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II

The January morning was still grey when Harry Wooler walked into London from the north, passing through the wall at Newgate. It was here that cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens were funnelled into the city to the shouts of the drovers, a steady flow of provision pouring into an ever-hungry gullet. It was like walking into one immense farmyard, Harry thought. Further south he came to the slaughterhouse district where the animals were killed, skinned, and dismembered, and then continued their journey in bits to the butchers' shops and the tanners'. Here he found himself walking on a slick of blood and animal guts, steaming in the cold air, and there was an almighty stink of shit and piss, and the iron tang of blood.

Then he pushed on south to Cheapside, where the farmyard bleats were drowned out by the clank of metal on anvil and the pounding of nails into wood or leather, as the blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, tanners, dyers and potters all laboured, and the cowshed stink was replaced by the stench of the fullers' urine jars. Cheapside was a magnificent, unending festival of trade. You could buy anything you wanted here, from a hot veal pie to a flagon of beer, from a Flemish-style hat to Italian-style shoes, from imports like French linen and Spanish silk to eastern spices and Scandinavian walrus ivory – from the words of an apocalyptic preacher that would fire your soul, to the moist quim of a girl to soothe your body. For Harry this was a wonderful place to be, for all the stinks and the filth and the crowding, and the beggars that swarmed like crows pleading for spare farthings.

Harry was Oxford born and bred, but he was a merchant, and England's capital of business felt like a second home to him. And in Cheapside industry and commerce pulsed as nowhere else in England.

But today Harry was not here for trade.

He pushed further south still, past the walls of Saint Paul's, and through narrowing streets lined with warehouses. Their walls were plastered with posters bearing apocalyptic pronouncements from the Bible. He looked at the posters curiously, for they were printed, a novelty still rare in Oxford.

He came at last to the river bank. He could just make out the brown, filthy water through a forest of cranes and ships' masts and furled sails, and he could hear the cursing of the stevedores in a dozen languages. He was near the old bridge, the only span over the river to the south bank. To his left there was the ugly pile of the Tower, to his right the great palace of Westminster with the abbey beyond, in their suburb around the bend of the river. He turned right and walked perhaps a quarter of a mile along the bank. When he came to the ancient dock road called the Strand he cut north, heading inland past more warehouses and factories.

And here he found, just where the monk's letter had described, a small, gloomy parish church, its roughly cut stone stained black by city soot. Chantries clustered around the church, chapels devoted to the souls of the long-dead rich. A stone tablet told him that the church was dedicated to Saint Agnes, a virginal martyr of Rome, and his sister's patron saint.

He felt a deep reluctance to enter. But it was to here that he had been summoned.

The letter from the monk had arrived in a pile of business correspondence. At his home in Oxford, Harry Wooler had read the letter, from a Carthusian called Geoffrey Cotesford, with a sinking heart, for it concerned a matter of conscience. Harry didn't regard himself as a sinful man, but he preferred to stick to commerce, and leave the affairs of the soul to others. But he could scarcely ignore this summons, for it had concerned his sister, Agnes, lost since Harry was a boy.

The church's heavy wooden door was open. Harry stepped inside. The church was cold, its heavy stone walls sucking out the heat, and the air was thick with incense. A man swept the floor with a cane broom, a portly fellow in a loose black robe, but otherwise the church was empty. Harry knelt at a pew, crossed himself, and uttered brief prayers. Then he walked up the church's central aisle to the altar.

He paused by an elaborate tomb that had been set against one wall, cut from some black stone. It was on two levels. Above rested the figure of a man of about fifty, handsome in life, well-dressed in a robe like a Roman toga, with his hands clasped in prayer. But on the level below lay the same man given up to decay, his clothes rotted to rags, his skin peeled back to reveal a cage of ribs, those praying fingers reduced to bone.

Harry didn't like transi tombs. The hideously realistic corpses always reminded him of his own father's death, and his final morbid mutterings.

But Harry was twenty-five now. He was a merchant, as his father had been before him, and his grandfather too – his family as far back as anybody cared to mention. As their name implied, the Woolers sold prime wool from the heart of England to the continent. Trade was what interested Harry – trade, and stories of exploration, of Prince Henry and his school of navigation in Portugal, of new routes to India and China and perhaps even to countries nobody had even heard of yet. Harry didn't like transi tombs and chantries. He didn't even much like churches, he admitted. Give him Cheapside any day, rather than this!

'You don't seem comfortable.'

The man who had been sweeping was resting on his broom, studying Harry. Harry saw that he had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, and that his black robe looked like a habit.

'I'm sorry, brother. I didn't realise – I would have paid my respects-'

The brother brushed that away. He might have been about forty, a tonsure neatly cut into greying hair. He looked sleek and comfortable, but his brown eyes showed a sharp intelligence. 'And I should not have crept up on you – not before a tomb like this, at any rate! But I don't apologise for reading your soul, for it's written on your face.'

Harry felt resentful. 'I'm not here to pray but to meet a man.'

'Geoffrey Cotesford from York?'

'You know him?'

'Only too well.' The friar stuck out his hand. 'I'm Geoffrey. I am glad to meet you, Harry Wooler.'

Harry shook the hand uncertainly.

'I was early.' The friar held up his broom. 'The door was unlocked – careless, that – and I saw the broom resting against a wall, and I thought I should make myself useful. You have a businesslike look about you – I expected that. I'm here on business myself, in fact.'

'I thought you Carthusians were contemplative.'

'Well, we are, some of us. But we have other vocations. I always had too restless a mind to be bothering God with my fragmentary prayers. So I became involved in my house's business affairs. We Carthusians make a bit of a living from the wool trade too, in fact. And I have always been more interested in the souls of others than in my own, a disadvantage for a contemplative! Your soul is as transparently displayed as this poor old fellow's desiccated heart, Harry.'

'It's just so gloomy,' Harry admitted. 'Transi tombs and chantries, monks murmuring your name long after you are dead. The priests say we must all long for the afterlife. Fair enough. But why long for death?'

Geoffrey studied him. 'Ah, but death sometimes longs for us. You're a young man, Harry, and like all old fools I envy you your youth. But as you grow older you'll develop a sense of the past. And our past contains a great calamity, a time when the dead invaded the shore of the living.'

'You mean the Mortality.'

'The Great Mortality, yes. The Big Death. My own grandfather told me tales of what his grandfather, who lived through it, saw for himself. England used to be crowded, you know! But everybody was stirred around by war, and the cities were brimming with filth… Well. We were ripe for the plague. In London, half the population died off in a few years. Think of how it was for the living, Harry, as all those faces around you melted away. The shock left scars in their souls, I think. No wonder they carved these transi tombs, memorials of a world become a vast boneyard.'

Harry was restless, feeling he was being preached at. 'You wrote to me about Agnes. Where is my sister?'

'Far from here, I'm afraid. She's in York. And you must travel to her; she can't come to you. You'll see why. But she's asking for you. Big brother Harry! And, you know, to understand your sister's situation, you will have to think about history – I mean, your family's. Your ancestors weren't always wool traders. You'll see, you'll see…'

'My business – I've work to do.'

'I know,' said Geoffrey. 'But you'll come with me even so, won't you? A spark of duty is bright under that woollen merchant's shirt. I see that in you too.'

These words made Harry feel trapped. With a mumbled apology he hurried down the aisle to the door, and drank in the reassuringly foetid air of the Strand.