The King’s List. Peter Ransley

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