There is only silence. She can see his face in profile, as he looks out over the darkness of the Temple gardens to where the river must be.
How little I know him, she thinks. He is a collection of things I find fascinating: his passion for the stars, his beautiful hands, the way his hair falls, his slightly crooked smile. But I do not know him, really, this boy who sits beside me.
His chin is tipped towards the sky as he looks at the heavens. His face picked out by pale moonlight is beautiful, but entirely new to her in this light.
Who is he? And if I do not know him, why am I made so tumultuous by his presence?
‘I should go,’ she says, no nearer to understanding.
‘Not yet.’ He turns to her, his face set in an expression she does not recognize, impossible to read. He shuffles closer. ‘It was a shock. Seeing you like this.’
They kiss, and there is an urgency about him. His hands wander further than usual, along her legs and between her thighs, where her heavy skirts should be. She pushes them away, but the longing to respond, to lay her body open to him, is so strong, so intense, it frightens her.
‘Will. No.’
‘Hen, my darling.’ His voice is thick, strange.
She stands up. ‘I must go.’
They cannot look at each other as they return to his candle-lit room. It is as if, by abandoning her women’s clothes, she has lost her armour.
Both are taut with desire, and shamed by it. They walk without touching down the stairs to the street. At the bottom, she runs off without turning.
Home through the window, and to bed, where she dreams strange, dark dreams of being pinioned to her mattress by the man in the moon.
Then there is The Wednesday After. She is nervous approaching the churchyard. Swallows swoop in her stomach. She sees him, and they greet each other stiffly. But the daylight, and the bustle of the bookstalls, and her dress, all combine to make them easier. The dark passions of their previous encounter seem unreal here; only the slight swirl of an undercurrent remains to remind her that it did happen.
They sit on their usual wall, and he makes her laugh with tales of his master – a man who manages to be both swollen by pomposity and shrivelled by pedantry.
‘’Tis the mark of a good lawyer, I fear.’
‘You shall have to learn it, then, Will.’
‘On my oath, Hen, I’m not sure I can.’
‘I think you can.’
‘I shall take that as an insult.’
‘And so it was intended.’
‘He thinks I am at the library, drowning in law. I wish my life was otherwise, Hen. I’m sure I shall be a very peculiar lawyer.’
‘Yet you can’t live on stars.’
‘Or feed a family on moon-pie.’
They sit in silence, but it is companionable. They both know the hopelessness; why talk of it? Better to sit here, side by side in the churchyard, creating a bubble that neither the city’s busy workings, nor their own impossible future, can prick.
CHAPTER SEVEN
November 1641
IN A FIELD IN HOXTON, HEN WATCHES HER FATHER RIDE PAST ON a tall grey mare. There are forty from his guild, marching in order as part of the king’s triumphant procession into the city, home from Scotland.
Not much to be triumphant about, Ned crowed on the way there. The king’s power is a limited thing in the north now, after the costly failures of the Scottish wars, and the godly Covenanters have the Scots’ souls in hand. But Ned is there to wave on his father, not the king. Richard Challoner is a rising man. A City player. He has his health, his hair and his teeth. A man to be envied: rich and prosperous, and blessed with two hale sons and one irrelevant daughter. Today is his day of triumph, chosen from all the guild to ride with the king.
Hen, there with Sam and Ned and the apprentices, cheers loudly and waves back at their father.
Cheese shouts, ‘Don’t he look the part!’ above the crowd’s hubbub and she nods happily. She imagines Cheese’s head is filled with images of himself, fat and prosperous, riding as a liveryman through cheering crowds.
Ned is smiling too. He seems happier, freed from their father’s yoke. The two men are finding ways to be friendly, despite their political enmity.
‘You’ll be riding up there one day, Cheese, old fellow,’ he says.
‘Cheese!’ cries Sam. ‘But he’s a beetle-headed halfwit.’
‘So, Sam Salad-Brain, are most of those bastards riding there,’ says Cheese. ‘Half a wit ain’t a barrier to a full wallet.’
‘Money can’t buy you what counts,’ Ned says.
‘Let’s see,’ says Cheese. ‘Power, women, food, booze.’
‘Sounds enough to me,’ Chalk shouts.
Ned stifles a smile.
‘Look at Gurney,’ says Sam, pointing to the Lord Mayor, who carries the city’s sword in a position of honour behind the Prince of Wales and in front of the Lord Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal.
‘My point proven,’ says Cheese. ‘Look at the old goat, and the smug grin on him. And him a newly minted baron too. Why? Money. That’s why.’
Chalk drapes an arm round Cheese’s shoulders, and the two bellow: ‘The Lord preserve King Charles!’ with the rest of crowd, as the king rides past on a magnificent white charger. Behind him comes a coach carrying Henrietta Maria, the Duke of York and Princess Mary.
‘The queen has aged shockingly,’ Hen says to Ned. Her small, doll-like face is criss-crossed with wrinkles. An old face sitting unnaturally on a little girl’s frame.
‘’Tis ageing paying court to the whore in Babylon,’ he says grimly.
Or perhaps it is the strain of a husband under siege, Hen thinks. Poor woman. Papist or no, the pressure must be almost unendurable. They say she is more of the warrior than her husband; that the queen’s influence is behind the king’s perplexing oscillations between conciliation and confrontation with his enemies. When her voice is loudest, he turns to fight, standing on his royal dignity to give himself height.
Suddenly Will is standing with them, grinning. Drums are beating and cannons firing. All is noise and thunder. The artillery men rattle their muskets and shout. At the centre of the noise is Will, and he is smiling at her in the weak winter sunlight.
‘I thought to see you all here,’ he shouts, looking at Ned, but speaking to her.
Ned slaps him on the back and says something that Hen can’t hear. Sam, though, looks at her as if to assess her reaction to Will’s sudden appearance. She feels her cheeks redden, and turns to shout again to hide the confusion.
‘The Lord preserve King Charles!’ she shouts, her voice feeble in the tumult. Will stands next to her. And if in the crowd he presses against her, if his hand brushes hers and his thigh touches hers, who is to know it?
Richard Challoner, senior liveryman, vestry member, heir apparent to the parish place on the city council, the very definition of a London pillar, is in his library. He is surrounded by papers: seditious ones, loyal ones, ranting ones, mad ones. Petitions and demonstrations, pamphlets and newsletters, scurrilous poems and subversive ballads. All the outpouring of London’s white-hot presses piled on his floor.
He looks across at Henrietta, who sits amid the piles, cross-legged and furrow-browed.
‘They will burn you for a witch, pudding, if we are not careful,’ he says.
‘I want to help, Father.’
‘It’s a Herculean task, kitten. The presses are like the Hydra’s head. Burn one, and another springs up. Imprison one dissenting, unlicensed scrivener and another three jump up writing pamphlets martyring the first. We shall drown in paper, pudding.’
She smiles at his vexation. Hen is entirely happy in this work. Her father, a moderate who still keeps friends on either side of the growing schism, is charged by his livery company’s aldermen with scanning the output of the presses. It is a whispered commission; some of these scribblings have earned their publishers the pillory, or gaol. But the company’s officers want to know what is
being said, by whom, and how far the press has escaped control of the government.
Strafford is more than six months dead, condemned by the rhetoric of Oliver St John, and the king’s reluctant acquiescence. He was executed at the Tower to a roar of approval that must have reached the king at Whitehall, as he lay shut in his chamber, prostrate with grief and guilt. With Parliament’s victory and the blowing of the Strafford-shaped hole in the king’s retinue, dissent has become a booming business. The king has been presented with petitions from the MPs, from the people and from the Lords. Some have even been written by women, and the thought makes many a crypto-Catholic compulsively cross themselves. Men have marched on Westminster in their thousands, barracking the bishops and the king’s peers. A barrage of grievances is raining down upon the beleaguered monarch – in print, in person and in the snarling voice of the crowd – and there is still no sign of an end to the tumult.
Bewildered by the scale of his task, Challoner has accepted Hen’s help in following the crisis as it appears in print. He covers his unease at exposing her to the endless tracts with pious chats about her duty: to him, to the Crown, to her maidenhood. She pretends to take his lectures seriously, and both are satisfied.
‘Another one about the Irish. Their rebellion is the first stage in a papist plot,’ she says, tossing a pamphlet into the ‘Evil Irish’ pile.
‘Shall we be knifed in our beds, or impaled on crosses?’ Challoner asks.
‘Neither. The Irish are cannibals, and like nothing more than smearing a Protestant baby on bread with quince jelly.’
‘It would be as funny as it should be, were people not believing it all, kitten.’
She nods, drawing another one from an unread pile beside her.
Challoner settles himself in a comfortable chair with a pamphlet calling for a march on bawdy houses. Hen knows that this exaggerated settling presages a slow, head-jerking descent into a deep nap.
‘Will you sleep, Father?’
‘Sleep!’ he cries, all astonishment. ‘Not I, pud. There is work to be done.’
Moments later, his head nods for the last time and he is gone. Hen has grown to associate the radical rhetoric with the rattle and whistle of her sleeping father.
There are tracts about the king’s demands for money, and equal wrath about Parliament’s poll tax. There are diatribes against the bishops, and eloquent justifications of them. There are papist plots uncovered and Arminians condemned. There are radical sects unearthed, and independent congregations lambasted, their occasional female prophets denounced as whores.
The wild rhetoric fascinates her. Do people believe words more, when they are fixed to paper? She thinks of the papist plot that never was. Do all the printed words that talk of papist plots make those plots real? Where do words and actions meet? Is there a space where it is impossible to tell the difference?
As Parliament opened in October, a pamphlet appeared which set the city ablaze with talk and gossip. ‘A damnable treason by a contagious plaster of a plague-sore, wrapt in a letter and sent to Mr Pym.’
Inside, a dark tale of a letter to Pym, the leader of the reform party in the Commons. He opened it, and out dropped a plaster with a plague-sore stuck to it. The letter condemned Pym as a traitor and promised to kill him: ‘I have sent a paper messenger to you, and if this does not touch your heart, a dagger shall, so soon as I am recovered of my plague-sore. Repent, Traytor.’
The horror of the first reading stays with her now. The word ‘plague’ is a powerful one; imbued with history and horror and all a crowded city’s fear.
‘It isn’t true, kitten,’ said her father contemptuously when she showed him the tract.
‘How not?’
‘Pym needs a plot to rally his friends and demonize his enemies. It’s nonsense. Everyone says so.’
‘Everyone with reason to hate Pym.’
‘Perhaps.’
But the realization that troubles Hen is that it does not matter, in effect, if the story is true or not. Those who want to believe it do; those who don’t, likewise. And the story is so strong, so powerful, that it rises above truth and falsehood, to become something else. It is a heavy-shotted broadside in the war of words, in which people sift the noise to find the nuggets they already believe in.
Ambiguity in words troubles her too. The Protestation, Parliament’s attempt to forge new unity, is riddled with ambiguity. Her father swore it, and Ned swore it, both with good faith. All grown men must, now it is enshrined in law. Yet if both could swear it, what use was it?
‘I, Richard Challoner, do, in the presence of Almighty God, promise, vow and protest to maintain and defend, as far as lawfully I may with my life, power and estate, the true reformed Protestant religion, expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all popery and popish innovations within this realm, contrary to the same doctrine, and according to the duty of my allegiance to His Majesty’s royal person, honour and estate; as also the power and privileges of Parliament, the lawful rights and liberties of the subject, and every person that maketh this Protestation, in whatsoever he shall do in the lawful pursuance of the same.’
Afterwards, she said to him: ‘But Father, what is, as you see it, “the true reformed Protestant religion”? What are the “power and privileges of Parliament”? You and Ned have both sworn and vowed to defend these things; yet, if I sat you both in a room for a month, you could not agree on a definition of each.’
Challoner nodded ruefully. ‘I know it. We let this document give us succour, and yet . . .’
‘It is meaningless.’
‘Not meaningless. Desperate, perhaps.’
She stops now, remembering the conversation, and looks across at him asleep in the chair. Now he would not sign. The Protestation has become the symbol of the reformers. The ‘true reformed Protestant religion’ is now defined by custom and partisanship as a non-Laudian one. It is pared back and Calvinistic. The Laudians rally around the Book of Common Prayer, Charles’ approved version of church services. The Scottish Covenanters and their English sympathizers believed the book ‘emerged from the bowels of the whore of Babylon’. More commonly quoted rhetoric to add to the maelstrom.
There is a notable rise in pamphlets, bills and posters calling for ‘No Bishops; No Popish Lords’. As the moderates in the Lords increasingly find themselves backed into the king’s corner, the votes of the bishops in the Upper House are carrying ever greater weight. The Commons’ reformist zeal is repeatedly punctured by the Lords. While the reforms are blocked by the Lords, the reformers rankle. The more strident they become, the further the moderates are pushed towards the king.
The fire burns fierce in the grate. It is bitterly cold outside, this December. Sam is upstairs, sleeping off last night’s outing with his fellow apprentices. She heard him come in, late and stumbling. It is hard to imagine, in this cheerful room, the trouble fermenting on the streets, fuelled by the innocuous piles of paper lying across this floor. She knows her sense of peace is an illusion. In May, not long after Will first kissed her, the family sat huddled at the back of the house while the windows at the front were broken, systematically, by apprentices cheering Strafford’s death. She buried her head in her father’s arm and realized, for the first time and with a sickening lurch, that he could not keep her safe. That the words he used to whisper to the little Hen – ‘Daddy’s here. You’re safe now, pudding. Safe –’ were empty lies. She cried then, and he thought it was fear, and he whispered in her ear more sugar-spun empty promises as the mob bayed outside and the glass shattered.
She wishes now, on this calm winter evening, that she could keep the world at bay, draw an unbreakable line round her family. She wishes she could daub lamb’s blood on the doorpost, so the Angel of Death will fly straight past.
Her father stirs and settles again, and she takes up a blanket and tucks it round his outstretched legs. The effort of flogging the business through the weakening of the City’s finances is telling on him. He looks ol
d, worn.
She picks up a tract: ‘The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ’. She notes, with a thrill, that it is written by a woman, Katherine Chidley. Chidley opens with an apology for being ill-educated and female, and yet presuming to write of the State and the Church. She lays out her argument with a beguiling simplicity. It is God who grants the right to worship and petition, not Government. The state church may be the ‘King’s Chappel’ but it is not the ‘Lord’s House’. The Lord’s House may be found in separatist congregations, meeting in private houses, anywhere with humble souls and open hearts.
And in those houses, thinks Hen, the women have the right to write petitions, such as this one, and even to preach.
Women have spiritual equality before God, Chidley implies. The thought is intoxicating. Hen dwells on it, turning the proposition over in her mind. She can understand why such a notion would be viewed with fear and suspicion. But is it not true, she asks herself, that the simplest, truest ideas are the ones that make their opponents most afraid?
The door opens, and her grandmother walks in. It is a rare occurrence to see her here, and Hen jumps to her feet. She can see Nurse hovering behind her, and a sudden dread takes hold of her.
Grandmother surveys the scene. Hen is dishevelled, ink spattering her like mud; Challoner is snoring, surrounded by papers piled high on each other in precarious stacks. Grandmother holds out her hand and Hen places the Chidley pamphlet in it. Grandmother reads the cover.
‘Henrietta, this is by a woman.’
‘Yes.’
Grandmother’s fist clenches round the paper, scrunching it tight.
‘Christ have mercy on us.’
‘But you would like what she says, Grandmother. That the state can have no monopoly on conscience.’
‘Henrietta, she is a woman.’ The word, loud and fierce, brings Challoner spluttering to wakefulness.
‘Hey, hey,’ he cries, as he sees Henrietta’s face, flushed and defiant, facing her grandmother’s tight-lipped rage.
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