Peter Ransley - The King’s List

‘When I said treating me like a wife, I meant, sir, you have shown little concern for me while I have been ill.’

‘I’m sorry. I did not realise you were so ill.’

‘Were you not told?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I was, but …’ What was the use? Why did I not say what I wanted, as other men did? Why did she always put me on the wrong foot? She always had from the very beginning! I wished I could go back and start again with that welcoming smile. No, no. That was contrived. She played this game far better than I ever could. All this, as I paced about on the pretext of looking at her pictures which she must have brought from Highpoint, for they were all from the King’s Collection. Whereas the pictures in Queen Street were blurred with dust and dirt, these were as bright as if painted yesterday. One I could not take my eyes off was an enigmatic picture of a woman, fully clothed, while another, naked apart from a stole which had drifted over her sex, leaned over her. A puckish-faced child was absorbed in his own play on the stone bench between them.

‘Naturally, I will prepare myself,’ she said. ‘You only have to tell me when.’

When? I could have taken her there and then. She was as calm and inscrutable as the clothed woman on the stone bench. That made her even more maddening. Her hand had stopped shaking and she was taking a sip of tea, as if we were discussing an alteration to the east front at Highpoint, which always troubled her. But was that not what I wanted, what I had planned? A business transaction? The object was not the treacherous will o’ the wisp of desire, but the solid certainty of having a child, who would be different. My child, not hers.

I bowed. ‘Thank you.’

The worst was over. The rest would happen at night. Agnes would be instructed, the door left open. Wait, wait, wait. I stared at the picture. The clothed woman seemed to have a mocking smile on her face. Prepare herself? What did she mean by that? I remembered when Highpoint had first taken over her life. We were still together then. We even talked about love. Did I really say something inane like I loved her when I first saw her, when I did not hate her for mocking my large, bare feet? She certainly said that she fell in love with me when she discovered I had greater prospects than putting boots on my ugly feet. She said it as a joke, but I began to believe it to be true when her body became as cold as the stone bench I was staring at. At the time of that first move to Highpoint I had wanted a child, a child brought up in peace, which I thought would bring us together. One never came. That was when she became wedded to Highpoint and I to the power I had just lost.

My throat was so dry the words came out with a hollow, parched ring. ‘When you say prepare yourself –’

She must have signalled for Agnes, who, when I turned, was staring at me as if I was about to suggest some bestial act. Her mistress dismissed her with an agitated gesture. For the first time she looked at a loss.

‘I want to have another child.’

‘You do.’

Her maid must have been listening, they always were, but I no longer cared. This was what other men and women took for granted. Scogman was astonished I felt I had to discuss it. Have her and be done with it, was his philosophy. The last thing he wanted was a child. If one appeared, he disappeared.

‘Another child. Yes. So I would be grateful if you –’ I strode across to a door which led to the bedroom and maid’s room and pulled it open. Agnes was bent so close to the door she fell towards me, only just stopping herself. She gaped up at me open-mouthed before scurrying into her room and slamming the door. ‘Grateful if you and your maid took no steps to prevent it.’

The blue vein in her forehead thudded as if to burst out of her skin. She tried to fish out a leaf floating in her tea. She kept missing it. It seemed the most important thing in the world to catch that leaf. When she had done so, she stared at it and said in a voice so low I had to bend to hear her: ‘I am afraid it is not possible for me to have another child.’

‘It is perfectly possible. You are still bleeding.’

She gave me a shocked look of fear and disgust. I was in the uncharted territory of Secreta Mulierum – women’s secrets. I had become so obsessed with having another child that for the first time in years I had not worked from early morning to night. I had cancelled my appointments with the City aldermen I had promised to persuade or cajole. I had not even seen John Thurloe. Why should I? He was no longer First Secretary of State and I was no longer in power with him. The state would right itself without us. A general would shoulder his way through the pack to replace Cromwell. Then we would be needed. Instead I read every book on reproduction I could lay my hands on, from old texts which held women to be leaky vessels whose menstrual blood poisoned children and gave men leprosy when they had sex with them, to more modern texts which criticised the secret world of women delivering women where an impatient midwife in a slow labour might yank off a baby’s hand or foot.

I interrupted my reading only when I realised that, from the number of days which had passed since the bleeding I had seen, my wife was, as one account put it, at the apex of her fertility.

She opened the door as if about to follow the maid, then slammed it shut, turning on me. ‘No gentleman would speak of such things.’

‘As you used to say often enough, I am no gentleman.’ I almost retorted that she was no lady, but that was the problem. She was. She was far more of a lady than most women of aristocratic lineage. She was a lady from her exquisitely small feet to the sculptured bones of her face. She was accepted by Royalists as such without question, whereas I, who had aristocratic blood, was dismissed by them as an upstart.

She told me she could not bear having another child. At least that was how I heard it. Her old friend and mentor, Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, who had no children, wrote pamphlets against late childbearing, which, she declared, ruined a woman’s figure and her health.

I was having no more of this. ‘It is your duty to bear one,’ I said.

She clenched her hands, colour flooding her cheeks. ‘Don’t you understand? I don’t mean I don’t want one. I can’t have any more –’

Tears choked her words. We had been so far apart for so long that I thought it was an act. But only for a moment. She flung her hands over her face. She could not stand tears, her own least of all. She hated losing her composure but walked about as if she had lost her senses, knocking into a chair. I caught it and put my arm round her.

‘Please don’t touch me.’

She groped at her chair as if fearing it was insubstantial before sitting heavily, taking in air with great rasping gulps.

‘I’ll get the maid.’

She shook her head violently. A blue tint from her eyelids was smeared down one cheek. Apart from that, the colour had fled her face again and she was deathly pale.

‘Doctor –’ She began to cough.

‘Get a doctor?’

‘No!’

Nevertheless I determined to get one and picked up the bell to summon Agnes, but that seemed to distress her more. She pointed to the tea. I held out the bowl. Her hands were shaking so much she could not take it but breathed in the infusion. Gradually the gasping subsided and her breathing returned to normal. She took a sip, then a few more until her eyes began to close and the bowl tilted in her hands. I took it from her. The room was hot, the fire blazing, and I thought she was falling asleep. Then something between a sigh and a shudder ran through her body.

‘Dr Latchford said I must not have any more children.’

‘When did he say that?’