Читать книгу The King’s List - Peter Ransley - Страница 15

I locked myself in my study and would not see anyone, even John Thurloe who wrote that the situation was getting critical. It was remote, but possible that the King might return. I scarcely finished Thurloe’s letter. The situation was always critical.

What consumed me and kept me awake in the middle of the night was that bizarre outburst when I said I was going to change my will. At first it felt like an explosion of temper. A fit of pique. An empty threat. Anne certainly read it as such. She retorted I could not do it because the estate was entailed to the eldest son. But Cromwell had broken the entail. The estate was mine. I could dispose of it in any way I wished.

‘Who would you leave it to?’ she demanded.

‘To whom would you leave it?’ I corrected.

That was the end of the conversation. Her voice and manner were so impeccable, she loathed it when I corrected her grammar. But she was right. To whom would I leave it? A candle-maker?

It was she who had put the thought into my head. ‘You have a son.’

Indeed I had. One she knew nothing about. The bastard that came when I left Anne to live with Ellie and became a Leveller. Apart from me, only Scogman knew of his existence. I had met him only the once, when he was a boy, too young for him to remember. He believed the candle-maker who lived with Ellie and to whom he was apprenticed was his father. Ellie had been sworn to secrecy. I trusted her – but, just in case, had made it clear that if she broke that trust she would lose the house. I took the file out of my drawer. Samuel Reeves. Closed. As soon as I looked at Scogman’s scrawl, noting that, through the years, at a cost of £109 8s 6d, he had been indentured, fed, clothed, educated so he could write and sign his name, add, subtract and multiply and progress from candles to candlesticks, the ludicrousness of the idea struck me. A candle-maker!

I shut the file in my drawer again, but could not shut it out of my mind. Deciding to scotch the idea once and for all and destroy the file, I rode to Farringdon.

It must have been early afternoon when I slowed my horse at the beginning of Cloth Fair but the low dark clouds gave it the pallor of evening. Spots of rain were falling. A figure came out of Half Moon Court. At first it was not the man I recognised, but his bag, the leather cracked and split so that the cupping instruments gleamed through. Dr Chapman used to come regularly to bleed Mr Black, the printer who had apprenticed me. I watched him go towards St Bartholomew’s, a limp distorting his old, familiar bustle, feeling an unexpected pang of emotion. A voice called out after him and I gripped the reins in shock.

The youth who ran out of the court was myself. He ran for the joy of running, as much as to catch Dr Chapman and hand him some instrument he had forgotten. He was as polite with the old man as if he had forgotten the instrument himself, before striding back to the court, drops of rain gleaming in hair as red as fire. The hair was as brash and coarse as mine used to be. I tried to turn away as he saw me across the street and checked his stride. But it was merely to touch his forehead deferentially before vanishing into the court, whistling.

If I had thought for a second, I would not have done anything so stupid. But I was not thinking. Old forgotten feelings I thought had long gone rushed into me. I tethered my horse and, like one of the spies I employed, slipped through the entrance into the court. It was empty. The apple tree stood forlornly in the centre of the court, the last of its dead leaves hanging limply from it. I slipped behind it as I used to do as a child. There was no sign of the youth – Samuel. I had almost forgotten his name. A candle was burning in the room above the shop. Below the gable, where a half moon had swung when I was an apprentice printer, was the sign of a candlestick.

The rattling of a pail came from the coal shed. I was about to retreat from the shelter of the tree when I heard a woman’s giggle, then the youth’s voice.

‘Mary, please don’t distract me.’

‘Dis –?’

‘Stop me from working.’

‘O, it is impossible to do that, sir. You are always working.’ Her voice had a knowing pertness, followed by a deep sigh of regret.

The shed door creaked open, throwing light on the pair. The maid’s apron was smeared with grease and her face marked with acne, but I could see how the tilt of her chin and the line of her breasts roused him. What fools we are at that age, I thought, with a growing sense of disappointment – and not only at that age, perhaps.

Now I was closer, I could see he was not like me at all. It was the hair more than anything. That and the Stonehouse nose. But it was the eyes that drew the attention, black, mild and enquiring; that, and his large roughened hands, tradesman-dexterous as they turned over a jagged piece of coal. My disenchantment deepened. Well, nothing fancy, I had told Scogman when he was planning his education, and nothing fancy was what I had got. Coarse and unkempt, he looked what he would always be: a candle-maker. I began to move back towards the entrance.

‘These are the coals for the kiln, Mary. Not these. They have too much sulphur in them. You can see the difference.’

‘Show me.’

She leaned forward, her dress dipping so he could see the curve of her breasts. I could feel the charge drawing them together like metal to a magnet. I turned away and had almost reached the entrance when out of the house came what sounded like the hollow beat of a drum. For a moment I was a boy again, running upstairs to my old master, who when he was ill, used to strike the floor with his stick.

‘Go to my mother, Mary,’ the youth said. ‘The doctor has just cupped her.’

Mary came out of the shed with a flounce and saw me before I could reach the gloom of the entrance. She gave me a curtsey, followed by a look of curiosity. She was staring at my ring. In the dimness the glittering emerald eyes of the falcon seemed to produce their own light.

‘Sam!’ she called.

‘See to my mother,’ Sam ordered, emerging from the shed.

Hastily, clumsily, I pulled on my gloves. Sam brushed coal dust from his breeches. There was a smear of coal across his cheek. His nails were as engrained with filth and coal as mine used to be with ink.

‘Were – were you looking for me, sir?’ he said, with a slight stammer.

I was struck dumb by being such a fool as to come here. I clasped my hands behind my back as if afraid he could see the ring through the gloves. My initial warmth at seeing him was swept away by close sight of this gawky youth whose head seemed too big for his body, and the creaking old house, whose gable seemed about to topple into the courtyard. Was this really where I had come from? Where I had been brought up? Anne, who had a more pitilessly realistic memory than me, had been right never to come back here. It was little more than a hovel.

I was about to ask him directions to get to Holborn when he said: ‘Are you the g-gentleman Mr H-Hooke said might call?’

‘Mr Hooke?’

‘Mr Boyle’s laboratory assistant?’

I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about but there was something so eager, so hopeful in his manner, I began to relent a little from my summary dismissal of him. And curiosity bit me. Laboratory? What on earth was he getting involved in?

‘I might be,’ I grunted.

He must have taken my hesitation as a reaction against the squalor of the place, since he apologised for it, saying his father had recently died and he was only just putting the house to rights.

‘He was a candle-maker,’ I said.

He stared at me. He had the peering eyes of someone who does much close work. I pointed to the sign of the candle swinging from the gable.

‘He made candles after the war,’ he said, seeming ashamed of candles. ‘When things were bad. P-people always need candles. He was trained as a glass-maker and he taught me. He was a w-wonderful –’

He turned away as his voice caught. I was both touched by this feeling for the man he thought his father and felt an obscure stab of pain for something I had lost, although how could I have lost something I never had? Mixed with it was a twinge of jealousy. Would Luke have anything like this reaction for me?

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Won’t you come in?’

I could feel the heat from the kiln as we approached the house. From upstairs came a murmur of voices.

‘Who? What sort of cove, Mary?’ The voice, coming from upstairs, was weak and querulous but the strong Spitalfield accent came back to me as if it was yesterday. I stopped on the step. The last person I wanted to see was Ellie.

‘He’s a customer, Mrs Reeves.’

‘That’ll be the day!’ Ellie laughed. ‘I told him to stick to candles. Candles is secure, candles is.’ She broke out coughing and could not stop.

Everything suggested that whatever had replaced candles was not secure. Half Moon Court had fallen on hard times. A window frame was rotting and the wall round it damp and mildewed. On the kitchen table was a piece of rye bread of the poorest quality.

Sam, hearing his mother’s bitter comments, had gone as red as the mouth of the kiln.

‘I do not want to disturb your mother,’ I said.

‘My – my mother is ill, sir. The maid is looking after her.’ Sam rushed over and shut the door which led to the stairs, cutting off their voices. ‘Please let me show you. I could equip you a whole laboratory, if that is your desire.’

He had the occasional odd choice of word or phrase, as if selecting what he thought a gentleman would like to hear.

‘A whole laboratory,’ I murmured, on edge at the thought of Ellie upstairs, but unable to overcome my curiosity.

We went into the shop. The stone kiln was where the printing machine had once stood, its flue going into the back wall. It used to be hot when we were printing. This was like stepping into an oven, although he apologised for the kiln being ‘down’, as he put it. The maid had put in the wrong coal and he had to let it cool and start it up again before he blew any more glass. Light from the still glowing coals fitfully lit up the room which seemed much larger. I could not work out why until I suddenly realised.

‘This is where the office used to be!’ I exclaimed, without thinking.

He stared at me. ‘You have been here before?’

I cursed myself. I pointed to the ceiling in a shadowy corner. ‘I can see the line of alteration.’

‘You have sharp eyes, sir.’ A compliment, or was there a trace of suspicion? ‘This used to be a printing shop.’ His nose wrinkled in distaste. ‘A hotbed of radicalism.’

‘Was it indeed!’ I pretended to look shocked, intrigued and amused that, brought up in such modest surroundings, this youth should have such pretensions. ‘You are a Royalist, sir?’

‘A Royalist?’ He laughed. For a moment I could see myself in him at his age, full of arrogant certainty, that the world was wrong, must be changed and he had the solution. ‘A p-pox on both their houses! B-both the King and Cromwell destroyed this country!’

‘They did?’

He crumpled suddenly, running his hand feverishly through his red hair. A flake of coal fell from the tangled mop. He might not have been on either side, but his change in manner, his body dipping in deference, told me he had abruptly remembered one should always be on the side of the patron. He gave a stumbled apology for what he called going beyond his station. Before he could continue, the stick thumped violently on the ceiling. He gave me an agitated, apologetic wring of the hands before running to the door at the bottom of the stairs and opening it.

Ellie might be ill, but her voice was as sharp and inquisitive as ever. ‘How can I get to sleep when you make such a noise? Who are you talking to?’

‘I’m s-sorry, Mother.’

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s business, Mother.’

‘Come here.’ Her voice weakened and trembled into a wheedling tone which I did not remember, and which she must have fashioned during her trade as a whore.

Sam stood at the door for a moment, twisting and turning, before telling her he would be up in a minute, and hurrying back to me. I told him he should see to his mother and I would return later.

‘She is –’ His lips tightened in frustration. He never finished the sentence, rushing over to a long trestle table behind the kiln, on which were a number of drug bottles and cheap-looking tumblers, the glass thick and foggy. He drew back a cloth, almost tenderly, showing an array of tubing and flasks such as you might see at an alchemist’s. The glass was thinner and clearer, albeit with a greenish tint.

‘I can make you pipettes, sir, b-beakers and bottles of course. Chemicals do not rot glass as they do metal and l-leather –’

I saw that, in his eagerness, he was going to stumble. I knew the raised stone in that treacherous, uneven floor, having caught my foot in it many times, ruining work by dropping wet proofs or a forme. I moved almost before he tripped and, as the bottle slipped from his grasp, caught it, then caught him. He apologised profusely, floundering for support against me and the side of the kiln. Coals settled as he knocked against it, sending a bright flicker of light from the open kiln door which fell full on my face. I suppose it was the first time he had had a good look at me.

‘You have red hair like – like me, sir.’

‘Brown,’ I snapped, taken off-guard. ‘It looks red in certain lights.’

He stared at me, clearly puzzled by my vehemence at what had been an innocent remark. Sweat was coursing down my face from the heat of the kiln.

‘Shall I take your cloak, sir?’

I began to unclip it, but then realised I would have to remove my gloves, exposing the ring which bulged through them. ‘No, no. I am not staying.’

The cold air at the door revived me. He looked so wretched in his disappointment at losing me as a possible patron I tried to soften the blow by changing my tone. I was also intrigued. ‘You declared a pox on both the radicals and the Royalists – what do you believe in?’

In a whirl of movement he grabbed upwards as if he was catching a fly. He brought his closed fist down before me, opening it slowly. His palm was empty.

‘This, sir. This is what I believe in.’

I recoiled, thinking him mad.

‘Air, sir.’

‘Air?’

‘People think it is one of the four prime elements, earth, fire, air and water.’

‘So it is.’

‘What you see in front of you is a fluid of massy particles resting on invisible springs.’

I stared at him, then at his cupped, blackened palm, convinced now he was ripe for Bedlam. ‘I see nothing but your hand.’

‘Exactly, sir. But Mr B-Boyle has proved that air is a substance, pressing down on my hand.’

I began to understand. Boyle was the son of an Irish peer, seeking to set up a society to promote natural philosophy. Sam must have mistaken me for one of his friends. ‘This is the same Robert Boyle who has constructed – what is it? An air pump?’

His eyes lit up. ‘The same! The apparatus was made by his assistant Robert Hooke and I had the honour of blowing the glass.’

‘But … but – what has this to do with radicals and Royalists?’

He looked at me triumphantly, subservience gone. ‘They are the same.’

‘The same? How can that be?’

‘In that they both believe in argument. Arg-argument that goes nowhere. Then they fight. But what does that prove? Only that one is the better fighter.’

I began to warm to this strange youth again. ‘Mr Boyle knows a better way, does he?’

‘Indeed he does, sir, indeed he does,’ he cried with fervour. ‘Reason and experiment. Construct a theory, then prove it by an experiment others can repeat. People argued fr-fruitlessly whether air was essential to life. Mr Boyle put a bird in an air pump and drew out the air. The bird died. So did the argument.’

He put it beautifully, transformed by his belief, face flushed, eyes shining. Again, I saw myself standing there, pamphlets singing in my head. No, it was poetry at that age. I had forgotten every line of it, scarcely believed I could have wasted my time over it.

‘Sadly,’ I said, ‘the world is not a laboratory.’

‘It will be, sir,’ he assured me, ‘it will be.’

For a moment it was almost as if he was comforting me. He was talking nonsense, but it was infectious nonsense. We returned through the kitchen with its mildewed walls and scrap of rye bread. Out of the blue, in that tawdry room, with the acrid smell of burning coal drifting in from the shop, he became my son. Perhaps it was because the man he thought was his father had just died and I acutely felt his grief and need. Perhaps because I identified with his hopeless longings and dreams. Whatever the reason, what I had done for him before, I realised, had been out of guilt and duty. Now I felt such a tug of feeling for him I stopped abruptly. He was leading the way and turned to stare at me. I struggled to find the words to tell him, but they would not come.

He gave me a concerned look. ‘What is it, sir?’

‘Sam?’ Ellie called. ‘Is he still there?’

Ellie’s voice pulled me back to my senses. I muttered something and hurried through into the living room. That scrap of rye bread brought back the memories of gnawing hunger, of trying to stave it by almost breaking my teeth on those indigestible, black husks. As he showed me to the door I wrestled to find a way to help him. I could hardly order a laboratory of glass to be delivered to Queen Street. I could not offer him money. He was too proud and Ellie would be suspicious. Then I saw it and had the idea. It came fully formed, all in that moment.

The one piece of furniture that had survived from more prosperous days was an old oak dresser. In the centre of it was a glass goblet, standing out against the dark wood.

‘Did you make that?’

He dismissed it as a poor piece that was not worth selling. Once I picked it up I could see the flaws. The glass was misty and the base chipped. But the curved line was beautiful and a delicate design was engraved round the rim. I knew little about glass, but Anne did. For Highpoint she bought ruinously expensive Venetian glass as clear and sharp as this was dull. The Venetians kept the secret of the clarity of their glass as closely guarded as a miser keeps gold. Sam told me the goblet was one of a number of experiments from which he hoped to find the secret and break the Italian monopoly.

‘What is going on down there?’ Ellie cried. ‘Help me up …’ she muttered. There followed a series of creaks and sighs, then a heavy thump came from the ceiling above.

‘Make me a goblet,’ I said to Sam.

He blinked at me, then shook his head. ‘I cannot. I will not sell such poor workmanship.’

‘That is to your credit but you don’t understand. I want you to experiment.’

‘Experiment?’

‘Isn’t that what you believe in? Make me a goblet as clear as Venetian glass. Discover the secret.’

Sam seemed determined to be his own worst enemy. ‘B-but if I fail?’

‘You won’t fail. I believe in you. I will make the investment.’

‘Investment?’

He gave me a bewildered stare as if he had never heard of the word. There was the rasp of a door opening upstairs. Through the partly open door at the bottom of the stairs I glimpsed the wavering edge of a nightdress, the ferrule of a stick. Sam continued stubbornly to stare at me. The idea began to feel hopeless and risky. He was too ill-educated to understand it. Or was his look that of someone who knows there is something wrong somewhere, but can’t quite put a finger on it?

‘If you succeed I will take a share of the profits,’ I said.

His face cleared. He understood that all right. His lips pursed and his expression became unexpectedly shrewd. There was a touch of the street child he was when I first met him, working in his mother’s brothel. ‘One th-third to you, t-two thirds to me.’

We were like two men betting at a cock pit. His face was flushed, his eyes standing out by his hooked nose. ‘Sixty–forty,’ I said. ‘The majority to you.’

‘Done.’

I clapped him on the back and drew out two sovereigns. ‘My initial investment. There will be more when the contract is drawn up.’

He gaped at the coins, turning them over in his hands as if he could not believe they were real, dropping one and scurrying after it. I hurried away as I heard the steady thump of the stick on the stairs, followed by an expelled gasp of air as Ellie made her tortuous way downstairs.

‘Wait! I do not know your name, sir.’

‘Black. My solicitor at Lincoln’s Inn will contact you.’