The Last Protector

by Andrew Taylor

  I watched him. Worms can turn. So can Marworms.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Poultry House

  Thursday 26 March – Sunday 19 April, 1668

  WILLIAMSON HAD BEEN dining with Lord Arlington. He was in a good humour because my lord had been in a good humour. My master was usually abstemious, at least where matters of business were concerned. But I could tell by his manner that he had taken more wine than was his custom.

  I had reached Scotland Yard before him. He was humming an air when he came up the stairs. He beckoned me into his room.

  He told me to close the door and flung himself into his chair. ‘Where have you been?’ He ran his eyes over me and frowned. ‘You look unwell.’

  ‘Cry your pardon, sir – a touch of fever. I couldn’t get here sooner. I was—’

  ‘Never mind that. How did you fare with your bawd in Dog and Bitch Yard?’

  ‘I’m afraid she was unable to find anything that linked His Grace with the riots. But I did call at Henrietta Street to question them about Mistress Hakesby’s involvement with the Duke, and why she went to Wallingford House that evening. She said it was to do with her husband’s business, and a mansion that the Duke has in mind to build in Yorkshire. Mr Hakesby was already there. But when she learned what the Duke was about with his dissenting friends, she insisted on leaving.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  I shrugged. ‘I see no reason not to. The Duke’s unlikely to have confided anything worth the hearing to a woman. I’m convinced she doesn’t share her father’s beliefs or the Duke’s politics. Besides, she has other things on her mind. Her husband has been very ill. In fact he died yesterday.’

  Williamson grunted. ‘God rest his soul. But it was probably a false scent in any case. Not that it matters any more. The riots are all but over, and the ringleaders in prison. We’ll hang one or two of them, and that will be the end of it. If the Duke had a hand in the affair, he’s gained nothing by it. If anything, he’s lost credit with his supporters.’

  So that was the reason for Williamson’s good humour. Though he did not know the full extent of Buckingham’s intrigue, it had become increasingly clear that the Duke’s failure to manage the King’s business in Parliament had dealt a fatal blow to his political ambitions. Williamson could not resist confiding to me that, according to Lord Arlington, His Grace’s voice no longer commanded much attention at Privy Council meetings.

  ‘The King has his measure now,’ Williamson told me. ‘He lets the Duke amuse him. He lets him strut about court and pretend to be a great man. And he leaves the work of government to those who can do it. So all ends well, Marwood, thanks be to God.’

  During the next fortnight, our lives resumed their even tenor. The issues of the Gazette came and went; letters were received, digested and docketed; other letters were written, copied into letter books, and dispatched to the four corners of the Kingdom; Mr Williamson and Lord Arlington walked slowly about the Privy Garden with their heads together, settling affairs of state and dispatching the business of government.

  As for me, I bought myself a new peruke. I spent nearly ten pounds on it, for Chiffinch’s jibe about my wearing two squirrels on my head had gone deep. It is a strange world where a man must pay through the nose to wear another’s hair, yet also spend money on a barber to keep his own hair short enough for the inconvenience of wearing a periwig perched on his head. I also ordered a suit of clothes with a long coat and waistcoat after the new fashion.

  Margaret raised her eyebrows at my extravagance. But the deaths I had witnessed during the last weeks had made me conscious of my own mortality. What was the point of laying up money in my strongboxes? Money is merely a means to an end, I told myself, and a man cannot spend it when he is dead.

  On Thursday 9 April, I had the final fitting for my new suit. Afterwards, I took a hackney coach to Holborn and called on Mistress Dalton in her house by Hatton Garden. She was a stern, grim-faced woman. My arrival was understandably unwelcome to her. I had met her briefly once before, when I had visited the Cromwells here. She was scared of me, I think, and that made her dislike me even more.

  She received me in the parlour. She asked me to close the door and speak soft.

  I declined the chair she offered me. ‘Have they gone?’

  ‘He went to Harwich. He was hoping for a passage on the Hellevoetsluis packet. With luck he’s in the Low Countries by now.’

  ‘Had he money?’

  She nodded. ‘Enough for his passage, and more.’

  ‘And where’s the young lady?’

  ‘In Hampshire. I had a letter from her this morning.’ Mistress Dalton sniffed. ‘She’s tougher than she looks, that one.’

  There was nothing more to say, so I went away.

  ‘Goodbye, mistress,’ I said as I left. ‘Have a care of the company you keep.’

  When I returned to my own house that evening, Margaret begged to speak to me. She followed me into the parlour. She was carrying a cloak over her arm.

  ‘It’s Mary, master. She miscarried this morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry for it. And yet …’

  I had had very little to do with the girl since I had brought her back from Dog and Bitch Yard. Mary had seen too much in the course of her short life. She had had too much done to her. Margaret kept her down in the kitchen where she did whatever she was told to do. But she would not say a word to anyone except Stephen, and then only in whispers. She shied away from Sam, Margaret had told me earlier, though he would never lift a finger against her.

  ‘It’s better this way,’ Margaret said, putting into words what I was thinking. ‘Far better. She’s no more than a child herself. What would she do with a bastard?’

  ‘Can we send her back to her family?’

  ‘She hasn’t any, sir. But she has this.’

  Margaret laid the cloak on the table. It was the one that had belonged to poor dead Chloris. I had given it to Mary when we fled from Madam Cresswell’s house. Just before she died, Chloris had said that Mary should take it.

  ‘She can keep it. I’ve no use for it.’

  ‘It’s more than a cloak.’ Margaret folded back the hem and pressed the material together. The outline of a disc appeared. ‘Mary unpicked the stitching – see: here.’ Like a magician, she pulled out a gold coin. ‘There are others. You can feel them in there.’

  That was where Chloris had put the money I had given her. I had thought it lost for ever.

  I said, ‘Tell Mary to unpick the whole hem. There should be twenty pounds. Eight pounds is for you and Sam to share. One pound each for Mary and Stephen. You had better keep theirs in your charge, as well as Sam’s. Give the other ten to me.’

  Margaret was staring at me. ‘Master. God bless you. But what’s it for?’

  ‘Honesty.’ I changed the subject before we embarrassed each other. ‘What do we do with the girl?’

  ‘We could keep her, see how she does. A scullery maid would give me another pair of hands in the kitchen. I could train her up to do more, given time. And she sews a little, and knows how to use an iron.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Margaret’s eyes met mine. She gathered up the cloak and curtsied. ‘Thank you, master.’

  But she hesitated at the door.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I went to Henrietta Street again today,’ she said.

  During the past fortnight, Margaret had gone there frequently. Someone had to manage the household – Jane Ash, the Hakesbys’ maid, was too young and too inexperienced to cope by herself. And someone had to tell Cat what a woman should do after a death. Death has rules and customs, like everything else, and the living can be censorious if they are not observed.

  They had buried Hakesby decently but without undue fuss or ceremony in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Covent Garden. I had not realized that he had been so well respected. Dr Wren was one of the pallbearers. Dr Hooke and Mr May, the comptroller of the royal works, had followed his coffin
, as had old Mr Poulton, the wealthy cloth-merchant of Dragon Yard. But afterwards I had not accompanied the other mourners to the sign of the Rose, where wine and biscuits had been provided.

  ‘How is Mistress Hakesby?’

  ‘She’s taken it hard, master. Harder than I expected.’

  ‘What will she do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nor does she, I think. She’s hardly been out of doors since it happened.’

  ‘Perhaps …’ I said, and stopped. I cleared my throat. ‘Do you think it might be beneficial for her to have some air? I might perhaps send Stephen to her with a note asking whether she would care to walk with me on Sunday.’

  Margaret avoided meeting my eye. ‘Perhaps, sir.’

  ‘If the weather remains fine, that is.’

  Towards the end of the second week of April, the body of a man was found on a piece of waste ground near the hamlet of Radcliffe to the east of the City. The man was tall, with unusually narrow shoulders and very long limbs. His body was clad in filthy brown rags. His feet were bare. He had been lying out in the open for some time. The body had attracted vermin and was already decaying.

  The searcher who inspected the corpse could see no sign of a wound or plague sores. She told the parish clerk of Radcliffe that the man had starved to death.

  The only possession on the body was a green leather case. It was empty, but the silk-lined interior suggested that it might once have held a quantity of valuable jewellery. On the lid, set into the leather, was a small gold shield engraved with a number of roundels.

  As a young man, the parish clerk had accompanied an English ambassador to Florence. He recognized the arms on the shield as those of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He considered reporting the matter. Presumably the dead man had stolen the case from someone. But the contents were long gone, and there was no point in making unnecessary work for himself. He prised off the shield with the tip of a knife, and later sold it to a goldsmith in Lombard Street for three shillings and eightpence.

  The body was buried at the expense of the parish. The empty case was sold for fourpence ha’penny to defray the cost.

  Death was everywhere these days, Cat thought, inside and out. The thought of it fogged her eyes and fogged her thoughts. It made a mockery of the spring sunshine and robbed the food she ate of its flavour.

  When Stephen brought up the letter from Marwood, she was in the Drawing Office, pretending to transcribe a list of almost illegible figures from Mr Hakesby’s notebook. Brennan was at work on the Dragon Yard commission at his slope by the window. Mr Hakesby would have liked to see the job through himself. It had given him much pleasure. It was rare that he had so much control over a complete project.

  ‘Of course Dragon Yard is small,’ he had said to Cat, ‘but at least it’s ours. Let’s hope it leads to bigger things. The future for us does not lie in palaces and public buildings. It lies in our cities, in the houses where people live and work. That is a far nobler ambition for us to pursue. Imagine what Inigo Jones must have felt when my Lord Bedford offered him the chance to design Covent Garden – the church, the piazza, the arcades, even the surrounding streets. Why, he had been granted a chance to create an entire world.’

  She had liked her husband best at times like this, when he spoke with passion of his work, of the buildings he saw in his mind. He had a chest full of notebooks in his closet, and they contained forty years’ worth of his plans and ideas. The chest had also contained his will. He had left his entire estate ‘to my beloved wife Catherine’.

  She did not answer Marwood’s note immediately. She found everything hard to decide. Making up her mind was not something she used to find difficult. Indecision was a novelty.

  When she next saw Margaret, Cat told her that her master had suggested they take the air on Sunday afternoon.

  ‘I don’t know whether to go or not,’ she said.

  ‘The air will do you good,’ Margaret said. ‘Master’s got himself a new peruke, the Lord be praised. He’s proud as a peacock about it. But at least he won’t shame you in public.’

  ‘But I’m in mourning,’ Cat said. ‘It’s been less than three weeks.’

  ‘No one will notice, mistress. And if they do, they won’t care. Anyway, what does it matter? A widow may do as she pleases.’

  The following Sunday, Marwood presented himself at Henrietta Street.

  He bowed; she curtsied. They asked each other how they did. They went downstairs. Pheebs opened the street door and ceremoniously ushered them out of the house.

  Marwood offered her his arm and they walked along Henrietta Street, he in his new finery and she in her widow’s weeds. After the Drawing Office, the outside world was almost unbearably busy. Cat felt it strange that life should continue, oblivious to what had happened. It was as if Mr Hakesby had never existed.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said.

  ‘It’s so fine today I thought we might go on the river. If you would care for it.’

  ‘Will we find a boat?’

  ‘There’s one waiting for us at Salisbury Stairs. But we can leave it if you’d rather not.’

  She was impressed by his forethought. ‘No. I should like that.’

  They turned down Half Moon Passage, crossed the Strand and went down to the river. Marwood had hired a tilt boat, with two pairs of oars. The watermen were squat, sour-faced men who looked like father and son.

  When they were settled under the awning in the stern, the men rowed them out into the middle of the river. It was much brighter on the water, and she shaded her eyes against the glare.

  ‘Where to, master?’ asked the elder waterman.

  ‘Barn Elms,’ Marwood said. He looked at Cat. ‘We can go ashore and walk there. It will be less crowded than the Park.’

  Fewer memories too, Cat thought, remembering Ferrus running towards her from the Cockpit, his arms wheeling and his long legs rising and falling.

  ‘The tide’s right, Wanswell,’ Marwood was saying to the waterman. ‘We should catch the start of the flood on the way back.’

  Inhibited by the presence of the boatmen, they spoke little during the crossing. At Marwood’s order, they were brought ashore not at the public landing place near the village but in the fields half a mile upstream which were part of the estate. He told the boatman to collect them in an hour.

  They were not alone – Barn Elms was a popular resort for Londoners on a fine Sunday afternoon – but there was so much space that people did not encroach on one another. Further upstream, three couples were singing old-fashioned madrigals in perfect harmony while staring raptly over the water. A family had spread rugs on the grass and was eating a picnic. In the neighbouring field downstream, a party of apprentices was engaged in a violent, mysterious game which involved the possession of an inflated pig’s bladder.

  Cat stared at all this, at the people, the blue sky, the green of the fields and the shifting silver water. ‘It’s strange,’ she said softly, almost to herself.

  ‘That all this should exist in the same world as that?’ Marwood gestured towards the far bank of the river: towards Westminster, Whitehall and London. ‘Yes.’

  She wasn’t sure that was what she meant. But she let it go.

  He looked about him. ‘Shall we walk a little in those woods?’

  It was cooler under the trees. The verges were strewn with the white stars of wood anemones and gleaming shoots of wild garlic.

  ‘For me, it began here.’ Marwood pointed through the trees with his stick. ‘See where the trees thin? There’s a field beyond. That’s where Buckingham and Shrewsbury fought their duel. There was still snow on the ground.’

  ‘You saw them?’ she said, shocked.

  ‘Mr Williamson sent me to observe the duel. It was a bloody business. I hid in the wood and watched them fight it out. I saw Shrewsbury fall. A young soldier called Jenkins was killed. But nobody really cared about him.’

  In the blink of an eye, she was angry. ‘Why bring me here? All that’s done
with, thank God, and better forgotten.’

  He turned to her and smiled. ‘Forgive me. I was curious to see the spot. But I’m glad we came. It’s changed, you see. It’s as if the duel never happened.’

  She smiled back, for yet again her emotions had abruptly switched their course. ‘The place has made a fresh beginning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They turned and walked back towards the sunlit fields. The apprentices set up a great cheer for no obvious reason, and the pig’s bladder rose high in the air. The singers were refreshing themselves with wine.

  ‘What will you do now?’ Marwood asked.

  ‘I shall try to carry on,’ Cat said. ‘My husband left everything to me, not that there’s a great deal. Brennan is willing to help, and we have Dragon Yard to finish.’

  ‘And is there new work? Commissions in hand?’

  She shook her head. ‘Very little that can be depended on.’

  ‘I have a suggestion.’ Marwood hesitated.

  She stopped, looking at him. She sensed his embarrassment.

  ‘It’s probably too small for you even to consider, too trivial, too.’

  ‘What is it? I want work. Brennan and I would design and build a privy as long as we were paid to do it.’

  ‘Mr Williamson mentioned something the other day. He had been talking with Lord Arlington. Did you know my lord has a daughter? She’s barely a year old, and he dotes on her to the exclusion of all else. He wants to give the child a present. A poultry house.’

  Cat burst out laughing. Marwood was smiling too. She could not remember when she had last laughed.

  ‘This will be no common poultry house. Nor will it house vulgar hens. It’s to be built of stone, and erected in the garden of Goring House, within sight of its windows. My lord thinks a small portico with pillars would lend it distinction in his daughter’s eyes, and his own. Her name is Isabella, by the way. He calls her Tata.’

  The bubble burst. ‘But I have no connection with my lord,’ she said. ‘Or with Tata.’