Cromwell’s Blessing. Peter Ransley

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to you, but it was for the good of both your souls.’

      He put out his hand. It felt as cold and slippery as the skin of a toad. I arranged the baptism with Mr Tooley in two weeks’ time. When I left I still had the clammy feeling of George’s grip. Matthew, the cunning man who had brought me up, would say I had been touched. It was a stupid superstition, but all the same I wiped my hand on the grass.

      My spirits rose again when I rode into Half Moon Court. The apple tree was a sad, withered stump, but from the shop came the familiar thump and sigh of the printing press. Sarah, the servant, came out to greet me. She walked with a limp now, but her banter had not changed since she used to rub pig’s fat into my aching bruises.

      ‘What has tha’ done to master, Tom?’

      ‘Done?’ I cried in alarm.

      ‘He’s had a face like a wet Monday for weeks. Now he’s skipped off like a two-year-old with mistress to buy her a new hat for the baptism.’

      ‘I only talked to him about his problems,’ I said modestly.

      ‘I wish you could talk to my rheumatism. My knee’s giving me gyp.’

      ‘Which knee?’ I said, stretching out my hand.

      ‘Getaway! I know you. Think you can cure the world one minute, and need curing yourself the next.’

      She hugged me just as she did when I was a child, then walked back into the house quite normally, before stopping to stare at me. ‘Why, Tom! Tha’s cured my knee!’

      I stared at her, my heart beating faster. Perhaps it was something to do with my prayers that morning.

      Sarah laughed, then winced at the effort she had made to walk normally. She flexed her knee and rubbed it ruefully, before limping back into the house. ‘Oh, Tom, dear Tom. If tha believes that, tha’ll believe anything.’

      Nehemiah was as good as any journeyman, I could see that. He was too absorbed in what had once been my daily task, to see me watching from the door. He was taller than me, and would have been handsome but for spots that erupted round his mouth and neck. It was a hard task for one man to feed the paper in the press and bring down the platen, but he did it with ease.

      I wondered why he did not put the sheets out to dry, as he should have done. Instead, he interleaved them with more absorbent paper before putting them carefully in an old knapsack. I gave a cry of surprise when I saw it was my old army knapsack. Nehemiah whirled round, dropping a printed sheet, and grabbed hold of me. I thought I was strong and fit but he twisted my arms into a lock and bent me double. His strong smell of sweat and ink was overpowering. I yelled out who I was. Only then did he release me with a confused apology.

      ‘I – I did not recognise you. I thought you were a spy, sir,’ he muttered.

      I laughed. The Half Moon printed the most boring of government ordinances. ‘A spy. What has Mr Black got to hide?’

      I bent to pick up the sheet he had dropped but he snatched it up and put it in the knapsack. I shrugged. While his master was out he was doing some printing of his own. I thought him none the worse for that. Most apprentices of any enterprise did so. When I was going to be a great poet I had secretly printed my poems to Anne on that very press.

      I gazed fondly at the battered knapsack, which I thought had been thrown away.

      ‘You do not want it, sir?’

      I shook my head, and he thanked me so profusely for it my heart went out to him, for I remembered when, in my crazy wanderings, it once contained everything I had in the world.

      ‘How would you like to be a journeyman, Nehemiah?’

      ‘Very much, sir. I have dreamed of it long enough.’

      ‘Well then, you shall be. In a few days’ time.’

      I smiled at his look of astonishment.

      ‘But my indentures are not over for –’

      ‘Nine months.’

      ‘And twenty days,’ he said, looking at the base of the press, where for the past year he had carved and crossed through each passing day before his release.

      I told him he was as skilled as he ever would be and the paperwork was a mere formality. I would arrange it. As a journeyman, his religion would then be a matter for his own conscience. I began to go into practical details, but he interrupted me. He had a stammer, which he had gradually mastered, but it returned now.

      ‘Has my m-master agreed?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It is …’ His face reddened, intensifying the pale blue of his eyes. ‘D-dishonest.’

      I told him the rules were dishonest for apprentices – medieval rules, designed to give Guild Masters free labour for as long as possible.

      ‘What about George?’

      ‘There’ll be no trouble there. I’ve told him you were leaving.’

      ‘With-without telling me?’

      He began to make me feel uncomfortable, particularly as I thought he was right. I had been high-handed. ‘I’m sorry, but the opportunity arose. And I was worried about Mr Black being thrown out of church.’

      ‘That would be a good thing,’ he said fervently.

      ‘A good thing?’

      ‘He could join the Baptists and see Heaven in this life.’

      The idea was absurd. But he elaborated on it with a burning intensity until I stopped him. ‘Nehemiah, Mr Black is old and he’s been in St Mark’s all his life. I’m sorry, but you have to leave. Or go to your master’s church.’

      ‘Obeying G-George? Like you did?’

      He knew the story of how I had struck George and might have killed him if Mr Black had not intervened. Then I had run off. I sighed. Helping him was not as easy as I blithely imagined, particularly when he brought up how I had acted like him – or even more violently – in the past. I walked outside to untether my horse. He followed me, saying he h-hoped he did not sound un-g-grateful – I detected a note of sarcasm in his stammer – but e-even with his journeyman papers he had no position to go to.

      I mounted my horse. ‘I will take care of that.’ I told him of a printer who, at my recommendation, would pay him twenty-eight pound a year.

      He gazed up at me, open-mouthed. ‘All f-found?’

      There was no sarcasm in his stammer now. Money. Everything came down to money. I was a fool not to mention that at first. ‘All found.’

      ‘Twenty-eight pound!’ he muttered to himself. ‘All found!’ He caught the saddle of my horse. ‘He is one of Lord Stonehouse’s printers. I would be beholden to Lord Stonehouse.’

      ‘We are all beholden to someone, Nehemiah.’

      ‘No!’ he cried, with such violence СКАЧАТЬ