The King's List Page 6

  Ellie might be ill, but her voice was as sharp and inquisitive as ever. ‘How can I get to sleep when you make such a noise? Who are you talking to?’

  ‘I’m s-sorry, Mother.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s business, Mother.’

  ‘Come here.’ Her voice weakened and trembled into a wheedling tone which I did not remember, and which she must have fashioned during her trade as a whore.

  Sam stood at the door for a moment, twisting and turning, before telling her he would be up in a minute, and hurrying back to me. I told him he should see to his mother and I would return later.

  ‘She is –’ His lips tightened in frustration. He never finished the sentence, rushing over to a long trestle table behind the kiln, on which were a number of drug bottles and cheap-looking tumblers, the glass thick and foggy. He drew back a cloth, almost tenderly, showing an array of tubing and flasks such as you might see at an alchemist’s. The glass was thinner and clearer, albeit with a greenish tint.

  ‘I can make you pipettes, sir, b-beakers and bottles of course. Chemicals do not rot glass as they do metal and l-leather –’

  I saw that, in his eagerness, he was going to stumble. I knew the raised stone in that treacherous, uneven floor, having caught my foot in it many times, ruining work by dropping wet proofs or a forme. I moved almost before he tripped and, as the bottle slipped from his grasp, caught it, then caught him. He apologised profusely, floundering for support against me and the side of the kiln. Coals settled as he knocked against it, sending a bright flicker of light from the open kiln door which fell full on my face. I suppose it was the first time he had had a good look at me.

  ‘You have red hair like – like me, sir.’

  ‘Brown,’ I snapped, taken off-guard. ‘It looks red in certain lights.’

  He stared at me, clearly puzzled by my vehemence at what had been an innocent remark. Sweat was coursing down my face from the heat of the kiln.

  ‘Shall I take your cloak, sir?’

  I began to unclip it, but then realised I would have to remove my gloves, exposing the ring which bulged through them. ‘No, no. I am not staying.’

  The cold air at the door revived me. He looked so wretched in his disappointment at losing me as a possible patron I tried to soften the blow by changing my tone. I was also intrigued. ‘You declared a pox on both the radicals and the Royalists – what do you believe in?’

  In a whirl of movement he grabbed upwards as if he was catching a fly. He brought his closed fist down before me, opening it slowly. His palm was empty.

  ‘This, sir. This is what I believe in.’

  I recoiled, thinking him mad.

  ‘Air, sir.’

  ‘Air?’

  ‘People think it is one of the four prime elements, earth, fire, air and water.’

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘What you see in front of you is a fluid of massy particles resting on invisible springs.’

  I stared at him, then at his cupped, blackened palm, convinced now he was ripe for Bedlam. ‘I see nothing but your hand.’

  ‘Exactly, sir. But Mr B-Boyle has proved that air is a substance, pressing down on my hand.’

  I began to understand. Boyle was the son of an Irish peer, seeking to set up a society to promote natural philosophy. Sam must have mistaken me for one of his friends. ‘This is the same Robert Boyle who has constructed – what is it? An air pump?’

  His eyes lit up. ‘The same! The apparatus was made by his assistant Robert Hooke and I had the honour of blowing the glass.’

  ‘But … but – what has this to do with radicals and Royalists?’

  He looked at me triumphantly, subservience gone. ‘They are the same.’

  ‘The same? How can that be?’

  ‘In that they both believe in argument. Arg-argument that goes nowhere. Then they fight. But what does that prove? Only that one is the better fighter.’

  I began to warm to this strange youth again. ‘Mr Boyle knows a better way, does he?’

  ‘Indeed he does, sir, indeed he does,’ he cried with fervour. ‘Reason and experiment. Construct a theory, then prove it by an experiment others can repeat. People argued fr-fruitlessly whether air was essential to life. Mr Boyle put a bird in an air pump and drew out the air. The bird died. So did the argument.’

  He put it beautifully, transformed by his belief, face flushed, eyes shining. Again, I saw myself standing there, pamphlets singing in my head. No, it was poetry at that age. I had forgotten every line of it, scarcely believed I could have wasted my time over it.

  ‘Sadly,’ I said, ‘the world is not a laboratory.’

  ‘It will be, sir,’ he assured me, ‘it will be.’

  For a moment it was almost as if he was comforting me. He was talking nonsense, but it was infectious nonsense. We returned through the kitchen with its mildewed walls and scrap of rye bread. Out of the blue, in that tawdry room, with the acrid smell of burning coal drifting in from the shop, he became my son. Perhaps it was because the man he thought was his father had just died and I acutely felt his grief and need. Perhaps because I identified with his hopeless longings and dreams. Whatever the reason, what I had done for him before, I realised, had been out of guilt and duty. Now I felt such a tug of feeling for him I stopped abruptly. He was leading the way and turned to stare at me. I struggled to find the words to tell him, but they would not come.

  He gave me a concerned look. ‘What is it, sir?’

  ‘Sam?’ Ellie called. ‘Is he still there?’

  Ellie’s voice pulled me back to my senses. I muttered something and hurried through into the living room. That scrap of rye bread brought back the memories of gnawing hunger, of trying to stave it by almost breaking my teeth on those indigestible, black husks. As he showed me to the door I wrestled to find a way to help him. I could hardly order a laboratory of glass to be delivered to Queen Street. I could not offer him money. He was too proud and Ellie would be suspicious. Then I saw it and had the idea. It came fully formed, all in that moment.

  The one piece of furniture that had survived from more prosperous days was an old oak dresser. In the centre of it was a glass goblet, standing out against the dark wood.

  ‘Did you make that?’

  He dismissed it as a poor piece that was not worth selling. Once I picked it up I could see the flaws. The glass was misty and the base chipped. But the curved line was beautiful and a delicate design was engraved round the rim. I knew little about glass, but Anne did. For Highpoint she bought ruinously expensive Venetian glass as clear and sharp as this was dull. The Venetians kept the secret of the clarity of their glass as closely guarded as a miser keeps gold. Sam told me the goblet was one of a number of experiments from which he hoped to find the secret and break the Italian monopoly.

  ‘What is going on down there?’ Ellie cried. ‘Help me up …’ she muttered. There followed a series of creaks and sighs, then a heavy thump came from the ceiling above.

  ‘Make me a goblet,’ I said to Sam.

  He blinked at me, then shook his head. ‘I cannot. I will not sell such poor workmanship.’

  ‘That is to your credit but you don’t understand. I want you to experiment.’

  ‘Experiment?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you believe in? Make me a goblet as clear as Venetian glass. Discover the secret.’

  Sam seemed determined to be his own worst enemy. ‘B-but if I fail?’

  ‘You won’t fail. I believe in you. I will make the investment.’

  ‘Investment?’

  He gave me a bewildered stare as if he had never heard of the word. There was the rasp of a door opening upstairs. Through the partly open door at the bottom of the stairs I glimpsed the wavering edge of a nightdress, the ferrule of a stick. Sam continued stubbornly to stare at me. The idea began to feel hopeless and risky. He was too ill-educated to understand it. Or was his look that of someone who knows there is something wrong somewhere, but can’t quite put a fi
nger on it?

  ‘If you succeed I will take a share of the profits,’ I said.

  His face cleared. He understood that all right. His lips pursed and his expression became unexpectedly shrewd. There was a touch of the street child he was when I first met him, working in his mother’s brothel. ‘One th-third to you, t-two thirds to me.’

  We were like two men betting at a cock pit. His face was flushed, his eyes standing out by his hooked nose. ‘Sixty–forty,’ I said. ‘The majority to you.’

  ‘Done.’

  I clapped him on the back and drew out two sovereigns. ‘My initial investment. There will be more when the contract is drawn up.’

  He gaped at the coins, turning them over in his hands as if he could not believe they were real, dropping one and scurrying after it. I hurried away as I heard the steady thump of the stick on the stairs, followed by an expelled gasp of air as Ellie made her tortuous way downstairs.

  ‘Wait! I do not know your name, sir.’

  ‘Black. My solicitor at Lincoln’s Inn will contact you.’

  8

  From the beginning, as soon as I recovered my senses in Queen Street, it seemed a hopeless project. The Venetians guarded their secrets well. I wrote to one of my spies in Venice, offering a reward for information on the process. For the first time the flow of money from Queen Street to Highpoint was reversed. I starved it of the income from the estate’s London properties which were now substantial. After a fire at Half Moon Court and complaints from neighbours, I invested in a new kiln and laboratory in Clerkenwell.

  There I could visit him without any risk of seeing Ellie. He was kept busy making flasks and bottles where the quality of the glass did not matter.

  He made no progress at all that I could see on the project I had invested in. At first I did not care. I loved his eagerness, his hope, his despair, his determination, his belief. He was the return on my investment, not the project for a brilliantly clear glass which seemed like the search for the philosopher’s stone.

  Nevertheless, the more each firing failed, the more I was drawn into it. He tried different sands, different coals, higher and higher temperatures. Some days I got as excited as he did, sweating before the blistering heat of the kiln, waiting for the glass to form, spellbound as he blew and twirled the white-hot bubble, pacing up and down while waiting for it to cool. I was more optimistic than he was. It was better, I told him. I was sure it was clearer.

  ‘Look!’ I said.

  ‘Compare,’ he replied gloomily.

  Compare it with the previous firings. Crucially, with the piece of Venetian glass he kept as a standard. I had to admit it was as foggy as ever.

  ‘You see like a politician, sir,’ he said sourly.

  I reacted with some severity to his insolence, which he immediately apologised for; but I was secretly proud of him. Inside all that deference he was his own man. I had no inclination to acknowledge him as my son. It was too complicated. It might harm or even destroy our relationship; from birth I had had nothing but bitter experiences, both as son and as father. I enjoyed the secrecy. I had forgotten the pleasure of real work; of getting my hands dirty. I donned a smock in Clerkenwell and became Tom Neave; I hung it up, put on my cloak and rode back to Queen Street as Sir Thomas. My humours were perfectly in balance again.

  I was affected in other ways. Living behind my desk or in meetings had removed me from the world where I had been brought up. Clerkenwell brought me back in touch with it. When the case came against the Quaker, Stephen Butcher, I went to see him in Newgate. I found that his main ambition was not to sing here, but in the New World. As a sailor, he was in a position to organise it. I withdrew my case against him and, with Highpoint money, funded his expedition, on the premise that it was both a more Christian and more effective way to clear the streets.

  Mr Pepys not only bought me a large chop and a bottle of the best claret to thank me for Lord Montague vegetating in the country and not in the Tower. Knowing my inclinations, he offered to introduce me to a very pretty widow in straitened circumstances. To his surprise, and in a certain degree to mine, I refused, on the grounds that I was far too busy.

  ‘I thought you were out of office, sir.’

  ‘I have various projects.’ I waved an airy hand, as if they were affairs of state.

  ‘Are you, er … already accommodated?’

  I shook my head and concentrated on my chop. He picked a shred of meat from his teeth, staring at me thoughtfully. ‘I do believe you are in love, sir.’

  I laughed, spluttering wine and almost choking on my chop. ‘What absolute nonsense, Pepys!’

  Obsession was the word I would have chosen. It was the third and most important of my projects. I wanted no diversion from the task in hand. I was determined to have Anne, and on my own terms. I made no more approaches. I was assiduous to her at supper. I took no more correspondence to table. I even took an interest in Luke’s clothes, asking for his advice on the correct width of britches that season. He looked at me with deep suspicion of my motives, but was far too stiff and polite to question them.

  It was when I sold land at Highpoint for Clerkenwell that Anne asked to see me in private. Because the transaction was done by my lawyer, Christopher Newton, she was convinced I had changed my will. I told her the truth. I needed the money. It was clear she did not believe me. Up to that moment I’d had no idea what I was doing, except that I was enjoying myself hugely: I had forgotten what enjoyment was.

  It was during that cold, acrimonious conversation with her that it came to me. I would divide everything between my two sons. Not only would it be fair and equable, but it would divide up Highpoint. I would sell it piecemeal. It was a destructive, malign force. From the moment I was born it had nearly killed me. It had destroyed any chance of a relationship between me and my father, corroded that between me and my wife. I decided I would destroy it.

  ‘I have a right to know if you change your will, sir.’

  ‘The will is in my gift,’ I said in my new, mild tone which infuriated her.

  We met on neutral ground, in the reception room on the ground floor, where I sometimes took a glass of port or sack after supper. There were no prying servants from either side, only satyrs chasing nymphs endlessly round the oval ceiling. She was more than usually modestly dressed, her low neckline covered by a gorget, the opening in her long dress showing only a touch of underskirt. She wore no jewellery and, so far as I could discern, no perfume.

  ‘In your gift to leave to Luke,’ she said.

  ‘He will be provided for.’

  ‘Provided for? What does that mean? You are punishing him for his beliefs?’

  ‘No. He can love his precious King to his heart’s content. But when he lies to me and gets involved in plots behind my back, then I shall punish him.’

  She would not give up. She said Luke had made no undertaking not to take part in the uprising and accused me of turning him into a Royalist because I had set myself against him from the beginning. I had ignored him – when I was ever there to see him – stopped him from becoming a soldier, which he dreamed of –

  ‘To protect him. I know what soldiers are like. With his scarred face, his mannerisms –’

  ‘You know what soldiers are like? Yes,’ she cried bitterly. ‘Do you know what he is like? You made him feel weak. Hopeless. That is why he became a Royalist. Because they would accept him as he is. As he wants to be.’

  I was incredulous. ‘I turned him into a Royalist? If anyone did that it’s you. You’ve become more a Royalist than anyone who was born one.’

  ‘Do you think I want the King back? I want another Cromwell. Order. But if the King returns …’

  ‘Long live the King? I don’t have that option.’

  It was odd. Very curious. We had never discussed it. I had never wanted Highpoint. In fact I had hated the very idea of it. But Anne’s obsession for it had driven her to the point of madness. She would not eat and scarcely drank unless the liquid was forced
down her. She was skin and bone that day twelve years ago when Cromwell’s son-in-law, Ireton, called. He was desperate to get people of any stature to sign the King’s death warrant. The staunchest Parliamentarians suddenly had urgent business in their country estates, or were too indisposed to pick up a pen. Ireton offered me the Stonehouse estate in return for signing the death warrant. It was almost as bald as that.

  Anne had come in. It was the first time she had left her bed since her illness. I could see her thin, wasted figure, hear her cracked voice before she collapsed in my arms.

  ‘Mr Ireton … it is good of you to come at last.’

  I signed. That was the day I became Sir Thomas Stonehouse. Had I really been so much, so despairingly, in love with her?

  For the first time, as we stared in silence at one another across the reception room, we acknowledged, without saying a word, that I might have signed my own death warrant.

  In the hall there was the rattle of plates being taken from the dining room. I stared up at the ceiling where, in the candle-lit shadows, even the satyrs seemed to have stopped chasing the nymphs. The raised voice of the ostler passed, complaining to someone about the shortage of fodder for the horses. Everything was short and would get shorter until a new government was formed. If there was a tax strike, as the City threatened, everything would stop altogether.

  ‘Could it happen?’ she asked. ‘The King?’

  Somewhere a door banged, making both of us jump. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What does Thurloe think?’

  I did not answer, again because I did not know. She thought I was seeing him every week, or going to the City to sound out the aldermen who mattered. I resolved that the next day I would see Thurloe. The trouble was once I got involved, it would take over the whole of my life, every waking moment and half my sleep. I would have to do it, I thought. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow Sam had a new silica mix for the firing for which he had the highest hopes. Once I had not turned up and he thought I had abandoned the project. I remembered the look on his face. I could not bear that.