Treason's Daughter (41 page)

‘You have your notions of duty, brother, and I have mine.'

‘You will talk at the end of the questioning. Everyone does. Please, Sam, please. Just tell me now.'

Sam spreads his hands wide, glancing at Hen. ‘Well then, brother,' he says. ‘Here it is.'

Ned leans forward in the chair, relief clear on his face.

‘Prince Rupert has taught me, himself, the secrets revealed to him by the imp, his dog Boy.'

‘Go on,' whispers Ned.

‘Aye. Necromancy, brother. Shape-shifting. To get here, we assumed the shape of a gull, and took wing across the sea towards—'

‘Sam! By the Cross you are trying me.' Ned turns away so Sam can't see his face, and the despair he knows it will betray. It was a faint hope that Sam would help him find his fellow plotters, and then vanish quietly.

Sam puts his head back, smiling broadly.

‘If you two have quite finished,' snaps Hen. ‘You,' she raps at Sam, ‘no more japes. We need to find a way out of this. What's to stop one of the men you are shielding from giving up your name, Sam? And how long do you think it will take them to come here looking for you? What about my son, Sam? My Blackberry?'

He looks up at the mention of his name, raising chubby fists to her, smiling wildly.

There is shouting from the street. ‘Sir, sir! Captain Challoner, sir.'

Hen and Sam turn to stare at Ned. He curses softly and crosses to the window. It is stiff, frozen shut with ice crusting the panes from the inside. Even so, the shock of the cold air draws a gasp.

‘What?' he shouts down to the sergeant waiting in the street below.

‘Sir, the MPs are said to have reached a decision. It will be soon. Today, perhaps, or tomorrow. We must—'

‘Yes, yes. Meet me downstairs,' says Ned. ‘God save us.' He must get back. He turns round to them, relieved that there is an excuse to put off this decision. ‘This is not over,' he says. ‘Not over.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

T
HE DAY WHIRLS BY. NED LETS IT GO, CONCENTRATING ON
his job, and on keeping his men mindful. He's too busy to decide. A few of the men bother him. They are keyed up, pumped. They laugh too loudly and bounce as they march. It is intoxicating, this regicide. This tearing down of the temple walls.

Roberts, a young boy blooded in the small fights of the second war and the New Model's divine certainty, is the worst. Ned fears he will do something rash, something shaming. His parents were killed in the siege of Brampton Bryan. The wars have created too many boys like Roberts – rootless and twitchy. Boys who believe only in the power of a musket.

As they guard the king's person, Roberts' eyes keep swivelling, turning back to where the man himself talks quietly to his chaplain, William Juxon.

It's hard not to look, to stare at this man who walks with death. The man bears it well. He is calm, self-possessed. His enemies are rootling about London, trying to persuade people to sign the death warrant. There is a safety in being one of many names on the paper that will kill the king. Fairfax, they say, has
locked himself away. He is washing his hands of the act.

Ned watches Charles and thinks of the two men, both pinioned in a corner. Fairfax, who Ned has admired so fervently, is choosing to do nothing. Should he not, having won the war, fight for the peace?

And here is the man Charles, surrounded by enemies, deserted by friends, and he knows what he must do. He knows that his only recourse now, his only escape, is to show them all how a king must die.

Hen steps out of the baker's shop holding Blackberry. She has that wired tightness to her face she remembers so well from when Blackberry was a tiny scrap who screamed all night for milk. Tiredness so strong it seeps into your bones, changing the very structure of your face.

She had managed to calm her fear, quelling it with lies and platitudes, but now it is back. She feels it in her trembling legs and sweating palms. And suddenly her heart is beating so violently and so fast that she cannot breathe. She clings on to Blackberry, trying to find some calm. The street swirls beneath her.

An oyster-seller shouts and calls, his words too familiar to be distinct; two women stand gossiping, their shawls pulled tight against the cold and their cheeks chapped and red; a veteran clumps past on a wooden leg, his crutches catching in the mud and the mutterings falling from him like imprecations to a deaf deity; a beggar sits on the corner, huddling under the overhang of the tenement above. She is poorly dressed and thin; beside
her sit two children – one baby and one toddler. One shivers violently, and the other sits motionless, her face so white as to be translucent, and her lips blue with the cold.

Hen focuses on them, trying to count her blessings and calm her breathing. Blackberry, swaddled, warm and red-cheeked, wriggles on her hip. The beggar woman catches her eye and holds out a hand. Hen reaches into the bag and tears off a chunk of bread, still warm, and hands it over.

She watches, appalled and fascinated, as the woman eats it ferociously. The mother doesn't look to where her children sit watching her eat. The older child turns and looks at Hen with dull, unseeing eyes beneath a ragged dark fringe. The woman finishes the bread with a sigh and, seeing Hen standing there still, stretches out a hopeful hand.

Hen shakes her head and walks on.

The woman's indifference is chilling. That despair and hunger and cold could override all pity, all care for her children – this Hen could not imagine until now. She hears the coward's voice in her own heart asking her the questions: And where would you break? What makes you think that you would be any better?

Another brick to add to her fear. She had thought that the existence of love was what made her vulnerable; that she was most afraid of her heart breaking. But now she sees a greater terror: in a place where her love has failed, and she exists without it. She fears her inner coward; she fears reaching the limit of love and crossing over to a place beyond.

Yesterday, the king said goodbye to those of his children who remained in England: Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth. Colonel Hacker tells Ned the tale as the troops line up to be inspected on another freezing dawn. The dawn of the day they will kill the king.

Grizzled New Model veterans openly wept, says Hacker, as the king sunk to his knees next to the young princess and told her not to grieve for this, his glorious death.

Ned nods, distracted.

‘We're worried about the young prince,' says Hacker as they turn back towards the rooms serving as their mess. ‘He promised his father not to usurp his older brothers and become Parliament's puppet king. But that promise is not enough from an eight-year-old surrounded by enemies.'

‘Mmm.'

‘We are worried they may try to kidnap him, the royalists. Use him as a pawn. Find new ways to undo what we have done. We need him yet.'

‘The royalists, sir?'

‘Yes, Ned. Are your wits addled this morning? The royalists – remember them? Their cursed London spies. The ones who not three days past tried to get into the king's rooms, the audacious puppies.'

The ground heaves beneath Ned's feet. He thought that time would make the decision for him. That the king's head could roll into the basket and take Ned's great choice with it.

In the mess Ned finds Skippon sitting alone by the fire. His former chief has been distancing himself from the trial. He tells Ned that he has found, at the last, that he wants to be among his fellow soldiers. That his feet brought him to their mess despite himself. He looks at Ned as if seeing him for the first time.

‘What troubles you, Ned?'

‘What are my troubles worth in these times?' he replies.

‘Come, Ned.'

Ned is silent. He did not know, before now, how very much grief can feel like fear. The same physical punch. The same nausea. The same enveloping sense of a stubborn presence that will never give ground to a lighter future. He watches the flames. He thinks about his God.

At last he speaks: ‘Sir, if someone you loved committed a great sin, against God and his country, and to be quiet meant bearing the silence on your conscience, but sparing his life, what would you do? I speak, of course, hypothetically.'

Skippon is quiet.

Ned babbles into the silence: ‘I mean, is it selfish, sir, not to want to bear the guilt of speaking up?'

‘But it is not your own guilt that matters, Ned. It is the sin. And not to bear sin is a mercy, not only to the good but to the sinner. Is it not, then, a mercy, a kindness for the one you love, to know the consequence of his sin?'

‘But,' says Ned, anguished even by saying it aloud, ‘what of my love for him? What of the pain of dealing the blow?'

‘You were talking of selfishness before, were you not?'

Ned acknowledges the truth of Skippon's words with a shrug.

‘And remember,' says Skippon, ‘that if we cannot stand before
our own consciences, how shall we be able to stand before the God who knows all things? Conscience is but God's deputy in every man's breast.'

Ned feels the weight of the words settle on his shoulders.

‘Sir,' he says, ‘I have something to tell you.'

The crowd is eerily silent. You bastards, thinks Hen. You cowed, stupid bastards. You were not so quiet when it was my father being killed. You were not so squeamish then.

She stands by Will and grips his hand. Blackberry is with Hattie. Sam is sleeping. There is a blush of pink in her brother's skin now, a sparkle in him of one who has kissed the scythe and lived. Ned has not come back. Now that they are standing here, watching the king's execution, what would be the point? Please God, let him let it lie. Please God, let him find some pity in his heavy soul.

She hears a murmur, like the rustling of linen. There he is – the king. Christ, but he looks small. They have led him out through the window of the Banqueting House, onto the scaffold built hastily outside and shrouded in black. He looks around him. The street is packed to bursting. The roofs are lined with people. There is a power in the silence of so great a crowd, and everyone can sense it pulsing. The awe hovers in the sky above their heads, whistles in the air that they breathe.

Will and Hen stand among the regicides, invited by John Cooke. Jesus weep for us. How did it come to this? What if Father could see this? What if he could see where I am? Ned
here somewhere wielding a sword that killed the king's power. I, clutching the beloved hand that wrote the words that will kill the king's body.

Charles looks around at the crowd, up at the men hanging from the tiles, across at the boys perching on impossibly small ledges, and the children hoisted onto shoulders. Is that a half-smile on his lips? Is it remorse? Pity?

Ned looks around at the crowd and fears trouble. It is too quiet, too solemn. He starts to remember the raucous, laughing crowd that watched his father die, and checks himself quickly.

What if this ominous, shuffling crowd turns? What if, amid all this talk of ‘the people', the people themselves cry out, and the word they cry is ‘No'?

He sees young Roberts muttering to himself, making himself brave. He is rocking back and forth on his heels. Ned considers reprimanding him but lets it go.

Ned turns to look at the man Charles, who is standing and looking out over the crowd. He is courageous, that much is clear. His path is fixed, his decisions made, and he is facing the consequences with shoulders set square. Ned catches his own thoughts as they drift past. It is as if he has looked in the mirror and found a stranger. Am I learning lessons now, from this man who has drenched the land in blood?

What do I know of God's will, after all? Am I wrong? Oh Lord, oh Jesus.

What have I done?