The Tyrant’s Shadow

by Antonia Senior

  While he is looking down, Sam steals a glance at Patience, who is watching her husband’s little play with a flicker at her lips that could be scorn or could be amusement. She catches Sam looking at her and turns away, her attention entirely fixed on an old tabby in the corner of the tavern. It yawns, rises and stretches out its back.

  ‘Your congregation must miss you.’

  ‘Yes, poor souls. But I am needed elsewhere, Captain Challoner. Elsewhere. Great and glorious deeds. Great and glorious.’

  He fixes Sam with a stare that could be intended to be meaningful but that makes him look ridiculous. Sam feels awkward and hot. His new collar is tight and pinching. There is a red wine stain on the satin of his coat, from Sidrach’s inept handling of the jug. None was poured for Patience. Sam found himself offering, but she looked at her husband and declined in a small voice.

  ‘Why Cologne?’ Sam asks.

  Simmonds looks significantly across the table at Patience. ‘Perhaps, my dear, you would step along to our lodgings and find out if they are ready for us? They are across the road, near to yours, Captain Challoner. Perfectly safe, I think, for my wife to see to it.’

  Patience stands, bobs to Sam and disappears out of the door.

  Simmonds leans across the table. He closes his body in, rounding his shoulders and dropping his voice.

  ‘This is not for women’s ears. We are here to find you, Captain Challoner. To ask you to use your contacts. I think there may be areas of considerable agreement between myself and my friends and yourself and your friends. With regard to the tyrant Cromwell. May the devil take him.’

  Sam leans back, away from Simmonds’ conspiratorial leer.

  ‘Careful, Mr Simmonds,’ he says. ‘Careful. Cromwell has spies everywhere. Everywhere.’

  He remembers Thurloe’s studied nonchalance. The way the man tried not to look conspiratorial as he said: ‘Just a chat. Gossip. From Charles II’s court. Tittle-tattle.’

  Who else is providing Thurloe with tittle-tattle? How many of the men clamouring for the king’s languid gaze are secretly betraying him?

  Sam has avoided the issue by coming to Cologne. If he goes back to London, there will be a reckoning with Thurloe. It is said that Thurloe is even more powerful now that Cromwell is demiking. A false idol needs his prophets.

  Sam thinks of Thurloe’s air of menace, the studied quiet of his voice. That is a meeting best avoided. Know when to retreat and when to advance, by God.

  He says again: ‘In these matters, care must be taken.’

  Simmonds draws back, waving a dismissive hand at the rest of the customers. In the corner are a couple of fat grocers that Sam knows by sight. Further back, in the shadows, a woman of dubious morality is stroking the thigh of an ancient merchant, whose red face is turning purple as her hands reach higher.

  ‘There will not be a spy here,’ he says, contemptuous.

  Sam fights to keep his eyebrow from arching.

  Tittle-tattle.

  The words are like a blasted imp on his shoulder, whispering at him whenever he is foolish enough to think himself happy. They will keep him in exile, in this foreign town, when all he wanted was to go home and begin his real life.

  Sidrach Simmonds takes a sip of his wine. He makes a face, and peers into the cup. ‘Germans,’ he says with a shrug.

  Sam smiles tightly. ‘It was no trouble, finding lodgings?’

  ‘No. I have a friend among the Rhine merchants. I wrote to him from Paris and he has organized rooms. We could have stayed with him, but we may be here for some time.’

  ‘It is not London.’

  ‘No. From what I have seen, it is not a godly place. There are, I am told, some justified fears of witchcraft here.’

  Sam looks about the familiar tavern: the upended casks, the veined wood of the tabletops, the sun creaking through dusty windows.

  ‘No more than elsewhere,’ he says. ‘The good folk of Cologne are more zealous in their prosecution, perhaps.’

  ‘Captain Challoner, you jest. There can be no limit on the zealotry necessary to weed out the devil’s work.’

  ‘Perhaps. I am sure you are right. Rest easy nonetheless, Mr Simmonds. You will not find witches sauntering down the street. Plenty of Royalists, though.’

  ‘That is why I am here.’

  ‘You are not turning Royalist, Mr Simmonds?’

  Sam means it in jest, but Simmonds looks furious. ‘I am not, Captain Challoner. I recognize no ruler but the Almighty.’

  Sam flinches. Simmonds can never tell when he is joking and when he is serious. There can be no friendship between two people whose definition of the humorous does not coincide. It makes conversation wearying. Strange then that Simmonds’ wife seems to have a humour calibrated with Sam’s own. Perhaps her husband is a different man when he is alone.

  Sam tries to imagine Patience and Simmonds entangled in an embrace of the best kind; one in which passion and laughter fight for primacy. He cannot stretch his mind that far. It is an impossibility.

  He fights down images of Simmonds naked, with long, pale and hairy limbs, like a spider.

  He says: ‘Not a Royalist, then. But you hate Cromwell more than the king?’

  ‘Charles Stuart is not a threat to England’s place at the forefront of the Coming. Cromwell is. Will you help me, Challoner?’

  Sam sighs. He does not want to be involved. He thinks of Patience. How much she has changed. Her thin grey face. Why does he care? He barely knows the girl. And yet Blackberry and Will are the closest thing he has left to family. And Patience is part of the circle.

  Patience sits on the bed in the unfamiliar room, waiting for Sidrach to finish speaking to Sam. She looks around. Here is where she will be covered by her husband’s body each night. Here is where he will press down upon her so she cannot breathe or think. Here is where she will fail to sleep, listening to him snuffle and wheeze. He sleeps deeply and easily. Why should he not?

  Here is the window she will stare at on the long nights, waiting for dawn to bring some relief. Waiting for the slow turn of the sky that will herald a new day. Sometimes, she knows, she will fall asleep only when she can see the first winking of daylight.

  On this mattress she will keep her head still; fearful that if she moves, he will wake. For if there is one thing worse than Sidrach noisily and reproachfully asleep in the dark hours of the night, it is Sidrach awake.

  In her wakeful head, she knows, there will be Sam.

  As she saw him, her heart seemed to leap high as a grasshopper. For a sublime long minute she felt entirely free – free to allow her heart to leap and her breath to catch and her legs to tremble. But human hearts are not grasshoppers, and its landing was heavy, and so painful she had to stop and stand. Quite still.

  Because there was Sidrach, beside her. His palm fleshy on her arm. And there was Sam’s face as he saw her. No delight, nor even pleasure. A strange half-stare that she could not read.

  Not that it matters. What is he to her? What can he be to her?

  She should rise from this bed. She should unpack their trunk, and sweep. She should find the maid that comes with the lodgings and make herself understood with signs and pointing fingers. The list of things she should do is long and laden.

  She will sit a while. Stay still and quiet a while. Adjust to the shadows and contours of this new room, in this unfamiliar place. She falls backwards on to the coverlet, listening to the thwack of her body hitting the mattress. She watches a spider scurrying up the bed’s curtain. It hides itself in the draped folds, and she waits, breath held, to see if it will ever emerge.

  HOUNSLOW

  December 1654

  A HEAD, THE HERONS SIT, UNSUSPECTING, ON THE RUFFLED grey water. It is too far for Will to identify them; his eyes are not good enough. Bram, the falconer, clips his horse closer to Cromwell and whispers something up at him. Will watches Cromwell nod. The familiarity of that gesture catches at something in him, that strange tumult of loyalty and affection.
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br />   He breathes out heavily, looking away.

  Blackberry, his short legs stretched wide across the fat barrelled back of a small pony, says: ‘What’s happening, Father?’

  Will glances towards Cromwell as he shushes the boy. The Lord Protector’s shoulders seem tighter, as the sound of Blackberry’s voice travels across the flat scrub of Hounslow Heath.

  ‘Shh,’ hisses Will. ‘Did I not say you were to be quiet if we were to follow the birds?’

  Blackberry turns to him with round eyes.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he says in a loud stage whisper. His most grown-up voice.

  Will is pinioned by tenderness. He reaches out and strokes the boy’s hair. Blackberry will be breeched soon. He should be already. Sitting astride a horse, no matter how small and slow, his skirts bunching awkwardly. Begging pardon like a little gentleman. It is time.

  There is such a melancholy in it, thinks Will. Henrietta should be here holding his leading rein. It should be her planning Blackberry’s rites. Lord, when will the should-bes and the what-ifs subside? When will the sharp edges of his pain blunt? Is it a betrayal to even wish such a thing? What will be left of her if he can no longer lacerate himself on his grief?

  His grip on the leather is white-knuckle tight, and the pony whinnies, tossing her head and pulling back on the leading rein. He slackens it, looking again at Blackberry and his serious, eager face. Such a heart-rending innocence.

  The boy’s focus is forwards, where Cromwell is reaching out a gloved hand. On it, Bram places the hooded hawk. A peregrine. A pernickety, grumpy bird of prodigious beauty, who likes her lure cast just so, and nips at unwary fingers.

  The jesses are of silk, and the bells are of silver, cast in Milan. Will knows this, as he has seen the receipt, and his eyes started at the cost. But they are a fine, pretty adornment for such a bird. Will and Blackberry can hear the sweet jangle even from where they lurk at the back of the pack of toadies and lickspittles.

  Next to Cromwell, to the disgruntlement of many of his followers, is Sir Kenelm Digby. Not only a sworn Royalist, but an actual, declared Roman Catholic. A giant, booming sort of a man. The two had formed an immediate attachment earlier in the year, when the former courtier to Henrietta Maria bent the knee to the Protector to ask for his lands back. And now, here they are knee by knee, glove by glove. Digby’s peregrine is darker than Cromwell’s, and smaller. A fierce, fast bird.

  Cromwell has a habit of picking up Royalists who share his love of music or hawking. Some find it ridiculous. Hypocritical. Sly.

  But Will watches him with Digby. They talk together about Spanish peregrines. About a rare Icelandic gyrfalcon that Digby saw once, and the light in its unhooded eyes. About training Digby’s daughters to handle a French merlin, with its dangerous tendency to soar high beyond the clouds. About underrated sparrowhawks. The alphanet that Cromwell saw in his youth, which, as soon as it felt the weak Anglian sun on its unhooded head, flew back to Africa, beyond the shouts and the lure.

  Cromwell has always had his hobbies. He has always loved the soar of the falcons and the wild wind on his face. He has always loved the melancholy draw of a fiddler’s bow. Once, needing him for endless signatures and following a trail of sightings and suppositions, Will found him in St James’s, standing beneath an open window, a rapture on his face like a mystic. Transported by the music as it floated down and out of the window, settling on him like a balm in the chill of the evening.

  Now, he clings to his hobbies. They are his raft. He is bucked and tossed by the making of endless decisions. By the countless small betrayals. By the astounding incompetence that Will sees creeping out of Whitehall and along the roads to the provinces. The Lord Protector is buffeted by the leakage between his intentions – God’s intentions – and their execution. The emperor says jump, and they hop, or skip, or quibble about the definition of jumping.

  Music is his calm. As long as the violin plays, he cannot hear the shrill whistle of dissent and failure. He cannot hear the querulous demand for more leadership and the petulant demand for less. In the silence, imperfections echo; but in the perfection of a soprano’s high note, Cromwell can be still.

  This is the first time Will has seen him with the falcons, and he recognizes the man’s quiet joy from evenings spent on music. Cromwell can be carefree, lost in the small tasks of the hunt. Wrapping the jesses into his glove, whispering nonsense into the hooded ear. Judging the distance and the wind. Arching an eyebrow at Digby, who smiles back – and all the blood of Newark and Marston Moor and Naseby and Worcester can be forgotten in the utter simplicity of this moment. The cry of the heron and the shift of the wind. The slipping of the hood and the jesses. The air catching the feathers of the bird’s outstretched wings as she lifts skywards. Lord, thinks Will. The infinite grace of your creation.

  Go on, my beauty, on.

  Blackberry’s mouth is an open O as he watches the two birds take flight.

  The herons are spooked out of their frozen stance. Up they soar, with long, slow beats of their wings. Necks cricked, the men below watch them rising higher.

  ‘The falcons are not trying to get them,’ says Blackberry.

  ‘Ha!’ says Cromwell, loudly. ‘Not so, young Master Challoner. They are working their way upwards. Do you see them gyrate through the sky, young man?’

  The peregrines, seemingly ignoring the herons, twist and spiral, gaining height fast. The herons’ path stays low now, and they swoop over the watchers’ upturned faces. Above, the peregrines hover. A point of stillness in the grey sky.

  Will is gripping the rein too tight again. Blackberry is holding his breath, a great inward sigh that must break soon.

  ‘Now,’ says Cromwell, striking his fist against the pommel of his saddle. Down flies his falcon, as if on command, cleaving the air. It is fast and sharp and deadly as it strikes the bigger heron with clenched talons, knocking the bird from the sky. The second falcon follows, a heartbeat behind. Plunging straight down like an arrow, piercing the flight of its victim.

  The herons drop from the sky; a slow, looping fall like a dropped feather. They seem weightless, until they land in successive thunks on the scrubby brown grass. Their once elegant necks are twisted, their orange beaks still strangely vibrant.

  ‘Well done indeed,’ says Cromwell, delight in his face. Bram is pink with happiness as his training and skill are vindicated once more. Cromwell leans down and slaps him on the shoulder.

  ‘Did you like that, my boy?’ Cromwell says, turning to Blackberry and fixing him with the full force of his joy.

  ‘I did, sir,’ shouts Blackberry back, beaming.

  ‘Your Highness,’ whispers Will, exasperated. Did he not drill the child on etiquette before they set out?

  ‘Your High . . .’ Blackberry stumbles over the word. His lip is quivering as if he might cry.

  Cromwell edges his horse closer, the pair of them towering over the little boy on his shaggy pony. ‘Never mind, Master Challoner. ’Tis all Your Highness this and that to impress the French ambassador. But between friends, it does not signify.’

  He smiles, and Will watches Blackberry’s awe turn to worship. It is clearer cut with a child – Blackberry wears on his face what grown men keep locked away.

  ‘It is settled, then,’ says Cromwell, and he wheels round. Digby stands impatiently, already swinging his lure in a figure of eight.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ says Cromwell. The two of them trot forward, ablaze with the thrill and the joy of it all. He looks younger out here. He looks weightless. As if the new first Parliament of the Protectorate, anticipated by him with such relish, were not full of duly elected Royalists and Presbyterians. As if the peace with the Dutch were not straining itself to snapping point. As if there were not plots to assassinate him fermenting in dark corners across England and beyond. As if some of the army officers were not agitating against him.

  Now, here, there is only the looping swing of the lure and the call to his falcon, who te
ases him with an unmoving, blinking stare. There is the wind rushing through the grasses and a first bird bagged and a man at his side who will not talk politics. An illusory freedom, thinks Will. But perhaps we must all succumb to illusions sometimes, or we will run melancholy mad.

  The snow is falling. Sam lifts his face to it, and thinks of the white mantle shrouding the ships in the far south, and the great shifting blocks of ice that float there.

  A long day. He creaks his shoulders backwards, straightens his spine. He is still trying to hold on to that first flush of enthusiasm for trade. But he has spent the day bounding from counting house to warehouse, in hot, smoky rooms, making small conversation with men who might be useful or might just have been sent by the angels to try his patience.

  Patience. As always, when he thinks of the word he thinks of the girl. He has not seen her much. She keeps to her rooms here in Cologne. She is trotted out on occasion, when it suits Sidrach to have a pretty woman on his arm. He has been cultivating men in the king’s circle. He can rein in his messianic streak when it suits him. Too much godliness would fright the men whose help he needs.

  Poor Patience, he thinks. He is not entirely sure why he feels so sorry for her, such a deep and aching pity. Perhaps it is her serious eyes – which he thought once were made to crease with laughter, but now seem stretched into a wide, lost stare.

  Is it Sidrach who makes her so serious? Or was she always that way, and he just imagined the flickerings of someone else? Perhaps he liked the shape of her face, and so imagined it contained a soul to match his?

  He has to pass their rooms to get home, and he looks up at the darkened window. He fancies he sees a shadow.

  There is a queue at the sausage stall. He can smell the onions and the blackening skin, and he stops. A sausage for his dinner, why not? There is half a jug of that fine ale he was gifted by Madame Shaw. She wants him to marry her daughter, of that Sam is now sure. They have a way of fluttering at him, mother and daughter. An overfamiliar solicitude. Is your wine to your liking, Captain Challoner? Are you too hot, too cold? Have more fowl, more of this fine cheese.