The woman with the wart was sweeping the yard. The blossom had begun to fall from the tree and I could almost smell the apples to come. There was a buzzing sound, like a persistent bee. It stopped, then resumed as I crept downstairs. It came from the print shop. No, that wasn’t right. The light dazzled me. It was a miracle. Everything came back to me as I stared at the clear glass goblet. He was so absorbed in his work he did not see me enter. He was working on something like a spinning wheel, which he operated with his feet on a treadle. It drove the engraving tool he was using to create an intricate pattern on a similar goblet.
‘You did it, Sam! You did it!’ I cried.
The point of the engraving tool jumped and he almost dropped the goblet. ‘You should not be up. You are not well, Father.’
‘I am perfectly well. Particularly when I see this.’ I picked up the glass goblet, turning it towards the light, rotating it, marvelling at the clarity of the glass, with no milkiness or crazing, and the exquisite intricacy of the engraving.
‘Please, sir.’ He was twisting about in agony. ‘It is not mine.’
‘Then, as your major shareholder, it is mine.’
‘The pair is for a customer.’
‘Customer?’
‘Lady Stonehouse.’
The glass slipped from my fingers. Sam dived forward, caught it, juggled with it and almost lost it, before holding it tightly to him as if it was a baby and putting it tenderly back on its shelf.
‘Did you not know, sir?’
‘No, no. I did not know. You mean Anne?’ He did not even know her first name. ‘My wife?’ He nodded, as if it was the least remarkable thing in the world. ‘She was here?’
It was the very last place I expected her to come. She hated it. It was beneath her. She wanted to expunge any idea that she had ever been a printer’s daughter. The thought of her coming to Half Moon Court to see Sam, of all people, dazed me. I was not as well as I thought I was and the rest of the story came out in fits and starts during that long day in which Mrs Bridges, who was as kind as she was ugly, administered me Dutch brandy possets, laced with honey. They were the very best cure, she asserted, for the moonstruck and, after several, I was not one to disagree with her.
It must have been shortly after Scogman and I set out for Highpoint. Anne had arrived in a coach. It was so heavily laden with cases and packets, the boot was almost scraping on the cobbles. There was a woman with her who stayed in the coach.
‘No man?’
‘No.’
‘Go on.’
He could not go on. He sat down, trembling, wringing his hands. Eventually, he said that at first he did not know who she was. She was masked. But he recognised her voice from when he had come to Queen Street that afternoon. She refused to take anything or even sit, looking at a drink he offered her as if it was poisoned, at a chair as if she might catch some disease. She treated him like a servant – no, worse than a servant, like a criminal, questioning him as if he was in a court of law, picking up a chemical flask or pipette from his workbench as if they were evidence of a crime. How much did that cost? What did you pay for that? Poor Sam had the worst head for money of anyone I knew. When he stammered that he did not know, she thought he was lying.
Was it anger, grief at Luke’s death, that had driven her there? Anger that Sam was alive and Luke dead? She asked him endless questions about money. What I had paid him. What I had promised him. Proof of my crime. My crime against Luke. In those moods she sickened and disgusted me. She was like a Dutch usurer. She would have gone through the books, if there had been books. Worst of all, she had poured scorn on Sam’s goblet, the nearest he had come to clear glass. Clear, she said? It was as clear as a London fog. Sam came out of his stammering awe. She could insult him, or me, but not his glass. He apologised for coming to Queen Street that afternoon when his mother was dying. He knew he should never have gone there. All the more so because we had quarrelled and our relationship was over.
‘You told her that?’ I said. ‘What did she say?’
‘N-nothing. She sat down. For the first time she said n-othing.’
He was trembling. He spoke the word with vehemence. I could imagine the scene: Sam switching abruptly, without warning, from deference to that stubborn, even arrogant, certainty when he felt he was right about something.
Outside there was the cry of the coal merchant and the rattle of his cart. Sam sent Mrs Bridges out to deal with him and drew me into the back room where I could not be seen. People were looking for me – there were notices everywhere, he said.
He went on with his story. He had read the Discoverer and told Lady Stonehouse what Scogman had told him – that Richard had killed Luke and I had tried to save him, how Luke talked of his love for his mother, and how Scogman and I had buried him.
No physic, no herb, could bring the life surging back into me more than the knowledge that she had been told the truth. Now Sam wanted to know more. What had happened that afternoon had been buried with Luke’s body, and for the first time I began to speak freely about it while Sam listened, his hands knotted together, his head bowed. I had not shed a tear, but I did so then as Luke was buried again, the loamy soil falling until his smile had disappeared and I was exhausted with weeping. It was done. I felt I had told Anne. At least Sam had. It was done. She had been told. I could do no more.
‘What did she say?’
He gnawed a nail. It was as filthy and cracked as mine used to be when I worked here. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? She did not cry, or say a word?’ He shook his head. This was inscrutable behaviour indeed, even for Anne. ‘Did she believe you?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I – I do not understand her at all, sir.’
‘No. Well. It has taken me a lifetime and I am no nearer. Nothing at all?’
All he could tell me was that she went back to the lady in the coach. From his description she sounded like Lucy. They had a long conversation, after which Lady Stonehouse –
His continual use of her title, with a kind of awestruck genuflection in the middle, began to irritate me. ‘For God’s sake, Sam, call her Anne.’
‘A – A –’
‘She is, after all, your stepmother.’
‘My …? Lady …?’ He swallowed. His eyes bulged. ‘A –?’ He could not say her name. In the end he settled for the pronoun. ‘She – she came back, took off her mask and …’ He bit the nail, then hid it in his other hand in a way that made me absolutely certain Anne had commented on it. The gesture brought back her disdain at the ink engrained in my hands when I was an apprentice, her amazed laughter at the size of my feet.
‘She took off her mask and …’ He stopped again and stared into space. ‘She is very beautiful, sir.’
For some reason this irritated me even more than his inability, or his refusal, to stop using her title. ‘Get on with it.’
There was a basket of rejects from the kiln near Sam’s workbench, which he sold to cheap markets for a penny or two. He picked out one, somewhat better than the rest. It was of a similar quality, he said, to the one he was working on when she visited. At that time he believed he had reached a reasonable form of clarity, and he thought it might be sold in a higher class of shop at the Exchange.
She studied the goblet without saying a word. She tapped it, and turned it, and held it up to the light. Sam put the nail to his mouth and pulled it away again as he relived the misery of that long silence, punctuated only by the ring of her fingers against the glass. I knew those silences. I squeezed his shoulder in sympathy.
‘She has a most eloquent way of saying nothing, Sam.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ he said. ‘She threw it in the basket and broke it.’
Again uncontrollable anger rose in me at the thought of her in those focused, uncompromising moods, when she would say exactly what was in her mind, however brutal, whatever the consequences. She told him not to take such work anywhere near the Exchange. Far from making his reputation, as he hoped, it would stifle it at birth. She
picked up her mask and wished him good day. She reached the door and paused. He remembered his manners – as he put it – sprang to the door and opened it. She continued to stand there.
‘It might work,’ she said.
‘What might work?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘She seemed to be talking to herself.’
I knew those moods too, that strange vacancy in her face when an idea occurred to her and she pursued it relentlessly. I could hear the rustle of her dress as she returned to the basket of rejects, see her ringed fingers as they picked up one of the broken pieces. A tiny bubble of blood welled from a pricked finger. He rushed to produce a cloth to wrap round it but she waved him away irritably, sucking her finger while she scrutinised the glass again.
‘Do you know Christopher Merrett?’ she said at last.
Of course he didn’t. Sam knew no one except the natural philosophers he consorted with, mostly as poor and obscure as himself. Only someone who lived in the enclosed, arcane world of magnificence like Anne would have bothered to ask the question. But, she went on with increasing impatience, he must be aware of Neri’s L’Arte Vetraria? Abjectly, he had to confess he had never heard of it. Murano glass?
With the last question, she met Sam’s own arrogance. Of course he knew Murano, the centre of Venetian glass-making for centuries. Their art was a closely guarded secret, so important to Venice the glass-makers were never allowed to leave the island.
‘But this book did,’ she responded. ‘L’Arte Vetraria.’
It revealed many of the secrets of Venetian glass-making and was published in 1621. ‘Art,’ she said, with that faint disgust I was also familiar with, ‘travels from Italy across Europe but, when it reaches the English Channel, disappears without trace.’ Only now was the book being translated by Christopher Merrett and was not yet published. She had seen an early proof.
All this time he had been holding the door open for her. She said she would have a proof sent to him and, should his work be satisfactory, commission a pair of goblets. The goblet he was engraving was one of them.
Sam went to a sack, plunged in his hand, and brought it out as if he was an alchemist who has discovered how to make gold. I blinked at the grey, dusty lump of rock he was holding.
‘Galena. Common in Europe. We mine it in Derbyshire.’ He pointed to a faint sheen in places. ‘Lead ore. Lead is the secret.’
It took many hours after that, but all the work he had done before had not been wasted. Far from it. Lead was the last piece to fall into place. It brought down the temperature of the firing and increased the malleability of the glass when he worked it. Swept up as I was by his enthusiasm, I felt increasingly irked at him refusing to accept the secret I had bought for him at a considerable price – no doubt simply copied from the book, which increased my resentment – but accepting it from Anne. What was the difference?
He became defensive. Soon it would be public knowledge. He had to use the work he had done to stay ahead. Sam had certainly lost his previous stiff, purist approach. He said, ‘All artists and philosophers, Father, build on each other’s work. They never call it theft.’
‘That sounds like my wife,’ I said tartly.
He flushed brick red from his neck to the roots of his hair. Good God, he had fallen for her, fallen for her claptrap about art, for her poisonous mixture of devastating charm and brutal honesty. My anger at her walking in here and treating him like dirt was replaced by fury that she was manipulating him. I plied him with questions. What did she mean – it might work? What might work? He swore he had no idea, so passionately, I believed him. On other matters he was more evasive. Who were the goblets for? At first he said they were for her. Then he admitted he thought they were a gift. I felt a sharp stab of jealousy. A gift? For whom? He did not know! He was adamant. I could get no more out of him. He denied knowing where she was.
‘Then how do you know where to deliver the goblets?’
‘She said she would have them collected. L-Lady Stonehouse is travelling.’
‘Is she. Is she indeed.’ I paced about the room. ‘I have to remind you, Sam, that we are a company. I set you up. I bought the kiln. Without it, none of this would have happened.’
He moved to bite his nail but pulled back his hand halfway. It riled me even more that it was her silent voice that stopped him. ‘I will for – for ever be grateful for that, Father,’ he replied. ‘Apart from my father – I – I mean the person I thought was my father – you are the first person who ever had faith in me.’
‘Good,’ I said, somewhat mollified. ‘Then, as the first fruits of the enterprise, those goblets belong to me.’
He bit his nail then. He bit it clean through and half swallowed the fragment, coughing violently until he managed to dislodge it. He straightened up. He was shaking like a sapling in a high wind. ‘I – I have to remind you, Father, that I – I am the majority shareholder. You – you ended our agreement. You said you wanted nothing more to do with me.’ He began coughing again.
‘Have you quite finished?’ I said coldly.
‘Not – not quite, sir. Lady Stonehouse commissioned those goblets. She paid me. In advance.’
If I had stayed a moment longer I would have struck him. I went up to my room and lay on the bed. What was she up to? She cared not a jot for him. When he had turned up at Queen Street, to tell me Ellie was dying, she was furious. She had walked out. She hated him. What was she doing commissioning him, giving him money? My love child, my bastard? She blamed me for Luke’s death and so was stealing Sam from me. That was what she was doing. Sam had told her what happened when I had gone to rescue Luke and what had she said? Nothing. What other explanation was there? She was stealing Sam from me. The thoughts ran endlessly round and round my head, as if driven by Sam’s drill engraving the goblets in the shop below, until the door slammed and the drill abruptly stopped.
It sounded like Mrs Bridges returning from some errand or other. There was a scurry of whispered voices, followed by Sam coming up the stairs two at a time. He entered without ceremony.
‘You must go, Father.’
Mrs Bridges had been to Smithfield to buy meat. A hawker had been selling pamphlets about a vicious murder near Shoe Lane by the regicide Tom Neave. Without thinking she had ordered more than her usual amount of meat.
‘Got a visitor, Mrs Bridges?’ the butcher said as he chopped the beef.
It was probably nothing more than a casual remark, but the butcher had a copy of the pamphlet near him and she grew increasingly flustered when she heard someone else say Tom Neave used to live at Half Moon Court.
At first, our argument still rankling, there was nothing more I wanted than to leave that place. Sam gave me a dusty workman’s pack in which he carried things to the kiln. In it I put a change of linen, a flask of small beer and some bread. It was little more than I had when I came here all those years ago, but at least, I thought, I had boots on my feet.
I got as far as the door. It was market day. I could hear from the cries of the hawkers that the streets were crowded. I put the pack down and told them it would be safer to slip away at first light the next morning. But the truth was I could not face leaving Sam without trying to repair matters between us. When I saw his concern – where would I go, what would I do, how could they tell such lies about me? – I felt I had been churlish and petty. But my anger about Anne blocked me from finding words and we ate the excellent beef Mrs Bridges cooked largely in silence. By the time we went to bed we were reduced to muttered monosyllables.
‘Night, Sam.’
‘Night, Father.’
I could not sleep. Where would I go? Scogman’s house? That was the first place they would look. And I would be a danger to him, as I was to Sam. I could not think. I could not stop thinking. Did that make sense? No. Nothing made sense any more. I jumped at every sound. The clatter of a late Hackney coming down Long Lane. The bang of a privy door across the court. The strangest sound of all, which made my ski
n crawl and my heart quicken: a hiss, followed by a thump, then a sigh. I shot up in bed. The house was silent except for the occasional crack of the old timber. The sound I had heard was that of the old printing machine. I must have dropped off and dreamed it. All the same, I crept downstairs, my feet remembering every stair, avoiding the cracks and groans.
I did not need a candle. The moon was the colour of skimmed milk, filling the workroom with a wash of pale, ethereal light. It glinted on the diamond tip of Sam’s engraving tool, placed exactly in its groove. He was as neat a worker as I used to be. The goblets were small moons of lights, seeming to float in the air. I stared at the image he was engraving on one of them. I half expected it to be the Stonehouse falcon, but it was not. It felt strangely familiar, but I could not make out what it was. The soft, bluish light splintered into a rainbow on the shards of broken glass in the basket of rejects. I stared from the chaos of colours to the clear, dazzling perfection of the goblets. In that moment I saw.
Saw what to do. Where to go. Where I had been going all my life. Saw the printing machine, exactly where it had been, from the cracks in the tiles that had never been repaired. Smelt the oil. Felt the aching of my muscles as I brought the press down on the platens, saw the gleam of the wet ink as I pulled the paper from the type. One by one. Pamphlet after pamphlet. All gone. Forgotten. Waste. Trash. Or so I had thought. But it was not so. They had inspired people to fight. Not in the war, although they had done that, but in the much more difficult business of finding a better way to live. They were still there, those pamphlets, lodged in a few people’s minds. Even speeches were never entirely forgotten.
I could still hear the Levellers in that Putney church telling Cromwell that the King must not return, hear Colonel Rainsborough’s ringing voice: ‘I do believe that the poorest he in England should have his say just as the richest he.’ I picked up a goblet from the basket. It was crazed and milky. The poorest he. Have his say. What a ridiculous idea. After all, was not the King returning?
‘What are you doing, Father?’
The King's List Page 24
