The King's List Page 5

  ‘Another girl,’ I said harshly. ‘Is that what it was?’

  She continued staring out of the window. Her voice was so soft I could scarcely hear her against the cries from the street.

  ‘A boy.’

  Her voice broke. The breeze strengthened, whipping a gust of smoke from the fire. It billowed around us. She began coughing and I shut the window and led her back to her chair. The tea was cold but she would not let me call the maid. She took tiny sips until her coughing abated, staring into the fire. Rather than warm her, it seemed to make her colder, for however close she crept to it she kept shivering.

  ‘Was it the fire that caused it?’ she said. ‘The smoke? Or the riots? But there are always riots.’

  She seemed to ask the question of the glowing, shifting coals, not me. For the first time it occurred to me that, as I had done, she had split herself into two halves. It was the Anne she had once been, a distant, remote figure whom Lady Stonehouse, in that impeccable voice, was questioning.

  It was one of them, or all of them, she answered herself. The riots were the ones that broke up Parliament before Cromwell took over. I had been in the thick of it, while my own house was burning. She turned on me then. It was the old Anne, full of bitterness and contempt, but how I preferred that to Lady Stonehouse’s icy indifference.

  ‘You were never there,’ she kept whispering, as if the incantation expressed our whole story.

  She told me it was not only Luke’s face that was damaged in the fire. She was seven months pregnant. Perhaps eight. She went into labour as she was trying to comfort Luke at her close friend Lucy’s house – the house where she would have been when the fire happened, if I had not forbidden her to go there because I suspected her old friend and mentor Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, of spying for the King.

  Her face was flushed from the fire, but still she shivered. ‘He was perfect.’

  ‘A boy?’

  ‘A boy.’ Her voice was hollow, a mere wisp of sound.

  ‘But how could I not have known?’

  I shook my head as she turned, the answer coming to me. Arriving late – always too late – that burning afternoon and believing them to be in the house, I had made a futile attempt to rescue them, sustaining injuries from which it took me weeks to recover.

  ‘He was perfect,’ she repeated.

  ‘Was he?’

  She nodded, cradling her arms as if she was still holding him. The warmth of the fire enveloped us, shutting out the rest of the room. I bent over, picturing him as she described him. A mischievous smile crossed her face, a smile from years ago, young, eager, hopeful.

  ‘He was not so much of a Stonehouse.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, the nose, of course. But he had your red hair …’

  ‘Not my terrible red hair!’

  ‘I swear it. He was like you … I kept thinking his eyes would open –’

  Her voice choked off. I held her. She was like a small bird I once held who could not fly, still but constantly trembling. Gradually, in fits and starts, she told me how she would not release the child, refusing to believe he was dead. Only when Dr Latchford and Lucy told her she might lose Luke as well did she let him go. He was buried with Liz. Mr Tooley said prayers over him and christened him.

  ‘What did you call him?’

  ‘Thomas.’

  The servant lighting the candles knocked but I told him to return later. She rubbed her elbows as if they had just borne the weight of a child. The coals had burned down to a dull flickering crimson. One fell on to the tiles.

  ‘Why did you not tell me any of this?’

  She stared at the eddying shreds of smoke from the fallen coal. Only when I snatched it up and flung it into the fire did she answer. ‘Do you think you would have kept it a secret?’

  ‘A secret? Why should I keep it a secret?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Just as it had been then, she went from an unexpected closeness to sudden acrimonious bitterness.

  ‘You would never have kept it to yourself. When Lord Stonehouse heard, that would have been the end of it.’

  Of course. With a burned child, frail as Luke was then, a stillbirth and no prospects, Lord Stonehouse would have written us off. A pity he didn’t, I thought. Now she did not want any more children because she had what she wanted. She was about to call the maid to see to the fire and the candles, but I stopped her. I wanted the darkness to continue, the closeness to return. I kissed her, gently, tentatively. Her eyes closed and for a while she leaned against me.

  ‘We could try again.’

  ‘Again?’

  She rose, looking around her as if she had just woken in a strange place. In a spurt of light from the fire she caught sight of a smear of coal dust on her cheek. She dabbed at it with a cloth. Like an actor slipping from one role to another, with each touch her reserve seemed to return.

  ‘I am sorry, sir. I told you. I cannot, must not, have another child.’

  I felt the stupid formality that had kept us apart for so long creeping back into my own voice. ‘If that is true, madam, I will of course abide by it. See Dr Latchford again. That is all I ask.’

  She put down the cloth. ‘Very well.’

  I found myself giving her a formal bow. Halfway through it I had a spurt of uncontrollable rage. She had Dr Latchford in her pocket. ‘And I would like another opinion. From a doctor of my choice.’

  She rounded on me. ‘You have a son!’

  ‘Luke?’

  It came out then. All I had been brooding over since Luke and Anne had been in London that winter. The burning of his face, I said, his scars, his damaged childhood, that was my fault. I had always accepted that. I had done everything I could to make amends. He had had the best doctors, tutors and, when I discovered horses were his passion and would draw out those sickly humours, some of the best stables in the country. There was nothing I would not do for him. He stood for everything I despised. Well, that was common enough. The son rebelling against the father. I bore even that. He was entitled to his opinions, obnoxious though I thought they were. How did he repay me? By joining that rebellion. I warned him against it – not because it was Royalist but because I knew it would be a disaster.

  ‘And you expected him to believe you?’

  I retorted that she always took his side. She had made him into a milksop. I should have done what other fathers do and taken the whip to him.

  That would have been better than ignoring him, she said acidly. Most of the time I was never there. When I was I had been cold, distant. What I had given him was money, when what he really wanted was a father.

  And so on. I stopped listening, for it was at that precise moment the thought struck me. Why was I arguing when I had all the power I needed to do exactly what I wanted? No sooner were the words in my head than I spoke them. ‘I intend to change my will so Luke will not inherit.’

  7

  I locked myself in my study and would not see anyone, even John Thurloe who wrote that the situation was getting critical. It was remote, but possible that the King might return. I scarcely finished Thurloe’s letter. The situation was always critical.

  What consumed me and kept me awake in the middle of the night was that bizarre outburst when I said I was going to change my will. At first it felt like an explosion of temper. A fit of pique. An empty threat. Anne certainly read it as such. She retorted I could not do it because the estate was entailed to the eldest son. But Cromwell had broken the entail. The estate was mine. I could dispose of it in any way I wished.

  ‘Who would you leave it to?’ she demanded.

  ‘To whom would you leave it?’ I corrected.

  That was the end of the conversation. Her voice and manner were so impeccable, she loathed it when I corrected her grammar. But she was right. To whom would I leave it? A candle-maker?

  It was she who had put the thought into my head. ‘You have a son.’

  Indeed I had. One she knew nothing about. The ba
stard that came when I left Anne to live with Ellie and became a Leveller. Apart from me, only Scogman knew of his existence. I had met him only the once, when he was a boy, too young for him to remember. He believed the candle-maker who lived with Ellie and to whom he was apprenticed was his father. Ellie had been sworn to secrecy. I trusted her – but, just in case, had made it clear that if she broke that trust she would lose the house. I took the file out of my drawer. Samuel Reeves. Closed. As soon as I looked at Scogman’s scrawl, noting that, through the years, at a cost of £109 8s 6d, he had been indentured, fed, clothed, educated so he could write and sign his name, add, subtract and multiply and progress from candles to candlesticks, the ludicrousness of the idea struck me. A candle-maker!

  I shut the file in my drawer again, but could not shut it out of my mind. Deciding to scotch the idea once and for all and destroy the file, I rode to Farringdon.

  It must have been early afternoon when I slowed my horse at the beginning of Cloth Fair but the low dark clouds gave it the pallor of evening. Spots of rain were falling. A figure came out of Half Moon Court. At first it was not the man I recognised, but his bag, the leather cracked and split so that the cupping instruments gleamed through. Dr Chapman used to come regularly to bleed Mr Black, the printer who had apprenticed me. I watched him go towards St Bartholomew’s, a limp distorting his old, familiar bustle, feeling an unexpected pang of emotion. A voice called out after him and I gripped the reins in shock.

  The youth who ran out of the court was myself. He ran for the joy of running, as much as to catch Dr Chapman and hand him some instrument he had forgotten. He was as polite with the old man as if he had forgotten the instrument himself, before striding back to the court, drops of rain gleaming in hair as red as fire. The hair was as brash and coarse as mine used to be. I tried to turn away as he saw me across the street and checked his stride. But it was merely to touch his forehead deferentially before vanishing into the court, whistling.

  If I had thought for a second, I would not have done anything so stupid. But I was not thinking. Old forgotten feelings I thought had long gone rushed into me. I tethered my horse and, like one of the spies I employed, slipped through the entrance into the court. It was empty. The apple tree stood forlornly in the centre of the court, the last of its dead leaves hanging limply from it. I slipped behind it as I used to do as a child. There was no sign of the youth – Samuel. I had almost forgotten his name. A candle was burning in the room above the shop. Below the gable, where a half moon had swung when I was an apprentice printer, was the sign of a candlestick.

  The rattling of a pail came from the coal shed. I was about to retreat from the shelter of the tree when I heard a woman’s giggle, then the youth’s voice.

  ‘Mary, please don’t distract me.’

  ‘Dis –?’

  ‘Stop me from working.’

  ‘O, it is impossible to do that, sir. You are always working.’ Her voice had a knowing pertness, followed by a deep sigh of regret.

  The shed door creaked open, throwing light on the pair. The maid’s apron was smeared with grease and her face marked with acne, but I could see how the tilt of her chin and the line of her breasts roused him. What fools we are at that age, I thought, with a growing sense of disappointment – and not only at that age, perhaps.

  Now I was closer, I could see he was not like me at all. It was the hair more than anything. That and the Stonehouse nose. But it was the eyes that drew the attention, black, mild and enquiring; that, and his large roughened hands, tradesman-dexterous as they turned over a jagged piece of coal. My disenchantment deepened. Well, nothing fancy, I had told Scogman when he was planning his education, and nothing fancy was what I had got. Coarse and unkempt, he looked what he would always be: a candle-maker. I began to move back towards the entrance.

  ‘These are the coals for the kiln, Mary. Not these. They have too much sulphur in them. You can see the difference.’

  ‘Show me.’

  She leaned forward, her dress dipping so he could see the curve of her breasts. I could feel the charge drawing them together like metal to a magnet. I turned away and had almost reached the entrance when out of the house came what sounded like the hollow beat of a drum. For a moment I was a boy again, running upstairs to my old master, who when he was ill, used to strike the floor with his stick.

  ‘Go to my mother, Mary,’ the youth said. ‘The doctor has just cupped her.’

  Mary came out of the shed with a flounce and saw me before I could reach the gloom of the entrance. She gave me a curtsey, followed by a look of curiosity. She was staring at my ring. In the dimness the glittering emerald eyes of the falcon seemed to produce their own light.

  ‘Sam!’ she called.

  ‘See to my mother,’ Sam ordered, emerging from the shed.

  Hastily, clumsily, I pulled on my gloves. Sam brushed coal dust from his breeches. There was a smear of coal across his cheek. His nails were as engrained with filth and coal as mine used to be with ink.

  ‘Were – were you looking for me, sir?’ he said, with a slight stammer.

  I was struck dumb by being such a fool as to come here. I clasped my hands behind my back as if afraid he could see the ring through the gloves. My initial warmth at seeing him was swept away by close sight of this gawky youth whose head seemed too big for his body, and the creaking old house, whose gable seemed about to topple into the courtyard. Was this really where I had come from? Where I had been brought up? Anne, who had a more pitilessly realistic memory than me, had been right never to come back here. It was little more than a hovel.

  I was about to ask him directions to get to Holborn when he said: ‘Are you the g-gentleman Mr H-Hooke said might call?’

  ‘Mr Hooke?’

  ‘Mr Boyle’s laboratory assistant?’

  I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about but there was something so eager, so hopeful in his manner, I began to relent a little from my summary dismissal of him. And curiosity bit me. Laboratory? What on earth was he getting involved in?

  ‘I might be,’ I grunted.

  He must have taken my hesitation as a reaction against the squalor of the place, since he apologised for it, saying his father had recently died and he was only just putting the house to rights.

  ‘He was a candle-maker,’ I said.

  He stared at me. He had the peering eyes of someone who does much close work. I pointed to the sign of the candle swinging from the gable.

  ‘He made candles after the war,’ he said, seeming ashamed of candles. ‘When things were bad. P-people always need candles. He was trained as a glass-maker and he taught me. He was a w-wonderful –’

  He turned away as his voice caught. I was both touched by this feeling for the man he thought his father and felt an obscure stab of pain for something I had lost, although how could I have lost something I never had? Mixed with it was a twinge of jealousy. Would Luke have anything like this reaction for me?

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  I could feel the heat from the kiln as we approached the house. From upstairs came a murmur of voices.

  ‘Who? What sort of cove, Mary?’ The voice, coming from upstairs, was weak and querulous but the strong Spitalfield accent came back to me as if it was yesterday. I stopped on the step. The last person I wanted to see was Ellie.

  ‘He’s a customer, Mrs Reeves.’

  ‘That’ll be the day!’ Ellie laughed. ‘I told him to stick to candles. Candles is secure, candles is.’ She broke out coughing and could not stop.

  Everything suggested that whatever had replaced candles was not secure. Half Moon Court had fallen on hard times. A window frame was rotting and the wall round it damp and mildewed. On the kitchen table was a piece of rye bread of the poorest quality.

  Sam, hearing his mother’s bitter comments, had gone as red as the mouth of the kiln.

  ‘I do not want to disturb your mother,’ I said.

  ‘My – my m
other is ill, sir. The maid is looking after her.’ Sam rushed over and shut the door which led to the stairs, cutting off their voices. ‘Please let me show you. I could equip you a whole laboratory, if that is your desire.’

  He had the occasional odd choice of word or phrase, as if selecting what he thought a gentleman would like to hear.

  ‘A whole laboratory,’ I murmured, on edge at the thought of Ellie upstairs, but unable to overcome my curiosity.

  We went into the shop. The stone kiln was where the printing machine had once stood, its flue going into the back wall. It used to be hot when we were printing. This was like stepping into an oven, although he apologised for the kiln being ‘down’, as he put it. The maid had put in the wrong coal and he had to let it cool and start it up again before he blew any more glass. Light from the still glowing coals fitfully lit up the room which seemed much larger. I could not work out why until I suddenly realised.

  ‘This is where the office used to be!’ I exclaimed, without thinking.

  He stared at me. ‘You have been here before?’

  I cursed myself. I pointed to the ceiling in a shadowy corner. ‘I can see the line of alteration.’

  ‘You have sharp eyes, sir.’ A compliment, or was there a trace of suspicion? ‘This used to be a printing shop.’ His nose wrinkled in distaste. ‘A hotbed of radicalism.’

  ‘Was it indeed!’ I pretended to look shocked, intrigued and amused that, brought up in such modest surroundings, this youth should have such pretensions. ‘You are a Royalist, sir?’

  ‘A Royalist?’ He laughed. For a moment I could see myself in him at his age, full of arrogant certainty, that the world was wrong, must be changed and he had the solution. ‘A p-pox on both their houses! B-both the King and Cromwell destroyed this country!’

  ‘They did?’

  He crumpled suddenly, running his hand feverishly through his red hair. A flake of coal fell from the tangled mop. He might not have been on either side, but his change in manner, his body dipping in deference, told me he had abruptly remembered one should always be on the side of the patron. He gave a stumbled apology for what he called going beyond his station. Before he could continue, the stick thumped violently on the ceiling. He gave me an agitated, apologetic wring of the hands before running to the door at the bottom of the stairs and opening it.