London (124 page)

“Well, I suppose He can,” said Meredith with a laugh, “since all things are possible to God. But He doesn’t. So you needn’t worry.” But O Be Joyful worried even more. I wonder, he thought, if his science, his Royal Society and Observatory may not all be the work of the Devil too. After all, Wren was an astronomer. It pained him to think that Meredith, whom he knew to be a good man, might unwittingly be on the path to hell.

It was not until the summer of 1679 that O Be Joyful truly understood the cunning of Sir Christopher Wren. He was hard at work carving a pulpit for the old church of St Clement Danes which Wren was rebuilding, and often walked by the cathedral on his way home. He had paused to chat one evening with a mason working on the eastern end when, glancing down the length of the huge interior, he noticed that not only were the foundations arising all the way down the church, the walls were going up too. “Apart from the extreme west end, he’s building the whole cathedral up in a single piece,” the mason confirmed. “At least, that’s how it seems to us. I don’t know why.”

Suddenly O Be Joyful knew exactly why. He only wondered why he hadn’t guessed it before.

“He’s building it like that,” he said bitterly, “so that by the time people realize what he’s really doing, it’ll be too late to change anything. They’ll either have to let him finish it his way or knock it all down and start again.” He could not help admiring the architect’s cleverness, wicked though he knew it was.

“So what’s he up to?” the mason asked.

“Wait a few years,” Carpenter replied. “You’ll see.”

Given all that he knew, it came as no surprise to O Be Joyful that autumn when Parliament reassembled, and the House of Commons voted to alter the succession to exclude Catholic James, that the House of Lords should have rejected the Bill and decided in favour of James. He was well aware that throughout the bitter debate the newly made Earl of St James had been prominent, arguing persuasively for the king and his brother.

The conspiracy was deep. The shining city on a hill was being prepared, before his very eyes, for the rule of the Evil One. It was only to be expected, he supposed, that the former Sir Julius Ducket should be of the Devil’s party, leading them all to hell.

1685

The two children were clinging to him, terrified. One of the troopers, still mounted, was shaking nuts from the tree while two others had just trussed up a pig and slit its throat with a sabre. The officer in command of the dragoons looked at Eugene with a cool insolence.

“We shall need all three of your bedrooms.”

“And where are we to sleep?” Eugene’s wife asked.

“There is the barn, Madame,” the officer shrugged. He eyed the two little girls. “Their ages?”

“Not yet seven, Monsieur le Capitaine,” Eugene answered drily. “I assure you.” If only, he thought, I had never returned.

Despite the protection of their cherished old Treaty of Nantes, the Protestant Huguenots had found his most Catholic Majesty less and less tolerant of their religion with every year that passed. Not only had their Calvinist synods been forbidden; their pastors had to pay special taxes and they were forbidden to marry good Catholics. To encourage them to mend their ways, they were offered tax concessions if they would abjure their heresy and return to the Catholic fold; but, more recently, King Louis had introduced a sterner measure. Any Huguenot child over the age of seven could be converted, without their parents’ consent. Another year or two, Eugene knew, and his girls would be under pressure. Such things would not have happened if he had stayed in London.

His return to France had not been happy. His father had been furious. “You were to prepare the way for us,” he had reminded Eugene coldly, and for a year refused to speak to him. Only when he had married a Huguenot girl whose father was a shipper at Bordeaux, did the rift begin to heal. They were on good terms when, five years ago, the older man had died and Eugene found himself head of the little family. Not that the family strife had ended. Within a year, his father’s young widow had converted, left the house and married a Catholic with a small vineyard. As a result, Eugene had not only his own two little girls to look after, but his unmarried half-sister, who had refused to be a Catholic and accompany her mother.

Difficult though life had been for Huguenots, however, it was only in the last four years that King Louis XIV had made it intolerable. His method was simple: he quartered his troops on them. Time and again Eugene had heard how parties of dragoons had arrived, eaten all the family’s stores, broken furniture, even terrorized the Huguenots’ wives and daughters. Technically, the French king could still say they were free to worship, but in practice it was a policy of persecution. Many times recently Eugene had wondered whether he should emigrate to England again with his family; yet he was unwilling to leave the area he so loved unless he had to – and there was a large financial consideration.

“The king has forbidden any of his subjects to leave France without his permission. That means,” he warned his wife, “that if we try to sell our house or furniture, we’ll almost certainly be arrested on suspicion of leaving. If we go, we’ll only have what we can carry.” His business as a watchmaker brought a modest living; but the family’s capital was in the house with its orchards that he had inherited. Like the other Huguenots in the area, therefore, they had prayed with their pastor, often in their own house, and read their bible, and hoped for better times. Until today.

“And how long,” he now asked the officer, “will you and your dragoons occupy my house?”

“Who knows?” the officer replied. “A year? Two years?”

“And if I became a Catholic?”

“Why, Monsieur. We could be gone tomorrow.”

But if the officer thought this short-sighted, bespectacled watchmaker with his little girls was going to be frightened into capitulation he was entirely wrong.

“Welcome to my house then, Monsieur le Capitaine,” he said with quiet irony. “I hope your stay will be a pleasant one.”

He made no complaint during the next two months while the family slept in the barn and the soldiers occupied the house. Once, it seemed to him, the officer meeting him one morning had even looked embarrassed. “We shall still be here when they have gone,” he told his children. “Be patient.” Things continued as they were until one afternoon when the officer, looking quite grave for once, clattered into the yard.

“I have news for you which will change the situation here entirely,” he announced. “The Edict of Nantes has been revoked. Toleration is ended.” After an appalled silence he continued. “All Huguenot pastors are banished; any caught will be executed. All Huguenots like yourselves will remain; none may leave. Your children will all become Catholic. That is the new law.”

They retired to the barn in silence. That night, at nearly midnight, Eugene quietly woke his children. “Wrap up as warm as you can and put on your boots,” he told them. “We’re leaving.”

As a man of God, Meredith knew he should not have done it, but as he came up the hill from London Bridge towards Eastcheap and caught sight of O Be Joyful’s woeful face heading directly towards him, he looked for cover. Thanking God for His providence, he stood in the shadow of a doorway waiting for the danger to pass.

With horror, therefore, after a brief pause, he heard a shuffling of feet, then a sigh, and saw not six feet away the familiar back of the craftsman as he sat down on the step right in front of him. Damn it, thought Meredith, now I’m trapped. There was only one choice. He must go up the stairs behind him. And five minutes later he was gazing out from the top of the Monument of London.

There were few more striking sights in London than the Monument. Designed by Wren as a single, simple Doric column to commemorate the Great Fire, it had been erected close by the spot in Pudding Lane where the huge conflagration had started. Constructed in Portland stone, it stood two hundred and two feet high and over its summit, made of gilt bronze, was a flaming urn that glowed and flashed when it caught the sun. The endless spiral staircase gave on to a balcony just below the urn, from which the drop was so sheer that it made many people dizzy. Having enjoyed the view – one could see up and down the Thames for miles – Meredith peeped over the edge to see if it was safe to descend. It was not: O Be Joyful was still there.

It would not be surprising if the woodcarver had things on his mind; it had certainly been an eventful year. In February, quite unexpectedly, without any sign that he was even unwell, King Charles had suddenly died. His Catholic brother James had therefore become King James II and all England had waited to see what would happen. To general relief, he had scrupulously observed the Anglican rite at his coronation in the spring; but there were hints that he hoped for more toleration for his Catholic subjects and clear signs that he would not have them abused. That summer, Titus Oates, finally exposed as a complete fraud, had been tied to a cart tail and whipped through the streets from Aldgate to Newgate. Personally, since he had no doubt that Oates was a rogue and a fraud, Meredith hadn’t the least objection to the sentence. More dangerous had been the Protestant rising that young Monmouth, foolishly thinking his popularity a much more powerful thing than it was, had tried to start down in the West Country. The regular troops, under the capable command of John Churchill, had easily crushed the rebels and poor Monmouth had been executed. But the sequel had been more disturbing. Judge Jeffreys, in summary trials that were immediately called the Bloody Assizes, had sentenced the rebels to hang by the dozen, and James had been so pleased that he had promoted Jeffreys to be his senior judge. Such thoughts, Meredith knew, were enough to cause O Be Joyful to plague him for hours.

As he grew older, Meredith found that he had less and less desire to concentrate upon such things. What, in the end, were these temporary affairs of men compared to the great mysteries of the universe? Especially when one of the greatest of all mysteries was being unravelled that very year in London?

It had been Halley’s idea, supported by Pepys, the then president, that the Royal Society should publish the theories which Isaac Newton, a rather dyspeptic Cambridge professor, had been expounding. For months now, as he prepared his great theory for publication, Newton had been sending a stream of requests to the Greenwich Observatory for astronomical information. From all this Meredith already had a fair idea of Newton’s system of gravity and it fascinated him. He knew that the attraction between two bodies depended upon the square of the distance between them; he also understood that two objects dropped from a height, regardless of their mass, should fall together at the same speed. And now, looking down, it suddenly occurred to him that the Monument itself would be an excellent place for such a demonstration. Indeed, he considered wryly, two objects dropped together just now should land on O Be Joyful’s head at exactly the same time.

Carpenter, two hundred feet below, was oblivious to these dangerous ideas. It was not the first time he had come to the Monument. Some months before, when he was admiring the fine carving of the panels at the base, a kindly gentleman had translated one of the inscriptions in Latin which accompanied it. Having described the course of the Great Fire, an additional sentence had been added a few years later:

But Popish frenzy, which caused
these horrors, is not yet quenched.

“For you know,” the gentleman had explained, “it was the papists who started the Great Fire.”

The fact that it was in writing, and upon such a great structure as the Monument must, O Be Joyful supposed, prove it beyond a doubt. And for another half-hour, while Meredith became rather cold above, he sat there and gloomily wondered what terrible things the Catholics would do next.

When everything was ready, they prayed. Then they put the children in the barrels.

Eugene’s father-in-law was a stout, sturdy man, not unlike a barrel himself. Eugene knew that the Bordeaux merchant was better placed to help them than most and he had also guessed that the sooner they left the better. “There will be so many other Huguenots trying to do the same thing that the escape routes will soon be jammed – or discovered by the authorities,” he told his wife.

Louis XIV, the Sun King as they called him, was an autocrat whose power even Charles I of England, with his belief in Divine Right, could hardly have dreamed of. The king who built the vast palace of Versailles and nearly destroyed the Protestant Dutch, and who could tear up the Treaty of Nantes, would certainly be thorough. Only an hour after they had sneaked into the merchant’s house, one of his children reported that the troops were on the quays, inspecting every ship.

Eugene’s faith in his father-in-law had not been misplaced. “The ship I’m putting you on is English. The captain and I have done business for years. He can be trusted.” He had sighed. “It’s your best chance.” It was sailing to the English port of Bristol.

Eugene thanked the merchant for putting himself at risk in this way and asked if he intended to follow them.

“No,” the older man replied sadly. “I shall have to convert.” He shrugged. “You’re younger. You also have a craft – you can work anywhere. But I’m a wine shipper. All I have is here and I still have five children to look after. So, for the moment anyway, I’ll have to be a Catholic. Perhaps in time the children will follow you.” It obviously caused him grief.

The main problem had been how to smuggle Eugene and his little family aboard. The merchant had been confident, though. “Five barrels among a hundred. You’ll be stacked towards the centre.” Tiny air holes had been drilled in the top of each cask. “I hope the captain will be able to let you out once you’re safely at sea,” he had continued. “But just in case . . .” His wife had provided each occupant with a flagon of water and two loaves of bread. “Remember, you may have to stay in there a long time,” he had carefully warned them all. “So you must eat and drink as little as possible.”

By mid-morning, the carts carrying the casks of wine were rumbling along the quay to where the English vessel was waiting. There was nothing in the least unusual about the sight. The shipper’s men and the English sailors began to load them, but in quite a leisurely fashion. The young officer in charge of the troops came over to watch carefully, placing himself near the merchant, whom he eyed from time to time, suspiciously. Suddenly he noticed that the men carrying one of the barrels seemed to be slightly off balance. He strolled over, drew his sword, and ordering the men to put their load down, drove it through the top of the barrel.