She sat staring at the documents before I locked them away in my case. They were for two émigrés, Thomas Black, Master Printer, and his wife, Anne, of an address in Shoreditch, which was one of Scogman’s houses. I chose the name because it was that of the gold account in Amsterdam from sales of Highpoint land.
Three days before we were due to leave, Mr Cole told me that the soldiers guarding the door had arrested a man who was behaving suspiciously. He wanted to see Mr Black, and when the soldiers said there was no Mr Black at the house, insisted that there was. There was a struggle. They took his knife and locked him in the cloakroom.
It had been too quiet. Too easy. We had become too complacent. Richard, or one of his agents, must have tracked down our new identity. I told Anne to stay in her rooms and hurried downstairs.
The man was a sorry sight, huddled in a corner, head bleeding from a cut on his forehead. That was all I could see at first as the soldier opened the door. There were no windows in the cloakroom, which was used to store baggage as well as outdoor coats. Our chest was there, fortunately labelled Highpoint, so the spy could have learned nothing from that. The man was crammed up against it, head in his hands.
‘Up!’ The soldier prodded him with his stave.
The man shot up, banging his head against a low beam which immediately knocked him down again. The soldier dragged him up. Somehow the man had managed to keep his hat, which was dislodged over his face.
‘Doff your hat!’
I pushed the door open further so light fell on the man as he took off his hat. I had that moment of confusion when you see someone in a totally unexpected place and are thrown completely off balance. It was Sam. A trickle of blood ran down his cheek as he stared at me, twisting his hat between his hands.
‘I will see to him,’ I said.
‘He is violent, sir,’ the soldier protested.
Nothing looked less violent than Sam as he backed away from the soldier, almost banging his head against the beam again. His red hair was tousled, his cravat torn, his stammer as pronounced as it was when I first met him. ‘I’m s-sorry – Mr Black –’
‘Sir Thomas!’ roared the soldier.
Sam gave him a bewildered, frightened look. I ordered the soldier away and as he reluctantly backed into the hall, stave at the ready, I beckoned Sam into the hall. Sam stood staring with awe round the checkerboard tiled hall, the statues of Mars and Venus, the sweep of pictures up the staircase.
‘I’m sorry, sir … but I didn’t know. She said but I didn’t think … she’s dying, sir. My mother. Ellie. She wanted to see you … before … before …’
I guided him towards the reception room. As we passed the foot of the stairs he looked up to see Anne staring down at him. In that moment his hair seemed redder than ever, burning like a beacon. My only thought was to get him out of sight. I pushed him towards the reception room. He almost collided with a statue, stumbled and went in.
‘It’s all right, Anne.’
‘Who is that?’ Her knuckles gripping the banisters looked carved there, bleached white.
‘The intruder. I will deal with him. Please.’
She turned and went slowly back upstairs. There was a crash from the reception room and a stifled cry. I hurried in to see Sam bent over pieces of a porcelain vase.
‘The edge of my coat … I am always so c-careful. I’m so … sorry, Mr Black. I never break things …’
The words poured out of him in a never-ending stream. James talked over him as if he was not there, saying he would send for the maid. I glimpsed Anne, staring down into the room, before James closed the door.
‘Leave it to the maid.’ He stood paralysed, not knowing what to do with the pieces he had picked up. ‘How did you find out my address?’
‘She … Ellie. She told me. I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t come here but …’ He put the pieces on a table. One of his fingers was bleeding. ‘I – I was just outside and the … s-soldier grabbed me –’
‘Go home, Sam. I’ll come and see her when I can.’
‘She’s dying! Don’t you under … I promised her I would – would ask you to come and see her.’
‘You had no right to do that!’
‘I know … I know …’ He plunged towards the door, stopping abruptly when he saw a glass goblet. Even at that moment his obsession claimed him. His hands were quite steady as he reverently picked it up, holding it up to the light. ‘Venetian. Look at the engraving. You see … Clear. How do they get it so clear?’
‘You had better give me that.’
He did so and put his hand on the doorknob. His voice was so low at first I could hardly hear him. ‘She told me … I thought she was raving … that you and she …’ He turned to face me. His voice strengthened. It must have been a pure act of will, for he overcame his stammer in a burst. ‘I didn’t believe her. I thought it was nonsense, but she kept on about it and on and on, and so I thought I would come and see and tell her it was nonsense, and then I saw the house and the soldier … then you –’
‘Sit down, Sam.’
He sat down again and looked at me in the way he had gazed at the goblet and the satyrs, as if I might break, or turn into a statue. Ellie had had a fall, he said, then a fever. The doctor could do nothing. She had told Sam I was his father. It was so muddled with the ramblings that came and went as the fever slackened, then burned afresh, that he did not know whether to believe her or not. But there were various things he remembered. What had meant little when it happened began to fall into place. My slip over the Half Moon, knowing it had been a printing shop. The fading glints of red in my hair.
‘It used to be as red as yours,’ I said.
He tousled his hair, in a furious movement of embarrassment. ‘I hate it.’
‘So did I. It goes. It will go soon enough.’
‘It is true then?’
Even then it took an effort, like the last burst to reach the top of a steep hill. ‘Yes.’
He stared at me, at the goblet, the broken pieces, the satyrs, before jumping up. ‘I must go. I must be with her when …’
He hurried to the door and opened it. The maid was waiting with her pan and brush. First he almost collided with her, then blundered the wrong way before half-running to the street door. Anne was still standing on the stairs, motionless.
‘Is his mother the whore I once saw?’
‘Don’t call her that!’
Sam twisted round. ‘I’m sorry … I’m –’
I rounded on him. ‘For God’s sake stop saying you’re sorry.’
He ran past James at the reception desk, between the two bewildered soldiers and, by the time I reached the bottom of the steps to shout after him, was at the corner of Queen Street, disappearing towards Holborn.
27
The Hackney dropped me at the entrance to Half Moon Court. I told him to wait, for it did not seem as if I would be long; in fact it looked as if I was too late. The curtains were drawn in the bedroom and the house was dark and silent. I went in through the shop. It was in a much better state than when I last saw it. A window frame had been repaired and the walls painted white. There were wooden crates containing cheap pottery for market stalls, laboratory flasks and pipettes. A basket contained rejected goblets.
In the dining room, in front of a mirror with an engraved frame which looked like Sam’s work, was the maid Mary, reddening her cheeks with Spanish paper. She saw me in the mirror and jumped, smearing some of the cochineal on to her chin. She gave me a deep flustered curtsey. Her breasts dipped in the low line of her bodice, showing a tiny network of blue veins. By the mirror was a blue crayon with which she had probably touched them in.
‘Sam here?’
‘No, sir. I thought he’d be with you.’
‘Is there a nurse with Mrs –’ I could not remember the married name Ellie went under. ‘Your mistress?’
‘Nurse? She don’t need no nurse, sir, when she’s got me to look after her.’
I pulled open the
door at the bottom of the stairs and went up two at a time. Even at that moment my feet did not forget which stairs sagged and could not be trusted. The smell hit me halfway up, a mixture of urine, blood-letting and sweat, cooked in an overheated room. The maid followed me up.
‘Sam didn’t want to go. I told him he must. I was right, weren’t I, sir?’
Ellie had thrown off most of the bedclothes in the stifling room. I stopped at the door. I did not recognise the twisted old woman whose arm, with its emaciated muscles, was flung upon the pillow as if to ward off some evil. Her hand was as cold as ice.
The maid entered. ‘Drifted off, has she.’
‘You should have been with her. She’s gone.’
She forgot her obsequiousness and pushed me to one side. ‘If you think she’s dead, you ain’t never seen no corpse.’
As if she was pulling a doll into shape, she yanked the arm down and lifted the woman on to pillows. There was a sudden explosion of sound, a rapid gasping, which sounded as if she was about to expire, but, very gradually, she began to take slow, ragged breaths.
‘Here. Have some of the elixir of life.’
The maid held a flask to Ellie’s lips. More of the liquid dribbled down her cheeks and into her nightdress than her mouth, but it seemed to revive her. An odour of Dutch gin joined the other smells in the room and brought back the memory of the last time I had seen her, in a Southwark brothel, where I first met Sam.
‘The gentleman’s here,’ the maid said.
More than the gin, the words jerked Ellie into life. ‘Am I decent?’
In the dim light she could not see me. The maid gave me an outrageous wink and now seemed determined to show what a good and caring nurse she was. She brushed what was left of Ellie’s old woman’s hair. With another wink at me, the maid applied paste to whiten Ellie’s cheeks and fill in the craters of smallpox. She looked more like a doll than ever, but one that resembled Ellie, and I realised she was not old. She was younger than me. She had been fourteen or fifteen when I met her – she was never quite sure. She could not be more than thirty. It was the life she led that had shrunk and wasted her, a life I had carelessly dropped her into and, just as carelessly, pulled her out of, believing it atoned for what I did. It did not. Nothing could. I could not look at her.
‘Do I smell all right?’ Ellie asked anxiously.
‘Like a Southwark virgin,’ the maid replied.
Ellie began laughing and could not stop. It turned into violent coughing. I could stand the charade no longer, dismissed the maid and sat by the bed, wiping Ellie’s face with a cloth and giving her a sip of cordial until she sank back on the pillows exhausted, eyes closed.
‘Sam …’ she began.
‘I’m here, Mother,’ he said. He was standing by the door, still twisting his hat between his fingers.
She opened her eyes, astonished, and saw me. Her smile cracked the paste that had dried on her face, but somehow, among the flakes of it and the shrivelled skin, the ghost of the smile I remembered was still there.
‘Tom? Is that you?’
‘It’s me.’
‘You came.’
‘I came. I’m sorry.’
She gripped my hand and fell into a doze. I told Sam to open the window. When he protested that the doctor had warned him to keep her warm, I said she needed air. Wasn’t that what he, or Boyle, called it? A bird in a glass chamber died when air was pumped out. Wasn’t that what he had told me? Silently, he drew the curtains and opened the window. A breeze ruffled her hair. She gave a tiny sigh. A house martin, which nested every year in the jutting gable, dipped and flew towards the apple tree I had planted to replace the one lost in the war.
‘Sorry?’ Her eyes jerked open. ‘Lord love you, you were always the odd one. Sorry for coming?’
‘No. For what I did to you.’
‘Did to me?’ She looked amazed. ‘I knew what I was doing – better than you did. I’ll tell you that for a plate of cockles.’ Her head sank back against the pillows. ‘You told me what would happen. You were honest. He’s the most honest person in the world, Sam.’
Sam looked at the floor and twisted his hat.
‘No, no,’ I muttered. ‘At least not now. Far from it.’ The memory of Anne’s expression as she stared down at Sam filled my head. The stink of the room, which I had begun to get used to, was suddenly overpowering. I had no idea how long I had been there and struggled to think of a way of leaving.
‘Not now? Not with her ladyship, you mean?’
I had forgotten how acute she was. Ellie’s eyes danced. Whatever else was dying, her eyes were alive. She was never malicious. Just open. I had forgotten that too.
‘D’you still like herrings?’
The question came out of the blue. Sam shook his head, looking embarrassed, believing, I suppose, she was rambling again. I told her, unthinkingly, I never ate them. In Queen Street herrings were what cook called poor man’s fish. They would never be served; it would be pike or lampreys, or carp. The light instantly went out of her eyes. Quickly, and with Stonehouse glibness, I said I had never been able to find anyone who could grill them as she did.
And somewhere, somehow, Tom Neave got in and the compliment became sincere. I could see her worming the largest, plumpest herrings from the hawker for a groat and a kiss and toasting her hands with them over the fire in the printing shop in Spitalfields, see the dripping oil send up little spurts of flame, feel the rich smoked taste on my tongue. I swear that the stink of the room disappeared. All I could smell was the kipper and the printing ink as we talked and remembered, and I realised, with an acute stab of pain, what I had lost. Tom Neave, that was what I had lost. Myself. She was right. She knew what she was doing, knew it would not last, knew, perhaps, that we both remembered it as wonderful because we just had the magic bit, not the reality afterwards. But those few months held so much more. Words that were not only going to change the world, but did. Soldiers who had lost half their colleagues in the war crammed into the church at Putney to tell Cromwell and his grandees they wanted their say.
Say?
I could hear the voice of Colonel Rainsborough ringing round that church: ‘I do believe that the poorest he in England hath a life to live as the greatest he … if a man is to be governed, he should have a say in who is to govern him.’
I must have been speaking out loud.
‘Dear Tom,’ she whispered. ‘You really cared about a better world then.’
She began to doze. Birds were making their evening calls. A red kite swooped on its way to Smithfield for its evening meal. I could tell exactly from the shadow of the gable across the courtyard what time it was. Had I really been there three hours?
I rose abruptly, miming to Sam that I had to go. He nodded. The door creaked as he opened it. It had always creaked but that evening the creak was like the crack of a musket. Ellie’s eyes shot open, staring blankly.
‘Sam? … Tom? … Why, you’ve come!’
‘Tom … he … Mr Black’s been, Mother.’
She gazed at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Been?’ She frowned, then her face cleared and she spoke to him as if he was a simpleton. ‘Been? Of course he’s been. Herrings …’
‘Herrings,’ I smiled and got a foot out of the door.
‘Herrings? What did we talk about herrings for? I forgot why I asked you to come. Please, Tom.’ She indicated the chair at the side of the bed. ‘No. Not you, Sam. Leave us. Please.’ When he had gone she said: ‘Jewellery box.’
It was a chipped wooden box with a design long faded, which had once carried trinkets. In it she had stored mostly money, silver pence and Cromwell half crowns.
‘Take it.’
‘I can’t do that.’
She gripped my arm with a sudden ferocity. She told me to get rid of the maid Mary. Pay her off. She would ruin Sam. Once, as Ellie put it, she had hopped it, Mary would get her claws in Sam, get pregnant, and the fool would marry her. He thought he knew everything but he didn’t. He was v
ery dependent. He was as stubborn as a mule and never listened to a word she said, but when the doctor said she had not long on God’s earth he went to pieces. That was why she had broken her promise never to tell him I was his father.
‘Does her ladyship know about him?’
‘She does now.’
‘Oh God, Tom, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t you start saying that. I should have told her. Told him. I should have – well. I should have done lots of things. Look. I must go. I really must go.’ But still I stood there. ‘He’s all right. Sam.’
Her face brightened. ‘He ain’t half bad, is he?’
‘Stubborn as a mule but …’
She smiled as if it was the best tribute I could possibly give him. When I said I would pay off Mary but did not need the money, she told me to take it. ‘Then,’ she added, with some of her old street asperity, ‘I’ll know you’ll do it.’
I took the half crowns, uncovering what looked like the remains of a broken white comb. It was a fish bone, part of a spine with a few smaller bones clinging to it. It came back to me, as vivid as if it had happened yesterday, when, after eating herrings in front of the fire, we had first tried to make love on the printing-shop floor. She had cried out and rolled away in pain. Sticking to her arse was a herring bone she had picked clean. We had laughed then. She was laughing now.
‘Oh, Lord,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten that was there.’ Whatever blood was left in her pinked her cheeks.
I kissed her.
‘Dear, dear Tom,’ she said. ‘You’re too good for your own boots. You did care for me a little, didn’t you?’
‘Rather more than a little,’ I said.
‘You liar,’ she said. But she turned away on the pillows, eyes closing, breath rising and falling more regularly.
Downstairs I told Sam she was sleeping more peacefully. Mary went to sit with her, and Sam stammered his thanks in his awkward stilted way, hoping that he had not caused me too much inconvenience.
Inconvenience! I became as awkward as he was and said he was right and I should have – and, well – I stuck out my hand, and he looked at it as if he did not know what to do with it, so I had to practically force his hand into mine and pump it. Then he took my hand in a grip that practically broke my fingers.
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