Cromwell's Blessing

by Peter Ransley

  ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ George was holding out the ring to me. I almost snatched it from him in relief. ‘I picked it up from the last inn where you left it and forgot to give it to you.’

  ‘You are an honest fellow after all.’

  ‘After all? What’s that mean?’

  The beer made it easier to be blunt about it. ‘Well … I saw you going through my clothes last night …’

  ‘And you thought I was a thief?’

  He jumped up in a rage and said he might be a tailor but he had as much honour as any gentleman, and demanded satisfaction. It would have been easier to sleep in a bear pit than my house, he said. To calm himself down last night he had been looking at my clothes in a purely professional way.

  ‘And, to be as blunt as you, sir, or my lord, or whatever you are, they do not serve.’

  ‘Do not serve?’

  ‘Mr Pepys was a good tailor, but, judging by the whip stitching, his eyes are gone. And the wine-red mockado suit –’

  ‘Mockado! That is the very best grade of silk!’

  ‘You may have paid silk, sir, but you got mockado.’

  By this time we were outside in the yard, to prevent disturbing the inn, our hands trembling over the tops of our swords. The stable boy gaped at us. His feet were bare, as mine had been at his age, and in that instant I saw us as he did, as I had stared at gentlemen in the dockyard, arguing over the design or payment of a ship, and I began to laugh.

  George drew his sword. ‘You laugh at me, sir!’

  ‘No, no, George, I am laughing at myself. Oh, George, I am in such a terrible muddle.’

  And I told him what had led to the arguments in my house, and that I might have jumped to conclusions about Lucy just as I had about him being a thief, and he said, rather sheepishly sheathing his sword, that he had much the same fault. He had thought me an arrogant tongue-padder, which had coloured his remarks about my clothing. The quality was not in doubt, although he must be allowed to criticise the cut. He thought I was right in what I had said to my wife, for if a man could not control his wife, how could he control anything else? I told him he had the wisest head on the youngest shoulders I had ever come across. By this time we were the living proof of the landlord’s claim that his beer was the strongest in England, and were convinced that misunderstanding others was the root of all evils.

  A man on a fine dappled grey horse was leaving the stables and tipped his hat to us with a smile, seeming to agree with our conclusions, and we wished him goodbye. Even finding one of our fresh horses lame did not cloud our mood, although it delayed us until another was found.

  It was mid-afternoon when we set off again. A heat haze clung over the road and the surrounding fields. We were less than half an hour from Holdenby, George reckoned, when he stopped to look for a scout whom Scogman had arranged to be here. There were signs of a tethered horse, but no scout. George said it was because we were late, but it made me feel uneasy. I wanted to stick to the main road because it was open country.

  ‘And be seen?’

  He rode down the forest path. Reluctantly, I followed him. The glare of the sun was cut off. Dazzling flashes of light were interspersed with shade. Eaton, Lord Stonehouse’s one-time steward, had known forests. He had lived in them as a rejected, wild child. Don’t think, he used to say. Listen, look carefully, like an animal would. No one can move in the forest without leaving traces. I beckoned to George to stop. He reined in impatiently. The path was still wide but ahead it narrowed, passing through a valley where trees climbed steeply on either side. Rising above one of the tallest, a number of crows were circling, crying harshly to one another.

  ‘They don’t like something,’ I whispered.

  ‘Us,’ said George, in exasperation, but my unease got to him and he picked his way at a slow trot.

  The crows began to settle, but I could see they did so some distance from their nests. A track ran upwards from the path, half overgrown with brambles and spindly saplings struggling to get up to the light. A couple were freshly broken, drawing my eyes along the path, where a breeze higher up the valley made a pattern of light and shade under the tree where the birds had their nests.

  I pulled my pistol from the saddle holster and cocked it. The sound made George whirl round.

  ‘The man at the last inn. On a dappled grey.’

  I pointed up the slope with the pistol. It was well concealed and, unless you were looking for it, no one would spot the horse’s flank.

  ‘He lamed our horse at the inn. I should have realised. Richard Stonehouse knows his father’s network. He must have learned of my escape. His mercenaries have been following us.’

  George motioned me to silence. There was the sound of another horse approaching. The path we were on led into a clearing where there was a woodsman’s hut and a pile of freshly chopped wood. From there it widened, the trees gradually thinning out. The mercenary could not have chosen a better spot for an ambush: high cover, looking straight down on open space.

  George frowned as we listened to the approaching hoofbeats. ‘Not a soldier,’ he whispered.

  The hoofbeats were not the regular drumming produced by a soldier who was at one with his horse. They were the jerky, spasmodic sounds of someone who did not ride with the horse but constantly urged it on then checked it. Yet he was in a hurry. The woodman? No, a civilian: there was the flicker of a brown coat before the path wound behind some trees.

  George gripped my arm. Above us, nearer than I expected, the mercenary had appeared from behind a tree. He must have been distracted from hearing us by the approaching horse. He was close enough for me to see the dog lock and the engraved plate on his pistol, which he held loosely. He began to raise his pistol at the same time as I saw who the civilian was.

  Nehemiah.

  He had lost his hat. He was almost losing his reins, slipping from one side of the horse to the other. Before the pistol was trained I kicked my horse forward. Nehemiah galloped into the clearing. I kept two lines in my head: the line of the shot and Nehemiah’s line across the clearing – inasmuch as you could call his erratic progress a line. I yelled – one long, screaming, ear-splitting yell.

  A combination of the scream and my riding low on my horse across the clearing caused Nehemiah’s horse to rear and throw its rider. In trying to control mine, I lost my pistol. I jumped from my horse to retrieve it, falling clumsily. In the confusion and the dust kicked up by the thrashing hooves the mercenary would have had to be very good to hit his target. He was better than that. He held his fire. Nehemiah, thrown on to a soft bank of leaves, was staggering about shouting incoherently.

  Spitting dirt from my mouth, I began to scramble up to reach my pistol. My ankle gave way and I fell back. I heard the click of the dog lock. The mercenary had come further down the slope and I could see the rifling on the long barrel. Then it was obscured as Nehemiah moved into the line of sight, yelling furiously at me.

  ‘Idiot! I-I came to warn you –’

  I flung myself at him, knocking him down as the pistol went off. He went limp. His eyes were closed. A crashing, snapping of branches drew my eyes back to the slope. George had seized the pistol and wrestled the mercenary to the ground, gripping his wrists to hold him down.

  Nehemiah sat up, looking blankly at the fighting men, his eyes staring, his face white. He was like a raw recruit: before battle cock-a-hoop, but turned by the first shots, noise and confusion into a rigid statue.

  The mercenary was slowly twisting free from George’s grip. I took a couple of limping steps and reached my pistol, but dare not risk a shot into the jerking, writhing bodies.

  ‘Go and help him!’ I cried to Nehemiah.

  He looked vacantly at me. The mercenary had a hand free. George grabbed it but the mercenary was stronger, dragging his hand down towards the knife at his belt, inch by inch.

  ‘Help him!’ I screamed, yanking Nehemiah up and pushing him towards the slope. I hobbled after him as he ran up obediently eno
ugh. But when he reached them, he stood there impotently, shifting from one foot to another, with that same trance-like look. The mercenary pulled his hand free and snatched the knife. Only then did Nehemiah move. The mercenary slashed at him, catching him in the hand. The blow once again paralysed Nehemiah, but the distraction was enough for George to break free and kick the knife away.

  By this time I had reached them and had the pistol trained on the mercenary. There was a silence, broken only by the raucous cries of the crows, wheeling slowly above us.

  Nehemiah gazed at the blood oozing from his hand. ‘He cut me.’

  With his blond hair and pale blue eyes, the mercenary might have been German. Before he had recovered his breath, George had taken off the man’s belt and secured his wrists.

  ‘Where is Richard Stonehouse?’

  The man smiled – the same affable smile he had given us at the inn near Bedford. ‘Far from here. He has the King.’

  ‘Liar!’ I said. ‘If he has the King, why are you here?’

  ‘He c-cut me,’ Nehemiah repeated softly, incredulously. He seemed to be in a world of his own, watching the blood drip from his hand. Suddenly he gave a cry, seized the knife and stabbed the mercenary viciously. If the man had not twisted away, the blow would have killed him. It ripped into his jerkin. Nehemiah aimed another blow and it took both George and I to pull him off. The mercenary spat towards Nehemiah. ‘Madman!’

  I cocked the pistol, levelled it at the mercenary, and asked him again where Richard was. Again he gave me that smile. During the war both sides used torture. It was routine but I never had the stomach for it. Perhaps that was why the mercenary smiled. He sensed it.

  ‘Kill him,’ said Nehemiah. He was gazing at the mercenary, pressing a handkerchief against his wound.

  The mercenary’s smile became fixed.

  ‘We’re wasting time!’ George said. ‘Holdenby is half an hour from here.’

  I returned the pistol to my belt, picked up the knife and gave it to Nehemiah. The smile vanished from the mercenary’s face. He was a handsome man, vain, careful and lucky enough to show few marks of his profession. There was a scar on his neck, but his face was unblemished.

  ‘Take his eye out,’ I said.

  Nehemiah stared at me, then at the mercenary. It became so quiet we could hear the horses cropping grass below us. The crows settled in a nearby tree. Until Nehemiah moved, I never believed he would do it. When I saw his set expression, the curious, dislocated look in his eyes, I knew he would. He seemed to hypnotise the mercenary. George turned away.

  ‘Leave him one eye,’ I said. ‘If he tells us what he knows.’

  The mercenary lashed out and struggled. I jumped on him, sat on his legs, and held down his thrashing arms until gradually he weakened. Nehemiah approached him with the dedicated concentration of a surgeon. I looked away.

  The mercenary screamed as Nehemiah brought the knife down. A trickle of blood ran down the mercenary’s cheek, from a cut by the side of his eye. The crows rose, in a fluttering, barking chorus.

  ‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you!’

  I pulled Nehemiah from him.

  ‘The King is at Althorp.’

  ‘Althorp?’

  ‘Lord Spencer’s seat,’ George said. ‘Twenty minutes away.’

  The words poured out of the mercenary in a garbled stream. The King had been allowed to visit Althorp with a skeleton guard. Richard was there, waiting to take him north. His mercenaries were near Holdenby, prepared to engage and distract us.

  ‘Waiting?’ I said. ‘You mean the King is still at Althorp?’

  The mercenary rolled his eyes, staring up at the sky and the tops of the trees, round which the crows were still uneasily circling. Nehemiah made a move towards him.

  ‘Keep him away,’ the mercenary screamed.

  ‘Leave him.’ I snarled at Nehemiah so savagely he stumbled backwards. ‘The King’s still there?’ I repeated to the mercenary.

  ‘The last I hear. The King wished to finish his game of bowls, and Sir Richard Stonehouse deferred to His Majesty’s pleasure. The English.’

  He spat contemptuously.

  22

  Althorp lay calm and peaceful in the late afternoon sun that broke through clouds like beaten pewter. Lord Spencer had amassed farms, cottages, meadows and woods to create one of the greatest estates in the country. We saw more sheep than soldiers. Scogman licked his lips.

  ‘Permission to speak, sir.’

  ‘No. Touch one of those and –’

  ‘You’ll eat it?’ he grinned.

  I silenced him. We were scouts for our main party and had reached the top of rising ground to look down on an enormous park dotted with trees. It looked a timeless, idyllic setting for the largely Tudor mansion, with its red brick and tall twisted chimneys.

  ‘Used to be a village down there,’ Scogman said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Fought with a Northants man whose great-grandfather used to live there. Cleared to raise those sheep. All that’s left is the village’s name. Althorp.’

  I signalled to George. Of his several hundred troops, he had left most below the rise, so they were not visible from the house. Now, he left two men at the top of the hill to watch our progress, and gave them instructions. He, Scogman and I then rode towards the house.

  As we approached the lodge gate we were ordered to stop. When the guard saw that George was a member of Fairfax’s cavalry, part of his own regiment, he was civil enough. But when George could not give a password, and refused to state his business without seeing an officer, the mood changed. Two more soldiers appeared, one with a pistol in his belt, the other with a pike. We were ordered to give up our swords. Scogman was reluctant, but George told him to undo his belt.

  ‘Avoid bloodshed,’ he muttered bitterly, echoing Cromwell’s words.

  The guard was sending for an officer when George saw a man crossing a window in the lodge house.

  ‘Samuel,’ he called. ‘Sam.’

  A fat, slow-moving man in a captain’s uniform came out of the house, gaping at him in astonishment. ‘George! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Changing the guard, Sam.’

  The captain stared at us. ‘The devil you are.’

  ‘Listen, Sam.’

  George took him to one side. They walked up and down outside the lodge, George talking urgently. I heard him mention pay, and indemnity, and the captain, perspiring in the stifling heat, took his hat off, scratched his bald head and said this was not about Cromwell, was it, because as a good Presbyterian he hated Cromwell. Cromwell had nothing to do with it, George assured him. The matter was about a fair deal for the army. Then, unaccountably, there was something about wool, and George called me over and told me that Sam was the son of a London cloth merchant, who had tried, unsuccessfully, to get his soldiers to save a fellow merchant’s bales of cloth from a fire.

  ‘Then the ungrateful bastard accused me of stealing them! They were damaged, worthless – had to be dumped,’ Sam said indignantly.

  I nodded sympathetically, although I imagined, from his agitation, that the cloth had finished up in his father’s warehouse as spoils of war. I showed him the indemnity ordinance I had produced at my regiment’s muster, pointing out there was no provision for the King’s signature. If he did ascend the throne, the ordinance would be invalid.

  Sam perspired even more. ‘God bless His Majesty, I say with the best of ’em,’ he muttered. ‘But he ain’t too hot on signing – he ain’t even signed the Presbyterian covenant yet. What are you waiting for?’ he yelled to the soldier with the pike. ‘Open the gate!’

  He said he would take us to the man in charge of the garrison. We went past statues that were beginning to cast long shadows, down a long avenue lined by trees towards a garden walled by high hedges. From behind it came the chatter of conversation, punctuated by occasional bursts of applause. Soldiers guarded an entrance in the hedge. A tall, greying man with them gav
e us a long, penetrating stare. George’s uniform and mine were torn and dirty from the fight with the mercenary. Scogman had never passed an inspection in his life.

  Major-General Richard Browne was in overall charge of guarding the King. He had risen from the ranks, but had never fought in the New Model, and cared not a jot for its petitions, whispered Sam. He had come to revere the King to such an extent that, with his long hair and his carefully trimmed moustache and beard, he was beginning to look like him.

  Sam looked about to melt altogether. His courage failed him under Browne’s gaze and he began to mumble something about finding us in the grounds.

  ‘Take them to the guard house. I’ll deal with them later,’ Browne snapped. He was turning away when George stepped forward. He saluted, bringing his heels together with the crack of a musket shot. ‘Sir! Cornet George Joyce! At your service, sir.’

  Browne turned slowly, giving him a wintry, amused smile. ‘And what service would that be, Cornet Joyce?’

  ‘Changing the guard, sir.’

  The amusement left Browne’s voice. He signalled to two of the soldiers at the hedge, who came forward, muskets drawn. ‘Changing the –? I have no knowledge of this. Whose orders are you under?’

  If George’s salute was exemplary, it was outdone by his about turn. He pointed beyond the lodge gates, towards the rise we had ridden down. At the top was a troop of cavalry, their horses, apart from the occasional tossing head, held in quiet, orderly lines, their spurs, buttons and sword pommels glinting in the late afternoon sun. They flew the flag of Black Tom, the standard of Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary army. They did so legitimately, for they were from his own cavalry unit, although Sir Thomas, a cautious, correct, man, would have been apoplectic if he had known it was put to this use.

  ‘They are my orders, sir,’ George said, pointing to the cavalry on the hill.

  Browne looked from the cavalry to the three of us. At that distance, and since they were on the brow of the hill, he had no means of knowing whether we had a hundred horse or five hundred. A burst of laughter came from the gardens behind the hedges. Browne stopped the two soldiers approaching us. They lowered their muskets.