Copyright © 2018 by Kate Braithwaite
Cover Image: John Ogilby - Maps of Old London, (1908) (Public Domain)
Cover Design: Soqoqo
Editor: Christine McPherson
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First Blue Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2018
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To Jean Taylor, my mum, with love.
Acknowledgements
Jean Taylor, Trisha Causley, Kat Smith and Zoe Fairtlough: there are not enough words to thank you for your patient reading of the many versions of this novel. Your feedback and friendship are invaluable. Others I would like to thank for their support for my writing endeavours include Shannon Albert, Jen Blab, Maren Albans, Sarah Miller, my husband Chris and our kids, Dominic, Max and Maddie.
Thank you, also, to authors Dennis Bock and Lee Gowan from the Creative Writing Programme at Toronto University. I am very proud and grateful to have received the Marina Nemat Award for an early draft of this book.
And thank you, Steph and Laurence at Crooked Cat for picking up The Road to Newgate and bringing it to publication. Your time and expertise is invaluable. It is a pleasure to be a Crooked Cat.
About the Author
Kate Braithwaite was born and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her first novel, Charlatan, was longlisted for the Mslexia New Novel Award and the Historical Novel Society Award. Kate lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and three children.
The Road to Newgate
London, 1678
Chapter One
Nathaniel Thompson
“All the world has been to the Bartholomew Fair! What do you mean you’ve never been here?”
“What do you suppose I mean?” Anne says, arching two fine, black brush strokes – eyebrows in a more commonplace face.
It is a genuine surprise. My wife has lived all her life in London. I’m astonished that she has never experienced one of the most famous attractions in the city.
“Well, look about you, Nathaniel,” she says, tucking her arm back into mine. “It is not exactly genteel. Why did you think I was so keen to come?”
She smiles, a dimple playing in her cheek, but I suppress a groan. Of course, her family would not have stooped to visit such a place. Various choice answers spring to mind, but I wind my fingers in hers and hold my tongue. This is our holiday; not to be spoiled by awkward thoughts of Anne’s relations. Instead, I kiss her smooth dark hair.
She is right about the fair. It is a storm of activity, and much of it far from decorous. Thankfully, we’re here in the late afternoon, not the evening, but even so, there are few families present. Instead, the fair attracts courting couples, scrubby urchins chasing rats, and saucy girls up for a lark during a few hours excused from sewing work or service. Working men, their bellies warm with ale, crowd around stalls to trade insults and roar out wagers. We pass a trio of buxom dames, glorious to behold in citrus satin stripes and sweating under their wigs. One drops her purse and bends to retrieve it. When she stands, we are treated to the sight of her ample flesh escaping the confines of her corset. Her friends squeal and point as Anne clutches my arm. She has to dip her head to hide her laughter.
After that, we take our time strolling past stalls selling lucky charms, playing cards, fans, dice, snuff boxes, trinkets, all manner of things. My wife is entranced. She stops to pick up goods, quizzes traders on their prices, gasps at a troupe of acrobats, and teases me to win her a prize. I keep a firm hand on my purse and an eye out for any pocket-pickers, otherwise content to watch her enjoy it all.
We have been married for just over four months. Without taking anything away from my love for Anne, I will admit that married life is rather trying. When contemplating the changes that matrimony would involve, I failed to anticipate that the wonderful physical freedom to be with her all night long would also impact on my comings and goings during daylight hours. Perhaps I came to this marriage business a little late. I was more set in my ways and routines than I knew.
At any rate, I am thirty and she is ten years younger. Anne has a young witch’s smile, silken skin, and bright, challenging eyes. I saw her and wanted her. I let go years of cautious bachelorhood and sneaked Anne to the altar when her family was not looking. It goes without saying that I have never been happier. But I’m a busy man, and while she does not complain, I’ve this curious guilt – an unaccustomed itch of responsibility, you might say – when I think about her sitting quietly at home when I am at work. After a neglectful week when I’d been out in Sam’s Coffee House until the small hours and quartered in my office above Henry’s print shop as soon as light broke each morning, I promised her this outing.
“There! That’s what I want.” She stops before a stall draped with exotic silk purses and scarves. “Win me something. Something colourful.”
How can I refuse? The vendor, a grinning Turk with a brace of broken teeth, gives me three hessian sacks to throw at a wooden wheel contraption at the back of his booth. On it stand ten gold and silver bottles, and as he turns the wheel with a handle, I try to knock them down. It looks simple, but it isn’t.
Three throws bring me nothing. Whether the fellow has such skill to see how to move his wheel just as I take aim, or whether he has somehow nailed those damned bottles down, I cannot say. I hand over more money and take another turn.
“Nat! I don’t really need anything,” says Anne, after the second attempt yields nothing.
“Oh, but you do.”
On my third round, I’m sure I hit one bottle squarely, but it does not fall.
“Here!” I say. Several passers-by stop to see what the commotion is. “Let me see you lift those bottles.”
But the Turk shakes his head. He cups a hand to his ear and shrugs as though he cannot understand.
“Come on, fellow!” calls someone behind me. “Surely you can knock one of that lot down. You’re a pretty-looking lad, but the lady wants a prize. She needs to find herself a tougher squire than you, you noddypeak!”
That galls me. Anne tugs my sleeve, but I am already counting more coins into the stallholder’s hand.
I suspect the Turk fears that he will have trouble if this nonsense carries on, because – wonder of wonders – this time, I have no difficulty. A cheer erupts as I knock over the bottles and the man gives Anne her choice of his wares. While she decides, I feel a light tap on my shoulder.
“Mr. Thompson?”
At my side is a skinny fellow that Henry sometimes employs to deliver our pamphlets about the coffee shops. His sort often has a nose for news and will know if an arrest has been made or a scandal is brewing. He knows something now. I smell it on him, read it in the eager nod of his head. God knows, there’s gossip aplenty in the city, with talk of a missing magistrate and arrests of prominent Catholic Lords, so I turn my back on Anne, anxious for news. My conscience may creak as I listen to the young lad’s tale, but that’s easily ignored. Easily that is, until the sound of an altercation causes us both to twist round.
A woman, tall and sharp-featured, her lips pulled back from her teeth in bare anger, has her hand on Anne’s arm and is screeching at her. For a moment, I’m dumbfounded. I step towards them, but not quickly enough. In that split second, t
he woman tilts back her head and hurls a plume of spit right into my wife’s face.
No-one moves. Then the woman disappears into the crowd and Anne does her best to make light of it. She wipes her face, shows me her new bag, and insists on continuing about the fair as if nothing has happened. All she will say is that the woman was obviously deranged, some Bedlamite; quite a sorry case, in fact. I squeeze her hand, proud that my young wife can be so composed. And then I put it out of my mind.
In my defence, there is little enough time to remember it or question Anne further in the days that follow. The rumour whispered to me at the fair is the main news on everyone’s lips by the next morning. A man has been found dead in a ditch on Primrose Hill. He is identified as the missing magistrate, Sir Edmund Godfrey.
Chapter Two
Anne Thompson
All my pleasure in the fair is gone. I try not to make a fuss, but my happiness in the day has vanished. It was certainly a first. Accosted by a stranger, shouted at, spat on. I add these to the long list of new experiences I have encountered since we married. Many have been good, but some have not been so welcome.
We walk home soon afterwards. Nat is pre-occupied, his face serious in the half-light of early evening. His long jaw curls slightly at his chin, as if he’s scraping his bottom teeth against the top. His brow is pulled low, his brown eyes narrowed in thought. I shiver. Something about this man catches my heart.
“Are you cold?” He turns and smiles down at me. The terrible things that the madwoman said about him disappear from my mind. My lips smile back.
“A little,” I say.
“I’ll warm you up when we get home.”
Will he stay, though? Or will he disappear into the night, off to his office, to his publisher, Henry Broome, or to the coffee shops to catch up on the news of the day? Nat’s London never sleeps. I’ve learned to read the signs.
“What is it, love?” I ask. “What did you hear?”
“Godfrey’s been found.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
As a modestly brought up young lady from a very good family, I’m supposed to know nothing and look decorous. My childhood was luxurious, full of long days practising dancing, music, and learning to sew. But I also had a younger brother with a tutor who was kind to me, and I learned far more than my parents ever realised. My life may have been sheltered but I’m not ignorant about the world we live in. King Charles has no legitimate children. Many people are horrified at the prospect of his brother, James, Duke of York – a Catholic – on the English throne. My father says the Catholics will stop at nothing. Everyone knows that Godfrey, a prominent Protestant magistrate, vanished several days ago. There has been talk of little else.
“Murdered?” I ask.
Nat nods. “That’s what I heard just now. Run through with his own sword. Already it’s been said that Catholics are behind his disappearance.”
“Will you have to go out again?”
“Probably.” He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close.
“You have a difficult job. Impossible, perhaps.”
Five years ago, with rumours of treason proliferating, the Privy Council appointed my husband as His Majesty King Charles II’s Licenser of the Presses. It was a great honour, he told me, for such a young man, with no family behind him. What it means is that beyond the authorised work of academics, lawyers, and the Church of England, nothing – nothing – is supposed to be written in the city without his permission. No-one should print or sell a word unless Nathaniel sees it first. All books must cross his table and bear his stamp.
It doesn’t pay well, but I knew that when I married him. He maintains a cramped office above the printing house of Henry Broome, and supplements his income by writing articles for the London Gazette and producing diverse pamphlets of his own, concerning news from Parliament, the courts, and so on. The woman at the fair said such terrible, wicked things about him. A mistake, I think. Or just plain lies.
“I’ll come home for a few hours,” he says. “But then I’ll have to catch up with developments. Henry will have the press ready, I’m sure.”
We cross Iron Monger Lane. Nearly home.
“I love to walk,” I say.
“That is a very good thing, Mistress Thompson, because we can’t afford to be hiring a carriage and horses anytime soon.”
“We don’t need them.”
“I don’t need them. But one day, I hope to provide better for you.”
“I don’t miss all those things,” I say.
***
When I wake the following morning, he has already left. Last night, he was out chasing information about Sir Edmund Godfrey until the Lord knows when. I stirred in the night and felt the weight of his arm across mine. Hints of coffee and tobacco linger in the air. But this morning he has slipped out without disturbing me. He means to be considerate, but I would rather not wake up alone.
Our house, on the corner of Thames Street and Love Lane, is a simple one, but like all the houses recently built in the area close to Pudding Lane, its brick walls are well enough made that the wind does not rattle our bones all the night as it can in some older dwellings. We have three rooms, stacked upon each other like boxes, and a basement kitchen with a cupboard for Kitty, our serving girl.
She has everything well in hand today. Together, we wash and fold linen, but the hours pass slowly. I wonder about the dead magistrate and how busy Nat must be. The house is very quiet. Too quiet. So, when Kitty asks if she may go and visit her sister, I do the same. My older sister Sarah is always at home in the morning. If her husband is there, I might ask him about the accusations made by that woman at the fair. As the son of a former Lord Mayor and now an Alderman himself, there is little that happens in London without James’s knowledge.
It is a long-ish walk to their house on the north end of Chancery Lane and the autumn air is cool. Near Snow Hill, a small boy runs toward me and stumbles. A woman plucks him from the gutter. Another second and a carriage wheel would have crushed his legs. She slaps him across the cheek, only to pull him into a crushing embrace and burst into tears. The sight of it makes my eyes sting. For the rest of my walk to Sarah’s, I imagine little boys with soft brown hair and sharp brown eyes, just like Nat’s.
James and my sister are both at home, but they also have another visitor that I am not prepared for.
Sarah rushes down the stairs towards me, pointing at James’s study door with one hand and shushing me with her fingers to her lips with the other. She pulls me into their morning room and leans back against the door.
“Papa is here!” she says. “He has only just arrived. Five minutes earlier and you might have met on the street outside. Imagine!”
I blanch at the thought, to be honest. He would have looked straight through me.
“Why is he here? This is not a normal time for him to visit.”
“No, but you have heard that Godfrey’s body has been found? I’m sure your Nat knows all about it. Papa is most upset. You know how he is. About Catholics particularly.”
“I should go.”
“What? No. He will leave soon enough.”
“But when he comes to take his leave of you?”
“Then he will see you, and perhaps this nonsense will come to an end.”
I shake my head. “Or perhaps it won’t. No, Sarah, I must go. I will come again another day. Maybe, in time, he will change his view of Nat. Until then, it is better he doesn’t know I was here.”
She is sorry to agree, but agree she must. My father swore to have nothing more to do with me when I ran away with Nat, and he’s a stubborn man. My mother will always side with him, and she is likely far too busy worrying about her own health and entertaining the parade of quacks whose company she so enjoys, to even miss me. I have the idea that when children come, my father might soften, but my current hopes on that subject are too new and personal to voice, even to my sister.
“All right, but wait here.” Sa
rah whisks out of the room. While I wait, raised voices can be heard coming from James’s study across the hall. My father is truly agitated. There could not be a worse time to see him. I pick up an embroidery from Sarah’s basket by the fireplace and examine it by the window. This is a lovely, light room looking out onto a walled garden. Someone has been piling up leaves and cutting back dead blooms. Sarah finds such work tedious, but I would love to have a garden to tend.
“What would Miss Frankham say about this stitching?” I ask with a smile, when she returns.
“Yes, yes, it’s terrible,” she laughs. “But it’s what we are supposed to do, so I do it. You know how it is. Now here, look at this.”
On the table by the window, she unfolds a bolt of pale, blue cloth. “Don’t even think about refusing me,” she says. “It is not my colour and I don’t know why I let the woman talk me into it. But because I did, I simply can’t face up to returning it. You must take it. Every time I look at it, I’m reminded of my weakness in buying it in the first place. Say you will take it home with you.”
This is so like Sarah. My older sister is kind and generous to a fault. It would be rude to refuse her, and the colour is truly pretty. I take the cloth, kiss her on both cheeks, and slip out of the house before my father discovers my presence.
On the way home, I imagine the charming dress I will make. At some point I remember I had wanted to talk to James about that woman, but it is too late to turn back now. On Fish Street Hill, more people than usual are gathered around the new monument to the Great Fire. They are pointing. An addition has been made to the Latin inscription on its northern side. I’ve read the stone panel many times. It describes the fire that ravaged this part of the city, day and night, in 1666. On the third day, it reads, the fatal fire died out. But a new line has been added, indicating the rising tide of concern felt all across London.
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