‘So we should aim for dull mediocrity?’
‘At all times. But enough of this. Why do I always fall into these conversations with you? I came for a purpose. I need you to visit Lucy Tompkins.’
‘Father!’
‘I know, I know. It will not damn you, my darling, to spend an hour in her company.’
‘Why do I have to?’ She crosses her arms, holding her book into her chest.
‘Is all the pain in the world not in my foot, keeping me housebound? Did I not ask you? Did your old man not prostrate himself to you, begging you for a favour?’
‘No.’
‘Well, consider yourself begged or ordered or entreated, or whatever it will take to make you bestir yourself and do me this service.’
‘Can I at least wait until the rain comes off?’
‘Yes, if you must. And Henrietta, you would oblige me by giving this parcel to her father.’
He hands over a small, nondescript package. She knows him well enough to sense the shift in tone, the sudden chill, and she looks at him.
‘Well, well,’ he blusters, and retreats from the room, his stick thumping on the floor.
Challoner is uncharacteristically evasive over the coming weeks, and Hen’s questions slide off him. Every few days, she finds herself visiting women she scarcely knows, binding herself into her formal clothes and flogging her small talk. And every meeting ends with an afterthought – a package or a letter for the man of the house, remembered casually and diffidently offered.
She watches them read, sometimes, as their frowns deepen and their heads tilt and their questions die on their lips. She would not be able to answer, anyway. She doesn’t know what the messages are about, and he does not tell her.
Soon enough, she stops asking her father, for fear of his answer. For a pattern is emerging. The men are prominent moderates, silenced by the raising of the king’s standard. These are the peace party, the merchants, the lawyers and the middlemen, who warned against the war and resisted the slide to a broken realm. These are the men for whom stability, trade and the unhampered wheezing of the law courts trump God and principle.
Hen comes to think of the tracks of her innocent visiting across the city as a silvery snail-trail of the disaffected. She can see the pattern, but she does not fully understand it. What do these men want, now that peace is in a disorderly retreat? The land has been shaken to its roots, and in the settling all men have chosen sides, whether or not they wanted to make that choice. Where are these men now, and why is she linking them together with her visiting?
She chooses not to question too far. What do her inclinations to support Parliament matter, compared to her loyalty to her father? Men have the luxury of a rampaging conscience. Women have duty. At least this is what she tells herself in yet another stifling room, with conversation stuttering around her and the basket on her lap weighed down by another package, heavy as thirty pieces of silver.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
December 1642
A WOMAN HOLDS THE DOOR AJAR, GRIPPING ITS EDGES between thumb and forefinger as if it were something foul. She peers out at Hen with reddened, hooded eyes. From somewhere behind her comes the frantic wail of an ignored toddler.
‘What?’
‘Mrs Pound?’ Hen stammers.
‘What is it to you?’
‘Sorry, I . . . My father is friends with your husband. He—’
‘Can go to the devil.’ She spits it from behind the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Hen. ‘Can I help?’
‘Food?’
Hen shakes her head. The door slams violently shut.
She returns later, this time with a full basket. The woman beckons her in, looking behind her on the street.
There is silence as she rummages in the basket and brings out a loaf, tearing into it with her teeth. Children gather, wide-eyed and eerily quiet. Five in all, ranging from about two to ten. They ignore Hen, watching their mother pulling apart the bread and handing it out.
They ravage the bread, falling on it like rats to the slops. Hen can hardly bear to watch it. The children are well dressed, and polite enough to thank her once the edge is chewed off their hunger. The children’s mother behaves oddly now that her own hunger is eased. There’s a shifting unease in her now, as if Hen has caught her in some secret transgression. The private pain has been laid open to this stranger, and the woman veers between a squirming over-familiarity and a clear resentment.
‘They arrested him,’ she says. ‘Five days ago. He left no money. The servants left. I should go to sell our stuff, I suppose, but I cannot yet… Not yet.’
‘I understand.’
‘Do you?’
Hen raises placatory hands.
‘They say he is a royalist spy. The daft bugger. They’ll hang him, I expect. He’s to be investigated by a special committee.’
One of the smaller boys begins to cry, and Mrs Pound distractedly draws him into a close embrace.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘And how am I to feed my children, miss? My husband’s patron, Lord Portland, is already in the Tower, damn his eyes. What will I do?’
‘I… That is, I…’ Hen falters, not knowing what to say.
‘Never mind. Thank you anyway for the food.’
Hen emerges into the street. She feels a sharp relief to be outside, shedding the woman’s cloying misery, sloughing off the immediacy of the children’s pitiful faces. And that plaintive, unanswerable question: ‘What will I do? What will I do?’
A guilty, happy smile on her face. Then, across the road, behind a rumbling cart, she sees a man watching her.
Her skin shrivels, shrinks on her bones. Of course they would watch the house. Of course, of course. Her heart quickens. He is small-featured, sharp: a rat-catcher of a man. Her legs buckle and beg her brain to run. Her stupid, stupid brain. Mrs Pound’s hunger is not her hunger. Those children are not her children. Her skin is too tight for her body, too tight to hold in place her yammering heart.
Jesus, keep me. Jesus, are you listening?
She struggles to push the fear back down into her gut, to keep from letting it out, betraying her. She forces her eyes to slide away from the man, who raises his face to the sun, his nose to the scent of her fear.
She walks away, risking a look back at the man. He is still watching the house. Perhaps it is a coincidence. Perhaps he is just taking a stroll, selling something, related to the house. Perhaps, perhaps.
He looks at her suddenly, a smudge of a smile on his face, and she knows that she is lying to herself. She feels a ridiculous urge to run over to him, to declare her allegiance to Parliament, to God’s pure voice. To name her brother Ned; to call on the name of Sir Philip Skippon; to throw herself on his mercy. The man looks away again, his air deliberately casual.
He has no proof of anything. Her basket is empty of all but crumbs. He does not even know who she is. She is two streets from home, where her father sits, laid up with the gout. His swollen leg is propped on cushions, and he shouts and grumbles at Harmsworth to distract himself from the pain. That man does not know these things. That man does not know who she is.
She sets off at an amble, up Bow Lane towards Cheapside. She has not thought this through. She glances around and there he is; ahead is the busy cacophony of Cheapside traffic. As she approaches it, she will have to slow down, and he will be upon her. Coming up to the corner, she sees a gap and runs to it. A whinnying horse and a shouted curse and she is through. It is busy, even more so than usual.
Her father had warned that there could be trouble today, at Haberdashers’ Hall, where the Committee of Both Houses for the Advance of Money is planning to meet. Londoners, wrung dry by Parliament’s demand for money, are feeling mutinous, rediscovering their affection for the king they jeered out of the city.
She struggles her way through the crowds. There he is, the rat-catcher, wandering along the other side of the street. Whistling. Looking in shop windows. He pauses in fron
t of one of the fine goods shops, strung between Bread Street and Friday Street, oodles of gilt proclaiming its exclusivity. The bastard. How to shake him? The need to take action helps quell the fear. If she stops, if she falters, it will swallow her.
Suddenly, she thinks of her books. Of the battle of Thermopylae, and how a narrow aperture can change the odds, shake fate off its trail. A reverse Thermopylae. She finds hope enough to smile at the thought.
So how to do it? She thinks of the narrow tangle of lanes that curl around each other, north of Cheapside.
She turns off, up through Gutter Lane. Now she will know – there will be no mistaking his purpose if he follows. She looks behind her, and there he is. Less nonchalant. Their eyes meet, and there is no mistake. And now she must be guilty of something for she is clearly running from him. An innocent would meet his eyes and bob, not turn, as she has done, speeding up to a near run, her shoes sliding on the mud and the cobbles.
She turns into a narrow passage overhung with slatternly buildings that meet in the middle and block out the light entirely. It’s barely big enough for two abreast. She can hear shouting through the flimsy timber walls, and a baby crying. Washing flaps down into the alley, waving at her and tugging at her hair like ghostly sentries. She can hear the squelch of his feet in the mud, and she begins to think that this is a terrible mistake. Time slows, like a nightmare, and his breathing is amplified in the closeness of the alley. She pushes aside some washing and there is light at the end, and shouting.
‘Peace and truth!’ shouts a voice ahead.
‘Hang truth,’ comes another cry. ‘Peace at any price!’
The man senses the danger of losing her and she hears his footfall wind up to a greater pitch, and suddenly she is through, into a packed and raucous crowd that swallows her up, and eddies her about with her feet barely touching the floor. And she crouches low, letting herself be lost in the crowd.
When she is sure she has lost him, when she has doubled back on herself and waited in nooks and scanned the faces around her, then and only then does she succumb to the great, tumbling fall of joy that follows her escape, filling her from the toes up. She bounces and skips. Her skin loosens and becomes sweetly tender, so the cool winter air feels like a lover’s kiss.
She is alive, she has beaten her enemy and she is reborn.
At home, she struggles to contain this wild happiness, even as she is telling her father about what happened. She watches the concern on his face, already furrowed with the pain of his gout.
‘We must put a stop to your wanderings, pudding cat,’ he says.
She looks around the room, at the familiar, safe walls. She imagines going back to how she was before she had tasted love, before she had stood on top of a fortification she had helped to build. Before these new adventures, and the intoxicating combination of fear and joy which was so exactly the opposite of boredom. She imagines going back, and the panelled walls seem to crowd in on her, like carved and polished trees in a sinister wood.
‘No!’ she cries. ‘No, please. Let me help. I want to help.’
‘The king?’ her father whispers, and it is in the open now, beyond secrecy.
‘Hang the king. I want to help you. Please.’
Christmas passes sombrely, if not soberly. Ned makes it home for the Twelfth Night feast. He is on Skippon’s staff now, and while the army idles at Windsor, waiting for the peace negotiations to bite, Ned’s duties are light. Few people expect peace. But, as Challoner says, at least the sides are talking, if not in a language intelligible to each other.
The Twelfth Night feast is a quiet meal, family only. The spectre of past Twelfth Nights lingers; but there is little visiting this year, and the family eats its own minced pies quietly, in front of its own charred yule log. Chalk’s absence is raw. Cheese has gone home to the country, pleading a sick mother for retiring from city life. They all expect him to burst through the door when the peace is signed, the mother miraculously recovered and the son eager to re-embark on his path to riches and dissolute living.
But if the party is small this year, it is warm. Richard Challoner watches his three children, all safe and healthy, talk and bicker with each other. The war seems very far away. They go upstairs with the wassail bowl; the old lady refuses to leave her room now. Sam carries it, and the punch sloshes, dripping over the side. Ned and Hen mock him as they reach their grandmother’s door.
Hen knocks gently, and pushes the door open. Grandmother is sitting upright in bed, her hair brushed and plaited, her gown clean and snowy white. She has been looking forward to this evening, Hen knows. She reaches for Ned, and he sits down next to her on the bed, holding her paper-thin hand.
‘Ned, boy. Ned, my darling one.’
‘Well now, Grandmother. Another year, and you still going strong.’
She smiles. ‘When it’s the fire that beckons, you’re in no hurry to meet it.’
Ned frowns. ‘God’s grace is with you, Grandmother.’
She looks at him as if he is a little boy still. ‘He is with you, Ned. I am forsaken.’
Just once, thinks Hen, could we move on? Worry about something other than salvation?
But Hen remains silent and, as if doing penance for her unkind thoughts, bustles forward to plump up her cushion.
‘You’re a good girl,’ her grandmother says. ‘Boys, you must look after your sister. Coddle her. She will not be much use on her own, and what man will have her in these times?’
‘Any man,’ says Sam fiercely. ‘Any man would be lucky to have our Hen.’
She snorts. ‘Oh yes? Her father a not-so-secret royalist in a city held by Parliament? And she a girl who can’t hold two stitches together, or carry a tune. Who gets lost in a kitchen. Who dances like a bear, or not so well, perhaps. Come, Sam, don’t be blind – look at her.’
Sam and Ned turn to look at Hen, as instructed. She shrugs and moves away from the bed towards the fire. I will not be needled, she thinks.
‘She knows I only say it from love,’ says the old lady behind her. ‘She knows, as well as I, that this is a bitter world for women, and she cannot change it, only accommodate it.’
‘She won’t need us,’ says Ned gently. ‘But if she does, Sam and I will both be there to look after her.’
Hen smiles wanly at him.
‘Aye,’ says Grandmother. ‘You a soldier, and him an apprentice to a dying business.’
They all four sit silent a while. Outside, there is snow falling. Once, when snow fell, the Challoner children would have been wriggling with anticipated joy, desperate to be out in the garden revelling in the fresh falls. Snow marks the passage to adulthood, thinks Hen. One morning, you wake up and see that it is snowing. And you list the inconveniences the snow will bring, and you grumble a little as you climb out of bed. And that moment is the pivot, the exact turning point between being a child and being an adult. The moment when, whether you realize it or not, your life has been drained of its unthinking joy. Happiness is harder to find, as an adult. Father looks in a glass, and Ned in the Bible, and I in my books, she thinks. But we’re all doomed to failure, as long as we look out of the window and think, ‘Bother that snow’.
‘It’s snowing,’ she says, in her brightest voice.
They all turn to the window and look bleakly at the crystals forming on the glass.
Challoner comes into the hall, brushing the snow from his shoulders.
‘Move your arse from the fire, Ned, boy,’ he says, and Ned vacates the great chair. Challoner’s eyes are shining, and his cheeks glow from the cold. He claps his hands in front of the blaze and laughs, as the snow drips into waterfalls from his cloak.
‘How I love a good snowfall. Makes the city look almost presentable,’ he says, his voice booming.
Sam grins back at him. ‘Twelfth Night never seems right without the snow.’
‘Where have you been, Father? We were waiting for you to start the games.’
‘Bring them up, bring them up,’ he says,
deflecting the question.
Sam darts out of the room, and then returns with the rest of the household, scrubbed and poured into their Sunday best. Nurse and Cook look as if they have been at the port, while little Milly, not so little, is ramrod straight by the door, as if looking for an escape. Harmsworth stands as if on sufferance by the wall, his face wretched. He disapproves of Christmas, and he wants them all to know it.
They gather round the wassail bowl, replenished and pungent. With great ceremony, Challoner dishes out the punch. He holds a cup to Ned.
‘Come, Ned,’ says Challoner quietly. ‘You may be dead by Easter. Or I may be. When I am, boy, you can make Christmas as drab and as dull as you like. But, for now, for me, take this.’
Harmsworth watches Ned as he reaches out a hand and takes the proffered cup. ‘Serpent,’ he hisses suddenly. ‘Serpent in the garden.’
In the bowl, apples bob and duck. Ned holds the cup, suddenly looking foolish and young. His eyes dart between Harmsworth and his father, both looking expectantly at him. Quickly, as if to take himself by surprise, he drinks.
Sam and Challoner cheer, and Hen smiles. Harmsworth retreats into himself, his face impassive and unreadable.
Hen drinks more of the heady spiced brew. It travels down her body, flooding her with a warmth that is compounded by the presence of her family, whole in body, and laughing together.
A knock, suddenly, at the door. Harmsworth slips out, and reappears a moment later with Edmund Waller.
‘Ah,’ Waller cries. ‘The family gathers! And I, the unwelcome interloper.’
‘Not at all, not at all!’ exclaims Challoner. ‘A cup for you, sir.’ He fills a cup with punch and Waller drinks deeply.
‘A triumph,’ Waller says. ‘Most perfectly spiced. Miss Challoner, I salute you!’
Nurse and Cook giggle, and an awkward silence threatens.
‘Apologies, Mr Waller, you don’t know my eldest boy, Edward. Ned, this is Edmund Waller, poet and Member for Hastings.’
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