The King’s List. Peter Ransley

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