Peter Ransley - Plague Child

I found the iron kettle she always had on the fire, and a twisted pewter candlestick that she had been proud of, for no reason I could think of.

‘If it was not for the men staying here, it would have been much worse.’

I dropped the candlestick. ‘Men? What men?’

‘Lodgers.’

‘Sailors?’

‘Susannah said they were from the docks. They said the shipwright sent them.’

‘What were they like?’

‘I never saw them, what with the smoke and everything. They were there just for that night. They dragged Susannah out. They went as soon as the fire was put out.’

‘When was this?’

‘Wednesday.’

The day after I ran from Half Moon Court. I scrambled up what remained of the stairs. The landing where I used to sleep was secure, the room Susannah rented out scorched but relatively undamaged. And the roof, which normally caught quickly in these fires, spreading them rapidly, was scarcely touched.

I returned downstairs.

‘It looks as though it started down here. You were lucky.’

‘Yes. I thanked the Lord.’ Mother Banks clasped her hands. ‘Near the church, two whole streets went up recently. We were lucky the men acted so quickly.’

I walked round the room where Susannah had slept, and where most of the damage was. King James had said he found London ‘built of sticks’ and wanted to leave it ‘built of bricks’, but had stopped at the eastern suburbs where the marsh would not support such houses. The builders rushing up the houses for new dock workers had daubed between the timbers a mess of mortar and rags that in a fire rapidly crumbled away. The debris crunched beneath our feet as the damp fog swirled round us from the street.

I picked up the candlestick again, turning the twisted stem round and round in my fingers. I remembered once trying to sneak upstairs with it so I could read after everyone had gone to sleep. It was the only time I had ever seen her angry.

I shook my head. ‘Susannah wouldn’t have left the candle alight.’

She pressed my hand gently. ‘She must have done, Tom.’

I pulled away from her, flinging the candlestick away. ‘I don’t believe it!’

She was frightened by the sudden violence, exploding out of a mixture of anger, bewilderment and grief. So was I. I couldn’t stop shaking. Two men. The day after I had run away. Thinking the obvious thing, that I would come straight to Poplar. Finding not me, but my mother.

‘Where is she?’

‘Buried. Yesterday. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Come with me.’

I was like a child again, going from sudden violence to uncontrollable weeping. She led me to her house, murmuring that weeping would make me feel better, but I did not believe it, did not believe it would ever be so. First to lose Matthew, for I was convinced then I would never see him again, and now Susannah . . .

Mother Banks had little coal so I went back to the wreckage of our house and foraged for pieces of half-burnt timber. Outside, the clinging, yellow fog was now so thick a muffled ship’s bell rang insistently, for any ship which had not sought shelter must be travelling dead slow. She built up the fire and heated up some pottage, which first I refused to eat, but once I started swallowed greedily.

The empty plate was slipping from my fingers. I felt her gently taking it from me.

‘She would not . . . leave a . . . candle lit . . .’ I muttered stubbornly.

‘Susannah had changed. She was not as you knew her.’

‘Changed?’

‘Ssshh. Go to sleep.’

‘How changed?’ I mumbled.

‘She turned preacher.’

‘A woman preacher!’

I smiled. This was the sort of story I loved in pamphlets, the sort you knew could not be true but wanted to be true, the sort that people bought for a penny or two and repeated over fires like this until many people believed it. The sort of story to fall asleep over. But this one jerked me awake, staring at Mother Banks with amazement.

Susannah had stopped going to Mr Ingram at St Dunstan’s, going instead to an independent minister where they prayed in silence until a person was inspired to speak. Most of the women were short on words, and looked to the minister, as a man, for guidance; but it appeared that Susannah had what he said was the gift of tongues. She rose to her feet and held the room spellbound as her words rang round it.

She said the great tumult in London stirred up by Parliament was the Second Coming. Christ had been born again, not in a stable this time, but in a plague pit. She claimed to have been a witness to it, speaking in a strange muddle of Bible stories and things that she claimed had happened to her. Oxford became Bethlehem and King Charles Herod.

People began to come from the surrounding parishes to hear her, even those who thought she was mad, for a strange voice came out of her, and some actually believed her prophecies, that Christ was being plotted against all over again.

‘What did you think of what she said, Mother?’ I asked.

She hesitated. ‘At first I thought it was hunger.’

‘Hunger?’

‘She fasted. She took nothing for days but small beer. Then . . .’ She hesitated again. A log settled and threw a flickering light on her face. ‘She spoke in riddles, like the Bible. She said you be her child, and not her child.’

I laughed. ‘What does that mean?’

The flickering flame died and her face was in darkness. ‘There was one child who was his mother’s, and not his mother’s,’ she said.

I stopped laughing and stared at her. Her hands were clasped together and her face came into the light again. ‘I prayed so much for you to come! And when you came out of the fog like that . . . I thought . . . for a moment . . .’

I took her hands and shook my head, unable to speak for I was so overwhelmed by the faith and the hope in her face.

‘You are not . . . He that is to come?’

She stretched out a hand to touch my face, and I took it and kissed it and now I could not help smiling and laughing.

‘No, no, Mother Banks, I’m sorry, but thank you – I am much more often mistook for the devil! But I’m neither, I hope. I am the same old Tom, Tom Neave, hands black as ever, look – but with ink now, not pitch!’

I hugged her and she laughed with me, for we both needed some laughter on that gloomy day. She laughed with relief as much as anything else, for she had a practical bent like me; yet I felt there was a tinge of regret and I saw again the narrow line between the stories we tell one another and believing them to be true.

When I finally fell asleep that night in front of the dying fire, Susannah’s riddle spun round and round in my head. Her child and not her child. For the first time I began to ask questions I should have put to myself long before.

Had I not too easily believed stories I had told myself? That Mr Black, for instance, had apprenticed me for no other reason than that he had heard of my miraculous gift for reading?

A bitter eastern wind sprang up during the night and cleared the fog. Mother Banks took me to St Dunstan’s and showed me the unmarked plot where Susannah was buried. It was in a neglected corner where the wind cut across the marsh. It bent the trees in one direction while the church, from the settlement of the land, leaned in the other. There were no stones and the grass was rank and uncut, except for the new grave.

At least it had the open view of the marsh which I loved, where the land, patches of flood water gleaming, mingled with the tumbling grey sky. I felt tears coming again and fell on my knees and tried to pray, but kept thinking about the two men and the fire.

We marked the spot with a little cairn of stones, and I vowed to return one day and have a proper stone made.