Why was she always at her most desirable when she was so angry? Her voice remained low, but her fists were clenched and her cheeks a dull red. ‘That estate is yours, sir. You have been promised it, you have earned it and you have been cheated of it. And I will see that you get it.’
‘You will?’
Her voice rose. ‘One way or another. Yes.’
Lucy had coached her well. I had had enough of this nonsense. ‘Come,’ I said abruptly.
‘Where? To your forest people?’
I would not be goaded. ‘Anne. It’s happening. We must be part of it. Together.’
Her lips trembled. Her eyes filmed over. I could feel the old magic between us. Once we were away from Lucy it would be all right. ‘Come,’ I said more gently.
‘You talk of masterless men,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Is there any talk of masterless women?’
I smiled. ‘Not that I have heard of.’
She dropped her head and went to the door. ‘Very well.’ Her voice began to break. ‘I will obey you, just as I did before you went away. I pleaded to come here, but you would not let me and I obeyed you.’ Her voice became charged with bitter regret. ‘You care for your forest people more than you care for us.’
Lucy sprang up. ‘Anne! Don’t disturb him.’
‘What is it?’ I cried. ‘What has happened?’
But Lucy had gone after Anne. I followed her across the gallery where the servant, who was putting up a picture on the wall, gaped down at us from his ladder. Lucy went down a dimly lit corridor leading to a withdrawing room. I called out after Anne. Lucy stopped and turned, putting a frantic finger to her lips. I collided into her, knocking a table from which a vase fell, shattering on the floor.
I had never seen Lucy so distressed, but when I mumbled an apology she kept saying, ‘The vase doesn’t matter. The vase doesn’t matter.’
There was a high-pitched scream. I could not believe it was Luke. It was like the cry of some animal caught in a trap. I blundered into the withdrawing room. He was on a couch, made up as a bed. One side of his face was practically untouched. The other was burned raw. It had been treated with one of those bandages that Ben and others had developed during the war, consisting of more ointment than bandage. The most painful business was getting it off. Part of it had come away from the skin. He screamed even more when he saw me.
‘It’s him! It’s him!’
‘Not him, Luke, not him. It’s your father.’
He ducked away to bury his face in his mother’s breast, but flinched back, afraid of the pain it would cause his inflamed skin.
‘It hurts, it hurts!’
‘This will make it better.’
‘Doesn’t, doesn’t!’
‘It will, it will.’
With infinite gentleness, she adjusted the bandage until it was secure. She fed him small sips of cordial until he began to be drowsy. I sat on the end of the couch and stroked him quietly.
‘You said you would kill him,’ Luke murmured.
‘I have.’
‘He will not come back?’
‘He will not come back.’
Eventually he fell asleep in Anne’s arms. I continued to sit there, her words ringing in my head. You care for your forest people more than you care for us. If I had betrayed my father, or at least not written to him, I would have brought the medicine back to Liz. She might have lived. No, no. That was ridiculous. But the thought would not go away. I should have been there. And now this! If I had not forbidden Anne and Luke to come here, this would never have happened.
I had to stay. I had to stay with them. But to stay, I must be Thomas Stonehouse. She wanted nothing less. She had said so: I would not have married a printer. Ah, that was just nonsense, said in the heat of the moment. But it carried in it the hint of another voice, one I had never heard, but was always there, somewhere inside me, that of my mother. There was an echo of that voice when Anne said: that estate is yours. I will see that you get it. One way or another. I shivered.
It was not only that I believed in the forest people and that the world was about to change. I had changed. She had not made that journey. Until she did, had I any right to tell her what to do? Masterless women. I smiled at it, but was it so ridiculous? Was that not what made me fall in love with her in the first place? And still loved about her.
So my thoughts spun uselessly, endlessly round and round, as the light went and shadows crept into the room.
Luke had his thumb in his mouth. Soothed by the bandage, his burned cheek rested on his mother’s breast. Miraculously, in that position, he looked whole again. All our breathing was in concert. Then Luke shifted, his face twisting in protest at being dragged from sleep by the pain, and she turned him on his good cheek and rocked him gently.
I got up. ‘You must stay. I cannot.’
‘Cannot?’
‘I will find a place for us.’
‘Where?’
‘I will find somewhere.’
She looked up. We stared at one another wordlessly, more in shock, bewilderment and disbelief that we were parting than anything else. My legs were shaking. She moved to put Luke back on the couch but he gave a wailing cry, and she drew him back to her. I went out into the corridor, walked away, then back to the door of the room, then back again. Lucy appeared at the door to the salon.
‘Ah. I thought I heard you. What do you think?’
The servant was picking up his ladder. The picture he had hung in place of Holles was one of Cromwell I had seen before. It had been retouched so that the nose was less prominent and the warts scarcely visible.
‘I’m afraid I don’t find it very … characteristic.’
‘I should hope not. The painter has done what he can, but the raw material has defeated him.’
I held out my hand. ‘Thank you for taking care of them.’
She took it, smiling warmly. For a moment there was a glimpse of a different person, before she had lost her only child and realised she could have no more, a glimpse of why she had such a close relationship with Anne.
‘There is a suite I have prepared for you, Tom.’ She picked up a bell. ‘I will get the servant to show –’
‘I am not staying.’
She mouthed, rather than said, ‘Ah.’ That was all.
As I went down the stairs, I heard the resigned thump of the servant putting his ladder against the wall again and the Countess saying, ‘I think a little more to the left. Away from the light.’
PART THREE
Without
Autumn 1647
29
Lucy hung up her picture with her usual impeccable timing. The day after, Fairfax and Cromwell entered London. Twenty regiments marched down Cheapside, colours flying and drums beating. The City went from Presbyterian – at least politically – to Independent in a day. It was not just the muskets that were persuasive. The City wanted only one thing: business as usual. They had been told by the Presbyterians that Cromwell’s army was a drunken rabble. They were amazed at how orderly and obedient they were: above all, that there was no looting.
‘They took not so much as an apple,’ marvelled one alderman.
Cromwell and Ireton would have thrown me back into prison if they could. But, while the army was in control of the country, Cromwell was not in control of the army. Not completely. I joined in the march with George, with Levellers like Nehemiah, and a small number of MPs who feared that Cromwell’s negotiations, like those of Holles, would give too much away to the King. What had started as a rebellion in the army was on the verge of becoming a wider revolution: above the heavy martial beat of the drums and the blare of the trumpets floated the defiant skirl of Joshua’s freedom pipe.
After the march, I went to Mr Black to see if Anne and Luke could stay at Half Moon Court.
‘You mean when they return from the country?’ he said.
‘Country?’
‘Did you not know?’
Anne and
Luke had left London to go with the Countess to a house she had at Maidenhead. Anne had evidently told her parents nothing of the difference between us and I struggled to keep up the pretence. The pewterer who lived opposite Mr Black had died, leaving the house empty. I cashed my army warrant and took out a lease. The house was in a bad state and while work was done I slept above the shop of Gun Press, in Spitall Fields, close to the apothecary’s where Matthew worked. He loaned his kitchen maid, Ellie, to keep it in some kind of order. There I worked night and day with Scogman and Nehemiah on what Mr Ink, who had been carried back in triumph to Westminster with Speaker Lenthall, called The Great Opportunity.
But opportunity for what?
Lucy was wrong in one thing. The King rejected the army’s proposals. Ominously some, like Nehemiah, said ‘there should be no further addresses to the King.’ Did he think we could rule without the King? We nearly came to blows. I said vehemently that we had seen from the crowds leaving Holdenby how the people loved the King. Nehemiah argued that the King was using the crowds to get his Royalists back into Parliament.
God was prayed to endlessly for a solution to the stalemate. From St Katharine’s in the east to St Dunstan in the west, people knelt for hour after hour for an answer. None came.
So many words dried so many throats in the Leveller alehouses that The Windmill in Lothbury and The Bull and Mouth in Aldersgate both ran out of beer.
The King played bowls in Hampton Court. A Royalist pamphlet reported him as saying, ‘You cannot be without me – you will fall to ruin if you do not sustain me.’
Not a day, scarcely an hour, passed, without my picturing Luke in his mother’s arms, hearing again that terrible scream. I stopped in the middle of composing a pamphlet, or wiping my hands, to go over that last scene with Anne. I was angry at her for leaving without a word – then more angry at myself, for how could she write when she did not know where I was?
I wrote to her and, miraculously, because I was writing as Tom Neave, poetry flooded back to me. I told her I had leased the house in Half Moon Court. I had planted a new apple tree there, to replace the one where we had fallen in love. It gave me the most intense longing for her and for days I was full of hope. I had no illusions about her reaction. She would obey me, but she would hate it. I could hear her objections, feel her silent contempt for the place. Even that was preferable to not being with her at all. And, gradually, as the first leaves formed and then buds opened, we would come together again. I believed more than anything else that, whatever happened, neither of us could live without the other.
A week passed. There was no reply. I wrote again by ‘hanging man’, which gave the letter the urgency of a pardon. Nothing. I was short with everybody, particularly Matthew’s kitchen maid Ellie, who was always at my elbow. She had become less interested in cleaning than in running pamphlets to the Levellers’ groups, or copy to Mr Black’s when our press broke down. She was, I think, fourteen – fifteen, she claimed. Like a plant that shoots up too quickly, she was always overbalancing in her pattens and kicking them off to run through the streets, her dress pinned up against the mud.
One day she gave me a letter from Maidenhead, which had been posted eight days previously. As she always collected the post, I rounded on her, thinking she had forgotten about the letter. She fled in tears. Scogman remonstrated with me, pointing out it had been wrongly addressed, and gone backwards and forwards to Maidenhead.
I was known by everybody now as Tom Neave. Anne had written to Thomas Stonehouse. She had closed the letter with the falcon seal.
I flew into a rage. I would not open it. It was not to me. I would return it, scribbling over it: ‘not known at this address’. My childish tantrum lasted all of five seconds. I tore it in my eagerness to see her sprawling impetuous hand. I stared in bewilderment at the neat, upright lines, stiff as a regiment standing to attention. She had dictated it to a scrivener. She addressed me as her dear husband. She had taken Luke to the country because she feared he would suffer even more distress when a looting army took over London (as she expected Cromwell’s troops to be). Had she known where I was, she would, of course, have asked for my permission. Not a day passed when Luke did not ask after his father. She begged to be excused from making any judgement about Half Moon Court until the good country air had led, hopefully, to Luke’s recovery. She remained my affectionate wife, etc., etc. She signed it Anne Olivia Stonehouse.
Anne Olivia! She never used the second name. She hated it. Wait, wait! I paced the press room, ignoring people who questioned me. It was how she had signed the marriage deed. The whole letter bore the hand of Lucy, and probably some lawyer. Hopelessly, Anne was still pursuing the Stonehouse estate. Well, that would burn itself out. It would have to. It was fruitless. I wrote to her in cold anger that she must now address me as Tom Neave and take that as her name. She wrote back immediately, and perfectly civilly, that, although she would obey me in most things, it was superseded by obedience to her Church and her God, who had made her Mrs Stonehouse.
What made it worse was that she was right. Or, I suspected, the hidden hand of her lawyer was. As September darkened into October, my cold anger persisted. The house at Half Moon Court was ready, but I did not occupy it. I was in exactly the same state as when I first met her. Half the time I hated her. The other half I longed for her with such passionate intensity I could neither eat nor sleep. Then my work took an astonishing turn, which allowed me to put her in the back of my mind, at least for a few hours.
A sometime lawyer, who now styled himself Major Wildman (although there was no record of him ever fighting), had put his finger on what Mr Ink called the Great Opportunity.
It was breathtakingly simple. He turned the soldiers’ case, their pay and grievances, into the people’s case, the soldiers’ rights into the rights of the people. To win those rights, Parliament had to be reformed. Until Parliament had been reformed – this was Wildman’s key point – it was futile to negotiate with the King.
With other pamphleteers I worked eagerly to turn the ideas into a pamphlet called The Case of the Army Truly Stated. It was ready to print, but our press broke down. My relationship with Mr Black was now stiff and awkward, and I told Ellie to take the copy to him. I could not stop myself from asking her to find out if he had heard from Anne in Maidenhead. She looked at Scogman, who was struggling to repair the press. He started to say something but, irritated by the delay, I told him to wait until I had done a last minute correction.
I gave it to Ellie. Through a placket in her skirt she was in the act of putting the copy in her pocket and dropped a couple of sheets. I picked them up and saw she had flushed a deep red. ‘What is it?’
‘I did not know whether to tell you, sir.’
‘Tell me? Tell me what? Has something happened to my wife and son?’
‘I saw them.’
I was incredulous. ‘When? Where?’
‘Two days ago. At Mr Black’s.’
‘Were they all right?’
One moment she was as nervous as a kitten, the next sullen and indifferent. She shrugged. ‘Your wife?’ Her indifference abruptly left her and she gave me a coquettish smile. For a moment she was Anne. It was unnerving. She caught some of Anne’s mannerisms exactly. She lifted her chin. Her snub nose quivered slightly, as if she was detecting a bad smell. She teetered on her clacking pattens, lifting her skirts, like a lady fearing they would be fouled.
‘Enough. Stop that!’
‘Stop what, sir?’ she said innocently.
I caught a grin on Scogman’s face. I told Ellie sharply to take the pamphlet. She gave me a surly flounce of a curtsey, pinned up her dress and, once outside, dropped her airs and was whooping halfway down the street before I called after her and asked how Luke was.
‘Nothing wrong with curds face,’ she scowled, ‘that a good thrashing won’t cure.’
Curds. The lumpy, cheesy residue when milk separates conjured up such an agonisingly vivid picture of how Luke’s face must have h
ealed that I could not speak for a moment. Then I raced up to her and shook her so that she overbalanced from her pattens and fell against the wall. ‘Don’t you ever call him that again!’
She scrambled up just as violently. ‘Well, I raced him round the apple tree and I won, and he called me Spitall slut. I knew I shouldn’t have told you, I knew it.’ She burst into tears. She fumbled through the petticoats she had taken to wearing, which she sowed together from varicoloured dorneck linen off-cuts, begged or stolen from the market, took the copy from her pocket and flung the sheets at me. ‘Here! Take them yourself!’
Before I could stop her, or say a word, she ran off.
The papers scattered in the wind. I caught some; Scogman chased after others. ‘I was going to tell you,’ he said. ‘She asked me to, but none of us wanted to. We were afraid you’d leave.’
‘Leave? Here? I’ll never do that. Not until we’ve convinced Cromwell Parliament must be reformed.’
He said nothing, but gave me the sheets he’d collected. My hands shook as I put them together, muttering that I would take them to Mr Black myself. I could not get the image Ellie had conjured up of Luke’s face out of my mind.
‘Don’t take it out on Ellie,’ Scogman said quietly.
‘She deserves thrashing.’
‘She’d love that,’ he grinned. ‘Anything rather than you ignoring her. You know what she feels about you.’ He gave me a wink, but it was tempered with a strange kind of concern.
I stared at him with astonishment. ‘She’s a child.’
Scogman returned my look with interest. ‘She’s a bitch on heat,’ he said shortly, and turned away.
30
Anne and Luke had been back not just for a few days, but almost two weeks. Mr Black told me all this in a strained, spasmodic conversation, most of which was on the setting up of the job to be printed. All he would say about them was that Anne was ‘better, better’ and Luke was ‘oh, lively, very lively, in the circumstances, very lively’. He told me Mrs Black was out, but from his frequent glances upstairs I knew she did not wish to see me. Only Sarah was normal.
Cromwell's Blessing Page 23
