The King's List

by Peter Ransley

  I embraced him and from being desperate to go found that for a second time I could not leave. I apologised for breaking off from him and he – it took him a full two minutes for he was punctilious in what he was sorry for and what he was not – for throwing the letter on the fire, but not for refusing the secrets, for that was against his beliefs. This took us as far as the door.

  There the enormity of it struck me: I had found him again, but would lose him for ever when I left the country But I could not find the words, not at that moment, and decided to tell him the next day, when I came to fulfil my promise about Mary. Instead I stumbled out some politeness about his work and he confessed, with equal formality, that he had made little progress on glass, but, through Mr Boyle’s laboratory assistant Mr Hooke, had had much work on the stretching and breaking of materials. I congratulated him on that and in this manner we parted.

  This time I got as far as the apple tree.

  ‘Mr Black …’

  He wrung his hands. His fingers were twisted together so tightly I thought he might never unknot them. He understood I was his father, he said, but he could not see me as that. His father was the man who had brought him up. He was Samuel Reeves. He felt that the man he still thought of as his father would turn in his grave if he changed his name.

  I stood thinking of the chain of events that had begun when Matthew Neave had heard what he thought was a dead baby cry out in his plague cart. It was as twisted and knotted as Sam’s fingers. What would he change his name to? Black? Neave? Stonehouse? The last thing I wanted him to be was a Stonehouse. At least it was something to say to Anne. He was making no claim on us. She knew everything. It would be in a past which, in a few days, would be on the other side of the world. I pumped Sam’s hand again and assured him I knew exactly how he was feeling.

  28

  When the Hackney dropped me back at Queen Street it was almost dark. The candles were lit. It was very quiet. I took a deep breath – several deep breaths – and went up the steps. The soldiers saluted. The falcon looked down disdainfully. James rose from reception and I asked him if Lady Stonehouse was in her rooms.

  ‘She has gone to collect you in the carriage, sir.’

  ‘Carriage? Collect me? Where?’

  He did not know. Nor did anyone else. I discovered her trunk had gone and Agnes had left with her. Mr Cole understood we had decided to leave for Highpoint early. She told him something had happened and Sir Thomas had asked her to collect papers he urgently needed from his study.

  ‘Papers?’

  Poor Mr Cole. His mouth opened and closed several times before he could find his voice. He drew his hand over his silver hair as if to make sure it was still there.

  She told him to unlock the drawers to which only he and I had keys. He thought it somewhat untoward – those were his words – but in these uncertain times …

  I asked him how she was. Was she angry? Disturbed? No, no. She was very calm. She told him she did not wish to trouble him at this time in the evening, but to give her the keys which she would return later. She was her normal, thoughtful self. Thoughtful about the servants, he meant.

  She would be. The perfect lady.

  All this while we went upstairs to my study. He looked as if his world had collapsed.

  ‘This was not your request, sir?’

  ‘It was not. But, as you say, Mr Cole, these are uncertain times. It is not your fault. Please do not distress yourself and go and rest.’

  The perfect gentleman.

  Once inside my study with the door locked I was less than perfect. Much less. It looked as though nothing had been disturbed, but then she was always fastidiously neat. We knew each other’s minds and habits so well I instinctively went to what I knew she would look for. Money. Property. Anything relating to Sam. I found it immediately – or rather did not. The draft will I had scribbled when I had been in such a dark mood with her and Luke that I had cut him out of the London properties and substituted Sam’s name was missing. I could see myself writing, with brooding relish, in my best Italianate hand: To Samuel Reeves of Half Moon Court, in the parish of Farringdon, the monies and properties here-enunder listed. I had not even discussed it with my lawyer, let alone enacted it. Stupid to keep it.

  I looked feverishly into the same files over and over again, in the hope that I was mistaken. I was not. She had taken Sam’s file. Not only that. She had taken the documents for the gold I had deposited in Amsterdam. They were no use to her without my seal and signature. Very calm, Mr Cole had said. Inside that perfect exterior she must have been boiling with rage.

  In a glass cabinet Lord Stonehouse had kept a very old brandy, so old that it had become a decoration that I never thought of drinking. I could not find the key. I smashed the glass and, sucking a cut in my hand, took a deep draught. It made my eyes water and my head sing, but it knocked a little sense into me. I had not changed a clause in my will. Once I found her, a session with the lawyer would clear up the misunderstanding.

  Almost at the same time as that comforting thought, I saw the letter. It was underneath my seal, partly hidden by the inkwell. I had missed it because I had been so fixated by the drawers. I did not imagine things could possibly get any worse until I moved the seal and saw that underneath Anne’s letter was another I had forgotten. It was the letter Luke had sent to Anne. I had kept it from her to protect her from more of the foul utterances he had flung at me, yet, in the guilt of concealing it, had been reluctant to destroy it and had locked it in the drawer without ever opening it. She had torn open Luke’s letter, in such a hurry – or a rage – that, in breaking the seal, she had torn the paper.

  I could scarcely bear to read Luke’s letter to her. How could I have been so wrong! So stupid! The letter had contained no foul utterances. It was a cry for help. It was hastily scribbled, the ink blotched and the words scarcely readable.

  Forgive me, Mother. I have been a fool and a bad son. I dare not write to Father after the letter I sent him but perhaps you would –

  A passage was crossed out but I picked out Sarah and love of my life but and found them in bed together and – I could almost hear the disbelief and outrage in the smeared capitals – HE IS AN OLD MAN!

  I poured myself another brandy. The letter was dated about a week after the one he sent to me, in which, compared to me, Richard was a man of unimpeachable honour and probity. A lot could happen in a week. After the deleted passage Luke wrote, in an increasingly incoherent scrawl:

  I discovered Sarah was Richard’s mistress and declared it my intention to leave. They stopped me. I do not know what they are going to do with me or what is going to happen. Am at Stavely Manor, Epping. Please –

  There was another crossed-out passage before it ended.

  There is a maid here who has been kind to me and has promised to deliver this. Must finish –

  Your Loving son

  Luke.

  I sat with my head in my hands, staring at Luke’s slashed deletions and chaotic scrawl, the end of his belief in love and honour being like a penny-book story, before I could bring myself to pick up Anne’s letter to me.

  When she had taken over Highpoint Anne had been determined to improve her hand. I had been flattered that she had chosen my Italianate script as a model. Her writing had become so like mine that when I began reading her letter it was almost as if I was accusing myself.

  Of all the things you have done, this is unforgivable, she wrote.

  That I could accept, but the rest was so wrong, so unbelievably wrong that I laughed out loud when I first read it. She could not believe this of me, not when we had come together again, lain together, miraculously, as we were when we first fell in love.

  You never cared for Luke. If you had, you would never have let him go into the City to see that woman. Either you were as naive as he was or you knew what would happen.

  In other words, I planned it. Again I laughed. Could she not see, remember how happy, how close Luke and I had become in that short
period of time, when I had yielded to his desire to be a swordsman? When I had encouraged his infatuation because falling in love and then into despair was what a man did?

  Why else would you keep this letter from me? Richard will kill him, if he has not done so already. If he does, his blood will be on your hands.

  A slow chill crept through me. There was a madness in this I had seen before when she was driven to the edge, but it was a madness with its own terrible logic.

  Why else would you cut Luke out of your will to give to that bastard whom you swore did not exist? Whom you planned to adopt?

  Adopt? She really had gone over the edge. Adopt? I picked up the brandy and put it down again. If she was mad, then I had colluded with it. I remembered when she confessed she had got Luke to spy on me at the kiln, when she had asked about the youth with red hair. That was when we had come together, with my glib answer that I had thought of adopting him because she refused to have another child. I could hear her laughing at herself, with relief and abandonment.

  ‘Oh, Tom! I have been such a fool. I have been driven half crazy by it! I thought … I thought he was your son.’

  Impossible to tell her now that I had finished with Sam, we had quarrelled and it was over and done with. Over and done with? I had been glib with that too. Glib all my life. Dividing myself up, thinking I could live one life here, another there, committing not only the unpardonable sin of lying to her, but the stupid one of lying to myself.

  Well, he will not benefit from Highpoint. Nobody will.

  She ended the letter there. There was no closure, as there was no greeting. It gave the letter a blunt, uncompromising sense of purpose. Whatever she had decided to do, sane or insane, she would do, unless I stopped her.

  I could have caught that boat. Taken Sam with me. New world, new opportunities. He would have jumped at the chance. I never thought about it. Not for a second. I was like an animal driven by old instincts. I put on my old torn army jerkin. In an inside pocket I put Anne and Luke’s letters. I took my broadsword and a pistol in my saddle bag.

  One of Monck’s soldiers was asleep in the porch. He awoke with a start. It was a moment before he recognised me in my old jerkin. He stared at the torn leather, not knowing whether to salute or grin. In the end he did both.

  ‘Ain’t seen one of those for years, sir.’

  It was a measure of my love, or my obsession if you prefer it, that, as soon as I was in the saddle I went west towards Highpoint where I was sure she had gone, like an iron filing dragged towards a loadstone. Yet I knew perfectly well what I had to do and where I was going. I dragged my horse round clumsily and forced myself to stay still and quieten her.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s this way, I’m afraid.’

  The horse had smelt the fields and the orchards. The moon was up, the stars glittered in a clear sky, and she neighed restlessly at the prospect of going into the stink of the City. An overwhelming tiredness crept over me. Only growing apprehension at what I had to do kept me awake. A distant watchman called the hour of eleven. My mouth was dry and all I wanted was to finish the bottle of brandy and find oblivion. I clicked the horse into motion and turned east into the City.

  29

  As Scogman had an office in Queen Street, where he sometimes slept, I never visited him at what he disparagingly called his hovel in Shoreditch. If I thought about it at all, I considered it slightly odd that he should choose that area, where murders and prostitution were commonplace, when, with his increased status, he could choose a little better. I supposed it was his nostalgia for his dubious past.

  How wrong I was. It was years since I had been outside the walls on this side of the City. I found that Crooked Billet Yard – did he choose the name, or did it choose him? – was a new development, brick, not ramshackle wood, close enough to the walls to be under some jurisdiction from the City. There was a well and a patch for growing herbs, which looked most unlike Scogman.

  Another surprise was that Scogman was up. In the light of one of the ornate brass candelabras a shop in the Exchange sold for ‘Men Rising in the World’ he was packing a trunk. He put some clothes in, then took them out. He picked up some papers, hesitated, then must have heard the horse for, shading his eyes against the light, he stared out in astonishment.

  The door seemed to have several locks and bolts. He left a chain on it before opening it fully. ‘It is you, sir. What is it? Has there been a change of sailing?’

  The little hall was dark and gloomy but the room where he was packing was bright and cheerful. On top of an oak chest was a vase containing some of the herbs and a bunch of forget-me-nots. A fire smouldered before a fine walnut chair with cresting rail and well-turned finials, which I suspected I had seen at Highpoint. Opposite it was a stool, beside which was a basket containing bobbins of wool and needles.

  He stared at my torn leather jerkin and broadsword. ‘What’s happened?’

  What had begun as apprehension in Queen Street was now that familiar mixture of fatalism, fear and jauntiness I always felt before battle. ‘So this is your hovel.’

  He saw me looking at the chair and colour crept up his neck to tinge his cheeks. ‘Wrong side of the walls, sir. Bad area … never get back what I paid for it …’

  ‘Very fine chair,’ I said, running my fingers over the cresting. ‘We have one almost as good at Highpoint.’

  His cheeks were red as fire. ‘Lady Stonehouse never liked it. Did her a favour by getting rid of it.’

  By now he was convinced that this unprecedented midnight visit was to expose his thefts, but abruptly I tired of the game and drew out Luke’s letter. He went to the walnut chair, recollected his position, drew it out for me and sat on the stool. He read slowly, with complete concentration, his tongue running over his lips, his finger jerking over every word. The stubby nailbitten finger was hypnotic. I must have dropped off, for I came to with a start, not knowing where I was for a moment or what I was doing there. He was standing over me, waving the letter.

  ‘It’s a trap.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘The dog! The French –’

  ‘Not him.’

  ‘What?’

  The heat of the fire was like a warm blanket. I struggled to put words together, let alone speak them. ‘Luke is a prisoner. He’s unaware he’s part of a trap.’

  He brandished the letter with derision. ‘A maid here who has been kind to me? Promise to deliver … That’s horse shit.’

  ‘I know. He doesn’t.’

  His voice was incredulous. ‘He’s fallen for another one? Being used again? Is that it? You can’t believe that.’

  ‘I believe that he found Richard in bed with the girl he thought was the love of his life. I believe that. It follows that this could be a cry for help. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. I’ve got to believe it.’

  ‘Got to? Got to? Beg pardon, sir, but you ain’t making any kind of sense.’

  I was scarcely making sense to myself. But, in the end, instincts are what matter, not sense. And I had spent what felt like a lifetime poring over letters containing all manner of lies and half-truths to know that you could never trust words, but there was a truth in the anguish of the collapse of his normally perfect writing, in the savage deletions, one of which went through the paper. I knew my son now, I believed. It was probably too late, but I knew him.

  I got up and held out my hand for the letter. It had suddenly become very precious. I folded it carefully, put it in my inside pocket and buttoned it.

  ‘What d’you expect me to do, sir?’ he protested. ‘Break in? Rescue him? I’ve done with that. I’m an honest man.’ He looked at the chair. ‘Well, more or less.’

  I turned to leave. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’

  I tried to get past him but he blocked my way to the hall. ‘We sail the day after tomorrow. The first tide.’

  ‘Your passage is booked. Everything is in order.’

  His voice rose as I pushed him to o
ne side. ‘You ain’t coming? What are you going to do?’

  Before I could answer a shrill voice rang out. ‘Oliver! Ain’t you never coming to bed?’

  If his face was red when I saw the chair, it was now scarlet. For a moment I could not see where the voice had come from. Then, when it repeated the question, I saw a pert little face, topped by a flowered nightcap, with a snub nose and a mass of ringlets dangling from under the cap. She gave a shriek when she saw me, and disappeared. Scogman did not know where to look. His discomfort spread to me and I did not know what to say.

  ‘Is your name really Oliver?’ I said at last.

  ‘She calls me it,’ he said savagely. ‘I keep telling her not to, having always been Scoggers, or Mr Scogman, when I am acting as your steward.’

  I looked from the stool, with the basket of wool bobbins and needles, to the brass candelabra, to the vase of herbs and forget-me-nots. ‘Is she …’ I did not know how to put it, ‘the lady of the house?’

  He flushed, clenched his fists, and was saved from answering by the lady in question hurrying down the stairs. She had removed her nightcap and looked even prettier with the ringlets bobbing around her cheeks. A flowered mantua was wrapped around her with a sash at the waist.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘to intrude on you at this time of night, Mrs Scogman.’

  She looked very pleased to be addressed as such, but Scogman bridled and shifted even more uncomfortably. I suppose from the dimly lit stairs she had taken in my torn jerkin and thought I was one of Scogman’s more dubious acquaintances. Then, when she saw my face, she said: ‘You ain’t –’ She dug Scogman fiercely in the ribs and said, ‘He ain’t –’ When she found out I was, she bobbed a confused curtsey, began to rush back upstairs, then stopped.