Some years are etched in the memory. The very numbers have an aura, a sense of magic about them. The most notable was 1655: for many it was the year we took Jamaica from the Spanish, and were on the road to becoming a colonial power. For me, it left a memory of the damp, clinging fog in the court and the apple I bit that had a worm in it, and a reminder of Scogman, directing me over London Bridge, deep into Southwark. The morality merchants, as he called them, were having one of their sporadic purges. Brothels had been closed and alehouses strictly licensed.
On the most memorable evening for me of that year, the place I went to was as black as pitch outside. The brightness and the stench of musk as I entered made my senses reel. It was done not only to excite me, but so the woman who ran it could size me up and take my name.
‘Tom Neave.’
It was compulsive. There was a degree of risk, but it was small and only added to the excitement. I could see from her reaction she took it as false, for it was the name of a well-known scurrilous pamphleteer during the war, who had not written for years, and was believed to be long dead.
She directed me down a hallway, which plunged me into darkness again. Overwhelmed by the changing light, the pungent smells, the murmurs from one room, and a burst of laughter from another, I was full of the most delicious sensations.
A boy took my hat and cloak, showed me upstairs and opened a door. The girl who rose to greet me was young enough to be the virgin she was supposed to be. Her trembling, awkward smile suggested it might even be true.
I was so set on my purpose that it was only when I closed the door that I took in the retreating boy. It was not just that his hair was red – it was that shade of bright, fiery red that had always been a curse to me.
‘Wait.’
He turned with slow insolence. He was about eight or nine. He wore some servant’s discarded livery, picked up at a rag stall. In the feeble yellow light of the tallows guttering on the wall, I could not see his face.
‘Come here.’
He did not move. His voice was loaded with mock deference. ‘If she ain’t what you want, sir, see her ladyship.’
He bowed, and began to make his way downstairs. I hurried after him and caught him in the dark well of the stairs. ‘Do as you’re told! Come here.’
I began to pull him into the light, but he caught me a vicious kick on the shin and yelled: ‘Trouble!’
Seeing there was no one at the desk, he ran upstairs where I cornered him again. He gave the most ear-splitting scream, more animal than human. A door flew open. Ellie was barely recognisable. The paint on her face glittered but could not completely hide her cratered skin. She was pulling a robe over her slack breasts and belly.
‘How many times have I fucking told you –’
I might have slunk away, but she stopped yelling at the boy to stare at me.
The shock in her face transmitted to the boy, who, with the unerring instinct of a child foreseeing some disaster, lost his cocky manner and ran to her. Against her robe, I saw his face. There was no doubt about it. He had the Stonehouse nose, but instead of the falcon-like arrogance of Luke had the predatoriness of the kite, the City scavenger. He had a knife and, emboldened by the protective arm of his mother, his expression showed he was prepared to use it. Both of them were abruptly shoved aside as Ellie’s irate customer blundered out of her room.
‘Who do you think you are, sir –’
He stopped abruptly. He knew who I was, and I vaguely knew him as some minor official in the navy. The bluster went out of him, like air from a punctured bladder. Not only was I far above him in station, I had my britches on.
‘Get out.’
He began to stumble away, remembered his britches and returned, almost knocking over a piss-pot in his hurry to find them. The boy let out a peal of laughter, cut off when Ellie gave him a stinging clip on the ear. The navy official gave me a curious half-genuflection in deference to my rank, then scurried down the corridor. By now the woman at the desk had appeared. There were lowered, panic-stricken voices and doors opening and closing, as people feared a raid by the morality merchants. Ellie made some signal to the woman, who told me to go. I told her if I went I would have the place closed down. Having crept in as Tom Neave, my voice had taken on the sharp tones of someone who expects to be obeyed.
Ellie bundled the boy into the room she had been in. My manner had driven all the bravado out of him, and he shrank into a dark corner. The room was much like many others I had been in; shadowy, cheap-coloured drapes, heavy cloying smells, all of which normally drove me into a frenzy but now filled me with disgust.
‘I will take him.’
‘Take him?’
‘Give me an address.’
Her robe fell open but she did not notice or care. I looked away. ‘Take him where?’
‘Off your hands.’ I could not bear the sight of her a moment longer. ‘The address. My man will collect him. Come on. You want to be rid of him, don’t you?’
She nodded in a vague, fuddled way, clutched her robe to her and muttered, ‘Never known one of you claim a bastard, that’s all. Always the other way about.’
I snapped my fingers at her. ‘The address!’
She shrugged indifferently. ‘Bankside. At the sign of –’
‘Don’t you tell the cove,’ said the boy. Up to now he had seemed as indifferent and acquiescent as she was, but his look of truculent insolence returned. ‘I ain’t going with no arse-cove.’
‘Sam, Sam. It ain’t that, I promise you. He ain’t all gentleman. He knows us. Him and me – well, never mind that.’ She knelt down and smiled. ‘This is something to your advantage.’
There was something mechanical about her smile, but he rushed to her and flung himself into her arms, which drew a real response from her. She kissed him, her voice catching as she repeated, ‘Something to your advantage.’
‘Don’t want something to my whatever it is. I ain’t going.’
‘You will do as you’re told,’ I said sharply.
Ellie drew away from him and turned to me. Without warning, Sam flew at me, knocking his mother to one side and attacking me with flailing fists. He was big for his age and it was a long time since I had been in any kind of fight. He landed a blow in the stomach and another in the face. I saw a boot coming towards me and upended him, but not before he had sent me staggering against the wall. He scrambled up and I saw the glint of a knife. It was what I had feared would happen some day. It was part of the excitement. But I was alert to the pad in the alley, not this. I was slow, far too slow. It was Ellie who caught him by the neck of his livery, dragging him to one side, so that the blade slashed into the doublet, grazing my skin. I fell back into a chair in a daze.
She wrenched the knife from him and proceeded to thrash him. He took it without a murmur, lips bit closed, not even raising his hands to his head, as if the blows were a kind of love. She did not stop until her chest was heaving, and turned to me.
‘Are you all right? Look what you’ve done to the gentleman’s clothes!’
She turned to inflict more punishment, but I told her to desist. She offered me some sickly sweet posset, telling me it had brandy in it. I shook my head. During this, he stood mutely, a thin line of blood trickling down from his forehead where a ring on her hand had cut him.
‘Wait until I tell your father! He’ll break every bone in your body.’
Father. The word wounded me as no blade had ever done. ‘You have a husband?’
‘I call him that.’
‘Has he a trade?’
‘He makes candles,’ the boy said. Something in his tone suggested that, far from breaking every bone in his body, his father never touched him. ‘Good candles, not tallow.’ He stared at me defiantly, fists clenched, lips curled, his hair burning like a beacon, as mine had done at his age, although now the fire was banked down, a dull glow sprinkled with ash. From that moment, a pain began which I knew would never go.
Ellie told me how Alfred’s bu
siness had failed, how the army had not paid him for his disability – the usual story, the usual excuses. I was only half listening. I said I would be in touch, would help them if I could, then left the place with my senses dazed and feeling in no state to make decisions.
I left it to Scogman. He found there was sufficient truth in the story, and sufficient temptation in a new life in Half Moon Court to drag them out of the mire. Alfred was one of those people thrown on the scrap heap by the army. He was a bit hapless, dragging his crippled leg after him, but kind, a combination that led him to accept someone else’s child and Ellie’s trade. I never met him, nor did I see Ellie or Sam again. Alfred believed he owed his good fortune to some disabled soldiers’ charity. I do not know what Sam believed, or suspected.
Every three-month Scogman sent a report to Queen Street, as Mr Black had sent on me. I had the boy tutored by Mr Ink. Nothing fancy, I told him. He was to be no gentleman. Give him his letters and his numbers. For the rest, he would have to make do with common sense. He had plenty of that. Oh, he was sharp! Candles being a seasonal trade, in the summer he persuaded Alfred first to sell then to make pewter candlesticks. Vicious and unruly at first, Sam became softened by Alfred’s increasing reliance on him and they began to build up a good business, of which, to tell the truth, I was as proud as they were.
Each autumn, as the first fogs began to roll up the river, I was consumed by the same restlessness and, clad in my clerk’s suit, would slip out of the back door. But now I had only one destination.
From the opening of Half Moon Court I would watch them at supper, or Sam and Alfred still in the workshop, building up stock for winter. Sam had my old room at the top. He sat there pondering over a new candlestick, or staring out of the window full of dreams, as I had once done. He was the last to blow out his candle. I gazed until he did so, and the house went dark, and, feeling a strange kind of peace, I would return to my desk at Queen Street.
So it went on, year after year, until the news came that part of me had been longing for, and part dreading.
39
Cromwell was dying. Like King Charles before the war, he had run out of money and friends. I hated him because he had never called a properly elected Parliament, relying to the last upon the army. Now the soldiers were beginning to desert him. I loved him because he had not only made England into Britain, but had turned it into an overseas power – but mostly because, from coast to coast, the killing had stopped. And most of all, I loved him because Sam, and all the other Sams, had been given time to have their dreams.
Cromwell’s son Richard succeeded him. He was an affable fellow, who could make an effective speech, when the words were written for him. But he had never been a soldier and, fatally, lost control of the army. There was growing unrest against military rule – even talk of the return of Charles’s son from Holland.
On a bleak day in the early spring of 1659, I stepped from my carriage in Queen Street to find consternation round my front door.
Mr Cole, rarely disturbed by anything, was on the steps, anxious and apologetic. He had no idea how it had happened. The servants in charge of the entrance had been dismissed. With pails of soapy water, scullions were attempting to clean the front door. Crudely lettered in black was the word REGICIDE. King Killer. Slashed through the word was a red plague cross.
I told Mr Cole to find a letter that had arrived that morning. Such letters arrived at irregular intervals, from various parts of Europe that had not signed a treaty with us. After the first, I tore them up unread. Most of the pieces of that morning’s letter were retrieved from the night soil and brought to me. It resonated with a sincerity missing when my father had first written to me. He blamed himself for not killing me. It had contributed towards the death of the King whom he worshipped and he would not rest until I was dead.
He went into some detail on how the Regicides who signed the death warrant would die. I would be ‘hanged until half-dead, dragged to the Scaffold where my foule prick and balls would be cut offe’. I would watch ‘that devil witch Anne Black (I wille not soil my family’s name with hers)’, saved from the same punishment ‘onlie for decency’s sake’, burned at the stake before my bowels would be ‘scouped out and throwne on the same fire’.
I studied it closely, not for its content, which I had seen before, but for the style of the scrivener who had written it. Dutch, I thought. A plain hand without flourishes, used to composing merchants’ letters. Probably Amsterdam.
I had been careless. At first I had kept track of Richard as the self-proclaimed Charles II begged his way through Europe. I had lost the trail and must find it again. I selected a few fragments, with distinctive ways of writing ‘s’ and crossing the ‘t’, and dictated a letter to a merchant in Amsterdam, ostensibly about the purchase of jewellery. He was one of our best agents in Europe and, within a month, with a bit of luck, I would know where Richard was and what he was plotting.
I put the remaining pieces of the letter in the drawer in which Lord Stonehouse had kept Richard’s correspondence or, more accurately, his bills and debts. I had not opened it for years. The candlelight caught a glint of metal in the crevice.
‘Mr Cole. What is this key?’
He took me to an upstairs room where various personal goods and papers of Lord Stonehouse were kept. At times I had vaguely thought of going through them, but more pressing matters always intervened. Mr Cole pulled out a casket. Intrigued, I opened it. I started back so suddenly I would have fallen if Mr Cole had not caught me. It was as though the falcon, flying up abruptly from its jewelled nest, had pushed back the lid. The rubies that were its eyes hypnotised me. My mother had stolen it shortly before my birth and Matthew, the man I once thought was my father, had told me that everything that happened came from that. Well, he was a fine storyteller, but I was long past such childish things. A promise I had made came back to me. I laughed at myself, my young self.
I was a Stonehouse, as cold and dispassionate as my grandfather, a rational man, with a bent towards natural philosophy. I dismissed the promise I had made as silly, irrational superstition. Yet still I sat there, on a box of mouldering papers in that musty room, staring into the bird’s red, flickering eyes until the candle went out.
I went to Highpoint next day, not by carriage with guards, as prudence and position dictated. I rode with Scogman, bearing his banter and my stiff, aching legs. The plague cross on my door had triggered old, long-buried instincts. Look for the unexpected. Never do the expected yourself. We went the green way, the old drover’s road. To Scogman’s amazement, I insisted on sleeping rough. I would not even stay at the Stonehouse Arms in Oxford, although I owned it. It had been a favourite haunt of Richard’s and, throughout the Cromwell years, Oxford had remained stubbornly, subversively, Royalist.
Scogman was as out of condition as I was. We both got colds and grumbled and swore at one another like crotchety old men, but by the time we had emerged from the Great Forest one morning our senses were singing.
Below us, silencing us, were the parklands, the fountains, and Highpoint itself, which had taken years to restore, the gleaming projected portico over the entrance guarded by a crouching falcon.
There were so many things I ought to be doing. I should be in Queen Street, attending meetings, plotting, making contingency plans. Why was I here to fulfil this obscure promise, a promise I had made only to myself, and so many years ago?
I told Scogman to tell Lady Stonehouse where I was going, reflecting that now I never called her anything else. It struck me, with a smile, that ever since we were children, she had always been that to me.
While Scogman rode down to the house, I forded the river, taking the hill road to Shadwell. The landscape was as bleak as ever, fit only for sheep, whose bells tinkled tinnily as they raised their heads to stare at me.
Shadwell church was much the same. It could have been yesterday that I came up here, trying to trace my father, believing my mother had been married here to Lord Stonehouse’s s
on Edward, who had the living. Edward had denied it, denouncing the obscure spot where she was buried as evil. Origo mali – the source of the evil.
I had cried, ‘I will put a fresh stone there!’
Where? That was the problem. I searched around the drystone wall at the north of the church, where the grass and weeds were thickest. What stones there were had no names, or names eaten away by the wind and rain. There was a step behind me. As if it was the ghost of one of the Stonehouses, I whirled round, feeling for my knife. Whirled? My movements were so clumsy and rusty, if it had been a Stonehouse I would have been dead.
A fat, jovial man was blinking at me. He introduced himself as Travers, the present incumbent. He knew the stone very well, he said, for my mother, Margaret Pearce, was a legend in the village. I thought he was seeking to add to his frugal living, but he went immediately to a stone that had become part of the roughly built wall. Tearing away grass, I saw a fading red mark, and I remembered some long-forgotten obscenity scrawled on my mother’s stone.
Travers pointed to the village and to the moor where it became even wilder. ‘Some people claim to have seen her. Some are afraid, but some see her as a free spirit. She goes with the land, some say. Poor as it is, this is all common land. Stonehouse Without, some call it.’
Then it came back to me. Strange how one forgets, but I had signed so many papers, sealed so many documents. And many of those documents had concerned this land. When I could, with Scogman’s help, I had turned back the relentless tide of half a century of Stonehouse enclosures. It was not easy, because the legal entail only left the estate to me in trust. There had been a wood, no, two woods, marshland, a stream, fishing rights, this moor. I could almost hear the ghost of Joshua’s flute playing. That I had done, at least.
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