Читать книгу Plague Child - Peter Ransley - Страница 10

Chapter 3

My master’s concern was so entirely bent on the dishevelled pottage of words I unpeeled from my pouch he seemed scarcely to notice the mess I was in.

The cold, God-like fury which I had expected to fall on me fell instead on the task of turning the chaos of smeared sentences into ordered Octavo newssheets. He would have failed his God and Mr Pym (and his purse) if the speech was not circulating round the inns and the taverns where the respectable gathered that week.

Who were Crow and the man in the beaver hat? They were not common cutpurses. Nor were they from the Guild. They had been told I frequented the Pot, and that I had red hair. All I could conclude was that the words I carried really were important, perhaps they would change the world, and they had hunted me and sought to kill me to get them.

My guilt and misery increased as Mr Black struggled to make sense of one ink-stained page after another. At that time we all thought that the end of the world was close – George was convinced the Last Judgement was due in 1666, because, in Revelation, 666 was the number of the first beast to be overthrown. For myself, I thought it had started that night. I had had the words in my hand that would save the world, and I had lost them.

My thoughts grew so crazy I even wished they would beat me rather than ignoring me, until Mr Black came to a page which completely defeated him.

‘Parliament is . . .’ he began. His eyes bulged as he struggled to decipher the words. He flung the sheet from him. ‘Damn the speech! Damn the boy!’ he yelled.

I picked up the sheet, clutching at a word I saw in the dark grey smudge as a drowning man clutches at a spar. The word, in a mess of obliterated ones, was ‘soul’. Other words, miraculously, seemed to form before me in the smear of ink, as I remembered what Mr Ink had declaimed.

‘Parliament is as the soul of the Commonwealth,’ I said.

They stared at me in astonishment, waiting for me to go on, but I could not. The spar was slipping from me and I was about to drown. Then Mr Black snatched the paper back and was able to de cipher the next few words:

‘. . . the Commonwealth that alone is able to understand the . . . the . . .’

Again we came to a dead halt. In desperation I took the sheet from him and stared at the smudged word. I may have deciphered it, but I rather think that, grabbing into my memory, I somehow retrieved it.

‘Diseases!’ I said triumphantly.

Mr Black seized the sheet as again I came to a full stop. The following words were indecipherable, both to his eyes and my memory; but a politician’s phrases and arguments become as familiar as his face, and Mr Black knew Mr Pym’s backwards.

‘Diseases that strike at the heart of the body politic!’ he cried.

No poetry has ever moved me as much as that bedraggled line of political rhetoric, for it was uttered with such a religious fervour, and a look at me that was a second cousin of the look I got from Susannah when she thought that I read the Bible; while, in truth, I was piecing it together from my memory of her readings and her promptings.

‘God is with us!’ he exclaimed exultantly.

Gloomy George, left out of this totally unexpected communion between us, scowled at me.

‘Compose!’ Mr Black shouted at him. ‘Don’t just stand there, man – compose!’

The scowl became a look of pure malevolence as George seized his composing stick. Before, I had simply been someone to chastise and, however hopeless the task, save from sin; now I was unredeemable, his sworn enemy. The devil was a very subtle creature, who had somehow slithered and slived me into Mr Black’s favours, and must, at all costs, be rooted out. That was how George’s mind worked.

Even George, however, got swept up in the desire to catch Mr Pym’s words and have them all over town as soon as possible. There was no faster typesetter in the City of London. If Mr Ink’s fingers had flown, George’s were a scarcely visible blur, dipping from case to stick and back to case again, working his own magic, reproducing the words backwards as between us Mr Black and I excavated John Pym’s fine phrases.

As the night wore on we ceased to care about the increasing gap between what he had actually said, and what we invented. For the first time I had a glimmer of understanding about the power of the words we were handling. They were as explosive as gunpowder. All that was wanted was a fuse. Parliament had the right to approve the King’s ministers. The right? The King chose his own ministers, by Divine Right. Parliament alone had the right to make laws. Alone? Without the King?

And there, by a miracle unsmeared, unequivocal, in Mr Ink’s flowing, cursive hand was the biggest keg of gunpowder of all: Parliament had the right to control the army.

Mrs Black stumbled downstairs to see what was happening, awakening her daughter. I caught a glimpse of Anne in her nightgown at the foot of the stairs, hoping she would see from the excited chatter between me and her father that he was looking at me in a different light. But she merely wished her father goodnight, turning away from me with a wrinkle of distaste. The flicker of that nose, with its tiny upturn I thought no sculptor could copy, made me miserably, hopelessly aware of the stink and grime of Smithfield on me, to which was being added the ink I was coating on the formes, now locked together for printing.

I heard her laughter on the stair, and the hated word ‘monkey’. I was too fearful to curse her again. I hated her then. I hated the whole Black family. I hated being an apprentice. I wanted, above anything else in the world, to kick my boots off and be in the shipyard with Matthew again.

After we had proofed and printed, I broke the ice in the pail in the yard, washed what dirt I could from my face and hands, and began to eat the cold pottage and drink the beer Sarah had left out. Mr Black took some wine for himself, gazing with pride at the newssheets, gleaming wet in the candlelight. There was a fine portrait of the King, hair curling luxuriously to his shoulders from his hat cocked at the front, and a more modest one of Mr Pym, his pointed beard chipped because we had used the block so many times.

Mr Black’s idea was to put Parliament’s explosive demands in a respectful wrapping, viz:

a Grand Remonstrance of PARLIAMENT to his MAJESTY THE KINGBeing the onlye true & faithful reporte of theproceedings of Parliament praying His Majesty toadresse the most humble supplications of his subjects

I had swallowed my beer in two draughts when Mr Black said to George: ‘Take some wine yourself and pour Tom some.’

George’s eyebrows lifted and looked as if they would never come down again. He was only offered wine on his name day, and Mr Black had never offered me it before; rarely had he called me Tom. I had always been ‘that boy’, ‘sinning wretch’ or ‘little devil’; only lately, as I had grown almost as tall as he was, kept my boots on regular, and was suddenly useful to him had he begun to call me, albeit with heavy sarcasm, ‘Mr Neave’.

Mr Black took some wine, cleared his throat, and gave me a long stare. My stomach churned. Now he was going to question me about how the papers and myself had got into such a dishevelled state. His eyes, however, were drawn back by the drying newssheets, still shining with ink in the candlelight, and his face filled with the triumph of getting the speech on the streets next day.

‘Well done, Tom,’ he said.

The words came stiffly and awkwardly from his mouth, for he was as unused to saying them as I was to hearing them. In fact it took a moment – several moments – before I was sure there was no hidden sarcasm signalling the reproof to come. It was only when he put more wine in my tankard and raised his glass, his face coming out of the shadows with a smile on it, that I knew he meant it.

The smile was as much a stranger to me as the words. Without warning, tears pricked my eyes. I had cried myself to sleep often enough in that place, but I had never cried in their presence. The more I was beaten, the more I resolved never to cry in front of them.

‘Come, Tom,’ he said, ‘are those tears?’

‘No, sir,’ I stammered, ‘no, sir,’ pulling away into the shadows and drawing my sleeve over my face.

‘Thou art a curious child, is he not, George?’

‘Aye, sir,’ said George, with a vehement look at me.

‘Hard as stone when chastised, and cries when praised!’

‘I am not used to it, sir,’ I said.

‘Ah well, Tom, that’s as maybe. You were very rough when we took you, was he not, George?’

George looked as if the end of the world was not merely imminent, but had come. ‘He was, sir. The roughest ’prentice in the City. And if I may venture an opinion, still is.’

‘But improving, George, improving.’

George said nothing, but Mr Black was not waiting for an answer. ‘There was much to do and too little time.’

He poked the dull red coals of the fire until a few flames appeared, lighting up his face. He was not yet forty, but the flickering light threw up the furrows in his face of a much older man, etched deeply into his forehead and cheeks like the lines of a finely cut woodblock. He stared into the flames as if he had forgotten we were there. I crept closer. When he had said I was a curious child I was minded of Matthew; now I was took back to the time when Matthew gazed into the fire and drew out the pendant, and I wondered how such a devious cunning man and a straight-backed religious man could stare into the fire in an exactly similar way, even though one was looking into the future, and the other into the past.

‘You do not know how much evil there was in your soul, Tom,’ he said.

I shuddered. At that moment I utterly believed in the evil he had found in me: Susannah only thought me good because of my trick with the Bible.

‘We prayed to God we could root it out, did we not?’ he said to George.

‘Aye,’ George replied, clasping his hands together, speaking with an irony that seemed to be lost on Mr Black. ‘We are still praying.’

‘More evil than you know. More than you can possibly imagine!’

He swung round as he said this, his face moving into shadow, his voice suddenly harsh. The change from a tone of reverie was so abrupt it shook not only me, but took George aback. George unclasped his hands, took his brooding attention from me and stared at his master with the avid expression I had once caught on his face when he was listening at the door to some quarrel between Mr Black and his wife.

‘I would never have taken you, never, if the business had not been bad. Bad? About to go under!’

He finished his wine, poured more, drank half of that and then walked about the room.

‘Even then I would not have done it, I would have gone home to Oxford with my tail between my legs if Merrick had not offered to buy me out. Merrick!’

He spat the word out. Merrick was the printer at The Star, in Little Britain. He finished his wine with a gulp, as if he wanted to wash away the taste of his rival’s name. George nodded slowly, looking at me, as if he was understanding something for the first time, though I had no idea what it was.

‘That was about the time, master, you . . . er, found the money to buy the new press, the new type from Amsterdam –’

‘Borrowed it!’ Mr Black said sharply, as though regretting these disclosures. ‘Just so! Borrowed the money!’

He half moved his glass to his lips, realised it was empty, and had a little argument between himself and the bottle. He put his glass down with resolution, then looked at the drying newssheets, his eyes gleaming with pleasure, turned back to the bottle, hesitated, turned regretfully away, then saw me, with a smile on my face at this little dance and, before I could remove it, to my utmost surprise smiled back. He poured more wine and pointed at me.

‘I thought I had brought the very devil into this place, the printer’s devil, did I not, George?’

‘A most subtle devil,’ said George, looking steadily at me.

‘Oh, come, George!’ His gesture included not only the well-equipped workshop, but the new cedar chest in the room where we ate, with its flagons and candlesticks – not silver, but the most expensive pewter, polished to look very like. ‘Is not all this a sign of God’s favour?’

George turned his steady, unblinking gaze on his master. ‘“Prosperity will not show you who are your friends. Or good servants.” Ecclesiasticus, twelve eight.’

The drink brought out a totally different side of Mr Black. He looked as solemn as ever, but I swear there was a twinkle in his eye.

‘Come, George. “Whose friend is he that is his own enemy, and leaves his own cheer untasted?” Ecclesiasticus, fourteen five.’

I had never heard Mr Black trump one of George’s quotations before. George looked completely put out. Mr Black clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Come, gentlemen – drink up!’

George refused, and when Mr Black moved to my tankard, said: ‘The boy has had enough, sir.’

Mr Black waved him away. ‘He has had but little.’

‘Aye, plus what he took at the alehouse,’ George said.

I jumped up. ‘I did not go to the alehouse!’

‘You stank of it when you came in!’

‘I was in a fight!’

‘A tavern brawl!’

‘Stop this! You will wake the house!’

For the first time, the rebuke from Mr Black was for both of us, not just me. And, for the first time, he questioned me without automatically assuming my guilt.

‘Did you go into an alehouse?’

I hesitated. Going into an alehouse had led to some of my worst beatings, and was the main reason why apprentices were thrown out of their Guilds. But that was because they drank, diced and whored. I had not even had one drink, or one pass of the dice.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘Mark the hesitation,’ said George.

‘Are you speaking the truth?’ The sternness reappeared in Mr Black’s speech, beginning to fight with his conviviality.

‘Yes, sir.’

George’s lips moved quietly, but I caught the prayer on his lips. ‘Oh Lord, guide him, let him see the error –’

‘Stop that, George!’

George did so, abruptly. His pale face seemed to twist and shrink, his lips still moving but no words coming out. Mr Black turned sharply, almost knocking a chair over. He sat heavily at the head of the table, in the leather seated, high-backed chair he had recently bought, looking like a judge.

George found his voice. ‘Ask him how he got into the fight.’

‘I was attacked. Thieves who tried to get the speech.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us all this before?’ George’s voice was acid with scepticism.

‘There has been no time!’

‘Apprentices from Merrick?’ said Mr Black.

‘No, sir. I never saw them before. One had a sword.’

George looked up at the ceiling in disbelief, but Mr Black leaned forward sharply.

‘A gentleman?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps once was?’

‘Yes.’

‘Describe him.’

‘A thin face. A beard like the King. He was wearing a beaver hat.’

‘Like half London,’ said George.

‘The other?’

‘A lowpad. Shoulders like a bull.’

George laughed. ‘It’s a tale from a halfpenny broadsheet! He’s lying.’

Mr Black jumped up. His good mood had disappeared as quickly as it came. He seized his cane, which had become a stranger to me in recent months. ‘Are you?’

‘No, sir!’

I ducked as I saw the cane move and flung my hands round my head, wincing in anticipation. But the blow never came. The cane clattered as he flung it on the stone flags. His face looked tortured. I feared he had been struck by the strange ailment that affected him at times when he would stand quite still, as if struck by some vision others could not see.

George backed away, muttering. ‘The boy has cursed you. I saw his lips move.’

Mr Black shook his head, as if he was shaking off the vision, like a dog shaking off water. He seized me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘Are you lying?’

‘No, sir!’ I sobbed, more frightened by the strange contortions of his face than the violence.

He shook me again, and pushed his face into mine. ‘It’s as import ant for you as it is for me that you tell me the truth! Do you understand, you little fool?’

I pulled away from him with a rush of anger that overcame my tears. I did not consider myself a fool and I was certainly no longer little.

‘It’s true – I heard one of the men asking another ’prentice about a boy with red hair and then the man turned round and saw me and I ran and then –’

‘Where was this?’

The words dried up in my mouth. Normally I would have lied. Told him the street, anywhere, but the look on his face was so alarmed, so urgent, I felt compelled to tell the truth.

‘The Pot.’

A sad smile played round George’s mouth. ‘Now we have it, sir, now we have it.’

I expected to be given the beating then. I wish they had. George was clearly relishing the thought. He picked up his old composing stick with the rusty metal end from which I still bear a mark on my left temple. But Mr Black waved him away. He gave me a look of such sadness it cut me more sharply than any whip or stick.

‘Oh, Tom, Tom, I was beginning to trust you.’

Now I could not stop the tears bursting out of me and with them a torrent of words. He must have beaten more of his obsession with sin into me than I realised, but it had all been concealed from me until a little kindness let it out. That, and my realisation that the words that were going to change the world could have been lost because of my desire for a drink.

I confessed drink. I confessed pass dice. I confessed lusting after Mary, the pot girl. I confessed cursing his daughter. I confessed, although I feared it would be the greatest sin of all in Mr Black’s eyes, drinking and getting into debt with Henry, Merrick’s apprentice.

George was hovering, testing the position of the stick in his hand. I wanted him to beat me. I needed his savagery. But as I moved like a sacrificial lamb towards him, Mr Black stopped him. He was berating himself under his breath for not having written to someone. He picked up pen and ink as if he would write a letter there and then, then set it down and paced again.

Waiting for my punishment made it ten times worse. I felt so wretched I begged him to cancel my indentures and send me home. I would return my uniform and boots, get some clothes from the rag woman at Tower Hill and go back to my father.

He came to a full halt, staring at me as if I had said something that first of all shocked, then amused him. ‘Your father? No, no, that won’t do, that won’t do at all. It’s far too late for that. As for the boots . . .’ He gave me one of his rare, dry, mirthless smiles. ‘I doubt anyone else would fit them.’

The touch of levity left him. ‘You are not to leave this house until I give you permission. Is that clear?’

No. Nothing was clear. Not the evil that he said was in my soul, nor the man in the beaver hat who had suddenly come into my life, causing him such consternation. But I promised to obey him.

He hesitated. ‘No, I can’t trust you. I can’t afford to trust you.’ He turned to George. ‘Lock him in the cellar.’

George gripped me by the arm, nodding his head in approval at the gravity and the justice of the punishment. My tongue and limbs were so paralysed with fear at the thought of being locked in there at night that George got me halfway to the door before I anchored myself to the table.

‘Not in the dark, sir,’ I pleaded. ‘Please don’t lock me in there in the dark!’

‘Why, Tom,’ Mr Black said, an amused look on his face, ‘I thought you were grown up now and afraid of nothing. Are you still afraid of the dark?’

I had made my confessions with the reason of a man, but now all reason deserted me and I whimpered my plea again like a child.

‘Let him have a candle,’ Mr Black said curtly.

I made no further resistance. In the early days I had learned, painfully, that it was useless and only gave George more satisfaction. George lit a candle and with the composing stick in his other hand led me down the stairs, his shadow splayed out over the low ceiling. As he opened the door of the cellar the dank rotting smell brought back to me the terror of the first time they brought me here, but I stifled it, determined not to show any more fear to George. It was very late, and the candle would last me until first light filtered through the broken plaster.

It is only when you have been punished regular that you learn instinctively to recognise refinements of such punishments. As George began to close the door on me I realised he was not going to give me the candle.

I put my boot in the door and struggled to pull it further open. The composing stick fell on my fingers with agonising force. For a moment I could not move for the pain, but the rattle of the key drove me to wrench at the door. I got it half open and grabbed for the candle. He pulled back but hot wax spilled on his hand. He yelled, dropping the candle, which went out.

There was now only a dim, flickering light from the room above. I glimpsed him coming for me with the stick. I ducked and, as he crashed into the wall, grabbed him from behind and shoved him into the plaster with such force I thought the wall was coming down. He groped feebly for the stick he had dropped but I saw it on the stair and grabbed it.

I was familiar with that stick on every inch of my body, except in the palm of my hand. The feel of it there, my fingers gripping it, that hated stick, and the fear of the dark in that stinking cell drove me into such a frenzy I lashed out at George. He ducked, but I caught him a glancing blow on the temple and the thought that I had scarred him as he had scarred me let loose such a rush of savagery it felt as if the devil George always claimed was in me was released, urging me to beat him and beat him as he had beaten me.

George slipped and fell and God knows what I would have done if I had heard Mr Black coming down the stairs sooner, but by the time I turned and saw him, he was bringing his stick down on my head.