Peter Ransley - Plague Child

The words he had copied and I had rescued from the dirt had done this. Or so I thought. Now the struggle was to have them officially published. Our pirated copies were in the alehouse, ringed with beer, passed from hand to hand, read out to people who could not read, people who nodded silently.

They were not talking then about rebellion. People talked of Magna Carta. Of old rights to disappearing common land, which had driven them to leave their families and come to London. Of rights to religion. And of the biggest right of all – the right to afford a loaf of bread.

I could not see Will. I was clutching a beer a complete stranger had given me when I glimpsed in the throng something that drove all this from my mind. At the bar was the man in the beaver hat. Anger fought a desire to run. I believed he had killed my mother. I had eaten little and the beer had gone to my head. Anger won and I fought my way through the laughing, shouting crowd. Now I saw the bulky shape of Crow, and felt again the sensation of him wrenching my head back to cut my throat. Crow turned and stared round. I put my hand on my knife, sure he had seen me, but he was the sort of man who habitually glanced about him, watching his back.

‘– last place he’ll come,’ I heard him say.

‘A dog always returns to smell his own shit,’ the man in the beaver hat said.

There were a couple of candles on a table as I got closer to the bar. I snuffed them out with my sleeve. Someone shouted. My approach to the bar was plunged in shadow.

The feel of the knife was quite different from my apprentice’s knife, which was a toy by comparison. This knife was heavier, balanced. I loosened it from my belt. I stopped, inches from their backs. They had caught the landlord’s attention.

‘. . . red hair – Tom Neave,’ the man in the beaver hat was saying. He drew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. As he unfolded it I glimpsed one of the sketches the artist had done of me that summer. In a few lines he had caught my grin, the sharpness of my nose between the dark gleam of my eyes.

I moved closer. I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. There was a rent in the back of Crow’s tough leather jerkin like an open mouth, gaping wider as he moved. I became drawn to it, fascinated by it.

The landlord was saying: ‘Haven’t seen him for a week.’

‘We’re working for the Stationers’ Company and Mr Black,’ the man said. His voice was grave and concerned. ‘He’s wanted for breaking his bond, theft . . . You can reach me at the Cock and Hen in Holborn . . . There’s a reward of five crowns.’

The landlord’s eyebrows lifted. I could see that he regarded that as a much more substantial profit than he would ever get from selling beer. But it was not this that made me lose control. It was hearing that Mr Black, whom I thought such a godly man, and who had hypocritically claimed to warn me of danger, was part of this plan to kill me.

The knife seemed to have a life of its own as I drew it from my belt. I could see nothing but the rent in Crow’s jerkin, opening and closing, a perfect target.

‘Tom!’

As God is my witness, I thought it was the Lord’s stern voice stopping me. Crow and the man in the beaver hat whirled round, bumping into a man trying to get to the bar, who knocked into me. My knife spun to the floor.

‘Tom!’

Will was waving near one of the doors. The man in the beaver hat pushed through a group of drinkers towards him. Crow immediately went to cover the other door. I could see his eyes moving meticulously from head to head. Even with my hat firmly wedged on and the dim light I could feel the red hairs crawling on my neck as if they were burning like a beacon.

Will was staring at me. All I could do was shake my head numbly at him. When the man in the beaver hat spoke to him, Will shook his head and pointed to the door where Crow was standing.

‘He’s run for it!’ the man in the beaver hat shouted to Crow, who dived out into the street, the other man following.

I picked up the knife, staring at its blade as Will pushed his way through to me with another, older man, who wore a jump jacket, Dutch style, with a square linen collar.

‘I was going to kill him,’ I said stupidly.

The older man shook his head. ‘You were wrongly positioned,’ he said, in an educated drawl. ‘You would only have wounded him. He would have turned and killed you.’ He drew his finger across his throat.

Will cut across him sharply, seeing the landlord say something to the pot girl. ‘Get him out of here, Luke!’

He grabbed me by one elbow and the man called Luke took me by the other and they hustled me into the night.

Chapter 8

That night I slept curled up in my Joseph coat on bales of the best Virginia tobacco, in the warehouse of Will’s father. Ever since then the smell of Virginia curling up from a clay pipe has meant the smell of rebellion to me. It rose from the pipes of Will and Luke when they woke me next morning. They took me through to the counting house, where there was a third man, Ben. What followed was a counting, not of money, but of me – an interrogation.

All three were members of the All Hallows Trained Band. Will and Ben were typical of many of the City’s part-time soldiers: middling men fighting against the City’s richest merchants, who generally supported the King. Will’s father, like many tobacco merchants, was struggling to break the monopolies of fabulously wealthy spice merchants such as Benyon, his opponent in the City elections the following month.

Ben was an apothecary. Prevented from working in the City by another monopoly, the doctors, he practised medicine in Spitalfields outside the walls, dispensing herbal cures to the London poor. Ben was as quiet and diffident as his grey jacket and hose, but there was a stubbornness in his silences, a refusal to take anything for granted, that I liked.

Luke was totally different. He seemed to have only one aim in joining the militia, and that was to fight. He had just come from fencing practice, and propped his sword against a rickety table in the counting house. A pupil to a lawyer in Gray’s Inn, he was the second son of a gentleman, and looked it. The achingly soft leather of his funnel boots ridiculed my shoes ‘as worn at court’. I hid them under the table, my cheeks burning with embarrassment, but could not hide the shabbiness of my breeches, the stink and stains of my Joseph coat, at which he wrinkled his nose. He stared at me quizzically, as if I was one of those curiosities exhibited at a travelling fair.

‘You’re on the run,’ he drawled.

‘Yes,’ I said defiantly. ‘Are you going to take me to Newgate?’

‘Bridewell,’ he corrected, ‘for petty offenders like you – unless you’ve actually murdered someone?’

He was looking meaningly at the knife in my belt. I jumped up, rocking the table. A week on the run had already changed me. Acting first had become a way of life. Another moment and I would have been on my way to the door, prepared to shove Luke from his stool if he tried to stop me. ‘What happened, Tom?’

Ben’s voice was soft, his concern calming. Ashamed now at my over-reaction, I dropped back on my stool. I told them everything, from Mr Black first taking me to Poplar, to the attempt on my life and the receipts and notes on me I had discovered in Mr Black’s office.

When I had finished there was a silence, except for the clang of bells from barges on the river. Will puffed at a clay pipe of his father’s best Virginia, which had gone from the ‘foul stinking novelty’ derided by King James to a soothing cure for all illnesses, from cholic to bladder stones.

‘Is this a pamphlet you’re writing?’ Luke said sceptically.

‘It’s true!’ I banged my fist down on the table, but then over the ships’ bells came the much deeper sound of a church bell.