Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  Richard told me I was to be charged with murder. He said something about mitigating circumstances if I gave him information about the pendant, but by this time I had reached a state of indifference about what was going to happen to me. As I was dragged away I held in my mind the picture of Kate cradling Eaton in her arms, of her bending to kiss him, of the blood suddenly spurting from his mouth, and of her kissing him anyway, blood and all, and holding him tight to her. While Richard was talking about what seemed to me unimportant, meaningless things, all I could see was this, and it struck me with great force how alike we were, in that Eaton had never known his father, and I was constantly searching for, yet never finding mine, and that the main difference, perhaps the only difference between us, was that I had found love early.

  They brought a man into the room whom I did not at first recognise, until I realised he was the blacksmith from Upper Vale without his apron. He testified that I was one of four Parliamentary troopers who had desecrated the church and hanged Mark Stevens.

  Nothing brings a man to his senses more acutely than lies, particularly when they are so cunningly interwoven they seem to be the truth, and the more you protest, the tighter the net closes round you. The only way out is to stop struggling and try to find the one knot that holds the whole mesh together.

  The trial was designed to break me further so I would reveal where the pendant was. Richard even had Mr Fawcett, the house steward, taking notes like a judge’s clerk. But when Edward entered, in his clerical robes and holding a prayer book, it took on a different tone. Richard told a soldier to prepare the horses. He would ride by night if the sky kept clear and would leave in half an hour. They really meant to hang me. It was evident in Richard’s eyes. Evident in the way the troops held me when, at that moment of realisation, my legs suddenly buckled and would not support me.

  Half an hour. There was a lantern clock behind the desk where Richard sat, which had just struck nine. It had a design of intertwined tulips on the face, and the hand was still, in the centre of one petal. I stared at it as if, absurdly, I could stop it.

  A whispered argument between the two brothers gave me a shred of hope. Edward, at least, seemed to grasp the enormity of what they were doing. Much as he wanted to see me dead, he was afraid, nay terrified, of his father. ‘What if the King doesn’t win?’ I heard him say.

  Richard dismissed any possibility of that, but I could see he feared it, and his father’s reaction. That was why he had to justify what he was about to do with this trumped-up charge. My only chance was to play upon that fear, to try and drive a wedge between the two brothers.

  ‘Why would I kill Mark Stevens?’ I said.

  They looked at me, startled, as if at that point I was already a body to be disposed of, not a real person.

  ‘Because he would not give you the information you wanted,’ said Richard.

  ‘But he did,’ I lied. ‘He told me he married Edward at Shadwell to my mother.’

  All the agitation that had been present in Edward that morning rushed back in him. Before Richard could stop him, he cried: ‘The marriage was illegal.’

  ‘Then why did your father have the records removed?’

  ‘Because I told my father the truth that night!’

  ‘Shut up, Edward,’ said Richard, but it was impossible to stop his brother. His glasses were askew, his face distorted. It was one of those faces where the shape of youth lives on well into middle age, and I could imagine him that night, facing his father, terrified.

  ‘I told him you were not my child.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘How did he know?’ said Richard contemptuously. ‘Because he never fucked her – he says.’

  ‘It’s true!’ screamed Edward at his brother. ‘I did not know she was pregnant when I married her!’

  Richard was suddenly aware of the steward, his protruding eyes standing out even more than usual, scribbling as fast as he could. ‘Strike that,’ he snapped. ‘Give me the book. Go! All of you go, except you –’ He pointed to Gardiner. ‘Wait! None of you heard that, is that understood?’

  They bowed and left. Edward was gripping his prayer book, saying some Latin line of prayer, over and over again. To my surprise, Richard went to him and put his arm round him with a real gesture of affection. ‘Eddie, don’t let him get at you. That’s just what he wants, can’t you see?’

  ‘Then who is my father?’ I asked.

  Richard pointed to his father’s picture. ‘You would think he is, after what he has done for you. You don’t know, do you? You have no idea what you have done to this family.’

  I stared back at him, astonished. ‘I have done nothing to you, nothing.’

  ‘Ever since you were born . . . reborn –’ He rounded on his brother, who was still muttering the line of Latin prayer. ‘For God’s sake, Eddie, stop saying that. If God hasn’t heard you by now, He never will.’

  Edward stopped, but his lips continued moving soundlessly as Richard marched over to his father’s desk. He pulled fruitlessly at a drawer, then gestured to Gardiner, who prised away the lock with his dagger. From the drawer Richard took a bundle of documents sealed with red wax, and another of letters which he threw on the desk. Then he drew out a bundle of childish drawings, pages of figures and lines of Latin repeated again and again. His hands shook as he tried to separate pages stuck together, until he finally found what he was looking for.

  The single hand of the lantern clock made a small grating sound as it jerked forward. Richard glanced at it. I felt the last half-hour of life he had allotted to me was almost done, and in those circumstances the yellowing piece of paper Richard thrust in front of my eyes was the last thing I expected to see.

  ‘Do you recognise that?’

  I took it and stared at it in bewilderment. It was a crudely written Latin tag, repeated again and again: omnes deteriores sum licentia.

  ‘It’s Terence, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Odd from a former slave: “too much freedom debases us”. But it should be sumus, not sum –’

  He snatched it back. ‘Oh, you would know that, wouldn’t you.’

  I ought to. I had written the same line tediously, again and again. I told him so.

  ‘Perfectly!’ he said. ‘Perfectly written, perfectly declined –’

  I told him that I had been as full of mistakes as anyone and beaten more than most, but he would have none of it. While Edward exclaimed in wonder at finding passages in Greek he had written, Richard said in a sarcasm brittle with rage that I was perfect, had a perfect hand, was a perfect scholar, and on top of that a perfect gentleman. I laughed at this idiotic picture of myself when I remembered the wild, uncouth apprentice who, at first, had to be forced into wearing boots. He caught me a stinging slap across my face.

  I understood then. I had always thought, from the moment I discovered it was Richard who wanted to kill me, that it was because I threatened his inheritance. And, of course, it was that. But it was about more, much more. After my pitch burn, when Lord Stonehouse picked me up, he had returned to Highpoint and called Richard and Edward into this room. I could see the scene, as Richard bitterly, compulsively told it.

  Lord Stonehouse wore what the two brothers called his hanging face. He told them he had seen a child with Stonehouse features and hair as red as fire. Moreover, the child was with that wretch Matthew Neave, who drove the plague cart that night in 1625. Lord Stonehouse went over again what his two sons had told him that September night ten years before – that Edward had been tricked into marriage, and that the child had been fathered by Margaret Pearce’s cousin, John Lloyd. Richard again supported his brother, saying everyone knew Margaret Pearce had been infatuated with John Lloyd. Lord Stonehouse made them swear on the Bible that their accounts were true, as if they were in a court of law.

  And that, they thought, was the end of it.

  But it was not. It was as if what had been buried in the pit had crept out and attached itself to Richard like a leech. That was how he desc
ribed it, although he did not at first connect the change in his father’s attitude to me. Before his visit to the shipyard at Poplar, Lord Stonehouse had resigned himself to the fact that Richard had no ambitions beyond the estate and his own pleasure, principally the latter. After he found me, his old desire for his eldest son to establish a place at court and in the affairs of state was rekindled. He wanted him to read Latin again, resume dusty lessons in rhetoric he had long forgotten. He was twenty-seven! His father cut his allowance until he conformed. He told him the Stonehouse name and fortune was not built on the contra guardia and ricavatione of the rapier, but on the ethos, pathos and logos of persuasion and argument.

  Belief, emotion and reason! Make them believe, make them feel and make them think. How often had I been beaten with the same three sticks! I had been taught by Dr Gill but the hidden hand behind the lessons was that of Lord Stonehouse. I had been whipped through exactly the same series of hoops as Richard.

  One day Lord Stonehouse put Richard’s Latin text next to the same text in another hand. Compared with Richard’s misshapen letters, it was perfect.

  ‘It is writ by a scrivener,’ said Richard, with contempt. ‘No gentleman would write like that. When I need a letter, I employ a scrivener.’

  ‘A gentleman cannot be illiterate, sir,’ snapped his father. ‘Your hand is unreadable.’ He tapped the other text. ‘This is written by a boy of ten.’

  Whether or not Lord Stonehouse intended Richard to know about me I cannot tell, but from that moment I became the leech sucking not just at his inheritance but, in his eyes, his whole manhood. He found out about the payments to Mr Black, which, in Lord Stonehouse’s careful management of his affairs, exactly balanced the reduction in Richard’s allowance (or so it appeared to his now fevered imagination). Then he saw my picture.

  I understood more and more, but grew more and more bewildered. ‘But if what you told him about John Lloyd is true,’ I burst out, ‘why should you be so concerned about him finding the pendant? Surely you want it found?’

  ‘You know,’ Richard said. ‘You know why.’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Tell him, Rich. Tell him.’ Edward broke in. ‘Because he wants to change it, of course!’

  ‘He knows that,’ Richard said.

  ‘I do not. I swear I do not.’

  ‘Liar!’ Richard lashed his hand across the deepening wound in my face. ‘Where is it? Where is the pendant?’

  Change it? Lord Stonehouse was devious enough, but what was important to him was the bloodline, surely. One of them was lying, probably both. There was something not right . . . something Kate had told me . . . In the dizziness, pain and confusion I could not think – but I had to think.

  Richard stared at the portrait of his father ‘He wants you,’ he said, with savage bitterness. ‘He wants you to inherit.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I saw you at Queen Street. Dressed for the part.’

  ‘I deceived the footman at the door. Your father did not know I was there.’

  ‘Liar! Did he send you up here for the pendant? Of course he did. Where is it? Tell me! Tell me!’

  Now it was Edward who pulled his brother away, whispering to him. I heard the word ‘cellar’. They must have seen Mr Black’s reports of my childhood fears, the cellar, the rats. My flesh began to crawl at the thought of it. They were grinning and whispering like two ghoulish schoolboys discovering a new form of torture for their victim.

  ‘Eddie’ – Richard struck the desk in triumph – ‘that is a stroke! That is genius! I always said you were the brains of the family.’

  Edward beamed, and I could see he had no greater pleasure in life than praise from his elder brother. Richard ordered a soldier to go and get Bryson. I had no idea who Bryson was, and when he turned out to be the barrel-chested, bearded man who had shown an interest in me at Mrs Morland’s funeral I was at first none the wiser. Then, like a sudden blow to the head, it struck me where I had seen him before. It was when I was leaving Oxford with Eaton, and he stopped at the plague pit to chat about how business was to the man depositing bodies from his cart. Bryson was the driver of the plague cart.

  Chapter 37

  It took four soldiers to hold me down. Richard regained control of himself as I lost it. I took a blow to the head and, as I slipped in and out of consciousness, I was dimly aware of him issuing orders for his ride north to the King, telling Gardiner to take me with Bryson to the pit, confident – as well he might be – that when I smelt the lime, I would talk.

  The bitter cold outside brought me round. They bound my hands and Gardiner and a soldier called Nat pushed me stumbling through the trees. Nat started back as out of the gloom a man appeared who seemed to have no face. The man moved into a patch of moonlight and became Bryson, masked so that only his eyes showed. He wore a long leather coat like my old Joseph coat, which bore the marks of his trade, staining it like an ancient map of the world.

  ‘Just beyond the trees, Captain,’ he said.

  Gardiner stopped short. ‘D’you have another mask?’

  ‘No, I ain’t. Sorry.’ Bryson gestured reassuringly. ‘You’ll be all right. Not many customers this year. Habit wi’ me, that’s all. Just keep well back.’

  Nat looked far from reassured as he pushed me forward. The horse harnessed to the plague cart looked up, then went on cropping the grass peacefully. Some of the miasma, that distinctive plague smell, hung round the cart, a sour reek of pus and sweat mixed with the milky-sweet odour of lime. The tail of the cart was down and, sprawled in the rotting straw, I could see two bodies. They were men, stripped naked. Deep shadows made it seem as if they had been dismembered. I glimpsed a putrefying face in which I could see the glint of bone, silvered by the moon, and a twisted, decomposing arm. Nat muttered a prayer and even Gardiner turned away.

  Bryson shifted the bodies as if they were sacks of turnips, making room in the wet, dark-brown straw. ‘Did I not tell you I had two customers in there already, Captain?’

  Gardiner swallowed and found his usual swagger. ‘Ah yes. I forgot. So you did. Well, come on,’ he snapped at Nat. ‘Don’t just stand there – get on with it!’

  Bryson lit a clay, lifting the mask to take a few puffs, saying it was a special mixture of Virginia and herbs, good against the plague, the pox and diverse other complaints.

  Gardiner bent over me, speaking gently, conversationally. ‘Now listen, Tom. You know the plague. The screaming fever.’

  ‘Vomiting blood,’ said Bryson.

  ‘Black boils.’

  Gardiner nodded towards the cart. ‘That’s just a taste of what’s coming. You’re going to talk eventually, so why not be sensible and talk now, mmm?’

  I stared up at him. I knew that if they threw me into that charnel cart I was as good as dead. If they took me to the house I stood a chance. However slim, I would rather die quickly than slowly of the plague.

  ‘That’s it, that’s it,’ said Gardiner, as however much I tried to stop them, tears filmed my eyes. It was the kindness, the sudden normality, however spurious, that did it. That and total exhaustion. ‘Tell us and you can have a hot perry and sugar.’

  ‘With spices,’ said Bryson, smacking his lips.

  ‘With spices. Better a live bastard than a dead Stonehouse, eh?’ Gardiner patted me reassuringly on the cheek. Perhaps it was the pat. Perhaps it was the wink he gave Bryson. Perhaps it was the memory of all those moments I had almost given in to George, then reacted with a rush of fury, as much at my own weakness as at him. Whatever it was, a mindless rage overcame me. I bit him. He roared with pain, lurching backwards as my teeth clamped round his finger, but I would not let go until he half-lifted me from the ground and my own weight dragged my teeth away, tearing his flesh. Gardiner sucked and stared at his mangled finger before giving me two vicious kicks. Bryson removed the clay from his mouth. He and the soldier looked at me in awe.

  ‘Well, I will say this for him,’ Bryson said: ‘he’s a gam
e one.’

  ‘On the cart! Throw him on the cart!’ Gardiner screamed at them.

  They hesitated. I suppose they had thought it would never come to this. Gardiner shoved the reluctant Nat forward: ‘On the cart!’ Bryson shrugged, pulled down his mask, and in one swift movement they hurled me on. I landed face-down in the dank, fetid straw, struggling to sit up, spitting and spitting the clammy, rotting spikes from my mouth. An eye, or the opalescent remains of it, shifted in its socket to stare at me. I opened my mouth to scream but then gagged as I saw the movement was a maggot. The corpse was crawling with them. I twisted away, vomiting, striking my head again and again at the side of the cart as if I could break my way through it, before collapsing in the straw.

  ‘I’m going to the house for a mask,’ Gardiner snarled.

  I heard him sucking at his finger as he walked away, then the scrape of a flint as Bryson relit his clay. He told Nat to watch me while he went into the woods for a crap. I spat out straw and acid flecks of vomit, and managed painfully slowly to twist myself into a sitting position, struggling to avert my head from my travelling companions. The tail of the cart was down. Wildly I thought about rolling off it, but as if he read my intention, Nat drew his sword. An animal cry from the woods made both of us jump. Gardiner, now masked, rode up as Bryson emerged from the trees, buttoning his breeches and still puffing at his clay. He slammed the tail of the cart into place. Gardiner dismissed Nat and rode behind the cart as Bryson clicked his horse into motion.

  It was that strange time when the moon has not quite died nor the sun been born. The barest glimmer of light picked out the shapes of trees, almost threadbare of leaves, through which I could see an inn that seemed familiar. The sign creaked in unison with the jolting cart wheels: it was the inn just outside Oxford where Eaton had stabled our horses, a short distance from the plague pit.

  In that moment I knew I would talk. Plague or no plague. I wanted life, whether it was three days of agony, or an hour or one minute: every second was precious. I had not lived. I had written no real poetry, only a few wretched pamphlets; snatched a few kisses, but never made love. Everything was preparing for life except me. The first bird was making a ghostly, hesitant sound followed by another, then another. Gardiner was yawning and stretching himself. He was no fool. He knew that even the cart, with its crawling maggots, was life compared with the pit. He knew I would tell him, for at least I would live until he had checked whether I was telling him the truth.