The Tyrant’s Shadow

by Antonia Senior

  Hyde looks out of the window, towards the dull blank wall beyond. He is stalling.

  ‘Your brother-in-law’s sister.’

  ‘Patience? What do you know of her?’

  ‘We know her husband. Simmonds. He was here, of course. Last year. I had a number of audiences with him. An interesting fellow. Strange, is it not, how these people never question their place in the Lord’s design.’

  Hyde turns back into the room. ‘You love your monarch, Challoner.’

  Again, the statement that could be a question. Sam thinks of Charles as he last saw him. At a gaming table. His face slipping with tiredness and the bilious aftermath of too much food and drink. The curse as he was trumped. The consoling whisper of his showy mistress. Around him the sycophants dripping their barbed honey. The circling of men who have known glory, known action, but now clamour for a crumb of favour.

  No, thinks Sam. I am monstrously indifferent to Charles Stuart. To the monarchy itself? That, I revere. But is this not the same question we have been fighting about for fifteen years? If not monarchy, then what? If not this monarch, then who?

  Hyde is looking at him. ‘Of course,’ he says. He sounds stupid. Unenthusiastic. He must concentrate. ‘I mean to say, my sword is his. My honour is his.’

  ‘Your heart?’

  ‘Sir Edward. I am a patient man. But I have a packet to catch. Is it at all possible to leave my heart aside and come instead to the blasted point?’

  Hyde smiles. A chubby wolf. ‘I need you to take a message to Simmonds. Tell him, now is the time. Tell him that you will smuggle him out. Afterwards.’

  ‘After what?’

  Hyde smiles again, and the sheen on his upper lip makes Sam unaccountably queasy.

  ‘No matter. It is best you do not know.’

  ‘And how will I smuggle him out?’

  ‘You have smuggled in and out before. We will send a boat to Viking Bay. Thanet. You know it?’

  Sam nods.

  ‘It will heave-to offshore with the dawn each day of the first week in August. The signal is three long, two short, one long. They will send a boat onshore. Do you understand?’

  Sam nods again. ‘Why me?’

  Hyde shrugs. ‘You know the man. You are related to him by marriage. Your meeting with him will not seem suspicious to Thurloe, who will have you followed. It is serendipitous that you are going to London. Why are you going?’

  ‘You have read my letters. You know why.’

  Hyde raises an eyebrow. He takes up his hat and makes for the door.

  ‘Sir Edward, I have not yet agreed.’

  ‘Captain Challoner. Your position in Cologne is entirely dependent on your relationship with the court in exile. You think Mr Shaw will continue his patronage if you are known to be out of the king’s favour? He is, as I understand it, already smarting from your failure to court his daughter.’

  He takes his leave, and the room is strangely cavernous in his absence. Sam feels a curious absence of rage. He sits heavily on his trunk, and raises a rueful smile as the lock catches itself. Thurloe in London; Hyde in Cologne. Somehow he is playing a double game, when he tried so hard not to play at all. But why bother with rage? Does a pawn fume at his fate? Or does he just limp forward, dumb and miserable, waiting to be sideswiped by a rook?

  Sam’s presence is astonishing.

  He sits at Will’s table, wide and vivid. Patience watches him reach for his glass, watches the way he knocks back the ale with a kind of joyous relish. She watches him reach for the cheese – how he cocks his head to catch the smell of it. He smiles to himself as he cuts a bit off.

  He catches her looking at him. She would expect a grin. A comedic mime – an exaggerated munching of the cheese. Instead, their eyes lock and he looks away quickly. He frowns down at the cheese as if it needs his sole attention to prevent it flying off the table and out of the window.

  Is it pity or contempt that is hammering out this distance between them? Her face is still a mess. Purple and yellow fighting for mastery. One eye still nearly closed. Oh Lord, the shame. The shame of being this woman. This battered, feeble mouse.

  She stands. She has forgotten the pain that strikes her ribs, sending sparks flying through her body. She catches her breath and he turns to look at her. His face is unreadable. Oddly serious.

  Will is talking, about some book he loves. He is flogging the conversation valiantly forward. But she is not listening, and she thinks Sam is not either. Eventually Will stutters to a halt.

  Into the great silence between them, Sam says: ‘I have something to tell you both. I wrestled with it all the way here. Should I tell you?’ His voice is sombre.

  ‘Will,’ he says. ‘Even knowing this could put your life in danger. And yours, Patience. But it touches you both.’

  ‘A pox on my life,’ she says, in a whisper.

  ‘Sir Edward Hyde came to see me. Before I returned to London. I was told to help Sidrach Simmonds in some unspeci-fied endeavour that will help the king. Charles Stuart, I mean. Then I must help to smuggle him to Cologne, afterwards.’

  Will and Patience glance at each other. Will looks as if he has been slapped. ‘Endeavour?’ he says. ‘What, for all love?’

  ‘I do not know,’ says Sam.

  ‘I do, I think,’ says Patience. ‘He means to attack Cromwell. The Antichrist, as he would have it. He means to kill him.’

  Will looks even more flabbergasted. But Sam just nods. This was his conclusion.

  ‘But why Sidrach?’ Will looks between the two of them.

  ‘It suits Charles Stuart’s party. Better Sidrach than a Royalist. If he succeeds, the monarch’s hands are not tainted. It is a fallout among allies. A Puritan scrap.’

  ‘And Sidrach can get close to him. Through you,’ says Patience.

  ‘Jesus,’ says Will in a whisper. ‘Jesus wept. What will we do?’

  The question is unresolved the next morning when Patience awakes in Will’s bed. Below, Will and Sam sleep on trestles by the ashes of the fire. Perhaps they arrived at a neat solution after she went to bed. But she doubts it. Some questions can be worried at endlessly and never settled.

  Leave Sidrach to it? If he succeeds, Blackberry will grow up in an England sliding towards chaos and blood again. Even if he fails, the violence of the state’s revenge could fall on Patience, and perhaps too on Sam and Will. And Blackberry. Cromwell’s men will winkle Sam’s involvement from somewhere. They will torture it out of Sidrach.

  Tell one of Cromwell’s advisors? They have no proof. No means of knowing about the plot that does not cast Sam in a suspicious light.

  He must be free to return to Cologne, to the capital he has accrued there, to the life he has begun to carve for himself. But Sam is caught between a noose and a lee shore, as he said last night, grinning despite himself. Dear Sam. She pauses on the thought of him, on the flare of regret that he came to London on Hyde’s orders, not for her sake as she had thought yesterday afternoon when the door opened and he bounced into the house. Whirled in, a riot of noise and laughter. And then he saw her bruises and stopped, pale suddenly and awkward.

  She pushes back the blanket and sits upright. She pulls back the curtain around the bed to let the light in, and hugs her knees to her chest. Sunlight fills the quiet room. It lights on a corner of the blanket, picking out the gold and making it gleam. It was a wedding present from her parents to Will and Henrietta.

  She thinks of their wedding and how happy they were. She thinks of her own wedding.

  The revelation comes to her suddenly. There is only one answer to their dilemma. Sam and Will probably knew it last night, but were too kind to say it. They must think she is dense, or a coward.

  Sidrach must be trapped in the act, with no hint of contrivance from Sam. He must be caught, and Sam, blameless on all sides, must return to Cologne alone. The only escape from their trap is to spring it back on Sidrach.

  But they cannot trap Sidrach without knowing his plans. And there is only on
e way to weasel those from him. She must go back to him. God help her. God save her. She must go back.

  LONDON

  August 1655

  ‘IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN, WILL,’ SAYS SIDRACH. HE TALKS past Patience, towards her brother. He is all smiles. All genial warmth. ‘It was that boy’s fault. The confounded boy.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Will. He is smiling back, but his eyes are dark and cold. Tom is upstairs. He was shaken when he understood that Sidrach was coming here. That Patience was returning to him. They could not explain why it was happening, this unthinkable surrender, and he looked at her with a silent plea. His hands were trembling and jumping. He wept, and ran from the room. She did not follow – what could she say to make this better?

  Her brother will look after him. Poor Tom.

  ‘We have not seen Tom since that night,’ says Will to Sidrach. ‘He has disappeared.’

  ‘It is not surprising. The cheek of it. The impudence. The damned nerve of the boy, pulling a knife out. Threatening me in my own house.’

  She tenses, hearing the rage swelling in his voice. But Will is here, and Sidrach only retreats from his anger. He smiles. Asks Will about his work. Makes a genial uncle comment about Blackberry. He enquires about the boy’s breeching.

  This. This is what makes her most furious. He can control his anger. He can, as most adults do, take a breath, swallow down his fury and act as a civilized human being would. But only when other people are watching. Other men.

  If he can contain himself, if he can be polite in the face of provocation, why not with her?

  She feels strong, suddenly. As if this revelation, and her secret knowledge of his plans, is enough to make her shoulders broader, her mind sharper. She knows, too, that there will be an ending. That the misery of her marriage has a finite span left. She might die – he might kill her.

  At least if I die, it will be over. Death as a full stop. She smiles at the absurdity of her logic. Sam would like the joke.

  Sidrach catches her smiling, and his face darkens. Quailing inside a little, she grins wider, forcing herself into a smile of wide joy, which unsettles him. His platitudes to Will fade to a stutter. Her smile is true now, feeding off his disquiet.

  ‘Well,’ he says. He looks back towards Will. He clears his throat. He is off balance. ‘We will be off. Back home with my lovely wife. A new start.’

  He ushers her out. His hand is on the small of her back. She can feel it there through the layers of fabric. She looks back at Will.

  ‘I will see you soon, Patience,’ he says. ‘Soon.’

  Outside, the heat is fierce. She feels prickles of sweat breaking out down her back as they walk. The sun is bright in her eyes and she squints painfully. It casts its muting glare on the street, drawing the stink from the ground. Cats and barefoot children mug the shade. The pie man is sweating and puce under his makeshift awning. London is not good at bearing heat.

  The smell of the meat juice meets the street stench, and Patience feels sick suddenly. She feels the gorge rising in her throat, and swallows it down, clasping her hands into fists.

  They are silent as they walk. She sees a rat worrying at something bloody in the shadows of Grope Alley. It seems less like dinner, and more like a fight the rat might lose. Her sense of broadening out, of courage, has receded. She is, instead, pleasingly numb. The world is a patina to her; she cannot be moved by its sights or sounds. By its terrors or threats.

  Sidrach clears his throat beside her, and she tenses. Her fists ball tighter, and she feels her spine curve, her shoulders hunch inwards.

  ‘Patience, I was obviously displeased,’ he says slowly, picking at his words. ‘Your antipathy when that boy was threatening me. Your failure to intervene. And letting him go. Letting him go! What were you thinking?’

  They walk on, turning into the familiar street. She sees the dark windows of the house, barricaded against the heat. She knows already that it will be damply gloomy inside. She knows the heavy ticking of the clock. The background silence in the corridors that makes floorboards creak and doors whine and his breathing sound loud as a death rattle.

  She stays silent. His question is, she is sure, rhetorical.

  They pause at the steps to the front door. The wood is so dark a brown it could be black, and it catches the sunlight and keeps it hostage.

  ‘But. I was, perhaps, a little severe in my chastisement. I pride myself, Patience, on being a calm man. A man of intellect. I am God’s chosen, and I have a duty to behave with forbearance, even to those who do not always merit it.’

  There is a movement at a window above them. Patience looks up, shielding her eyes against the sun.

  ‘I have lured Sarah back,’ he says.

  The door opens, and there she is. Straight-backed and severe. Her hair is pulled tightly back, with none of the fashionable loose tendrils that smack of frivolity. ‘Master,’ she says, bobbing to Sidrach. She ignores Patience, and for a moment it seems as if she will bar the way, square-hipped and furious. But she draws back and they walk in.

  Panic rises in Patience. It flip-flops inside her chest like a dying fish.

  Courage. What is the worst he can do?

  The door smacks shut behind her.

  Sidrach is quiet over dinner. Contemplative. His chewing is loud and it shreds her nerves. She cannot eat; she mangles the meat and prods the vegetables into disorder, hoping that this will disguise her telltale lack of appetite.

  Sarah clears the last of the dishes. She is rough with Patience’s plate, and a crest of unwanted parsley sauce spills over. It stains Patience’s cuff; the startling green of it will be hard to shift.

  Patience is staring at it, distracted by it, when Sidrach begins to speak.

  ‘I begged your pardon earlier,’ he says.

  No. No you did not quite do that, she thinks. But she inclines her head as if in acceptance of an apology.

  ‘My father,’ begins Sidrach. He pauses. ‘I do not speak often of my father. He beat my mother when she did wrong. I did not mean . . .’ He stutters to a pause, reaching for his glass.

  ‘It is no matter, Sidrach,’ she says. ‘It was my fault. I provoked you.’

  ‘Yes. You did. And yet I believed that you were dead. That I had killed you. That, at least, you had not deserved. Thou shalt not kill, said the Lord. And I very nearly disobeyed him. Believe me, Patience. I have begged His pardon until my throat is raw.’

  When he pauses again, she hears the unnatural silence of the house. The menacing stillness. At home, before she came to London, there was never silence. Someone was always laughing or crying or shrieking.

  ‘I pray for a child,’ says Sidrach. ‘I have prayed. He has not answered.’

  ‘His ways are deep.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps it is this place, this England. How can we be blessed when we do not do His work? It is, perhaps, a sign. That we must work harder for Him, for His coming. Push forward. Find courage.’

  She makes a non-committal noise. She fills his glass, taking care not to spill any drops.

  ‘It may be, Patience, that I have to go abroad. In haste, perhaps. I will send for you.’

  ‘When, Sidrach?’

  ‘Did I not just say? In haste. I do not know exactly when.’

  ‘I beg pardon, Sidrach.’

  ‘Well, no harm. Soon, I think. I must convert some of our possessions into ready money. To start again elsewhere. Somewhere in the Palatine, or the Netherlands. Among godly folk. Perhaps even in America. Would that please you, my dear? America!’

  ‘I would be happy with whatever pleases you.’

  America! She cannot conceive of it.

  There is a sudden knocking at the door. They sit in silence, waiting for Sarah’s head to peer round into the dining room. ‘I beg your pardon, sir. There’s a Captain Samuel Challoner here. Begging to see you, urgent. So he says.’

  Patience hangs on to the table. She looks down at her plate to hide her face.

  ‘You will excuse me, my dear
,’ he says.

  He leaves the room and she stays sitting there, hanging on as if she might fall. She unclenches her hand from the table’s edge and reaches for her glass. A small sip to steady her. She twirls the glass round and round, watching the red wine through the distorting crystal. She picks at the green stain on her cuff. She watches the flicker of the candlelight. One candle is nearly burned down to its nub. He is mean about many things, her husband, but not the light. He likes good-quality wax – light enough to read the Bible by.

  The wax pools in the lip of its holder. She watches the little flame fight for life as it slides down into the liquid heat.

  ‘Patience.’ She jumps; his voice is loud and sudden behind her. Turning, she expects to see Sam, but he is not there. Only Sidrach, standing in the doorway. He walks forward. His face is white.

  ‘Captain Challoner did not stay?’

  ‘No. He . . . he came with a message for me. Nothing for you to concern yourself with, my dear.’

  He sits down. He seems diminished, somehow. As if he is being pressed downwards and inwards by some unseen force. He tries for a smile, but it falters on his lips. She can see the child in him suddenly. An unexpected swell of pity hits her.

  What happened to him? What failure to love or be loved created Sidrach Simmonds? She fights the pity. Remember what he did. Remember who he is.

  ‘It is done,’ says Sam. He sits heavily into the chair. ‘Hyde’s message delivered. My help pledged. The shy bastard turned white.’

  ‘You think he will do it?’

  ‘He said little. It is a game for quiet fellows, this. Perhaps that is why I am so poor at it. I must see Thurloe.’

  ‘Thurloe? Why?’

  Sam sighs. He looks at Will. Can he trust him? Maybe yes, maybe no. What to do? He decides with a firmness learned on campaign. Maybe he cannot trust Will. But he must believe in a world with trust in it. He must believe that Will can put his loyalty to his brother-in-law above his loyalty to the state.

  So he tells Will about Thurloe and his request for tittle-tattle. About his failure, so far, to comply. About the reckoning that must come if he is working in theory for both Thurloe and Hyde – and in practice for neither.