Cromwell's Blessing

by Peter Ransley

  George grabbed me triumphantly. The minister was shouting for constables. George was about to march me off when something struck his head. A book fell at his feet as he slowly released me and sank to the cobbles. Gangraena. A man came towards me and in my groggy state I thought the Puritan who had been holding the book wanted to claim me as his own arrest, until I looked into his eyes under the stovepipe hat and heard Richard’s cultured, measured, unhurried voice in my ear.

  ‘I think we should be going. Unless you prefer to lose your horse, rather than your argument?’

  He threw my sword at me and stopped the cutpurses at a narrow opening known as Pissing Alley. The stench caused even hardened Londoners to recoil. Another moment and my horse would have been lost in the warren of streets round Leadenhall Market.

  ‘My friend’s horse, I believe,’ Richard said.

  One of the cutpurses put his hand on his dagger. The other, looking into Richard’s cold eyes, at odds with his pleasant voice, had more sense. ‘We were only holding it for the gentleman,’ he whined.

  ‘That’ll be a groat,’ said the man with a dagger sullenly.

  Two constables were pushing their way through the crowd. Richard drew out a handful of coins and flung them in the air. The cutpurses, half the crowd and one of the constables dived after the rolling coins.

  Richard grinned as I helped him on the back of my horse. ‘They’ll hang the devil, but take his money.’

  The alley was so narrow and twisting we could barely squeeze through. I reined in the horse. Silhouetted at the end were three men. They were not constables who would run after a few coins. Nor did they have on the uniform of the City Trained Band. They were armed and had the tense, edgy watchfulness of people hunting, wearing the buff army jerkin I had worn for so long, and their faces were as tough and seasoned as the leather from which it was made. They were Cromwell’s men. Their voices echoed down the alley.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  I glanced back. Richard had changed. Five years had lined his face, pouching his eyes and cutting deeper grooves into the corners of his mouth. It was not just the absence of a beard and fine clothes that made him unrecognisable. It was the absence of arrogance. Even the aquiline Stonehouse nose seemed to lose its prominence in this exiled, hunted face. But when he drew his sword I recognised him well enough. I recognised the look in his eyes, sharp and cold. This was the face of the man who had tried to kill me.

  ‘Drop your sword,’ shouted one of the soldiers.

  The click of the dog lock on the man’s pistol echoed down the alley. Richard kicked savagely at my horse and it leapt forward. There was a blinding, echoing flash and a stink of sulphur. For a moment I could neither see nor hear. The horse plunged. I lost the reins, then grabbed them again. Richard’s fingers dug into me, half-slewing round my jerkin as he scrabbled to cling on. I ducked as the empty pistol was thrown at me and saw another soldier taking aim. We were only just emerging from the alley, a perfect target. The pistol grew very large, then jerked upwards, firing harmlessly in the air as Richard’s sword went through the soldier.

  9

  Partly because the bolting horse took us in that direction, and partly because, when I had her under control, I wanted a place where few questions would be asked, I rode through the back streets to The Pot, where I used to drink as an apprentice. Neither of us spoke. It was that time in the afternoon when people have just eaten, and are reluctant to get up from the table or the fireside. The stable yard was empty. Not even a dog appeared.

  He slid from the horse first, holding up his hand for the reins. I did not give them to him, nor look at him.

  ‘He would have killed you,’ he said.

  I could scarcely get the words out. ‘Only because you wouldn’t stop!’

  He spread out his hands. He looked far more vulnerable than I remembered. ‘You would have given me up.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I would,’ I shouted.

  There was no sign of a stable boy. While I tethered the horse, Richard drifted aimlessly over to a neglected bowling alley at the corner of the yard. I remembered once losing my boots in a bet there. The Presbyterians, who condemned gambling, had closed it, along with shutting down the theatres. The wooden box with the bowls and jack had been broken into. Richard tossed the jack on to the green. It bumped through the overgrown grass to rest against a stone. He half-knelt and sent a bowl after it, curving it to knock away the stone and rest against the jack. He tossed a bowl to me. Dazed by what had happened, and the incongruity of the green, I flung the bowl down. It bounced crazily, before finishing up in the ditch. Richard pursed his lips and shook his head. In a burst of irritation I seized another bowl, adjusting the bias so it swung in, knocking away his bowl and rolling back nearer to the jack.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Not bad.’ He picked up another bowl. ‘I shall never get one like it,’ he said. ‘My sword, I mean. The balance was perfect. It was made in Bologna by Fabris himself –’

  Suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what had happened, I knocked the bowl from his hand. ‘You killed him. Cromwell’s soldier. You killed him. I work for Cromwell. Worked. Wanted to –’

  The words choked in my throat. All my hopes, all my ambitions, my future had disappeared with that one thrust of his sword.

  ‘No one would have recognised you. Not in that dark alley. The confusion.’

  I became incoherent, one word jamming into another. ‘They know who you are. You left your sword in him. They’ll work out I was with you. You killed him. You –’

  He put out a hand in a comforting, reassuring gesture. ‘He was one of the rabble, Tom.’

  I grabbed him by the doublet, tearing his collar, and drove him across the yard against the stable door. It was not just the speed of my attack that shocked him. Five years of war, including a period in the infantry, had given me a ferocity in hand-to-hand combat that he could not match. He was half the man without his sword. I was at the height of my strength, while he was in decline. I saw the realisation of this in his face, and the fear in his eyes when he found he could not release my grip as I held him with one hand and reached for my knife.

  I brought back the knife. ‘I am one of the rabble!’

  ‘Behind you,’ Richard said frantically.

  I almost laughed at him thinking I would fall for that one but, to be sure, kneed him in the groin and glanced round. A stable boy, knuckling his eyes, straw still sticking to his hair from where he had been sleeping, was gazing at us open-mouthed. When I had lived on coins given to me by gentlemen, a penny would buy a good loaf and my silence. Now it was nearer twopence. I held out sixpence.

  ‘You heard nothing.’

  His eyes bulged. He cupped his hand round his ear. ‘What, sir? I bin deaf as a post since birth, sir.’

  The coin disappeared into his pocket. Whistling, he took the horse to water. I pushed my dagger back into its scabbard, went to the pump and sluiced water over my face.

  Slowly, painfully, Richard straightened himself up. His right cheek was streaked with blood. ‘You fight like one of the rabble.’

  I pumped water over my handkerchief and walked across the yard towards him. Stone chips from the wall had scoured his cheek. One was still embedded in his lip. In the stable the boy murmured to the horse as he rubbed her down. Richard kept his eye on my dagger as I approached, and jumped as I held out the dripping handkerchief. He hesitated before taking, it, then wiped his face, watching me all the time, wincing as he dislodged the stone fragment from his lip.

  By some silent agreement, we said nothing more as we walked through the yard. Richard went into the inn first and I followed close at his heels, afraid he might make a bolt for it.

  The Pot was now patronised by a mixture of market traders, scriveners and pamphleteers who traded gossip over lamb pies at tables shut off from one another by high wooden stalls. It was as gloomy as night. What little light crept through the narrow windows
was snuffed out by the smoke from ill-swept chimneys.

  We found a table cluttered with dirty plates and I bought sack for him and a small beer for myself. He looked disparagingly at the beer.

  ‘Keeping your wits about you?’

  I said nothing. Under the banter, when he ate a piece of fat from one of the dirty plates, I saw again the fear in his eyes when I had rammed him against the stable door. As he flirted with the serving maid, saying that if the lean of her mutton was as good as her fat he must have a leg of it, I scarcely took in how charming he was with women. I was still seeing the shock on his face when I drew the knife and he realised I was stronger than him. I would have been a fool to kill him. I had done something far better. I had killed the nightmare of my late childhood, the man who had hired men to kill me, terrifying me because they came out of the darkness, for no reason, like bad dreams. It was as if I had awoken from a long, disturbed sleep to see the nightmare had a paunch, with skin beginning to slacken into jowls, and that, although he was kissing the serving maid’s hand, she was looking at me.

  I could not believe I had been moved to tears by his letter. Anne was right. All I had to do was hand him over. What had happened made no difference. I had been colluding with him only to find out what his plans were. To take those plans to Cromwell would put Ireton’s nose out of joint and be a great feather in my cap. The maid served him his leg of mutton. As he tried to grab her again I gave her a smile of sympathy, which she returned with interest. He saw our glance. Again there was that moment of disorientation, of seeing himself in the mirror of other people’s eyes. Recovering, he fell on his mutton, declaring it the best he had ever tasted. And the raisin and gooseberry sauce!

  He swallowed half of a second glass of sack. ‘Come. Our first meal together and you are not eating?’

  I told him my only appetite was to know what he was doing in London. All the false joviality left him. He jumped up, glancing at the nearby stalls. The only diner in sight was asleep, and the maid was throwing scraps from his plate to a dog. ‘Serving my King,’ he said. ‘Cromwell is planning to take the King from the Presbyterians and exile him.’

  I laughed. ‘Rubbish. Disobey Parliament? Cromwell would never do that.’

  We spoke across one another in an increasingly heated argument, laying bare our feelings about politics in a way we could not do about each other. I said passionately that Cromwell did not want to exile the King. The people wanted both King and Parliament. Richard thought Cromwell a great ogre, but I was as fervent about Cromwell as he was about the King. The arguments got nowhere, petering out into an exhausted silence. Neither of us had talked in any depth before to someone on the opposite side and, in spite of our violently different opinions, they drew us closer in a way I would never have anticipated.

  Richard painted a rueful, witty picture of what he called the charms of exile. The hospitable French spared nothing, he said, to encourage their guests to leave as soon as possible. They had given their poor relations lodgings at the wrong end of the Chateau de St Germain, damp and draught-ridden, where Queen Henrietta’s court bickered, fought duels to allay boredom, and dreamed of home. The Queen, desperate to return and impatient with Charles’s religious scruples, was arguing for Charles to settle with Parliament, in impassioned letters of which Richard was the entrusted messenger.

  ‘You have the letters with you?’

  ‘I’m not such a fool.’

  Nevertheless his hand went to a bulge under his shirt. He had become so animated, a number of people had entered the inn without us being aware of it. Two men passing stared at Richard, making him jumpy, until one joked that if Puritans were drinking there was hope for them all. A tinge of malice went through me as he glanced nervously towards the door every time it opened, just as I had done when I was on the run. He went to the bar to pay the maid, fumbling under his shirt for a bulging purse. I glimpsed not letters, but money, before he concealed it again. A lot of money. Gold unites and angels. It was growing darker, and the maid was lighting candles.

  ‘What are you doing in London?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. I told you. I have messages for the King.’

  ‘The King’s in the north. What are you doing here? With all that money?’

  ‘I came to see you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you are my son.’

  I would have treated that with the same distrust I had given his letter, had not a flickering candle thrown light fully on his face. His mask of arrogant certainty had slipped. He seemed at a loss; surprised he had said the words. He gave me a cautious look, ready to flee behind some flippancy. Perhaps he expected rejection. Derision. Instead I was struck dumb by the same conflict of feelings that had run through me when I opened his letter. The door opened and the draught plunged us back into shadow. When the silence continued to lengthen he ordered more wine and poured me a glass. I shook my head.

  ‘You will drink with me, damn you, sir, or I will say no more.’

  I took the glass. ‘If you wanted to see me, why didn’t you reply to my letter?’

  ‘Because when it came to it, I was afraid it was a trap. Was it?’

  ‘No. But I nearly took your letter to Cromwell.’

  ‘Nearly? Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  He moved further down the bar so he was out of the light and I in it. He told me that when he had landed a month ago on the Kentish beach, one of the customs officers he killed had wounded him slightly. The wound had turned infectious. He was too ill to ride but could not entrust the letters to anyone else. The first day he was up he heard at the Exchange that Lord Stonehouse had thrown me out. He celebrated with two bottles of sack. That perfect boy, whom Lord Stonehouse had treated as if he was his own son, had turned out to have feet of clay! But that night the priest came back to haunt him, robbing him of sleep.

  Priest? He told his story in fits and starts, in no kind of order, staring not at me, but at the candle. With the pools of light, and the high wooden stalls like pews, it was as if we were in church. He crossed himself even while he swore that, in St Germain, it was impossible to get away from the bloody papists. Half drunk one night, he took a wager from Prince Rupert he would go into confession. He knew enough about the damned breed from the Queen, who was brought up one, to fool his way into the box. Box?

  ‘Box of tricks, I thought. A grille. A voice. I could scarcely keep my face straight! Peccavit. Holy Father, I have sinned. I started to talk about you. Well. I had to say something.’

  He shivered. He glanced round one way, then another, at the jumping shadows.

  ‘Went in there without a problem in the world. Came out in hell.’ He laughed, but his face glistened and he licked his lips compulsively. ‘Much healthier for the soul in England. No bloody priests. After celebrating when my father threw you out, I had a nightmare – bloody priest threatening me with hellfire. That’s when I wrote you that letter.’

  ‘I replied. I waited at the Exchange. Twice!’

  ‘First time I feared a trap. Had to check it out.’

  ‘And the second time?’

  He fiddled with his glass. ‘When you turned up at the ’Change I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. Followed you. Curious, I suppose, that’s all. Curious.’

  He moved to pick up his glass, but made a face as if the wine had gone sour. For the first time he looked at me directly.

  ‘I saw your face when you came out of your tailor’s empty-handed. How many times have I been through that when my skinflint of a father cut my allowance!’ He slapped his thigh and laughed until the tears shone. ‘I almost went up to you then.’

  He had stood on the same patch of carpet. Suffered the same torrents of abuse, the same unexpected grunts of praise, which led only to dashed hopes and even more savage recrimination. Gradually, it was impossible not to wince, laugh, warm to him. I took several glasses of the wine, while he no longer touched it.

  ‘When he picks
up the seal, do you duck?’

  ‘Never!’

  He nodded approvingly. ‘Sign of weakness.’

  He wiped his eyes. ‘Followed you to your house.’ I stiffened. He shook his head. ‘Very mean. A merchant would do better for a poor relation.’ He was disapproving, but at the same time expressed a measure of satisfaction that I was living in such modest circumstances. ‘No ostler, even. Your son mistook me for the new one.’

  I went very still, pushing my glass away and gripping the edge of the table to control myself as he went on.

  ‘Chatted away. Fellow has spirit. Good on a horse. Got on famously –’

  He saw my expression. I kept my voice low only with an effort. ‘Touch my son and I will have you in the Tower, whatever happens to me. I should do so now. I’m a fool to talk to you.’

  ‘Not so much a fool as me.’ His tone was as savage as a moment before it had been affable. ‘You’re supposed to be so clever, but you don’t understand, do you?’

  ‘I understand when someone is spying on me.’

  ‘Spying? The boy is my grandson. Do you think I’d harm him?’

  That he could say that with a straight face took my breath away. ‘You tried to kill me.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘How different?

  ‘I don’t know. Different. I was young. Thought I knew everything. Now I think I know nothing, except that one day the King will have his own again. That’s all that matters. All I hang on to. You’re like that damn priest. Cornering me like a fox.’ His voice took on a new edge of bitterness. ‘All right. I can understand why you think I will harm your son. But I would be a damn fool to do so. I know my father thinks the sun shines out of his little arse.’

  He had a knack of saying something that was reassuring and disturbing at the same time. ‘Does Lord Stonehouse know you’re here?’

  ‘No! For God’s sake don’t tell him. He risked everything to get me out of the country years ago. I don’t want to get the old sod in any more trouble.’