P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

Mother Smith’s had a red cross on the door and the shutters nailed together. They stared at it dully and carried on up to Eastcheap and along to another little house with red lattices. Dodd bought three large horn cups of aqua vitae and some beer with the change from his false angel, and they sat by the window drinking in silence.

‘What’ll we tell the Courtier?’

Barnabus thought carefully about this. ‘Nuffing,’ he said decisively at last. ‘Don’t want to worry him and I’ll have trouble finding a new master if they think I’ve got plague.’

But you could have it, yammered the scared wean inside Dodd’s head, you could and not know it, the death marks could be growing on you out of sight right now, they could…He shook his head and swallowed the rest of his aqua vitae.

None of them felt like hefting a clumsy heavy cage full of outraged fowl all the way back to the western suburbs, so they took a boat. Simon sat in the back on the cushions and trailed his fingers in the water and wouldn’t look at either of them. Barnabus stared at him the whole way, until Dodd was unnerved just watching.

‘Take us past Mermaid Steps, boatman,’ Barnabus said. ‘I want Whitefriars.’

The boatman nodded, and when they landed Dodd paid him, including a tip after Barnabus elbowed him. He thought he had never ever spent so much money in one day in his life before. He couldn’t even bring himself to count it up, it came to so much, and some of it was false and the plague on top of it all.

‘We’ll take Tamburlain the Great back to the room so he can rest and keep his strength up. Now you’ve looked after him before, haven’t you, Simon?’

Simon nodded and perked up a little with enthusiasm. ‘Me dad was teaching me to handle ’im, how to feed him up before a match and make sure he wasn’t got at and how to put the spurs on. Dad says…’ His voice trailed off. Then he shrugged and went back to staring at the water.

‘Well, you look tired,’ Barnabus said. ‘How do you feel? Peaky? Got a headache?’

Simon shook his head.

‘Well, you can go to bed so you can keep an eye on Tamburlain. If I know Sir Robert he’s playing primero by now and we’re in for a late night.’ Gloomily Dodd thought he was probably right. London was a den of iniquity and no mistake, full of evil greedy folks just plotting to take your money by any way they could, and no wonder it was being visited by the Sword of God’s Wrath.

But would God’s vengeance hit Dodd as well, even though he hadn’t done anything bad? Well, nothing iniquitous, anyway, just the routine normal sins that everybody committed. But the Reverend Gilpin had said that there wasn’t any such thing as a normal sin, a venial sin like the Papists said, they were all sins and that was bad enough to draw down God’s wrath. God had good reason to be angry with every man or woman. Dodd shook his head and tried to stop thinking about it. If he let his mind go down that road he’d be a gibbering wreck by the next morning (or dead of plague, if God was angry enough with him). What could you do? If you got the plague, you got it, there wasn’t anything you could do to stop it except stay out of plague houses and away from sick people and repent of your sins. And even that wouldn’t necessarily help you. Barnabus had said his sister was a good woman, she’d done nothing to deserve such a visitation. Deep in the recesses of his soul, Dodd found it terrifying that God was so much less reasonable than Richie Graham of Brackenhill. At least if you paid your blackrent on time and didn’t kill any Grahams, Richie Graham wouldn’t burn you out.

On the way to the river they had bought grain to feed the fighting cock. It seemed tame enough when they cautiously let it out of its cage in the attic room, fed it grain on the bare floorboards which magnified every footstep and peck, every creak. It glared at Dodd and Barnabus suspiciously, but it seemed to know Simon and even let him smooth down some long feathers that had been disarranged by being in the cage. At last they left the cock roosting on the head of the bed and Simon curled up in his blankets on the pallet by the wall. Barnabus called him to get up and bolt the door from the inside, which he did.

They clattered down the stairs and hurried to Fleet Street to get back into the City before the gates shut. By the time they arrived at the Mermaid, the sun was drowning in a brilliant red blaze that set light to the water and gilded the little boats scurrying across it. All Dodd wanted was to go to bed and sleep.

Barnabus caught his arm just as they went in. ‘Keep quiet for me, Sergeant.’

Dodd sighed. ‘He willnae like it when he finds out.’

‘He won’t find out.’

‘All right, if ye want.’

‘You’re a prince, Sergeant. I owe you one. Not many would have stuck around like that for people that weren’t even related.’

Dodd ducked his head in embarrassment, not able to explain that he had stuck around because he was afraid of getting lost in London again.

Carey was happily calling his point score as they came in, putting down more money on a terrifyingly large pile. Beside him was bundled the still unconscious mound of Robert Greene. When he saw Dodd and Barnabus, Carey closed up his cards and smiled.

‘Oh, there you are. Greene’s no better, as you can see, though I think it’s now the booze not the blow that’s made him so sleepy. Pull up a stool, Sergeant, I’ll introduce you.’

Dodd nodded politely as Carey went round the circle of cardplayers, firing off names like a bowman in a battle. Unfortunately not one of them hit the mark and all were instantly lost from his overtaxed brain. Dodd recognised one man. Shakespeare, his fuzzy dome glinting in the candlelight above him. He had already folded. From the look of concentration on his face and the sideways manner he sat on his stool it was clear he was magnificently drunk. Next to him sat a short rotund man in a grey wool suit with a confiding way to him; Dodd couldn’t remember his name. Another one, directly opposite the Courtier had a handsome slightly smug face, the kind of face that believes itself to be cleverer than any company, and very annoyingly often is, and a fine doublet of black velvet slashed in peach taffeta, almost as good as the Courtier’s. Next to him was a pale man with a nose that had been broken once who Dodd vaguely thought was called Poley or Pool or something, and that took you to Robert Greene and the Courtier again. Dodd narrowed his eyes and sat down on a stool deferentially brought for him by Barnabus and decided that he could throw any one of them a lot further than he was prepared to trust them, and would on the whole prefer to throw them anyway.

‘Will you join us, Sergeant?’

‘Ah’d prefer to watch for a while, Sir Robert. I’m no’ so well in practice with gleek.’

As Dodd knew perfectly well, they were playing primero and in fact he was in razor-sharp form for primero, for him.

The self-satisfied man in the pretty doublet raised his eyebrows at Dodd. ‘Sergeant?’ he asked. ‘Are you a lawyer, sir?’

Was the man deliberately trying to insult him? ‘Nay, sir, I’m a Land Sergeant.’

‘Very important man, in Carlisle,’ said the Courtier helpfully. ‘Keeps an eye on some of the most important reivers’ trails from Scotland into England. He has land and a tower in Gilsland.’

The reaction to this was glazed-over politeness.

‘Fancy,’ said pretty doublet, distantly.

‘And ye, sir?’ Dodd asked pretty doublet. ‘What are ye yerself?’

Pretty doublet laughed. ‘Oh, I’m a poet, a playwright, a scholar, a striver for the incomprehensible crystal reaches of the heavens.’

Dodd gave him a glazed look right back. ‘Och, fancy.’