London - Edward Rutherfurd [296]
Though his brother Peter had not returned to the London Charterhouse yet, Thomas Meredith knew enough of the monks to beg a place for the old man. He would sleep in a cell with two other old fellows and work in the garden.
“You’re to behave yourself, now,” his son admonished him a few minutes later. “If you get thrown out of here, that’s it. I’m not taking you back.” To all of this, in his habitually cheerful manner, Will Dogget listened with a smile. “Though God knows how long he’ll last,” Dan remarked to his sister when they got outside.
Before leaving he went over to Meredith and bowed to him. “How can I repay you, sir?” he said.
Meredith smiled.
“I’ll think of something,” he said.
For Susan too, this was a happy time. In late summer, she and Rowland took a little house in Chelsea. It was charming, made of brick and oak beams with a tiled roof. There were two chambers on the upper floor, attics, outbuildings and a pleasant garden that led down to the river.
During the first weeks that Rowland had worked for the chancellor, she had often thought about her meeting with the king. Had it been a mistake to hide it from Rowland? Was it right that they should be at court at all? Yet as time went by, these fears began to recede. No hint of trouble ever came: Rowland would return from Westminster, where he spent most of his time, with stories only of the kind treatment he received there. The house was delightful; their new income gave her a sense of ease she had never known before; the children were happy. Gradually, reassured, she began to put the whole business out of her mind.
The family had slipped easily into a natural rhythm of life. Her eldest daughter, Jane, now ten, was her chief helper in the house; but every day, without fail, while the two little girls played, she would make her sit down for three hours to work on her books, just as she had been made to do. Jane already had a good command of Latin, and if, sometimes, she complained to her mother that many of her friends could only just read and write English, Susan would tell her firmly: “I don’t want you to marry an ignorant man; and believe me, a happy marriage is a sharing of minds as well as of other things.”
But sweetest of all was to watch young Jonathan. The girls were all fair, but with his fine, dark hair and his pale, intense little face, he was clearly an eight-year-old version of his father. He had now started to go to school at Westminster. Often his father would take him in the mornings, and she would watch as the two of them set off to walk down the lane together, hand in hand; or sometimes, if he rode, Rowland would put the boy in the saddle in front of him. Once or twice, having seen them go off like this, she had felt such a wave of happiness and affection that it had brought a lump to her throat.
Peter was still away, and she missed his company and his wise counsel very much. Yet her brother Thomas stepped in to take his place. He and Rowland often met now, and Rowland would bring him home. These were happy evenings, when he would play with the children, who loved him, and tease everybody gently; and though she had always thought he was too worldly, she could not help laughing at some of the witty things he said and admiring his intelligence when he discussed his life at court.
Sometimes, as the three of them sat before the fire, the talk would turn to matters of religion; and here things would get especially lively, with both men on their mettle.
Susan sensed that behind Thomas’s bantering tone and worldliness, there was a concern for a simple faith that she had not realized before, and she liked him for it. Some of his views on the laxity and superstition that had crept in to the Church, she could almost share. Though sometimes he went too far.
“I cannot see by what right we deny the faithful