We have not earned sufficient reward for the blood and treasure spilled, says Cromwell. We won the war but we have not won the peace. The godly are yet to rejoice in their triumph.
There are nods and harrumphs of agreement.
I will not advise you, says Cromwell. I will pray for you to find wisdom.
Now Will wrenches himself free from the tide. He plants two feet in the swirl of rhetoric and refuses to budge. Not even love for his chief will let him move. Let him have my heart, he thinks, his inner voice sounding surly and rebellious even to his own ears; he will not have my intellect.
For this is nonsense. Cromwell is talking nonsense. Can he believe it himself? Every man here, nodding and smirking, already believes himself wise; believes that it is the fellow next to him who needs help from the Lord to find his brain.
You. You have been chosen and called, says Cromwell. For all the rest are not yet ready to do His work. ‘Who can tell how soon God may fit the people for such a thing? None can desire it more than I. Would that all were the Lord’s people.’
Will leans back further, feeling the hard ridges and bumps of the wall digging into his back. He thinks of his youthful passion for natural philosophy; how clean and clear it was compared to this. Observe, hypothesize, experiment. He thinks of Francis Bacon’s belief: that a man who starts with certainties will end with doubts, but a man who is content to own his doubts will end with certainties.
This room is all bullish certainty. The power of this puffed-up, puffed-out self-aggrandizing could carry a carriage to the moon.
Cromwell leans into his speech, carrying all but Will inexorably onwards. ‘I confess I never thought to see a day such as this,’ he calls low into the ears of his acolytes, ‘when Jesus Christ should be so owned as He is this day, in this work. Jesus Christ is owned this day by the call of you, and you own Him by your willingness to appear for Him.’
But, thinks Will. But. But.Jesus Christ did not call them here, my lord general. You called them here.
At home, Patience is wrapped in her parents’ affection. She finds herself treasuring the tics that grated on her pre-London self. The way her father clears his throat before a speech. The way her mother cocks her head over her sewing. The precise kiss Father plants on his wife’s cheek as he bids her goodnight. The soft voices as they talk of mundane things. Of brewing ale and buttermilk. Of Sunday’s joint and Monday’s tasks. Of prayer and sleep.
She watches the gentle currents that link them as they go about their individual days. She watches her mother’s sharpness balanced by her father’s sweetness; his placidity tempered by her passion. And for the first time she wonders about what lies beneath and what came before. Did they fit so well together before they knew each other? Or did it come from knowing each other and growing in time?
She feels stupid and heavy. She despises herself for despising this when she was last here. Before the crack of Sidrach’s palm across her cheek wakened her to the possible joys of quiet love. Of gentleness.
She thinks of Tom, left behind with Hattie while his hand heals. She thinks of Hattie’s eyes as she smeared the lard on the boy’s livid skin, and the lie that dangled in the room like a hanged corpse. An accident. A stupid accident.
Her mother’s eyes follow her here. ‘I am well,’ Patience tells her, twenty, thirty times a day. ‘I am happy.’
She knows that her pinched face betrays her. But she will not lay her white-hot misery on them. She has wounded them enough in the past, with her great and ridiculous disdain. She will not compound her sins.
On the last day, she comes close to breaking.
They are picking raspberries in the garden, the last of the summer’s fruiting. Later comes the harder work of the preserving, but for now, there is the sun on her back and the light wind at the nape of her neck. There are bees nosing in the flowers, and the scent of summer is spread, thick and luscious, across the garden. Blackberry is ferreting in the bushes. He is intoxicated by the greenery, the space, the possibility of adventures. His face is stained red with raspberry juice, and now some fresh excitement calls him elsewhere.
They can hear her father’s voice through the open window of his study. He likes to practise his sermons aloud. It used to irritate her, but she listens now to his deep voice with pleasure. She does not follow the words, just the cadences of his voice.
Her mother picks a raspberry and eats it, smiling across at her.
‘Delicious.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You leave us tomorrow, Patience dear. Will you take our dear love to William? He will be missing Richard.’
Mother never will call Blackberry by his nickname.
‘I will. I do not see him often. I am . . .’
Forbidden. Banned. Lost.
‘. . . busy.’
‘Well, my dear, you must make time. What is there but family that matters?’
A pause. Patience thinks about going home, and shivers in the bright sunlight.
Her mother says with studied casualness: ‘You have been married some time now. Any sign of . . .’
She lets the question trail away, popping a fat raspberry in her mouth to cover the awkwardness.
‘No.’ Patience is short. She wants to head off this conversation. If her mother asks more, she will crack. If her mother shows sympathy, she will crack. The merest touch of a maternal hand to her cheek and she will weep and weep until the garden is watered by her tears.
But her mother just smiles a forced, bright smile. ‘In the Lord’s own time, my dear,’ she says, moving on to new canes, humming a tuneless song as she goes. Over her shoulder she says: ‘And if you are blessed, Patience, you will learn that it is not sufficient to love your children. You must be fierce for them.’
Patience smoothes down her rising panic, and breathes deeply, inhaling the heady summer smells as if for the last time. She must hide the shame of her bruises; the marks of her failure and her stupidity.
LONDON
August 1653
WILL RETURNS HOME TO FIND PATIENCE AND SIDRACH sitting with Sam. The air in the room is close and hot. He had planned to throw off his heavy coat, his collar and cuffs. To lie on his bed with the window open and the curtains pulled back, and a book about the stars to distract him from the grubbing of man on earth. He is half-cut already; he shared a flask with Nedham after watching Cromwell address the Barebones. They are beginning to look mutinous, and Cromwell is increasingly irascible and hard to please.
He wanted sanctuary. Instead he must watch Sam and Sidrach circle each other like wary fighting dogs. Why don’t they just sniff each other’s arses and be done with it? he thinks as he pours the wine. He knows he is sullen and peevish, but Blackberry is not here to be set an example on stoicism, and Will had planned to indulge his misery today. To cosset it with a decanter of wine and honey cakes, eaten in that cool bed so that crumbs dropped on the linen sheets.
Instead there is Sam’s voice, which is loud and pugnacious, picking up a thread dropped when Will entered the room: ‘Yes, Mr Simmonds, I have met His Majesty on several occasions.’
‘His Majesty? Do you call him that? My dear sir.’
Will lifts his head from his glass. ‘Sam,’ he says fiercely. ‘I have asked you repeatedly to call him Charles Stuart under my roof. Even when the boy is not here.’
Sam inclines his head graciously. He smiles at Will, a smile that seems to say, I know you are miserable, dear fellow, so I shall indulge you. Will finds it deeply provoking.
He turns away from the smile, and drinks deep.
Patience stands from her chair and walks to the open window, looking out into the street. The hubbub of a day’s trading goes on uninterrupted. Oysters are called and sold, sausages are sizzled, leather is worked, cheese is rolled, geese are herded, pigs are slaughtered, coins are begged and traded. The clang of the blacksmith’s hammer sounds through the street in a regular beat.
‘How much do the people care,’ says Patience, ‘that their fate is
in Cromwell’s hands?’
‘Not much, I would say,’ says Sam. ‘What difference does it make? The beer still needs brewing.’
‘Why should we care what the people think?’ says Sidrach. ‘Most are godless. Fornicators and liars and bawds. This new assembly will pave the way for Christ’s return, despite them. They will thank us when they sit at the Lord’s side.’
Sam rises and walks to stand beside Patience, looking out of the window. She feels the air between them shiver with his nearness. It is because of his size, she thinks. Because he is like a caged bear in this little house.
‘In his speech, the lord general said that the people must be given time to find their way to godliness,’ says Will.
Sam laughs. ‘Good luck with that, say I.’
Patience turns to him. He is disarmingly close. ‘How can you laugh? These are souls.’
‘How can you not laugh? What else is there? Is anyone naive enough to think that if Cromwell and Harrison and the rest preach at us long enough and hard enough we will all fall to our knees?’
‘You are godless. I pity you.’
‘I am not godless, Mrs Simmonds. I believe in your God. I just do not believe he wants us to crawl like worms when there is music, and wine and love and song. Did he not make those too?’
Sidrach Simmonds stands abruptly, so that Patience and Sam both turn to face him. Will watches Sidrach’s gaze shift from one to the other.
He waves an impatient hand at them, as if they are children. ‘Tsk. You are both deluded. We do not need to wait for the people to be ready. We must force it. Prepare the ground, by the sword if necessary. Christ is coming. Babylon must fall.’
Sam swallows his retort and turns back to the window, leaning out and letting Sidrach’s sermon wash over him.
‘. . . Does it not say in Jeremiah, “I have seen thine adulteries, and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom, and thine abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem! Wilt thou not be made clean? When shall it once be?”’
Will sinks his cup of wine and reaches for another. He is losing patience with arguing, debating. Men believe what they want to believe. Turning their minds is so rare, and so unlikely, that arguing for different versions of heaven seems pointless. Futile. He drinks too deep, and the wine has not been decanted long enough, so that the dregs catch in his teeth and fur his tongue. He spits into a handkerchief and thinks of a time when this room was silent and still.
As he sets down the cup, he catches Sidrach’s monologue.
‘. . . Did not the prophet say, “Awake ye drunkards and weep”?’
Sleep, ye drunkard, and evade the weeping, thinks Will.
In the absence of contradiction, Sidrach clearly believes himself persuasive and ratchets himself up. Arms are wildly deployed, his forehead is furrowed.
‘. . . “Repent ye, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Not my words, Mr Challoner. Not my words. The Bible. Matthew.’
Patience watches Sidrach and the flexuous spill of his rhetoric. She listens to him pile quotation upon quotation. Beside her, she knows that Sam is deliberately impassive. She watches her husband with his eyes, rather than the eyes of a persuaded congregation.
Can it be possible, can it really be possible, that Sidrach is a little absurd?
Will cannot help himself. It’s the wine. ‘Sidrach, dear fellow. What does this Kingdom of Heaven actually look like? How is it governed? No one can tell me.’
Simmonds rounds on him and begins to quote. Will recognizes his mistake. He has an empty cup, and an empty decanter, and once you have set Sidrach off, really it’s too difficult to stop him.
The Kingdom of Heaven will be a kind of paradise. It will be virtuous. It will be, to use one metaphor beloved of the saints, like a treasure found in a field.
Sam puffs his cheeks out in an exaggerated sigh. Patience has an urge to elbow him. Sidrach is still directing his diatribe largely at Will, who is sinking further and further into his chair, as if he hopes to hide in it.
‘. . . And Mathew tells us that “the Kingdom of Heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom”.’
‘Ten virgins, hey?’ whispers Sam to Patience. ‘Perhaps I’ll drop in after all.’
To her amazement, her utter surprise, she finds herself beginning to laugh. She tries to stifle it, to swallow it whole, but it grips at her stomach and forces its way out until she is laughing helplessly. Sidrach stops mid-parable and glances at her quickly. Lord help me, she thinks, looking at his face. She walks towards him, away from Sam. Her hand is raised in a placatory manner, but he scowls at her. Her arm drops limply to her side.
Sam catches Sidrach’s expression and has an unfathomable urge to throw himself in front of Patience to shield her.
Will sinks, with immense gratitude, into a boozy snore, dropping his cup to the floor with a violent clang.
WHITEHALL, LONDON
October 1653
‘THE MOON DID NOT STAY HONEYED FOR LONG,’ SAYS Nedham, as they wait outside Cromwell’s door. Inside, they can hear shouting.
‘The first time I stood outside this door, he was shouting in your ear,’ says Will.
‘Lord help me, Will. But I love it when he shouts at someone who is not me. Who is it this time?’
Will shrugs. ‘Some of the members. He is trying to clash heads together. Make them agree.’
‘It is like making wine from dew. You tried to tell me, Will. That the Barebones was doomed.’
Will smiles, leaning against the wood panels. He rests his head back and closes his eyes.
‘I know, old fellow,’ says Nedham. ‘You do not want to be smug. But you’re failing. Do you think the chief believed in it?’
‘The Barebones? Aye. He has a kind of innocence, our lord and master. Believes in people’s goodness. Believes that if you give them enough rope, they’ll rig themselves a hammock.’
Nedham jerks a thumb at the door, through which they can hear the lord general’s rising fury.
‘Innocent as a lamb, our Oliver.’
‘You know my meaning, Nedham.’
‘Do I? Does anyone know what his game really is, Will? Do you? Do I?’
The door is pulled roughly open. Will and Nedham push back against the wall, as a column of men exit in a sort of buzzing silence. Growl-faced and looking straight ahead. They are waiting to round a corner, perhaps two, before unleashing their grievances to each other.
When they have gone, Will and Nedham enter the room, each angling ostentatiously to be behind the other. Cromwell is at his desk, his head in his hands. Will feels immediately guilty for his play-acting, and glances sideways at Nedham before approaching the general, slowly and a little warily. He kneels by his side.
‘Sir, are you quite well?’
Cromwell lifts his head and looks at him with bloodshot eyes.
‘Where will it end, Will?’
‘I do not know, sir. Nedham is here.’
Cromwell looks over Will’s head at the newsbook man and smiles. A strange, forced smile. ‘Nedham. Can we postpone, man? I am . . .’ He pauses, lost in the middle of a sentence. ‘Tired,’ he says eventually, with an emphatic nod.
‘Shall I get your chaplain, sir?’ says Will.
‘My chaplain. Yes. Thank you.’ He sits up straighter, palms face down on the desk as if to push himself upright. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘prayer is both an answer and an admission of defeat. Go on then, Will, fetch my chaplain. I am in great need of him.’
Later, Will sits alone at the top of his house. There is an attic here, with a round window set into the eaves. Through the window he can see the rooftops stretching and smoking, the gathering coal smear hanging over the city. He can see the pinkness of cloud as the sun sets somewhere lost to view. There is a black and white cat on the roof opposite, arching its back and settling down for a dusk nap.
It is quiet up here. He looked in on Blackberry on the way up. He was aslee
p already in the room next to his nurse. Will never sees the boy now. He fobs him off in the morning as he rushes out towards Whitehall. He comes home late and tiptoes through the quiet house, avoiding the nurse. He hopes she is kind. How can he know what secret lives she and Blackberry lead when he is not looking on? There must be a tutor soon. Get the boy reading, and starting off on his Latin and Greek. He will ask Milton.
He thinks of Blackberry. His white skin and serious eyes. His furious energy.
He whispers to Blackberry when he is asleep. Wine-soaked words of love and sorrow.
Ah, he sighs, spiralling into the pointlessness of it all. The great unfathomable nothingness. Where is God? The sky over London is a hash of colours. Blues and pinks, blotches of white and tunnels of gold. Where is He? Will sips at his sack, letting the sweetness fur his tongue. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine having a depth of faith like his chief. He tries to search for it, inside his blindness. What would it look like, feel like?
If he cannot imagine a faith so strong, so muscular, perhaps it does not exist. Perhaps it is just what people say they believe. If the spirit is working in Sidrach and in Cromwell, why does it say such different things? If it is not, and yet they both claim its authority, then are they fools or cynics?
Who dupes whom in this great game of God?
He drinks deeply again, his eyes still closed. He tries to imagine Christ on His cross, surveying them all. What does He make of it all?
Downstairs, a door clatters loudly shut. Sam. Will opens his eyes. The sky has lost its riotous colours and is a dusky smudge.
Last night they got drunk together. Maudlin, weep-into-your- pot pickled. They talked of Henrietta.
Will feels too raw, too flayed from the conversation to go downstairs yet. Perhaps he will hide up here a pace longer. I love my sister, Sam had said. But the boy needs a mother. You need a wife. Let her go, Will. Let her go.
He drains his glass; reaches for the bottle. The answer, he knows, is not at its bottom. But what else is there to fill the long evening? Perhaps Sam will leave again.
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