Treason's Daughter (15 page)

Ned ran, tripping over mud, his feet scrabbling for purchase. Men were cut down either side of him, their blood raining on him and running into
his eyes with his sweat, so that he could barely see. There was no reasoning left to him, no prayer; just the zigzag flight of a cornered fox. The fierce thrumming of hooves behind him pushed it on, that dumb animal trapped inside Ned's familiar, crazed body. At last, the ground gave under his feet, and he threw himself into the river. The icy water knocked the air from his lungs, punching his terrified frame into a new state of shock
.

He wrestled his heavy coverlet, icy hands pulling at the straps. He turned, sensing something behind him, and looked straight into the eyes of a man on horseback, a man whose sword was drawn and pointing at Ned's throat. Ned waited, beyond even fear, at the last. Flooded with a calm emptiness. Cowed. The mute creature gazed at the Cavalier through Ned's wide eyes
.

And the man cocked his head and turned away, pulling his sword back from the death stroke
.

Ned's knees buckled, and the icy water reached his waist. Then suddenly, Taf's face loomed in front of him, shouting at him. Words Ned seemed to take minutes, hours to understand
.

‘Can't swim, Ned. Help me, Ned.'

The current pulled at his legs and he launched himself into the river as Taf grabbed onto him, clawing at his back
.

Behind them the horsemen were coming, scything down the fleeing soldiers. The water was already swirling red as Ned and Taffy fell forward into the choppy waves. Taffy was panicking, pulling them both down. The shock of the cold pulled Ned back to the fore, pushing the scared beast back into its corner of his mind
.

Ned struggled across the water, fighting the current and his thrashing comrade. As he pulled himself up on the far bank, only then did he master the demon. But with his returning self came a rushing shame. For what man can lose himself to the beast and not be tainted?

Squatting here next to his father, tummy full and wrapped in the warm cloak, the horror is receding. He plays the scene in his head, but it already feels like a tale told by someone else. He remembers how the urge to live bade him drop his friend in the icy river; how close he came to biting Taffy's arms as they wrapped round his neck, pulling tighter and tighter.

His father is looking at him with compassion, the face he has always worn for his children's grazed knees and bruised limbs. Ned fights the urge to cry like a boy.

‘I looked back across the river, and it was just one great mass of bodies. You could walk across their backs. On the other side, there was Prince Rupert. I knew it was him – I could see his dog prancing at his horse's legs. The mark of Satan, that imp. No dog, but evil, dog-shaped.'

‘A bad day.' Challoner shakes his head. ‘It's done him no good, His Majesty. There was a peace delegation with him at Reading. And then reports came back of how Rupert's men sacked Brentford. Brutal, it was – the way they learned it in the European wars. Englishmen sacking an English town, even while the king talks of peace. So now the king's seen as too devious to trust with talk of peace, and his men are feared as demons poised to sack London.'

‘Small wonder that most of the city seems to be here, in support of Lord Essex.' In the grey light, Ned can see the crowds of people; the carts and the militiamen; women and children; boys armed with kitchen knives and old men brandishing staves.

‘We're better off in a crowd. Standing fast,' says Ned.

‘Not always, boy. Not always.'

Ned looks down at the grass and picks a fat blade. As a boy he would have pulled it taut between two thumbs and blown on it, imagining it a war trumpet. Not so long ago, in fact.

He finds the words he's looking for. ‘Father, I haven't seen Chalk. Not since Brentford.'

His father sucks in his breath.

‘No hope?'

Ned shakes his head.

‘Lord, I shall have to write to his parents. When this battle is done, Ned, should you like to join the cavalry? I'll settle enough on you now.'

‘Thank you. I will think on it.'

They are silent a while, Ned eating slowly now. Picking at food because he can, not because he is hungry.

‘I'm not much of a soldier.'

‘You're lucky, Ned. Twice you've cheated death. The only good soldier is a lucky one.'

‘I keep thinking about the Cavalier who held the sword to my throat. All that I am, all that I feel – he had it in his power to end it all. And yet…'

‘He didn't. Be thankful. The Lord's hand was in it.'

‘But Father, do you see? He had the power to kill me, and he chose not to. On a whim? Because he liked my face? Because he didn't? The randomness of it, it terrifies me. Perhaps he had a letter from his mistress, or he has a boy my age and it's his birthday. Chalk dead, me alive. A toss of a coin between us.'

Challoner puts a hand on Ned's shoulder.

‘Not a coin, lad. Providence. My poor boy. Soldiering does play with a man's mind. My time in Europe brought me to Arminius.'

‘How so?'

Challoner pauses before he speaks, weighing his words. Ned recognizes his father's fear of causing an argument between them here, now.

‘Please tell me, Father,' he says.

‘Well, then. I saw a man, one I knew, pick up a newborn baby. It mewled in that way they have, like a blasted kitten. He took it by its ankles and smashed its head against a wall. Its brains splattered – some landed here.' He points to his forehead and rubs it, as if to wipe out some ancient stain.

‘I saw so many things, but that I could not forget. It made me question what I believed. If God is shaping our destinies, is He a God who guides a man's hands to crush a baby? If it is all predestined, the baby-killer could stand side by side with the saints in God's grace, while the baby sinks into damnation. I know –' he waves his hand as Ned opens his mouth to speak – ‘the chosen have a responsibility to deserve God's choice. But I found the argument hollow.

‘Then I read of Arminius' teachings, and it felt right for me. That man had free will. He chose to kill that baby, without God's goading. Yet, if Arminius is right, there will be a reckoning. How can there not be? He will be weighed and judged. We will be weighed and judged.'

They are silent, for a space. Ned can't think of a riposte, not now. It is all too abstract. Only his full belly, and the fear churning it into a nauseous mess, is real to him. The coming battle hovers at the edge of his mind, like a malevolent raven.

‘We will have this argument for all our lives, Father,' he says.

‘One of us will prove the other wrong, at the end. Pray God I find out first, my Ned.'

‘I must go back.' It is fully light now. They can just make out the king's army ranged up across the flat marshy fields. All around them, the chatter of the crowd grows, and the screech of sharpening steel rings across the grass. Ned wants to stay, to rest his head in his father's lap, and wrap himself in his heavy cloak.

‘I'll look for you after,' says Challoner.

‘You should go home. Look to Henrietta and Sam. We might lose.' Ned smiles, as he recognizes the irony of that ‘we'.

He turns, and walks back to Taffy and Holy Joe, the last of the boys who set out by his side from the Artillery Ground that summer.

In Fetter Lane, Hen paces in the hall. She feels like one of the lions in the Tower, measuring out time and space in an endless, pointless prowling. The house is echoing and empty. Sam has gone. He came to her room in the darkness, and told her he was heading out of the City to Turnham Green. She knew that with the battle so close to home, with his friends all ranged up against the king's troops, that Sam was beyond reach. So she kissed him goodbye, and waited until the door closed shut before crying.

Harmsworth has gone too; bitter, pinched Harmsworth. Perhaps he will curdle the Cavaliers to death with his sourness. Some apprentices she didn't know knocked for Cheese. He left with them, white-faced and silent. A sure beating if he didn't go, a chance of death if he did. Poor Cheese. Not all men are born heroes.

Nurse is still in Oxford, please God to stay for ever. Sally, the cook, after they finished baking, asked if she could go to her sister, whose three boys were all standing against the king. Hen kissed her and blessed her, and she bustled off into the darkness, taking little Milly, the maid, with her. Only Hen and her grandmother were left now, in the rattling old house.

Hen has heard of the sack of Brentford – who has not? She has divided the mountains of pamphlets into royalist and radical. The royalist ones are in the hall, ready to be strewn about, to prove loyalties if such a thing becomes necessary. The radical are buried in a chest in the garden, with her father's best claret, the silver plate and the jewellery her mother left her. Her father, before he left to find Ned, was downstairs in the counting house for the evening; he too buried a full chest under the hawthorn tree.

Hen walks through to the library to look out into the garden. She has scattered dead leaves over the freshly dug soil. The garden looks unkempt, but at least not suspicious. I am the only thing worth plundering now, she thinks. Like Cheese, I face fates I cannot influence.

She goes upstairs to Grandmother, who is lying in bed with the blankets pulled up to her nose.

‘Will you come downstairs?' says Henrietta. ‘We should be together.'

The old lady nods. When was the last time she left her room? Hen wonders. The summer? The spring, even.

At the threshold of her room, the old lady clings to Hen. With huge frightened eyes, she croaks: ‘I can't, can't.'

‘Why not? Come, Grandmother. What could happen? Just the stairs.'

But there is a frenzied fear building in the old woman now. ‘Can't, Hen. Don't make me. I want to stay here. Safe here.'

Hen is exasperated, furious. She wants to shake the trembling woman, to pick her up, carry her down and shout: ‘See! Nothing! No demons, no evil.'

She fights to sound patient. ‘Come, Grandmother. Please.'

The old lady pulls herself away from Hen. With surprising agility she pulls back the blankets and leaps into her bed.

With Milly away, no one has emptied the pot, and the room smells high. Hen gives in and pulls the blanket round her grandmother's chin. She opens the window and a rush of cold air smacks her face. The City is eerily quiet; preposterously empty. Will, she thinks suddenly. Did Will go to Turnham Green? Is he there now? Everyone I hold in my heart is miles away, facing guns and pikes and death in all its guises.

She picks up the chamber pot and flings the contents onto the street below. She cannot stir herself to take it outside. Anyway, even the night-soil man is probably at the Green.

Behind her, her grandmother is whimpering. She is becoming ever weaker and more diminished. The flashes of fire that survived her descent into despair have been dampened by time. She is turning childlike. Reduced to the sum of her appetites and excretions. What is it Jaques says in
As You Like It
?

Last scene of all
,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
.

A miserable sod, though, Jaques, she thinks. Her father always liked him. She smiles to think of it.

She closes the window and walks back to the bed. She pulls a chair and sits next to her grandmother, pushing the old lady's grey hair back from her forehead. I could get a book, she thinks. But what book can I read with my life in the balance? She lays her forehead on the blanket and closes her eyes. They are stinging; she has not slept. Up all night making pies for Ned, in case her father finds him. She knows they were not very good. Mrs Birch and Nurse are right, she thinks. Who will want me to keep their house? What use am I to Father, to Sam or Ned? I am steeped in all things useless and empty where it matters.