The Tyrant’s Shadow

by Antonia Senior

  ‘He is not,’ Patience agrees. ‘I was perhaps . . .’ She trails off. Blackberry stops crying, burying his face in her shoulder, wiping his nose on her dress. She tries to brush off the slimy stain without Sidrach Simmonds noticing, but when she sneaks a glance up at him, he is looking away.

  His face is in profile, and she stares longer than is necessary. There is a nobility to his features, she decides. A modern Seneca.

  She kisses Blackberry, and he grins at her, bouncing back already. ‘I like woods, Auntie Imp.’

  ‘What is that the boy calls you?’ asks Capp.

  ‘Imp,’ she says, standing. ‘A stupid nickname from home. From impatience, you see.’

  ‘You must teach him otherwise, my dear,’ says Marigold Capp. ‘Anyone listening might mistake the name, and its bearer, for a witch’s helpmeet.’

  Patience begins to laugh but sees their faces and checks herself.

  They walk on, Blackberry running ahead. She finds his exuberance trying. The wood echoes with his cries. ‘Look, Auntie! Help, Auntie! What’s this! Watch me! Are you watching?’

  On it goes. She can sense Sidrach Simmonds’ irritation. She can almost see the tremor in his skin when the inevitable happens and Blackberry calls out in a high treble a phrase he must have picked up in Hattie’s shop: ‘God’s blood, Auntie Imp!’

  She hopes they have not heard, but their faces betray them. Capp looks serious; Marigold as if she has buried her nose in lemons. The smallest Capp girl, four-year-old Martha, giggles. Sidrach Simmons turns to look at her and she falls silent, so that the only sound in the wood is the absence of chat and the sly call of a cuckoo.

  ‘A lovely notion,’ says Patience brightly. ‘To leave the walls behind and stroll here.’

  ‘Does it remind you of home, my dear?’ asks Marigold Capp, God bless her.

  ‘A little. We have fields by us, mainly. But beyond the village there is a wood where we walk sometimes.’

  ‘Your father has a living there, I believe,’ says Sidrach Simmonds. Not a question, but a statement.

  ‘Yes. Not a large parish, but he is happy.’

  There is a pause; an unasked question.

  ‘He is not political,’ she says. ‘We were lucky. We avoided most of the worst of the wars.’

  ‘In these days,’ says Capp, ‘a man of God must also be a man of politics. If we are to remake the world for the Lord’s coming, we cannot hide away in country backwaters, grateful for a good crop.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Patience, and perhaps she is too loud, too strident, for Capp looks surprised and Sidrach Simmonds turns to study her with an unreadable expression on his face.

  ‘My dear,’ says Marigold, linking arms with her husband. ‘There are some matters I would talk to you about. Boring, domestic affairs,’ she says, in an apologetic aside to Patience.

  They draw behind. Blackberry is sauntering ahead. A stick for a sword. Playing at being Lord Cromwell, no doubt, laying waste to the rebellious Scots. She is alone with Sidrach Simmonds. What if she says something stupid? Something theologically absurd?

  She wants him to speak first, to prick the tension. But he smiles a half-smile and lets the silence stretch. ‘Blackberry wants to be a soldier, I think,’ she says.

  ‘Yes. A strange nickname the boy has.’

  ‘His mother gave it to him before she died. It stuck fast. He is called Richard, for his maternal grandfather. He died in the wars. So too did Blackberry’s uncle Edward. In Ireland.’

  ‘Are there none of them left on his mother’s side?’

  ‘Blackberry has an uncle. Samuel. He is on the Continent somewhere, I think. With Prince Rupert. I have not met him, of course.’

  ‘A grandfather and an uncle for the king. The boy is of Royalist blood.’

  ‘He is four!’

  They fall silent again. Patience chastises herself. She does not quite understand why Sidrach is displeased with her; she only knows that it is so.

  She speaks first, again. She asks about his family. He has none, it seems. An only child, his mother and father died of fever when he was a boy. He was raised by an ancient aunt. Her modest possessions and his parents’ have all passed to him.

  He seems to like talking about himself, and it is safe ground. She cannot be stupid in front of him if she asks short questions about his life. The king raised his standard when the young Sidrach was but eighteen. He was aimless and without profession. Joining the fight seemed the obvious path.

  ‘I was a foolish youth. The army made me. It taught me of brotherhood. Of duty. Most of all, it brought me to the Lord’s grace. I was a worm. A weak and foolish sinner. In the New Model Army I found the Lord, and He found me.’

  ‘And you were lately in Ireland?’

  ‘Yes.’ A bald, solitary reply. A drawing-in of brows. She has touched on something uncomfortable again. But this time he speaks: ‘And now I find myself a youth no longer. My thoughts turn to Whitehall, my heart to Christ. And my home? Well. There is a vacancy, I think, for a woman at its hearth.’

  A violent, ragtag collision of caught breath and beating heart. She does not know how to reply. She feels sucked into something momentous. This is what she wanted, was it not? But now the Capps have stopped and they are upon them, and the talk softens to mundane things. The weather and the harvest. The possibility of rain.

  The tavern is full. Clerks and secretaries and scriveners; the quiet men who stand behind the booming power players. Will sits with his room-mate, Milton. He takes a short sip from his tankard and waits for the other man to speak. Milton is older than him – early forties, perhaps. He has a long, shrewd face. His eyes seem sore – he rubs at their red rims in a habitual gesture. They water almost continuously. Is it a physical affliction that makes his whole demeanour seem melancholic? The word in the corridors is that his wife has recently died, but their friendship is too new to probe.

  Two men drinking in a tavern after work. Two dead wives. Two cold beds. Will grips his tankard all the tighter.

  ‘Well,’ says Milton. ‘And how do you find it? Shoulder-man to our lord general.’

  ‘Interesting,’ says Will.

  ‘How so?’

  Will pauses to summon his thoughts. He has learned in the past week that Milton is frank and disarmingly honest. He expects his conversations to be sharp-pointed.

  Before he can speak, a man breaks in, throwing careless greetings at them and sitting without being asked. Marchamont Nedham. ‘Well met, gentlemen,’ he says. ‘And how is our lord treating you?’

  Will is momentarily confused.

  ‘Cromwell,’ says Milton.

  ‘The mighty warted one.’

  ‘Nedham.’ Milton raps the name as a rebuke, but he is amused, too.

  ‘Ignore him, Johnson,’ he says. ‘He’s a scoundrel.’

  ‘Ah, but you love me, my serious friend.’

  The two men grimace at each other briefly, before Nedham turns to Will.

  ‘Well, Johnson. Have you learned yet that the mighty one is our one topic of conversation? His moods. His fancies. We pore over him as if he is a lover.’

  ‘Closer than a lover, in your case,’ says Milton.

  ‘Aye, well. I’m yet to meet a woman who can string me up for treason as he can. So therefore none worth the same scrutiny.’

  ‘Leave the treason alone, then.’

  Will watches them spar. Milton says: ‘You know, of course, that our friend here turned monarchist some years back. Wrote thundering apologies for the king.’

  ‘God rest his soul,’ says Nedham. To be mischievous, more than from conviction, Will thinks.

  ‘But now you are a Commonwealth man?’ he asks. Nedham waves an ambiguous arm.

  ‘Our friend here,’ says Milton, ‘found he miraculously converted to the idea of the Commonwealth inside Newgate, where he found himself on the king’s demise.’

  ‘A proper Saul you have before you, gentlemen. That place was remarkably persuasive,’ says Nedham, unabashed.


  ‘Did you meet the king?’ asks Will.

  ‘I did. He gave me a royal pardon. My first job was to write furious prose to accuse him. My second to write furious prose to praise him. And now . . . Well. Milton here would like all men of letters to believe every word they write. My job is to convince all men to believe every word they read. The truth belongs to he who pays for the ink. Damned pricey, ink.’

  Will finds himself smiling. There is something twinkling and irrepressible about the newsbook man. His irreverence is disarming in these days where talk is deadly serious.

  ‘Come, Nedham,’ says Milton. ‘You will have the boy believing in your nonsense. Nedham is a serious thinker, Mr Johnson, when he applies himself.’

  ‘Deadly so,’ agrees Nedham, with an exaggerated, wise nod.

  ‘We even,’ says Milton, ‘are in agreement at times. We are in the same mind on the possibility of liberty existing only within a republic.’

  Will stares at Milton. Not so long ago, the word ‘republic’ was to be whispered. Even the killing of the king came not from principle in most men’s eyes but from pragmatism. A cruel necessity to end the stalemate. How fast the world turns.

  ‘Now,’ says Nedham, deflecting the talk as if to spare Will from using the word himself. ‘Tell us. How many potentates have you served?’

  ‘The one. I saw the king. At his trial. I never talked to him,’ says Will.

  ‘Nor like to, now, where he is,’ says Milton. A rueful smile, like a tapster admitting her best ale is sour.

  Will says: ‘You have met the king, Nedham, and you have met Cromwell. Cromwell has a force, a presence to him. Near him, I feel young, foolish. Keen to be approved. Is that a function of his office, or of his person?’

  Nedham draws breath, as if considering. Milton says: ‘A shrewd question. What do you say, Nedham? The man or the title?’

  Nedham becomes more serious than Will has seen him. Beneath the charm is intellect, deftly hidden. ‘What presence the king had was a function of his office, not of his person. But Cromwell? Milton, what do you say?’

  ‘Physically, they are opposites,’ says Milton. ‘One slight, one broad. Cromwell is a big man. Powerful.’

  ‘Powerfully ugly, too,’ says Nedham. ‘The impact of a man’s physique is important, sure. And yet there’s many a big, ugly man in the shadows.’

  ‘Perhaps part of it is that we know their stories,’ says Will. ‘The king’s only story was his birth. His power was a function of that birth. Cromwell’s power is all earned. He came from nothing, from nowhere, and that counts.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nedham slowly. ‘But there is something more, is there not? Personality, and how it affects the men in his orbit. Cromwell’s temper is fiercer than other men’s, and his sweetness sweeter. So we caper and prance to avoid the first and earn the second.’

  ‘And his sincerity,’ says Milton. ‘He believes, even when others doubt it, that God works through him.’

  ‘I often think sincerity walks hand in hand with foolishness. But not in the Lord Cromwell’s case,’ says Nedham.

  ‘Though he is not a great scholar,’ Milton says, with a shake of his head.

  ‘Nor even a great thinker. A great soldier, I am told, by people who understand these things,’ says Will. They all nod sagely into their tankards. Nedham pours the last of the jug of ale.

  ‘No matter how great Cromwell is,’ says Nedham, ‘we must guard against him. We must be wary of self-seeking great men in this newborn republic. The greater they are, the more threat they are.’

  We will wrangle this question all evening and not be bored, thinks Will as they call for another jug. Another sign of the Lord Cromwell’s power. He tries to pin down the analogy flitting in his head.

  ‘Magnetism,’ he says. ‘Magnetism, gentlemen. Thales of Miletus broached the idea that magnets have souls, and it is this that gives them the power to move iron.’

  Nedham looks blank, but Milton smiles. He leans forward, lips parted. His palm slaps open on the table, and the rattled tankards judder. ‘Leading us, Mr Johnson, to the question posed by the Lord Cromwell. Magnets may or may not have souls, but does the opposite hold? Do some souls act as magnets? Is Cromwell’s such a soul?’

  Will smiles, and Nedham leans back in his chair. He whistles. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says. ‘I think this calls for a bigger jug.’

  After the next meeting of the church, Sidrach Simmonds draws her into a corner. He turns those eyes on her. They twist her stomach.

  She is trembling, still, from the sermon. She feels the hot breath of God. He is coming. There is no doubt.

  ‘Did you understand today, Patience Johnson?’ he asks.

  ‘I did.’ She hopes he can see the earnestness in her face. She does not know how to express her sincerity. She wants him to understand her, to feel the answering call of her soul.

  ‘Of course you did,’ he says. He smiles, and it occurs to her that it is the first time she has seen him smile. He has been serious, almost severe. His face is warm now, lit from some place within that she longs to know.

  Over his shoulder, she can see the faces of the saints. A half-smile from Marigold Capp, their eyes meeting across the room. A stare from one of the Mason sisters. She flutters around Sidrach; Patience has seen her.

  Patience stops herself winking at the disgruntled Mason, with some difficulty. Be serious, she tells herself. Be worthy.

  She concentrates on Sidrach. The moving of his lips.

  ‘. . . we will be chosen, Patience. You understand this. We, who need Him, will be needed by Him.’

  How? She wants to ask for particulars, but she is afraid that if she speaks, this sharp intimacy will smudge. She is close enough to smell him. Nutmeg?

  ‘. . . and the Lord’s light, Patience! Imagine it. Can you even come close to it – the brilliance, the purity?’

  She nods.

  ‘And you understand, Patience, what is coming. We will be tested. We will be called. What point, what purpose, did the late bloodletting serve, if not to pave His way? He will need bearers for his olive branches. He will need our hearts to be open, to be pure.’

  He lays a hand on her arm, lightly. She looks down at the neat nails, at the long fingers. It seems almost proprietorial, this gesture. She does not quite know how to respond. She smiles up at him, hoping that her warmth will be evident.

  The summer is fading into autumn and the sun is bright but low behind them. Their shadows stalk ahead on the stony track, melded together and lengthened by the angles of the light.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ says Sidrach Simmonds.

  She blushes, casts her eyes downwards. She is so nervous, she might be sick. She berates herself: you have waited all your life for a man such as he to make love to you, and now you will vomit on his shoes. Breathe, you ninny. Breathe. He cannot see her face, only the bowed top of her head.

  ‘You are modest. That pleases me,’ he says.

  She swells a little, enjoying his approval.

  He takes her hand and tucks it into the crook of his arm, and they walk onwards.

  Behind them, the Capps keep their distance. This walk has become a settled thing. Taken once a week on Friday afternoons, out in the fields beyond the walls. Each walk a step closer to something.

  He helps her across a stile, handing her up and over. She could do it herself – she was bred amid fields and fences. But she takes his hand and thanks him, and steps lightly into the mud. Only a year or two ago, she would have jumped down, laughing as she sank to her ankles, sucking her boots out to chase a sister down a tree-lined path.

  She finds she has not let go of his hand. His palm is cool to the touch. She feels as if her own hand is burning.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Beautiful. Young. Healthy. No fortune, as such. However . . .’ He pauses, as if weighing her.

  She draws a breath, and finds she cannot exhale it.

  ‘You must know, Patience,’ he says, ‘that I am moving towards a decision regarding you. It
is time, I think, for me to take a wife. A helpmeet. Someone to stand by me in what is to come. A mother for my children. I have chosen you, Patience Johnson.’

  Oh, the blessing of the Lord! Chosen by such a man.

  ‘I will do you honour,’ she says. She looks up at him with blazing eyes.

  ‘Good, good,’ he says, quietly. He doesn’t look at her, but scans the horizon for the Capps. He tightens his grip on her hand.

  SOMEWHERE NORTH OF THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

  September 1652

  THIS IS NOT A LARK, NOT ANY MORE, THINKS SAM. THIS IS not the same sea. This is not the same balmy world he has come to expect and love. This is – and he will admit it only to himself in a whisper in his cot, drenched and shivering and starving – fucking terrifying.

  The hurricane hit two days ago. A sudden slam of wind and rain, whipping the seas up into staggering peaks and troughs with unbelievable rapidity. They had time, just, to take in all but one sail – the course on the foremast. Strong, new canvas, thank God, whose white face is keeping them scudding along with the screaming wind at their backs.

  They can scarce see ten feet beyond the taffrail in the gloom and rain. Only the sounding of the near-sacred bell tells them if it is night or day. Swallow’s master is in irons below, awaiting punishment for the enthusiastic buggering of unwilling ships’ boys. But even that excellent navigator would be lost in this tumult, with the ship making leeway at incredible speeds, and the stars and moon shrouded in thick cloud.

  Lost on this violent black sea, the Swallow climbs the peaks and drops into the troughs with a gallant heart that seems to foresee its own death. Each peak feels impossible to climb; each trough is impossible to escape. The fear of being swamped is constant, and yet familiarity does not deaden it – just ratchets it up so that a man’s nerves are screaming, screaming red.

  Out there, somewhere, the squadron’s other ships are alone too. God help the prize crews on the handful of captured ships they have taken in this leisurely cruise, trying to face this storm with a few men and a hold full of furious prisoners.