into the cellarage. I had never been here before – the palace was so vast and so rambling that I knew only a fraction of it, and none of it well. A low passage stretched the length of the range. Small gratings were set high in the left-hand wall to let in a modicum of light and air. On the right was a row of doors, all closed.
Williamson took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door at the far end. We entered a windowless chamber with a low barrel-vault of bricks. It contained no furniture apart from a heavy table in the centre of the room. The cellar smelled strongly of burning, as everywhere did now, as well as of sewage and damp.
On the table lay a large, untidy bundle draped with a sheet.
‘Uncover it,’ Williamson said.
I set down the lantern and obeyed. The man was naked. He was on his side, facing me.
‘God in heaven,’ I said.
He lay awkwardly on the table, for his arms were behind his back, which pushed his shoulders forward and twisted his body to one side. It was as if he had been frozen in the act of trying to roll off the table.
He had matted, shoulder-length hair, which was grey with ash and perhaps with age as well. There wasn’t much flesh on him. His head poked up and forward like the prow of a barge.
‘Who is he, sir?’
‘I don’t know.’
Williamson took up the lantern and directed its light towards the body. The skin was powdered with ash. Seen from close to, it looked yellow beneath the dirt, like parchment. It was shrivelled and blistered. The heat would have done that. The body didn’t stink. But that didn’t necessarily mean the death was recent, I thought, because the heat would have mummified it.
The man’s chin had caught on the table, and his mouth was open, which gave him the air of surprise. His lips were pulled back, exposing the remaining teeth. A bruise on the temple had grazed the skin.
‘Was he naked when he was found?’ I asked, for it seemed to be my place to ask questions.
‘No. His clothes are there.’ Williamson nodded at a bundle on a bench that stood by the wall.
‘Perhaps he was trapped inside when the cathedral caught fire.’
Williamson shrugged. ‘Turn him over,’ he ordered in a casual voice, as if telling me to turn a page or a key.
I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that the soul of the dead man was floating about the roof of the cellar and watching us. I gripped the corpse’s shoulder with one hand and his hip with the other. The flesh was cool and yielded slightly to my touch. It felt like a slab of boiled brawn. I pulled the body towards me, gradually increasing the pressure.
The corpse lacked the rigidity of the recently dead, which made it unnervingly unpredictable. It was also much heavier than I expected. It reached its tipping point and fell with a thump on to its front.
The arms poked up.
‘You see?’ Williamson said softly.
We stood side by side, staring at the hands of the dead man in the light of the lantern. The thumbs were tied together with a length of cord, so tightly tied that they had turned black.
‘Why just the thumbs?’ I said. ‘Why not tie the wrists?’
‘I don’t know. But look there, Marwood. The back of the head.’
There was a small wound in the neck, just below the skull.
‘Stabbed from behind,’ Williamson said. ‘Up into the brain. By someone who knew what he was about.’
I held my peace. So it was murder, that much was clear. The Fire acted as a cover for many crimes, so why not murder among them? What wasn’t clear to me was why Williamson was so interested and, above all, why he had brought me here to see the body.
‘It’s the clothes that matter,’ Williamson said abruptly.
He had wandered over to the bench. He held up a torn shirt, then a coat and a pair of breeches with the same pattern. I joined him. The heat had darkened the material, charring it in places, but it was still possible to make out the broad vertical stripes on the material of both coat and breeches. Black, perhaps, and yellow.
‘A suit of livery?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
A badge was fixed to the collar. Williamson rubbed it with his fingertip. I peered at it. A pelican was feeding her young with flesh plucked from her own breast.
‘He’s one of Henry Alderley’s men,’ Williamson said. ‘The goldsmith – you must know of the man. That’s his device, and his livery. That’s why the body has been brought here. That’s why we must know who killed him. And above all that’s why we must go carefully.’
The King had gone by barge to the Tower, inspecting his ruined capital on the way. From there he intended to ride to Moorfields, to address the crowds of refugees. Master Williamson would have liked to go with him.
Instead, he was obliged to walk to Barnabas Place in Holborn to see Henry Alderley about a dead servant, with me in attendance on him. It was much hotter here, even in the unburned streets, than it had been by the river. In the normal run of things, he would have taken a coach, but the streets were so congested with traffic that this was impracticable. He was not habitually an active man and his face was soon shiny with perspiration.
These were strange times. There had been riots last night, and rumours of food shortages. Foreigners had been attacked on the assumption that they had been responsible for the destruction of London, purely by virtue of their being foreign. The King had summoned the militias of neighbouring counties, ostensibly to help fight the Fire but also to keep order if the riots spiralled out of control.
But even in the middle of this crisis in the nation’s capital, Master Alderley was still a man of importance, not just a goldsmith and an alderman of the City. His wealth was enormous, and the King himself was said to be one of his principal debtors.
So Williamson naturally wished to treat Master Alderley with due respect. But I was puzzled, all the same. Why come himself at a time like this? He was not a justice. He was not a lawyer. He was not a courtier.
Williamson frequently glanced over his shoulder, as if worried that I might slip away, leaving him alone among the refugees and the desolation. This was probably the first time that he had left Whitehall since last week. He must have known in theory what the Fire had done to London, but the reality of it took him by surprise.
We skirted the remains of the City, avoiding the worst of the destruction. He was visibly shocked by what he saw: the smoking ruins, the blackened chimneystacks rearing out of the ashes, and the sluggishly moving crowds of homeless people encumbered with possessions and with the weaker members of their families.
These horrors affected me, too, but I had my own worries to distract me. Williamson had no reason to trust me, let alone like me. I had worked for him only since the beginning of the summer. The connection between us had come about in a most unexpected way, and he could not have welcomed it.
In May, I had petitioned the King for the third time, begging that His Majesty might in his infinite mercy see
