London - Edward Rutherfurd [418]
He had turned and was walking out along Fleet Street. As he was approaching the Temple, he saw a group of youths. They had backed a young fellow against a wall. It looked as if they meant to harm him. He heard one of them cry: “String him up.”
For a moment he hesitated. They were only youths, but there were a dozen of them and they looked sturdy. He crossed the street to avoid them and proceeded towards the Temple. He heard the young fellow cry out. And then stopped, ashamed.
He still had not told his family exactly what had happened to Martha. From the moment when he had backed up the burning street, he had told himself that there was nothing he could have done. So powerful was his need for this to be true that he had even managed to sleep a whole night believing it. He had still comforted himself with the belief on his way down to the city and all the way to Ludgate. But there he had seen Meredith.
Doctor Meredith, son of the preacher; Meredith who had, unlike most of his profession, stayed in London through the plague, risking his life, no doubt, scores of times. Meredith who, with no claims to any religious calling, had shown himself, in his quiet way, to be stout-hearted.
And what was he? Like an arrow penetrating armour, the question had struck through O Be Joyful’s defences, causing him a spasm of pain. Faint-hearted. Even if Martha could not have been saved, had he really tried? Hadn’t he lost courage when he ran down those stairs? And now it suddenly occurred to him: if you walk by on the other side, you prove your guilt. He turned back, and a moment later was confronting the youths.
“What has he done?” he asked. The young man himself began to respond, but the youths cut him off.
“He started the Fire of London, sir,” they cried.
Even the day before, the rumours had begun. A fire like this could not be the work of chance. Some said it must be the Dutch. But most – perhaps half the good people of London – had a sounder suspicion by far. “It’s the Catholics,” they said. “Who else would do such a thing?”
“But,” the poor boy cried in his broken English, “I am not Catholic! Am Protestant. Huguenot.”
A Huguenot. Despite Englishmen’s fear of the popish leanings of the Stuarts, to any Protestant living in Catholic France the kingdom of England had seemed a safe haven indeed. Massacred by the thousand by a pious French king in 1572, they had been protected from actual violence for a generation by the Edict of Nantes. But these devout French Calvinists were still subject to constant restrictions, and a modest but steady stream of them had come into England where they had been allowed to worship discreetly. Huguenots, they had come to be called.
The young fellow before him, O Be Joyful guessed, was not more than seventeen. He was a slim, intelligent-looking boy, with fine brown hair, but his most noticeable feature was the pair of spectacles he wore, through which he was peering short-sightedly at his assailants.
“You are Protestant?” Carpenter demanded.
“Oui. I swear,” the boy replied.
“But he’s a foreigner. Listen to him,” one of the boys protested. “Let’s give him something to think about.”
O Be Joyful found his courage. Stepping in front of the boy he told them firmly: “I am O Be Joyful Carpenter. My father Gideon fought with Cromwell, and this boy is of our faith. Leave him alone or fight me first.”
He would never be sure what would have happened next if a small patrol of the Duke of York’s men had not ridden into sight from St Clement Danes. Reluctantly the youths went off, and he found himself left alone with the young Huguenot.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“Down by the Savoy, sir,” the young man replied. There was a little French Protestant community and church there, Carpenter knew. He offered to escort