Treason's Daughter (13 page)

‘Of course God is with us. Are we not fighting for his church?' Ned snaps, to nodding from Holy Joe.

‘Our horse lost the first bout,' said Chalk, nervously.

‘Never fear, Chalk,' said Turnip. ‘It was a poxy skirmish. First blood to them, so they come at us with all presumption and arrogance. Then the Lord of Hosts will prove whose shoulder he sits on.'

Taffy had laid back, head on his arms, legs crossed casually. Like he was on a picnic. ‘A relief, like I said, boys. A cum-rush after some bitch has been teasing you.'

Taffy was trying to wind him up, Ned knew, so he refused to rise.

Chalk was quiet, looking into the fire.

‘Frightened, Chalky?'

‘Plague take you, Taf,' he replied.

‘Something will,' said the Welshman. ‘Plague or pox. Smothered to death by giant teats is how I'd like to go. Not a bastard Cavalier if I can help it.'

Turnip laughed. ‘Fat chance you'll die happy, Taf. In a ditch, I'd wager. A cuckold's knife in your back.'

Chalk poked the fire with a stick, and a shower of sparks escaped skywards.

‘Why are you here, Taffy?' Ned asked bluntly. ‘You do not count yourself as godly. Christ's voice is silent in you. What offended you about the king? His laws? His taxes? His abuse of Parliament privilege? Why here?'

‘Why not, laddo? Fancied a rumble, and had to choose a side. Why not this one? If I'd known I'd be stuck with prigs like you, I might have chosen differently. Mind, I like getting your share of the wine.'

The regiment was full of Taffys – men with no ability or desire to articulate their choice. What Ned found unfathomable was that
they did not care, the Taffys; that they had no definable cause. It was enough that life had brought them there, to this point. To wield a pike for a reason is one thing, Ned thought. Holy Joe understood that much. No shades or subtlety for Joe; he just wanted to stick his pike in some papists. But to brave death and you can't say why, like Taffy?

Ned thinks about Sam. The boy lacks conviction to go against their father. He is sitting at home, by a fire, no doubt. And I'm glad, Ned decides. Better to choose love over faith, if the one is stronger than the other. Though I wish the Lord's voice were stronger in them, my family, he thinks. Yet where is He? Where is the voice? Why have you forsaken me, oh Lord?

Ned's thoughts keep straying to his gruesome blanket, defeating attempts to drive them elsewhere. He doesn't look around him, but keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the stars. If I did look at their faces, he thinks, I would not be able to tell who is a Taffy, who is a Joe, and who is like me. Your cause dies with you. Does it make your death any more pitiable if you fought for no reason? Or perhaps – and this thought makes Ned squirm beneath his fellows – it makes not one jot of difference. Your eyes stare just the same.

Move on, Ned. Think of something else. A fire. They were billeted in a town, Ned remembers, one of many in that strange, prolonged hunt across the country for the king's army. Every day a march, and the king just over the horizon. Sam and Ned used to play tag in the fields beyond the walls; this strange marching was like a prolonged military tag. With a hefty dose of cold and misery and hunger stirred in.

A Sunday morning in this somewhere place, bright and clear, and the regiment gathered round their chaplain, Obadiah
Sedgwick. He preached with fire in his belly; his thin, pinched face suffused with the power of truth. He was deep in the meat of it. Ned stood with his mates watching, and felt an answering fervour.

Sedgwick wound himself, his voice and his tone spiralling ever upwards. ‘There is not such a God-provoking sin, a God-removing sin, a church-dissolving sin, a kingdom-breaking sin as idolatry. Down with it, even to the ground. Superstition is but a bawd to gross idolatry.'

Behind Sedgwick, the church loomed. In its windows stood the coloured proofs of idolatry, the graven images of the modern, Laud-corrupted church. Inside those huge wooden doors were altar rails – set up to divide the clergy from the people.

Impossible to hear the pure word of God in a place of idolatry and popish rails. The regiment sat in Sedgwick's clenched fist, quiet and breathless. Even Taffy, next to Ned, seemed caught up in the preacher's power. Chalk, eyes wide open, stared and shuffled from foot to foot. Holy Joe, eyes closed and muttering, was repeating the words back, committing them to memory.

When Sedgwick stopped speaking and opened his fist, the soldiers flew past him towards the church. They battered at the heavy door, until it splintered into pieces. The clergy of the church sat huddled inside. Only one dared stand, and was swept aside by a fist, as the righteous men marched in. The Laudians crawled like dogs to the corner, and watched as the altar rails were ripped from their place. They watched as the stones flew through the glass images of Christ, as the icons on the wall were ripped from their settings. They watched as Taffy jumped on a pew and pissed on a statue of the Virgin, his urine running down her porcelain face like tears.

Like dogs, thinks Ned. Papist dogs.

Outside, they bundled the wooden altar rails onto a pyre, and then laid the fire. In the flicker of the flames, Ned looked at the faces of his comrades, and thought, ‘These are my brothers in Christ.'

Ned remembers the joy of it, and the sense of fellowship. The opposite of loneliness. It was warm, too, near the righteous fire. How strange and abstract an idea warmth is, he thinks now. He feels like his body is suspended in ice. Chettle once told him of visiting the Earl of Warwick's mansion, and the ice cave there. They harvested the ice in winter, stored it in the cave and served it up with strawberries on sun-drenched summer lawns. It must be like this inside an ice cave, he thinks.

What is it like to be warm? Have I ever known such a thing? he wonders. He simply cannot imagine warmth. The moon is clear and severe above him; it looks cold up there. Perhaps the man in the moon does not feel the ice. The sun, he knows, is hot. What does that even mean? Hot sun. He rolls the words around in his head, but cannot grasp their meaning. Empty words.

He drifts on the iciness for a while. He pulls himself back. Think, Ned. Think. About what? The battle. That's it. The battle.

The foot soldiers were in the centre. Holles' Redcoats were stationed near the cavalry on the flanks, sitting tucked in behind the Essex Brigade. The king's army was ranged on the ridge ahead of them. Neither side stirred. Ned could hear the grumble of frightened men's unruly bowels in the silence. He was amused despite his fear: an unexpected sound to accompany the start of a holy war. Then, slowly, they rolled down the hill, and his own bowels gave an answering twitch. A terrible wave advancing
towards him. The crash of the artillery; somehow louder and more vicious than the same sound on the training grounds. Then the cavalry charged at the flanks, and the panic gripped the City volunteers.

He saw Prince Rupert, he thinks, leading the right wing of the king's horse. A young face to promise death so implacably. His sword waving, his dog, Boy, prancing at his side. No true dog, that one, but a devil-sent imp. Standing crowded in the middle, they saw their flanks crumble like marchpane, and the fear in the foot regiments stank like piss and wet wool. Ned saw Holles, standing firm in the centre, urging them on, and Ned gripped his pike with shaking hands. Chalk stumbled forward beside him. The two sides came together in a clash of metal and panic. Then… Then nothing.

Ned raises his hand to touch his head, and wonders what happened to the others.

Ned thinks about Taffy, and his provocative coarseness. I am twenty years old, Ned thinks, and I am likely to die on this field. And I have never known what it is to touch a woman. He thinks of Lucy Tompkins, and her soft curls and tempting curves. If I escape this, Lord, can I visit a bawdy house? Just once, oh Lord. Cheese will take me; he knows them all. But I won't get home, he thinks, and even if I do, I cannot sin. Can I? Just once?

The devil is tempting me, Ned thinks. Like our Lord in the desert. But deserts are so very hot, and I am so cold. You didn't know how lucky you were, Lord.

Now, thinks Ned, I am a blasphemer, as well as a man desperate to sin. I am being tested and I am failing. Who am I?

He cries now, at last. In the darkness, he prays. He tries to hear God's pure voice. But there is only the sound of his own sobbing.

‘Son of God, shine on me,' he says aloud. ‘Shine on me.'

As if to mock him, the moon drifts behind a silver cloud.

He tries to remember the example of the martyrs, who were burnt by fire for the true faith. John Hooper, the Bishop of Worcester and Gloucester, who spent three-quarters of an hour being eaten by an inefficient fire. How did Foxe describe the end, in his book of the glorious Protestant martyrs? How Ned pored over that book as a boy, committing it to memory. Hooper bore it, until: ‘having his nether parts burned and his bowels fallen out, he died as quietly as a child in its bed'.

Hooper was always Ned's favourite of Foxe's martyrs; the one he chose to play when the boys played papists and saints.

Is Master Hooper looking down on me? Ned wonders.

Now, alone and naked in the field, he whispers: ‘“He now reigneth as a blessed martyr in the joys of heaven prepared for the faithful in Christ before the foundations of the world; for whose constancy all Christians are bound to praise God.”'

Ned adds a private, silent prayer. He wants constancy and courage now, the strength to bear this trial. Cold is better than fire, he tells himself. Hooper's face turned black, and all the fat, water and blood that fill a man's body dropped out of the scorched ends of his fingers. This trial is as nothing to his, thinks Ned. And yet, a small voice whispers mutinously in his head. And yet. I am me, and not him. And his torment is trapped in the pages of a book, and mine fills the world. All the universe is now turning on my freezing body and faltering mind. And a still smaller voice whispers: Fuck Hooper the martyr, what about me?

He sleeps a little, or at least, he thinks he does. The moon has gone without him seeing its passing, and there is a lightness at the
edge of the sky. Christ's blood, but I'm cold, he thinks. Cold, cold. He's not sure he wants it to get light; he'll be able to see the faces of his companions. But if it stays dark, he'll die here. Jesus wept. Make up your mind, Ned. Light or dark, which is it?

Suddenly, he thinks, what have I done?

I stood firm for what I believed was right, I lost my family, and this is where I am. I thought I was making a choice. But was I? Unmanly to shirk the fight, manly to fight; what manner of choice is that? The past few years have seen me backing myself into a corner, so this was the only fate possible. And I thought myself my own master.

And this, he thinks, is what it means to be a man, after all. Lying naked in a field, covered in other men's corrupting flesh, waiting for a dawn I'm terrified of. And suddenly Ned, who has spent the best years of his youth disciplining himself into godly sobriety, is laughing. Alone with the naked corpses, he laughs until his ribs ache. The sun comes up, at last, streaking the sky with warm pink light.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
N LONDON, THE TALE DRIBBLES BACK FROM THE BATTLE.
A victory, and Prince Rupert captured, come the first reports, bringing cheering to the street. Then the news travels, from shop to shop, mouth to mouth, kitchen to kitchen. No victory, nor a loss neither. An inconclusive, fractious thing. Both sides amateurishly astonished by the horror of battle.

Birch arrives, unexpectedly, after dinner on the Sunday. The young lawyer, Oliver Chettle, is with him. The family are sitting at the table together: Sam, Hen and her father. And an empty chair where Ned should be.

They are surprised by their visitors; callers are uncommon in these times. Birch has been liberal with his money for Parliament, and if it is pragmatism rather than conviction loosening his wallet, the recipients are not asking. Challoner, meantime, twists his way around the levies where he can. The men bow stiffly to each other from across their political differences.

‘We came,' says Birch, ‘with news of Ned.'

Hen drops her book. Birch slowly sits down in the great chair vacated by her father. He rearranges himself just so, and seems
deliberately to be drawing out the tension. Hen thinks she might fly at him, and scratch out his eyes. Pompous old bastard, just tell the punchline.

‘He was at Edgehill, and is well.'

The Challoners seem to let out a collective sigh. Oliver Chettle is watching Hen, and as she puts a hand to the table to steady herself, moves forward as if to offer an arm. Sam is there first.

He pulls out a chair. ‘Here, Hen,' he says, and she sinks into it.

I will not cry in front of these men, she thinks, and digs her fingernails into her palms. But Ned, Ned is safe. Thank you, Lord, thank you.

‘He was injured,' says Chettle. ‘A blow to the head, and deaf for a time. They say he appeared out of the morning mist, bloody and naked, and they thought him a ghost at first. But he is well, and hearing. A runner came to the committee, to bring word from my Lord Essex, and told it as a tale from the battlefield. When I heard the apparition's name, I thought to come and tell you.'

‘I take it very kindly, very kindly indeed,' says Challoner. He is visibly moved, discomposed. Harmsworth enters the hall, carrying a wine jug. ‘A glass of wine for you, gentlemen,' offers Challoner. ‘Harmsworth, tell his grandmother that Ned is safe and well after the battle at Edgehill.'

‘Indeed, sir! Very glad to hear it; they'll be in the kitchen too, if I may say so.'

‘Well, well,' says Challoner, and drinks deeply, too deeply. His hand is trembling.

‘He is much cosseted by his regiment, they say,' says Birch. ‘In the symbolic line, it seemed, him looming out of the dawn like that. Alive when they thought he was lost.'

The wine is poured and the atmosphere seems almost convivial.

‘And the battle,' says Sam. ‘What course did it take?'

Poor Sam, thinks Hen. Like a hunter pulling a miserable plough in the field next to where the other thoroughbreds chase.

Chettle lines the wine glasses up like regiments on the table. ‘Imagine both lines arranged so,' he says. ‘Foot in the centre, cavalry on the flanks. This is Prince Rupert, devil take him. He charges, and our flank collapses, with barely a whimper. If he'd reined them back, His Majesty would be marching down Ludgate Hill this day. But the ill-disciplined whoremongers chased our fleeing boys, instead of wheeling round to take our middle. All was confusion after that. Pike met pike in the centre. Your brother's regiment, led by General Holles, held their ground, the Lord be praised. They fought until dusk, and then lay down and slept.'

He pauses.

‘So no side won,' says Challoner.

Chettle inclines his head. He is rising thirty, now, the young lawyer. He exudes confidence, yet without the edge of arrogance that could spill over. Handsome, too, thinks Hen. Not Will-handsome, but comely enough. His hair curls over his collar as he nods.

‘Can we not, then, gentleman,' says Challoner, ‘consider this as a duel. Both sides have honourably discharged their pistols, and now we may all go home and consider ourselves friends again.'

Birch says: ‘It would be a relief to return to trade as usual, but I fear it will depend on the king.'

Chettle nods. ‘In confidence, I can tell you that both Houses are preparing a delegation to the king to talk terms. Essex is withdrawing to Warwick, and at present the roads to London are
clear for the king's army. But His Majesty proved intransigent in the summer.'

‘Parliament asked too much,' says Challoner, belligerently. ‘There is little point offering a man terms he cannot accept, then blaming him for not accepting them.'

‘Father,' says Hen. ‘It is Sunday. Mr Birch and Mr Chettle did not come here to fight, but to comfort us with news of Ned.'

He opens his mouth as if to disagree with her, and closes it again, almost sheepish.

Chettle looks at Hen, a smile hovering.

‘Wise words, Miss Challoner. Perhaps we should include you in the delegation.'

Challoner laughs. ‘Send my Hen, and we'd be living in peace within the week. If anyone can cut this Gordian knot, it's my clever cat.'

Birch stirs uncomfortably. ‘Not even in jest, Challoner. I was there when the women marched on Parliament last winter to deliver their peace petition. Women! In political discourse. I never thought to see the day.'

Hen opens her mouth to speak, but closes it again on catching Chettle's eye. They smile at each other, almost conspiratorially. She stands and walks to the window, overlooking the street. She looks towards the Temple. How long since I saw Will? she wonders. More than a year.

‘Bad enough,' continues Birch, ‘when it was the poorer, nastier sort of slattern.'

‘Among the godly, there are more reports of women preachers,' says Chettle. ‘Women who claim to be moved by the Spirit to speak of God.'

The glass in the window is steaming up. Hen wipes it with her sleeve and looks down into the street. She can guess who is coming next, and sure enough, St Paul's strictures thunder around the room in Birch's nasal voice.

‘“Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak.”'

She knows they will all be nodding behind her, as men do when St Paul is invoked to remind them of their women's weaknesses. ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord,' she thinks. I am my father's property, and then my husband's; and this is how it is and always will be. I must learn to be more obedient, in my heart, as well as in my actions, she resolves, and turns back from the window.

But Lord, if you wanted me to be obedient, why did you make me so questioning?

When their visitors leave, Sam, Hen and Challoner sit together, not speaking. Glad of each other's presence.

Sam breaks the silence. ‘Have you heard the ballad, Hen, that's doing the rounds?'

She shakes her head.

Sitting by the fire, their arms linked and their heads close together, Sam sings softly, following a tune of an old nursery rhyme Grandmother used to sing. Challoner sits in the chair, watching them.

Lament! And let thy tears run down
,
To see the rent
Between the robe and crown
.
War like a serpent has its head got in,
And will not end as soon as it did begin
.

Challoner repeats the last line in a low bass. And the three of them sing the verse again, in a deep, full-throated lament that carries through the house, up to the attic where the old lady sits, alone.

Later, on this day of reckonings and foreboding, there is another visitor. The poet Edmund Waller calls on Challoner. He is silky in his greetings, and professes himself willing to wait for Challoner, who is struggling awake from an afternoon nap. Waller stands by the fire in the hall, legs apart, hands on hips. He holds himself as if acting in a masque.

‘My dear Miss Challoner. More beautiful than ever.' He bows.

Hen curtsies, blushing, instantly annoyed with herself for the blush. Odious man.

He stares at her a little longer.

‘Yet still so young,' he says. ‘
And then what wonders shall you do / Whose dawning beauty warms us so.'
He declaims his own lines, wrapping his tongue round the words with relish.

Hen debates with herself. Shall I feign ignorance, or admit to this man that I know his work? Lord grant me humility, she thinks, but not yet. She says:

‘Hope waits upon the flowery prime
,
And summer, though it be less gay,
Yet is not looked on as a time
Of declination and decay
.
For with a full hand that does bring
All that was promised by the spring.'

The triumph curdles halfway through when she realizes how flattered it makes him, how much he is preening. But she is committed now, and limps to the finish of the stanza.

He bows again, deeper this time. ‘Never have I heard my words with such pleasure, Miss Challoner.'

Hen notices something interesting now with a strange detachment. Flattery from a man is only as valuable as the man is attractive. She can see how some women would find Waller compelling: he is smooth and polished like a wax candle; he is fashionable and charming; he has fleshy lips and clear skin; and if he's running to fat, his clothes are cut well enough to hide it. But to her, his attentions are off-key. She thinks of Will's naked admiration, and of Chettle's candid smile. Perhaps, she thinks, he is just too polished by the court ways for a simpleton like me. His gaze makes her curve her shoulders to hide her breasts, and clasp her arms across her appraised body.

Her father enters now, and she is relieved to see him. She can stand a little straighter with him beside her.

‘Mr Challoner, your daughter was delighting me with proof of her erudition. She is the learned one of the world, I declare.'

Challoner chuckles fondly. ‘She is, she is.'

‘But perhaps the young lady has business about the house.
I would talk to you alone.'

‘Well.' Challoner looks embarrassed.

Hen runs over to kiss him. ‘I should visit Grandmother,' she says.

As she walks out of the room and up the stairs, she feels lighter, somehow. Chettle told them earlier that Waller had been picked to join the peace delegation. A good choice, said Chettle. The reformers in Parliament trust him after his stand on ship money, even if he cannot be brought to hate the bishops. Yet the king loves a poet, and this one has spread his courtly flattery thick. He can butter both sides of a slice, that one. But, she wonders, if he's been charged with this urgent mission to the king, why is he here? What business can he possibly have with her father?

The next day, Hen is at Hyde Park Corner with Mrs Birch, helping to build one of the series of fortifications Londoners are throwing up against their advancing king. It is a peculiar thing, to build a barrier against your own king.

Hen is set to work carrying away the stones unearthed by the spades of the men. Mrs Birch decided on the Hyde Park fortifications on hearing rumours that a better class of woman would be pitching in at this fort building. Sure enough, each time Hen passes the patch of grass where Mrs Birch has spread herself most of the afternoon, she gains some new whispered intelligence.