Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  He saddled my horse on one side of the apple tree, while Anne came to say goodbye on the other. The weather was changing, and the first leaves were beginning to drop. She kicked at a small pile of them, and wanted to know why I had changed my clothes.

  ‘Because I’m in the army.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you with Will and the rest of the unit?’

  I felt there was too much to tell her in too little time. Well, that is not quite true. For some reason I felt uneasy about telling her of the strange meeting with Lord Stonehouse. To be back in Half Moon Court was to breathe a different atmosphere. Washing in the pail in the yard as I had always done. Changing in the print shop where the very smell of the ink was pure fresh air to me. And above all there was Anne’s expression of sheer delight when she saw me.

  ‘Why are you going off with him?’ she whispered, with a sidelong glance at Eaton. ‘Are you going to look for the pendant?’

  I laughed. That summer I had told her everything I had learned at Turville’s. But then I had dismissed it as a fantasy, a piece of trickery dreamed up by Turville and Eaton, which in part it was. The pendant, and the Stonehouses themselves, seemed like a story in a pamphlet. Now it was real, I felt strangely uneasy about telling her. And I felt Eaton’s mocking eyes on me while he tightened the girths on the horse. I knew what he was thinking – what a great joke it was that I would ever give up the possibility of a great position, and one of the largest estates in England for her.

  ‘It’s an army mission,’ I said. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you.’

  ‘You’re a terrible liar, Tom! My lord.’ She gave me a mocking little bow. The smell of damask roses intoxicated me as she came right up to me, whispering in my ear. ‘Tell me. Tell me the truth.’

  Branches rustled as Eaton picked a couple of apples from the tree. I broke away from her. ‘I’ve told you!’

  ‘Touch the tree!’ she demanded.

  It was a game we used to play in our brief childhood together, before Eaton had warned Mr Black to keep us apart. Once you touched the tree, you were solemnly swearing you told the truth. Irritated, I moved to put my foot in the stirrup.

  She gave a cry, ‘Don’t leave like this, Tom!’ and grabbed at my arm. I fell backwards, almost knocking her over, and we were in each other’s arms. ‘I’ll always love you, whatever happens,’ she said.

  I kissed her. ‘I’ll always love you, whatever happens,’ I said.

  I touched the tree, and she put her hand on mine. Eaton whistled softly as he held my horse for me to mount.

  Rain in the night had washed away some of the stink, and there were bursts of patchy sunshine as we cantered down Aldersgate. I felt a sudden surge of happiness. I had no idea what was going to happen on the road ahead and I did not care, for I felt I had the answer to everything. I did not even care about words changing the world at that moment. There was one thing that did not need changing. Would never change. I saw love everywhere: in a mother comforting a crying child, in a man bantering a girl selling apples, even in an old man and woman bickering as they might have done for years. The grey mare seemed to pick up my mood, her restlessness going as I patted her.

  ‘Have you fucked the girl?’

  I pretended not to hear Eaton, urging the mare forward, but Eaton overtook me with accomplished smoothness. His scar did its twisting smile, disappearing momentarily in his cheek. ‘I thought not. I knew a woman like that.’

  I stared at him in astonishment. He had never before displayed feelings for any creature, least of all women. ‘Proud,’ he went on, his lips tightening, staring ahead of him. ‘Wants you and no one else. Wants you, aye, and that’s very good, but that type wants you like a man wants a woman and that’s bad, very bad. Unnatural.’ He dropped to a walking pace as a troop of militia crossed Lothbury, flying a standard: God is with us – who can be Againste us?

  ‘You’re right not to tell her what’s going on. But don’t make the mistake of not having her, Mr Tom. She’s as ripe as the apples on that tree. Don’t leave it too late. Pluck her now – before she knows she can’t marry you.’ He gave me a lascivious grin.

  He disgusted me. I was no Puritan. If Luke or Will had said such a thing it would have been different. But it was as if he had taken my mood of hope and love and trampled it in the filth that the horses were throwing up round our boots. I kicked the mare viciously, unleashing an unexpected burst of power in the startled horse that had been as placid as I was a second ago.

  A couple of straggling soldiers dived for the wall as the horse abruptly careered towards them. I bounced in the saddle, slipped, half lost the reins, just managing to retrieve them as she went at terrifying speed round the corner into Broad Street, straight towards some market stalls. I shut my eyes. She seemed determined to vault them but veered at the last moment. A woman screamed. Children cheered, shouted ‘Runaway!’ and threw vegetables.

  Round the next corner I was flung one way, then the other. I lost one stirrup then the reins again. Approaching me was a Hackney hell-cart. Its brakes screeched, on and on. The driver was one obscene yelling mouth. I grabbed at the saddle. I was slipping off. The cobbles were rushing up to meet me. A hand gripped me and thrust me back into my saddle. Then it grabbed at my horse’s reins and yanked her to one side of the hell-cart. There was not enough room to pass, and Eaton pulled down the rearing horse and quietened it. The hell-cart driver got off his horse shouting. Eaton gave him one look, and he went away muttering. He turned to me, his voice shaking.

  ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’ he said.

  I had not a breath to respond with, and scarcely the energy to hang my head. I hope I was never as hard and cruel with a horse as Eaton was, but it was Eaton who taught me how to control a horse on that ride to Poplar. I lost count of the number of times he shouted to me to keep my toes out and my knees in, until I was doing that unaccountable thing, rising and falling with her, becoming at moments one creature, as if I had her legs, her power. She had a white blaze on her forehead and I began calling her Patch – an obvious name which perhaps the stable boy used, for she immediately responded to it. After our escape from the hell-cart, I felt we were not just horse and rider but companions.

  There is a bleak, lonely stretch of marsh just before Poplar. We were going at what I thought was a gallop when Eaton suddenly, with no warning, took his whip to his horse and streaked away. Patch jerked after him, almost leaving me behind. I lost everything Eaton had taught me and clung on. Then somehow the horses seemed to draw closer. My hat went. My hair streamed. I saw his glance of surprise over his shoulder as I began to gain on him. I took my whip to Patch. Eaton had released the childhood wildness I had in Poplar. Yelling and whooping, I was as savage as he was. We were neck and neck before he slowly pulled away again, finishing a length in front.

  He grinned. ‘That’s it. Give her the whip. Show her who’s master.’ He took an apple he had picked at Half Moon Court and bit into it. ‘Just ripe.’ He held it out to me. I shook my head and would not look at him. He ate the apple as he ate all food, as if he never knew where the next meal was coming from, laughing from time to time, but I finished the journey in stubborn silence.

  Eaton had so little trust in anyone that he disclosed only the bare minimum, and only when he had to. It was not until we were nearly in Poplar that he told me what was in the file on Matthew that Richard had stolen. Matthew had been traced to the Oxford area where he eked out a living as a cunning man. Lord Stonehouse’s intelligence network had intercepted two letters addressed to K. B. J. Ingram, minister at St Dunstan’s Without, because they were sent from Oxford, a Royalist stronghold. They were thought to concern jewellery smuggled from London for the Royalist cause until Lord Stonehouse saw them and realised they referred to the pendant.

  One letter, as Eaton remembered it, said the pendant could not be destroyed, for there were ‘forces against it’. It was signed with a red cross.

  ‘Matthew’s signature,’ I said, remembering his grisly humour
of signing his name with a plague cross. ‘But why is he writing to Mr Ingram about the pendant?’

  ‘He’s not. He’s writing to KB, who is at Mr Ingram’s.’

  ‘KB?’

  ‘Kate Beaumann.’

  ‘Kate – the woman who was my mother’s companion?’

  ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘Just so.’

  And now he, in his turn, rode on in silence.

  Chapter 25

  I took him the marsh way, round the back of St Dunstan’s. On Susannah’s grave there was a pot of fresh wildflowers, primula and bog iris. I was about to dismount but Eaton gripped my arm and pointed towards the row of almshouses. He had the keenest sight of anyone I ever knew. I could see nothing untoward. The almshouses looked calm and peaceful. But it was unusual that no one was about. Our horses picked their way between the graves. Descending towards the almshouses, I saw what Eaton had picked up in the distance: churned-up earth under some trees where a group of horses had been tethered overnight.

  The door to the main almshouse, where Mr Ingram lived, was ajar. Eaton shoved the door fully open with the toe of his boot. The hallway was a mess of muddy footprints. He gestured me to stay still, ducking his ear to listen. I could hear nothing but the constant sough of the wind over the marsh. There was a small office where Mr Ingram saw parishioners. Papers were scattered about, and coats were in a tumbled pile in a small cloakroom.

  As we approached his living room, I caught a sour smell which brought back the burning of my mother’s house. Before Eaton could stop me, I pulled away from him and ran into the living room. Some books were scattered on the floor but otherwise everything was in order. Then I looked through into the bedroom. Sprawled out, arm hanging over the side of a simple box bed, was John Ingram. Eaton pushed me to one side and put his ear to Ingram’s mouth.

  ‘At least they left him alive,’ he said. He pulled down the coverlets. I turned away. If getting the pendant meant this, I wanted none of it. ‘Come on – lift him! If you’ve not seen worse than this, you’re a lucky man!’

  Ingram was clad in the coarse linen shirt he habitually wore. Beneath it he was naked. There were burn marks on the soles of his feet, his ankles and up the inside of his legs. He had wet himself and the sour tang of it mingled with the smell of the burned flesh that clung to him. Eaton seemed unmoved by this horror. But his desperate need for information was of much more use to poor Mr Ingram than my pity. We stripped the bed and turned the mattress. As we did so my foot kicked against a poker. It had been dropped while hot, for the floor where I picked it up was charred. While I looked for fresh coverlets, my boots crunched over dead coals and ash. The sound opened Mr Ingram’s eyes. He gazed at us in terror, and Eaton pulled me in front of him. ‘Talk to him – he don’t want to see an ugly brute like me!’

  I tried, but he did not seem to recognise me, twisting away, muttering that he had told us everything he knew, until his eyes closed and he drifted off again. Maybe, in my buff jerkin, I looked too similar to the men who had tortured him. I went into the kitchen to find something to give him. It was a large one, with a baker’s oven, since it served all the almshouses. I opened a cupboard. From it came a powerful smell of spice, but there was little in there apart from a yellow powder. I wished I could remember what herbs Matthew would have used for those dreadful burns. I opened the pantry and started back as I saw a ghost-like figure. The figure gave a cry as I pulled out my knife and I realised, just in time, who it was.

  ‘Mother Banks!’

  Flour was stored in the pantry, and she had knocked over a sack of it in her hurry to hide, terrified the men had returned. I went to hug her but she backed away, her terror unabated. ‘It’s me – Tom!’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘I thought you were a ghost!’

  ‘I thought you would make me one,’ she retorted bitterly.

  She was cold and distant, quite unlike the last time I had seen her, when she had comforted me after Susannah’s death. She kept looking at me as if I was a stranger and when she saw Eaton I had to beg her to stay. I thought at first it was my uniform which she associated with the men who had come, but then, with a sinking heart, realised what it was. She was avoiding me just as Anne had avoided me, years ago, when Eaton had told her I was a plague child. She would not touch me, or even come near me. When I did, her lips moved in silent prayer. I was a creature of ill-omen. First I brought death to Susannah. Now this.

  I persuaded Eaton to leave her while she treated John Ingram, making a salve of herbs, soap and oil of roses, mixed with egg white. Eaton went through some papers in the office, but found nothing.

  I put some order into the little cloakroom, picking up a hat, crushed by the imprint of a muddy boot. It was a stove hat, most unlike anything Mr Ingram ever wore. Near it was a woman’s grey cloak. It was short, very short. Kate Beaumann must have left in a hurry to leave this here. Perhaps she saw the men arrive and fled. Idly, I dropped the hat on my head, looked at myself in a mirror, and was still. Then I put the cloak round my shoulders. It was exactly what I had believed a will o’ the wisp or a witch would wear. Exactly the shape I had seen as a child, disappearing into the swirling mist, when I had tried to see who was delivering my cake.

  I went back into the kitchen and sniffed at the spice and the saffron-coloured flour. It was not September yet, but it was all there – all the ingredients to bake a simnel cake.

  ‘Maybe Mr Ingram told them nothing,’ I said, when I returned to Eaton.

  ‘Oh, he did, he did.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because they stopped. We shall have to give him some of the same medicine.’ He rattled the fire irons in the grate. John Ingram started up, syrup dribbling down his chin.

  ‘No!’ I cried.

  ‘I was joking!’

  I was not so sure he was. He claimed he had a conscience as much as the next man, and only meant to show the irons to him. Where was the harm in that? It would make him cough, and save us a deal of trouble. I warned him that if he so much as touched him I would go and he would get no further help from me. He was like a boiling pot being taken from the heat to be reduced to a slow, bubbling simmer.

  He touched his hat. ‘Very good, very good, my lord. We are to do this the straight and honest way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very good. What, er, precisely is that way?’

  ‘I will think of something.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He tipped his hat, scratched his head and smiled. ‘Very good. Meanwhile Richard might be torturing Matthew, who brought you up like a loving father. Then finding and destroying the pendant.’

  I turned away, but with his long stride he overtook me as I reached the door. ‘Such are the consequences of the honest, straightforward way, my lord. Just so we understand one another.’

  His scar beat like a pulse, hypnotising me. I feared him much more when his temper was controlled and his eyes held that curious smile, for it was as if he was looking into my very soul, and he saw things there I did not know, things I did not want to know. He glanced at Ingram, who was dozing, Mother Banks gently wiping syrup from his lips. He brought his lips to my ear. ‘If you want the pendant, we are going to have to do worse things than this.’

  I ran outside. Wind rippled the marsh grass, like waves in the sea. It carried the first drops of rain and in it what I had always imagined to be the will o’ the wisps’ voices. The rain was falling faster, streaming down the windows through which I could see piles of prayer books on the sill. I went into the office, and there it was. The cover was coming away from the spine. It was smaller and lighter than I remembered, when I had first learned to read from it. Eaton’s sardonic smile deepened when he saw it.

  Ingram was asleep, or pretending to be. Mother Banks looked at me warily, but the prayer stopped on her lips when she saw the Bible. Perhaps she still believed the words had come to a child who could not read. Eaton, I am
sure, knew the story. I struggled to ignore him as I opened the book and found the familiar page.

  ‘I am the good shepherd . . .’

  ‘The miracle child returns.’ There was no mistaking the sarcasm in John Ingram’s voice. His eyes were still closed. A speck of syrup gleamed on his lips.

  I remembered the joy on Susannah’s face. She believed. She made it a miracle. Miracles were what you believed. ‘The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep –’

  ‘Whereas the hireling abandons the sheep.’ Ingram opened his eyes, giving me a steady, accusing stare, licking the globule of syrup from his lips.

  ‘Only if you do not help us,’ I said.

  ‘Help you! When you have brought the wolf with you?’

  ‘He is not in the fold. I will keep him out! I swear it.’ He turned his face away. ‘Kate Beaumann baked a simnel cake here, didn’t she?’ I said.

  There was a long pause, with only the sound of the drumming rain. A slow smile flickered across Mr Ingram’s face. Eaton crept away, and hunched over the dead fire.

  ‘Every Michaelmas,’ Mr Ingram said. ‘She made me swear not to tell you, but as you now know . . .’ He stared out of the rain-streaked window. ‘Every Michaelmas. I told her it was the wrong time of year, it was a resurrection cake for Easter, but she used to smile and say, “That’s right, Mr Ingram. A resurrection.”’

  The wind blew in gusts now, throwing rain against the window, as Ingram told us how a plague cart arrived in Poplar seventeen years ago. A plague cart.

  Three people and a baby. In a plague cart! Crouched in the grate, Eaton stared at the streaming window, as if he could see the cart arriving. It was weather like this, Ingram told us. Winter early. Their cart would have been turned away, but one of the occupants, although she was dressed like Matthew and Susannah, had the voice of a lady. And she had a letter from Mr Stevens, minister at Upper Vale, near Highpoint, where he, Ingram, had once been curate.