We reached the top of the steps. There the heat was more intense but the smoke less. Only then, when my head began to clear and I heard what he said, did I come to my senses.
‘The last one. Then it’s done. Then it’s finished. He must go into the heart of the fire, to burn with the rest of his brood …’
Come to my senses? I came to my rage, my own hatred. I wrenched my head away, yelling as hairs tore from it. Taken by surprise, he fell down the steps. I levered myself up, moved to throw myself after him, but my body stayed where it was. He drew his knife.
‘Would you. Would you.’ He seemed almost pleased I had come round. ‘Remember this?’ He pointed to the scar I had inflicted as an apprentice, glowing red on his forehead. ‘The Lord has promised. It will disappear when you are dead.’
He lunged with his knife. It ripped my jerkin as I stumbled backwards. The knife was at my throat. He could have killed me then. What stopped him was habit. He was that journeyman again, and I the apprentice. He never simply inflicted his punishments. He savoured them. Now he forced me away from the stone hall towards the heart of the fire. He drove me backwards with his knife, step by stumbling step. The knife went through my jerkin and pricked my flesh. He would not be satisfied until he saw me not merely burning, but charred to ash.
The fire seemed to be reaching out for me, scorching my hair, my neck. I fell over something. There was a stench of burning flesh. Jed. His wooden arm had gone but the hook remained. As George brought his knife back for the final thrust, I snatched up the hook, the hot metal searing my hand. This time there was no one to stop me when I drove the hook up into George’s face again and again.
I heard their voices through the roar and crackle of the fire. It was as if their spirits had been released by George’s death. Anne would be where the threadbare pattern of her shoe was left. If I could only find that, I would be with them for ever. But my lungs were on fire and my eyes half-blinded by the stifling smoke, and their voices, their billowing shapes, were like the will o’ the wisps of my childhood, who enticed people on to the marsh, from where they were never seen again.
28
Breathing was like drawing in thorns, so I breathed as little as possible. Which meant I moved as little as possible. I did not know where I was. I did not want to know. My soul was detached from my body, in the inferno with Anne and Luke. Why did people not leave me alone, to burn with those I loved? Only when I was lifted on to a pot, or had the bandage stripped from the raw burned flesh of my hand, did I become a screaming body again, my lungs torn by the thorns.
Eventually, they forced me back into that body, but still I did not want to hear or see. Most of all I did not want to think. The way to avoid that was to count the stitches in the sampler on the wall. But the stitches became letters and the letters words: Two things there are that will not come back.
I looked wildly away. The words seemed to have formed themselves as I looked, burned into the wall as they were for Belshazzar. I got up to try to sweep them away. Only then did I realise it was a familiar Puritan aphorism. Two things there are that will not come back: the appointed hour that could not wait and the helpful word that was spoke too late. Neatly, and probably thankfully after the months it had taken to sew, it was signed Elizabeth Bourchier 1608.
I fell back on the bed, knocking against a table next to it. Something fell on the floor with a metallic tinkle. I picked up a small, twisted piece of metal, staring uncomprehendingly at it for a moment before I realised it was the bridle from Luke’s toy horse. There was a tiny trace of soot on it, which came away with the sweat of my finger. I could hear him. I can ride! I can ride! Watch me, sir. But where was the other shoe? Where was Anne? The door opened, but I did not look up until I heard Jane’s voice.
‘You are awake, sir.’
‘It seems so.’ The only thing I wanted to ask I could not bear to. Instead, nothing but empty trivia came out of my mouth. ‘Who is Elizabeth Bourchier?’
‘Why … Mrs Cromwell, sir. Bourchier was her maiden name.’
‘Cromwell is about to put me into prison again, is he?’
Jane stared at me blankly. ‘Mr Cromwell is with the army. His wife is in the country. We heard you shouting through the smoke –’
‘We?’
She described Scogman, who, she said, had been fighting the fire from the stables. They heard me crying out for Anne and Luke. Scogman kicked open the kitchen door. The air fed the flames but cleared some of the smoke. They saw me on the floor, holding the piece of bridle, and managed to pull me clear.
‘Where’s Scogman?’
He had gone. Where, she did not know. ‘He left you this.’ She gave me a leaf. It was a dry, flaking laurel leaf, which he had carried in his hat during the march with the King. She seemed reluctant to part with it, and when I caught her eye, she blushed. Life was going on as normal, then. I wanted to cry out, Why should it? How could it? I dropped the leaf, picked up the twisted piece of toy bridle, and forced out the words.
‘Where are Anne and Luke?’
‘I – I do not know, sir,’ she said falteringly.
‘What? There was nothing left – nothing?’ She stared at me as if I was crazy, as twisted and misshaped as the tiny piece of metal I turned round in my fingers. ‘Nothing but this? No shoe?’
‘Shoe? She lost her shoes when Luke went back for his horse. That man –’
‘George?’
‘Was waiting for them but Jed saved them and –’
‘Saved them? Jed saved them? Their bodies?’
She stared at me as if I was mad. ‘Bodies? They escaped. They are alive, sir.’
‘A-live?’ I stuttered. ‘But they – I thought – you said – what did you say? You said you didn’t know where they were and I thought – alive?’ I seized her by the shoulders. ‘You are sure? Alive?’
She began laughing at my craziness. ‘Yes, sir.’
I kissed her. Then for some reason I went over and kissed Elizabeth Bourchier’s sampler. It was not too late. Not too late. I noticed that she had skimped some of the cross-stitching on the border. It made the child who had done it less perfect but more alive. Alive! I began to smell the lavender Jane had placed near my bed, and heard the sounds through the window I had not realised was open, the rattle of wheels, the clank of a milkmaid’s pail.
I gripped Jane by the shoulders again, savouring the pain in my bandaged hand. ‘Where are they?’
She looked away. I had to shake her before she answered. ‘With the Countess.’
‘I see.’ I walked gravely round the room, my hands folded behind my back. ‘After I expressly forbade her to go there?’
‘She – she told me not to tell you, sir.’
‘Told you not to tell me?’
That meant nothing to me then. Nothing mattered but that they were alive. I could not keep up my charade. To Jane’s astonishment, I danced her half round the room, before dropping back on the bed, wheezing with exhaustion.
‘Never fall in love, Jane. It is the sweetest, but the most painful thing in the world.’
‘I have no intention of doing so, sir.’
‘Good. I may keep this then?’ I held up the laurel leaf.
‘He left it for you, sir.’
‘Are you sure?’ I dropped it in her hand. A small smile trembled round her lips.
I shook my head. ‘He is a rogue and a thief, Jane.’ The smile went. ‘But reformed,’ I assured her, closing her hand round the leaf.
The Countess was not at home to Tom Neave. Mrs Stonehouse was indisposed. Indisposed! Well, she could be anything she liked, so long as she was alive. I told my old enemy the footman to tell her that I too was indisposed, and to suggest that we might be indisposed together. He looked askance at the cast-off steward’s clothes Jane had found for me, his expression as severe as Cromwell’s frown, and did so reluctantly. When he eventually returned, he told me he had been unable to deliver the message because her ladyship was asleep.
Her ladys
hip! I pushed past him, up the stairs into the salon. It was empty. Another servant looked up at me, startled. He appeared to be putting a picture on the wall. The Countess had kept up her habit of having Royalist pictures on one side, dominated by a Van Dyke of Charles, and Parliamentary pictures on the other. The portrait the servant had in his hands was a rather florid one of Holles.
I heard voices from an adjoining room and opened the door. The Countess rose from a chair without speaking. Anne, her feet bandaged, was stretched out on a chaise longue.
‘I thought even you would not break in …’
‘Not break in? I thought you were dead!’
‘I wish I were.’
She spoke so tonelessly that I went to her in alarm. ‘What is it? Your feet?’
‘My feet will heal.’
‘Is it Luke?’
She looked away.
‘Where is he?’
‘Asleep.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Don’t wake him. He has bad nights.’
‘Is he all right?’ I became frantic when they evaded my questions, and went towards the door. The Countess stopped me with something I never expected from her. Gentleness. ‘He needs his sleep.’
‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly to Lucy, ‘for taking them in.’
‘Is that all?’ Anne said savagely. ‘You forbade us to come here. You insulted her. Or have you forgotten?’
I thought of the picture of Holles being put up. What I had said the night I left to ride to Holdenby seemed only too true. She had gone over to Holles, even if she was not actually warming his bed. I turned to the Countess and managed to get the words out.
‘The … the manner in which I spoke to you was unpardonable. I am deeply sorry.’
‘Manner? Deeply sorry? You are mincing words, sir. You are taking back nothing you said?’
‘Enough, Anne,’ the Countess said. ‘Please. I’ll leave you –’
She moved to go, but Anne gripped her hand and practically forced her to sit in the chair next to her. Her anger flushed her cheeks and tightened her skin. She would not release Lucy’s hand. My gratitude to Lucy for sheltering my family began to slip away.
‘I am sorry, but I cannot take back what seems to be true. Now Holles is in control of London, I see you are putting up his rather florid portrait.’
There was a silence. Anne swung her feet from the chaise longue and tested them gingerly on the ground. I thought she was going to fly at me. Then they looked at one another and began to laugh. Lucy poured out some cordial, which she refreshed with white wine. When I refused it she gave it to Anne, who looked over the edge of it at me, one of Lucy’s mannerisms. She was even beginning to sound like her.
‘For a pamphleteer – is that what you are again? – you are singularly ill-informed.’
‘Holles’s portrait is not florid,’ Lucy said. ‘It is gross. And it is being taken down, not put up.’
She told me that the riots had been a futile gesture from the City, who feared and hated the prospect of the army taking control. They were misled by people like Sir Lewis, who puffed up the numbers ready to fight for the Presbyterians. Cromwell played a clever hand, showing force but never using it. As soon as the Presbyterians heard Cromwell was twelve miles away, they melted like snow in spring. While I was recovering, news came that authority had been added to force, with Cromwell being joined by the Speaker and a number of fugitive peers. In a few days the army was expected to march in and restore Parliament.
‘I hope you have commissioned a portrait of Cromwell by a better painter,’ I said to the Countess.
‘Cromwell?’ Lucy said, as if the name left a bad taste in her mouth. ‘I have an old one of him. More importantly, I have my Van Dyke of Charles. The talks with Parliament are going well and he will be back on his throne in the autumn. Long live the King!’
She raised her glass. Anne stared into hers. Her enjoyment seemed to have been short-lived. For the first time she looked at me straight in the eyes with that old look of contempt, which I did not mind, but indeed welcomed, for it was mixed with hunger and need.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’
Anne’s eyes were wild. Her hand shook, spilling her drink. I took it from her. ‘What is it, my love?’
I sensed, rather than saw, Lucy with her glass still upraised, then she became no more than a piece of furniture as I watched the movements of Anne’s throat, still thin and delicate as she tried to speak. And words almost came, but each time she tried to say them she swallowed them back and tears came to her eyes, and I held her to me, shaking and gasping, and kissed her until we lapsed into silence. When she eventually stirred, and I again asked her what was the matter, and she shook her head, I could no more keep my words back than a river can keep to its banks at flood time.
‘Oh, Anne, I have been on such a journey. I have seen wonderful things. You know the treasure we talked about as children? I have found it. It is not in a chest, as we always thought, held by big rusty hasps, locked by a key that must be found. It is in ordinary people. They have brought King and Parliament together. They have begun to speak.’
‘Speak?’ she whispered, half crying, half laughing.
‘Aye. The dumb have found their voice.’
She was as we were when children, half rubbishing me, half eager to hear more. I told her about Scogman, oh, a desperate rogue, who now talked of a better world. About the masterless men and the pipe of freedom. Even the King had sung to its tune! In spite of slaughtering half of them, the King had always said how much he loved his people – now he had ridden among them, his standard flying with that of Black Tom. I told her that the prophets were wrong; every doom-saying, nay-saying one of them. The war was not the end of the world. It was the beginning – a world in which King and Parliament would have to answer to the people.
There was a small rap as Lucy set her glass down on the table.
I got up, still clasping Anne’s hands. ‘Come. Let us go home.’
It was just an ordinary phrase, the most comforting in the world, so well-worn it slipped out without thought. It was like setting a match to a train of gunpowder. She snatched her hands away.
‘Home? Where is that? Tell me. Go on. Tell me.’
‘We can go to your father’s while we rebuild –’
‘Rebuild? What with?’
Without waiting for an answer, she rounded on Lucy who seemed as frightened of her explosion of anger as I was. ‘Tell him. You tell him. I can’t.’
She flung herself back on the chaise longue and turned away from me.
For once, Lucy told me without preamble. ‘Both Lord Stonehouse and Cromwell have disowned you as a dangerous radical for kidnapping the King.’
‘Kidnapping? We saved the King from Richard!’
‘He has denied it.’
‘Denied? He was there!’
I groped for the wine and poured myself a drink.
‘It’s going round the ’Change that anything might have happened with such a dangerous band. The King is using that as a bargaining point. Cromwell denies having anything to do with Cornet Joyce and the rest of you.’
‘He – he paid them!’ I stuttered, fumbling in my pockets to take out the army warrant I was given.
‘Of course he paid them. They will keep their mouths shut.’
‘I will not.’
‘No doubt that is why you were thrown into prison.’ She took the warrant. ‘It looks genuine. That is curious, I admit. That you were released and paid.’
I could say nothing without giving Mr Ink away. I took back the warrant. ‘Cromwell’s blessing,’ I said bitterly. ‘You can trust none of them. Richard is welcome to what he gets from his father. If he gets anything. The last time I was in Queen Street I saw the woman he intends to marry.’
‘Lord Stonehouse?’ Lucy cried.
I took a savage satisfaction from, for once, telling her something she did not know. ‘It seems so, madam. I saw her leaving in his carriage.�
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‘A tall woman,’ Lucy said. ‘Handsome rather than beautiful, with greenish eyes?’
‘You know her?’
‘I know who she is.’
‘Her name is Geraldine,’ Anne said. ‘She is the daughter of the Duc de Honfleur and a close confidante of Charles’s Queen Henrietta.’
‘Even more important for Lord Stonehouse,’ said Lucy, ‘is that she has given birth to a son.’
‘Lord Stonehouse has another son?’ I cried.
‘The woman is Richard’s wife.’
Anne spat the words out. I groped for my drink, but put it down immediately. I could take nothing more in that place, not even the drink I badly needed. I turned to Anne. ‘Come. We are better off without them.’
It was another unfortunate choice of words. The Countess’s eyebrows lifted. Anne sprang at me. ‘Better off? Is that meant to be a joke? If you had shown your father’s lying letter to Cromwell –’
‘Betrayed him. Acted like he does, you mean.’
‘Oh, you are too good for this world, sir. I would not have married you if I had thought you were only a printer.’
I laughed. ‘Come, come, that is not true. You are a printer’s daughter, madam, masquerading as a lady, as I ape the gentleman from time to time. It is all nonsense, all play. We have been through this many times before. Come. Let us get away from these people.’
She walked towards me. She scarcely came past my shoulder, but seemed to stretch up as tall as me. Her borrowed clothes were more sumptuous than we could ever afford. Her silk gown crackled as she walked, its deep blue matching her eyes, which never left me. Behind her, her mentor the Countess watched approvingly. Anne’s voice was unnervingly quiet.
‘And Luke, what is he?’
Lucy half rose but, in the exchange of glances between them, sat down again abruptly. I could not understand the look they shared, and said nothing.
‘I am a lady, sir, and you a gentleman,’ Anne said.
‘Well then,’ I said equally quietly, ‘you must get used to your new station in life.’
Cromwell's Blessing Page 22
