Cromwell may claim innocence – and Will may even believe in that innocence when he is feeling chipper – but they can also see the crown he pretends not to wear on his thinning pate. Its wearer can protest all he likes, yet they can all see its glitter, and how it catches the light of the great hall’s candles and illuminates his face. Those warts, that nose, that cragged brow: glowing gold from his invisible heavy crown.
But what else can he do? wonders Will. And, it occurs to him as they all file out in sombre array, if that questions torments me, what must it do to him?
Patience turns the letter from Sidrach in her hands. She folds it once, twice, three times so that it is small and fat and unremarkable. Perhaps, if she makes it small enough, the words will shrink to become meaningless.
There is a knock on the door, and she runs to open it. Here he is, smiling at her.
‘Sam!’
‘I do not intrude, I hope? Have you eaten? Will you join me?’
She pauses. Her hand grips the door. She thinks of all the joy of being with Sam. And all the pain of not touching him, of not talking about the sinful thrum in her blood when he is close. The talk will be light and bantering and honeyed, and underneath it? The devil dancing in her skin, compelling her closer.
‘The large frau across the way has taken delivery of some geese. Who can resist her attempts to mangle the poor fowl? Come, Patience. I need you to laugh at her with me.’
‘Well then, Sam. If you cannot laugh at the large frau by yourself, I must help. I must . . .’
She turns away from him, into the room. She places Sidrach’s letter on the top of the chest. On it she rests a book, to keep it from sliding to the floor. The letter from Hattie lies on the bed, unfolded.
Grabbing a shawl, she turns to Sam, letting herself be sucked in. Something in her face makes him laugh, and he looks as if he will reach for her hand. Checking himself, he pulls his own hand firmly behind his back, and his laugh turns into something more rueful.
Outside, the sharp air gives her courage. She says: ‘I have received two letters.’
‘Yes?’
‘One from Hattie. She is worried about Will. He is drinking heavily.’
Sam looks at her. He grimaces.
‘I have seen drink ruin good men, Patience.’
‘I do not understand it,’ she says. ‘Why not stop? Why not make yourself draw back from the bottle?’
Sam pauses to check his hat at a passing man. The stranger looks almost destitute – his clothes seem held together by witchcraft, they are so tattered. Yet he holds himself upright, and answers Sam’s greeting with a flourish. A penniless cavalier in exile is a pitiful thing, Patience thinks.
‘Sometimes,’ says Sam as they move past the man, ‘we slide towards the things we know we should avoid. Sometimes we are moving too fast, too furiously towards the thing we should not touch. We cannot check the rush.’
She feels the blood run to her cheeks.
‘In the late wars,’ he says, ‘I knew such a feeling. In a cavalry charge, Patience, if you break the enemy, you want to gallop and gallop. To chase your fleeing enemy and make him pay. Pay for your fear, your dead friends, your dead shadow.’
‘You do not talk of it much,’ she says.
‘Do I not? And yet I think on it all the time. No matter. My point is that when you are lost in the charge, it is a momentous hardship to check. To stop. To return to the field and finish the job. Cromwell could do it. Could make his men do it.’
‘Perhaps that is why he is King Cromwell.’
‘Perhaps. Even those of us who would see him hang would concede his quality. But you spoke of two letters.’
‘The second is from Sidrach.’
He pauses. They are outside the tavern. She can see the fat frau through the dimpled window, dishing up a plate. Her face is a queer red pattern through the glass. They can hear her laughing.
‘He has concluded his business in Paris,’ says Patience. ‘He wants me to take ship to England and beg for his pardon and a safe passage.’
Sam whistles. ‘It is not safe, Patience. Do you remember Mistress Lee? Her husband sent her to beg pardon for his part in the king’s armies. The customs men stripped her naked at Gravesend looking for letters and secrets.’
Absurdly, Patience thinks of her fading bruises rather than her modesty. The possibility of shame on two fronts.
‘I will lose your society,’ says Sam. His air of dejection makes her perversely happy. ‘Must you go?’
‘Of course. He is my husband and he wills it.’
‘Bah,’ says Sam. ‘Sid says jump and you leap.’
Sid? She would laugh, but for once Sam’s face forbids it.
‘What would you have me do, Sam?’
He pushes open the door, and the warmth and light pull them in.
The business of sitting, of divesting themselves of coats and shawls, of ordering, of taking the first sip of a stringent wine: these familiar rituals mask the silence between them.
At last, when there are no practical matters to divert them, Sam says: ‘Have you read any of the works of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle?’
The question is abrupt. Accusatory, somehow. Patience bridles, shaking her head. Sidrach insists that she reads only the Bible, but she senses that to tell Sam that will goad him further into this unfamiliar sourness.
‘I know her. She is a wonderful, learned woman.’
Patience knows jealousy then. A quick stab of fury. She drinks her wine, feeling the sear of it on her throat.
‘She says that without learning and independence of thought, women are like worms shuffling in the dirt of ignorance. Some men prefer their women in such a condition.’
‘You imply that you are different.’
‘Am I not?’
‘How can you know? Fine words are easy. I am yet to meet a man happy to be outshone by a clever wife.’
‘Your brother. My sister was such a woman.’
‘And I am a worm?’
‘I did not say that.’
Patience looks away, towards the fat frau and the judder of her chins. She begin to cry, and is furious with herself, with Sam, with the absent Sidrach. The indiscriminate rage is building in her, leaking out of her as tears.
‘Patience,’ says Sam. ‘Do not cry. Next to my sister, you are quite the best woman I know.’
‘Do not say such things. It is not appropriate.’
‘Bugger what is appropriate,’ he says. He grasps hold of her hand. ‘Patience, you must know. You must guess . . .’
He pauses as she wrenches her hand away. The rage and the hopelessness and the desire make her entirely giddy. She reaches for the cup full of wine, and before she can check herself, she has tipped it at him. Hurled it at his face. She watches the shock and bemusement sit, wine-soaked, on his beloved features. The curl of hair above his eyes collapses damply over his forehead.
People are turning. Watching. The fat frau giggles nervously. Patience stands abruptly, pushing her chair backwards. Wordless – helpless – she runs away.
If Will could write a letter to his dead wife and place it in the hands of an angel he is not sure he believes in; if he could watch that letter flutter heavenwards, gripped in the snow-white hand; if he could know the letter would arrive in heaven, a place he is almost certain does not exist – then he would write of guilt and solitude.
He would write of the unbearable humdrum misery of being the widower of a woman who was alive and fiercely loving. The loneliness of surviving.
He would write of the guilt in the choice he makes every day. The choice he makes each evening in the echoing house to ignore his solemn vows and pledges of the daylight hours. The choice – for that is what it is, he knows, no matter how intense the compulsion – to pour out the first steadying glass. The second lubricating glass. The third for joshing at shadows. The fourth self-pitying. The fifth maudlin. And on to the one he is waiting for. Oblivion. But this is an oblivion that comes wit
h a price. Soiled clothes, and crumpled skin. Blackberry crying out in his sleep unanswered. Shaking hands. Daylight hours spent wished away, in an impatient, irascible race for his first drink.
He is lucky, he supposes, that he is so far removed from his old chief. Cromwell cannot move for scribes and spies and soldiers, following him around and waiting for orders. Will’s crumbling is – largely – unnoticed. Nedham watches him, painfully silent, as his eyes water and his hands tremble.
But the further he is removed from Cromwell, the more he feels an unexpected lassitude. He did not crave proximity to power. He prided himself on his indifference to it. And yet in its withdrawal, he is finding himself lost.
This is what he would not say to Henrietta: that his greatest problem now is not guilt or loss or loneliness. It is boredom. It is apathy that gives him the excuse he seeks to reach for the numbing bottle. A great and unnerving paralysis of soul. He is the tiny cockle left behind by the retreating ocean, looking motionless at the sky and waiting for something – anything – to happen.
CORNHILL, LONDON
April 1655
THE SMELL IS QUITE EXTRAORDINARY. A PUNGENT, DARKLY sweet aroma that hangs over the room.
‘Here,’ says Nedham, and the two of them sit near the dimpled glass of the window. The warmth of the coffee shop has put a steam about the place, misting up the view to the street outside. It gives the room a cave-like intensity. A fire rages in the corner.
A neat, round-faced man wipes the table, and Will allows Nedham to take charge of the ordering.
‘It is an age since I have seen you,’ says Nedham.
‘I am on the fringes now. Do you see the change, Nedham? Since the paltry Royalist uprisings. Since the Parliament failed. The chief is less open.’
Nedham nods, solemnly. They have both of them been immersed in the fallout from the rising. A Royalist call to arms that sent Thurloe scrabbling to his spies, and put the army on alert. Handfuls of men answered the call, rallying to the Stuart cause. But the rising followed Leveller and Fifth Monarchist agitation in the army. At the centre, Cromwell is an embattled man.
Thurloe, grim-faced and anxious, reminds Will of a farmer with a club and a mole problem. Clunk! An army mutiny quelled. Gah! Up pops a Royalist. Clunk!
The farmer is winning, for now. All the moles are clubbed; sedated if not dead.
Nedham has been writing furious denunciations of the enemy without and within. He too looks exhausted – grey shadows edge his eyes. He leans back on his chair and opens his mouth to speak. But he stops, and looks about the room. He leans forward, bringing his face close to Will and lowering his voice.
‘I have seen the change, Will. He is a man under siege. The failure of his Parliament, and the swell of Royalist feeling. It may have been a pathetic thing, the uprising, but it worried him nonetheless. The stakes are high – it is his great design at risk, his great plan. He wants religious unity. An England of Puritan soul and English heart.’
‘He has always wanted that.’
‘Yes,’ says Nedham. ‘But I think he is beginning to understand that souls are harder to win than he thought. He will not quite admit it, though. That is why you are on the outside of his circle now, Will. Do you see? You have been close to him. A confidant. If he cannot bring even your soul to a Puritan cleanliness, then what hope does he have with the farmer in Lincoln, the dairymaid in Yorkshire, the goodwife in Bristol?’
‘I do see,’ says Will. ‘I am the seeds of his failure made flesh. But what of you? He keeps you close.’
‘He needs my pen. And he never had any designs on my soul – he watched it flip and flop between king and Parliament, following a purse. But you are a good man, Will. And he cannot bear to have a good man close who refuses to rack himself for God.’
The boy comes with a pot for the two of them. There is a pause for pouring, which allows Will a space to develop his thought. It is a new one – it comes unbidden. He takes a sip of the hot black liquid. It is bitter and aromatic.
‘I feel as if the sun has gone in, Nedham. I am cast into shadow. Can I not love the man without loving his God?’
‘Not if the man is Cromwell,’ says Nedham. He says the name a little too loudly, and heads turn. This is a coffee house, after all. The rule, as Nedham has explained to Will, is that conversation should be general. Their intimacy, the closeness of their heads and their low voices, has been an affront to the house. Nedham grins and leans back in his chair. Will mirrors his action, and they sit wide-legged and open-shouldered, inviting conversation in.
‘Well,’ says a man on the table next to them. ‘I have not seen you gentlemen here before.’
‘It is my first visit,’ says Will.
‘Indeed?’ He is of middling height, with thinning brown hair and startling blue eyes that peer out over half-moon spectacles. ‘And yet you look familiar,’ he says. ‘Oxford men?’
‘Not for some years,’ says Will. ‘I know who you are, sir. If you will excuse my presumption. My name is William Johnson, and I am secretary to the Lord Protector. You dined with him last week, with his sister and her husband.’
‘Just so. Just so. John Wilkins, sir. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Johnson. And?’
‘My friend is Marchamont Nedham.’
‘The newsbook man! Capital. Capital.’
He beams at them with great satisfaction and good humour. Will finds himself grinning back.
‘How did you find our Lord Protector, sir?’ asks Nedham.
‘Tolerably spry, all things considered,’ says Wilkins. ‘Most put out about the intransigence of his first Parliament.’
‘They were determined to vex him, I think,’ says Will. ‘They did so insist on curtailing freedom to worship.’
‘Yes,’ says Nedham. ‘But I daresay that he was more vexed by their constant nit-picking at his constitutional place and theirs. There is much work to be done, and they spent their time gazing at their own buckles. I wonder, gentlemen, if His Highness thinks with pity now on his predecessor.’
The three of them look at each other awkwardly. This is territory too murky to discuss with strangers, and Will pulls Nedham back.
‘Nedham, the Reverend Mr Wilkins is master of Wadham College.’
Nedham says the name again ponderously. Then he looks up. ‘Mathematical Magick!’ he barks, and Wilkins simpers into his coffee.
‘A most prodigiously learned book, Will,’ says Nedham. ‘Written by Mr Wilkins. It was all the rage in London about the time of the late king’s fall. I am afraid, sir, that I was like a babe in the woods amongst your geometry. Words are more my line.’
‘It is, alas, a book that many own and few have read,’ says Wilkins, sipping at his coffee with a delicate hand.
‘Better that way than the other,’ says Will. ‘Although I confess, I neither own it nor have read it. I was preoccupied at the time of the late king’s death.’
‘Many of us were, Mr Johnson. Many of us were.’
‘My friend Johnson here,’ says Nedham, ‘is a keen natural philosopher.’
‘Indeed? And your interest?’
‘The stars, primarily,’ says Will. ‘But my interest has been in abeyance these last years. I was robbed of my wife, Mr Wilkins. I have found that grief and philosophy do not sit well together.’
‘Is that so?’ says Wilkins, drinking the last of his coffee and waving for another cup. ‘And yet philosophy is also a consolation.’
‘Yes, but natural philosophy – by which I mean the close study of the world – requires a kind of optimism, I think.’
The boy comes with hot water, interrupting Will in his thoughts. It gives him time to order them properly, and when the ritual of pouring and sipping and nodding is done, the words rush out of him.
‘I mean, sir, that one must view the world – and, I suppose, its skies – with a benevolent gaze to be a natural philosopher. If one cannot feel that the world is worth studying, then it is hard to raise the impetus. Other more urgent
matters take precedence. Putting food on the table. Putting one foot in front of the other. Pessimism is too akin to lethargy to allow for useful study.’
Nedham looks across at him, a strange expression on his face. ‘My dear fellow. It occurs to me that I have only known the melancholic Will Johnson. Were you quite the joker before the death of your wife?’
Will pauses, not knowing how to answer the charge. He cannot remember, quite, what the boyish Will Johnson was like. He smiled more, certainly that is true.
Into the silence Wilkins says: ‘We go through many permutations of character, do we not, in the face of great provocation from the universe. And yet there is an essential spirit that carries through from childhood. Tell me this, Mr Johnson. As a boy, did you gaze at the stars with a passionate longing to know their provenance?’
‘I did, sir.’
‘And did you spend your pennies on books about the stars? Kepler and the like. When other youths spent on wine and women?’
‘I did, sir.’
‘And I did not, sir,’ says Nedham, and the three of them laugh.
‘Then, Mr Johnson, I declare that you are a natural philosopher at your core. Grief has clouded your spirit, and there is no surprise or shame in that. When did she pass away?’
‘Six years ago,’ says Will, and he is astonished it is so long.
‘I will not bother you with trite words about how she would want you to pursue your interests. In my experience anyway, Mr Johnson, living wives are not always keen on their husbands’ heads roaming the heavens.’
‘And yet you are not married, sir?’ asks Nedham.
‘Exactly so, Mr Nedham.’ His eyes twinkle with the joke.
‘And yet,’ says Nedham, ‘some believe that marital felicity is the summit of man’s ambition.’
‘What rot you talk, Nedham,’ says Will. ‘Nedham here believes that the summit of a man’s ambition is always commercial interest. Commercial success, he tells anyone unfortunate enough to ask him, is the surest route to a happy soul.’
‘And to a happy state,’ says Nedham. ‘A wealthy England is a happy England. We clothe our commercial ambitions with words of justice or God. But it is hard to be happy with an empty purse. The state is at risk from an empty treasury, and the empty purses of its citizens, and more so from potentates who rob those purses. The best hope for peace is prosperity.’
The Tyrant’s Shadow Page 20