Plague Child (24 page)

‘That will make them rather more cautious,’ Eaton said. His eyes gleamed. His habitual moroseness had gone and he seemed almost looking forward to them coming on again. There was silence among the trees, but I caught a movement on one side, then the other.

‘They’re surrounding us,’ I whispered.

‘Aye. If they’re sensible, we’re done for. We have two shots against four. If the bastards go off. Untether the horses. Keep down as I showed you.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Cover you.’

‘But –’

‘Go!’

I wriggled away from the fallen tree as he had taught me, using what cover I could, skirting the bush to which the horses were tethered and untied them. I grabbed the reins but the movement of the horses raised a cry from one of the Cavaliers.

‘They’re running for it!’

As the Cavaliers broke cover, Eaton stood up with his pistol. ‘I have one shot and my friend has another. Which of you fine gentlemen wants the balls in their hearts, to give your good friends the pleasure of the horses?’

Eaton’s putting the matter like this so divided the Cavaliers they stopped, glancing nervously from one to another, staying just out of range of the pistol. The scar which had once so terrified me must have been, to them, every much a weapon as the pistol. The nearer we got to Highpoint, the more he had picked and rubbed at it, until it was a weeping sore. Now he looked a fearsome sight, a man with a contempt for death, standing in the open, holding them with his gaze while backing imperceptibly towards me. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Is my stirrup free, Tom?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put your foot in yours.’

One of the men made a move for his flintlock. Eaton fired, missed and ran for his horse, leaping on with the agility of a far younger man.

‘Stay low on the horse – they will not shoot at that!’

We careered forward, weaving between the last of the trees. Across a valley, like a mirage, I saw statues that seemed to dance round a fountain as I was bounced this way and that, and beyond them a great white building whose endless pilasters and chimneys flickered through the trees. It was my first view of Highpoint and almost my last. I felt the wind of a shot and Eaton fell right in front of my horse. I tried to swerve round him but the hooves caught him.

I dismounted. He was quite still. His forehead was bleeding. His jacket was torn at the back and blood was soaking through. There were a number of shots, one striking a nearby tree. I bent over him, feeling his breath on my cheek and struggled to drag him into the shelter of a tree. Eaton’s black gelding had bolted, to be seized by two of the Cavaliers, who were arguing over him. I could not see the other two, but there were more shots as I managed to get Eaton behind the tree, next to my horse.

His eyes opened. ‘Leave me! Let them have your horse and run for it!’

I crawled to get his pack and there was the crack of another shot. Either they were reloading incredibly quickly or more had joined them. The pack had been split open in the fall and I pulled out his spare shirt. He tried to get up to protest again, but gasped in pain and fell back. I turned him over and ripped the back of his jacket open with my knife, wincing at his wound, which was steadily ebbing blood. I stuffed the shirt over it as tightly as I could and turned him back so his weight would help stop the flow. His eyes began to glaze over like those of the other dead man and I could not check the sobs as I knelt there, remembering that once I would have given anything for him to be dead, but now I would give anything for him to live. I prayed Our Father – what I could say of it, for the words choked in my mouth.

The prayer brought some life back to his eyes, but not I fear to his soul, for it was an angry spark of life. ‘None of that! Leave me to die – it’s better for you! Go!’

He pushed me away. I overbalanced and as I scrambled up saw a movement in the trees. One of the cavaliers darted to a tree not far from me. Eaton’s hand was quivering above his body as if he was still feebly trying to push me away. Through the last of the trees I could see the fountain, which seemed to make the pilasters of the house shimmer in the air. He was right. I could leave the horse and slip away through the trees. But instead it was as if he had infected me with some of his detached, bitter anger at life. I picked up my flintlock and wriggled behind Eaton, who was now quite still. I lay as if dead, using Eaton as a convenient rest for the pistol. When the Cavalier ran forward I waited as Eaton had done and shot him with some of his cold anger.

As I watched him fall I heard a sound behind me and turned too late to avoid the pistol butt coming down on my head.

Chapter 28

The sky had miraculously changed to an aching blue, across which perfectly formed white clouds floated. Nine muses rode on clouds blown by Cupids with pink, fat cheeks. They, in turn, were being chased by goats. Goats in heaven? One of them appeared to be eating a cloud, wispy fronds of it clinging to his beard. I could hear it munching, its hooves rapping on the sky as it gripped another piece of cloud. Surprisingly, there was pain in heaven. The light was so bright it forced me to shut my eyes and I struggled to turn my body, indeed discover whether I still had a body, then wished I hadn’t as a wave of nausea swept over me. I had a body, but it consisted principally of bruises.

This was more like purgatory, with a tantalising glimpse of heaven. Yes, I was suspended between the two places, for I heard the hooves and smelt the stink of the goat as it bent over me.

‘Tom . . . Tom . . .’

I opened my eyes a fraction, gripping the goat’s beard. ‘It’s real.’

The goat had turned into Will. The sky tilted – clouds, Cupids and goats falling towards me, then righting themselves as I was mercifully carried away from the blinding sunlight of the windows and my senses slowly returned. I was being carried under an ornate, swaying ceiling on a makeshift stretcher, composed of a soldier’s coat slung on two pikes.

Big Jed grinned down at me. ‘Peaceful use of the pike,’ he said. ‘Not in the manual.’

He and another soldier deposited me on a truckle bed in a withdrawing room where Luke was sitting, alongside a statue of Mars with a musket hanging on his sword arm, and another of Minerva, hung with coats and packs. The marble tiles were grey with mud.

‘Welcome home,’ Luke said. I struggled up on one elbow, gazing at the incongruent muddle of classical figures and drying clothes, at Will leaning against a pillar, and Luke who even in that place managed to have a clean shirt with carefully turned lace cuffs. ‘It is your seat, isn’t it? Not bad, as estates go.’

I sat up further, very gingerly. From the room I could see into the great hall from where they had taken me, through shattered windows that looked out on to an avenue wide enough for three carriages. There was no wind, and the water of the fountain seemed to hang motionless in the air. Beyond lay gardens that dropped imperceptibly to the river below, the land on the other side rising from the tumbling, fast-running water, up to the wilderness of the Great Forest. I understood what Pym meant about power. Kings had stayed here and to give them an acceptable setting, Lord Stonehouse’s ancestors had almost bankrupted themselves.

While I stared at the scene in awe, Will told me they had fought with a strong unit of cavaliers at the Battle of Highpoint. His voice had become more clipped, casual, like a dispatch to his colonel.

‘They were horse and we were foot, of course, so we had no chance on open ground. Held them with pike at the ford for a while, although we lost some good fellows there, didn’t we Luke?’

Luke said nothing. He took some tobacco and a clay from his pack.

‘Retreated to the house in good order –’

‘We were scared shitless.’ Luke tore off a plug from Mr Ormonde’s best Sweet Virginia. His hands were shaking.

Will went on as if he had not heard him. Later, I realised they were both shocked by what they had seen, but reacted in different ways. Will talked constantly, issuing orders to passing soldiers. Luke was as flippant as ever, but his jokes had a bitter edge.

‘Their army charged up the approach there –’ Will took his sword, propped up against Mars, and pointed through the shattered windows.

‘All twelve of them,’ muttered Luke.

‘We drew them inside with a feint, ambushed them from the landing up there. They fled in disorder, but we had secured their horses –’

The clay slipped from Luke’s fingers as he tamped in the tobacco and broke on the tiles. He swore. ‘Oh, come on, Will. They came in to plunder. We had run up there to hide. I had a lucky shot on one of the bastards and you knocked a bust of Caesar on another. When they tried to run away, their horses had been taken by some of our good fellows, who deserted and buggered off back to London. I wish I’d joined them.’

He grinned, but I thought he was only half joking. In the absence of his clay, he twisted at his wedding ring, on which was engraved:
Noe heart more true than mine to you
.

‘I am to be a father,’ he said. ‘I had a letter from Charity.’ I stared at the ring enviously as he kissed it. He had held her properly, discovered the mysteries of love. Their hearts and souls were mingled in another mystery, a child; whatever happened, they would be together, whereas if I had died in the forest, my soul would mingle only with the rotting leaves, without discovering my father or becoming one. Such melancholy, and a feeling of the old bond with Luke over matters of the heart, made me put out my arms to embrace him, but he shoved me away.

‘You stink, Neave!’

It was as much comfort to hear that name as a hug. It felt as real as bread, while Stonehouse and this magic palace had the substance of a philosopher’s stone, which the alchemists are always discovering one day, only for it to vanish the next.

I asked if Richard Stonehouse had been one of the band that attacked them. None of the men matched his description. Will had heard he was riding to join Prince Rupert near Banbury. This, if true, was both a comfort and a puzzle; for I could not understand why Richard had not come to take Highpoint. Perhaps, I thought, the glory of riding with Prince Rupert had been even greater than the desire for his inheritance.

The men who tried to steal our horses were the rump of the band who attacked Highpoint. Luke said they had heard the firing, and he had only just stopped his man from killing me when he saw my red hair.

‘What happened to the man I was with?’ I asked.

‘We brought him back here,’ Will said. ‘Since he was with you.’

‘He was cursing us. Telling us to leave him where he was. Fine fellow,’ Luke said.

I sprang up. ‘He’s alive?’

Luke shrugged. ‘Probably dead by now.’

The wounded got little treatment. A surgeon might treat you if you were a gentleman, or high enough in rank, but then you were billeted on some unwilling family to nurse. Will’s unit was exceptional. Ben insisted that if the wounded were not picked up regardless of rank he would go, denying the troops even the limited form of treatment he could offer.

He stood at the end of the long table where the servants normally ate. There were a few truckle beds, but most of the wounded soldiers were laid on straw spread over the table.

‘Wait!’ Ben snapped. He was tying a crudely fashioned splint to the arm of a man who was groaning in pain. He turned to me. ‘Take that filthy shirt off. Go away, Luke.’

‘Ben, it’s –’

‘I know who it is.’

Luke went away. I took off the shirt and watched, while Ben warned his patient not to try and loosen the splint, for the tighter it was, the quicker the bone would heal. The mild-mannered man I knew in London had gone. His lower lip stuck out stubbornly. His skin had a grey, tired pallor and he worked with a dogged bitterness. In one of the truckle beds I saw Eaton, or at least his scar. It was rising and falling steadily. Where once I had run from it in fear, I ran to it now and I fell down on my knees and thanked God.

‘None of that,’ Eaton mumbled restlessly. ‘None of that.’ He was so hot it was like kneeling in front of a furnace. His forehead seemed to crackle and bubble with sweat, and there was a sweet smell about him from some herbs Ben had used to try and cool him. He gave a sudden cry. ‘I did it for the estate! D’you see that? Keep it together! Keep it together!’ He seized my hand with a grip which was a mere ghost of his old violence.

‘It’s Tom.’

‘Tom?’ His eyes opened, but I did not know how much he took in. ‘Tom? Tell him to go away. Now. Before it’s too late.’ He pushed at me feebly. I overbalanced and another hand grabbed me.

‘Leave him!’ Ben cried angrily. He called an orderly over to Eaton and led me away. ‘I’m trying to bring the man’s fever down and you send it sky high!’

I apologised. ‘Will he live?’

Ben shrugged. ‘The ball didn’t lodge, and only chipped the bone. His mind seems more diseased than his body – he doesn’t seem to want to live. What have you done to him?’

‘Me? Nothing.’

‘He keeps going on about you. Who stuffed that shirt on his wound?’

‘I did. Sorry. Was it wrong?’

‘The devil to get off, but you probably saved his life.’ He scratched his head. ‘Then I don’t understand why he’s so angry at you.’

Chapter 29

Highpoint had become two worlds. During the fight most of the servants had fled. The soldiers occupied the ground floor, while the first, which was almost untouched, was run by the assistant housekeeper. She was a quiet woman, Will told me, but her look was full of the Bible and the soldiers did not dare to venture upstairs to cross her. She spent most of her time looking after the real housekeeper, Mrs Morland – Jane’s mother – who was seriously ill. She had remained upstairs, nursing her patient, while the soldiers fired from the nearby gallery. Soldiers’ stories grow in the telling like pamphlets, and there was already a legend that during the firing she went out to the gallery to reprimand them for swearing, and stayed to read them the Bible.

Eaton grew worse, his fever deepening. Ben refused to let me see him and I determined I must get back on to the trail of Matthew and the pendant alone. I found the pack I had lost in the forest. Most of its contents were gone, but the letter I had written for Jane to her mother was still there. I determined to brave Mother Preacher – as the soldiers called the woman in charge – both to fulfil my promise to Jane and in the hope of finding out what had happened in this house when I was born.

I went upstairs through a maze of empty, echoing corridors, seeing no one, stopping transfixed when I came to an enormous room. I had never seen such a library before. Amongst shelf after shelf of priceless books was a portrait of Lord Stonehouse, staring dreamily, his finger keeping his place in a book which, I saw on closer inspection, was Machiavelli’s
The Prince.
On a scroll above the shelves was painted:
Homo doctus in se semper divitias habet –
a learned man always has wealth.

And power, I thought, symbolised by the book in the painting. How else did you get the wealth to buy the learning? Each one of the hundreds of books cost a labourer’s wages for several years.

Somewhere a door opened and closed. I ran out into the corridor, but saw no one. I went down another corridor, hung with Flemish tapestries of the seasons. At the end of it stood a pair of double doors which drew me to them. I did not need to see the portrait of Frances Stonehouse to know it was her bedroom. Opposite it was a portrait of James I. The room was spotlessly clean, but the oak furniture had a dark, brooding heaviness that belonged to a previous era. A faded, fringed carpet covered a table. Half-burnt candles, petrified in their holders, had been left just as they were snuffed out when Frances died. In this room, Charles, whose divided people were about to fight one another, had not yet ascended the throne. Everything had stopped here, more than twenty years ago.

Not everything.

My heart thudded painfully as I stared at myself. It was a portrait of a boy I had never seen before, yet it was me. There I was, when I had run to the Guildhall that morning with a message from Mr Black, and an apparently bored painter, Peter Lely, had stopped me to improvise some casual sketches. But I was no dirty, unkempt apprentice, grinning and excited about being sketched. Just as Mr Pym had described, I was elegantly dressed, with a dog at my feet and Highpoint in the background.

Lely had kept my grin, but he had turned it into something else, something halfway between a cheeky smile and one of superiority. It was partly a lie – or so I felt – and partly the truth. It was a boy on his way to manhood, a picture of what might be, rather than what was.

I wanted to stick my tongue out at him, but could not quite do so. The truth was, I rather liked him. No, it was more than that. I was captivated by him. I took off an imaginary hat and swept it with a flourish in a deep bow. Then I stood quite still as a thought struck me. How did I know he was me? I had only ever seen myself in distorted glasses, or in dark, still pools.

‘Are you sure?’

The voice was so quiet and the question so apposite I thought for a moment it had arisen in my own head. But I turned and there she was, standing by the door. I did not believe she was real at that moment. She had appeared, out of air. She was the will o’ the wisp, the good spirit who had looked after me throughout childhood.

‘S-sure?’ I stuttered. ‘You want to be Lord Stonehouse?’

I could not answer. Ridiculously, I wondered why she was carrying a garden trug of herbs and not a simnel cake, which I had not had that year. Afraid she would vanish, I went towards her and touched her face. She sprang back, startled, herbs spilling from her trug. I picked them up, mumbling an apology. ‘I was not sure you were real.’

She laughed. Eaton had been rather flattering to say she was as plain as bread; she was quite ugly, with a snub nose and pocked cheeks, rather like those weathered gargoyles that spew rainwater from churches. But her laughter and her voice, as perfectly pitched as plainsong, transformed her. Then she became grave. ‘I did not want to be real, but I have to warn you to forget the pendant, forget the Stonehouses.’

It is strange how awkward and obdurate and downright unhelpful a spirit becomes when it turns into flesh and blood. Kate Beaumann would not deny she knew where Matthew was. She had been on her way to him when she learned Mrs Morland was very ill. Then she had been trapped by the siege. But she refused point-blank to tell me where Matthew was. That would lead me to the pendant, which was the source of all the evil that had happened. Her sole purpose was to find it and destroy it, and nothing would shake her from that. She refused even to tell me what had happened at my birth. I was so desperate I told her Eaton was with me, thinking it might advance my cause.

She stood there looking every bit as fixed as a stone gargoyle, then hurried away. She was gone so quickly I was afraid she had turned into a spirit again. I had to run to catch up with her, pleading with her to see Eaton, telling her that he seemed to have lost the will to live.

‘Then leave him to die,’ she said, without changing her pace.

‘What has he done?’

Now she stopped. ‘You, of all people, to ask that!’

‘I mean to you.’

‘Ask him.’

I was shocked by her tone, which had some of Eaton’s own savagery in it, but she refused to say any more. All equanimity left her. Herbs dropped from her trug again and I picked them up, following her trail, to find her outside the housekeeper’s bedroom, her lips moving in an almost inaudible prayer which I dare not interrupt. Gradually her breast stopped heaving beneath her plain brown dress, which was only relieved by a snow-white collar. I put the herbs in the trug and asked if I could see Mrs Morland.

‘You want to ask her about the night you were born?’

I avoided the question. ‘I have a message from her daughter.’

Mrs Morland’s bedroom was the hottest place in that huge, draughty building. Sprigs of lavender crackled on the fire, but its sweet scent could not hide the pervasive smell of sweat and the stink of the piss-pot a young maid was removing. In the flickering light of the fire, under a nightcap, I could just make out the still, wasted outline of a woman’s face. Kate dismissed the maid, but when she saw me she stopped so abruptly to do an elaborate curtsey, she forgot she held the piss-pot, spilling some of the contents.

‘Sorry, sir . . .’ she stuttered. ‘But you are so like your picture.’ Either the noise, or the sound of a male voice, broke through Mrs Morland’s fragile sleep. Her voice was disjointed. ‘Rose . . . Who is it?’

‘The young master has come, Mrs Morland,’ Rose said.

‘Nonsense!’ Kate said sharply. ‘It is one of the soldiers.’

But Mrs Morland attempted to struggle up, peering one way, then another, with eyes that were so pale, so milky blue they could have seen little. ‘Mr Richard – is it Mr Richard come back?’

Kate tried to intervene but Mrs Morland pushed her away and seized my hands. I struggled to tell her I was a soldier, but she felt my face, the curve of my nose and was in such a confused state she was convinced it was her Mr Richard who, it rapidly became clear, had been her favourite.

I began to read the letter I had brought from Jane. I thought Mrs Morland would not only forgive Jane but express joy in Jane forgiving her. Nothing could have been further from that fond imagining.

‘Forgive her? When she brought shame on the family!’ She made my flesh crawl with disgust. I tried to pull away, but she gripped my hands more tightly. ‘You’re too good, Mr Richard. You always had a warm heart, like you had with that other harlot, whose son has come back to plague you. But I’ll keep an eye out for him!’

‘Will you?’ I murmured.

‘I saw the bastard being born . . .’

Kate gripped my arm. There was a look of outrage on her face that – as she put it later – I should be preying on a dying, confused woman. I shook her away, feeling no qualms after what Mrs Morland had said about Jane. ‘The old goat!’ Mrs Morland chuckled.

‘The old goat?’

‘Your father! Planning to marry Margaret Pearce.’

‘Lord Stonehouse?’ I said, stunned.

‘You were all in love with her . . . You for her looks. Edward for her good works. My lord for both. I knew what was in his mind!’ Her hands shook with something that continued, after all those years, to outrage her so much she spat the words out. ‘He told me to change Lady Frances’s room!’

Her face suddenly creased in pain and she clutched at my hands. Kate gave her some cordial, which she swallowed with little grunts, never letting go of my hands. A small drop of sweat coursed down her forehead, which Kate wiped away. Again Kate motioned me to go as Mrs Morland’s eyes closed and she sank back against the pillow, but when the old housekeeper began to murmur drowsily in disjointed, jerky phrases, she listened as intently as I did.

‘That day . . . last day of summer. Cold coming. Rain in the air. My lord due from London. Every fire laid, every surface polished. I took some things from my lady’s room, leaving the door open. When I returned, Margaret Pearce was in that corridor. Said she got lost. Lost! That was when the thief took the pendant!’

She struggled for breath and it was some time before she continued. ‘My lord late . . . black as the clouds coming over the forest. Horse lost a shoe . . . groom his job.’

She chuckled and a quivering sliver of pale blue eye appeared, struggling to focus on me. ‘You made yourself scarce. So did Edward. But not
her
! He melts like sugar in water with her. In the library they were . . . “You know how long I’ve loved you,” my lord says.’

I felt she was raving, slipping into nonsense, and tried to loosen her grip on me, but it immediately tightened.

‘Were you there?’

‘Of course I was there! What do you think keyholes are for – keys?’

She choked with laughter at this, fought for breath, then continued with more urgency. ‘She just stood there. So did I, I can tell you!’

‘What did she say?’

‘She laughed.’

‘Laughed?’

The memory seemed to give her fresh energy and she sat up. ‘The bitch laughed! “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m asking you to marry me.” “That’s what I came to talk to you about, my lord,” she said. Brazen! Just like that! I thought the end of the world had come. It had. For her.’

Her head darted about, as if she was trying to see through a keyhole.

‘Couldn’t see her. Bell rang three times. That’s me. Three for Mrs Morland for trouble inside, two for Mr Eaton for trouble out. “The lady’s fainted,” he said. Fainted! I could feel the crown when I put my hand up there – excuse my language, Mr Richard, but I know you’re a man of the world. “The lady is with child, my lord,” I said. He went as white as this sheet! I took charge. He’d made enough of a fool of himself, fathering the bastard. And this was woman’s work.’

‘How do you know I – it was his child?’

‘Of course the bastard was his! He’d been after her all summer, hadn’t he? If Eaton had done his job properly you wouldn’t be in this mess now – but you’ll see to him, Mr Richard, won’t you . . . you’ve come back, as you said you would, to see to him . . .’ Her voice flickered like a dying candle. She lay back on the pillow, the taut lines of her face relaxing, as if she had confessed all her sins and was now at peace with the world. ‘Keep evil and shame from this house. That’s all I’ve ever . . . tried . . . to do.’