PART TWO
The King’s List
January–February 1660
11
Fourth of January and snowing hard. It was before the fires in the house were lit, but I had to be up early for I was meeting Thurloe and had papers to prepare. My breath hung in clouds above my head as I drew back the sheets. The water in my jug was iced over and fern leaves frosted the windows. In Queen Street a man with a courier’s pack slung over his shoulder galloped silently over the carpet of snow. My clothes were stiff with cold. By the time I had hurried into them the horse’s prints had disappeared.
In my study the maid, eyes still gummed with sleep, had barely finished stoking up the fire. Mr Cole, hands blue with cold, brought in the courier’s message. It was coded and brief, even by Thurloe’s standards.
‘General Monck crossed the Scottish border on New Year’s Day and is marching south. Get here as soon as possible. JT.’
General Monck? What on earth was he up to? I looked at his file. When he had objected to the army generals taking over completely and called for the Rump Parliament’s return, he had told its leader, Haselrig, he would await Parliament’s instructions. I sent an urgent message to Haselrig, asking what instructions had been given.
In the file were copies of the flattering letters I had sent to Monck, dangling out to him various inducements in lands and honours. His soldiers called Monck ‘Honest George’. With his West Country burr he portrayed himself as a simple soldier, but he was shrewd and calculating. His only mistake was to marry his cook, a shrew who incensed the other generals. Unlike them he had acquired no titles or land. My letters had been designed to put that right.
‘Did we ever get any replies?’
‘No, Sir Thomas.’
I swallowed a small beer and a piece of turkey pie without tasting it while Mr Cole brought in the mail. Some of the letters were for Anne. Mr Cole put them to one side, handing me a packet, on which were instructions that only the addressee should open it. I had been sent all manner of unsavoury objects, including plague and leper dressings, and told Mr Cole to use the coal tongs. With them, and a pair of scissors, he teased the wrapping away. Normally inscrutable, even he was shocked. He had served my grandfather, Lord Stonehouse, whose casual brutality easily outdid mine. Perhaps Lord Stonehouse had been more successful in keeping these acts beyond his own front door; or perhaps Mr Cole, his scanty hair silver, his face crazed like old porcelain, had reached an age when his Maker felt closer than the man he served.
I could swear he turned away to cross himself, an unwise thing to do in Protestant England. His hand shook as he put the remains of a cut-off finger, with a ring embedded in it, on my desk. An insidious smell of decay rose from it.
I decoded the letter. The agent wrote as if he was sending me a specimen of the diamonds that were his trade, apologising for the state of the ring. It had been difficult to clean it properly before the boat left. Evidence of hurry, or revulsion in removing it from the finger, was embedded in the intricate, decorative twists and turns of the ring. The smell seemed to grow stronger, as if the air had released it. The Stonehouse falcon, raised from the surface of the ring, glared at me. I wore a similar ring. Like its partner, it had sunk into my flesh, becoming part of me over the years. Nausea brought the taste of the pie back into my throat. I put the decoding in my drawer and locked it. I gave Mr Cole the original letter, innocuous in itself, dismissed him, flung the packet and wrappings into the fire and forced myself to study the ring carefully.
There was no doubt about it. The ring was genuine, engraved on the inside with his initials RAS and the Stonehouse motto, Ab Imo Pectore: from the heart. It was a gift from his father, Lord Stonehouse, his inheritance, his whole life. He would never have parted from it willingly. That was why I had demanded it as proof of his death. It was an indication of how my mood had changed in the last few months that a wave of guilt overcame me before I put it with the agent’s letter into the drawer for finished business and locked it. Gradually, mixed with the guilt was relief. It was necessary. Richard was not Prince Rupert, but without his organisation and leadership flair plans for a Royalist invasion would be seriously disrupted. I had bought us time, at least. Perhaps to assuage the guilt I went to tell Anne. I had no doubt what her reaction would be. She was leaving her rooms, on her way out too, wearing a heavily quilted cloak and a mask against the cold.
‘How did he die?’
‘A brawl in Amsterdam.’
‘Typical.’
She tore the mask away. Not for years had I seen her act with such spontaneity. She hugged me. Her eyes sparkled. Her relief swept away the remains of my guilt. I only realised as we held one another that, although he had been in exile, not a day had passed without my feeling I had glimpsed him at the back of a crowd or in a shadow in the street.
She pulled away. ‘You’re sure? You have proof?’
‘I have his ring.’
She gripped me so tightly her nails bit into my shoulders. ‘We have a chance,’ she said. ‘Whatever happens, we have a chance.’
She was thinking of the estate, of course, but at that moment I did not care. I was about to draw her to me when at the door of his room I saw Luke. He was shivering in his nightshirt, half-dazed with sleep. He rubbed one frozen foot against another. How long he had been there I did not know.
He started to speak, coughed, and had to clear his throat before he continued. ‘When did Grandfather die?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I only got the letter from Amsterdam this morning.’
‘I remember,’ he said inconsequentially, ‘he put me on a horse. He knew about horses. I must have been …’
‘Eight,’ I said. ‘You were eight. He was on the run. You thought he was the new ostler while all the time …’
‘All the time he was planning to kill your father,’ Anne said.
Luke glanced from one of us to the other. He wore no wig and scratched his shaven head. ‘Yes. Yes. I know. I know the story.’ He drifted back into his room.
We looked at one another, wordlessly regretting that he had seen our jubilation at the death of someone who was not only my father but, to him, a Royalist hero. I went to follow him, but Anne stopped me.
‘You go. I’ll talk to him.’
12
I was riding down Queen Street when I saw Haselrig’s courier. Thick flakes of snow clung to our faces and settled in the crevices of our cloaks as I fumbled open the message. I could see Haselrig’s choleric face, the spittle that flecked the air when he spoke, as I read the scrawled words.
‘Monck has received no instructions from Parliament. What does he want? Another civil war? General against general? Order him to return!’
On the one hand I was given no powers, on the other told to order him to return.
‘No reply,’ I said.
There were boxes of papers in Thurloe’s chambers, stacked in the corridors and in his office. He was going through one box, marked Not to be removed from Whitehall. He was using his time out of office, he said, to write a history of Cromwell’s rule. I told him my father was dead. He nodded, but because of the news from the north it did not make the impact I expected. He turned to a map on the wall.
‘General Monck is here.’ Thurloe pointed to York. ‘Or here.’ He pointed to a place so small it had been inked in on the map.
‘Nun Appleton? Fairfax’s seat?’
Fairfax was Cromwell’s old commander, a conservative who had distanced himself from the King’s trial but was revered by troops as a symbol of the Good Old Cause. Crippled with gout, he had to be lifted into a coach to travel anywhere. Thurloe told me that, following Fairfax’s intervention, the small garrison in York had opened the gates to Monck. The only troops that stood between Monck and London were those of Lambert’s republican army in the Midlands.
‘How many troops has Monck?’
I consulted my dispatches. ‘Seven thousand.’
‘Lambert?’
�
�When he put down the uprising in the summer, twice as many. But they have not been paid. Perhaps a few thousand? Morale is poor.’
Thurloe gazed at the map, silent for a while. The only sound was the scraping of snow from the cobbles so a carter could get through. Snow shrouded the trees and the light reflected from the wide stretch of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was blinding.
‘What is Monck up to?’
‘You’re asking me?’
‘You wrote to him.’
He had the prosecuting lawyer’s trick of dropping his voice when he reached a key moment in his questioning, so one strained to hear, with the feeling that you were about to be found out – whether or not there was anything to find.
‘He never replied.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure!’
‘Were your letters intercepted?’
‘Intercepted?’
There were shouts outside. The carters were making snowballs. One saw me watching and picked up his spade guiltily. The other, a boy, hurled his ball, hitting the carter full in the face and shrieking with laughter before he, too, saw me and scuttled to his spade.
‘Was this one of them?’ Thurloe took a letter from a file marked Monck.
My face must have looked as white as the landscape. There was Mr Cole’s carefully chiselled Italian hand, my obsequious blandishments, with preferments between the lines, requesting that we might meet, in Edinburgh or London. From the furred folds and greasy fingermarks, it looked as though it had gone through a number of pockets. It was dated mid-December and must have been the second letter I sent to Monck.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘A courier was killed leaving London. Enfield. Eventually it found its way back to me.’
Not me. One of Thurloe’s paid constables. In the past I would have put the letter in a secure coach, but being out of power I had no access to one. The system which for years I had taken for granted was falling apart. Normally, I would have checked. Persisted. But I had not been normal these past months – if you called normal becoming part of these boxes of paper as Thurloe was, not just during the day, but during sleep, so that you awoke in the middle of the night with the answer to a problem, fumbling to make a note for fear you might lose it, spilling ink, lighting a candle, then lying in the half-darkness unable to get back to sleep because the problem you had solved raised a host of others. I had committed the sin of falling in love and it was true that love and politics did not mix, even if it was love for your own wife. It was an odd moment to admit it. An odd place. I gazed out of the window, oblivious of Thurloe’s stare, for the first time seeing how beautiful it was: snowflakes, as big as coins, whirling, dancing, whitening the hair of the carter’s boy who had lost his cap, coming to rest on the bare branches of trees to form strange, bulbous shapes.
‘Are you secure, Tom?’
‘What?’
His voice never rose, never lost its even, steady monotone. ‘It might have been a normal robbery, of course. But the constables don’t think so. He had nothing of value except to the Royalists.’
Thurloe’s eyes never left me. He was good at waiting. And he never repeated questions; the one he had asked hung in the air.
‘There are no leaks from my end.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m not sure. How can one ever be sure?’ His secretary had brought me a dish of coffee. Either it was getting better, or I was growing used to its sharp, bitter taste. It helped to steady me. ‘You’re thinking about Luke.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
There was a clattering of boots from the corridor. The carter was delivering more boxes. There followed a short argument between Thurloe’s secretary and the carter who was expecting a signature. Thurloe sighed and went out to the corridor. I turned to put the letter back in the Monck file. On top was a note in Thurloe’s neat hand. Sir Richard Grenville. Letters to Edward Hyde. There was a list of dates, one recent. Evidently it was not just history that Thurloe was writing. Hyde was Charles Stuart’s chief adviser in Brussels.
‘No signature,’ Thurloe said in the corridor. The carter muttered that it was irregular, but there was a clink of coins, followed by the sound of his retreating boots. When Thurloe returned I was staring out of the window at the drifting snow.
‘Luke has given me his word he will not consort with Royalists while he is living in my house,’ I said.
The faintest of smiles crossed Thurloe’s face. ‘His word.’
‘He is a gentleman,’ I said. Was I really saying that? With all my contempt for gentlemen?
‘Unlike you and me,’ Thurloe said.
‘Unlike us,’ I said, with an echo of his faint smile, ‘his word means something. I believe him. I’ll write to Monck again and send it by a man I can trust.’ That word again. ‘What does Monck want?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Who is Sir Richard Grenville?’
He was still. For Thurloe, a little too still. ‘How do you know him?’
‘I don’t. I saw his name when I put the letter back.’
‘A nonentity in Somerset. I try and keep an eye on everyone who writes to Brussels.’ He closed the file. ‘Monck told Fairfax he’s coming to the City to get more pay for his soldiers. Do you believe that?’
‘Honest George? He’s there to get pay for himself. Or, more likely, power.’
‘Or broker it.’ Thurloe went back to his boxes.
Of course Thurloe intercepted the letters to Brussels, or tried to. The interesting thing was the reason for it being in the Monck file. Thurloe only ever told me what he believed it was essential for me to know. For survival, it helped to know that little bit more and I determined to get Mr Cole to check Sir Richard Grenville as soon as I returned. One thing was certain. Whatever game he was playing, Thurloe’s first consideration was always his own skin. He knew that if Charles Stuart seized his crown, as Cromwell’s closest confidant and Secretary of State Thurloe would be among the first to be put on trial for his life. If he really thought there was the remotest possibility of that he would not be drinking coffee and writing a history of Cromwell’s rule in his comfortable chambers; he would be on his way to Geneva on the first available boat.
13
The snow had almost stopped when I returned to Queen Street. While the ostler took my horse I stared at the strange shape in a corner of the stables. At first I thought it was a beggar who had wandered in for shelter. Snow had swirled in to cover the hat pulled over his head and powder his shoulders. Only his snore identified him. It was a most irritating sound which I recognised from nights in the field during the war; a throbbing bass cut off in mid-note, which hung in the air before ending in a dying whistle. I put my finger to my lips to motion the ostler into silence and bellowed in best army fashion.
‘Atten – shun!’
Scogman scrambled up, his hat falling off, bringing his hand halfway up in salute, almost falling before he grabbed at the stable door for support.
‘What the hell are you doing there?’
‘Been dismissed, sir,’ he said thickly.
I grinned. He looked like the trooper he once was, straw clinging to his steward’s dark britches, his linen crumpled and a smear of horse shit on his green doublet. ‘You certainly deserve it but I don’t recollect dismissing you, Scogman.’
‘She did.’
‘Who?’
‘Lady Stonehouse.’ He turned away and slung a pack over the saddle of his horse, then belted it into place.
‘Now come on, Scogman. What is all this?’
He came out of the stable trembling with rage. ‘How long have I served you, sir? How long? Spying on me! You tells me not to spy on him and I don’t – even though I knows they were twisting you round their little fingers. And all the time, all the time, he’s spying on me.’
‘Calm down, Scoggy, and tell me what happened.’
‘He happened! He did!’ He pointed up at the house. From a wind
ow overlooking the yard Luke’s pale face stared downward. Anne appeared, said something sharply to him, and Luke withdrew. Scogman spat out a piece of straw. ‘That fine son of yours. The French dog. The Royalist trickster.’
‘Keep a civil tongue in your head or you will be dismissed.’
I walked away, weary of his battles with Luke. My closer relationships with Anne and Luke had made me think it really was time to get rid of him and employ a proper steward whose hand I could read and whose numbers added up. I was scraping the snow from my boots on the doorstep irons when I heard him behind me.
‘Permission to speak, sir.’
I didn’t even have the heart to go through the charade of telling him to stand at ease. He had taken off his hat and was shuffling from one foot to another.
‘What is it now, Scogman?’
‘I never told him nothing about the boy, Sir Thomas.’
‘Boy? What are you talking about?’
‘Sam. I never breathed a word about him, nor Clerkenwell, the kiln, not to no one.’ His cockiness had gone. I had not seen him so frightened for a long time.
I glanced around. Steam rose from my horse as the ostler flung a pail of water over her before rubbing her down. There was no sign of anyone else. The house felt unusually quiet. I motioned him towards the tack room and told him he had better tell me what had happened.
After I had gone out, Scogman had arrived to collect some letters from Mr Cole when he saw Mr Luke loitering with intent.
The King's List Page 9