Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  Eaton swore softly. ‘I thought I’d seen you before.’

  Ingram’s fear of him seemed to have gone. Rather, it was Eaton who appeared to grow fearful of what he might say, yet increasingly eager to hear it. Shadwell had no love for Lord Stonehouse, Ingram went on. There had been some scandal at Highpoint House, after which Shadwell was evicted from his living. The lady, Kate Beaumann – she gave her name then as Mrs Turner – said in the turmoil that followed the scandal she also lost her place. Lord Stonehouse had called in loans and forced the sale of the small estate where she held a position. It was given to his steward, for his services during the scandal.

  Eaton shook his head violently. He sprang up. ‘That’s not true! I –’ He clenched his fists but seemed more liable to do damage to himself than Ingram, flailing his hand against his side.

  The first years she was here, Ingram said, she was a tortured woman. She said her connection with the child, and who she said were his parents, must never be revealed, for it would be a danger to him and to her. In the church she made long prayers of penitence for some unmentionable sin about which she said she could only unburden herself to God.

  ‘After you went to London, Tom,’ he said, ‘she used to take the cake to London and stay with a lady there. When the men came yesterday she was on her way to tend Susannah’s grave. She must have seen them and fled.’

  ‘Why did she write to tell Matthew to destroy the pendant?’ Eaton asked.

  Ingram looked at him steadily. ‘She said it was evil.’

  Eaton swore under his breath. ‘You said nothing to Richard Stonehouse about Kate Beaumann?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Thank God. What did you tell him?’

  ‘Where letters to Matthew were sent: for collection at the Blue Boar, Oxford.’

  While Eaton ran out to see to the horses I said goodbye to Mr Ingram. He pulled me close. ‘Do not tell him, but once I saw the seal on a letter from the woman she stays with in London. She is the Countess of Carlisle in Bedford Square. Kate may have fled there first.’

  Eaton rode hard. For the first few miles he did not seem to care whether I kept up with him or not. Then, as the horses tired, with the thick mud splashed up to their manes, he preserved a sullen silence.

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard God on your lips,’ I said. He looked at me, startled. ‘You said thank God Richard did not know about Kate Beaumann.’

  ‘Did I?’

  He dug his spurs viciously into his horse’s flanks, driving it into a gallop, which only ended as we approached Aldgate. There had been talk of fortifying and trenching the main entrances to London. Nothing had been done, partly because the City feared that trade, disrupted already, would be stopped altogether. But there was an increased guard that held us up while they checked our business, to Eaton’s increasing irritation. When we were through he looked as if he would resort to silence, but he twisted in his saddle, his eyes like fresh wounds as he looked at me. His words, the self-derisive ring in his voice, remain with me, livid as his scar.

  ‘Before you were born that night, I had asked her to marry me.’

  Chapter 26

  Eaton had arranged to meet Turville’s replacement at the Seven Stars in Carey Street, an inn patronised by lawyers who dealt with litigation and debt. We reached it by early evening, Eaton sending a dispatch to Lord Stonehouse, saying we would leave at dawn next morning for Oxford. He said no more after his confession – for that is what it sounded like. I do not know if I was more astonished by what he told me, or by his manner of telling it. For a moment he was full of remorse and regret. I never before saw him regret anything, unless it was measured in acres and rents.

  I closed my hand round my lucky half crown, which I kept in my jerkin pocket. Whether I was right to regard it as lucky, I still did not know. Whatever had happened on the evening when I was born had spread ill-luck and remorse in an ever-widening circle of people, like a stone thrown into a pool.

  While Eaton met the lawyer, I went across Covent Garden to the Countess of Carlisle’s house in Bedford Square, where Mr Ingram had told me Kate Beaumann might have fled.

  As I walked up the steps, I felt like a small boy again, sent round the back to wait by the shit heap for replies to messages. It was my old persecutor, Jenkins, who answered the door. Determined to burst my way in, I had my foot ready to jam the door, but he opened it with a flourish. Not a muscle of his face moved as I stumbled forward in astonishment. He bowed to me.

  ‘They are expecting you, sir.’

  They? Expecting me? He took me upstairs under a ceiling elaborately moulded with floral and leafy scrolls, before leading me into a panelled salon. Perhaps it was Lucy Hay’s sense of humour, but on one side were portraits of King Charles and his party, by Van Dyck, and on the other somewhat cheaper pictures by Lely of Bedford, Stonehouse and other lords who supported Parliament. Jenkins announced me, with a good deal of relish and even more ambiguity as the ‘gentleman you are expecting, my lady’. The Countess was seated in what looked to me like a throne at first glance, but was merely an upholstered chair with elaborate gilt arms. The magpie pendant she had worn in the coach sparkled at her breast. She indicated a chair, but I thought she was giving me her hand to kiss and bent forward.

  ‘Oh, don’t be a fool,’ she said, irritably. She talked as she had done in the coach, as if there was no time to waste. ‘Sit down. You got my letter?’

  ‘No.’

  She had sent it to Half Moon Court. A letter with the Countess’s seal must have caused a sensation there. I could imagine Mrs Black snatching it from Sarah’s greasy hands, holding it up to the light, and putting it prominently on the chimney piece where any visitor might see it. I was so hypnotised by this thought I did not at first realise there was someone else in the room. With his trim beard he looked so like a life-size version of the battered woodblock we had printed with the Grand Remonstrance, I was not sure until he spoke that he was real.

  ‘Now we shall be in his scandal sheets, Lucy!’ he said, then when I stood there tongue-tied: ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I – I was expecting someone else, Mr Pym.’

  ‘The King, perhaps?’ He roared with laughter, and pointed to Lucy Hay. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past her.’

  ‘A – a lady called Kate Beaumann,’ I stammered. ‘I thought she might be here.’

  ‘I wish she was,’ Lucy said, then to Mr Pym: ‘This is –’

  ‘Oh, I know who he is.’ Unlike his thunderous speeches in the House, his voice had the soft burr of Somerset, where he came from. He took my hand. ‘The man who mangles my prose, smuggles me out of the House . . . Thomas Neave – or should I say Stonehouse?’

  ‘Neave, sir.’

  ‘Well, well, we shall see.’

  He looked at Lucy. She unclasped the pendant, holding it before a candle. It dazzled me as much as the other, but in a mischievously wicked rather than a menacing way. The magpie had a little cluster of tiny pearls in its enamelled nest, perhaps symbolic of the gossip she picked up in one place and flew with to another, the gossip that had saved Mr Pym.

  She pressed a garnet on one side of the nest, held it down, then pressed its fellow on the other side. I sprang back instinctively as the magpie flew towards me. Inside, I glimpsed the portrait of a man, but she was too swift to close it before I could see who it was.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Pym. ‘Now we shall never know where her heart lies.’

  Lucy told me she had been presented at court the same day as Frances Stonehouse. They had become friends and ordered the same style of pendant from an Italian jeweller. Through Frances, Lucy came to know Kate Beaumann, who lived on the neighbouring estate. She knew my story through Kate, who believed Frances’s pendant was lost. Matthew had told her, when they first came to Poplar, he had never seen it.

  ‘Kate only found out recently that Matthew was lying,’ Lucy Hay said.

  ‘Because I told you –’ I burst out. ‘In the coach
! I didn’t mean to but –’

  ‘The boy’s sharp,’ Mr Pym said. ‘You’re right, as usual, Lucy. He may do.’

  ‘Do?’ I said.

  He waved my question away. ‘Lord Stonehouse has told you to find the pendant?’

  ‘Yes. He –’

  ‘We know he’s considering you for the inheritance. We have our intelligence too. But Lord Stonehouse is . . . changeable. And he is not well. We cannot afford the inheritance to go to either of the two brothers – the enormous power and influence of the Stonehouse name going to the King!’

  He was standing, making a speech now, his voice sonorous. I was even more dazzled than I was by the pendants. Enormous power and influence . . . Stupidly, I had never considered this. I was a person who ran with speeches, or copied them, or set them in type. Not a person who made them. He paused, standing directly in front of me. His voice rapped out.

  ‘Suppose you do inherit? Will you support us?’

  My throat was so dry with excitement it was a moment before I could speak. ‘Yes, Mr Pym,’ I said. ‘I would do anything for you.’

  ‘Good! Good!’ He squeezed my arm with a politician’s certainty, as if everything was settled, the pendant found and the inheritance secured.

  ‘Suppose,’ said Lucy Hay drily, ‘he is not a Stonehouse?’

  She had a remarkable capacity for bringing him down to earth, but he had an equally remarkable capacity for leaving it. Politics, for him, was just as much a question of belief as religion.

  ‘Look at him,’ he said. They both walked round me, gazing at me from different angles, as if I was a marble statue. ‘Look at the nose. The chin.’

  Lucy Hay tilted it. Her hand was warm, and she left a heavy smell of musk and sweet marjoram clinging round me as she moved away. ‘I admit everything looks Stonehouse, except for the dreadful hair, which is that of his mongrel mother but –’

  ‘He’s not only a Stonehouse, he’s the old man’s child,’ Pym said decisively.

  ‘You just want him to be! How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘Because when I was at Highpoint I got lost and found myself in the wing he kept unchanged since his wife Frances died. I went into her old bedroom. Hanging there was a portrait of, er . . . this fellow, youth –’

  He had forgotten my name. ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Tom, I know he’s Tom,’ Pym said irritably. ‘Tom, painted when he was about –’

  ‘Twelve,’ I said. ‘By Peter Lely.’

  He jumped a little, as if a statue had spoken. ‘You know Sir Peter?’

  ‘Only as a model.’ I told them about the trick, my errand to the Guildhall, by which he had sketched me.

  ‘How were you dressed?’

  ‘As an apprentice.’

  ‘You see!’ Pym turned triumphantly to Lucy. ‘Lely painted him in the height of fashion. Highpoint in the background. Dog at his feet. Lace dripping from his collar, from his funnelled boots. Plumed hat hiding completely his red hair. Gloved hands holding a little cane. Did you ever have such clothes?’

  ‘Only in my dreams,’ I said.

  Only in my dreams! It was not until I left, dazed, still in a trance, that I remembered the contract I had signed with Lord Stonehouse. I did not want to be Lord Stonehouse. I wanted Anne. And, at that moment I wanted her so badly I almost went to Half Moon Court. Almost.

  It was dark when I got back to the Seven Stars. Eaton was beside himself, thinking I, like Kate had disappeared. He assumed I had been to see Anne, and I did not disabuse him. He was very drunk and I was about to go to the room that he had booked upstairs when two late travellers, a man and a woman passed. Eaton’s eyes followed the woman. So did mine. She was wearing a cloak, and was about the same height as my will o’ the wisp, and moved with the same quick grace. But when she turned to address her companion I saw she was far too young to be Kate Beaumann. That shape, that gliding grace had compelled me to strain to try and catch a glimpse of her face. Eaton had exactly the same, hungry compulsion, and at the same moment that each of us felt a small, irrational tug of disappointment, our eyes met. We turned sharply away from one another, like two men discovering they have the same secret vice. And it was that discovery, as much, or more than the drink, that started him to talk.

  He sat so close to the fire, his boots began to singe. He never looked at me. It was as if he was talking to himself, unpicking a long-crusted-over scab. As Lord Stonehouse’s scavenger he told me – or told the fire – he was hated throughout the vast estate, from Edgehill in the east to Grey Horse in the west. He relished it. It made his job easier. Fear was a great inducement for people to pay their rents. Labourers and even some of the richer yeomen threatened unruly children that the black horseman would get them. He enjoyed hearing them scream and run to hide as he approached a farm. He had no use for company, living alone in the steward’s lodge.

  One day he was at Earl Staynton, on the fringe of the Stonehouse lands and the Pearce estate, where Margaret Pearce lived with her sick father and her companion, Kate Beaumann. The Pearces were an old family that had once had a greater estate than Lord Stonehouse, but had fallen into decline. Poachers went unchecked in Rowan Wood, whose ownership was disputed between the two estates. Eaton set traps for them. He nearly caught a poacher running away, but in his eagerness to get him ran into his own trap.

  The iron teeth bit through the leather of his boot. At first he was more enraged by missing the poacher than the pain, until he realised he could not reach the teeth and was losing blood. It was Kate Beaumann, walking on the edge of the Pearce estate, who heard what were more his savage oaths than cries for help.

  The pain was excruciating when Kate found him and he was near to fainting, which he had never done in his life before. He thought it was misfortune upon misfortune when he saw it was a woman, but she took the pinion out as he directed her, then, with a stout piece of wood, managed to prise the jaws apart.

  He was over a month recovering, during which she visited him with Margaret Pearce. He was surly and ungrateful – he had no language with which to express gratitude. But when he returned to work he suggested to Lord Stonehouse that Rowan Wood should be divided between the two estates. Margaret Pearce’s father died. For the first time there was a period of peace between the two families, Margaret’s friendship developing with Lord Stonehouse and his two sons.

  Water had always been a problem on the neglected Pearce estate. It was Kate who came to Eaton for advice about a spring that had stopped flowing. Limping away from her – for a bone had been broken and was proving slow to heal – he sneered that he had always known she expected payment for freeing him from the trap. Her reply was to bring him a salve for his foot from Matthew Neave, the driver of the plague cart, known to be a cunning man with a gift for herbal cures. When his foot was strong enough, Eaton went up to the hills above Earl Staynton, found the fall of rocks that had blocked the spring, and freed it.

  When Kate came to thank him, he denied all knowledge of it. From that moment their relationship, although he did not call it that, grew. One day, during the summer of 1625, that terrible summer when the sun beat down from a copper sky and the plague spread through Oxford, she asked him if he knew a minister who would perform a marriage outside the parish. Eaton was the holder of many secrets, which was precisely why she asked him, but they were all ones he had prised out of people. Never before had anyone, certainly not anyone like Kate, entrusted him with anything like this.

  His first thought was that it concerned Margaret, but Kate denied this. In any case, now Margaret’s father was dead no one had any hold over her. Kate said the information was for a friend. Suspicious of everything, Eaton investigated that. He could discover no such friend. Then it dawned on him that the friend might be himself. He laughed at the idea. She would as soon marry his dog! And he had never felt the slightest desire to marry anyone. But, usually a heavy sleeper, he found he could not sleep. He kept seeing her plain, almost placid face, usually with a smile on it, whatever insults or g
runts he threw at her.

  He had no illusions about himself. He was rough and uncouth, but he had acquired money, property. He began to wash and dress more like the prosperous man he was. He told her that the Reverend Mark Stevens in Upper Vale was in debt and would carry out the service she required, no questions asked. She was grateful but nothing more was said. Their dealings were like this. A request was made in the guise of a remark, which the other picked up without further discussion.

  Now he was convinced Kate was going to marry someone else, and was desperate to keep it from Margaret Pearce, who relied on her so much she would put every obstacle in her way. Yes, that must be it! He had been a fool to think she would even look at him! But he was tortured by his feelings for her. He had to know the truth. But though he struggled dozens of times to talk to her about it, the words would not come. He could talk about dogs. Hawks. Scheming, lying tenants. But love . . .

  It was the first, and I think the only time I heard the word on his lips. I do not know whether I was more surprised by that or by the eye nearest to me gleaming wet in the guttering candlelight. The fire was low, ash softly clinking in the hearth. From the distant stables a horse whinnied as the doors were closed for the night.

  It was Margaret Pearce who brought it out into the open. Seeing the change in Eaton, she said that he must have a secret love. Nobody but Margaret Pearce could talk to him – or Lord Stonehouse – like that. She was so beautiful, said it with such grave concern, without a glance to Kate, that he fled. Kate followed him and in an agony of confusion his feelings came out. He nearly fled again, but she stopped him. She said she was complimented, and he had many qualities that he was denying to himself. She needed time to think about what he had said. He did not know what she meant by qualities, or how he could deny something to himself if he really wanted it. But he was overwhelmed that she had not dismissed him out of hand.

  He was silent for a long time, staring into the dying, softly settling fire. The candle had gone out and I was in a pool of darkness. I felt like an intruder, hunched on a stool, legs stiff from riding all day, until the cramp cried out in them and I was forced to move. He looked round startled, as if he had completely forgotten I was there. Frightened he would not finish the story, I said: ‘What happened?’