Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  ‘Mr Cole, I believe we have an agreement with Mr Neave?’

  With a flourish the secretary drew out the document he had witnessed and I had signed – years ago, it felt, as an arrogant youth, full of certainty and ideals. That arrogance was even there in my signature, with the ridiculous squiggle underlining it, which I had been so proud of, but now made me wince.

  ‘I believe it was one pendant for the freehold of . . .’

  ‘Half Moon Court, my lord.’ With another flourish, Mr Cole set a document, heavy with seals and legal language in front of me.

  I signed for the receipt of it, my signature now being a very sparse one, with no squiggle. Lord Stonehouse gazed at it, and the other, but made no comment. It was a moment or two before I realised I was dismissed. At the door I turned.

  ‘And . . . the marriage, my lord?’

  ‘What? Oh. Old Black’s daughter. Why should I stand in your way? Make you into what you are not? Mmm?’

  Before he had finished the sentence, Lord Stonehouse was immersed in the file Mr Cole had placed in front of him, back in his familiar world of paper.

  Chapter 43

  The file they were discussing was the one on Richard. Lord Stonehouse would not rest until he knew what had happened to his eldest son. No doubt he was already setting Mr Cole to work to find out whether I had killed him. Not a word about me being his grandson. Nothing. I was Mr Neave. His father was tight on his feelings, Richard had said. Tight? Feelings? All he cared about, after all this, was his eldest son, the entail, the estate! I worked myself up in this manner until I realised it must have been exactly the state of mind Richard was in when he first saw my portrait.

  I told myself I was free. I had everything I had ever wanted, and tried to return to the mood of the previous, idyllic summer. But I was so morose when I returned to Half Moon Court that Mr Black called me into his office fearing the worst. Indifferently I put the freehold on his desk. At first he would not look at it, thinking it was another notice to quit. Then he saw the seal. Read the clauses, threw the document in the air with a whoop of joy, caught it, read the clauses again to make sure they had not fallen from the paper and got lost, and shouted for his wife. I was happy then. Grinning all over my face as he poured wine and went over brick after brick of the place saying, ‘This is ours – thanks to Tom! And this! And this!’ Suddenly I was not mad, talked about in whispers, but a saviour.

  ‘Shouldn’t you post the banns,’ Anne whispered, ‘in case you go away again?’

  I kissed her and said I would go right away to see Mr Tooley, but while the wine gave me courage, went to see Charity instead. She was bewildered when I stumbled out that, but for me, Luke would be alive.

  ‘But the sword was not in your hand.’

  ‘No, no, but –’

  I gave up. What she wanted to hear, again and again, was that he loved her, and would see her in heaven. All the guilt I had tortured myself with was dismissed, was nothing compared with that. She even asked me if I would be little Luke’s godfather, and when I said I would gripped my hands and said: ‘What exactly did he say? Tell me again.’

  As well as giving Mr Black the freehold, Lord Stonehouse seemed to take in earnest my decision to be a printer and put government work our way. Parliament ruled by ordinance, and we printed ordinances on loans to put the navy to sea, ordinances to ‘find’ sailors (in other words, press them), ordinances on armaments, on manuals for armaments (making what was already complex incomprehensible), ordinances to trench, stop and to fortify the highways (such as they were), to build a great wall round the City, and ordinances to raise rates to pay for all this. Parliamentary rule was not the Eden foretold by the Grand Remonstrance I ran so eagerly through the streets with, and its demands for money started to make the King’s previous excesses look frugal. And it was as dull as ditchwater. I grew sick of the sight of the word ordinance.

  To relieve the tedium, Mr Black wanted me to go to Westminster as I used to, but I refused. Be a printer’s runner again? I was a journey man, near to being my own master! Nehemiah should go. So Nehemiah went, and came back, eyes shining, saying he had seen Mr Pym. As surly as my hands were black, I snarled at him to get on with the presswork. I had not heard a word from Mr Pym. Nor from the Countess. Not a word. I remembered the heady evening, before I left London with Eaton, when I met Mr Pym at Bedford Square. But, of course, all they were interested in was my prospect of becoming a Stonehouse, which I had traded in for Half Moon Court.

  I struggled to concentrate on composing the grubby text that Nehemiah had brought me, which was an Ordinance on the Rightfull Printing of Ordinances.

  The only letter I received was from Kate. After leaving me on the road to Warwickshire, Matthew had returned to Highpoint. He and Kate had travelled back to London, as they had done many years before, in the only vehicle that could get through both warring sides unhindered – the plague cart. Poplar was thriving. A ship was being built for the navy and Matthew was – or called himself – a shipwright.

  One bleak day tempers were at their shortest. The ice was half an inch thick in the pail in the yard where Sarah crunched and slipped over layers of dirty frozen snow to return from the bakers with only two small loaves of black rye bread. There were so many ordinances I was setting type while Nehemiah worked the press. I smelt beer on his breath and accused him of going to the Pot. He denied ever going there, which made matters worse, for I had seen him there once before and said nothing.

  I lashed out at him with my composing stick, catching him on the forehead. The type I had set up flew in every direction, making me even more furious. I drew back the stick again. A trickle of blood was making its way down Nehemiah’s forehead. I stopped as Nehemiah flung up his hands. I saw myself crouching there, biting my lips so I would not cry out when the next blow hit me.

  I hurled the stick across the shop and went into the house. I saw Mr Black’s startled face as he came out of the office, but went straight upstairs into my old bedroom in the garret. I wrapped a blanket round me, for it was bitter cold up there. The morning’s frost patterns were still on the window. I pushed away Susannah’s Bible, which I had not opened for a long time, sat on the window seat, breathed a hole in the patterns and stared out. My knees brushed against my pack and I had a sudden deep, profound longing to put it on my back and go, wherever my feet took me.

  I heard a step on the landing, and thought that Mr Black had followed me. The door opened, but I continued staring out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  There was a touch, the gentlest, most hesitant of touches on my shoulder. It was Anne. I knew what she had come for. Wearily I said: ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t seen Mr Tooley yet for the banns but –’

  ‘I do not want you to see him.’

  Irritably I thought – first Nehemiah, now Anne. She was already at the door, going. ‘I promise you –’

  ‘I do not want you to see him,’ she flared.

  ‘Come on, come on.’ I stopped her and held her in my arms. She lifted her face, looking at me searchingly, with a wildness I had not seen in her before. It sent a thrill of desire through me and I bent to kiss her. At the last moment she turned her lips away. That only redoubled my excitement and I pulled her more tightly to me. She struggled, trying to speak, but I shut her lips with mine. We had twisted back inside the room and I had a brief glimpse of the apple tree and I remembered Eaton throwing the apple core away and saying, Show her who’s master! Give her the whip! He was right. Stupid that we had lived together, so close for so long, and never done this. The more she struggled, the more her fists struck and her nails bit, the more inflamed I got, until I had her over the bed, about to fling her on it when she gave me the most infernal blow to the head.

  No. Not her, the beam – that wretched beam! But it was as if she had wielded it as she pulled away and ran to the door. I staggered and sat down heavily on the bed, my head ringing. She took a step or two back towards me. I could not look at her. The force of the b
low had caused me to bite my tongue, and my voice came out thick and dazed. ‘I . . . I . . . will go now . . . to Mr T-T—’

  ‘You don’t understand, Tom. I don’t want to marry you.’

  I shook my head dizzily. ‘Don’t be silly.’

  She clenched her fists with a sudden ferocity. ‘I am not being silly! I do not want to marry you.’

  I got up giddily, the room swaying until I was able to focus on her tight lips, her determined eyes. The top of her dress was torn and the curve of her breasts rose and fell quickly. She said something so low and mumbled that I could not follow it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You – do – not – want – to – marry – me.’

  The words came out in such great gulps, tears welling, my heart went out to her. At the same time I laughed, I was so astonished. ‘Oh, Anne! What nonsense! I love you. I’ve always loved you, always wanted to marry you.’

  She dashed the tears away from her eyes with a violent gesture of her hand. ‘You may love me, but you don’t want to marry me. You will never be happy with me.’

  Beneath the anger she was shaking. I felt that her whole life, and mine, was falling to pieces and longed to hold her, to comfort her, but feared from her look another outburst. ‘I will never be happy with anyone else,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You will never be happy with me,’ she repeated, just as quietly. ‘We are not suited.’

  ‘Not suited? Of course we are suited. We have always been suited.’

  As if every word was being torn out of her, she said: ‘I’ve stopped you . . . being . . . having . . . a position.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. This is what I want.’

  ‘This? Is it?’ She had stopped trembling and was quite calm now, staring round the garret at Sarah’s bed, with the sacking she used for blankets, at mine, still unmade. Mr Black must have joined Nehemiah at the press, because it was now working at a regular rhythm, sending a little tremor through the house every time the platen came down on the paper, then jerked back for the next pass. She came closer, staring steadily into my eyes. ‘Is it?’

  She made me look at things I had been refusing to face, look inside myself in a way that was so painful I could not speak. I turned away from her and almost cracked my head on the beam again. I drove my fist viciously into it and grimaced, clutching my hand, feeling I had broken every bone in it. I sat in the window seat breathing so heavily the last of the ice patterns melted.

  ‘Here.’ She brought me a cloth. ‘Your lip’s bleeding.’

  I wiped it and indicated her torn dress. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s nothing. I’ll sew it. That’s what women are for.’ It was the only sign of bitterness she showed. ‘What did Lord Stonehouse say?’

  ‘He thinks I killed his son.’

  She was very still. ‘Did you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I told her all I knew, all I remembered. She was silent until I told her what I had said to Lord Stonehouse, how what he had done had caused Richard and I, father and son, although he did not know it, to hate one another. I thought it was true, it hurt him and was meant to hurt him and I was glad I had said it, but she stared at me, appalled.

  ‘You cannot talk to your betters like that.’

  ‘Betters?’ I snarled at her. ‘How is he better than me?’

  ‘He is a lord!’

  ‘He is a lord,’ I mocked. ‘He is a cheat and a murderer.’ I told her about the contract and she was, if anything, even more appalled.

  ‘You fool!’

  It was one thing for me to feel it, quite another for her to call me it. She backed away as I only just stopped myself from flying at her, as I did when she wore the pendant. Even then I felt it was the pendant that had somehow poisoned things between us. ‘Yes. I am a fool. I could have got myself a position, I suppose. Is that what you mean? I did it for you! God knows why! You are right – we are not suited at all! I will go!’

  She was so pale it seemed as if every drop of blood had been drained from her face. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘It’s best you go. Go now. I wish you’d never come here.’

  It was all the more terrible because she said it so quietly. She turned at the door and I thought she was going to say more, but if she was the words would not come. She went and I heard her say something to her mother, again quietly, evenly, as if nothing had happened, then her bedroom door closed. Half a dozen – no, a dozen times – I went to go downstairs to tap at her door but returned to stare down at the frozen apple tree. She knew me better than I knew myself. I had been bitten by the pendant, by the falcon, and wanted more than this – what, I did not know. She was right. I would have married her, stayed here, or somewhere like it, become restless, perhaps grown to hate her. Instead she had refused me – refused me! It made me love her more deeply than ever and resent her bitterly at the same time. She had given me my freedom, but there is nothing more terrible than freedom when you do not know what to do with it.

  The press stopped, and the house seemed to steady itself, as it always did, like a ship coming to anchor. They would be spreading out the printed copies to dry now; Mr Black carefully, meticulously, inspecting every one, criticising one here, another there. I listened. Yes, there was his sharp voice, the sound of a blow aimed, but it produced only a snivel not a cry. He had not the strength now, as he had had with me. Ah, if I could only go back, start again, how I would welcome that blow. If I could go back, correct my mistakes – and my hopeless aspirations . . .

  I picked up my pack. There were a few hours of daylight left. I put my clothes in my pack and checked my boots, with a sudden desire to leave without delay. There was only one thing left to pack, which was what I came with – Susannah’s Bible. I picked it up to thrust it in, but seemed to hear her voice saying: ‘Tom, whenever you need guidance, open the book.’

  I had not opened it for many a month and God knows I needed guidance then. I fell on my knees before the window seat and opened the book at random, as she used to do, only making the choice of the New Testament, not the Old, for that meant to me the blood and vengeance of Edgehill. I shut my eyes and put my finger between the pages, as Susannah used to, and opened them to see that passage in John where Jesus feeds the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes. I stared at it but I could not for the life of me understand what meaning it had for me. The only bread in the house was rye bread, and it was difficult to break that at all, let alone for five thousand.

  I pored over it, and puzzled over it, but I had not Susannah’s belief nor Matthew’s guile to extract a meaning. Finally I closed it with a thwack, thrust it in my pack and went to the door. The house shook, but it was not the tremor of the press. It was a carriage approaching, and not a bone-rattling hackney carriage, but a carriage and pair. I could see the fine horses edging carefully into the narrow entrance. There flashed through me that only my lack of belief, my insistence in believing there must be a riddle when there was none, had prevented me from seeing the obvious. Susannah would have seen the meaning in the passage straight away. A miracle was about to happen! Now the sceptics may say that the real miracle was that, had I not pored and puzzled over that passage, the pack would have been on my back by now and I on the road, unreachable.

  In that moment, I knew with absolute certainty that Lord Stonehouse, overcome by remorse at the hatred he had fed between father and son, had come to beg forgiveness. I saw him again as the kindly old man who had taken me in his arms when I had the pitch burn. Great treasure. It was exactly what Matthew had foretold in the pendant. Exactly the ending that a story or ballad should have. I ran down the twisting stairs into a house of turmoil, with Mrs Black colliding with me as she shrieked to Jane to get her best dress, and Mr Black and Nehemiah coming out of the shop, jaws dropping.

  Only Sarah, wiping her hands on a cloth, seemed unmoved. ‘He’ll never get that thing through there,’ she said.

  I ran into the yard, slipped on the ice and fell, finding myself staring at the liveried legs of a foot
man, then into the disdainful eyes of Jenkins, my old enemy from Bedford Square, who was placing the steps for the Countess to descend.

  Chapter 44

  They were overawed, but they loved her. I never knew anyone more capable of being charming and dismissive in the same breath. Lucy Hay complimented Mrs Black on the exquisite cloth of her shawl (‘Who is your merchant?’) and Mr Black on being London’s Voice of Liberty (a phrase I could see him setting up there and then, with due acknowledgements) and begged for the opportunity to see me and Anne alone.

  I feared she wanted to tell Anne she was standing in my way. So did Anne, I believe, for she refused to come down. Only dire threats from her mother and father brought her down eventually, very pale in the face, with her dress repaired. The last of the coals were heaped on the fire, wine pressed into our hands and we were left alone. The Countess kept her fur cloak on, for the coals Sarah tipped on the fire had practically extinguished it. She sipped at her wine, grimaced and, since I had swallowed mine at one gulp, poured the rest into my glass.

  ‘You’ve heard the news about Richard Stonehouse?’ she said in the tone of one who was quite sure we had not. I went very still, suddenly certain that his body had been found. Normally she was the most tantalising person in drawing the most from a piece of news that no one else knew, but she saw my expression and said: ‘He’s alive. Very much so.’

  Relief was followed by a confusion of emotions. That, and what I had said to Lord Stonehouse, finished any hope of a position with him. He had not contacted me to tell me this, although Richard was my father and he must at least have had an inkling of the torment I had been through. A miracle. Lord Stonehouse overcome by remorse. What an idiotic fool I was! I should go back to my ballads and pamphlets – it was all I was fit for. I scarcely listened to what the Countess was saying. Richard had got back to Royalist lines. He was Sir Richard now, she told us. He was in France with the Queen’s retinue, recruiting English soldiers from Continental armies. There was still enough daylight left for me to go. I stared at my pack, which I had dropped by the door. I finished the wine, unable to meet Anne’s eyes, wishing the Countess would leave, but she rattled on, saying that Lord Stonehouse wanted to celebrate the news that his son was alive but deemed it inappropriate to hold a function for an important Royalist commander.