Peter Ransley - The King’s List

‘Again?’

She rose, looking around her as if she had just woken in a strange place. In a spurt of light from the fire she caught sight of a smear of coal dust on her cheek. She dabbed at it with a cloth. Like an actor slipping from one role to another, with each touch her reserve seemed to return.

‘I am sorry, sir. I told you. I cannot, must not, have another child.’

I felt the stupid formality that had kept us apart for so long creeping back into my own voice. ‘If that is true, madam, I will of course abide by it. See Dr Latchford again. That is all I ask.’

She put down the cloth. ‘Very well.’

I found myself giving her a formal bow. Halfway through it I had a spurt of uncontrollable rage. She had Dr Latchford in her pocket. ‘And I would like another opinion. From a doctor of my choice.’

She rounded on me. ‘You have a son!’

‘Luke?’

It came out then. All I had been brooding over since Luke and Anne had been in London that winter. The burning of his face, I said, his scars, his damaged childhood, that was my fault. I had always accepted that. I had done everything I could to make amends. He had had the best doctors, tutors and, when I discovered horses were his passion and would draw out those sickly humours, some of the best stables in the country. There was nothing I would not do for him. He stood for everything I despised. Well, that was common enough. The son rebelling against the father. I bore even that. He was entitled to his opinions, obnoxious though I thought they were. How did he repay me? By joining that rebellion. I warned him against it – not because it was Royalist but because I knew it would be a disaster.

‘And you expected him to believe you?’

I retorted that she always took his side. She had made him into a milksop. I should have done what other fathers do and taken the whip to him.

That would have been better than ignoring him, she said acidly. Most of the time I was never there. When I was I had been cold, distant. What I had given him was money, when what he really wanted was a father.

And so on. I stopped listening, for it was at that precise moment the thought struck me. Why was I arguing when I had all the power I needed to do exactly what I wanted? No sooner were the words in my head than I spoke them. ‘I intend to change my will so Luke will not inherit.’

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.