Treason's Daughter

by Antonia Senior

He shakes his head, as if to dispel the image, and looks around.

  ‘Ensign,’ he calls.

  ‘Sir.’ Ensign Somers bounds up to him, reminding Ned, not for the first time, of an over-familiar piglet.

  Keeping his voice quiet, Ned says: ‘We missed prayers in the rush to march. Private prayers, at a whisper. Satan’s imps may be close.’

  Ned kneels, grunting a little with the effort. He prays, long and hard, the dew soaking through to his bare knees. Hen is in his prayers, and Lucy, his wife. Keep them safe, oh Lord. And Sam. He asks his Lord for Sam’s deliverance.

  Let him be the last boy standing, even as all your enemies are smited by our righteous swords, oh Lord. He is lost and misguided, oh Lord. Let him see Your glory, and bring him back to Your flock. But spare him, please, my Saviour.

  He imagines Sam, standing in a mire of traitors’ corpses. More than two years since last I last saw him, Ned thinks. The Sam in his mind’s eye is still a boy; a shining, mischievous boy who climbs trees that are too high, and jumps streams that are too broad. And yet this same boy rides with the devil Rupert. Will I even recognize him? wonders Ned, as he clambers to his feet.

  ‘Sir!’ A voice emerges from the grey gloom of dawn. ‘The major-general wants you, sir.’

  Ned hurries over to Skippon, who sits eating breakfast, wrapped against the cold in a heap of blankets. It may be hot later, but dawns are cold to men who sleep out the night. And his commander, Ned realizes with a jolt, is getting old for this game.

  ‘Ned, good morning,’ says Skippon, with unexpected brightness. ‘First rule of war, boy?’

  ‘Know your enemy, sir.’

  ‘Good lad. We know they’re somewhere near, God be praised. You know, I expect, that some of Ireton’s men had a set-to with some Cavalier boys last night?’

  Ned nods. He saw the troop riding past on their way back, sombre and bloodied. Henry Ireton at their head, his name whispered around the watching foot-soldiers. Ned knows the godly cavalryman by reputation. He is a rising man, they say. Close to Cromwell, and, through him, to Fairfax himself.

  ‘Yes, sir, I saw them. Hence this night-time marching, sir?’

  ‘Aye. Now we just need to find the rest of the traitors, God willing, and we can bring them to battle. Lord Fairfax has ridden on in front of us, along the ridge.’ Skippon waves ahead. ‘Will you go to him, Ned, and be my ears and eyes?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I have no horse at present, sir.’

  ‘Of course, of course, I forgot.’ Skippon turns to address another of his men. ‘Quartermaster. A mount for the captain-lieutenant.’

  Amid the bustle, Skippon beckons Ned closer. ‘Second rule, Ned?’

  Ned hesitates, unsure of what is expected of him.

  ‘Know your friends, boy. I drew up a plan for the battle for the lord general not two days ago. But that was before Colonel Cromwell joined us. He may have suggested changes, Ned, and I want to know about them. He is wily, Cromwell. I am still at sea as to how he alone, of all the MPs, managed to keep his commission when Parliament made this new army and stripped it of politicos. Off you go, then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Ned is handed the reins of a tall, grey mare. He mounts, a little awkward from lacking the habit, and presses the horse forward with his knees. It responds, and he is relieved, glad that he has not been betrayed as an uneasy horseman in front of his general.

  He heads first to his own men. Ensign Somers stands with the colours unfurled: the plain green block denoting the company’s pre-eminent standing.

  ‘Somers, Fowler!’ Ned shouts, and the two men hurry over. They have learned to be brisk when Ned calls.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I know the men have had a long march, and little sleep. Allow breakfast, but stay in loose formation. No fires. Pikes to hand. I have a mission for the general. On an alert, you know where to take the company. Do it, don’t wait for me, and I will find you.’

  His servant, Wakes, appears behind him, jabbering about breakfast.

  ‘Later, man!’ Ned shouts, wheeling the horse round. It follows his command, and Ned thanks the Lord for its biddable nature. He has worked hard to gain his standing as a man of competence and courage; the senior lieutenant of the major-general’s own company in his own regiment. Landing on his arse in front of his men would undo months of work.

  They hate him; he knows this. They have marched up and down this riven land, hungry and tired. And every time the marching stops, Ned has been there, calling them to their drills. He has drilled them until the blisters pop and their hands run with blood. A martial stigmata. And in the winter quarters, when their training was done and the alehouses and baggage women called their siren call, Ned volunteered them for cavalry training. They have stood too many times in the rain and sleet, being mock-charged by friendly cavalry, to love Ned.

  But he has been in a square that crumbled, and felt the panic and fear. He has watched men die because their mates ran. He has been ridden down by Rupert’s horse and heard the yapping of his poodle, chased like a fox into a frozen river. Drill, drill and more drill – until, in the cacophony of battle, the men hear only the rattle of their own drums, spurring them on in order. Drill, drill and more drill – until each man is a mindless cog, and safer for it.

  I have become a hard bastard, he thinks. But so be it. I will wear this carapace until the job is done.

  The horse picks its way through the little groups of men huddled together, and Ned is content to let it lead. The sky is brightening all the time, and the sails of the windmill are becoming ever more distinct. The red coats of the soldiers are bright against the grass. It takes some getting used to, this homogenous uniform. Some of the officers hate the passing of the multicoloured ragtag uniforms of the old armies, but Ned likes the New Model look. He looks down at his own red coat, with the blue sash of Fairfax’s colours, and relishes afresh the sense of purpose in this new army. Gone are most of the old officers, and all of the MPs, bar Cromwell. Gone is the Earl of Essex, tainted as he is with the suspicion that he baulks at crushing the king. This now is God’s army – His red-coated avengers.

  They all hate us. The old women in Parliament, who cling to their hopes of peace, though the king spits in the tureen each time it is offered. The Presbyterians, content with the old Church stripped of bishops, who fail to recognize that the world has cracked open and men can find their own way to God. The nobles, who loathe the lack of titles in the New Model Army, which is commanded by two barons and a squire. The Earls of Essex and Manchester, who have slunk off to polish their coronets and dream of kissing the king’s arse. They all hate us, thinks Ned, with satisfaction.

  Ned notes with approval the number of redcoats kneeling in morning prayers. God’s warriors. He thinks back with amusement to the amateur bands that set off to fight at Edgehill. This new army, dedicated to the Lord’s work, will give no quarter to that slippery old sod who calls himself king.

  And then I can go home, he thinks, and I can let the shell crack. Home. He retreats from the idea of the old house in Fetter Lane, which conjures itself immediately in his head. He thinks instead of the two rooms above a butcher’s shop, where Lucy sits waiting for him.

  One year married, and yet how seldom they have seen each other.

  It looks as if it will be a fair day. The sort of day that might have heralded a picnic beyond the city walls in a different time, a different life. Ned wants to think about Lucy, just for a little while, as the horse trots on – about her soft blonde curls and her blue eyes. He wants to think about her naked. He wants to think about lying in the darkness, lust slated, and how he will tell her all that has happened. How much he will pour out when he lets his shell crack. What plans they will make, what secrets they will share!

  As he trots along the ridge, he looks to the horizon, and there they are. The king’s men, arranged on top of a far hill in what seems to be full battle deployment. They are at least five miles away, he estimates. He realizes too that the New Model
is drawn up below the crest of the hill behind him. We can see them, but they cannot see us, he thinks. They must have scouts, though.

  Ahead of him a small group of horsemen clusters, watching the enemy. At its front are two men talking. It is light enough to recognize them. One slim and long-faced, a handsome but tired face under a tumble of dark curls; the other is broader and uglier. Fairfax and Cromwell. Like a fox and a toad, Ned thinks irreverently, as he makes them aware of his presence, and they turn, unblinking, to stare at him.

  Hen closes the door of the two rooms above the butcher’s shop. She closes the door on Grandmother, and on Lucy, who will sit being prettily vacant all day, as far as she knows, storing up grievances for Hen’s return. The room will be too cold, or too hot. Grandmother too silent, or too voluble. Perhaps Hattie will be out the back, enthusiastically slaughtering a pig, and its squeals of fear and explosive death-shits will waft upwards to where Lucy sits at the window, pretending she is still rich enough to be idle.

  Hen hopes that Hattie will, indeed, be slaughtering today. She still has not quite learned the knack, since her husband was pulled off to fight in the last levy. They scream more when Hattie wields the knife. The apprentices are long gone: one dead, one run from the levy. Hen hugs the thought of Lucy’s discomfort to herself, smiling as she walks, thinking of that pretty nose wrinkling in disgust.

  She goes up Newgate Street and turns towards St Paul’s, her back to the great prison. She will not look at it. On Sunday nights, when the bellman from St Sepulchre tolls for the next morning’s execution, she buries her head in her blanket. Lucy seems unmoved, though her father, too, died on the gallows.

  Hattie takes leftover scraps from the shop to the prison, she knows. Offal and eyes and snouts, cooked and chucked down the food chutes to the crouching convicts who have no relatives to feed them. Hattie’s husband forbade the practice when he was around. Hen smiles to think of Hattie’s florid face and salty tongue.

  ‘He may kiss me arse if he ever comes back,’ she said when Hen asked her about the convicts’ food. ‘Those poor souls may at least taste meat before their necks are stretched out, God love ’em. He can kiss me broad backside and I shall not budge.’

  God help John Smith if he does make it back from the wars. Hattie has a taste for independence. As have I, thinks Hen, as she walks past St Paul’s to the churchyard and the bookshop.

  She passes through the front of the shop into the back room, nodding and smiling at Mr Rowan, who is talking to a customer. She knows enough not to interrupt – Mr Rowan has given her this work for love of her father, and due to a lack of suitable apprentices. But the customers might not like it, a woman loose among the shelves, so she stays hidden amid the stores and reserve stacks.

  Once in the back she begins the day’s tasks of sweeping and dusting, cataloguing and accounting. But first, she looks to the map that lies on the table in the centre of the room. A map of the British Isles, it shows, to the best of their knowledge, the progress of the war. Chestnuts serve as the king’s armies; conkers serve as Parliament’s. One chestnut has an S cut in it; one conker bears an N.

  She has watched the war develop on this table, as conkers and chestnuts march and meet and retreat from each other in waves. She watched the king’s initial victories, and the scrabbling of Parliament to gain a hold. She watched Sam’s criss-crossing of the north with Prince Rupert, and learned to hope that the tales dribbling back to London about Rupert’s men and their depredations were exaggerated. She hears little from Sam. Three letters in all this time. The first reads a little subdued and lost as it recounts the granting of his commission. The second, a note scribbled as they entered winter quarters last year. The third, received just weeks ago, assumes knowledge of lost letters in the interim. It was written on march to Leicester. The newsbooks say that the sack of Leicester by Rupert’s men was a second Magdeburg. Women raped and babies crushed. The tone of Sam’s letter was buoyant, more familiar, full of lengthy descriptions of his horse’s capabilities. Pudding Cat he seems to have called her. She smiles at that.

  She writes once a week and misses a meal to pay for the letters to float about the country on secret channels in the hope of meeting him. But she has no way of knowing what he receives.

  Ned is a more frequent correspondent, and occasional visitor. She tracked him on this table last year all the way down to the West Country, to that alien spit of land they call Cornwall, where wild men speak their own tongue.

  There is, she admits, a fault to her system. It makes a game of it all, moving these pieces about her map like so many chess pieces. Rowan’s friends come in, sometimes, to look at the table, and he tells them what’s what. They are mostly old, like he is; the ones left behind. Rowan struggles to get the map in focus, now his eyes are going, but he never calls her forward, except when they are alone. The conkers and chestnuts can be brushed away quickly, if necessary, or laughed away as foibles. Rowan is careful to keep his head low in these times.

  But these are real men’s lives she carelessly totes across the table. The skin fell off Ned in loose folds when he returned from Cornwall. He was haunted by the surrender of Skippon’s troops to the king, and emaciated from the long march back across a hostile country. The Cornishmen followed the column of defeated London boys and picked them off in the night, beating them and taunting them all the way across the border.

  He recounted the tale in an even voice, but the horror could be glimpsed through the monotone. For the first time, Ned’s certainty seemed to waver. Was God with the king after all? She thinks back to him sitting hunched like an old man by the fire, Lucy at his feet wearing her Dutiful Wife mask. It didn’t help that he had become too small for his uniform. Shrunken. She couldn’t imagine him commanding a full company. She still can’t.

  They fed him up – food from the hawkers, mainly. No Cook this time, nor a kitchen. But plenty of cured meat from Hattie’s shop, and tidbits from the baker across the way. Fed up on pies and puddings and oysters, and then sent off to fight again.

  She watched the Ned conker begin to move again, and watched all the pieces whirling around the map, as the fortune began to smile at last on Parliament’s armies. The king’s hold on the north was crushed at Marston Moor where, she surmises from an allusion in his letter, Sam rode hard to escape capture.

  Marston Moor. That was the turn of the tide. They say that four thousand royalists died that day, for three hundred of the godly. The north was lost to the king, and an implacable, hostile bulwark forged between his strongholds in the south and west and the resurgent royalists in Scotland. The King had lost the North Sea ports that day too, severing his lines to the Continent.

  Hen imagines her namesake in Paris, sitting in exile, eyes turned towards the Channel and her husband’s desperate fight. She’s waiting for news, just like I am. It’s our unhappy fate in the wartime – yet more punishment for that cursed apple.

  Marston Moor. A place she’d never heard of, nor had anyone else she knows. Yet now the name reverberates. It was, she recalls, the first time she had really marked the name Oliver Cromwell. He turned the battle that day, with his troops from the Eastern Association and his Ironsides, breaking Rupert’s own cavalry.

  And yet it’s still not done. Everyone thought after Marston that the end must follow. But nothing decisive. She remembers waiting anxiously after the second battle at Newbury last year, looking for hours at the notched chestnut sitting squarely alongside the notched conker. It was an indecisive fight, and neither brother hurt, God be praised.

  She looks at the present configuration on the map. She knows about the New Model Army’s orders to besiege Oxford. All London is ablaze with this push to end things once and for all. She can’t be sure of Sam’s whereabouts, nor the king’s. Is he returned from the north? Where are they all? Are they close? Are they, as rumour had it last night, both scuttling about somewhere near Market Harborough?

  The map is clearer cut than it was last year. To the west of Oxford, the
king holds out, into the wilds of Wales and the West Country. The rest is for Parliament, now. From Reading to York, London to Ely and the Fens, the Committee of Both Kingdoms rules. The war must end soon. Surely it must. And here they are, the Ned chestnut and the Sam conker, circling round each other.

  Hen thought that nothing could be worse than watching her father hang. But this waiting, this suspended ignorance of the fates of the people she loves, is unbearable. She remembers her father’s death with precise horror. She left before the end, not wanting to watch the cutting down, or the rest. She didn’t know if he was dead yet, or just dying, and she still feels a deep shame for not being able to stay until the end. Her eyes are for ever burned with the image of his dangling body, his legs kicking hopelessly, his face turning purple.

  It was the next day, she remembers, that she sought out the kind butcher’s wife, Hattie Smith, to ask her if she knew of any cheap rooms to let. And Hattie diffidently offered her own two rooms going begging above the shop – meant for a nursery, she’d said, but there was never any need.

  Dear Hattie, thinks Hen. Strange to have grown close to someone so different. Can she read? I wonder. I have never seen her.

  In the bookshop, as the dust dances in the columns of light, she wonders where her father’s soul is, and what it looks like. She thinks of his corporeal body swinging on the gibbet, the knife coming in to slice out his organs. Rowan says that her father will be pleased, wherever he is, to know if he was right. A predestined heaven, or an earned one. She can imagine Challoner’s soul haranguing the angels.

  Hen shivers, though it is not cold. She loathes the idea of Sam and Ned standing against each other. She concocts elaborate daydreams where they pause on seeing each other, embrace like brothers and walk away from the fighting. She imagines them sitting together by the fire in her rooms, sharing a bottle of wine, laughing at their lucky escapes. She will not think of the alternative. She cannot.

  At least it’s June, not winter. Poor Ned, he hates the cold. No wonder, after what happened to him at Edgehill. Dear Ned. If they all get through this, she will make sure he is never cold again.