Plague Child (30 page)

Chapter 36

I was deafened by the explosion, spun round expecting the blow and the violent, searing pain in my right hand, which I knew would no longer be there. Yet in almost the same moment I was being pushed against the balustrade by Eaton. His lips were moving, but I could not hear a word for the ringing in my ears. Beyond Eaton, I could see the man who had been holding Kate, his one eye staring rigidly from his shattered face as he slowly slipped to the ground. Gardiner was on the floor, trying to retrieve his rapier from amongst the feet of the panic-stricken fleeing servants. Most inexplicable of all, my right hand was still there, bleeding but still there. I realised that Eaton had used the rapt attention of the audience to draw the man holding Kate into a vulnerable position, then had knocked Gardiner down with the discharged pistol.

I winced as the hearing rushed back to my ears. ‘Jump!’ Eaton yelled. Richard’s determination to discredit me before the servants now told against him as they ran, screaming and pushing towards the stairway, blocking the efforts of his soldiers to reach me. I scrambled up on to the balustrade to jump down into the hall below, expecting Eaton to follow me. But he ran to Kate. A soldier aimed his pistol at Eaton’s back. I jumped back down from the rail into the gallery, sending the soldier sprawling, his shot hitting a candle sconce, spraying shards of glass and molten wax down on Richard as he came at me with his sword. I ran to the room where Kate was, just before Eaton slammed the doors, shoving a table under the handles. Kate looked about to remonstrate with him but, realising it would be useless, helped me bring up more furniture to block the door.

‘I told you to jump!’ Eaton yelled at me.

‘You’ve saved my life too many times for me not to repay the compliment.’

‘I told you! Only fools are heroes. There’s an ante room – a window – go.’

Lifting a chair, he almost lost his balance. I caught him. His face was parchment yellow, and I could hear the violent thudding of his heart, in tune with his palpitating scar, which seemed to be opening up his whole face. But his manner was as surly as ever, his voice almost a snarl. ‘I didn’t do it for
you.
Don’t think it! I did it for the estate. Everything – even the thieving – was to keep the estate together, to stop them mortgaging it piece by piece. I realised too late you are the one to do that – go.’

He shoved me away so violently I fell near the body of the soldier who had been guarding Kate.

‘Here – this way! Quick, Tom!’ Kate opened the door to an ante room as there was a shot, the ball tearing a hole in the door and sending one of the handles flying. Eaton attempted to hold the makeshift barrier together with his failing weight but the table grated back inexorably and one of the doors jerked open, catapulting a soldier into the room. Eaton struck him with a chair.

I was scrambling up to run into the ante room when Gardiner lunged over the remains of the barrier. I saw the tip of his sword come through Eaton’s back before Gardiner withdrew it. Kate was shouting at me but I made nothing of the words, for Eaton still stood there, only staggering a little. I suppose, from our journey together, I had grown to think him invulnerable. Perhaps everyone in some measure thought that, for there was a brief silence, a stillness. He was like a great tree which, after no matter how many blows, shows no inclination to fall. He was still holding the chair with which he had struck the soldier, and he made a movement to strike back at Gardiner. Then the chair dropped, and, slowly, he fell.

All I could see was Richard’s triumphant face in the doorway. I seized the sword from the dead soldier and ran at him. I had none of Gardiner or Richard’s fancy Italian swordsmanship. If the Trained Band taught anything, it was the old-fashioned cut and thrust. But I had foolishness, plenty of that, and blind rage at the sight of Eaton falling, a great deal of that, as well as a liberal dash of surprise and leapt on the table, bringing the sword down on him. For a moment he staggered, but I had been deceived by the billowing cloak as he ducked away, giving him no more than a glancing blow in the arm, before the cloak twisted my sword away and I was dragged from the table. If Richard wanted to demonstrate to the servants that I was the lowest of low life I gave him full measure then. I returned, as if there had been no interval of time between now and then, to how I had been when George first locked me in the cellar, screaming and kicking and biting and scratching until, I suppose, I was like the wild animal Eaton had been before the Stonehouses subdued him.

I believe – I was slipping in and out of consciousness – Richard intended to hold the trial the next day, but a mud-splashed messenger arrived, telling him he had to leave early in the morning. I was kicked and jeered at and told the King was going to have his own again: there was to be a great battle in Warwickshire and what a pity I would not be there to take part in it.

Richard told me I was to be charged with murder. He said something about mitigating circumstances if I gave him information about the pendant, but by this time I had reached a state of indifference about what was going to happen to me. As I was dragged away I held in my mind the picture of Kate cradling Eaton in her arms, of her bending to kiss him, of the blood suddenly spurting from his mouth, and of her kissing him anyway, blood and all, and holding him tight to her. While Richard was talking about what seemed to me unimportant, meaningless things, all I could see was this, and it struck me with great force how alike we were, in that Eaton had never known his father, and I was constantly searching for, yet never finding mine, and that the main difference, perhaps the only difference between us, was that I had found love early.

They brought a man into the room whom I did not at first recognise, until I realised he was the blacksmith from Upper Vale without his apron. He testified that I was one of four Parliamentary troopers who had desecrated the church and hanged Mark Stevens.

Nothing brings a man to his senses more acutely than lies, particularly when they are so cunningly interwoven they seem to be the truth, and the more you protest, the tighter the net closes round you. The only way out is to stop struggling and try to find the one knot that holds the whole mesh together.

The trial was designed to break me further so I would reveal where the pendant was. Richard even had Mr Fawcett, the house steward, taking notes like a judge’s clerk. But when Edward entered, in his clerical robes and holding a prayer book, it took on a different tone. Richard told a soldier to prepare the horses. He would ride by night if the sky kept clear and would leave in half an hour. They really meant to hang me. It was evident in Richard’s eyes. Evident in the way the troops held me when, at that moment of realisation, my legs suddenly buckled and would not support me.

Half an hour. There was a lantern clock behind the desk where Richard sat, which had just struck nine. It had a design of intertwined tulips on the face, and the hand was still, in the centre of one petal. I stared at it as if, absurdly, I could stop it.

A whispered argument between the two brothers gave me a shred of hope. Edward, at least, seemed to grasp the enormity of what they were doing. Much as he wanted to see me dead, he was afraid, nay terrified, of his father. ‘What if the King doesn’t win?’ I heard him say.

Richard dismissed any possibility of that, but I could see he feared it, and his father’s reaction. That was why he had to justify what he was about to do with this trumped-up charge. My only chance was to play upon that fear, to try and drive a wedge between the two brothers.

‘Why would I kill Mark Stevens?’ I said.

They looked at me, startled, as if at that point I was already a body to be disposed of, not a real person.

‘Because he would not give you the information you wanted,’ said Richard.

‘But he did,’ I lied. ‘He told me he married Edward at Shadwell to my mother.’

All the agitation that had been present in Edward that morning rushed back in him. Before Richard could stop him, he cried: ‘The marriage was illegal.’

‘Then why did your father have the records removed?’

‘Because I told my father the truth that night!’

‘Shut up, Edward,’ said Richard, but it was impossible to stop his brother. His glasses were askew, his face distorted. It was one of those faces where the shape of youth lives on well into middle age, and I could imagine him that night, facing his father, terrified.

‘I told him you were not my child.’

‘How did you know?’

‘How did he know?’ said Richard contemptuously. ‘Because he never fucked her – he says.’

‘It’s true!’ screamed Edward at his brother. ‘I did not know she was pregnant when I married her!’

Richard was suddenly aware of the steward, his protruding eyes standing out even more than usual, scribbling as fast as he could. ‘Strike that,’ he snapped. ‘Give me the book. Go! All of you go, except you –’ He pointed to Gardiner. ‘Wait! None of you heard that, is that understood?’

They bowed and left. Edward was gripping his prayer book, saying some Latin line of prayer, over and over again. To my surprise, Richard went to him and put his arm round him with a real gesture of affection. ‘Eddie, don’t let him get at you. That’s just what he wants, can’t you see?’

‘Then who is my father?’ I asked.

Richard pointed to his father’s picture. ‘You would think he is, after what he has done for you. You don’t know, do you? You have no idea what you have done to this family.’

I stared back at him, astonished. ‘I have done nothing to you, nothing.’

‘Ever since you were born . . . reborn –’ He rounded on his brother, who was still muttering the line of Latin prayer. ‘For God’s sake, Eddie, stop saying that. If God hasn’t heard you by now, He never will.’

Edward stopped, but his lips continued moving soundlessly as Richard marched over to his father’s desk. He pulled fruitlessly at a drawer, then gestured to Gardiner, who prised away the lock with his dagger. From the drawer Richard took a bundle of documents sealed with red wax, and another of letters which he threw on the desk. Then he drew out a bundle of childish drawings, pages of figures and lines of Latin repeated again and again. His hands shook as he tried to separate pages stuck together, until he finally found what he was looking for.

The single hand of the lantern clock made a small grating sound as it jerked forward. Richard glanced at it. I felt the last half-hour of life he had allotted to me was almost done, and in those circumstances the yellowing piece of paper Richard thrust in front of my eyes was the last thing I expected to see.

‘Do you recognise that?’

I took it and stared at it in bewilderment. It was a crudely written Latin tag, repeated again and again:
omnes deteriores sum licentia.

‘It’s Terence, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Odd from a former slave: “too much freedom debases us”. But it should be sumus, not sum –’

He snatched it back. ‘Oh,
you
would know that, wouldn’t you.’

I ought to. I had written the same line tediously, again and again. I told him so.

‘Perfectly!’ he said. ‘Perfectly written, perfectly declined –’

I told him that I had been as full of mistakes as anyone and beaten more than most, but he would have none of it. While Edward exclaimed in wonder at finding passages in Greek he had written, Richard said in a sarcasm brittle with rage that I was perfect, had a perfect hand, was a perfect scholar, and on top of that a perfect gentleman. I laughed at this idiotic picture of myself when I remembered the wild, uncouth apprentice who, at first, had to be forced into wearing boots. He caught me a stinging slap across my face.

I understood then. I had always thought, from the moment I discovered it was Richard who wanted to kill me, that it was because I threatened his inheritance. And, of course, it was that. But it was about more, much more. After my pitch burn, when Lord Stonehouse picked me up, he had returned to Highpoint and called Richard and Edward into this room. I could see the scene, as Richard bitterly, compulsively told it.

Lord Stonehouse wore what the two brothers called his hanging face. He told them he had seen a child with Stonehouse features and hair as red as fire. Moreover, the child was with that wretch Matthew Neave, who drove the plague cart that night in 1625. Lord Stonehouse went over again what his two sons had told him that September night ten years before – that Edward had been tricked into marriage, and that the child had been fathered by Margaret Pearce’s cousin, John Lloyd. Richard again supported his brother, saying everyone knew Margaret Pearce had been infatuated with John Lloyd. Lord Stonehouse made them swear on the Bible that their accounts were true, as if they were in a court of law.

And that, they thought, was the end of it.

But it was not. It was as if what had been buried in the pit had crept out and attached itself to Richard like a leech. That was how he described it, although he did not at first connect the change in his father’s attitude to me. Before his visit to the shipyard at Poplar, Lord Stonehouse had resigned himself to the fact that Richard had no ambitions beyond the estate and his own pleasure, principally the latter. After he found me, his old desire for his eldest son to establish a place at court and in the affairs of state was rekindled. He wanted him to read Latin again, resume dusty lessons in rhetoric he had long forgotten. He was
twenty-seven!
His father cut his allowance until he conformed. He told him the Stonehouse name and fortune was not built on the
contra guardia
and
ricavatione
of the rapier, but on the
ethos
,
pathos
and
logos
of persuasion and argument.

Belief, emotion and reason! Make them believe, make them feel and make them think. How often had I been beaten with the same three sticks! I had been taught by Dr Gill but the hidden hand behind the lessons was that of Lord Stonehouse. I had been whipped through exactly the same series of hoops as Richard.

One day Lord Stonehouse put Richard’s Latin text next to the same text in another hand. Compared with Richard’s misshapen letters, it was perfect.