Peter Ransley - Plague Child

I heard the crack of a stair that was rotten, followed by Mr Black’s muttered curse, and knew he was nearly downstairs. I slipped into the kitchen as he entered the room, holding up his candle. Its light flickered towards me. I ducked behind a chair. From there I could see into the printing shop.

As Mr Black, candle in one hand, stick in the other, approached the stairs that led to the cellar, I flung the key into the shop. It hit the press and, by great good fortune, dislodged some of the drying pamphlets, the clips holding them clattering down.

‘Thieves!’ he yelled, setting the candle down and running into the shop. I went after him, ducking round the press, trying to get to the door, but he saw me and blocked my way. He drew back his stick. Whatever vague plan I had formed deserted me.

‘It’s you!’ he said. ‘How did you get out?’

‘Run!’ I shouted. ‘Run!’

‘Two of you are there!’

I dodged the first blow. He had his back to the kitchen and I glimpsed Anne’s petrified face as she emerged from the cellar steps.

‘I can handle two of you!’

Distracted by the sight of Anne, the next blow caught me and a third sent me to the floor.

‘Where’s the other? Who let you out?’

I flung my hands round my head, curling up into a submissive ball as I had done so many times before to receive his blows. Then the thought of him seeing Anne drove me to fight in a way I had not done since they first took me from Poplar. Through an aching, blurred mist I saw his legs, inches from me, grabbed them, and pulled. Off balance as he swung back his stick, he went down easily, a look of great astonishment on his face, hitting the floor with such a thud I thought the house must fall down.

I was at the door, fumbling with the key, before I realised he hadn’t moved, and there was no sound from him. I went back to him. Mr Black was still, his eyes closed. One wild thought after another chased through my head. I was in love. I had told her I loved her. And moments afterwards I had killed her father!

As I bent over him, his eyes shot open and he grabbed my wrist. He was a powerful man and I could not wrench away. I grabbed hold of the table to stop him from pulling me down. A chair clattered down.

‘Damn you!’ he panted, gasping for breath. ‘Would you –’

I thought his grip would break my wrist. He pressed his other hand on the floor to push himself up. Another moment and I would have fallen. I brought my boot down on the hand he was using as a lever at the same time as I saw Anne returning down the stairs into the kitchen, as if she had just awoken. A look of horror crossed her face as her father yelled in pain and released me. I tried to say something to her, but her father made another enraged grab at me and I ran for the door, pulling at the latch and was into Half Moon Court before he reached the door shouting after me.

‘Stop, you little fool – you’re in great danger! Come back! I must speak to you!’

I was about to run into Cloth Fair. I stopped and turned. I nearly went back. I wish I had. I hesitated, not because of what he shouted at me, for I took his warning to be yet more claptrap about the danger to my soul, and since hell could not be worse than that dark, rat-infested cellar I decided there and then I would take care of my own soul in future.

No, it was the look of horror on Anne’s face when I stamped on her father’s hand that cut me to the heart and made me hesitate. Mr Black walked towards me. The anger had left his face. On it was that troubled expression I had seen when, only a few hours ago, he had praised me.

I continued to hesitate as he approached. If I returned, what would I say to Anne? Explain? Explain what? Apologise? Why should I apologise? I had taken so many beatings and I was taking no more. Even so, I stood there, until he was nearly on me, for he was my master, and I respected him and thought him a good man. Unlike George, there was never malice in his beatings, which were done only to bend me to what he thought was right.

So I stood there, hypnotised by the dark eyes set among the powerful lines of his face. He was almost close enough to touch me when I saw, above the crooked jetty of the house, the first chinks of light in the night sky.

And in a rush it brought back that dark cellar, that terrified longing to see the first fissures of light in the plaster with such force I wrenched my gaze away from him and turned and ran.

He shouted something else, but I could no longer hear him. I ran down Cloth Fair and into Smithfield, where the first cattle were being driven into market. I threw away my apprentice’s blue hat, which would have marked me, and it was immediately lost among the trampling hooves. There were two herdsmen. I picked up a stick and became a third, as I had sometimes done as a small boy in Poplar.

And that stick with which I prodded the cattle’s swaying rumps, and the light edging into the night sky over the great open space of the market, as I had so often seen it over the docks with half-open eyes as Matthew and I stumbled down to the yard, filled me with an overwhelming, aching desire to go home.

Chapter 5

I wish with all my heart I had got back sooner to Poplar, but I dared not go the direct way through Aldgate for fear it would be watched.

I was not only breaking my bond; the very clothes on my back and the boots on my feet belonged to Mr Black. The first time I had run away, a month after I had been there, I had been swiftly caught and it had been dinned into me that I was stealing the clothes I wore, for which I could be thrown into Newgate.

Instead of going east, which I am sure they expected, I struck out for the river, with the vague hope of persuading a waterman to take me. At Blackfriars Stairs they laughed or shook their heads. But further downstream a waterman was repairing his boat, which was badly holed. I helped him, boiling pitch as I used to and caulking the boat. I slept in his hut where the fog crept in like an old friend, for I was used to it at home, rising from the marsh and making the opposite river bank disappear.

He paid me in bread, dried ling and eel, and a seaman’s cap and torn jacket with which he had plugged one of the holes in his boat. The cap and tattered jacket helped conceal my uniform until I eventually made my way to Poplar High Street. The fog blurred the houses into soft, indistinct shapes, and deadened footsteps so, as with increasing excitement I neared our old house, I almost walked into a woman, mumbling an apology as I skirted past her.

‘Tom!’

She was so swathed in clothes, with a scarf round her face, it was her voice I identified as that of our neighbour. ‘Mother Banks –’

I went to embrace her but her tone of voice stopped me. ‘I prayed you would come!’

‘Why? Is my mother not well?’

‘Don’t you know? Dear Lord help us!’

She looked down the street. Following her gaze I saw, among the blurred line of houses, one that stuck out like a broken tooth. I ran. The door hung open. The houses next to it appeared to have suffered little damage.

The roof of our house was still intact, but the windows were gaping holes, the wood round them blackened. I pushed at the partly open door, and an acrid, damp smell filled my nose. Timber from a half-burned beam crumbled under my feet as I went into Susannah’s room where she lived and slept. I heard Mother Banks behind me.

‘I’m sorry, Tom. She died in the fire.’

I turned and she held me close to her.

‘What happened?

She told me that, in the middle of the night, she had been awaken ed by shouting and had smelt smoke. By the time Mother Banks got there, neighbours had managed to get water to it, for the streets were so ramshackle there had been several fires and they had butts of water in the alley. People thought it was a candle Susannah had left burning when she went to sleep. The fire must have been going for some time before the neighbours awoke, for Susannah was overcome by the smoke.