Peter Ransley - The King’s List

The lantern clock in the hall showed midnight. Was it really that time? It was too late and too dangerous. And the servants would know. They knew, or sensed, everything. Somehow I could not bear it reaching her. The indecision raged around in my head. Normally I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but that night I slept little.

Up late, stupefied from lack of sleep, I enquired after her again. She was still indisposed. Indisposed! Far from going away, my sudden, inexplicable desire for her had grown during the night. It was absurd, laughable, to have a wife and not have her if I chose. I pushed past the maid. As well as brightening the place, she had altered the layout of the rooms. I found myself in the changing room next to the bedroom. It was full of the smell of her, herbs which I fleetingly recognised, like lavender and sage, intensified by some aromatic oil. A shift of voluminous white linen lay ready to be stepped into. Crimson-faced, the maid snatched up a linen cloth. The sharp, acrid odour reached me before I caught sight of the blood staining it. The maid thrust it among the dirty washing.

It was the time of her flux, her flowers as the delicate put it. I turned away, muttering apologies, covering my nose. I did not, like the uneducated, believe that the woman’s flux turned wine sour and sugar black; but, being nature’s device to upset her humours, it might affect mine.

On the landing I saw Luke, who was going in to see her, and told him she was still not well. ‘She is missing Highpoint, sir,’ he said. ‘As am I.’

For a moment I was tempted. Highpoint was probably safer than London. I longed for the even tenor of what had been virtually my bachelor life. I could concentrate my energies on trying to influence what the next government would be. But I saw the hope and expectation in Luke’s face and dismissed the thought. He might get up to anything near Oxford with his Royalist friends. I told him curtly it was better if we stayed together.

He bowed his head. ‘Then can I go out alone, sir?’

‘If I have your assurance that you will have nothing more to do with the Sealed Knot.’

He tightened his lips stubbornly. ‘Then can I have a guard other than Scogman?’

‘He is not your guard. He is your companion.’

‘He is not respectful, sir.’

‘Enough! You will do as he says.’

Nevertheless, a day or two later, I told Scogman to be more respectful. He looked astonished and said no one could possibly give Luke more respect. ‘Even when I’m insulted I turns the other cheek.’

‘He insults you?’

‘He calls me a bilker and a leather-mouthed prig.’

I was shocked that Luke knew such thieves’ cant, let alone used it. Perhaps he picked it up in his short stay in prison. I took a guilty pleasure in enjoying the thought that Luke might be less of a gentleman than he appeared. The fact that there was some truth in Luke’s allegation started to bring a smile to my lips, but Scogman was displaying such righteous indignation I bit my cheeks and looked at him sternly.

‘A bilker. When was this?’

‘At the Moor in Watling Street. He told me to wait outside, sir, while he had a coffee. When I told him I would follow him casual-like, as if we did not know one another, he said I was like a pair of frigging darbies round his ankles.’

This time I could not prevent a smile coming on my face. The Moor Coffee House was frequented not by Royalists but by shipping merchants and posted news of ships. There was a reason for Luke to go in there. The Highpoint estate owned part of a ship and Luke had shown an interest in it.

‘Let him go in there.’

‘Alone?’

‘You are always telling me you cannot stand the coffee there.’

‘Foul-smelling Turkish piss.’

‘Wait for him in the alehouse next door then. They could do with some of the business they’re losing to the coffee houses.’

As a scout in the army Scogman had sensed trouble like a rat smelling a ferret. He had that look now, his lips tightening belligerently. ‘Very good, sir. But he’s up to something.’

It was a little later when I asked Agnes about Anne’s condition that the thought occurred to me. Curious that I had been so repelled by the sight of that bloodstained linen pad, it had never occurred to me. If she was still bleeding, she could bear a child.

I was determined to be as formal in my approach as she was. I even considered calling her into my study. After all, was not having a child a business like any other? A business at which I had singularly failed? Luke was weak, a milksop who ran to his mother, easily led by others. Scogman believed a good flogging was the solution but it had never worked for me. I believed with Thomas More that a whip should have the violence of a peacock’s tail. In any case it was too late. When he was building the New Model Army Cromwell used to tell me that selection was more important than training. You could not train damaged goods.

I would have to start again. In the end I did not call her into my study. It would have been unheard of. To my knowledge no woman had ever been in that room, save the maid who cleaned it. Lord Stonehouse frowned from his picture above the fire at the thought of it. It was curious that, since she had remarked on it, I saw him everywhere: portraits in little-used rooms, one in the library I had never noticed before. There were no pictures of me. It was as though I was a temporary resident. She said so at one of our stilted dinners.

Strange, also, how dark the place had become since she had mentioned it. I noticed as never before how the tapestries smelt of soot and how grey the walls were in contrast to her apartments, where I had made an appointment to see her. It was as dark as evening in the corridors, but became afternoon in her drawing room. I had not seen her since she was indisposed, and was struck dumb at the sight of her.

She wore dark blue silk which was almost black, white lace and a single diamond in her hair. Her skin was translucent and paler than the lace. She had ordered tea unless I preferred coffee or chocolate? There was a selection of sweetmeats which I remembered from Highpoint, but which never appeared at Queen Street, including small sugar cakes of which I was inordinately fond. My hand went out to them but I withdrew it. Business first.

The words I had prepared flew out of my head. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me, saying it was kind of me to visit her. Or was there some kind of edge to it, as if I had just arrived from a distant town?

‘Should a husband not visit his wife, madam?’

It was what I called Highpoint language, the sort of social glue that had kept us together for so long, as comfortable as slipping into an easy chair. I was sorely tempted to do so. After all, these things took time, like an angler catching a fish.

‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘But you have not been treating me like a wife, sir.’

She could only mean one thing, surely. I sat painfully upright, her words, accompanied by that smile, which was like a distant memory, giving me such an instant arousal I had not had for years. I shifted uncomfortably, seeing for the first time the virtue of Luke’s fashionably wide new britches. I swallowed. I could not get rid of the wretchedly light Highpoint tone with its accompanied fixed smile.

‘That, that is precisely what I have come to amend, madam.’ The pain from my tight britches was so excruciating I had to walk about. ‘I wish to visit you.’

She was picking up her bowl of tea. ‘But you are visiting – oh. I see.’ Tea spilled on her dress. I pulled out my handkerchief but Agnes appeared from nowhere with a cloth. When she had gone and fresh tea was poured Anne went to pick up her bowl, but did not trust her shaking hand. Her cheeks had coloured but when the blood retreated it only emphasised how pale she was. She looked at me directly, a thin blue vein at the side of her forehead pulsing.