London - Edward Rutherfurd [358]
The curse had been lifted.
Thrice he had been married: three children by the first wife; three from the second; and now this made three more, the ninth child. And all were free of the curse of the webbed fingers. He had never forgotten the day when, as a boy, he had inspected his grandfather’s hands and the old man had told him: “My grandfather’s were the same. And he had it from his grandfather – the Ducket that dived into the river and married the Bull heiress. Helped him swim, I dare say.”
The Ducket family were rich, as rich as any of the Bulls had been. When King Henry had dissolved the monasteries and taken over much of the Church’s huge hoard of plate, the alderman’s grandfather had acquired so much that he was known as Silver Ducket. But there was no denying their lowly origins. Not that they had ever tried to do so. Descendants of Bulls also, they instinctively scorned any lie; and besides, every generation or two, the webbed fingers had appeared to remind them. They had accepted the fact. But the proud boy could not. His grandfather’s hands had shocked him. In his mind, it was if the grand river flow of the patrician Bulls, to which he felt he belonged, had been joined by a polluted stream. Worse yet, in those increasingly Calvinistic times, he began to wonder – could this even be a mark of God’s displeasure, a sign that he and all his blood might not, after all, be members of God’s elect?
Yet surely the river was cleansed now. His father had not been disfigured; nor was he. Anxiously, but with growing hope, he had inspected each of his new-born children, the third generation; and now thrice three had come, all whole. The curse had passed. It must be so.
Of course, you still had to be careful. Even the elect had to fight the Devil – the hidden enemy within. It would, for instance, have amazed the actors at the Globe to know that when Ducket had attended their plays, he had enjoyed them. He had crushed this sign of weakness in himself, however, just as firmly as he had tried to crush them. Two years ago when, despite his continued protests, the harmless and courtly boy-actors had been allowed to give occasional performances in the new Blackfriars theatre, he had moved away to his present house, to escape the contamination. But of this he could now be confident: God had shown His hand. As long as he brought his family up carefully, with clear moral precepts, the future was bright indeed.
As he gazed down at his ninth child and third son, he smiled happily and, since he had a taste for the classics, announced:
“Let us call him Julius. A hero’s name, like Julius Caesar.” Then, gently taking the baby’s tiny finger he said quietly: “No curse, my little son, shall ever attach itself to thee.’
A month later, proof of the divine favour now attaching to the family came when, riding out with the mayor to greet the new king, Ducket along with his fellow aldermen received the accolade of knighthood. He was Sir Jacob Ducket now, bound by sacred fealty to the monarch. And so with confidence he could give his children these two important lessons: “Be loyal to the king.” And perhaps profounder still: “It seems that God has chosen us. Be humble.”
By which, of course, he really meant: be proud.
1605
On the eve of 5 November, the day when King James – the first of that name in England, the sixth in Scotland – was to open his English Parliament, it was discovered that a great cache of gunpowder had been hidden in the Palace of Westminster and that a certain Guy Fawkes, together with other Catholic conspirators, intended