The Tyrant’s Shadow

by Antonia Senior

  There are holes in her logic, but Will finds he cannot face pointing them out to her. It is too much trouble. Besides, Patience is deep in her fever. She has barely eaten or drunk for ten days, and Sidrach is still in gaol. A place of violence and illness. It is entirely possible that, one way or another, the issue of Sidrach and Patience will resolve itself.

  His mother darts around his kitchen with impatient haste. She lays out the ingredients for the broth in neat rows. A boiling fowl, some herbs, a handful of winter greens. She wipes down as she goes, keeping things as ordered as she can. A contradictory broil of precision and impatience. A slim woman held upright by an invisible rod that keeps her back straight and her shoulders square.

  ‘What will we do, Mother, if Sidrach is released?’

  ‘We? Nothing. He is her husband.’

  She hears his silent scorn – a mother’s magic.

  ‘Will, I love your sister. As I love you. She is a good girl, and yes, I could wish her a different husband. But husband he is. Once done, it cannot be broken. Where would we be if vows were malleable? If marriages could be wished away? Chaos. Anarchy. She must bear it. Women have borne worse.’

  He hears variations on this argument often. He has heard it this week, in fact. Necessary evils. It is unarguably true. Yet sometimes the truth is blindingly miserable. How glorious to believe in utopia. To think that heaven on earth is imminent if we just reach, fingertips stretching, a little further.

  Will craves a little of that gullibility. A belief in utopia. For Patience’s sake, and the sake of this bloodied, chaotic land.

  It seems to him that political life in the new England is an incontinent pissing on the ideals that brought it into existence. And yet, without the dampening drizzle, all would burn. This, he thinks, is the condition of man. Caught, hapless, between flames and piss.

  So what, he silently asks his balm, his jewel-deep crush of grape and booze, is the point of protesting any of it?

  Her surfacing is abrupt. She wakes, fully aware and held taut by her confusion. Where is she? At Will’s. In his bed. She recognizes the grey coverlet, and the raggedy ends where it trails the floor. She is dressed in a linen shift. The bruise on the inside of her arm is yellowing; she must have been lying here some time.

  She hears the handle turn on the door, hears its sharp, ominous creak. She shrinks into her blankets. The door opens a fraction, then pauses. She waits, breath inhaled. A small boy’s head pokes around it.

  ‘Blackberry!’ Her throat is parched and it emerges as a croak.

  He sidles into the room.

  ‘They said I shouldn’t come in. Why can’t I do whatever I like, Auntie Imp?’

  She pats the bedclothes and he crawls on next to her, burrowing into her shoulder.

  ‘We cannot do as we like, little Blackberry.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because we must all live together. And if all men did as they liked, there would be violence and war.’

  ‘But there was a war. I know. My mama died.’ He says this seriously, as if it is a great truth he has learned.

  She thinks about telling him of the Ranters, one of the sects spawned by the wars. If we are chosen or not chosen for heaven at birth, say the Ranters, then our actions have no consequence. We may drink, fornicate, lie, cheat, steal with impunity. How do you explain such a creed to a five-year-old? How to tell of the misery that ensues, of the women left penniless and alone in anarchy’s wake, as the men dance to the Dionysian pipes?

  ‘Never mind, little Berry.’

  ‘Your voice is funny.’

  ‘I have been unwell. Is your father here?’

  ‘He is with the Lord Protector.’ Blackberry stumbles over the words, then beams as he gets them out.

  ‘You are not alone?’

  ‘Grandmama is here. Will I fetch her?’

  She nods, kissing his forehead. He slithers backwards from the bed and disappears with a clatter and a shout. Beside the bed she sees a pitcher and a cup. Blessed water. She drinks long and deep.

  Why can I not do as I want? she thinks. Why?

  Her mother comes into the room, padding quickly across to the bed. She feels Patience’s forehead and lifts her up to plump her cushions. She straightens the blankets and the coverlet, then checks the water pitcher and the pot under the bed.

  At last she sits on the edge of Patience’s bed. Her hands twitch compulsively at the folds in her skirt, and her eyes are fixed at some point on the wall behind her daughter’s head.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ says Patience, glad to hear the strength returning to her voice. To her astonishment, her mother erupts into spasms of crying. Her shoulders shake as she buries her head in the blankets, rumpling them with forehead and fists.

  Patience reaches out an uncertain hand to pat her back.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  Her mother lifts her head. She stares at Patience with streaming eyes.

  ‘I thought I would lose you. I thought . . .’

  She loses herself in crying again, and Patience is stunned. She cannot remember seeing her mother cry. This is new, and she is off balance. She slowly pats her mother’s back, waiting for the retching sobs to subside.

  When at last she is calm, Mrs Johnson puts her hands to her blotched red cheeks and smiles at her daughter. ‘My dear, I apologize. Such a spectacle.’

  ‘It is no matter. Was I so bad?’

  Her mother nods. Tells her of the course of the sickness: of sleepless, feverish nights and days where she lay like a grey-lipped corpse, life just fluttering beneath the pallid skin of her throat. Of the doctor’s rueful, shaking head. Of the letter from Will and the dash down to London.

  ‘Your father wanted to come,’ says her mother. ‘But his work . . .’ She waves an arm as if that is explanation enough.

  ‘You came.’

  Patience reaches out a hand and her mother grips it. The light creaks through a gap in the curtains, throwing a single spear of sunshine on to the bed. There is a low fire in the grate, but she can’t feel its heat. She shivers, and her mother quickly pulls the blankets up and round her, pushing them in and under her chin.

  ‘How is Will?’

  ‘Busy. The Lord Protector is demanding many changes to Whitehall Palace, and Will is involved in seeing to his whims.’

  Patience nods.

  ‘And has there been word from my husband?’ She hears her voice crack, and hopes it will not be noticed. But her mother’s hand tightens its hold and her eyes turn on Patience. The room is silent but for the crackle and hiss of the fire.

  ‘Will thinks he will be out soon. Perhaps this week.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Patience, and that is all she can muster, all that she can find to say.

  ‘Patience,’ her mother says, as if to embark on some great revelation. But she loses the wind, and sighs. Standing, she says: ‘You should rest, but eat first. I will fetch you something.’

  Patience watches her go. She thinks of Sidrach in Newgate. Thinks of him amid the stench and the filth; hungry and thirsty and cold. She feels nothing. Nothing at all.

  Later, with the broth warming her from the inside out and the sky an inky blue chink in the curtains, her mother says: ‘We must talk. About Sidrach.’

  ‘What is there to say?’

  ‘The bruises. My poor child.’

  Patience nods. She draws her knees up to her chest, and the blanket slips sideways. As it falls, they both see the livid mark on her arm, and another on her thigh. She reaches for the blanket and pulls it up under her chin.

  ‘It is my fault. I make him angry.’

  ‘You must learn to soften him.’

  ‘Must I go back?’

  Her mother stands and paces the room. Patience remembers being a child – lying in bed at night, the moon high over the fields, hearing footsteps about the house and knowing the pattern of the feet. Her father’s long, heavy stride. Her mother’s quicker, lighter steps.

  ‘Where can you go? A woman leavin
g her husband? Patience, your father is a man of the cloth.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Patience,’ her mother raps. Patience sighs as her name becomes a command and a rebuke. ‘Listen to me. Your father has his position. Will has his place with the Lord Protector. What do you think the Lord Protector believes about women who leave their husbands?’

  Mrs Johnson paces some more, crossing to the window and back to the bed.

  ‘A child,’ she says. ‘You need a child. No sign?’

  Patience shakes her head.

  ‘And there are reasons to expect one? What we talked of, before the wedding.’

  Patience feels her cheeks burn. You didn’t talk of what it is really like, she thinks. Awkward and painful. She says: ‘He tells me that is my fault too.’

  ‘Fault,’ says her mother, ‘is a childish word. Whose fault is it? My fault, his fault, your fault. Leave that aside now, Patience. He should not beat you, of course. But you must not provoke him. God has joined you.’

  Patience has the sense that her mother is talking wildly, reaching for the platitudes she has used to discuss other people’s children, other people’s problems with her neighbours. Be a good wife. Do not make trouble, and trouble will not find you. Did not St Paul say: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’

  Patience can picture her mother sitting in the garden with Mistress Greenacre, agreeing with absolute certainty that wives must submit to their husbands, while Patience’s father snoozes and smiles in his sleep in his study and Squire Greenacre cowers in a corner somewhere awaiting the lash of his wife’s tongue. If she closes her eyes, she can see her mother’s certainty, see the sharp nod of her head, the thrumming of her fingers on the old stone table beside the willow tree.

  But her eyes are open and she watches her mother flounder. The nervous flutter of her hands as she clenches them on a handkerchief. She hears her say again: ‘But God has joined you.’ This time it sounds like a question, rather than a fact. An entreaty. As if He Himself might pop down from His cloud and say: ‘Don’t worry, Mistress Johnson. This time, just this once, I will un-join the unhappy couple.’

  Patience imagines the scene as her mother talks on. Imagines the fiery Godhead and her mother’s awed gape, and this dusty box room alight with radiance. Imagines the relief on her mother’s face as they are absolved of guilt, of fault. So she can go home and shock Mistress Greenacre and the rest of the coven with the news that Patience has left her husband but it is not a sin in this particular instance, in this one divinely absolved case, and she has that from the lips of God himself. Yes, God himself has declared Patience Johnson an exception to the rule that unhappy wives must bear their misery and their bruises with meekness and – a divine chuckle at the pun here, a sort of rumbling, thunderous giggle – patience.

  Beneath her pillow there is the crinkle of paper. Will, who believes that words and books are the solution to everything, has thrust a pamphlet at her. Written by his colleague John Milton, it argues that the Bible should not impede divorce. At least, she thinks it does. Its logic is tortuous – the reaching of a man trying too hard to make facts bend to inclination – and she feels too weak and feverish to rise to it. One phrase leaped out at her, and she thinks about it as her mother talks herself in circles. What a violent and cruell thing it is to force the continuing of those together, whom God and nature in the gentlest end of mariage never joynd.

  The gentlest end of marriage. What is that?

  Her mother stops pacing and comes to sit on the bed. She takes Patience’s hand, looks into her eyes. ‘Courage, my darling. Courage. He may not even survive the gaol. Not that I wish harm on any man, of course,’ she says, suddenly flustered.

  Patience lets herself cry then. That it has come to this. To an unarticulated prayer for gaol fever that hovers in the room with them, the silent echo to all her mother’s bombast. She imagines him dead, coffined. In her fancy, there, standing above the Sidrach-shaped hole in the ground, with a smile unbefitting to a funeral, is Sam. She grins back at the man in her head, at his careless good humour, which beams even in figment form. Accepting that he is there, lounging brightly in her mind’s eye, and not struggling to question it, or fight it.

  She is still smiling when she hears the tread on the stair. Hears the heavy, precise footfall. Not Will. She recognizes the stately pace of it. Sidrach. The smile slides from her face. Her mother catches the change in her expression and stiffens. They both turn to watch the door swing slowly open.

  PART TWO

  COLOGNE, GERMANY

  October 1654

  SAM IS FEELING – AND THERE CAN BE NO OTHER WORD FOR it – jaunty. A good word. The crowd surrounding the king are using it. There’s a fashion for slurring French words into English. It is something to do in the long, slow hours shadowing a king who is no king.

  Today, now, this year, the sun is smiling on the jaunty Captain Sam Challoner. Sam, in thinking this, squints up at the leaden grey sky and notes the irony.

  He is wearing his new doublet, cut from a deep burgundy satin. His collars and cuffs are lace, and although they are not the finest cambric, they will blind the pedant with their whiteness. He looks dapper; if not actually prosperous, then verging on it. Since he arrived in Cologne, following King Charles’s court to their new home-in-exile, he has found his feet. John Shaw, the merchant, is the only rich Englishman in Cologne – the rest are penny-pinched aristocrats with fine feelings about trade and the correct disdain for Continental creditors. And Shaw is a friend and former colleague of Sam’s deceased father.

  ‘Samuel Challoner,’ he boomed, wine sloshing and chins quivering. ‘God bless my soul. Come, sit with me and tell me how Richard Challoner’s boy comes to suckle at Prince Rupert’s empty teat.’

  So Sam sat, and let Shaw play the avuncular buffoon, until the two were firm friends. Sam likes the merchant. He likes the double face of the man – the front all bonhomie and bluster, the back all shrewd calculation. It reminds him of his father, and the two faces of the best cavalry officers – public insouciance and private efficiency.

  Sam has slotted in at Shaw’s right hand. Making contacts, greasing palms, levering deals from speculative wisps. The small amount of capital he accrued from his venture selling English goods to the court has doubled through investments advised by his new mentor. He has laid out a little to look the part, and now he strokes the fine cloth of his coat and sighs a happy sigh.

  Yes, life is holding up its end of the bargain for Sam. The German sky is grey enough to sate any homesick Londoner’s soul. The Rhine is brown enough to play proxy for the old Thames. And there on the skyline is the unfinished cathedral tower, and the crane next to it, soaring high but unused and useless. An unfinished, botched job that allows a patriotic Englishman to feel a little superior to his German fellows. Give us four hundred years to build a church and at least we’d finish the bloody thing, they say to each other as they pootle aimlessly around the cobbled streets, avoiding their creditors.

  No aimless pootling for me, thinks Sam, rounding the corner and coming towards his lodging. I have linen to buy, to sell. I have a fortune to make.

  Shaw has a daughter, Alice. She is not bad looking, she is the right age, and she seems to have most of her wits. She has the great advantage of being the eldest of the merchant’s gaggle of daughters, in a family with no sons. She is also seemingly enamoured of the dashing Captain Challoner, with his tales of battles and shipwrecks and warring African tribes.

  There are two ways of telling a war story, Sam thinks. There is the way you tell it when there are ladies present. Just sufficient gore and peril to elicit admiring gasps. Only the villains die, and it is a bloodless, clean sort of a death. ‘I ran him through with my sword, ma’am, and he died sorry he was not an Englishman.’

  Then there is the story you tell yourself unwillingly in the dark, silent hours of the night. The true story. The rasp of steel on bone; the slow, jagged dying of a man in pain. The
shit and puke and fear. The terror of knowing that you are enjoying his pain, because it belongs to him and not to you.

  Sam shudders. Think jaunty, Sam. Think bouncy. He stops at a street stall to buy a sausage. It is long and under-seasoned, not like the ones from home. But it is hot and he is famished. He smiles at the sausage-seller – a matron with a sauce in her large brown eyes – and tries a few words of German. She grimaces, then winks at him as he hands over the coin. No matter; he can get by in French until his German improves. Although Alice has told him that many of the locals do not speak German, only a variant dialect.

  He bites down on the sausage, feeling the grease dapple his chin. He thinks again of the true war stories. He would like to tell them to someone. Will, poor fellow, has too much to worry about. Perhaps Alice? He thinks of her apple cheeks and bright blue eyes, and pushes the thought away. Unbidden, an image of Patience springs into his mind. Her lively face and her quick understanding. I could tell Patience how it was, thinks Sam.

  Turning the corner to his lodging behind Shaw’s counting house, he spies two people loitering on the corner with their backs to him. A man and a woman, sombrely dressed and looking up at his closed window. They are familiar somehow. When the woman turns to him, she reminds him of Patience – perhaps because he has just been thinking of her. She is thinner, older. There is something diminished about her; like the Patience he remembers but with the flame shrouded.

  ‘Captain Challoner,’ she says, walking towards him. With a shock of recognition, Sam realizes it is Patience after all. And the man beside her turns towards him and Sam finds himself being greeted effusively by Sidrach Simmonds.

  ‘And so, Captain Challoner,’ says Simmonds, smiling broadly over his glass of wine, ‘my friends and I thought it politic to leave London for a while. We obtained a pass. No doubt the foul tyrant and his henchmen were glad to be rid of me. I am a considerable thorn in the side of the Commonwealth, and alas, have suffered for my stand.’

  He looks modestly down at his fingers, which are clasped together under his chin.