‘… and then Colonel Rainborough said … The poorest he in England hath a right to live –’
‘What about the poorest she?’ she said.
She turned round. She was stark naked, except for the gold necklace I had bought her. I never answered the question, but blew out the candle, and we made love which made her cry out with joy, for she said it did not hurt any more, and I said brotherly love was a very great thing but it was not to be compared with the love of a man and a woman.
‘Tom …’ she whispered in a trembling voice. ‘You said you loved me.’
I did not think I quite said that, but I kissed her gently and said nothing. She curled up tightly, with me still partly inside her, and I fell into the deepest of deep sleeps – until the knocking started.
It was part of a dream. At first it was the hammering of the soldiers on the pews in Putney church. Then it became something darker, more sinister, my hammering on the cellar door when I was locked in as a child. Finally, it was real. The whole building shook with the blows. Muttering that it was the falcon, Ellie clung to me in terror.
The knocking stopped and a voice shouted. ‘Tom Stonehouse!’ There was another voice I did not catch, then the first voice yelled, ‘Stonehouse or Neave or whoever you are.’
Ellie lit a candle while I scrambled into britches and shirt, picked up my dagger and stumbled my way downstairs.
33
The knocking began again when I reached the press room. I could hear windows being flung open down the street. People were cursing. A dog barked incessantly. Through the cracks in the door I could see the shape of a Hackney coach. The driver, a surly-looking figure in a heavy overcoat, was about to raise his fist again.
I slid back the bolt, but left the chain on. ‘Who is it?’
‘I’m looking for a party called Stoneneave.’
‘Neave! Tom Neave. Who wants me?’
‘A lady.’
‘A lady!’ There were whistles from a nearby window. ‘You can give my door a knock, sweetheart.’
Another voice yelled, ‘Let’s have a look inside your placket.’
I took the chain off the door. The first real fog of the winter was building up. It took a moment for me to see a cloaked and veiled figure descending from the coach. There were more whistles but, from a window opposite, came a volley of epithets, followed by what looked like the Sleeper’s Revenge sailing through the air. The coachman ducked. The woman almost fell in her haste to avoid the object, which shattered near her. Fortunately, it was not a chamber pot, but a bowl of cold pottage that splashed her skirts. Her veil blew back as I caught her, and saw it was Anne. The abuse and the catcalls continued as I pulled her inside.
‘What is it, Anne? What is it?’
She was staring beyond me. Halfway down the ladder, still holding the candle, was Ellie, a blanket wrapped round her. I had only one thought. One terrible fear that turned my stomach to water.
‘It’s Luke, isn’t it.’
Anne did not answer. Her breath came and went in little jerks. Beneath her thrown-back veil her face was dead white, her eyes fixed on Ellie.
Ellie gave one movement, a small tilt of her chin, a ghost of her imitation of Anne. The blanket slipped, exposing the glint of the gold necklace hanging between her small breasts. She pulled the blanket round her more tightly, turned and went back up the ladder.
I shook Anne violently so that the veil flopped over her face. I tore it half off. ‘Answer me. It’s Luke, isn’t it?’
‘It’s your grandfather. He’s dying. He wants to see you.’
I had been so convinced it was Luke I had been unable to breathe. Shutting my eyes in relief, I sucked in great gulps of air. Now she shook me, spots of red flaring up in her cheeks.
‘Don’t you understand? Lord Stonehouse is dying.’
I feared some kind of retribution if I did not answer a dying man’s request. And, although there was no love lost between us, at the dead of night, in the Hackney rattling through the empty streets, Lord Stonehouse felt for the first time like my own flesh and blood.
He had been dying for so long, I never thought he would. The first time I met him, I heard him tell his son he had a year to live. That was five years ago. He had survived the stone, and countless other ailments, real and imagined. Long before I met him in the flesh, he had been a strange figure of the imagination, pulling me on invisible strings. Such figures do not die.
The thought crossed my mind that it was a trick to get me back. I gripped her arm. ‘Are you telling me the truth? He’s really dying? Lord Stonehouse?’
Her taut face gave me the answer. ‘I pray we are not too late.’
‘He asked for me?’
‘For Tom Neave.’
‘Tom Neave? Not Stonehouse?’
‘Yes. Tom –’ She swallowed and her lips tightened. It was as if she could not bring herself to utter my birth name again. ‘He has moments when he’s as clear as day. Then he gutters like a candle. He rambles.’ She turned to the coachman. ‘Can’t you go any faster?’
‘In this?’
He waved his hand at the thick, dirty yellow fog creeping up from the river, reducing the moon to a pale ghost, softening buildings, swirling up alleys, inserting clammy soot-smelling fingers into the coach.
‘A man is dying.’
‘Won’t get there by killing my horses, will we, ma’am?’
The fog grew even thicker, the coach lurching more slowly over the cobbles. I could hear but not see the horses, and the coachman was just a dim shape.
‘Ropemaker Street,’ he muttered. ‘I tell a lie. Silk Street. Scarce see the horses’ heads in this.’
‘Did he send for you? What happened?’ I asked Anne.
She stared outside, although she could see nothing but the wall of fog. ‘I have been going to Queen Street. Day after day.’
It came out, in fits and starts. She had gone there begging, even though he would never see her. Then one day, about a month ago, he had an attack. His heart was failing and it looked as though he would die. In the general confusion she had gone upstairs, helping Mr Cole and comforting Lord Stonehouse. With an enormous effort, he had rallied, but only she, Mr Cole and a few of the closest servants knew his condition.
‘That is where your money has been coming from.’
‘I earned it,’ she said bitterly. ‘Every groat. As a servant. A nursemaid.’
Convinced, as always, he would recover, Lord Stonehouse was more terrified of those in power learning how ill he was than of death itself. Then, one day, Ireton came, unexpectedly …
Of course! Ireton’s sudden friendliness. I know why you’re a Stonehouse again. Hadn’t he almost winked? They needed the power, the influence of the Stonehouse name. They needed me. For some reason that, more than anything else, told me that Lord Stonehouse was going to die – or was already dead.
It was Anne’s expression that made me ask the question. ‘Did you tell Ireton how ill Lord Stonehouse was?’
‘He did not get it from me,’ Anne retorted. She shrugged. ‘Jane may have been indiscreet to Betsy Cromwell’s maid. They are very close.’
In other words, she used the servants to tell them.
‘What have you been saying to Lord Stonehouse about me?’
‘I have been trying to help him put his soul in order.’
‘His soul – or his affairs?’ She continued to stare at the blank wall of fog. I gripped her arm. ‘Anne! What have you been saying –’
Another coach loomed out of the fog, heading straight towards us. Although both were travelling slowly, the horses reared in panic. The coach tilted and Anne was thrown against me. Only the wall against which it grated saved the coach from going right over. Among the jolting and rocking, the whinnying of the horses, the shouts of the coachmen to calm them and their yells of abuse, I held Anne tightly. Among all the subtler odours of her perfumes was the sharp, simple smell of rosemary I used to catch when I was an apprentice and she was distant, unatt
ainable. God knew how much I had tried not to want her. I gently stroked her trembling thinness.
She pulled away violently. ‘You stink of that whore.’
I pushed at the door, which scraped open reluctantly, and jumped out of the coach. Fog eddied round me. ‘Call her that again and I will leave you and not come back.’
She bit her lip. ‘There is no time to argue!’
‘What have you been saying to Lord Stonehouse about me?’
‘Get in. Please!’
The horses had been quietened, and both coachmen turned from their argument to listen, open-mouthed, to ours. Neither of us cared. When I did not move, she spoke in a violent rush of words.
‘I have been saying what you should have been saying. That he has done you a great wrong. He tried to kill you when you were born. More than that. No one has done more for him, for the estate, than you. No one has done more to destroy it than Richard.’
It was impossible not to be drawn in by her vehemence, by the hypnotic glow in her eyes. A new fear ran through me. She had always been the realistic one, pricking my dreams, or at least channelling them to a more practical course. But her obsession with the estate seemed to have gone beyond sense.
‘Anne, Anne, listen. The estate is entailed. It must go to the eldest son, from one generation to the next. To Richard. Lord Stonehouse has no power to break the entail.’
‘In normal times. Cromwell will break it.’
‘Cromwell must do a deal with the King. Richard is one of the King’s favourites – Cromwell will not upset an agreement just to change the ownership of Highpoint!’
‘It is possible.’
‘It is not possible!’
‘I have seen Roger Hanmer, Lord Stonehouse’s lawyer. He has assured me it is possible.’
I remembered following her to Gray’s Inn. It was not a separation from me she had been seeking – far from it. She needed me to secure the estate that she was determined, by any means, to possess. Her manner had changed. Her tone was matter-of-fact. There was even a faint smile on her face at my stunned reaction.
‘Do you want me to take you or not?’
The coachman stood scowling. The coach he had collided with was driving off. Anne beckoned to the man, her voice low and husky.
‘My husband is desperate to say farewell to his grandfather before he dies. Please, please could you hurry.’
I was her husband again, even if I was Tom Neave. The coachman tipped his hat and looked dubiously at the fog, yellow as newly shorn wool. ‘I’ll do my best, ma’am.’
‘I’ll double your fare if you get there before he dies.’
The coachman slammed my door shut after me, scrambled into his seat, shook the reins and careered off, throwing us back. He drove by pure instinct. I shut my eyes as he plunged through the fog, or grabbed at the door, which had been damaged and kept flying open.
As we bounced and struggled to hold on to something, I yelled at Anne in jerky snatches. ‘I am going there to pray for him. Do you understand? Even if it was possible to break the entail, I would not do it. I don’t want the estate. The world has changed! Land – belongs to the people!’
‘I have done all this for you. I have not slept –’
The strap she was clinging to slipped from her hand. She was flung against me. ‘You did it for yourself!’ I said.
‘I know what you want better than you do. You no sooner get one thing than you want another.’
The coachman struggled to yank the horses clear from a mound of rubbish. The coach ploughed through it, the stench of rotting meat filling the cab. Smithfield. A dog howled as one of the horse’s hooves caught it, its whimpers gradually fading as the coachman urged the horse blindly on. I held the door shut while Anne clung to me.
The foul reek of tanning and the tarry tang of the coal barges meant we were going over the Fleet. In Holborn the fog was more spasmodic and the coach picked up speed. Anne alighted almost before it had come to a stop in Queen Street. I began to hurry after her but the coachman blocked my way. I pulled out some money.
‘The lady promised double if …’ I gave him all I had. ‘Why, thank you, sir. Good luck, sir.’
Through shreds of mist the stone falcon peered down at us as if we were interlopers. I always had that feeling and usually gave him the apprentice’s finger, but that night I bowed my head and slipped up the steps like a thief. The hall was so ill-lit that the house seemed already in mourning. Mr Cole appeared out of the gloom. Anne lifted her veil, her eyes shining with tears.
‘Oh, Mr Cole, is he …’
‘Still with us, ma’am, but barely … The minister is confessing him. You cannot see him now –’ he began, but she pushed past him and grabbed me by the hand. There was such a force driving her, it seemed I had lost my own will. Mr Cole shouted something but we were already at the top of the stairs, passing the study that had marked so many of the climatic stages of my life. The door was open and it was silent and empty. The fire, which burned winter and summer, was out. I glimpsed the strip of carpet where I had stood so many times. The desk had been cleared of papers; only the seal, with which he had made so many orders, including that condemning me to death as a plague child, rested on the leather top.
Anne pulled me away, down corridors where I had never been, towards Lord Stonehouse’s private chambers. Two servants came forward, but she scarcely checked her pace, her tone and look dismissing any idea of dissension.
‘Mr Cole sent for us. Lord Stonehouse wishes to see his grandson.’
Before they could properly take in my crumpled shirt, my britches, which, I was suddenly acutely conscious of, had the buttons stuffed in the wrong holes, and a tattered jacket I had snatched up from the floor, we were in the bedroom.
Bedroom?
It smelt and sounded like a church. There was an overpowering smell of incense, under which lingered an insistent odour of urine and decay. It was so dark we stopped, feeling our way with our hands in front of us. The enormous bed loomed like a chancel, emphasised by the screen-like curtains from which came the only source of light and the intoning of the minister.
‘… give him repentance for all the errors of his life past.’
The shifting light of the candles played on Lord Stonehouse’s pallid face, his wax-like hands folded on the sheets, as if he was already an effigy. Anne stared at the image in a mixture of disbelief and terror, then fell on her knees, covering her face in her hands.
‘God forgive me for what I have done, God forgive me!’ she repeated over and over again.
For the first time, from the shadowy movements turning in our direction, I realised there were other people in the room, but could not distinguish who they were.
‘… if thou wilt, even now, thou canst raise him up,’ the minister went on.
Anne was shaking in such distress that I dropped on my knees to comfort her. Only then, as she continued to beg for forgiveness, and was shaking with such fear, did the truth strike me.
‘Did he really ask for me?’
The minister glanced round, the light catching his outraged expression, before he continued. ‘Yet, as in appearance it seems his dissolution draweth near, prepare him, we beseech thee, against the hour of death …’
I shook her, then rammed my lips against her ear, whispering, ‘Answer me. Did he ask for me?’
She lifted her head. She was shaking, her eyes running with tears. ‘No,’ she cried out. ‘He should have done – he rambled about Tom Neave often enough. After all I did for him!’
Scandalised, the minister drew back the curtains, spilling light into the room. I sensed rather than saw the people on the other side of the room staring. ‘Get up,’ I said to Anne. When she did not respond, I dragged her to her feet. She went submissively, passively, head bowed, as I guided her towards the darkness of the hall, desperate for it to swallow us up, away from the battery of accusing eyes. We were almost into that comforting oblivion, where the shadow of Mr Cole was there to escort us out,
when she stopped abruptly, staring back into the room at the people there. I tugged her one more step to the door but, like a horse that refuses a fence, she would go no further. Her knuckles gripping the door jamb were bone-white, her gaze rigid.
Among the group of people watching our departure, dressed in dark grey silk, sombre but not morbid, with an expression that managed to be both censorious and amused, was Richard.
34
It was no more than a second, but the tableau was as still as if it had been painted: the minister, eyes bulging, cheeks flushed to the point of apoplexy; Dr Latchford, glasses threatening to fall from his nose; a man with a wart on his chin, his face half turned away as if trying to conceal himself; a young woman in a gold-embroidered silk dress craning avidly forward. I guessed she was Richard’s wife from the locket I had seen, and knew it as soon as she opened her mouth.
‘Dégoutant! Est-ce la femme diabolique?’
‘Laisse-moi m’occuper de la salope, Geraldine,’ muttered Richard. He raised his voice. ‘Mr Cole. The lady is not well.’
Only Richard, by putting the slightest of hesitations before ‘lady’, could reduce the word to something from the gutter. Anne tore away from me, her voice like ice. ‘The lady is perfectly well!’
Richard ignored her. ‘Tom. I must see you.’
Treating her as if she was not there infuriated Anne more than any verbal insult. She lost control completely, whirling round on me. ‘Don’t listen to him. Haven’t you had enough of his tricks? He tried to kill you. Have you forgotten?’ She turned on Richard. ‘Ignore me. Go on. Ignore me. You should be in the Tower. I’ll have you put there.’
‘Elle est une gamine des rues … une folle,’ muttered Geraldine, stepping back hastily as Anne glared at her, treading on the foot of the man with the wart, who let out a yell of pain.
With pretended sympathy, Anne rounded on him, instead of Geraldine. ‘Your gouty foot, Mr Hanmer?’
Hanmer, I remembered her telling me in the coach, was Lord Stonehouse’s lawyer who had given her the assurances about breaking the entail and, it seemed, from her scarcely veiled anger, the impression he was on her side. I stood like the others, hypnotised and appalled, unable to stop her, as Dr Latchford caught Hanmer, hopping on one foot, and helped him to a chair. During the process, Dr Latchford’s spectacles fell from his nose, Hanmer’s skipping foot coming down on them with a crunch.
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