up speed at the start of the hill. The cart, rattling and bumping down the incline, had drifted into the centre of the road. He yanked at the reins and sparks flew as he pulled ineffectively at the brake.
The horses of the approaching coach reared. Matthew glimpsed the driver’s angry face and felt the sting of a whip across his cheek. He lost the reins and the cart lurched, with a grinding of wood against stone, into the ditch.
He shouted and cursed after it, then searched for the coin, which had jumped from his hand. He shoved aside one of the bodies which had been thrown from the cart, before giving up, dropping his head in despair. Then he thought of the other silver coin, waiting for him at the pit. He flung the body back in the cart with the others and covered them with the thick bundles of hay with which he disguised his cargo.
The near-side wheel was buckled and grating against the side as, just before Horseborne, he found the track to Bennet’s farm. The name meant something to him, but he couldn’t remember what.
The track was a thick, gluey pottage of mud, leaves and dung, pockmarked by cattle and horses. Overlaying them were the recent, deep ruts of a coach.
It was now almost dark and the rain, which had slackened, dripped steadily through the trees. The cart rattled and jerked through a small copse, a branch wrenching at Matthew’s hat before the open gate of the farmyard.
He stopped at the door of a prosperous-looking wattle-and-daub farmhouse. There was no red cross on the door. And something else was wrong.
There was no dog. Who had ever heard of a farm without dogs? Then he remembered. Bennet was a farmer who, returning from market drunk, had been murdered. The farm had been bought by Mr Ralph to add to his nearby lands, and was not yet tenanted.
Feeling increasingly uneasy, he approached the door, stopping abruptly. A pair of eyes glittered at him from the bushes. He was about to run when he realised the gaze was unblinking. They were jewelled eyes, set in the head of a falcon, the centrepiece of a magnificent pendant whose gold chain was entangled in the bushes. He knew where it came from. There would be a reward for it – a substantial one. He had lost silver, but found gold. He stuffed it inside his jacket and knocked at the door.
He expected Widow Martin, or some other fuddled midwife, but the woman who answered the door was another shock. Like Mr Ralph, she was not quite gentry. Kate Beaumann was a gentlewoman’s lady, as God-fearing as her sober black indicated, and she was plainly as shocked to see him as he was to see her. They knew each other, for it is surprising how many people, from all walks of life, will seek out the services of a cunning man. She had a warm, kindly face, which reminded Matthew of the good neighbour who had kept him alive during the plague. She was in her mid-twenties, but there were already streaks of grey in her hair, and her eyes were red with weeping. Her dress, like her pattens, was splashed with mud.
He touched his dripping hat. ‘Evening, Miss Beaumann.’
Without a word she beckoned him to follow her, shutting an inside door quickly, but not before he glimpsed a weakly guttering fire, a birthing stool, and a spattering of blood on the rush-covered floor. She led him into a stall where the farmer would have kept a sick animal. On the straw was a small shape wrapped in a linen apron.
‘Take him.’
When he didn’t move she picked up the object and thrust it into his arms. The little bundle was cold and wet. Part of the covering fell away from the baby’s face, which carried none of the telltale plague spots or scars. The child looked to Matthew to be stillborn, or to have died shortly after birth.
‘He don’t look no plague child,’ he said.
The harshness in Kate Beaumann’s voice was as unexpected as her kindly face. ‘He was a plague to us,’ she said.
Without another word Matthew left, half-running to the cart. He took off the apron before dropping the baby on the cart and covering it with the bundles of straw. The apron was fine linen, Flemish possibly. Kate Beaumann’s muddy skirt suggested she had dumped the child in the fields to die. That was as common as death itself.
The mystery was why Kate did not leave the child there. Or bury it. Or throw it in the river. One baby was much like another. But bodies could be found.
Mr Ralph’s urgency and fear all but spoke out loud there must be no risk of that. Perhaps the child had some special feature, or birthmark. If that was the case, the pit was the ideal solution to the problem.
Put there to destroy the plague, lime ate quickly into bodies and faces, dissolving them in a few days into an unrecognisable slime. No one would go near the pit, let alone lift a body from it. Someone wanted to prevent anyone from recognising, or claiming he recognised, the features of the child at the bottom of his cart.
Matthew shrugged. His hand closed round the pendant, feeling the outline of the jewelled bird and the links of the chain, one by one. Then his hand stopped stroking it. Suppose he was accused of stealing it? It was risky, far too risky to return it. The horses, which were dragging the cart more and more slowly, needed shoeing and the blacksmith would melt the gold down. Broken up, the stones he could sell one by one at Witney Fair, or Oxford, with the linen apron, which Susannah would wash and press.
He was musing like this, the rocking of the cart sending him into a half-sleep, the reins slipping gradually from his fingers, when he first heard the stuttering cry.
He had been asleep. Dreaming. There was nothing but the wind, the weary stumble of the hooves and the creak of the cart. But there it was again. Unmistakable. A baby’s cry.
Hadn’t he feared, from the very beginning, that this was wrong? Hadn’t Susannah warned him, time and again, of the evil of throwing someone who had not died of plague into the pit? The baby had been clap-cold dead – now it had come back to haunt him.
As the cry increased into a pitiful wail, he crossed himself in terror, lashing the horses in an attempt to escape from the spirit that he believed was pursuing him, he was now convinced, into hell. It was the hell he had somehow escaped as a child, but knew he had always been destined for; a pit, not of fire, but of bodies slowly eaten, burned, then re-formed, only to be eaten and burned again, forever being consumed, writhing in lime.
Part One At the Half-Moon
November 1641–September 1642
Chapter 1
That was the story which I eventually got out of the man I believed to be my father, Matthew Neave. There were various versions, each more colourful than the last and, of course, there was what happened next, but that has to come in its proper place.
We lived in Poplar, which some people said was a land of heathens and barbarians, because we were outside the walls of the great City of London and were not freemen. I could not understand that because in Poplar Without, as it was sniffily called, we had much more freedom. There were few laws, and I never saw a constable. I loved it there. Named after the tall, shapely trees that lined the High Street and the marsh, it was still half farming land, breeding cattle that lost little fat on the short drover’s road to Smithfield. But the farmers were being pushed back by the huddling mass of small houses being knocked up every day.
These houses were unlike the tall buildings of the City, which struck awe in me when I first saw them. Rackety, timber-framed houses with narrow, gabled fronts, they were home to some of the first Huguenot refugees who had fled from France and taught me to call my hat a shappo and swear about the Pope in French. But the houses were mainly run up for shipyard
