Plague Child. Peter Ransley

kitchen was empty. Ignoring me, she went to the pail in the yard we normally washed in. I followed her, taking the pail from her, doing what I had done so many times, drawing my fingers over the water, breaking the thin film of ice already forming on it. I ached for normality, and the everyday action calmed us both. I dipped a jug in the water and poured it into the kettle.

      ‘How is Mr Black?’

      ‘He cannot speak.’

      I was stunned. Water flowed over the top of the kettle as she pulled it away. I stared up at the window, where I could see the elongated shadow of the doctor move across the wall.

      ‘I am sorry.’

      ‘You struck him,’ she said, accusingly.

      ‘He struck me!’

      ‘It is his right.’

      ‘When it is just. George taking the candle was not just.’

      We had instinctively drawn away from the house, into the shadows of the tree where, for that brief period, we used to play as children. ‘I should never have let you out! George knows.’

      ‘Don’t trust him.’

      ‘I must.’

      She began to move back to the house.

      ‘If he meant well by you, he would tell your father.’

      She stopped. She was now in the light, and I could see that her hands, which she twisted together constantly, were white with cold. I longed to touch them, to take them in my hands, but dare not. There was a trace of the old mockery in her voice.

      ‘And I can trust you?’

      ‘Yes!’

      I spoke with a ferocity that made her jump with fear, but then she gave me back a look of such intensity I wanted to lower my eyes but could not, or dare not. It seemed to go into my very soul in a way no preacher, nor my mother and father had ever done.

      ‘Did you write that poem?’

      ‘Yes – and meant every word of it.’

      Everything at that moment was as sharp and clear as the moonlight on the splinters of ice I had broken in the pail. She stared back at me, trembling, but before she could speak there was the sound of someone turning into the court from Cloth Fair. At the same time I saw her mother coming to the window. I jumped into the shadows.

      It was the pewterer who lived opposite. His clothes were usually dusty with the chalk shed by the plates and mugs when he took them from the mould, but now they were clean. For him, like the shipwright, business had dried up.

      His gait was unsteady. He scarcely gave Anne a glance. ‘Goodnight, Mr Reynolds.’

      ‘Goodnight, Anne.’

      Mrs Black had withdrawn from the window. The intensity of the moment had gone. Neither of us spoke. She picked at her apron. Suddenly she put a hand to her mouth to smother laughter.

      ‘What do you look like!’

      ‘Well, I think,’ I said stiffly, with a stab of indignation, yet with a feeling of relief that we were back on the familiar ground of mocking banter.

      I displayed my shoe. In the dim light the gap where the upper was parting from what was left of the sole could scarcely be seen, and I thought it had a particularly fine buckle.

      ‘This shoe has been presented at court.’

      ‘Which court?’ She struggled to stop giggling. ‘James or Elizabeth?’

      She could not contain her laughter and I was frightened they would hear her. ‘I had to change my clothes!’

      ‘As people do in your pamphlets?’ she mocked. ‘Because someone is trying to kill you?’

      A movement in the window drew our eyes upwards. The candles in the room threw a wavering silhouette on the wall of Dr Chapman fastening his bag. Time and again, I find, ideas come out of desperation.

      ‘You know your numbers?’ I whispered urgently.

      ‘Of course,’ she said indignantly.

      Without another word I grabbed her hand and ran her into the house. Water splashed from the kettle and she almost dropped it. I took it from her and put it down. Now she looked convinced I was mad, was ready to scream. I went into the office, picked up the accounts book and pointed out the letter T, which I think she understood.

      And, as I whispered the names of the purchases, she with increasing bewilderment in her face scanned the numbers. She knew some of her letters by stitching them and her numbers by shopping. We heard the bedroom door opening upstairs. I almost dropped the book, then could not find what I was looking for. She was begging me silently to go, her hands locked beseechingly.

      I found the entry.

       8 August 1635. Paid to P. Lely. Portrait in oils & frame. £20-0-0.

      She did not understand the words, but stared in such wonderment at the number, she did not react to Dr Chapman’s voice.

      ‘I will call in tomorrow morning.’

      There was no reply from Mr Black, but his wife said: ‘Look – he is writing something!’ I could hear the doctor go back into the room.

      ‘Twenty pounds!’ Anne exclaimed.

      It was as much as a skilled clerk earned in a year. I told her what it was for.

      ‘A picture! Of you? It must be something to do with the man with the scar.’

      ‘So I imagine.’

      ‘I hate him!’ she said vehemently. ‘Shouting at my father when he’s ill; ordering him about. Who is he?’

      I shook my head. She kept looking at the entry in the book and then at me. I do not know what she was seeing, but it was no longer a clown, a tumbler, or even an apprentice. She bit her lower lip as she often did when she was vexed or puzzled.

      ‘Twenty pounds,’ she kept saying with awe. ‘For a picture. Of you.’

      ‘A monkey.’

      ‘Don’t joke. Where is it?’

      ‘How do I know?’

      ‘I knew it.’ The words came out in a tiny explosion. ‘One day my father –’ She stopped herself.

      ‘Your father what?’

      She shook her head and refused to say more. We heard Dr Chapman saying goodbye and hurried through the darkened print shop to the door. I desperately tried to think of a way of seeing her again.

      ‘Can you bring me my Bible?’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘I’ll write to you. Through Sarah.’ I groaned inwardly again at the frustration of her being unable to read.

      ‘I will learn,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as though it was something she could do in a day or two. ‘If my father cannot speak, I shall have to read. My mother is no good at business.’

      ‘Bring the Bible to church. Sunday.’

      She stood there, slight, determined, letting me out through the back door, while her mother let the doctor out of the front. There was something about her I had never even guessed at before, behind all the mockery, the trivial games, something that I can only call, even at that age, calculation.

      Whatever it was, I leaned forward, before she could close the door, and kissed her.

       Chapter 7

      I was in a daze, a dream after that kiss. I suppose you could scarce call it a kiss, more a bump of noses, a collision of my lips on her cheek, as cold and splintered as the ice in the bucket, a brief holding of her trembling slightness, as slight as the bird fallen from its nest I had once picked up in Poplar and tried