Bloods revolution, p.12
Blood's Revolution, page 12
‘That name, Maguire – it’s not one that you bandy about in the Liberty, brother,’ said Thomas quietly. ‘They are bad people, Patrick Maguire and his brothers. I mean, really evil people. They hurt folk. They like hurting folk. If the Matthews boy owed them money and couldn’t pay it, he’s better off facing transportation. Even the Tyburn jig. Least it’d be over quick. You should stay away from them, little brother.’
‘Matthews said they ruled like kings here.’
‘And so they are. Henry Killigrew is Master of the Savoy and chaplain to the King, he’s another papist, or so they say.’ Thomas gave a shiver of disgust. ‘But while Killigrew rules the old Palace and its precincts, these streets round here are ruled by Patrick Maguire and his brothers. They have a finger in everything that happens here. The rank-riders, the filching-morts and whores, the purse-nippers, even the crimpers pay them. Patrick Maguire beat a man half to death a few days ago, then crucified him on his own front door. And not because he wouldn’t pay, because he quibbled over how much. You see, brother, they are like kings here. And they always get their due. It’s like a tax – a tax on thievery. And everyone pays. Everyone.’
‘I don’t care about the Maguires, Thomas, truly I don’t. I just want to check that Matthews told me the truth. He said he stole the powder to sell to the rank-riders.’
‘Could be. You can buy ’most anything in the Grapes you ask the right cove.’
‘Where did you get powder and ball for your . . . professional activities?’
‘That would be telling.’
‘That’s why I’m asking, Tom. I want you to tell me. That’s why I’m paying.’
‘All right, you can buy powder, ball, pistols, blades here – anything you like if ye have the chink to pay for it. Your boy Matthews could have been telling you true. But if that was his game, stealing powder, the Maguires would surely come to know of it, and they would soon demand their rightful slice of the pie.’
The walked on in silence for a few paces. A patch of river opened up before them, visible through the tangle of a collapsed warehouse, a drift of brown sludge.
‘What else can you tell me about Matthews?’
‘Nothing. He wasn’t part of a crew, I mean, he had no reputation as a thief.’
‘Nothing else?’
Holcroft could faintly hear the sound of chanting, many voices, high, childlike.
‘He has a mother still living, I think. I saw him once in the Grapes with an older sort fussing over him, Mary or Maria, something like that, I think it was; huge great pair of udders on her. Which no doubt came in handy in her line of work.’
‘She was a whore?’
‘No, though she’d have made a fortune. There’s some rich gents who would pay handsomely to play with those great bouncers of hers. No, she was a wet nurse.’
They found themselves standing beside a long low building, reasonably new and built of timber planks. There were three large, chest-high plate glass windows in the front of the building. The sound of chanting was much louder. Holcroft went over to the building and peered through the shining glass. He found he was looking into a large room where about seventy children on wooden benches were reciting the declensions of irregular Latin verbs. A small, lean man in a shapeless black cassock was standing by a blackboard at the end of the room with a long wooden pointer in his hand, tapping it against the dark slate in time to the children’s voices.
Holcroft turned back to his brother. ‘Thank you, Thomas. You’ve been helpful.’
He fished in his coat pocket and from a handful of small coins he selected a silver half crown which he held out to Thomas.
Thomas kept his hands by his sides, he hung his head, looking sly and shifty. ‘Couldn’t make it a yellow-boy, could you brother? Times is very hard.’
Holcroft picked out a heavy golden sovereign and handed it over.
‘Obliged,’ Tom muttered and began to move away.
‘Fare thee well, brother,’ said Holcroft, stroking his horse’s nose.
‘Stay clear of those Maguires, mind,’ said Thomas over his shoulder. He began to walk rapidly away up the street, back the way they had just come.
*
Father Michael Palmer was a little surprised to be confronted in his own classroom by the tall, healthy, military-looking man in a fine blue coat with a sword at his side and a big odd-looking pistol shoved in his waist sash. He hid it well, though. He had seen some extraordinary sights in the five months he had been living in the Liberty and he took this strange apparition in his stride. He had dismissed the pupils to their midday meal and was cleaning the chalk from the board with a cloth when the man knocked on the door and walked in without awaiting a summons.
‘Father Palmer?’ he said.
The priest admitted that it was he, and gave him a perfunctory blessing.
‘My name is Blood, Father, and I’m here on the King’s business,’ said the big man. ‘I want to ask you about one of your pupils.’
‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what have the young scamps been up to now?’
‘I mean one of your former pupils: John Matthews.’
Father Palmer looked blank. Holcroft said: ‘Small fellow, dark hair, fifteen years old or so, now works at the Tower of London as a clerk. Matthews.’
The priest looked none the wiser. ‘And he was a pupil of mine? Forgive me, sir, but I have no recollection.’
‘You don’t remember him at all then?’
‘No, but if he was one of mine, I’m sure he is an honest, upright sort of fellow. A clerk, you say? Does he need a character reference? Is he in some sort of trouble?’
‘You might say that. He was caught red-handed in an act of theft at the Tower.’
‘Merciful Father – that is bad. I shall pray for him.’
‘You really don’t recall him at all? A clever boy, slight in the body. One of your flock – by which I mean a Roman Catholic.’
A guarded expression came over the priest’s face. ‘Mister Blood, I have a licence from the Duchy of Lancaster to minister to my parishioners here in the Liberty; it is signed by the King himself along with Dr Henry Killigrew, Master of the Savoy. I can show it to you, if you require it. We have a chapel, yes, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some of the people follow the True Faith, and worship without fear of arrest. Some do not. But your Protestant laws do not apply to us.’
‘I have not come here to persecute you, Father. I have no interest in your soul. I merely wish to know about John Matthews, a former student of this school.’
‘I am afraid I cannot help you. I have four hundred pupils here, half Protestant, half Catholic. And as we only began to teach classes in March this year – with the kind permission of His Majesty – your boy cannot have studied here for very long.’
‘Do you mind, Father, if I take a quick look around your school. I have to report to my master that I have made a thorough investigation.’
‘Of course, of course. We have nothing to hide. I will have one of the teachers show you around. And now, if I cannot be of any further service to you . . .’
A young man in a similar baggy black cassock, one Father Williams, was summoned and, after leading Holcroft’s horse into a stable block, he took the Ordnance lieutenant on a long and seemingly meandering tour of the many school buildings. It was a bigger place than Holcroft had first imagined, with five separate classrooms of a similar size to the one he had already seen. There were even some empty rooms, quiet, neglected and dusty, that they passed through on the way to others that were in use. At the heart of the school, there was a large central courtyard, next to the kitchen, where hundreds of boys aged between ten and fifteen were being served out a grey slop from steaming cauldrons. The noise was horrendous. Father Williams guided him through the throng, shouting out pieces of pertinent information and pointing to the various different buildings around the open space.
Holcroft found himself feeling uncomfortable: he hated crowds at the best of times, and this vast jostling pack of grubby slum children, shrieking and shoving and slurping their soup and bread, made him feel slightly ill. It reminded him too much of his own Shoreditch childhood. He pulled himself together when he caught a glimpse, through the shutters of a window they passed, of the unmistakable square wooden frame of a printing press and half a dozen inky folk hard at their work.
I wonder if they have a licence for that, too, he thought. The press was probably illegal but hardly the stuff of a grand conspiracy – there were dozens of unlicensed presses all over London putting out pamphlets that ranged from the mildly seditious to the stark raving mad. You could find an illicit news sheet on the table of any coffee house in the city. And he cared not a jot if the priests here made up and distributed unlicensed material promoting their own faith. What he’d said to Father Palmer was true: he wasn’t there to persecute them. Their souls were their own business.
There was a whipping post where one unfortunate lad was receiving chastisement from another priest with a birch rod. They passed a small brick chapel, and Holcroft caught a sickly, unfamiliar whiff of incense, and Father Williams waved vaguely at a weed-slimed wharf that led out to the brown river, where stacks of paper were being delivered from a barge: fodder for the press, Holcroft assumed.
This was a noisy, crude, dirty place and full of exuberant life. But, despite the obvious Catholic stamp, Holcroft got no sense that this might be a place for plots and treason. Father Palmer and his fellow priests were trying to do God’s work, to educate the poor, and without feeling the need for any secrecy or shame.
Holcroft thanked Father Williams, collected his horse, mounted and pointed its nose toward home. As far as he was concerned, John Matthews, clerk of the Tower, had become a thief only because he saw the opportunity to steal a keg of powder and was in desperate need of the money. Now, he had to persuade the Master-General of the Ordnance to show the poor fellow the doubtful mercy of transportation.
Chapter Twelve
21 July 1685: Tower of London
Holcroft was awoken the next morning by the bells St Peter ad Vincular in the northwest corner of the Inner Ward calling the Protestant faithful to matins. He quickly washed, dressed and, ignoring the call to prayer, took his breakfast alone in the almost deserted officers’ mess.
As he ate, he kept a sharp lookout for Captain Glanville. He had no desire to encounter that officer, fearing that anything the fat little man might say to him would cause him to lose his temper. Even the thought of Glanville’s well-fed smirk made his blood seethe. After his meal, he went to the little Ordnance office where he kept the ledgers and papers, and began looking at the reports on the proofing of the new twenty-four-pounders, including the one which had exploded and killed the officer of engineers.
He was deep in his reading when the door banged open and Enoch Jackson stood on the threshold. Unusually for the master gunner, he was pale and shaking. Even his bald, sun-tanned pate seemed to be unnaturally blanched.
‘You’d better come, Mister Blood. Better come now. I’ve sent a boy for the doctor but there’s quite a to-do in the White Tower. The gaolers think the plague has struck again. Best if you come now, sir, before somebody does something silly.’
A few minutes later Holcroft stood in the doorway of the cell in the White Tower. For once, the gaoler Widdicombe, who had conducted him from the entrance up to the chamber, had not reminded him that it had once held his father. Holcroft looked through the doorway, with Widdicombe cowing behind his bulk, and Jackson hanging back in the corridor. The chamber was in disarray, the stool and chair knocked over, papers from the small desk in drifts on the floor. There were sticky, foul-smelling pools of liquid here and there. Vomit streaked with blood. The bedsheets and blankets were tangled around the body of Matthews, which lay half on and half off the bed. The remains of a meal – a pie of some kind, pork or ham, a bowl of radishes, a chunk of cheese, a half-drunk pewter mug of ale. A curl of orange peel.
Holcroft went over to the corpse – there was clearly no life here – but he felt the neck for a pulse anyway. Matthews’s skin was a blueish-grey colour and cold and it was clear from the contorted muscles of his young face that he had died in agony.
‘Is it the plague returned?’ asked Widdicombe, his voice trembling. Holcroft pulled open Matthews’s shirt and peered at his armpits. No swellings, no buboes.
‘No, not the plague, thank God,’ he said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said a high voice, and the scrawny form of Arnold Whicker, a gentleman who was licensed to practice medicine in the city by the Bishop of London himself, wormed through the thick press of bodies in the doorway.
The little doctor, an elderly grey-haired man in a stained black coat, knelt beside the body and peered at it. He lifted one of the corpse’s eyelids, and sniffed at the mouth. Then, like Holcroft, he pulled open the shirt and examined the armpits.
‘He clearly died of a convulsion, sir, but—’ Holcroft began, but before he could say any more the doctor leapt to his feet and held up a hand to silence him.
‘It is not the plague,’ the little man pronounced, and there was an audible collective exhalation from the crowd of gaolers, soldiers and servants at the door. ‘Looks very much like apoplexy, to me,’ the doctor said briskly. ‘The distortion of the body, the facial expression, skin tone post mortem. Yes, apoplexy.’
‘Do you think it is possible, sir,’ said Holcroft, ‘that this might be—’
‘I have made my diagnosis, young man,’ said Doctor Whicker. ‘And I am almost never wrong in these matters. I shall direct my bill to Lord Dartmouth, and now if you will excuse me, sir, I have a pressing engagement in Cheapside.’
The doctor brushed past Holcroft and walked out of the door.
The dwarfish Widdicombe decided it was time to exert his authority.
‘Right then, Hodges, Simpson, get in there and let’s get this place cleared up. Take his body up to St Peter’s. We’ll let the padre say a few words and get him into the ground. Just like Matthews to give us all a scare like that. No consideration.’
Holcroft stepped aside as the two assistant gaolers bustled into the cell. He put a hand on Widdicombe’s arm: ‘Tell me, Jeremiah, the food. Who brought it for him?’
‘The pot boy brings it from the Red Lion on Tower Hill, same as for all the others. Those who can pay, at least. Fine grub there, if you don’t mind the prices.’
‘Are any of the other prisoners sick?’
‘No, fit as fiddles, sir. All of them. Save for old Sir Francis – but he’s got the consumption. Cough, cough, coughing away. The poor old soul. He won’t see the month out, and such a fine and generous old gentleman, too. It’s a damned shame.’
*
Half an hour later, Holcroft was once again standing before Lord Dartmouth’s desk in his cosy wood-panelled study. He reported the death of John Matthews. And also added that his inquiries had discovered nothing that might suggest that the boy had been involved in a plot of any kind or that he had been anything other than a thief.
‘Well, the fellow is dead now. So I believe we can close the book on him. Saves us hanging him. Give me a brief written report, if you will, by this evening and then I want you to pack your bags and be ready to move out in the morning.’
‘Sir?’
‘I know that you have apologised to Captain Glanville – and that it cost you a great deal to do so. But I’m posting you away from London for a while to let things cool down between the two of you. I’m sending you to Sheerness. I want you to take command of the garrison there and to strengthen the fortifications. The Dutch burnt the fort to the ground in ’67, as I’m sure you remember, and coastal defences are one of the few things that the King is now willing to spend money on. So off to Sheerness you go – to make the Thames Estuary impregnable to our sea-borne enemies; I’ll have the detailed orders on your desk by this afternoon.’
‘Sir, I should prefer to remain here. I am concerned about the manner of poor Matthews’s death. It looked to me as if it could just possibly have been poison.’
‘You think he was poisoned?’
‘I don’t know, sir . . .’
‘Did Whicker think he was poisoned?’
‘No, sir, he said it was apoplexy.’
‘Do you think you know better than the good doctor? He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, you know.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Who would want to poison Matthews?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look, Holcroft, I like you, I think you know that. And I understand that you don’t want to go off to the wilds of Kent. It’s a miserable, dreary place and the wind whips off the North Sea something cruel. But you can come back to London from time to time to see your friends, attend parties and so on. Sheerness is not very far away. It’s just that I don’t want you living here in the Tower for a year at least. I am fairly certain that if I allowed you to stay, you would kill Captain Glanville or he would kill you within a matter of days or weeks. So you are going to Sheerness and I would be obliged if you did not give me any more nonsense about mythical poisons.’
‘I’m not refusing to go, sir. I would just like a few days to investigate—’
‘The orders will be on your desk this afternoon. And you will leave tomorrow morning. Is that understood, lieutenant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
*
As Holcroft walked across the Inner Ward, heading for his rooms to begin packing, he realised, to his surprise, that more than anything, he was feeling a sense of relief.
Matthews may or may not have been poisoned. Probably not, it was likely just apoplexy – the doctor was, as Lord Dartmouth had pointed out, one of the most respected medical men in London. And who could have poisoned him? Narrey? Why? In God’s name, why would the Frenchman, on an important mission for his King, want to murder an innocuous thief? A thief who was to be hanged in a week or so. It made no sense. It came to him that he had been conjuring absurd and terrifying fantasies inside his own head. The news from Aphra that Narrey was in London had shaken him more than he liked to admit. It had made him suspicious of everyday, ordinary things. The French bodyguard in Hyde Park with the scarlet cap. The poor boy Matthews, facing a horrible fate, and dying of a sudden fit – as dozens did every day. Holcroft realised that he was beginning to start at shadows.
