Treason's Daughter

by Antonia Senior

  Think. Why am I here? Witchcraft? Devilry?

  Where is my father? When did I see him last? An age ago. On the banks of the river. The five MPs returning in triumph down the river, from the City to Westminster, after the king failed to catch them. Cheering, bonfires. The king fled London. Gone north.

  That’s right. I was cheering, happy. Arms linked with Oliver Chettle, the lawyer. Good fellow. Not one with Christ, but sound. Shouting for Parliament and for the true faith. Then I turned and there was Father. He stood looking at me, I remember now. Sam told me the old man had been to the Guildhall to rally support for the king when he’d come after the MPs. And they’d failed, the king and my father. The king chased out with cries of ‘Privilege, privilege’. And now the king gone and the City divided, and we stood there, and we knew we were on opposite sides of a torrent. I was all triumph, then I saw his face. Oh, my father.

  I’m naked in a field of corpses, Ned tells himself. By rights, I should think of my mother. But I can’t remember her face. I can remember a presence, a great love. I could call that feeling Mother. But it was always him there. He danced with me on his shoulders. When was that? On Twelfth Night. A room with a guitar and lute, and smiling faces, and me jigging on my father’s shoulders, and he turning round and round in circles.

  He chased me in a wood. And I hid behind a tree, and wanted to be found. He pretended to be a bear, growling at me. Where? He kissed me, and told me I’d grow up to be a hero, and now here I am, naked in a field of corpses.

  Ned thinks of his father standing there in the middle of a delirious crowd on the North Bank. Open-throated roaring; copies of the Protestation everywhere. Fluttering from the bands in men’s hats. Posters and bills proclaimed the MPs’ escape from a tyrannical king. The MPs, themselves, sailed down the Thames on gilded barges. Pym, at the fore, standing at the prow of the barge, waving at the crowd.

  ‘The barge he sat on was of burnished gold,’ shouted Chettle, and Ned smiled.

  Ned remembers how the joy curdled when he saw the look of untouchable misery on his father’s normally sunny face. At least, thinks Ned, I did not deny him. Like Peter as the cock crowed. Although I thought of it, God judge me. Thought to turn my back on him. Afraid of Chettle’s scorn.

  He shivers again. Cold. I have never been so cold. Can a body become frost? When does the blood freeze? Will would know.

  How strange it was, at the last, Ned thinks. After all the wrangling, all the fighting, you would have thought we would shout at each other.

  Instead, they walked towards each other, wordless, and hugged tightly. The talking done. They clasped each other. Ned realized he was the taller, as his father whispered in his ear: ‘Oh, my boy. My Neddy. Be safe. God watch you.’

  Then he walked away, and Ned watched his scarlet back disappearing through a sea of dun-clad godly revellers.

  God watch you, he said. Is he watching me? Ned wonders. He tries to remember what his father smells like, but all he can smell is the entrails of the boy lying beside him. The smell catches in his throat, picks its way into his skin through the goose pimples. He tries to imagine himself curled up in the warmth of his father’s arms, but the make-believe slides off his icy skin.

  Then what? Why am I here? Ned asks the moon. I volunteered. That’s it. Chettle made Adviser to the Committee for Public Safety, and Pym in charge. The king went riding around the country, securing munitions. He issued a call to arms, and Pym’s committee the same. I went to the Guildhall with Chalk, and we signed up for Denzil Holles’ regiment. They gave me a red coat. Where is it? My red coat? No money to keep a horse for the cavalry. So Chalk and me – pikemen. Standing beside the butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers.

  Old Birch, he was furious. Ned remembers his master’s brick-red face shouting. ‘Throw your life away,’ he said. ‘I care not. Soldiery: a fool’s errand. Don’t think I’ll have you back if you break your terms.’

  But Parliament had absolved the apprentices that fought of oath-breaking, and Ned walked away, head held high.

  So proud we were, me and Chalk, Ned remembers. Marching up the Artillery Ground, and back down again. A summer of drills, and sleeping on cold ground. New words becoming familiar. The long pike becoming less unwieldy, and hard skin forming on soft palms.

  At the centre of it all – Holles, the hero of Parliament. He spoke to Ned once. ‘Well done, boy,’ he said, at his pike work. When Ned was a tot, Holles was already an MP, making his name by holding the Speaker in his chair, to read out the grievances against the king. In and out of the Tower.

  So there we were, thinks Ned. Boys playing at soldiers, and up and down the country small fights broke out like boils. All the country bubbling with it, both sides squaring up, till the world tilted on its axis and we all slid to this. The king raised his standard at Nottingham in August, planted it in the mud and looked about him. And it fell down – just a puff of wind and down it fell.

  Ned laughs. The joke of the king’s standard falling – which had the boys in fits in the summer – that joke will never grow stale. Laughing hurts his head, though, clouding it again. He struggles for lucidity, shaking his head from side to side despite the pounding pain.

  There was a battle. ‘Edgehill!’ Ned says it aloud, triumphant in his feat of remembrance. I am at Edgehill. We are at Edgehill, me and all the corpses. A battle, then. Who won? Jesus, Lord. Maybe the godly lost. Are the corpses Roundhead or Cavalier? Hard to tell when a man’s naked and turned inside out.

  Taffy told Ned they strip corpses after battle, the camp scavengers. Scum. They must have thought I was dead, he thinks. I will be, unless I can find some warmth. Which way to go? Where are their lines, where ours?

  Ned is shivering violently. Gingerly, he stands. His head pounds. He looks around but can see only darkness, and the lumps of the dead. Maybe he should wait until morning. But you will freeze, Ned, he thinks in his father’s voice.

  He walks to one of the piled-up mounds of bodies. He lies next to it. Closing his mouth and his eyes, holding his nose, he tugs at a lolling arm. Flailing cold bodies land on top of him. Too many; he can’t breathe. He wriggles and pops his head out the top. They will keep me warm, he thinks, pushing the rising nausea back down into his belly. Still cold. But the shivering dies a little. Don’t think about them. Don’t look at them. Look up, at the sky.

  The stars are out now. He remembers Oxford, and lying on the roof of his college with Will.

  ‘Look there,’ Will said, pointing. Up there, beyond reach of the provosts, they talked in English. It came haltingly at first, the unshackling of their tongues from Oxford’s compulsory Latin. Will reeled off names that drifted into one of Ned’s ears and out of the other. The old names. The English names.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It is beautiful, Will, I grant you that.’

  ‘You can feel the workings of God, in beauty like this.’

  ‘But where is He? Where among the stars is heaven?’

  ‘Mysteries like that I leave to you who talk to Him. I talk to my books and my star charts.’

  ‘’Tis all the same mystery, though, Will.’

  ‘True.’

  Now Ned can’t even remember which one is the North Star. Will would be appalled. It would help to know. He could follow it north. But what’s there? A triumphant king, perhaps, and a gaol? Better that than dying.

  If I die in this field tonight, thinks Ned, will my soul float upwards? Will I look down on this field of corpses and see my body? Or does it work differently, in ways our brains cannot comprehend? Will says that sometimes the world is composed in ways which confound our common sense. We think the world is flat, because it seems so. Yet it is round, like a ball. What is the name of that Greek philosopher who first supposed that all matter is made of more than we can see? Thales of Miletus. Thought all the world was water.

  Perhaps, thinks Ned, we only assume our souls float up, because that’s the easiest way for us to understand it. Perhaps we break into fragments to get t
o heaven. Perhaps I am already halfway there. Naked in a field of corpses. Thales would recognize this as Elysium. Lord, I’m straying into blasphemous waters, he thinks. Forgive me. That’s not a prayer. Why am I not praying?

  I should pray for the ones I love. For my father, and for Sam and Hen. Oh, Hen.

  I wrote to her, he remembers. Told her we were marching under my Lord Essex to meet the king. Poor Hen. How worried she will be. Ned pictures her at home, curled by the fire with a book. What will become of her? She can construe any Latin text you throw her way, but would crumble if left to run a kitchen. Can’t see how the old man parades her. A novelty. Like the queen’s dwarf. Behold! My extraordinary daughter! Hear her declaim Cicero! Be amazed as this daughter of Eve speaks in tongues! Watch as she talks of philosophy, natural and ancient! A woman!

  The old man forgets what counts. What kind of wife will she make? Who would take her? Little Hen. Not so little now. Cheese looks at her with those puppy eyes. Ned smiles in the darkness at the thought. Then he remembers. Chalk. Where is he? Did he make it? Will I?

  What then? wonders Ned. Think. Why am I here? We marched and marched. Blisters. Ned runs one freezing toe over his other foot and finds the telltale little lumps. I thought they were sore. Now I know what sore means, he thinks, touching his head.

  Evenings round the fire, waiting for it all to begin. Who was in his mess? Chalk, yes. And Stephen Edwards, one of the countless run apprentices in the motley army, who everyone called Turnip on account of his unfortunate nose. And Taffy, the strange little Welshman. Small and tough, and scarred, though he pretends to be a novice like the rest of them. Holy Joe, who prays all day, muttering to himself. And Inky Pete, the eldest at twenty-five, a printer’s boy near the end of his term, driven by godliness to quit his bishop-loving master and don the red coat of Holles’ regiment.

  I never had a nickname, thinks Ned. The only one without. Chalk tried to lose his. It made no sense without Cheese, yet still it stuck. Why not me?

  He remembers a meal. The first skirmish of the war had just been won by Prince Rupert’s cavalry. First blood to the king. The survivors of the small fight had skulked back to the camp, smeared in blood and shame. The two armies had found each other at least, and battle clearly loomed. The boys were rambunctious and pensive in turn. They couldn’t strike the right mood. Ned wanted to ask Chalk if he remembered the old man’s warning about battle, but not in front of the others.

  ‘It’s a relief,’ said Taffy, swigging from his canvas carry, ‘that it’s finally here. No more talking, no more worrying. Just Cavalier blood on our pikes, and the fuckers lying in a stinking pile.’

  Turnip nodded. ‘No more thinking: have I chosen right? Is God with us? We’ve chosen. We’re here.’

  ‘Of course God is with us. Are we not fighting for his church?’ Ned snaps, to nodding from Holy Joe.

  ‘Our horse lost the first bout,’ said Chalk, nervously.

  ‘Never fear, Chalk,’ said Turnip. ‘It was a poxy skirmish. First blood to them, so they come at us with all presumption and arrogance. Then the Lord of Hosts will prove whose shoulder he sits on.’

  Taffy had laid back, head on his arms, legs crossed casually. Like he was on a picnic. ‘A relief, like I said, boys. A cum-rush after some bitch has been teasing you.’

  Taffy was trying to wind him up, Ned knew, so he refused to rise.

  Chalk was quiet, looking into the fire.

  ‘Frightened, Chalky?’

  ‘Plague take you, Taf,’ he replied.

  ‘Something will,’ said the Welshman. ‘Plague or pox. Smothered to death by giant teats is how I’d like to go. Not a bastard Cavalier if I can help it.’

  Turnip laughed. ‘Fat chance you’ll die happy, Taf. In a ditch, I’d wager. A cuckold’s knife in your back.’

  Chalk poked the fire with a stick, and a shower of sparks escaped skywards.

  ‘Why are you here, Taffy?’ Ned asked bluntly. ‘You do not count yourself as godly. Christ’s voice is silent in you. What offended you about the king? His laws? His taxes? His abuse of Parliament privilege? Why here?’

  ‘Why not, laddo? Fancied a rumble, and had to choose a side. Why not this one? If I’d known I’d be stuck with prigs like you, I might have chosen differently. Mind, I like getting your share of the wine.’

  The regiment was full of Taffys – men with no ability or desire to articulate their choice. What Ned found unfathomable was that they did not care, the Taffys; that they had no definable cause. It was enough that life had brought them there, to this point. To wield a pike for a reason is one thing, Ned thought. Holy Joe understood that much. No shades or subtlety for Joe; he just wanted to stick his pike in some papists. But to brave death and you can’t say why, like Taffy?

  Ned thinks about Sam. The boy lacks conviction to go against their father. He is sitting at home, by a fire, no doubt. And I’m glad, Ned decides. Better to choose love over faith, if the one is stronger than the other. Though I wish the Lord’s voice were stronger in them, my family, he thinks. Yet where is He? Where is the voice? Why have you forsaken me, oh Lord?

  Ned’s thoughts keep straying to his gruesome blanket, defeating attempts to drive them elsewhere. He doesn’t look around him, but keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the stars. If I did look at their faces, he thinks, I would not be able to tell who is a Taffy, who is a Joe, and who is like me. Your cause dies with you. Does it make your death any more pitiable if you fought for no reason? Or perhaps – and this thought makes Ned squirm beneath his fellows – it makes not one jot of difference. Your eyes stare just the same.

  Move on, Ned. Think of something else. A fire. They were billeted in a town, Ned remembers, one of many in that strange, prolonged hunt across the country for the king’s army. Every day a march, and the king just over the horizon. Sam and Ned used to play tag in the fields beyond the walls; this strange marching was like a prolonged military tag. With a hefty dose of cold and misery and hunger stirred in.

  A Sunday morning in this somewhere place, bright and clear, and the regiment gathered round their chaplain, Obadiah Sedgwick. He preached with fire in his belly; his thin, pinched face suffused with the power of truth. He was deep in the meat of it. Ned stood with his mates watching, and felt an answering fervour.

  Sedgwick wound himself, his voice and his tone spiralling ever upwards. ‘There is not such a God-provoking sin, a God-removing sin, a church-dissolving sin, a kingdom-breaking sin as idolatry. Down with it, even to the ground. Superstition is but a bawd to gross idolatry.’

  Behind Sedgwick, the church loomed. In its windows stood the coloured proofs of idolatry, the graven images of the modern, Laud-corrupted church. Inside those huge wooden doors were altar rails – set up to divide the clergy from the people.

  Impossible to hear the pure word of God in a place of idolatry and popish rails. The regiment sat in Sedgwick’s clenched fist, quiet and breathless. Even Taffy, next to Ned, seemed caught up in the preacher’s power. Chalk, eyes wide open, stared and shuffled from foot to foot. Holy Joe, eyes closed and muttering, was repeating the words back, committing them to memory.

  When Sedgwick stopped speaking and opened his fist, the soldiers flew past him towards the church. They battered at the heavy door, until it splintered into pieces. The clergy of the church sat huddled inside. Only one dared stand, and was swept aside by a fist, as the righteous men marched in. The Laudians crawled like dogs to the corner, and watched as the altar rails were ripped from their place. They watched as the stones flew through the glass images of Christ, as the icons on the wall were ripped from their settings. They watched as Taffy jumped on a pew and pissed on a statue of the Virgin, his urine running down her porcelain face like tears.

  Like dogs, thinks Ned. Papist dogs.

  Outside, they bundled the wooden altar rails onto a pyre, and then laid the fire. In the flicker of the flames, Ned looked at the faces of his comrades, and thought, ‘These are my brothers in Christ.’

  Ned remember
s the joy of it, and the sense of fellowship. The opposite of loneliness. It was warm, too, near the righteous fire. How strange and abstract an idea warmth is, he thinks now. He feels like his body is suspended in ice. Chettle once told him of visiting the Earl of Warwick’s mansion, and the ice cave there. They harvested the ice in winter, stored it in the cave and served it up with strawberries on sun-drenched summer lawns. It must be like this inside an ice cave, he thinks.

  What is it like to be warm? Have I ever known such a thing? he wonders. He simply cannot imagine warmth. The moon is clear and severe above him; it looks cold up there. Perhaps the man in the moon does not feel the ice. The sun, he knows, is hot. What does that even mean? Hot sun. He rolls the words around in his head, but cannot grasp their meaning. Empty words.

  He drifts on the iciness for a while. He pulls himself back. Think, Ned. Think. About what? The battle. That’s it. The battle.

  The foot soldiers were in the centre. Holles’ Redcoats were stationed near the cavalry on the flanks, sitting tucked in behind the Essex Brigade. The king’s army was ranged on the ridge ahead of them. Neither side stirred. Ned could hear the grumble of frightened men’s unruly bowels in the silence. He was amused despite his fear: an unexpected sound to accompany the start of a holy war. Then, slowly, they rolled down the hill, and his own bowels gave an answering twitch. A terrible wave advancing towards him. The crash of the artillery; somehow louder and more vicious than the same sound on the training grounds. Then the cavalry charged at the flanks, and the panic gripped the City volunteers.

  He saw Prince Rupert, he thinks, leading the right wing of the king’s horse. A young face to promise death so implacably. His sword waving, his dog, Boy, prancing at his side. No true dog, that one, but a devil-sent imp. Standing crowded in the middle, they saw their flanks crumble like marchpane, and the fear in the foot regiments stank like piss and wet wool. Ned saw Holles, standing firm in the centre, urging them on, and Ned gripped his pike with shaking hands. Chalk stumbled forward beside him. The two sides came together in a clash of metal and panic. Then… Then nothing.