Plague Child (35 page)

Chapter 42

Lord Stonehouse was good at mourning. It was his natural habitat. My mother must have known this instinctively when she chose the clothes for her father’s funeral. I thought as I went into Queen Street that morning she would have cherished this moment. I felt that I knew her then, that I was closer to her than to any living person, even Anne.

Richard Stonehouse was still posted as missing. The great town house was in mourning for Edward. Hangings were half-drawn and there was an air of sepulchral quiet in the black-and-white chequer-board hall, where the Greek busts and the footman looked at me askance. Sarah had mended an old jerkin, and stitched a new collar on a shirt she had beaten almost white under the pump. I carried my soldier’s knapsack. They searched the pack for gunpowder, which I suppose in a way the contents were.

‘Name?’

‘Thomas Neave.’

‘Business?’

‘I have concluded a mission for Lord Stonehouse.’

Lord Stonehouse was in a meeting and continued his business as punctiliously as usual. When I was eventually shown into his study I stood waiting as I had stood before, some distance from the desk, while the single hand of the clock jerked on and Mr Cole shook sand on his signature, sealed the document, bowed and went out. Lord Stonehouse was wearing reading glasses I had not seen before. He put them in a case and beckoned me forward.

‘You have it?’

It was as if he was referring to a run-of-the-mill dispatch from some informant in Oxford. Yet there was something comforting in his abstract, weary tone, in his remoteness, his coldness, which I was beginning to understand, above all in what he did not say. He did not, as might have been expected, refer to Edgehill, or ‘our great victory’ as some called it. He knew. He understood. There was, at least, that bond between us.

He became alive when I took the pendant from my pack, swooping on it like a falcon on its prey. It seemed to fill the whole of that dark sombre room with light, reflecting from the polished oak of his desk, glittering in his black eyes. He gave a great sigh, stroking the falcon as if he was smoothing out its feathers. The light only seemed to die down when he noticed that I had put two other things on his desk: a small pile of letters and Richard’s tattered cloak.

Slowly he put down the pendant and picked up the cloak, putting his hand through the rent in it, staring at the dark brown stains at its edges, then at me, as malevolently as the falcon, which now seemed to slumber in the jewel.

I told him how Richard had confronted me, killed Luke and ridden away. How I had run after him, drawing my dagger, but could remember nothing else, until I returned to London. Gradually what had happened that night had been coming back to me, patchily, incompletely, in nightmare flashes.

Lord Stonehouse smoothed the torn cloak, his sceptical eyes never leaving me as I told him I lost Richard before I got to the meadows, which were no longer meadows, but a dark marsh of the dead and dying. I kept on running, kept on hearing his horse, or thought I heard it, but it was a will o’ the wisp sound, leading me this way, then that, until I saw the escarpment looming above me as the clouds drifted from the moon. Not far away was a camp fire. Dipping in and out of the light of it was a familiar face: the hollowed eyes and the spade-like beard of the King. Other figures rose in the firelight, staring at me. I stumbled away, too exhausted to run, but nobody followed me. Perhaps they thought I was a spirit. Then I saw it. Richard’s horse. Doing something unbelievable in that place. It was peacefully cropping grass. It sniffed indifferently at a man with half a mouth and twisted, sightless eyes before browsing for another patch. From the pommel of the saddle trailed Richard’s cloak.

I took the cloak and went from body to body, some dead, some still crying out, their cries redoubling as I approached them. I looked, or turned over body after body until I came upon two men who were manhandling a corpse, one removing the dead man’s jerkin, the other his boots. They snarled at me like wolves.

‘This is our patch!’

‘Find your own!’

But when they saw I was taking nothing, simply turning corpses over, they ignored me and fell to quarrelling over the boots. I came to one man, face buried in the grass, who had a jacket I thought was Richard’s. He was still, moonlight shining on small crystals of hoar frost forming on his cheek in the intense cold. I turned him over. He was alive, the movement lifting him out of his frozen coma.

‘Help me,’ he whispered. ‘Dear mother, help me.’

At first I had not seen anything wrong, but now I saw a terrible wound in his stomach, from which the guts spilled. I turned away, retching, but he had found a last strength, clutching at my arm, shrieking at me: ‘Kill me, kill me, kill me!’

He would not let me go. I stabbed him until his arm fell away from me and the cries stopped. Even then I could not stop. I was still stabbing him when Ben found me.

My hands were covering my face. I brought them down slowly, fearing I was still in those meadows, but I was in the study with Lord Stonehouse whose expression was as cold as the frost that night. My shirt clung to my back with sweat, but I was shivering as if I was still on that freezing field.

‘Did you find Richard?’

‘I don’t know, my lord.’

He stared at the cloak. ‘Did you kill him?’ he said softly.

‘I don’t know. Don’t you understand? I don’t even know whether I’m really remembering or whether it’s part of the nightmares I have.’

He stood up, his voice rising abruptly. ‘Did you kill my son?’

‘I don’t know,’ I screamed back at him.

The door flew open and the servants who were always outside rushed in. Lord Stonehouse made a violent gesture for them to go and they almost fell over themselves in an effort to turn, bow, leave and close the door again, all at the same time. After the door was closed, all you could hear was our jerky breathing. Lord Stonehouse so rarely lost control he looked unfamiliar with it, touching his desk as if to make sure it was solid, then sitting and folding Richard’s cloak into a meticulous square until his hands stopped shaking. He turned to the letters, and I told him how I found them.

Letters, papers were meat and drink to him, and he could extract the meat from the fat faster than any man I knew. He skimmed through the pages rapidly.

‘I thought as much.’

There was not a word about me, that I was his grandson, nothing. ‘You thought as much?’

‘I am not a fool.’ He leaned forward, his black eyes venomous and unpitying as the falcon his ancestors had chosen as a symbol. ‘One last time: did you kill my son?’

Those eyes made me feel as if I was halfway to the gallows, and brought out in me, unexpectedly, not what he dreaded to hear, but what I did. ‘I do not know. What I do know is that I killed my friend.’

There it was. I had said out loud what I had never admitted to myself before. It was there, unlike what had happened to Richard, but slippery memory had been assiduously burying it. Now I had said it. Admitted it. I felt, with a welling of grief, a profound relief. I could now do what I had avoided thinking about, let alone doing. I could go to Charity, give her his ring, and tell her how Luke died.

Lord Stonehouse swept his hand across his desk, dismissing what I had said as of no importance, irrelevant. Perhaps to him it was. I heard he had no friends. That gesture, reducing someone I loved to a triviality, goaded me into a fury. He moved his hand to the bell to summon the servants, but I no longer cared who he was, what he said, what he did to me. I jumped forward, bending over him, gripping the edges of the desk.

‘He was my dearest friend. If I had not shouted to stop him, Luke would have killed your son. Instead, Richard killed him.’

The words choked in my throat. He kept his hand near the bell. His voice was cold with scepticism. ‘Why did you shout to stop your dearest friend?’

‘Why? Why? Because Richard is my father, as well as your son! Do you think, my lord, that having found him, my instinct was to kill him?’

‘From what you say, he tried to kill you.’

‘From what I say! Ask your servants at Highpoint. How much proof do you need? You brought us up to hate one another. First you try and make Richard into something he’s not – then me.’

Lord Stonehouse stabbed angrily at the bell. The servants sprang in, hovering round me. I tensed, clenching my fists. I was not going to be dragged away as I was before. But Lord Stonehouse took a sip of the wine that was always on his desk, dabbed his lips, and told them to get his secretary.

As the door closed, I said: ‘When it came to it, I don’t think my father could do the job himself. Or perhaps,’ I added bitterly, ‘I’m naive, and that is what I like to think.’

Lord Stonehouse jumped as the coals settled and a flame lit up his lined face, which was the colour of old parchment. He stared at the bundle of letters written to my mother, part deceit, but part love, or perhaps again that is what I like to think. He read one page, then another. The secretary, Mr Cole, entered and stood in the required position, legs slightly straddled, files under his arm. On one of them, I noticed, was the heading
Mr Richard
.

Lord Stonehouse finished the letters, tapped them square with his fingertips, put them in the drawer, the first on the right-hand side which I now knew to be Richard’s, and locked it.

‘Mr Cole, I believe we have an agreement with Mr Neave?’

With a flourish the secretary drew out the document he had witnessed and I had signed – years ago, it felt, as an arrogant youth, full of certainty and ideals. That arrogance was even there in my signature, with the ridiculous squiggle underlining it, which I had been so proud of, but now made me wince.

‘I believe it was one pendant for the freehold of . . .’

‘Half Moon Court, my lord.’ With another flourish, Mr Cole set a document, heavy with seals and legal language in front of me.

I signed for the receipt of it, my signature now being a very sparse one, with no squiggle. Lord Stonehouse gazed at it, and the other, but made no comment. It was a moment or two before I realised I was dismissed. At the door I turned.

‘And . . . the marriage, my lord?’

‘What? Oh. Old Black’s daughter. Why should I stand in your way? Make you into what you are not? Mmm?’

Before he had finished the sentence, Lord Stonehouse was immersed in the file Mr Cole had placed in front of him, back in his familiar world of paper.

Chapter 43

The file they were discussing was the one on Richard. Lord Stonehouse would not rest until he knew what had happened to his eldest son. No doubt he was already setting Mr Cole to work to find out whether I had killed him. Not a word about me being his grandson. Nothing. I was Mr Neave. His father was tight on his feelings, Richard had said. Tight? Feelings? All he cared about, after all this, was his eldest son, the entail, the estate! I worked myself up in this manner until I realised it must have been exactly the state of mind Richard was in when he first saw my portrait.

I told myself I was free. I had everything I had ever wanted, and tried to return to the mood of the previous, idyllic summer. But I was so morose when I returned to Half Moon Court that Mr Black called me into his office fearing the worst. Indifferently I put the freehold on his desk. At first he would not look at it, thinking it was another notice to quit. Then he saw the seal. Read the clauses, threw the document in the air with a whoop of joy, caught it, read the clauses again to make sure they had not fallen from the paper and got lost, and shouted for his wife. I was happy then. Grinning all over my face as he poured wine and went over brick after brick of the place saying, ‘This is ours – thanks to Tom! And this! And this!’ Suddenly I was not mad, talked about in whispers, but a saviour.

‘Shouldn’t you post the banns,’ Anne whispered, ‘in case you go away again?’

I kissed her and said I would go right away to see Mr Tooley, but while the wine gave me courage, went to see Charity instead. She was bewildered when I stumbled out that, but for me, Luke would be alive.

‘But the sword was not in your hand.’

‘No, no, but –’

I gave up. What she wanted to hear, again and again, was that he loved her, and would see her in heaven. All the guilt I had tortured myself with was dismissed, was nothing compared with that. She even asked me if I would be little Luke’s godfather, and when I said I would gripped my hands and said: ‘What exactly did he say? Tell me again.’

As well as giving Mr Black the freehold, Lord Stonehouse seemed to take in earnest my decision to be a printer and put government work our way. Parliament ruled by ordinance, and we printed ordinances on loans to put the navy to sea, ordinances to ‘find’ sailors (in other words, press them), ordinances on armaments, on manuals for armaments (making what was already complex incomprehensible), ordinances to trench, stop and to fortify the highways (such as they were), to build a great wall round the City, and ordinances to raise rates to pay for all this. Parliamentary rule was not the Eden foretold by the Grand Remonstrance I ran so eagerly through the streets with, and its demands for money started to make the King’s previous excesses look frugal. And it was as dull as ditchwater. I grew sick of the sight of the word ordinance.

To relieve the tedium, Mr Black wanted me to go to Westminster as I used to, but I refused. Be a printer’s runner again? I was a journey man, near to being my own master! Nehemiah should go. So Nehemiah went, and came back, eyes shining, saying he had seen Mr Pym. As surly as my hands were black, I snarled at him to get on with the presswork. I had not heard a word from Mr Pym. Nor from the Countess. Not a word. I remembered the heady evening, before I left London with Eaton, when I met Mr Pym at Bedford Square. But, of course, all they were interested in was my prospect of becoming a Stonehouse, which I had traded in for Half Moon Court.

I struggled to concentrate on composing the grubby text that Nehemiah had brought me, which was an Ordinance on the Rightfull Printing of Ordinances.

The only letter I received was from Kate. After leaving me on the road to Warwickshire, Matthew had returned to Highpoint. He and Kate had travelled back to London, as they had done many years before, in the only vehicle that could get through both warring sides unhindered – the plague cart. Poplar was thriving. A ship was being built for the navy and Matthew was – or called himself – a shipwright.

One bleak day tempers were at their shortest. The ice was half an inch thick in the pail in the yard where Sarah crunched and slipped over layers of dirty frozen snow to return from the bakers with only two small loaves of black rye bread. There were so many ordinances I was setting type while Nehemiah worked the press. I smelt beer on his breath and accused him of going to the Pot. He denied ever going there, which made matters worse, for I had seen him there once before and said nothing.

I lashed out at him with my composing stick, catching him on the forehead. The type I had set up flew in every direction, making me even more furious. I drew back the stick again. A trickle of blood was making its way down Nehemiah’s forehead. I stopped as Nehemiah flung up his hands. I saw myself crouching there, biting my lips so I would not cry out when the next blow hit me.

I hurled the stick across the shop and went into the house. I saw Mr Black’s startled face as he came out of the office, but went straight upstairs into my old bedroom in the garret. I wrapped a blanket round me, for it was bitter cold up there. The morning’s frost patterns were still on the window. I pushed away Susannah’s Bible, which I had not opened for a long time, sat on the window seat, breathed a hole in the patterns and stared out. My knees brushed against my pack and I had a sudden deep, profound longing to put it on my back and go, wherever my feet took me.

I heard a step on the landing, and thought that Mr Black had followed me. The door opened, but I continued staring out.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

There was a touch, the gentlest, most hesitant of touches on my shoulder. It was Anne. I knew what she had come for. Wearily I said: ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t seen Mr Tooley yet for the banns but –’

‘I do not want you to see him.’

Irritably I thought – first Nehemiah, now Anne. She was already at the door, going. ‘I promise you –’

‘I do not want you to see him,’ she flared.

‘Come on, come on.’ I stopped her and held her in my arms. She lifted her face, looking at me searchingly, with a wildness I had not seen in her before. It sent a thrill of desire through me and I bent to kiss her. At the last moment she turned her lips away. That only redoubled my excitement and I pulled her more tightly to me. She struggled, trying to speak, but I shut her lips with mine. We had twisted back inside the room and I had a brief glimpse of the apple tree and I remembered Eaton throwing the apple core away and saying,
Show her who’s master! Give her the whip!
He was right. Stupid that we had lived together, so close for so long, and never done this. The more she struggled, the more her fists struck and her nails bit, the more inflamed I got, until I had her over the bed, about to fling her on it when she gave me the most infernal blow to the head.

No. Not her, the beam – that wretched beam! But it was as if she had wielded it as she pulled away and ran to the door. I staggered and sat down heavily on the bed, my head ringing. She took a step or two back towards me. I could not look at her. The force of the blow had caused me to bite my tongue, and my voice came out thick and dazed. ‘I . . . I . . . will go now . . . to Mr T-T—’

‘You don’t understand, Tom. I don’t want to marry you.’

I shook my head dizzily. ‘Don’t be silly.’

She clenched her fists with a sudden ferocity. ‘I am not being silly! I do not want to marry you.’

I got up giddily, the room swaying until I was able to focus on her tight lips, her determined eyes. The top of her dress was torn and the curve of her breasts rose and fell quickly. She said something so low and mumbled that I could not follow it.

‘What?’

‘You – do – not – want – to – marry – me.’

The words came out in such great gulps, tears welling, my heart went out to her. At the same time I laughed, I was so astonished. ‘Oh, Anne! What nonsense! I love you. I’ve always loved you, always wanted to marry you.’

She dashed the tears away from her eyes with a violent gesture of her hand. ‘You may love me, but you don’t want to marry me. You will never be happy with me.’

Beneath the anger she was shaking. I felt that her whole life, and mine, was falling to pieces and longed to hold her, to comfort her, but feared from her look another outburst. ‘I will never be happy with anyone else,’ I said quietly.

‘You will never be happy with me,’ she repeated, just as quietly. ‘We are not suited.’

‘Not suited? Of course we are suited. We have always been suited.’

As if every word was being torn out of her, she said: ‘I’ve stopped you . . . being . . . having . . . a position.’

‘Don’t be stupid. This is what I want.’

‘This? Is it?’ She had stopped trembling and was quite calm now, staring round the garret at Sarah’s bed, with the sacking she used for blankets, at mine, still unmade. Mr Black must have joined Nehemiah at the press, because it was now working at a regular rhythm, sending a little tremor through the house every time the platen came down on the paper, then jerked back for the next pass. She came closer, staring steadily into my eyes. ‘Is it?’

She made me look at things I had been refusing to face, look inside myself in a way that was so painful I could not speak. I turned away from her and almost cracked my head on the beam again. I drove my fist viciously into it and grimaced, clutching my hand, feeling I had broken every bone in it. I sat in the window seat breathing so heavily the last of the ice patterns melted.

‘Here.’ She brought me a cloth. ‘Your lip’s bleeding.’

I wiped it and indicated her torn dress. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s nothing. I’ll sew it. That’s what women are for.’ It was the only sign of bitterness she showed. ‘What did Lord Stonehouse say?’

‘He thinks I killed his son.’

She was very still. ‘Did you?’

‘I don’t know.’ I told her all I knew, all I remembered. She was silent until I told her what I had said to Lord Stonehouse, how what he had done had caused Richard and I, father and son, although he did not know it, to hate one another. I thought it was true, it hurt him and was meant to hurt him and I was glad I had said it, but she stared at me, appalled.

‘You cannot talk to your betters like that.’

‘Betters?’ I snarled at her. ‘How is he better than me?’

‘He is a lord!’

‘He is a lord,’ I mocked. ‘He is a cheat and a murderer.’ I told her about the contract and she was, if anything, even more appalled.

‘You fool!’

It was one thing for me to feel it, quite another for her to call me it. She backed away as I only just stopped myself from flying at her, as I did when she wore the pendant. Even then I felt it was the pendant that had somehow poisoned things between us. ‘Yes. I am a fool. I could have got myself a position, I suppose. Is that what you mean? I did it for
you!
God knows why! You are right – we are not suited at all! I will go!’

She was so pale it seemed as if every drop of blood had been drained from her face. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘It’s best you go. Go now. I wish you’d never come here.’

It was all the more terrible because she said it so quietly. She turned at the door and I thought she was going to say more, but if she was the words would not come. She went and I heard her say something to her mother, again quietly, evenly, as if nothing had happened, then her bedroom door closed. Half a dozen – no, a dozen times – I went to go downstairs to tap at her door but returned to stare down at the frozen apple tree. She knew me better than I knew myself. I had been bitten by the pendant, by the falcon, and wanted more than this – what, I did not know. She was right. I would have married her, stayed here, or somewhere like it, become restless, perhaps grown to hate her. Instead she had refused me – refused me! It made me love her more deeply than ever and resent her bitterly at the same time. She had given me my freedom, but there is nothing more terrible than freedom when you do not know what to do with it.

The press stopped, and the house seemed to steady itself, as it always did, like a ship coming to anchor. They would be spreading out the printed copies to dry now; Mr Black carefully, meticulously, inspecting every one, criticising one here, another there. I listened. Yes, there was his sharp voice, the sound of a blow aimed, but it produced only a snivel not a cry. He had not the strength now, as he had had with me. Ah, if I could only go back, start again, how I would welcome that blow. If I could go back, correct my mistakes – and my hopeless aspirations . . .

I picked up my pack. There were a few hours of daylight left. I put my clothes in my pack and checked my boots, with a sudden desire to leave without delay. There was only one thing left to pack, which was what I came with – Susannah’s Bible. I picked it up to thrust it in, but seemed to hear her voice saying: ‘Tom, whenever you need guidance, open the book.’

I had not opened it for many a month and God knows I needed guidance then. I fell on my knees before the window seat and opened the book at random, as she used to do, only making the choice of the New Testament, not the Old, for that meant to me the blood and vengeance of Edgehill. I shut my eyes and put my finger between the pages, as Susannah used to, and opened them to see that passage in John where Jesus feeds the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes. I stared at it but I could not for the life of me understand what meaning it had for me. The only bread in the house was rye bread, and it was difficult to break that at all, let alone for five thousand.

I pored over it, and puzzled over it, but I had not Susannah’s belief nor Matthew’s guile to extract a meaning. Finally I closed it with a thwack, thrust it in my pack and went to the door. The house shook, but it was not the tremor of the press. It was a carriage approaching, and not a bone-rattling hackney carriage, but a carriage and pair. I could see the fine horses edging carefully into the narrow entrance. There flashed through me that only my lack of belief, my insistence in believing there must be a riddle when there was none, had prevented me from seeing the obvious. Susannah would have seen the meaning in the passage straight away. A miracle was about to happen! Now the sceptics may say that the real miracle was that, had I not pored and puzzled over that passage, the pack would have been on my back by now and I on the road, unreachable.