The Thief Taker (25 page)

Chapter Fifty-Three

Bitey inched carefully along the Wapping streets with Charlie and Maria following behind.

On leaving the hayloft Bitey had insisted they take several more drafts of rum for courage. Charlie suspected Maria was drunk. He kept a close eye on her as she drifted behind, a faint smile on h
er face.

Bitey froze suddenly and Charlie saw his attention had been drawn to a door on one of the smart homes. It was opening slowly.

‘We must be still,’ Bitey pushed them both back against a wall and raised his cudgel.

Out of the doorway came a small boy. He was inching out slowly with his back to the street, and Charlie strained to see what made him move by slow degrees. As his arms came into view they saw him to be dragging something. A female corpse, finely dressed and grotesquely disfigured by disease.

‘It is his mother,’ said Charlie. ‘The poor fellow removes his dead mother from the house.’ He could see plague spots were already bulging behind the boy’s ears.

Charlie felt a deep wave of sadness. Every instinct was shouting to help the boy bury his mother and give him some shelter and comfort. But they would be condemning themselves to almost certain plague death. And the child was good as dead already.

‘What is it?’ asked Maria, the rum working to pitch her voice loudly down the street.

‘Sssh!’ hissed Charlie.

But his warning came too late. The child turned to see them and dropping the arms of the corpse took a wailing step towards them, then broke into a trot.

‘Stay back,’ shouted Bitey, unhooking his sword and pointing it forward. The little boy stopped, and his face crumpled. He began to howl, his eyes and nose overflowing.

‘I mean it lad,’ said Bitey. ‘I am sorry for you indeed. But there is no help for you here. You must go on back that way,’ he gestured in the opposite direction. The little boy began a slow walk away.

Maria had now worked out what was happening and made to follow the boy.

‘He needs our help!’ she announced, outraged that neither man was offering aid.

Charlie grabbed her arm, pulling her back. ‘Hold,’ he whispered. ‘I know you would give him comfort. But already the plague tokens are on him.’

‘We have to help him!’ Maria was suddenly furious.

‘He is not long for this world,’ said Bitey, his expression sympathetic. ‘You must learn to do without that soft heart if you are to survive in these times.’

‘Come,’ he added, with a wave of his hands. ‘The tavern is just up ahead.’

The Coach and Horses tavern was a half-timbered tavern made of three stories. What had once been leaded windows was now boarded up on all sides by thick planks. Huge ships nails had been hammered through into the walls and across the door.

Across the battered remains of the cobbled street was a church. And in front of the huge doors lay heaps of scattered bodies.

‘Did they come to die in sight of God?’ whispered Maria, looking at the corpses.

Bitey turned distractedly from his assessment of the building.

‘They are not dead,’ he said. ‘People come in the hope that a minister will receive their last rites. Or some Christian soul will do what they cannot and end their lives,’ he added, ‘for even in the agony of plague many are still brave enough to stave off suicide and save their souls from the depths of hell.’

Charlie stepped protectively in front of Maria, who continued to stare at the mound of plague victims.

‘Surely they must be dead,’ she muttered, as Bitey sought the opening to the tavern.

‘This board here is the one,’ he said, reaching up to tug at a plank. ‘They left it loose so those that know might get inside.’

Charlie moved to help him pull at the board, but as he grasped it the plank seemed solid.

‘Bit stiffer than I remember,’ said Bitey, gripping with his hands and leaning back to apply his body weight.

The wood gave a sudden shriek, and an arm-sized sliver sheared away. Charlie moved just in time to catch Bitey as he was thrown off balance.

‘Mayhap that is not the plank,’ said Bitey, staring at the damage they’d done accusingly. Perhaps the other side,’ he added, straightening his hat.

But the sound of the rent wood had had an effect on the mound of plague bodies.

Groans and shufflings echoed out over the deserted street. People had begun to stir.

Charlie turned to Bitey.

‘We must hurry,’ he hissed. ‘We have woken some of the plague people. They will come petitioning us to finish them.’

A single man had heaved himself up faster than the rest and was now righting himself on unsteady feet. Most of his shirt was torn away, but by his breeches he looked to have been a wealthy man.

His yellowed eyes settled on Maria, and he began loping towards her.

She gripped at Charlie’s arm.

‘Tell him to make haste,’ she said. ‘A plague man comes.’

Bitey had taken a step back from the tavern and was assessing it in confusion.

‘My memory is not so good as it was,’ he admitted.

The plague man was closing in now, and he was near enough they could see the balloons of purple skin which had risen up under either armpit.

‘You look like my daughter,’ he said to Maria, in a voice which came out as a croak. ‘Surely you would take pity on me.’

‘Get behind me,’ said Charlie, drawing the rusting sword.

The man made two more staggering steps, and then an earth-
shattering boom sounded, shaking the windows of the empty
street.

The plague man fell down, and a growing pool of blood formed beneath him.

Another blast sounded, and Charlie felt a pain in his u
pper arm
.

He looked to see he had been grazed by musket shot.

‘They are firing at us from the tavern!’ he said, pulling Maria and Bitey back towards the wall. ‘They think we are plague people trying to get in.’

‘There is not reason for them to think so,’ said Bitey, scratching at his head. ‘Wait, I will have words with them.’

Bitey swung back towards the aperture they had made, and Charlie grabbed him back just in time as a third shot went off.

Across the street the effect on the plague people was electric. The mound shifted. Bodies began to right themselves one by one.

Charlie leaned back towards the opening.

‘We are not plague people,’ he shouted to the unseen occupants, moving the side of his face as near as he dared to the open sliver of plank.

The barrel of a musket slid out within inches of his cheek.

In a single fast movement Charlie grabbed the gun with both hands and pulled it free. On the other side of the board he heard a man’s voice curse.

‘We are here with Bitey,’ he added, checking the musket was loaded. ‘He knows you.’

‘Aye that I do!’ called Bitey, from his position backed against the building. ‘And I would take it well if you would let us in, for we have some plague people headed for us.’

Charlie’s eyes fell back on the church. At least ten bodies had now mobilised. Some crawled and some walked.

‘How do you know which plank it is?’ Charlie asked, aiming the musket at the nearest plague sufferer.

‘Three along from the top, west wall, the plank with the crotchet shaped knot,’ said Bitey. ‘I thought I had it right,’ he added.

Charlie made a quick glance at the sun. ‘We are on the north wall,’ he said. ‘We need to move around the building.’

He signalled with his arm and moved back, keeping the barrel of the musket pointed towards the plague people.

‘Maria,’ he called, ‘can you count the planks?’

‘Of course I can count,’ she said. ‘And I have music too. I know what a crotchet looks like.’

Charlie turned his head to see she was scanning the west face of the building.

‘Crotchet shaped knot,’ she muttered, running her hand along a plank.

An elderly man had made ahead of the rest and started up a shambling kind of run towards them.

Trying to keep his body steady Charlie aimed the musket and pulled the trigger.

The old man wheeled violently to one side and then fell.

‘That was my only shot,’ said Charlie. ‘You need to get us inside.’

‘I have found it,’ said Maria. ‘Here.’

‘That’s the one,’ said Bitey delightedly, ‘I remember it well now.’

‘Then get it open, said Charlie.

‘Of course.’ The old man ran his calloused fingers over the plank and twisted. It dropped free revealing a wide opening.

‘Get Maria through first,’ he said to Bitey.

‘Don’t offend anyone inside before we get in there,’ he added to Maria, as Bitey hoisted her headfirst through the gap.

She launched forward in a flurry of thick skirts and was gone.

‘I hope you are right about this opening,’ said Charlie, hefting the musket through the gap after Maria. ‘They might kill her before we get inside.’

‘They are kindly folk,’ said Bitey, placing a foot on the plank to lever himself through the gap. ‘You must not mind they shot at us.’

Several of the crawling sufferers were making good ground now. A young woman of seventeen or so with grotesque buboils either side of her ears, a middle aged man and a young boy were heaving themselves over the cobbles.

Charlie turned to see Bitey was still halfway through the gap and gave the old man a quick shove to push him the rest of the way through.

He heard a muffled cry of reproach and then the opening was empty.

The young woman was gaining ground fast. She had adopted a strange bandy-legged hobble, as though her muscles had given
out, and the swaying of her skeleton alone was moving her
forwards.

Unhooking his sword Charlie banged it loudly against the cobblestones and then threw it as far as he could over the heads of the plague sufferers.

The man furthest from him turned to make after it, but the young boy and the woman only watched it go, then continued their stumbling progress towards him.

The young woman was only a few yards away from him now. Her eyes were a mass of red blood vessels, and she was panting through slightly parted lips, like a long-distance runner approaching a finish line.

Charlie stepped onto the plank and pulled himself into the gap.

Halfway through he felt a hand with sharp fingernails on his bare foot. He kicked back and felt his heel connect with something hard. Teeth, and then his leg was free and he somersaulted forward into the tavern beyond.

‘Close up the gap!’ commanded an angry voice. And people either side of him hammered a plank into place.

Charlie looked up to see Bitey and Maria were being held with muskets pointed at them.

A man with buckteeth peered drunkenly at Charlie.

‘Like I said,’ he slurred. ‘They have compromised our safety. We must kill all three of them.’

Chapter Fifty-Four

King Charles knocked on the door a little too loudly, then opened it in softer apology.

His wife’s face showed surprise as he moved inside her bedchamber.

‘Our appointment was arranged,’ he reminded her, closing the door behind him.

She nodded, her face still contorted in confusion.

English was her second language and Charles was never sure what she understood. Though he knew she dreaded the fulfilment of their marital obligations.

Her room smelled of sealing wax. Queen Catherine of Braganza wrote many letters to her Portuguese family. Her room too, was a little enclave of Mediterranean gold and red in a Palace of English tastes. The four-poster bed was hung with tapestries stitched by nuns from the convent where Catherine had grown up. The rugs on the floor had been acquired on her pilgrimage to a favourite shrine in Lisbon.

Charles stepped towards her, and she held out her arms, childlike, ready to be undressed. He began drawing off her heavy clothes, starting with her uppermost dress.

‘I hear things from the court,’ she began in her stuttering
Portuguese
accent. ‘That Catholics in England are unhappy with how they are treated.’

Catherine was a devout Catholic, a fact which Charles did his best to keep hidden from the English people.

‘I have received letters,’ she continued, ‘from an astrologer.
William
Lilly. He asks for his position in the Royal Household to be reconsidered now you have returned.’

Charles tugged off the uppermost dress and laid it carefully on a chair. ‘I remember William Lilly,’ he said, ‘I am doing my best to see he is rewarded for his loyalty. But parliament are all against me.’

‘There is something else,’ insisted Catherine.

Charles moved to loosen the dress at the front. He had tried to kiss her once, on the mouth. But she had twisted her head away and one of the ornaments in her elaborate wig had scratched his face.

‘What is that?’ he asked, stooping to roll down her stockings. He felt the muscles in her legs tighten.

Charles had experimented with ways to make his wife more complicit in their marital obligations. But so far all his efforts had come to nothing. Any attempt at intimacy set his wife rigid and twitching, as though she was being tortured.

He stood, and moving behind her began unlacing her stays with expert speed. This experience with women’s clothing, he felt, was one of the few skills his wife enjoyed.

‘This symbol,’ she said. ‘The one they say is used by the witch-murderer. You know what it means. I see you draw it.’

Charles’s hand faltered for a moment. Then continued the practised unlacing. The stays came away in his hand, leaving Catherine in nothing but her white linen shift.

‘It is a symbol from long ago,’ he said carefully. ‘From my childhood. Back in the days when my father was on the throne.’

He took her hands and guided her to the bed. She lay down obediently, and in an effort to make her comfortable Charles began to prop pillows around and under her. The expression on
Catherine’s
face was unreadable.

She looked up at him uncomfortably from her position, prone on the bed.

‘What does it mean?’

‘It is the sign of the Sealed Knot,’ said Charles, ‘It was a group of
Royalist noblemen who swore to protect the crown from
Cromwell
.’

Catherine’s face showed confusion.

‘They were all powerful men,’ said Charles, ‘Powerful, and skilled, and fearless. The kind of men you would want on your side. After my father was executed they worked in secret to return me to the crown. But then they fell to fighting amongst themselves.’

He began working off her shift. Underneath her clothes his wife’s body was small, childlike even. With breasts like a partially-grown afterthought.

‘Where are they now?’ asked Catherine, drawing her arms tight across her naked chest.

Charles shook his head. ‘Long gone. Dead.’

Stroking the shape of her body with his hand, Charles let it rest between her legs. The space felt parched, cold.

He worried he must hurt her.

When he had first experienced the tightness of his wife’s body, he thought the other women had lied to him about their virginity.

Now he realised it was due to how much she hated her wifely duties. The thought was unsettling.

Resting his gaze on the space above Catherine’s head, Charles summoned up an image of Louise’s legs spreading slowly open. The picture allowed him to rally. He entered the reluctant body of
his wife.

Catherine lay with her jaw clenched, her breath sounding fast through her pinched lips.

The smell from her mouth was of her orange-water perfume. And something else. Garlic, perhaps.

The thought sapped him of the thin enthusiasm he had managed to muster. He felt himself flag and wondered if she could fe
el it.

Charles trawled his memory for some scene to enliven him.

It settled upon Louise, her hand between her legs, her fingers working frantically, expertly.

The thought caught for a moment and then slipped from him. He tracked deeper, plumbing the depths of his fantasies in partial panic.

Louise with one of the maids, her little white hand deep inside, the maid’s face contorted in ecstasy, Louise’s white fingers thrusting relentlessly deeper.

To his great relief the image allowed him to finish. Though it was in a silent shame that the most debased prostitutes had yet to illicit from him.

Beneath him Catherine’s eyes twitched back and forth, asking whether it was all over.

Charles rolled himself off his wife and sent up a short but
fervent
prayer that he had finally made her pregnant.

‘What if any of those men still lived?’ asked Catherine, her eyes still fixed pointedly on the ceiling.

‘That,’ said Charles, taking the hint to get off the bed and start dressing, ‘would be very dangerous indeed.’