‘I call it one,’ I answered her. ‘Some knave has painted a red cross on my door!’ Looking up and down the street again, I checked. Sure enough mine was the only door painted. ‘Was it you?’
Jane looked at the door and dabbed at the paint with her finger. ‘Fie to you! What a foolish question.’ She knelt down. ‘There are words too.’
Crouching next to her I had a closer look. ‘To the pest-house,’ I read. Very strange. It was what they used to write on the doors of those infected during the days of the plagues. ‘You haven’t got the plague have you?’
‘No, of course I haven’t got the plague.’
‘Well it must be the wrong door, then. What about next door? Do they have the plague?’
‘There hasn’t been a plague in London for forty years, and there isn’t a plague tonight. If there were, then I would know it, even if you didn’t.’ She seized me by the lapel of my poor fine jacket and manhandled me over the threshold. My hand brushed against her breast. It was warm and soft.
‘Someone’s idea of a jest, then.’
‘All the children are in bed well before one o’clock at night and this paint is still wet. Strange foolery for a grown man to play.’ She bundled me into the kitchen and sat me down at the table upon which stood a plate of cold meats and a cup of hypocras.
My stomach now declared itself to be very hungry. I smiled blearily.
‘I have enquired of my colleagues about the town. They tell me that they allow themselves to be merry with their servants and their servants do not object. They may run their hands where their hands do please.’ I had been thinking on it a while.
‘These colleagues of yours are gentlemen, I suppose?’ Jane snorted before turning on her heel and disappearing, only to reappear a minute later with a bucket and scrubbing brush, face taut and pale.
‘Is your rhubarb up, old woman?’ I felt myself stiffening.
‘My rhubarb?’ Jane exclaimed. ‘You run your hands where you fancy, Lytle. You may place them where you please, but when you wake in the morning you will find them nailed to the bedpost.’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘That sounds like a reasonable proposition.’ She glared furiously. Time to put her in her place. ‘God created Adam. Then later he created Eve, that man might be satisfied.’
‘God created animals before he created Adam. Was that so that Adam might satisfy the animals?’ I felt her slap me hard somewhere proximate to the top of my head. My eyelids fell down over my eyes and the muscle that could have lifted them fell asleep.
My eyes gave up and I let my head fall back. ‘You are right. I will not run my hands where I please.’
‘God save us both.’ Picking up the bucket and brush, she headed back out towards the street.
I felt guilty. ‘You don’t need to do that now, do it tomorrow instead,’ I called after her as she marched out.
‘Oh aye, what wit!’ She stopped, turned, and stamped back into the kitchen. ‘Have the whole of London town saying that we have the plague in our house. Word would be all over the country by lunchtime.’
‘Oh aye. Best do it now then,’ I muttered. The door opened and that was that.
Chapter Four
In stagnant waters.
Dowling danced like a dervish, all fingers and fairy steps, eyes blinking like a big green frog. Then he started stomping his left leg on the floor like a wormy horse. Jane lingered, fascinated, until she noticed what looked like a piece of gizzard stuck to his shirt, whereupon she left us to it. Mercifully, for else I think Dowling would have eaten his arm.
‘We have a man locked up at Newgate,’ he declared. ‘They say he is the man that killed Anne Giles. A multitude of witnesses saw him running out of the church the night that she was killed with blood dripping from his hands.’
‘Praise the Lord!’ I exclaimed. The answer to all my prayers. ‘So they will hang him, I suppose?’ Would Shrewsbury be at Westminster today, or ought I visit his house to deliver the good news?
Dowling shook his head. ‘He hasn’t confessed it. The mob swears in God’s name it’s him, but we cannot take the word of the mob.’ The mob usually meant apprentices, groups of inarticulate ne’er-do-wells that spoke with one voice and followed each other like newborn chickens. The mob would swear that the King was a horse if it meant a poke full of plums. Staring down at my feet, brown eyes unfocussed, Dowling’s mind was clearly wandering. ‘What perplexes me is that they brought him to my shop. Their usual inclination would be to beat him with sticks and hang him themselves at Cheapside.’
‘They reckon he’ll be hung anyway.’ I pulled on my stockings and put on my shoes. ‘Let’s go and get that confession.’
Newgate gaol was another place I had not anticipated becoming acquainted with. It consisted of two square straight towers, sixty feet tall, on either side of the gateway in and out of the City. Three wenches without clothes stood over the gate draped with flimsy pieces of fabric, very yardy. All I could see that day, though, was the portcullis, with its sharp pointy teeth and eleven black windows, each one covered with a tight lattice of bars. I followed Dowling up five flat steps at the base of the left-hand tower into a gloomy little room. Two scabby-looking wastrels sat in the anteroom drinking and trying to play cards. They looked up as we entered, all lolly headed and winey. Their shoes were a disgrace; battered and uncared for, leather peeling off in torn patches. One of them nodded at Dowling as we entered, our permission to pass deeper into the prison, it seemed. We left behind a thick fug of cheap wine and walked into a mist of old sweat and stinking shit.
‘This floor isn’t too bad.’ Dowling led us across large square flagstones. Not bad? The air was so thick you could feel it cling to the inside of your nostrils, greasy brown and sticky. It clogged your lungs and made your eyes water. Worse than anything I had ever experienced, though it was true that — unlike him — I did not spend my days in a merry slaughterhouse soaking in the spirit of dismembered bodies.
I peered through a barred window into the room beyond. It was large and very dark with just one small window set at the top of the far wall. Once my eyes got used to the gloom I saw movement, lots of movement, like a sea of maggots in an open wound. The room was full of men, forty or fifty of them, lying on pallets on the floor, all lined up next to each other. A bucket stood by each pallet, used to piss in and shit in, no doubt. Every man was chained. I had seen chickens boxed up like this, but never men. Chickens pecked each other’s eyes out and started to eat each other. What would men do? It was a foul disgrace. Dowling drew up beside me.
‘They pay for fire, candles, clothes and food. They can be rid of those chains if they want, but again they must pay for the privilege. Given that most of them are in here for stealing or for not paying their debts …’
Torture of the mind. ‘Is our man in there?’
‘Our man is downstairs in the stone hold, God have mercy on his soul.’
Worse. The stone hold was notorious. Tiny underground cells with no windows where they locked men up alone in the dark. My head was so giddy with the stench of shit that I could hardly stand. I tried to breathe shallow. Dowling took a deep breath and pulled a face like he was tasting fine wine. ‘This way.’
I followed him to the end of the corridor towards a small door. He pulled it open and we peered into the darkness below. A cesspit.