Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  She chuckled and a quivering sliver of pale blue eye appeared, struggling to focus on me. ‘You made yourself scarce. So did Edward. But not her! He melts like sugar in water with her. In the library they were . . . “You know how long I’ve loved you,” my lord says.’

  I felt she was raving, slipping into nonsense, and tried to loosen her grip on me, but it immediately tightened.

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Of course I was there! What do you think keyholes are for – keys?’

  She choked with laughter at this, fought for breath, then continued with more urgency. ‘She just stood there. So did I, I can tell you!’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She laughed.’

  ‘Laughed?’

  The memory seemed to give her fresh energy and she sat up. ‘The bitch laughed! “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m asking you to marry me.” “That’s what I came to talk to you about, my lord,” she said. Brazen! Just like that! I thought the end of the world had come. It had. For her.’

  Her head darted about, as if she was trying to see through a keyhole.

  ‘Couldn’t see her. Bell rang three times. That’s me. Three for Mrs Morland for trouble inside, two for Mr Eaton for trouble out. “The lady’s fainted,” he said. Fainted! I could feel the crown when I put my hand up there – excuse my language, Mr Richard, but I know you’re a man of the world. “The lady is with child, my lord,” I said. He went as white as this sheet! I took charge. He’d made enough of a fool of himself, fathering the bastard. And this was woman’s work.’

  ‘How do you know I – it was his child?’

  ‘Of course the bastard was his! He’d been after her all summer, hadn’t he? If Eaton had done his job properly you wouldn’t be in this mess now – but you’ll see to him, Mr Richard, won’t you . . . you’ve come back, as you said you would, to see to him . . .’ Her voice flickered like a dying candle. She lay back on the pillow, the taut lines of her face relaxing, as if she had confessed all her sins and was now at peace with the world. ‘Keep evil and shame from this house. That’s all I’ve ever . . . tried . . . to do.’

  Chapter 30

  The cold, raw brutality of Mrs Morland’s story struck me numb. I could picture the others, but in spite of being drawn in such lurid colours, my mother, Margaret Pearce, remained a shadowy person. In spite of what Mrs Morland said, it was hard to believe Lord Stonehouse was my father. My impending birth seemed to have come as a shock to him. Eaton had told me Kate had asked him for the name of a minister who would perform a marriage outside the parish. My mother’s visit to Lord Stonehouse was linked to that, surely? What a fool I had been. All this time I had been searching for my father, but the key to everything surely lay in my mother. I determined immediately to try and talk again to Kate, but that night Mrs Morland died.

  It was as if, having unburdened her soul to Richard, as she thought, she had no more to do in this life. And it seemed that Eaton would shortly join her. Ben, for once, was no comfort, quite the reverse. He was usually equally interested in the patient and the disease; here he was repulsed by Eaton, but had what I thought was a ghoulish fascination with the disease, which he described as a sickness of the soul.

  ‘Mark the wound,’ he said to me, as if teaching a student. ‘It is almost healed. But the humours are so out of balance it has broken out in another place.’ He pointed to the scar, oozing a yellow pus, and made a note in his commonplace book, which he wrote up every day. He had a drawing of the scar which, he said, most interestingly, had increased in size over the last two days. He closed the book. ‘He will not eat or drink. He has a day, perhaps two. I shall be sorry not to see him out.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Have you not heard? We are leaving.’

  It was true. I had been so caught up with Mrs Morland and my own affairs I had not noticed men loading up the baggage train to leave at dawn the next day. I pleaded with Will to leave a small body of men to defend Highpoint, for Mrs Morland had been expecting Richard to return. Will refused. He had lost too many already. The King had succeeded in reaching Shrewsbury, and it was feared at any moment he would break out and march south to London. Essex was at Worcester and Will had received an urgent dispatch to join him.

  If it was not raining that autumn, it had merely paused and was threatening to return. I found Kate in the kitchen garden where she was picking herbs. The edges of her cloak were dark with recent rain and drops clung to the backs of her hands as she snipped marjoram.

  ‘I am sorry I upset you over Mrs Morland,’ I said.

  Her voice was equable, but condemning: ‘I thought you wanted to reconcile her with her daughter, Tom.’

  ‘I did! I did! But she was so bitter and unforgiving!’

  ‘You did not correct her when she thought you were Richard.’ She moved to a row of lavender, snipping spikes of it, a weak cautious sun colouring raindrops on each spray as she threw them in the trug. I was suddenly so exasperated by her calmness, condemning everything and answering nothing, I burst out: ‘Would you have married Eaton if I hadn’t been born?’

  She staggered as though she had been struck, dropping the trug and spilling some of the contents. All the colour drained from her face and, afraid she was going to faint, I led her to a bench in an arbour. I kept on saying how sorry I was, but she cut short my apologies with a curt gesture. She was breathing heavily. I went to the trug, rubbed lemon balm with lavender and the rainwater clinging to it, and gave it to her in a lime leaf as a small pomade.

  She smiled faintly. ‘Matthew’s son.’

  ‘Amongst others.’

  She began to breathe more easily. ‘Eaton told you . . . What did he tell you?’

  I now felt guiltier than ever about betraying the secrets Eaton had told the dying fire at the Seven Stars rather than me, but once I had started I had to continue. Perhaps I gave a poetic gloss to his coarse, abrupt story, put into it feelings of his I assumed from the bare facts he related. She said as much but, as if my own heart was in her hands, I pleaded his case, saying that if you just took what happened, what he did, however clumsily and bluntly he carried out his actions, did they not show that he was genuine, that he was – well, I had to say it, I had to – in love with her?

  She was shaking and I thought she was crying, then I saw she was laughing. ‘Oh, Tom, Tom, it is as if you are making love to me!’

  ‘He would use these words if he could, I swear it!’ I cried passionately.

  ‘You can see into that man’s heart, can you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do believe I can, yes.’

  She laughed until tears welled into her eyes. She picked at the lavender spikes, dropping them into the lap of her dress as if she was a little girl playing lovers’ fortune, then abruptly the tears came in earnest and I realised her calmness was not calmness at all, but a door tight shut on feelings that had been locked away since the day I was born.

  I put my arm round her and anyone coming into that garden would have thought us lovers, in spite of the disparity of our ages. For a moment she clung to me, then rose to go, but a squall of rain swept over the garden. We pressed back against the accumulation of dusty, snapping twigs and dead leaves in the arbour, staring at the curtain of rain in front of us.

  ‘Why did he tell you all this?’

  ‘Because he heard you were alive. He thought he might see you again. From that moment he changed.’

  ‘Changed? That man?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Tom, he is fooling you, as he fooled me.’

  ‘It was as if he was dragging the words out of a deep well.’

  ‘That, at least, is like,’ she muttered.

  The squall died away as quickly as it had arisen, and the sun crept out again. In my vehement movements I had edged into the rain and became aware that one sleeve of my shirt was clinging to my arm. Part of her cloak and hair were dark with rain. ‘You think he told you the truth?’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes, yes, I
do. No man could invent such feelings.’

  She sighed and shivered. I realised how wet we were and urged her to go in before she caught a chill, but she refused, saying she had to talk now, or she never would. She had thought it all best buried, that my happiness depended on it. Now I had been drawn to this cursed place, it was the lesser of two evils to tell me what part of the truth she knew.

  Over the years, she had given me more than simnel cake on my birthday. It was she who persuaded Mr Ingram to begin teaching me my words with the Bible. What began as an atonement for her sin – well, she would come to that – ended as, why not say it, a labour of love.

  ‘You asked me if I would have married Eaton if all this had not happened? Did he not tell you, I did answer him?’

  I shook my head. She shivered again, and again I pleaded with her to go in, but she said it was not the cold that made her shiver but the memory of that day, that summer creeping back to her. It had begun, as Eaton had told me, when she released him from the trap. Before then she knew him only as a person hated by the Pearce family, whose once vast estates had long been in decline. Margaret Pearce was an only child. Her mother was dead, her father a stubborn man who had lost most of his money fighting Lord Stonehouse’s encroachments on his land. When he died, the estate was close to ruin. The only thing he left her that was not mortgaged was his hatred of Lord Stonehouse.

  I listened spellbound. People had talked about my mother, if they had talked at all, as if she was a whore in a penny pamphlet, but no one had brought her to life as a real person.

  ‘She was beautiful?’ I asked.

  ‘And witty. And intelligent. And charming. Like you.’

  ‘I am charming?’

  ‘Oh, Tom! Listen to yourself!’

  ‘My feet are too large for me ever to be charming.’

  I splayed them out sulkily and she laughed. ‘And she was ruthless.’

  ‘I am not ruthless! Far from it!’

  ‘No. Not yet.’ Although the sun grew stronger, and it was now quite warm in the arbour, she shivered again. ‘I see so much of you in her. That is what I am afraid of. I did not see her as ruthless then. I thought I knew everything about her – until that day.’

  She was silent for a while before telling me that she was used by Margaret Pearce. Well, that is what companions were paid, fed and sheltered for – mostly sheltered, in that house. But most companions are also confided in. She thought she was, but she was not. Margaret Pearce had a way of saying things, in violence or exaggeration or in their opposite, lightness and mockery, both of which Kate could not take seriously, until it was too late.

  Margaret Pearce believed Lord Stonehouse was as responsible for her father’s death as if he had murdered him. And she believed his soul would not rest in peace until she had taken her revenge. How did she plan to do this? By no less than taking over all his estates as he had almost swallowed up her father’s. To Kate Beaumann this was an excess of grief and loss which, with patience and needlework, would disappear. But they did not.

  ‘I shall have one of them, Kate. Who do you think it should be? The father is an old goat, but he is my lord and must take pride of place. But when he dies, where should I be? The estate is entailed to Richard. So Richard it must be, it seems. He is devilish handsome, but a complete boor! I cannot imagine spending my life with him! Edward, at least, has pleasant conversation and a head on his shoulders, but is as weak as water. And he is a second son.’

  To Kate, listening as she stitched a sampler, this was like one of the chapbook legends of villains and heroes Margaret used to read with her childhood sweetheart and cousin, John Lloyd. She was deeply in love with John, who wrote passionate letters to her from Ireland, where he was fighting the rebels. Kate could not see her jeopardising that love for any Stonehouse. If she was alarmed when Margaret ordered the most sumptuous mourning clothes in damask and brocade for her father’s funeral, it was only because she was already deeply in debt.

  The service was in Highpoint church, deemed a great expression of forgiveness by Lord Stonehouse to his old enemy. The living had once been in the gift of the Pearces, and there were still more Pearce effigies and coats of arms than there were Stonehouses in the Norman church. It did briefly cross Kate’s mind that Margaret’s plans might not be complete nonsense. The Pearces were an older, nobler family than the Stonehouses.

  In black, Margaret Pearce looked even more beautiful, startlingly so. Yet her grief was genuine. When the minister said: ‘Death unites us all,’ her ‘Amen’ echoed fervently round the old stone walls. The sound drew all eyes to her grief-stricken face, her white perfect skin and her large, liquid eyes, hollowed by sleeplessness, framed in black, except for her flaring red hair. Even Lord Stonehouse, normally as unmoved as one of the effigies of his ancestors, turned his face away abruptly, and was heard to remark that it reminded him of his long grief over his wife Frances.

  Margaret Pearce became a constant visitor to Highpoint, keeping her black thoughts away, she said, by devoting herself to charitable work for the deserving poor on the Stonehouse estate, which had been neglected since Frances’s death. Perhaps she expected a better relationship with the Stonehouses over her land. Perhaps that would have happened but for Eaton, who blocked all progress. Then came the time when Kate released Eaton from the trap, and later, he freed the stream to water the Pearces’ remaining land at Earl Staynton. Margaret was ecstatic. ‘He is in love with you,’ she said. ‘This will save the estate. You must give him some encouragement!’

  Well, of course, she talked like that, as she talked, in her wild, private moments, of taking over the Stonehouses’ fortune. Kate gave Eaton no encouragement. She was, in fact, repulsed by him. But Eaton’s goodwill was their lifeline. That was why Kate got the salve from Matthew for his injured leg. That was why she continued, fighting her repulsion, to see him. He gave advice for the Earl Staynton land, even sent some of his men there. The land improved beyond recognition. Astonishingly, she discovered, within that surly, brutal man, feelings which shied away like a nervous horse when she tried to approach them.

  She fell silent again. She was breathing heavily, and now she did not look at me for a while; like Eaton telling his story, she seemed scarcely aware I was there. Margaret got rid of the maid who dressed her – for economy’s sake, she said. She was sick every morning for a while, would not call the doctor but told Kate to collect a remedy from Matthew. It contained ergot, for getting rid of an unwanted child, although Kate had no idea of that at the time.

  Margaret told Kate to ask Eaton for the name of a minister who would perform a secret marriage, saying it was for a friend. Did Kate believe that? It was rather that she did not question it. Of course she was naive, blind to what was going on, but she was living in her own enclosed world. Eaton proposed. She found she did have feelings for this strange, uncouth man. And she certainly had feelings about not wanting to be a companion for the rest of her life. She told him she would give her answer the following day.

  The final strange action that brought everything to a climax was when Margaret declared she would sell Earl Staynton. After all her promises that she would rebuild her father’s estate, let alone take over the Stonehouses’, this was astonishing. But she needed the money. Why, she would not say, but Kate believed she intended to flee to London. It was the early afternoon of 20 September 1625. Eaton rode over on his black gelding to give Margaret a price on Earl Staynton, and to hear Kate’s answer to his offer of marriage.

  Kate half thought, half hoped that he would recommend Margaret not to sell. Where would they live? Whatever his feelings for Kate, Eaton could not escape from a lifetime’s habit of hard, grasping dealing. The price he gave was reduced by the money owed to the Stonehouse estate, and by the work he claimed to have done on the Pearce land; it was a fraction of what Margaret expected. She accused Eaton of cheating her and ordered the cart – their carriage having been sold long since – to drive her to Highpoint. Kate felt cheated also, and refused to tal
k about marriage. Eaton would not go, but followed her around like a dog, saying he would not leave until she answered him. She retired to her needlework, but when, an hour or so later, she heard the sound of a carriage and came out, he was still there, pacing, his hat in one hand, his whip in another.

  Henry, the Highpoint coachman, touched his hat. ‘You are to get in, ma’am.’

  ‘Why? What has happened?’

  ‘Don’t know, ma’am, but you are to get in and come to Highpoint.’

  As Henry lowered the steps, Eaton struck the crop of his whip against his boots. ‘I need an answer!’

  ‘No,’ she shouted, as the coach lurched off down the pot-holed driveway. ‘No, no, no!’

  Kate shouted the words in the kitchen garden so loudly that startled birds flew up and two soldiers crossing the top of the garden turned to stare, but she seemed totally unaware of them and me. It was as if she was back in that rocking coach, trembling with fear.

  The servants at Highpoint were in a state of confused upheaval. She heard the raised voice of Lord Stonehouse and ran up the stairs and along the landing, where she saw him and his two sons. Richard had an amused look on his face which he was careful to hide from his father. Edward, who had only just taken to wearing spectacles, kept pushing them back as they slipped down his nose.

  ‘She has cheated me, she has cheated all of us, sir!’ Lord Stonehouse cried.

  ‘She – she is a married lady, Father,’ Edward said.

  Kate had never seen Edward like this. Usually meek and deferring, he met his father’s gaze defiantly, hands clenched. Margaret married? At that moment, to Kate, it seemed impossible. She was even more bewildered by Richard’s remark, as he squeezed his brother’s arm protectively.

  ‘Married. Aye. But to whom?’

  His father glared back at him, then saw Kate. ‘Library!’ he barked. She scuttled away. This was women’s business. The men seemed to have automatically congregated in one half of the house, and the women in the other. When she lost her bearings in her panic a maid took her to the library. Her chopines made a muddy pattern in some water on the floor, and she remembered thinking how curious that was, because Mrs Morland was such a fastidious housekeeper. Margaret Pearce was stretched out on the floor, a cushion under her head, with Mrs Morland next to her. She stared up at Kate and smiled. It was a weak smile, part greeting, part relief, for she had been in severe pain, but still a smile, and it enraged Mrs Morland as if Margaret Pearce, of all people, had no right to it.