When Mr Cole showed me in, Lord Stonehouse’s whole stance at the window, a slight smile on his face as he stared in the direction the carriage had taken, suggested to me, improbable as it may seem, that he was in love.
Love, however, had not made him notice summer. The windows were shut and the coal fire burning as usual. It was so stifling that sweat trickled down my back as I stood on the patch of carpet. When he eventually turned to acknowledge my existence there was no smile on his face. He gave me the same cold look of distaste as he gave the flask of cordial, which had replaced the usual wine on his desk.
‘Come to your senses?’
I felt I had no senses to come to. They had been buried with Liz. I wanted to mourn, to weep, to pray, but I could not. Once, when I went up to the nursery where her crib was, and rocked it, just for a moment, I saw her turn and it was so real I found myself holding out my finger for her to grasp before she vanished. But I could not weep. Curiously, it was Anne, who had never seemed to care for her while she was alive, who wept and mourned. At least I could meet Lord Stonehouse’s gaze with a look as dead and cold as his.
‘I will do the job you want me to do, my lord.’
‘Oh, you will, will you. Just as you kept the peace with Sir Lewis Challoner in Essex? An artillery train has been stolen near Oxford – by Presbyterians, Independents? I do not know. You will do what I want? You think you can walk in here and say that, do you? Short of money, are you, or frightened of arrest?’
He opened a drawer, the third one down. My drawer. Richard’s was the first. He pulled out a document with a City seal, which I recognised as an arrest warrant.
‘It is fortunate for you the magistrate is a friend of mine. Well, not so much a friend – more importantly, he owes me money.’ He tapped the warrant. ‘You threatened a minister and drove him and his elder out of his own church. Is there any reason I should plead for you not to be arrested?’
When I first stood on that stretch of carpet I would passionately have said there was every reason. It was Mr Tooley’s church. More than that, it was the people’s church. Those feelings were still there, more strongly than before after what had happened to Liz, but they were now focused on action, not on argument. I said, indifferently, ‘None, my lord.’
He rarely looked away from my gaze, but he did so then. ‘Were you in Cornhill two days ago, around noon?’
‘Yes.’
‘There was a murder there. One of Cromwell’s soldiers. Do you know anything about that?’
‘I did not kill him.’
His voice scraped out of his throat, high-pitched and shrill. ‘I said, do you know anything about it?’
I stared back at him, saying nothing. Richard. My father. His son. Did he know? Or at least suspect? Again he looked away first. He stretched out his hand to where his wine usually stood, saw the cordial, and pounded his fist on the desk. ‘Damn the stuff. I will take no more of that disgusting dog’s piss. Get me some wine. No, no, no wine. No wine. Damn Dr Latchford. Damn you. Damn –’
Leaving the last consignment to hell unfinished, he rested his head on his clenched hands until his breathing returned to normal. He picked up the arrest warrant for assaulting a minister. Safer ground.
‘You returned the day after the funeral and threatened this minister … Burke.’
‘I returned to make sure they did not disturb my daughter’s grave.’
‘You half-drew your sword.’
‘Not true. It is true that I looked at him and, if he had tried to interfere, I would have killed him.’ I touched the sword at my waist.
He began to cough and, with a grimace, took a swallow of the cordial. He looked at the sword, then at me, as if he had just realised I was not dressed as a gentleman. I wore the buff jerkin and high riding boots that I had thrown into the cupboard when I returned home. Luke, who had never seen the clothes before, had helped me dress in great excitement, marching round and putting on my belt. Anne had tried to pull him away, for he was not yet in britches, but I stopped her and explained what everything was. He was instantly quiet, staring up at me with his large, liquid eyes. I taught him as Lord Stonehouse’s steward Eaton had taught me, on our ride to Highpoint, lessons not from a manual, but lessons of survival.
I favoured a short sword, which I took from a dead mercenary at Naseby. With it was a matching main-gauche, or left-handed dagger, to parry blows. Their only ornaments were the scars and nicks on the blades. With short cross-pieces, a simple guard and hilt, and perfectly balanced, it was the sword of a man who earned his living by killing.
Lord Stonehouse digested these weapons with another swallow of cordial. ‘I was sorry to hear about …’ He hesitated. He had forgotten her name. ‘Your daughter …’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Elizabeth. Yes. Still, not as if you’ve lost a son, mmm?’
I said nothing, although anger at this casual dismissal of Liz surged through me. But it was cold anger, anger with a purpose I did not want to waste on him.
He brought his fist down on the warrant. ‘Have you nothing to say in your defence?’
‘No.’
‘I will never get to the bottom of you! Never. Not in this world. You expect to work for me?’
‘I am prepared to.’
‘Prepared to! Oh! Prepared to. Very generous of you.’ He walked round me, inspecting me as if I was on parade, pushing his face into mine as he used to, except there was the sickly smell of cordial on his breath instead of the sour tang of wine. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough, sir, to explain to me why you have had this sudden change of heart?’
‘Because I think you are right, my lord. If the Presbyterians return to power with the King they will kill my son just as they killed my daughter’s soul. She will not rest in peace until we are rid of them and neither will I.’
He stood in silence, staring at me, walked away and whirled back, staring once more, seeming to scrutinise every pore of my face. ‘You are prepared to serve me?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Do all the things your fine moral sense previously despised: spy, lie, cheat, dissemble?’
‘Yes.’
He picked up the greasy, well-thumbed file he had shown me before. ‘You will work with any of my informants, and prospective informants, however repellent you may find them, to get the information we need?’
‘Yes.’
‘You will apologise to Challoner and do what is necessary to get the information from him?’
‘Yes.’
It was in his nature to suspect some trick, some subterfuge. He kept pacing the room and turning, waiting for me to speak, but I said nothing more. I was not seeing him, but the churchyard as it took shape at the end of that long night, silhouettes beginning to become faces, Mr Tooley urging us to hurry, for if it got much lighter they would not let him bury her.
Mr Cole brought in a letter for me to sign. It was carefully crafted, begging Sir Lewis to accept my humble apologies for a moment of hotheaded behaviour I deeply regretted. It had all the diplomacy I lacked; it even made me smile, containing as it did the loftiness, the condescension of someone with prospects of a peerage, however remote, to a mere gentleman, turning the apology into granting a favour, in a way someone like Sir Lewis Challoner would be too unsubtle to notice. Mr Cole held out an inked quill.
‘There is one condition,’ I said.
Mr Cole quivered. A drop of ink threatened to fall from the quill. Lord Stonehouse’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened.
‘While I was away my wife suffered from shortages of coal in winter. Her allowance has been inadequate.’
A pulse beat in Lord Stonehouse’s forehead. ‘Everyone had to suffer during the war. Coal was blockaded.’
I stared meaningly at the fire, crackling merrily up the chimney. ‘All I am asking, my lord, is that you do not punish my wife for what you may perceive as my shortcomings.’
Lord Stonehouse’s pulse looked as though it would burst out of his skin. Th
e drop of ink fell from the quill and Mr Cole, in terror of it going on the carpet, only just managed to catch it in his other hand.
‘I will review your wife’s allowance,’ Lord Stonehouse said, each word drawn from him like a tooth.
He kept his eyes on me all the time as I took the pen. Without his protection I could do nothing. Even so I hesitated. It was just a matter of words, that was all, I told myself, only these were not the words I had run with through the streets, words which I believed would change the world, but words of double-meaning and deceit.
Then I heard the rattle of soil thrown hurriedly on Liz’s coffin before the light broke, and felt Luke snuggling against me under my cloak as we slipped like graverobbers from the churchyard.
I signed.
Thomas Stonehouse.
The name had an air of finality about it. It was a scribble of ink, that was all, but I felt I was taking a step into another country, from which I might not return. Lord Stonehouse expelled his breath in a long sigh, then took the letter to sand it himself, as though I might snatch it back.
‘Here. You can get anything you want with this – providing you sign for it.’ He gave me a signet ring, a smaller version of his own, with the falcon standing proud. Its claws seemed to grip my finger as I slipped it on. I bowed and began to go.
‘Wait!’
I might have foreseen it. He was like an angler casting a lure on to water. Once you swallowed it, you were hooked, reeled in, little by little.
‘You will deliver this letter in person.’
‘To Sir Lewis?’
He gave me a wintry smile. ‘That is to whom it is addressed, Thomas.’
Thomas now. Welcome back to the Stonehouse fold. This was to be the punishment for my transgressions. Not just the letter, but crawling before Challoner. I could see that in Lord Stonehouse’s eyes – the cruel streak that had once sent me to the plague pit, with that very same falcon seal drying on the letter. I bit back words of protest. For the sake of my family I would endure it. I was bonded to him now as tightly as any apprentice to his master, but I resolved he would not break me, any more than the cane had broken me when I was Tom Neave. I took the letter and gave him another bow.
‘Wait!’
He ordered Mr Cole to hand me some papers from the pile of petitions. They included the pamphlet on Scogman. Lord Stonehouse was now in a very genial mood. ‘You will use your best endeavours, as the lawyers say, to track down this wretched thief and hand him over to Sir Lewis.’
It would have been politic to agree and then not to find Scogman. But I was yet new to being completely Thomas, and Tom got the words out of my mouth before I could stop him. ‘I cannot do that.’
Like registering the change of wind before a storm, Mr Cole backed away, trying to disappear in the tapestries. Lord Stonehouse, already into next business, did not even lift his eyes from the document he was reading. Scogman was of so little importance to him that he completely misinterpreted what I said. ‘Nonsense. Of course you can do it. A man of your resources? Sir Lewis will not see you until Scogman is brought to him in chains. I’ll wager you know where he is. Eh? Or your friends in the army do.’
Arrest Scogman? Hand him over to that brute!
When I did not reply he looked up, his smile tightening. By his elbow was the warrant for my arrest. He would have no compunction in using it. A pulse, a second cousin to his, thudded in my temple. As his hand hovered over his bell to summon his servants, mine crept towards my sword. I stilled it. In prison I could do nothing. What had Scogman ever done for me, except take me for a fool? Even his starving wife and family, with whom he had played on my emotions, had turned out not to exist.
I gave a deep, final, bow. ‘I am grateful for your lordship’s confidence in me.’
12
In The Cart Overthrown, at Dutton’s End, I stared at the figures Will gave me in dismay. About a third of the regiment had agreed to go to Ireland. A third was prepared to accept the paltry back pay offered, which Parliament had grudgingly raised to eight weeks. The rest were split between men who were undecided and a hard core who were holding out for what I thought was a proper settlement.
‘This is how the men voted?’ I said to Will.
He nodded. I was stunned. All the grievances – the protestations of men who said they would resist such unjust treatment to the last – had withered to less than a page of names.
‘All these men have agreed to go to Ireland?’
‘That’s the list Colonel Wallace gave to the Parliamentary Commissioners.’
He went up to the bar to get me another drink. I needed it. When I left London Holles had persuaded the City, with its part-time force of 20,000 men, to go over to the Presbyterians. Parliament had voted to disband the New Model Infantry, Cromwell’s power base, in two weeks’ time, in the middle of June.
If cavalry regiments like this one were dismembered, Cromwell was finished. The Presbyterians would be in total control. The King would be back without the strictures that Cromwell would put on him. I stared at the list. Every night I awoke with the same nightmare. I was in that damp, dark church, unable to move, hearing that Presbyterian minister argue while Liz coughed her life away.
The one hope was to get Cromwell to act. He would not do so unless I could prove that, although so far everything Holles had done was through Parliament, he was planning a coup.
Two labourers came in while Will was bringing back the drinks. One spat in the straw, narrowly missing Will’s boot. ‘The beer’s not that bad,’ Will said with a smile. The man gave him a sour look. The other ignored him. They joined a group at the other end of the inn. There were occasional shouts of laughter, which dwindled into sullen mutterings when they glanced towards us. A man with a yellowing black eye got up drunkenly, held back by his companions.
‘I know he,’ he said, pointing at Will. ‘He cursed my cow.’
‘Friendly as ever,’ I said.
‘He blames us for the death of his cow. Me in particular because I refused his claim. We’re banned from this inn. I’m surprised you’re able to stay here.’
I said nothing, pretending to concentrate on the names. It was Challoner’s influence that got me a bed at the inn. I had expected to stay at his seat, Byford Hall, but my letter of apology had not been enough. He refused to see me until I produced Scogman. In desperation I had contacted Will, hoping to tap him for information about Scogman. After our difficulties over my promotion, I was unprepared for the warmth of Will’s greeting.
He had always known I was a radical at heart, he said. He confessed he had been jealous of the way the men looked up to me.
‘Looked up to me? I thought they hated me for lashing Scogman.’
‘They respected you for turning the tables on that shit Challoner. You have Cromwell’s ear. They’ll listen to you.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘You know what this feels like? When we first started … in The Pot. Do you remember … when you were on the run …’
‘Like Scogman. The most wanted man in Essex.’
‘The rubbish Challoner puts out about him! It’s because you made a fool of him. Scogman’s a changed man. He’s walking in the way of the Lord.’
‘Scogman? He’d steal a baby’s milk!’
‘Not any more.’
‘Where is he?’
He stared at me with sudden suspicion. ‘Why do you want to know?’
I felt as if I had been infected by those greasy bits of paper in Lord Stonehouse’s file. I shifted uncomfortably.
‘I’d like to see this walking miracle.’
‘So would Sir Lewis. But he’ll never find him.’
I returned to the lists. Bennet, the marksman who had aimed his musket at Stalker. Whether he would actually have fired the shot I did not know, but he killed for sport. I was not surprised he had put his hand up to go to Ireland. But Knowles? Knowles was a shoemaker for whom I had written a letter telling his wife and children he would be home soon. I remembered his wife was ill and he had e
nclosed a little money for her, which he said he had earned by soling boots.
‘He borrowed the money for his sick wife from Jenkins,’ Will said.
I groaned. Jenkins ran an unsavoury alehouse always on the edge of losing its licence. It was one of the few places that would serve soldiers. Jenkins operated a little usury on the side.
‘Sergeant Potter got Jenkins to call in his debt, then threatened Knowles with arrest unless he went to Ireland. Come on, Knowlesey, he said. What’s another few months? With plenty of loot.’
I went down the list. ‘Bromley? He said he’d never go to Ireland!’
‘Wasn’t at the meeting. If you weren’t there, Sergeant Potter spoke for you.’ Will gave an excellent, stiff-necked imitation of Sergeant Potter, saluting to Colonel Wallace. ‘Sir, discretion to use personal knowledge of soldier’s wishes. Bromley keen to go to Ireland and wreak the Lord’s vengeance on those murdering papists!’
‘Maddox?’ A weaver with his apprenticeship in Shoreditch to return to, who would gamble on anything, which frequently got him into trouble.
‘Accused of stealing. Hauled before the Colonel. Charges to be waived if he agreed to go on the boat to Ireland.’
‘Gough?’
‘Always goes where Knowlesey goes.’
‘Kenwick?’
‘Wasn’t at the meeting. Sick. He’ll be even sicker when he knows he’s on the boat.’
I grew angrier and angrier as we went down the list. If this was happening in other regiments where Presbyterian officers had control, then the figures Parliament had voted on were lies and falsehoods. The labourers gaped at us as we drew a map in the sawdust on the floor, showing where the regiments with Presbyterian officers were stationed. Roughly half the rest, we reckoned, would be loyal to Cromwell. At the moment. But he was taking no action. He believed in Parliament. Holles believed only in manipulating it to get the King back, at any price.
Will whispered he had a link with a group in another cavalry regiment, which planned to seize the artillery train near Oxford. Sporadic mutinies would be worse than useless, I thought, playing into Holles’s hand, but I said nothing.
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