He gazed down at the purple features thoughtfully. Fitz-Simons had disguised himself as a beggar, and the dead man in front of him certainly looked as though he had been a vagrant. Could there be two dead men with the same name? Chaloner supposed it was possible. Then he recalled Holles saying that vergers had been summoned from St Martin’s Church – not St Olave’s – to collect Fitz-Simons’s body. Had Surgeon Fitz-Simons been buried already, and Beggar Fitz-Simons was completely unrelated to him? Or had someone taken the opportunity to exchange corpses? Chaloner stared for some time before accepting that these were questions he could not answer.
The chase had exhausted Chaloner, and he did not feel like walking all the way home, so he visited Leybourn instead. The surveyor said nothing when he flopped in a chair next to the fire, although his eyes lingered on the grazed hands and the torn, soiled clothes. He poured himself some wine and went back to his reading, commenting occasionally on a particularly interesting passage. Frobisher’s descriptions of Guinea made it sound like paradise, and Chaloner wondered how its people survived being torn from their homes and transported to the plantations. He found a copy of Musaeum Tradescantianum, and learned a lot about edible plants before Leybourn announced he was going to bed. Chaloner took advantage of the spare room, and did not stir until the clocks chimed six o’clock the next morning.
‘Are you in a better mood today?’ asked Leybourn, looking up from where he was scraping mould from a piece of bread. ‘You were sullen company last night.’
‘I cannot play my viol, Will,’ said Chaloner in a low voice. The loss of music had been uppermost in his mind when he had woken up, and meant he would probably be ‘sullen company’ at breakfast, too. ‘I tried yesterday, but it was like using someone else’s hand.’
Leybourn was sympathetic. ‘Your skills will return once a surgeon removes the … ’ He pointed.
‘It is a new invention that will revolutionise surgery, according to Wiseman. Or a dangerous experiment that will maim its victims, according to Lisle.’
‘Wiseman is the best surgeon in London, and I doubt either he or Lisle made a mistake over something as basic as a broken arm. I am sure they both know what they are doing.’
‘They cannot both know,’ said Chaloner irritably. ‘Their diagnoses are contradictory.’
Leybourn handed him some ale. It was stronger than the brews Chaloner usually drank first thing in the morning, and would make him drunk if he had too much of it, which would not be a good way to interview Dillon. He set it aside and ate some of the mouldy bread instead, then left for Newgate Gaol, hoping Thurloe was right when he claimed the governor would not arrive until later.
Newgate was one of London’s most notorious prisons. It was a robust structure that exuded a sense of despair and hopelessness, and even its recent refacing did little to render it less forbidding. It was stone-built with a massive front gate and virtually no windows, which Chaloner supposed was not surprising for a house of confinement. He hated such places intensely, having spent time in several when spying missions had not gone according to plan, and did not find it easy to step up to the door and present Thurloe’s letter to the guard. When the man spent a long time reading it, he considered abandoning the escapade altogether. Arrest would be inevitable if the document was recognised as a forgery, and the prospect of another spell in a dark, dripping underground pit brought him out in a cold sweat.
‘All right,’ the soldier said eventually. ‘We are expecting the governor a bit earlier than usual today, so with luck, you will see him before you leave. I will tell him you are here.’
It was too late for second thoughts, and Chaloner had no choice but to follow him through a series of dank, echoing corridors that led deep inside the maze of cells. A rank stench enveloped him. It was of sewage, old bedding, inedible food, and unwashed bodies. He put his sleeve across his face, thinking that even the decaying reek in the Anatomical Theatre was preferable to a prison’s odour.
Newgate was a noisy place, too. People shouted and moaned as he passed, women as well as men. They clattered chains against the walls, and there always seemed to be a door slamming. A few prisoners had pewter cups or plates, and they clanged them against the bars of their windows – if they were lucky enough to occupy a chamber with real light. Others were crammed into dismal dungeons, their feet squelching in rotten straw as they paced back and forth.
‘The governor is stopping off at Smithfield Market for a bucket of bull’s blood on his way in,’ said Chaloner’s guide conversationally as they went. ‘His wife makes these puddings, see. I am sure he will not be long, though, and he likes it when friends come to see him.’
‘Oh,’ said Chaloner weakly, feeling his trepidation mount.
The guide escorted him to an ‘interviewing room’ and told him to wait. It was a nasty chamber, with a dirty lamp hanging from the ceiling and no furniture but a table and two chairs. The floor had been swept, but there was an ominous stain on one of the flagstones. Chaloner sat and rested his head in his hands, wondering whether he would be able to learn what he needed from Dillon and escape before the governor exposed him as an impostor.
‘Now there is a pose visitors should be encouraged to avoid,’ came a mocking voice from the doorway. Chaloner leapt to his feet, supposing the governor had arrived sooner than expected. ‘It is bad for the morale of the inmates.’
‘This is Mr Dillon, sir,’ said the guide, bowing as he backed out of the room. Chaloner shuddered when he heard a key turn in the door on the other side.
‘Why the gloom?’ asked Dillon. ‘I am supposed to be the one in despair – you are free.’
Chaloner only hoped he would remain so. Dillon wore a large hat that shielded the upper half of his face, although it was more affectation than disguise. He was extraordinarily well dressed, and was wiping greasy fingers on a clean piece of linen – Chaloner’s arrival had evidently interrupted his morning meal. He looked around the cell in distaste, flicking the chair with his cloth before deigning to lower his elegantly clad rump on to it. Dillon, it seemed, was no ordinary prisoner, but one who was afforded a considerable degree of comfort.
Meanwhile, Chaloner tried to push from his mind the fact that it had been Dillon’s refusal to kill an enemy that had brought about his old colleague Manning’s death, and he half wished Thurloe had not told him. It was difficult to sit in the same room as a man whose actions had resulted in the execution of a friend. Dillon removed his hat, revealing his face for the first time.
‘You!’ Chaloner exclaimed in astonishment.
Dillon raised his eyebrows, and spoke in the same laconic drawl Chaloner remembered from Ireland. ‘I might be forgiven for saying the same. What are you doing here, Garsfield? The guard said you are a friend of the governor, but I doubt you are anything of the kind.’
‘I did not know your name was Dillon,’ said Chaloner. ‘I thought it was O’Brien, and that you were one of the Dublin rebels who escaped when we rounded up the culprits.’
Dillon glanced towards the door and lowered his voice. ‘Not everything is as it seems. People called you Thomas Garsfield in Ireland, but I suspect you are actually Tom Heyden, Thurloe’s man. He said he might send you to see me if he could not come himself. However, from our brief acquaintance in Dublin, I was under the impression that you worked for the Earl of Clarendon.’