The Fire Court. Andrew Taylor

the Bible was mine. I took it down to the parlour and laid it on the table, where the light fell on it from the window. I turned the pages, which were brittle and torn. Without my father there, the book had lost its significance. It was still a Bible, of course – the Holy Book, more precious than all the world. The Word of God. I did not dispute that. The volume was dense with wisdom, crammed with essence of holiness. But at the same time it was just a book, a small, shabby copy of something available in its tens of thousands across the country. It needed my father to lend it weight and value.

      Fixed with a rusty pin to the back cover was a fold of paper. Inside, I found a lock of light brown hair, the strands twisted together and held in place with a knotted red thread.

      Memory ambushed me, swift and vicious as a footpad. ‘Rachel … how graceful she is, James, even in her kitchen. Why, she is as graceful as a deer.’

      I touched the curl of hair, the fragment of my mother, a relic of someone who had been alive, whom my father had once loved and desired. I could not imagine him courting her. I could not imagine my parents being young together, younger than I was. But it seemed that her youthful self had remained so vividly alive in his memory that the image of her had lured him into Clifford’s Inn, had lured him among the lawyers.

      My father hated them. Lawyers were agents of Satan, servants of the Antichrist. They had helped to put him in prison. Yet desire for his dead wife had cast out all fear of them.

       CHAPTER SIX

      St Dunstan-in-the-West was partly clothed in scaffolding. The church projected into the street, forcing the roadway into a bottleneck before it passed under the Bar into the Strand. Shops and booths huddled as if for protection against the south aisle wall, blocking more of the pavement and constricting the foot traffic. Though the Fire had not destroyed the church, it had come close enough to cause minor damage and blacken the stonework, particularly at the east end.

      The entrance to Clifford’s Inn lay at the west end of the nave, squeezed between the square tower of the church and the wall of the neighbouring building. I walked along a flagged passage that took me past the churchyard to a gate. A small, dingy courtyard lay beyond, much wider than it was deep, surrounded by a series of buildings of different sizes and ages.

      The hall was directly opposite, filling the right-hand half of the northern range. I followed the path to the doorway at its left-hand end, where people were standing and talking in low voices. Some were lawyers and their clerks. Others were ordinary citizens, both men and women.

      They ignored me as I passed like a ghost among them, through the doorway and into the passage that ran through the range to another doorway. The passage was crowded too, though the people were much quieter than those in the courtyard. The door to the hall itself was on the right. It was closed. A porter with his staff stood in front of it.

      ‘Hush, sir,’ he said in a savage whisper. ‘The court’s in session.’

      I went out by the further door. I found myself in a much larger courtyard, which had a garden beyond. Over to the left, through another gateway, was Serjeant’s Inn, with Chancery Lane beyond, running north from the Strand. To the right was an irregular range of buildings, leading to a further court and then another gate, which gave on to an alley off Fetter Lane. The lane had marked the western boundary of the Fire last September, but the flames had left their mark on both sides of the road. One of the Inn’s buildings had been gutted – a block just inside the gate on the north side of the court. The roof was gone and the upper storeys had been partly destroyed.

      Clifford’s Inn as a whole had an air of dilapidation like an elderly relation in reduced circumstances left unattended in the chimney corner. There was one exception to the general neglect: a brick range facing the garden, on the far side of the blackened ruin.

      What had my father said?

      ‘I followed her by a garden to a doorway in a building of brick.’

      It was strange indeed. Here was another grain of truth among my father’s ramblings on his last evening. First a place full of lawyers, and now a building of brick beside a garden.

      The building had four doors at regular intervals along its length, with a pair of windows on either side overlooking the garden. I sauntered across the courtyard towards it in an elaborately casual manner. Each doorway led to a staircase, on either side of which were sets of chambers. The names of the occupants had been painted on a board beside each doorway.

      I paused to examine the nearest one. There was something amiss with the lettering. I had spent my early life in the printing house, and I noticed such things. My father had made sure of that.

      XIV

      6 Mr Harrison

      5 Mr Moran

      4 Mr Gorvin

      3 Mr Gromwell

      2 Mr Drury

      1 Mr Bews

      ‘The letters of a name were most ill-painted, James, and ill-formed as well.’

      My skin prickled at the back of my neck. It was extraordinary. The board was just as he had described it. One name had obviously been added more recently than the others, and by a painter with little skill, and with no inclination to make the best of what skill he had. Gromwell.

      ‘There was a great drip attached to it, and a poor creature had drowned therein.’

      It was as if my father’s ghost were beside me, murmuring the words into my ear. Yes, there was the ant, trapped below the last ‘l’ of ‘Gromwell’, decaying within its rigid shroud of white paint.

      Horror gripped me. If my father had been right about all this, then what about the woman he had seen displaying herself like a wanton in a chamber above? The woman with her coach and horses. The woman whose eyes he had closed in the chamber with the ant.

      Gromwell’s chamber?

      I opened the door and climbed the stairs. I did not hurry, partly because I was scared of what I would find. On the first landing, two doors faced each other, numbers 3 and 4. I waited a moment, listening.

      ‘I thought to find her in the chamber with the ant … up the stairs …’

      I knocked on number 3. I heard movement in the room beyond. A tall, florid-faced man opened the door. He wore a morning gown of dark blue plush and a velvet cap. There was a book in his hand, with a finger marking his place. He frowned at me, raised his eyebrows and waited.

      ‘Mr Gromwell?’ I said.

      It must have sounded like ‘Cromwell’ to the man’s ears. Or perhaps he was merely oversensitive, which was understandable as Oliver Cromwell’s head was displayed as a dreadful warning to traitors on a twenty-foot-high spike over Westminster Hall.

      ‘It’s Gromwell,’ he said, drawing out the syllables. ‘G-r-r-romwell with a G. I have no connection with a certain Huntingdonshire family named Cromwell. The G-r-r-romwells have been long established in Gloucestershire. G-r-r-romwell, sir, as in the plant.’

      ‘Whose seeds are used to treat the stone, sir?’ I said, remembering a herbal my father had printed.

      The eyebrows rose again. ‘Indeed. A thing of beauty, too. As Pliny says, it is as if the jeweller’s art has arranged the gromwell’s gleaming white pearls so symmetrically among the leaves. Sir Thomas Browne calls it lithospermon in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica.’

      I bowed in the face of so much learning. Behind Mr Gromwell was a table piled high with books.

      ‘Forgive me for disturbing your studies.’ I shifted my stance, so I could see further to the left. I couldn’t see a carpet. All I could make out was an expanse of bare boards and a grubby rush mat. ‘My name is Marwood. I wonder if my late father called on you last week.’

      Gromwell frowned, and I guessed he