Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  The fire had at last blazed up, and the Countess sighed with pleasure, dropping the fur cloak from her shoulders. The twin of the falcon pendant, which I had first seen in her carriage, was glittering between her breasts. ‘Men,’ she said to Anne, shaking her head, ‘have no idea how to resolve such a conflict of interests.’

  Anne stared at her mutely. I reddened for her, sure she had no idea what the Countess was talking about, and stared into the fire.

  ‘Everything all right between you two?’

  Anne sat bolt upright, screwing her hands together. I wanted to hold her, to protect her from this prying, inquisitive woman, who was like a bloodsucking flea, gaining her nourishment from the intimate secrets of other people’s lives.

  ‘I see. It seems I came at the right time.’ I leaned forward to tell her not to interfere but she held up an imperious hand. ‘I am having one of my occasions for Lord Stonehouse tonight – not on the face of it about Richard, but it will enable him to, er . . . discreetly celebrate. Warwick will be there. Bedford. Mr Pym, of course. All the right people. I want you to be there.’

  I was looking into the fire and turned to stare at her. After all that had happened, she expected me to celebrate Richard’s return to life. On the other hand, Mr Pym would be there and the great earls who employed him, Bedford and Warwick, who ran the navy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, looking away off-handedly into the fire. ‘I don’t know if I should go –’

  ‘Oh, not you!’ she said. ‘That would be not be right at all.’

  She was not looking at me, but at Anne. I stared at the Countess in amazement, Anne in abject terror.

  ‘I need a lady in waiting. All the lively ones are in Paris with the Queen, or Oxford with the King. There is no reason why righteousness should not be attractive, but Puritan women are as dull as dumplings.’ I tried to interrupt her again, but nothing could stop her. ‘We live in an upside-down world where, as the ballad has it, war makes lords peasants and peasants lords. But for the moment I shall call you Lady Black. Men like a mystery. Come on, Anne. We have little time.’

  She rose, gesturing Anne to follow her. Anne leapt up, but there her obedience ended. She backed away, twisting her hands together as if she would tear them off. ‘I cannot. I cannot.’

  ‘Nonsense. Of course you can.’

  ‘I would not know what to say,’ Anne cried in agony, ‘what to do!’

  I came between them, shielding her from the Countess. ‘She’s right. It’s ridiculous. How can she have a conversation with Mr Pym? Or Lord Stonehouse?’

  Before the Countess could answer, Anne rounded on me like a spitting cat. ‘Do you think I have learned nothing from you, the way you endlessly go on about politics? Nothing from there?’ She pointed to the print shop. ‘Nothing about the war? Do you? Do you?’ She turned away, tears springing into her eyes, gulping out the last words.

  ‘Exactly,’ the Countess said soothingly, comfortingly. ‘You listen beautifully, Anne, and ask questions charmingly, which is all men ever expect of us – isn’t that right, Tom?’

  She smiled at me sweetly. I hated her. I hated her like poison. I could not understand why I had ever found her beautiful, ever been so fascinated by her. But even with all her scheming I did not think she would persuade Anne. She was panic-stricken at the prospect, too over-awed by what she called her betters. Sure enough, she dropped back in her chair and huddled before the fire again, shaking her head stubbornly.

  ‘It’s impossible. What could I wear? I’ve only this dress and one or two other rags.’

  ‘Well,’ the Countess said, ‘you could wear this, for a start.’

  Anne turned, staring, the tears in her eyes glittering like the diamonds in the pendant the Countess was removing from her neck.

  All the humiliation I ever suffered from Anne when I first came to that house with no boots on my feet was as nothing to seeing her being helped into the coach by Jenkins. Her terror seemed to have vanished in excitement. There seemed to be a familiarity between her and Jenkins, who was back to giving me his old looks of disdain at my crumpled clothes, my blackened hands. Of course! Anne had not been once to the Countess, but several times. Lucy Hay had dropped me for a new favourite.

  The whole household turned out to see them off, Mrs Black curtseying and Mr Black lifting his hat like a pair in a puppet show at Bartholomew Fair. Half the porters came out of Smithfield to help the coach back into Cloth Fair. Some of them thought the Countess was the Queen, the way she smiled and raised her hand. Anne waved to me, but I could not, would not, wave back. There was too much in that wave, in the look she gave me, that reminded me of the time when she had called me Monkey in disdain.

  ‘Some of us go up, and some of us go down,’ Sarah said. ‘But what do we do now for coal?’

  It was freezing, and far too late to leave now. After supper I took my pack upstairs and went to bed early, but could not sleep for thinking about Anne. Now, as I tossed and turned, my envy and burning resentment vanished in an agony of concern. I knew her so well. Her panic would come back. They would know who, or at least what she was. I could not stand the thought of Lord Stonehouse’s black, penetrating eyes on her, what he would say. I sprang out of bed, and went out into the cold night.

  There was no sound except the watchman’s cry. Not a dog barked. Even in the inns, people seemed huddled over fires. I stopped, my breath hanging frozen in the air as the watchman passed me. He said something but I caught not a word. What was I doing, hurrying across London, on this bleakest night of winter, to care and comfort her, forsaking all others, as the marriage service puts it, if I did not love her beyond anything else? I felt as I had when we had our first kiss. No! When I longed for it. I whooped. Ran. Fell, picked myself up laughing, and in this manner reached Bedford Square.

  I could not see her among the glittering array of people caught in the blaze of candlelight, or hidden in deep shadow. I saw Jenkins serving drinks, and the Countess in earnest conversation with Mr Pym, before passing to another group. Perhaps Anne was in the back where I used to be, ignominiously bundled into the kitchens. Or – it would be like her – had fled there.

  I took a step to go round the side, where I had so often delivered letters, and saw her. Or, it would be more accurate to say, saw the pendant. For a moment I still did not recognise the woman wearing it. She came out of the shadows with Lord Stonehouse. She was Anne, yet not Anne. Her rosy lips and cheeks stood out in sharp relief from the rest of her pure white skin, set off by the pendant, which sparkled on the swell of her small breasts. She was nodding, tilting her chin earnestly, deferentially at Lord Stonehouse, drawing up the long, smooth line of her neck. At the same time, within the frame of beautifully, tightly curled ringlets of hair her large blue eyes shone brilliantly, coquettishly up at Lord Stonehouse, in a way I had never seen before. She reminded me of somebody, but try as I might, I could not call her to mind.

  Chapter 45

  She did not return that night. Torn with jealousy, I slept little. Having stood there, still and frozen as an icicle, until the first carriages came, I awoke next morning with a thickening cold and a fever. I realised who, gazing up at that window, she had reminded me of. It was not someone I had ever known, but only imagined: my mother.

  In my growing fever, the two merged together, until I felt I no longer knew who Anne was, just as I lost my own certainty when I saw my portrait at Highpoint. The pendant at Anne’s breast became the pendant Matthew was picking up from the wet bushes and I thought I must leave, but in this slipping, fading vision I was holding her hand and we were leaving together.

  ‘Cream Ice!’ Mrs Black shrieked.

  I lifted my head to hear the murmur of Anne’s voice. I was covered in sweat and my nose was as swollen as a pig’s bladder. From the weak sun filtering through the fresh ice patterns on the window it was past noon. Someone had piled extra blankets and coats on me. I heaved them off and immediately began to shiver. Mrs Black shrieked again.

&nbs
p; ‘The earl of who?’

  I slumped back on the bed and dragged the blanket over my head. A little later Anne came in, calling my name. When I did not move she began piling the coats and blankets over me again. Irritably I shoved them away, telling her in a thick, croaking voice I was too hot.

  ‘Poor Tom. You sound dreadful.’ I blinked at her. She had been in my dreams so much as she was at the window in Bedford Square that it was bewildering to see her in the thick old dressing gown of her mother’s. She wore it over the dress I had torn, which she had repaired so neatly the stitches were scarcely visible.

  ‘Here –’ She put down a hot posset.

  ‘Thank you.’ I buried my head on the pillow.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear what happened?’

  ‘I just want to sleep,’ I mumbled, ‘Lady Black.’

  She touched my head. ‘You’re jealous.’

  I sprang up shouting: ‘I am not jealous! I just want to slee—’ I broke into a fit of coughing. She put a pillow behind my back and I swallowed some of the posset. ‘What did you say to Lord Stonehouse?’

  ‘How do you know I talked to him?’

  ‘Because I saw you.’

  ‘Saw me? How?’

  I blew my nose. ‘Through the window. I thought you would be . . . terrified . . . out of your . . .’

  ‘Oh, Tom, Tom!’ She held me.

  I sneezed. ‘I thought . . . up there . . . you were so much above me.’

  She pulled away. ‘What do you think I have felt since this business began? That’s why Lucy – the Countess – after I had gone that first time gave me lessons.’

  ‘I see. I see.’

  ‘I didn’t talk to Lord Stonehouse. He talked to me. He likes that, because he can’t hear very well. Didn’t you realise that?’

  I shook my head at how obtuse and self-centred I was not to have picked it up. It explained why he shouted and was so brusque and non-committal about some of the things I said. Lucy Hay used his deafness. She introduced Anne as Lady Black and only when Lord Stonehouse had been talking to her for some time – he said she reminded him of his wife when he first met her – did Lucy reveal who she was, saying he must have misheard, for she had introduced her as her lady-in-waiting, Anne Black.

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He cut me.’

  That she had so soon adopted salon language, and the despair I read in her dropped head and shaking shoulders, made me think my fears she would be cruelly rejected had been realised. I put my arms indignantly, protectively round her – and then slowly withdrew them. She was not crying, but laughing. Her blue eyes, the pupils still enlarged with the belladonna Lucy had evidently dropped in them the previous evening, were sparkling wickedly.

  ‘Bedford came over –’

  ‘The Treasurer?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Go on.’

  She caught the urbane tone of the fifth earl I had often heard in the lobby to perfection. ‘He said if the uneasy truce persisted and I happened to find myself in Hertfordshire . . . Then he was interrupted by Warwick who talked about some jewels, captured from the Spaniards by a privateer, Resolution, owned by him and Lord Stonehouse, which would just match my pendant . . .’

  Resolution was the ship Matthew helped to build, the one I had run with the pitch to caulk. I stared at the scar on my leg from the pitch burn, after which Lord Stonehouse had picked me up.

  ‘He just cut you? Lord Stonehouse?’

  ‘Yes. But once he saw Bedford and Warwick talking to me . . . he seemed to, well . . . to see me differently.’

  ‘Differently?’

  ‘Perhaps he was jealous. I don’t know.’ There was a mischievous glint in her eyes I had never seen before. Now she mimicked Lord Stonehouse’s rough, abrupt tone. ‘“You’re Black’s girl,” he said. He was surprised I could read and was interested in estate management and –’

  I gaped at her. ‘You know nothing about estate management.’

  ‘He does. I listened.’ Her voice faltered. She clasped her hands and stared at me earnestly. ‘Do you think I made a fool of myself?’

  I stared at her suspiciously, but she continued to return my gaze modestly, meekly. I was no longer quite sure where I was with her. However rattle-brained Mrs Black might be, she always looked upon Mr Black as the master of the house and was obedient to him, which was as it should be, since a man’s honour was so tightly bound up with his ability to rule his own household. I hated the thought of the hot eyes of those nobles on her, but was avid for the information she had gleaned from them.

  ‘Did Lord Stonehouse say anything about me?’

  She looked at the floor and shook her head unconvincingly.

  ‘What did he say?’ I said sharply.

  ‘He said . . .’ she trembled and bit her lip, then abruptly the words spurted out in a burst of laughter ‘. . . you talked too much.’

  I continued to stare at her coldly until she choked off the laughter. ‘Are you going to Hertfordshire in the spring?’ I said. ‘Or to look at Warwick’s jewels?’

  She burst out laughing again. ‘Oh, Tom, Tom – you are a million times more to me than those rich old men.’

  ‘Am I?’ I said stupidly. ‘You are a million times more to me than Lord Stonehouse.’

  To hell with it. To hell with honour, Lord Stonehouse, the King – if this was the upside-down world, I wanted to be in it.

  ‘You’ll get my cold,’ I said, as she kissed me. ‘We’ll share it,’ she said.

  * * *

  I returned to the print shop. My mind was made up. I would like to be, to do, much more than ordinances, but if it had to be ordinances, so be it, so long as Anne and I were together.

  I no sooner picked up my composing stick than I saw Nehemiah cringe. A stab of guilt went through me, and I told him, I swore it, that I would never hit him again. He sniffed and backed away uncertainly, sure I was only planning a more subtle form of torture. Mr Black heard me, and took me to one side and told me I would ruin the boy.

  ‘It is how I see the world now, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it is a most peculiar way to see it. I never liked beating you, Tom, but it formed your character, did it not?’

  I said nothing and he went away sighing something about youth and change and the old solid ways being disrupted by the war, and the sooner it was over, the better.

  It was a fine March day and ice in the yard was turning into slush when Nehemiah came running back from Westminster, full of excitement. He apologised for losing his hat – in the past he would never have dared tell me – but he had an important letter for me. Lord Stonehouse’s falcon stared out at me from the seal. I had become resigned to expecting nothing from him, but at the sight of the seal all my old hopes and aspirations rushed back. My fingers shook as I broke the seal. I stared at the short, abrupt sentences, almost sick with disappointment.

  It was not from Lord Stonehouse but his secretary, Mr Cole. It said there was a Parliamentary meeting in two days’ time at Westminster and his lordship required me to take notes.

  ‘It seems an honour to me,’ said Anne, meekly.

  ‘An honour? Taking notes like a common scrivener?’

  ‘It is not what you hoped for, certainly.’

  ‘Not what I hoped for? It is an insult!’

  I crumpled up the letter and hurled it into the fire. It bounced out and she fished it from the grate, smoothing it out. She read slowly, but in a thoughtful way, her lips spelling out the difficult words. ‘His manner is, perhaps, a little unfortunate.’

  ‘A little –’ Several times a week now she went to Lucy and she was picking up phrases, mannerisms. I wondered whether she had picked up anything else. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

  ‘No. No. Why should I?’ She gave me a look I was beginning to recognise, tentative and submissive but calculating, a look that preceded her suggesting I did the exact opposite of what I was planning. ‘Except . . . I think it might be about Edgehill.’

&
nbsp; Edgehill was a running sore. Locals claimed the place was haunted. On New Year’s Day on Kineton meadows, between three and four o’clock on a cold, misty afternoon, strange apparitions had been seen of musketeers and pikemen. The boom of cannons was heard and the shrieks and groans of dying men. Troops of horsemen charged one another, then vanished into the mist. The following day many people witnessed a full-scale battle, which began at midnight, the ghostly apparitions, many of them littered about the meadow, vanishing at sunrise.

  So said the pamphlet A great vvonder in Heaven: shewing the late Apparitions and prodigious noises of War and Battels, seen on Edge-Hill. The King authenticated the events, sending six observers who witnessed the apparitions, identifying some of them, including Sir Edmund Verney, who had died holding the King’s standard. They were taken by many as a sign of God’s displeasure at the spilling of so much Christian blood. Nehemiah went to a large demonstration of apprentices in Covent Garden calling for peace, and there were riots in the City calling for an end to the war. The prosperous were now finding Parliamentary tax ordinances much worse than the Ship Money the King had imposed on them.

  The King was gradually strengthening his position. He held the North, from Newcastle to York; Wales and the Midlands down to Oxford, and Cornwall and Devon. Bristol, still in Parliamentary hands, was being encircled by Prince Rupert. Abroad, the Queen was successfully raising money for Charles.

  In the face of this increasing threat from the King, Parliament was split. Denzil Holles, one of the five members whom the King tried to arrest for treason in the House, led a strong faction who wanted peace on almost any terms. Holles had fought long for Parliament, but had been sobered by Prince Rupert slaughtering a third of his regiment at Brentford, just before the stand-off at Turnham Green. He was prepared to barter civil control of Government for freedom of religion. Mr Pym argued this would be a disaster; if Parliament laid down its arms – the King’s first demand before drawing up a treaty – they would lose all the ground gained, and he would be the first to walk to the scaffold.