‘Go away! You stink, sir!’
I pulled her to me and kissed her. She shoved me away. I collided into the crib, almost knocking it over. Now really angry, she went to the door. Contrite, I followed to appease her, but the baby was giving startled, terrified cries and I returned to soothe her.
The encounter with Anne roused me. We had not slept together since I returned, but I resolved not to go to her room. Although I mocked Dr Latchford, I could see that, even when she had been out in the garden, her skin did not colour. Her blue eyes had lost some of their sparkle. She loved rushing round with Luke, but she left him more and more with Jane and Adams.
I was asleep when she came into my room and climbed into bed beside me.
‘Are you sure?’ I mumbled.
‘Sssshhh!’
‘Dr Latchford –’
‘Do you want me? Or do you want Dr Latchford?’ She leaned over me and kissed me on the mouth.
There was a violence, a hunger in that kiss that swept away the dry old doctor and all our arguments and fears, swept them away in the wonderful rediscovery of the touching of skin, bringing every feeling crackling back to life until her cheeks coloured and her eyes sparkled. We laughed at the absurdity of our arguments, at the sheer joy of being together.
We were side by side. I began to climb on top of her.
‘No!’
‘No?’
She twisted away and wriggled on top, which seemed unnatural, outlandish to me. I had heard some of the men, in their cups, talking of whores having them like men. I had reproved them, not just for the whores, but saying did they want to wear skirts, like cuckolded husbands shamed in a Skimmington? But, before I could utter a word, she had clumsily but effectively put me inside her. I was on the brink and could not stop, until she gave a cry of pain and pulled back. I checked myself but her nails dug into my back as she thrust me back into her and we came together in a confusion of pain and pleasure. She instantly rolled away and lay panting with her back towards me.
‘Are you all right?’
She nodded and curled up to sleep.
‘What was all that?’
‘Did you not like it, sir?’ she murmured. ‘It’s called world upside down.’
It was a well-worn phrase describing the chaos after the war, vividly illustrated in a pamphlet by a man wearing his britches on his head and his boots on his hands. Now it seemed to have entered the bedroom.
‘World – world –? Who on earth told you that?’
‘Lucy.’
I was outraged. ‘You talk about our love-making with that woman?’
Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle, had been the mistress of John Pym, leader of the opposition to the King. Since he had died, there had been great speculation about who was now sharing her bed.
Anne sat up, fully awake, her gown half off. Her belly was slacker, her breasts full, but her neck was thinner, her cheeks pinched. ‘We talk about how a woman should keep a man when she has just had a child. About what to do when – when it is difficult to, to make love … That’s all.’
‘All!’
She hid her face on my neck and I held her to me. I could feel her heart pounding. ‘We should wait,’ I said half-heartedly. ‘You know what the doctor –’
She pulled away. ‘Wait? I want another child in my belly before you go off again!’
She spoke so loudly and ferociously I clamped my hand over her mouth. There was silence for a moment, then a cry from Liz, broken off by a stuttering cough.
‘I will not be going away again.’
‘You will. I know.’
Liz gave a long, piercing wail. ‘She’s hungry. Could you not go to her?’
‘Women who are in milk can’t conceive. The wet-nurse fed her. Don’t you want another child?’
‘Yes, but when you are well.’
‘I am well.’
I put my hand over her mouth again as footsteps stumbled past the door. I listened to Jane’s soothing, sleepy voice, the clink of a spoon against a pot of some syrup, until the coughing eventually ceased. Anne ran her finger gently down my nose and along my lips. She dropped her gaze demurely. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I will not do that again, sir, if it displeases you.’
I swallowed. I could not get out of my head the vision of her being above me and began to be aroused again. She laughed out loud at my expression. ‘You’re like a small boy who’s just been told he can’t have a pie!’ As I moved to her, she stopped me with a raised finger. ‘Wait, wait, wait! Promise me you are Thomas Stonehouse, and not that stupid Tom Neave.’
I put on my deepest gentleman’s voice. I enjoyed being a gentleman when it was a game. ‘I am Thomas Stonehouse –’
‘I mean it!’ She clenched her fists. ‘Why do you put on that stupid voice? Why do you quarrel with Lord Stonehouse? You can get on with him so well when you want to!’
‘When I do what he wants.’
‘Please, Tom!’
‘All right.’
‘Promise? Promise you will not quarrel with him when he gets back from Newcastle.’
‘I promise.’
‘Touch the bed.’
When we were children we made solemn vows by touching the apple tree. Now we touched our marriage bed. Being a great lady was as much a game for her as being a gentleman was for me. But for her it was a deadly serious game. I looked at her knotted hands, her earnest, determined face, even lovelier in its fragile, faded pallor. I felt a deep, swelling surge of love for her. Being a gentleman at that moment seemed a most desirable thing to be. No more fighting. Sleeping in my own bed. Or hers. I touched the bed-head.
‘I promise.’
When the letter arrived next morning it felt like too much of a coincidence. I could not believe she had not known, before coming to my room, that Lord Stonehouse was on his way back. But she looked so shocked that I could ever think she would dissemble like that, and said it so charmingly, and was so full of excitement, and fussed so much over my linen and over a button on my blue velvet suit – in short, it was so much as if we had just been married all over again that I was completely disarmed and able to read the letter, if not with equanimity, with more composure than otherwise. Lord Stonehouse, as frugal with words as he was with money, presented his compliments and would appreciate me calling at Queen Street at noon sharp.
5
Only in Queen Street, from where Lord Stonehouse ran the Committee of Acquisition and Intelligence, was it business as usual. The title was a euphemism for plunder, but since everything had been plundered, spying had become its main occupation. Lord Stonehouse looked much the same, although there were more medicines on his desk along with the wine he habitually drank while signing papers. The fire burned brightly; there was never any shortage of coal in Queen Street.
He did not ask me to sit, but waved me to the same spot on the carpet where I had stood as a bastard apprentice, long before he had declared me his heir. He wasted no time on preliminaries. I had been sent to that part of Essex to improve relations. They were now at their worst since the end of the war. I had made a most dangerous enemy in Challoner. Why had I not let him hang the wretch?
I winced inwardly, seeing again that raw, bleeding flesh. But I said nothing, determined to keep my promise to Anne. It was the price I paid for the house she loved, for the children, for my fine bucket boots, the fall of my exquisite lace collar, and the thought of more nights in a world upside down. I came out of my reverie as he brought his fist down on the desk.
‘Lost your voice? That’s new. That’s something, at least! You have lost that part of Essex to us as well.’ He banged his fist on a bundle of papers. ‘Nothing but petitions from the people there. Disband the army. Cromwell’s only bargaining point. Holles will do it. His Presbyterians are in control of Parliament. Or have you become such a fool you do not realise that?’
I hung my head, murmuring that I did. Denzil Holles, who led the Presbyterians in Parliament, hated Cromwell. He had sued for peace
during the war, eager to reach a settlement with the King at almost any price.
‘Not only do you not hand the thief over to justice, he’s now deserted!’
He was flinging the Essex petitions into a tray as I came out of my torpor.
‘Scogman?’
‘What?’
‘He’s alive?’
‘Of course the wretch is alive. Very much alive, unfortunately. Why do you think I’ve sent for you?’
Lord Stonehouse pulled out a pamphlet from the jumble of petitions, and flung it at me. It had a neat play on the New Model Army in its headline, which I had to admire: New Model Thieves Let Robber Escape. The pamphleteer had had a field day. In his lurid prose, Scogman became the most wanted man in Essex, the silver spoon a priceless collection of plate. A woodblock depicted him with one tooth and a devil’s tail.
Scogman alive! I felt a lift of spirits that no lace collar could give me. The most wanted man in Essex! I could not keep a smile from my face when I thought of Challoner’s puce-faced reaction.
‘You find it amusing, sir, do you?’
I straightened my face hastily. ‘No, no, no, my lord. I am, er, concerned about the inaccuracy of the report.’
‘Standards were higher in your day as a pamphleteer, were they?’
Sometimes I could not make him out. Was there an edge of mockery in his voice, a sign that the worst of the storm was over? ‘It was a spoon, my lord, not plate. Not even silver.’
‘Thirty pieces of silver,’ he murmured, staring into space.
‘I beg your pardon, my lord?’
He gave me a baleful look and stared into the fire. There was a silence apart from the click of the coals and the drumming of his fingers on his old leather desk. He broke it abruptly.
‘For your ears only. We have the King.’
I went forward impulsively. ‘Congratulations, my lord.’
He waved me away, a frown forming. ‘Well, well, there’s more to it. Unfortunately. I’ll come to that.’ But he could not contain his exuberance, and his face lit up again.
‘D’you know how we got His Majesty? We bought him! As good as. He was going to do a deal with the Scots but had to accept their religion. Charles loves the warmth of his Anglican ritual, and they chilled him to the bloody marrow with their damp kirks and bored him senseless with their gloomy hairsplitting.’
He took up his wine and then – it was unheard of – poured me one. He sprang up, animated, almost young again.
‘Warwick sat there. Moneybags Bedford there – what are you standing like a loon for, boy? Sit down! Sit down! Oh, of course we were paying for the Scottish army to leave. On the face of it. For services rendered – coming to our aid. You don’t buy a King, do you?’
He put on a shocked look, then laughed. ‘The grasping Scottish tinkers wanted nearly a million and a half pounds! For a King. Beaten. We knocked them down to four hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand.’ Lord Stonehouse relished the figure, as he savoured the taste of wine on his tongue. ‘In two instalments.’
I had never seen him so lively. He finished his glass and stood over the fire. ‘Newcastle fishwives threw rotting herring at the Scots as they left, crying “Judas!”, and I bought a shipload of coal. Warmest coal I’ve ever burned.’
He kicked at the fire, oblivious of the smouldering coals which singed his boot. Flames lit his face, throwing into sharp relief his aquiline nose, which was reflected in the family symbol of the falcon. For a moment the shadows took his years away and he stood there, proud, full of belief in himself, as he must have been when he first built his great house, Highpoint. But as the fire burned higher, the lines returned to his face and the stoop to his back.
‘Now we’ve lost him.’
‘The King? The King has escaped?’
‘No, no, no. But almost as bad. Holles and his Presbyterians have him. He’s in the middle of England under house arrest. Holdenby House, Northamptonshire, guarded by one of Holles’s Presbyterian regiments.’
‘Any settlement with the King will have to be ratified by Parliament!’
He gave me a bleak look. ‘Who controls Parliament?’
I swallowed my wine. ‘We must win the debate. It’s what we fought for. Parliament.’
‘Majority opinion?’
‘Yes.’
‘All well and good.’ He went back to his desk. ‘When it’s on your side.’ He opened a drawer that was double-locked, the one I had nicknamed his dirty tricks drawer. ‘What matters is not the debate, but what you can dig out beforehand. I must find out what Holles is up to. I had an informant high up in his inner circle I was hoping to catch. Unfortunately, I’ve lost him. I think you are the man to reel him back in.’
This was going far better than I had feared. But I looked at him warily as he drew out a fat bundle of papers. What exactly did ‘reel him back in’ mean? The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into Lord Stonehouse’s shady network of spies and informers. I wanted to defeat, perhaps even convince Holles, but by argument, not dirty tricks.
‘I will do all I can to help, my lord, but …’ I groped for a diplomatic way of putting it.
‘But?’
‘After the battle of Naseby,’ I said, ‘I accepted the sword of the Royalist Jacob Astley.’
‘Lord Astley. Did you now.’
‘Astley said: “You have done your work, and may go and play, unless you fall out among yourselves.”’
He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his chin. ‘A good aphorism. I must remember it. Meaning we should not quarrel, but reach agreement?’
I beamed at him. The wine put a rosy glow on everything. The firelight gleamed on the old oak furniture that smelt of polish, and on the jewelled falcon perched on his signet ring. This was the moment. I was on the verge of suggesting he put me up as an MP to fight Holles in Parliament when he struck like the bird on the ring, his voice acid with contempt.
‘I would as soon reach agreement with Holles as I would with a poisonous snake. Don’t you understand? He has the King! The English Presbyterians are not like the dreary Scots! They hold him at a fine house, where Charles practises his religion, and holds his court. Holles will push through all the concessions the King wants, just to have him back on the throne. In a year or two the King will have his own army, dismiss Parliament –’
‘Cromwell will never agree to such concessions!’
‘Cromwell has given up.’
This was too much. Lord Stonehouse had sat here throughout the war, his arse warmed by his coals. He had no idea what Cromwell and his army had been through. ‘Cromwell is ill, my lord,’ I said coldly.
‘Ill? Cromwell ill? He should have my years. My bladder. My stone. Ill? A grateful Parliament has conferred on him £2,500 a year. From estates I confiscated from the Marquis of Winchester. Cromwell ill, sir? He has drawn his pension, that’s the only thing wrong with Cromwell. Meanwhile we are in danger of losing all we fought for.’
‘Holles has no soldiers to launch a coup.’
‘He has Poyntz’s northern army.’
That at least was true. Major-General Poyntz’s soldiers had been recruited from strict Presbyterians. ‘They are no match for the New Model.’
‘Yet.’ He pointed to the petitions heaped up on his desk. ‘Holles is seeking to disband half the New Model and send the rest to Ireland.’
‘Nobody wants to go to Ireland. Cromwell will never let him disband –’
‘Cromwell, Cromwell.’ The name seemed to stick in his throat and he began to cough. ‘Cromwell is counting his pension and waiting for God to tell him what to do. Until God speaks or someone puts a keg of gunpowder under his arse in the form of solid proof of what Holles is up to, he won’t budge. I was on the verge of getting that proof from my informant but –’
He burst into an explosion of coughing. I picked up his wine.
‘Not wine … Cupboard … Not that one! Cordial …’
I opened the cupboard. In it was a miniature of a strikingly bea
utiful woman with greenish eyes. With it was a partly folded letter in which I caught only the opening line: This is a true likeness of …
‘Quick!’
I pulled out a flask and poured him a greenish liquid which smelt pleasantly of cinnamon. He swallowed some, spurted it out, mopped his face and took another sip or two, until the coughing gradually stopped. I moved to return the flask, but he stopped me and did so himself. I had disturbed the miniature so it was on the edge of the cupboard shelf. When he moved away, the miniature was no longer there. It was a clumsy surreptitious movement, and for a moment he did not meet my eyes. He looked almost human for a moment. Surely, I thought, he’s not fallen in love. At his age! The idea brought a smile to my face. It was wiped off immediately when he rounded on me.
‘I don’t know what you have to smile about. You have no idea what you’ve done! The informant who was going to tell me what Holles is up to is Sir Lewis Challoner.’
It was a world upside down in this room too, where nothing was as it seemed.
‘You sent me there to keep the army under control,’ I protested. ‘How could I know there was anything else going on!’
‘Just so, just so,’ he conceded. ‘I should have told you. But I could not afford to trust you. You and your damned scruples. Your radical views. You might have told anybody! I thought that your desire to be an MP would keep you in check. But now – now, I can’t afford not to trust you.’
He began coughing again and drank more cordial before he told me that Challoner had been planning to meet him, until the incident with Scogman.
‘Challoner knows Holles’s plans. He should do. He’s part of them. Why do you think there is so much trouble between the people and the army in Essex? Challoner is fomenting it.’
‘Why should he tell you Holles’s plans? He hates Cromwell.’
‘He loves land more.’
Everything fell into place. I remembered Challoner’s sudden burst of friendliness, his winks and slaps on the back as he rhapsodised about the beauty of the countryside.
‘The farm, you mean.’
‘Oh, more than that. The estate Parliament seized. I was negotiating to sell it on favourable terms if he came over to us.’
Cromwell's Blessing Page 4
