The Best of Men

by Claire Letemendia

  “I’m in his Lifeguard,” Beaumont admitted, as if embarrassed.

  “It pays to have such friends!” teased Ingram. “And I’m proud of you,” he added more seriously. “I know you weren’t keen to join up.”

  “In the end I hadn’t much choice. How was your sister’s wedding?” Beaumont asked, to Ingram’s surprise, for he did not generally show an interest in such events.

  “It passed off well, though I felt sorry for Kate that she had no honeymoon. Radcliff left the following day to visit his estate in Cambridgeshire. I didn’t see him again myself until the middle of September.”

  “He was away from his troop for a whole month?”

  “I know, it was a long time, but he’s desperate to keep his property from being confiscated by the rebels. They’ve imposed the most outrageous taxes on anyone in his neighbourhood who doesn’t support them.”

  Beaumont hesitated, toying with the reins of his horse. “Ingram, did he ever express any doubts about where he’d stand in this war? After all, most of his county has gone the other way.”

  How odd, Ingram thought, before answering: Radcliff had asked him much the same question about Beaumont. “That would make no difference to him! He came home ready to fight for his King, as he did bravely at Powick.”

  “I thought he came home to get married,” Beaumont said, with a playful smile.

  “That, too,” Ingram agreed, smiling also.

  “How was Powick? For you, I mean.”

  “I can’t say I enjoyed it. And ever since – you may think me foolish, but I’ve had a premonition that either Radcliff or I won’t come out of the war alive. I dream about it now and again.”

  “That’s natural.”

  “But – if it were to happen, would you go to Kate and tell her, so she doesn’t have to hear by some vile official letter? Promise, Beaumont,” Ingram insisted. “It’s important to me. She’s such a peculiar girl – not easy to like, in some ways. But we’re very close. And of course Radcliff is devoted to her.”

  “I promise, but promise me in return that you won’t dwell on this. Sometimes the more a man fears dying in battle, the more it tends to happen. Not that I suggest you act the hero. I never did myself, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I cared about.”

  Ingram felt a deep pang of affection for his old friend. “I wish you were riding with us,” he said.

  Beaumont squinted at him mischievously. “You’ve got Radcliff, haven’t you?”

  “He doesn’t make me laugh, as you do.” Ingram nearly mentioned Radcliff’s persistent curiosity in Beaumont but held off. Beaumont would not appreciate it, he knew, and he so wanted the two men to be friends. “That’s a handsome pair of flintlocks you have there,” he remarked instead, pointing at the pistols in the holsters of Beaumont’s saddle. “I didn’t get a proper look at them on the night of our drunken foray. May I?” Beaumont pulled them out for him, and he weighed them in his palms, impressed by their lightness compared to his English wheellocks. They were indeed beautiful, of highly polished wood inlaid with a decorative silver pattern. “Where did you find them?”

  “In Bremen, I think it was, though they’re French-made. I won them in a game of dice.”

  “By luck or trickery?”

  “Probably a bit of both.”

  “You won’t see many of them around here.” As Ingram replaced them in the holsters, he noticed a sword tied to the saddle. “And how about this?” he said, fingering the ornate hilt. “Another game of dice?” Beaumont did not answer, but took it down for him. “A far cry from our broadswords, damned clumsy things,” Ingram said, as he unsheathed it admiringly. “Radcliff would be envious. When he was in the Low Countries this past spring, he lost a sword that must have been as fine as yours. He had it crafted to his design, even had his initials embossed on it.” Ingram made a few passes in the air with Beaumont’s, sensing how comfortably the grip embraced his hand. “No, now I remember. It wasn’t lost. Some thief sneaked off with it while he was eating at a tavern.”

  “At a tavern?” Beaumont repeated. “What bad luck. Was anything else stolen from him?”

  “Yes, money, I believe, though it was the sword that upset him most. But then he wasn’t expecting a woman to rob him.”

  “The thief was a woman?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Beaumont’s gaze was riveted on his own sword, and as Ingram returned it to him, he inspected the pattern on the hilt as if seeing it for the first time. “It just occurred to me,” he said, looking up blithely. “I didn’t give Radcliff a wedding present. Please deliver this to him with my compliments.” He handed Ingram the sword, in its green scabbard. “And tell him I hope it makes up for the one he lost.”

  “Beaumont, you can’t! You’ll need it soon, if we engage with Essex.”

  “I’ll borrow another from Wilmot,” Beaumont muttered, as though to close the subject.

  “Why don’t you wait, and give it to Radcliff yourself?”

  Beaumont appeared to consider, then shook his head. Typical, Ingram thought, his friend had always hated being thanked. “But do me a favour,” Beaumont said. “I want to know the look on his face when he first sees it.”

  “I can predict that,” Ingram told him. “He’ll be dumbstruck.”

  IV.

  On the evening before the King’s army moved out of Shrewsbury, Laurence called on Isabella again. When he entered her chamber she was lying dressed on the counterpane, propped up by cushions, her head bent over a thick volume. She smiled on seeing him and patted a spot on the bed beside her.

  “In our difficult times,” she said, closing the volume with a dull thud, “I find it appropriate to study the Bible. But I am still mired in the earlier Books.”

  “Violent stuff,” he commented, sitting down.

  “Yes – I have reached the part where everyone has just been circumcised. All those males, I should say, who were not wandering about in the wilderness. I wonder why the custom is not still respected to this day amongst Christian people.”

  “If you were a man, you might be relieved that it isn’t.”

  “Ah!” Her eyes widened. “Have you personal knowledge of the subject?”

  “No, though a couple of times I’ve seen evidence of it. Not all my friends have been Christian.”

  “Then you have a broader acquaintance than I. Beaumont,” she went on more gravely, “I think you’ve been avoiding me. You haven’t come here all week.”

  “Wilmot’s kept me busy at drill,” he said, which was true; he had not even found an opportunity to ask Ingram about the sword.

  “You might have visited me in the evenings, instead of tippling with him downstairs.”

  “You seem better,” he observed, to deflect the issue.

  “I am. Mrs. Fulford has lavished me with attention. She is most distressed, by the way, that you gentlemen are leaving tomorrow. But I, too, shall be joining the dreary procession of camp followers. Digby says there are even more whores amongst them than wives, and of the wives, many will be turned into whores by the end of this campaign,” she concluded, with a hard little laugh.

  “Why did he bring you to this house, Isabella?” Laurence inquired, moving nearer to her on the bed.

  “To recover from my illness. Why else?”

  He let the question pass. “Thank you for telling me about Captain Milne. I think I’ll go and speak to him after we camp down tomorrow night.”

  “No! You cannot go near him!” Isabella burst out, confirming to Laurence that he should be wary of her offer. “Don’t you see? If he has heard that you may be working for Hoare, you’ll scare him into silence. I must address him first – he will require persuasion to come forward.”

  “What sort of persuasion did you have in mind?”

  “You are annoying,” she snapped, heaving the Bible at him with both hands.

  “Ow,” he cried, as it smacked him on the kneecap; and he picked it up and held it away from her.

&n
bsp; “Give it back!” she ordered, though she had started to laugh, not as she had before, but in a spontaneous, unaffected manner. “Beaumont, I’m sick of us arguing,” she said, once she had composed herself. “Can we be friends again?” She extended her hand to clasp his, as would a man. “Now, will you let me address Captain Milne? And then you can bring him to Falkland.” Laurence shrugged, and nodded. “Did you speak to his lordship about this?”

  “Er … not yet.”

  “You should.” She released his hand and glanced away. “I pray you are not all slain in battle, before we can arrange the meeting.”

  “At least it would be the end of our tribulations,” Laurence joked.

  She did not seem amused. “You mustn’t be too valorous, Beaumont, when you are in the field.”

  “You’ve no need to worry about that.”

  They regarded each other in silence, and he had the impression that she was lonely in a way that he understood. He would have liked simply to hold her. But he rose to leave.

  “Good night, Isabella,” he said.

  “Good night, Beaumont,” she said, with a sweet, triste smile.

  Back in his chamber, he stared out of the window into darkness, twisting Khadija’s bracelet round and round his wrist. He should get rid of the damned thing, he thought; it was blackened from wear. Shutting his eyes, he tried to picture Juana’s face, and was disturbed to find that he could recapture only the sketchiest memory of it, though he could easily recall so many other faces from his past. Perhaps, in the words of Khadija, the poison had left his system. But to acknowledge this was no consolation.

  V.

  “You have stopped going out these past nights, Monsieur,” Juana remarked one evening in Paris, as they ate supper together.

  He paused to reflect. Though he was not sure why, more and more he had tended to stay at home with her in their lodgings not far from the fashionable Marais, wasting his time over the indecipherable letters. A month had slipped by without any sign of the Englishman’s servant, and Laurence would have suspected that she had lied about seeing the man in Paris, if not for the fact that he could rarely persuade her to leave the house, and only with him.

  “It is nearly May,” she continued, deliberately. “The roads should be dry by now.” He made no reply. “Monsieur, I should like to set out for Spain.”

  “Why not,” he said.

  “So you will come with me!”

  “Oh, Juana, don’t start that again.”

  “Have you never been to your mother’s homeland?” He shook his head. “Are you not curious to travel there?”

  “Not for the moment,” he replied, thinking that he was not taking advantage of the city’s pleasures as he should. He had become too lethargic, too habituated to her company; they were behaving like some old married couple.

  That same evening, he went out prowling in search of amusement. At a drinking house nearby he struck up conversation with a party of men and women who were celebrating someone’s birthday. They were young, attractive and lively, and flirtatious in the French style, teasing each other about their latest conquests, and boasting as to how ingeniously they had managed to deceive their spouses. He found himself enjoying their urbane cynicism, and as the night wore on, he could predict how it would end. A coquettish creature named Angelique suggested that he and she take a room; and afterwards she insisted on another assignation, and then another.

  Over the next week, however, he wearied of her moods, her obsessive attention to matters of dress and social etiquette, and her interminable stories about an overzealous husband of whom she clearly hoped he would be envious. Just the sound of her voice began to irk him, particularly since she refused to shut up even during the act of love. One day he rose, dressed, kissed her goodbye, and left without telling her that it was finished between them.

  Juana had not once asked him where he had been, and he thought no more of the affair until, on a sunny morning as he was lazing in his chamber, three men burst in and hauled him from his bed. In the bluntest terms, they introduced themselves as Angelique’s husband, brother, and father. Unarmed and outnumbered, Laurence could not win the fight that ensued, and eventually the aggrieved husband sliced open his lower lip with a stiletto while the other two held him down. They were about to tear off his breeches and inflict worse damage when he was rescued by the arrival of Juana, brandishing the Englishman’s sword. Her ear-splitting shrieks alerted some lodgers from next door, and the intruders were chased away, though they swore to return.

  “What knaves, to come at you three against one,” Juana said, hunting out a clean cloth to staunch the blood dripping from his mouth. “Who were they?”

  “Never seen them before in my life,” Laurence mumbled, shaken.

  Very gently, she attended to the wound; and as he looked up at her face, he considered it more beautiful, without a hint of artifice, than Angelique’s could ever be, even with all the skilful tricks she employed to improve upon nature.

  “Now we both have enemies here,” said Juana. “Let us leave Paris, Monsieur.”

  He agreed, pondering nonetheless how conveniently the incident had worked in her favour. “As thanks for saving my manhood, I’ll take you to the Spanish border,” he said. “That’s my limit.”

  By afternoon they were packed and had set out, walking their horses over the busy Pont Neuf, through crowds of people buying and selling from shops that lined the bridge. Juana seemed a little nervous, as she always was in public, glancing about surreptitiously and staying very close by his side. Then suddenly he felt her grip his hand. “Look behind you,” she hissed.

  He turned, expecting to see Angelique’s vengeful kin coming after him. But instead, at a distance, he espied a more familiar figure, tall and bulky, wearing a hat pulled low over his face.

  VI.

  “Not gone ten bloody miles,” Wilmot grumbled, as the Royalist army made camp after their first day on the march; there were fourteen thousand men settling down for the night across a swath of countryside. “At this rate, we’ll reach London by Christmas.”

  “Essex must be moving no faster.” Laurence held out a leather flask. “Here – from Mrs. Fulford.”

  “Bless her heart.” Wilmot sampled the contents. “How could you reject a woman of such singular forethought, you ingrate? I suppose you had your sights set on the luscious Mistress Savage. Tell me, did you get up her nightgown before we left Shrewsbury?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “She said she would have liked it,” Wilmot said complacently, “but she was worried that I might catch her illness.”

  “How considerate of her,” said Laurence, feeling buoyed by this news. “Wilmot, I’ll see you later. I have to talk to a friend of mine.”

  He had ascertained earlier where the main body of Prince Rupert’s Horse was encamped. After an hour of riding about and making inquiries, he found Radcliff’s troop and was fortunate to spot Ingram leaving the fire around which his companions were huddled. Moving off towards a clump of bushes, Ingram stopped to unlace. Laurence waited for him to finish before addressing him.

  “Good to see you, man. Where are you camped?” Ingram asked, as he refastened the front of his breeches.

  “About three miles north.”

  “Not very clement for the middle of October, is it. I wish I’d brought a thicker pair of stockings. You know, Beaumont, I’ve been wanting to speak to you.” He led Laurence a little further away from the camp before speaking again, in a lower voice. “You remember what you asked me, about Radcliff and the sword?”

  “Ah yes,” Laurence said.

  “You wouldn’t believe – that day I gave it to him, I’d never seen him act so strangely.”

  “Why, what did he do?”

  “Well,” Ingram began, “as I may have told you, he’d gone off to buy some horses, but he couldn’t find any for love or money, and he returned very disappointed. I thought it would cheer him tremendously to receive your gift. But as soon as I mentioned
to him that you’d come by, he turned pale as a ghost.”

  Laurence caught his breath. “That is strange.”

  “He turned even paler when I showed him the sword. And when I said it was a wedding present from you, he became almost angry! He said he didn’t understand why you would part with your sword when we were about to engage in battle.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “I told him it was just like you – how when we were at Merton together, I’d have to bite my tongue on many occasions because if I let slip that I admired something of yours, you’d wear me down with all the arts of persuasion if I refused to take it.” Laurence smiled, touched by the warmth in Ingram’s tone. “He made some comment to the effect that generosity comes easily to those born into wealth,” Ingram continued. “I found that snide. I said – and I know you’ll forgive me, Beaumont – that you were always in funds, but not because of your birthright. I suppose I wanted to provoke him, so I told him that you looked after yourself by gaming, which ensured your freedom from the family purse, if not from their judgement. I even told him you paid for my first woman.”

  “I did?” Laurence murmured, his mind on Radcliff.

  “Don’t you remember? You insisted that I couldn’t pass my seventeenth birthday without losing my virginity at an Oxford brothel. And that night the deed was done, though too fast for me to be proud of it. You kindly assured me that I would improve with practice.”

  “I’m sure we’ve both improved since then,” Laurence said, laughing. “Did Radcliff share any similar confidences in return?”

  “No! He told me such pursuits were unworthy of me, and he hoped I’d given them up. That made me angry, and I said if he thought the sword was unworthy of him, he should give it back to you. He apologised profusely then. I think I’d struck on a sensitive issue. I’ve observed before that he has a sore spot when it comes to social rank, and he may resent you for what you are, and for your ability to be generous. But he was grateful, in the end.” Ingram hesitated. “Why did you ask me that question – about how he would receive the gift?”