Peter Ransley: The King’s List

‘Could it happen?’ she asked. ‘The King?’

Somewhere a door banged, making both of us jump. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What does Thurloe think?’

I did not answer, again because I did not know. She thought I was seeing him every week, or going to the City to sound out the aldermen who mattered. I resolved that the next day I would see Thurloe. The trouble was once I got involved, it would take over the whole of my life, every waking moment and half my sleep. I would have to do it, I thought. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow Sam had a new silica mix for the firing for which he had the highest hopes. Once I had not turned up and he thought I had abandoned the project. I remembered the look on his face. I could not bear that.

‘If there is any way I can help …’

The words came out of her like drawn teeth. But she meant them. Thurloe distrusted her but recognised the value of her contacts and her political flair, and if I asked her to do so, in spite of the gulf between us, she would work tirelessly at it.

‘Thank you.’

I could think of nothing more to say. We continued to sit there, exhausted by argument. It felt as though we had packed twelve years of differences, quarrels and bitter resentments into one short hour. Eventually she spoke.

‘Suppose Luke does give you the undertaking not to have anything more to do with the Sealed Knot?’

She looked at the floor, twisting her hands nervously. There was no sign of that starched remoteness. She had come round. She must have talked to him. I felt a leap of gratitude. If he really had made that promise, she had done more than I ever could.

‘I will be very glad to hear what Luke has to say,’ I said warmly.

She touched the bell for the servant to clear away. As she rose, I stood up awkwardly with her. For a moment we were like two people who had never met before. She raised her head and gave me a half-smile. ‘Thank you.’

I was wrong that she was not wearing perfume. There was the barest trace of it in the air as I followed her to the door. It was not the usual stronger scent she wore now, but the lighter, transient, barely discernible hint of rosemary and lavender she used when she was younger. A pad bearing it dropped from her bodice but she did not appear to notice. My heart beat painfully. When she had been desperate for a child she had not been averse to the old whore’s trick of making such a signal.

At the door I touched her arm. As the servant’s footsteps came towards the door, she turned and murmured hurriedly, ‘I have seen Dr Latchford. It is as I feared, sir. He has warned me strongly against having another child.’

I took the pad from her bodice to my room, like a callow youth who keeps a flower his mistress has worn, long after the petals have paled and the leaves withered. The scent seemed to increase until it filled the room. My need was so great, so urgent, it overwhelmed a growing unease I could not put my finger on. I paced about until I heard the sliding of bolts and locking of doors and the house grew quiet, then slipped along the silent corridors, dim with night candles, and up the stairs towards her apartment.

I stopped. Suppose she was not expecting me? Of course she was! I knew the signs, I knew the rules of this particular game only too well.

The night porter’s face swam in front of me, a mixture of deference and lewdness that almost, not quite, became a wink. ‘Oh. Good night, sir.’

I grunted something and waited until he was out of sight. The door to her apartment was slightly open, a candle still burning in the anteroom. When I crept away, Agnes would snuff it out. I took a step and stopped as the source of my unease came to me. Of course. Only overwhelming desire had prevented me from seeing something so obvious.

She was doing what she had always done: a deal. Do not change your will. Leave everything to Luke and, in exchange, I give you my bed. Not her. Her bed. It was all there in the last words she said. ‘It was as I feared, sir. Dr Latchford has warned me against having another child.’ Was that true? I doubted it. She had Latchford in her pocket. This was a return to Lady Stonehouse, dutiful and submissive.

Well, why should I care? I had what I wanted. Another child. Sam. I could have her. Use her. Cheaper and much more convenient than the widow Mr Pepys offered me. I took another step. The door to the bedroom was open. I smelt the rosemary and lavender, intensified from the heat of her body.

I turned and went out of the apartment, leaning against the wall, shutting my eyes. I could not bear it. I wanted her, not her pretence. Puritans condemned pleasure in the act. They even expunged from the marriage service ‘with my body I thee worship’. They averted their eyes from their wives’ bodies. Perhaps that is why they said I was born of the Devil. I wanted to see her. I wanted her, body and soul, not this hasty coupling like a whore in a dark alley.

It came back to me so sharply I covered my face in my hands. That time when, whatever our differences, we were so much in love we were one flesh; the time of hope, the time of bearing children. Of course it was stupid to expect it to last; it had to cool and grow old, but with the long war it had been snatched away before its time, winter coming sharp into summer, with no gentle, preparatory autumn in between.

A light shone into my face. The night porter. There was no doubt now about the conspiratorial wink on his face, sharing what he must have thought was my satisfaction on the way back. ‘Still up, sir?’

‘You can see I’m still bloody well up, man! I can’t sleep!’

But I did sleep, a strange restless sleep, disturbed with dreams in which there was a light shining in my face, which became the moon glimmering into the garret in Half Moon Court, where I was an apprentice searching for something I had lost. What made me even more frantic was that I had forgotten what I was looking for. It turned out to be the small pad, dipped in rosemary water, which Miss Black used to keep tucked in her bodice. Strange, that even in my dream, I could not call her Anne. I had found a pad on the stair one day and kept it under my pillow, in the hope that, if I found the right magic spell, she would fall in love with me. I awoke exhausted, my nightshirt wet, disgusted with myself. That had not happened since I was a callow youth.

I took no breakfast, determined to be out early and go to Clerkenwell. Sam would already have the bellows going on the kiln, which had slumbered overnight. My spirits revived. There was nothing like an early ride, breath steaming, beating together my frozen hands as the horse was saddled, stamping on the cobbles, eager to go.

Sam would have a meat pie kept hot by the kiln and a jug of small beer. A laboratory, I was discovering, was not like other worlds. Natural philosophers like Boyle worked with their servants among the glass tubing and air pumps. We were all slaves to the secrets of nature, of sand melting and fusing, turning into a shimmering glass which one day, Sam assured me, would be so clear when you looked through it, you would not know it was there.

I was riding out when Mr Cole shouted after me. I had forgotten to sign for a sale of more Highpoint property. While I was sealing the papers, Mr Cole told me that Mr Luke was waiting in the reception room in the hope of seeing me. I was incredulous, not so much that he wanted to see me, for surely his mother had put him up to this, but that he was out of bed. Luke scarcely ever showed his face before noon. I retorted that he would have to wait, then reined in my horse again. It was churlish of me not to see him for a few minutes. And she would make capital out of me if I did not.

I saw him in my study. As usual, he stood to attention like the soldier he wanted to be, toeing the line in the carpet that Stonehouse sons had toed before their fathers in memoriam. I hated that but it was what he expected, what he would subject his son to, if he ever had one.