Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  Chapter 33

  He had every reason to lie. His wife was standing there. His children had stopped playing, gazing awe-struck at their normally mild-mannered father ranting with the venom of a radical preacher at me, stabbing a finger towards my mother’s grave. They had on their faces the look only children have, when they have some terrible foreboding that a disaster is about to strike, but do not understand why or what is happening. The two youngest had run to their governess’s arms, and she was whispering to them, comforting them.

  Origo mali – the source of the evil. He was wrong to point to my mother’s grave. The source of the evil was all around me. The land. The rich valley below me that led to Highpoint and beyond to what had once been the Pearces’. That was the source of the evil, the reason for the feud between the Stonehouses and the Pearces, which probably went back to Tudor times or even further, the true source long forgotten, buried generations back. And I was prolonging it. I could understand now why Kate kept urging me to leave. If I did find out the truth, would that be the end of it? No – it would lead only to more bitterness and conflict. I suddenly had a great longing to be with Will, Luke and Ben in a righteous conflict I could understand, and, if I survived, to return to Anne. I could feel her in my arms. I longed for her and London – the whole wretched stink of it!

  But that urge lasted only as long as it took me to find my horse. If I rode away, it would not end. Ever since I had been born, the Stonehouses had tried to kill me. First the father. Then Richard. Now Edward, at the end of his tether, looked capable of doing so. My hands as I gripped the reins were blotched red and white with the nettles and scored with scratches from the brambles I had torn from my mother’s grave. I knew her now. Whatever else I was, I was my mother’s son. I would finish what she had begun, or end with her in that limbo of weeds, more suited to my nature as to hers than any comfortable, tended, consecrated spot. I could hear her voice, whispering in the wind: I shall have one of them . . . The father is my lord . . . the estate is entailed to Richard . . . a complete boor! . . . Edward has a head on his shoulders, but is as weak as water . . .

  I had thought for a time I was Lord Stonehouse’s son, but now it looked as if I was Edward’s. He admitted he had been prepared to run away with Margaret Pearce, but when the money did not appear and she stole the pendant, that was too much for him. He would have been not much older than me. Young. Gullible. Easy to catch. And all the time Lord Stonehouse was, in his cautious, secretive way, harbouring a passion for her.

  She laughed, Mrs Morland said: ‘Marriage! That’s what I want to talk to you about!’ Laughter has different meanings, according to who hears it. Mrs Morland heard the mocking laughter of a whore. I heard laughter that was bitter, ironic. If only she had waited, she would have landed the biggest fish of all.

  I turned into the lane that ran past the church. Edward was closing the door, talking to the verger who held the parish records. The children, chattering in the coach, became silent when I appeared. So did the mourners in the carts. Perhaps they expected me to follow them, as I had done on the way here, as a curlew follows a traveller over a moor. But I turned Patch the other way.

  * * *

  On our way to Highpoint, Eaton had pointed out the way to Upper Vale, where the coachman, Henry, had told me I would find Mark Stevens. It was less than an hour’s ride from Shadwell, but was as different again as Shadwell from Highpoint.

  It was strange, barren land I rode through, rock and heath from which even sheep would derive little sustenance. Strange, yet curiously familiar. It was like the marshland round Poplar; it was Stonehouse without – outside his jurisdiction.

  The land improved as I descended from the heath to a straggle of small villages, of which Upper Vale was the first. And the first building, a little distance from the village, was a run-down church. The cottage next to it looked more prosperous, the thatch new and the chimney smoking. A clattering sound came from the yard at the back as I approached. Perhaps I had been stupid to trust Henry. He seemed genuine but, after all, he worked for Lord Stonehouse. I slipped from the saddle, eased out my pistol and crept round the back. A sudden movement made me cock my pistol. I found myself staring into the face of a sorry-looking nag who had just kicked over his pail of water. I righted the pail so he could take the last mouthful and tethered Patch next to him.

  The back door was invitingly half-open. Still suspecting a trap, I thrust my boot at it. The draught blew a tang of woodsmoke at me. It did not take long to see the cottage was empty: it was one room, with a ladder to an upper-storey for sleeping. The fire was almost out, producing more smoke than warmth. It was neat and tidy, but there was no sign of a clergyman living here: no books, no papers, only a shelf of herbs.

  As I approached the church, I realised it was not run-down, but pillaged. Brasses had been ripped from their matrices. Spikes of broken stained glass were strewn outside a window. Shards of it crunched under my boots as I walked up the aisle. The glass was mixed with splinters of wood from the altar rails, which had been hacked away, as Eaton and I had seen some Parliamentary troops doing on our journey to Highpoint, in an excess of religious zeal and alcohol. They took the rails for firewood, and as a substitute for burning Catholics.

  A man was there, a cleric. I saw at first only the fluttering of his black surplice in the breeze from the broken windows, a gentle movement in the darkness of the chancel; I thought he had ascended the pulpit and was gazing towards the ceiling. Then I realised: he was hanging from the tie beam, the knot in the rope tilting his head upwards. I scrambled up to the pulpit, struggling to reach him. The more I tried, the more he spun away from me, like an erratic pendulum. His hand moved with the motion, as if it was trying to reach mine. At last, I managed to grab him and cut at the rope, but he pulled me away with him. For a nightmare moment I was swinging alongside him; the rope seemed alive, wriggling like a snake, about to wrap itself round my neck before it snapped under the double weight and we fell to the floor together.

  I broke a nail clawing the rope away from the deepening purple groove in his neck. There was no heartbeat. He was cold, but there was no resistance when I moved his arms: he had been dead just over an hour, perhaps two. There was blood on my hands. No, not blood – dye. It looked like redding, the same dye that had marked my mother’s grave. Gently I smoothed out the crumpled surplice. The letters were smeared and incomplete, but I could still make them out: PAPIST. Not far from his body was a scarf – the same orange colour I was wearing which identified the Parliamentary troops.

  I was so deep in the horror of this I scarcely registered Patch’s distant whinny and snort, until it was combined with his hooves on the flags and the grating creak of a gate. I ran towards the cottage. A man was riding the nag I had given water to and letting my horse out of the yard. If the gate had not stuck he would have succeeded. I dived forward, catching at the edge of his coat. I glimpsed a beard, a mouth bared with few teeth as he tried to bring his whip down on me but I pulled him off and we were on the ground together. I brought back my fist before I saw who it was.

  ‘Matthew!’

  He stared at me for such a long, long moment I began to think I was mistaken. I was too young to realise that the distance between forty and fifty, given the losing of teeth and a good deal of hair is much less than that between eight and seventeen. He stretched out a tentative hand, feeling my stubbly beard, touching my red hair, then gave me a very slow, crooked, almost toothless smile.

  ‘Why, Tom!’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  We had no time for a leisurely reunion – if we had stayed much longer, I would have been hanged myself.

  Matthew pointed to an angry crowd gathering where the village began, a short distance away, armed with clubs and pitchforks. One man had a hammer, and was still wearing his blacksmith’s soot-stained apron. Later in the war, villagers, maddened by the atrocities and plundering they suffered from both Cavaliers and Roundheads, formed themselves into large associations called Clubmen,
to protect themselves. Incidents like this were the seeds of it.

  ‘I thought you were one of the people who killed poor Mark,’ Matthew said. ‘So do they. Take off that orange scarf, for God’s sake, otherwise they’ll hang you! I’ll pretend to be chasing you, otherwise I’ll not be able to return.’ He threw a punch at me which caught me in the face. I staggered backwards. ‘Go on!’

  There was a roar from the crowd. ‘Get him, Matt!’

  I scrambled on to my horse as the blacksmith came running towards me. He threw his hammer, which glanced off the wall as I galloped away. He ran beside me, grabbing at my saddle. Tight as I had the girths, he was immensely strong and I felt the saddle twisting round. The ground and his grinning face swayed towards me. I saw myself hanging from that beam. I wrenched at the reins. Patch reared. The blacksmith’s momentum flung him forward, but still he clung on to the slipping saddle. I lashed out with my boot, the spur catching him in his face. He gave a single grunt and fell. I righted myself in the saddle. The crowd had stopped, silent now their leader was down, blood pouring from his face. I stopped, full of guilt and bewilderment. What was I doing, what were we all doing, fighting one another? They were like me, like the crowd who had fought and demonstrated for those words I had rescued from the mud. I would help him, talk to them! So I thought wildly, until the blacksmith stirred, the crowd began to mutter angrily and I kicked my heels into Patch and rode on.

  I waited on the heath, by a stream, until Matthew joined me. He marvelled at my height, at my beard, while I could not believe he was so small and, well, so . . .

  ‘Shrunk and wizened?’ he said. ‘It’s good for business as a cunning man. The older I get, the more people believe me.’

  I laughed, touching him, still not quite able to take in that he was here, that he would not disappear at any minute; in one moment I could look at him in awe, the next in disbelief. I hugged him with delight and wonder, for he was my past, all the stories he had told me . . . but then, as I felt his bony chest against me, my hands crept down to where, under his shirt, he kept the belt and the pouch.

  I had dreamed of this moment ever since Eaton and I had travelled together. Just as it had been in front of the flickering dockyard fire he would take the pouch from his belt and the pendant from the pouch. I could feel nothing but skin and bone. I pointed back towards the village.

  ‘Is it down there?’

  He looked as directly at me as he had ever done in my life.

  ‘I don’t have it, Tom.’

  ‘You’re lying! Where is it?’

  ‘I don’t have it!’

  ‘Tell me! Tell me!’ I shook him. I was like a maniac. He pulled backwards, stumbled and almost fell in the stream, then yanked his shirt so violently from his britches the old, rotting fabric tore. His ribs stood out in the greying, puckering flesh.

  ‘I don’t have it, I tell you! I did what Kate told me to and got rid of it – and that’s the truth!’

  Chapter 34

  I sat on a stone by the stream, unable to move or think. In one part of the sky rain clouds were building up again, merging with the heath, but in the west the sky was white as milk. The horses were sucking contentedly in the stream. The constant heath wind rippled the hair tufted round Matthew’s bald crown as he took some bread and cheese from his saddle bag.

  ‘Did me no good and it would have done you no good, Tom,’ he said softly.

  I said nothing. I had carried the memory of him all these years and tried to tell myself I still loved him, but the truth was I did not. I loved the memory of him building ships and telling me stories of foreign lands, and making things happen by magic and bringing out the pendant, the falcon flashing and dipping and flying in the firelight as he told me my fortune. But I knew now he had never left England and the stories were from sailors in the docks; there was no magic but that of persuading people his herbs would work; and, he was now telling me, no pendant.

  I noticed how bent his back was and that the bread he was preparing to eat was mouldy. He offered me some, admitting it did not look much, but fresh air and a dip of spring water was a very fine sauce.

  ‘What is it, Tom?’ he said gently. ‘Art thou not pleased to see me?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course I am,’ I said, against the curious sort of lump that seemed to be forming in my throat. Then: ‘No! No! No! I am not!’

  I seized the lump of mouldy bread and flung it into the stream. He stared in astonishment as it drifted away, bumping and eddying against a rock before being swept out of sight. He was even more astonished at the torrent of bitterness that poured out of me. So was I. I had no idea that it had been sealed up in the deepest caverns of my heart all these years. He had deserted me. He had deserted Susannah, leaving her to be murdered. Burned. Did he know that?

  ‘Of course I know that!’ He rounded on me with a sudden venom. ‘Why do you think I got rid of it? Ever since I picked it up it’s been a curse on me, and it would have been a curse on you. Do you think there’s been a day when I haven’t thought about Susannah? About you?’

  That cut me, but like everything Matthew said it was true and not true. There was something he was holding back from me. He knew where I was in the City, I retorted, because he had remained in touch with Kate. Yet he had made no effort to contact me. Why should I be pleased to see him? To care about him?

  He stood by the stream, fidgeting with the lump of cheese, putting a crumb of it in his mouth. When he gave no answer and I made a furious move towards him to demand he at least look at me, he jerked his cheese away as if afraid I would throw that in the water too. The movement both filled me with shame and irritated me beyond endurance.

  ‘I have not been a good father,’ he mumbled.

  ‘You are not my father!’ I shouted, so loudly the horses lifted their dripping mouths from the stream to stare at me.

  ‘That too,’ he said. ‘That too.’ He scratched his bald patch. All life’s puzzlements seemed to be in that scratch, as he stared across the barren heath which, with its scrub and rock, always seemed to retain something of evening. In places it was almost one with the lowering sky, which looked heavy with more rain, in others brighter than noon with flickering patches of light. I thought for a moment he was whistling through his front tooth, but it was the wind, shredded by the thorns. Furtively, he eased another crumb of cheese into his mouth.

  I could not look at him or keep still. I strode to my horse, feeling I never wanted to see him again. Patch shook herself, spraying me with water, but I scarcely felt it. I stopped, strode back to see Matthew sucking some morsel from a crevice in his tooth and turned to my horse again, plunging my hands in my pockets, as I always did when I did not know which way to turn. My fingers closed on the coin. I whirled back, overwhelmed by a great rush of guilt, staring at his bent figure, his cheeks hollowed, then ballooned out by his scouring tongue. After what he did, how could I have said he was not a good father?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I wept, ‘I’m sorry.’

  I went over and hugged him properly. He jumped, dropping his cheese, afraid I had gone crazy and was about to throw him in the stream too, then saw the coin in my hand. ‘Kate told me it was dangerous to get in touch with you. You were leading a different life. You are different.’ He took the coin. ‘Is that it? My Judas coin? Is that really it?’ He turned it on the edge, saw the fleur de lys, weighed it in his hand and moved to give it back to me. He told me what I have related, that when he threw what he thought was a dead child into the cart there was a fiendish cry of an evil spirit pursuing him. The faster he went, the louder and more piercing it became, until he could stand it no longer. He stopped, intending to fling out the child. But the fearsome cry stopped as soon as he went round the cart.

  ‘You looks at me. And I looks at you. And you looks as though you’re about to cry up to the heavens again, so I puts you inside my jacket and, God help me, you goes to sleep! After taking you to Susannah, I show Mr Eaton a dead baby from the cart and –’

  He
flipped the coin in the air, caught it, looked at it rather regretfully, then flung it in the stream. I looked at him with the same astonishment that he had shown when I threw away the bread. I ran down the stream, saw it glinting in the water, but as I stretched out to get it, he put his hand on my arm.

  ‘Leave it, Tom. It’s finished now. It’s no more good to you. Nor is the pendant.’

  ‘You still have it.’

  ‘No, Tom.’

  ‘I need it to find out who my real father is. I don’t want to keep it!’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He gave a great sigh. He stared at the coin glinting in the eddying water. ‘I put it back.’

  ‘Back? Where?’

  ‘Highpoint. So no one could accuse me of stealing it. I gave it to Kate. She put it in the jewellery drawer in Frances’s bedroom.’

  I gaped at him. ‘In the – Anyone could find it. I could have found it.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a secret drawer. It’s true!’ he said when he saw my disbelieving expression, with the desperate vehemence of a habitual liar who cannot get anyone to believe him when he does tell the truth. ‘Where do you think I learned carpentry? Before I got the plague cart I delivered wood to the cabinet maker. I watched him shape that secret drawer.’

  I rounded sceptically on him again. ‘Then how did my mother know where to look for –’ I shivered. It was not just the evening cold that was coming with the advancing rain clouds that crept slowly over the heath, gradually staining the paler sky like spilled ink. I knew the answer to my question before I put it. ‘You told my mother, didn’t you?’ I shook him. ‘Didn’t you?’

  He sighed a very deep sigh and said he used to tell stories about the pendant which everyone had marvelled about when Frances Stonehouse wore it in church. He boasted he knew where it was. That afternoon in September, Margaret Pearce came to him. She threatened to tell everyone neither his love philtres nor his whore’s physic worked if he did not tell her about the drawer.