The Fire Court. Andrew Taylor

       CHAPTER ONE

      Rachel. There you are.

      She hesitated in the doorway that led from the Savoy Stairs and the river. She wore a long blue cloak over a grey dress he did not recognize. In her hand was a covered basket. She walked across the garden to the archway in the opposite corner. Her pattens clacked on the flagged path.

      That’s my Rachel, he thought. Always busy. But why did she not greet him?

      You are like the river, my love, he had told her once, always moving and always the same.

      They had been sitting by the Thames in Barnes Wood. She had let down her hair, which was brown but shot through with golden threads that glowed in the sunlight.

      She had looked like a whore, with her loose, glorious hair.

      He felt a pang of repulsion. Then he rallied. A woman’s hair encouraged lustful thoughts, he argued with himself, but it could not be sinful when the woman was your wife, joined to you in the sight of God, flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone.

      Now the garden was empty. There was no reason why he should not go after her. Indeed, it was his duty. Was not woman the weaker vessel?

      He used his stick as a prop to help him rise. He was still hale and hearty, thank God, but his limbs grew stiff if he did not move them for a while.

      He walked towards the archway. The path beyond made a turn to the right, rounding the corner of one of the old hospital buildings of the Savoy. He glimpsed Rachel ahead, passing through the gate that led up to the Strand. She paused to look at something – a piece of paper? – in her hand. Then she was gone.

      She must be going shopping. A harmless pleasure, but only as long as it did not encourage vanity, a woman’s besetting sin. Women were weak, women were sinful, which was why God had placed men to watch over them and to correct them when they erred.

      The porter in his lodge took no notice of him. A cobbled path led up to the south side of the Strand. The traffic roared and clattered along the roadway.

      He looked towards Charing Cross, thinking that the shops of the New Exchange would have drawn her like a moth to a blaze of candles. No sign of her. Could he have lost her already? He looked the other way, and there she was, walking towards the ruins of the City.

      He waved his stick. ‘Rachel,’ he cried. ‘Come here.’

      The racket and clatter of the Strand drowned his words.

      He followed her, the stiffness dropping from his limbs, his legs gathering strength and momentum with the exercise. On and on she walked, past Somerset House and Arundel House, past St Clement’s and under Temple Bar into Fleet Street and the Liberties of the City.

      He kept his eyes fixed on the cloak, and the rhythm of his walking lulled his mind until he almost forgot why he was here. By the Temple, Rachel hesitated, turning towards the roadway with its sluggish currents of vehicles and animals. She looked down at the paper in her hand. A painted coach lumbered to a halt on the opposite side of the road. At that moment, a brewer’s dray, coming from the other direction and laden with barrels, drew up beside it. Between them, they blocked the street.

      Rachel slipped among the traffic and threaded her way across the street.

      The brewer’s men were unloading the dray outside the Devil Tavern. A barrel broke free and crashed into the roadway. The impact shattered the staves on one side. Beer spurted into the street. Two beggars ran whooping towards the growing puddle. They crouched and lapped like dogs. The traffic came to a complete halt, jammed solid by its own weight pressing from either side.

      A sign, he thought, a sign from God. He has parted this river of traffic for me just as it had pleased Him to part the Red Sea before Moses and the Chosen People.

      He walked across the street, his eyes fixed on Rachel’s cloak. She turned to the left in the shadow of the square tower of St Dunstan-in-the-West.

      Why was she leading him such a merry dance? Suspicion writhed within him. Had the serpent tempted her? Had she succumbed to the devil’s wiles?

      An alley ran past the west side of the church to a line of iron railings with a gateway in the middle. Beside it, a porter’s lodge guarded the entrance to a cramped court. Men were milling around the doorway of a stone-faced building with high, pointed windows.

      Rachel was there too, looking once again at the paper in her hand. She passed through the doorway. He followed, but the crowd held him back.

      ‘By your leave, sirs, by your leave,’ he cried. ‘Pray, sirs, by your leave.’

      ‘Hush, moderate your voice,’ hissed a plump clerk dressed in black. ‘Stand back, the judges are coming through.’

      He stared stupidly at the clerk. ‘The judges?’

      ‘The Fire Court, of course. The judges are sitting this afternoon.’

      Three gentlemen came in procession, attended by their clerks and servants. They were conducted through the archway.

      He pressed after them. The doorway led to a passage. At the other end of it a second doorway gave on to a larger courtyard, irregular in shape. Beyond it was a garden, a green square among the soot-stained buildings.

      Was that Rachel over there by the garden?

      He called her name. His voice was thin and reedy, as it was in dreams. She did not hear him, though two men in black gowns stared curiously at him.

      How dared she ignore him? What was this place full of men? Why had she not told him she was coming here? Surely, please God, she did not intend to betray him?

      On the first floor of the building to the right of the garden, a tall man stood at one of the nearer windows, looking down on the court below. The panes of glass reduced him to little more than a shadow. Rachel turned into a doorway at the nearer end of a building to the right of the garden, next to a fire-damaged ruin.

      His breath heaved in his chest. He had the strangest feeling that the man had seen Rachel, and perhaps himself as well.

      The man had gone. This was Rachel’s lover. He had been watching for her, and now she was come.

      His own duty was plain. He crossed the court to the doorway. The door was ajar. On the wall to one side, sheltered by the overhang of the porch, was a painted board. White letters marched, or rather staggered, across a black background:

      XIV

      6 Mr Harrison

      5 Mr Moran

      4 Mr Gorvin

      3 Mr Gromwell

      2 Mr Drury

      1 Mr Bews

      Distracted, he frowned. Taken as a whole, the board was an offence to a man’s finer feelings and displeasing to God. The letters varied in size, and their spacing was irregular. In particular, the lettering of Mr Gromwell’s name had been quite barbarously executed. It was clearly a later addition, obliterating the original name that had been there. A trickle of paint trailed from the final ‘l’ of Gromwell. The sign-painter had tried ineffectually to brush it away, probably with his finger, and had succeeded only in leaving the corpse of a small insect attached to it.

      Perhaps, he thought, fumbling in his pocket, temporarily diverted from Rachel, a man might scrape away the