‘Make way, there! Make way for the Honourable Sir Matthew Quinton!’
I can still hear Phineas Musk’s unmistakeable voice, can smell the mass of humanity pressing into the courtroom.
‘Make way, I say!’
Phineas Musk enjoyed few things in life better than pummelling those who were too slow to get out of his way, and clearing a path for me into the courthouse provided him with much opportunity for pummelling. For the crowd attempting to squeeze into the court, hastily designated to replace the burned Old Bailey, was a large and fevered one. This, after all, was the chance to look upon the face of the man who had supposedly confessed to starting the Great Fire of London, and it seemed as though the whole of the cremated city had turned out for the occasion.
Musk obtained a stool for me – I did not enquire how, but suspected that it involved more pummelling – and I settled down to view the proceedings. Insofar as I could, at any rate; the throng meant that even someone as tall as I could not quite see everything. Of course, I had been in a courtroom before, but Bedford Assizes could not compare to this in spectacle, and the trials of those caught poaching on Ravensden land certainly could not compare for attendance, nor the atmosphere of gravity, anger, and vengeance. Nor could a circuit judge compare with the red-robed, bewigged magnificence of the Lord Chief Justice of England himself, Sir John Kelyng, who had earned the undying respect of my mother by virtue of his having sentenced the fanatic Bunyan at Bedford Assizes.
My bones turned to marble, my flesh to cold gunmetal, my blood to ice.
A fleeting gap had opened in front of me, and through it, I caught my first glimpse of the accused. Since Aphra’s departure for Antwerp, I had been principally at Woolwich dockyard, returning only that morning, and was thus out of touch with London news. So the only thing I knew of the supposed arsonist was his name. Robert Hubert, a Frenchman, originally of Rouen, latterly of London. But names did not matter, there in the courtroom, as I shivered at the implications of what I saw in front of me.
For I had seen this man, this Robert Hubert, before.
He was the simpleton in the Swedish ship at Saint Katherine’s, when Aphra and I had first boarded it in search of the Four Horsemen.
Slowly, very slowly, my heart quietened, and feeling returned to my limbs. Robert Hubert’s presence aboard the Milkmaid could surely have been nothing but coincidence; how could it be otherwise? Indeed, this conviction was swiftly reinforced as the trial began, and the pathetic nature of the accused Frenchman became apparent.
‘How do you plead?’ demanded Kelyng, after the reading of the charge.
Silence.
A clerk mumbled something to the Lord Chief Justice: presumably, the information that Robert Hubert could speak almost no English. Kelyng rolled his eyes to the heavens, shook his head at the jury, growled an order to the clerk – seemingly, to find an interpreter, for a pale, stooping law student from one of the Temples was swiftly plucked out of the crowd and fulfilled this role for the rest of the trial – and then turned back to the accused.
‘How do you plead?’ repeated Kelyng, this time in execrable French. ‘Coupable, ou non coupable?’
‘Coupable,’ said Hubert, so quietly that most of those at the back of the court missed what he said.
There was a groan from those who had heard. A guilty plea meant no evidence, no explanation, and no entertainment. Kelyng saw the matter rather differently, and smiled. He nodded to the clerk of the court to make ready the black cap. No doubt his thoughts were on a quick sentence and an early dinner.
Suddenly, though, Hubert laughed, as if at some private joke.
‘Coupable,’ he said, ‘non.’
Loud murmuring ran around the courtroom, and perplexed jurors whispered frantically to each other.
‘What in God’s name does that mean?’ snapped the Lord Chief Justice, in English. He resorted to French once again. ‘Are you pleading guilty, or not guilty? I remind you that you have signed a confession.’
The Frenchman stared at him as though he were the man in the moon. His mouth opened and closed several times.
Then, loudly and happily, he said, ‘Non coupable.’
The crowd cheered.
Within an hour, the hostility that had been present in the court at the beginning of proceedings was all but abated. Within another, there was a palpable sense of pity. By then, Hubert had changed his plea two or three times; or rather, nobody was entirely certain whether he had or not, least of all his confused interpreter, the jury, and Lord Chief Justice Kelyng. The watchmaker seemed to be in another world, engaged in some peculiar dialogue with himself. He was certainly incapable of mounting his own defence, as any Englishman brought before a court would expect to do.
Lowman, the keeper of the Surrey county gaol, was called as a witness, and testified that some days before the trial he had taken Hubert to St Katherine’s Dock, so that the watchmaker could show him where the Swedish ship that brought him to London had lain. He could find no such ship, said Lowman. Of course he could not: he was looking for a ship called the Skipper, which is what Hubert, in his written confession, had said it was called. The poor, confused Frenchman had somehow conflated the colloquial title of the ship’s master with the name of the ship itself – or, if you prefer, he had all too easily thrown Lowman off the scent of the real ship, the Milkmaid.
I knew, as almost no one else in the courtroom did, that the ship in question was long gone. It had been released by direct order of the Privy Council, responding to a most pressing request from Lord Leijonbergh, the Swedish ambassador. He, in turn, was seemingly acting at the behest of Lord Hagerstierna, the richest man in Sweden; and Hagerstierna was a close friend of both Magnus de la Gardie, the High Chancellor, and that kingdom’s enigmatic former ruler, Queen Christina, both of whom I had encountered during a desperate business only a few months before. In the more than sixty years since the Great Fire and the trial of Robert Hubert, I have sometimes wondered whether that was all mere coincidence: whether it was nothing, or was everything. I never pursued it, but perhaps one day, another man will.
Anyhow, on that October day in 1666, Lowman continued his testimony. At the Frenchman’s insistence, he said – for this had been during one of the interludes when Hubert was proudly proclaiming his guilt – he had taken Hubert from St Katherine’s into the charred ruins of London, where the watchmaker made unerringly for the site of Farriner’s bakery. How could he have known where it was, unless he had been there before? There were knowing nods all around the courtroom. But Musk and I exchanged a glance. Even a two-year-old child could have pointed out the spot where the Great Fire of London began: for it was the one place among all the ruins where, every day without fail, a large crowd gathered to stare pointlessly at the charred pile of wood and rubble that had once been Pudding Lane.
Finally, Hubert himself was called to give evidence, muttering ‘coupable ou non coupable’ time and time again, as though he were some lesser version of Shakespeare’s Dane.
‘And how did you put the fireball within the bakery?’ barked Kelyng.
The student translated, and Hubert became animated, waving his hands, then mimicking the act of pushing something upwards. The student leaned close to catch his mumblings, then turned to address the jury; the youth seemed to be revelling in the attention, no doubt reckoning that an impressive performance before the Lord Chief Justice of England might advance his future legal career.
‘He says, My Lord, that he placed it on the end of a pole, and put it through an open window.’
‘On the street side?’
The question was translated back to Hubert.
‘Yes, My Lord, on the street side.’
Farriner, the baker, a large man who had evidently sampled too much of his own produce, was sitting close to the accused, following proceedings intently. As well he might, for upon the verdict hinged the question of whether both the current populace of London and the whole of posterity until kingdom come blamed Robert Hubert and Thomas Farriner for the Great Fire of London.
The baker got to his feet.
‘My Lord, there was never any window on that side!’
‘Be silent, Mister Farriner!’ snapped Kelyng. ‘You will have your chance to give evidence in due course.’
The baker sat down amid a considerable hubbub which, for some moments, Kelyng did not seek to restrain. Not a few brows were furrowed now, Musk’s among them.
‘What’s he playing at?’ he said. ‘If he wants the Frog to hang, why not stay silent about the window? Or agree that there really was a window? Nothing to prove otherwise, after all. The evidence is a pile of ash, like the rest of London.’
I nodded. Thomas Farriner would surely want Robert Hubert to swing. Moreover, he, his son, and his daughter, were three of those who had brought the original indictment against the Frenchman. Suddenly, though, I saw that there could be only one plausible explanation for the baker’s behaviour; and my opinion was reinforced by the attitude of his children, who were scowling and giving him black stares.
In truth, Thomas Farriner was a remarkably stupid man.
The afternoon wore on, with Hubert’s testimony becoming ever more rambling and self-contradictory. There was more and more shuffling in the courtroom, and a steadily increasing level of whispering as the audience’s attention wandered. My mind drifted away to thoughts of Cornelia, and Aphra, and my brother, and my ship. The fleet had come in to pay off, and the forlorn attempt to get the Royal Sceptre back to sea had been abandoned. Sir Robert Holmes was come up to London to deliver a report to the King on the fleet’s condition, and I had promised to drink with him once the day’s proceedings in court were concluded. In this particular instance, no one expected the course of justice to take very long. The next day, I was to dine at Ravensden House with Julian Delacourt, Lord Carrignavar, whose conscience had mastered him after all, so he was destined for the long road to County Kerry and a lifetime of worry.
From time to time, my attention returned to Robert Hubert. The poor fellow was a lunatic, as was evident to all. Quite why he should insist so vehemently that he had put a fireball into Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane, and thus seek the martyrdom of the noose, was a mystery. But it did not matter. Robert Hubert would swing for the Great Fire of London, whether he had started it or not. And it was obvious to me, just as it was obvious to every man from the Lord Chief Justice of England downwards, that he had not started it.
Then he said something that I nearly missed. Something that teetered at the very edge of my mind, almost falling out of it entirely. But then he repeated it, and added one point of detail that caused me to sit bolt upright upon my stool.
At first Hubert had stated that he was part of a small army of twenty-four men, intent on destroying the city. Of course, there was one very obvious flaw with this testimony. As I looked around the courtroom, and saw the shaking heads and the furrowed brows, I knew that one did not have to be a captain in the King’s Navy to wonder how, exactly, that could be so, if the would-be destroyer had been aboard a ship that had not been destined for London at all, and only sent there as a result of its fortuitous capture at sea. But then, as so often during the trial, Hubert changed his testimony, very nearly in mid-sentence, his interpreter struggling to keep up or to make sense of his words. Now there was a new number of conspirators, and the watchmaker proclaimed it time and time again. Quatre. Hubert seemed to be claiming that he was one of four men who designed to fire London. Four men. And he gave the name of the man, a fellow Frenchman, who had recruited him, and come to London with him in the same ship; so this must have been the second man, the older man, that we had encountered aboard the Milkmaid.
Stephen Piedloe.
It was a name I had heard before, only once, and which I had very nearly forgotten. But Aphra had mentioned it in passing, as a mere detail during the conversation on our coach journey to Chelsea College in August, when we were first setting out on our frantic search for Mene Tekel and the Precious Man. She was recalling her dealings with the Horsemen in Surinam and trying to describe their appearances to me. And then the name of Stephen Piedloe had come up.
Phineas Musk’s face told me at once that it was a name he knew, too. He would have read it on the papers he’d checked during our first visit to the Milkmaid. The papers I had judged so insignificant that I’d never even asked him what they contained, and that Musk had judged so insignificant that he’d forgotten their contents almost immediately. The papers that contained the names of the two Frenchmen we had discovered.
No, poor, mad, soon-to-be-dead Robert Hubert could not possibly have been one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
But the French Huguenot who had supposedly died before going to Surinam, the colleague of Schermer, De Wildt and Goodman – the one Horseman whom Aphra Behn had never seen, and thus could not have identified even if she encountered him face-to-face, say, on a ship moored off Saint Katherine’s Dock – most certainly was.
Stephen Piedloe was the name of the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.
‘You could not have done any other, you know,’ said Charles Quinton, Earl of Ravensden, who was sufficiently recovered to go out with me in his coach to watch the execution of Robert Hubert at Tyburn.
It was the seventeenth day of October in the year of Our Lord, 1666; or, as some still had it, the year of the antichrist. A fortnight since the jury had brought in a swift and entirely expected verdict, and a black cloth had been placed atop Lord Chief Justice Kelyng’s wig.
‘I could have stopped the trial,’ I said, albeit without conviction.
All the guilt and rage I felt that day in the courtroom, all the doubts and fears I had experienced since, came back to me in a great wave.
‘On what grounds? One name? Kelyng would have slapped you down, and rightly so. You had no evidence, Matt. No proof. We do not know – will never know – whether you killed Schermer and de Wildt before or after they attempted to fire the City. We will never know whether Piedloe succeeded in their stead. For all we know, it could have been pure chance that a fire broke out in Pudding Lane on the very night that the Horsemen were preparing their attack. Or God’s will, if you prefer. One way or the other, London was destined to burn that night. You couldn’t have stopped destiny, Matt. No man can ever stop it. Not even Lord Percival.’
The coach was moving slowly through a vast crowd, thronging all sides of the scaffold, probably thousands strong. Musk was sitting by the coachman, both of them using their whips to clear a path. The scaffold was in sight now, surrounded by a ring of musketeers from the Trained Bands. Robert Hubert was already upon it.
‘And it is that man’s destiny to hang,’ I said. ‘That poor, simple fellow who barely knows what he says.’
‘He made his own destiny. God knows why – perhaps it is just the weakness of his mind, as you say, or perhaps there is more to it. After all, brother, some men seek nothing more than martyrdom.’
‘But martyrdom in what cause?’
Charles looked out at the scene, and was silent for some time. The noose was around Hubert’s neck. We could not hear the priest’s prayers, although we were close enough; there was a constant noise from the crowd, jeers, boos and angry shouts, and it grew louder by the second.
‘Another thing we shall never know,’ said my brother. ‘Perhaps no cause other than this – for history to discount the notion that such a colossal horror as the Great Fire of London could possibly have been started by such a deluded simpleton, and thus conclude that it could only have been an accident.’
At that moment, Robert Hubert dropped. His legs danced, and then were still. The body hung limp in the breeze. I can remember the noise that the crowd made, for in all the years of my life since that day, I have never heard anything remotely like it again. At once a cheer and a scream, it seemed as loud as the greatest broadside, and shook the very ground itself.
‘And for history not to pursue Stephen Piedloe,’ I said, as the noise subsided a little.
‘Amen,’ said Charles, although whether to my words, or to some prayer he had silently offered for the dead, I could not tell.
The mob was already flooding away from the scaffold, pressing so tightly around us that it was impossible for our coach to move. Hubert’s body had been cut down, and was being bundled into a cart; it was common knowledge that the corpse was to go to the College of Surgeons, there to be dissected. The carter started his donkeys, a file of troopers from the Trained Bands fell in on each side, and the cart began to come down Tyburn Hill, directly towards us.
The cart was very nearly alongside our coach when it began. To this day, I am not certain whether it was an accident or not. Whether a meanly dressed bald man from among the crowd simply stumbled due to the press of people, and stretched out his hand to grab the site of the cart for support. Or whether he had intent in his mind from the very start. In either event, the troopers did nothing to stop him. The fellow pulled himself up, looked into the cart, then struck out and punched the corpse of Robert Hubert.
A woman shrieked. Not a shriek of horror, but one of delight. She flung herself forward, pulled herself into the cart, and began to tear off Hubert’s shirt. A short man climbed up beside her, then another, then a boy of ten or so, who snatched the Frenchman’s left hand and tried to rip off his thumb. The troopers did nothing. More and more climbed aboard; more and more hands snatched at the watchmaker’s corpse.
Within seconds, fingers were tearing at Hubert’s flesh, pulling it apart, ripping it from the bone. A woman scoured out an eyeball. A man produced a large knife and began to hack off the head. But as he did so, the Frenchman’s ghastly, torn face turned toward me. To this very day, I can still see the expression that Robert Hubert must have had on his face when he died, and I will swear upon oath that it was a smile.