Doctor Who_ The Roundheads - Mark Gatiss [2]
Thinks he’s the only one to have suffered.
He glanced up at the sign above his inn.
The World Turn’d Upside Down.
Aye, that it had been.
He brushed the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders and shouted at a young boy who stood at the trap-door entrance to the cellar.
‘Come on, lad! Look lively! I don’t pay you to dawdle.
Look lively there!’
The boy sighed and struggled on, rolling barrels and blowing into his numb hands to warm them.
Kemp turned back to his contemplation of the sky, wiping his hands on his apron and muttering under his breath.
Suddenly, among the plethora of strange smells that whirled through the street, something particularly evil began to assault his senses. It was like the worst kind of rotten vegetable, mixed with a dreadful, sewer-like odour. An image suddenly flashed into his mind of himself as a boy, playing in his father’s barn and uncovering the tiny corpse of a rabbit, its hide suppurating with maggots. The stench from it had been nauseating but this...
Kemp turned to see a strange, crook-backed old man crunching cheerfully through the snow drifts towards him. He groaned and placed his broad, splayed fingers across his face in a none-too-subtle effort to avoid the smell coming off the newcomer.
‘Good day to thee, Master Kemp,’ said the old man, his voice high and cracked with age.
Kemp did no more than grunt in reply and slowly shook his head at the fellow’s rough appearance. His tunic and breeches were black but so stained and filthy as to appear almost like a new colour altogether. His collar, ingrained with grime, had not been white for many a year and his holed and wrinkled stockings hung like loose skin around his ankles and ruined shoes.
‘Good day, I say!’ said the man again.
This time Kemp acknowledged him. ‘You may find it so, Master Scrope. For myself I have things pressing on my mind.’
Nathaniel Scrope let out a funny little giggle and smiled, exposing a gallery of loose black teeth. ‘See a surgeon, Kemp.
They say water and all manner of things can press on the brain.’
Kemp ignored him, his eyes rolling heavenward again.
‘This weather, I mean. It’ll keep my customers abed, mark my word. And if they’re abed they’re not drinking and, as a consequence, Master Scrope, I am not a happy man.’
Scrope shrugged. ‘Nay, man. A little frost never harmed no one. I’m living proof.’
Kemp let out a short, unpleasant laugh. ‘Living proof that a little muck never harmed anyone, that’s for sure.’
Scrope looked affronted and ran a liver-spotted hand through his mane of matted hair. ‘You know very well, Kemp, that the work I do is vital to this country’s wellbeing.’
Kemp suppressed a smile. The nerve of the man!
‘Oh, aye, Nat. I was forgetting.’ He gave a formal bow.
‘Please excuse me.’
Scrope nodded, apparently mollified. A stiff wind blew a wave of snowflakes in their direction and Scrope suddenly stiffened. ‘What’s this?’ he muttered.
Kemp listened. In among the cacophony of street sounds they could make out something else. A regular, drumming beat, flattening the virgin snow and echoing around the squalid lanes of the city.
Both Kemp and Scrope turned swiftly as the sound coalesced into the unmistakable tattoo of horses’ hooves.
There was a shout and then a troop of soldiers clattered into view, perhaps thirty in number and dressed in heavy breastplates over thick, buff, skirted leather coats. They had on huge, thigh-length boots over their crimson breeches and each wore a segmented helmet that tapered down his neck, revealing almost nothing of his face.
As they passed, breath streaming like smoke from the mouths of their horses, all work in the little street came to a sudden halt. It was as though the violence in the air had suddenly taken on solid form.
Kemp shuddered and it had nothing to do with the cold.
‘God a’ mercy,’ he whispered as the soldiers disappeared in a tight pack around the corner. ‘What next for this benighted land of ours?’
Nathaniel Scrope wiped a drop of moisture from the tip of his nose and watched the last of the mounted