Copyright

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First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2015

Copyright © Peter Ransley 2015

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be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007312429

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007584727

Version: 2014-12-15

Dedication

For Finlay, Blake and Nina

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Prologue

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

PART TWO

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

PART THREE

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

PART FOUR

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

Epilogue

Historical Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Peter Ransley

About the Publisher

Prologue

August 1659

On a bright, summer day I rode alone from London to Oxford, getting fresh horses by showing the ring that told the world I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, Second Secretary of State and a mix of other titles and honours. These, not to put too fine a point on it, meant I was – or had been – Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster.

Cromwell had been dead for eighteen months. His son Richard had succeeded him but had nowhere near the iron grip of his father on the country. Outside London, Oliver Cromwell’s spectre still hung over the country. Some people could not believe he was dead. Others said his spirit had been seen at the great battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby. Few wanted to rekindle that war except members of the Sealed Knot, Royalists who believed the executed King had died a martyr. They wanted revenge and the return of the King’s son, who had done little for his country, except sire fifteen bastards at my spies’ latest count. Some in the Sealed Knot were sincere. Most wanted their lands and power back.

My son, Luke, was sincere. When my steward, Scogman, told me Luke was a member of the Sealed Knot my first instinct was to confront him – not about being a Royalist, for he scarcely made that a secret, but about joining a hopeless, ramshackle conspiracy like the Knot. I dismissed this approach. Luke would not believe me. It would make things worse between us, and they were bad enough. I determined to let him find out for himself. The Knot leaked like a sieve. Simultaneous uprisings were planned in the north, the West Country and even in East Anglia, Cromwell’s old heartland. Luke was part of a group planning to take over an armoury in Oxford. I could have told him who would let him down, the county gentlemen who would promise money which would not be paid, or troops who would not arrive. Instead I would let him find out for himself. He would be arrested. Scogman would see he was not charged or gaoled but brought straight back to me.

It would be a salutary lesson, better than any I could give him. He would be contrite, realising how false his friends were, how hopeless the Royalist cause was. England would never see a King on the throne again, least of all the self-proclaimed Charles II, who begged his way from one European court to another. I would be magnanimous. Because of the war I had rarely seen Luke as a child. This would bring us closer together, giving me the father–son relationship I had always wanted.

So I imagined until the rebellion grew closer and Scogman set out for Oxford. He wore bucket boots with a jump jacket of oiled leather, and carried an old-fashioned broadsword and a pistol. I not only felt a flood of nostalgia for the war, but the weapons brought me to my senses with a jolt. Years at my desk had given me the mind of a planner, not a soldier. I began to think like a soldier again and a soldier – unlike a politician – knew that nothing went according to plan. My intelligence might be wrong. It could be a full-scale rebellion. Luke might be killed.

When I reached Highpoint, my estate in Oxfordshire, I learned the intelligence was right. One of the leading Royalists in the county, Sir Simon Barber, had been bought with land he had lost during the war. The others would not move a finger without him. From information Barber gave us some were arrested.

‘Including Luke?’ I said with relief.

Scogman shook his head. Luke had disappeared. From that moment the plan I had carefully constructed to bring my son to his senses, and the two of us closer together, fell to pieces.

Although the uprising was a dismal failure everywhere else, Sir George Booth, an excellent soldier and well-liked in his county, managed to raise 4,000 men and hold Cheshire and part of Lancashire for several weeks. This inspired Luke and a group of hotheads to try and take over an armoury. It was a foolhardy project; the sort Cromwell used to dismiss with contempt as going for glory, not results. Scarcely more than boys, they were too young to have fought in the war and were dying to distinguish themselves for their King. Two did. Several were wounded, including Luke. I made sure he was kept in a separate cell. I hired a coach and removed my ring so only the gaoler knew who I was and, with Scogman, went there late one evening.

It was hot and muggy. The stench of the gaol hit us through the windows of the coach. We clamped nosegays of herbs tightly to our faces.

‘You’ll need those, sir,’ the gaoler said. ‘Time of the year for gaol fever. Found one of them dead in his cell this morning.’ He spat reflectively as he selected a key. ‘Unless it was the plague.’

I silently cursed my stupidity. A fine lesson if Luke died from it! He had never been very well ever since he had suffered a bad burn to his face in the riots in London at the end of the war. Although she never said anything, I knew my wife Anne blamed me for not allowing them to shelter with her friend Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle, because I suspected she was a Royalist.

‘Hurry, man!’ I said, almost snatching the key from the gaoler. Then, when he was about to insert it in the lock I stopped him, putting a finger to my lips.

Luke had a beautiful voice, which rang out like a church bell. What he was saying was the last thing I expected to hear.

‘When Love with unconfinèd wings

Hovers within my Gates;

And my divine Sarah whispers

At the prison Grates …’

There was more. It was a poem by the Royalist poet Richard Lovelace, written in his cell. After lying ‘entangled in Sarah’s hair’, the poet says, the very gods ‘know no such Liberty’.

A hollow knocking came from the cell next door, and one of Luke’s fellow prisoners joined in. His voice was much more feeble but its import just as determined as they chanted that when they sang about the glories of the King, ‘the winds that curl the Floodes know no such liberty’.

I signalled to the gaoler. Far from stopping them, the sound of the key redoubled their defiant chanting of the final line. There was so little light from the barred window, I could see only a shape sprawled on a stone bench. As the gaoler opened the door further, the candles in a corridor sconce lit up his face. Few would have thought us father and son without the hook of the Stonehouse nose. There the resemblance ended. At seventeen, the fresh, tight curves of his good cheek held the lofty arrogance that only a privileged upbringing on an estate like Highpoint gives a man. The raw, rippled skin of his burned cheek, which at first had made him a withdrawn child, now only emphasised that absolute assurance, as he realised people often took it as a badge of the war he had never fought in.

Most people saw the same assurance in my face, but it was skin deep. Once I had believed in the republic as Luke believed in the King. I still did, but not with the enthusiasm of the child of the streets I had once been. Years of working with Cromwell, of looking for a form of government that would work without falling back on the army, had convinced me that power came first. If I looked in the mirror, which I seldom cared to, I saw a man who looked older than his thirty-five years, whose cheeks were rather too pink from sweet sack, and whose once fiery red hair was a dull copper streaked with grey.

The rush of relief when I saw that Luke was not only well, but apparently in rude health, was followed by anger both at his foolhardiness and my weakness in not leaving him to take his punishment. At first, with the gaoler blocking his view of me and Scogman, he did not see us.

Luke gave the gaoler a long, languid look and raised a declamatory hand. ‘When I think of my sweet King … a gaoler with his keys knows no such liberty!’

‘Well said, Luke!’ called the prisoner next door.

My anger was redoubled when the gaoler touched his forehead to Luke. ‘Beg your pardon, sir –’

I pushed him to one side. Luke stared at me as if I was an apparition, before turning the good side of his face away. It was a habit of his when he was with me. The muscles were more rigid on his scarred side and made his expression difficult to read.

‘Get up.’

Slowly he uncurled his legs and rose. He was an inch or two taller than me. I flung a nosegay at him. He caught it, then let it fall amongst the straw littering the floor.

‘Did you have anything with you when you were taken?’

When he did not answer, the gaoler said, ‘Packed and ready, sir. To be signed for. Thank you, sir!’

This when I tossed him a Cromwell, a half crown which he caught with the dexterity of a swift catching a fly, moving to bite it before his finger ran suspiciously over the edge to check its validity. It was the first coin to be milled at the edge against forgeries. It frustrated me beyond measure that from small innovations like this to large ones like the world’s first professional army, Cromwell had transformed the country in a way that the gentlemanly but hopeless and untrustworthy King Charles had never done, yet my son and his friends called Cromwell a devil and Charles a saint.

The light caught Cromwell’s head on the coin. Luke stared at it and found his voice. ‘Where are you taking me? The Tower?’

I only just stopped myself from smiling. One moment Luke frustrated me, the next he touched my heart. He lived in a world of fancy. I was about to tell him we were going home but Scogman got in first.

‘The axe is being sharpened at this very moment, Mr Luke.’

There was no love lost between them. Luke complained that Scogman was not a proper steward, for he could not write or add up, except in ways that suited him. In other words he was a thief. Not having served in the army, Luke did not realise that there were normal accounts and army accounts. I knew perfectly well what Scogman was doing. He did it out of habit, for the thrill of it, mostly for someone else, usually a woman he fancied. It was small stuff. At the same time he was ferociously loyal to me.

‘I want the same treatment as everyone else,’ Luke said.

‘This is not a game!’ I said. ‘Come.’

He knew that tone, that manner. Automatically, he began to follow me, stumbling against the piss-bucket. He almost immediately righted himself, but Scogman made a move to grab him and save him. Luke must have misinterpreted that as an attempt to frogmarch him out of the cell. He lashed out at Scogman, winding him. The bucket went over, spilling its contents over Scogman’s boots. No one was more conscious of his status than Luke. Now, in a blind rage that a servant he despised would dare to lay a hand on him, he aimed another blow. Scogman caught Luke’s flailing fist and twisted his arm behind his back.

‘Easy, Mr Luke, sir, easy,’ Scogman said.

This mixture of control and deference inflamed Luke even further. The more he struggled to get away, the more pain he inflicted on himself, but he would not give up.

‘Enough!’ I said. ‘Release him.’

Scogman did so. Luke staggered into the gaoler before sprawling against the wall, rubbing his arm, tears of humiliation pricking his eyes. I was tempted to leave him there and be done with it, but Anne would never forgive me. My wife found an excuse for his every fault.

‘Luke. Your mother is not well.’ I hated saying it but it was the easiest option and it was partly true. Anne was sick with worry about him. There was no one he cared about more than his mother. I was convinced that was the problem. She alone had brought him up, eschewing nurses when he was a baby. Even after the war they lived in the country, which they loved, while my work with Cromwell kept me in town.

Luke’s reaction was immediate. He forgot his humiliation in his concern for her, asking what was wrong. I would not answer, angry at both myself for my deception and at him that concern for his mother meant far more than any respect for me. But there was no more resistance, physical at least.

‘God bless the King in heaven!’ he shouted as we walked down the corridor.

‘And the King across the water!’ answered the man in the next cell.

Their cries were picked up by other prisoners. The shouts and the drumming on the cell doors could still be heard as our coach went off into the night.

PART ONE

The Perfect Marriage

Autumn 1659

1

The rebellion was soon put down. I brought Luke and Anne to London on the pretext that they would be safer with the guards I had there, but they saw it for what it was: a form of house arrest for Luke. I tried to make him see that there was no chance of the King returning. He could see what little support he had from the abject failure of the uprising. The army generals who were in control would eventually stop arguing and a new leader to replace Cromwell would be found. Then it would be business as usual.

He stood on the worn patch of the carpet in my study, where I had once stood as a rebellious bastard before Lord Stonehouse, and said nothing.

I tried reason. It was not his beliefs, I said. He was as entitled to them as I was to mine. If more people wanted a monarchy, it would return. But too many people had gained too much land during Cromwell’s reign to want the King back. That was why all the Oxfordshire gentry who had made promises before the rebellion had not lifted a finger to help him and his friends when they were in prison.

He stood fidgeting in his bucket boots and floppy linen, staring straight in front of him, rigid in silence.

I tried diversion and flattery. He was mad about horses and had a very good eye for them. Would he go with the ostler to a horse fair and buy a pair?

His eyes gleamed for a moment, then he bit his lip and said nothing. Finally, I gave him an ultimatum. He could have his complete freedom and go into the City alone if he promised to have nothing more to do with the Sealed Knot and took no part in any further plots.

He stood rigidly to attention. He may even have clicked his heels. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said, in his beautiful, clipped voice, a real Stonehouse voice which Anne had made sure he acquired, unlike mine which slipped, sometimes intentionally, into the sound of the London streets where I was brought up. ‘I am sorry. I cannot do that.’

I almost ordered Luke to dismiss, but that was part of the problem. He wanted to be a soldier. He had missed the war. Perhaps he believed that if he and his friends had fought, the Royalists would have won.

I sighed. ‘Go away and think about it, Luke.’

‘I suppose it’s too late to beat the French dog,’ said Scogman hopefully. He called him that because, in the manner of the man he declared to be his King, he dressed in French fashions: short doublets and increasingly wide-legged breeches which seemed about to fall from his hips. ‘You could cut his allowance.’

I would not do that. Beatings and other punishments had never worked on me. Nor would I let him be cooped up, although I insisted that Scogman went with him into the City. Anne agreed with that, at least. She wanted no more trouble.

People believed we had a perfect marriage. It certainly was a perfect relationship, but only because we rarely saw one another. Love had gone. It went for me when I became convinced Anne was taking potions to prevent having another child.

The child might have been another little Liz, who had died in infancy. Or another son, giving me the chance to be a better father. Once or twice I even unlocked the left-hand bottom drawer of my desk, and took out the papers on my bastard son.

It had happened when I was a Leveller, struggling after the rebellion for rights for the people. I had broken up with Anne and lived with a girl called Ellie. But then I had returned to Anne, and it was only by chance, years later, that I discovered I’d had a son with Ellie. I paid to have him brought up at Half Moon Court, in the house where I was raised, and still owned. I gave him a rudimentary education. Nothing fancy. He had no idea of my existence, believing the man Ellie lived with, a candle-maker to whom he was apprenticed, was his father. The file I took out of my drawer was marked: Samuel Reeves. Closed. Payments had stopped when he was indentured. Each time I took it out with the intention of throwing it away. It was pointless, stupid to keep it. Anne had no idea of his existence. But each time I put it back.

Apart from Luke, Anne’s child was Highpoint, our great estate in Oxfordshire. Estates were in decline. The extravagant years, when noblemen were expected to bankrupt themselves on the chance that the King might visit, went with his execution. The mood was, as one churchman put it, that ‘a house had better be too little for a day than too great for a year’. Even so, Anne improved the classical facade and opened up the lofty hall to the great sweep of the imposing staircase. She had an eye for paintings which lived, as she put it, rather than just hung. Many were bought cheap at Parliament’s ‘Sale of the Late King’s Goods’, a chaotic affair in Somerset House where dusty masterpieces were crammed amongst tapestries and chipped statues. She spotted dirty Titians and neglected Van Dycks, and had them restored and reframed to their original beauty. Her gardens were marvelled at. I admired Highpoint, but could not live there. Its builders, staff, stables, brew houses, granaries and farms drained most of our money. While she spent it in the country, I economised in town. It suited us both.

It gave her the pleasure of creating it and me the power it emanated. We saw one another at glittering occasions there where I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, charming to the county, most of whom were covert Royalists. Lady Stonehouse – I called her that at first, in a slightly mocking way, until, as the house gained in eminence, it became impossible to call her anything else – put on her sober dress and mien when she came to town to entertain Cromwell and the other old generals who ruled the country. Cromwell would call me Tom, but he would never dream of calling Anne anything other than Lady Stonehouse.

So we believed it would continue until the family grave at Highpoint (she had already planned it) bore not one of those stiff, heraldic memorials that were going out of fashion, but a personal portrait that recorded our enduring love and affection for one another.

2

Like a pebble in a pool, the summer rebellion made a small impact but caused wide ripples. There was unrest in the City. Mutterings that there would be a tax strike if a successor to Cromwell was not found soon. I had the usual vitriolic letter from my father, Richard Stonehouse, threatening what would happen to me when the King returned.

Cromwell had given me Richard’s estates and made me Sir Thomas Stonehouse, in return for supporting him and signing the King’s death warrant. I had done it for Anne, who had become so obsessed with the place she had fallen into an illness from which I was afraid she would die. It was also true that Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, finally intended me to have it. He feared Richard’s profligacy would destroy the estate, but had died before he could complete a new will. Richard saw it much more simply: I had seized Highpoint by signing away the King’s life. The estate was blood money. To my father, I was what I had always been: Tom Neave, bastard, scurrilous pamphleteer, usurper and, worst of all, regicide – King killer.

At erratic intervals, from different parts of Europe, my father sent me such letters. Under Cromwell, who had built up a powerful navy as well as a full-time army, Britain had become the most feared nation in Europe. In those years I could afford to throw Richard’s incoherent letters into the night soil without reading them. Now the armies – there was not one but several – were beginning to disintegrate. Soldiers had not been paid. Their generals quarrelled. Montague, who headed the navy, was suspected of being involved in the rebellion and there were moves to put him in the Tower. I read my father’s letter with more than usual care.

He praised Luke for his courage and part in the rebellion. With all my father’s old contacts in Oxfordshire, I wondered if he had deliberately involved Luke in it. In the same post was a letter for Anne from her old friend and mentor, Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, who was in Brussels with the makeshift court of Charles Stuart. I had rescued her from the Tower, but Cromwell had exiled her for spying for the King. Now she was spying for me. Her letter was full of gossip about penniless dukes and duelling courtiers and – principally – about Mrs Palmer, Charles’s new mistress.

‘She has enslaved him,’ Lucy wrote. ‘When she is in the room he cannot take his eyes from her. She is planted of course, by the Villiers family – she was Barbara Villiers – for their benefit, if the King ever crosses the water. The whole place is alive with the feeling that it is going to happen but I am afraid we have all heard it so many times before & everyone is as poor as ever & the food just as vile.’

Anne, as usual, gave the letter to me for my amusement and, as usual, I took down my Bible to decode it. It made disturbing reading. Far from discouraging the Royalists, the failed rebellion had made them even more determined. Lucy gave figures for a large number of troops from Ireland. There was money from Europe and the West Country. Richard was heavily involved. He had played a major part in the summer rebellion.

It was late evening when I decoded the letter. I went from my study to return it to Anne. The door of Luke’s room was open as was that of the anteroom of Anne’s apartment. He often slipped in to see her, to agonise over the width of a pair of breeches, or the colour of a cloth. I could hear the murmur of her voice from the corridor and was raising my hand to knock when Luke spoke.

‘When I have the estate I will have a proper steward, not that rogue Scogman.’

Her reply was inaudible but I could guess she agreed with the sentiment. She had her own house steward at Highpoint, a correct and punctilious man. I went into the anteroom. Unlike the rest of the house, which was dark and gloomy, she had, in a short space of time, made her rooms bright with fresh paper and a few of her favourite pictures. There was no sign of her maid and I raised my hand to knock again.

‘Of course, Grandfather will have Highpoint first,’ Luke said.

She loathed Richard much more wholeheartedly than I did and once would have had him killed by Cromwell if I had not interceded, but her reply was chiding, indulgent. ‘Oh. Will he. Then what will happen to your father and me?’

‘Oh … don’t worry. I will protect you, Mother.’

It was banter. She did not take him seriously, but still I could not trust myself to speak. If I had gone in he would have thought I was spying on him, which, by that time, it was impossible to deny.

I returned to my study and picked up my father’s letter. Luke’s grandfather would have Highpoint first, would he? Again I wondered if my father was in contact with Luke, and picked up his letter.

Richard Stonehouse was a threat to the state. That was how John Thurloe, the Secretary of State, for whom I worked, regarded him. Throughout fifteen years of turmoil and change, whatever people thought of his methods, John Thurloe had kept a steady hand on the affairs of state. He had built an admired and feared network of contacts, spies and informers that made one ambassador say: ‘He has the secrets of Princes in his pocket.’ Not just princes. Nobles, gentlemen, politicians, merchants, lawyers, ministers: anyone of any consequence was recorded in papers at his offices in Whitehall. He was one of the few people with Cromwell when he died. Cromwell trusted him implicitly. So did I. I knew what he would say about my father – he had said it often enough.

‘Write to Amsterdam.’

In other words, have him killed by our agent there. I had always recoiled from it. Thurloe thought it was a sign of weakness, but it was not just that he was my father. What was the point? He was a pathetic figure with no real hope of his King returning. But I could not stand the thought of him poisoning my son’s mind.

I had much more to do but Luke’s words and Anne’s indulgence continued to irk me. I felt excluded in my own house. I had put Luke under house arrest but, in a curious way I did not fully understand, I felt I had imprisoned myself.

I flung down my pen and had a glass of sack while I shrugged into my shabby old Brandenburg coat. Anne would call a servant to put on a coat but I detested all that formality. A servant sprang up from the booth in reception, the gold embroidered falcon glittering on his cuffs. He was new – Anne had been dissatisfied with some of the staff – and for a moment I could not recall his name.

‘I am going to the club. Would you be good enough to tell Lady Stonehouse that I shall not be in for supper?’

No, I did not want the coach; nor the ostler to get my horse. I went down the steps into Queen Street, turning surreptitiously to put two fingers up to the austere stone falcon over the entrance. With a feeling of release I breathed in the stink of the streets, walking my legs back to life through Covent Garden towards Parliament. There, swathed in the mists from the river was New Palace Yard, a huge open space full of eating houses, taverns and coffee houses. Coffee had taken London by storm, almost overnight, like pantaloons and feathers in hats. It was in the Turk’s Head Coffee House that the Rota Club met.

It was a pretend Parliament. A republican debating society that anyone with eighteen pence could join and have a vote. Cromwell had purged Parliament, reducing it to a small number – the Rump – until even that had been dismissed. With historically a large Royalist majority he could never have governed. Yet he never reformed it. God would provide the answer. God never did, and there we were, crammed into the smoke-filled Turk’s Head a few steps from Westminster, the republican Parliament that might have been.

The eighteen pence included coffee and pipes of tobacco. I found the coffee foul, boiled thick as soup and bitter, but many sniffed appreciatively and were very knowing about different Turkish blends. It certainly kept people sober and the debate fierce. As novel as the coffee was the Balloting Box. The motion was put and every member dropped his ball in the Aye or the Noe section. That evening the question was whether a Minister should serve a fixed term only and it was decided he should, to avoid consolidation of power.

We streamed into the night, flasks of Dutch brandy coming out to take away the taste of the coffee, and the real business began. William Clarke, whom I used to dub ‘Mr Ink’ in our republican days, took me to one side. He was now rather grand and staid, being secretary to the Committee of Safety, the hotchpotch of army officers that ran the country.

‘Lambert won’t fight,’ he said, taking a pull from my flask. Lambert was the general who had put down the summer rebellion. He had gone north to subjugate another general, Monck, in charge of the Scottish army, who had refused to join the Committee of Safety, declaring it illegal. ‘His troops are not paid. Some of them are without boots.’

He slipped me a paper, containing army movements and committee minutes. It was old, thin stuff, some of it rehashed from what I had seen before. He read the disappointment in my face and took another drink from my flask.

‘What happened at the last meeting?’

He wiped the brandy from his lips. He looked ill and feverish. ‘I wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘I was excluded. How can I take the minutes of a meeting when I’m excluded?’ He addressed me as if I was personally responsible, almost immediately muttering, ‘I’m sorry, Tom. It used to be difficult to know who will be in charge tomorrow. Now I scarcely know who is in charge today.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Bill. This will be very useful.’

In other words, like Lucy, he would be paid. I ended the evening in a chop house with Sam Pepys.

We had both climbed out of the streets, his father having been a tailor. His patron, Lord Montague, was under suspicion of involvement in the summer rebellion and Pepys had lost his position as his secretary.

‘So I have nothing to do, which is bad, and no money to do it with, which is worse, unless Lord Montague is reprieved …?’

He looked at me hopefully. I concentrated on my mutton chop in pomegranate jelly. Montague was able, if a little headstrong, and I had put a case for him but John Thurloe was adamant. Montague would go to the Tower. When the Secretary of State made a decision it was final. Montague was finished. I complimented Pepys on his choice of eating house. Only a good chef could turn a tough old piece of mutton into such a rare delicacy.

He made a face at me and sighed. ‘Then I am done. I will have to while away my hours writing a diary.’

‘A diary?’

‘A record of each day. Big events. Plenty of those. There’s a new government every day. Small ones – the sort of things you and I get up to.’ He gave me a prodigious wink.

‘How are you going to sell it?’

‘Sell it?’ He looked shocked. ‘I’m writing it in shorthand. I could never sell it. My wife might read it.’

He roared with laughter and I ordered another bottle of claret to launch his new enterprise. By the time I stumbled out of the Hackney in Queen Street I was only too glad for James in reception – I remembered his name and used it several times – to help me out of my Brandenburg coat.

Two or three times a week I found my way to the offices of the Secretary of State in Whitehall. I say ‘found’ because the old palace in which Cromwell had installed government offices was a labyrinth in which even servants got lost. After going through the Elizabethan Great Gate, past buildings with crumbling timbered gables, I snaked through a warren of twisting corridors which seemed to get narrower and narrower, taking me past room after room of state papers before reaching John Thurloe’s apartment overlooking the river.

He never wasted time and greeted me with no more than a nod. I gave him the figures Lucy had sent me.

‘How sound are they?’

‘I don’t know. But Richard Stonehouse is at the heart of it.’ In Thurloe’s presence, I never referred to him as my father.

He shrugged. He had trained as a lawyer and counted his words. Words cost money. He had said all he had to say about my father, and the ball was in my court. Although I expected nothing, it was always worthwhile, when making a concession, seeking a quid pro quo.

‘I wonder if it’s wise to send Montague to the Tower?’

He stared at me coldly and I thought I had gone too far. With his dark eyes set rather too close together in a thin, cadaverous face, it was like being observed by a surgeon planning to operate. At last he spoke.

‘As it happens, I’ve been reflecting on what you said. I’ll send him to the country instead.’

‘I’ll write to Amsterdam about Richard Stonehouse.’

Another nod and he returned to the papers he was working on. The interview was over. I was surprised and gratified about Montague. I was almost out of the room when he spoke again.

‘Tom.’

He never called me Tom. Perhaps Sir Thomas; usually he dispensed with names altogether. When I returned he was gazing out of the window at the hazy line of the river, watching the press of boats going under London Bridge. Two boats had collided and an argument had erupted.

‘If you’re going to do it, you’d better get on with it. I expect I shall be out of office next week. Or shortly after.’

I thought I had misheard him. He continued to stare down the river as if the accident absorbed all his attention. Oars were pushing the quarrelling boatmen to one side and the other boats resumed their steady flow.

‘Out of the office?’

He turned his full gaze on me. There may even have been a hint of amusement on his face at my bewilderment. ‘Out of office. The Committee of Safety is yesterday’s story. They have caved in to General Monck. The Rump Parliament is to be assembled to er … run the country, led by Arthur Haselrig.’ There was a wealth of dry scepticism in the hesitation. ‘Arthur has been good enough to inform me that I will not be invited to join the State Council.’

I still did not take it in.

I could find nothing to say. If he was out of office, so was I. The boatmen had settled their difference and were steering back into the stream of traffic.

‘I suspect we shall be wanted again,’ he said. ‘I suggest we meet once a week at my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn.’

I stammered something, which he interrupted with a final nod before returning to his papers.

I got lost on the way out in the web of alleys that linked small courts and gardens, where the first piles of fallen leaves were being swept away. I had to be directed by the gardener to the Great Gate. It was a bright, unseasonal day. I walked aimlessly back to Queen Street. I badly needed a drink, but dare not. Everyone seemed busy but me, from hawkers crying to gentlemen in coaches on their way to the City. I did not have the heart to raise two fingers to the falcon over the door, but hurried up the steps, suddenly realising how much there was to do.

Everything that I had put off I did that day, coming to a decision on problems that had seemed intractable yesterday, dictating to my secretary, Mr Cole, until the servant came to light the candles. I left my father till last.

‘There is one more.’

I had coded the letter a year ago, after a particularly vitriolic letter from my father when Cromwell died. The code was embedded in a letter ordering some diamonds from a jeweller in Amsterdam, one of our agents. As proof that the job had been done, I requested him to send Richard’s ring. If Mr Cole did not know what it meant, he knew what it signified. He had done enough such letters for Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, including one ingeniously condemning me as a plague child, which should have resulted in my death. His only reaction was to push back his long white hair and rub his wrist with a sigh of relief.

‘Mr Thurloe has kept us busy today, sir.’

‘He has indeed, Mr Cole.’

I said no more. He would know soon enough. I poured myself a large sack and raised it to the portrait of Lord Stonehouse over the flickering fire. Anne thought it dreadful – ‘even worse than he looked in real life, if that were possible’ – but, for me, it was an old companion. In the shifting light of the candles and the fire, my grandfather’s smoke-blackened face with the beaked Stonehouse nose seemed to come alive. That evening I thought he looked disapproving. No Stonehouse had been out of office since before the reign of James the First.

I finished the sack. I considered going to the club but, with my sudden loss of influence, felt disinclined to, and found, for the first time in years, I had nothing more to do than go down to supper.

3

The first sign of unrest in the City is always when apprentices, egged on by their masters, begin to riot. They were roaming the streets, hunting down Quakers, a sectarian group which the City saw as a serious threat to order. Church ministers hated them because they were against tithes and interrupted services. I came across a group of them when I rode through Covent Garden on my way to my weekly meeting with John Thurloe.

It had been raining since early morning. Some of the Quakers had no outdoor coats and the feet of their children were bare, but their eyes shone exultantly as they chanted. A growing group of apprentices jeered at them, but their singing only grew louder. I tried to force my horse through. The apprentices tipped or drew off their hats at me.

‘Remove your hats for the gentleman,’ yelled an apprentice at the Quakers.

He was provoking them. They acknowledged no social betters and whatever tattered scraps they wore remained firmly on their heads. The rumble of an approaching carriage caused the apprentices to cry out in increased fervour.

‘Off with their hats!’

One caught a woman a stinging blow on the head. Her bonnet flew off. The blow scarcely interrupted her singing but the child with her flinched and darted away, stopping when she saw the carriage. There was no danger. The coachman saw her, slowed and turned away the horses. But the occupant of the carriage, no doubt in a hurry, rapped loudly with his stick. The coachman jumped, lost the reins for a moment and the horses panicked, heading straight for the child. There was an innocence in her mud-stained face, a curiosity in her widening eyes as she stared towards the tossing heads, the shafts that were about to impale her.

There are some instincts that, however rusty, spring back into life. It was the cavalryman I had once been who drove his horse between the carriage and the child, diverting the horses towards the street posts and helping the coachman bring them back under control.

The apprentices had stopped shouting and the Quakers singing. The child had not moved. She still had that fixed look of curiosity on her face. I picked up her hat, which had been swept off in the draught from my horse, and gave it to her. She turned and ran, disappearing into the group of Quakers.

The door of the carriage scraped open, its occupant so corpulent he could extract himself only with the aid of the footman, whom he berated, before flinging abuse at the coachman.

I found my breath. ‘You should leave your coachman to do the driving, sir.’

He moved to face me at the speed of a ship turning round. His fat cheeks narrowed his eyes into slits. ‘You should leave the country, Sir Thomas, to those who know how to govern it.’

I had not seen Sir Lewis Challoner for years. Cromwell had thrown out Royalists like Sir Lewis, creating the Rump Parliament, which had now returned, giving the army some semblance of legitimacy. It was another sign of unrest that, in spite of his part in the rebellion, he was back.

‘Go home, Sir Lewis. You are banned from the City.’

He smiled. Suddenly he was enjoying himself. ‘You are forgetting yourself, sir. You are dislodged from office, are you not, Sir Thomas?’

The singing began again, this time on a triumphant, exalted note. A man was holding up the child I had saved. He was an odd figure in that crowd, dressed in sailor’s slops, a coloured jumble of canvas doublet, breeches and linen shirt, tight-fitting to avoid being caught in the rigging of a ship. At his side stood a woman who would soon be in danger of wearing no clothes at all. She was flinging away her tattered skirt and beginning to remove her blouse, the singers round her chanting in ecstasy. The apprentices watched in a mixture of stunned disbelief and licentiousness. I had heard of this Quaker rite, but never seen it. The woman reached a state of euphoria where the innocence of Eden came upon her and compelled her to remove her clothes before God entered the garden, asking who told her of her nakedness.

In this attempt to return to a time before sin she had unpeeled her blouse, revealing breasts which, from bearing children, were as shrunk as old leather wine bottles. Perhaps the girl perched on the sailor’s shoulders was her child. Far from feeling the cold and the driving rain, the woman embraced it, her skin glowing with effort, drawing superstitious awe from the watching crowd.

Except for Sir Lewis. What was innocence for her was the utmost depravity for him, a consequence of the religious licence Cromwell had given such pernicious sects.

As she dropped the blouse in a pool, spurning it with her dancing feet, Sir Lewis ordered his footman to seize the whore while the coachman went for a constable.

‘If there still is anyone keeping order in this Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he said.

‘Leave her,’ I said to the footman. ‘I will deal with her.’

Sir Lewis lost all restraint. The brooding sourness built up during his enforced exile burst out of him. He looked the arrogant, despotic hanging magistrate I had first met years ago.

‘You? You can do nothing! You are one of the creators of this evil!’

The woman, now naked, danced in a mounting frenzy, matched by the insistent rhythm of the Quakers’ singing, accompanied by the apprentices, whose shocked outrage had been overwhelmed by prurience. They outdid one another in nudges and jokes, gazing lasciviously, their handclapping, which had begun with a mocking slowness, increasing in speed until it matched the ecstasy of the singers.

‘Your master Thurloe has been sacked. You have no power. No position. It is you who should flee – if you can, regicide!’ He spat the word out. ‘There was a ballot to be on the jury of those who killed the King. I was lucky enough to win a place.’

When you have been in power for a decade you do not lose it overnight, whether it has substance or not. ‘Get in your coach, Sir Lewis, or I will bring an action against you for endangering the life of that child.’

‘That slattern –’ he began, but saw the look on my face and turned to shout at his coachman to open the door.

I strode over to the crowd. The apprentices stopped clapping when they saw my expression. Disgust and outrage began to return to their faces at the sight of the naked woman.

‘Stop her,’ I said to the sailor.

‘I cannot. She is with the Lord.’

I told an apprentice to fetch a constable. ‘Name,’ I said to the sailor.

‘Stephen Butcher,’ he said, with one of those beatific smiles that made me want to strike him across the face.

I knew of him. He was one of the followers of the Quaker preacher James Nayler who had re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on an ass. I had wanted Nayler to be dealt with quietly, but he had been charged with blasphemy, flogged, and his tongue bored. As I feared, his supporters had increased tenfold.

There was no sign of the constable. The apprentices were looking at me expectantly, itching to be told to lay their hands on the woman. Blood oozed in a muddy rivulet on one of her feet where she had cut herself on a stone, but she seemed unaware of it. I looked away but, in spite of myself, could not keep my eyes from her. Shrivelled as her breasts were, her gyrations and the look of ecstasy on her uplifted face smoothed out its lines, giving it a strange, mesmeric beauty, and leaving no doubt that the girl who had nearly been killed was her daughter.

Her dance not only took the years from her; it took them from me. Anne’s body was a distant memory. When the urge came on me, Scogman found me a whore. Working for Cromwell late into every night had killed the desire even for that. I was not sorry. I thought of love, if I thought of it at all, as a false god, a spy within which robbed a man of his secrets and left him helpless, out of control. I had seen many men ruined by love; I had almost been destroyed by it myself. Had not my relationship with Anne become immeasurably better without love?

As I stared at the twist and turn of the woman’s rump, I caught the sailor’s smile, more knowing than saintly. I snatched up her clothes and thrust them angrily at him. ‘Cover her.’

‘Is that what your voice is telling you?’

I had had enough of the Quakers and their inner voices. I flung the clothes at him. ‘Do it!’

Without the smile leaving his face, Stephen Butcher picked up the clothes. ‘Martha,’ he said. ‘Martha.’ He seemed to be calling her from a great distance, for at first she did not respond. But the mood was broken for most of the Quakers, whose singing gradually stuttered to a stop. That slowed the woman’s dancing but did not stop it. Like a top, her whirling became a stagger until the sailor caught her by the arm. She gazed at him dizzily, as if she did not know him. He held her patiently until she regained her balance.

‘Martha,’ he said gently. ‘He is here. The man who saved Hannah’s life.’

She looked at him blankly, her breasts heaving as she drew in great gulps of air, and then at the clothes he was holding out to her. ‘I heard the Lord coming. I heard him. I saw him!’

‘Put them on,’ I said.

Martha took a step towards me. The lines were folding back into her face. Stretch marks slackening her belly suggested several children. ‘The sin is in your eyes, not in my clothes.’

Butcher dropped the blouse over her head and held out her underskirt. At least he was a pragmatist, I thought – he had seen the approaching constables. Automatically, Martha hooked the blouse to her skirt. Her body disappeared, except where the wet rags clung to it. Momentarily, perversely, before the constable came up to me, I felt I had destroyed something.

‘Lewdness in a public place,’ I said to the constable.

‘Your name, sir?’

His colleague dug him in the ribs and pointed to the falcon ring on my finger. ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Thomas.’

He seized Martha roughly, although she made no resistance. Some of the crowd bowed their heads; others began singing. Her daughter Hannah stood staring, thumb in mouth, before flinging herself at her mother. I suspected Martha was a recent convert, for the girl had absorbed none of her piety. When a constable pulled her off, she bit him, momentarily freeing her mother, yelling that they would escape to Spital, beyond the walls. Incensed, the constables began to drag them both away. Martha broke down and began to struggle, pleading with the constables that her daughter had the flux, and would die in gaol. This was a fine show for the apprentices, who liked nothing better than seeing the rewards of sin – unless they were committing the sins themselves – and began jeering and applauding.

I cannot say why I acted as I did next, for it was quite out of character. Perhaps the girl crying that they would escape to Spital, like her dancing mother, brought back to me the time of my life I preferred to forget.

‘Leave them,’ I said.

The constables stopped, staring at me uncomprehendingly. The girl half-wrenched away, screaming as a constable twisted her arm behind her back.

‘Release them,’ I snapped.

The girl immediately turned to run. Her mother stopped her, giving me a bewildered look which changed into one of gratitude, tinged with the piety that so aggravated me. The apprentices, robbed of their prey, began to mutter rebelliously.

‘Arrest him,’ I said, pointing at the sailor, Stephen Butcher.

‘On what charge?’ said the constable whose hand had been bitten.

‘Incitement to lewdness.’

In Puritan England there was no distinction between sin and crime. Adultery had become a felony, and, just as Eve picked the apple, it was invariably the woman’s fault. The apprentices moved threateningly towards me, but one of them, who from his superior clothes looked like a lawyer’s clerk, cried: ‘We have a Solomon amongst us. He has arrested the whoremaster, not the whore.’

The apprentices switched in a moment from threatening me to applauding me. ‘The whoremaster not the whore,’ they chanted.

Hannah stood puzzled, her thumb in her mouth again. She whispered to her mother, who pointed to me. Hannah darted over to me. She looked as if she was about to hug me but the thought of her flux, and the stench that came from her, made me draw away in disgust and she made a strange genuflection, somewhere between a bow and a curtsey, before fleeing back to her mother.

Stephen Butcher went without resistance, but stopped as he passed me. The constables attempted to jerk him away, but they might as well have tried to move one of the ships he sailed in. His muscles bulged under his linen shirt as he anchored himself in front of me. There was a livid scar on his neck and one of his ears was twisted out of shape. For a moment I thought the smile on his face was a feint and he was about to strike me, but in a voice as gentle as melted butter he had a much more cunning blow to land.

‘Your voices are telling you different things. Listen to the right one.’

4

When Anne and Luke first came down from the country we had a variety of dinner guests, chosen to avoid politics: lawyers, doctors, City merchants and the like. Luke was perfectly mannered and scrupulously polite, but remained at a distance. At first Anne did her best. She sparkled and drew the best out of me. But whereas her table at Highpoint was the most sought after in the county, full of wit and life, this was hard work.

Everyone knew Luke was there under duress. It was impossible to ignore and equally impossible to talk about it without the risk of an explosion or a penetrating silence. Gradually Anne’s sparkle died and she became as mechanical as Luke. I felt that, with her growing desire to return to Highpoint, tacitly she was taking his side, but would not give up. More and more guests found excuses not to come; others were reluctant to go out as the nights drew in and the disturbances increased.

Often the table was reduced to the three of us, as it was on the evening after the confrontation with Sir Lewis Challoner. Conversation ran out during the grouse soup, with stewed carp, ox tongues, fricassee of rabbits, lobsters, a choice lamprey pie, tarts and sweetmeats to come. I ate and drank well, both to cover the growing silences and because, although out of office, with Thurloe I was keeping my hand in, preparing – perhaps plotting would be a better word – for the next government. I had fallen into the bad habit of taking documents to the table, as I did when I lived alone. I finished my soup and began to glance through the documents.

Anne, who had scarcely had a mouthful of soup, dropped her spoon. A servant scuttled from the wall to give her another. She gripped it as if she was about to fling it at me. ‘I cannot stand this place!’

She stared directly at me, as if she meant it was me she could not stand. The servants were as still as the hunters woven into the tapestry behind them. Luke gazed at the piece of lamprey pie embedded on his fork. It was so quiet I could hear a candle gutter, and the rustle of silk as her bodice rose and fell. Side ringlets of her hair, normally carefully arranged, were in disarray. Among them a bead of sweat gleamed. Disconcertingly, at that moment, I wanted her. It was extraordinary how familiarity had stopped me seeing how young she still looked. She had avoided the constant ravages of childbirth that aged most women at thirty. The guttering candle went out, snatching away the ringlets and the tightly laced bodice, sketching there the lines of the haughty, scornful, but in some strange way vulnerable, girl I had first met.

A servant sprang to replace the candle. With it came back the ringlets, the sumptuous dark green of her dress and the measured voice of Lady Stonehouse.

‘I mean, sir, it is so dark and gloomy.’

I picked up her manner with relief, mingled with a lingering regret. ‘We are not spending money on Highpoint, madam. Why not employ your talents here?’

She took a sip of soup. ‘He would not approve.’

She indicated another portrait of Lord Stonehouse, which hung over our proceedings. When I dined alone, if I noticed him at all, I always saw him as a stern but comforting presence for, in spite of our differences, we were alike in one thing: we both hated extremes, and struggled to keep things together rather than let them fall apart.

‘He is not here to stop you.’

‘His ghost is.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘He haunts the place. He does not want us here. When his wife died he spent all his time here. As you do.’

She began calmly, almost flippantly, but again her voice shook and the implication of what she had said only seemed to strike her when she had spoken. She dabbed her lips, her hands trembling, said she was out of sorts and begged to be excused. Luke and I finished our meal in silence. I went up to her apartment to enquire after her. Her maid, Agnes, told me she was not well and had retired for the night. Agnes had come from Highpoint and I sensed her disapproval as she put away Anne’s dress. The crackle and sheen of the silk, black then sharp green as it caught the light, aroused me again. I took a step towards her room. The maid turned to me enquiringly. I felt my cheeks burning like a schoolboy as I brought out some stilted phrase about wishing her ladyship a good night, and almost walked into a chair on the way out. Her ladyship! For the first time it struck me that what had kept us together had also kept us apart.

I tried to work. I had a report for Thurloe on the City I must finish. Together with the generals, money would decide the next government. Everything was in the balance. I knew the hidden vices of every alderman in the City: who might be bought, sold or persuaded. But every time I began writing, the crackle of the paper brought back the lustre and sheen of her dress. Her ladyship! She was a printer’s daughter from Farringdon. I saw the rain gleam again on the twisting rump of the Quaker woman. That was how it had started. Of course. A good whore was all I needed. I had not been to Southwark for a long time.

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.

5

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.

‘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?’

She jerked up in her chair and stared at me, as if I was a stranger who had just walked into the room. ‘I am sorry, sir. I … have not been myself.’ Her dress had ridden up, showing her ankle and crumpled shift. She smoothed them down and, apart from the blue smear on her cheek, looked as composed as ever.

I began to bridle again. Another ruse! ‘When did Dr Latchford say you must not have any more children?’

‘After our third child was born.’

‘Third …?’

She nodded. I thought in spite of her matter-of-factness, the effect of the flux was still unbalancing her mind. The books I had been reading had spoken at length about the woman as a weaker vessel, whose unstable womb bred irrational fears.

‘Anne,’ I said gently. It was the first time I had used her name for months. ‘We have only had two children.’

She jumped up, saying the room was suffocating. I opened a window, but in spite of the chill air beads of sweat formed on her forehead.

‘There was a third child,’ she said.

6

A strange calm came over her. Although the room rapidly became colder she would not have the window closed. A thin breeze drew the sound of a street crier, selling poor jack, crabs and eels. Traders’ cries were growing longer and more persistent as indecision over who would take over the country went on. Trade was seizing up, jobs were scarce and there was less money for people to buy.

It was the year after the first war ended, she told me: 1647. ‘You were away,’ she said bitterly. ‘As usual.’

‘You mean the child was not mine?’

‘Do you think I would bear a child who was not a Stonehouse?’

I believed that. Oh, I believed that. I envied other men whose wives were unfaithful with someone of flesh and blood whom I could kill. But what could I do when she was in love with stone pillars?

‘But we did not sleep together.’

‘Oh, we did, sir. We did.’

It flooded back to me as if it was yesterday. It was she who was desperate then to have another child. A male child to find favour with Lord Stonehouse and increase my chances to inherit. When Luke was born, Lord Stonehouse furnished the house he had given us. When the second child turned out to be the little girl I loved passionately, Lord Stonehouse barely gave us a grunt of acknowledgement.

Anne loved me then. She wanted me in her bed then, although she was thin, ill, and had been warned by Dr Latchford to wait until she recovered. Oh, I remembered. World Upside Down – she went on top of me like a whore. She was still Anne then, not Lady Stonehouse. We laughed, joked, we talked not bantered, we looked into each other’s eyes. We were in love. Oh, I remembered that time.

She was quite still by the window. The fish crier had been joined by a fruit seller, a woman who called hot codlings with ‘pears-and-lemoooooons!’

Again I wondered if it was a fantasy. I had been back briefly during that summer and seen no sign of her being pregnant. But it was impossible to tell with the stays which ballooned out the dresses. A terrible thought occurred to me. The child had been a girl, another girl like little Liz, and she had got rid of her.

‘Another girl,’ I said harshly. ‘Is that what it was?’

She continued staring out of the window. Her voice was so soft I could scarcely hear her against the cries from the street.

‘A boy.’

Her voice broke. The breeze strengthened, whipping a gust of smoke from the fire. It billowed around us. She began coughing and I shut the window and led her back to her chair. The tea was cold but she would not let me call the maid. She took tiny sips until her coughing abated, staring into the fire. Rather than warm her, it seemed to make her colder, for however close she crept to it she kept shivering.

‘Was it the fire that caused it?’ she said. ‘The smoke? Or the riots? But there are always riots.’

She seemed to ask the question of the glowing, shifting coals, not me. For the first time it occurred to me that, as I had done, she had split herself into two halves. It was the Anne she had once been, a distant, remote figure whom Lady Stonehouse, in that impeccable voice, was questioning.

It was one of them, or all of them, she answered herself. The riots were the ones that broke up Parliament before Cromwell took over. I had been in the thick of it, while my own house was burning. She turned on me then. It was the old Anne, full of bitterness and contempt, but how I preferred that to Lady Stonehouse’s icy indifference.

‘You were never there,’ she kept whispering, as if the incantation expressed our whole story.

She told me it was not only Luke’s face that was damaged in the fire. She was seven months pregnant. Perhaps eight. She went into labour as she was trying to comfort Luke at her close friend Lucy’s house – the house where she would have been when the fire happened, if I had not forbidden her to go there because I suspected her old friend and mentor Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, of spying for the King.

Her face was flushed from the fire, but still she shivered. ‘He was perfect.’

‘A boy?’

‘A boy.’ Her voice was hollow, a mere wisp of sound.

‘But how could I not have known?’

I shook my head as she turned, the answer coming to me. Arriving late – always too late – that burning afternoon and believing them to be in the house, I had made a futile attempt to rescue them, sustaining injuries from which it took me weeks to recover.

‘He was perfect,’ she repeated.

‘Was he?’

She nodded, cradling her arms as if she was still holding him. The warmth of the fire enveloped us, shutting out the rest of the room. I bent over, picturing him as she described him. A mischievous smile crossed her face, a smile from years ago, young, eager, hopeful.

‘He was not so much of a Stonehouse.’

‘No?’

‘Well, the nose, of course. But he had your red hair …’

‘Not my terrible red hair!’

‘I swear it. He was like you … I kept thinking his eyes would open –’

Her voice choked off. I held her. She was like a small bird I once held who could not fly, still but constantly trembling. Gradually, in fits and starts, she told me how she would not release the child, refusing to believe he was dead. Only when Dr Latchford and Lucy told her she might lose Luke as well did she let him go. He was buried with Liz. Mr Tooley said prayers over him and christened him.

‘What did you call him?’

‘Thomas.’

The servant lighting the candles knocked but I told him to return later. She rubbed her elbows as if they had just borne the weight of a child. The coals had burned down to a dull flickering crimson. One fell on to the tiles.

‘Why did you not tell me any of this?’

She stared at the eddying shreds of smoke from the fallen coal. Only when I snatched it up and flung it into the fire did she answer. ‘Do you think you would have kept it a secret?’

‘A secret? Why should I keep it a secret?’

‘Exactly!’

Just as it had been then, she went from an unexpected closeness to sudden acrimonious bitterness.

‘You would never have kept it to yourself. When Lord Stonehouse heard, that would have been the end of it.’

Of course. With a burned child, frail as Luke was then, a stillbirth and no prospects, Lord Stonehouse would have written us off. A pity he didn’t, I thought. Now she did not want any more children because she had what she wanted. She was about to call the maid to see to the fire and the candles, but I stopped her. I wanted the darkness to continue, the closeness to return. I kissed her, gently, tentatively. Her eyes closed and for a while she leaned against me.

‘We could try again.’

‘Again?’

She rose, looking around her as if she had just woken in a strange place. In a spurt of light from the fire she caught sight of a smear of coal dust on her cheek. She dabbed at it with a cloth. Like an actor slipping from one role to another, with each touch her reserve seemed to return.

‘I am sorry, sir. I told you. I cannot, must not, have another child.’

I felt the stupid formality that had kept us apart for so long creeping back into my own voice. ‘If that is true, madam, I will of course abide by it. See Dr Latchford again. That is all I ask.’

She put down the cloth. ‘Very well.’

I found myself giving her a formal bow. Halfway through it I had a spurt of uncontrollable rage. She had Dr Latchford in her pocket. ‘And I would like another opinion. From a doctor of my choice.’

She rounded on me. ‘You have a son!’

‘Luke?’

It came out then. All I had been brooding over since Luke and Anne had been in London that winter. The burning of his face, I said, his scars, his damaged childhood, that was my fault. I had always accepted that. I had done everything I could to make amends. He had had the best doctors, tutors and, when I discovered horses were his passion and would draw out those sickly humours, some of the best stables in the country. There was nothing I would not do for him. He stood for everything I despised. Well, that was common enough. The son rebelling against the father. I bore even that. He was entitled to his opinions, obnoxious though I thought they were. How did he repay me? By joining that rebellion. I warned him against it – not because it was Royalist but because I knew it would be a disaster.

‘And you expected him to believe you?’

I retorted that she always took his side. She had made him into a milksop. I should have done what other fathers do and taken the whip to him.

That would have been better than ignoring him, she said acidly. Most of the time I was never there. When I was I had been cold, distant. What I had given him was money, when what he really wanted was a father.

And so on. I stopped listening, for it was at that precise moment the thought struck me. Why was I arguing when I had all the power I needed to do exactly what I wanted? No sooner were the words in my head than I spoke them. ‘I intend to change my will so Luke will not inherit.’

7

I locked myself in my study and would not see anyone, even John Thurloe who wrote that the situation was getting critical. It was remote, but possible that the King might return. I scarcely finished Thurloe’s letter. The situation was always critical.

What consumed me and kept me awake in the middle of the night was that bizarre outburst when I said I was going to change my will. At first it felt like an explosion of temper. A fit of pique. An empty threat. Anne certainly read it as such. She retorted I could not do it because the estate was entailed to the eldest son. But Cromwell had broken the entail. The estate was mine. I could dispose of it in any way I wished.

‘Who would you leave it to?’ she demanded.

‘To whom would you leave it?’ I corrected.

That was the end of the conversation. Her voice and manner were so impeccable, she loathed it when I corrected her grammar. But she was right. To whom would I leave it? A candle-maker?

It was she who had put the thought into my head. ‘You have a son.’

Indeed I had. One she knew nothing about. The bastard that came when I left Anne to live with Ellie and became a Leveller. Apart from me, only Scogman knew of his existence. I had met him only the once, when he was a boy, too young for him to remember. He believed the candle-maker who lived with Ellie and to whom he was apprenticed was his father. Ellie had been sworn to secrecy. I trusted her – but, just in case, had made it clear that if she broke that trust she would lose the house. I took the file out of my drawer. Samuel Reeves. Closed. As soon as I looked at Scogman’s scrawl, noting that, through the years, at a cost of £109 8s 6d, he had been indentured, fed, clothed, educated so he could write and sign his name, add, subtract and multiply and progress from candles to candlesticks, the ludicrousness of the idea struck me. A candle-maker!

I shut the file in my drawer again, but could not shut it out of my mind. Deciding to scotch the idea once and for all and destroy the file, I rode to Farringdon.

It must have been early afternoon when I slowed my horse at the beginning of Cloth Fair but the low dark clouds gave it the pallor of evening. Spots of rain were falling. A figure came out of Half Moon Court. At first it was not the man I recognised, but his bag, the leather cracked and split so that the cupping instruments gleamed through. Dr Chapman used to come regularly to bleed Mr Black, the printer who had apprenticed me. I watched him go towards St Bartholomew’s, a limp distorting his old, familiar bustle, feeling an unexpected pang of emotion. A voice called out after him and I gripped the reins in shock.

The youth who ran out of the court was myself. He ran for the joy of running, as much as to catch Dr Chapman and hand him some instrument he had forgotten. He was as polite with the old man as if he had forgotten the instrument himself, before striding back to the court, drops of rain gleaming in hair as red as fire. The hair was as brash and coarse as mine used to be. I tried to turn away as he saw me across the street and checked his stride. But it was merely to touch his forehead deferentially before vanishing into the court, whistling.

If I had thought for a second, I would not have done anything so stupid. But I was not thinking. Old forgotten feelings I thought had long gone rushed into me. I tethered my horse and, like one of the spies I employed, slipped through the entrance into the court. It was empty. The apple tree stood forlornly in the centre of the court, the last of its dead leaves hanging limply from it. I slipped behind it as I used to do as a child. There was no sign of the youth – Samuel. I had almost forgotten his name. A candle was burning in the room above the shop. Below the gable, where a half moon had swung when I was an apprentice printer, was the sign of a candlestick.

The rattling of a pail came from the coal shed. I was about to retreat from the shelter of the tree when I heard a woman’s giggle, then the youth’s voice.

‘Mary, please don’t distract me.’

‘Dis –?’

‘Stop me from working.’

‘O, it is impossible to do that, sir. You are always working.’ Her voice had a knowing pertness, followed by a deep sigh of regret.

The shed door creaked open, throwing light on the pair. The maid’s apron was smeared with grease and her face marked with acne, but I could see how the tilt of her chin and the line of her breasts roused him. What fools we are at that age, I thought, with a growing sense of disappointment – and not only at that age, perhaps.

Now I was closer, I could see he was not like me at all. It was the hair more than anything. That and the Stonehouse nose. But it was the eyes that drew the attention, black, mild and enquiring; that, and his large roughened hands, tradesman-dexterous as they turned over a jagged piece of coal. My disenchantment deepened. Well, nothing fancy, I had told Scogman when he was planning his education, and nothing fancy was what I had got. Coarse and unkempt, he looked what he would always be: a candle-maker. I began to move back towards the entrance.

‘These are the coals for the kiln, Mary. Not these. They have too much sulphur in them. You can see the difference.’

‘Show me.’

She leaned forward, her dress dipping so he could see the curve of her breasts. I could feel the charge drawing them together like metal to a magnet. I turned away and had almost reached the entrance when out of the house came what sounded like the hollow beat of a drum. For a moment I was a boy again, running upstairs to my old master, who when he was ill, used to strike the floor with his stick.

‘Go to my mother, Mary,’ the youth said. ‘The doctor has just cupped her.’

Mary came out of the shed with a flounce and saw me before I could reach the gloom of the entrance. She gave me a curtsey, followed by a look of curiosity. She was staring at my ring. In the dimness the glittering emerald eyes of the falcon seemed to produce their own light.

‘Sam!’ she called.

‘See to my mother,’ Sam ordered, emerging from the shed.

Hastily, clumsily, I pulled on my gloves. Sam brushed coal dust from his breeches. There was a smear of coal across his cheek. His nails were as engrained with filth and coal as mine used to be with ink.

‘Were – were you looking for me, sir?’ he said, with a slight stammer.

I was struck dumb by being such a fool as to come here. I clasped my hands behind my back as if afraid he could see the ring through the gloves. My initial warmth at seeing him was swept away by close sight of this gawky youth whose head seemed too big for his body, and the creaking old house, whose gable seemed about to topple into the courtyard. Was this really where I had come from? Where I had been brought up? Anne, who had a more pitilessly realistic memory than me, had been right never to come back here. It was little more than a hovel.

I was about to ask him directions to get to Holborn when he said: ‘Are you the g-gentleman Mr H-Hooke said might call?’

‘Mr Hooke?’

‘Mr Boyle’s laboratory assistant?’

I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about but there was something so eager, so hopeful in his manner, I began to relent a little from my summary dismissal of him. And curiosity bit me. Laboratory? What on earth was he getting involved in?

‘I might be,’ I grunted.

He must have taken my hesitation as a reaction against the squalor of the place, since he apologised for it, saying his father had recently died and he was only just putting the house to rights.

‘He was a candle-maker,’ I said.

He stared at me. He had the peering eyes of someone who does much close work. I pointed to the sign of the candle swinging from the gable.

‘He made candles after the war,’ he said, seeming ashamed of candles. ‘When things were bad. P-people always need candles. He was trained as a glass-maker and he taught me. He was a w-wonderful –’

He turned away as his voice caught. I was both touched by this feeling for the man he thought his father and felt an obscure stab of pain for something I had lost, although how could I have lost something I never had? Mixed with it was a twinge of jealousy. Would Luke have anything like this reaction for me?

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Won’t you come in?’

I could feel the heat from the kiln as we approached the house. From upstairs came a murmur of voices.

‘Who? What sort of cove, Mary?’ The voice, coming from upstairs, was weak and querulous but the strong Spitalfield accent came back to me as if it was yesterday. I stopped on the step. The last person I wanted to see was Ellie.

‘He’s a customer, Mrs Reeves.’

‘That’ll be the day!’ Ellie laughed. ‘I told him to stick to candles. Candles is secure, candles is.’ She broke out coughing and could not stop.

Everything suggested that whatever had replaced candles was not secure. Half Moon Court had fallen on hard times. A window frame was rotting and the wall round it damp and mildewed. On the kitchen table was a piece of rye bread of the poorest quality.

Sam, hearing his mother’s bitter comments, had gone as red as the mouth of the kiln.

‘I do not want to disturb your mother,’ I said.

‘My – my mother is ill, sir. The maid is looking after her.’ Sam rushed over and shut the door which led to the stairs, cutting off their voices. ‘Please let me show you. I could equip you a whole laboratory, if that is your desire.’

He had the occasional odd choice of word or phrase, as if selecting what he thought a gentleman would like to hear.

‘A whole laboratory,’ I murmured, on edge at the thought of Ellie upstairs, but unable to overcome my curiosity.

We went into the shop. The stone kiln was where the printing machine had once stood, its flue going into the back wall. It used to be hot when we were printing. This was like stepping into an oven, although he apologised for the kiln being ‘down’, as he put it. The maid had put in the wrong coal and he had to let it cool and start it up again before he blew any more glass. Light from the still glowing coals fitfully lit up the room which seemed much larger. I could not work out why until I suddenly realised.

‘This is where the office used to be!’ I exclaimed, without thinking.

He stared at me. ‘You have been here before?’

I cursed myself. I pointed to the ceiling in a shadowy corner. ‘I can see the line of alteration.’

‘You have sharp eyes, sir.’ A compliment, or was there a trace of suspicion? ‘This used to be a printing shop.’ His nose wrinkled in distaste. ‘A hotbed of radicalism.’

‘Was it indeed!’ I pretended to look shocked, intrigued and amused that, brought up in such modest surroundings, this youth should have such pretensions. ‘You are a Royalist, sir?’

‘A Royalist?’ He laughed. For a moment I could see myself in him at his age, full of arrogant certainty, that the world was wrong, must be changed and he had the solution. ‘A p-pox on both their houses! B-both the King and Cromwell destroyed this country!’

‘They did?’

He crumpled suddenly, running his hand feverishly through his red hair. A flake of coal fell from the tangled mop. He might not have been on either side, but his change in manner, his body dipping in deference, told me he had abruptly remembered one should always be on the side of the patron. He gave a stumbled apology for what he called going beyond his station. Before he could continue, the stick thumped violently on the ceiling. He gave me an agitated, apologetic wring of the hands before running to the door at the bottom of the stairs and opening it.

Ellie might be ill, but her voice was as sharp and inquisitive as ever. ‘How can I get to sleep when you make such a noise? Who are you talking to?’

‘I’m s-sorry, Mother.’

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s business, Mother.’

‘Come here.’ Her voice weakened and trembled into a wheedling tone which I did not remember, and which she must have fashioned during her trade as a whore.

Sam stood at the door for a moment, twisting and turning, before telling her he would be up in a minute, and hurrying back to me. I told him he should see to his mother and I would return later.

‘She is –’ His lips tightened in frustration. He never finished the sentence, rushing over to a long trestle table behind the kiln, on which were a number of drug bottles and cheap-looking tumblers, the glass thick and foggy. He drew back a cloth, almost tenderly, showing an array of tubing and flasks such as you might see at an alchemist’s. The glass was thinner and clearer, albeit with a greenish tint.

‘I can make you pipettes, sir, b-beakers and bottles of course. Chemicals do not rot glass as they do metal and l-leather –’

I saw that, in his eagerness, he was going to stumble. I knew the raised stone in that treacherous, uneven floor, having caught my foot in it many times, ruining work by dropping wet proofs or a forme. I moved almost before he tripped and, as the bottle slipped from his grasp, caught it, then caught him. He apologised profusely, floundering for support against me and the side of the kiln. Coals settled as he knocked against it, sending a bright flicker of light from the open kiln door which fell full on my face. I suppose it was the first time he had had a good look at me.

‘You have red hair like – like me, sir.’

‘Brown,’ I snapped, taken off-guard. ‘It looks red in certain lights.’

He stared at me, clearly puzzled by my vehemence at what had been an innocent remark. Sweat was coursing down my face from the heat of the kiln.

‘Shall I take your cloak, sir?’

I began to unclip it, but then realised I would have to remove my gloves, exposing the ring which bulged through them. ‘No, no. I am not staying.’

The cold air at the door revived me. He looked so wretched in his disappointment at losing me as a possible patron I tried to soften the blow by changing my tone. I was also intrigued. ‘You declared a pox on both the radicals and the Royalists – what do you believe in?’

In a whirl of movement he grabbed upwards as if he was catching a fly. He brought his closed fist down before me, opening it slowly. His palm was empty.

‘This, sir. This is what I believe in.’

I recoiled, thinking him mad.

‘Air, sir.’

‘Air?’

‘People think it is one of the four prime elements, earth, fire, air and water.’

‘So it is.’

‘What you see in front of you is a fluid of massy particles resting on invisible springs.’

I stared at him, then at his cupped, blackened palm, convinced now he was ripe for Bedlam. ‘I see nothing but your hand.’

‘Exactly, sir. But Mr B-Boyle has proved that air is a substance, pressing down on my hand.’

I began to understand. Boyle was the son of an Irish peer, seeking to set up a society to promote natural philosophy. Sam must have mistaken me for one of his friends. ‘This is the same Robert Boyle who has constructed – what is it? An air pump?’

His eyes lit up. ‘The same! The apparatus was made by his assistant Robert Hooke and I had the honour of blowing the glass.’

‘But … but – what has this to do with radicals and Royalists?’

He looked at me triumphantly, subservience gone. ‘They are the same.’

‘The same? How can that be?’

‘In that they both believe in argument. Arg-argument that goes nowhere. Then they fight. But what does that prove? Only that one is the better fighter.’

I began to warm to this strange youth again. ‘Mr Boyle knows a better way, does he?’

‘Indeed he does, sir, indeed he does,’ he cried with fervour. ‘Reason and experiment. Construct a theory, then prove it by an experiment others can repeat. People argued fr-fruitlessly whether air was essential to life. Mr Boyle put a bird in an air pump and drew out the air. The bird died. So did the argument.’

He put it beautifully, transformed by his belief, face flushed, eyes shining. Again, I saw myself standing there, pamphlets singing in my head. No, it was poetry at that age. I had forgotten every line of it, scarcely believed I could have wasted my time over it.

‘Sadly,’ I said, ‘the world is not a laboratory.’

‘It will be, sir,’ he assured me, ‘it will be.’

For a moment it was almost as if he was comforting me. He was talking nonsense, but it was infectious nonsense. We returned through the kitchen with its mildewed walls and scrap of rye bread. Out of the blue, in that tawdry room, with the acrid smell of burning coal drifting in from the shop, he became my son. Perhaps it was because the man he thought was his father had just died and I acutely felt his grief and need. Perhaps because I identified with his hopeless longings and dreams. Whatever the reason, what I had done for him before, I realised, had been out of guilt and duty. Now I felt such a tug of feeling for him I stopped abruptly. He was leading the way and turned to stare at me. I struggled to find the words to tell him, but they would not come.

He gave me a concerned look. ‘What is it, sir?’

‘Sam?’ Ellie called. ‘Is he still there?’

Ellie’s voice pulled me back to my senses. I muttered something and hurried through into the living room. That scrap of rye bread brought back the memories of gnawing hunger, of trying to stave it by almost breaking my teeth on those indigestible, black husks. As he showed me to the door I wrestled to find a way to help him. I could hardly order a laboratory of glass to be delivered to Queen Street. I could not offer him money. He was too proud and Ellie would be suspicious. Then I saw it and had the idea. It came fully formed, all in that moment.

The one piece of furniture that had survived from more prosperous days was an old oak dresser. In the centre of it was a glass goblet, standing out against the dark wood.

‘Did you make that?’

He dismissed it as a poor piece that was not worth selling. Once I picked it up I could see the flaws. The glass was misty and the base chipped. But the curved line was beautiful and a delicate design was engraved round the rim. I knew little about glass, but Anne did. For Highpoint she bought ruinously expensive Venetian glass as clear and sharp as this was dull. The Venetians kept the secret of the clarity of their glass as closely guarded as a miser keeps gold. Sam told me the goblet was one of a number of experiments from which he hoped to find the secret and break the Italian monopoly.

‘What is going on down there?’ Ellie cried. ‘Help me up …’ she muttered. There followed a series of creaks and sighs, then a heavy thump came from the ceiling above.

‘Make me a goblet,’ I said to Sam.

He blinked at me, then shook his head. ‘I cannot. I will not sell such poor workmanship.’

‘That is to your credit but you don’t understand. I want you to experiment.’

‘Experiment?’

‘Isn’t that what you believe in? Make me a goblet as clear as Venetian glass. Discover the secret.’

Sam seemed determined to be his own worst enemy. ‘B-but if I fail?’

‘You won’t fail. I believe in you. I will make the investment.’

‘Investment?’

He gave me a bewildered stare as if he had never heard of the word. There was the rasp of a door opening upstairs. Through the partly open door at the bottom of the stairs I glimpsed the wavering edge of a nightdress, the ferrule of a stick. Sam continued stubbornly to stare at me. The idea began to feel hopeless and risky. He was too ill-educated to understand it. Or was his look that of someone who knows there is something wrong somewhere, but can’t quite put a finger on it?

‘If you succeed I will take a share of the profits,’ I said.

His face cleared. He understood that all right. His lips pursed and his expression became unexpectedly shrewd. There was a touch of the street child he was when I first met him, working in his mother’s brothel. ‘One th-third to you, t-two thirds to me.’

We were like two men betting at a cock pit. His face was flushed, his eyes standing out by his hooked nose. ‘Sixty–forty,’ I said. ‘The majority to you.’

‘Done.’

I clapped him on the back and drew out two sovereigns. ‘My initial investment. There will be more when the contract is drawn up.’

He gaped at the coins, turning them over in his hands as if he could not believe they were real, dropping one and scurrying after it. I hurried away as I heard the steady thump of the stick on the stairs, followed by an expelled gasp of air as Ellie made her tortuous way downstairs.

‘Wait! I do not know your name, sir.’

‘Black. My solicitor at Lincoln’s Inn will contact you.’

8

From the beginning, as soon as I recovered my senses in Queen Street, it seemed a hopeless project. The Venetians guarded their secrets well. I wrote to one of my spies in Venice, offering a reward for information on the process. For the first time the flow of money from Queen Street to Highpoint was reversed. I starved it of the income from the estate’s London properties which were now substantial. After a fire at Half Moon Court and complaints from neighbours, I invested in a new kiln and laboratory in Clerkenwell.

There I could visit him without any risk of seeing Ellie. He was kept busy making flasks and bottles where the quality of the glass did not matter.

He made no progress at all that I could see on the project I had invested in. At first I did not care. I loved his eagerness, his hope, his despair, his determination, his belief. He was the return on my investment, not the project for a brilliantly clear glass which seemed like the search for the philosopher’s stone.

Nevertheless, the more each firing failed, the more I was drawn into it. He tried different sands, different coals, higher and higher temperatures. Some days I got as excited as he did, sweating before the blistering heat of the kiln, waiting for the glass to form, spellbound as he blew and twirled the white-hot bubble, pacing up and down while waiting for it to cool. I was more optimistic than he was. It was better, I told him. I was sure it was clearer.

‘Look!’ I said.

‘Compare,’ he replied gloomily.

Compare it with the previous firings. Crucially, with the piece of Venetian glass he kept as a standard. I had to admit it was as foggy as ever.

‘You see like a politician, sir,’ he said sourly.

I reacted with some severity to his insolence, which he immediately apologised for; but I was secretly proud of him. Inside all that deference he was his own man. I had no inclination to acknowledge him as my son. It was too complicated. It might harm or even destroy our relationship; from birth I had had nothing but bitter experiences, both as son and as father. I enjoyed the secrecy. I had forgotten the pleasure of real work; of getting my hands dirty. I donned a smock in Clerkenwell and became Tom Neave; I hung it up, put on my cloak and rode back to Queen Street as Sir Thomas. My humours were perfectly in balance again.

I was affected in other ways. Living behind my desk or in meetings had removed me from the world where I had been brought up. Clerkenwell brought me back in touch with it. When the case came against the Quaker, Stephen Butcher, I went to see him in Newgate. I found that his main ambition was not to sing here, but in the New World. As a sailor, he was in a position to organise it. I withdrew my case against him and, with Highpoint money, funded his expedition, on the premise that it was both a more Christian and more effective way to clear the streets.

Mr Pepys not only bought me a large chop and a bottle of the best claret to thank me for Lord Montague vegetating in the country and not in the Tower. Knowing my inclinations, he offered to introduce me to a very pretty widow in straitened circumstances. To his surprise, and in a certain degree to mine, I refused, on the grounds that I was far too busy.

‘I thought you were out of office, sir.’

‘I have various projects.’ I waved an airy hand, as if they were affairs of state.

‘Are you, er … already accommodated?’

I shook my head and concentrated on my chop. He picked a shred of meat from his teeth, staring at me thoughtfully. ‘I do believe you are in love, sir.’

I laughed, spluttering wine and almost choking on my chop. ‘What absolute nonsense, Pepys!’

Obsession was the word I would have chosen. It was the third and most important of my projects. I wanted no diversion from the task in hand. I was determined to have Anne, and on my own terms. I made no more approaches. I was assiduous to her at supper. I took no more correspondence to table. I even took an interest in Luke’s clothes, asking for his advice on the correct width of britches that season. He looked at me with deep suspicion of my motives, but was far too stiff and polite to question them.

It was when I sold land at Highpoint for Clerkenwell that Anne asked to see me in private. Because the transaction was done by my lawyer, Christopher Newton, she was convinced I had changed my will. I told her the truth. I needed the money. It was clear she did not believe me. Up to that moment I’d had no idea what I was doing, except that I was enjoying myself hugely: I had forgotten what enjoyment was.

It was during that cold, acrimonious conversation with her that it came to me. I would divide everything between my two sons. Not only would it be fair and equable, but it would divide up Highpoint. I would sell it piecemeal. It was a destructive, malign force. From the moment I was born it had nearly killed me. It had destroyed any chance of a relationship between me and my father, corroded that between me and my wife. I decided I would destroy it.

‘I have a right to know if you change your will, sir.’

‘The will is in my gift,’ I said in my new, mild tone which infuriated her.

We met on neutral ground, in the reception room on the ground floor, where I sometimes took a glass of port or sack after supper. There were no prying servants from either side, only satyrs chasing nymphs endlessly round the oval ceiling. She was more than usually modestly dressed, her low neckline covered by a gorget, the opening in her long dress showing only a touch of underskirt. She wore no jewellery and, so far as I could discern, no perfume.

‘In your gift to leave to Luke,’ she said.

‘He will be provided for.’

‘Provided for? What does that mean? You are punishing him for his beliefs?’

‘No. He can love his precious King to his heart’s content. But when he lies to me and gets involved in plots behind my back, then I shall punish him.’

She would not give up. She said Luke had made no undertaking not to take part in the uprising and accused me of turning him into a Royalist because I had set myself against him from the beginning. I had ignored him – when I was ever there to see him – stopped him from becoming a soldier, which he dreamed of –

‘To protect him. I know what soldiers are like. With his scarred face, his mannerisms –’

‘You know what soldiers are like? Yes,’ she cried bitterly. ‘Do you know what he is like? You made him feel weak. Hopeless. That is why he became a Royalist. Because they would accept him as he is. As he wants to be.’

I was incredulous. ‘I turned him into a Royalist? If anyone did that it’s you. You’ve become more a Royalist than anyone who was born one.’

‘Do you think I want the King back? I want another Cromwell. Order. But if the King returns …’

‘Long live the King? I don’t have that option.’

It was odd. Very curious. We had never discussed it. I had never wanted Highpoint. In fact I had hated the very idea of it. But Anne’s obsession for it had driven her to the point of madness. She would not eat and scarcely drank unless the liquid was forced down her. She was skin and bone that day twelve years ago when Cromwell’s son-in-law, Ireton, called. He was desperate to get people of any stature to sign the King’s death warrant. The staunchest Parliamentarians suddenly had urgent business in their country estates, or were too indisposed to pick up a pen. Ireton offered me the Stonehouse estate in return for signing the death warrant. It was almost as bald as that.

Anne had come in. It was the first time she had left her bed since her illness. I could see her thin, wasted figure, hear her cracked voice before she collapsed in my arms.

‘Mr Ireton … it is good of you to come at last.’

I signed. That was the day I became Sir Thomas Stonehouse. Had I really been so much, so despairingly, in love with her?

For the first time, as we stared in silence at one another across the reception room, we acknowledged, without saying a word, that I might have signed my own death warrant.

In the hall there was the rattle of plates being taken from the dining room. I stared up at the ceiling where, in the candle-lit shadows, even the satyrs seemed to have stopped chasing the nymphs. The raised voice of the ostler passed, complaining to someone about the shortage of fodder for the horses. Everything was short and would get shorter until a new government was formed. If there was a tax strike, as the City threatened, everything would stop altogether.

‘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.’

9

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.

I had thrown on yesterday’s clothes. He bore the marks of Gilbert, the fastidious servant he had brought from Highpoint: barbered cheeks and fresh, clean linen. I could not help having the feeling that he should be sitting at the desk and I standing there. He was a Stonehouse from the tip of his elegantly coiffured crown, to his turned-down floppy boots. When he eventually spoke, his words were as polished as his boots.

‘I wish to apologise, sir.’

That was all. I waited for more, but there appeared to be no more. ‘Well, go on. Apologise for what? For being a Royalist?’

I cursed myself as soon as I had said it. Why did he always drive me the wrong way? He seemed to grow even taller. Or perhaps years at my desk had made me more bent. His nostrils flared; his voice was edged with contempt.

‘I will never apologise for that.’

Oh, to hell with you, I thought, the fuse has been lit. And in a moment we would be in the middle of a full-blown argument that would leave us worse off than before. I jumped up. Better end it before we reached that explosive point. I calmed myself by thinking of the ride to the City.

‘Look, Luke, you can see I’m on the point of going out. If you have something more to say, please say it.’

He spoke carefully, painfully slowly, as if I was a lawyer ready to seize on a faulty argument. ‘This house belongs to you, sir …’

I paced up and down. The toes of his boots seemed glued to the line in the carpet.

‘… as does Highpoint.’

‘Yes, yes. Thank you. I’m aware of that.’

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