Andrew Taylor - The Fire Court

‘No, sir.’ She and Mary had agreed it was wiser this way, wiser to bide one’s time. ‘I had pains in my head when I woke up.’

‘The doctor called it a sudden inflammation of the brain. Thanks to his treatment, it came and went like an April shower. Can you remember how it happened?’

‘No. It is all a perfect blank to me until I woke up in my bed.’

‘You and Mary went out for a drive in a hackney coach,’ he said slowly, as if teaching a child a lesson. ‘After you’d dined – on Thursday. Remember?’

‘No.’

‘The fever came on suddenly. You were insensible, or very near to it, when Mary brought you home.’

‘I remember nothing,’ she said, though she remembered everything that mattered. She remembered every inch of the way to Clifford’s Inn, every step up the stairs of Staircase XIV. For now, however, it was better to pretend to forget.

Philip’s hand touched her arm. ‘The doctor said that sometimes sufferers are much troubled by dreams when the fever is at its height, and believe all sorts of strange fancies. But thank God all that is passed now.’

‘I am much better, sir,’ she said. ‘I feel quite refreshed.’

‘Good. In that case, will you join me at supper?’

‘I think not. I will take something here instead.’

Jemima watched him as she spoke, but his expression told her nothing. Her husband was tall, lean and dark-complexioned – like the King himself. He was not a handsome man but usually she found his face good to look at, because it was his. But now his face had become a mere arrangement of features, an array of hollows, projections, planes, textures, colours. He was a stranger to her.

A familiar stranger. A treacherous stranger, and that was the very worst sort of stranger.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said, smiling. ‘For dinner. We shall have guests, by the way – a brace of lawyers. One of them’s Sir Thomas Twisden, the judge.’

It seemed to her that he spoke more deliberately than usual, enunciating the words with precision as if they were especially significant. He paused – only for a second, but she knew that the pause meant something, too. He knew that she didn’t like people to come to the house.

The maids had finished making the bed. Hester left the room, her arms full of dirty linen. Mary remained, tidying the pots and bottles on the dressing table.

‘And I’ve asked Lucius Gromwell to join us,’ Philip said.

Jemima caught her breath, and hoped he hadn’t noticed. Gromwell, of all people. The sly, twice-damned, whoreson devil. How dared they? She stared at her lap. She sensed he was looking at her, gauging her reaction to Gromwell’s name. She was aware as well that, on the very edge of her range of vision, Mary’s hands were no longer moving among the litter on the dressing table.

‘It will be good to have you at the table,’ he went on. ‘You must make sure they send up something worth eating. We must do our best to keep Sir Thomas amused. We want him to look kindly on us, after all, don’t we?’

His voice sharpened towards the end, and she looked up. He wants me to twitch like a hound bitch, she thought, to the sound of her master’s voice.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘He’s a Fire Court judge,’ Philip reminded her. ‘He’s down for the Dragon Yard case.’

He smiled at her and made his way towards the door. He paused, his hand on the latch.

‘Lucius is writing a book, by the way. He is mad for it. It’s called The Natural Curiosities of Gloucestershire , and it will have many plates and maps, so it will cost a great deal to produce. I promised him I would pay for the publication, and he assures me it will make me a handsome profit when the edition sells out, as well as enshrine my name for posterity.’

Gromwell, she thought. I hate him.

‘You remember him, don’t you? My old friend from school and Oxford.’

She nodded. Gromwell will look at me tomorrow and know my shame, she thought, and I shall look at him and know that he knows it. He arranged it all. None of this would have happened without him. Gromwell, who dared to stand in my way at Clifford’s Inn.

‘Poor Lucius, eh?’ Her husband lifted the latch and laughed with what seemed like genuine amusement. ‘I doubt he’ll ever finish the book. He is a man of many parts but he finishes nothing he begins. He was like that at school, and he’s never changed.’

My father had been run over in Fleet Street by a wagon bearing rubble removed from the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. The weight had broken his spine, killing him instantly. It was a miracle that the pressure had not cut him in half.

Infirmary Close was full of wailing women. Margaret persuaded herself that his death had been her fault, for she had left him in the parlour while she was making dinner, believing he was no longer capable of managing the locks and bolts of the door into the lane. The neighbours’ maids wept in sympathy. The laundry woman came to the house to collect the washing; she wept too, because tears are catching and death is frightening.

After he brought me home in the hackney coach, Sam went into the kitchen yard and chopped wood as if he were chopping down his enemies: one by one, with deliberation and satisfaction.

As for me, I went into my father’s bedchamber and sat beside him, as I should have done last night. He lay with his eyes closed and his hands folded over his chest. Someone had covered the great wound with a sheet and bound up his jaw. His face appeared unmarked. Sometimes the dead look peaceful. He did not.

I could not pray. I did not weep. The weight of his disapproval bore down on me, for I had strayed from the godly path he had ordained for me, and now it could never be put right. Worse still was the shame I felt about how I had behaved to him and how I had felt about him during the last few months, when he had become as vulnerable as a child.

Something shifted inside me, as an earthquake ripples and rumbles through solid earth and rock, bringing floods and ruin in its wake. Nothing would be the same again.

That was when the memory of Catherine Lovett came into my mind. She was a young woman with a strange and independent cast of mind. I had done her a service at the time of the Fire, though I had not seen her since; she was living in retirement and under an assumed name. As it happened, I had been with her when her father died, and I had seen what she had done. She had taken his hand and raised it to her lips.

I looked at my father’s hand. Flesh, skin and bone. The fingers twisted like roots. The nails discoloured and in need of trimming. Death had robbed his hand of its familiarity and made it strange.

I lifted the hand and kissed it. The weight of it took me by surprise. The dead are heavier than the living.

‘I am truly sorry for your loss,’ Mr Williamson said the following morning.

I thanked him and requested leave of absence to bury my father and settle his affairs.

‘Of course.’ Williamson turned away and busied himself with the papers on his desk. ‘Where will you lay him to rest?’

‘Bunhill Fields, sir.’

Williamson grunted. ‘Not an Anglican burial ground?’

‘I think not. He would not have wished it.’

Bunhill Fields was where the Dissenters lay, and where my father belonged. Williamson returned to reading letters, occasionally annotating them. The two of us were alone in the Scotland Yard office, which lay just to the north of the Whitehall Palace itself. Williamson had two offices, one close to my Lord Arlington’s, and this one, which he used for the Gazette and for other concerns that required more privacy.

A few minutes later, he spoke again, and his voice sounded harder than before, closer to his northern roots, which was often a sign of irritation in him. ‘You must look to the living, Marwood, as well as the dead.’