‘Blaspheming, Ned?’
He blushes. ‘The shock,’ he mumbles. He helps her upright, and then turns to the wiry man at his side. ‘It’s her, all right. Thanks, Taffy. Thank you. I am in your debt, always.’
‘Evens, I’d say,’ says Taffy. ‘Sir.’
Ned grins at him, and then turns back to Hen.
‘Come,’ he says.
He takes her across the road to an inn, and they duck inside the door. He orders ale, ignoring the open stares at the bedraggled figure beside him, and asks to speak to the goodwife of the house. As a potboy is sent to find her, he sits Hen down, looking searchingly at her.
‘Well?’
‘Did you get my letter?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you did not think to answer it, or to come home?’
He looks down at his cup. ‘For what? If it were anyone else, I’d rejoice at his capture. He would not want me there, playing the hypocrite. Crowing. But Hen, why are you here?’
‘He is to die. In three days.’
He blanches, and then takes a swig of his ale, as if to fortify himself. ‘Well. I guessed it would be so.’
‘Ned, he thinks you betrayed him. That night we found him with the gold and Lady d’Aubigny. He thinks it was you.’
She watches his face fall as she tells him, watches the horror spreading slowly. ‘But I didn’t… I . . .’ he stammers.
‘I know,’ she says urgently. ‘It was Harmsworth.’
‘Harmsworth?’ He says the name in a daze.
‘Yes. So I’ve come to get you. To take you to him. You must tell him, Ned, that it wasn’t you. Before he… Before he . . .’ She peters out. Her hunger and tiredness, the pain and the fear, all catch up with her. She feels the ale that sits in her empty stomach rising, and she vomits it up into a frothing fizz on the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY
GUARDS SHE DOES NOT KNOW BLOCK THE GATES OF THE Tower. One more night. For one more night he will be alive. But they will not let them pass.
‘Please,’ says Hen. ‘Send word. Ask Thomas Hood, his warder. He will let us in.’
One of the guards, beetle-browed and surly, shouts for a fellow within the gate, who runs off with the message.
Hen looks out over the river. The dull water, pockmarked with rain, meets the lead-grey sky, and a tangle of rotting wood drifts by. Hood finally appears. He is clearly irritated at being disturbed, and greets Hen and Ned shrewishly.
‘Your father has lost his privileges,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘For not telling more details of his wicked crime. Tompkins and his friend Waller have been squealing away. The plot laid bare in all its viciousness. But your father, the old sot, just swears at Stroud. Laughs sometimes, the mad old bastard.’
Ned steps forward. ‘Sir, I have come all the way from the army at Thame to see my father. Please, I beg you, let me see him.’
‘Look, son. No visitors.’ Hood looks at Ned as if seeing him for the first time. ‘No visitors,’ he repeats. ‘Not even Parliament’s soldiers. You’re better staying away from the traitorous old sod anyway. You’ll see him when he swings, and not before.’
They walk away. Silent. Anyone looking would know them for brother and sister. But no one is looking. They are just two bodies wandering in the indifferent city.
Hen and Ned walk home despite the rain, following the river, seeing glimpses of it through gaps in the close-packed houses. Everywhere holds memories of him. Here, the tavern he blamed for a dodgy oyster that kept the chamber pots full for a week. There, the alley leading to his livery company, its arms gouged into the brickwork. There, his wine merchant’s well-visited house, and his favourite bookseller. And into Fleet Street, at last. Here is the place where they watched Charles’ march into the City, with Sam sitting on the tavern’s sign. Ahead, St Dunstan’s spire, evoking Sunday upon Sunday of Challoner family life.
Silence, though, between Ned and Hen. Too early to say, ‘Do you remember when?’ Too raw for reminiscences. Besides, he is still alive. Where there is breath, there is hope.
Breath and hope. Breath and hope. Hen chants it like a silent liturgy as they turn into Fetter Lane.
She lies in her bed, waiting for the sun to come up. She imagines the reprieve coming. Pym jumps from the shadows, waving a pardon. The king rides in to cut her father down, a smile of triumph on his foxy, sad face.
Later that morning, her eyes scoured raw from sleeplessness, Hen leans out of the window at the front of the house and watches the gibbet being finished off. It is, to her irritation, a beautiful day. A clear blue sky, and a warm sun bathes the structure in a golden light. Nails are banged in, edges sawn. At last, the rope is swung into place, its frightful hoop swinging mid-air.
The crowd begins to gather. The pie-sellers shout: ‘Traitor-pie! Get your traitor-pie hot!’
From her vantage point, Hen can see the cutpurse boys at work, and she wills them a success rooted in bitter hatred of those gathered to see her father die. She spots Chettle in the crowd, talking to a man she does not recognize. He looks entirely too normal, as if he has been sauntering along the Strand and stopped to gossip with a chance-met friend. He turns his face towards the window, and Hen shrinks back out of sight.
Ned stands next to her, and stays in Chettle’s eye-line. She sees her brother’s face set hard, and his chin tilt upwards. It’s an echo of her father’s tick, the bullish putting on of his public face. Ned’s hands clench the sill of the window, the blue veins clear beneath taut skin.
There is a dreamlike quality to the day. She has not slept, and her brain lags behind her eyes. She cannot make sense of anything quickly. Faces pop out of the crowd. Here, an old woman with stumps for teeth, throwing her head back to laugh; there, a man biting down on a sausage, the grease on his chin gleaming in the sun. There are children below, arguing about who plays Prince Rupert. The biggest boy seizes a wooden crown from his playmate and, newly crowned, climbs aboard his horse-stick to launch the charge. The deposed prince sits in the mud, visibly trying not to cry.
The voice of the crowd swells. It clamours like a mythical beast, demanding its blood libation. The tenor of the noise changes, as if the crowd senses its offering is coming. She sees him, then, pinioned to a wooden post, being pulled out to the gibbet in front of the heckling crowd. He has shrunk. His shoulders hunch over and his hair is no longer speckled grey but is now shockingly white. The midday sun is harsh on his lined face. She hears Ned draw a breath beside her, all his wonder at their father’s dramatic decline contained in that sharp inhalation. It must be a shock to see him like this. Ned did not sit with him in the Tower, day after day, as he crumbled piece by piece.
She wonders, for the thousandth time, what it would feel like to face the noose. To know it will score your neck and slowly choke you. To know that your gasping last breaths are just a prelude to more pain, as they carve out your innards and cut off your cock.
She feels faint, suddenly, from the heat and the horror. She forces herself to stay standing; she will not add to his fear, to his humiliation, by crumbling now. She must be there – he needs loving faces in this hostile crowd. But, oh, how she wants to yield to it, to curl inwards like a hedgehog, and close her eyes.
He is in place now, and the crowd is ravenous. They love a hanging, but the prospect of a drawing and a quartering is making them slaver. With gleeful, well-practised prurience, they prepare to be shocked. They anticipate being frightened; they look forward to that small, delicious moment of relief that comes as someone else feels the noose tighten – someone else’s father or brother begins to choke.
Children will peep through their mother’s fingers, storing the details for the telling to less fortunate, absent friends. Apprentices will jostle to the front to get the best view, and to hope – joy of joys! – that a splatter of blood will hit them, to be paraded from tavern to tavern at sundown. Genuine traitor’s blood! The dark-suited godly folk will practise their stoic faces on her fathe
r’s death throes, murmuring proverbs and thanking Providence for the exposure and the punishment of the Judas.
The Judas looks around him. His chin tilts upwards, and his eyes are wet with tears.
Hen feels a hand slip into hers. Ned. He’s trying to shout something to their father.
‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’ But the bile of the crowd is too strong, and Ned’s voice too faint. She sees her father scanning the crowd, looking for them.
‘Father!’ she cries out. But her voice does not carry. He looks at the house, then, and sees them in the window.
‘It wasn’t me!’ shouts Ned, but it’s clear the old man can’t hear. He looks up at them, holds his hand over his heart, and nods once. He turns away, looking back out over the many-faced crowd of those who hate him; the jeering, shouting, slavering mob.
They lay the noose round his neck. Still she prays for a miracle. Still she hopes, and lets a morsel of belief live on. And then. Then, they push. And he swings by his neck.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
14 June 1645
‘HEY, PUDDING, MY PUDDING.’
Lieutenant Samuel Challoner strokes the horse’s soft nose and smiles as she snorts with a juddering pleasure.
‘Hey, hey. Puddingy pud.’
It is night, and Sam can only see the whites of her eyes. But he knows her by the way she smells, the way she moves beneath his hands; by everything about her. He came straight to her in the dark stable, past the other officers’ horses.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he tells her, quick hands stroking her long and elegant neck. ‘Not at all. You awake too, my best girl?’
She pushes her head into his shoulder and he smiles again. ‘Nothing for you, lovekin. Are you hungry? Wait till we smash those joyless bastards, and you shall have the pick of their baggage train. So you shall, my pudding heart.’
He looks behind her head and through the door of the stable, to where the hint of dawn smudges the horizon.
‘Today, they reckon. There was a skirmish last night in Naseby town. We’ll meet them today. Do you think Ned’s with them?’
He turns back and pulls a pail of water to where she can reach it. She bows her long neck and drinks loudly, water splashing up the side of the bucket and onto Sam’s leg. He stays with her as she drinks, running his hands over her in the darkness, checking she’s still whole and healthy. Up her right foreleg, over her powerful shoulder, along her back, down her haunch and her back leg.
She lifts her head from the pail and turns, looking for him. She pushes her wet nose into his neck, and he laughs as the icy water trickles across his skin.
‘Oi, Pudding, careful.’
He takes his brush and begins to tug it through her mane, feeling his way in the darkness. He talks to her in a low, soft voice to keep her docile.
‘Do you remember when we first met, Pudding? Oh, I do, queen of horses, I do. When the king kissed me for my father’s loyalty and gave me my commission, and had you led forward to me. And there was I, penniless and friendless among all these potentates; and there were you, all grace and beauty. Oh, my Pudding.’
He moves on to her coat, brushing her down with quick, practised strokes. ‘And there I was, dressed in a borrowed coverlet and sporting a dead man’s pistol. And they sneered at the tradesman’s boy, the city boy, and said I’d never make a king’s horseman. But we showed them, my Pudding, we showed them, hey?’
He moves round to the other side of her. There are stirrings in the camp now, low voices and dark figures stretching. A man wanders past the open door, and Sam can hear his happy sigh as his piss rattles a bush. The sky is beginning to lighten, and Pudding is coming into focus. He can see the chestnut shine of her coat where he has brushed it. He leans in to kiss her neck, before brushing again.
‘You must look your best today, my queen. Your lovely best. They say they’re here somewhere, the traitorous sods, and we shall deal them out today. It’s their new army, Piers says. The New Noddle, or whatever they call it. Fairfax, the chief; Cromwell, heading up the cavalry. Shall we be the ones to spit him, Pud, you and me?’
He works on, brushing away the dirt of yesterday’s march. Not long now before the morning starts properly. Not long left of just the two of them, close together in the dark lull before daybreak.
He leans in to whisper in her ear. ‘You’ll look after me, won’t you, Pudding? Like at Marston Moor, when you carried me away from Cromwell’s Ironsides.’
Barely a sound; more like a rush of breath on her ear which pricks upright and twitches as he moves in closer. ‘Don’t tell the other horses, lass, but I’ve a secret.’
Her hoof rakes the fetid floor of the stable. It’s not designed for so many horses. She deserves better. He puts an arm across her long neck as he whispers.
‘I’m fearful, Pudding. Proper piss-your-breeches fearful. And I miss my father, and I miss Hen, and I even miss that bastard Ned, who’s probably there across that hill waiting to kill us.’
A voice from behind him. ‘Sam, that you?’
He straightens and twists round, glad of the gloom that hides the rush of blood to his face.
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘Just grooming Pud.’
Piers Langton walks towards him. The rolling strut of a king’s cavalry officer is unmistakable, even in silhouette.
‘I’ll never understand why you called such a noble beast such an ignoble name,’ says Piers.
‘I told you. After my sister.’
‘Pretty girl, is she? Face like a horse, body like a suet pie.’
Sam bristles, and Piers throws his hands in the air.
‘Calm it, Samson. I’m sporting with you.’
He moves closer, and Sam can make out his matted long hair and stubble. Even Piers struggles to groom himself on campaign. He stretches sleepily.
‘Still, Samson, she’s your twin, ain’t she? So can’t be much to look at.’
‘Better than the monkey-woman that spawned you, Piers.’
‘Now, Sam. Mockery of a countess – it ain’t gentlemanly.’
Sam turns to whisper in Pudding’s ear. ‘Cuntess, more like.’
She whinnies as his breath tickles her ear, and he takes it for laughter. He smiles, feeling the two them are conspiring against Piers’ effortless, aristocratic smugness. Though the two boys are the same age, Piers had been his superior until Marston – a lieutenant to Sam’s cornet. Now they are both of equal nominal rank, and Sam struggles with the parity, on occasion.
‘Any word on the rebels?’ Sam asks.
‘No. They’re hereabouts, though. I can smell their rotten traitor souls.’
‘I thought that was your feet.’
Piers laughs. ‘The whores at Mother Goffrey’s shall wash these with honey when we make it back to Oxford, Sam.’
‘While you’re dipping your feet in honey, I shall be dipping my –’ Sam pauses – ‘tongue in a pie.’
‘Are you speaking in tongues, Sam?’ says Piers.
‘No. It’s priorities, Piers. Pie first, girl second.’
He thinks of Sally, his favourite girl at Mother Goffrey’s, and her snowy, pink-tipped breasts. Sorry, Sal. A hot meal first.
Piers’ voice takes on that dreamlike quality of a man who lives on stale cheese and hard tack. ‘Aye, Sam. You’re in the right. Hot chicken. Mutton breast.’
Sam says: ‘My cook at home made court sops on cold mornings like this one. Bread dripping with ale. Not too much cinnamon. Hot from the fire. Crisp on top, soggy below. Christ’s bones, when I think of that grey stink the old woman served us last night.’
‘Not our best billet, Sam-boy. I don’t believe a word of it. No food, my arse. The old witch is hiding it. Her imp’s guarding it, waiting to jump out and suckle on her third teat.’
‘Did you have to hit her, though?’
‘Not this again. Hell’s breath, Sam. We’re fighting for the king, and these loyal fucking subjects have a loyal fucking duty to fe
ed us. And if they don’t feed us, they ain’t loyal.’
Sam shrugs. Light is beginning to leak in through the crumbling walls. They have had this argument too many times, and today he finds himself unable to stir.
‘Aye, well, perhaps you are right,’ he says finally.
Piers smiles and claps Sam on the back. ‘That’s it. Come join me for breaking our fast. I have some bread that’s as hard as a whore’s heart. And some cheese. And, Sammy-Samson, if you are very charming to me, you shall have the maggots which have made a home of my cheese.’
Sam bends into a low, mock bow. ‘The maggots? Too kind, sir.’
Piers throws an arm round Sam’s shoulder and they saunter back towards the small house where they are billeted. Sam doesn’t have to remind himself to strut any more; it comes naturally. He is twenty years old and a veteran of these wars, after all.
It is growing steadily lighter as they walk away from Pudding. He turns to bid her goodbye, and she tosses her head as if in farewell. He pauses as he looks back, forgetting to be scared, and forgetting to be tough – brimful of her beauty in the dawn light.
Across the dewy fields, Captain-Lieutenant Edward Challoner comes to a halt. He passes the order back to Sergeant Fowler, who turns to bark at the company.
Around him, men sling off their packs and adjust to the new terrain. A low-level grumbling breaks out: the first sounds since they were pulled out of their sleep and marched across country without warning. Close by, he sees the sails of a windmill looming out of the brightening sky. Ned’s joints feel stiff and sore. He remembers, suddenly, how his father used to grunt on rising or lowering into a chair; and how he would blame the rough sleeping of a soldier’s lot for his stiff limbs.
Ned tries not to think about his father. Even the most benign of memories soon becomes overlaid with his old man’s face as he looked up at them from the gibbet.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Ned mutters to the old man in his head. ‘It wasn’t me.’
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