The King's List Page 10

  ‘How can he loiter with intent in his own house?’

  ‘He was upstairs, wasn’t he? I saw him from here through that window up there. He slipped into an alcove. Looked suspicious to me, but I told myself Sir Thomas has told me to trust him and trust him I will …’ Scogman spoke with the injured relish of someone who has been right all along but not believed.

  ‘Get on with it.’

  He told me he heard a cry which sounded as if someone had been struck. He ran back inside where he found Mr Cole sprawled out on some chairs on the landing, his papers all over the place, with Luke standing over him.

  ‘He hit Mr Cole? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘That’s what it looked like to me, sir. He had picked up a file and was reading one of your letters. I grabbed him. He called me a thief and said I was the one who should be arrested for stealing money from the estate and salting it away in Clerkenwell.’

  ‘The kiln?’

  ‘Just so, sir.’

  My mouth was so dry I had to swallow several times before I could speak. ‘How did he find out about that?’

  It turned out that Scogman had been followed. He was as indignant as a gamekeeper who finds he has been stalked by a poacher. Luke, in his newfound freedom, seemed to have followed Scogman when he made payments to Sam to fund the kiln. It was at this point that, according to Scogman, Lady Stonehouse dismissed him. I told Scogman to go back into the house and stay there until I called him.

  ‘Does that mean I’m not dismissed, sir?’

  ‘Let me talk to Lady Stonehouse.’

  ‘I’d rather stay here, sir, until I know where I am.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘He’s talked to Sam, sir.’

  ‘Luke?’ It felt as though the chill of that day had entered my blood and frozen it. ‘Does he know who Sam is?’

  ‘I don’t know. That was when Lady Stonehouse told me to go.’

  Once there would have been a number of people waiting for me in reception. Now there was only Alderman Collins. I had to have the City’s reaction to Monck, but he could wait. He was paid for it. I could hear Luke’s voice on the landing and as I went up the stairs could see the swirl of Anne’s skirts. They were so intent on one another and Luke so distraught, they did not hear me.

  ‘I must see him. I will see him,’ Luke said. He was holding a letter.

  ‘Give it to me.’ She held out her hand for the letter.

  He shook his head. ‘I got myself into this and I must deal with it myself, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ll only make matters worse. I’ll handle your father.’

  He shook his head stubbornly. For a moment it looked as though she was going to snatch the letter from him. Then she saw me.

  ‘Go to your room, Luke,’ she said.

  He swivelled his terrified eyes towards me, hesitating. The letter he was holding was the one from the agent in Amsterdam. ‘Luke wants to see me,’ I said. ‘And I certainly want to see him.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let me –’

  ‘Handle it?’

  She flushed, twisting her fingers together. ‘I meant, sir, you always get the wrong ideas about one another –’

  She looked past me down into the hall. James and the other servants were pretending not to see us. I held out my hand for the letter. Mutely, Luke gave it to me and followed me into my study.

  14

  I sent for Mr Cole but was told he was ill. Luke looked ill as well, feverish, breathing irregularly as if he had been running. I told him to sit down. He shook his head and stood vacantly, not even finding the customary line in the carpet. Only when I asked him if he had struck Mr Cole did he look at me with astonishment and come to furious life.

  ‘Strike him? Is that what that thieving rogue Scogman told you?’

  ‘Show some respect for him.’

  Far from striking him, Luke protested, he had gone to help the old man, who appeared to have had some kind of fit. Luke had reached him as he began to collapse and helped him to a chair, where the papers slipped from his hand. After calling the servants, he picked up the fallen papers himself, for he knew they must be confidential. He stared at the letter on my desk. He had seen it came from Amsterdam and because he knew his grandfather had died there could not help reading it. He admitted that.

  ‘Then the rogue –’ He swallowed and controlled himself. ‘Your steward, Mr Scogman, laid his hands on me.’ He brushed his clothes with movements of disgust, as if Scogman had permanently soiled them. ‘I am afraid I lost my temper, sir. I know he has served with you, but I am afraid you do not seem to see what is happening. He has taken money from the estate and bought a glass-works in Clerkenwell. It is not in the London accounts.’

  ‘You study these accounts, do you?’

  He shifted uncomfortably. ‘My mother does.’

  This must have been when we were in the middle of our bitter arguments, when she thought I had changed my will. ‘She suggested you follow him?’

  He stared past me, a look of what I could only call shame crossing his face. Following someone through the backstreets of Clerkenwell was not the act of a gentleman, but reduced him to Scogman’s sordid level. ‘She said you would not believe me unless you had proof.’

  ‘And you have that proof?’

  He had. He was convinced of it. When Scogman had gone he went into the glass-works, pretending to have an interest in the subject, and talked to the glass-blower.

  ‘Did you indeed,’ I said. I thought of Thurloe asking if I was secure and the letters to Monck that had been intercepted. Every time I believed I knew Luke, something happened to confound the picture. ‘You are becoming quite an accomplished spy, Luke.’

  ‘Is it spying to try and protect your own property?’ he flashed, before correcting himself. ‘The estate’s property?’

  ‘And what did you make of this glass-blower?’

  ‘Another rogue, sir!’ I went to the window and stared out, afraid my expression would betray me. My reaction encouraged him in his vilification of the half-brother he did not know existed. ‘Uncouth. Hair the colour of Devil’s blood. He told me the works were owned by a man called Black, obviously a name Scogman has assumed.’

  I let him wait while I pretended to make some notes. I had not worked for Thurloe for years without watching him in cross-examination. Picking up some of the tricks. The mildness. The pauses. Above all, the simple, unexpected question.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Where?’ He gave me a startled look, like a deer who thinks he has heard a sound, but is uncertain whether to run or not.

  ‘The way down to the vault. That’s a servant’s passage, isn’t it?’

  ‘I – I heard him cry out.’

  ‘Scogman said he saw you hiding in an alcove and then following Mr Cole. Is that true?’ He was breathing more quickly, rubbing at his chest as if it was sore. ‘Luke?’

  ‘Yes.’ He spoke so low I could scarcely hear him. ‘When you told Mother my grandfather was dead I wanted to know when he had died … what had happened …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? He is … was … my grandfather.’

  His breathing took on the steady crackle that I remembered from his childhood illnesses. It crossed my mind that he used his illness, perhaps even faked it. Perhaps his professed feelings, along with the respect he had shown me in the last months, were faked too.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I … I touched Mr Cole on the shoulder. He was startled. He was not feeling well, I think. He dropped the papers. I helped him to a chair and when the servants came I picked up the papers. Then Scogman came and accused me of stealing them.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stealing them?’

  He gave me that old, superior look of contempt which had irked me so much when he was in prison. ‘I will not even answer that, Father. I wanted to find out when … how my grandfather died.’

&
nbsp; ‘He died in a brawl.’

  He stared at the letter from Amsterdam on my desk, his rasping breath the only sound in the room. He could surely have got little from the letter. Even if he knew the code, he would have had no time to decode it. His eyes only left the letter to stare again at the map of the Highpoint estate, as if he was longing to be there in the pure air of the country. He mumbled something, more to the map than to me.

  ‘I cannot hear you, Luke.’

  ‘What does that say?’ He pointed to the letter.

  ‘It confirms the purchase of some jewellery.’

  ‘I know what goes on in this room.’ His voice became shrill. ‘They use codes in the Sealed Knot.’

  ‘Not very successfully.’

  ‘No,’ he said bitterly. ‘No. That’s true.’

  ‘You followed Mr Cole, didn’t you?’

  His look became sullen, defiant. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Intending to read this letter?’

  ‘Yes. I had to.’

  ‘Had to?’

  He almost spat out the words. ‘For your sake.’

  ‘My sake? Stop talking in riddles. Look at me. Have you read any more of my private correspondence?’

  He gave me a look as if the question was not worth answering. ‘No.’ He glared at me directly. ‘I am not like one of your spies.’ His gaze never flinched; either he was very good, or he was telling the truth.

  ‘Two months ago I wrote a letter to General Monck. It never arrived. Did you see that letter?’ There was a tiny stiffening of his body, a checking of his breath. ‘The letter never reached Monck. A courier was murdered …’

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said.

  ‘What is it, Luke?’

  He was completely still. There was no sound except for the steady rasp of his breath and the flickering of the fire. I had been through many such moments during the war, when torture was a matter of course on both sides. I never used it. People would say anything to stop the pain. Far better to find a point of weakness and let a man torture himself. The art then was to be like, well, what I was. A father. To be gentle, caring, understanding, sympathetic; above all to stop questioning: he would do that himself. I could see the self-interrogation in the growing fear in his eyes, the increased tempo of his crackling breath, the dart of his tongue across his dry lips. I rang for a servant to bring in some cordial. At first he refused it, but when I put it back on my desk he almost grabbed it from me. Finally, when, lips shining with cordial, he began to talk, what he said was the last thing I expected.

  ‘You must go, Father.’

  ‘Go? Where?’

  The cordial had soothed his throat and his voice came out more strongly, urgently. ‘Europe. Anywhere. There is no time to lose. Go now. Before it is too late.’ He twisted his hands together, speaking in the hackneyed phrases of a mystery play. ‘There is an army you cannot defeat.’

  ‘The King has raised another army?’

  My heart sank. In spite of what I had said and the botch-ups and betrayals of the last rebellion, he was involved in the Sealed Knot again. At least he was telling me about it, instead of him being involved in another crazy enterprise.

  ‘Where is this army? Ireland? The Netherlands?’

  He seemed totally unaware of the scepticism in my voice. ‘Have you heard of the King’s List?’

  The Puritans had closed the theatres, censored print and condemned bear baiting and cock fighting. But they could not put an end to betting. Somewhere most nights south of London Bridge there was always a pair of gamecocks fighting. And when people could not bet on the cocks there was always the public hanging. They would wager on whether a man would die game or piss in his britches. How long it would take him to die. Would he accept the preacher or curse him? Would the doctors seize his body or his relatives claim him for burial?

  No one knew who started it. When London ground to a halt there was a lull even in public hangings. The King’s List began to circulate in coffee houses where they took wagers on the King coming back. The list was a grisly adjunct to that: offering odds on the regicides; who would stay, taking his chance on the King’s mercy; who would run and, of those who gambled and stayed, who would be caught and hanged, drawn and quartered.

  ‘I believe I am number eleven on the list.’

  ‘Number nine.’

  ‘The odds must have shortened.’

  ‘It is not a joke, Father.’

  ‘Go on. Enlighten me.’

  He was not talking about the gamblers’ list, circulating round the taverns, he said. There was a real King’s List, naming people who would be executed when the King landed. It was held by Edward Hyde, Charles’s chief counsellor in Brussels. Luke claimed to have seen a copy of it.

  An alehouse pamphleteer would have headed it with John Cooke, who prosecuted King Charles at his trial. Any fool could list the regicides. Of the sixty-nine who signed the death warrant, forty-one were still alive. It was a name, Cooke insisted, that was missing that marked it out as a forgery, a tawdry piece of Royalist propaganda. Although he had not signed the death warrant, any genuine list would have had, after Cooke, the man who had been closest to Cromwell.

  ‘John Thurloe will be mortified to know he is not there.’

  ‘He is not on the list.’

  ‘It is nonsense, Luke. Claptrap. Whoever has shown you this is trying to get at me.’

  His voice became low and quiet. ‘It is true. I know you think I am a fool, Father, but I am not that much of a fool. Thurloe’s name was there but it had been crossed out.’

  A chill crept into me, like damp finding old wounds. I only realised the light was going when I could not see Luke’s expression, lost in the deepening shadows. I remembered the meeting with Thurloe. Had there been a change in his attitude towards Charles Stuart? For the first time he had considered Charles as a possibility, albeit remote. I had never before heard him confess that he had no idea what was going on. No idea? I tried to remember the name of the man in the Monck file. I should have made a note of it.

  I strode across the room and pulled open the door. ‘Are there no candles left in this house?’

  Servants scurried, colliding with one another as they removed stumps, trimmed old candles and put in new. The taper boy, flame cupped in his hand, rushed to light them as soon as they were in place. Luke blinked at the sudden light, reduced from a threatening shadow to a youth playing soldiers.

  ‘Where did you get this nonsense from? The Sealed Knot?’

  ‘It is not nonsense and it is not from the Sealed Knot. I told you I would leave them and I do not break my word.’ He started to cough again.

  ‘Then where did you see the list?’

  He shook his head violently. The coughing had brought tears to his eyes and he brushed them away angrily. I was sure he was telling the truth. It would have been easier if he told me half-truths and lies, as most people did. Eventually they always tripped themselves up, but with this obdurate honesty the more I questioned him, the more he tightened his lips. Much as he exasperated me I could not help admiring him for it. In the leaping light of the candles I could see behind his belligerence the fear in his eyes, in the constant twist of his thin, beautiful fingers.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because you are my father.’

  No subtlety was needed to interpret Luke’s expression. The fear in his face was as vivid as a slash of Dutch oil paint. He would break soon. Perversely, in that instant, I didn’t want him to. I wanted him to be better than that. His eyes stared, his lips quivered. I changed my tone, as the anglers have it, easing him through the pain so the line does not break.

  ‘I am grateful. It sounds like a forgery. But if it is not, there are other people on the list I have a duty to warn. You do see that, Luke, don’t you?’

  He did. It was evident in his constant drawing of his tongue over his dry lips, his eyes staring anywhere but at me. He knew, or had met, a number of people on that list. Some he loathed, but some he respected,
had even warmed to as a child before he knew what the word regicide meant. A number of them had been to Queen Street recently, and we had agreed to warn each other if we heard about the King’s plans. A few, taking no chances, had already left the country. Outside a carriage approached, silent except for the cry of the driver.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he muttered.

  There was a knock at the door. ‘No,’ I called, but the door was opened by James, on duty at reception in the front hall. ‘I said no.’ He shut the door immediately, muttering an apology. I struggled to hold on to the moment between me and Luke through the scuttering of James’s feet across the marble hall, but my anger at his interruption found its way into my voice. From that moment I lost Luke. It would be more accurate to say I lost myself.

  ‘If you do not tell me where you saw the list I will have you arrested.’

  He stood up. This time he found the line in the carpet. He seemed more comfortable there. ‘You are not in power now, Father. Nor will be.’

  ‘I am not, but to the people who are, even talking of this list is seditious. You can tell me where you saw it, or you can tell them. It is your choice. Go to your room. You have an hour to think about it.’

  He stood stiffly to attention. For a moment I thought he was going to salute me before he plunged away, stumbling, almost falling as he went up the stairs towards his rooms. In the hall I told James never to interrupt me in that way again. He stammered out another apology. He knew that normally I should not be interrupted, but Alderman Collins said he had been waiting an hour and could not wait any longer, and he thought that was important.

  I ran into the street. The moon was coming up, its ghostly light glinting in footprints and the winding track of the carriage that had arrived for Alderman Collins when I was totally absorbed in Luke. Like an angry, petulant child, I kicked at the already freezing track, slipping and almost falling. James was staring at me from the top of the steps.

  ‘You were quite right, James,’ I said. ‘It was important.’

  A month ago, no matter how long I kept them waiting, nobody would have dared do that to me.