‘You are to treat him humanely,’ I said.
‘Humanely? Very good, sir.’ He released Scogman’s head, which slammed against the saddle.
I insisted on him writing and sealing a note of safe receipt that I could show to Sir Lewis. As he wrote it he disturbed the cards he had tried to conceal, one of which fell to the floor. It was the Queen of Spades. Spades are a bad omen, and the Queen is the worst. Stalker coughed and licked his lips nervously. He asked me not to mention the playing cards to Sir Lewis. He had discovered them on the gentleman, who was imprisoned for debt, and was confiscating them, but Sir Lewis, who had a particular antipathy towards gambling, might misinterpret the situation.
‘By playing cards with the debtor,’ I said, ‘and taking his money, you were merely demonstrating to him the error of his ways?’
He beamed, impervious to sarcasm. ‘Exactly, sir! Exactly. The error of his ways. Oh, very good, very good. We are in accord, sir.’ He shook hands and signed the receipt with a flourish. ‘I will certainly show this wretch the error of his ways.’
He checked the rope binding Scogman’s hands tightly in front of him, told him he had another fine piece of hemp waiting for him, and carried him into the house like a sack of potatoes. Stalker opened the door of the cell, which, he said, had been kept warm by the last prisoner. Scogman cannoned into the piss-pot, which had not been emptied, its contents spilling on to the filthy straw as he collapsed into a corner.
‘You see what animals these people are, sir,’ Stalker said.
Scogman stared up at me in mute reproach. A thin smear of blood was trickling from his lip. I was at the door when I heard a metallic rattle. Stalker was in a small office. From a row of hooks he was taking down a key and leg-irons.
I only just managed to keep control of my voice. ‘At least let him sleep. He does not need irons until you take him to the gaol.’
‘He is not secure, sir.’
‘Dammit, man, his hands are tied, the windows are barred and you have a heavy lock on the door!’
‘Leg-irons is the rule, sir. To make him double secure.’
I walked up to him. ‘Mr Stalker, he is as secure as I am in the knowledge that you were confiscating those cards, not gambling.’
He gnawed his lips, absorbing the threat, before replacing the leg-irons on their hook.
It was now dark, but with the unrest at the regiment I could not delay seeing Sir Lewis and rode to Byford Hall. There was a fork from the main driveway, used recently by a number of horses. Thinking that this would lead directly to the stables, I took it. On the edge of a copse I checked my horse. I was some distance from the main driveway where there was the glimmer of light in the lodge.
‘Who’s that?’
A figure came out of the lodge. I was about to answer when another man came out of the shadow of some bushes. The moon glinted on his half-drawn sword.
‘Fox,’ he said. ‘After Sir Lewis’s coneys.’
‘The men are all here?’ asked the lodge-keeper.
I did not hear the reply as they went back in the lodge. To state my business there would mean further delay. The men all here? Was there some kind of a meeting? I urged my horse gently forward over the grass. At least Sir Lewis would be up.
Candles flickered in many of the bay windows of an older, Tudor wing. The main building was much more imposing, crowned with lead-capped stair turrets and Dutch gables. In what looked like a long gallery on the first floor there was the shadowy movement of servants picking up dishes. I knew the Parliamentary Commissioners who supported Holles stayed here when they investigated the army claims. I moved into the shadows of a tree, quietening my horse. My career as a spy would not last very long if I walked into a meeting between Sir Lewis and the very people Lord Stonehouse hoped he would betray.
The moon lit up a courtyard on the end of the wing from which came the sound of a number of horses. I edged my horse away from it, into the shadow of a clump of trees, and tethered it there. I hesitated over leaving my sword, but they would take it away from me anyway. Sliding it into the saddle holster, I walked towards the house.
If there were Commissioners present, it was too risky to give my name as Stonehouse. I said I was Thomas Neave. Sir Lewis would know who I was when he saw the prison receipt for Scogman. The footman did not seem surprised at such a late call. The tiled floor was scored with muddy bootmarks. It was a house of creaks and shuffles and lowered voices, of doors softly opening and closing. My heart began to thump alarmingly. To be seen by one of Holles’s ministers would be a disaster.
Fortunately, unlike the Tudor wing where I had glimpsed some light and life, the main wing was the darkest, gloomiest building I ever entered. I stood in the shadows until the footman showed me into an austere, oak-panelled chamber which served part as waiting room, part cloakroom. It was damp, ill-lit and still smelt of winter. I hung my cloak next to one with a velvet collar which put mine to shame, torn and bedraggled from the fight with Will.
On a mahogany side-table a copy of the Bible was dwarfed by two folio volumes of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, full of woodcuts of Protestants burned at the stake by Catholics. Like many strict Puritans Sir Lewis expected his visitors not to waste a moment, but to contemplate the forces of Antichrist they were battling with – not only Catholics but ministers like Tooley who preached toleration. There were so many illustrations, the books seemed to reek of burned flesh.
I turned to the title page. There was a written inscription, dated 1610: ‘To Lewis. Read a martyr a day to remind you the staires to Heavene are paved with peril, toile and pain. Fugit ora. James Challoner Bt.’
Presumably this was Sir Lewis’s father. Fugit ora – time flew. A birthday present when he was five, or six? I shuddered. It did not give me a greater liking for Sir Lewis, but I felt I understood him a little more. I shut the book. A sudden eerie silence had fallen on the house. I opened the door a fraction. Further along the gloomy hall a door was open. I picked out Sir Lewis’s bulky shape, but the figure with him was in shadow. He made a move towards the front door, but Sir Lewis stopped him.
‘My cloak …’
‘Not that way.’
It sounded as though Sir Lewis was as apprehensive as I was of being seen. His visitor’s voice sounded vaguely familiar, but I could not place it. I closed the door. A servant came to fetch the cloak, returning a short time later to show me into a room that the candles fought a losing battle to light. The furniture was dark oak, with not a carving to relieve its severity. The few portraits were blackened with age and smoke. One might have been Sir Lewis’s father, a stern-looking man with a Bible in his hand. The other rested on a skull. Sir Lewis was pacing behind a desk on which were some papers weighed down with a seal.
‘You have a nerve to come here – Mr Neave.’
‘I apologise –’
‘Another apology! Apologies are cheap.’
He flung the letter of apology I had sent from London on the desk. It had been squeezed out of me by Lord Stonehouse, he said. It was all round the ’Change that I had written it under the duress of being cut off, of being reduced to nothing, worse than nothing – returned to being the bastard I was. It was as sincere as a whore’s prayers. My lips tightened and my cheeks burned. I had forgotten how much I loathed him.
Only an instinct that he was deliberately trying very hard to provoke me, though I could not understand why, enabled me to keep any kind of grip on my temper. That, and the urgency of getting Holles’s plans from him.
‘Lord Stonehouse has told me everything about your agreement with him,’ I said.
The tirade stopped abruptly. He moved away from me, as if I was contagious. ‘Agreement? What agreement? With Lord Stonehouse? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I brought out the letter Lord Stonehouse had given to me to hand him in person. The effect on him when he saw the falcon seal was astonishing. His cheeks, which had become almost purple when berating me, turned sallow white. The clatter of a
horse in the courtyard, which I suppose was his visitor leaving, made him jump. His eyes darted from me to the seal, to the sound of the receding horse, in a mixture of fear and greed. Greed won.
He checked the seal, broke it, and took the letter into the light of the candelabra over his desk. There was no sound, apart from his rusty, laboured breathing.
‘The estate contracts are ready to be signed,’ I said. ‘As soon as you let me have the information you promised.’
‘You took a risk coming here with this.’
‘I had to. Lord Stonehouse believes Holles is about to act –’
‘Keep your voice down, will you!’ He turned away to read the letter again, picking over every word of it like a lawyer. ‘So, his lordship is finally prepared to give me everything I want,’ he muttered, half to himself. He went to an old, browning map on the wall. ‘The forest … the mill … if only he had agreed to these terms sooner!’
‘What do you mean?’
He whirled round as if he had forgotten I was there. ‘How did you catch Scogman?’
I cursed my stupidity. I had rehearsed my apology but not how I had caught Scogman. I could scarcely tell him the truth. I plunged into a story any self-respecting pamphleteer would have been ashamed to give to his printer. How I trapped Scogman and his band. They were desperate men. I shot one; wounded another. The fight I described with Scogman was the most vivid part of it, because I took it from the fight I had with Will, the only difference being that I won. It had the verisimilitude of matching exactly the state I was in; my bruised face and my torn and dirty clothes.
I came to an abrupt stop. I had told my story at the pace of a trickster who keeps both hands moving swiftly while he deals marked cards, or palms a weighted dice; so much so that I had scarce noticed the effect it had on Sir Lewis. He believed the gibberish I had told him. He leaned forward, his eyes bulging, small globules of sweat gleaming in his thick eyebrows. He wanted to hear more about how I had beaten Scogman. He dwelt on it, and remembered how I had lashed him in such detail that I felt sick.
Not having been brought up a gentleman, I had the advantage of having no sense of honour. For the first time I realised how much I had insulted him over Scogman, and made him a laughing stock throughout the county. It was more than that. I had not understood how Puritans suffered for their faith. Scogman had become his penance.
‘Penance, sir?’
‘When I failed in a task my father made me perform a penance until I succeeded. His favourite was the candle.’
‘Candle?’
In reply he took a candle from a sconce on the wall and held his finger in it. Not a muscle in his face moved. He did not withdraw his finger from the flame until the skin blackened and there was a smell of scorched flesh. When he did so it was more with a look of exultation than pain. His other fingers were scarred and reddened from such a practice. One carried a blister. The practice, he told me, demonstrated to a child what the Protestant martyrs had endured for the faith.
I indicated the picture of the man with a skull. ‘Your father, sir?’
‘My grandfather, sir. He was burned at the stake by that papist bitch, Mary Tudor.’
I looked again at Sir Lewis’s burned fingers. I had thought mortifying the flesh was more a Catholic practice, sacrificing the body so that the soul should live, but it seemed these Puritans, too, tortured themselves as well as others. The pain he had inflicted on himself released some kind of euphoria. He became almost genial, saying he was a bad host indeed for not offering me food and a bed. I said that was very civil of him, but I had no time for either. Neither did he, if he wanted to acquire the land from Lord Stonehouse. Colonel Wallace was splitting up my regiment in two days’ time. I must have the information and go.
He stared at the map, then at the falcon seal. ‘I have to trust you. I’ll give you some of the information now. In strict confidence, you understand?’
He steered me away from his martyred grandfather, and whispered, as if the portrait was listening. ‘Colonel Wallace favours Holles. That is true. But he has not the money to pay the troops. Denzil – Holles – is raising it in the City, but those tightfisted East India merchants drive as hard a bargain as, as – well, as Lord Stonehouse.’
He laughed and clapped me on the back. I knew the soldiers would not move a step without money. He rang for a servant, ordering food and a room to be prepared. Feeling it would be churlish to reject both and wishing to capitalise on his change of mood, I agreed to eat: while I did so he could give me the information and I need not trouble him with the bed.
‘No trouble, Tom. There is no greater pleasure than coming together, after such a difference of opinion, eh?’
I nodded, smelling the odour of singed flesh that seemed to linger in the oily flicker of the candles, and vowing I would not stay in that place a moment longer than I had to.
He led me to a long, dark room, gloomily lit by candelabras on an equally long table. At the far end of the room high windows were draped with a murky-coloured velvet, a smoke-blackened version of what had once clearly been a rich crimson. I hesitated before sitting. There were so many chairs, and such a long table, and only the two of us dining. I felt a reluctance to sit too near the man, his burned finger even now wafting the odour of singed flesh in my direction, yet could not sit at too great a distance. But he settled the matter in a courtly fashion, gesturing to a chair at a short distance from his own, and I was glad to sit down.
Determined to keep my wits about me, I did not touch the wine. But a large slice of cold venison pie found me unexpectedly hungry, and I swallowed too quickly. A mouthful of congealed fat, and the sight of Sir Lewis picking the blister on his finger, made me retch and cough. Before I knew it I had taken a gulp of the wine, then another. He refilled my glass and raised his to our working together. I drank to that and told him that if he would give me the information, I would go. He told me there were three problems with that, tapping them out on his blackened finger.
Item one, he found my company unexpectedly agreeable and was loath to lose it.
Item two, the information was extremely sensitive and it would be most imprudent for me to travel with it, alone, so late at night.
He paced the room, his hands folded behind his back, like a wise father counselling his son. He appeared to have entirely lost the agitation he had shown when I first produced Lord Stonehouse’s letter.
Item three – his finger took on a strange shape like a blackened sausage – a letter was a letter and not a contract, even if it was from someone whom one could trust as implicitly as Lord Stonehouse. He smiled, as if Lord Stonehouse was the last possible person on earth whom he would trust.
‘He told me it was urgent! There is no time to –’
I jumped up. Or rather I tried to. My legs seemed to be going in different directions. Sir Lewis gripped my arm, his voice full of concern. He knew it. I was in no fit state to travel.
Yet, curiously, it seemed I was going to travel. There was cold air on my face, and the rattle and stink of a cart. It was the plague cart into which I had been thrown when I was born. I saw my father Richard’s angry, distorted face, and smelt the sickening stench of lime-soaked straw, before I kicked and struggled out of the nightmare
Sir Lewis’s face swam back into my vision. The stairs were swaying around me. I was being helped up, step by step, by two servants, except one did not seem to be a servant. He wore no livery, but the buff jerkin of a soldier. From some war wound his nose had been split, the nostrils hideously twisted, the air rasping through them into my ear. Somewhere behind me Sir Lewis’s voice floated.
Tomorrow we would ride together to London, he said, to see Lord Stonehouse. After he had renewed acquaintance with his old friend, Scogman, of course.
Scogman! I tried to turn but was snatched up by the man with the split nose, and though I struggled to speak found I could not form words. I was in a room full of moonlight and red hangings, all of it pitching and tossing about me like a rou
gh sea into which, after a brief struggle, I sank.
15
The noises penetrated my thick, sluggish sleep. Sharp, daylight noises: a fire being raked, the ring of hooves on cobbles. I opened my eyes a fraction. And shut them. Even the dim light was unbearable. I badly needed to return to sleep but my last coherent thought cut into my head, sharp as a knife. Scogman. I forced my eyes open and dragged myself up.
The room was clad with red tapestries of the seasons, musty and faded. I drew the hangings at the bay window. Whatever Sir Lewis had put in the wine had left my tongue feeling like a lump of thick cloth and my head singing.
I opened the casement and sucked in air. I was at the top of the house, looking out over the Tudor wing. The sun had barely risen. There was not a breath of wind and the light had a shimmering, luminescent quality that glittered in the dewed grass and promised a hot day.
This peaceful scene was disturbed by a distant shouting, followed by a group of men coming out of the wing, pushing and jostling one another. They wore the buff hats and clothes of soldiers. I glimpsed a hard-lined face, and caught the nasal twang of a Dutch accent when one shouted. They were mercenaries. One was wearing what I had not seen since the end of the war: the red scarf of the Royalists. They pissed in the bushes. One shoved another so he wet his britches. What began as hilarity and joking became a fight until a voice rang out. It came from the porch of the wing. I could not see the man, or hear what he said, but it had an instant effect. They finished relieving themselves in silence. The mercenary with the red scarf removed it. The man who had silenced them came further out of the porch so his boots were visible.
‘Remember who you are fighting for,’ he said quietly.
I leaned out of the window, gripping for support the edge of the entablature, which ran above the larger window below.
‘See to your horses,’ the man said.
Obediently, they went towards a group of trees, where I could now see a group of horses tethered. I had recognised my father’s voice, but when he came out of the porch I barely recognised him, for he was so different from the hunted, run-down, rather pathetic figure I had seen at The Pot. He wore a plain, buff uniform with no favours or badges of rank. He did not need them. His whole manner, when he spoke, was that of a man expecting to be obeyed. Absurdly, at that moment, I felt a surge of pride for him.
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