Peter Ransley: Plague Child

Susannah’s great treasure – practically her only possession – was her Bible. She could not read, but knew whole passages by heart from the services at the church and where to find them.

‘Blessed are the poor and meek,’ she would say, tracing her finger over the passage, ‘for they shall see God.’

I would stare in wonder at the passage, knowing we must be blessed for I could see well enough how mean was the tiny room where the wind blew through gaps in the oiled paper at the window, even though I could not see God.

I thought if I could only understand the words, I would see Him. One day I pointed to a passage and said to Susannah: ‘I . . . am . . . the . . . good . . . sh-sh—’

‘Shepherd!’ she cried out.

She was so steeped in parables she thought it was a miracle. I had suddenly been given the gift of reading. Shaking, tears of joy glistening in her eyes, she pulled me into the street for the neighbours to hear.

A sceptical woman opened the book at a passage Susannah had never recited. When I looked dumbly at the page, Susannah first thought I was being stubborn, then that she had done wrong by making a show of me like a travelling bear and God had taken His words back as a punishment.

She was so stricken by this and by the grins and jokes of the neighbours that I went to the passages she had so often recited to me that I knew by heart, and pretended to read them. I even put in stumbles and hesitations so that Susannah, with joy on her face again, could correct me.

The neighbours were awestruck and, not wishing to lose this reputation, I applied myself diligently to try and make the pretence real. And on that day, when I thought my cake had been stolen, Mr Ingram began to teach me himself. He explained that the cake was a simnel cake, with saffron and fruits of the East, a symbol of resurrection, of rebirth. I could not understand what this had to do with the cake on my doorstep, nor who Gloria was, unless it was one of the will o’ the wisps. He laughed and said it was not a name at all – it was short for Gloria in Excelcis Deo – Glory be to God on High.

And that was my first lesson in Latin.

One day, when I was ten, a great gentleman came to inspect the Resolution , a five hundred-ton armed merchantman in which he had an interest. It had his flag fluttering from the mast; a falcon with an upraised claw. I saw the gentleman staring at me as I put down a bucket of boiling pitch and went off to collect another. He said something to the shipwright, who called over Matthew. Curious, I took my eye off the pitch I was tapping, which splashed over my bare leg. I had been burned before, but never as badly as this.

Yelling and screaming I ran to the pump to douse it, but the gentleman had me see the barber-surgeon who dressed the wound and gave me a cordial, London Treacle, a mixture of herbs and honey dissolved in wine, which some of the men said they would wound themselves to have. It was the first wine I ever drank, and I lay in the shipwright’s office, among the drawings and the model ships they made before they built the real thing, and fell asleep.

Did I dream of the gentleman because he had been kind to me? Or was it real? I do not know, but I have a shifting memory of an old man’s face bending over me, a wispy tuft of hair rather than a beard below his lips, which smiled one moment and tightened the next, just as his dark eyes looked cloudy and troubled, then stared down at me with penetrating, frightening shrewdness as though they could cut right into my heart and soul, like a surgeon’s knife.

When I questioned Matthew about him as we prepared to go home, saying he looked concerned and kind, Matthew laughed bitterly.

‘Kind? Aye, he’s kind all right. One of those gentry-coves who would be kind enough to send you to Paddington Fair.’

He was not looking at me but staring towards the river, where the tide was on the turn and a boat was being cast off. Often in his stories he told me that one day we would leave on the tide to a distant land, and I thought they were just stories, but now there was something in his voice that told me he wanted to be on that boat, and made me clutch at his hand.

‘Paddington Fair – send me to Tyburn? He wouldn’t! Why? What have I done?’

He laughed. ‘Nay, do you not know when I’m joking?’

Still in the manner of a joke, he took me to a fire on the edge of the yard where there were few people.

Some in the yard said Matthew was a cunning man, because he polished their thumbnails until they gleamed in the firelight, and saw their future in them. I had often begged him to tell mine, but he had always refused. Now he built up the fire, squatted by it, and stared into the flames.

I had seen him do this with the others. ‘Are you going to tell me my future?’ I said, polishing my nail in great excitement.

He grinned. ‘Nay, Tom. I shall need more than a nail for thy future.’

His face, lit by the fire, seemed all eyes. The dock was quiet. The frantic hammering and sawing and shouting and swinging of timber was over. The gentleman was pleased with the ship, and they were taking on board canvas, ready to run up sails. Two men approached, arguing. Matthew waited until they passed, then undid his jerkin, then his shirt, which he never took off in winter. Under that was a belt, attached to which was a pouch. He started to take something from the pouch, then thrust it back.

‘Say nothing about this, or I’m a dead man!’

I can now see that many of his jokes were made to ward off the fear which, at some level, was always with him. Back then I understood nothing but the sheer naked force of that fear, all the more terrible since it came so unexpectedly from someone who had always seemed, to me at any rate, a simple, jovial man.

Constantly looking about him, he took something from his pouch which seemed to have a fire of its own. It was a pendant, with a falcon staring so furiously from its enamelled nest I ducked back instinctively, for fear it would fly at me. Its eyes, Matthew said, were rubies and in one of its talons it gripped a pearl, irregularly shaped, as if it had just been torn from the earth.

I reached out my hand for it, but he cuffed it away. ‘Ah ah!’

His fear seemed to recede as he gazed at it. He smiled, caressed it almost, murmuring to himself. A log settled and the gold chain glittered in the spurting flames. He addressed the pendant rather than me, seeming to enter into some kind of a trance with the red-eyed falcon. He saw a lady, he said, a real lady, with hair as bright red as mine.

‘Will I marry her?’

‘Nay, nay. Not her. You will make a great fortune. And lose it.’

‘A crown?’

He shook with laughter. He seemed to have returned to his normal self. I loved his laughter, which made his cheeks and his belly shake, for, although he was always making fun of me, there was kindness in it.

‘Rather more than a crown, boy.’

He put the pendant in the pouch, and pulled down his shirt and jerkin. The falcon seemed to flutter as it disappeared, reminding me of the bird on the flag flying on the old gentleman’s ship.

‘Is the pendant something to do with the old gentleman?’ I said.

He seized me by the throat. For a moment I thought he was going to make up for never beating me by throttling the life out of me. ‘Who told you that? Who told you? Answer me!’

‘No one!’ I choked. ‘The bird is like the one on the ship’s flag.’

He laughed, releasing me. ‘Nothing like! Nothing like at all.’

I thought he was lying. He whirled round at a movement in the shadows, but it was only a dog searching for scraps.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if you ever see a man – he calls himself a gentleman these days – with a scar on his face.’ He pulled his face into a smile that was not a smile, and drew his finger down the line of it, on his right cheek, down to his neck. ‘He works for the old gentleman. Meet him, and you wouldn’t think the old gentleman so kind.’ When I said nothing, he pushed his face into mine with such a sudden ferocity I jumped in fright.