Peter Ransley: The King’s List

‘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.’

From the beginning, as soon as I recovered my senses in Queen Street, it seemed a hopeless project. The Venetians guarded their secrets well. I wrote to one of my spies in Venice, offering a reward for information on the process. For the first time the flow of money from Queen Street to Highpoint was reversed. I starved it of the income from the estate’s London properties which were now substantial. After a fire at Half Moon Court and complaints from neighbours, I invested in a new kiln and laboratory in Clerkenwell.