The King's Chameleon (33 page)

Such neglect would have annoyed and perhaps cumulatively unhinged the increasingly unstable but fastidious Gooding, Faulkner thought sadly as he left the poor man in his bed and returned to the parlour.

Edmund had found some wine and was pouring it into four beakers. He was alone. ‘Some wine, Sir Christopher?'

‘Where are …? He got no further; Edmund indicated with a jerk of his head that the women were in the kitchen.

Faulkner went to the door, moved along the short passage and peered in. Two lanterns had been lit and placed upon the large kitchen table. Their light disguised the lack of cleanliness, but it was the three women who gave the domestic scene its air of normality. They worked in complete silence. Molly was fanning a crackling fire beneath the griddle, Judith was beating eggs and Katherine was cutting and buttering bread.

Faulkner went back and joined Edmund. They sat a moment in silence, and then Edmund asked, ‘And what will you do now?'

‘I don't know. Nathan is, indeed, out of his mind. 'Tis a pity, for he was a good man and a solid partner. I trusted him implicitly in affairs of business.'

‘You have clerks of competence. Can you not bring one of them on?'

Faulkner shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But I must first look to Nathan. He may get better in time.'

‘I doubt it. He is an old Puritan. Their world has passed, and the present drives them to desperation.'

‘That is equally true of his sister.'

‘Yes, Hannah has told me of her mother's creed.'

‘And what about you?'

‘Me? Why, I have a ship to command.'

‘You could come ashore; you have made enough of a fortune to become a ship's husband. I have a conceit to build another Indiaman and I should name her for Katherine.'

‘After your …' Edmund lowered his voice and flushed. ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Christopher, I did not mean anything disrespectful.'

Faulkner waved aside his son-in-law's apology. ‘She is my mistress, but also the love of my life. I married Hannah's mother thinking that Katherine was beyond my reach. She was a kinswoman to the ill-fated Duke of Buckingham. Before Felton's knife robbed him of his life, no man stood higher in the King's favour, nor wielded greater influence. She might have been a Duchess now.'

‘She is a remarkable woman,' Edmund said, ‘and Hannah is very fond of her.'

‘That pleases me, but –' he made a gesture of deprecation – ‘I have a wife.'

‘It is ironic, but had you not ventured here tonight, you might not have done.'

Faulkner looked at his son-in-law and nodded. ‘I have enough on my conscience not to lay that speculation upon it.'

‘Katherine is part of your household. If your wife—'

‘My dear Edmund, the happiness of hundreds of thousands of men and women would be agreeably enhanced
if
. But, alas,
if
is just wishful thinking.'

They committed Nathan Gooding to Bethlem Hospital. He remained obdurate, convinced his sister was a witch, and he might have been believed had he not constantly compromised his accusations by his own behaviour. The slow degeneration that had begun by that bout of drunkenness had created such a sense of self-loathing, engendered though it was by the wayward behaviour of his sister and the suicide of his nephew, that it nevertheless consumed him utterly. Before a month was out his ravings had him chained to the wall, and he became a popular object of curiosity to those minded to spend a leisurely hour in the company of the insane.

On the afternoon that Faulkner had taken Gooding into the custody of the hospital, he returned home to Wapping.

Judith was awaiting him. ‘So,' she said, ‘he is gone.'

‘No, Judith, he is not gone; he is in Bethlem Hospital near Moorfields, a pathetic and broken man. You cannot dismiss him so easily, for not only was he your own brother, but your conduct made him what he became.'

Surprisingly, Judith remained silent. After a while she said: ‘I did what I believed in. There is no sin in that.'

‘Not in itself, perhaps, but in its consequences much wrong was done. Oh –' he held up his hand – ‘I take responsibility myself, do not fear. And for you. How was I to know that the tranquillity of our lives was to be disrupted by civil war and in the ensuing turmoil I should again encounter Katherine, or that the fire should be so fierce?'

They both became lost in their own thoughts. There were tears in Judith's eyes, and Faulkner said, ‘I shall never forget your coming to me in The Tower.'

She nodded and cleared her throat. ‘Is that why you did not do what my brother so clumsily attempted when you had his sword in your hand? You might so easily have taken my life for …' She began to sob and fell forward on her knees, staring up at him, the tears coursing down her face. With a tremendous effort she spat out the words, as though determined to void the thought from her system: ‘Taken my life … for Henry's?'

He regarded her with suspicion. She still possessed the power to attract, and in this posture of submissive helplessness he perceived the dangers of misplaced sympathy. He shook his head in denial, embarrassed at her abasement. Gesturing Judith to get up, he handed her a handkerchief which he pulled from his sleeve. ‘Come, Judith, this is no answer. What is done is done, you know that.'

Again silence fell between them. Faulkner's patience was running thin. He felt the awkwardness of his own position acutely and wished himself for the solution suggested by those speculative
ifs
. She must have divined something of this, for she asked: ‘We are none of us any longer young. What shall become of us?'

‘What would you have become of us?' Faulkner asked. He hesitated a moment and then threw caution to the winds. ‘You are not without means,' he went on before she could prevent him embarking on the logic of separation, ‘for I have never argued, as the law does, that you should not have property. Your shares in Lorimer's
Mary
and the other vessels would make you a woman of independence. I would see that you lived free of encumbrance …'

‘By putting me in your alms-houses in Deptford?'

‘Of course not! Why would I do a thing like that? Besides, the Brethren would determine you had no need of such charity. No, we could find you somewhere pleasant enough to live with Molly, after which we could arrange an estrangement.'

‘Or I could turn a blind eye like the cuckolded fools that surrender their wives to the Royal bed and accept a title in return. What would my title be, Husband?
You
cannot make me Duchess of anything – but you could give up your whore!'

‘She must live somewhere too,' he said quietly, ignoring Judith's outburst.

‘But not here! Not under my roof!'

Faulkner regarded Judith for some time. She met his gaze with steady eyes, as determined as ever. The brief hope that had kindled in his foolish heart when he had seen her and Katherine working in such apparent amity in the kitchen that night had been, he now realized, nothing more than an illusion. Judith might have been affected by the events of that night, but she had had no Damascene moment and was, as he supposed he was himself, still herself.

They were, as Judith had pointed out, none of them any longer young. Whatever motive Judith had had for reminding him that he might forsake Katherine's bed, it had no effect upon Faulkner. In the weeks that followed he strove to recover his business and introduce Edmund into its complexities. They received generous and enthusiastic help from a surprising quarter. Under their noses Charlie Hargreaves had matured and grown in intellectual and physical stature. When Faulkner summoned his head-clerk and offered him a rise in pay and the prospect of an offer of partnership if all went well, the old man shook his head.

‘Ten years ago, I would have thanked you for it, sir, but my eyes are failing. While I can sit at my desk in your interest, Sir Christopher, I shall do so and that as diligently as I may be capable of so doing. As for a new partner, for that is what you need in the …' The old man coughed with a deferential distaste. ‘In the, er, absence of Master Gooding, I should recommend young Hargreaves. He will need a year, to be sure, but I can see to that, for an increase in my emolument, of course. I do not think that you will be disappointed. He is an active and able young fellow, though his elevation will doubtless annoy others in the counting-house. But I should not trouble myself over them, Sir Christopher; not if I were you, that is.'

By the spring, with the change of the year, the shipping enterprise established by Faulkner and Gooding entered a new phase. Captain Edmund Drinkwater became the new ship's husband and with his father-in-law negotiated a new contract at Blackwall. By May 1667 a new East Indiaman had been laid down, and while Faulkner left the ship's supervision to Edmund, he took particular interest in the carving of her figurehead, for it was soon known that the ship was to be called the
Katherine Villiers
.

‘I would it were
Lady Katherine
and that you were my lawful wedded wife,' he said to Katherine one evening as they sat in Hannah's new withdrawing room. She looked up from her needle-work, her eyes still lustrous, her face as beautiful as ever to his old eyes.

‘La, sir,' she said mockingly, ‘I hear marriage is vastly over-rated at the Court and held to be of little account. I should not trouble yourself on the matter.'

‘But I do. I am being serious Kate. I am grown old and increasingly helpless.'

She laid aside her point-work to kneel beside him. Taking his hands in hers, she rubbed their backs with her thumbs. ‘You are not old, my love, not to me. Do you not think that following all the tribulations of my life, all the changes of fortune that I have seen in others and undergone myself, I give a fig for the forms that so often bind men and women in fetters stronger and more repulsive than steel. I understand that you cannot abandon Judith; you would not be the man whom I adore had you done so. I am content; it is you who is not.'

He looked at her, his heart full. He found it difficult to speak for a moment, and she smiled as she saw his eyes fill with tears. He smiled back and gave a mighty sniff. ‘The fire of love is unassuaged, my dearest,' he said, bending towards her.

‘That,' she breathed in his ear, ‘is as it should be.'

While youth considers itself eternal and maturity recognizes mortality, old age trembles in fear of death. While youth embraces change, and maturity knows it for the chimera it is, old age fears it and seeks its days of constant quietude. In those months, though Judith remained in the house at Wapping and he and Katherine were a burden upon an uncomplaining Edmund and Hannah, Faulkner sought his own days of restful idleness, pottering about the garden with his grandchildren – Hannah and Edmund had added a second boy to their first. True, he called regularly at the counting-house and made his forays to Blackwall to watch the
Katherine Villiers
rising on the stocks, but these were leisurely in their character. In the summer, he had promised Edmund, they would take a sea-cruise down to Harwich in the
Hawk
. Old Toshack was dead, but Faulkner thought himself fit enough to command the little ship and relished the prospect. At Edmund's suggestion, early in June, he and Faulkner had gone to look over the
Hawk
, to survey the repairs they had put in hand and admire the repainting undertaken by Shish's yard at Rotherhithe. As they stood in the sunshine, Faulkner was delighted at the
Hawk
's handsome appearance, congratulating himself on his wise purchase all those years earlier. Beside him, Edmund was full of admiration for the little vessel that had been matched against those of the King and a Prince of the blood.

‘I suppose we must now follow the fashion and call her a yacht,' he remarked.

Faulkner grunted. ‘That's a damned Dutchman's description,' he grumbled.

Their business done, Mister Shish had been called away; the two men lingered, idly regarding the movements of boats, barges and vessels in the river. A fresh north-easterly breeze lifted the flags and pendants of several vessels moored in the stream. They watched with professional interest as a collier worked her way up, through the press of shipping. The direction of the breeze and Edmund's remark touched an instinctual response in Faulkner, making him think of the Dutch and the risk of de Ruyter putting to sea; he felt a quickening heartbeat before recalling that the war was as good as over and he could rest easy. Thank God the King's ministers were conferring in Breda with a view to ending the bloody and expensive conflict between the two rival Protestant states. Not that the present condition of the Navy would admit further fighting, by God!

Since its triumphs the previous year, lack of money had resulted in few proper repairs of battle-damage being under-taken, the ships being virtually abandoned at their moorings off Chatham in the River Medway, exactly as their crews had left them. Almost none had been taken into the dock-yard where work had all but ceased and he had heard by word of mouth at the Trinity House that Pett, the Dockyard Commissioner, was being deliberately dilatory in bringing the
Royal Charles
upstream for repairs. Faulkner chuckled to himself: the Trinity Brethren did not like the Petts, regarding the whole pack of them as troublesome, ill-informed and, worst of all, busybodies, whose interference with their own advice to the Admiralty was an outrage.

Such arguments were amusing enough and should not be taken too seriously, Faulkner mused, but if the neglect of the ships was a cause for concern then that of the seamen was a far worse and more consequential one. Matters stood as badly as they had years earlier, long before the Civil War, when Faulkner had been in the employ of Sir Henry Mainwaring and the dockyard labourers and craftsmen had laid down their tools. It was rumoured, or so Faulkner had again heard at the Trinity House, that large numbers of seamen had offered their services to the Dutch, a horror he did not dare think about. Young Sam Pepys had mentioned it, railing against the practice of paying the seamen off after service with promissory notes instead of hard cash. Once again, as in the bad days of the King's father and grand-father, and even on occasion in those of Oliver, when the men presented their ‘tickets' the authorities declined to pay them, pointing to the ravages of the great fire, the dearth of trade and the consequent loss of this most essential mother of wages. Such events undoubtedly had their effect, but the obvious and licentious excesses of the Court seemed equally to blame. No belt-tightening was in evidence in that quarter.