When the man had gone Alan sat down and wrote an impassioned letter of protest to Susan, with many expressions of sorrow at the plight of her family, indignation that ill could be believed of such an upright worthy gentleman as her father and anxiety for his present welfare. The English Court had heard how ill he had been treated and were shocked and angered by it. He hoped he would be allowed to meet her father, explain all he had put in his letter and have it conveyed to her. In any case he remained her faithful, loving, humble, obedient servant –
The Chancellor sent for Alan, but he did not allow him to see Charles, nor did the King command him to arrange another audience. But he did graciously give permission for the young man to visit Amsterdam if Colonel Ogilvy took responsibility for the expedition.
Charles was very well aware of his own present unpopularity with all three nations embroiled with one another and at the same time with the English upheaval. France, Holland and Spain of the Spanish Netherlands, having all suffered from the aggressive skill of Cromwell’s navy, looked with unreasonable but natural dislike upon the surviving cause of each continuing strife. The King was too poor in men and wealth to do anything as yet for himself. Indeed, as Alan had been shocked to observe, both he and his Court were still more poorly dressed and meagrely fed than when he had last attended there. So he was not surprised by the outcome of his appeal to Lord Clarendon, simply thankful for his father’s kindness.
It meant confessing the depth of his feelings for Susan Phillips.
‘I had not intended to confess our mutual regard,’ he said, ‘until this woeful state of our country be altered back to freedom, so men may live in England again as they choose, by the light of their own conscience.’
‘The men of property, you mean, my son,’ the colonel said dryly. ‘For those without have never lived by their own will but by their stomachs, dependent upon the wills of their masters and the work of their hands.’
‘You would say that under the Lord Protector that name is rightly given? There is a sort of freedom?’
‘His troops show a great, an astounding difference from those among whom I served under Buckingham and others before I found a place with Gustav of Sweden and later His Highness of Orange.’
‘You do not consider that God has worked this miracle for Cromwell as a sign of His personal favour?’
‘I consider that meat and bread and stout clothing have worked the miracle as they always do and that every good general knows they do. And that Cromwell is a general of genius, but as an administrator makes too many enemies.’
‘So we have no hope of that return I long for? Would you approve my marriage if matters change?’
Colonel Ogilvy put an arm across his younger son’s shoulders. He loved him dearly, but seldom understood his thoughts. Unlike his heir, who was so like himself in his devotion to the military life that they understood one another almost without speech. Gordon was already a fine soldier: Charles had even promised him a command when the army on paper began to assume a living form. But Alan would go farther in the end, perhaps, with the new knowledge and the new skills. The boy must not be discouraged, but nor must he become mixed in rash endeavours in his anxiety to heal his present misunderstanding. To turn his mind from the Phillips family, Ogilvy said, ‘My son, I am content you go find Master Phillips in Amsterdam. I think he may refuse to see you, but you can try to discover how he lives and who are his friends and where are his wife and young Mistress Susan and the other children. And at the same time while you are in Amsterdam I would have you inquire after those two other Ogilvy’s, Thomas and James. I have had no news of them these many weeks and I feel very greatly Tom’s wound may not have healed as we hoped.’
Alan was ashamed to say he also had no news of the brothers and had not set about getting any since Doctor Richard had refused to consider joining his sons abroad and so both helping them and relieving their anxieties for himself. So he took down a note of the last address where they had established themselves to continue the treatment for Thomas’s shoulder. He determined to find them as soon as he had, as he hoped, explained himself to the exiled cloth merchant.
With Master Phillips he had no success whatever; the merchant refused to see him and when he tried again the good people he was staying with ordered him to go away and cease to pester them. He gave them his address in Amsterdam, begging them to persuade Master Phillips to allow him to explain the misunderstanding. In a couple of days a very stiff letter came that seemed to finish his hopes, for the time being at any rate, most probably for ever.
‘Sir,’ the letter began. ‘I confess I was misled by your lying and deceitful approach, as formerly I was betrayed by your dastardly uncle, George Leslie. Your commerce with the rebel Charles Stuart and his followers hath led the Lord Protector to suspect that your growing familiarity with my family must be due to my disloyalty, both to my cause and my leader. Your part in this seems plain and confirmed by your attention paid to the said rebel’s former mistress, the notorious whore, Lucy Walter. Wherefore there can be no communication between you and any member of my family. Signed, Hugh Phillips.’
‘God’s curse on that filthy hag!’ Alan exclaimed aloud. So that accounted for Susan’s cruel rejection. It was easy to understand. Most of those about her would distrust him for his apparent neutrality, his probable allegiance to the Stuart cause, hopeless though it now seemed. Susan had failed him because of her instant jealous rage! She had failed in her love, for it had not been strong enough to hold up her trust in the face of Lucy’s brazen presence, the woman’s bold, stupid attempt to make money out of her predicament.
All this must have been manufactured, shaped, guided by Leslie in his endless seeking for revenge. Alan swore another firm oath to turn vengeance about upon the head of the evil schemer. He tore up the two Phillips letters, father’s, daughter’s, and set about finding his cousins.
They had moved from the lodging where he had seen them installed after their escape from Devon. Their fortunes had not improved. James explained that though Charles welcomed his loyal approach he had been quite unable to employ him, for his so-called army consisted entirely of volunteers, unpaid, and would remain so until the King’s prospects improved, which they showed no signs of doing at present. However, knowing that James was an experienced soldier, he had used him to train these raw recruits to some advantage, but on a voluntary basis.
Colonel Ogilvy had been very generous, James said, and had even found him a semi-military position with the States government that carried a small stipend. This provided a meagre living for the brothers, but they had to forgo the services of the surgeon who had been attending Thomas and it meant too removing to their present single room in a poorer part of the town, where the houses stood close to a very stagnant canal, seldom flushed out to clean it.
‘But the wound?’ Alan asked, looking from one to the other of the pair.
He had been shocked at once by the younger man’s changed appearance. Thomas had been gravely affected by the serious state of his shoulder after his difficult and dangerous voyage, but he had improved so much, with marked healing and absence of fever, that Alan had expected after so many weeks, to find him cured. But on the contrary, he looked worse now than he had done when he arrived in Amsterdam. He was very thin, very pale, with an unhealthy yellow pallor. He was dressed and walking about, but the wounded arm was out of his jacket, held up in a sling, packed and bandaged; and it stank abominably. ’
‘Young surgeon Alan, egad!’ the sufferer exclaimed with a cracked laugh. ‘Your first thought I see. I warrant you’d have it exposed to your curiosity?’
‘I know a few more facts of my profession now,’ Alan stammered, uncertain whether Thomas resented or welcomed his interest.
‘My lasting gratitude if you relieve me of my daily nausea,’ James told him. I’ll go fetch basin and water.’
The wound was foul, as Alan’s nose had led him to expect, but he found it healed except for two small open spots, with muc
h spreading, granulated tissue of the kind he had learned to call ‘proud flesh’. This, he knew, could be controlled by touching it with a caustic stick. It should then heal if the cause of the continuing suppuration was also treated. He decided there must be a deep pocket of pus here that could be probed to allow discharge.
‘Do what you can, cousin,’ poor Thomas said feebly, when the first examination and cleaning-up was over. ‘I am reduced to a mere skeleton, as you see. I much fear the rest of the winter and the early spring, for my cough has worsened all the time since we came to this damp place and the filthy ditch outside.’
‘Cough?’ said Alan, suddenly seeing Thomas’s condition in a new, fearful light.
‘No new affliction,’ the other said, trying to laugh. ‘I have been subject to it for years. In which I take after my dear, dead mother.’
Alan found, no comfort in this, but he was too ignorant of the described disease to find an added alarm. He bought fresh dressings, some caustic, some vinegar and a probe and over the next three weeks produced a marked improvement in the stale wound by the discharge of a considerable pocket of pus that brought with it the final piece of dead bone that had caused most of the delay in healing. Encouraged by the end of pain, the promise of final healing and a certain freedom of movement at the shoulder, Thomas’s spirits were greatly improved, also his appetite. He was delighted with himself, began to go abroad on fine days and even to get some strength back into his hand and forearm by increasing their use. But his cough did not improve.
James took Alan away from the house alone one afternoon while Thomas was resting.
‘I think you have wrought a near miracle,’ he said, ‘for which I am everlastingly grateful. But this cough is the absolute like of that which killed my mother. An affliction, a kind of dropsy of the lungs, the physician in Oxford called it. They say it carries off its victims at any age, most rapidly in childhood, less quickly in the prime but no less certainly, and slowest of all in old age, but still fatally. None of us suffered before my lady mother died, but Tom and I were still children at the time and felt her loss most deeply. Thomas above all, except for my poor father. He was driven near mad by her loss and I think hath never quite recovered his wits since.’
Alan continued to visit the Ogilvy’s frequently while he lingered in Amsterdam, hoping to find some way of approaching Master Phillips or at least of discovering news of him. This last he did succeed, through a friendly inn-keeper whose house stood on a corner near Alan’s lodgings. He knew the people who were looking after the distressed cloth maker and merchant and after Alan had explained in part his own situation, was willing to tell what he had heard of affairs in England. He did this with a certain relish and smugness, since the Dutch merchants were profiting by the sporadic war that was going on with the troubled island, so long their rival across the narrow seas and also now beyond the oceans.
‘This General Cromwell now, sir,’ he said, in his fluent English, for he had plenty of business with seamen of many nations and knew something of several dialects. ‘This general that calls him Protector. The other generals envy and hate him. The people hate both him and the generals. His own particular army and his own followers, as it might be a bodyguard, obey him but few love him.’
‘Master Phillips is still in Amsterdam?’ Alan asked. He wanted simple news, not a political report of a kind he had heard over and over again.
‘Still here, sir. Still waiting for his wife and family to come over.’
‘But they have not yet come?’
‘I have heard nothing.’
And so it went on. There was news that Master Phillips was in touch with all his former Dutch contacts in the cloth trade. But still no news of Susan.
Then, one day, loitering beside the great main canal at the centre of the city, Alan heard a cheerful well-remembered voice and felt a heavy hand clap his shoulder.
‘Young Ogilvy, as I live, by God!’
It was Henry Wilmot, Lord Rochester, stouter in the body, redder in the face, greying fair hair tumbling about his shoulders, his manner as strongly confident as ever.
‘What do you here, lad? I was told you had become a scholar in Oxford, studying under the great William Harvey. You that turned from the sight of blood or even a bout of sea-sickness, as I remember?’
Alan laughed.
‘I do indeed study in the medical field, my lord. The interest has dispelled my squeamishness. I should be in Oxford at this present time, but His Majesty required me upon a certain service and now I attend two cousins of mine, former captains in the royal forces.’
Lord Rochester said positively, ‘They will not lack employment long, nor you, rather, should you seek it.’
Alan had no wish to confide his personal anxieties and disappointments to the noble lord, whose reckless attitude to events was not reassuring. But he was close to despair over Susan and his rejection by Master Phillips, so he asked for more particulars and presently found himself seated with Lord Rochester, drinking Holland’s gin and hearing another new account of affairs in England.
‘Cromwell’s power is still absolute,’ Rochester said. ‘But he is more hated now than feared. Those rulers lack stability and are coming to realize the country hath no true head. A leader, yes, but they lack a symbol. I have been told they would crown this Norfolk commoner, make him king in the Martyr’s place. Already he is addressed as “Lord”, he wears a robe, he bears a sceptre. But he will have no truck with the Crown, which is not surprising, seeing he struck off the last head to wear it.’
Alan shuddered: the very possibility of such a thing seemed to him obscene.
‘That shocks you, lad? So it does me. But it raised my spirits. For such a suggestion means the end of all the unnatural substitutes for true government that these scoundrels have attempted. It means the growing impatience of a people bound by the chains of an unfamiliar and unwanted religion of puritanical bigots. It means we may look forward to fresh rebellions that in the end must prevail.’
‘Surely we have nothing ready that could prevail as yet?’ Alan protested. ‘I have seen the New Army’s power.’
He held back any detailed account of his adventure in the west country, but Lord Rochester had heard most of it from Charles, who had had it from the Chancellor’s files of Alan’s full report. But the young man did not know this. He could only agree and refrain from adding anything more.
Alan continued to stay in Amsterdam. Thomas Ogilvy continued to improve and as he became less dependent upon his brother, Captain James was able to find and take more employment, which greatly improved their circumstances.
Master Phillips remained totally obdurate; his wife and family had not yet arrived. Tom Howard appeared from time to time, but he had no firm or detailed news of George Leslie. The latter, having succeeded as he imagined in ruining Master Phillips, had not pursued his victim abroad but had seemed to have renewed his persecution of the Ogilvy family in England.
Sarah Ogilvy, upon the collapse of the Phillips family home in London, had consented to return to her old father. She would not go abroad with her sister. She would stay in England, bearing her secret attachment to George close within her shrivelled heart. She would do his bidding if he had any further use for her, as she foresaw he might, for he now began to devise and pursue a fresh purpose with regard to the Ogilvy house in London. He was determined to wrest the ownership from Colonel Francis, whose claim he swore he would never recognize. Now was his chance to force his old uncle from Oxford, present him with the loan of Paternoster Row and secure as well the more valuable Oxford property for himself. With Sarah’s help he might succeed.
So Alan, partly from despair over his lost love, partly from an intention to protect the legal rights of his father in London, which he guessed would be threatened, did, when the occasion finally arose, agree to go with Lord Rochester on a secret expedition to the capital, leaving no message to explain his purpose except a single remark to Tom Howard that life no longer held a future or
a plan, but Death in a noble cause was all he desired.
Tom, as was his duty, reported this to Lord Clarendon, who saw fit to inform the colonel of his son’s highflown and romantic intention. Colonel Ogilvy kept the news to himself. If Alan chose to make a fool of himself over a cloth maker’s daughter, that was his own business. And as for affairs of state, the lad was quite of an age to engage himself in any way he wished.
Chapter Seventeen
During the journey to London Lord Rochester made it plain to Alan that he knew most of the detail of the young man’s escapade in the west country.
‘Nay, do not look so horrified, lad,’ the earl told him. There was no breach of confidence. His Majesty, at a second interview, demanded the full story from your cousin, Captain James Ogilvy. How Penruddock brought on the action in the west with a certain initial success, but had no support save from those distant counties. The sortie of parliament troops from Exeter, trained, disciplined, well-armed men, rolled up our royal enthusiasts with lamentable ease, so that they fled away westwards, scattering in all directions.’
‘To where I found my kinsmen,’ Alan said bitterly. ‘Led by Silas, that faithful servant.’
‘I met the fellow,’ Rochester answered. ‘He returned again to Devon and, brought back terrible news that hath grieved the King sorely.’
‘The whole rising was grievously mismanaged,’ Alan continued, but Lord Rochester interrupted him.
‘There you are very right.’ He paused and then said, ‘I think you do not know I was there at the start. Do not look so appalled. The plans were fair enough, had each leader concerned assembled and produced those troops he promised. We were to attack upon Marston Moor, ill-fated plain, ill chosen for a second defeat! Defeat! Battle scarcely joined, with troops appearing late or not at all. Paralysed it seemed and then fleeing at the mere sight of the enemy!’
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