They all shook their heads at me except Anne, who after the minister had left said she saw no devils and refused to let anyone else into the room, bringing me food and drink, meeting with tight lips her mother berating her for behaving like a servant.
Gradually the devils, or visions or whatever they were, faded. One day I woke up and snatches of that battlefield had, as usual, come into my dreams, but that morning it was different. There had come back into my mind as much as I was ever likely to remember of what had happened after I had run from Luke on to the battle-field after my father. Mr Black had told me that Edward Stonehouse had been killed, blindly finding himself in the wrong part of the battlefield. Richard Stonehouse had been posted in one of the pamphlets as missing. His body had not been found. I felt I had to see Lord Stonehouse as soon as possible. I got out of bed and almost fell, clutching on to a chair. Anne came running in and told me to get back into bed. I shook my head, but sat down heavily in the chair.
‘Are you back?’ she whispered.
I nodded.
‘Are you Tom?’
I nodded.
‘Can you speak?’
I smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘It does funny things to your scar. Smile again.’ I laughed. She flung her arms round me and kissed me. ‘I love you!’
‘I love you.’
‘As much as the Countess?’
‘What is this Countess stuff?’
I felt automatically for her letter, which I had carried beneath my shirt, and she produced it. ‘I helped you undress. With Sarah . . . You don’t remember?’ She blushed. ‘Only the top part. My mother was horrified.’
I read again I Hope Youe doe Think of Mee as I of Youe and not of Your Countess – and was mortified when she told me what led up to that sentence. When Eaton and I returned from Poplar to stay at the Seven Stars, before going on to Highpoint, I had gone to Bedford Square in search of Kate, at the same time as the Countess had sent me a letter asking me to meet Mr Pym. The letter sat in some state over the fire in Half Moon Court, its elegant hand and impressive seal sending daggers of jealousy into Anne’s heart. That it was a love letter, she had no doubt. Every time she saw it she felt an urge to throw it in the fire, but dare not. At last she could stand it no longer and went to Bedford Square.
I covered my face with my hands and got up, unable to listen or speak for a moment. It was so childish, so unwomanly, so undignified. It was more than that, although I did not see it then. I had taken a step into that world, perhaps more than a step, and it was my private world, for which she was quite unsuited and had no place. I was deeply in love with her, but deeply embarrassed at the thought of her turning up in Bedford Square. If ever the time came to resolve this problem, which now seemed more unlikely than ever, it was my part to do so, not hers. She waited as if she was aware of this, hands clasped, head bowed, until I sat down.
‘A foul animal of a footman told me to go round the back,’ she said.
‘I know him,’ I said faintly.
‘Then she came out.’
I covered my face with my hands again, visualising Lucy Hay sending poor Anne packing, seeing her wandering away from Bedford Square humiliated, as I had done so many times in the past. But it was worse, much worse than that.
‘She took me up to her with-with—’
‘Withdrawing chamber.’
‘And gave me a drink of cho-cho—’
‘Chocolate.’
‘She’s old.’
‘She is a very beautiful woman,’ I said coldly.
‘She wears beautiful paint. She gave me some. Look –’
I stared speechless as Anne, with great excitement, dabbed her cheek from a pot, producing a smear of red. Apparently the misunderstanding over the Countess’s letter was soon dealt with. Anne never said as much, but I could not stand the thought that they must have been talking about me. I could not believe how intimate they had become in such a short space of time; so intimate, I found myself listening open-mouthed to things about Lucy Hay I never knew. Before I was born (Anne emphasised that) Lucy Hay was seriously ill and lost her first and only child, who was still-born. Then her husband died. It was such a terrible tragedy, Anne said, having apparently gone from hating Lucy Hay to adoring her in the space of a cup of chocolate. ‘But it made her as a woman.’
‘Did it? How so?’
Anne was literally wringing her hands, twisting her small fingers together, looking faintly ridiculous with a smear of cochineal on one cheek, like a half-made-up player on Bankside.
‘Have you heard of Sir Thomas More?’
‘Of course.’
‘He said if female soil be more productive of weeds than fruit it should be cult-cult—’
‘Cultivated?’
‘Thank you. It should be culti-vated with learning.’
A little writing was one thing, but I did not much care for the sound of this, nor when she referred to a short period in the last century when women like Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey had become as familiar with the classics as men. But it was what she said next that really shocked me.
‘Lucy,’ she said, ‘advised me to have no more than four children.’
I told her that was unnatural nonsense. The typical remark of a woman who could not perform her natural function. She replied that it gave women a better chance to help men, since women had cooler heads than men, who sometimes needed their judgement.
‘Judgement? Oh, Anne, I love you, not your judgement. What judgement do you have? I don’t know what she’s playing at, but she’s an intriguer, a meddler! You mustn’t listen to her, do you hear me?’
She bit her lip rebelliously. ‘Are you jealous I went to see her?’
‘Jealous? What an odd thing to say. No. Of course I’m not jealous.’
She dropped her head and plucked at her dress in silence for a few moments, then sighed, and gave me a resigned, supplicating look. I normally gained fresh life and energy from the love and nonsense we talked together, as a bee sucks nectar from a flower, but I found this conversation confusing and exhausting. I went to the window. It was beginning to snow again. Sarah was feeding the robin, which she always claimed was the same one every year.
‘She also said you were one of the most intelligent and capable men she had ever met.’
I whirled round, staring suspiciously at her, but her face was eager and earnest, with not a trace of a smile. I could not help reflecting that eagerness. ‘Did she? Did she really?’
‘Yes, and you are, you know you are, Monkey!’ She dived across the room and flung herself at my feet, eyes sparkling. I seized her to kiss her, but she wriggled away from me. ‘Wait! Wait! Stay there! Don’t move! Don’t look!’
She rushed to a scrap of mirror and there was an intriguing rustling and fumbling and peering into the mirror with her back towards me.
‘Cheat! You’re looking!’
I turned away, covering my face with my hands. This was a form of silliness I much preferred. In the endearing way in which women pick up a fashion one moment and discard it the next, she seemed already to have forgotten about learning Latin and Greek. There was an intense little silence in which I could hear her breathing and murmuring to herself. Then a rustle of skirts.
‘You may look,’ she said, commandingly.
She had turned herself into a woman of the court, her lips reddened, her cheeks flushed pink, her eyebrows blackened, emphasising the astonishing, imperious grey of her eyes. But it was not that that made me react as I did. She had unbuttoned the top of her dress, folding down the collar. On her breast was the pendant. It seemed to fill the whole room with a virulent light, the falcon’s venomous eyes staring at me from its enamelled nest.
I leapt across the room at her. ‘Take it off! Take that thing off!’ I wrenched at the pendant. She screamed as the chain bit into her neck. The clasp broke and I threw the thing across the room. The bird seemed to flutter and hiss at me. ‘You have been into my pack!’ I shouted. ‘Never do that
again! Never touch that thing again!’
Her mother appeared at the door and Anne flung herself into her arms, sobbing. ‘I thought he was going to kill me! I thought he was going to kill me!’
Chapter 42
Lord Stonehouse was good at mourning. It was his natural habitat. My mother must have known this instinctively when she chose the clothes for her father’s funeral. I thought as I went into Queen Street that morning she would have cherished this moment. I felt that I knew her then, that I was closer to her than to any living person, even Anne.
Richard Stonehouse was still posted as missing. The great town house was in mourning for Edward. Hangings were half-drawn and there was an air of sepulchral quiet in the black-and-white chequer-board hall, where the Greek busts and the footman looked at me askance. Sarah had mended an old jerkin, and stitched a new collar on a shirt she had beaten almost white under the pump. I carried my soldier’s knapsack. They searched the pack for gunpowder, which I suppose in a way the contents were.
‘Name?’
‘Thomas Neave.’
‘Business?’
‘I have concluded a mission for Lord Stonehouse.’
Lord Stonehouse was in a meeting and continued his business as punctiliously as usual. When I was eventually shown into his study I stood waiting as I had stood before, some distance from the desk, while the single hand of the clock jerked on and Mr Cole shook sand on his signature, sealed the document, bowed and went out. Lord Stonehouse was wearing reading glasses I had not seen before. He put them in a case and beckoned me forward.
‘You have it?’
It was as if he was referring to a run-of-the-mill dispatch from some informant in Oxford. Yet there was something comforting in his abstract, weary tone, in his remoteness, his coldness, which I was beginning to understand, above all in what he did not say. He did not, as might have been expected, refer to Edgehill, or ‘our great victory’ as some called it. He knew. He understood. There was, at least, that bond between us.
He became alive when I took the pendant from my pack, swooping on it like a falcon on its prey. It seemed to fill the whole of that dark sombre room with light, reflecting from the polished oak of his desk, glittering in his black eyes. He gave a great sigh, stroking the falcon as if he was smoothing out its feathers. The light only seemed to die down when he noticed that I had put two other things on his desk: a small pile of letters and Richard’s tattered cloak.
Slowly he put down the pendant and picked up the cloak, putting his hand through the rent in it, staring at the dark brown stains at its edges, then at me, as malevolently as the falcon, which now seemed to slumber in the jewel.
I told him how Richard had confronted me, killed Luke and ridden away. How I had run after him, drawing my dagger, but could remember nothing else, until I returned to London. Gradually what had happened that night had been coming back to me, patchily, incompletely, in nightmare flashes.
Lord Stonehouse smoothed the torn cloak, his sceptical eyes never leaving me as I told him I lost Richard before I got to the meadows, which were no longer meadows, but a dark marsh of the dead and dying. I kept on running, kept on hearing his horse, or thought I heard it, but it was a will o’ the wisp sound, leading me this way, then that, until I saw the escarpment looming above me as the clouds drifted from the moon. Not far away was a camp fire. Dipping in and out of the light of it was a familiar face: the hollowed eyes and the spade-like beard of the King. Other figures rose in the firelight, staring at me. I stumbled away, too exhausted to run, but nobody followed me. Perhaps they thought I was a spirit. Then I saw it. Richard’s horse. Doing something unbelievable in that place. It was peacefully cropping grass. It sniffed indifferently at a man with half a mouth and twisted, sightless eyes before browsing for another patch. From the pommel of the saddle trailed Richard’s cloak.
I took the cloak and went from body to body, some dead, some still crying out, their cries redoubling as I approached them. I looked, or turned over body after body until I came upon two men who were manhandling a corpse, one removing the dead man’s jerkin, the other his boots. They snarled at me like wolves.
‘This is our patch!’
‘Find your own!’
But when they saw I was taking nothing, simply turning corpses over, they ignored me and fell to quarrelling over the boots. I came to one man, face buried in the grass, who had a jacket I thought was Richard’s. He was still, moonlight shining on small crystals of hoar frost forming on his cheek in the intense cold. I turned him over. He was alive, the movement lifting him out of his frozen coma.
‘Help me,’ he whispered. ‘Dear mother, help me.’
At first I had not seen anything wrong, but now I saw a terrible wound in his stomach, from which the guts spilled. I turned away, retching, but he had found a last strength, clutching at my arm, shrieking at me: ‘Kill me, kill me, kill me!’
He would not let me go. I stabbed him until his arm fell away from me and the cries stopped. Even then I could not stop. I was still stabbing him when Ben found me.
My hands were covering my face. I brought them down slowly, fearing I was still in those meadows, but I was in the study with Lord Stonehouse whose expression was as cold as the frost that night. My shirt clung to my back with sweat, but I was shivering as if I was still on that freezing field.
‘Did you find Richard?’
‘I don’t know, my lord.’
He stared at the cloak. ‘Did you kill him?’ he said softly.
‘I don’t know. Don’t you understand? I don’t even know whether I’m really remembering or whether it’s part of the nightmares I have.’
He stood up, his voice rising abruptly. ‘Did you kill my son?’
‘I don’t know,’ I screamed back at him.
The door flew open and the servants who were always outside rushed in. Lord Stonehouse made a violent gesture for them to go and they almost fell over themselves in an effort to turn, bow, leave and close the door again, all at the same time. After the door was closed, all you could hear was our jerky breathing. Lord Stonehouse so rarely lost control he looked unfamiliar with it, touching his desk as if to make sure it was solid, then sitting and folding Richard’s cloak into a meticulous square until his hands stopped shaking. He turned to the letters, and I told him how I found them.
Letters, papers were meat and drink to him, and he could extract the meat from the fat faster than any man I knew. He skimmed through the pages rapidly.
‘I thought as much.’
There was not a word about me, that I was his grandson, nothing. ‘You thought as much?’
‘I am not a fool.’ He leaned forward, his black eyes venomous and unpitying as the falcon his ancestors had chosen as a symbol. ‘One last time: did you kill my son?’
Those eyes made me feel as if I was halfway to the gallows, and brought out in me, unexpectedly, not what he dreaded to hear, but what I did. ‘I do not know. What I do know is that I killed my friend.’
There it was. I had said out loud what I had never admitted to myself before. It was there, unlike what had happened to Richard, but slippery memory had been assiduously burying it. Now I had said it. Admitted it. I felt, with a welling of grief, a profound relief. I could now do what I had avoided thinking about, let alone doing. I could go to Charity, give her his ring, and tell her how Luke died.
Lord Stonehouse swept his hand across his desk, dismissing what I had said as of no importance, irrelevant. Perhaps to him it was. I heard he had no friends. That gesture, reducing someone I loved to a triviality, goaded me into a fury. He moved his hand to the bell to summon the servants, but I no longer cared who he was, what he said, what he did to me. I jumped forward, bending over him, gripping the edges of the desk.
‘He was my dearest friend. If I had not shouted to stop him, Luke would have killed your son. Instead, Richard killed him.’
The words choked in my throat. He kept his hand near the bell. His voice was cold with scepticism. ‘Why did yo
u shout to stop your dearest friend?’
‘Why? Why? Because Richard is my father, as well as your son! Do you think, my lord, that having found him, my instinct was to kill him?’
‘From what you say, he tried to kill you.’
‘From what I say! Ask your servants at Highpoint. How much proof do you need? You brought us up to hate one another. First you try and make Richard into something he’s not – then me.’
Lord Stonehouse stabbed angrily at the bell. The servants sprang in, hovering round me. I tensed, clenching my fists. I was not going to be dragged away as I was before. But Lord Stonehouse took a sip of the wine that was always on his desk, dabbed his lips, and told them to get his secretary.
As the door closed, I said: ‘When it came to it, I don’t think my father could do the job himself. Or perhaps,’ I added bitterly, ‘I’m naive, and that is what I like to think.’
Lord Stonehouse jumped as the coals settled and a flame lit up his lined face, which was the colour of old parchment. He stared at the bundle of letters written to my mother, part deceit, but part love, or perhaps again that is what I like to think. He read one page, then another. The secretary, Mr Cole, entered and stood in the required position, legs slightly straddled, files under his arm. On one of them, I noticed, was the heading Mr Richard.
Lord Stonehouse finished the letters, tapped them square with his fingertips, put them in the drawer, the first on the right-hand side which I now knew to be Richard’s, and locked it.
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