table and shouting: ‘It won’t do, Black, it won’t do! Keep the boy close!’

  The man had bent down to her so the scar almost touched her upturned face and she could smell the wine on his breath. ‘You know what Tom Neave is, don’t you? A plague child!’

  Only then did she drop the weeds she was gathering and realise her hands were blotched red from the nettles.

  ‘What did he mean?’

  She scratched her hands wildly. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ Turning to look back towards her mother, she said, ‘They told me not to come near you. They believe you’re evil.’

  ‘That’s George,’ I said contemptuously. ‘He’s a liar and a hypocrite.’

  ‘He’s not!’ she said vehemently. ‘He’s kept the business going! Without him, I don’t know what we’d have done! He does much work for Mr Benyon.’

  ‘Benyon?’ I could not believe my ears. ‘He’s a Royalist! Does your father know?’

  ‘George shows him what he prints.’

  ‘Ar
e you sure?’

  ‘He gives him proofs, but I cannot read them. George knows someone paid my father to take you. He says he warned him you were evil, and now his illness is God’s punishment.’

  ‘What nonsense!’

  ‘He told Father I let you out of the cellar. I thought he would go mad! It’s worse because he can scarcely speak. He writes – tries to write . . .’

  She buried her head in her hands, stumbling about blindly. Blood ran down the backs of her hands where she had scratched them.

  ‘Anne – where are you?’ Mrs Black called.

  ‘Coming!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve stung my hand. I’m just getting some dock leaves.’

  She wrenched up a fistful of dock leaves. I seized her by the hand.

  ‘Anne – when he said I was a plague child, did you think I would get black boils?’

  Unexpectedly she began to laugh. ‘Yes. I looked for them every day.’

  ‘Did you see them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think I’m evil?’

  ‘The devil is clever,’ she said, with a penetrating directness.

  ‘George says.’

  ‘He says nobody knows who you really are. Where you’ve come from.’

  It was true. Everything pointed to me not being Matthew and Susannah’s child. Matthew had fled to Poplar not only because of the stolen pendant, but because of me. A plague child. What did the man mean? So far as I knew, I had never had the plague. A chill ran through me. There was a law that made it a hanging offence to ‘talk, feed, entertain or employ any wicked or evil spirit’. This, the Church believed, was the greatest offence against God: maleficium – making a pact with the devil.

  ‘Anne, you can’t believe I’m an evil spirit!’

  My face must have looked so desolate, so woebegone that she laughed and held me. ‘No, no, no, Tom – not when I’m with you, not when you look like that.’

  She kissed me impulsively. I had never seen her more beautiful, although her face was reddened with half-shed tears and her hat was awry, allowing her fair hair to blow in unruly tangles in and out of her eyes.

  The crack of the coachman’s whip made her jump as if she had felt the lash. ‘But when I see my father lying there . . . You said if I told you I did not love you, you would go.’

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘I cannot love you.’ She was crying now, the tears blurring the words. ‘I promised my father . . . I swore on the Bible I would never see you again. And here I am, God forgive me. Promise me on your mother’s Bible you will not try and see me again, Tom.’

  Her eyes were so blinded with tears, her voice so desperate, and I loved her so much, so much that I would do anything for her that the words were out of my mouth before I could stop them: ‘I promise.’

  Chapter 11

  That December, that Christmas is a total blank to me. I cared about nothing: life, politics, words – everything had the taste of dry bread. I joined the All Hallows Trained Band and went with Will, Luke and Ben to Moorfields for what I thought senseless drilling practice. But I needed something senseless: ‘Trail your pike . . . Palm . . . Charge your pike!’ Or, with a musket: ‘Put in bullet and ram home! Remove scouring stick!’

  The pikemaster, Big Jed, was a coal heaver, a huge man whose gentle manner belied his words. His mood fitted mine. He was a veteran of the London riots who declared the pike manual had been written by gentlemen who liked pretty pictures. He took the smiles from our faces and the jokes from our mouths with two short, chilling sentences: ‘This is a pike,’ he said. ‘It kills people.’

  I thought my love for Anne would fade eventually. I prayed for this to happen, but it only seemed to grow stronger. Evenings were worst, when I saw the red kites floating above Smithfield and longed to walk down Cloth Fair, just for a sight of her.

  Just before Christmas the City’s Common Council elections were held. The King’s supporters lost their majority, George’s friend Benyon losing his seat to Will’s father, John Ormonde, but even that did little to lift my spirits.

  I earned my keep at the Ormondes by running messages for Mr Pym. The riots grew worse. Apprentices – now being called Roundheads, because of their close-cropped hair – responded by taunting the Royalists as ‘Caballeros’, after the despised Spanish troops, a word which became on Londoners’ tongues ‘Cavaliers’. Throwing myself into politics was one way of trying to forget Anne. I helped organise demonstrations preventing bishops from entering the House of Lords, removing the King’s majority that had becalmed the Commons’ reformist legislation. The Lords were now approving legislation, reported a gleeful Mr Ink, at an unprecedented, most unparliamentary speed.

  Even a move by the King to prosecute him for treason did not seem to concern Mr Pym, for that would take time, and time was now on Mr Pym’s side. Splashed with ink, shaking his cramped fingers, Mr Ink told me there was a Bill to deprive the bishops of their seats permanently. Second reading. A Bill to remove the King’s power to raise an army without Parliament’s consent. Third reading. A Bill . . . He pressed a letter in my hand to be urgently delivered to the Countess of Carlisle and rushed back to transcribe yet more Bills. As I was crossing Bedford Square, a coach approached at such speed I was forced to dive to the pavement, falling and losing the letter in a pile of swept-up snow. By the time I had picked myself up and retrieved it the coach had jerked to a stop outside her house and the Countess was coming down the steps. I was as transfixed as when I had mistaken her for the Queen in the royal procession. She had no need for a queen’s jewels. Her eyes glittered and her cheeks glowed in the sharp air. She wore a fur cloak over an embroidered dress of green silk. Her tight ringlets of hair quivered as she berated a footman who was ordering a boy to clear scraps of snow from the steps.

  ‘For the Lord’s sake, Jenkins, let me pass! If I don’t hurry it’ll be more than my leg that’s broken!’ She slipped at the bottom of the steps, righted herself and turned to him. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘I’ll try, ma’am.’

  ‘I’m not interested in trying! You must!’

  He gave a little bow. As his head dipped I saw him shut his eyes briefly and clench his teeth as he kept his feelings under control. She took a letter from her cloak to give to him, and in the same moment saw me, letter in hand, gaping. So did Jenkins. He vented his pent-up feelings on me, snatching my letter and shoving me away.

  ‘Off!’

  I slid, found my balance, and as he went back to her, gave him the apprentice’s finger and slouched away.

  ‘Wait!’

  Thinking she could not possibly be addressing me, I trudged on, until Jenkins grabbed me by the arm.

  ‘You – boy! Come here.’ She beckoned me impatiently. ‘Yes – you!’

  I went reluctantly, so reluctantly that Jenkins gave me a couple of shoves to propel my progress. I skated towards her, only just stopping in front of her, gazing at the ground, convinced she recognised me as the boy who, clinging on to the window ledge at the royal procession, had looked down her low-cut dress.

  ‘Look at me.’

  It was like being asked to look at the sun. She had that kind of brightness, that kind of perfection that belonged in imagination, hinted at inadequately in battered woodcuts of goddesses, but was now before me in full glory. She was supposed to have had smallpox but I could not believe it. There was not a pit, not a blemish in the perfect white skin of her neck, in her cheeks pinked by the cold. She was supposed to be old, all of thirty, but I could not believe her to be much over twenty. She was supposed to be in love with Mr Pym, but much as I revered his words and his courage, I refused to believe such a divine woman could love old bones.

  She was staring at me inquiringly. I realised in a panic she had said something to me, and I had not heard a word.

  ‘Has he a voice?’ she said to Jenkins, who gave me a sharp prod.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, finding it, but barely.

  ‘Can you take this letter to Mr Pym?’ As I opened my mouth s
he anticipated my reply, waving it away impatiently. ‘I mean now, during the debate, interrupting him?’

  It was impossible for strangers to enter the House during debates, but it seemed equally impossible to say that to her.

  ‘Yes.’

  Another savage prod from Jenkins. ‘Yes, ma’am!’ he said. ‘Don’t you know how to speak to your betters?’ He turned, unctuously apologetic to the Countess. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s the times, the rabble –’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet, Jenkins!’ She gave the footman the letter. ‘Give it to him,’ she said, as if it was not quite safe to move close enough to hand it to me direct.

  Jenkins gave me the letter with a look of pure hate, and I added him to my lengthening list of my enemies in this world. I took the letter, but still stood there, unable to stop gazing at her.

  ‘Go on,’ she shouted. ‘Mr Pym’s life depends on it! Run!’

  I ran. For her I would do anything. Fly like Mercury, who should be the messenger of such a goddess.

  ‘Stop! Wait.’

  I jerked to a halt, almost falling in the snow again. She was running to the coach. She was a woman who expected everyone to keep up with her rapidly changing thoughts.

  ‘Come on! Don’t just stand there!’

  I had no idea then that she had the reputation for doing the unbelievable, the unthinkable. I ran back, watching her as she got in the coach, her dress lifting, petticoats momentarily frothing round her galoshes.

  ‘Get in.’

  I stood there dumbly, frozen as the snow. She lifted her eyes to heaven, as if asking God why she had to deal with nothing but imbeciles. ‘You’ll never get there in time! Jenkins –’

  An appalled Jenkins sprang forward, slipped, saved himself by clutching at the open coach door, gave me another look of hatred, this one shot with disbelief, shoved me in and slammed the door. She rapped on the panel and the coach jerked away, throwing me against her. Her face flickered with disgust at the contact. I grabbed for a swaying strap like a man drowning, heaving myself into the opposite corner. I hung on to the strap as the coach rattled out of the square into Bow Street, dizzy with her scent, which clung heavily round me. In the great stink of London I had grown so used to taking short, exploratory breaths that it was a novel sensation to breath in so deeply, to abandon myself to breathing. I was amazed to find there was not one scent but many; jasmine and lavender that intoxicated the senses, only to be stimulated again by a sharp whiff of cinnamon.