drew closer, and stooped over her. Such a wanton, sinful display of flesh. The devil’s work to lead mankind astray. He stared at the breasts, unable to look away. They were quite still. The woman might have been a painted statue in a Popish church.
She had a foolish face, of course. Her mouth was open, which showed her teeth; some were missing, and the rest were stained. Dull, sad eyes stared at him.
Oh God, he thought, and for a moment the fog in his mind cleared and he saw the wretch for what she truly was.
Merciful father, here are the wages of sin, for me as well as for her. God had punished his lust, and this poor woman’s. God be blessed in his infinite wisdom.
And yet – what if there were still life in this fallen woman? Would not God wish him to urge her to repent?
Her complexion was unnaturally white. There was a velvet beauty patch at the corner of her left eye in the shape of a coach and horses, and another on her cheek in the form of a heart. The poor vain woman, tricking herself out with her powders and patches, and for what? To entice men into her sinful embrace.
He knelt beside her and rested his ear against the left side of her breast, hoping to hear or feel through the thickness of the gown and the shift beneath the beating of a heart. Nothing. He shifted his fingers to one side. He could not find a heartbeat.
His fingertips touched something damp, a stickiness. He smelled iron. He was reminded of the butcher’s shop beside his old premises in Pater Noster Row.
Was that another sound? On the landing? On the stairs.
He withdrew his hand. The fingers were red with blood. Like the butcher’s fingers when he had killed a pig on the step, and the blood drained down to the gutter, a feast for flies. Why was there so much blood? It was blood on the yellow gown: that was why some of it was red.
Thank God it was not Rachel. He sighed and drew down the lids over the sightless eyes. He knew what was due to death. When Rachel had drawn her last labouring breath—
The cuff of his shirt had trailed across the blood. He blinked, his train of thought broken. There was blood on his sleeve. They would be angry with him for fouling his linen.
He took a paper from the table and wiped his hand and the cuff as best he could. He stuffed the paper in his pocket to tidy it away and rose slowly to his feet.
Rachel – how in God’s name could he have forgotten her? Perhaps she had gone outside while he was distracted.
In his haste, he collided with a chair and knocked it over. On the landing, he closed the door behind him. He went downstairs. As he came out into the sunshine, something shifted in his memory and suddenly he knew this place for what it was: one of those nests of lawyers that had grown up outside the old city walls, as nests of rooks cluster in garden trees about a house.
Lawyers. The devil’s spawn. They argued white into black with their lies and their Latin, and they sent innocent, God-fearing men to prison, as he knew to his cost.
Birds sang in the garden. The courtyard was full of people, mainly men, mainly dressed in lawyers’ black which reminded him again of rooks, talking among themselves. Caw, caw, he murmured to himself, caw, caw.
He walked stiffly towards the hall with its high, pointed windows. At the door, he paused, and looked back. His eyes travelled up the building he had just left. The shadowy man was back at the first-floor window. He raised his arm at the shadow, partly in accusation and partly in triumph: there, see the rewards of sin. Fall on your knees and repent.
Suddenly, there was Rachel herself. She was coming out of the doorway of the blackened ruin next to Staircase XIV. She had pulled her cloak over her face to cover her shame. She was trying to hide from him. She was trying to hide from God.
Caw, caw, said the rooks.
‘Rachel,’ he said, or perhaps he only thought it. ‘Rachel.’
A lawyer passed her, jostling her shoulder, and for a moment the cloak slipped. To his astonishment, he saw that the woman was not Rachel, after all. This woman wore the mark of Cain on her face. Cain was jealous of his brother Abel, so he slew him.
Not Rachel. His wife was dead, rotting in her grave, waiting among the worms for the Second Coming of the Lord and the everlasting reign of King Jesus. Nor had Rachel borne the mark of Cain.
‘Sinner!’ he cried, shaking his fist. ‘Sinner!’
The bite of the serpent endured beyond death. Perhaps he had been wrong about Rachel. Had she been a whore too, like Eve a temptress of men, destined to writhe for all eternity in the flames of hell?
Caw, caw, said the rooks. Caw, caw.
It is marvellous what money in your pocket and a toehold in the world will do for a man’s self-esteem.
There I was, James Marwood. Sleeker of face and more prosperous of purse than I had been six months earlier. Clerk to Mr Williamson, the Under-Secretary of State to my Lord Arlington himself. Clerk to the Board of Red Cloth, which was attached to the Groom of the Stool’s department. James Marwood – altogether a rising man, if only in my own estimation.
That evening, Thursday, 2 May, I set out by water from the Tower, where I had been a witness on Mr Williamson’s behalf at the interrogation of certain prisoners. The tide was with us, though only recently on the turn. The ruins of the city lay on my right – the roofless churches, the tottering chimney stacks, the gutted warehouses, the heaps of ash – but distance and sunlight lent them a strange beauty, touching with the colours of paradise. On my left, on the Surrey side, Southwark lay undamaged, and before me the lofty buildings on London Bridge towered across the river with the traffic passing to and fro between them.
The waterman judged it safe for us to pass beneath the bridge. A few hours later, when the tide would be running faster, the currents would be too turbulent for safety. Even so, he took us through Chapel Lock, one of the wider arches. It was a relief to reach open water at the cost of only a little spray on my cloak.
London opened up before me again, still dominated by the blackened hulk of St Paul’s on its hill. It was eight months since the Great Fire. Though the streets had been cleared and the ruins surveyed, the reconstruction had barely begun.
My mind was full of the evening that lay ahead – the agreeable prospect of a supper with two fellow clerks in a Westminster tavern where there would be music, and where there was a pretty barmaid who would be obliging if you promised her a scrap of lace or some other trifle. Before that, however, I needed to return to my house to change my clothes and make my notes for Mr Williamson.
I had the waterman set me down at the Savoy Stairs. My new lodgings were nearby in the old palace. I had moved there less than three weeks ago from the house of Mr Newcomb, the King’s Printer. Since my good fortune, I deserved better and I could afford to pay for it.
In the later wars, the Savoy had been used to house the wounded. Now its rambling premises near the river were used mainly for ageing soldiers and sailors, and also for private lodgings. The latter were much sought after since the Fire – accommodation of all sorts was still in short supply. It was crown property and Mr Williamson had dropped a word on my behalf
