Sam hopped down the passage and into the yard. I followed. Over his shoulder, I saw the crossing-sweeper sitting on the side of the trough that caught the rainwater. He was huddled in a filthy cloak with his hat drawn low over his ears. He was a crooked man with a sallow countenance.
When he saw us, he sprang up and executed a clumsy bow. Then he shrank back into his cloak as if he wanted to make himself as small as possible.
Sam says you saw my father on the day he died, I said. As well as the day before, when you brought him back here.
Barty nodded so violently that his hat fell off, exposing a bald patch covered in scabs, below which a fringe of greasy hair straggled towards his shoulders. He licked his lips. You wont make me go before a justice, master? Please, sir.
Not if you tell me the truth.
I done nothing wrong. He looked from me to Sam with the eyes of a dog that fears a beating.
Tell me, I said. You wont be the poorer for it.
It was like Thursday, master. He came out of Cliffords Inn again, down to Fleet Street. He was in a terrible hurry, and he knocked against a bookstall there, and the bookseller swore at him
Sam nudged him with his elbow. Tell his honour the rest.
Barty screwed up his face. He was looking back over his shoulder. As if someone was chasing him.
What? I snapped. Who?
Couldnt see, sir. There was a wagon coming down from St Pauls, and a coach coming the other way, under the Bar. But I thought Id go over and give the old fellow a helping hand, like I done the other day.
Hoping it would be worth your while, Sam said. You dont have to tell us all that. Go on.
Well Barty looked at me, and then away. Thats when it happened. The old man tripped fell into the road in front of the wagon. But I heard
I seized his collar and dragged him towards me. Part of me wanted to shake the life out of him. What did you hear?
His screams, master. His screams.
I let the wretch go. He fell back against the trough. I was trembling.
And next? I said.
All the traffic stopped. I went over the road to see if
If there were pickings to be had?
He tried to give me an ingratiating smile. He was alive still, sir. Just. There was a crowd around him. But he looked up and he saw me there among them. I swear he saw me, master, I swear he did. He knew me. I know he did. He said Rook. Wheres the rook?
Rook, I said. Rook? What rook?
Barty stared up at me. I dont know what he meant, master. But I know he was scared of something.
What else? I demanded.
Thats all he said, master. Then he was gone.
Later that morning there was a knocking at the door. Sam announced that the tailor had come to wait on me.
I had quite forgotten the appointment, perhaps because I did not want to remember it. Death is a dreary business, time-consuming and expensive, and so is its aftermath. But it would not be right in the eyes of the world if I went abroad without visible signs of my bereavement.
Some of these signs were cheap enough to arrange before the funeral, I had ordered Margaret to dull the metal of my buckles, attach black silk weepers to my hatband, and blacken my best brown shoes including the soles, on Margarets advice, for they would be visible when I knelt to pray.
I had borrowed a suit of mourning for the funeral but I needed to have my own. On Saturday, I had visited the tailors shop to be measured, and to choose the material and discuss the pattern. Now the man had come to fit the suit and to try to persuade me to buy a black silk sash to set off the new clothes.
By the time all this was done, my head was clearer, and my stomach had returned to something approaching normality, though the very thought of sack made me feel queasy.
Death has this consequence: it jerks a man from the rut of routine: it throws him back on his own company at a time when he wants it least. All this time, as the tailor prattled away and my mind became my own again, I could not concentrate on anything but the one word: rook. There was nothing to distract me from it.
But what could I do? Find the nearest justice and lay the information before him? What was there to say? That a foolish old man had strayed into Cliffords Inn, and afterwards he had fallen under the wheels of a wagon in Fleet Street. A crossing-sweeper had told me that his last words had been to ask where the rook was.
What crime had been committed? Whom could I lay information against? But I had to do something, for my fathers sake.
No. That was a lie. I had to do something for my own sake as much as his. In the hope of easing the grief, the guilt.
When the tailor was gone, I took the tray of my fathers possessions upstairs to his chamber. The bed had already been stripped to its mattress and the curtains removed. The floor had been scrubbed and the room aired; Margaret was a vigorous housekeeper.
My fathers clothes, such as they were, lay folded in the press. His smell clung to them, faint and unsettling. An old mans smell, musty and familiar. He had left little else behind him apart from his Bible and the contents of his pockets.
He had had the Bible as long as I could remember. It was a Geneva Bible, the old translation favoured by those of a Puritan persuasion. When he had been taken up for treason, he had had the book in prison with him and he read it over and over. When I was a child, he had ordered me never to touch it in case I sullied the sacred volume with the sinful touch of my grubby fingers. Until now, I had obeyed him.
Now the Bible was mine. I took it down to the parlour and laid it on the table, where the light fell on it from the window. I turned the pages, which were brittle and torn. Without my father there, the book had lost its significance. It was still a Bible, of course the Holy Book, more precious than all the world. The Word of God. I did not dispute that. The volume was dense with wisdom, crammed with essence of holiness. But at the same time it was just a book, a small, shabby copy of something available in its tens of thousands across the country. It needed my father to lend it weight and value.
Fixed with a rusty pin to the back cover was a fold of paper. Inside, I found a lock of light brown hair, the strands twisted together and held in place with a knotted red thread.
Memory ambushed me, swift and vicious as a footpad. Rachel how graceful she is, James, even in her kitchen. Why, she is as graceful as a deer.
I touched the curl of hair, the fragment of my mother, a relic of someone who had been alive, whom my father had once loved and desired. I could not imagine him courting her. I could not imagine my parents being young together, younger than I was. But it seemed that her youthful self had remained so vividly alive in his memory that the image of her had lured him into Cliffords Inn, had lured him among the lawyers.
My father hated them. Lawyers were agents of Satan, servants of the Antichrist. They had helped to put him in prison. Yet desire for his dead wife had cast out all fear of them.
CHAPTER SIX
St Dunstan-in-the-West was partly clothed in scaffolding. The church projected into the street, forcing the roadway into a bottleneck before it passed under the Bar into the Strand. Shops and booths huddled as if for protection against the south aisle wall, blocking more of the pavement and constricting the foot traffic. Though the Fire had not destroyed the church, it had come close enough to cause minor damage and blacken the stonework, particularly at the east end.
The entrance to Cliffords Inn lay at the west end of the nave, squeezed between the square tower of the church and the wall of the neighbouring building. I walked along a flagged passage that took me past the churchyard to a gate. A small, dingy courtyard lay beyond, much wider than it was deep, surrounded by a series of buildings of different sizes and ages.
The hall was directly opposite, filling the right-hand half of the northern range. I followed the path to the doorway at its left-hand end, where people were standing and talking in low voices. Some were lawyers and their clerks. Others were ordinary citizens, both men and women.
They ignored me as I passed like a ghost among them, through the doorway and into the passage that ran through the range to another doorway. The passage was crowded too, though the people were much quieter than those in the courtyard. The door to the hall itself was on the right. It was closed. A porter with his staff stood in front of it.
Hush, sir, he said in a savage whisper. The courts in session.
I went out by the further door. I found myself in a much larger courtyard, which had a garden beyond. Over to the left, through another gateway, was Serjeants Inn, with Chancery Lane beyond, running north from the Strand. To the right was an irregular range of buildings, leading to a further court and then another gate, which gave on to an alley off Fetter Lane. The lane had marked the western boundary of the Fire last September, but the flames had left their mark on both sides of the road. One of the Inns buildings had been gutted a block just inside the gate on the north side of the court. The roof was gone and the upper storeys had been partly destroyed.
Cliffords Inn as a whole had an air of dilapidation like an elderly relation in reduced circumstances left unattended in the chimney corner. There was one exception to the general neglect: a brick range facing the garden, on the far side of the blackened ruin.
What had my father said?
I followed her by a garden to a doorway in a building of brick.
It was strange indeed. Here was another grain of truth among my fathers ramblings on his last evening. First a place full of lawyers, and now a building of brick beside a garden.
The building had four doors at regular intervals along its length, with a pair of windows on either side overlooking the garden. I sauntered across the courtyard towards it in an elaborately casual manner. Each doorway led to a staircase, on either side of which were sets of chambers. The names of the occupants had been painted on a board beside each doorway.
I paused to examine the nearest one. There was something amiss with the lettering. I had spent my early life in the printing house, and I noticed such things. My father had made sure of that.
XIV
6 Mr Harrison
5 Mr Moran
4 Mr Gorvin
3 Mr Gromwell
2 Mr Drury
1 Mr Bews
The letters of a name were most ill-painted, James, and ill-formed as well.
My skin prickled at the back of my neck. It was extraordinary. The board was just as he had described it. One name had obviously been added more recently than the others, and by a painter with little skill, and with no inclination to make the best of what skill he had. Gromwell.
There was a great drip attached to it, and a poor creature had drowned therein.
It was as if my fathers ghost were beside me, murmuring the words into my ear. Yes, there was the ant, trapped below the last l of Gromwell, decaying within its rigid shroud of white paint.
Horror gripped me. If my father had been right about all this, then what about the woman he had seen displaying herself like a wanton in a chamber above? The woman with her coach and horses. The woman whose eyes he had closed in the chamber with the ant.
Gromwells chamber?
I opened the door and climbed the stairs. I did not hurry, partly because I was scared of what I would find. On the first landing, two doors faced each other, numbers 3 and 4. I waited a moment, listening.
I thought to find her in the chamber with the ant up the stairs
I knocked on number 3. I heard movement in the room beyond. A tall, florid-faced man opened the door. He wore a morning gown of dark blue plush and a velvet cap. There was a book in his hand, with a finger marking his place. He frowned at me, raised his eyebrows and waited.
Mr Gromwell? I said.
It must have sounded like Cromwell to the mans ears. Or perhaps he was merely oversensitive, which was understandable as Oliver Cromwells head was displayed as a dreadful warning to traitors on a twenty-foot-high spike over Westminster Hall.
Its Gromwell, he said, drawing out the syllables. G-r-r-romwell with a G. I have no connection with a certain Huntingdonshire family named Cromwell. The G-r-r-romwells have been long established in Gloucestershire. G-r-r-romwell, sir, as in the plant.
Whose seeds are used to treat the stone, sir? I said, remembering a herbal my father had printed.
The eyebrows rose again. Indeed. A thing of beauty, too. As Pliny says, it is as if the jewellers art has arranged the gromwells gleaming white pearls so symmetrically among the leaves. Sir Thomas Browne calls it lithospermon in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
I bowed in the face of so much learning. Behind Mr Gromwell was a table piled high with books.
Forgive me for disturbing your studies. I shifted my stance, so I could see further to the left. I couldnt see a carpet. All I could make out was an expanse of bare boards and a grubby rush mat. My name is Marwood. I wonder if my late father called on you last week.
Gromwell frowned, and I guessed he was taking account of my mourning clothes for the first time. Your late father?
Over the fireplace was a dusty mirror in a gilt frame that had seen better times, but no trace of a painting, lewd or otherwise.
He died the day after he came here.
I am sorry to hear it. Mr Gromwell did not look prosperous but he had a gentlemans manners. But I have been away. My rooms were locked up.
He took a step back. His arm nudged the door, which swung further open, revealing most of the room. There wasnt a couch of any description, let alone one with a body on it. None of the furnishings could be called luxurious. I felt both relieved and disappointed. It was remarkable that my father had recalled so much. Once he had entered the building, his imagination must have taken over. But I persevered.
I am much occupied with business at present, Gromwell said in a stately fashion. I bid you good day, sir.
Does the name Twisden mean anything to you, sir? I asked. Or Wyndham? Or Rainsford?
He shook his head. Forgive me, sir, my studies
Or the initials DY?
Gromwells face changed. For an instant, he looked surprised, jolted out of his stateliness. His features sharpened, which made them look briefly younger. No, he said, more firmly than he had said anything yet. Good day to you.
He closed the door in my face. I knocked on it. The only answer was the sound of a bolt being driven home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The young woman sat in the gallery taking shorthand. Her real name was Catherine Lovett, but most of the time she tried very hard to forget that inconvenient fact. Now she was Jane Hakesby, a maidservant attending the Fire Court at Cliffords Inn to serve her master, Simon Hakesby, who was also a second cousin of her fathers. She was a maidservant with accomplishments, equipped with some of the advantages of gentle breeding, though few of them were much use to her at present. In her new life, only Mr Hakesby knew her true identity.