Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  ‘This is a foul business, Miss Beaumann,’ Mrs Morland said.

  ‘Foul?’ Kate said, bewildered at her manner, for she thought Margaret had merely fallen ill.

  ‘Foul!’

  She pulled up Margaret’s dress violently, tearing one of the under-skirts as she did so. They were wet, and Kate realised where the water had come from. She stared at the distended belly, the straining, partly torn sex, the dark, reddened shape of something, something which had been struggling to get through. It had stopped, but was beginning another attempt to thrust its way out, the lips of Margaret’s sex peeling back. Kate stared in horror, for she knew what that something was. Samuel Pearce had been a strict Puritan, allowing few books in the house, apart from the Bible. One of those was Stephen Batman’s The Doome Warning All Men to the Judgemente, a chronicle of every prodigy and monstrous birth ever recorded. As Mrs Morland pulled the dress down, Kate remembered that the list proved beyond doubt that indecent, adulterous sex led to the birth of monsters. There were children born with two heads, limbs or fingers missing, twisted or malformed bodies. She was convinced such a monster was about to appear.

  ‘Get her up!’ Mrs Morland snapped at her. ‘Get her up while she is between times!’ She gave Kate an accusing look, as good as saying she must have known, and was a party to this outrage.

  How they lifted her, Kate never knew. She was small, and Mrs Morland lean and tall, and Margaret tilted over between them. The maid who had taken her to the library helped get her down the stairs, but as soon as Margaret began talking Mrs Morland dismissed the maid. Margaret reeled between them into the hall. She sounded drunk, but there was no smell of wine about her.

  ‘I am to be married to Lord Stonehouse! What do you think of that, Kate? I am to be Lady Stonehouse! You see – it’s all come true! It’s all come true!’ She half-slipped on the tiled floor. Kate lost her grip momentarily, but Mrs Morland kept hers and with savage momentum half dragged Margaret across the slippery floor before Kate caught up. ‘Thank you, Mrs Morland,’ Margaret said. ‘Is my carriage ready?’

  Then the pains caught her again. Mrs Morland watched with a smile of grim satisfaction as the coachman Henry helped her into the carriage. Margaret fell across Kate, digging her nails into her hands and biting one of the leather straps, but could not stop a scream tearing from her.

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ Mrs Morland hammered at the coach door. ‘You know what you have to do?’

  ‘Do?’ Kate stared at her, bewildered.

  ‘God’s wounds!’ Mrs Morland twisted her hands together in frustration, then clapped one hand over her nose and mouth in a smothering gesture.

  ‘I can’t do that!’

  ‘You’ll be all right. The cart will come for it.’

  Having left Highpoint land in accordance with his instructions, Henry breathed more easily, and he, at least, showed some pity on them. Before leaving the cold damp farmhouse, he gathered wood and struck a flint to light a fire. Kate had no idea what to do. She felt she was in the presence of evil. Several times she nearly left, but every time she opened the door, Margaret muttered or screamed and flung out a clutching hand, groping for hers. Kate found water, and heated it, and some dirty cloths. The head came out and it was sticky and wrinkled but, to her surprise, looked normal. For a while, whatever was coming out of Margaret seemed stuck, as exhausted as the mother. During these moments Kate prayed. She heard a clicking and fumbling sound from the mattress where Margaret lay. Margaret kept mumbling something, but Kate shut out the words by praying harder to ward off the devil which was slowly but surely slithering into the world.

  The wind blew in swirls, clattering a pail outside. Finding chinks in the crumbling chimney, it whirled spatters of rain hissing into the fire. As if it was part of that sound, part of the violence outside, the thing came out suddenly in one violent eruption. Kate thought with relief the sticky mass was dead. Steeling herself, she picked it up. It slipped from her fingers. Instinctively she grabbed it. The thing shuddered, warm against her, quivered, its mouth trembling and to her astonishment gave a high-pitched, stuttering, but increasingly strong and certain and very human cry. He was normal, flawless. She held him to her and he seemed to fit perfectly in her arms, something that she had never known was missing until now and all her fears and imaginings were swept away. For a moment.

  Margaret’s eyes opened, her hands moving towards the child. Kate felt a strange reluctance to let the child go. Nevertheless she was passing him to the mother when she started back from what looked like the hypnotic eyes of a snake, the darting glitter of its forked tongue. Another imagining! But the reality was worse.

  In her hand Margaret had a jewel which Kate knew well. She also knew that Lord Stonehouse prized Frances’s pendant above any other of his possessions. Firelight glinted in the falcon’s eyes, as it seemed to stare accusingly at her. Panic filled her as she thought of Lord Stonehouse’s man arriving and seeing it. She put down the crying child and tried to take the pendant from Margaret, saying she was mad to steal it.

  ‘It is what I am owed,’ Margaret said. ‘It is what I’ve been cheated of! I was going away with the child’s father.’

  ‘His father?’

  ‘One of his fathers. That evening. That afternoon. All we needed was the money.’

  One of his fathers? What was she raving about? There was a cunning, crazy look in her face and the words came out of her mouth in jerks, like the child had come out of her belly, but there was a terrible kind of sense in what she said. If Eaton had brought the promissory note for the land, they would have gone. The child, probably, would have been born later, in secret, not brought into the world suddenly, by the crisis. The words tumbled out of her, a vehement savage retribution. She clung on to the pendant more than she held on to the child, saying it was her hold on the child’s father, for the secret compartment contained proof of who he was. But gradually, spent and exhausted, her grip on the pendant and, Kate thought, her grip on life began to weaken. Muttering that if anything happened to her, Kate was to keep it for the child, saying again and again that her hold on the child’s father was in the portrait compartment, she fell into a deep but troubled sleep.

  Kate took the pendant from Margaret’s slackening grip. The wind snatched the farmhouse door from her hands as soon as she unlatched it. She flung the pendant away as far as she could throw it.

  The child was asleep in his mother’s warmth. The snake that attached him to her had stopped its strange beating. Kate bit it off near to the child’s belly, as she had once seen a midwife do and, although there was no sense in it, in view of what she intended to do, tied the remains carefully and tightly. Then she tried to smother him. He kicked, struggled and cried. His mother stirred. Kate began to weep and tried again. She could not do it. She realised she was still wearing the linen apron she always wore for her embroidery work. She wrapped it round the child and took him to the most exposed place she could find where the east wind cut across an open field, and there was no shelter from the rain. Then she fell asleep in front of the fire, as exhausted as if she had given birth herself.

  The distant sound of a cart awoke her. She ran to the field. The child was cold, wet and quite still. She ran back to the farmhouse with him. It seemed to take forever for the muttering, cursing driver to draw up and knock at the door. It was a shock when she opened it to see it was Matthew Neave with the plague cart.

  ‘Evening, Miss Beaumann.’

  As if it was a normal evening, normal business!

  ‘He don’t look no plague child, Miss Beaumann.’

  The shifty manner, scarcely looking at her, but accusing her nevertheless, as if she was complicit, responsible! It brought out all the outrage in her, the God-fearing side of her, and she was as bitter as Mrs Morland when she shoved the child, cold as stone, at him. ‘He was a plague to us, Matthew!’

  Matthew shrugged, took him and went away whistling. Whistling! As if he’d made a fortune! As soon as she slammed the door shut, the recr
iminations began. She had pushed the sin out of the door: why did it remain with her? In her? She cleaned away all traces of the childbirth, threw the snake on the fire where it seemed to hiss and spit at her. But she could not clean away the feeling that she had committed a mortal sin. What was worse was she could not understand why. It was not her child, not her sin, she had done her duty, but there it was, she could still feel his slippery warmth in her arms, hear his first cry . . .

  The good-hearted coachman Henry arranged for a friendly carter to take them home the next day. Margaret was struck by a fever. The craziness that had been in her when Kate and Mrs Morland took her out to the coach at Highpoint took root in her mind. Sometimes she knew about the child, sometimes not. Sometimes she was on her way to Highpoint to see her lover, but which lover was never clear. Always she raved about the pendant. She had to take the pendant. Kate must see that! Taking the pendant was taking his wife, becoming his wife. She spoke about a marriage, sometimes it was as if she was going through the ceremony with Kate, but whether the marriage was a fantasy or a real one was impossible to say. Always her rambling ended with the pendant. ‘Keep it close,’ she used to say. ‘It is the secret of everything. Keep the pendant close.’ She lingered two months before she died.

  Lord Stonehouse refused to allow her to be buried at Highpoint, so the funeral took place at Shadwell, where the servants were buried. Eaton was at the service, but Kate was barely civil to him. He was as coarse and blunt as usual, seeming unaffected by the whole business. She could not believe that she had once had feelings for him, that inside that brutality she had seen – well, never mind that. She shut her ears to him, except when he asked her if she had heard the stories about Matthew Neave’s miracle child. Then she flew at him. She had done what Lord Stonehouse wanted, she cried. The child was dead!

  Miracle child! As she watched Eaton ride away she knew he would check. It was one of the things she had liked about him – he checked and double-checked, never leaving things to chance. Just as she did. He would check, and she knew what he would do.

  Kate told the carter to take her to Matthew’s hovel of a barn, although it was miles away. When she saw the child, the tinges of red hair beginning to show, she fell on her knees and wept for joy. She had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever that the Lord had brought him back from the dead. That was why, ever since, on that day in September, however difficult it was, and wherever he was, she left him a simnel cake, the cake of resurrection.

  She told Matthew they must go, and go now, and that she would join them in their flight. She did not know where. Nor did she know how until she saw the plague cart. Few people would question, or even go near, a plague cart. When they were well away from the parish, they could paint over the red crosses and join the thin but steadily increasing stream of people escaping, like themselves, from some crime, or perceived crime, from the recurring threat of harvest failure, from shrinking wages and rising prices, from the loss of smallholdings, from enclosures or shrinking forest rights such as Lord Stonehouse was imposing, to the land of new opportunity: London.

  Chapter 31

  Kate had forgotten I was there. She was hunched forward on the bench, her hands clasped, rocking slightly, and I swear that in her mind she was on the rutted road to safety, to London without, in the plague cart. She came to with a start, stared at me as if I was really risen, at that very moment, from the dead and fell on her knees.

  ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’

  I pulled her up. I held her. I told her not to be stupid. There was nothing to forgive. I should go down on my knees to her. I duly did and she pulled me up, laughing. Then I wept. We wept together, great sobs shaking us as we held one another. The soldiers who had passed us earlier stopped again in astonishment. They had killed a pig to salt before leaving the next day and carried great haunches, still dripping blood, on their shoulders. I shouted to them to leave some unsalted for our feast tonight and one of them joked back – for your wedding feast?

  ‘A reunion!’ I cried. ‘A reunion!’

  The rain had cleared, but there was more on the way. The birds were silent. Eaton had taught me to listen to them in one of his jingles that sat oddly on his lips: when the birds come not out, there’s more rain about. Soldiers were cleaning muskets and Will was striding about, ordering the packing of wagons that were already packed, the repair of a broken wheel which I thought would be done faster without his interference. Luke was sealing a dispatch, then a letter to Charity, which he handed to a waiting rider. There was a sense of purpose that had been missing for days. I felt it in myself. Purpose, excitement, and, rising steadily inside me, anger. I told Kate that all this time I had been trying to find my father, but I no longer cared. Who needed fathers when I had such mothers as Susannah and Kate? I kissed her again.

  She pulled away, laughing. ‘I am not your mother, Tom!’

  ‘Then you are very like.’

  ‘You will forget all this then, and go back to London?’

  I fell silent. We went inside the great hall and I stared up at the landing. I took two things over all else from Kate’s story. One was her steadfast love, the other my birth mother’s burning hatred. I felt she had given me that hatred in my blood. Just as she believed Lord Stonehouse had killed her father, I believed – no, I knew – he and his sons had killed my mother. I could see them, the three of them, watching from above as Kate and Mrs Morland half-led, half-carried her down the great stairway while I was being born. I am sure she knew what I was seeing, as I answered her at last, for she kept looking at the stairs, then looking away, trembling.

  ‘No. I am going to stay,’ I said. ‘I want to find out what happened. I want the truth.’

  ‘You want revenge! You are becoming like her – I knew this would happen. This is the worst possible reason for wanting Highpoint.’

  I could feel that blood, my mother’s blood, rising to my cheeks as I struggled to keep my voice steady. ‘Where is Matthew?’

  ‘I won’t tell you!’

  ‘I’ll find him.’

  She began hurrying up the stairs. ‘I wish I’d told you nothing!’

  I followed her. ‘The minister Eaton gave you the name of – who did secret marriages – he’s at Shadwell?’

  ‘He was dismissed. After the scandal.’

  ‘Shadwell is where Mrs Morland’s funeral is being held tomorrow?’

  She whirled round. ‘You cannot go there! Edward Stonehouse is taking the service! They will kill you!’

  ‘Then tell me where Matthew is.’

  She ran, disappearing just as she had done for most of my life. I saw her only later that evening, when the pork had been roasted on a spit and the soldiers were drunk on perry cider they had found. The hospital had become a servants’ dining room again, with only Eaton left. Ben would not let me go in, pulling me back in the dark doorway.

  ‘It is a miracle,’ he whispered.

  Eaton was propped up in a truckle bed. Candles were lit only at that end of the room, and Kate moved in and out of the light, dipping a cold compress into a bowl, then dabbing Eaton’s face with it.

  ‘She has been with him all afternoon and evening,’ Ben whispered. ‘From the moment she came he opened his eyes and – look, look!’

  His scar had been weeping prodigiously, but when Kate brought the compress away it was clean. He shifted restlessly. Kate murmured something and his voice had some of its old strength.

  ‘I see. You came because of Tom. Is that all?’

  I was sure it was not – otherwise why had she not come before I told her how he had confessed his love and remorse to me? But when she said, ‘All? You saved his life!’ his old violent self seemed to return, and he went into a vehement, barely coherent ramble saying that was rich! He had only saved my life to bring me into great danger.

  ‘He knows that.’

  ‘He does not know that – he knows nothing! He must leave here! He must go now!’ Alarmed he would relapse, she threatened to go unless he was quiet and h
e gave her a look like that of a trapped, partly tamed animal, a mixture of burning resentment and need. Several times he opened his mouth to speak, but what he had to say would have been difficult enough in full health, and he closed it under that quiet gaze, until his resentment faded under the need for those gentle movements, the soft rustle of her skirts along the floor and then, quite suddenly, he slept.

  Chapter 32

  One of the strangest things about the war was that, although both the King and Parliament vowed they were fighting for God and the people, as soon as either side appeared, the people disappeared, taking their food and animals with them. So it was at Highpoint. When the soldiers were there, there was only Kate and Rose, looking after Mrs Morland. The morning Will’s unit left, in some mysterious way the news of their departure had reached every corner of the valley, from Earl Staynton in the west to the Grey Horse in the east.

  I went into the kitchen to find some food. A stout woman was scolding a kitchen maid, as if she was responsible for the dirt and grease left by the soldiers on the spit. They were taken aback to see me. I apologised for the mess, but the woman, whom I learned later was Mrs Adams, the cook, turned her back on me.

  Other servants disappeared as I approached. At first I took it as an understandable resentment of the unit leaving the house in such a state. But it was more than that. They knew who I was. Edward Stonehouse would be taking Mrs Morland’s funeral that morning. I heard someone ask if Richard would be there. I was a usurper.