Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  ‘I don’t want the inheritance, Father. I just want –’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ he shouted. ‘Tom –’ Luke called.

  Richard flung me across the stable to crash into the opposite wall. The sword blade leapt forward like the tongue of a snake. I fought with every instinct to keep my eyes open, staring into his.

  The sword blade stopped at the last moment and steadied. ‘Shout back.’

  I swallowed, panting, and for a moment could get no word out.

  He was swallowing too, breathing heavily. ‘Shout back!’

  I managed one word: ‘Coming!’

  From where he had thrown me, near the door, I could just see the edge of the encampment. Luke, his head now bandaged, walked across the light of the fire, glancing in the direction of the stables. Keep him talking, I urged myself, keep him talking . . . But my mind was jammed. All I could utter was an inane mumble.

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘Love her?’ He gave an incredulous laugh. ‘I saw what she was after right from the start.’

  His father, his dear father, he said, and there was both a longing and a hatred in his voice, never gave him credit for anything. But he saw through Margaret Pearce when she was in deepest black at her father’s funeral. Attracted to her? Of course he was attracted to her. Everybody was. But he knew women. He had had enough of them.

  ‘Like Jane,’ I could not help interjecting, remembering the story she had told me at Turville’s.

  ‘Jane?’ he said.

  He had forgotten her. I cursed myself for distracting him, but it made no difference. He went on compulsively, driven to talk about something he had never talked about to a living soul before. Fathers and sons, fathers and sons! Almost every word he said rang with pride for and hatred of his father. His father was the cleverest, shrewdest of men – but he was a total fool with women! His wife had twisted him round her little finger. When she died, he never stopped mourning her – until he saw Margaret Pearce in deepest black.

  Oh, there was not a man at the funeral who did not feel for her, Richard said. Both up there – he struck his head – and down there – he slapped his groin. Oh, he wanted her! He wanted her all right!

  Luke was saying something to Ben, their shadows dipping and swaying in the firelight. He left Ben and slowly, casually, looking as if he was enjoying the cold sharpness of the air after the heat of the fire, began to stroll towards the stables. I prayed he was wearing his sword.

  The day after the funeral, Richard said, he was called into his father’s study. When Lord Stonehouse had been through his mis doings, and he was on the point of leaving, his father said: Margaret Pearce – respect her grief. That was all. Respect her grief, with a penetrating look from those black eyes.

  ‘I was – how old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘I was nineteen! Nineteen! I believe he only ever knew my mother. I had had whores, servants, even a lady-in-waiting old enough to be my mother who showed me more of the deceits in women’s hearts than my dear father ever dreamed existed. Respect her grief! In other words, keep away from her, she’s mine. He was blind to what he was walking into, what she was doing. I knew what she was using her grief for! Seduction, the subtlest form of seduction.’

  There was a grudging admiration in his voice now, and I suddenly saw that my mother and he were two of a kind. His eyes shone and the sword trembled. Perhaps, in his own way, he had been in love with her and, in her own way, she with him. Then his voice took on a sharp, bitter edge.

  ‘I knew exactly what she was doing.’

  ‘Plotting to take over the estate,’ I said.

  His sword dropped. ‘How do you know?’

  I thought of what Kate had told me, and shook my head. Origo mali, the source of the evil. The estate. Wildly, for the first time I had the barest glimmer of hope that we might reach out to one another, perhaps even one day understand one another. I took a tentative step towards him. The sword came up. Luke strolled towards the stables, but I noticed him only when he stopped. He must have seen the glint of Richard’s sword in the doorway, for his hand went towards his belt.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Tell him? There was no point in telling him. I was nineteen. What did I know about grief, love? What did I know about anything?’

  There was such a deep well of bitterness inside him that had been dammed up for so long he was shaking, the sword a trembling glint of silver. I moved a fraction closer. Perhaps some of my own rebelliousness came from him – and perhaps he read that thought, for the sword drifted lower. Another step and I could duck under the sword and seize his arm.

  ‘The estate was entailed to me, but I knew women like that. If she could not unwrap the entail, she would persuade him to leave everything outside it – whole streets of London properties – to her.’

  ‘Then why did she not just pursue him?’

  ‘Oh, she did! Of course she did. But my dear father, so clever, but so naive with women, respected her grief too long. He is as tight with his feelings as a miser with his money and she thought she would get nowhere. So she turned to me. I played the innocent. I was easier. And young . . . and we both, for a time, were attracted to one another and – you are too young to know anything about love.’

  ‘As your father said about you.’

  He gave me an angry stare, the sword jerking up again. Then laughed shortly. His arm relaxed, the sword drifting downwards again. That was the moment. One step. Half a step and I could have taken him, twisted the sword out of his hand. I could have done it. I know it. But in that moment I was as compulsively drawn into the story as he was in the telling of it.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got her pregnant. She thought I would marry her. I told her I knew what her game was and to get rid of it . . . I never, not in a million years, thought she would turn her eyes on my fool of a brother . . .’

  He dropped his guard completely. I could have taken him then or perhaps even kept him talking. Perhaps, perhaps . . . I shall never know. There was a deep frost that night, beginning to sparkle on the blades of grass where the moon touched them. I heard Luke’s boot crunching on it. Caught the glint of his sword.

  ‘No, Luke, no!’ I shouted.

  He was halfway through his thrust. My shout both caused him to partly check his thrust and alerted my father. He was too late to parry the sword but twisted away so Luke caught him in the side. My father lunged forward at him with such force he could not withdraw the sword as Luke fell. I caught him as he struggled to pull out the sword. There was a look of surprise, of complete disbelief on his face, and then a shadow of his disarming smile.

  ‘I thought I’d . . . got . . . away with it . . . old fr—’

  Blood abruptly poured from his mouth. I screamed for Ben and held Luke to me as he struggled to speak again. ‘Tell Charity I love her, I will see her in heav—’

  Ben pulled me to one side and knelt by Luke. He could not get the jerkin open because of the sword, and slit it with a knife. He peeled away the bloodsoaked letter Charity had sent. He made a vain attempt to stop the blood, then shook his head.

  I heard the horse and glimpsed my father riding away. Howling like an inmate of Bedlam, I went after him in a limping run, dragging the knife from my belt.

  Some time later Ben found me on the battlefield, where, as the frost deepened, the dead and wounded still lay. I was repeatedly stabbing a man who was already dead. Near me was Richard’s tattered cloak. The man I was stabbing was not Richard. My mind was blank. I could not tell Ben why I was stabbing the man. I had never seen him before, nor had Ben. Nor was it possible to say which side he had been on, for, like many of the corpses around him, he had been stripped naked by men who took rings, boots, belts – anything they could use or sell. As Ben led me back to the camp we could still hear them, moving about the field, like wolves in the night.

  Chapter 40

  The Bedlam I went through was part of a greater
Bedlam. Both sides claimed victory. Fleeing Parliamentary deserters reaching Oxford said the whole army was retreating and the King on his way to London. In London on 25 October, two days after the battle, someone who called himself ‘A Gentleman of Quality’ – it may have been Crop-Eared Jack – printed a smudged quarto claiming a great Parliamentary victory in which Prince Rupert had been captured.

  What neither side expected was a stalemate. Each thought such a bitter conflict would resolve everything, one way or the other. The King did march on London. Rupert sacked Brentford, ten miles west of London, on 13 November. Londoners both panicked and were outraged. Fear of losing their property caused many Royalists to support Parliament. The following day, at Turnham Green, the Royalist army found itself facing an army of Londoners, enlarged to twenty-four thousand with Trained Bands from Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey. A few shots were fired. The King had faced far superior numbers, but it was more than that which made him retreat to winter in Oxford. The memory of Edgehill hung like a miasma over everyone. Both the King and Essex had spent that frozen night on the battlefield. The King had stared at the sixty corpses which lay where his standard had stood before crouching over a camp fire, unable to sleep for the cries of the wounded. Nobody wished to fight again. But although half-hearted negotiations began, neither side was prepared to give an inch.

  It was mid-December when a carter carrying the last of the season’s frost-bitten fruit from an orchard in Chiswick took me into the City.

  I went up Holborn and into Cloth Fair, the snow still falling but not settling. The City was silent. The air was strangely clear. The smell of Smithfield was a ghost of its former stench, for there was little meat coming in. I stood at the opening of Half Moon Court, an inexplicable panic seizing me, for I felt I had done something terrible, but knew not what. From the printing shop came a steady rhythmic clank. I knew and loved every sound, the groan of the platen – the press needed oil – the sigh as it met the paper. Before Edgehill I had longed to be here, picturing myself running across that courtyard into Anne’s arms, seizing her and kissing her under the apple tree. Yet I stood there, reluctant to go on, the panic rising in me, staring through the drifting snow at the bare tree, at the window in the jutting gable, from which I had gazed with so many dreams.

  There was the sound of raised voices inside and then Sarah came out to empty some slops, calling after her that it was more than her life was worth. She was followed by Anne. Whatever was happening to my mind, my heart was still there. It hopped, skipped, jumped, stopped, then started again at twice the rate when I saw her. Yet . . . why did I not jump towards her? Why did I just stand there gawping? – as Sarah used to put it when I was an apprentice who refused to wear boots. She was as beautiful as I remembered. No, no. More so. She wore an old blue dress, her hair was tangled and she wrapped a shawl of her mother’s tightly round her shoulders as she engaged in the most mundane of exchanges with Sarah, but I loved and swallowed hungrily every word, every movement.

  ‘Pleeeease, Sarah. One bucket.’

  ‘Master said no more coal till nightfall.’

  Anne wheedlingly stroked her cheek. ‘Feel my hand. It’s freezing.’

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a blockade at Newcastle?’

  ‘You’ll be sorry when I freeze to death.’ She went in, slamming the door behind her.

  ‘Sorry? Good riddance!’ Sarah muttered, dumping the slops and looking towards me.

  That was why the air was so clear: few chimneys were smoking. I turned away. I was wearing a battered wide-brimmed hat I had picked up from God knows where and my breeches and jerkin were fit only to throw on the pile of slops. What was left of the sole of one of my boots kept company with the upper only by courtesy of a piece of string.

  ‘Another bloody tinker, pretending to come back from the war,’ Sarah grumbled as if to herself, but deliberately pitching it loud enough for me to hear.

  I could not stay a moment longer. Could not face any of them. Least of all the girl I loved. I needed the safety, the anonymity of the road.

  ‘Stop! Here, you –’ She came after me, fumbling in the pocket of her apron, where she kept dry crusts for beggars. She held out a crust to me, then dropped both it and the pail. ‘The good Lord be praised! It’s Tom! Tom!’ She hugged me, then she recoiled. ‘Your face. What on earth have you done with yourself? You stink like the slop pile.’ Then she hugged me again, eyes shining. ‘It’s Tom! Tom!’

  The house seemed about to fall into the courtyard there was so much opening of doors and shouting. The printing machine stopped in mid-cycle. A window flew open and Mrs Black leaned out.

  ‘Oh, my goodness! And I aren’t dressed yet to receive him. Jane!’

  Anne ran out, shawl flying from her shoulders. ‘Tom . . . Tom . . . you’ve come back . . . you’ve –’ She stopped and clapped a hand over her mouth, choking off a scream. ‘I thought you were Eaton for a moment.’

  ‘Eaton’s dead.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘God rest his soul,’ I said, with the first burst of passion that had risen up in me for a long time.

  ‘What’s wrong, Tom?’ she whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I still wanted to run, and yet I longed to hold her. How could that be? ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

  She pulled me to her and kissed me and then we were overwhelmed, Mr Black seizing me by the hand and drawing me inside, shouting at Sarah to put coal on the fire – did she not realise how cold it was? His voice still slurred a little, but was almost back to its old, deep pitch. He thought it was a great victory. Was it true that the King was suing for peace? He had something on the press now that depended on it. I fought for something to say as he sat me down on his chair by the fire, which Sarah was hastily raking out and building up.

  ‘The press needs oil, sir,’ I said.

  He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘D’you hear that? Once a printer, always a printer. Nehemiah!’ he shouted, and an apprentice, as small and sullen and ink-blacked as I used to be, stared in from the shop. ‘Stick to your calling and you may grow up to be like Tom.’

  I could see from the expression on Nehemiah’s face the last thing he wanted to be was a bedraggled creature like me.

  ‘Go on! You heard him! Oil the press!’ Mr Black bellowed, just as he used to shout at me. ‘Anne! Stop staring at his scar – it’s a badge of honour! Get wine!’

  Mrs Black made her entrance, sweeping up to me with every intention to embrace me as I stood up but, stopped by my smell, growing in pungency from the heat of the fire, extended first her hand, then her fingertips. ‘The charts said you would be here before Christmas. I kept telling Anne, but she would believe you were dead. She was weeping her heart out.’

  ‘I was not, Mother,’ said Anne furiously.

  ‘I told her to do something useful, but all she would do was try to write to you.’ Anne turned away, her eyes shining, as her mother wagged a chiding finger at me. ‘Shame on you, Tom! And you a poet!’ She would never use the word pamphleteer. ‘Not one letter!’

  Mr Black was already well into his second glass of wine, and wagged a finger in his turn at his wife. ‘Come, come, Mrs Black. You don’t carry your quill and ink with your musket into the field, do you, Tom, eh?’

  He spoke man to man, as if he had experience, or at least a conception of ‘the field’, and I saw with a sense of dread that he would expect me to write something like the pamphlet An Exact Account of the Most Dangerous and Bloody Fighte near Kineton I had seen but been unable to bring myself to read. I was struggling again to find something to say when I saw Jane in the background. With a lurch of guilt I remembered that, somewhere in my knapsack, was the letter I had promised to give to Mrs Morland.

  She greeted my shyly and asked if I had seen her mother. I blurted out abruptly: ‘Your mother’s dead.’ My clumsiness silenced everyone and she asked if I had seen her. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes, I did.’ Each word felt like a piece of lead dropping from
my mouth. ‘I gave her your letter,’ I lied. ‘She forgave you and gave you her blessing.’

  She closed her eyes and clasped her hands in a silent prayer, then opened her eyes and gave me the most wonderful smile. ‘God bless you, Tom.’

  I burst into tears.

  There was a moment’s awful silence, then everyone crowded around me talking at once, but I could hear nothing. Their faces were a blur through the tears which, feeling intense shame, I struggled to stop but could not. I tried to get away from them, stumbled over my knapsack and found myself looking into the shop, Nehemiah gawping at me. He was oiling the press and, distracted from his task, the oil dribbled over his boots. They were laced in true apprentice fashion, that is to say, scarce laced at all. For some reason this re doubled my tears.

  ‘What have you done, Tom?’ said Mr Black, with all his old sternness.

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’ I did not, and that made me weep all the more, until I thought I would never stop. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know!’

  ‘He needs rest,’ Jane said. ‘He can have my bed. His old bed.’ She coloured as Anne gave her a jealous look.

  ‘He can have my bed,’ she said.

  ‘Anne!’ cried Mrs Black, scandalised.

  ‘I can sleep in your room,’ she said.

  Before they could argue, she led me upstairs like a child.

  Chapter 41

  For I do not know how many days I fell asleep in her room, but awoke at Edgehill with the acrid smell of gunpowder in my nose or, sometimes, the curious, clean fresh smell of blood. Or I would sit up with a start, with the order to ‘Palm your pike – charge your pike!’ ringing in my ears and find I had gone through the movements in my sleep. Or I would hear Luke’s relaxed, almost lazy voice: ‘Try your match . . . guard your pan . . . present . . . fire.’ They brought the doctor, who tried to bleed me, but I could not stand the sight of blood. They brought the minister, Mr Tooley, who tried to cast out my devils, quoting Luke to me where Jesus cast out a legion of devils into swine. But I argued, apparently – I do not remember this – that I did not understand why the poor swine had to suffer, throwing themselves from a cliff, and I preferred to keep my devils.