Peter Ransley: Plague Child

‘Did anything happen that evening before the fire?’ I asked, as we walked back.

‘Nothing. Well . . .’ She hesitated.

‘Go on.’

‘When I went out to the privy, I heard Susannah shouting and screaming.’

‘Did you knock on her door?’

‘No.’ She swallowed nervously. ‘I was frightened. You don’t know what she was like, Tom. She would stand up at a meeting and shout that the Lord had come to her!’

‘Is that what she was shouting then?’

‘No, no, no. I can’t remember. Well, I heard her shout, “God knows I don’t know where he is!” Then there was silence. I thought she was calling out in her sleep.’

There was the skeleton of a new ship in the dry dock, but no men working on it when I went there after leaving the graveyard. I passed some pitch, frozen in a bucket, on my way to the shipwright’s office.

He exclaimed at the size of me, saying he used to look down at me and now had to look up; and would not have recognised me but for my red flare of hair and the jutting prow of my nose. He took it I had returned because of the death of Susannah and I said nothing about the breaking of my bond, but there was an edginess about his greeting, as if he suspected something. He had a bad leg, and at the sound of a footfall outside from one of the few workers in the yard, he limped quickly to the door to see who it was, as though he was afraid of some unwelcome visitor.

Most of the workers had drifted away to find other work, he told me. After the keel of the ship outside had been laid down, the money had run out. Three gentlemen had shares in the boat. When one had been imprisoned for debt, the others had refused to pay until they could replace the shareholder. Until the arguments between King and Parliament were settled, he said, all business was marooned, like the skeleton of the ship which was slowly beginning to rot.

I asked him who the sailors were who had stayed with Susannah that night.

‘Sailors?’ He shook his head. ‘Weren’t sailors. Boatman brought them from the City. They said they were friends of yours. Hoped they might find you here.’

‘Did you believe them?’

He spat and went to the window again. ‘Wouldn’t have them aboard ship,’ he said. ‘One looked like a soldier.’ He spat again. ‘Or had been. He had a long face. Wore a beaver hat. The other I wouldn’t like to argue with. Said they were helping you find your father.’

‘Matthew? What did you tell them?’

‘Same as I told the other man that came looking for him, soon after he vanished.’

‘What other man?’

For the first time he looked at me directly. ‘In trouble, are you?’

I said nothing.

He hesitated, then went on. ‘I told them and the other man that Matthew was looking for a berth on a boat to Hull, or maybe a coal boat back to Newcastle.’

‘Is that where he went?’

He looked at me searchingly, spat again, then moved some charts from a stool and told me to sit down. He took down a flask from the same shelf on which stood the bottle of London Treacle they gave me the day I burnt myself with pitch, and I remembered the strange dream of the old gentleman bending over me that day as I slept in this very room.

‘How’s your scar?’ he asked.

I showed him the discoloured, slightly puckered flesh. He looked at it almost approvingly as he shoved to one side of his desk drawings of ships that might be, or might never be, and poured a dark brown liquid from the flask.

‘You’ll have a few of those before you’re done.’

I coughed as I swallowed the fiery brown liquid and tears came to my eyes. This seemed to put him in better humour.

‘And a few of those.’

He swallowed what he said was the best Dutch brandy-wine, duty paid (a wink), poured himself another and stared out at the half-finished boat in the silent dock.

‘Matthew stood here, the day you went. He wanted to go down and say goodbye. He heard you shout “Father” and he very nearly went down then. But he was too frightened.’

‘Where did he go?’

He pointed at the river. ‘He went upstream, not down, the day after you left – the very next tide. I got him a berth in a barge. I heard him say he wanted to be dropped off somewhere between Maidenhead and Reading. I’ve no idea where he was going from there, but he reckoned it was a day’s travel, by the green road, whatever that means.’

I embraced him. ‘Thank you, thank you! You said there was another man came looking for Matthew. Just after he vanished. Who was that?’

The shipwright gave me something between a shake and a shudder. ‘I never seen him before, and I’m not very particular about seeing him again. Told me where to send knowledge of Matthew, but I never had no knowledge to send him, did I?’

During this he rummaged in a drawer amongst old charts and tidal tables until he unearthed a slip of paper. The hand was crabbed and uneven, with short, angry downstrokes that dug into the paper; the hand of a man who had learned to write later in life and with difficulty, and with many loops and flourishes designed to display his status. He had written: R. E. Esq., at Mr Black, Half Moon Court, Farringdon, London .

The shipwright did not know who R.E. Esq was, but said he had a scar on his face, drawing a line from cheek to neck, exactly as Matthew had done when he had warned me about the scarred man over the camp fire six years ago.

Before I was out of the door he was pouring himself another brandy. I was halfway down the steps when he shouted:

‘Wait! All that talk and I nearly forgot . . .’

Again he rummaged in a drawer, then another, muttering to himself before finally unearthing a coin. ‘Matthew said it was yours, not his.’

It touched me to the heart when I thought that my father, even in such a panic, and when he must have needed all the money he had, had left me what he could. ‘Mine?’

‘Belonged to thee. That’s what he said.’

Puzzled, I took the coin from him, turning it over and over, as if I could read some message from the inscriptions. But it was a silver half crown, like any other, showing the King on a charger.

Chapter 6

They – whoever they were – would find me if I stayed in Poplar. So I did what I judged they would not expect. Like Dick Whittington, I turned again, walking back towards the City.

I would find out who they were, the men who, I was convinced, had killed my mother. Try and find the answer to the questions that whirled endlessly in my head like so many angry bees. Why had Mr Black taken me on as an apprentice? What was his connection to the man with the scar?

The man who could answer these questions, or most of them, was Mr Black.

The wind was driving dark, scudding clouds over the marsh when I set off next morning, after spending a second night at Mother Banks’s. I reached the outskirts of the City at midday. There I stopped. I would not get far in my apprentice’s uniform, and the seaman’s jaunty scrap of a cap barely concealed my red hair.

Just inside the City I found the kind of market I needed. From Irish Mary at a second-hand clothing stall I bought thin britches – because they had bows that tied at the knee, which I fondly imagined to be the height of fashion – and traded my give-away apprentice’s boots for a pair of shoes with fancy buckles like those ‘worn at court’, she said. A leather jacket tempted me, and I drew out the coin Matthew had left for me. She bit it, saying it was not only a good one, but one of the first to be minted.

‘How can you tell that?’

‘See? On the rim there – the lys?’

Her long fingernail pointed to a tiny fleur-de-lys, above the King’s head. She said the mint mark showed that it was coined in 1625, the year of the King’s Coronation.