‘Someone has to look after Grandmother. How I envy you, Sam. To do something. To fight. What utter bliss. What joy.’
He finds a rare smile. ‘They should raise a regiment of women, Hen, and set you at its head.’
‘If only that were possible,’ she says fiercely. She pauses for a space, before giving her greatest fear a voice. ‘What if you meet Ned? In battle, I mean.’
‘How likely is it? Besides, when he turned Judas, he set all this in motion.’
‘But what if he did not? What if he is playing Peter, not Judas? Coward, not knave.’
Sam snorts. ‘Hen, they came for Father first, before the others. They knew too much. About him, about us. If not Ned, then who? What happened, do you think, when he weighed his father against his God? Him and his poxed conscience.’
She sinks a little further into his shoulder.
‘I must go to visit Father. When will you leave?’
‘At daybreak.’
On the way to visit her father, Hen stops at the butcher’s shop. Inside, a woman in her early thirties is cheerfully wielding a cleaver. She lifts it deftly and thwacks it down onto the wooden bench as if she’s enjoying it immensely.
Hen watches, unseen. There is something comforting about watching this woman, with her capable hands and her sense of purpose. She stacks the portions she’s been hacking neatly, and swings the leg round at right angles. She lifts the cleaver but then, as she’s about to start the downward stroke, she notices Hen, stopping the swinging action with a lurch.
‘Oh, miss,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.’
‘Never mind. I was watching.’
‘Cutting for pies, miss, begging your pardon. I like ’em all the same size, see.’
‘Yes,’ says Hen. She walks forward.
‘Miss Challoner, ain’t it?’ the woman asks.
‘Yes. Sorry, I…’
‘It’s all right, miss. I’ve seen you in church.’
‘Oh. And your name…’
‘Hattie Smith, miss,’ she says, smiling, waving a bloody hand in a cheerful gesture.
The smell of pies permeates the shop, rich and deep. Hen suddenly realizes how hungry she is, and the realizing of it makes it keener. She feels dizzy.
‘Are you well, miss?’ comes Hattie Smith’s voice, as if from a great and unbreachable distance.
‘Yes, I…’
Hattie’s there, suddenly, holding her by the elbow, guiding her to a chair.
‘There now, miss. Don’t you worry.’
‘Sorry,’ says Hen. ‘Sorry, I didn’t… I mean… Sorry.’
‘Well now, you’ve not had an easy time of it, miss. I heard about it. Your father, I mean. And him such a kind, cheerful old chap. You been eating?’
Hen shakes her head. She thinks about how all her father’s old friends cross the street to avoid them; the echoing silence from his business associates. She thinks about all the standing tall she’s been doing when all she wants is to crouch.
Then Hattie pushes an oven-hot pie into her hands. ‘There, miss. On me, and one for your father too.’
The unexpected kindness is too much, a final push, and Hen finds herself crying fat, inconsolable tears.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
INSIDE THE TOWER IT IS DARK AND COLD. DAMP CREEPS UP the wall. Hen stifles her regret at leaving the clean sunlight outside. She sits at his feet; he is in the only chair. The room is silent, thick with stale air and misery. The sunlight in the small window is blindingly bright. Sounds drift in from outside. She can hear the big cats in the menagerie roaring in unison – the keeper must be prodding them or provoking them. She can hear the sound of bowls being thrown, the thud and clink of the balls. Someone is singing a psalm, badly. Someone else is laughing loudly.
She can hear the scuttle of an insect across the stone flags, but she can’t see it in the gloom. She looks up at him, at the way his shoulders droop, and his head lolls sideways; and always the slow, determined raising of glass to lips. She listens to the clink of the bottle hitting the rim of the glass, the sloshing of the fresh wine, and the rhythmic swallowing, regular as a heartbeat.
She lets herself be entranced by the stillness of it all. Hen has never been good at being still and empty of mind. In normal times, if she is still, she is asleep or reading. Too easily bored, her father said. Too male, Nurse said.
Occasionally he reaches down and strokes her hair. It is simply gathered at the back, unstyled. Who has time to tease out curls and lacquer down partings when the world is slowly shattering?
She watches the light in the window begin to lose its brilliant noon-glare. The game of bowls has stopped. How long has she been sitting here? They must think of food soon.
They have been sitting quietly for so long, she struggles to speak. ‘Here, Father,’ she says, pushing the pie towards him again. ‘Please eat it. The butcher’s wife gave it to you especially. Bade me make sure you ate it.’
‘Not I,’ he says, his voice muddy with wine.
‘You must eat.’
‘Must I? And why must I, Hen? Does it matter, when I’m up there, swinging, if I’ve eaten or not?’ He looks at her and softens. ‘Well now, pudding, perhaps a little wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘You’re just humouring me.’
‘Aye. I am.’
‘Well, I am not hungry. We’ll forget it.’
‘Now you must eat. You’re too thin, darling. Like a bargeman’s pole. Not a wrinkle of fat on you.’
She puts her head on her drawn-up knees. Neither of them makes a move; they are gathered in by the torpor again.
‘I used to think,’ he says, ‘when I was young like you, that if I knew my time was coming, I’d pack the intervening hours so full they would explode. Women and booze and laughter spurting out of them for hours like fireworks.’
‘And yet,’ she says.
‘Yet I find I am sitting in the dark like a God-blasted mole. Waiting for judgement. Chalk that one up, pudding. Yet another thing the young, who think themselves so blasted clever, are wrong about. And here’s another one, pudding. The young think that the old have cracked the great mystery. That they have learned how to die.’
‘Not true?’
‘Not at all. We’re just as scared of death. We’ve learned nothing. But it’s closer to us. We can hear the whoreson’s scythe whistling past our ears in the darkness.’
‘So it’s the same – young and old.’
‘No, not the same. Are you listening, pudding? The fear itself may be the same. But when you can hear Him whistling for you, it just means you are scared all the time. That’s what age brings, pudding. No fucking wisdom. Just a nagging, perpetual fear. So stay young, my darling girl. Stay young.’
She doesn’t wake when Sam leaves. When she does come to consciousness, it is late and the sun has warmed the curtains on her bed too much. She feels clammy and heavy. As she struggles out of sleep, she knows he’s gone without having to call or search. The loneliness weighs perceptibly heavier on her. I will not bend, she vows to herself. I will not.
She is hungry. She pulls on an old gown and walks out of her room, forgetting to listen at the door for footfalls first. She nearly trips over Harmsworth, who is walking down the stairs, arms full of linens. He ignores her and carries on down the stairs, placing the linen in a pile next to a basket full to the brim with silver plate. Her father’s best wine glasses are there too, laid in a padded chest.
‘What are you doing?’ She leans over the balustrade.
‘Taking what’s my due.’
‘Your due? How dare you! Put it all back. Put it back, I tell you. Or I shall . . .’ She trails off.
‘Or you shall what, exactly, miss?’ He smiles up at her from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Twenty years, miss. Twenty years of abuse, and viciousness, and living in a house with no godliness. The devil dances here, and I’ve played the pipes too long. A godforsaken dandy-prat. And when the sequestration order comes, I shall be on the street, old and penniless. Just b
ecause your father could not see right from evil.’
‘That does not give you a licence to steal.’
‘Steal? No.’ He turns his back on her and tidies up his pile of linens.
‘Harmsworth!’ she shouts, furious. She runs down the stairs and stands in front of him. ‘Put it back!’
‘Shut up, witch!’ He shouts it at her, spittle flying from his mouth and landing on her cheek, like a slap. ‘Vile, unnatural creature. Satan’s whore.’
She takes a step backwards.
‘I know all about you, witch. Meddling with mysteries. Reading the word of heretics. Cavorting with that unnatural boy. Do you spread your legs for the devil at night, witch? Do you call him in through your window? Does he suck on your witch’s teats?’
She shakes her head, frightened by his vehemence. She backs into the wall.
Hen notices that he wears Ned’s burnt cross round his throat, and it dangles down over his heart. He turns away, muttering. ‘I should have denounced you, too.’
‘Too? What do you mean, too?’
‘What do you think? That I would sit by and let the devil’s work go unchecked? That I would let Satan sit on your pig father’s fat stomach and cause the ruination of all the godly reforms? All that Master Edward and his fellows fight for. He made me weak, your poxed and pathetic father, but he did not crush me altogether.’
‘It was you! You informed on him!’
He smiles and puffs out his concave chest. ‘Of course! Who else?’
He bends down and piles all his booty into one sheet of linen. He picks up the ends, twists them, and heaves the makeshift sack onto his shoulders. He makes for the door, and Hen stands aside to let him go. She waits until the door has slammed shut before she sinks to her knees and shouts her gratitude to God.
Hen is in Sam’s familiar old breeches, her breasts bound against her chest and hidden under a heavy grey doublet. Heavy because she has quickly sewed every piece of her mother’s jewellery, every piece of precious metal that Sam bought with her father’s liquid assets, into its patched lining. Her pass, begged from a reluctant Chettle, carries Sam’s name on it.
She has hired a horse from an inn outside the gate, and she is clinging, with an ungainly desperation, astride its saddle. She remembers trotting round the paddock in Oxfordshire on a horse named Strawberry, learning to sit man-style on the saddle. She can picture Anne’s face, bright with laughter.
She is not distracted for long by her thoughts. The physical punch of her journey is starting to tell – already her thighs are feeling the unusual strain. Even though it feels like she has been travelling for ages, she can still see the walls and defensive works of the city if she turns her head.
By the end of the second day riding, her thighs are oozing blood through the breeches. Her skin is rubbed raw, and exquisitely painful. The muscles are screaming for her to stop. Yet still she rides, hour after hour. The latest horse she has hired from the postmaster is skittish. But at least her guide is silent, unlike the curious and garrulous fellow she jettisoned at Uxbridge. She had fobbed him off repeatedly, replying with curt lies to all his probes. There was one thing he said which stuck with her, that long day.
‘An army marching through is like a plague of locusts,’ he had said. ‘It strips the country bare. It don’t care about the lives it ruins. Don’t care about which side they are on, even. Just destroys. That’s all it does.’
She remembers the man’s face, his curious stare and his button nose. ‘Yup, locusts all right,’ he said. ‘And the folk with sense don’t give a gnat’s piss about altar rails or who prances about on the throne when they’re weeping over the stripped bones of their pig.’
The words come back to her as she comes to the top of a small hill, and her taciturn guide points down the valley to a field furrowed with rows of tents, ringing a small and besieged town.
‘Great Bicknell,’ he grunts.
‘And that’s the army,’ she says unnecessarily. It stretches far and wide, clusters of men lolling in the grass, smoke rising from countless fires. The sound of steel being sharpened, and of hammering, reaches the top of the hill. The smell of hundreds of cook-pots reaches her too, and she thinks of how much it must have taken to fill all those pots. All those stomachs to fill, all those thirsts to be quenched. Locusts.
The guide’s horse snorts and paces, as if sensing its rider’s impatience.
‘I will take the horses now, Master Birch,’ he says. There is an emphasis in the way he says the word ‘master’ that she does not like. ‘I’ll not take them down there, where a quartermaster will sniff them from a mile away, and have them for the cavalry. They’re eating the country bare, the sods, and they’ll not have these two.’
She climbs down from the horse’s broad back, the change of movement bringing fresh agony. She follows the guide’s gaze to where blood has seeped through the rough cloth of the breeches. Handing over the balance of what she owes, she sets off down the hill, walking as tall as she can manage, trying to ignore the pain.
It is nearing dusk, and the soldiers are laying fires in small groups. The atmosphere in the camp is heavy, and quiet, despite the golden beauty of the late afternoon. The ground beneath her boots is muddy, the crops trampled into the ground. A few men look up, but their eyes flick on, uninterested, as she moves through the tents.
The officers, she guesses, will be in the town. It’s a small, unfortified place, and she approaches it on the main path. Just as the mud turns to cobbles, her way is blocked. A big, ugly man stands in front of her, a musket in his hand. His messmates are idling on the grass by the side of the path, and a couple turn lazily to watch the encounter.
‘And where are you going?’
‘I’m looking for someone.’
‘Course you are, pretty boy like you.’
‘Step aside.’
He just laughs at her as she tries to sidestep him. He moves too, and they are locked in a parody of a dance.
‘Please!’ She tries to keep her voice steady, but it cracks.
Suddenly he grabs for her, and grips onto her shoulder.
‘Hold still, little eel,’ he hisses as she tries to pull away. ‘What’s all that staining on your legs, hey? Been pissing blood, boy? Just excited to see me?’
He puts a meaty hand on her thighs, moving it upwards while she wriggles, as a few of his friends lolling on the grass laugh.
‘Jesus!’ He lets go of her suddenly. She tries to dart past him, but he grabs her coat and wrestles her to the ground. She can feel him lying on top of her, his breath like a ripe Stilton, his fat body crushing the breath from her lungs.
‘Lads, it’s a girl!’ he shouts. ‘Or a eunuch boy.’
They are interested now, the clutch of soldiers on the grass. They stand and move closer. He heaves himself off her, and she lies on the ground, pressing her forehead into the mud, trying not to cry.
‘You sure?’ a new voice growls.
‘Unless the poor boy’s got the paltriest package in Christendom.’
‘Remember what we did to that whore we found in the camp before Edgehill?’
‘Aye.’ They laugh, and she hears the sound of backs being clapped.
With an effort, she rolls onto her back. ‘I am no whore,’ she says. ‘And you will let me go.’
‘Will we, angel?’ says her captor.
They stand in a ring round her. Above their heads a cloud drifts across the circle of blue sky. She closes her eyes for a second, begging the Lord for strength.
She scrambles to her feet and looks the big man in the eye.
‘I am a woman, yes, but no whore. I have come to find my brother on urgent family business. He is with the army somewhere.’
‘Oh aye,’ says the big man. ‘If you’re no whore, you look like one. Boy’s clothes and blooded thighs. Someone else been having their fun with you?’
He reaches out and under her doublet. She steps backwards, but feels someone grip hold of her arms as the man’s meaty hand
s fumble beneath.
‘Please, please. I just want to find my brother.’ She feels the tears pricking at her eyes.
A new man, sallow-faced and leering, says: ‘And who’s your brother?’
‘His name is Ned, Ned Challoner. He’s a cornet, and serves Philip Skippon.’
‘An officer,’ says the big man. ‘Of course he is.’
A man steps out of the circle behind her and looks into her face. ‘Ned Challoner?’
‘Yes. Do you know him? Please, please take me to him.’
‘All right, lads,’ says the man, taking hold of her arm. ‘Fun’s over.’
‘She’s mine, Taf, I found her.’ The big man squares his shoulders.
‘Aye, well, you wouldn’t know what to do with her anyway, you limp-pricked bastard.’ He says it quietly, but she senses that he has authority, this small, wiry man. A few of the others laugh, and the big man spits angrily.
‘Here’s the deal, Billy,’ says the one called Taf. ‘I’ll take her to the man she says is her brother. And if it turns out she’s telling tales, I’ll bring her back and strip her for you myself.’
‘Come, that’s fair,’ says another, and the big man, Billy, can tell that he has lost the crowd.
Taf pulls her out of the ring of men, and Hen wants to crumble with relief. Her legs give a little, but she feels herself pulled upright.
‘Come, miss,’ says Taf, supporting her. ‘Walk a little now in front of the bastards, and we’ll sit soon enough.’
She nods, forcing her ravaged, trembling legs to walk. A sudden image of her father strikes her, and how he must dread the walk to the gibbet. The crowd watching, his legs trembling. The thought gives her courage, and she walks on.
They come to a brick house in the centre of town, and Taffy sits her on a low wall opposite an inn with dimpled glass windows and a broken sign.
‘Wait there,’ he says.
He walks into the house, and minutes later, a man runs down the steps and looks up and down the street, his eyes flicking over her.
‘Ned!’ she shouts, and his eyes swivel back to her.
‘Jesus Christ in heaven,’ he says, and runs towards her. ‘Hen. Jesus. Look at the mess of you. Jesus wept.’
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