The Fire Court. Andrew Taylor

appeared in the kitchen doorway. He jerked his head towards the scullery passage and the back door. ‘Barty’s in the yard.’

      I stared at him.

      ‘He won’t get any scraps out of me at this hour,’ Margaret said tartly. ‘Tell him to come back after dinner.’

      ‘Hold your tongue, woman.’ Sam looked at me. ‘Barty, master. The crossing-sweeper who saw your father. You told me to find him for you. Do you remember? In the Devil?’

      Suddenly I was sober, or I felt I was. I stood up, knocking over the bench. ‘Bring him in.’

      ‘Best that you go out to him, master.’ Margaret wrinkled her nose. ‘If you’d be so kind. He stinks.’

      ‘You’ll give him something to eat,’ I said. ‘Take it out to him.’

      ‘Something you should know, sir,’ Sam said. ‘Barty says he saw your father again.’

      ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

      Sam’s voice was gentle. ‘On Friday morning. As well as on Thursday.’

      There was a moment of silence. My mouth was open. Margaret stood with a pan in her hand, leaning forward to put it on the fire, as still as a statue.

      I swallowed. I said slowly, ‘Last Friday, you mean? The day my father died?’

      Sam nodded.

      ‘Did he see what happened?’

      ‘He’ll only speak to you. I’m no use to him. You’re the one with the purse.’

      Margaret whimpered softly. She set the pan on the fire.

      ‘Why didn’t he tell us sooner?’

      ‘He was taken up for debt that very afternoon. It’s only yesterday evening his mother raised the money to get him out of prison.’

      Sam hopped down the passage and into the yard. I followed. Over his shoulder, I saw the crossing-sweeper sitting on the side of the trough that caught the rainwater. He was huddled in a filthy cloak with his hat drawn low over his ears. He was a crooked man with a sallow countenance.

      When he saw us, he sprang up and executed a clumsy bow. Then he shrank back into his cloak as if he wanted to make himself as small as possible.

      ‘Sam says you saw my father on the day he died,’ I said. ‘As well as the day before, when you brought him back here.’

      Barty nodded so violently that his hat fell off, exposing a bald patch covered in scabs, below which a fringe of greasy hair straggled towards his shoulders. He licked his lips. ‘You won’t make me go before a justice, master? Please, sir.’

      ‘Not if you tell me the truth.’

      ‘I done nothing wrong.’ He looked from me to Sam with the eyes of a dog that fears a beating.

      ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You won’t be the poorer for it.’

      ‘It was like Thursday, master. He came out of Clifford’s Inn again, down to Fleet Street. He was in a terrible hurry, and he knocked against a bookstall there, and the bookseller swore at him …’

      Sam nudged him with his elbow. ‘Tell his honour the rest.’

      Barty screwed up his face. ‘He was looking back over his shoulder. As if someone was chasing him.’

      ‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Who?’

      ‘Couldn’t see, sir. There was a wagon coming down from St Paul’s, and a coach coming the other way, under the Bar. But I thought I’d go over and give the old fellow a helping hand, like I done the other day.’

      ‘Hoping it would be worth your while,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t have to tell us all that. Go on.’

      ‘Well …’ Barty looked at me, and then away. ‘That’s when it happened. The old man tripped – fell into the road – in front of the wagon. But I heard …’

      I seized his collar and dragged him towards me. Part of me wanted to shake the life out of him. ‘What did you hear?’

      ‘His screams, master. His screams.’

      I let the wretch go. He fell back against the trough. I was trembling.

      ‘And next?’ I said.

      ‘All the traffic stopped. I went over the road to see if …’

      ‘If there were pickings to be had?’

      He tried to give me an ingratiating smile. ‘He was alive still, sir. Just. There was a crowd around him. But he looked up and he saw me there among them. I swear he saw me, master, I swear he did. He knew me. I know he did. He said … Rook. Where’s the rook?’

      ‘Rook,’ I said. ‘Rook? What rook?’

      Barty stared up at me. ‘I don’t know what he meant, master. But I know he was scared of something.’

      ‘What else?’ I demanded.

      ‘That’s all he said, master. Then he was gone.’

      Later that morning there was a knocking at the door. Sam announced that the tailor had come to wait on me.

      I had quite forgotten the appointment, perhaps because I did not want to remember it. Death is a dreary business, time-consuming and expensive, and so is its aftermath. But it would not be right in the eyes of the world if I went abroad without visible signs of my bereavement.

      Some of these signs were cheap enough to arrange – before the funeral, I had ordered Margaret to dull the metal of my buckles, attach black silk weepers to my hatband, and blacken my best brown shoes – including the soles, on Margaret’s advice, for they would be visible when I knelt to pray.

      I had borrowed a suit of mourning for the funeral but I needed to have my own. On Saturday, I had visited the tailor’s shop to be measured, and to choose the material and discuss the pattern. Now the man had come to fit the suit and to try to persuade me to buy a black silk sash to set off the new clothes.

      By the time all this was done, my head was clearer, and my stomach had returned to something approaching normality, though the very thought of sack made me feel queasy.

      Death has this consequence: it jerks a man from the rut of routine: it throws him back on his own company at a time when he wants it least. All this time, as the tailor prattled away and my mind became my own again, I could not concentrate on anything but the one word: ‘rook’. There was nothing to distract me from it.

      But what could I do? Find the nearest justice and lay the information before him? What was there to say? That a foolish old man had strayed into Clifford’s Inn, and afterwards he had fallen under the wheels of a wagon in Fleet Street. A crossing-sweeper had told me that his last words had been to ask where the rook was.

      What crime had been committed? Whom could I lay information against? But I had to do something, for my father’s sake.

      No. That was a lie. I had to do something for my own sake as much as his. In the hope of easing the grief, the guilt.

      When the tailor was gone, I took the tray of my father’s possessions upstairs to his chamber. The bed had already been stripped to its mattress and the curtains removed. The floor had been scrubbed and the room aired; Margaret was a vigorous housekeeper.

      My father’s clothes, such as they were, lay folded in the press. His smell clung to them, faint and unsettling. An old man’s smell, musty and familiar. He had left little else behind him apart from his Bible and the contents of his pockets.

      He had had the Bible as long as I could remember. It was a Geneva Bible, the old translation favoured by those of a Puritan persuasion. When he had been taken up for treason, he had had the book in prison with him and he read it over and over. When I was a child, he had ordered me never to touch it in case I sullied the sacred volume with the sinful