The Butcher of Smithfield Read Free Page A

leave London. He smiled absently at
     Ellis, then made a show of listening to the sermon. Ellis sighed at his tenant’s uncommunicative manner, but did not press
     him further.
    When the service was over, the congregation flooded into Fleet Street and Ellis went to join cronies from his coffee-house.
     They immediately began a spirited debate about a newsbook editorial that described Quakers as ‘licentious and incorrigible’;
     some thought the epithet accurate, while others claimed they would make up their own minds and did not need L’Estrange telling
     them what to think. Chaloner began to walk to White Hall, aware that his Earl would want to know he was home at last. The
     rain had stopped, although it had left Fleet Street a soft carpet of mud, and he was astonished by the lively bustle as traders
     hawked their wares. Therehad been few secular activities allowed on the Sabbath in Catholic Spain, and the contrast was startling.
    ‘God will send a great pestilence,’ bawled a street-preacher, who evidently thought the same. He stood on a crate in the middle
     of the road, and risked life and limb as traffic surged around him. ‘There is plague in Venice, and He will inflict one on
     London unless you repent.’
    ‘He has already sent one,’ quipped a leatherworker’s apprentice, as he staggered by with a load of cured pelts balanced on
     his head. ‘Half the Court has French pox, so I have heard.’
    People laughed, and Chaloner was impressed when the lad managed a cheeky bow without dropping what he was carrying. The preacher
     scowled at him, and muttered that God would be including cocky apprentices among His list of targets when the plague arrived
     in the city.
    Chaloner hurried on, warned by a rank, acrid smell that he was approaching the Rainbow Coffee House, an establishment infamous
     for the ‘noisome stenches’ associated with its roasting beans. Suddenly, the door was flung open and a man stalked out. He
     was tall, lean and elegantly dressed, and a pair of outrageously large gold rings dangled from his ears. His handsome, but
     cruel, face was dark with fury, and he gripped the hilt of his sword as though he itched to run someone through with it. Chaloner
     thought he looked like a pirate – dangerous and unpredictable.
    Moments later, the Rainbow’s door opened a second time, and two more men emerged. Both were clad in the very latest Court
     fashions, although the spotless white lace that frothed around their knees and their clean shoes toldChaloner that they had not sloshed through Fleet Street’s mud that morning, but had travelled in style – carried in a sedan-chair
     or a hackney-coach. The shorter of the pair, who sported a long yellow wig, held a newsbook in his hand.
    ‘“Personal lozenges by Theophilus Buckworth for the cure of consumptions, coughs, catarrhs and strongness of breath”,’ he
     read in a yell that drew a good deal of attention from passers-by. ‘You call that news, L’Estrange?’
    The tall man whipped around to face him, while Chaloner noted wryly that, for all London’s vast size – it was by far the biggest
     city in the civilised world – it was still a small place in many ways. Ellis had mentioned a newsbook editor called L’Estrange,
     and suddenly, here he was. Not wanting to be caught in the middle of a spat that looked set to turn violent, Chaloner stepped
     into an alley, joining a soot-faced lad who was disposing of a bucket of coffee-grounds there. The youth scattered his reeking,
     gritty pile by kicking it, and the stench of decay told Chaloner that the lane had been used as a depository for the Rainbow’s
     unwanted by-products for years. The coffee-boy pulled a pipe from his pocket and watched with interest as L’Estrange strode
     towards his tormentor.
    ‘That particular notice had nothing to do with me,’ he snarled. ‘My assistant inserted it without my knowledge.’
    ‘I see,’ drawled the yellow-wigged man, exchanging a smirk