The cart stopped. I sat up. Gardiner had checked his horse a little distance away, and was scratching at the morning’s first flea. Bryson was stumbling sleepily through thick, white-streaked mud, shoving open the gate marked with faded red crosses. I began to shout to Gardiner, to tell him where the pendant was, but half-swallowed a prickly stalk of straw which stuck in my throat. I coughed and coughed but could not get it out or talk. Now I began to panic I would be too late. Bryson bent over me, a shadowy figure of whom I could see little but the eyes above his mask. I spat out the straw and spluttered: ‘The pendant is –’
Bryson clamped his hand over my mouth.
Gardiner rode closer. ‘What did he say?’
‘“I’ll see you in hell,”’ Bryson said.
‘Then let him see hell.’ Gardiner jumped off his horse. I stared up at Bryson in bewilderment, starting to splutter into speech again but stopped as Bryson took a knife to the ropes binding my hands, fraying them partly through. To complete my astonishment Bryson thrust the knife into my belt as he dragged me from the cart. My scattered wits could only fleetingly bring up the explanation that it was a more exquisite form of torture; they were playing some kind of game with me to improve the sport, like the Romans arming gladiators against wild animals. My legs were already dead and I swayed and staggered in the mud until Bryson prodded me forward with a heavy stick used for propping open the gate. Gardiner drew his rapier and followed us, gripping his mask tight to his face.
I stumbled over muddy circular furrows ploughed by constantly turning carts. The mud sucked at my boots, reluctantly releasing them; it splashed up to my cheeks and seemed to streak the gradually lightening sky. The awful stench was less suffocating than the cart, but only because it was overlaid with the stealthy, sickeningly sweet smell of lime. The two men goading me on fell silent and I stopped and would go no further. The paintings of hell I had seen could not match that picture; they were a lie, a Mayday farce of festival devils and fairground monstrosities. Better to burn and scream in those mock fires than lie lifeless in that pit. Some attempt at covering the bodies with earth had been made, but the recent rains had formed a cold fetid lake covered with a thick, chalky scum, penetrated by the occasional bubble of gas in which could be seen the bones of a hand or the frozen stare of a child.
I backed away, blundering into Bryson, who held me, stolid and unconcerned as a street scavenger whose daily business is decay and rubbish. Gardiner flicked his rapier towards me, but the stench kept him at a distance, pressing his mask to his nose. ‘I can see this is unlocking your tongue, Tom . . .’
I said nothing, pulling at the frayed ropes round my wrists, but they would not break.
‘Where is it?’ he snapped. ‘Take him closer, Mr Bryson. It will sharpen his mind.’
Even Bryson seemed reluctant. ‘You do it, Captain. Your rapier be longer than my stick.’
Gardiner swore and drove me forward. I yanked at the ropes fruitlessly, slipped and fell. He shoved me nearer the edge with his boot. ‘Are you going to tell me? If you don’t I swear I –’
Bryson lifted his stick above his head and brought it down on Gardiner. It would have knocked him insensible but for his beaver hat, which cushioned the blow and flew into the pit. My mind was as numbed as if it had been tied up like my legs, into which the feeling was flowing back in painful surges. I gazed up at Gardiner, who swayed in a daze above me for a moment then gave a roar and drove his rapier at Bryson. Bryson half-parried it with the stick, but Gardiner struck it out of his hand, then flicked the mask away from his face. It was Matthew.
It seemed to take for ever running through the mud, which sucked me back at every step. For ever seeing the sword drawn back before I jumped, sending Gardiner sprawling, his rapier flying through the air. He rolled free and went for his sword, kicking Matthew away. I wrenched at the ropes, searing my skin raw, but at last snapped them. I tore off his mask and got his arm in a lock, but he levered his legs up and flung me from him. He picked up his sword as I took the knife from my belt. Matthew was lying motionless.
Blood trickled from the tear in the jerkin over Gardiner’s left arm. ‘Pendant or no pendant,’ he said, ‘you are going where he should have put you in the first place –’ He kicked at Matthew, who was coming round, groaning. ‘And where he –’ he gave Matthew another kick ‘– will keep you company.’
I did not know then the contra cavatione, nor the ricavatione, the various feints and deceptions which, by my instinctive reactions to the whirling, flickering blade, however I tried to avoid it, were driving me back closer and closer towards the edge of the pit. But I knew the stoccata lunga, the method of delivering the point by the shortest and fastest means to the heart – or, at least, engraved in my mind were the sequence of movements he had made when he killed Eaton. The glittering blade – there seemed several of them – darted at me from every angle, hypnotising me, but I knew I must not look at the blade but at his footwork. When his left foot went back and his right knee was moving to bend forward he would lunge. He had me where he wanted me, right on the edge. The smell was overpowering. His left foot went back. I threw the knife. It caught him in his chest, diverting but not stopping the lunge. He cannoned into me, then, carried by his own momentum, plunged into the pit. I slipped, teetering on the edge, struggling to keep my balance before Matthew grabbed me and pulled me back.
Gardiner’s screams were choked by the chalk-coloured slime, threaded with blood, which frothed and bubbled as it drew him under, until all that was left, floating on the surface as the scum began to form again, was the beaver hat. I turned away, shaking, unable to stop, and Matthew held me as he had not held me since I was a little boy.
‘I thought it was about time I stopped running,’ he said.
Chapter 38
Matthew wanted to dump the two bodies that had travelled with me into the pit, not just to get rid of them, but because three was a lucky number. I would not hear of it. Ghastly they might look, I said, but they had been my companions on what I thought was my last journey, and they deserved a better resting place.
‘You are a strange one, Tom,’ he said. ‘You always were, and I do believe you always will be.’
But he allowed me my whim, and we found a spot under a willow, which Matthew said had a kinder spirit than the yews further downstream. I told him I was glad of that, for I might like to be buried there, if a church could not be found for me.
He paused on his spade. ‘Why are you talking about your burial, Tom? I have every intention of going first.’
‘Why?’ My voice faltered. ‘I was with them. And they died of the plague.’
‘Ah.’ He dug a little longer and looked at me searchingly. ‘Are you a little hot?’
‘Yes, yes. I am.’
He felt my forehead, my pulse, and then squeezed my groin. ‘Is it tender here?’
I winced in pain. ‘Yes, yes! How long do I have?’
‘Oh, Tom, Tom . . . you will bury me yet.’
‘Don’t make game of me. Tell me the truth.’
He held me. ‘You’re much braver than I am. And taller. And a soldier.’
‘That doesn’t make me any less afraid.’
‘No. But it should tell you what this is.’ He turned the corpse with the opalescent eye over.
‘A musket wound.’
‘And this?’ He pointed to a terrible wound which had half-severed the neck from the body.
‘A sabre cut! They’re soldiers – they died of their wounds.’
He grinned. ‘Very bad year for the plague, this. They were trying to frighten you. Do you feel better? Fever gone down?’
Better? Miraculously all my symptoms had disappeared, and I told Matthew I wished his magic was as effective as his more rational explanations. I hope the poor soldiers will forgive me, but I danced round their grave feeling I could defeat the whole King’s army. At least I was able to attend to them more reverently, searching the rotting jerkin of one, the breeches of the other for s
ome form of identity, but there was none. So we put them in a grave with no marks and I said a short prayer for them and their mothers and sweethearts or wives who would never know whether they were alive or dead.
We eventually came to a fork in the road. Matthew pointed his whip and said that way was Highpoint and the other London, and recommended the latter. I shook my head and pointed to the former.
‘You’ll get no peace, Tom,’ he said quietly.
‘I told you: I want to give it back to its rightful owner,’ I said hotly.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Is that so?’
He said nothing more, but clicked at the horse, and turned the cart on to the Highpoint road.
The house was silent again. The servants were there, or at least I saw a face at a window, but they must have seen me alight from the cart, for they vanished again. The doors in the reception room where Eaton had built the barricade were leaning drunkenly from the hinges. The piled-up furniture had been cleared, and on the floor was a large dark stain. There was no sign of Kate. I reached Frances’s bedroom well ahead of Matthew, lifted the lid of an oak chest, pulling out a drawer, flinging out necklaces and bodice ornaments as if they were playhouse baubles. The drawer looked perfectly normal. I shook it. There was no telltale rattle. I emptied the second drawer. Again there was nothing.
‘You’re lying,’ I said to Matthew as he entered.
‘Tom. When have I ever lied to you?’
‘You may not lie, but you never tell the truth.’
‘Patience, patience. Look at yourself. You’re changing.’
I thought this was another of his jokes, but then looked in a mirror, started and glanced back, almost thinking Eaton, or the spirit of him, was standing behind me. The cut Gardiner had given me had opened up my cheek in a livid wound that turned me from a fresh-faced boy into a man. In the portrait I could see the boy who had run into the Guildhall that day, full of dreams that he would be a freeman and marry the master’s daughter. The man staring back at me from the mirror had dreams, but they were tempered with the first shadows of caution and bitterness. Matthew appeared in the mirror.
‘Do you still want me to open it?’
‘Yes.’
He lifted up a drawer. ‘Look. See the difference between the two thicknesses?’
I snatched it from him and would have battered it open but he stopped me and with irritating slowness showed me the carefully glued wooden plugs that concealed wooden screws. It seemed to take him an age to take out the plugs and screws and remove the false bottom. Cushioned in velvet was the Stonehouse pendant. It was as if the room was on fire. I started back as the falcon seemed to strike at me with its emerald beak. Its nest was a huge, polished ruby, surrounded by a miniature forest of enamelled flowers and insects, set in a framework of gold.
Matthew did not try and stop me now. Whatever power had drawn me to it now silenced him. He watched as I struggled to remember which jewels Lucy Hay had pressed, and in which order. There were two small emeralds, a deeper green than the rest – old mine green, she called it – on the edge of the miniature forest. I held one down, then pressed the other. I ducked as the falcon almost hit me in the eye. The ruby had sprung clear of its mount, exposing an oval space in which a portrait might be kept, or painted. Only there was no portrait.
I had accepted the legend that my father’s picture would stare out at me so completely I sat stunned, unable to believe that there was nothing there, unable to see what was there.
‘Look –’ Matthew pointed to a small piece of folded paper, wedged at the bottom of the compartment.
I remembered what Kate told me my mother had said: If anything happens to me, give it to the child. In the portrait compartment is my hold on the child’s father. Not a portrait, but her ‘hold on him’ – whatever that was.
Carefully I teased out the paper and unfolded it, expecting a name, but like the will o’ the wisp, the truth constantly came close, then eluded me. There was no name, but some kind of cipher. My eyes blurred as I struggled to read the letters, for legends are so strong and simple but ultimately absurd. Where would my mother, in the chaos of that day and evening, have found a portrait of my father to put in the pendant she had stolen? What actually must have happened was far more poignant. The wavering letters were a faded brown and did not look as if they had been written in ink. She had got this scrap of paper from somewhere and, in the blood of my birth, had written, with her nail possibly, two words, the latter being so badly smudged I could read only the first letter:
BOWNDERY L—
I read them out to Matthew. He stared at the pendant, then at the floor, scraping his hand against his beard.
‘What does it mean?’
For answer he took me to the copse where we had left our horses the previous night. They had broken free, but I called Patch and eventually found her with the other. We rode to what, just before I was born, was the boundary between the Pearce and Stonehouse estates. Now the fences had gone, it was all Stonehouse land, but Matthew knew exactly where the old boundary was. We tethered our horses by a stream, which he said was the water released by Eaton after Kate had freed him from the trap. Following the stream upwards, we came to a well-worn path crossing it. It was an unexpected sheltered spot, the sort of place in which children delight to hide. A group of trees grew over a jutting lip of rock, under which was a small cavern. The path ran just below it, downwards to Highpoint and upwards in the opposite direction to the ruins of what had once been a house.
‘What’s that?’
There had been a fall of rock in the cavern, and Matthew was clearing it. He looked round, then carried on clearing the rock before he answered. ‘That was where your mother used to live.’
I walked a little way along the path towards it, until I could see from the line where the foundations were it must have been a substantial manor house. Stones had been taken from it for other buildings, leaving one roofless wing, overgrown with ivy. In a few years that too would be gone. I walked slowly back in the cutting wind which snatched at my hat and coat. This must be the path my mother had taken to Highpoint, or to this spot to meet her lover. Or lovers. I shall have one of them, Kate. Who do you think it shall be?
Matthew had cleared the stones, and crawled to a lower, shadowy part of the cave, feeling over the wall.
‘Did she meet her lovers here?’
He scratched his head. ‘I remember her meeting her cousin.’
‘John Lloyd?’
‘That’s right.’
‘When did he come back from Ireland?’
‘He didn’t. He was killed in the fighting there.’ Matthew cut his finger, swore and sucked it. ‘I used to leave her herbs here.’
‘Love potions?’
‘Something like that.’
Where I had swallowed everything he said as a child, I now recognised the shift in his tone, his evasive grin. ‘Something like that to get rid of me?’
He continued to grope for a moment before saying: ‘Didn’t work very well, did it? . . . Ah!’ He found the niche he was looking for, pulled away a stone, then scrabbled his fingers deeper in to tease something out. I snatched it from him. It was a small pot, stoppered crudely with a piece of flint. L. Letters! Inside the pot was a small bundle of them. When I read them, exactly where my mother had collected them, I recognised the hand immediately and everything that had happened to her that year – and to me, growing inside her – fell into place.
Part Three
Edgehill
October 1642–April 1643
Chapter 39
Once more Matthew and I came to a fork in the road. Again he pointed with his whip. That way was to Warwickshire, that to London. He pleaded with me to take the road south with him, but the pendant, which I now kept close to my skin just as Matthew had done, drew me north like a compass. We embraced each other tightly, silently; then, with a heavy heart, I watched him until he was out of sight, on the road he had taken in the plague cart seventeen years befo
re.
I caught up with the Parliamentary baggage train south of Worcester. No one knew what they were doing, or where they were going – or if they did, they would not tell me. Passing a good-sized inn, I had an inspiration. Eaton had always headed for a town’s main inn. The landlord had barred the door against soldiers, and when I kept hammering on it opened it only to point a pistol in my face. I said my name was Eaton, and I was on Lord Stonehouse’s business. He lowered the pistol a little, stared at my scar, then poured me a small beer and gave me a message sealed with the familiar falcon.
Lord Stonehouse’s letter was curt and to the point, demanding to hear from his steward who, as Eaton had said, had done his dirty work for him for so long.
‘Any reply?’ said the innkeeper.
‘No reply,’ I said.
I spent the night at the inn, setting off at dawn. It was October the twenty-third. Unusually for that autumn there was no rain that day, and the sun came up in a cloudless sky. Lord Stonehouse’s letter had been sent from a manor house in Chadshunt, two hours’ ride away. It told me that all the Stonehouses would be in Warwickshire that day. It touched me that both brothers, although they had taken the opposite side to their father, had written to him. Richard was with Prince Rupert’s cavalry, and Edward was a chaplain with the King’s infantry.
At Chadshunt I was told that Lord Stonehouse was at church in the nearby village of Kineton. The service was almost over. Instead of going in, I prayed outside for God to give me guidance in what I had discovered, and in what to say to Lord Stonehouse. I waited just inside the lych gate. While I was in prayers, the lane outside became as busy as St Paul’s Churchyard, with as many people trying to go one way as the other, and a minister in his black robes trying to force his horse through. There were even hawkers selling protect ive amulets. One held up to me the tattered remains of a pocket Bible, which he claimed had stopped a musket ball and had special powers. For a shilling, it would save my life. I pulled him back so the minister’s horse would get through, and found myself staring into the eyes of Edward Stonehouse. For a moment they were unfamiliar, the blinking desiccated eyes which normally lived behind glasses, surrounded by the whorl of wrinkles formed by constantly squeezing to see. The two armies were now less than two miles apart in places, and a man with good sight might suddenly find himself in the wrong one, let alone someone with blurred vision.
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