Plague Child (37 page)

In action, often precipitate action, this self-torture lifted. Where other people dithered, he was not held back by self-questioning. He had done that with God, and God had given him the answers. Long before the King raised his standard, a group of Royalists rode to East Anglia ‘to protect’ the silver plate of the Cambridge colleges. Cromwell lined the Great North Road with musketeers. He marched on King’s and other colleges, drums beating, flags flying, seizing plate worth twenty thousand pounds for Parliament.

None of this was evident in this rough, raw-boned man, forty or so, who had the reddened face of a countryman over his white collar, which Sarah would have said could have done with a good wash or two to beat the grey out of it. Nor did there seem any expectation of what he would say, beyond praising Essex. He was a supporter, having originally moved the motion for Essex to be made general. And indeed he praised him for his fortitude, for his steadfastness of command. That air of torpor began to steal round the room when people feel a consensus has been reached and the restless begin to think of food and drink.

Then Cromwell paused and ran his hand through his tousled hair. He pushed aside his notes, and gazed over the heads of the people in the room. It was a gaze of a man of the country he came from, for the Fens are said to be so flat that no one there believes the world is round.

‘My lords, gentlemen, the Lord granted us that we did not suffer defeat at Edgehill,’ he said. ‘But can we describe it as victory? Are we being blasphemous in doing so? Would God have allowed us to be driven back to London? Rupert to carry out his bloody massacre at Brentford? To sue for a peace which would give us a penny or two of what we asked for and lose some of us our heads? My lords, I see in all this God’s disapproval, but also His infinite wisdom, in giving us another chance – the opportunity to learn lessons.’

His language became rougher, his accent thicker. ‘On my first going into engagement at Edgehill, I saw our men being beaten at every hand. We need new regiments. Money, numbers . . . I agree, my lord. Yes. But we need to spend the money on the right sort of men. Your troopers –’ he looked round everyone at the table ‘– are mainly decayed old serving-men, tapsters and such like. Their troopers are gentlemen’s sons and persons of quality. Do you think your base and mean fellows can ever defeat gentlemen with courage, honour and resolution?’

I did not care for the sound of that, for I thought of Jed, and hadn’t I, too, been base and mean when I was not the other? But he qualified that by saying he would rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knew what he fought for, and loved what he knew, than one who was a gentleman and nothing else. I would have died for him then.

You were either Cromwell’s man or Cromwell’s bitter enemy, and from that moment, as his harsh urgent voice rang round that room, I was Cromwell’s man. My hand flew over the paper as my feet had flown over the streets when I had carried the Grand Remonstrance. I was fired up by him as I had not been since those first heady months. No preacher ever inspired me like him. As he spoke, I believed the world was going to change, and change utterly. It was not that he spoke as others did, in large numbers and grand visions. Quite the opposite. Vision he left to God, and he was His practical servant. He spoke about what he knew, his corner of England, for which his simple desire was to raise regiments.

It was the way in which he talked about them that nearly made me leap from my seat, for his description met all the weaknesses I had seen at Edgehill. Men would be carefully selected, God-fearing and disciplined. They would be trained from what had been learned in combat, not from military manuals. Above all, they would centre round the cavalry – not on slow cumbersome positioning, as if a battle were a formal duel obeying court rules, but on movement and surprise.

Cromwell’s speech was such an attack. It was an ambush that took Essex by surprise. Denzil Holles, for whom attack was the last, not the first resort, looked furious. But he saw some of the lords nod in agreement, as did Mr Pym, and held his fire. Lord Stonehouse neither nodded nor shook his head, but stared round the table at other people’s reactions. He was one of those men who, at this stage in a meeting, would rather give away money than give away his thoughts.

When Cromwell had done, Holles launched his own attack. His argument was simple, but savage. ‘You were not at Edgehill,
Colonel
Cromwell,’ he said, emphasising his rank in a belittling way.

‘I arrived late, it is true,’ Cromwell began. ‘But –’

Several people began speaking at once. The chairman called for order but could not control them. I dropped my pen on the floor in my agitation and rose to pick it up. It was such a cheap, intemperate attack by Holles I opened my mouth to speak but caught what I took to be a warning glance from Lord Stonehouse. Mr Pym said something to me but in the noise I could not hear what he said. In my anxiety I was trampling my quill with my boot. I was remembering, in the evening gloom at Edgehill, watching a late Royalist cavalry charge being repulsed by Parliamentary cavalry led by a man who had lost his helmet.

‘You were not there,’ Holles was shouting.

I flung down my broken pen, trembling. ‘I was there, sir,’ I shouted. ‘I saw Cromwell in the late afternoon, in a counter attack on the meadows.’

There was an abrupt silence. A ring of faces stared up at me, in the centre of which swam Lord Stonehouse’s baleful black eyes. All I could think of was his one-line dismissal of me: he talks too much. It dried the words in my mouth. The sigh of the wind outside and the creaks in that draughty chamber were suddenly audible. I could not stop shaking. Who was I to talk in that august company? Base, mean – a scrivener! A man to write down opinions, not to have them – let alone express them. Then I saw Cromwell looking at me and I remembered his words – that he would rather have a man who knew what he fought for, and loved what he knew, than one who was a gentleman and nothing else. It was as if he had given me permission to find my own voice at last.

I told them what it was like to be a soldier in the line that day. How the line broke at the first charge of their horse. I told them that Colonel – and I looked at Holles as I stressed the rank with pride – that Colonel Cromwell was right. That cavalry must be the main weapon. But it must be disciplined cavalry. Their horse charged on to plunder the baggage train. If they had wheeled and attacked our rear, the day must have been lost.

It was youth, it was arrogance that drove me on, but mostly it was anger and bitterness at the senseless slaughter of untrained men, for again Cromwell was right. They had been trained to drill, not to fight. It took an apprentice seven years to become a cooper, printer, baker or goldsmith, but a soldier was expected to learn to fight in his spare time? Oh, I lost myself then. Every runaway horse has to come to a stop. I saw the ring of staring faces again as my voice slowed and faltered, saw Holles’s red contemptuous face as my knees began to buckle and I remembered where I was and who I was – a scrivener, with a broken quill.

‘And who, may I ask, are you, sir?’ said Holles.

It was a question I had been asking myself all my life. ‘Thomas,’ I began miserably. ‘Thomas –’

‘Thomas Stonehouse,’ said Lord Stonehouse, his harsh voice ringing round the room. ‘He is Thomas Stonehouse, my grandson and heir.’

Chapter 46

Did Lord Stonehouse make that astonishing announcement because he was proud of my performance? Because he wanted to make amends? Because he thought I was a worthy heir? Of course I believed that! What other motives could there be? There were small things that made me wonder – Anne fishing the letter out from the fire and persuading me to go the meeting, Mr Pym pulling me away from the scrivener’s desk to sit with him at the committee table – but I brushed them aside.

I was walking on air when Lord Stonehouse – my grandfather, I should say – introduced me to Cromwell, who asked me where he might get in touch with me.

‘Write to him at Queen Street, Oliver,’ said Lord Stonehouse.

Cromwell bowed to him, then to me. Cromwell, bowing to me! Whatever lay behind Lord Stonehouse’s decision, I left the House a very different person from the poor scrivener who went in. In the lobby I almost walked past Mr Ink. He was behind a pillar, looking at me in the way people do when they believe you are something. I put out my hand but he refused to take it, although mine was almost as black as his.

‘Dear Mr Ink – come, I am no different.’ You may judge that the first hint of patronage had crept into my voice.

‘Oh, you are, sir. You talk different. You walk different.’ Shyly he offered me two sheets of paper, as ink-splashed as the very first sheets of Mr Pym’s words with which I had run through the streets. ‘Your speech, sir.’

‘Thank you. And God bless you, Mr Ink.’ I laughed and hugged him, for he had taught me to believe in words and in hope for the future, and there is no better thing for a man to do.

It was only when I reached Queen Street just before seven that evening to take the proceedings of the meeting to Lord Stonehouse that doubt began to creep in. There was some catch. My footsteps faltered. But the servants bowed, Mr Cole offered me his congratulations and whisked me upstairs.

Only Lord Stonehouse – it is difficult to call a man Grandfather when he has once consigned you to the plague pit – was intimidatingly the same. I stood on the slightly worn patch of the oriental carpet – the patch Richard used to call the gallows spot – exactly as I had stood so many times before while Lord Stonehouse signed letters and gave them to Mr Cole to seal. When the secretary had gone he read the proceedings of the meeting, still without acknowledging my existence. My heart sank as he turned the pages. The catch must be Anne. He would never agree to my marrying her. And if he did not, I would walk away. He reached the end of Mr Ink’s pages, removed his spectacles, coughed and cleared his throat.

‘You spoke well.’

‘Not too much, my lord?’ I hazarded.

The lids lifted from his eyes, and he gave me his basilisk look. ‘You failed at the peroration. Holles would have had you there.’

He opened the drawer which I now knew was mine, and paused for a moment before dropping in the speech. ‘Did you see Cromwell at Edgehill?’

I was very far from the boy who had first come into this room, violent with dreams and words. I had learned not to move a muscle of my face in front of him. Holles was not alone in his attack on Cromwell. His enemies were circulating a story that he had climbed a church bell tower, seen that Parliament was losing and fled.

‘It was growing dark. I saw someone who was very like, my lord.’

Not a muscle in his face moved. ‘Did you see Cromwell?’

‘I am sure Cromwell would not lie, my lord.’

There was a slight tremor in his cheek, the vestige of a dry smile. He looked at the speech again, then dropped it in the drawer and locked it.

‘Sit down.’

It was a novel experience for me in that room and I looked wildly about me. Silently he pointed to an elegant walnut chair, with a finely carved back in which the inevitable falcon glared at me malevolently as if he, at least, knew me as an impostor. Lord Stonehouse went to the window, his hands folded behind his back, and stared out over the dark street. A carriage rattled past, then it was so quiet I could hear the candles flicker. When he did speak, it was the last thing I expected him to say.

‘Did your leg heal?’

I stared at his broad back in bewilderment. ‘My leg?’

He swung round as if I had insulted him. ‘Your leg!’ he barked. ‘Did it heal? From the pitch burn?’

‘Yes, my lord. Well. There is a scar.’

‘Show me.’

Embarrassed, I got up and unbuttoned my breeches, until my leg was as bare as it had been on the day the pitch fell on it. He stared at the reddened, puckered skin, touched it, then suddenly, clumsily embraced me. The embrace ended as quickly and abruptly as it had begun, and when he released me there was something as near to a twinkle as I ever saw in his dark, brooding eyes.

‘How is Lady Black?’

* * *

‘The marriage is to be in one of the chapels at St Paul’s,’ I said.

‘St Paul’s!’ Mrs Black shrieked and fainted, Mr Black only just catching her in time. When Jane brought her round, with a vigorous application of salts and vinegar, the first words she murmured were: ‘What on earth shall I wear?’

‘Anyone would think it were her wedding,’ said Sarah, the only one totally unmoved. She remained steadfast to her philosophy that people went up and people went down –

‘– but it’s best to stay where you are?’ I grinned.

‘More room in garret with your big feet out o’ way,’ she sniffed. ‘Until you’re back.’

She more than half believed it was one of my pamphlet stories. From time to time, so did I. While a house in Drury Lane from the Stonehouse estate was being prepared for us, I had nothing to do. Everything was taken care of by the steward, Banks, and by Jane. When Lord Stonehouse found out she was Mrs Morland’s daughter, he insisted she must become housekeeper at Drury Lane. A positive side of his harsh, extreme paternalism was that he looked after his servants. When I offered her the post she could not speak, only nod and pink with pleasure. For her it was more than rehabilitation, it was a return to the estate where she had been brought up, and, for her, the estate was family.

Never in my whole life was I so idle. Mr Black would not allow me in the print shop. His formality with me was almost distressing. My hands grew whiter and whiter, and I itched to touch type once more. Anne was swept up by the Countess, who took charge of her clothes, her mother’s clothes, their language, their manners, what was correct and what was not. Anne, too, became formal with me, calling me Thomas in a stupid stilted way, until I longed for her to call me Monkey again.

Neither Kate nor Matthew would attend the wedding. Kate wrote that Matthew was working night and day on a new ship, the
Endeavour
, but I believe the true reason was he was afraid of the long hand of Lord Stonehouse, and preferred to stay in the relatively lawless Poplar Without. He did, however, send me a wedding gift, which he said I might need after all. Wrapped up inside the letter was a tightly folded scrap of paper, torn from a shipwright’s drawing. Inside that was a silver half-crown coin, the fluer de lys on the edge showing it had been minted in 1625. Sly as ever, unable to leave the coin in the stream at Upper Vale, he must have fished it out before galloping after me on our ride to Highpoint.

For herself, Kate wrote, her part was played now and she was at peace. But I know she was there, outside St Paul’s, watching, vanishing like a will o’ the wisp when I turned, for that wedding morning Jane, now ensconced at Drury Lane, had found a simnel cake on the doorstep.

Strutting in silver buttons and scarlet stockings I faltered at the sight of an imperious figure wearing a head-dress of gilt and flowers.

‘Come on, Monkey,’ Anne whispered, as the bride-cup was held aloft and the fiddlers began to play.

The wedding was marred for me only by Lord Stonehouse insisting that Anne wore the pendant. All the time we made our vows I felt the falcon’s ruby eyes glowering at me as if I was an impostor.

‘You should be grateful to it, Tom,’ said Mr Pym at the wedding feast in Queen Street. ‘The bird chose you.’

‘The wretched bird chose me? What kind of a riddle is this?’

‘In the sense that the bird is the great estate.’

‘Stop it, John,’ said Lucy. ‘Let Tom enjoy his day.’

But we had drunk a good deal of wine, I had to crack the riddle, and they wanted to tell me. Like born conspirators, they moved me away from the throng in the reception room, into the shadows of the hall, near the statue of Minerva, behind which I had hidden the day when I had first coneyed myself into Queen Street. Mr Pym asked me why I thought Lord Stonehouse made his astonishing announcement at that meeting.

‘Why? Because I made a brilliant speech,’ I boasted. ‘And in searching for the pendant I found myself and showed him I was the man to inherit.’

‘All true,’ said Mr Pym. ‘All very true. It would not have happened without all that, certainly.’

‘But . . .?’

He abruptly fell silent. Lord Stonehouse appeared at the entrance to the reception room. He had a glass in his hand, but still looked as if he had the affairs of state in his troubled face. Then he saw Anne talking to Warwick and a smile crossed his face as he went to join them.

‘Power is a fragile thing,’ Lucy said, suddenly sober.

‘Stonehouse’s loyalty to Parliament was being questioned. Rightly.’

‘Rightly?’ I said, staring across the hall at my grandfather, who, as Warwick slapped him on the back, was laughing, happier and more relaxed than I ever thought to see him.

‘He helped Richard get to France.’

Not only that, I learned, he saw him off. Warwick controlled the sea and it was a hazardous passage. It was a ship in which Lord Stonehouse had a substantial share that took Richard. Warwick was informed of this by one of his commanders. It was also rumoured that Richard had been given funds by his father to pave his way in Paris.

‘Best you know this,’ Mr Pym said, lowering his voice still further. ‘He keeps a foot in both camps. What really matters to him is the estate – the name. But he went too far in helping Richard, and in that meeting he was forced to make a decision about you – and declare his loyalty.’

Pym had engineered Cromwell’s speech. And mine. And, if you like, my inheritance. I was glad my grandfather had helped Richard, at considerable risk, whom he had harmed in the past as much as me. Yet I thought of him touching the scar on my leg, and his clumsy embrace. In his own way he loved us both. But he was driven as he had always been driven by the falcon, the estate, and was hedging his bets. Suitably chastened, I drew from my pocket the lucky half crown Matthew had returned to me, spun it in the air and caught it. ‘So in the end it all came down to this.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Which way the coin falls.’ She took it. ‘Sixteen twenty-five. When Charles was crowned.’

‘When I was born.’ Something struck me. ‘You mean – I may not inherit!’

‘Of course you will!’ Mr Pym beamed. Then his beam was modulated. ‘So long as Parliament is in power.’

I pocketed the coin. I raised my glass and my voice rang round the hall. ‘To Parliament!’

There was a sudden silence. Faces turned – then everyone raised their glasses. ‘To Parliament!’

I suppose, from their smiles, Warwick, my grandfather and the rest saw in my flushed face and outburst a burning, youthful, naive enthusiasm for the cause, of the kind that had moved me that night when I ran down the street clutching in my hand the words of the Grand Remonstrance. And that, as Mr Pym would say, was true. Very true.

‘What were you talking about so secretively?’ said Anne in the carriage home.

‘The falcon,’ I said.

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Anne said.

‘Not as beautiful as you.’ I kissed her, but could not kiss her properly until she had taken off the pendant, and locked it safely away, I hoped forever, and we drew the curtains round our marriage bed, and finally came together.