Fire (2 page)

Fire. Vulnerable as any newborn. Like a child, you give it life, pray that it will thrive and repay your care. Yet how will it survive its first moments in a harsh world?

Take the lit taper from a neighbour. Softly now, softly – even in the few steps to your room, it has so many ways to die. Despite your cupped hand, draughts beset it. It flickers, shreds, re-forms in waves, bends to you as if craving protection, shrinks. You think you've lost it, you stop – and it revives, rising straight again, a final boldness. Now you must be quick.

Over the threshold, across to the stub of candle on the mantel, lower flame to wick. So – it catches! Dropping the taper's end onto a pewter plate, you cross and close the door. The swirl of your motion blows a tiny ember to the floor. You do not note its fall. How can it matter anyway when it is all but dead?

The flame lives now in the candle. You could snuff it in a cone of metal, extinguish it with a snap of fingers, destroy it with a breath. Instead, you pause to admire the yellow spear with cobalt at its heart, the burning eye of the wick. It streams high in three slender fingers and you give thanks to God for life renewed, for warmth, for heat. Now you will be fed as you have fed.

You transfer fire to the grate. Kindling catches and flames move
upon the small logs you offer it. You bend to add breath. The chimney draw is not enough, so you cover the hearth with a blanket, seal it from the room. Silence – then a whoosh. Through threadbare wool, you see fiery arms reach high. Folding the blanket fast, you smother any new life within it.

Larger logs now – and your tender babe becomes a brawling youth. As it grows, so does its appetite. Soon it is all the fire you need. You swing a pot over the flames and cook your supper.

Heat makes you drowsy. But you know that unattended fires can be dangerous. You add one last, larger piece of wood to see you into the night, put a metal guard before the hearth and sink into your chair.

You doze before the dwindling light. And though some worry tugs at the edge of your mind, you lose it in sleep.

That ember. That tiny ember from the taper. That orphan. Most orphans in this city perish and this one would have too – if it had not fallen first onto a fragment of leaf, shifted onto an edge of rug, finally settled onto a dropped wool stocking. There a little draught reaches it, gently, and the ember glows and grows ever slowly into the night. Until it is hungrier.

Then it moves more quickly. Consuming all that is beside it, it begins on everything beyond. It reaches out to its cousin fire almost faded on the grate. Revives it, becomes one with it. Smoke fills the room. You, the parent before the hearth, are dead before you are consumed.

The window's lead is melting, its glass is bowing out. Within the plaster walls, horsehairs crisp in filaments of fire. Soon there is nothing left of the room – wood, wool, flesh, all gone. So now, like any living thing, flame has a choice: feed or die.

Across the threshold, a city sleeps.

Of all the drunk men in the Seven Stars that noontime, he was undoubtedly the drunkest.

The tavern was one of several close to the law courts but was favoured above others for the quality of its sweet sack, its beef and kidney pudding, and for the several snugs where lawyers could meet their clients or each other in relative privacy. Matters could be discussed with discretion, bribes subtly transferred from cloak to cloak.

The drunkard disturbed their equilibrium. It was not that the legal profession in London was any less inebriated than any other. Indeed, few of them would dream of venturing into the courtroom entirely sober; given that the judge, the juries, most plaintiffs and all defendants were unlikely to be, what would be the purpose? Despite that, most in the tavern comported themselves with decorum, keeping their voices low, their movements minimal.

Unlike the tall man whose long black hair – filigreed with silver and uninhibited by judicial wig or even ribbon – flew around him as he danced to music only he could hear. The man had tried to engage another in his dance, pulling him close, whirling him
around again and again before being shoved aside with an oath. Rebuffed, he began to punctuate his jig with short snatches of song, and clapped a-rhythmically along to his stamping.

It was the jarring quality of this last that finally provoked a corpulent barrister named Woodstrode, three bumpers of sack the worse for the morning and so finding it hard to grasp the exact amount he was being offered to lose his case that day, to bellow, ‘Christ's mercy, Peterson. Throw the bedlamite out!'

Thom Peterson, landlord of the Stars, had been contemplating doing so since the man began his jigging. But the only part of him that was large was his belly; he'd strained his back shifting barrels earlier in the day and he'd dispatched his tapster, Smythe, who enjoyed hurting drunks, to fetch more offal from the Fetter Lane shambles. Still, with the tavern now suddenly quieter and his regular clients regarding him, he knew he must do something.

Stepping from behind the trestle, he warily approached the man who, on the lawyer's cry, had ceased singing and taken a few unsteady steps back to the crook stool he'd risen from to dance. He swayed above it now and, just as the landlord reached him, flopped onto it.

‘Now, listen to me, you –' Peterson began.

‘Grash,' the man slurred.

‘What's that, fellow?'

Another unintelligible word came, whispered this time while the drunkard also reached up, took the landlord's hand, tugged him down until their heads near touched. Peterson, bending to listen and consider how, with his back, he could lift the larger man from his seat and run him out the door, then realised that there was not just flesh between them – there was metal as well. The
man was turning his hand slightly, not letting it go, just enough to reveal that the metal was silver, and had His Majesty's head upon it.

‘Leave me be,' the man whispered, releasing the coin over, retaining the hand, ‘and I vow I'll be good.'

Between the half-crown in his palm and the pain in his back, Peterson came to an immediate decision. ‘See that you are, ye dog,' he declared into the silence that lingered, looking around to add loudly, ‘He sued his wife for criminal conversation – and he lost! I've told the poor cuckold he can rest here if he makes not one peep more.'

A few laughs came, along with expressions of wonder – it was rare for a husband to sue a wife for adultery in an adulterous world, rarer still for her to win. Wondering which lucky lawyer it was who had thus triumphed, Woodstrode and the rest turned back to their hushed negotiations. The hum returned to the tavern, the landlord to his trestle, the drunkard to himself. Indeed, the cuckold was now completely, contemptuously, ignored.

Which is just as I want it, thought Captain Coke, as he peered through the falling veil of his hair at the man who'd been his brief and unwilling partner in the dance. Use all your senses, his tutor in crime had told him. The man we seek will be unusual. He will stand out, e'en as he seeks to blend in. Something will distinguish him, give him away. Above all, he'd said, use this. And he'd tapped his nose.

He'd not meant it literally, of course. ‘Sniffing out villainy' was a phrase as old as villains and those who hunted them. And yet?

Coke inhaled. The air was fragrant with so many things. Smoke overlaid it all – from the hearth, where sweet applewood burned
to stave off the chill of this raw April day; from the clay pipes at which every second man puffed. You could tell the quality of the clientele by the quality of what they smoked. In an alehouse in Wapping, the seaman's rough shag would make all eyes run. However the tobacco in the Seven Stars was finest blended Turkish leaf, purchased on the Haymarket or from Louis on Fleet Street – gentle on nostril, throat and chest.

Deeper, thought Coke, taking another breath which brought…the pungency of kidney from one of the establishment's famed puddings, an example of which lay open and ravaged on the table to his side, wafting its flavourings over: nutmeg, cinnamon and black pepper. It brought perfume too, for near all men wore it, in different notes. Within his, bought at considerable expense from Maurice of the Strand Arcade, sandalwood predominated – a good, masculine smell, he'd always felt. Other perfumes nearby were not so nice. He smelled rosewater; then bergamot, lavender and lily.

He looked across the tavern again. The man he'd danced with smelled of none of these. Or rather, anything he wore was overlaid with something far stronger.

The scent of terror.

The man was now looking towards him. Muttering, Coke lowered his head into his hands, looked to the floor – and smiled. Though it was half hidden in floor reeds, had been trampled in muck and had a boot heel's mark obscuring some of the words, the rest of the paper was clear – and told that at two that same afternoon at the Duke's Playhouse, not three hundred paces from where he now sat, Thomas Betterton, ‘the prince of players', would give his Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, for the very first time.
And though there was no other name upon the bill, Coke saw one there anyway. For Sarah Chalker, who he hoped one day soon would be Sarah Coke, would be giving her Gertrude.

Smile changed to frown. He wasn't well read in Shakespeare. But he knew that Gertrude was a widow. And ‘the Widow Chalker' was what Sarah was called by many. Her husband had been slain, brutally slain, but eight months before. She'd told him that she was reluctant to marry again so soon before she had fully mourned. But Coke feared otherwise: that even though he knew she loved him, he also believed that the child that she carried, that they had created, made her wary of a life with him. He did not blame her – for what prospect was he? How could he provide for her and the babe? What was he, after all? A disinherited knight. A man forced to give up the one trade he had any skill in and exchange it for another which was…what? Sitting in a tavern, sniffing men? Seeking…

‘Do not turn about.' The voice came low from behind him. ‘Or at least if you do, do so slowly and in your current – and masterly, may I say – personation.'

Coke continued slouching forward for a further half minute. Then, yawning widely, he turned about, laid his head upon the forearms on the table and closed his eyes. He'd seen all he needed.

Pitman was a big man, taller by half a head than himself, and half as broad again. Yet while Coke had jigged, the man had contrived to cross a crowded tavern and insert his large self into the corner of the settle unobserved. This quiet way of being there and yet not seeming to be was just one of several skills that Pitman had been trying to teach his new partner, which the thief-taker alluded to now.

‘I see you took my advice about hiding in plain sight,' he said. He tamped then lit his pipe from the table's candle, exhaling a plume of smoke – shag, Coke thought, coughing, the man had low tastes in some things – to add to the fug. ‘Well done, William.'

Coke sighed. The lessons were good, and well received. Yet sometimes they were delivered in the tone of a schoolmaster speaking to a particularly dense child. ‘Nay, sir,' he replied without raising his head, ‘that's a catch I learned all by myself – perhaps on the score of robberies I undertook
in plain sight
while you and all the other thief-takers chased my shadow.'

The big man chuckled, scratching under his luxuriant beard. ‘Ah, Captain Cock. Would you rather be holding up coaches still than about such subterfuge?'

‘I would rather be about what we agreed.' He sniffed. ‘Using our respective skills to hunt and snare my former fellow road knights. Splitting their bounties between us.' He coughed again at Pitman's execrable tobacco. ‘This is not the king's highway, sir. We will find no highwayman here.'

Pitman stopped smiling. ‘No. But we may find someone else. And there's money in him, have no fear.' The thief-taker leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table, hands and pipe bowl sheltering his mouth. ‘Have you found him out?'

‘I believe so.'

‘Is he the short young fellow in the brown doublet sitting directly behind you across the tavern?'

Coke opened one eye. ‘How do you know already what I have only just discovered?'

‘He is one of the few here not in company. His clothes, though
plain, are better cut than most. His wig is certainly more expensive. And he has just pulled out his timepiece for the third time in as many minutes. He is waiting for someone.' The pot boy placed a tankard on the table and moved away. Pitman took a large swig. ‘And I was told the rendezvous would be in the Seven Stars.'

‘By whom? For Chrissakes, Pitman, who is this bloody fellow? Why are we concerned with him?'

The questions came fast, borne on irritation. Pitman shoved the pint pot across. ‘Drink, Captain, while the fellow scans behind him now and pays us no nevermind.'

‘But –'

‘Season your impatience with ale and I will answer you – as far as I am able.' As Coke obeyed and drank, he continued, ‘I'll tell you this, though – find him out and we will be wealthier for it at twenty guineas a man. Nay, I do not know who he is, Captain, if that is what you would ask. Neither does our employer –'

‘Employer! We work for no man –'

Pitman raised a hand, interrupting the interruption. ‘Alas, Captain, but in this case we do. He is –' Pitman took a deep breath. It was the information he knew he'd have to share with his friend. It would not please. Marry, it did not please him. Nonetheless. ‘Sir Joseph Williamson. He is the Under-Secretary for –'

The expected reaction came. ‘I know who he is, sir,' hissed Coke. ‘For any fancy title he possesses, he is still England's spymaster. What have we to do with such a man?' His eyes widened. ‘Pitman, you do not say –'

‘I do.' Pitman took a big swallow before he continued. ‘We are summoned to the service of the state. Again.'

‘Shit.' Coke reached over and took Pitman's ale from his hand,
near draining it, before setting it down. ‘And what service are we doing it in this tavern, pray?'

‘According to the whisper Sir Joseph heard, we are here to thwart a conspiracy that will begin here.'

‘Its aim?'

‘To assassinate the king.'

Strangely, Coke felt his anger leave. Perhaps it was the ale. ‘Oh. Merely that?' Coke laid his head back onto his forearms. ‘You make me tired, Pitman. We are not spies, nor government agents, nor guards of the king's person. Why would Sir Joseph seek our aid?'

It was another thing that Pitman truly did not wish to discuss. Yet he must. ‘Because he believes the conspiracy is hatched by our old enemies, the Fifth Monarchists. That the man over there still checking his watch, and this other he awaits, are both members of that infernal crew.'

The captain reached up to pinch between his eyes. And so it circles back, he thought. The fanatics who made Sarah Chalker a widow, who near killed us all, now seek to kill the king – again. ‘Other? What other?'