The King’s List

‘Your name, sir?’

His colleague dug him in the ribs and pointed to the falcon ring on my finger. ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Thomas.’

He seized Martha roughly, although she made no resistance. Some of the crowd bowed their heads; others began singing. Her daughter Hannah stood staring, thumb in mouth, before flinging herself at her mother. I suspected Martha was a recent convert, for the girl had absorbed none of her piety. When a constable pulled her off, she bit him, momentarily freeing her mother, yelling that they would escape to Spital, beyond the walls. Incensed, the constables began to drag them both away. Martha broke down and began to struggle, pleading with the constables that her daughter had the flux, and would die in gaol. This was a fine show for the apprentices, who liked nothing better than seeing the rewards of sin – unless they were committing the sins themselves – and began jeering and applauding.

I cannot say why I acted as I did next, for it was quite out of character. Perhaps the girl crying that they would escape to Spital, like her dancing mother, brought back to me the time of my life I preferred to forget.

‘Leave them,’ I said.

The constables stopped, staring at me uncomprehendingly. The girl half-wrenched away, screaming as a constable twisted her arm behind her back.

‘Release them,’ I snapped.

The girl immediately turned to run. Her mother stopped her, giving me a bewildered look which changed into one of gratitude, tinged with the piety that so aggravated me. The apprentices, robbed of their prey, began to mutter rebelliously.

‘Arrest him,’ I said, pointing at the sailor, Stephen Butcher.

‘On what charge?’ said the constable whose hand had been bitten.

‘Incitement to lewdness.’

In Puritan England there was no distinction between sin and crime. Adultery had become a felony, and, just as Eve picked the apple, it was invariably the woman’s fault. The apprentices moved threateningly towards me, but one of them, who from his superior clothes looked like a lawyer’s clerk, cried: ‘We have a Solomon amongst us. He has arrested the whoremaster, not the whore.’

The apprentices switched in a moment from threatening me to applauding me. ‘The whoremaster not the whore,’ they chanted.

Hannah stood puzzled, her thumb in her mouth again. She whispered to her mother, who pointed to me. Hannah darted over to me. She looked as if she was about to hug me but the thought of her flux, and the stench that came from her, made me draw away in disgust and she made a strange genuflection, somewhere between a bow and a curtsey, before fleeing back to her mother.

Stephen Butcher went without resistance, but stopped as he passed me. The constables attempted to jerk him away, but they might as well have tried to move one of the ships he sailed in. His muscles bulged under his linen shirt as he anchored himself in front of me. There was a livid scar on his neck and one of his ears was twisted out of shape. For a moment I thought the smile on his face was a feint and he was about to strike me, but in a voice as gentle as melted butter he had a much more cunning blow to land.

‘Your voices are telling you different things. Listen to the right one.’

4

When Anne and Luke first came down from the country we had a variety of dinner guests, chosen to avoid politics: lawyers, doctors, City merchants and the like. Luke was perfectly mannered and scrupulously polite, but remained at a distance. At first Anne did her best. She sparkled and drew the best out of me. But whereas her table at Highpoint was the most sought after in the county, full of wit and life, this was hard work.

Everyone knew Luke was there under duress. It was impossible to ignore and equally impossible to talk about it without the risk of an explosion or a penetrating silence. Gradually Anne’s sparkle died and she became as mechanical as Luke. I felt that, with her growing desire to return to Highpoint, tacitly she was taking his side, but would not give up. More and more guests found excuses not to come; others were reluctant to go out as the nights drew in and the disturbances increased.

Often the table was reduced to the three of us, as it was on the evening after the confrontation with Sir Lewis Challoner. Conversation ran out during the grouse soup, with stewed carp, ox tongues, fricassee of rabbits, lobsters, a choice lamprey pie, tarts and sweetmeats to come. I ate and drank well, both to cover the growing silences and because, although out of office, with Thurloe I was keeping my hand in, preparing – perhaps plotting would be a better word – for the next government. I had fallen into the bad habit of taking documents to the table, as I did when I lived alone. I finished my soup and began to glance through the documents.

Anne, who had scarcely had a mouthful of soup, dropped her spoon. A servant scuttled from the wall to give her another. She gripped it as if she was about to fling it at me. ‘I cannot stand this place!’

She stared directly at me, as if she meant it was me she could not stand. The servants were as still as the hunters woven into the tapestry behind them. Luke gazed at the piece of lamprey pie embedded on his fork. It was so quiet I could hear a candle gutter, and the rustle of silk as her bodice rose and fell. Side ringlets of her hair, normally carefully arranged, were in disarray. Among them a bead of sweat gleamed. Disconcertingly, at that moment, I wanted her. It was extraordinary how familiarity had stopped me seeing how young she still looked. She had avoided the constant ravages of childbirth that aged most women at thirty. The guttering candle went out, snatching away the ringlets and the tightly laced bodice, sketching there the lines of the haughty, scornful, but in some strange way vulnerable, girl I had first met.

A servant sprang to replace the candle. With it came back the ringlets, the sumptuous dark green of her dress and the measured voice of Lady Stonehouse.

‘I mean, sir, it is so dark and gloomy.’

I picked up her manner with relief, mingled with a lingering regret. ‘We are not spending money on Highpoint, madam. Why not employ your talents here?’

She took a sip of soup. ‘He would not approve.’

She indicated another portrait of Lord Stonehouse, which hung over our proceedings. When I dined alone, if I noticed him at all, I always saw him as a stern but comforting presence for, in spite of our differences, we were alike in one thing: we both hated extremes, and struggled to keep things together rather than let them fall apart.

‘He is not here to stop you.’

‘His ghost is.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘He haunts the place. He does not want us here. When his wife died he spent all his time here. As you do.’

She began calmly, almost flippantly, but again her voice shook and the implication of what she had said only seemed to strike her when she had spoken. She dabbed her lips, her hands trembling, said she was out of sorts and begged to be excused. Luke and I finished our meal in silence. I went up to her apartment to enquire after her. Her maid, Agnes, told me she was not well and had retired for the night. Agnes had come from Highpoint and I sensed her disapproval as she put away Anne’s dress. The crackle and sheen of the silk, black then sharp green as it caught the light, aroused me again. I took a step towards her room. The maid turned to me enquiringly. I felt my cheeks burning like a schoolboy as I brought out some stilted phrase about wishing her ladyship a good night, and almost walked into a chair on the way out. Her ladyship! For the first time it struck me that what had kept us together had also kept us apart.

I tried to work. I had a report for Thurloe on the City I must finish. Together with the generals, money would decide the next government. Everything was in the balance. I knew the hidden vices of every alderman in the City: who might be bought, sold or persuaded. But every time I began writing, the crackle of the paper brought back the lustre and sheen of her dress. Her ladyship! She was a printer’s daughter from Farringdon. I saw the rain gleam again on the twisting rump of the Quaker woman. That was how it had started. Of course. A good whore was all I needed. I had not been to Southwark for a long time.

The lantern clock in the hall showed midnight. Was it really that time? It was too late and too dangerous. And the servants would know. They knew, or sensed, everything. Somehow I could not bear it reaching her. The indecision raged around in my head. Normally I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but that night I slept little.

Up late, stupefied from lack of sleep, I enquired after her again. She was still indisposed. Indisposed! Far from going away, my sudden, inexplicable desire for her had grown during the night. It was absurd, laughable, to have a wife and not have her if I chose. I pushed past the maid. As well as brightening the place, she had altered the layout of the rooms. I found myself in the changing room next to the bedroom. It was full of the smell of her, herbs which I fleetingly recognised, like lavender and sage, intensified by some aromatic oil. A shift of voluminous white linen lay ready to be stepped into. Crimson-faced, the maid snatched up a linen cloth. The sharp, acrid odour reached me before I caught sight of the blood staining it. The maid thrust it among the dirty washing.

It was the time of her flux, her flowers as the delicate put it. I turned away, muttering apologies, covering my nose. I did not, like the uneducated, believe that the woman’s flux turned wine sour and sugar black; but, being nature’s device to upset her humours, it might affect mine.

On the landing I saw Luke, who was going in to see her, and told him she was still not well. ‘She is missing Highpoint, sir,’ he said. ‘As am I.’

For a moment I was tempted. Highpoint was probably safer than London. I longed for the even tenor of what had been virtually my bachelor life. I could concentrate my energies on trying to influence what the next government would be. But I saw the hope and expectation in Luke’s face and dismissed the thought. He might get up to anything near Oxford with his Royalist friends. I told him curtly it was better if we stayed together.

He bowed his head. ‘Then can I go out alone, sir?’

‘If I have your assurance that you will have nothing more to do with the Sealed Knot.’

He tightened his lips stubbornly. ‘Then can I have a guard other than Scogman?’

‘He is not your guard. He is your companion.’

‘He is not respectful, sir.’

‘Enough! You will do as he says.’

Nevertheless, a day or two later, I told Scogman to be more respectful. He looked astonished and said no one could possibly give Luke more respect. ‘Even when I’m insulted I turns the other cheek.’

‘He insults you?’

‘He calls me a bilker and a leather-mouthed prig.’

I was shocked that Luke knew such thieves’ cant, let alone used it. Perhaps he picked it up in his short stay in prison. I took a guilty pleasure in enjoying the thought that Luke might be less of a gentleman than he appeared. The fact that there was some truth in Luke’s allegation started to bring a smile to my lips, but Scogman was displaying such righteous indignation I bit my cheeks and looked at him sternly.

‘A bilker. When was this?’

‘At the Moor in Watling Street. He told me to wait outside, sir, while he had a coffee. When I told him I would follow him casual-like, as if we did not know one another, he said I was like a pair of frigging darbies round his ankles.’

This time I could not prevent a smile coming on my face. The Moor Coffee House was frequented not by Royalists but by shipping merchants and posted news of ships. There was a reason for Luke to go in there. The Highpoint estate owned part of a ship and Luke had shown an interest in it.

‘Let him go in there.’

‘Alone?’

‘You are always telling me you cannot stand the coffee there.’

‘Foul-smelling Turkish piss.’

‘Wait for him in the alehouse next door then. They could do with some of the business they’re losing to the coffee houses.’

As a scout in the army Scogman had sensed trouble like a rat smelling a ferret. He had that look now, his lips tightening belligerently. ‘Very good, sir. But he’s up to something.’

It was a little later when I asked Agnes about Anne’s condition that the thought occurred to me. Curious that I had been so repelled by the sight of that bloodstained linen pad, it had never occurred to me. If she was still bleeding, she could bear a child.

5

I was determined to be as formal in my approach as she was. I even considered calling her into my study. After all, was not having a child a business like any other? A business at which I had singularly failed? Luke was weak, a milksop who ran to his mother, easily led by others. Scogman believed a good flogging was the solution but it had never worked for me. I believed with Thomas More that a whip should have the violence of a peacock’s tail. In any case it was too late. When he was building the New Model Army Cromwell used to tell me that selection was more important than training. You could not train damaged goods.

I would have to start again. In the end I did not call her into my study. It would have been unheard of. To my knowledge no woman had ever been in that room, save the maid who cleaned it. Lord Stonehouse frowned from his picture above the fire at the thought of it. It was curious that, since she had remarked on it, I saw him everywhere: portraits in little-used rooms, one in the library I had never noticed before. There were no pictures of me. It was as though I was a temporary resident. She said so at one of our stilted dinners.

Strange, also, how dark the place had become since she had mentioned it. I noticed as never before how the tapestries smelt of soot and how grey the walls were in contrast to her apartments, where I had made an appointment to see her. It was as dark as evening in the corridors, but became afternoon in her drawing room. I had not seen her since she was indisposed, and was struck dumb at the sight of her.

She wore dark blue silk which was almost black, white lace and a single diamond in her hair. Her skin was translucent and paler than the lace. She had ordered tea unless I preferred coffee or chocolate? There was a selection of sweetmeats which I remembered from Highpoint, but which never appeared at Queen Street, including small sugar cakes of which I was inordinately fond. My hand went out to them but I withdrew it. Business first.

The words I had prepared flew out of my head. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me, saying it was kind of me to visit her. Or was there some kind of edge to it, as if I had just arrived from a distant town?

‘Should a husband not visit his wife, madam?’

It was what I called Highpoint language, the sort of social glue that had kept us together for so long, as comfortable as slipping into an easy chair. I was sorely tempted to do so. After all, these things took time, like an angler catching a fish.

‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘But you have not been treating me like a wife, sir.’

She could only mean one thing, surely. I sat painfully upright, her words, accompanied by that smile, which was like a distant memory, giving me such an instant arousal I had not had for years. I shifted uncomfortably, seeing for the first time the virtue of Luke’s fashionably wide new britches. I swallowed. I could not get rid of the wretchedly light Highpoint tone with its accompanied fixed smile.

‘That, that is precisely what I have come to amend, madam.’ The pain from my tight britches was so excruciating I had to walk about. ‘I wish to visit you.’

She was picking up her bowl of tea. ‘But you are visiting – oh. I see.’ Tea spilled on her dress. I pulled out my handkerchief but Agnes appeared from nowhere with a cloth. When she had gone and fresh tea was poured Anne went to pick up her bowl, but did not trust her shaking hand. Her cheeks had coloured but when the blood retreated it only emphasised how pale she was. She looked at me directly, a thin blue vein at the side of her forehead pulsing.

‘When I said treating me like a wife, I meant, sir, you have shown little concern for me while I have been ill.’

‘I’m sorry. I did not realise you were so ill.’

‘Were you not told?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I was, but …’ What was the use? Why did I not say what I wanted, as other men did? Why did she always put me on the wrong foot? She always had from the very beginning! I wished I could go back and start again with that welcoming smile. No, no. That was contrived. She played this game far better than I ever could. All this, as I paced about on the pretext of looking at her pictures which she must have brought from Highpoint, for they were all from the King’s Collection. Whereas the pictures in Queen Street were blurred with dust and dirt, these were as bright as if painted yesterday. One I could not take my eyes off was an enigmatic picture of a woman, fully clothed, while another, naked apart from a stole which had drifted over her sex, leaned over her. A puckish-faced child was absorbed in his own play on the stone bench between them.

‘Naturally, I will prepare myself,’ she said. ‘You only have to tell me when.’

When? I could have taken her there and then. She was as calm and inscrutable as the clothed woman on the stone bench. That made her even more maddening. Her hand had stopped shaking and she was taking a sip of tea, as if we were discussing an alteration to the east front at Highpoint, which always troubled her. But was that not what I wanted, what I had planned? A business transaction? The object was not the treacherous will o’ the wisp of desire, but the solid certainty of having a child, who would be different. My child, not hers.

I bowed. ‘Thank you.’

The worst was over. The rest would happen at night. Agnes would be instructed, the door left open. Wait, wait, wait. I stared at the picture. The clothed woman seemed to have a mocking smile on her face. Prepare herself? What did she mean by that? I remembered when Highpoint had first taken over her life. We were still together then. We even talked about love. Did I really say something inane like I loved her when I first saw her, when I did not hate her for mocking my large, bare feet? She certainly said that she fell in love with me when she discovered I had greater prospects than putting boots on my ugly feet. She said it as a joke, but I began to believe it to be true when her body became as cold as the stone bench I was staring at. At the time of that first move to Highpoint I had wanted a child, a child brought up in peace, which I thought would bring us together. One never came. That was when she became wedded to Highpoint and I to the power I had just lost.

My throat was so dry the words came out with a hollow, parched ring. ‘When you say prepare yourself –’

She must have signalled for Agnes, who, when I turned, was staring at me as if I was about to suggest some bestial act. Her mistress dismissed her with an agitated gesture. For the first time she looked at a loss.

‘I want to have another child.’

‘You do.’

Her maid must have been listening, they always were, but I no longer cared. This was what other men and women took for granted. Scogman was astonished I felt I had to discuss it. Have her and be done with it, was his philosophy. The last thing he wanted was a child. If one appeared, he disappeared.

‘Another child. Yes. So I would be grateful if you –’ I strode across to a door which led to the bedroom and maid’s room and pulled it open. Agnes was bent so close to the door she fell towards me, only just stopping herself. She gaped up at me open-mouthed before scurrying into her room and slamming the door. ‘Grateful if you and your maid took no steps to prevent it.’

The blue vein in her forehead thudded as if to burst out of her skin. She tried to fish out a leaf floating in her tea. She kept missing it. It seemed the most important thing in the world to catch that leaf. When she had done so, she stared at it and said in a voice so low I had to bend to hear her: ‘I am afraid it is not possible for me to have another child.’

‘It is perfectly possible. You are still bleeding.’

She gave me a shocked look of fear and disgust. I was in the uncharted territory of Secreta Mulierum – women’s secrets. I had become so obsessed with having another child that for the first time in years I had not worked from early morning to night. I had cancelled my appointments with the City aldermen I had promised to persuade or cajole. I had not even seen John Thurloe. Why should I? He was no longer First Secretary of State and I was no longer in power with him. The state would right itself without us. A general would shoulder his way through the pack to replace Cromwell. Then we would be needed. Instead I read every book on reproduction I could lay my hands on, from old texts which held women to be leaky vessels whose menstrual blood poisoned children and gave men leprosy when they had sex with them, to more modern texts which criticised the secret world of women delivering women where an impatient midwife in a slow labour might yank off a baby’s hand or foot.

I interrupted my reading only when I realised that, from the number of days which had passed since the bleeding I had seen, my wife was, as one account put it, at the apex of her fertility.

She opened the door as if about to follow the maid, then slammed it shut, turning on me. ‘No gentleman would speak of such things.’

‘As you used to say often enough, I am no gentleman.’ I almost retorted that she was no lady, but that was the problem. She was. She was far more of a lady than most women of aristocratic lineage. She was a lady from her exquisitely small feet to the sculptured bones of her face. She was accepted by Royalists as such without question, whereas I, who had aristocratic blood, was dismissed by them as an upstart.

She told me she could not bear having another child. At least that was how I heard it. Her old friend and mentor, Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, who had no children, wrote pamphlets against late childbearing, which, she declared, ruined a woman’s figure and her health.

I was having no more of this. ‘It is your duty to bear one,’ I said.

She clenched her hands, colour flooding her cheeks. ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t mean I don’t want one. I can’t have any more –’

Tears choked her words. We had been so far apart for so long that I thought it was an act. But only for a moment. She flung her hands over her face. She could not stand tears, her own least of all. She hated losing her composure but walked about as if she had lost her senses, knocking into a chair. I caught it and put my arm round her.

‘Please don’t touch me.’

She groped at her chair as if fearing it was insubstantial before sitting heavily, taking in air with great rasping gulps.

‘I’ll get the maid.’

She shook her head violently. A blue tint from her eyelids was smeared down one cheek. Apart from that, the colour had fled her face again and she was deathly pale.

‘Doctor –’ She began to cough.

‘Get a doctor?’

‘No!’

Nevertheless I determined to get one and picked up the bell to summon Agnes, but that seemed to distress her more. She pointed to the tea. I held out the bowl. Her hands were shaking so much she could not take it but breathed in the infusion. Gradually the gasping subsided and her breathing returned to normal. She took a sip, then a few more until her eyes began to close and the bowl tilted in her hands. I took it from her. The room was hot, the fire blazing, and I thought she was falling asleep. Then something between a sigh and a shudder ran through her body.

‘Dr Latchford said I must not have any more children.’

‘When did he say that?’

She jerked up in her chair and stared at me, as if I was a stranger who had just walked into the room. ‘I am sorry, sir. I … have not been myself.’ Her dress had ridden up, showing her ankle and crumpled shift. She smoothed them down and, apart from the blue smear on her cheek, looked as composed as ever.