Peter Ransley - The King’s List

There I could visit him without any risk of seeing Ellie. He was kept busy making flasks and bottles where the quality of the glass did not matter.

He made no progress at all that I could see on the project I had invested in. At first I did not care. I loved his eagerness, his hope, his despair, his determination, his belief. He was the return on my investment, not the project for a brilliantly clear glass which seemed like the search for the philosopher’s stone.

Nevertheless, the more each firing failed, the more I was drawn into it. He tried different sands, different coals, higher and higher temperatures. Some days I got as excited as he did, sweating before the blistering heat of the kiln, waiting for the glass to form, spellbound as he blew and twirled the white-hot bubble, pacing up and down while waiting for it to cool. I was more optimistic than he was. It was better, I told him. I was sure it was clearer.

‘Look!’ I said.

‘Compare,’ he replied gloomily.

Compare it with the previous firings. Crucially, with the piece of Venetian glass he kept as a standard. I had to admit it was as foggy as ever.

‘You see like a politician, sir,’ he said sourly.

I reacted with some severity to his insolence, which he immediately apologised for; but I was secretly proud of him. Inside all that deference he was his own man. I had no inclination to acknowledge him as my son. It was too complicated. It might harm or even destroy our relationship; from birth I had had nothing but bitter experiences, both as son and as father. I enjoyed the secrecy. I had forgotten the pleasure of real work; of getting my hands dirty. I donned a smock in Clerkenwell and became Tom Neave; I hung it up, put on my cloak and rode back to Queen Street as Sir Thomas. My humours were perfectly in balance again.

I was affected in other ways. Living behind my desk or in meetings had removed me from the world where I had been brought up. Clerkenwell brought me back in touch with it. When the case came against the Quaker, Stephen Butcher, I went to see him in Newgate. I found that his main ambition was not to sing here, but in the New World. As a sailor, he was in a position to organise it. I withdrew my case against him and, with Highpoint money, funded his expedition, on the premise that it was both a more Christian and more effective way to clear the streets.

Mr Pepys not only bought me a large chop and a bottle of the best claret to thank me for Lord Montague vegetating in the country and not in the Tower. Knowing my inclinations, he offered to introduce me to a very pretty widow in straitened circumstances. To his surprise, and in a certain degree to mine, I refused, on the grounds that I was far too busy.

‘I thought you were out of office, sir.’

‘I have various projects.’ I waved an airy hand, as if they were affairs of state.

‘Are you, er … already accommodated?’

I shook my head and concentrated on my chop. He picked a shred of meat from his teeth, staring at me thoughtfully. ‘I do believe you are in love, sir.’

I laughed, spluttering wine and almost choking on my chop. ‘What absolute nonsense, Pepys!’

Obsession was the word I would have chosen. It was the third and most important of my projects. I wanted no diversion from the task in hand. I was determined to have Anne, and on my own terms. I made no more approaches. I was assiduous to her at supper. I took no more correspondence to table. I even took an interest in Luke’s clothes, asking for his advice on the correct width of britches that season. He looked at me with deep suspicion of my motives, but was far too stiff and polite to question them.

It was when I sold land at Highpoint for Clerkenwell that Anne asked to see me in private. Because the transaction was done by my lawyer, Christopher Newton, she was convinced I had changed my will. I told her the truth. I needed the money. It was clear she did not believe me. Up to that moment I’d had no idea what I was doing, except that I was enjoying myself hugely: I had forgotten what enjoyment was.

It was during that cold, acrimonious conversation with her that it came to me. I would divide everything between my two sons. Not only would it be fair and equable, but it would divide up Highpoint. I would sell it piecemeal. It was a destructive, malign force. From the moment I was born it had nearly killed me. It had destroyed any chance of a relationship between me and my father, corroded that between me and my wife. I decided I would destroy it.

‘I have a right to know if you change your will, sir.’

‘The will is in my gift,’ I said in my new, mild tone which infuriated her.

We met on neutral ground, in the reception room on the ground floor, where I sometimes took a glass of port or sack after supper. There were no prying servants from either side, only satyrs chasing nymphs endlessly round the oval ceiling. She was more than usually modestly dressed, her low neckline covered by a gorget, the opening in her long dress showing only a touch of underskirt. She wore no jewellery and, so far as I could discern, no perfume.

‘In your gift to leave to Luke,’ she said.

‘He will be provided for.’

‘Provided for? What does that mean? You are punishing him for his beliefs?’

‘No. He can love his precious King to his heart’s content. But when he lies to me and gets involved in plots behind my back, then I shall punish him.’

She would not give up. She said Luke had made no undertaking not to take part in the uprising and accused me of turning him into a Royalist because I had set myself against him from the beginning. I had ignored him – when I was ever there to see him – stopped him from becoming a soldier, which he dreamed of –

‘To protect him. I know what soldiers are like. With his scarred face, his mannerisms –’

‘You know what soldiers are like? Yes,’ she cried bitterly. ‘Do you know what he is like? You made him feel weak. Hopeless. That is why he became a Royalist. Because they would accept him as he is. As he wants to be.’

I was incredulous. ‘ I turned him into a Royalist? If anyone did that it’s you. You’ve become more a Royalist than anyone who was born one.’

‘Do you think I want the King back? I want another Cromwell. Order. But if the King returns …’

‘Long live the King? I don’t have that option.’

It was odd. Very curious. We had never discussed it. I had never wanted Highpoint. In fact I had hated the very idea of it. But Anne’s obsession for it had driven her to the point of madness. She would not eat and scarcely drank unless the liquid was forced down her. She was skin and bone that day twelve years ago when Cromwell’s son-in-law, Ireton, called. He was desperate to get people of any stature to sign the King’s death warrant. The staunchest Parliamentarians suddenly had urgent business in their country estates, or were too indisposed to pick up a pen. Ireton offered me the Stonehouse estate in return for signing the death warrant. It was almost as bald as that.

Anne had come in. It was the first time she had left her bed since her illness. I could see her thin, wasted figure, hear her cracked voice before she collapsed in my arms.

‘Mr Ireton … it is good of you to come at last.’

I signed. That was the day I became Sir Thomas Stonehouse. Had I really been so much, so despairingly, in love with her?

For the first time, as we stared in silence at one another across the reception room, we acknowledged, without saying a word, that I might have signed my own death warrant.

In the hall there was the rattle of plates being taken from the dining room. I stared up at the ceiling where, in the candle-lit shadows, even the satyrs seemed to have stopped chasing the nymphs. The raised voice of the ostler passed, complaining to someone about the shortage of fodder for the horses. Everything was short and would get shorter until a new government was formed. If there was a tax strike, as the City threatened, everything would stop altogether.