Chapter 1
1st September 1666

Three hundred years later...

Thwack!

The birch cane struck Ben’s thigh, sending a jolt of pain down his leg. He bit his tongue to avoid crying out and then, when no further blows came, opened his eyes and blinked to clear the tears the pain had brought.

He was standing in the yard outside his dormitory, his head bent forward in an attempt to avoid the terrifying and almost Medusa-like glare of the Headmaster. Next to Dr Busby, Ben’s own tutor Wilkinson was looking with frustration at the boy. Behind them the entirety of the teaching faculty loomed and further back still, Ben’s classmates watched the proceedings with a mixture of horror and excitement on their faces.

Ben returned his gaze to the form of Dr Busby who having now completed the punishment began his customary lecture.

“Boy, you will learn to be obedient and follow the rules!” Busby said, eyes glinting darkly and cheeks puffing as he spoke. “No pupil, and I mean no pupil, will abscond from any activities at this school, and certainly not my Saturday morning assembly or this afternoon’s debate. Do you understand?”

Ben’s legs were still throbbing with a burning pain. This was his penalty for being caught hiding in his room rather than being in the hall enduring two hours of his classmates reciting passages of Plato. Despite, or perhaps because of, the pain there was an edge of defiance in his voice as he replied.

“But Sir...,”

“Do not ‘but Sir’ me! Everyone has to attend the debate!” Busby roared and even the teachers winced at the noise.

“But Sir,” Ben tried again, “I know it all already,” he replied, “isn’t there anything more interesting I could do?”

That brought gasps of surprise and shock from pupils and teachers alike. Busby’s eyes flared in indignation. A pupil daring to make such a statement was unheard of. Ben knew this too and part of him wondered what was getting into him. He knew he was in deep trouble and yet another part of him did not care.

“More interesting? You come here to be educated, not entertained. Know it already do you? Oh do you indeed!” Busby said and smiled nastily at the assembled ranks of his teachers. Ben shivered, suspecting that expression could not bode well for him.

“Please educate us, young man, who wrote The Carmen Saeculare?”

“Horace, Sir,” Ben answered with a smug smile. Busby nodded.

“Very good and what are the opening words?” The Headmaster asked. Ben’s face dropped.

“Er...I don’t know Sir.”

“I see...well, let’s try another question. According to Plato, how old was the philosopher in the Apology of Socrates?”

Ben’s mouth moved, but he was unable to reply. He dared not look at the teachers, but he could feel them watching him, listening to and judging him and he could also feel his face beginning to burn in embarrassment under their gaze. A few sniggers at his discomfort reached him from the pupils. In front of him he saw Busby’s lip now curling in contempt.

“I thought you ‘knew it all already’ boy,” he said in a mocking voice.

Ben squirmed, desperately wishing he was somewhere else: he did not care where it was. There was no escape however and, showing no mercy, Busby asked another question.

“In The Iliad, who does Homer say is the father of Diomedes?”

Ben’s mind was blank. What was wrong with him? He should know all this.

“I don’t know Sir, I am sorry.”

There was total silence, punctuated by a gentle swishing sound as the Headmaster waved the birch cane back and forth through the air. Fearing it would be used on him again, Ben tensed in anticipation of the blow. Busby looked rather like a kettle into whose spout someone has pushed a cork before placing it on the fire: boiling hot and likely to explode at any moment. In the end though, Busby just spoke softly but in a tone that made Ben wish the Headmaster had just used the cane on him.

“Your behaviour and attitude is unacceptable for a boy at my school as is your impertinence and arrogance. You are confined to your room as of this moment. On Monday, I will see you again and decide whether to write to your uncle and to inform him of my intention to have you removed from this school forthwith on suspension. Whether I do or not is entirely in your hands. Do you understand?”

Anxious to escape from the attention of the Headmaster and the rest of the school, Ben nodded eagerly at that and with apparent sincerity, but he knew he was lying. He was already making plans for an expedition of his own for this same afternoon. With a final glare at Ben and with his robes billowing behind him, Busby marched away towards the refectory and his midday meal, followed by the other tutors hurrying along in his wake like a naval squadron in line behind their flagship. The pupils marched off as well, but not before several had met his gaze and sniggered at him. Finally, he was alone with Wilkinson who now studied the boy for a moment whilst he appeared to marshal his thoughts. At last he spoke.

“I don’t know what to do with you boy. The change in you since last year has been marked,” his tutor said, “you never used to be a poor student: quite the opposite was true in fact. I’d say you were by far the most intelligent and able pupil that had been to this school in many years. You can - and you and I both know you can - read and write Latin better than a Roman. You used to be able to quote all the writers of antiquity with effortless ease. Heavens, but there was even a point last year when you started correcting errors I had made!”

Ben said nothing. He felt angry and not only at his tutor, but at everything and everybody. The pain of the punishment was not the source of his dissatisfaction, although it hardly helped his mood, and he could feel the anger twisting inside him like a knot, but terrible as it felt it was better than the other feelings it had replaced: feelings he did not want to and could not deal with at present. The anger helped him cope so he just stood there in a cloud of misery, looking at the tutor with a glazed expression on his face, waiting for the discussion to end but not really caring what the outcome was.

“You are late handing in work. What you do hand in is poor and shows almost no sign of effort. You hardly pay attention in class and you are surly and bad tempered. You don’t seem to talk to your classmates any more, or join in with them in their activities. I know that your parents died and I sympathise with your loss, but you must know that many of the boys in the school lost some relation last year,” Wilkinson said, referring to the plague of ‘65, “they bear their loss bravely, and you must - although the circumstances are different.”

He waited for Ben to say something, but the boy remained silent and so he angrily pointed towards the dormitory.

“Get out of my sight,” he shouted and then stomped off in the direction Busby had gone, towards the teacher’s entrance to the dining hall. The boy stood alone and watched him depart.

In his heart Ben knew that Wilkinson was trying to help. The Ben of a year back would have responded enthusiastically and with grace, but that Ben seemed buried far away. It was with a sense of frustration that the boy endured each school day for every activity seemed pointless; every moment spent a waste of time he resented.

Suddenly he kicked the ground in fury and looked at the door to his rooms and then, shaking his head, turned away and walked towards the front gate of the school. He knew there would be trouble when he was found missing but he hardly cared. With a final furtive glance backwards, Ben sneaked out of the school and turned northwards towards the heart of London.
**********

Standing on Fleet Bridge, the Thief counted the miserable few coins yielded by the sale of a shirt and a pair of stockings stolen earlier off a washing line in Holborn. A fat looking merchant, passing by on a cart loaded with barrels of ale, glanced over and noted a splash of red hair and unwashed hands, scruffy britches riddled with holes, shoes whose soles flapped and gaped and a wide brimmed hat that shrouded most of the Thief’s face. His haughty sniff clearly dismissed the figure as a vagabond, beggar or a good for nothing lad best avoided. This was a common reaction and meant that few folk came close and that suited the Thief just fine. If a vagabond lad was the role to be played to keep living, then so be it.

Below the Thief, on the banks of the ditch running beneath the bridge, was the Rag Fair. The poorest came here each day to pay copper coins for a few pathetic clothes stolen in tenements or stripped off the dead, linen taken from the beds of plague victims and then washed in urine to try and cleanse the contagion, or wigs pulled off the heads of passing pedestrians on Cheapside by enterprising boys hanging out of first floor windows.

Children played at the water’s edge barely inches from the decaying body of a dog that floated down stream through the stinking filth that was the River Fleet. A brief gust of wind from the North brought more noxious smells towards the thief, this time from scores of huge brass and iron vats standing along the water’s edge perched on top of fires which each threw a dense cloud of smoke and fumes skyward. The vats produced a hundred wares: vinegar, glue, cured leather and soap or were used to bleach cloth or boil the fats off animal skins. Further up the river butchers smoked animal carcasses and the refuge from their and all the other trades were thrown into the river or littered its edge. The smell was unbelievable and the sight looked like a picture of hell but here, in rotten wooden huts overlooking the ditch, the poor just endured. The Thief’s nose wrinkled: time to move on perhaps.

The Thief drifted towards Newgate, through lanes lined with the tottering two and three story wooden houses that made up the city of London. The top floors leant out so far that, in some places, it was possible for folk in one house to shake hands with those living opposite. The streets below were often in permanent gloom, overshadowed by the buildings above and the permanent clouds of smoke that covered the city. A cry of warning rang out from above and the Thief deftly dodged the torrent of excrement from someone’s chamber pot tipped out of a high window. A lawyer walking down the lane, towards the Inns of Court, was not so lucky and let out a shout of outrage as his fine clothes were ruined. The Thief chuckled and moved on.

Just outside Newgate, country women were selling nosegays from the side of the road. The ale merchant had stopped his cart at Pie Corner to buy one and now held it close as he drove on through the gate. By the way he screwed up his face, the Thief guessed that it failed to disguise the fetid stench that escaped the jail built into the gatehouse, where the condemned and the accused alike had to endure rats, ‘gaol fever’ and the open sewer that ran through their cells.

“Have pity on us Sir, please Sir do you have any food, any coins?”croaked a voice from a barred window built into the jail at ground level, where a prisoner was holding a desperate hand out for anything passing Londoners might give him. Prisoners were not fed in the jail and survived by begging or buying food and on the charity of friends. Many died in that dank hole. The merchant turned his head away but the Thief went over and dropped one copper coin into the palm: enough perhaps for a meal.

“Bless you lad,” the prisoner said and the Thief nodded, not seeing it as charity or weakness but thinking that no one knew when they too may need help in that terrible place.

Passing through the city wall, the Thief entered the Shambles, where blood and offal from freshly butchered meat dripped onto the ground and ran off downhill. All round the market, hawkers sold candles, beer, mussels, honeyed nuts and cane rods for the punishing of children. Beggars, prostitutes and pick pockets plying their trade were all spotted and expertly avoided by the Thief. Some were moving stealthily and in disguise, deftly taking coin pouches off belts or food from baskets. Others drew attention to themselves by first having scratched and cut their own skin, or that of their children, before rubbing mud, or even the blood spilt by the butchers, over themselves to exaggerate their pitiful appearance. They then lay on the ground in the street crying for alms.

Concluding that this place was just a bit too occupied by those who shared a less than rigid adherence to the law - and as such, given the competition, opportunities for profit were probably limited - the Thief decided to move on. The objective was easy enough: to survive another day. To creep along looking for an opportunity: a dropped coin, an inviting money bag, or perhaps a valuable object left unguarded by a careless shopkeeper. Maybe a piece of fruit would find a place inside the Thief’s tunic along with a crust of bread. On a good day a bottle of beer might join it.

After the hell on earth that was the Fleet Ditch and the poor pickings at the Shambles the Thief decided to head for richer prospects, somewhere where one theft would pay for a week or two’s food. Yes, that was the plan: just one risk, one chance and then the easy life for a bit. Where to go though? Somewhere like, somewhere like...ah yes, just the place.

“Lambs to the slaughter!” The Thief muttered with a smile and slinked away, eastwards.