LITMIR.BIZ

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Mistress Noxon came into the room before the task was half done.

      ‘You’re to go to St Paul’s,’ she said. ‘For Master Hakesby. It’s urgent.’

      Cat stared at her. Since her arrival here she had not gone further than the Strand.

      ‘There’s no one else to send.’ Mistress Noxon ran her finger along the curved mouldings of the door panels, automatically checking for dust. ‘You know the way?’

      Cat nodded. She had grown up in Bow Lane, east of St Paul’s, and the streets from Charing Cross to the Tower had been part of her childhood.

      ‘John’s in Westminster or I’d send him. Margery gets lost if she pokes her head out of the door. So that leaves you.’ There was no need to add that the kitchen boy couldn’t be sent because he was a halfwit, and Mistress Noxon wouldn’t go herself because it would be beneath her dignity. ‘Besides, it’s time you went further abroad. You need air. You’re as pale as a death’s head.’

      ‘What am I to do?’

      ‘Master Hakesby wants a portfolio. It’s the small green one on the table in his chamber.’

      ‘I know.’ Cat knew everything there was to know about Master Hakesby’s chamber.

      ‘You’ll find him in Convocation House Yard. Do you know where that is?’

      ‘Yes, mistress.’

      ‘Show this paper to the men on the gate, and they will let you in. Give the portfolio into his own hands, mind – he was most particular about that – and take care to keep it clean. Be off with you. And keep it dry. Hold it under your cloak.’

      It was still raining, though less heavily than before. Wrapped in the grey cloak she had stolen from the man at St Paul’s, Cat walked through the ruins of London. After Temple Bar and the first few houses of Fleet Street, there was nothing to be seen but devastation.

      Even now, six weeks afterwards, London was a desert from the Temple to the Tower. You could see from one end of the City to the other. All that was left of the greatest city in the country, apart from mounds of ash and rubble, were gutted churches and blackened spires, fragments of stone and thickets of unstable chimneystacks. In places the heat had been so intense that stones had calcined and become an unnatural white in colour.

      The change in the weather had affected everything, and not on the whole for the better. The rain had turned the pale ashes into a dark grey sludge that clung to your shoes and pattens and stained your clothes. It was growing colder, too. Everyone said it was going to be a bad winter.

      Cat crossed the Fleet Ditch, which was choked with sooty debris. Tendrils of smoke rose up from the labyrinth of ruins on either side of Ludgate Hill, for rubbish still smouldered, and fires burned slowly in deep, almost airless cellars.

      At Ludgate, the mounting block was still there, marked by the flames, but one of the few features recognizable from before the Fire. She supposed she should feel guilty about the thin young man for repaying his attempt to help her by biting his hand and stealing his cloak; but a sense of guilt was one of the luxuries she could no longer afford.

      In a moment Cat reached the spot where she had stood on the night of St Paul’s destruction. Had her father been inside? Had he been among the nameless dead? She wanted to know, one way or the other. Her lack of knowledge unsettled her. Even after he had fled abroad at the Restoration, she had known he was living somewhere beyond the Channel. Occasionally letters from him would come, sent care of an unknown friend and then passed to Jem, who would slip them into her hand.

      She paused to look at the ruined portico. By a strange paradox, it had been her father’s pride. He had been a mason by trade. Before the war he had worked on the cathedral under the direction of Master Inigo Jones. True, Master Lovett hated the Church of England and all its works, including St Paul’s. But she had seen him stroke the stones of one of the columns as a man strokes a favourite dog. He had talked, almost against his will, of the novelty and the elegance of the portico’s design.

      A porter passed close to her, brushing his hand over her hip. She moved quickly away. In the old days, she had not been a servant and she had never walked alone in the streets. Now she had become a target for passing men of all ages, for their touches, squeezes, attempted kisses and lewd suggestions. She wondered at this, at the curious lack of discrimination that men showed in their lusts.

      In Convocation House Yard, a crowd was gawping at the bodies propped against the wall. St Paul’s had given up a number of its dead because of the Fire, for tombs had burst open in the heat and flagstones cracked apart. Some corpses were little more than skeletons. Others were clothed in dried flesh in various stages of decay, a few with fragments of clothing and shrouds clinging to them. The souvenir hunters had been at work, and there were bodies that had lost fingers, toes, hands or feet; one lacked a skull.

      Pride of place, according to Mistress Noxon, went to Bishop Braybrooke, who hadn’t been seen in public since 1404. His mummified corpse had tumbled down to St Faith’s in the crypt underneath the choir. Here he was in person, propped on his feet against a blackened wall to await his second resurrection: he was quite intact, with many of his teeth, a red beard and hair, though his skin was like leather.

      A fence had been erected in the angle between the cloister containing the ruined Chapter House and the south wall of the nave. Its gate was guarded by a watchman with a large dog. He took Cat’s paper and peered at it, his lips moving. She had already examined it – it was a general pass, signed by Master Frewin, the Chapter Clerk, and was so thumbed and greasy that it had clearly been used many times before.

      Even with the pass, however, the watchman did not let her in. He made her state her business and told her to wait. He sent a boy to fetch Master Hakesby. The dog, which was chained to one of the gateposts, strained towards her and forced her to recoil, to the obvious entertainment of its master.

      With a sudden stab of loss she thought of the mastiffs she had left behind her. Now Jem was dead, she missed none of the human inhabitants of Barnabas Place, with the possible exception of Aunt Olivia, but she yearned for the dogs, for their protection and their uncritical affection.

      Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse. Especially Bare-Arse.

      The boy returned. With him came Master Hakesby. He was a tall, shabbily dressed man with his own grey hair. Everything about him was thin, from his long feet to his head, a distorted cylinder of bone perched on narrow shoulders. Cat curtsied. He held out his hand for the portfolio.

      ‘Come with me,’ he ordered. ‘I may need other drawings as well, and you can fetch them. I shall enquire of Dr Wren when he comes.’

      The watchman pulled on the dog’s chain, drawing him to one side so Cat could pass through the gateway. She followed Master Hakesby across a yard that stretched from the outer wall of the cloister towards the west end of the cathedral.

      An open tent stood to one side of the yard. Workmen were sorting a miscellany of objects heaped against the wall at the back. Cat glimpsed an iron-bound chest with a curving lid. Propped against it was a marble bust of a periwigged gentleman that could not have been long from the sculptor’s chisel. There was a blackened memorial brass of a dead cleric and a carved throne of painted wood surmounted by an episcopal mitre.

      ‘Come along,’ Master Hakesby said over his shoulder. ‘Dr Wren is away, but he sent word he will be here at any moment and he wishes to see this most particularly.’

      Blocks of stone stood in the open air, some of them carved. It occurred to Cat that, if they did not repair St Paul’s, the ruins would become, if nothing else, a vast quarry.

      Master Hakesby led her into a shed, about fifty feet long, which had been built against the exterior of the cloister. Two clerks were standing at a long, high desk and entering items into ledgers that lay open before them. Behind them was a ledge with a jumble of boxes and books on it. At the other end of the shed was a table to which a sloping surface had been attached with iron clamps. Hakesby walked over to it.

      ‘Don’t touch anything,’

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