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