Peter Ransley: The King’s List

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.

I began to bridle again. Another ruse! ‘When did Dr Latchford say you must not have any more children?’

‘After our third child was born.’

‘Third …?’

She nodded. I thought in spite of her matter-of-factness, the effect of the flux was still unbalancing her mind. The books I had been reading had spoken at length about the woman as a weaker vessel, whose unstable womb bred irrational fears.

‘Anne,’ I said gently. It was the first time I had used her name for months. ‘We have only had two children.’

She jumped up, saying the room was suffocating. I opened a window, but in spite of the chill air beads of sweat formed on her forehead.

‘There was a third child,’ she said.

A strange calm came over her. Although the room rapidly became colder she would not have the window closed. A thin breeze drew the sound of a street crier, selling poor jack, crabs and eels. Traders’ cries were growing longer and more persistent as indecision over who would take over the country went on. Trade was seizing up, jobs were scarce and there was less money for people to buy.

It was the year after the first war ended, she told me: 1647. ‘You were away,’ she said bitterly. ‘As usual.’

‘You mean the child was not mine?’

‘Do you think I would bear a child who was not a Stonehouse?’

I believed that. Oh, I believed that. I envied other men whose wives were unfaithful with someone of flesh and blood whom I could kill. But what could I do when she was in love with stone pillars?

‘But we did not sleep together.’

‘Oh, we did, sir. We did.’

It flooded back to me as if it was yesterday. It was she who was desperate then to have another child. A male child to find favour with Lord Stonehouse and increase my chances to inherit. When Luke was born, Lord Stonehouse furnished the house he had given us. When the second child turned out to be the little girl I loved passionately, Lord Stonehouse barely gave us a grunt of acknowledgement.

Anne loved me then. She wanted me in her bed then, although she was thin, ill, and had been warned by Dr Latchford to wait until she recovered. Oh, I remembered. World Upside Down – she went on top of me like a whore. She was still Anne then, not Lady Stonehouse. We laughed, joked, we talked not bantered, we looked into each other’s eyes. We were in love. Oh, I remembered that time.

She was quite still by the window. The fish crier had been joined by a fruit seller, a woman who called hot codlings with ‘pears-and-lemoooooons!’

Again I wondered if it was a fantasy. I had been back briefly during that summer and seen no sign of her being pregnant. But it was impossible to tell with the stays which ballooned out the dresses. A terrible thought occurred to me. The child had been a girl, another girl like little Liz, and she had got rid of her.

‘Another girl,’ I said harshly. ‘Is that what it was?’

She continued staring out of the window. Her voice was so soft I could scarcely hear her against the cries from the street.

‘A boy.’

Her voice broke. The breeze strengthened, whipping a gust of smoke from the fire. It billowed around us. She began coughing and I shut the window and led her back to her chair. The tea was cold but she would not let me call the maid. She took tiny sips until her coughing abated, staring into the fire. Rather than warm her, it seemed to make her colder, for however close she crept to it she kept shivering.

‘Was it the fire that caused it?’ she said. ‘The smoke? Or the riots? But there are always riots.’

She seemed to ask the question of the glowing, shifting coals, not me. For the first time it occurred to me that, as I had done, she had split herself into two halves. It was the Anne she had once been, a distant, remote figure whom Lady Stonehouse, in that impeccable voice, was questioning.

It was one of them, or all of them, she answered herself. The riots were the ones that broke up Parliament before Cromwell took over. I had been in the thick of it, while my own house was burning. She turned on me then. It was the old Anne, full of bitterness and contempt, but how I preferred that to Lady Stonehouse’s icy indifference.

‘You were never there,’ she kept whispering, as if the incantation expressed our whole story.

She told me it was not only Luke’s face that was damaged in the fire. She was seven months pregnant. Perhaps eight. She went into labour as she was trying to comfort Luke at her close friend Lucy’s house – the house where she would have been when the fire happened, if I had not forbidden her to go there because I suspected her old friend and mentor Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, of spying for the King.

Her face was flushed from the fire, but still she shivered. ‘He was perfect.’

‘A boy?’

‘A boy.’ Her voice was hollow, a mere wisp of sound.

‘But how could I not have known?’

I shook my head as she turned, the answer coming to me. Arriving late – always too late – that burning afternoon and believing them to be in the house, I had made a futile attempt to rescue them, sustaining injuries from which it took me weeks to recover.

‘He was perfect,’ she repeated.

‘Was he?’

She nodded, cradling her arms as if she was still holding him. The warmth of the fire enveloped us, shutting out the rest of the room. I bent over, picturing him as she described him. A mischievous smile crossed her face, a smile from years ago, young, eager, hopeful.

‘He was not so much of a Stonehouse.’

‘No?’

‘Well, the nose, of course. But he had your red hair …’

‘Not my terrible red hair!’

‘I swear it. He was like you … I kept thinking his eyes would open –’

Her voice choked off. I held her. She was like a small bird I once held who could not fly, still but constantly trembling. Gradually, in fits and starts, she told me how she would not release the child, refusing to believe he was dead. Only when Dr Latchford and Lucy told her she might lose Luke as well did she let him go. He was buried with Liz. Mr Tooley said prayers over him and christened him.

‘What did you call him?’

‘Thomas.’

The servant lighting the candles knocked but I told him to return later. She rubbed her elbows as if they had just borne the weight of a child. The coals had burned down to a dull flickering crimson. One fell on to the tiles.

‘Why did you not tell me any of this?’

She stared at the eddying shreds of smoke from the fallen coal. Only when I snatched it up and flung it into the fire did she answer. ‘Do you think you would have kept it a secret?’

‘A secret? Why should I keep it a secret?’

‘Exactly!’

Just as it had been then, she went from an unexpected closeness to sudden acrimonious bitterness.

‘You would never have kept it to yourself. When Lord Stonehouse heard, that would have been the end of it.’

Of course. With a burned child, frail as Luke was then, a stillbirth and no prospects, Lord Stonehouse would have written us off. A pity he didn’t, I thought. Now she did not want any more children because she had what she wanted. She was about to call the maid to see to the fire and the candles, but I stopped her. I wanted the darkness to continue, the closeness to return. I kissed her, gently, tentatively. Her eyes closed and for a while she leaned against me.

‘We could try again.’