Treason's Daughter (30 page)

The moon is high now, and they can see it through the sloping window. It always makes her think of Will. She looks for the man in the moon, but tonight she cannot make him out.

‘It's hard to say. We knew we were losing when the first fleers came by, the cowardly bastards. Then we heard the retreat. But it's a hilly country, that, Hen. And it had been raining, and the ground was chewed up and boggy. The wagons were stuck, and we were scared, Lord, how scared. Me and a few others were set to abandon the train and run when the rebels came over the hill and rounded us up. We thought they were just going to take us prisoner, Hen. So we went towards them with our hands in the air, waving what grey scraps could pass as white, asking for quarter. I was scared of being forced.'

She gives a low chuckle. ‘We'd have spread our legs to save ourselves, I'd wager. Many of the girls had children, hiding in the carts or under them. Better a raped mother than a dead one. But they did not want us like that, the unnatural bastards. They set to killing us or maiming us. Screaming, I was: “I'm not a papist. Not a papist, not a papist.” But there was so much fucking screaming.'

She shivers and closes her eyes tight. ‘Why do they hate us so much, Hen? I've lain with a man now. Remember we used to talk of it? And it's all right. Nice enough. But what is it about the rutting of flesh that twists men? Mad with hatred or lust. And whichever way it takes them, we are the victims. Why, Hen?'

Hen looks at the moon as if, somehow, it can provide the answer. She searches for the right words but can't find any. She feels unworldly, small. She reaches across and brushes her cousin's hair back from her forehead. Anne reaches up and takes her hand, squeezing it.

‘Still, I'm here, and whole, and there's too many who are not. Lord, Hen, it's good to be alive. And as for the rest, well, it's your fault, anyhow, Hen,' she says, a smile hovering on her lips.

‘Mine!'

‘When you came that Christmas, all growling with love and despair. I was jealous. I hungered for it, the passion of it, the excitement. And then, one day, there he was.'

Hen props herself up on an elbow to look at her. ‘Yes, but Anne, I did not give myself to Will.'

‘True.' Anne pauses, pensive. ‘It was not that, I suppose,' she says at last. ‘You told me once the tale of Achilles. He had to choose between a short-lived glory or a long life lived in tedium. I turned all on the toss of a coin. Heads I'm a countess. Tails I'm a whore.'

‘It's not the same choice,' says Hen.

‘How not? Men have their sphere; we have ours.'

‘But it was not the toss of a coin you gambled on, just this boy's word. His life too, and him a soldier.'

‘True.'

There is silence for a while. ‘But I did so want to believe him, Hen. So very much. And by the time I started to realize I shouldn't, it was too late. When you're riding a bolting horse towards a cliff, when do you jump?'

In the bedroom, Ned and Lucy lie side by side. They can hear quiet voices next door, punctuated by laughter.

Anne's levity chafes Ned. He turns and twists, oppressed by the sound and the weight of unspoken words pressing on his
chest. He remembers how Anne ran to him, wide-eyed like a demon, her hair loose and matted, her clothes torn. He quailed before her, failing to recognize her, puzzled by this creature's use of his name.

‘Ned, Ned,' she shouted, again and again, and grime-streaked hands reached out to clutch at his buff coat. He tried to shake her off, but she clung on.

‘Anne, Anne,' she sobbed at him, incoherent in her despair, and then he knew her.

He dragged her away from the astonished stares of his men, from the questions that hung like screams in the air around them. Which is worse, he wondered as he pulled her away. That this thing from the papist baggage train is my cousin, or that they think she's been my whore? What will they think of me?

The mortification! He remembers the look on Sergeant Fowler's face. Respect peeling away, leaving contempt, stark and unyielding. He had to ask Skippon for emergency leave, even as the injured general prepared to let the butchers loose on his gaping chest wound. He had to bear his chief's disapproval and the pain-edged crabbiness with which his request was greeted. And yet, somehow, he is the devil in Anne's story! He shudders, appalled anew by the memory, by the fracturing of his carefully sealed carapace in front of his men.

Lucy, disturbed by the movement, stops pretending to be asleep and turns to him.

‘How long are you here?' she asks.

‘Just tonight.'

‘Is that all?'

Ask me about the battle. Ask me about the women.

‘Can you leave me some money? I must have a new dress; this one is absurd.'

‘Of course, my dear.'

Ask me about the way they screamed as the lads cut them. Ask me whether I would have stopped it, had Anne not appeared. Ask me about Sam.

‘Grandmother is growing more impossible, Ned. How long must I live with her?'

‘Not long. The war should be done soon. Our victory was a complete one. The king is lost.'

‘And then what, Ned? You never finished your apprenticeship. There's no money. What then?'

‘I will think of something, my love.'

She sniffs and turns away from him. The curve of her shoulder is lovely. He wants to kiss it, but he is afraid of crying.

Ask me about searching the corpses for Sam. Ask me about turning them over, one by one, the lost boys. Ask me about the maggots, and the rats and the crows and the flies, and all the parasites that eat a dead boy's flesh.

Hesitantly, quietly, Ned asks: ‘Are you glad to see me, Lucy, love?'

‘Of course, husband. What a question.'

They lie in silence for a while.

Lost in a vast loneliness, Ned reaches across to Lucy's body. Is this all there is, he asks his God, before he sinks, relieved, into lust and the quelling of thought. Is this it? Strangers grunting in the dark?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

18 July 1645

T
WO DAYS LATER, ANNE AND HEN STAND WATCHING THE
sorry march of the royalist prisoners. They stumble along under their captured colours, which hang limply in the still air – a strange parody of a martial procession. Their mottos smack of hubris here. God was not watching; the king was not victorious, nor was his strength proclaimed.

Hen scans the faces as they march past, not daring to turn away in case she misses him. Anne is beside her, restless eyes searching. Hattie is there too, solid and unmoving amid the crowd, her face fierce and arms crossed.

Hen tries to shout Sam's name at the passing boys, but her voice is lost amid the jeering. All the city's hunger and fear rains down on the prisoners in a torrent of bile and fury. They attract that contempt Londoners have for the outsider: the poor fools who know grass, not brick; who are dazzled by the scale of the place, its mighty squalor and its heaven-provoking grandeur.

Some prisoners shout back, but most fix their eyes on the
shoulders of the man in front, marching, marching, as they marched away from their homes and into the death pit at Naseby.

She has dreamed that she will find him, and filled the waking gap between dreams with her prayers. Keep him safe, oh Lord. Keep him safe. Warm and fed, and happy. She thinks of the map in the bookshop and imagines all the other desperate midnight prayers across the country – all variations on the same theme, wending their way to heaven. Imagine the cacophony of pleading the Almighty must hear. Perhaps He can't distinguish one name from the other in all the noise.

The queen – does she pray for the king? Does He hear papist prayers? Does He look down on us as we once looked through the microscope at ants? Does He laugh at our antics and ceaseless scurrying?

Such thoughts turn her nights into a looping, wakeful riddle. But her dreams are worth nothing. He is not here. She stares until her eyes hurt, lost in pity for these ragged losers, their unhappiness radiating from their slouched, marching bodies. Hattie disappeared at the start of the march, muttering darkly. Now she returns with a basket of bread, and she and Hen press it into passing hands.

‘Leave off, you peageese! Leave off!' a jowly man with a drinker's purple nose shouts at them. ‘Don't feed the whoresons. Have you no shame?'

There is muttered agreement from the crowd around him, and Hen feels the fluttering of fear in her belly. She continues to pass out the bread. Anne steps in beside her and helps now, goaded by the jowly man.

‘Deaf as well as ninny-headed?' Another man has joined the first, short and bristling with his fury.

Hattie rounds on them, furious. ‘Is the manikin your pet, you goddamned looby? Did you get a knock in the cradle? Were these boys not forced to fight as well as ours? Were they not levied out of their hearths and hurled at a stupid war like so many hares to the mastiff? Are our boys not somewhere, hungry like them, tired like them, in want of a rag of kindness?'

‘Hold thy tongue, trull,' shouts the first man. ‘I know you – the butcher's wife. They're traitors and scum.'

‘Aye, and I know you, Jeremiah Weeks. A fumbler, ladies and gentlemen!' She turns to the crowd that has gathered around the commotion. ‘Whirligigs the size of oranges, I'm told, but a prick the size of my finger.' She waggles her little finger at the man's face, to laughter from the crowd, and then lets it droop. ‘Aye, a fumbler. Has to pay double for the extra time he needs, and to give his hackney-whores time to stop laughing.'

Anne is laughing loudly beside Hen, who watches the man begin to bluster. But he's lost the crowd and he knows it, and he scuttles away, yelling over his shoulder.

‘Wouldn't pay a ha'penny to strap you, quean.'

‘I'd starve first, fumbler.'

She turns back to the girls, and starts at the sight of them as if she forgot they were there. ‘Sorry for my language, Hen, Anne. He made me that angry. I'm all in a tweak.'

‘Hattie,' says Anne, ‘I think I love you.'

Flushed, Hattie smiles. She is still a bit flustered by her lodger, and this new arrival. They are well spoken, well educated, these girls. In other times she would have bobbed to them, and Lucy is clearly indignant that she does not. But with not a rag to their name, and dependent on her intermittent
charity, the relationship between them all is odd. Arsey-versey.

Hen puts her arm through Hattie's spare arm. ‘You were wonderful, Hattie. As if it's these boys' fault.'

‘The fault lies with the slippery sod who calls himself king, Hen. Beg pardon, Mrs Wells.'

Anne shrugs. She wears Hen's mother's wedding ring; a fake, dead Captain Wells conjured in case the potion Hattie brewed failed. There's no bleeding yet. And no mileage in the lie either. Lucy must have talked, despite Hen's urgent pleas. Anne is condemned in the parish already as a grass widow.

They pass the minister's wife, Mrs Pike, who greets them but pointedly ignores Anne. She bustles past, to a real or imagined urgent meeting.

Hattie, after a pause, says in a voice weighed down by acute embarrassment: ‘Mrs Wells, I must advise you against coming to the parish church in the morning. I've been warned they mean to refuse you the communion.'

Hen gasps, but Anne carries on walking.

‘There's been tongues off like mill clappers, Mrs Wells, and, well, there we are. When the world turns upside down, some women hold on to their morality all the tighter. As if a stricter grip can flip the world back to where it was.'

‘Oh Anne,' says Hen.

‘Oh, never mind. I shall have to turn independent. It's like Hattie says: the world's turned upside down, and if the Presbyterians won't have me, there's a sect that will. What shall it be, Hen? Baptist? Particular Baptist? Quaker? Socinian? Latitudinarian?'

Hen smiles, but she can't quite bring herself to laugh. Surely some things are beyond even the reach of Anne's wit?

Hattie, however, is grinning widely. She adds in a voice copying Anne's singsong inflection: ‘Arminian? Anti-Trinitarian? Antinomianism? Adamite?'

Anne comes back: ‘Brownist? Traskite Sabbatarian?'

Hattie is silent, thinking. ‘You've trumped me, Mrs Wells.' They turn into Newgate Street. ‘I've got one!' she shouts, actually skipping in her excitement. ‘Grindletonianism.'

‘You made that up,' Hen protests.

‘I did not. There's a couple walked here from the north after the king's men burned their farm. He preaches down behind the Three Tuns. Garnered quite a crowd.'

‘What do they believe?'

‘Lord,' says Hattie, ‘you lose track. I'm all a jingle-brains when I start thinking about it. They are against the established Church and the sacrament, like most the independents. They think the Lord's spirit and the scriptures can bring man to a state of perfection.'

‘Antinomian then,' says Hen.

‘Is it? Lord.'

They turn into Hattie's closed shop and head to the back, where a broth bubbles on a fire and Jenny, Hattie's maid, is sweeping. Hattie ladles bowlfuls out for the girls, who slurp hungrily at it.

‘Anyway, Anne,' says Hen, ‘you can't just choose your faith like that.'

‘No? What must I do then?'

‘You must pray and reflect, and listen to God's guidance.'

‘But what if I can't hear Him? Can't I just choose the sect most likely to promise me entry to heaven despite my Great Sin?'

‘No!'

‘Why not?'

Hen is foxed. She searches for her arguments. Hattie breaks in.

‘Did you see the news-sheet about the letter from Cromwell purged by the MPs? The letter before they censored it called for religious liberty for soldiers. If for soldiers, why not us? That's what Mary Overton says. You know Mary, Hen? Her husband's the firebrand who acted before they banned it.'

Hen nods. She's seen the Overtons, and heard the neighbourhood mutterings about them.

‘Ned thinks Cromwell is a great man,' says Hen. ‘He says the army is awash with independent thinking, and the Presbyterians will never be able to contain the outpourings of faith.'

‘Well, Hen,' says Anne, ‘you are the clever one. Just say you could choose. Where would your clever-puss head direct you?'

‘If head alone could choose, I would be a Baptist.'

‘Arminian or Particular?'

‘Arminian, though Ned would disown me for it. Salvation through good works, no predetermined choice of elect and non-elect. But I cannot choose the workings of salvation. Our God has already chosen how we are saved.'

‘And how do we know what He has chosen?' says Hattie.

‘My head hurts,' says Anne. ‘Too much doctrinal tattling does that.'

She wanders out of the room towards the stairs, doubtless for a lie-down. Hattie says that women with child need more sleep than well women, but Hen is beginning to suspect that Anne's endless sleeping is an excuse to be looked after. Another mouth for Hen to feed, another body to keep warm.

In her absence, Hattie says: ‘I am sorry you didn't find your brother, Henrietta.'

‘I know. But Ned said he had checked the prisoners, so I did not expect it.'

‘Hoped, though?'

‘Yes.'

Hattie pours out some more broth, brushing aside Hen's thanks.

‘Did I tell you, Hen, about walking with the peace protestors back at the start of all this? We got up a petition, the women of these neighbouring parishes, and we marched to Parliament. Made it all humble. We're only poor women, blah-di-blah, and you so wise. That's the rub with men, dear. You have to grease 'em up like a pig on a spit. Then ask.

‘They paid us no heed, of course. Set on breaking out their sabres, the lob-cocks. So the world has turned, and we've all this freedom to think what we like and talk how we like. Women standing on tubs, preaching away, the rest of us making do and running things our way. But it's only because half the whoresons are away fighting and the other half are looking the other way.'

‘I know what you mean, Hattie. But none of this upside is worth my father and Sam and Ned. One dead, one lost and one . . .' She leaves the sentence unfinished.

‘True. I don't mind if my soldier comes back or not. I lost him to drink before our honeymoon was done. It goes straight to his noddle, and he's top-heavy from the soaking.'

Hen looks at Hattie as she prods at the fire, at her deft hands and broad shoulders. She struggles to imagine her as anything other than this woman alone, running her shop and propping
up the neighbourhood women with counsel and herb-skill. She probably struggles to imagine me as a pampered trade princess. Yet that was me too, she thinks. Perhaps we are like jelly: we can set in different moulds.