‘I was glad to help, sir,’ I said, realising that I meant it.
As I slung my cloak round my shoulders – for it was still cold outside – Arthur returned with another young man. He was well-dressed and personable, certainly from his demeanour he was a gentleman. This must be the courier who was trusted by the traitors in France and at home, but who was working for Sir Francis. He gave me a brief nod, which I returned, then went into Arthur’s cubbyhole to collect his packet of letters. It was the first time we had crossed paths and we were not introduced, but I had once overhead Arthur referring to him as ‘Gifford’. Still, it was better for me to know nothing about him. I wished Phelippes good-night and made my way down to back stairs on my way home.
‘Give way, there!’
A government official with a train of half a dozen armed men clattered south into London, and I shrank back into a doorway. I had been walking up Bishopsgate Street admiring the fine inns which line it, greater in number and grander than almost anywhere in London: the Black Bull, the Green Dragon, the Angel, the Four Swans, the Wrestlers, the Peahen, the Vine. They were all doing good business, though it was not yet mid-day. Round the corner in Camomile Street were the White Horse and the Saracen’s Head, and, further along, the Golden Axe.
It is not only the traffic coming into London from the north-east which brings these inns their business, but the two playhouses a mile or so beyond the gate, the Curtain and the Theatre. The tenter fields lie out here as well, stretching away north and west of the wall, forming the southern part of Finsbury Fields, with its windmills and archery butts. So the audiences coming thirsty out of the playhouses, or the tenters waiting for their cloth to dry, or the young men who have been practising at the butts, all drop into one of these inns, so temptingly displaying their painted signs or ancient bushes along the road back into London.
‘You must take this tincture,’ my father said, ‘to a woman brought to bed with child three days ago. Her husband trades in Houndsditch.’
‘What ails her?’ I asked.
‘She has bled more than she should, and the midwife has sent to me for help. She is young and healthy. With God’s aid this should slow the bleeding.’
At the same moment, it seemed, we were both stabbed with memory. I picked up the stoppered phial and turned away without a word.
Some of the poorer members of our community lived in Shoreditch, outside the City walls, beyond Bishopsgate, and this was where I was now headed. At the corner of Houndsditch and Bishopsgate-Street-Without stood the Dolphin Inn, the great gathering place for the farmers and carters from Norfolk and Suffolk bringing their animals and goods into London. The Dolphin boasted that it could lodge and feed two or three hundred people and their horses at a moment’s notice, and so long was its southern wall along Houndsditch that I could easily believe the claim. Against the outside of this wall were built clusters of small and rather shabby shops, some hardly more than market booths, others ramshackle houses, mostly not more than one room deep, with the shop at street level and lodging for the shopkeeper and his family above.
As I came through the City wall at Bishopsgate, I found myself surrounded by a flock of some hundreds of geese, herded by a man and two boys who must have walked them here from Norfolk. I backed away and pressed against the time-worn stones of the wall so they could pass, my fingers digging into the moss and lichen that spotted the rough surface with their spongy cushions. Despite their long journey, the birds had abated not one whit of their malice. Their vicious necks darted out at me like snakes, and their hissing was like snakes, too, the snakes that sometimes we would see on the fringes of the forest of Buçaco. The pigs from my grandfather’s farm always jumped aside from the snakes as I jumped from the geese. Their cold eyes watched me as they waddled painfully on their tarred feet through the gate and into London. They would be kept a while to be fattened up, having lost much of their flesh in the long walk, before being sold off at Smithfield.
The small Marrano community lay to the right beyond the gate, eastwards along Houndsditch. On the other side of the main road, to the left, just before Bedlam hospital where they keep the madmen, a narrow causeway clings to the southern brick wall of St Botolph’s churchyard, leading to an area which people had lately started to call Petty France, for it thronged with French Huguenots.
‘Some builder with an eye to his own enrichment,’ said my father, ‘and little care for his fellow creatures, has seized the chance to build ramshackle tenements five or six storeys high on that strip of ground, where those poor refugees huddle, whole families to a single room, and carry on their trades of weaving silk and fine fabrics.’
Because they were so crowded together, the refuse from the Huguenot houses and businesses was beginning to choke the flow of water in the city ditch. There had been complaints and threats from their English neighbours, who did not care to have this foreign community thrust in amongst them.
Where the geese had passed, the ground was spattered with green droppings, through which I picked my way to the crowded thoroughfare of Houndsditch. The street was wide and paved, but busy. First there were the secondhand clothing stalls, where dirty crones plucked and pawed at the mounds of garments even dirtier than they, which gave off a rank smell of illness and death. Another group of wizened dames, indistinguishable from the first, bargained with the stallholders to buy the contents of the baskets they carried. If a dead man were left unattended even for a short while, the word would spread amongst these women and they would have every stitch of clothing off him, sheets, bed-hangings and all, and it would be on sale here before the relatives returned to wash the corpse for burial. Their high-pitched, arguing voices, their cold eyes and darting heads reminded me of the geese, and I hurried to pass them by.
The din in the street made my head ache. There was the constant clanging from the metal-workers’ shops, the shouting of the stallholders, the hammering from half a dozen carpenters. The sweet perfume of new-sawn wood mingled with the dung of the street and the hellish scent of molten iron from the foundry. There were tailors here, too, sitting cross-legged at their open shop fronts to gain the benefit of sunlight, while they stitched on new cloth, fresh and pleasant after the rags at the far end of the street. Upholsterers, with their mouths full of brass tacks, tapped away with small, round-headed hammers, securing Barcheston tapestry or glossy brocade to chairs for the wealthy, to satisfy the new fashion for cushioned furniture. They themselves no doubt sat to dine on bare benches.
At last I found the house I wanted, at the sign of the Black Boy. It was a secretive shop, and I entered hesitantly. At first I could make out nothing in the gloom, then I saw two people talking quietly at the back of the narrow room. One I recognised as the husband of the woman I sought, for I had seen him at services in the synagogue. The other, a slight, fair-haired youth, had his back to me. I waited by the door until they had concluded their business, for Manoel de Barros was a pawnbroker, and such business was often delicate. When the young man turned at last toward the door, I realised that I knew him.
‘Kit!’ he cried, ‘Kit Alvarez!’ And he seized me by the hand as though he was glad to see me, and not one jot embarrassed at being caught in a pawnbroker’s shop.
For a moment I could not remember his name, though I remembered well enough that he was the boy actor who had fetched me to the Marshalsea, and so baited Poley’s trap.