Peter Ransley: Plague Child

‘God is with us!’ he exclaimed exultantly.

Gloomy George, left out of this totally unexpected communion between us, scowled at me.

‘Compose!’ Mr Black shouted at him. ‘Don’t just stand there, man – compose!’

The scowl became a look of pure malevolence as George seized his composing stick. Before, I had simply been someone to chastise and, however hopeless the task, save from sin; now I was unredeemable, his sworn enemy. The devil was a very subtle creature, who had somehow slithered and slived me into Mr Black’s favours, and must, at all costs, be rooted out. That was how George’s mind worked.

Even George, however, got swept up in the desire to catch Mr Pym’s words and have them all over town as soon as possible. There was no faster typesetter in the City of London. If Mr Ink’s fingers had flown, George’s were a scarcely visible blur, dipping from case to stick and back to case again, working his own magic, reproducing the words backwards as between us Mr Black and I excavated John Pym’s fine phrases.

As the night wore on we ceased to care about the increasing gap between what he had actually said, and what we invented. For the first time I had a glimmer of understanding about the power of the words we were handling. They were as explosive as gunpowder. All that was wanted was a fuse. Parliament had the right to approve the King’s ministers. The right? The King chose his own ministers, by Divine Right. Parliament alone had the right to make laws. Alone? Without the King?

And there, by a miracle unsmeared, unequivocal, in Mr Ink’s flowing, cursive hand was the biggest keg of gunpowder of all: Parliament had the right to control the army.

Mrs Black stumbled downstairs to see what was happening, awakening her daughter. I caught a glimpse of Anne in her nightgown at the foot of the stairs, hoping she would see from the excited chatter between me and her father that he was looking at me in a different light. But she merely wished her father goodnight, turning away from me with a wrinkle of distaste. The flicker of that nose, with its tiny upturn I thought no sculptor could copy, made me miserably, hopelessly aware of the stink and grime of Smithfield on me, to which was being added the ink I was coating on the formes, now locked together for printing.

I heard her laughter on the stair, and the hated word ‘monkey’. I was too fearful to curse her again. I hated her then. I hated the whole Black family. I hated being an apprentice. I wanted, above anything else in the world, to kick my boots off and be in the shipyard with Matthew again.

After we had proofed and printed, I broke the ice in the pail in the yard, washed what dirt I could from my face and hands, and began to eat the cold pottage and drink the beer Sarah had left out. Mr Black took some wine for himself, gazing with pride at the newssheets, gleaming wet in the candlelight. There was a fine portrait of the King, hair curling luxuriously to his shoulders from his hat cocked at the front, and a more modest one of Mr Pym, his pointed beard chipped because we had used the block so many times.

Mr Black’s idea was to put Parliament’s explosive demands in a respectful wrapping, viz:

a Grand Remonstrance of PARLIAMENT to his MAJESTY THE KINGBeing the onlye true & faithful reporte of theproceedings of Parliament praying His Majesty toadresse the most humble supplications of his subjects

I had swallowed my beer in two draughts when Mr Black said to George: ‘Take some wine yourself and pour Tom some.’

George’s eyebrows lifted and looked as if they would never come down again. He was only offered wine on his name day, and Mr Black had never offered me it before; rarely had he called me Tom. I had always been ‘that boy’, ‘sinning wretch’ or ‘little devil’; only lately, as I had grown almost as tall as he was, kept my boots on regular, and was suddenly useful to him had he begun to call me, albeit with heavy sarcasm, ‘Mr Neave’.

Mr Black took some wine, cleared his throat, and gave me a long stare. My stomach churned. Now he was going to question me about how the papers and myself had got into such a dishevelled state. His eyes, however, were drawn back by the drying newssheets, still shining with ink in the candlelight, and his face filled with the triumph of getting the speech on the streets next day.

‘Well done, Tom,’ he said.

The words came stiffly and awkwardly from his mouth, for he was as unused to saying them as I was to hearing them. In fact it took a moment – several moments – before I was sure there was no hidden sarcasm signalling the reproof to come. It was only when he put more wine in my tankard and raised his glass, his face coming out of the shadows with a smile on it, that I knew he meant it.

The smile was as much a stranger to me as the words. Without warning, tears pricked my eyes. I had cried myself to sleep often enough in that place, but I had never cried in their presence. The more I was beaten, the more I resolved never to cry in front of them.

‘Come, Tom,’ he said, ‘are those tears?’

‘No, sir,’ I stammered, ‘no, sir,’ pulling away into the shadows and drawing my sleeve over my face.

‘Thou art a curious child, is he not, George?’

‘Aye, sir,’ said George, with a vehement look at me.

‘Hard as stone when chastised, and cries when praised!’

‘I am not used to it, sir,’ I said.

‘Ah well, Tom, that’s as maybe. You were very rough when we took you, was he not, George?’

George looked as if the end of the world was not merely imminent, but had come. ‘He was, sir. The roughest ’prentice in the City. And if I may venture an opinion, still is.’

‘But improving, George, improving.’

George said nothing, but Mr Black was not waiting for an answer. ‘There was much to do and too little time.’

He poked the dull red coals of the fire until a few flames appeared, lighting up his face. He was not yet forty, but the flickering light threw up the furrows in his face of a much older man, etched deeply into his forehead and cheeks like the lines of a finely cut woodblock. He stared into the flames as if he had forgotten we were there. I crept closer. When he had said I was a curious child I was minded of Matthew; now I was took back to the time when Matthew gazed into the fire and drew out the pendant, and I wondered how such a devious cunning man and a straight-backed religious man could stare into the fire in an exactly similar way, even though one was looking into the future, and the other into the past.

‘You do not know how much evil there was in your soul, Tom,’ he said.

I shuddered. At that moment I utterly believed in the evil he had found in me: Susannah only thought me good because of my trick with the Bible.

‘We prayed to God we could root it out, did we not?’ he said to George.

‘Aye,’ George replied, clasping his hands together, speaking with an irony that seemed to be lost on Mr Black. ‘We are still praying.’

‘More evil than you know. More than you can possibly imagine!’

He swung round as he said this, his face moving into shadow, his voice suddenly harsh. The change from a tone of reverie was so abrupt it shook not only me, but took George aback. George unclasped his hands, took his brooding attention from me and stared at his master with the avid expression I had once caught on his face when he was listening at the door to some quarrel between Mr Black and his wife.

‘I would never have taken you, never, if the business had not been bad. Bad? About to go under!’

He finished his wine, poured more, drank half of that and then walked about the room.

‘Even then I would not have done it, I would have gone home to Oxford with my tail between my legs if Merrick had not offered to buy me out. Merrick!’