A tall, fair- haired man had been hurriedly sent by Thurloe. He identified the prisoner: 'Yes, this is Sexby'
Sexby bore no malice. His self-confidence, always only a little short of arrogance, made him proud to be recognised. They were using the Beauchamp and Broad Arrow Towers for political prisoners these days, though there was plenty of choice. Sexby was taken to a cell, a grim lodging but at least it was a room, not a dungeon. Taking a chance, Gideon asked to be allowed time with him.
'Yes, settle him in — good notion. Soften him up..' No chance of that, not with Sexby.
It was nine' years since Holdenby, eight from the Putney Debates. Gideon found Sexby older, more worn, yet more direct; probably he himself was the same. As a prisoner, Sexby looked tired, withdrawn, accepting. He made no excited protestations of innocence: all classic signs of guilt. Briefly questioned on arrival, he had given very little away. He would be like Sindercombe, never admitting anything. He would positively enjoy holding out. But Gideon did not believe Sexby would kill himself; he would force Cromwell to execute him, intending that Cromwell would look more tyrannical.
The two men stared around the bare, dark cell, with its barred windows, cold stone walls, empty fireplace. There was a narrow bed and an uneven little table. Through the thick stone walls crept sickness, damp, bedbugs and despair. There was a high risk of death.
'I would offer to bring in necessities, but…' Gideon was thinking of Sindercombe and the poison. Daring escapes had happened over the Tower's long history, but Colonel Barkstead was meticulous. He had caught one Royalist soaking his window bars with aqua fortis. He would not lose Sexby.
'Ink and paper?'
Gideon shook his head. 'Forbidden. I heard you are married — your wife and any other family will be allowed to visit.' Sexby gave a faint nod. Mrs Elizabeth Ford, the mistress who effected Sexby's escape from capture at Weymouth, now called herself Elizabeth Sexby; she had been with him in Flanders and had borne him children.
Gideon felt more demoralised than he had expected. Sexby half unbuttoned his coat, the best he could do to make himself at home. He turned and shared a fatalistic glance with Gideon. Though they had reached different positions, their shared past experiences gave them bonds. Both sighed. Neither blamed the other. The mutual dislike they had felt all those years ago became a matter of indifference.
'End of an era,' said Gideon in a grey voice. 'Walwyn is doctoring the poor, Wildman died of a seizure outside Eltham Jail as he returned from bail, Overton has turned to wild religion.' Lilburne, turning pragmatist, was still on the loose. Neither Gideon nor Sexby mentioned it. Gideon glanced at the door and lowered his voice as if his purpose was unofficial. 'My second wife was married to Orlando Lovell, the Royalist known as William Boyes. Will you tell me where to find him?'
Sexby looked at him more keenly. Gideon's legal quandary did not interest him; he was locked inside his personal predicament, weighing everything that was said to him against that. 'Have you been told to ask me?'
'My quest is personal.'
'I know nothing of him.' A standard answer. Gideon realised Sexby did not trust him. Even without knowing that Gideon had been ordered to look for the second firework, Sexby would protect Lovell.
'He has my wife's son.'
'His son, presumably.' Sexby shrugged. Elizabeth would have to bring up their children alone; Gideon wondered just how much — or how little — Sexby had invested in them emotionally.
Still, he tried again. 'Lambert wanted Thomas to be a grocer.'
Sexby, once a grocer's apprentice, finally laughed. 'And how is Lambert?'
'His health is broken.' He held up his own arm like a bird's broken wing. 'And I too am ruined.' Gloomily philosophical, Gideon opened up to Sexby, speaking his fears for the future as he would to no one else: 'We regret nothing. We would do it all again, and gladly. We recite to ourselves that miserable cliche, our fighting achieved so little, yet not to have fought would have been disastrous. It is, of course, no consolation. Failure has lain in wait all along and nothing changes that.'
Sexby was tensed to resist interrogation yet he too seemed prepared to forecast: 'Cromwell will die. The young Charles Stuart will return. Whatever promises he makes, monarchy restored under him will have a godless, dissolute core.' He spoke as one who had seen the man at close quarters. 'He will round up all those who brought his father to account. Liberty, which has died under Cromwell, will be permanently lost then… Well! I shall not see it.' Gideon could not argue with that bald conclusion. 'What will you do, Gideon Jukes?'
'As I must. Endure it. It has been fifteen years since we took up arms,' said Gideon. 'People are tired. Tired of fighting. We did our best, but we cannot continue. We want a normal life. A week of work, a Sunday sermon, a wife and children in the home, peace and prosperity. We want a settled commonwealth.'
'Your commonwealth is a lost cause,' Sexby told him. No thanks to you, thought Gideon.
He could bear no more and ended the interview. To his surprise, Sexby sent him off with the old Leveller salute: 'True unto death!' Gideon could not bring himself to return the same.
It would take until November, four months of mental grind, for the authorities to persuade Edward Sexby to admit he was the author of Killing no Murder. Raving and shaking with an ague, he would confess everything — or so it would be said. Sexby would have no trial, but an inquest would decide he had been carried off by jail fever. That, he would have said, was extremely convenient for Cromwell.
His wife, recently delivered of a child, sent her maid with forty shillings to have him buried. Although she was given the opportunity to have his body taken outside, with her husband's kind of defiance, Elizabeth Sexby told them to inter him in the grounds of the Tower of London where he had died.
Gideon never saw Sexby again. Feeling exhausted and mournful, he had walked out that evening from a gatehouse, into the vast open interior spaces of the Tower of London, bathed in the last filtered twilight of a long July evening. Candles showed high in the constable's quarters. Military sounds came from the garrison. A breeze carried the smell of the stables; even its pungency failed to eradicate the stench of prison neglect he had absorbed. Chilled to the bone even after so short a visit, he felt his shoulder aching badly.
Somewhere here, Gideon remembered, was a copy of the Magna Carta. It had been shown to Lord Fairfax once, but Gideon Jukes did not request a viewing.
Chapter Eighty- Five — The Swan Tavern, King Street: July 1657
Mrs Maud Tew was well aware that her brother grew more and more to resemble their father. Red in the face, outstanding in the belly, complaining and work- shirking, Nat had happily adopted the traditions of his ancestors. He had become as useless as Emmett always was. Maud Tew squared up to her fate with resignation — a slight, pallid but pert figure, who had made herself formidable in her chosen domain. She looked as if a puff of wind would bowl her over, though she had the wiry strength of all working women who constantly heaved about heavy tubs and barrels. Nat allowed her to do it, unaware that she was perfectly capable of carrying out such work, whilst simultaneously plotting in her nowadays well- ordered mind how to be rid of him.
Her thin brown hair was tied in a tight little topknot, without a cap or headscarf, though she wore an oversized white collar on her tiny shoulders, above a more-or-less fitting grey gown. A capacious apron completed what would have been a respectable ensemble, had not the butt of her pistol been visible in her apron pocket where a lesser woman might carry a housewife-cloth to dust her mantel-shelves.
Mrs Tew had a reputation. Both her brother and her customers respected and admired it. She made no secret that she had been a soldier, in disguise; it was also reported that she had been a highway robber, like the infamous Molly out at the Black Dog Tavern on Blackheath. Maud kept her mouth shut about her history, but for a slightly built woman who kept an alehouse in a hard district, such rumours did no harm. It was one way to impress upon the public the Act against Drunkenness
; when the Swan's customers had supped enough in her opinion, they were encouraged homewards by her gun.
It was, therefore, not sensible for anyone to cause a rumpus in her tavern's yard. When one of the occasional lodgers lost his temper with an ostler, he was asking for it. Thomas, the ostler at the Swan, pistolled coming to take their horses… Hearing the racket, Maud ran up from the brewhouse. She found a swank cove in a suit that annoyed her, yelling that his young son had been permitted to run off. He was attempting to take his horse from the ostler, who kept a good hold of the animal because the reckoning had not been paid.
'Now then!' cried Maud.
'You tell him, Maud,' encouraged Nat. Customers came out and jostled one another, eager to see the fun.
'So who is this?' demanded Maud like an actress, with her usual sarcasm, as if the cove were just a woodlouse that crawled under her broom as she swept out the taproom.
'Mr Boyes,' said her brother, pretending this situation was none of his fault.
'I think not!' rounded Maud, who still remembered the man from Birmingham. 'I know you,' she said, speaking directly to Lovell. She was no longer in the least afraid of him. She could not tell whether the cavalier who had once — twice — nearly killed her simply for being in his way now understood. 'This dodger's name is Lovell.'
'Oh!' piped up Nat. At last he spotted the connection. 'Would he be the dangerous cavalier the man Jukes was searching for so urgently?'
'Your head is as soft as a poached egg, Nat,' his sister informed him. 'None the less, it is true, and Master Jukes will pay us a fine ransom.'
Colonel Orlando Lovell cursed her to hell and back, very fluently like a true cavalier. Then he abandoned his horse — which was valuable — and his luggage — which was not. As he turned on his heel with a derogatory expression, ready to make his getaway without paying his bill, Maud did what she notoriously did to bolters. She advised him to stay where he was. To make sure he listened to her kind words, she drew out her pistol and threatened to shoot him.
When Orlando Lovell kept walking, she fired.
'That never happened before!' marvelled Nat. It was unlikely to be necessary again. Word would soon spread.
Lovell took her ball in the shoulder. He did not stop, but loped off into King Street. Keeping well back in case of trouble, Nat followed the blood spots all the way to the Cockpit Gate before the trail petered out.
Afraid to report he had lost the debtor, Nat drank ale at several other taverns, then crept home guiltily. Maud ticked him off on principle, then sold Lovell's horse, weapons and various disguises all within the next half-hour. She knew that unless Lovell found a surgeon very quickly, he was a dead man walking.
On the same morning, Lambert Jukes had gone to see his brother at the print shop. He sent Miles out to buy muffins. Then Lambert, broad as a gate and unusually sombre, seated himself on a joint-stool with his knees apart and his arms folded.
'Now listen to me, young Gideon, and do not interrupt. Tom Lovell is safe. We have him at home with us. You are not to visit, or let his mother visit, or do anything that will lead an observer to our house — ' As the startled Gideon made to interject, Lambert held up his hand. 'Now, be calm in your spirits and thankful for this boy's intelligence. He came to us because his father will look for him — and the first place Lovell will come to is your house.'
Gideon was still resisting: 'Lambert, Thomas holds information. Enquiries must be made of him.'
Both brothers were silent, loathing the unpalatable thought of subjecting a child to formal interrogation.
'I will not allow it,' decided Lambert.
Gideon laid a hand on his brother's shoulder; Lambert shook him off. 'Lambert — '
'We shall lose him — he will run away back to his father.'
'Listen to me, Lambert. There may have been a second great firework for killing the Protector. Lovell made them. Thomas can tell us where they were living, where Lovell has perhaps left the device in a box — '
Lambert stood up. 'They stayed at the Swan, in King Street. Lovell brought them back again this week.' Gideon realised Lambert had in fact gently questioned the boy. 'Tom has mentioned no firework — but he is anxious because his viol, which Anne gave him, was left behind when they fled. His father told him not to ask after it.'
Gideon at once put on his coat. 'Go home, Lambert.'
'Not I!' Lambert scoffed. 'Do not argue. This is not Holdenby House. This time I am coming with you!'
They were too late. By the time they rolled up at the Swan, with Lambert puffing badly as Gideon hustled him, they were informed by the landlady that Lovell had left. Gideon swore. 'I talked about the gentleman before, with Master Tew — ' He remembered Nat Tew as gloatingly unhelpful.
'I've sent that fool to buy meat pies for the ordinary. If you must speak, speak to me.' The sister eyed up Gideon with an attitude he could not place.
'I told your brother I was looking for a fugitive, William Boyes.'
'Lovell,' Mrs Tew agreed placidly. 'I knew him when he was a filthy cavalier in Prince Rupert's bloody army. I saw him at Birmingham. He never remembered me — but I knew him. Nat gave him the room, more fool him. I had not seen him myself until today, and I never saw the young boy. They were here for two days without any trouble. Then the boy vanished and the man caused a commotion. I shot him.'
'That must have surprised him,' said Gideon, feeling surprised himself.
'I know you too; you are Gideon Jukes,' said the woman coolly. 'Does that surprise you?'
She was pleased how astonished it made him. 'You know me from where?'
'On the road by Stony Stratford. Calverton — you wanted me to know the parish. I had another name then — '
'Dorothy Groome!'
"Well, I am Mrs Maud Tew now, and that's for real.'
'I am amazed she still remembers you,' commented Lambert to his brother.
'I remember the day I gave birth in a ditch!' asserted Maud Tew without embarrassment. 'Your brother was just a big stripling on a saggy- backed old horse — though he was spying for Sir Sam Luke then, and Nat says he's spying for John Thurloe now'
Gideon was terse. 'I need to search Colonel Lovell's room.'
Maud Tew shrugged her narrow shoulders. 'Nothing there. As soon as he scarpered, I galloped to look. Just the usual full piss-pot and a smell of trouble.'
'Would that trouble smell like brimstone, pitch and tar?'
'What?'
'I must search your whole house. I apologise, but it may save you being blown up. While I am looking, please ask all your staff again: do they remember Lovell before? And when he went away then, did he leave behind a box?'
'He did not,' asserted Mrs Tew, jauntily. 'I would have looked in it.'
'A musical instrument?' asked Lambert.
'That would have been sold! But I would remember.'
'Could he have hidden something?'
'Where? Up the chimney with the jackdaw nests?'
'This would cause more than a soot-fire!' chortled Lambert.
'Cellars? Attic?' Gideon persisted.
'We are in and out of the cellars all the time, so no. The public never rummage in my attics; if he went up there, he's a cheeky beggar.'
'Oh Lovell is that!' Gideon confirmed. She knew he was right. 'Madam, take me to your garrets, if you will.'
In a low roof space at the Swan Tavern, Gideon and Lambert discovered Tom Lovell's missing viol. Its dead weight immediately revealed that it had been meddled with. When they lifted it down and found space and light in a low corridor to examine the thing, they could see its gut strings had been removed and the high bridge was missing. The silenced instrument was not one of the older designs that had a central sound hole; it resonated through two elegant F-shaped scrolls; they were too narrow to admit material in any quantity. So someone had spent time very skilfully removing the flat back of the viol's polished body, either prising it free or cutting it around the edge with a slim knife. The body, with its elegant wais
t, had been taken apart carefully, packed full and reassembled — glued and tied around with pack- thread, tightly in the first instance, though since it was done, the material inside had dried out the wood and made it gape slightly at the seams. 'Like an old powder barrel!' Lambert said meaningfully.
This size of viol was meant to be bowed by a seated performer, balancing it on the floor. Its neck would extend above the player's head. If such a large instrument was stuffed full of explosives, it was quite a bomb.
The Jukes brothers were both spirited. Gideon looked at Lambert; Lambert grinned back. Rather than wait for soldiers to remove the device officially, they each grabbed an end and lugged the viol downstairs between them, keeping it as horizontal as possible, which was how it had been stored. Outside, they put it down on its back in the middle of the small stable yard. A lad was sent to the Whitehall Mews for Lifeguards to take the device into custody.
Puffing out their cheeks with relief, Lambert and Gideon retired to a doorway; they calmed their nerves with pewter tankards of Maud Tew's excellent ale. Soon, she called them indoors for refills. While they were inside, one of Maud's more stupid customers wandered up to have a look. Detecting nothing of interest, he tapped out his pipe on the viol. Sparks fell through the sound- holes. Inside, a mass of combustible material was connected to gunpowder which was contained, for extra power, in a metal tube. Since the attic had been extremely dry, this still retained enough viability to produce a great flash and sheets of flame.
The mighty bang was not so large as the explosion of the magazine at Edgehill, into which a soldier put his hand while holding a lighted match. Nor so terrible as the eruption of eighty-four barrels of gunpowder at Torrington Church that nearly killed Sir Thomas Fairfax in a shower of blazing timbers, bricks and molten lead. Nor yet so enormous as the old gatehouse at Colchester that the two Jukes brothers had watched burst apart, showering severed limbs and shattered stone for many yards. But it was larger than anybody present ever wanted to experience.
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