Chapter Fourteen
The Earl of Chatwyn’s heir entered London through the Moorgate shortly before midday. Mounted, and his squire close behind, he pushed through the squash, threw a halfpenny to the suddenly cooperative gatekeeper, avoided the young woman leading two bleating heifers down to the Shambles, nodded to a twittering bustle of frocked priests as they elbowed their way under the low gateway, breathed a small sigh of relief, and finally followed the road leading through the city, trotting down Broad Street towards the strident excitement of the markets easily heard three lanes back. But once into the wide glow of welcoming bustle, Nicholas did not dismount, nor take interest in the stalls and their clamorous barter. His horse trotted on, keeping to the central gulley. David Witton rode just a half pace behind, with more of an eye to the shine and glamour of London’s thoroughfares than his master.
It was as they approached the northern shadows of The Tower that Nicholas slowed, almost ambling, the horse’s hooves echoing on the damp cobbles. Along Seethinge Lane and immediately to his left was a sharp angled alleyway where he turned abruptly, dismounted almost at once, and then led his bay to the back entrance of a tenement building sharing its stables with two others almost identical. He and David stabled their horses and paid the keeper for three days in advance, hauled the stuffed saddle bags over their shoulders, entered the immediate bleak darkness of the open doorway beyond, and mounted the stairs.
There was a low planked wooden door to the tiny occupancy on the third floor where they stopped, and stooped to enter. Most others of the dwellings within were simply curtained, loose screened or open to each other, and so unintentionally communal. Without greater division than a threadbare drop of unbleached hessian long turned stiff and black, or the unwieldy swing of an old leather blind, the oppressive dark was the only form of privacy. Families led their lives in permanent struggling enmity, one encroaching neighbour to the next. The weary insults and squabbles wove mutter and complaint into a constant chant, soon sufficiently familiar to fade into unnoticeable inconsequence, as does the sound of water flowing continuously over pebbles, becoming finally unheard.
Few dwellings boasted the status of the privacy which a solid barrier brought, and as Nicholas closed the little door behind him and slammed home the heavy wooden bar on the inside, so the murmur of discontent was blocked. David Witton sighed, leaning back against the flaking plaster. He said, “I never thought to come back here, my lord, and never wished it. Yet now it’s the fourth time. I pray it will be the last.”
Nicholas smiled. “Not the right prayer, my friend. You wish us dead so soon? The prayer I’d suggest is for living long enough to return a hundred times, and on into the future.”
“If we live at all, my lord,” David objected, “I mean to give this place away to some other family in need.”
“Then let us clean it up, worthy of the gift to be,” Nicholas said. “There are cobwebs, ashes, old candlewax, mouse shit and dirt of every kind. Did we leave it last time in such squalor? But the small comforts I remember supplying, have disappeared beneath the grime.”
“The stools are stacked beneath the back window, my lord.” David whipped the oiled rag from the wall, revealing the window beneath, and the stools beside it. The draught immediately whistled through the loose parchment covering the unglazed opening. “Platters, cups, jugs and pans on the shelves over there. The three pallet beds are heaped next to the hearth. The cauldron is still hanging on its chain, and, as far as I can see in this wretched gloom, a small pile of faggots is ready for your tinder box, my lord.”
“Candles?”
“Some were left, as far as I remember.” David crossed to the shelves he had indicated and returned, holding two candles and a handful of burned out stubs. “If you see to the fire and the light, I’ll unpack our saddle bags.”
“Unpack the food first.”
“A pottage then, my lord? Shall I use the pork scraps and leeks you bought in Hendon Village?”
“No, you won’t,” said Nicholas. “But I will. I’ll do the cooking myself. As I remember, your cooking is bad enough to frighten a starving rat. Which is near enough to how I feel.”
“No rats here, my lord. In this tenement, they’d be eaten themselves before twitching a whisker.”
He smiled. “Light the fire then, David. We need comfort, not talk.”
David looked down sheepishly at the empty grate. “If you wish it my lord, but you know I have trouble ever getting a flame to spark, and all my attempts end in shame.”
Nicholas laughed, knelt and reached for the faggots, twigs and tinderbox. The first tiny flames sent the shadows flying. There was just one chamber, thin plank walls held together with iron nails, gaps stuffed with rags, and the space within little larger than a public privy. The old door and the doorway it closed were low, far lower than most men’s heads, cheaper to build and helpful for conserving heat. This was the corner of the tenement building where the third floor quarters huddled around the central and roofless staircase, its iron steps open to the sky above, its sides flanked by the desperation of London’s poor. Nicholas spread two pallet beds against the walls and dragged one of the stools closer to the little hearth. The chimney, rising through all floors above and below, had neither flue nor draw, so smoked with a dry persistency which blew back and coloured everything drab, but warmed the room, and also helped warm those above where families who had nothing to burn could still huddle close to the chimney breast where the smoking heat of flame swirled up from below.
David brought water from the butt outside the door, which caught rain from the roofless square above the stairs. “There’s a toad in the barrel,” he said, “and not much water. No doubt the neighbours have been helping themselves.”
“Having been months since anyone lived here, they’d be mad not to. Unless the toad drank it. But I doubt stewed toad would add much flavour to the pottage.” David was scrubbing the leeks as Nicholas prepared the pork rind. “So I intend eating what I can first, at least sufficient to keep myself alive until I die of the Pestilence. After dinner I shall dutifully examine my groin for signs of buboes, bed myself down on that flea ridden straw, and sleep for a week.”
“I suggest sleeping for just two more days, my lord.” David brought the wooden ladle from the top shelf. “In two days or less we will know the truth. In three days, if God is good, we can go home.”
“Home? I no longer know where that is. But we can go to Gloucestershire to collect my wife,” Nicholas sighed, “if she will still speak to me by then. Wives – duties – families – and all the paraphernalia of responsibility which I once thought to ignore forever, is now mine after all, and I must remember to remember it, if I live. In the meantime, once I know I won’t spread enough contagion to slaughter every lord from monarch to mayor, I intend visiting my father.”
“Your father?”
Nicholas chuckled. “I’ve avoided the man for most of my life. Times change, David.”
“You’ve taken a new interest in family loyalties, my lord?”
“I’ve taken a rather sudden interest in power, wealth and position.” Nicholas sat back on the settle, leaving the ladle resting in the cauldron of slowly simmering pottage. “And there’s no other way to get it than through the Westminster Court and that parcel of self-serving hypocrites, and my father in particular. Unless I decide to horrify the old sot and take up trade. I suppose I could always go to Flanders and trade in best Burgundy. If I brought plenty back, he’d forgive me.”