Will stands, abruptly. He walks across the room and takes up his book. He sits with his back to the wine, aware of it.
Slowly the book creeps into the space left by the booze. Fills his blood with ideas, with notions. The first part of Mathematical Magick is interesting enough: a route map for novices through the beauty and symmetry of maths. But this is familiar territory for Will, even if it is years since last he visited. He reads with a fondness, with the shadow of his excited youth at his shoulder.
In the second half, however, Wilkins moves on to more speculative stuff. More specifically, Will becomes entranced by his insistence that man might fly. Wilkins envisages a flying chariot, with beating wings powered by springs.
Will pauses, his mind alive with the notion. He is abuzz with questions and possibilities. Experiment, says Wilkins, is the key. Constant and bold experiment.
Yes, thinks Will. Yes.
So caught is he in Wilkins’ vision that he barely registers the knocking on the door. It grows in force and intensity; a violent and insistent knock.
The sudden intrusion of the outside world sends Will’s eyes beetling across to the decanter. He grips the arms of his chair and pulls himself upright. He crosses the room not knowing quite which urge he is giving in to.
The knocking is louder. He follows it.
On the stairs, he sees Blackberry’s head peeking around the corner of the door to the study. Above him, the tutor’s owlish glare. Will smiles reassuringly towards them. ‘A messenger, no doubt,’ he says.
Word from Cromwell, perhaps. He is needed. He thanks his God that he resisted the call of the wine. He will need to be in good fettle.
‘Go back to your studies,’ he says to Blackberry. The boy winks. It is a new trick, and he uses it on any and every occasion. A careful, exaggerated wink. Will feels a sober lurch of tenderness towards the boy. He winks back, and Blackberry grins before he pulls his head back behind the door. As it closes shut, Will hears the muffled sing-song of a verb being conjugated.
Amo, amas, amat, he thinks, as he walks down the stairs. Amabam. I was loving.
The door is rapped upon again. Whoever it is will wake the whole bloody street.
‘I am coming!’ he shouts. ‘I am coming!’
At the door is Tom, Patience’s boy. He looks wild. Red-eyed and unkempt. There is a murky smell of beer and mould rising off him. Will looks at him stupidly.
Tom shouts at him, waving his arms.
‘He’ll kill her!’ he cries, pulling at Will’s sleeve. ‘Kill her!’
Will tries to make sense of it. The words are so unexpected, so extremely unlikely, that they do not translate into meaning. But he is leaving the house, letting the boy pull him down the steps. He feels a shake in his legs, in his hands, as he is towed away from his door. He tells himself to focus, noting the boy’s frantic face.
‘What has happened, Tom? Calm down, for Christ’s own sake. What has happened?’
‘No time,’ the boy sobs, shaking his head. ‘Run, please, mister. She said she’d let him go. Gave me money to run. I don’t want her money, mister. I want her safe. Not dead.’
Dead? A strong word. An improbable word. Will fights for lucidity.
They are moving quickly through the streets. London is lazily stirring itself. Will gives up trying to understand. But the quicker he strides, the calmer the boy seems. And he can understand the essence of the crisis, anyway. All his fears for Patience, all his dislike for Sidrach, are coalescing into an urgency. He runs now.
Their door is closed, locked shut.
He knocks. Bangs on the door. An echo of Tom’s earlier urgency.
There is no answer.
‘Sidrach,’ he shouts. ‘Patience!’
‘Please, mister. Please, mister.’ The boy’s incoherent plea buzzes at him, melting into his panic. He takes a few paces backwards and runs at the door, slamming into it with his shoulder. The pain jolts through his side, but – miraculous! – the wood splits and gives. He is through.
Once inside, he pauses. The house is entirely still. Outside, they can hear the insistent cries of the street hawkers. Pies. Sausages. Oysters. The thunderous trundle of a cart. A drum beats somewhere. A snatch of a woman’s laughter, intense and loud, pushes its way into the quiet corners of the hallway.
Tom stands close behind him, peering around his shoulder.
‘The kitchen, mister. They were in the kitchen. Oh, she’s dead. And it’s my fault.’
He lapses into a babble, a stream of seemingly unconnected sounds. Nonsense, perhaps. Or a different language.
‘Quiet, Tom.’ The boy stops his gibbering, although his breathing is still ragged. Together they step further into the house. The floor creaks as they walk, signalling their presence. No bad thing, perhaps, thinks Will. He shivers. There is something so deadening, so dark in the fabric of this house. Perhaps it is a fancy, but the walls have known misery. Thank God she has not brought a child into it.
Patience.
He forces himself to stop thinking of fancies. To stop thinking how much easier this would be if he was a glass or two into a full decanter.
The kitchen is ahead. The door is ajar. Light spills from its edges into the darkness of the hallway. He grabs a candlestick from the table in the hallway, feeling self-conscious and melodramatic as he does so. It is reassuringly thick and heavy in his hands.
‘Patience,’ he says softly. ‘Patience.’
No answer. He reaches out and pushes the kitchen door. It swings inward. The first thing he sees is Sidrach, sitting hunched on a chair by the fire. He turns to face Will as he comes in. There is a strange, blank look on his face. It is as if he has expected to see Will. He catches sight of Tom, sheltering behind Will’s back. He flinches, makes to stand. Fury flits on to his face. But then his eye catches on something beyond the table, and he hunches back down again.
‘She’s there,’ he says. He points.
Will sees her then. She is lying on the floor. Curled into a ball. Her hair streams across the grey tiles. There is blood, pooling on the floor. Blood on her face. On her limp hands. On her thin cotton shift. There is blood clumping in her head.
‘Oh Jesus, Sidrach. What have you done?’
He drops to her side. Her face is white, her skin is cold to the touch.
Tom runs at the man by the fire, beating his hunched back with small, violent fists.
‘You devil. Devil. Devil. Devil.’
Sidrach sits through the assault like a placid bull being buzzed by a fly.
Will catches it then. A tremor under her eyelid, a flicker at her temple. A breath. A breath! Not dead. His body almost collapses under the weight of his surging blood. ‘Not dead, you son of a whore,’ he says to Sidrach. Sidrach raises his head.
‘Not? I thought . . .’ He trails off.
Will slides his arms under her body.
Sidrach seems to crumple further. ‘Thank God. Thank God,’ he mutters. He raises a hand to his throat, as if to brush off the shadow of a noose. Will sees the bruises and scrapes on his knuckles. He has a violent urge to smash his own fist into Sidrach’s face, to watch the blood spread on him, to hear the snap of his nose breaking.
He must concentrate on Patience.
‘Tom. Run for the doctor. Then Hattie. You know Hattie, the butcher’s wife? To my house.’
Tom nods. He looks broken, as if the strings holding him upright have suddenly snapped. ‘Be strong, boy,’ says Will. ‘Just for a little longer. Be strong.’
Tom pulls himself upright. As he turns for the door, he pauses, then spits at Sidrach, suddenly and violently. Sidrach starts, and begins to lumber to his feet, the spit sliding down his cheek.
‘Stop!’ shouts Will. ‘Tom. Go. Sidrach – sit down.’
They obey him. Tom runs out of the door. Will struggles to his feet with Patience hanging limply in his arms.
‘Shh, little Imp,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘You’re safe now.’
‘The bed upstairs,’ say
s Sidrach. ‘She belongs here.’
Will looks at him. The strength of contempt he feels must burn hot on his face, for Sidrach turns red and looks down.
‘What will people say?’ he says sullenly to the floor.
Will cannot dredge a riposte contemptuous enough. Silent, he holds Patience tight and walks away.
Patience is astounded to discover that she is still alive. There is no mistaking the symptoms. Pain. A dry mouth. A thump of blood in her head that slams into her forehead behind her eyes.
Besides, this is clearly Will’s bedroom. Books teeter up the wall in piles. She pulls herself upright, dragging the blankets with her.
At the end of the bed, curled like a puppy, is Tom. He is asleep. There is something comforting in the fact that he is so still. She thinks back to his face when she saw him last; his eyes bright with fear and red-rimmed with wakefulness. Sidrach rising behind him.
She closes her eyes. She wills herself to think of something other than Sidrach. But he is there, eyes shut or open. Does this mean that he has won? That she is finally broken?
She cannot lie here. If she does nothing, she will think of him. His face, even more than his fists. How those handsome, fleshy features twist with menace. The coal-burn black of his eyes. The unbearable lurch of failing to placate him.
She swings her feet out of bed. Her toes find the floor and she pulls herself to standing, hauling on the corner post of the bed. Her head spins. She will stay standing. She will.
Over to the boy, whose sleeping breath is quiet and even. She pulls the blanket down the bed and over his thin body. He stirs a little, and she strokes his forehead. He whimpers himself back to sleep. Poor mite. What a story he told. And what happens now?
She leaves him there and walks slowly to the kitchen. The corridor is cool, and she shivers in her shift, wrapping her arms around herself.
There at the table, his head bent over a book, is Will. She pauses for a moment, watching. His hair falls forward over his face, hiding the scoring around his eyes. The forefinger of his right hand is tapping the wood insistently, as it does when he reads something that excites him. Tap tap tap. How they teased him for it when he was a boy.
Will, Will
He makes us ill.
He read a book
Till his finger shook
And he had no ink for his quill.
Who made up that stupid verse? She can’t remember.
‘Will,’ she says. He throws his head up, his finger pausing mid-tap.
‘Patience! Sit down, sit down. How are you faring?’ He bustles her into a chair.
‘What happened, Will? How did I get here? Where is Sidrach?’
‘Not yet, Patience. Not yet. Let me bring you something. Some wine? Something to eat. Look. Here is a broth for you. Mary made it. She’s gone to the market, but we left it at a simmer. For if you woke up.’
‘Was it not certain I would wake up?’
‘Not wholly. The doctor comes and goes. Looks at you and shakes his head. Hattie, too. Quite a blow to the head you had. Such a deal of blood. Come, eat.’
She takes a few sips of the warm broth to make him happy. Then she reaches her hand up to her head, and feels the lump there, like a misshapen egg.
‘Tom has not left your side,’ says Will. ‘Blackberry is in a rage. Called Sidrach out for a duel. Said you were his aunt and he should guard you.’
She smiles, and he grasps hold of her hand, squeezing it tight enough to make her flinch.
‘Do you remember, Will, on Sunday mornings? When Father used to gather us for bible reading? And we would laugh, and flick pellets of paper at each other behind his back.’
‘You were the worst, little Patience. I remember it well. How you yawned at the begats.’
‘Jeremiah begat Seremiah begat Feremiah. Lord. You laughed at the rude bits.’
They laugh now, and the pain gripes at her ribs.
‘We didn’t know we were in Eden,’ she says.
‘No. But the fall is inevitable.’
‘He would catch us messing, sometimes,’ she says. ‘Do you remember? And he would feign a fury.’
‘Make his voice deep. “Suffer the little children. Suffer, indeed.”’
She eats some more of the broth. It is cooler, but warm enough to soothe. Will brings her a cup of hot spiced ale. He makes it himself, stirring and muttering. She sips at it. There is something sour at the back. She looks questioningly towards Will. ‘Hattie’s recipe,’ he says. ‘She says it will help your blood thicken, after all you have lost.’
She nods and sips some more. She shivers, and he jumps to his feet. He brings a blanket and wraps it around her shoulders.
While he is behind her, and cannot see her face, she says: ‘I wanted him dead, Will. Dead.’
He comes and sits next to her. ‘And yet, from what Tom tells me, you could have let him die.’
‘I could not let the boy take the sin on his soul. I thought of taking it on mine. Oh Will. I was so frightened. Of him. Of dying. Of living with him. I thought to kill him myself. Oh Will. Thou shalt not kill. Yet the sin was so deep in my skin – the wanting it, the craving it.’
‘And yet, Patience. Yet. You did not kill him. All the saints in heaven would be tempted to kill that man. And you did not.’
‘But what now? What now, Will?’
He looks at her dove-white skin. The tremor in her hands, and the great grey circles beneath her eyes.
‘Now? Now you sleep again. And when you wake, I will have Mary draw you a bath. And then you will sleep again.’
‘You will not let him in, if he comes after me?’
‘By God, I will not.’
Sam is struggling to close his trunk. He pushes the lid down again, and manages to snap the catch. Riled, ready to be furious with something, he kicks the wood. He has forgotten he has not yet pulled on his boots, and he yelps.
He is still dancing about the room, swearing, when there is a sudden cough behind him.
He swirls around to face the open door, and there, to his astonishment, is Sir Edward Hyde. A lawyer turned King’s right hand. They say that Charles II listens to his voice, even when others shout louder.
‘Captain Challoner,’ says Hyde, in a manner that is both a question and an accusation.
‘Yes, Sir Edward. We have met before, if you will forgive me. After Naseby.’
‘Hmm.’ Hyde looks about the room. He sees a chair and moves across to it, lowering himself heavily into it. He is running to fat, Hyde. More than one chin jostles for position above his collar. He takes out a handkerchief and wipes the sweat from his forehead.
‘Damned hot, Challoner.’
‘It is, sir.’ Why is he here? Sam begins to feel a prickle of unease. Hyde is one of the king’s closest advisers. He is a clever, shrewd man. It does not do to cross him. Sam has successfully avoided him.
‘Have you heard of this business with Manning?’ asks Hyde, in a tone that suggests he and Sam are old chums, parlaying gossip.
‘The spy?’
‘That’s the one. The whoreson leaked the plans of the last rising to Thurloe. No wonder it was a damned damp squib.’
‘What will happen to him?’
‘We should hang him. But we’re guests in this infernal country and they might not like it. So I fear we will have to content ourselves with banishing him from our shadow court. I would not bet on him lasting long. A bullet in the back, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Sam fiddles with the lock on the trunk. He should meet the fellow’s eyes, but he can’t quite do it. Is he blushing? Christ, he’s blushing like a nun. He manages to lift his head, look at Hyde and say: ‘I would do it if the chance arose, Sir Edward.’
‘Would you now?’ Hyde raises an eyebrow. Sam feels the strength of the older man’s scrutiny. Thurloe’s voice pops into his head. ‘Tittle-tattle.’
Can Hyde know? He has not supplied Thurloe with anything. Not yet.
But he is on his way to London, and a reckoni
ng is coming. Inside the chest is the letter from Will.
. . . Forgive me for burdening you with this. But it is so pressing and so miserable. She was near dead with the beating he gave her. Yet Sidrach insists she returns to his house. Spouts guff about the Bible, when it is obvious that it is his reputation he fears for. I fight him off as best I can, while she is weak. But he has the law on his side. We cannot afford a deed of separation, even were I to persuade my parents that putting this marriage aside is the only course. Oh Sam. I would that your sister were here to advise me. She had courage enough for these battles . . .
Sam does not know what he will do when he gets there. He only knows that he must go.
He realizes that he has been silent for some time, and Hyde is staring at him oddly.
‘Tell me about your brother-in-law,’ says Hyde.
‘Will Johnson? He is a good man.’
‘He is a regicide. He helped kill the king.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘There can be no buts in this. He helped kill the king. You stayed with him in London.’
‘I did. I had little money. He offered.’
‘He writes to you here.’
‘How do you know that?’ Will is becoming irritated by this. Only the tethering of his conscience to that word tittle-tattle is preventing him from shouting. He keeps his calm, but only just.
‘I know what I know. And I also know, Captain Challoner, that you are returning to London.’
‘Just for a visit, Sir Edward. I have business.’
‘You are very sure they will let you in. Why is that, I wonder?’
‘What do you insinuate, sir?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
Hyde stands, pulling himself out of the chair. He moves towards the window. The small effort makes him breathless.
‘Prince Rupert vouches for you,’ he says, when his breathing is even.
‘And so he should. I fought for him from Yorkshire to the Virgin Islands and back. And I would remind you, Sir Edward, as you seem to know me, that my father was killed by the rebels, and my sister was killed by the rebels’ soldiers. My loyalty should not be questioned.’
‘You would be astonished, Captain Challoner, at the number of men whose unquestionable loyalty has been bought by Thurloe. The king cannot pass wind without that man knowing of it.’
The Tyrant’s Shadow Page 23