Oh Sam, would my heart know if you were dead?
She lights a taper from the embers of the fire and crosses to the door, willing herself to open it. Behind her, Grandmother peers out from her cupboard. Hen has tried to coax her out into a bed in the big room, but she likes the small space. She likes being able to touch the walls and the ceilings. She burrows in, watching from where she feels safe. Sometimes she is lucid. But mostly she mutters to herself, obsessed by her approaching damnation. She has started talking to Satan now, begging him to be kind.
Hen does what she can, but knows it is not enough. She is embarrassed that Grandmother is turning beast-like, but she is rebuffed every time she tries to help. The old lady crouches there now, disturbed by the knocking. Hen can see the whites of her eyes beneath the tangled locks of hair.
She mutters: ‘See, He comes! He knows I’m here. He knows what I am. Sees through me. Wants to burn me. Wants me. Eat me. He’s at the door. He’s coming for me, with fire. Where’s His fire? Not yet, my Lord. Not yet. Please don’t take me yet.’
The knocking comes again, and the old lady’s fear grows with it. Hen shushes her, trying not to let the panic grip her.
‘Hen, Lucy. It’s me, Ned. Open up.’
Ned!
‘Grandmother, it’s just Ned, just our Ned.’
Relieved, she opens the door to see Ned’s grim, unsmiling face. There is someone behind him, an outline in the dark whose shape tugs at her memory.
‘Hen. Is it you?’ A familiar voice. It can’t be. She is in Oxford. Surely.
Ned walks through the door and the pathetic light from her taper falls on a dirty face framed by a bedraggled nest of hair.
‘Anne!’
‘Hello, Hen.’ She walks into the room, nervousness making her step bouncy, her tone ebullient. ‘My turn to arrive dramatically at midnight, I thought, cuz.’
Lucy, now tucked into Ned’s arm, looks towards Anne with horror. She is spattered with mud and a rust colour that Hen realizes must be blood. Her hair is wild. And yet Anne, irrepressible Anne, smiles at her and bobs into a curtsy.
‘Mrs Challoner, I assume,’ she says into the silence. She carries herself like a lady, chin high and shoulders straight, but looks like a beggar, and Lucy is clearly awed by her.
‘This is Anne Challoner,’ says Ned to Lucy. ‘Our cousin.’ His voice is odd, and strangely accented on the surname. Hen stores the detail to worry at later.
She kisses her cousin’s dirty face. ‘Welcome, Anne. Have you come far?’
‘Just sauntered in from St James, don’t you know,’ she says, and struts the width of the room. ‘What a hole this is, Hen.’
‘Suits you, then,’ Hen retorts. They smile at each other.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I found her,’ says Ned. ‘In with the whores by the king’s baggage.’
Anne looks at him, a straight and level stare. His eyes slide off to the side, and he hides his confusion by crossing to the jug on the shelf and pouring himself some ale.
‘Is that it, Ned? Is that all you are going to say? Tell them what your friends did,’ Anne says to his back. ‘Tell them how you watched.’
‘They were papist whores.’ His fist crashes down on the table in emphasis. Still he will not look at her.
Lucy looks between them, her face unreadable.
‘Am I a papist whore?’
He is silent, and Anne demands again: ‘Ned, am I a papist whore?’
He turns to face her, visibly discomfited. ‘Not a papist, no.’
‘You want to cut my nose? Go on then, cut it, you snivelling turd. Or cut my ear. Not so fucking brave now, are you, with your wife and sister watching?’
‘Ned, what is this woman talking about?’ Lucy crosses to him.
‘Never mind, poppet.’
‘Ned,’ Hen says. ‘Ned.’
He turns to her. ‘You don’t understand. And anyway, they were papists.’
They stand there, immobile, looking at each other.
Anne breaks the silence. ‘Oh, we’ve had a fine old time hotfooting it down from the Midlands, haven’t we, Ned? Riding for hours in silence on borrowed hacks, Ned here purple with the shame of being seen with me.’
‘Am I to be blamed for that?’ Ned looks at Lucy, his natural ally.
‘Aye, for that, and for what your friends did.’
‘I did nothing.’
‘You stood by.’
Hen walks to Anne and takes her hand. ‘Enough, both of you. Come, honey, let us clean you and feed you. All is well now.’
Close to, she sees Anne crumble a little under her kindness, and fight to hold herself upright. ‘All is well now? Is it so?’ Anne says as she finds her smile again.
Hen turns back to Ned. ‘The battle?’
‘A glorious victory. God was with us, Hen. The king is destroyed.’
‘Sam?’
‘No sign. I searched, Hen, but if he was with the dead or the injured, I didn’t find him.’
She sags with relief. No news is better than bad. Ignorance frays the nerves, but it is better than grief.
She turns back to Anne. ‘We’ll get you clean,’ she says. ‘Ned, you go next door,’ she says over her shoulder, and hears Ned and Lucy walk into the bedroom and shut the door.
Anne shivers as Hen strips her clothes off. There are finger-shaped bruises on both her upper arms, and a thick tide mark of dirt at the neck and wrists. She is a gypsy. Her clothes smell high, and are crinkled with a crust of dirt and mud.
Hen takes a cloth and dips it in the bowl sitting in a tripod in the corner.
‘We’ll go to the bathhouse tomorrow,’ she says. ‘But we can make you comfortable.’ Even by the sallow light of the taper, Hen can see the telltale pockmarks of the fleas that feast on Anne’s skin. The dirt has built up, layer on layer, and the water turns grey as Hen rinses the linen cloth out. Even in the warm summer air, it can be cool in these rooms that run to damp, and the cold water draws goose pimples from Anne’s skin.
At first they are silent, as if intent on hearing the rustle of linen in water.
A small voice, behind a curtain of matted hair, breaks the silence. ‘Thank you.’
‘It is nothing. My poor Annie.’
Hen takes up her comb and starts on Anne’s hair, which hangs in clumps and tatters down her back. She holds it close to the roots as she tugs, and Anne sits uncomplaining.
‘So the king was put to flight? How did it run?’
‘Lord, Hen, don’t ask me. There’s little enough chance to work out what’s happening when you’re in the thick of it. I tried asking Ned, but when he would talk, he just blethered about Providence.’
‘But what were you doing there, honey?’
‘There was a boy.’
Hen notices, for the first time, the outward curve of Anne’s belly and the fullness of her breasts.
‘Oh Lord,’ she says.
Later, in a thin trestle bed pulled out of Lucy’s bedroom into the big room, they talk.
‘He was – is – the son of an earl, you see. He promised me marriage. He promised me parks and fountains and curtsies. He promised me horses and servants and a place at the masque. Ice in summer and a dozen fires in winter. Pineapples, even!’
Hen smiles, and reaches across for her cousin’s hand.
‘Oh, Hen. I followed him. Left Oxford one night when his regiment marched out. He promised me the world.’
‘And he gave you that.’ Hen nods at Anne’s belly, straining the fabric of her shift.
Anne’s fingers flutter protectively on her stomach, and she laughs. ‘Yes. He gave me this. I forgot to thank him.’
Anne’s spirit is infectious, and the two of them giggle together. Hen says gently: ‘But, Anne. What now? Where is he?’
‘Dead, I think. But anyway, no matter. Before the battle, he was cross. It was the fear, I think, talking, but he made it clear that the promises were as solid as farts. So, here I am.’
‘
Here you are.’ Hen squeezes her cousin’s hand.
‘I will try to get rid of it. There must be a wise woman hereabout. Don’t look at me that way. What would you have me do? I have no money. My mother and father would see me in the gutter. You must help me.’
Hen nods, muttering a silent prayer of forgiveness. These were dark times – perhaps dark measures were allowed. Ned would not think so, but then Ned was not a woman, and not schooled in compromise from birth.
‘Hattie,’ says Hen. ‘Hattie is the butcher’s wife. She is skilled in herbs, and if she does not know herself what to take, she will know where to ask.’
The two of them fall quiet, Hen thinking of how it would be done. She knows the properties of the potions designed to keep a woman’s blood flowing; Hattie brews her own concoction of laurel, madder, pepper and sage. Was it enough to increase the dose, to dislodge a life? A life. Was it a life?
As if reading her thoughts, Anne says: ‘The minister at home told my mother it is not until the quickening that the child inherits sin. I have not quickened yet. This is not yet a life.’
Her fingers, tapping gently on her belly as if to send a message, tell a different story, but Hen pretends not to notice.
They lie together under a blanket, warming each other. The closeness brings an intimacy. Anne talks of love, of her noble boy’s soft lips and lying tongue. She tells of the relief of leaving home, the excitement and the sense of adventure, the night she crept out of the house and into his arms.
Some small part of Hen is jealous, and she thinks of Will as she saw him last: abashed and uncertain, with his mother hovering at his shoulder. The Cavalier of Anne’s tale is a hero, a dashing figure. And yet he is gone, and here is Anne. With child and alone.
She tries to tell Anne some small part of this, and her cousin turns towards her and flings an arm over her. They lie close and warm under the blanket.
‘Did you meet Sam?’
‘I saw him, a few times. He didn’t know me. I vowed to wait until I was married before I made myself known to him. He’s quite the dashing cavalry lieutenant. I thought it better to leave him be until I was respectable. But each place of safety seemed to withdraw the longer I was with my lover. Richard.
‘I did not see Sam at the Naseby fight, though, Hen. He was with Rupert, and they charged off. Richard was with the Northern Horse, and they were cut down or fled. They could both be alive, or dead, or somewhere in between.’
Oh Sam. Where are you? My other half; my brother. God keep you. God guard you.
Anne breaks into her thoughts. ‘And you, Hen? This is poverty.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Come, tell me.’
‘Oh Anne. I like this life. I have purpose. I like working. I remember those days back in Fetter Lane, those endless, stretching days. You know how it is, how it was. Waking up and not knowing why, exactly, you are bothering to rise. Expected to fill a whole day with admiring a new bonnet. I was without the worry I have now. How to feed us all; how to keep us warm. But the boredom! Oh Anne, the boredom!’
‘God grant me some of that boredom. You want to try following an army, cuz. God’s wounds.’
‘Really? You’d prefer to have stayed at home?’
‘Home? No. Surely there’s some middle ground between boredom and terror?’
‘Misery?’
Anne’s laughter is loud after their whispering. ‘Aye, misery,’ she says.
‘There’s guilt, though, Anne. The price of my freedom, if you like, was my father’s hanging. Each time I let the joy of it all fill me, I remember his face.’
‘Poor cuz. My father wept when he heard. I never saw him cry before.’
‘Not just my father, either. All the boys dead and maimed in the war. They bought me this . . .’ She pauses, unable to find the word. ‘This rebirth.’
Anne pulls the blanket up under her chin and gazes out of the open window to the black sky.
‘It was fun, sometimes, on the baggage train. The women, all in it together, you know. I was frightened at first. They were coarse and salty. But kind under it all. And those that weren’t kind were funny, which is, as it turns out, a better cure for blisters than kindness or praying.’
‘What happened, Anne? At Naseby.’ She wants to ask more directly, but somehow she cannot articulate the words properly: What did Ned do?
The moon is high now, and they can see it through the sloping window. It always makes her think of Will. She looks for the man in the moon, but tonight she cannot make him out.
‘It’s hard to say. We knew we were losing when the first fleers came by, the cowardly bastards. Then we heard the retreat. But it’s a hilly country, that, Hen. And it had been raining, and the ground was chewed up and boggy. The wagons were stuck, and we were scared, Lord, how scared. Me and a few others were set to abandon the train and run when the rebels came over the hill and rounded us up. We thought they were just going to take us prisoner, Hen. So we went towards them with our hands in the air, waving what grey scraps could pass as white, asking for quarter. I was scared of being forced.’
She gives a low chuckle. ‘We’d have spread our legs to save ourselves, I’d wager. Many of the girls had children, hiding in the carts or under them. Better a raped mother than a dead one. But they did not want us like that, the unnatural bastards. They set to killing us or maiming us. Screaming, I was: “I’m not a papist. Not a papist, not a papist.” But there was so much fucking screaming.’
She shivers and closes her eyes tight. ‘Why do they hate us so much, Hen? I’ve lain with a man now. Remember we used to talk of it? And it’s all right. Nice enough. But what is it about the rutting of flesh that twists men? Mad with hatred or lust. And whichever way it takes them, we are the victims. Why, Hen?’
Hen looks at the moon as if, somehow, it can provide the answer. She searches for the right words but can’t find any. She feels unworldly, small. She reaches across and brushes her cousin’s hair back from her forehead. Anne reaches up and takes her hand, squeezing it.
‘Still, I’m here, and whole, and there’s too many who are not. Lord, Hen, it’s good to be alive. And as for the rest, well, it’s your fault, anyhow, Hen,’ she says, a smile hovering on her lips.
‘Mine!’
‘When you came that Christmas, all growling with love and despair. I was jealous. I hungered for it, the passion of it, the excitement. And then, one day, there he was.’
Hen props herself up on an elbow to look at her. ‘Yes, but Anne, I did not give myself to Will.’
‘True.’ Anne pauses, pensive. ‘It was not that, I suppose,’ she says at last. ‘You told me once the tale of Achilles. He had to choose between a short-lived glory or a long life lived in tedium. I turned all on the toss of a coin. Heads I’m a countess. Tails I’m a whore.’
‘It’s not the same choice,’ says Hen.
‘How not? Men have their sphere; we have ours.’
‘But it was not the toss of a coin you gambled on, just this boy’s word. His life too, and him a soldier.’
‘True.’
There is silence for a while. ‘But I did so want to believe him, Hen. So very much. And by the time I started to realize I shouldn’t, it was too late. When you’re riding a bolting horse towards a cliff, when do you jump?’
In the bedroom, Ned and Lucy lie side by side. They can hear quiet voices next door, punctuated by laughter.
Anne’s levity chafes Ned. He turns and twists, oppressed by the sound and the weight of unspoken words pressing on his chest. He remembers how Anne ran to him, wide-eyed like a demon, her hair loose and matted, her clothes torn. He quailed before her, failing to recognize her, puzzled by this creature’s use of his name.
‘Ned, Ned,’ she shouted, again and again, and grime-streaked hands reached out to clutch at his buff coat. He tried to shake her off, but she clung on.
‘Anne, Anne,’ she sobbed at him, incoherent in her despair, and then he knew her.
He dragged her away fro
m the astonished stares of his men, from the questions that hung like screams in the air around them. Which is worse, he wondered as he pulled her away. That this thing from the papist baggage train is my cousin, or that they think she’s been my whore? What will they think of me?
The mortification! He remembers the look on Sergeant Fowler’s face. Respect peeling away, leaving contempt, stark and unyielding. He had to ask Skippon for emergency leave, even as the injured general prepared to let the butchers loose on his gaping chest wound. He had to bear his chief’s disapproval and the pain-edged crabbiness with which his request was greeted. And yet, somehow, he is the devil in Anne’s story! He shudders, appalled anew by the memory, by the fracturing of his carefully sealed carapace in front of his men.
Lucy, disturbed by the movement, stops pretending to be asleep and turns to him.
‘How long are you here?’ she asks.
‘Just tonight.’
‘Is that all?’
Ask me about the battle. Ask me about the women.
‘Can you leave me some money? I must have a new dress; this one is absurd.’
‘Of course, my dear.’
Ask me about the way they screamed as the lads cut them. Ask me whether I would have stopped it, had Anne not appeared. Ask me about Sam.
‘Grandmother is growing more impossible, Ned. How long must I live with her?’
‘Not long. The war should be done soon. Our victory was a complete one. The king is lost.’
‘And then what, Ned? You never finished your apprenticeship. There’s no money. What then?’
‘I will think of something, my love.’
She sniffs and turns away from him. The curve of her shoulder is lovely. He wants to kiss it, but he is afraid of crying.
Ask me about searching the corpses for Sam. Ask me about turning them over, one by one, the lost boys. Ask me about the maggots, and the rats and the crows and the flies, and all the parasites that eat a dead boy’s flesh.
Hesitantly, quietly, Ned asks: ‘Are you glad to see me, Lucy, love?’
‘Of course, husband. What a question.’
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