Hen watches as Will helps Aunt Martha over a stile. Her aunt turns back and smiles at the boy from the stile’s summit, and Hen thinks how strange it is that a sudden, careless smile can conjure the child in the most resolutely middle-aged of women. How kind he is, she thinks. Why, you turnip, Ned would have done the same. With such grace, though? Now you’re arguing with yourself. Fool.
‘Why fool?’ Anne asks. ‘Who’s a fool?’
‘Did I say it aloud? I’m the fool. Come, honey. Let’s run. Let’s chase the littleys.’
They arrive, thirsty and tinged with that irritable happiness reserved for hot days, at the picnic spot. The river curves in a wide arc, and a company of willows stands guard over the shining water. The littleys run through the hanging shields of leaves, to paddle and poke things with sticks at the water’s edge. Linens are spread on rampant grass, baskets unpacked, and wine wedged between rocks in the river to cool. Then, at last, they are settled and still, the heat heavy on them, with only the laughter and shrieking of the little ones to splinter the summer silence.
Aunt Martha’s voice, querulous, breaks the spell. ‘Your face is in the sun, Anne dear. All this excitement is all very well, but I’ll not have you looking like a peasant.’
‘Nothing wrong with peasant girls, eh, brother?’ says Hen’s father, watching Martha sideways.
Ned blushes. ‘Never mind my father, Will,’ he says. ‘He likes to tease.’
‘He’s pure Benedict,’ says Will, grinning.
‘You puppy. Quit your yapping, boy,’ says Challoner. ‘Pass me a piece of that cheese before I whip you for impertinence.’
Will rolls over onto his front, his hair falling over his eyes. He tucks it behind an ear as he cuts a slice off the cheese. Hen finds herself mesmerized by his ear; the way it curls and tucks in on itself, the delicate peach of the lobe’s skin. Why have I never thought about ears before, she wonders, about how miraculously odd they are? Were William Prynne’s ears so beautiful before they cut them off for writing that pamphlet about the queen?
Fearful that he will catch her looking, she pulls her eyes away to stare at the grass. But they stray back again, as far as his hand where it grips the knife. Big hands, capable hands, with bitten, ink-rimmed nails. She traces the veins on the back of his hand, up to his wrist. A strong wrist, with fine hair on his arms visible up to where his shirtsleeve is pushed back.
As he passes the cheese to her father, Will looks up and catches Hen watching him. Both look away quickly, both turning red, neither seeing the other’s confusion. But Richard Challoner sees.
With more than usual tenderness, he says: ‘Ah, my pudding cat. Look at you there. All grown up. Where has my life gone that you, my baby, are all grown?’
‘Lost in wine, brother?’ Uncle Robert passes him a glass with the mockery.
‘Indeed, brother.’
‘Will? Ned?’ Uncle Robert asks, holding out the wine.
‘No, Uncle, thank you,’ says Ned, as Will holds his hand out.
His father bristles. ‘None for you last night, Ned? Are you turning temperance on us?’
‘If I say yes, you will mock me.’ Ned picks a daisy, pulling at the petals.
‘So say no.’
‘I cannot lie to please you, Father.’
‘Clearly. Where, boy, does it say in the Bible that you should renounce pleasure? When our good Lord turned the water into wine, did he put a cork in the blasted bottle?’
Ned says nothing. The silence spins out over the company, until Will clears his throat and says, with precision: ‘Forgive me, Mr Challoner, but I have not yet invited you to come to the college and view our new telescope.’
‘A telescope, boy! What a thing, what a boon. I will come, most definitely.’
Hen finds herself speaking before she can stop herself.
‘How much does it magnify, Mr Johnson? What can you see?’
‘Well, Miss Challoner, you can see as much as eight times larger than the naked eye. You can see the pockmarks on the moon.’
‘How different does the moon look, that magnified?’
‘She’s as beautiful, Miss Challoner, silver and glowing. But when you look closer, you can see the pits and the craters. She looks like she’s ravaged by the smallpox.’
Richard Challoner laughs throatily at this. ‘Hear that, Ned, boy? You must take the telescope with you when you’re wife-hunting. Check the goods.’
Ned scowls. Will carries on talking to Hen, who feels the tips of her ears burn as she watches his lips move.
‘You can see the stars, as if they’re in the room with you – whole ribbons of stars, Miss Challoner, strung across the sky. And if the sky is clear, and the time is right, you can see the moons a’circling round Jupiter.’
His voice sparkles, thinks Hen, as she feels herself drawn in by his enthusiasm.
‘How wonderful. Can I go with you, Father? To look through Mr Johnson’s telescope?’
I sound like a littley, she thinks, hearing the excitement in her voice.
‘Perhaps, perhaps. We must go home, child. In the morning, I think.’
‘Tomorrow!’ Anne and Hen cry in unison.
‘Father, what of the rioters?’
‘They will have burned their anger out by now, I have no doubt. News travels slower than their fury. I must be home, in case of damage. And you, my pudding, must come with me.’
After supper, as they gather to hear Robert Challoner reading, Ned tries to put some distance between Will and his father, sitting between them. Their friendliness grates on him. How can Will not mind the older man’s coarseness? Is Will laughing at them all, on the inside, storing up vulgarities to entertain his other Oxford friends? As Uncle Robert’s interminable reading of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus wends onwards, Ned imagines Will’s future betrayal, his mockery, in agonizing detail.
The reading finishes, God be praised, but Ned is horrified to see his father immediately corner Will. The conversation is harmless enough, however, for the moment. They talk of stars and meteors, safe amid the celestial equations. Henrietta listens in, enthralled.
Why, Ned wonders, would his father let her become so unattractively learned? No fellow wants his wife to know her hic haec hocs, nor to know more mathematics than him. It amuses his father to have Henrietta perform in public, to preen and primp her learning. Poor girl.
Henrietta catches Ned’s eye and smiles; glad that he smiles back. He has been prickly and difficult. Anne pulls her off to the window seat, for pledges of fellowship and last whispered secrets. And while Hen, too, feels the sorrow of their imminent parting, she finds herself looking over her friend’s shoulder. As the regrets grow wilder, and the promises to write grow ever more exacting, Hen finds her eyes flit, again and again, to where Will Johnson, talking passionately of his work to her father, draws stars in the air with his beautiful hands.
CHAPTER FIVE
August 1640
A FULL HOUSE. SAM AND NED ARE HOME, AND THEIR CLATTER and clutter fill the corridors. Two new apprentices, too, soon known as Chalk and Cheese. Chalk is tall, thin and pimpled; Cheese, small and verging on spherical. Their nicknames give Sam and his father a reliable source of mirth, inflated by Cheese’s hopeless resistance to the name.
‘He’s John and I’m Michael. Or Chadwick, if you prefer,’ Cheese says to Sam. His round face reddens when he’s angry, giving him the air of a maddened beet.
‘I know your name, Cheese, old fellow,’ replies Sam. ‘Would you prefer Mr Cheese?’
Even Ned’s rare smile makes an appearance during the Cheese-baiting, though he tries to look severe. He has come down from Oxford to start his apprenticeship with his father.
Hen likes the full house. She likes the noise and the laughter, and the sense of being connected to the world as the boys pile in from the Exchange or their carousing. Her father has a reputation as a man strict with business principles, but loose with moral ones, and godly parents do not choose him to s
hepherd their lambs. Cheese comes home smug and silent, trailing cheap perfume; Chalk more often carries the tang of the groundlings at the Blackfriars or the Cockpit. Ned, the household’s sole puritan, disapproves of bawdy houses and theatres, treating both with the same outraged contempt. His disapproval rolls off the boys, intoxicated as they are by being young and loose in London.
Hen fills long letters to Anne with Sam’s wit and Cheese’s wrath. She chronicles Ned’s increasing godliness and his growing estrangement from their father. Both Ned and Challoner believe that there can be no reasoned, sensible route to the other’s moral high ground; each sees the devil’s whisperings in the other man’s argument.
Hen watches this mutual incomprehension spiral and turn fractious. She sees, too, what they cannot – that it is their love for each other which ratchets up the bitterness; neither can bear to see the other become the devil’s imp. They draw further apart, pushing each other into ever-stronger intransigence.
Ned spends his spare time reading the pamphlets and lectures that are whipping London’s godly into a passion against Laud and his popery. Hen suspects that he creeps into the leather-seller’s shop on Fleet Street, abandoning his own parish to hear unlicensed preaching by the layman Praise-God Barbon. She sees Barbon striding down Fetter Lane sometimes, carrying his trade’s tools with the air of a man who takes his soul seriously.
She writes:
Ned told Father that Mr Gouge, the godly divine at St Anne’s Blackfriars, preached a broadside against covetousness. Sam tried to kick him under the table, but he repeated Mr Gouge’s thunderings.
‘An immoderate getting is when men spend their wit, pains, and time in getting the goods of this world, and rather than fail, lose their meal’s meat, and sleep, and other refreshments, yea, and neglect the means of getting heavenly treasure.’
How Father thundered back. My darling Anne, you must imagine here cursing and the swearing; I should blush to write it. But if you read it back and insert an immoderate word or phrase at every third word, you will have the sense of it.
My father said: ‘How can you be a merchant without being covetous? Do you have any sense of what your calling will be? If you must choose between your God and your trade, your conscience and your family’s empty bellies, where will you choose?’
They have not spoken since, that I have seen, just mutter at themselves as the other passes. How Ned will stay all these years under Father’s tutelage without it coming to violence, I cannot tell. His ally, my grandmother, largely keeps to her room, so Ned stands alone against my father.
Hen writes too, with deliberate lightness, of the news that Will Johnson is to live in London from the autumn, coming to the Temple to study law.
Though Ned says he wanted to stay in Oxford and survey the stars between lectures, his father, it seems, had different notions. Will was placated, Father thinks, by the notion that Astronomy and Geometry are treated with due reverence at Gresham, although not at Oxford. In London, then, he will have more chance of meeting those who share his passions.
Hen’s happiness is tempered only by her father’s air of distracted worry.
Hen knows that the Exchange is a cauldron of fear and rumour. The costly Scottish wars drag on. Credit is drying up. Money slips through the City, oiled by confidence, and it is one commodity in short supply. But her father’s concern seems to run deep.
‘It’s London, Hen,’ he says, when pressed. ‘I don’t like the mood. The place is like a feverish colt. Twitchy. Skittish. It can smell the failed parliament still, and it’s nervous.’
One night, with the first chill of autumn in the air, they gather by the fire. The Scottish army has crossed onto English soil, the king’s army is in disarray, and even Chalk would rather talk in sombre tones, with the front door bolted and barred, than venture out.
To Ned, with whom he has a temporary rapprochement in the face of the Scots’ threat, Challoner says: ‘I am not a defender of the personal rule. Not I. But it was better for our trade than this fog of uncertainty. A failed parliament is worse than a no-parliament.’
‘How bad is it, Father?’
‘It is not good. The money supply is frozen. Mere scruff available on insulting terms, even for those with impeccable words. We rely on our own books to keep us afloat. But uncertainty is no bedfellow of household spending. Orders are down. Prices stagnant or falling. The aldermen bleat like sheep and know not where to turn. Our own guild is seething with rows and worries, and the others, I’m told, fare little better. The lord mayor, well, Hen would be more of a man than him.’ He reaches for his wine. ‘Yet it is good for you boys to see merchandising in shadows, as well as in sunlight. It is all in the nature of huckstering. We are not holding out our caps for poor relief just yet, nor reduced to pedlary. The ship I told you of, from the Levant, is not yet worryingly late. The astrologer Penn tells me the stars are still with it. And the Scots, well, they will doubtless stay holed up in Newcastle. The crisis must break soon.’
Cheese stirs himself from making dove eyes at an indifferent Hen to say: ‘I was in Whitehall today, sir, and the soldiers were buttressing the defences round the Banqueting House.’
‘And there are chains on the streets at Cheapside, and they are strengthening the Tower,’ adds Chalk. ‘Do they really think that the Scots will come?’
Hen imagines the Scots of the pamphlets, blue-faced and ferocious, tearing up Fetter Lane.
‘No, boy,’ says Challoner. ‘The defences are not for the Scots; they’re for you.’
‘Sir?’
‘The Scots are not coming. But Strafford knows that there’s plenty here, like our Ned, who think the Scots have the right of it in this argument, and that they should be at liberty to pray without bishops and altars.’
‘As should we all,’ says Ned fiercely.
‘Let us fight about this no more, Ned,’ says Challoner. ‘The Privy Council is afraid of you, astonishing as it may seem. I should get Strafford round here, to watch you ladies lolling by this fire. That would cure his fright. But it was apprentices who stormed Laud’s palace not four months ago. You can form a formidable mob when roused . . . And you, well, you boys all think yourselves men when there’s violence in the offing.’
Sam says: ‘You proved yourself a man when you went to fight in the Low Countries.’
‘I proved myself a fool.’
Hen can tell her father is a little drunk. She knows Sam sees it too, and wants to needle tales out of the old man.
‘It is manly, Father, to fight for what is right, not foolish,’ says Ned.
Chalk, Cheese and Sam all nod vigorously. But, thinks Hen, you all have such different notions of what is right. Who is to judge?
Challoner says: ‘So I thought when I set out to fight for the faith. Lord, what a ninny-head I was. It is right, too, Ned, and worthy of a man, to fight to keep himself whole, intact, so he can feed and care for his family.’
Hen looks at the boys, who all wear that curiously uniform face the young assume when they think their elders are talking nonsense.
‘Well, boys,’ says Challoner. ‘If we must do this, we must. Stand up. Let’s look at you.’
They stand in a line in front of him, drawing themselves up taller under his scrutiny. Cheese puffs out his chest, soldier-shape, and looks at Hen.
Challoner says: ‘Cheese, you are a gambling man, I believe, though you swore to your mother you would not.’
Cheese blushes and murmurs a perfunctory denial. His chest caves inwards.
‘So there are four of you. Here are the odds, as my ragtag band of Holy Protestant warriors found them when we fought the devil in the Low Countries. At least one of you will, at the first sign of a battle, piss himself and shit himself. Wars being what they are, you will not find sufficient water to wash yourself or your clothes for at least a week. So even if you survive the battle, you will lie in your own filth. When you finally peel off your putrid breeches, you will find maggots living there.
‘Chalk, boy, let us say that this is your fate. Sit.’
‘Sir!’
‘Sit, boy.’
Chalk reluctantly sits down.
‘And then there were three. At least one of you will have your guts blown out by a gun, wielded by a man who never even saw your face, and cares not in the slightest for you, or your soon-to-be-departed soul. You will be trampled on by your colleagues as you lay dying in the mud. Probably calling for your mother. Sam, sit down.’
Hen seats herself beside Sam as he sits, white-faced. She takes his hand.
‘One of you will find out that you are a terrible coward. Terrified of the enemy, but terrified of your brethren more. So you will fight and hack at the enemy and be feted as a heroic soldier, while all the time the fear haunts you and the devil dances in your brain, until one day you step under an enemy axe, hoping it will cleave your addled mind in two. Which it duly does. Cheese.’
He taps Cheese on the head.
Cheese grins as he sits, but it is a forced smile, and no one believes in it. Ned stands, eyes level with his father’s, waiting.
‘Father,’ says Hen, trying to head off whatever is to come, but he ignores her. I should stand in front of Ned, she thinks, and goes to move. But Sam grasps her arm, holding her back.
‘And one of you,’ says Challoner, moving towards Ned until their faces are close, ‘will find something else about himself. In my experience, the one who believes himself closest to God. He will find that he likes it. He feels the battle-rage pouring into his soul like molten lead, and oh, how he loves smiting the enemy. He likes watching the light drain out of a man’s eyes as he twists the pike. He likes the small grunt some men give as their soul flees. He likes to crush the faces of those he kills under his heel, just because he can. And one day, still raging from battle, he will find himself in the defeated enemy’s camp, and he will feel God’s fire in his loins as he forces himself into a papist witch. And the fear in her eyes makes him harder and harder, until he bursts, and he tells himself that her cries prove her guilt.’
Treason's Daughter Page 5