I finished the sack. I considered going to the club but, with my sudden loss of influence, felt disinclined to, and found, for the first time in years, I had nothing more to do than go down to supper.
3
The first sign of unrest in the City is always when apprentices, egged on by their masters, begin to riot. They were roaming the streets, hunting down Quakers, a sectarian group which the City saw as a serious threat to order. Church ministers hated them because they were against tithes and interrupted services. I came across a group of them when I rode through Covent Garden on my way to my weekly meeting with John Thurloe.
It had been raining since early morning. Some of the Quakers had no outdoor coats and the feet of their children were bare, but their eyes shone exultantly as they chanted. A growing group of apprentices jeered at them, but their singing only grew louder. I tried to force my horse through. The apprentices tipped or drew off their hats at me.
‘Remove your hats for the gentleman,’ yelled an apprentice at the Quakers.
He was provoking them. They acknowledged no social betters and whatever tattered scraps they wore remained firmly on their heads. The rumble of an approaching carriage caused the apprentices to cry out in increased fervour.
‘Off with their hats!’
One caught a woman a stinging blow on the head. Her bonnet flew off. The blow scarcely interrupted her singing but the child with her flinched and darted away, stopping when she saw the carriage. There was no danger. The coachman saw her, slowed and turned away the horses. But the occupant of the carriage, no doubt in a hurry, rapped loudly with his stick. The coachman jumped, lost the reins for a moment and the horses panicked, heading straight for the child. There was an innocence in her mud-stained face, a curiosity in her widening eyes as she stared towards the tossing heads, the shafts that were about to impale her.
There are some instincts that, however rusty, spring back into life. It was the cavalryman I had once been who drove his horse between the carriage and the child, diverting the horses towards the street posts and helping the coachman bring them back under control.
The apprentices had stopped shouting and the Quakers singing. The child had not moved. She still had that fixed look of curiosity on her face. I picked up her hat, which had been swept off in the draught from my horse, and gave it to her. She turned and ran, disappearing into the group of Quakers.
The door of the carriage scraped open, its occupant so corpulent he could extract himself only with the aid of the footman, whom he berated, before flinging abuse at the coachman.
I found my breath. ‘You should leave your coachman to do the driving, sir.’
He moved to face me at the speed of a ship turning round. His fat cheeks narrowed his eyes into slits. ‘You should leave the country, Sir Thomas, to those who know how to govern it.’
I had not seen Sir Lewis Challoner for years. Cromwell had thrown out Royalists like Sir Lewis, creating the Rump Parliament, which had now returned, giving the army some semblance of legitimacy. It was another sign of unrest that, in spite of his part in the rebellion, he was back.
‘Go home, Sir Lewis. You are banned from the City.’
He smiled. Suddenly he was enjoying himself. ‘You are forgetting yourself, sir. You are dislodged from office, are you not, Sir Thomas?’
The singing began again, this time on a triumphant, exalted note. A man was holding up the child I had saved. He was an odd figure in that crowd, dressed in sailor’s slops, a coloured jumble of canvas doublet, breeches and linen shirt, tight-fitting to avoid being caught in the rigging of a ship. At his side stood a woman who would soon be in danger of wearing no clothes at all. She was flinging away her tattered skirt and beginning to remove her blouse, the singers round her chanting in ecstasy. The apprentices watched in a mixture of stunned disbelief and licentiousness. I had heard of this Quaker rite, but never seen it. The woman reached a state of euphoria where the innocence of Eden came upon her and compelled her to remove her clothes before God entered the garden, asking who told her of her nakedness.
In this attempt to return to a time before sin she had unpeeled her blouse, revealing breasts which, from bearing children, were as shrunk as old leather wine bottles. Perhaps the girl perched on the sailor’s shoulders was her child. Far from feeling the cold and the driving rain, the woman embraced it, her skin glowing with effort, drawing superstitious awe from the watching crowd.
Except for Sir Lewis. What was innocence for her was the utmost depravity for him, a consequence of the religious licence Cromwell had given such pernicious sects.
As she dropped the blouse in a pool, spurning it with her dancing feet, Sir Lewis ordered his footman to seize the whore while the coachman went for a constable.
‘If there still is anyone keeping order in this Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he said.
‘Leave her,’ I said to the footman. ‘I will deal with her.’
Sir Lewis lost all restraint. The brooding sourness built up during his enforced exile burst out of him. He looked the arrogant, despotic hanging magistrate I had first met years ago.
‘You? You can do nothing! You are one of the creators of this evil!’
The woman, now naked, danced in a mounting frenzy, matched by the insistent rhythm of the Quakers’ singing, accompanied by the apprentices, whose shocked outrage had been overwhelmed by prurience. They outdid one another in nudges and jokes, gazing lasciviously, their handclapping, which had begun with a mocking slowness, increasing in speed until it matched the ecstasy of the singers.
‘Your master Thurloe has been sacked. You have no power. No position. It is you who should flee – if you can, regicide!’ He spat the word out. ‘There was a ballot to be on the jury of those who killed the King. I was lucky enough to win a place.’
When you have been in power for a decade you do not lose it overnight, whether it has substance or not. ‘Get in your coach, Sir Lewis, or I will bring an action against you for endangering the life of that child.’
‘That slattern –’ he began, but saw the look on my face and turned to shout at his coachman to open the door.
I strode over to the crowd. The apprentices stopped clapping when they saw my expression. Disgust and outrage began to return to their faces at the sight of the naked woman.
‘Stop her,’ I said to the sailor.
‘I cannot. She is with the Lord.’
I told an apprentice to fetch a constable. ‘Name,’ I said to the sailor.
‘Stephen Butcher,’ he said, with one of those beatific smiles that made me want to strike him across the face.
I knew of him. He was one of the followers of the Quaker preacher James Nayler who had re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on an ass. I had wanted Nayler to be dealt with quietly, but he had been charged with blasphemy, flogged, and his tongue bored. As I feared, his supporters had increased tenfold.
There was no sign of the constable. The apprentices were looking at me expectantly, itching to be told to lay their hands on the woman. Blood oozed in a muddy rivulet on one of her feet where she had cut herself on a stone, but she seemed unaware of it. I looked away but, in spite of myself, could not keep my eyes from her. Shrivelled as her breasts were, her gyrations and the look of ecstasy on her uplifted face smoothed out its lines, giving it a strange, mesmeric beauty, and leaving no doubt that the girl who had nearly been killed was her daughter.
Her dance not only took the years from her; it took them from me. Anne’s body was a distant memory. When the urge came on me, Scogman found me a whore. Working for Cromwell late into every night had killed the desire even for that. I was not sorry. I thought of love, if I thought of it at all, as a false god, a spy within which robbed a man of his secrets and left him helpless, out of control. I had seen many men ruined by love; I had almost been destroyed by it myself. Had not my relationship with Anne become immeasurably better without love?
As I stared at the twist and turn of the woman’s rump, I
caught the sailor’s smile, more knowing than saintly. I snatched up her clothes and thrust them angrily at him. ‘Cover her.’
‘Is that what your voice is telling you?’
I had had enough of the Quakers and their inner voices. I flung the clothes at him. ‘Do it!’
Without the smile leaving his face, Stephen Butcher picked up the clothes. ‘Martha,’ he said. ‘Martha.’ He seemed to be calling her from a great distance, for at first she did not respond. But the mood was broken for most of the Quakers, whose singing gradually stuttered to a stop. That slowed the woman’s dancing but did not stop it. Like a top, her whirling became a stagger until the sailor caught her by the arm. She gazed at him dizzily, as if she did not know him. He held her patiently until she regained her balance.
‘Martha,’ he said gently. ‘He is here. The man who saved Hannah’s life.’
She looked at him blankly, her breasts heaving as she drew in great gulps of air, and then at the clothes he was holding out to her. ‘I heard the Lord coming. I heard him. I saw him!’
‘Put them on,’ I said.
Martha took a step towards me. The lines were folding back into her face. Stretch marks slackening her belly suggested several children. ‘The sin is in your eyes, not in my clothes.’
Butcher dropped the blouse over her head and held out her underskirt. At least he was a pragmatist, I thought – he had seen the approaching constables. Automatically, Martha hooked the blouse to her skirt. Her body disappeared, except where the wet rags clung to it. Momentarily, perversely, before the constable came up to me, I felt I had destroyed something.
‘Lewdness in a public place,’ I said to the constable.
‘Your name, sir?’
His colleague dug him in the ribs and pointed to the falcon ring on my finger. ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Thomas.’
He seized Martha roughly, although she made no resistance. Some of the crowd bowed their heads; others began singing. Her daughter Hannah stood staring, thumb in mouth, before flinging herself at her mother. I suspected Martha was a recent convert, for the girl had absorbed none of her piety. When a constable pulled her off, she bit him, momentarily freeing her mother, yelling that they would escape to Spital, beyond the walls. Incensed, the constables began to drag them both away. Martha broke down and began to struggle, pleading with the constables that her daughter had the flux, and would die in gaol. This was a fine show for the apprentices, who liked nothing better than seeing the rewards of sin – unless they were committing the sins themselves – and began jeering and applauding.
I cannot say why I acted as I did next, for it was quite out of character. Perhaps the girl crying that they would escape to Spital, like her dancing mother, brought back to me the time of my life I preferred to forget.
‘Leave them,’ I said.
The constables stopped, staring at me uncomprehendingly. The girl half-wrenched away, screaming as a constable twisted her arm behind her back.
‘Release them,’ I snapped.
The girl immediately turned to run. Her mother stopped her, giving me a bewildered look which changed into one of gratitude, tinged with the piety that so aggravated me. The apprentices, robbed of their prey, began to mutter rebelliously.
‘Arrest him,’ I said, pointing at the sailor, Stephen Butcher.
‘On what charge?’ said the constable whose hand had been bitten.
‘Incitement to lewdness.’
In Puritan England there was no distinction between sin and crime. Adultery had become a felony, and, just as Eve picked the apple, it was invariably the woman’s fault. The apprentices moved threateningly towards me, but one of them, who from his superior clothes looked like a lawyer’s clerk, cried: ‘We have a Solomon amongst us. He has arrested the whoremaster, not the whore.’
The apprentices switched in a moment from threatening me to applauding me. ‘The whoremaster not the whore,’ they chanted.
Hannah stood puzzled, her thumb in her mouth again. She whispered to her mother, who pointed to me. Hannah darted over to me. She looked as if she was about to hug me but the thought of her flux, and the stench that came from her, made me draw away in disgust and she made a strange genuflection, somewhere between a bow and a curtsey, before fleeing back to her mother.
Stephen Butcher went without resistance, but stopped as he passed me. The constables attempted to jerk him away, but they might as well have tried to move one of the ships he sailed in. His muscles bulged under his linen shirt as he anchored himself in front of me. There was a livid scar on his neck and one of his ears was twisted out of shape. For a moment I thought the smile on his face was a feint and he was about to strike me, but in a voice as gentle as melted butter he had a much more cunning blow to land.
‘Your voices are telling you different things. Listen to the right one.’
4
When Anne and Luke first came down from the country we had a variety of dinner guests, chosen to avoid politics: lawyers, doctors, City merchants and the like. Luke was perfectly mannered and scrupulously polite, but remained at a distance. At first Anne did her best. She sparkled and drew the best out of me. But whereas her table at Highpoint was the most sought after in the county, full of wit and life, this was hard work.
Everyone knew Luke was there under duress. It was impossible to ignore and equally impossible to talk about it without the risk of an explosion or a penetrating silence. Gradually Anne’s sparkle died and she became as mechanical as Luke. I felt that, with her growing desire to return to Highpoint, tacitly she was taking his side, but would not give up. More and more guests found excuses not to come; others were reluctant to go out as the nights drew in and the disturbances increased.
Often the table was reduced to the three of us, as it was on the evening after the confrontation with Sir Lewis Challoner. Conversation ran out during the grouse soup, with stewed carp, ox tongues, fricassee of rabbits, lobsters, a choice lamprey pie, tarts and sweetmeats to come. I ate and drank well, both to cover the growing silences and because, although out of office, with Thurloe I was keeping my hand in, preparing – perhaps plotting would be a better word – for the next government. I had fallen into the bad habit of taking documents to the table, as I did when I lived alone. I finished my soup and began to glance through the documents.
Anne, who had scarcely had a mouthful of soup, dropped her spoon. A servant scuttled from the wall to give her another. She gripped it as if she was about to fling it at me. ‘I cannot stand this place!’
She stared directly at me, as if she meant it was me she could not stand. The servants were as still as the hunters woven into the tapestry behind them. Luke gazed at the piece of lamprey pie embedded on his fork. It was so quiet I could hear a candle gutter, and the rustle of silk as her bodice rose and fell. Side ringlets of her hair, normally carefully arranged, were in disarray. Among them a bead of sweat gleamed. Disconcertingly, at that moment, I wanted her. It was extraordinary how familiarity had stopped me seeing how young she still looked. She had avoided the constant ravages of childbirth that aged most women at thirty. The guttering candle went out, snatching away the ringlets and the tightly laced bodice, sketching there the lines of the haughty, scornful, but in some strange way vulnerable, girl I had first met.
A servant sprang to replace the candle. With it came back the ringlets, the sumptuous dark green of her dress and the measured voice of Lady Stonehouse.
‘I mean, sir, it is so dark and gloomy.’
I picked up her manner with relief, mingled with a lingering regret. ‘We are not spending money on Highpoint, madam. Why not employ your talents here?’
She took a sip of soup. ‘He would not approve.’
She indicated another portrait of Lord Stonehouse, which hung over our proceedings. When I dined alone, if I noticed him at all, I always saw him as a stern but comforting presence for, in spite of our differences, we were alike in one thing: we both hated extremes, and struggled to keep things together rather than let them
fall apart.
‘He is not here to stop you.’
‘His ghost is.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘He haunts the place. He does not want us here. When his wife died he spent all his time here. As you do.’
She began calmly, almost flippantly, but again her voice shook and the implication of what she had said only seemed to strike her when she had spoken. She dabbed her lips, her hands trembling, said she was out of sorts and begged to be excused. Luke and I finished our meal in silence. I went up to her apartment to enquire after her. Her maid, Agnes, told me she was not well and had retired for the night. Agnes had come from Highpoint and I sensed her disapproval as she put away Anne’s dress. The crackle and sheen of the silk, black then sharp green as it caught the light, aroused me again. I took a step towards her room. The maid turned to me enquiringly. I felt my cheeks burning like a schoolboy as I brought out some stilted phrase about wishing her ladyship a good night, and almost walked into a chair on the way out. Her ladyship! For the first time it struck me that what had kept us together had also kept us apart.
I tried to work. I had a report for Thurloe on the City I must finish. Together with the generals, money would decide the next government. Everything was in the balance. I knew the hidden vices of every alderman in the City: who might be bought, sold or persuaded. But every time I began writing, the crackle of the paper brought back the lustre and sheen of her dress. Her ladyship! She was a printer’s daughter from Farringdon. I saw the rain gleam again on the twisting rump of the Quaker woman. That was how it had started. Of course. A good whore was all I needed. I had not been to Southwark for a long time.
The lantern clock in the hall showed midnight. Was it really that time? It was too late and too dangerous. And the servants would know. They knew, or sensed, everything. Somehow I could not bear it reaching her. The indecision raged around in my head. Normally I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but that night I slept little.
The King's List Page 3
