They see her sitting there and they halt, with almost comical awkwardness, in the doorway.
‘Beg your pardon, miss,’ says one, a little sheepish.
Hen remembers the carriage of Lady D’Aubigny, her extraordinary poise. She draws herself up and lifts her chin, and then says in a voice infused with as much steadiness as she can manage: ‘How dare you burst into my room like this. Who are you? What business can you have here?’
They mutter something inaudible. Behind them, she can hear her father’s voice. Though she can’t hear his words, she can tell from his tone that he is blustering. He’s turning on the boozy charm, and she prays to God it will work.
The soldiers continue to stand foolishly in the doorway. They look like apprentices from the rougher trades, scooped up from the tanner’s workshop or the smithy, handed a sword and told to be fierce. Hen holds her pose. A man comes in behind the pair.
‘Miss Challoner?’ he says. He is expensively and soberly dressed. His coat is cut from fine midnight-black cloth. His hair is sparse on top but long at the back, where it curls almost foppishly over his gleaming white collar. His eyes are pale and unblinking. There is something at once clammy and fleshy about his skin, like hot-crust dough slipping from its mould.
She nods. The man – around her father’s age she would estimate, perhaps a little younger – bows.
‘Nehemiah Stroud, Miss Challoner, at your service.’
‘If so, my service demands you leave this house immediately, whoever you are.’
He bares his teeth in a semblance of a smile. ‘Wit, good lady? We are taking your father.’
Hen feels her poise slipping away. ‘Where to?’
‘The Tower, of course.’
She closes her eyes. The Tower. Dear Lord, protect us.
‘What for?’
‘Treason.’
‘Against whom?’
‘Very droll, again, dear girl.’ He inclines his head in a demibow. ‘And now I must ask you to leave. We must search the house.’
Hen pulls the poise back, tucking herself up in it like a blanket on a cold night.
‘And if I refuse to leave my own house?’
‘You cannot, I’m afraid.’
‘Mr Stroud, is it? I have nowhere to go. One brother lives at home, and is out somewhere. The other is marching with Phillip Skippon. His right-hand man. Ned was at Edgehill and at Reading.’
Stroud smiles again, and she realizes that he knows all this. He knows all about her, and all she has is his name. This imbalance of power unsettles her.
‘Your admirable brother will, I fear, be distraught when he hears of your father’s betrayal.’
There is something she does not like about the way he says it, something knowing and snide about his tone. Her father has come into the room behind the soldiers and she wonders if he caught the off-key tone in Stroud’s voice. His face is impassive; only a nervous adjustment and readjustment of his cuffs suggests he is aware that a troop of armed soldiers is raiding his house and threatening him with the Tower. He can walk, at least. The gout is in abeyance, for now. She wants to run over and stand by him, but she fears the rustling of the paper in her skirts and the exposure of the lumpy cushions.
Challoner’s eyes dart to the table where the Mercurius had been sitting, and the space where the newest royalist pamphlets were sitting. Others – the oldest ones – are held in a chest he has buried in the garden.
Stroud picks up a murder pamphlet from the table, from amid the towering stacks of papers. It is a lurid account of a crypto-Catholic’s slaughter of his wife and child. He looks at the woodcut on the front and turns it sideways, to better establish that it is indeed the child’s headless, spurting trunk on the floor. He tosses it to one side.
‘I will go through these later,’ he says. ‘And now, Miss Challoner, you may, if you prefer, wait in the kitchen with the servants.’
‘I would prefer to stay here,’ she says.
Challoner walks towards her.
‘Pudding cat. Do as the man says.’
She tries to speak to him with her eyes. ‘I would have a minute alone with my father.’
Stroud, visibly impatient, waves a dismissive hand. ‘Miss Challoner. Enough. Move now.’
Challoner holds out a hand and she takes it. Standing, she watches Stroud as his eyes move past her to the lumpy cushions now laid bare. He walks over in short, sharp strides and pulls a cushion away from the seat with one violent motion. The newsbooks tumble to the floor. Loose papers float like leaves and settle on the library’s rush-strewn floor.
Stroud stoops down and picks one up. The front page, in bold type, spells out its aims: ‘Communicating the Intelligence and Affairs of the Court to the rest of the Kingdom’.
Hen is still holding her father’s hand, and he squeezes it tightly.
‘Will we have to stretch that pretty neck too?’ says Stroud. ‘Quite a collection, Miss Challoner.’
‘They’re clearly mine, Stroud,’ says Challoner. ‘Now, can we get on with this? Hen, go to the kitchen. Go on, child.’
Hen walks stiffly to the door, trying not to dislodge any of the papers. A sudden thought comes to her.
‘My grandmother,’ she says to Stroud. ‘Please. She’s upstairs. She’s too scared to leave her room. Please don’t make her. She’ll be terrified.’
Stroud just slides his face into a strange, bloodless smile.
In the kitchen, Hen sits with Sally, Nurse and Milly at the table. Harmsworth faces the fire, his face hidden from view. The boy Wayneman cries, frightened.
‘Stop that noise, you wretched sniveller,’ spits Nurse.
Milly holds out an arm and the boy comes to hide his head in her skirts.
‘Fool boy,’ says Nurse.
Silence again. They listen to the tramp of the soldiers’ boots overhead, echoing through the floors.
‘They said they were taking him to the Tower,’ says Hen.
‘Jesus wept,’ says Sally under her breath.
‘What will become of us!’ cries Nurse. ‘We shall be turfed out to beg, to pimp, God help us.’
Suddenly they hear screaming. A high-pitched wail pierces through the house.
‘Grandmother,’ whispers Hen. She stands and walks to the kitchen door, pulling it open. A soldier stands, blocking the way.
The screaming fades into a low whimpering. Hen watches as three soldiers carry her grandmother down the stairs, gripping her thin wrists and ankles. Carrying her like a sack of coal, they toss her into the kitchen, and she scampers into the corner furthest from the fire. There she crouches, her grey hair loose and tangled around her face, her thin arms clutching her knees. Hen can see the purple fingermarks of the soldiers on her skin.
‘Grandmother,’ she says quietly, and crouches down next to the old lady. She reaches a tentative hand out to touch her shoulder.
Quickly, spitefully, her grandmother twists and spits at her.
‘Did you ever see the like?’ whispers Sally. ‘Wits set adrift by fear, poor thing.’
Hen remains crouching down, not sure of what to do next. Her back is pressed against the wall, and she leans her head against it. Lord, give me strength, she prays. Please, please, give me strength.
‘Look at her,’ says Nurse. ‘Looks like she’s right all along. Damned. Clearly damned. Would our Good Lord send one of his own to such a state?’
Hen finds herself standing, fury blinding her. Before she recognizes her own actions, she has slapped Nurse across the face – a full, open-handed slap, which sends Nurse’s head cracking backwards, her mouth frozen into an ‘Oh!’ of astonishment. The noise of the slap ricochets around the kitchen, and even Harmsworth turns round. Milly smothers a smile, and the boy registers amazement amid his still-flowing tears.
Ashamed of her violence, yet fiercely refusing to regret it, Hen retreats into the corner. Nurse puts a hand to her red cheek, looking at Hen all the while. She opens her mouth as if to speak, but then closes it. They look
at each other, and then both look away.
The door is closed again, the soldier on the other side. Hen stands up and walks over to the fire. Ignoring Harmsworth, she reaches under her skirts and pulls out the sheaves of paper concealed there. She throws them into the fire in batches. They catch and burn, the black charred edges spreading to devour the words. Rants against rebels and radical plots. Warnings of women preachers and social sedition in all its devilish guises. Exhortations of loyalty to the king, paeans of praise to Prince Rupert and the warrior Queen Henrietta, who shared a ditch with the king’s soldiers at Edgehill as the cannonballs whistled over her head.
All the words crumple and burn in the flames. It is a gesture towards helping her father, but it is too little, too late. Destroying the words will not help, she knows that. Stroud knows. And after all, her father is clearly guilty. Of something, anyway. He is not the only one. Fear prickles across her skin in a familiar pattern. Jesus, keep me. Please, God.
Hen feels herself faltering. She could too easily curl into the corner next to Grandmother and start whimpering. If I lose my mind, she thinks, who will help Father? I am to be tested, like Peter at the cock-crow, and I fear that I will fail.
At last, the door opens, and Stroud appears. His pale eyes sweep the room until he finds her.
‘Miss Challoner. We are taking your father. I have no doubt he will be given liberty of the Tower soon, and you will be allowed to visit.’
‘I must come to say goodbye.’
‘Too late, I fear,’ he says with a smirk. She feels her fingers itching to deal out another slap.
Hen waits until she hears the front door thud shut before she emerges from the kitchen. The house is turned upside down. Chairs are upended, chests emptied, beds stripped. In the hall, her father’s great chair lies tipped on its side, amid the chaos. The chest where the dining service is kept lies open, its contents thrown across the floor. In the library, the books are pulled from the shelves. Loose pages litter the floor; countless spines lay cracked, broken underfoot.
Something crunches under her feet – glass. She looks down and, with infinite care, picks up the broken pieces of The Object, her father’s microscope. She sits, cross-legged on the floor, trying to piece the bits together. Behind her, there are footsteps.
‘Hen, thank the Lord you’re safe. What in Christ’s name happened here?’
‘Sam! Sam, I can’t fix it. It’s broken, Sam. I can’t do it.’
She breaks then, spilling great, heaving sobs into Sam’s shoulder as he crouches on the floor next to her, looking around at the chaos in the gathering darkness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HEN WALKS THROUGH THE TOWER’S GREAT ARCH, PAST THE guards and the idle gawpers, past the cluster of ravens which gathers at the entrance, past the beggar woman who sits every day begging for coins and lamenting her lost husband. Just a week of this routine. It is incredible how quickly the extraordinary can become commonplace.
She walks under the shadow of the White Tower and ducks into a doorway in one of the further, smaller towers embedded in the wall. Even this place has its hierarchies. Her father is in a small room with a slit for a window and a bare stone floor. But he has the liberty of the Tower and can come and go within its walls. Hen has done her best with cushions and hanging cloths to soften the room. No shelves here, just books in stacks against the walls. A layer of dust is collecting on the surface of the uppermost books – they are horribly undisturbed.
Her father rises to greet her. She hates his forced smile. The light has gone from his dear face, and what’s left is a shell, brittle and empty. She lays down her basket of food and kisses him.
‘Dear one,’ she says. ‘How did you sleep?’
‘Fair, pudding, fair.’
She looks out of the thin window into the courtyard. A gang of children are playing an intricate game with a ball. Sunlight finds its way through the ramparts in patches; men and women cluster in the dappled light. An old man sits on a bench in the corner, turning his face up to catch the sun. A couple argues in a darker corner, the man waving an angry finger at the woman.
It could be a normal street. If you walk through the cobbled paths quickly, and try not to think about the darker corners, that is. There is talk of the Rats’ Dungeon, deep in the Tower’s bowels, where high tide floods the cell and draws the rats in, hungry and vicious. There is an old and crooked man who walks the cobbles and tells all who will listen of his time in Little Ease, the four-foot square hole which forces a man into a perpetual bestial crouch.
The Tower is safe enough, for most, above the cobbles and in the daylight. At night, when the ghosts roam, and below street level in its dark recesses, it reeks of evil. Tortured souls wander here, they say. Papists and godly alike, depending on which sister was on the throne. Their souls walk where their bodies were racked and stabbed, pliered and twisted and forced to recant. Every fire, here, carries the echo of flames past, when the kindling was heretics and the spark was a monarch’s righteous fury.
They say Archbishop Laud is here somewhere, but Hen has not seen him. The Tower is full to bursting. Thomas Hood, Challoner’s warder, wears the perpetual look of a man ordered to feed scores of mouths on two loaves. Not that she pities him; he is an unbending keeper. A man without compassion. He has developed a knack of seeing only the prisoner, and not the man. Perhaps it’s a necessary skill for a warder.
She turns back into the room, where her father sits on his bed and gazes at some point in the middle of the room as if it holds some deep significance.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Yes, child, don’t fuss.’
‘What have you eaten?’
‘And would you care to know the secrets of my bowels too? God rot it, Henrietta. Leave off mothering me.’
She turns back to the window, waiting for his anger to blow itself out, and the inevitable contrition to set in.
She watches a small, cheerful man walk across the courtyard, waving his arms about to make a point to the younger man who towers over him. Is that Laud? If so, she wonders, does he feel the shame of helping to bring us all so low? Without Laud, would the country be all ablaze?
She runs through the steps they have taken since her father’s arrest. Letters have been sent to Ned and Uncle Robert; the Lord knows if they will arrive. Sam managed to unwind at least some of their father’s deals on the sly before news of his imprisonment and looming sequestration reached the Exchange. His face was aglow with his small triumph. He converted what little stock he could into cash, albeit at pitiful prices.
Life continued as normal, otherwise. The servants kept on, and in the dark. The house still lit with full wax candles – no tapers or rushes. Meat on the table. Ale brewed and poured. Washing pummelled and scrubbed. Keeping face. And keeping faith that their father will escape this web.
Tompkins and Waller were arrested too. Let them hang. God, please, let them hang, not him.
‘I will visit Lucy Tompkins and her father later,’ she says, still gazing out of the window. ‘Do you have a message for him?’
‘No. But thank you. I will see him later anyway, no doubt. The girl never stops snivelling. Grates on a man’s nerves. If her godly relatives refuse to take her in, you may have to, after we swing.’
‘You will not swing,’ she says.
Lord, not Lucy. Hen feels the burden already of Grandmother, old and feral. Her wits have never returned. The servants are edgy, too, and needy. She is weary of maintaining her poise, but to let it slip would sow panic. And now Lucy to add to it, who sleeps on a trestle bed in her father’s Tower cell. She veers between tears and whining. Hen prefers, on balance, the whining. At least it sometimes has a measure of wit about it, the occasional flash of acerbic spirit.
‘Hen. I will swing, you must know it.’
‘I do not.’
‘My trial starts in one month. It will be absurd, I warn you now. A mock trial, like Strafford’s or Laud’s.’
He reaches for his w
ine glass. The sun is still low: hours to go until noon. He sits here all day and drinks, she knows. Waiting to pass out. These hours before lunch are his most lucid.
‘We will be scapegoated. A new Hipponax.’
‘Hipponax?’
‘The pharmakós. There’s nothing new in man’s history, my kitten. In ancient Athens, at times of strife, the Demos would appoint a scapegoat: a human sacrifice to atone for whatever is rotten in the state. Hipponax, the satirist, was one. I am to be another.’
He stands and paces, waving his free arm for emphasis.
‘Sacrificed for the sake of this rotten government, which needs my blood to shore up its waning support. Bastards. And Waller, the bastard, is calling in his friends and favours. Mark this, Hen. His neck will not stretch, while me and Tompkins will dangle like scarecrows. Westminster protects its own.’
‘Stop it, Father, please. Stop. Would you have me snivel like Lucy? I am trying not to break, but you are not helping.’
‘Am I not?’ He turns to look at her. She watches him struggle with some internal strife. ‘Aye,’ he says, and sits down heavily. ‘I am called a traitor. A traitor! To whom, Hen? The ignorant culls. How can loyalty to the king be treacherous? How can loyalty to being at peace be treacherous? This land is bleeding, and they call me the traitor, God blast their souls.’
He pours a fresh measure. ‘I have a duty to you, my pudding, with what time I have left. Here’s the truth, so you at least shall know it. I did arrange for monies to be sent to the king. I did secretly collect gold, and make contact with those loyal to the king in the city.’ He drops his voice. ‘Tell nobody of your involvement, Hen. Nobody.’
She nods.
Louder again, he says: ‘I was the channel for the money, and Lady D’Aubigny the boat that took it to Oxford. All else, those wild stories of a deeper plot to kidnap the king’s children, or to seize the city walls – that is all fantasy. I wish, now that I am to be condemned anyway, that I had gone further.’
‘Really? Yet you are not such a friend to the king.’
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