Andrew Taylor - The Fire Court

The kitchen smelled of smoke and old meat. Now I was here, I wanted to leave, but I lacked the strength. In a moment Margaret returned with a jug of small beer and a pot to put it in. Without speaking, she poured a morning draught and handed it to me.

The first mouthful made me retch. I fought back the rising nausea and took a second mouthful. I kept that down and ventured cautiously on a third.

‘I put juice of the cabbage in there too,’ Margaret said. ‘A sovereign remedy.’

I retched again. She went back to stirring the pot over the fire, the source of another smell. I watched a rat skim along the bottom of the wall from the larder and slip through the crack below the back door. I lacked the energy to throw something at it.

Taking my time, I drank the rest of the pot and let it settle. I felt no worse for it. At least my mouth was less dry.

Margaret refilled the pot without my asking. Sam had a tendency to take too much drink, and she knew how to deal with it.

I closed my eyes. When I next opened them, Margaret was standing over me. She was a short, sturdy woman with black hair, dark eyes and a high colour. When hot or angry, she looked as if she might explode. She looked like that now but I wasn’t sure why. My memory of the later part of yesterday was blurred. Clearly, I had been very drunk. That probably meant that Sam had been very drunk too.

‘Master,’ she said. ‘Can I speak to you?’

‘Later,’ I said.

She ignored that. ‘Your father’s clothes, sir. I—’

‘Give them to the poor,’ I croaked. ‘Sell them. I don’t care a fig what you do with them.’

‘It’s not that, sir. I tried to clean his coat yesterday. The one he was wearing.’

I winced and looked away, reaching for the pot.

‘It’s a good coat,’ she said. ‘There’s a deal of use left in it.’

‘Then get rid of it somehow. Don’t bother me with it, woman.’

‘I emptied the pockets.’

Something in her voice made me look up. ‘What is it?’

For answer, she went to the shelves on the wall opposite the fireplace and took down a small box without a lid. She set it on the table.

Inside was my father’s frayed purse and a piece of rag. The purse contained two pennies – we had never given him more because his money tended to be stolen or lost, if he had not given it away first – and four pieces of type, the only surviving relics of his press in Pater Noster Row. His folding knife was there too, with its handle of wood, worn and stained with constant use. At the bottom was a crumpled sheet of paper, smeared with rust.

Not rust, of course. Dried blood. Just as there had been dried blood on the cuff of his shirt.

Yesterday’s conversation with Sam flooded into my mind. The crossing-sweeper. Clifford’s Inn. Where the lawyers are. Those creatures of the devil . And, before that, my father talking deluded nonsense about my mother, and the woman on the couch, and closing her eyes.

I picked up the paper and smoothed it out. It was a strip torn from a larger sheet. Written on it were the words ‘Twisden, Wyndham, Rainsford, DY’.

Margaret refilled my pot. ‘It wasn’t there last week, master.’

‘Are you sure?’

She ignored the question, treating it with the contempt it deserved.

My brain was still fighting yesterday’s fumes. I screwed up my eyes and tried to focus on the words. First, the three names. Then two initials. DY – a name so well known that initials sufficed for it?

‘Bring me a roll and some butter.’

She went away. I sat there, staring into nothing. Clifford’s Inn. A scrap of paper stained with blood. A few names. It unsettled me that my father’s ramblings had contained a grain of sense. He really had strayed into a place of lawyers. But he could have picked the paper up anywhere.

The door from the yard opened and closed. There were footsteps in the scullery passage, and the tap of a crutch on the flagged floor.

Sam appeared in the kitchen doorway. He jerked his head towards the scullery passage and the back door. ‘Barty’s in the yard.’

I stared at him.

‘He won’t get any scraps out of me at this hour,’ Margaret said tartly. ‘Tell him to come back after dinner.’

‘Hold your tongue, woman.’ Sam looked at me. ‘Barty, master. The crossing-sweeper who saw your father. You told me to find him for you. Do you remember? In the Devil?’

Suddenly I was sober, or I felt I was. I stood up, knocking over the bench. ‘Bring him in.’

‘Best that you go out to him, master.’ Margaret wrinkled her nose. ‘If you’d be so kind. He stinks.’

‘You’ll give him something to eat,’ I said. ‘Take it out to him.’

‘Something you should know, sir,’ Sam said. ‘Barty says he saw your father again.’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’

Sam’s voice was gentle. ‘On Friday morning. As well as on Thursday.’

There was a moment of silence. My mouth was open. Margaret stood with a pan in her hand, leaning forward to put it on the fire, as still as a statue.

I swallowed. I said slowly, ‘Last Friday, you mean? The day my father died?’

Sam nodded.

‘Did he see what happened?’

‘He’ll only speak to you. I’m no use to him. You’re the one with the purse.’

Margaret whimpered softly. She set the pan on the fire.

‘Why didn’t he tell us sooner?’

‘He was taken up for debt that very afternoon. It’s only yesterday evening his mother raised the money to get him out of prison.’

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 won’t 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 won’t be the poorer for it.’

‘It was like Thursday, master. He came out of Clifford’s 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?’

‘Couldn’t see, sir. There was a wagon coming down from St Paul’s, and a coach coming the other way, under the Bar. But I thought I’d 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 don’t have to tell us all that. Go on.’

‘Well …’ Barty looked at me, and then away. ‘That’s 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 …’