The King's List Page 8

  ‘Eye or heart?’

  He stared at the carpet.

  ‘This is why you’re so desperate to go out unhampered by Scogman?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Some buttock, some wench on the game –’

  He stepped over the line again. ‘She is a lady of good blood, sir, who has fallen on unfortunate circumstances. I cannot stop thinking of her, sir. It is not just that Scogman is a gaoler. He sullies my thoughts. He leers at the madams and their dollymops. He says he will find me a good frigate not a fireship that will give me pox. I can’t stand him! I would rather stay in this prison than walk another step with him!’

  There was more. I let him have his piece. He had never strung more than two or three awkward sentences to me since he was a small boy. Of course no one had experienced what he was going through. Of course she was of good stock and was in unfortunate circumstances. They all were. I stopped him in full flow.

  ‘Does your mother know about this?’

  The blood left his cheeks. ‘She has no idea. Please don’t tell her. She will put a stop to it immediately.’

  ‘And I will not? Give me your sword.’

  He stood rigidly to attention again, his lips clamped shut, trembling. For a gentleman to give up his sword was surrender. Humility.

  ‘Come on, man,’ I barked, holding out my hand. ‘I have wasted another day on you.’

  Slowly he unbuckled his sword. Even more slowly he took the rapier from its scabbard. I took it with distaste. I was used to receiving gentlemen’s swords; after Naseby I took a whole spate of them. For its master to have survived that long in five years of bloody conflict the sword had to have been a killing machine, with a balanced weight and a slicing edge. This was a toy, designed to go with the ringlets and wide britches of its owner. When I dropped it on my desk it gave out a tinny rattle.

  ‘Useless.’

  ‘Rupert has killed men with a sword like that,’ he said hotly.

  Prince Rupert was Charles’s cavalry commander, who at one stage might have won the war. ‘Rupert lost,’ I said.

  ‘Only because the King got rid of him!’ Luke spoke with fiery contempt. For a moment it looked as if he was going to snatch back his sword. ‘I know the points in the circle, the movements, the stoccata lunga –’

  I tossed the sword back to him. ‘Kill me.’

  He almost dropped it but instantly took guard with a correctness and alertness that surprised me. Clearly he had been having lessons somewhere. I stared down at the sword, the point inches from my breast. The furrowed skin of his ravaged cheek looked as if it was on fire.

  ‘Go on. Kill me.’

  His eyes narrowed. A tiny blob of saliva leaked from the corner of his mouth. The tip of the sword drifted downwards. Someone had taught him well. One lunge upwards would travel between bone and pierce the heart. It was so long since I had been in this position I had to force my eyes away from his and focus on his feet. When his left foot went back, anchoring his body, and his right knee bent forward, he was about to lunge. There was a blur of movement. He was fast and I was slow. Far too slow. The tip glittered and danced in front of my eyes, before he returned to the guard position. I felt the trickle of blood on the back of my hand after the prick his rapier had given me. It was only then I realised my shirt was drenched in sweat.

  ‘I do not fight unarmed men, Father.’

  Father! When had he last called me that? Was there mockery in it? Certainly there was mockery in the pinprick, an insult in his code of honour. I sucked at my bleeding hand, my temper rising.

  ‘Very well.’

  I went into the anteroom and unlocked a cupboard. From it came a stale, musty smell. Luke stared at the thick, leather jacket I had worn for war. A hundred times I had told the servants to get rid of it, and a hundred times I had changed my mind. Its chapped, stained surface was a map of all the battles I had fought in.

  Once Luke had helped me on with that sword belt, but he would not remember that; he had still been in skirts. The sword felt as if it had never left my hand. It was a short German sword I had taken from a dead mercenary. I wiped the grease from it; there was scarcely a flake of rust. With it went a main-gauche, a left-handed dagger. Luke gazed at them with a mixture of awe and disbelief, as if they had been disinterred from some ancient grave.

  ‘Again. Kill me.’

  He stared at me as if he thought I was moonstruck. The German sword looked unwieldy but it was perfectly balanced. And, unlike the rapier Luke was holding, it had a cutting edge as sharp as a razor. When I flicked it forward, merely brushing the back of his hand, it immediately drew blood. An insult for an insult. He stared for a moment at the oozing red globules.

  He was fast. God in heaven he was fast. And in that moment I realised I was too old for this, old and stupid not to believe what the stiffening of my bones was telling me, not to register that slow, insidious weakening of the eye which makes all the difference between life and death.

  He drove me back into the cupboard, his blade darting like a snake’s tongue, at my throat, towards my heart. My helmet clattered to the floor with other clothes and books. His blood was up. He hated me. I was the man who had killed his King. Who had thrown him in prison. If the fight, for it became a real fight, had not been in a confined space he would have killed me. I have no doubt of it. The rapier always needed space. He knew that and tried to drive me into the study. I would not have it. I kicked the anteroom door closed. He had been trained well, but too well. He fought correctly, according to the rules, in which elegance was as important as the hit, but elegance demands movement between the points in what a swordsman calls the magic circle, and I starved him of that. In desperation he struck. Too cramped to put his body behind a lunge, I caught the blade in the hook of my dagger and twisted it away from his grip.

  The door to the study was open and Scogman was staring at us. How long he had been standing there I do not know. Gripping his sword wrist, which he must have sprained when I wrenched the rapier from him, Luke panted, ‘That is not fair! Gentlemen do not fight in cupboards.’ He turned and saw Scogman. ‘Nor do they have someone to step in if they’re in trouble.’

  ‘Leave us,’ I said quietly. Scogman knew that mood of mine, although he had not seen it since the war. When he had gone I gave Luke his rapier. ‘On the London streets you will not be fighting gentlemen. This will be worse than useless.’

  Prigs, I told him, would stalk him for the jewels in its guard. In a mob fight, London apprentices used cudgel and buckler. The less tassels on his boots, the safer he would be. It only gradually dawned on him I was giving him his freedom, and it was only when I said I took him at his word that on his trips to the City he would not be involved in any more Royalist plots, that he believed it.

  10

  Scogman had no doubt I was wrong. The fact that there was a woman involved made it worse. He trusted women even less than Royalists, declaring he would never marry one. They bred children whom, he knew from his experience of mine, were nothing but trouble. Released from his duties with Luke, he was buying a house in Shoreditch, where the only women would be a housekeeper and a maid.

  Luke and I remained awkward with one another, but in a different way. I felt the respect he gave me was no longer feigned. One day, when he was going into the City with his servant Gilbert, Luke said he had lost his own dagger and asked if he could borrow mine. It had been with me since the early days of the war. Its heft was chipped and its blade scarred, but it came smoothly out of its scabbard, as sharp as ever. I told him he could keep it.

  I felt a pang of loss as soon as I had said it, but the expression on his face was worth it. I never wanted him to be a soldier, but after that I felt a strange kind of peace. And a respect for him I had never had before. I had mistaken his foppish dress for his character. He was not a milksop. He was headstrong and arrogant but brave. Above all, he was in love. It was there in the way he checked the mirror before he left the house, whistled and did a little dance o
f pure happiness as he entered the stable yard. I watched him from the window as he rode from the house. Once he saw me and waved. I stiffened, but only for a moment, then waved back. It was our secret, the only one we’d ever had together, one which Anne had no knowledge of. Childish? Naive? Of course. But I had rediscovered something childish, but fundamental, which, in the long years of being Cromwell’s spymaster, I had lost. Trust. I trusted him.

  In all this, I forgot Sam. I did not see him for well over a week. When I did the kiln was cold. He was packing a box of candles. I apologised for not attending to the firing and my long absence. To my amazement he said it was of no consequence. The experiment was over.

  ‘Over?’

  ‘It was a failure.’

  Laconically, he packed more candles and took them out to a waiting carter. I could not believe that he had dismissed our experiment without consulting me, and said so with some warmth. This broke through his lassitude and he humbly begged my pardon, but replied when I had not turned up he thought I was the one who had lost interest. Sponsors often did, he added, on a whim, without notice.

  That cut me to the quick and I apologised again, saying I had needed to attend to other urgent business.

  ‘What business are you in, sir?’

  My heart beat more quickly. It was an innocent enough question, but he looked at me with a certain penetration and I wondered if he had discovered or suspected who I was. That might account for his strange moodiness. I told him brusquely I had a small estate and said he must do another firing.

  It all poured out then. His mother was still ill and was constantly asking who I was and what I did. When I did not turn up it was Ellie who convinced him that I had given up on the whole idea. That is what the rich did, she told him. One moment you were the whole world, the next they forgot you. I could almost hear her saying it, in that flat, fatalistic Spitalfield voice. She had wanted me. She had thrown herself at me. She expected me to leave her. When I did she never reproached me. But I reproached myself at that moment. I felt it so sharply I had to turn away from Sam for fear of betraying myself. I had ruined her life. Odd as it may seem I had never put it in such terms before. When I met her, years later, in that Southwark brothel, I regarded it as one of life’s little ironies. Had I not made amends for that? Given them a house? A business? But that was just money, a few strokes of the pen. That was not making amends.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  ‘A little fatigued from the ride. It is growing colder. It may soon snow.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I had not noticed – but – but that’s true. Very true … I am sorry, sir. I have not been very hospitable. I – I have these black humours …’

  Like me, I thought. He raked out clinkers from the bottom of the kiln, and began laying another fire and preparing the silica. The firings resumed. And, after this, I made sure I went in once a week.

  One day I received a letter from my agent in Venice, claiming to contain the secret of making clear glass. From what little I understood, I gathered Sam was on the right track: what mattered were the temperature range and the impurities in the coal. I went to Clerkenwell in high excitement and gave it to him without a word. He read only a line or two before he handed it back to me.

  ‘I cannot read this.’ I had forgotten it was in Latin, which he did not understand, and began to translate. He stopped me. ‘I know enough Latin. I mean I must not read it.’

  ‘Must not?’ I laughed. ‘Why? Do you think there is some curse on it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Exactly. Some curse. Where did you g-get it?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘No, sir.’ His stammer became more pronounced. ‘It’s m-m-my business also. Did you …’ It took several seconds for him to get the words out. ‘… steal it?’

  The kiln was roaring away and for a moment I could not believe I had heard the word. ‘Are you accusing me of being a thief?’

  His face became as red as the fire. ‘N-no, but someone m-must have stolen it.’

  ‘I obtained the information as part of a commercial transaction. Now let us get on. I have many more things to do.’ I handed him the paper. ‘If this is right you need an even higher temperature.’

  He swallowed, apologised, and took the paper into the light of the kiln. He translated painfully slowly, his finger tracing to the end of the first line before he suddenly folded up the paper and shook his head violently. It really was as if he thought the paper was cursed. With many contortions and hesitations, he said he was sorry but he could not read it. He wanted to discover the secret for himself. It had been his father’s dream to find the answer and he was doing it for him. And he wanted to be a natural philosopher. Such a philosopher did not steal secrets. Nature was not a commercial transaction. Nature was everybody’s. A man approached it humbly or shared his work with others. He did not steal.

  At first irritated, I was drawn in by the fervour of his belief, softened by his naivety, by his rose-tinted memory of the man he thought was his father, whom Scogman – I had never met him – described as an honest nonentity. A candle-maker.

  I squeezed his shoulder. ‘Come, Sam. That is all very well in a tale. Or a penny book. But it is not the way of the world. This would make your name in London.’

  He gazed at me wonderingly. ‘Would it?’

  ‘If it is true, yes. And the man I deal with would not dare cheat me. You would be talked of in the same breath as Robert Boyle. And make more money.’

  ‘Robert Boyle …?’ His voice was full of awe, reverence even. His eyes shone, the dancing flames of the kiln reflected in his pupils. I clapped him on the shoulder, laughing at the awe on his face. He unfolded the paper, stared again at the first line, then crumpled it up in a ball and flung it into the fire. It bounced on some coals at the front which had not yet set alight. I stood in disbelief, gaping at the smoking ball, before plunging forward to rescue it. It burst into flames as I touched it. I fell back with a cry, sucking at my burned fingers, berating him.

  ‘Idiot! Fool! That is my only copy! Was! Have you any idea how much I paid for it? How much this has cost me?’

  Only the thought that I would have to give my real name stopped me from going out for the constable. I told him that people only got one chance in life and that was his. Did he really think an uneducated boy could discover what it had taken a whole city a century to find and perfect? Through all this tirade he stood silent, hands clasped, head bowed.

  ‘Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself? Eh?’

  His lips quivered before he spoke. ‘I will repay the money you have given me, sir. Every p-p-penny of it.’

  ‘What?’ I gestured derisively towards a bench where he melted the wax for the mould. ‘With candles?’

  He stared back mutely at me, his only answer the stubborn look in his eyes that reminded me of that in the Quaker seaman Stephen Butcher’s face, or my son Luke’s, which I could only call belief, whether it was in God or the King, or natural philosophy, and which never failed to raise a stab of envy before I despised it, for all I had to remotely compare with it was fighting with Cromwell, then the Levellers for the battered, discredited Good Old Cause.

  ‘A pox on it!’ I said as I walked out. ‘I will write it off as a bad investment and there’s an end to it.’

  When I rode away he was doggedly working the bellows, pumping up the kiln to a white heat. I regretted not what I had said, only the way I had said it. I wished we could have parted on better terms, but mingled with regret was a sense of relief. He wanted to go his own way and, in truth, that suited me. Without him I would never have had the prospect of such harmony in Queen Street. But with his moods and the constant risk of him discovering who I was, which would destroy that harmony, he was becoming a liability. I kept his papers together, in a file marked Samuel Reeves, Bread Lane, Clerkenwell. With the amount I had spent on the kiln, materials and the spy in Venice, I considered he had done very well out of me. I closed the account and locked it securely in my desk
in the drawer I kept for finished business.

  My newfound trust in Luke seemed to run magically through the whole of that gloomy old house. The rattling of his boots on the stairs on his way out cured Anne of her indispositions. She begged for this area to be lit, for those dark pictures to be replaced by brighter ones. Dinners came alive again as we invited generals, City councillors and MPs. I tried with Thurloe to move on from the dictatorship to find a workable franchise which would lead to a more representative Parliament and carry the ideals of the Good Old Cause.

  Lucy sent more gossip from Brussels, which I decoded. Money had been raised in Dublin, and an Irish force would link with a rising in the heavily Royalist south-west. Kent would follow. London was vulnerable because, apart from the City militia and a scatter of disorganised, quarrelling regiments, the only strong, viable force was George Monck’s in Scotland, several weeks’ march away. By the time Monck reached London any rebellion would be over. The City had never been more exposed. I would awake in the dark in a cold sweat, hearing the rattle of carts, convinced the Royalists had struck, then stumble to the window, only to see it was the shit wagons collecting the night soil. I would call myself a fool, thinking – or persuading myself – that the Royalists had learned their lesson that summer. They were too weak and disorganised to invade.

  After years of being at the centre of affairs, the worst thing was not knowing. The centre had moved elsewhere – if there was one.

  As the old year died in the shortest, darkest days of December, London, like a great ship when there is no wind, lay becalmed. Frost gripped the City, icing the shallows of the Thames. Everything seemed frozen. Stephen Butcher and his motley band of Quakers could not move from Poplar: the naval fleet lay in the river at Gravesend, sealing off London. Lawson, its commander, flew no flag. Like everyone else, he had no idea who was in charge of what.

  In Queen Street, too, I felt our relationship was becalmed. Anne was still very much Lady Stonehouse, but gradually, very slowly, so slowly I dare not press it, a new intimacy began forming between us. We were like casual acquaintances who have known and been on friendly terms for years, and who suddenly discover there might be something more than that. I winced now and went hot with shame like a blundering youth at the crass demands I had made of her. It was as though I had picked up the disease from Luke; it was like those early days in love, before anything has been declared, and one grows more and more apprehensive of doing so, in case those looks, that smile, are nothing but imaginings, which one clumsy move might destroy.