Sam, blinking, bleary-eyed in his nightshirt. Beyond the gable across the court, the first glimmers of light showed in the sky. A cart rumbled towards Smithfield. Soon there would be the drumming of the first cattle being driven down St John’s to be slaughtered. I dropped the rejected goblet back in the basket.
‘I must go.’
‘Where?’
I did not answer; easier for him if they came to question him. I apologised for my boorishness. He was right. I had given up on him. Sadly, it was part of my nature. But perhaps it was not too late to improve on it, as he had worked on the goblets, for firing after firing. Of course he must finish them for Lady Stonehouse. They were wonderful.
‘Do – do you think so? Every time I engrave them I see another flaw.’
‘Nothing is ever perfect, Sam. You taught me that.’
‘Did I? What do you mean?’
I refused to say any more, dressed and picked up my pack. He found it as difficult to let me go as I did to set off.
‘You are leaving the country, Father?’
‘Perhaps. There are things I must do first.’
‘She says you must go abroad.’
‘Lady Stonehouse?’
My heart hammered painfully. It would take a while but, sooner or later, I would stop reacting like that. I had done it before. No, it was not true, but with Sam’s mother, Ellie, I had spent a whole afternoon, perhaps as much as a day, without thinking about her.
‘Go abroad? Did she indeed. Was it concern, do you think, or was she trying to get rid of me?’
He was shocked. He did not know what to say. At that moment he looked even more like me at that age with his shock of violent red hair, his earnestness, his belief in himself. No. He was better than me, with his stubborn, dogged persistence, his refusal to be diverted, as I had been, by love and power. There was no Stonehouse in him. I had done that for him, at least. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a rush of feeling for him. If I did not go now, I felt I never would. His eyes were beginning to shine.
‘If you go abroad, Father, I may never see you again.’
‘Come, come, Sam. I have a terrible habit of turning up on this doorstep like a bad penny.’ I was beginning to lose control of my voice and embraced him abruptly. ‘Bless you, my boy. Be true to yourself.’
And before he could say another word I plunged across the court, touching the apple tree for good fortune, as I always used to do, and, following another habit, took the road east.
36
I deliberately got into a drunken brawl in which my nose, my fine patrician Stonehouse nose, was smashed. At a second-hand clothing stall where they asked no questions I sold my rich leather jerkin, my boots and my linen for long-legged breeches that stank of the privy and a torn dorneck shirt. Peering at myself in a scrap of mirror through the eye that was not swollen, I recoiled. I was no longer a Stonehouse.
They were clearing the City in preparation for the King, throwing out beggars, prigs, unlicensed hawkers, whores and Quakers. Richard had guards looking for me at all the gates. I walked out under their eyes, chanting with a group of Quakers. My feet were bare and, when I dropped a piece of bread, I stopped and crooked my toes to pick it up, as I used to do when I first arrived at the Half Moon printing shop and refused to wear boots. Seeing that, Anne had called me monkey, after one she saw on a gentlewoman’s shoulders. I could hear her laughing. The chanting had stopped. People behind me were colliding into me. From the gatehouse came Sir Lewis Challoner, cold eyes staring. I felt he was rebuilding my pulped nose, opening my blackened, closed eye. I still could not move. A guard shouted. Another gave me a violent shove in the back. I stumbled, half-fell, and, as the chanting resumed, was carried by the press of the others out of the City.
I asked a Quaker to take me to Stephen Butcher but the man told me the sailor had left for the New World. But Stephen Butcher had a brother, Adam, also a sailor, the Quaker told me. Could he be of help instead? Adam Butcher lived in Spitalfields, near where I used to live with Ellie. He was not only a sailor like his brother, but a Quaker too. He and the other Quakers who remained had not wanted to leave their homes, so had not joined Stephen’s band of travellers to the New World. I showed him a money order, payable at my goldsmiths’ in Amsterdam, and told him I wanted a ship to the New World.
‘A passage?’
‘No. A ship.’
I told him I would do a deal with him. The Quakers, who had been given freedom to worship by Cromwell, were being thrown out of the City. They would be persecuted by the new King. They could freely cross the sea, along with my passengers.
‘And who might they be?’
‘Parliament.’
With my battered face and stinking clothes, he thought at first I was mad. But the money order looked very sane. And when I told him I wanted to make a Parliament that might have been, he began to listen. I told him about the day the Levellers had met Cromwell in that Putney church. We thought the world had changed, but we were wrong. It was like the glass goblet, foggy and crazed, fit only for the reject basket. But we were right, also. There could be another mix, another firing. We would learn from our failures. My passengers would be other regicides and people I trusted, who would not only travel to the New World, but try and build one. It would fail, but we would try again and, when that failed, again.
So I struck a common cause with the Quakers. Adam Butcher chose a ship with a legitimate trade, taking wool and various cloths from Europe and bringing back furs from Boston. Early in May the ship would leave Gravesend and divert from its usual route to stand off the coast near Deal. A two-masted brigantine, much favoured by smugglers, would ferry passengers out to the ship.
I rather liked my new nose, squashed and bent to one side of my face. In sober black, with my hair cropped short like a tradesman, I scarcely recognised myself. I slipped in and out of the City to see regicides and republicans. Some were only too eager to seize the opportunity. Others could not bear to leave their families and were persuaded – or persuaded themselves – that the King would pardon them. Some, like the regicide Major-General Thomas Harrison, were insulted.
‘Run away?’ he barked. ‘D’you think I’m afraid of meeting my Maker? Eh? Eh?’ At the door he softened and held out his hand. ‘The Good Old Cause,’ he said. He gripped my hand for a moment. ‘I tell thee, Tom, there’s only one thing I’m afraid of, and that’s this leg of mine. It will tremble, damn it. Shot to pieces at Marston Moor. If it does happen, and I shake a bit, tell ’em it’s this damned leg of mine, not me.’
My only real disappointment was that I could not persuade William Clarke to come. Although we had drifted apart, I still saw him as the Mr Ink who had once smuggled speeches out of Parliament, and he knew more about it than anyone else. John Thurloe’s return had given him the hope that, after all, he might obtain a position in the new government. An even greater disappointment was that he could not let me have a copy of the Putney papers. They were in the hands of the army.
There was no news of Anne, only rumours from sympathetic friends. It was common knowledge now that she had become a Royalist, out of sympathy with our dead son. The worst thing was that no one was surprised. People who had once described us as a perfect couple now said they had always known it would happen.
It was the talk of the Exchange. How Sir Thomas had been duped, his great house stripped. I had been forced to laugh at it, in order not to give myself away. Many of the treasures had been sold but the best of them, like my early books, had vanished. I checked rigorously, because through them I might find her. There was not a trace of them. In my worst moments it seemed obvious what had happened. Andrew had told me she had another man. They were in his house. She was waiting for the King to return and me to leave the country before she moved in with him not, perhaps, to build a new life, but to build another Highpoint.
And yet.
Why did she go to Sam, of all people? Yes, she was vindictive. Yes, she wanted to find out what money I had given him. Yes, when Sam had rounde
d on her and told her the truth about Luke’s death she had said nothing. But what did her silence mean? I was wary of hope, that great deceiver, but I could not help it stealing back into me. I could picture her so clearly, so sharply, in her black dress, hands clasped, head bowed. No one looked better in black than she did. She wore grief with a kind of bitter resentment, her eyes less likely to film with tears than smoulder with anger.
Why had she helped him, commissioned the goblets? To spite me, of course. That was typical. What was not typical was that it meant recognising my bastard. Sam had heard her mutter to herself it might work. What might work?
Tortured by these unanswered questions, I went back to Half Moon Court, determined to ask Sam what he was engraving on those goblets. Foolish, maybe, but I thought it safe enough with my new disguise. He was away, Mrs Bridges said, she did not know where. The shelf, on which he had constructed two stands to keep the goblets safe, was empty. The kiln at Clerkenwell was cold.
It was the beginning of May. Our ship was due to sail in a week’s time. I had chosen the date to coincide with the arrival of the King. There would be so much attention on his landing that we could slip away more easily. Already, only the most vigilant bounty hunters, most of whom I now knew by sight, were on the lookout for me. London had begun celebrating early. In the Strand apprentices jeered at Puritans as a huge maypole was erected, so large that sailors had to secure it with ropes, like a mast. At night fires burned and church bells rang. It is miserable being on your own while the whole world is celebrating. It was too dangerous to meet with fellow regicides, and I was glad to join Scogman to witness his wedding. For security, nobody knew I was going to be there until the last minute.
Being Scogman, he was married by a rogue clergyman with me as a witness, a child at his bride’s breast and others round her skirt. If she was disappointed at this furtive, clandestine affair outside church, with the clergyman taking the fee as soon as the vows were exchanged, she never showed it; but a look of joy leapt on her face when she heard the deep sound of Shoreditch church bells and thought they were for her, and nobody had the heart to tell her they were practising for the King.
While people went down on their knees on the streets to toast the King’s health, I raised my glass to the happy couple. For, I said, whether the country was Royalist or republican, or whatever muddle you chose, all depended on them raising their children. Children were the beating heart of the country. I did not say I had lost mine, for I did not believe I had. With Scogman’s children around my feet, I celebrated the laughter of little Liz before she died, Luke’s courage, Sam’s stubborn persistence. Children were the chances we took; they were the future.
There was much applause at this from the friends present, most of whom had served with Cromwell. Some were old Levellers from my Spitalfields days. I doubt whether there was a warmer celebration for the new King than there was that night in Shoreditch for the Good Old Cause.
Scogman was still in bed when I left first thing in the morning, but he came stumbling after me in his nightshirt with Dick tottering after him, carrying a letter with an air of great importance. Scogman apologised. With all the excitement he had forgotten to give me it. The letter was creased, with small fingermarks all over it, the seal crumbling so it was unrecognisable, but the paper was good and it was addressed to me in a meticulous scribe’s hand, and had followed me, in my peripatetic existence, from friend to friend, until it had finally reached Scogman. Up till that moment I was in a good state. I had applied Sam’s natural philosophy to Anne. There was a limit for everything, I reasoned, even love. If she felt anything for me she would have written by now. I had not thought of the simplest obstacle. How could she write without an address?
My hand shook a little and I dropped the letter, almost scrambling over the child as I went to retrieve it before he did it more damage.
I broke open what remained of the seal. The first page was in shorthand. I read the second page.
‘Bad news, sir?’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It’s the very best of news. Mr Clarke has managed to get the Putney papers from the army.’
I stared at the page of shorthand as if it was from one of my rare books. It looked like a copy, but even that was rarer than any of the books. One or two words were too much for Clarke’s shorthand, and from them I realised it was the first page of An Agreement of the People. It proposed sovereignty for the people, giving votes to a majority of men. It was the people’s Magna Carta.
Scogman said he would collect the papers, but when I told him Clarke would only give them to me he was immediately suspicious. ‘It’s a trap.’
‘Maybe.’
There had been similar approaches. I ignored them all even when I had known the person for years. I only ever worked through an intermediary. It was the best way to be safe. But I wanted those papers.
37
I left London as I had first entered it as a boy, by boat, carried by my old waterman, Jack. The Royalists might now rule the City, but they could never rule the water. With its complex currents and tides, it took years to know the river in its different moods and the watermen jealously guarded their trade. The previous day I had written to Clarke, telling him to meet me at Alderman’s Stairs. I would not be there, but a boatman would be. If all looked safe, he would be taken downstream to meet me.
It was early, before most trade began, and watermen fought for space. Wisps of cloud were clearing and the still low sun flashed on water dripping from the oars. There was still a chill in the air and I huddled in my jerkin, watching the tip of St Paul’s disappear, the grey walls of the Tower glide past. There was an unearthly quiet. The bell ringers had practised themselves into exhaustion.
Jack spoke no cant. He said he was glad the King was returning.
‘Then why are you helping me?’
He rested the oars for a moment. ‘Because you might come back, sir.’ He gave a throaty laugh and spat into the river. ‘Governments. Watermen have their own government and that’s bad enough.’
The wind picked up as the City gave way to wharves where dockers weaved about with shouts and the thud of boots as goods were unloaded. Among the smoke and oily stink of the river I briefly caught the rich smell of spices. With some sense of irony, I had told the waterman who picked up Clarke to take him to King Henry’s Stairs at Wapping. There he was, clutching a small case under his arm, cloak flapping from his dark, waisted jacket. The boat he had travelled in was moored, waiting to take him back to London. He glanced towards my boat, then paced away without any sign of recognition. Only when I shouted did he turn towards us. In his smart, square-heeled shoes he slipped on the muddy bank, almost falling before he righted himself at the top of the stairs.
‘You have led me a merry dance, Thomas,’ he said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘No. I trust no one.’
‘Quite right,’ he said, with unexpected savagery. ‘You can trust no one. Not in these times.’ The outburst caused him to slip again. I caught him, and for the first time he saw me close. ‘What has happened to your face?’ he muttered. ‘From the bank I didn’t recognise you.’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Yes. You were always good at that.’ He hesitated, then with a sudden movement, thrust the case at me, walking away immediately, glancing guiltily around. There were only some children squabbling over a bottle washed up by the tide and two men on the opposite bank, fishing.
From the case I took a packet, sealed and wrapped in oiled paper. The top sheet was foggy, but transparent enough for me to pick out written words where Clarke’s shorthand was inadequate. Sovereignty was one. Sovereignty of the People, the whole phrase would be. Bedfordshire was another word he had written in full – Clarke had been unable to catch the names of speakers, simply identifying them as Bedfordshire Man or Suffolk Trooper. For a week, these largely unknown men had crammed into a small church on the other side of the river to propose England’s only written Constitution. I thought it ha
d been lost. I might never see it enacted – I was thinking of Sam’s doggedness – but I determined to plant the seed of it, even if it was in another country, as unknown as those who had proposed it.
I looked round, dizzy at the thought. There was no sign of Clarke on the riverbank. I thought he had gone, not wishing to be seen with me, or to find a constable. Then I saw him sitting further down the steps, hunched up moodily, the water lapping almost up to his shoes, watching Jack unwrap a wad of tobacco. From a chain at his waistcoat hung a small knife with which, for as long as I could remember, he had sharpened quills. It was the only sign of his previous trade of scrivener. His cuffs were flecked with mud and for an instant I saw him as I did the first time, in the lobby at Parliament, cuffs splashed with ink, writing tray wobbling, dipping down to me with a smuggled speech against the King, urging me to run to the printer with words that would change the world.
‘Thank you, Mr Ink. God bless you.’
Normally he disliked me using the nickname, just as Anne dismissed Half Moon Court. He scrambled up awkwardly, looked moved to say something, but in the end simply raised a hand. I thought he was going to his boat on the other side of the stairs but when I was in mine he was still standing there, shifting from one foot to another. He did not look penniless, but he had no office and was too proud to go back to being a scrivener.
‘I should pay you for this.’
‘Money?’ He flung the word at me in a tone of disgust. ‘I don’t need money. A passage, yes.’
‘A passage?’
‘There is nothing for me here,’ he said bitterly. ‘I have served the country for fifteen years but all positions will come through court favours. Everything will be closed to me.’ He fingered the knife at his waistcoat. ‘You are sailing today?’
‘Soon. When the tide favours us,’ I said evasively.
‘I have my papers with me.’ He showed me letters of introduction and credit. ‘My servant will send on my chest.’ His pride crumbled and he became haggard, pleading.
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