Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  ‘P-plot, sir?’ I stammered, in bewilderment.

  A bony finger jabbed me in the back. ‘My lord,’ Eaton corrected me. He had been so still in a corner he had merged with the dark tapestry behind him.

  Lord Stonehouse’s voice was as cold as his look. ‘Step forward. Look at me.’

  I forced myself to look at the man who might be my real father. At that moment I cared little. I had lost any desire for a real father, particularly one who condemned you to a pit at birth.

  His linen was crumpled and there were wine stains on his collar. Yet this very carelessness of dress spoke more eloquently of power than the finest clothes. His face was long and gaunt and his nose slightly hooked, like the falcon that was his symbol, and his jet black eyes had the bird’s unyielding, penetrating stare. It was hard to believe this was the man whose emotional parting with his son that morning I had interrupted. His voice had the rasping harshness of another bird, a rook.

  ‘You chose your moment well.’

  I had spent the day regretting bitterly the misunderstanding, the rupture I had caused between father and son. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ I mumbled wretchedly, jumping as I got another prod in the back: ‘– my lord.’

  My very abjectness goaded him to a sudden fury. I learned later that, like many strong, obdurate men, he could not abide weakness. I saw Eaton flinch, his scar curling into his cheek, for he knew what was coming. Lord Stonehouse leapt up. ‘Sorry? Sorry! You will be sorry! Did you think you could come in here and pick up your inheritance like that?’ He snapped his fingers in my face. ‘Did you? Did you?’

  Spittle struck my face. I tried to answer, but it was impossible against this violent torrent of words. He raged at me, saying he had atoned for what he did. He had clothed me. He had educated me. God knew, he could do no more! And how did I repay him? By destroying his relationship with his eldest son. Despite all their endless arguments they had always been reconciled, but now it was over, and I was the reason for the final rift. He was only stopped by a fit of coughing. He leaned against his desk, breathing heavily, taking a swallow of wine. Red veins flared on his cheeks.

  ‘No news of Richard?’

  Eaton re-emerged from the gloom of the tapestry. ‘No, my lord. You were considering whether he should be arrested. Shall I –’

  Lord Stonehouse flung the glass at Eaton, who only just ducked in time. ‘Arrested? Arrest my son? For the only noble thing he has ever done?’ Eaton wiped the dregs of wine from his face. The look of hatred he gave Lord Stonehouse’s back was so savage that the ones he had given me seemed mild in comparison. Lord Stonehouse came back to me. His anger was spent, replaced by the cold remorseless look he had displayed at his desk. I preferred the violent, uncontrolled fury. I remembered the reports on me which, year after year, must have passed over that desk, pages read by these cold eyes, which I felt knew every blemish, every sin. Uncannily, he seemed to read my mind.

  ‘When I first brought you from that slum, the first reports suggested you would be hanged. You are but a step from it now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? He thinks I have to have a reason to hang him, Eaton.’

  Eaton laughed. It was short-lived, for Lord Stonehouse gave him a long, cold stare before coming so close to me I could smell the wine on his breath. ‘I could have you hanged as an impostor. There is no proof who you are.’ His black eyes that never left my face told me he would do it, as easily as he had signed the plague order to consign me to the pit. ‘Who put you up to this?’ he said softly. He darted a look towards Eaton and the look of fear on the steward’s face sent a shiver through me. ‘Put – put me up to what?’

  ‘You think you can walk in here and claim your inheritance, do you?’

  ‘No, my lord! That that is not what –’

  ‘It was deliberately planned, wasn’t it?

  ‘I don’t know what –’

  ‘Who told you my son was going to be here?’

  ‘No one!’

  ‘Liar!’ He felt my doublet. ‘The finest velvet. Who bought you this?’

  Again he shot a look at Eaton. Guilt was written all over the steward’s face. I saw it all then. I remembered Eaton’s panic when he first saw me in the clothes. His saying to Turville they were going too far. Desperate that Richard should not inherit and ruin their rich livings, they had painted an optimistic picture of my prospects. The town house they talked about now seemed like a dream; perhaps there never were any such prospects of inheritance, apart from a fantasy in Lord Stonehouse’s mind, or simply as a threat to use against his son. Eaton and Turville had plotted to sell me at the right time – and I had turned up at a spectacularly wrong one.

  He fingered the doublet again. ‘Who gave you this? What have they been telling you?’

  The words were almost out of my mouth, but I bit them back. If I told him the truth he would be convinced I was part of a plot with Eaton and Turville. ‘Nothing! I bought these clothes myself.’

  I glimpsed the look of relief crossing Eaton’s face. Lord Stone-house picked it up too; he read things into every nuance. ‘You?’ The word was loaded with disbelief and contempt. He would have got the truth out of me but for that contempt – contempt at the very idea that a miserable wretch like me could possibly earn money to afford such clothes. That riled me, for my pride was as great as his, but it was a different sort of pride; the pride of seven years of honest work and toil. The sale of my pamphlets had begun to make me more money than I had dreamed possible and I could – just – have bought the clothes.

  ‘Yes – I earned it!’ I spread out my hands. Every crevice of my hands down to the whorls of my fingers were once again engrained with ink. The work I was so proud of was beneath his contempt. And no argument would convince him once he had decided he was right. He shook me so my head rattled. I lost my temper, grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him from me.

  I felt I was at the end of a journey which had begun with my rescuing from the mud those words that were going to change the world. The words had started the process, and the army would finish it. But if this was one of the men who was leading the army, one of the Great Twelve whom Mr Pym himself deferred to, what hope was there? His words were twisted and devious. They were not the words of hope, of change, but of double meanings and despair.

  He was so shocked I had dared to lay a finger on him, he gaped at me open-mouthed while words poured out of me. I told him about rescuing the words from the mud, about how I thought he was a great leader like Mr Pym, but all he was interested in was hanging a man for stealing Barbary horses and turning an honest printer out of house and home. Eaton turned away, wincing, expecting Lord Stonehouse to explode as I said all that and more. Oh, I said all kinds of twaddle, things I had picked up from Crop-Eared Jack and barely understood, but I made up for my lack of understanding with passion and belief while he stared at me as if I was a creature just dropped from the moon.

  When he had got some kind of breath back he picked up a bell from his desk. Still I kept on talking, starting from the very beginning when he had picked me up in the dockyard when I had burned myself. It was him, I knew it was him, I said, when he looked about to deny it. I said everything I might have said to him if I had been brought up by him instead of his money. When two burly servants came in and seized me, the story had to be cut pamphlet size. In short, I told him, I had not come for treasure.

  ‘Treasure?’ he said, with a puzzled frown.

  ‘I mean inheritance. I have come for this –’ And I pulled out the letter he had sent Mr Black.

  ‘Wait!’ He motioned the servants to release me and took the letter. He stared at the falcon seal. I thought for a moment that it was a trick of Eaton’s and he had never seen it before, but it was so unimportant to him he had forgotten it. He read it through to remind himself of it before looking up. ‘You came here for this?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  There was that sharpness of disbelief in his voice
that set me off again, sounding like Crop-Eared Jack in his pot, saying I was the very last person to want an estate. Landowners seemed to forget that there was a Charter of the Forest as well as Magna –

  ‘Be quiet!’ he roared. He gestured towards a painting of Highpoint House. It was much larger than the one in Turville’s house and, I realised, done at a much later date, for the village that straddled the river was not there; perhaps it had been removed because it spoiled the view. ‘You would not have that?’

  ‘I would not, my lord.’

  ‘Then you are a fool.’

  Riled again, and having nothing to lose I said: ‘I see what problems it brings you, my lord.’

  His black eyes bored into me. I felt the servants, one at either side of me, staring stiffly ahead, hands twitching at my elbows, ready to lift me away like a course at dinner. Then he grunted and smiled. It was a smile bitter as vinegar, but still a smile. ‘Not, perhaps, such a fool,’ he muttered. The hands of the two servants stopped twitching and returned in unison to fold behind their backs.

  He looked at the letter again. ‘You came here for Mr Black?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. He has been like a father to me.’

  He winced, and walked up to me, giving me a piercing look. ‘Like a father?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  He turned abruptly away so I could not see his face. He crumpled the letter as he walked towards the window, pieces of wax from the seal crumbling from it and pattering on the floor, leaving a little trail behind him. It was quite dark now, candles glowing in the houses opposite. A window was open but the air was thick and warm and as still as the servants guarding me. It was so quiet I could hear their breathing and the creak of their shoes as they shifted slightly. Eventually he tossed the letter on his desk and swivelled curtly to Eaton. ‘You did not tell me any of this.’

  Eaton came to life. ‘It was all in the reports, my lord. The devil in him, the temper, the –’

  ‘No, no, not that, Eaton, not that.’ The old man walked restlessly away. Then, like a lawyer suddenly finding a flaw in a case, he pounced on me. ‘But the wonderful Mr Black, like a father to you – you ran away from him!’

  Triumph shone in his eyes. I was a fraud, making up a story to show what a wonderful son I was – and would be, in contrast to his own. It was a plot to get his estate from him. Plots were wrecking my life every time I tried to build it up. I was done with plots. He would see the worst in me anyway, whatever I said, so I flung the words bitterly at him: ‘I ran away because your son’s men tried to kill me.’

  Eaton winced. He looked as if his scar had been freshly reopened. I remembered Turville saying he would not want to be the man who, without the most incontrovertible evidence, told Lord Stonehouse his son was a cold-blooded murderer. He stood quite still for a moment, then dismissed the servants, ordering them to stand outside his room. His face had the bleakness of those winter days that are never far from night. Eaton retreated into the shadows. Lord Stonehouse sat in the pool of light looking for the first time what he was, one of the most powerful men in England – or at least in that part of England opposed to the King. All my bravado left me. I began to shake and could not stop. His silence was the most awful thing, much more so than his violent, unpredictable temper, which was at least human; the measured way in which, with a key from a bunch at his waist, he unlocked and opened a drawer, had me convinced he was going to draw out a black cap.

  Instead, he took out a file of papers. When he went through them, my shaking increased, although it was from a different cause. I recognised immediately Mr Black’s flowing, Italianate script, of which he used to be so proud. With my printer’s eye I could read upside down as well as in reverse. As Lord Stonehouse turned the pages I caught ‘devil beat out of him’ . . . ‘Latin good, but morally’ . . . ‘outstanding’ . . . ‘if not in hell first’. They were the carefully written versions of the drafts I had seen in Mr Black’s office, submitted once a quarter for the last seven years of my life. It was to this office, this desk they had come. Lord Stonehouse had made notes in the margin in a cramped, hurried scrawl. What moved me was not the notes – I could not read them – but that he had made them at all. Whatever the truth about my parentage, I realised I meant something to him and I saw him then, for the first time, as my benefactor.

  Unlike the harshness with which most children were raised, the love and warmth with which Susannah brought me up made me look upon those arid pages of moral progress, or lack of it, with gratitude. They had given me an education. Without them I would never have met Anne. I could not stop my eyes filming over. He looked up as I dashed my hand quickly over my eyes and stared at me sternly, tight-lipped, expecting perhaps repentance, a confession for my part in the plot he imagined – anything but the two words that came awkwardly out of my mouth.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He stared blankly at me for a moment, then gave me a glare of suspicion. ‘For educating me,’ I stammered. ‘For giving me a chance to use words to –’

  ‘Enough!’ he said curtly. For the first time he looked uneasy, unsure of himself. Then he returned to the pages in front of him, checking dates, rapping out a series of questions about the time when the first alleged attack on me – as he put it – took place. Exactly as Eaton and Turville had warned me, he demanded proof. ‘Why did you think it was my son who hired these men?’

  ‘I didn’t. I thought it was you.’

  ‘Me?’ He laughed. ‘After spending all this money on you?’

  It poured out then, in a strange mixture of gratitude and bitterness. I told him of the letter Eaton had sent Mr Black, warning him of the danger Richard posed to me, and that I mistakenly thought it was him, Lord Stonehouse, who had grown tired of me; that the experiment or whatever it was had failed and he was discarding me as a potter would throw away a piece flawed in the firing. When I came to the royal procession and said I thought he had ordered his son to run me down, he hammered on the desk for me to stop. ‘You thought I was ordering him to kill you?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  His sharp eyes darted from me to Eaton. ‘I shouted to Richard to stop,’ he said curtly. ‘He said he did not hear me. That he feared my life was in danger.’ He suddenly rounded on the steward. ‘Do you believe that, Eaton?’

  ‘It is possible Mr Richard did not hear you, my lord.’

  ‘Possible, aye, possible! But what do you think, man?’ Eaton was silent. I began to see how the two men fed each other’s suspicions. ‘Why did you not tell me any of this, Eaton?’

  The question was put very softly. Again Eaton did not answer. Thin beads of sweat had collected along the line of his hair, and one trickled slowly from his forehead and down his cheek. I never thought I would feel a shred of sympathy for that crude, violent man, but it ran through me then. He was like an animal fearing a trap.

  ‘Mr Eaton saved my life,’ I said.

  The effect of this on Lord Stonehouse was remarkable. I cannot explain it, except by saying that the two of them were like a man and his dog. The dog, having been brought up brutally with scarcely any acts of kindness, responds blindly to orders, always fearing that brutality might reappear at any moment, for no apparent reason. But even the most primitive relationship has a long history, and in that history there are shared experiences which force them more closely together. This seemed to be one of those moments.

  ‘Why did you not tell me all this, man?’ Stonehouse said. Now some of the pent-up tension and bitterness I always felt simmering in Eaton charged his reply. The dog was showing his teeth. ‘It was one of Mr Richard’s periods of reform, my lord. I feared you would not believe me.’

  Lord Stonehouse met his eyes, then gave a long sigh. ‘Nor would I. Nor would I. You are quite right, Eaton. I told him he had nothing to fear from this boy, but on the gallery I could see . . . he almost had his sword in him!’ He gave a deep sigh, finished his wine, went to the open window again and stared out. It was so quiet I could hear a candle g
uttering as its wick ran out. ‘Get Turville,’ he said. He pointed to me. ‘And get him something to eat.’

  Chapter 22

  On the way down the stairs Eaton murmured: ‘Well done! I did not know you had it in you, Tom.’ He spoke as if he was already half-convinced we had plotted my entry into Queen Street together. Perhaps that would be how he described it to Turville. I pulled away from him angrily, in a state of utter confusion. I had come to this place to be open and honest, rid myself of the plot that was destroying our lives at Half Moon Court, free myself to marry Anne, only to become mired deeper. Eaton seemed to enjoy the look of hatred I gave him, treating it as a bond between us. ‘That’s the spirit, Tom! Turville don’t trust me and I don’t trust him. That’s the way we get on.’

  In high good humour he bullied the servants, ordered his horse and ‘vittles for Mr Tom’ before leaving. The two servants who had picked me up like a course at dinner looked now about to serve me it. They guided me deferentially down an oak-panelled corridor, approaching a large dining hall which contained a gleaming mahogany dining table as long as a ship. Lord Stonehouse was sitting alone at one end of it. I was almost through the doorway when the servants coughed (they did everything in unison) and steered me adroitly away. Lord Stonehouse did not notice. Besides his setting there was one more cover. He was ordering a servant to remove the silver cutlery, plate and glasses. I suppose they had been laid for Richard, in what might have been their last meal together.

  After a meal of game pie with the secretary, Mr Cole, I was taken up to Lord Stonehouse’s study again. His voice had resumed its curt tone.

  ‘You are not to wear those clothes again. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘I will decide what station in life you occupy. Meanwhile you will dress like Mr Cole.’

  I said nothing. It seemed I was right. Turville had exaggerated Lord Stonehouse’s plans for me, partly to draw me away from Mr Black and Anne, partly so he could promote me at the right time as a puppet in line for the inheritance, whom he and Eaton could manipulate.