Treason's Daughter

by Antonia Senior

  ‘Yes, yes. Meet me downstairs,’ says Ned. ‘God save us.’ He must get back. He turns round to them, relieved that there is an excuse to put off this decision. ‘This is not over,’ he says. ‘Not over.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE DAY WHIRLS BY. NED LETS IT GO, CONCENTRATING ON his job, and on keeping his men mindful. He’s too busy to decide. A few of the men bother him. They are keyed up, pumped. They laugh too loudly and bounce as they march. It is intoxicating, this regicide. This tearing down of the temple walls.

  Roberts, a young boy blooded in the small fights of the second war and the New Model’s divine certainty, is the worst. Ned fears he will do something rash, something shaming. His parents were killed in the siege of Brampton Bryan. The wars have created too many boys like Roberts – rootless and twitchy. Boys who believe only in the power of a musket.

  As they guard the king’s person, Roberts’ eyes keep swivelling, turning back to where the man himself talks quietly to his chaplain, William Juxon.

  It’s hard not to look, to stare at this man who walks with death. The man bears it well. He is calm, self-possessed. His enemies are rootling about London, trying to persuade people to sign the death warrant. There is a safety in being one of many names on the paper that will kill the king. Fairfax, they say, has locked himself away. He is washing his hands of the act.

  Ned watches Charles and thinks of the two men, both pinioned in a corner. Fairfax, who Ned has admired so fervently, is choosing to do nothing. Should he not, having won the war, fight for the peace?

  And here is the man Charles, surrounded by enemies, deserted by friends, and he knows what he must do. He knows that his only recourse now, his only escape, is to show them all how a king must die.

  Hen steps out of the baker’s shop holding Blackberry. She has that wired tightness to her face she remembers so well from when Blackberry was a tiny scrap who screamed all night for milk. Tiredness so strong it seeps into your bones, changing the very structure of your face.

  She had managed to calm her fear, quelling it with lies and platitudes, but now it is back. She feels it in her trembling legs and sweating palms. And suddenly her heart is beating so violently and so fast that she cannot breathe. She clings on to Blackberry, trying to find some calm. The street swirls beneath her.

  An oyster-seller shouts and calls, his words too familiar to be distinct; two women stand gossiping, their shawls pulled tight against the cold and their cheeks chapped and red; a veteran clumps past on a wooden leg, his crutches catching in the mud and the mutterings falling from him like imprecations to a deaf deity; a beggar sits on the corner, huddling under the overhang of the tenement above. She is poorly dressed and thin; beside her sit two children – one baby and one toddler. One shivers violently, and the other sits motionless, her face so white as to be translucent, and her lips blue with the cold.

  Hen focuses on them, trying to count her blessings and calm her breathing. Blackberry, swaddled, warm and red-cheeked, wriggles on her hip. The beggar woman catches her eye and holds out a hand. Hen reaches into the bag and tears off a chunk of bread, still warm, and hands it over.

  She watches, appalled and fascinated, as the woman eats it ferociously. The mother doesn’t look to where her children sit watching her eat. The older child turns and looks at Hen with dull, unseeing eyes beneath a ragged dark fringe. The woman finishes the bread with a sigh and, seeing Hen standing there still, stretches out a hopeful hand.

  Hen shakes her head and walks on.

  The woman’s indifference is chilling. That despair and hunger and cold could override all pity, all care for her children – this Hen could not imagine until now. She hears the coward’s voice in her own heart asking her the questions: And where would you break? What makes you think that you would be any better?

  Another brick to add to her fear. She had thought that the existence of love was what made her vulnerable; that she was most afraid of her heart breaking. But now she sees a greater terror: in a place where her love has failed, and she exists without it. She fears her inner coward; she fears reaching the limit of love and crossing over to a place beyond.

  Yesterday, the king said goodbye to those of his children who remained in England: Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth. Colonel Hacker tells Ned the tale as the troops line up to be inspected on another freezing dawn. The dawn of the day they will kill the king.

  Grizzled New Model veterans openly wept, says Hacker, as the king sunk to his knees next to the young princess and told her not to grieve for this, his glorious death.

  Ned nods, distracted.

  ‘We’re worried about the young prince,’ says Hacker as they turn back towards the rooms serving as their mess. ‘He promised his father not to usurp his older brothers and become Parliament’s puppet king. But that promise is not enough from an eight-year-old surrounded by enemies.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘We are worried they may try to kidnap him, the royalists. Use him as a pawn. Find new ways to undo what we have done. We need him yet.’

  ‘The royalists, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Ned. Are your wits addled this morning? The royalists – remember them? Their cursed London spies. The ones who not three days past tried to get into the king’s rooms, the audacious puppies.’

  The ground heaves beneath Ned’s feet. He thought that time would make the decision for him. That the king’s head could roll into the basket and take Ned’s great choice with it.

  In the mess Ned finds Skippon sitting alone by the fire. His former chief has been distancing himself from the trial. He tells Ned that he has found, at the last, that he wants to be among his fellow soldiers. That his feet brought him to their mess despite himself. He looks at Ned as if seeing him for the first time.

  ‘What troubles you, Ned?’

  ‘What are my troubles worth in these times?’ he replies.

  ‘Come, Ned.’

  Ned is silent. He did not know, before now, how very much grief can feel like fear. The same physical punch. The same nausea. The same enveloping sense of a stubborn presence that will never give ground to a lighter future. He watches the flames. He thinks about his God.

  At last he speaks: ‘Sir, if someone you loved committed a great sin, against God and his country, and to be quiet meant bearing the silence on your conscience, but sparing his life, what would you do? I speak, of course, hypothetically.’

  Skippon is quiet.

  Ned babbles into the silence: ‘I mean, is it selfish, sir, not to want to bear the guilt of speaking up?’

  ‘But it is not your own guilt that matters, Ned. It is the sin. And not to bear sin is a mercy, not only to the good but to the sinner. Is it not, then, a mercy, a kindness for the one you love, to know the consequence of his sin?’

  ‘But,’ says Ned, anguished even by saying it aloud, ‘what of my love for him? What of the pain of dealing the blow?’

  ‘You were talking of selfishness before, were you not?’

  Ned acknowledges the truth of Skippon’s words with a shrug.

  ‘And remember,’ says Skippon, ‘that if we cannot stand before our own consciences, how shall we be able to stand before the God who knows all things? Conscience is but God’s deputy in every man’s breast.’

  Ned feels the weight of the words settle on his shoulders.

  ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘I have something to tell you.’

  The crowd is eerily silent. You bastards, thinks Hen. You cowed, stupid bastards. You were not so quiet when it was my father being killed. You were not so squeamish then.

  She stands by Will and grips his hand. Blackberry is with Hattie. Sam is sleeping. There is a blush of pink in her brother’s skin now, a sparkle in him of one who has kissed the scythe and lived. Ned has not come back. Now that they are standing here, watching the king’s execution, what would be the point? Please God, let him let it lie. Please God, let him find some pity in his heavy soul.

  She hears a murmur, like the rustling of linen. The
re he is – the king. Christ, but he looks small. They have led him out through the window of the Banqueting House, onto the scaffold built hastily outside and shrouded in black. He looks around him. The street is packed to bursting. The roofs are lined with people. There is a power in the silence of so great a crowd, and everyone can sense it pulsing. The awe hovers in the sky above their heads, whistles in the air that they breathe.

  Will and Hen stand among the regicides, invited by John Cooke. Jesus weep for us. How did it come to this? What if Father could see this? What if he could see where I am? Ned here somewhere wielding a sword that killed the king’s power. I, clutching the beloved hand that wrote the words that will kill the king’s body.

  Charles looks around at the crowd, up at the men hanging from the tiles, across at the boys perching on impossibly small ledges, and the children hoisted onto shoulders. Is that a half-smile on his lips? Is it remorse? Pity?

  Ned looks around at the crowd and fears trouble. It is too quiet, too solemn. He starts to remember the raucous, laughing crowd that watched his father die, and checks himself quickly.

  What if this ominous, shuffling crowd turns? What if, amid all this talk of ‘the people’, the people themselves cry out, and the word they cry is ‘No’?

  He sees young Roberts muttering to himself, making himself brave. He is rocking back and forth on his heels. Ned considers reprimanding him but lets it go.

  Ned turns to look at the man Charles, who is standing and looking out over the crowd. He is courageous, that much is clear. His path is fixed, his decisions made, and he is facing the consequences with shoulders set square. Ned catches his own thoughts as they drift past. It is as if he has looked in the mirror and found a stranger. Am I learning lessons now, from this man who has drenched the land in blood?

  What do I know of God’s will, after all? Am I wrong? Oh Lord, oh Jesus.

  What have I done?

  Hen looks at the king and thinks of his children. Princess Elizabeth, they say, has not stopped weeping. Prince Henry vowed that he would be torn to pieces before he did Parliament’s will. She imagines the pugnacious stance of an eight-year-old trying to be a man, his pinched white face and his little-boy bravery, and she feels herself begin to cry.

  Stupid, stupid. Why cry for a stranger’s boy when her own is still in peril? Why do You make it so difficult, Lord God? Why do You crush us? Why do You grind Your heel when we are already prostrate? Is it because we killed Your son?

  The king starts to speak. The crowd is held back by the soldiers. They inch forward to try and hear him, but the pikes push them backwards again.

  At last, Hen spots Ned. His back is to the king and he scans the crowd, watching for rebellion. There’s something odd about his face, something troubling. She tries to decipher it, but the king is speaking, and she supposes she ought to listen. Only the regicides can hear him clearly; the rest are too far.

  ‘A subject and a sovereign are clear different things,’ he is saying. His words are pulled away by the icy wind.

  The man with the axe steps forward at last, fingering the edge. Charles’ voice drops lower. Hen can’t hear his words, but Ned can, there at the front.

  ‘Take care they do not put me to pain,’ he says, his voice more tentative than Ned has ever heard it. Oh Lord take pity on him, Ned finds himself thinking. On us all.

  A voice behind Hen says: ‘We ordered a small block. For a small man – you see the joke?’ But no one laughs and Hen is not the only one to turn and look at the speaker with contempt, so that he mumbles something and looks at his feet.

  The king hands Juxon his garter. ‘Remember,’ he says.

  King Charles looks awkward as he kneels. He has to lean too far over, and it makes him look undignified at the last. The axe flashes up to the sky and falls with the dull thwack of a man’s soul dispatched. With it comes a long, keening sigh from the crowd which rolls down Whitehall, through St James and beyond Westminster to where the Thames coils, frozen and still.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AFTERWARDS IS A DAZE. EYES SLIDE AWAY FROM EYES; WORDS die on lips. Everywhere she looks, there is a blinding uncertainty. An old man, with tears running down the lines of his face, raises his eyes to the heavens. Is he looking for thunderbolts, or paeans from the angels?

  The king’s headless body lies awkwardly on the scaffolding. His head is carried away, rattling around a threadbare basket. Someone made that, Hen thinks. Someone whittled and bound and worked that basket, watching it grow. Expecting apples, perhaps. Or loaves. Instead, a king’s sightless eyes stare up from its depths.

  The mood begins to shift as they disperse, shepherded away by troops of horse. A few boys break free from the cordon and run forward to dab handkerchiefs in the king’s blood, which drips down the black cloth of the scaffold. One goes down under a flurry of nailed boots, but more escape, pocketing their prizes and melting into the crowd.

  There’s a reckless wonderment now. They can look at each other again. Their feet shuffling through the slush whisper: We killed a king, we killed a king.

  A raven circles above, cawing: You killed your king, you killed your king.

  Their voices return, and there’s a low murmur. The same question rattling around different mouths, taking different forms: ‘And now what?’

  Hen holds onto Will’s hand and looks up into his face as he says: ‘Are you bearing up, my darling?’

  She nods, the lie of omission curdling inside her.

  He says: ‘I must go back. I’m sorry. There are some loose papers to deal with.’

  She feigns disappointment. ‘What more use your papers, Will? He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘We should be together. It won’t take long.’

  She looks past his shoulder and sees Ned, standing to one side of a handful of soldiers. He looks detached, incongruously still against their evident sense of purpose. An older man is talking to the troop, all flailing arms and urgency.

  Ned looks crushed. He is motionless and hunched amid the buzzing crowd. Her heart leaps in sympathy for him. And then catches.

  Hen turns to Will, kissing him quickly. ‘I love you,’ she says.

  She makes her way through the crowd, pushing and shoving against the flow. As she nears Ned, he sees her. He takes a step forward, then glances sideways. He shakes his head, and she pauses. He looks to one side again, to where the handful of soldiers stand with their backs to him, watching their colonel harangue them.

  Unobserved, he mouths: ‘Go. Go quickly.’

  She pushes through bodies. Her elbow rams the head of a short woman who swears at her. She steps on toes and curses chase her as she cleaves her way through the mass of people. The river? Too crowded and slow. No. Think. It’s frozen solid. She can’t imagine the soldiers skittering along the ice in their great boots. They will have to fight this crowd. Dare she risk it?

  She remembers the last time the Thames froze. She was ten, or thereabouts. Ned was twelve, and still happy. They went down at Temple stairs with their father and ran around on the ice, laughing at each other’s slipping and sliding. They drank hot, spiced wine from the stalls and ate sausages, huddling around the ice fire. They had watched the mummers and the archery contests. The winner had bright red hair, she remembers. It seemed to burn against the frosted ice.

  Ned and Sam had competed in a race of their own invention. It involved running to a mark and dropping to their knees, and then sliding along the ice as far as they could go. She remembers the cold in her toes, and the helpless laughter as they slid past her, Sam pulling theatrical faces, Ned grinning at her. Until at last they had stopped sliding, keeling over onto the ice, arms outstretched like fallen angels, laughing at the sky.

  The memory takes her down to the river. It is already dusk. A gloomy, short winter’s day. She edges down onto the steps; the wind rattling up the frozen river steals her breath. There are dark figures on the ice. She pauses on the bottom step, the now familiar fear returning. �
��What should I do?’ she shouts to the silent sky. ‘What should I do?’

  Ned’s troop rounds the corner into the street where Hen lives. It is near dark and the linkboys’ torches throw leaping shadows on the ground. The crunch of their feet and the clanking of their swords send people scuttling into the dark corners. Ned catches sight of Roberts’ face in the light from a flame just as one old man hurries for cover. He recognizes the boy’s smile, his satisfied sense of his own power. I was him once, thinks Ned. He feels as old as Methuselah.

  He has told them that Henrietta is away, staying in the country with her husband’s parents during the disturbances. Will is at the Temple, killing the king. He said that Sam was there alone. Unaided. He’s hoping – praying – that Sam will have left already. Somehow he will cover up signs of any complicity, any succour from his sister. He will protect her. Lord, he prays, help me protect her. Guide me.

  They come to the door.

  ‘Show us the way, Ned,’ says Colonel Hacker, and he finds himself nodding.

  He finds himself gripping the door as it is pulled away from him. He finds himself stumbling backwards as a woman rushes out. She is tall and wide, and her skirts, he notices with staggering slowness, barely reach the tops of her big, incongruous boots.

  ‘Excuse me, madam,’ Ned says, but there is something not right here, something altogether awry. Something familiar and all wrong about her form in the darkness.

  Roberts pushes past him, taking the stairs two at a time. He is eager, bristling. He needs to prove himself. Ned chases the boy up the stairs, shaken out of his reverie, the discord still tugging at his brain.

  Hen watches his figure walk quickly down the dark street. The soldiers ignore him, thank the Lord. If they looked closer, they would see the undone ties at the back of the dress – the only one that would fit him, the one she had worn today to watch the king die. They would see the largeness of his feet, the stubble underneath the overhanging cowl of the shawl. If they’d had time, they could have made him more convincing. Still, it’s dark now and easier for a woman, even an unconvincing one, to flit through the advancing soldiers.