Ellie was not at Matthew’s. Nor was she at the market, where he thought she was doing the shopping. On my way back I passed the house where Scogman had a room. We were in and out of each other’s places so often I did not bother to knock. I had seen Scogman charm women with words often enough, but I had never seen him at it. His britches were off and his hairy arse was about to come down on someone. I began to mutter an apology, then recognised the multi-coloured underskirts of the woman he was on top of. Ellie’s frightened face appeared. She yelled, kicked and bit Scogman. I pulled him from her and threw him against the wall.
‘Can’t you leave any woman alone? You really have no feelings, have you?’
Sobbing and crying, Ellie pulled a sheet over herself.
‘Cover yourself up, man.’ I threw his britches at him.
He yanked them on, bringing out his words in savage bursts, as he hooked the britches on to metal rings under his shirt. ‘It is you who have no feelings for people – only paper people.’ He kicked at a pamphlet on the floor. ‘I’m human. Unlike you. She came at me. Didn’t you?’
She screamed as he pulled the sheet from her.
‘She doesn’t want me. She wants you, you pious prig. God knows why. Don’t you? Don’t you? She couldn’t stand it any more. Could you?’
I stared at her, waiting for an answer, but she shrank back, sobbing.
‘Well, go on. Tell him. Tell him.’
She looked like a broken doll. Some red ochre paint that could be bought at the market for a penny was smeared over her face. The stitching on a tattered patch of her underskirt had come apart. She pulled her skirt down, looking wildly about her, then darted to the door. I grabbed her by the wrists. She kicked and struggled but at last went limp, panting, her head bowed. She had twisted her hair into a fashionable bun that had come awry. The ribbon holding it was on the point of falling. I took it and held it out to her, telling her I had found the notes and was sorry I had wrongly accused her. She stared at me, warily and suspiciously, snatched the ribbon and ran.
She was on her hands and knees in the press room when I got there, covered in soapy ink from hands to elbows.
‘You must go home to Matthew, Ellie.’
‘I told him what I had done and he said I must clean it up. Every spot of it.’
I replied it was my fault, but she would have none of it. I had some press work to do which I was late with. She wanted to help me, saying she had learned from Nehemiah. Again I told her to go home, but press work is tediously slow for one person and, after I had inked the type and she had inserted the paper, I no longer tried to stop her. While the ink was drying I went to the market and got a loaf and some herrings, of which I knew she was fond. She sniffed when she saw them, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. She had put coal on the banked-up fire. The light from it and the candles gleamed on the polished floor. She had removed the ingrained dirt of months with great effect, but this drew more attention to the ink spots. I began to say so, but she looked so stricken and was for getting out the pail again that I hastily said I was joking, and swore I could not see where the ink had fallen.
I always ate where I happened to be, but now she spread her apron out on the floor and we sat leaning against the press. We ate in silence. The only sound was from the shifting coals or the rustle of her skirts as she bent to pick up another herring. She ate delicately, picking every shred of fish from the bone, from head to tail. She had kicked off her pattens, and when a piece of coal fell from the fire she scuttered in her bare feet to fling it back.
Gradually the warmth of the fire stole over us. I had not eaten like this, with someone, without feeling the need to talk, since I had left Anne. I could understand why Scogman thought I had no feelings. The only way I could cope was by shutting them out. Now they flooded back I had such a devastating ache for Anne I must have given a little groan, for Ellie looked at me with alarm.
‘What is it? Is it the fish?’
I laughed and shook my head. She looked aggrieved at my laughter and said, as if to tell me she was quite aware all pains were not physical, ‘Is it –’ And she did her imitation of Anne, lifting her chin and pointing a contemptuous toe at an ink spot. I turned away sharply. Immediately she ran to me, contrite, and dropped on her knees beside me.
‘She makes you unhappy?’
I smiled at her instant concern. Her cheeks were flushed and her tattered underskirt splayed out in a fan of different colours. ‘No, no.’
‘She makes you happy?’
I was silent.
‘What then?’
She was so full of life, so full of that moment, in which she cared not a jot about the past or the future, it was impossible not to share that joy, to laugh again, not at her, but with her. To talk. She listened with a sudden graveness. Her liquid brown eyes took on a greenish tinge in the eddying light of the fire, like a cat’s eyes. All her movements had the exquisite economy of a cat’s, darting, abruptly stopping, listening, every sense alert.
I tried to say that love was not just love, but a fight, sometimes even hate. That sounded crass, so to illustrate it I said that, unlike Anne, who would not do anything I wanted, Ellie would do anything for me. That sounded so arrogant I winced. But, far from being offended, she leaned forward and said she would. What did I want her to do?
It was said with such eagerness, such childlike innocence, it snatched any risible laughter from me. But, at the same time, it was knowing, predatory. Her bodice was so tight-laced round her already thin waist it pushed up her emerging breasts. Between them was a pad exuding a strong smell of musk. A vivid picture came to me of her sprawled out on the bed, skirts thrown up. Scogman was wrong. I was as human as he was.
‘Go home, Ellie,’ I said. ‘Go home.’
Quietly, submissively, she rose, cleared up the mess of fish bones, put the remains of the loaf on the press where she knew I had breakfast, if I had breakfast at all, rolled up her apron, thanked me very civilly for the herring, which she assured me was the best she had ever tasted, and walked away.
She was closing the door when the words came from me. It was as if there was another person inside me, letting out a cry, almost a scream of despair. I hammered my hands on the stone floor where I was still sitting.
‘Oh, Ellie! What am I going to do!’
She ran to me, flinging her arms round me. I never even kissed her. I went for her like a starving man swallowing food. It was more of a savage attack on Anne than making love to Ellie. She responded with a hungry, violent desperation akin to mine. It was fiendishly uncomfortable, on the floor, or moving against the hard edges of the press. But our instincts told us nothing would happen if we did not do it there and then. I could not get her bodice unlaced. I pulled up her skirts. She cried out and rolled away. Still sticking to her arse was the skeleton of a herring she had picked clean. I peeled it off, kissed the slowly disappearing image on her flesh, then solemnly held up the skeleton.
We broke into fits of laughter. We could not stop. We kissed the skeleton. We kissed each other. I undid her bodice. From being so knowing, so assured, with her musk and her rainbow underskirts, she suddenly became clumsy, shy. Her eyes seemed to grow larger, more fearful. At first I thought it all part of her act, her pretended innocence. It was only when I was going in her that I realised. I drew back.
‘Go on,’ she choked ferociously. ‘Go on!’
She was not expecting the pain. Her face crumpled, distorted. I held her close, then I came. It meant more pain for her but I did not care. I stayed in her, wanting to go in her as far as possible until I was finished. I rolled away; dozed; I may even have slept until sounds began to creep back: the fall of a coal, the bark of a dog, the clank of a pail. The pail was level with my half-open eyes. She was cleaning up the blood from the floor.
‘Leave it.’
She ignored me, rinsing the rag, staring at the mark the blood would leave among the archipelago of stains on the floor.
‘I didn’t realise –
’ I began.
‘Like your son, you thought I was a Spitall whore.’
She took the pail outside. I heard her emptying it and pumping it full for morning. Returning, she wet some slack in the coal bucket and banked up the fire so it would smoulder through the night. Once, I glimpsed her furtively drawing her sleeve over her eyes.
‘Ellie, leave it! Go home. Matthew will be worried –’
She rounded on me ferociously. ‘Matthew? Matthew worried? Matthew would be worried if I came back. Matthew knows.’
‘Knows? Knows what?’
‘Don’t you realise? … You don’t, do you? You don’t realise anything that’s happening around you, do you? You think you want to come back here and live among the people, but you don’t, you don’t. You want to tell us what to do. What to be. I don’t know. You’re just like –’
She tried to mimic Anne with a few mincing steps, but tripped over her pattens and would have fallen if I had not caught her. She burst into tears. I held her to me.
‘Let me go, let me go, let me go!’
She caught me in the face with her fist and when I held her wrists kicked out at me with her patten. I gripped her tightly until, in another avalanche of tears, she finally went limp.
‘What does Matthew know?’
She looked up at me, her face criss-crossed with tear-stained rivulets of red ochre and ink. I kissed her gently. Her lips tasted of salty fish. In fits and starts, with gulps as tears threatened again, she said Matthew had told her I was in great danger from an evil spirit. I sighed, and said Matthew told stories, very tall stories, as tall as St Paul’s. But this one was true, she cried vehemently. There was a pendant in which an evil bird lived. It had snatched Anne and now it wanted me.
I began to laugh, then I felt her shivering. I remembered the pictures Matthew had painted in my childish mind: the will o’ the wisps on the marsh, the man with a scar. There was a pendant, she asked. There was. Matthew warned me it was a source of evil? He did but … I tried to tell her it was the Stonehouse estate, and greed that was the evil. How much she understood I did not know. What mattered was that she believed in evil, in Matthew’s story, not my literal version. And, as usual, Matthew’s story was a mixture of nonsense cunningly wrapped round a kernel of common sense.
She pulled away from me, sniffing. ‘Anyway,’ she scowled, ‘he knows. I’m fed up with the two of you being miserable, he said. Why don’t you sod off and be miserable together?’
I laughed outright. There was no doubting the truth of that. She caught Matthew’s tone perfectly. I could see now what had been building up between them. Matthew had never liked Anne. He had refused to go to our wedding. He had a fear of the Stonehouses and a regret for stealing the pendant, which had been the seed for everything that followed. And, I felt with a pang, he wanted me back. In the way that most mattered, in bringing me up, I was his son.
Ellie thought I was laughing at her, snatched up her pattens and ran for the door. I caught up with her as she opened it. She screamed. On the roof opposite, silhouetted against the moon, was a bird.
‘The falcon!’
She hid in my arms. I tensed and my hand went for my dagger for a different reason. From one of the doorways opposite I saw the shadow of a man before he slipped away towards an alley.
‘It’s a kite,’ I muttered. ‘Not a falcon.’
She refused to look in case she caught its evil eye. The kite, disturbed by the scream, flapped upwards, then almost lazily dropped, tail forking to steer it towards a rat darting from a pile of rubbish. Ellie shuddered and pressed herself tightly against me as the kite rose so close to us we caught the draught from its wings. I glimpsed the tiny spikes of blood where its talons gripped the mewling rat. The echoing sounds of the man running down the alley dwindled into silence. I pushed her inside and locked the door.
‘It was the falcon!’ she said, shaking with terror.
‘It was a red kite. Catching its supper.’
‘Then why are you holding that?’
I was still gripping the dagger. I sheathed it, barred the door, which I did not normally do, picked up my pack to act as a pillow on the floor and told her to sleep upstairs.
‘Not alone,’ she said. ‘Please! Not alone.’
I sighed, and dropped the pack back where it was. She scurried up the ladder like an arrow from a bow and by the time I was in the sloping room all I could see of her was a sight of her large eyes peering from the edge of the blankets. Her teeth did not stop chattering until she felt the warmth of my body. She pleaded with me not to blow out the candle. I did not do so even when I felt her regular breathing, but lay watching the shadows, tensing when I heard the sound of some drunk in the street. Her fear brought back all my youthful fears, when I was hunted and did not know why. The man watching could not be anything to do with my father. He must know I had rejected the estate – even his name.
I dreamed I was with Anne. Liz was still alive, giving out her stuttering cry. We continued making love, trying to ignore her. I awoke to find the candle guttering fitfully and Ellie rousing me. I shoved her away.
‘Ellie, we can’t, we musn’t – you know I’m married –’
‘Are you?’ she said, eyes round with mock horror.
‘Ellie, stop that. Listen. I can’t love you –’
‘Love?’ she spat scornfully. ‘Ain’t none of that in Spitall. Love? This is what we have. This is what I want. This.’
When we had finished and I was falling back to sleep, she stroked the scar on my cheek. ‘You pious prig.’
The candle finally blinked and went out. In the darkness she whispered, ‘It didn’t hurt as much. It does get better … don’t it?’
32
It did get better. Not only in bed. Ellie knew Spitall, knew the Levellers, and with her quick wit opened many doors to me. From being suspicious, from tapping their noses when they saw me, a warning of the Stonehouse within, the people accepted me as one of them. And I began to accept myself.
When I signed my name, Tom Neave began to flow naturally from my quill. So, astonishingly enough, did pamphlets. One, on the freedom ride from Holdenby, sold so well that I began to save, determined to show that Tom Neave did not need Thomas Stonehouse’s money.
Best of all was supper with Matthew. We had eels and pike and cold rabbit pie, washed down with strong beer. Matthew demanded Scogman told his story of being caught with his britches down. Ellie tried to leave the room, but I stopped her, saying I had never seen her blush before, and she blushed so prettily.
She struck out at me angrily. ‘’Course I blush! I’m a woman, ain’t I?’
The men howled with laughter and beat the table. She ran to the kitchen. I followed her and she burst out that she knew I didn’t love her, but she was a woman, she had her feelings and, and … Then she gave a great gulp. She was ready to hit me again, but looked so vulnerable I held her and could have made love to her there and then, but Matthew came in and said, ‘You say none of my potions ever work, Tom. What about this one, eh?’
He stroked Ellie’s heaving shoulders gently until they quietened.
On those days it was like coming home to Poplar. I could almost smell the tang of the salt wind across the marsh and hear the hammer of great ships being built to sail into Matthew’s stories.
I never saw anyone watching the house again at night, but I felt it. Sometimes, in a crowd, or an alehouse, I thought I recognised someone following me, but I always lost him, or it turned out to be no one I knew. It was on one of those black days, when Ellie said I had got out of the wrong side of the bed, that I had the idea.
I was at the goldsmith’s on London Bridge, where I deposited my money. I determined to lease a better house than the one at Half Moon Court, with no cellar, well away from any ghost that Luke might fear. I hired a horse and went to the Countess’s house. Once there, my spirits deserted me. I heard again Luke’s cries of terror. A clumsy, unannounced visit could destroy everything. Both Anne and I were b
eing stupid. I would write asking the Countess to act as an intermediary. I was turning to go when Luke came out, running down the steps, chased by Jane.
I was preparing to mount my horse to follow them, when a Hackney hell-cart drew up. A woman came down the steps, curtly dismissing the footman. I say woman, for at first I did not recognise Anne. She wore a half-mask and hood and a long, flowing cassock, for it was very cold.
She was in the Hackney before I could so much as shout. I followed it past St Giles’s Fields, along Holborn and into Gray’s Inn. There I lost her, but I had seen enough. There were no bread-and-cheese lawyers there. They dealt with great estates, family disputes and divorce. Milton, whose wife had deserted him, just as, by slow degrees, Anne seemed to be deserting me, had written a pamphlet that railed against divorce that was not a divorce, for there was no nullity, no remarriage, only separation of bed and board. And money.
‘That’s your game, is it?’ I kept saying to myself as I rode furiously, anywhere, just to keep riding.
Was Anne’s visit to Maidenhead just to take the country air? Luke was well enough now to skip down those steps. She was putting him up to his nightmare about me, I was convinced of it. I rode back to the Countess’s house to confront Anne, but again my conviction vanished. Nobody could invent Luke’s cries of terror. I rode the horse into exhaustion but could not exhaust my mind.
What hurt me most was that I no longer knew her. What had been pretence, practice before, had become part of her. She was more elegant, more distant than ever. And that was not the worst thing. The worst thing was that I wanted her. I wanted her so badly that dark October evening that I gazed into the oily blackness of the Thames at London Bridge until some drunk lurched into me and told me to get on with it, as there were others wanting my space.
Cromwell's Blessing Page 25