P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

He went along with his two new friends, smiling and laughing like the Courtier, and making out that he was there to deal wool. Oh and that was lucky, because they happened to dabble in the wool trade themselves, and the one that was calling himself Wee Colin Elliot had a number of sacks in a warehouse near Queen’s Hythe just begging for a buyer since they’d missed the fair…

Dodd’s heart began to beat hard as they went out of a side door he hadn’t noticed, through the churchyard. It seemed they were heading for a narrow alleyway. A little bit late it occurred to him that actually, when he was on his own with neither his kin nor the men of the Carlisle guard to back him, he was feared of both the Waste and the Moss because they were normally full of robbers.

‘They serve the finest wine in the world just around this corner…’ said the smaller man, hurrying him into the alley.

Suddenly Dodd decided he’d had enough of the game. He balked just inside the alley, felt a hand clutching at his elbow, ducked instinctively, swung about and caught the arm of the bigger man who was bringing a small cudgel down on where Dodd’s head would have been. Dodd snarled. This was something he understood. He headbutted the man so his nose flowered red, bashed the hand holding the cudgel up against the wall until the weapon dropped. There was a metallic flash in the corner of his eye, so he kneed the man to put him down, whirled around sweeping his broadsword from its sheath and caught a rapier on the forte of his sword. The rapier flickered past his ear a couple of times and terrified him by nearly taking out his eye. Dodd knew that a rapier which could thrust had all the advantage over a broadsword, especially when he wasn’t wearing a jack, so he pulled out his dagger and went properly into the attack, crowding the smaller man up against the opposite wall and raining blows down on him so he had no chance to pull any fancy moves.

Something grabbed his leg and bit his calf and Dodd glared down to see that the larger man had crawled over, still sobbing, and had caught him. He stamped down with his other boot to get the teeth off and went after the one with the rapier again. Unfortunately the bastard southerner was running away, so Dodd shook his foot free again and gave chase.

Barnabus appeared in the mouth of the alley and thoughtfully tripped the man up. Dodd was onto him, kicked the dropped rapier away, hauled him up by a fistful of doublet and slammed him against the wall.

‘Careful, mate,’ said Barnabus confidentially over his shoulder from where he was robbing the man on the ground. ‘Don’t kill ’im; Sir Robert’s right about juries round here.’

Dodd was snarling at his prize. ‘If ye ken who I am, ye’d ken that Wee Colin Elliot’s dad killed mine, ye soft wet southern fart. Wis it robbery ye were after, eh? Eh?!’

The man’s eyes were swivelling in his head and he was gobbling. Dodd slammed him again. ‘By Christ, did ye think I wear ma sword for a fucking decoration, ye long slimy toad’s pizzle, who the hell d’ye think…’

‘Well, ’e wasn’t to know, was he?’ said Barnabus reasonably. ‘He just thought you was some farmer up for the law-term, what with yer homespun suit and funny talk. Poor bugger, look at ’im, he’s gone to pieces.’

Dodd realised to his disgust that the man was actually crying now, and dropped him in a convenient pile of dung. Barnabus rolled him expertly, tutted and led the way out of the alley back to Ave Maria Lane, with a quick glance either side at the turning for further ambushes. Dodd, whose blood was up, rather hoped there would be someone, but put his sword away again when Barnabus hissed at him.

Feeling witty, Dodd paused, went back, found the rapier and broke it in two with his boot. Barnabus shook his head at the waste.

‘Nasty foreign weapon,’ Dodd explained. ‘When d’ye think they’ll come after us wi’ their kin?’

Barnabus laughed. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Not the way you think. Though I’d keep a weather eye out for coney-catchers-they’ll want your purse one way or the other, believe me.’

‘What’s a coney-catcher, for God’s sake?’

Barnabus rolled his eyes at this display of ignorance. ‘Someone what wants to help you rob yourself, someone what fools you and draws you in with your own greed and fear. It’s philosophical, really. They say nobody can coney-catch an honest man. Mind you, I shouldn’t think there’s ever been one come to London before.’

Dodd grunted, suspicious of compliments, however back-handed. Not that it mattered. With luck, once the Lord Chamberlain and Vice had satisfied themselves that Carey wasn’t working for Spanish spies nor likely to become King James’s new catamite, the lot of them could go north again.

A scurrying down by the entrance to the crypt caught his eye. There were black rats on the steps, crawling over and under each other brazenly in daylight. Two rat corpses lay close by, swollen out of shape by death.

‘Good God, look at that,’ he said in horror. ‘Look at the size o’ them.’

Barnabus glanced over and shrugged. ‘Oh yes,’ he said off-handedly. ‘They say the biggest rats in the world prance up and down Paul’s aisle.’

‘Ah hadnae thought they meant real rats.’

‘Well both, it’s one of them witty comments, innit. You coming in again?’

Suddenly he felt choked by all the buildings rising up around him, hemmed in and trapped. Your eyes were always coming up short against a wall, and he was trammelled and crowded with people, the stink would fell an ox. And he had always hated rats.

He stopped at the side door of the church, unable to bear the thought of entering the high solemnity of the place with its faded paintings too high up to be whitewashed and the human trash prancing to and fro nibbling meatpies beneath the hard-faced old-fashioned angels. And God knew what horrors were underneath, in the crypt where no-one went.

‘I’ll take a turn round about the churchyard,’ he said, hoping Barnabus wouldn’t notice how pale he felt. ‘Take the air.’

Barnabus nodded. ‘You’ll be safe enough, I should think. It’ll take them a day to work out what to do about you. You could buy yourself a book.’

‘Good God, what would I want to do that for?’ said Dodd. Barnabus grinned and winked at him, before disappearing into the gloom.

Dodd glowered around but found no more would-be friends. He ambled past the stalls of the churchyard, looking with growing astonishment at all the different books, just casually lying there, higgledy-piggledy in piles with the first pages pinned up on the support posts of the awnings and the brightly coloured signs over the stalls-there was a cock, a pig, a blackamoor, a mermaid, all different like inns.

He stopped under one awning, picked up a small volume and opened it, squinted to spell out the words under his breath. It was poetry-some tale about foreigners, he thought, from the funny names. Dodd couldn’t be doing with such nonsense.

Suddenly he caught sight of a familiar face, Mistress Bassano’s servant, the balding young man called Will. He was not in livery but wearing a dark green woollen suit trimmed with brocade and a funny-looking collar that wasn’t a ruff, but looked like a falling band starched so it stood up by itself. He was standing with his hat off in front of another of the men with inky aprons, though skinny this time, under the sign of a black swan. Will was proffering a sheaf of closely-written paper. The printer shook his head, arms folded, legs astride.

‘Nobody’s interested in rehashes of Ovid,’ grumbled the printer. ‘I’ve told you before, there’s no demand for that kind of thing.’

Will’s response was too soft for Dodd to hear it, though he caught a whining note. The printer rolled his eyes patiently.