Treason's Daughter (9 page)

There are other meetings that summer. There is The Picnic, as Hen thinks of it afterwards. Hen, her father, Sam, Ned and Will, along with the Birch and Tompkins families, take the boat upstream to Barn Elms, baskets groaning with food and wine. They wander in the meadows by the river, and sit in the shade as the hot summer sun seeks them out through the leaves overhead. Sam and Will go to swim upriver with the Birch boys, and Hen lies on her back looking at the patterns where the green leaves interlace with the blue sky. She can hear their shouts and laughter, the sound of splashing. She tries to imagine what it must be like to peel off all her layers of sweating clothes and plunge feet first into the cool water.

She imagines Will swimming, pushing the wet hair back from his forehead, the sun glistening on his wet skin.

When the boys saunter back, bright-eyed and damp from the water, Will's eyes seek hers. Their secret is curled inside her like a spring, and she fights to keep the happiness from breaking out on her face.

Mrs Birch, red and damp from the combination of sun and bulk, supervises the laying out of the food. There are cold cuts, slivers of cheese sweating with the heat, fine-milled bread, and pastry cases filled with meat and fruit. They all sit for a minute before the blessing, savouring their wealth made edible, thanking
the Lord in their hearts for lifting them above the beggars they passed on the way. There but for His grace.

Ned, her father, Tompkins and Birch talk about the quietening mood in the City, how midsummer day approaches and the tensions ratcheted up by the army plot seem quieter. They talk of trade, how their livelihood is linked to the political machinations of state, the invisible threads which link Westminster to the Exchange. How confidence and trust ease the ebb and flow of money around the City, and how quickly both can disappear.

‘'Tis like a spider's web,' her father says, to nodding from Ned. ‘I sit in the middle, and all the links holding me there sag and spin in the wind. Some purely fiscal, some political, some a curious blend of the two. Any one breaks, and down we tumble.'

‘So,' says Birch, ‘your response to the crisis is dictated not by your conscience, but by your coffers?'

‘Can both not be the same, sometimes? I have children, a household, apprentices, clerks to support. My money fills sails, and my linens stock shops. If I tumble, so do many others. There are already plenty starving in our city, while we sit here in the sun, drinking wine. I'd just prefer it if me and mine did not join them.'

Tompkins nods. ‘Conscience is a luxury for those with full bellies.'

‘Indeed,' Challoner says. ‘Do you think the poor sods lining up for bread at the parish gates give a pot for where the altar rail is? Or how much the king's men steal from us in illegal taxes?'

Ned says: ‘Surely, Father, there is more to conscience than self-interest? More to a man's honour than the need to fill his belly?'

‘Come to me, boy, and tell me that when you've been hungry and naked.'

Hen fades their voices out, concentrating on Will's approach and the carapace of calm she is projecting.

Will flops on the grass near her. He picks a daisy and pulls its petals off, one by one. Only she knows that he is chanting in his head, ‘She loves me, she loves me not.' At the last leaf, he raises his head and grins a puppyish grin, and she can't help herself from smiling back, the delight bubbling in her body.

Later, as they wander through the woods, they lag behind the party, and suddenly he pushes her against a tree and kisses her. The risk-edged kissing intoxicates her, and she wonders afterwards that no one can see its traces in her face. How could such joy not mark her body, somehow, as Cain was marked by guilt?

It is The Night of the Full Moon.

‘A messenger will come to you, with a surprise,' she had told him. ‘Be at the Temple gates at dusk.'

Cesario walks to the gate and sees Will standing in the shadows. She taps him on the shoulder and he turns.

‘Sam,' he says.

‘No.'

A linkboy passes, and she sees the shock of recognition on Will's as the torchlight falls across her face. She laughs and teases him, but it is only as another linkboy passes that she realizes he is not smiling.

Uncertain now, ugly in her boys' clothes, she stammers: ‘The full moon. I thought we could see it from the roof, together, as you told me.'

He says little as they climb up the stairs to his room, out of his window and onto the roof of the Inner Temple Hall. There is a play tonight, and the sound of laughter and muffled declamations drift up the chimney with the smoke. There, hanging low over the London sky, is a huge and creamy moon. The silver clouds scud across the lightened sky, and the spires and stacks of the city glower darkly.

It is mesmerizing. Hen wants to throw up her arms and sing at the moon. She sits down, upwind of the chimney, feeling the chill of the tiles through Sam's breeches. She crosses her legs and settles to contemplate the view.

Will sits a little apart, and she senses his disapproval.

‘How else could I come?' she asks.

‘You ought not to have. It is not right.'

‘Why?'

‘What if you were caught?'

‘I will not be.'

A pause. ‘You are playing the whore, a little, dressed so. Like an actress, or a bawdy boy.'

‘I can only be a whore if you make me one.'

God's blood, she thinks. That sounds like an invitation.

She had imagined tonight so differently. They would lie side by side, hand in hand, looking at the moon, talking of the heavens. Instead, there is this sourness, this mutual disappointment.

‘I did not mean that how it sounded,' she says. ‘I trusted you, Will, to come like this.'

There is only silence. She can see his face in profile, as he looks out over the darkness of the Temple gardens to where the river must be.

How little I know him, she thinks. He is a collection of things I find fascinating: his passion for the stars, his beautiful hands, the way his hair falls, his slightly crooked smile. But I do not know him, really, this boy who sits beside me.

His chin is tipped towards the sky as he looks at the heavens. His face picked out by pale moonlight is beautiful, but entirely new to her in this light.

Who is he? And if I do not know him, why am I made so tumultuous by his presence?

‘I should go,' she says, no nearer to understanding.

‘Not yet.' He turns to her, his face set in an expression she does not recognize, impossible to read. He shuffles closer. ‘It was a shock. Seeing you like this.'

They kiss, and there is an urgency about him. His hands wander further than usual, along her legs and between her thighs, where her heavy skirts should be. She pushes them away, but the longing to respond, to lay her body open to him, is so strong, so intense, it frightens her.

‘Will. No.'

‘Hen, my darling.' His voice is thick, strange.

She stands up. ‘I must go.'

They cannot look at each other as they return to his candle-lit room. It is as if, by abandoning her women's clothes, she has lost her armour.

Both are taut with desire, and shamed by it. They walk without touching down the stairs to the street. At the bottom, she runs off without turning.

Home through the window, and to bed, where she dreams strange, dark dreams of being pinioned to her mattress by the man in the moon.

Then there is The Wednesday After. She is nervous approaching the churchyard. Swallows swoop in her stomach. She sees him, and they greet each other stiffly. But the daylight, and the bustle of the bookstalls, and her dress, all combine to make them easier. The dark passions of their previous encounter seem unreal here; only the slight swirl of an undercurrent remains to remind her that it did happen.

They sit on their usual wall, and he makes her laugh with tales of his master – a man who manages to be both swollen by pomposity and shrivelled by pedantry.

‘'Tis the mark of a good lawyer, I fear.'

‘You shall have to learn it, then, Will.'

‘On my oath, Hen, I'm not sure I can.'

‘I think you can.'

‘I shall take that as an insult.'

‘And so it was intended.'

‘He thinks I am at the library, drowning in law. I wish my life was otherwise, Hen. I'm sure I shall be a very peculiar lawyer.'

‘Yet you can't live on stars.'

‘Or feed a family on moon-pie.'

They sit in silence, but it is companionable. They both know the hopelessness; why talk of it? Better to sit here, side by side in the churchyard, creating a bubble that neither the city's busy workings, nor their own impossible future, can prick.

CHAPTER SEVEN

November 1641

I
N A FIELD IN HOXTON, HEN WATCHES HER FATHER RIDE PAST ON
a tall grey mare. There are forty from his guild, marching in order as part of the king's triumphant procession into the city, home from Scotland.

Not much to be triumphant about, Ned crowed on the way there. The king's power is a limited thing in the north now, after the costly failures of the Scottish wars, and the godly Covenanters have the Scots' souls in hand. But Ned is there to wave on his father, not the king. Richard Challoner is a rising man. A City player. He has his health, his hair and his teeth. A man to be envied: rich and prosperous, and blessed with two hale sons and one irrelevant daughter. Today is his day of triumph, chosen from all the guild to ride with the king.

Hen, there with Sam and Ned and the apprentices, cheers loudly and waves back at their father.

Cheese shouts, ‘Don't he look the part!' above the crowd's hubbub and she nods happily. She imagines Cheese's head is
filled with images of himself, fat and prosperous, riding as a liveryman through cheering crowds.

Ned is smiling too. He seems happier, freed from their father's yoke. The two men are finding ways to be friendly, despite their political enmity.

‘You'll be riding up there one day, Cheese, old fellow,' he says.

‘Cheese!' cries Sam. ‘But he's a beetle-headed halfwit.'

‘So, Sam Salad-Brain, are most of those bastards riding there,' says Cheese. ‘Half a wit ain't a barrier to a full wallet.'

‘Money can't buy you what counts,' Ned says.

‘Let's see,' says Cheese. ‘Power, women, food, booze.'

‘Sounds enough to me,' Chalk shouts.

Ned stifles a smile.

‘Look at Gurney,' says Sam, pointing to the Lord Mayor, who carries the city's sword in a position of honour behind the Prince of Wales and in front of the Lord Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal.

‘My point proven,' says Cheese. ‘Look at the old goat, and the smug grin on him. And him a newly minted baron too. Why? Money. That's why.'

Chalk drapes an arm round Cheese's shoulders, and the two bellow: ‘The Lord preserve King Charles!' with the rest of crowd, as the king rides past on a magnificent white charger. Behind him comes a coach carrying Henrietta Maria, the Duke of York and Princess Mary.

‘The queen has aged shockingly,' Hen says to Ned. Her small, doll-like face is criss-crossed with wrinkles. An old face sitting unnaturally on a little girl's frame.

‘'Tis ageing paying court to the whore in Babylon,' he says grimly.

Or perhaps it is the strain of a husband under siege, Hen thinks. Poor woman. Papist or no, the pressure must be almost unendurable. They say she is more of the warrior than her husband; that the queen's influence is behind the king's perplexing oscillations between conciliation and confrontation with his enemies. When her voice is loudest, he turns to fight, standing on his royal dignity to give himself height.

Suddenly Will is standing with them, grinning. Drums are beating and cannons firing. All is noise and thunder. The artillery men rattle their muskets and shout. At the centre of the noise is Will, and he is smiling at her in the weak winter sunlight.

‘I thought to see you all here,' he shouts, looking at Ned, but speaking to her.

Ned slaps him on the back and says something that Hen can't hear. Sam, though, looks at her as if to assess her reaction to Will's sudden appearance. She feels her cheeks redden, and turns to shout again to hide the confusion.

‘The Lord preserve King Charles!' she shouts, her voice feeble in the tumult. Will stands next to her. And if in the crowd he presses against her, if his hand brushes hers and his thigh touches hers, who is to know it?

Richard Challoner, senior liveryman, vestry member, heir apparent to the parish place on the city council, the very definition of a London pillar, is in his library. He is surrounded by papers: seditious ones, loyal ones, ranting ones, mad ones. Petitions and demonstrations, pamphlets and newsletters, scurrilous poems
and subversive ballads. All the outpouring of London's white-hot presses piled on his floor.

He looks across at Henrietta, who sits amid the piles, cross-legged and furrow-browed.

‘They will burn you for a witch, pudding, if we are not careful,' he says.

‘I want to help, Father.'

‘It's a Herculean task, kitten. The presses are like the Hydra's head. Burn one, and another springs up. Imprison one dissenting, unlicensed scrivener and another three jump up writing pamphlets martyring the first. We shall drown in paper, pudding.'

She smiles at his vexation. Hen is entirely happy in this work. Her father, a moderate who still keeps friends on either side of the growing schism, is charged by his livery company's aldermen with scanning the output of the presses. It is a whispered commission; some of these scribblings have earned their publishers the pillory, or gaol. But the company's officers want to know what is being said, by whom, and how far the press has escaped control of the government.

Strafford is more than six months dead, condemned by the rhetoric of Oliver St John, and the king's reluctant acquiescence. He was executed at the Tower to a roar of approval that must have reached the king at Whitehall, as he lay shut in his chamber, prostrate with grief and guilt. With Parliament's victory and the blowing of the Strafford-shaped hole in the king's retinue, dissent has become a booming business. The king has been presented with petitions from the MPs, from the people and from the Lords. Some have even been written by women, and the thought makes many a crypto-Catholic compulsively cross themselves. Men have
marched on Westminster in their thousands, barracking the bishops and the king's peers. A barrage of grievances is raining down upon the beleaguered monarch – in print, in person and in the snarling voice of the crowd – and there is still no sign of an end to the tumult.

Bewildered by the scale of his task, Challoner has accepted Hen's help in following the crisis as it appears in print. He covers his unease at exposing her to the endless tracts with pious chats about her duty: to him, to the Crown, to her maidenhood. She pretends to take his lectures seriously, and both are satisfied.

‘Another one about the Irish. Their rebellion is the first stage in a papist plot,' she says, tossing a pamphlet into the ‘Evil Irish' pile.

‘Shall we be knifed in our beds, or impaled on crosses?' Challoner asks.

‘Neither. The Irish are cannibals, and like nothing more than smearing a Protestant baby on bread with quince jelly.'

‘It would be as funny as it should be, were people not believing it all, kitten.'

She nods, drawing another one from an unread pile beside her.

Challoner settles himself in a comfortable chair with a pamphlet calling for a march on bawdy houses. Hen knows that this exaggerated settling presages a slow, head-jerking descent into a deep nap.

‘Will you sleep, Father?'

‘Sleep!' he cries, all astonishment. ‘Not I, pud. There is work to be done.'

Moments later, his head nods for the last time and he is gone.
Hen has grown to associate the radical rhetoric with the rattle and whistle of her sleeping father.

There are tracts about the king's demands for money, and equal wrath about Parliament's poll tax. There are diatribes against the bishops, and eloquent justifications of them. There are papist plots uncovered and Arminians condemned. There are radical sects unearthed, and independent congregations lambasted, their occasional female prophets denounced as whores.

The wild rhetoric fascinates her. Do people believe words more, when they are fixed to paper? She thinks of the papist plot that never was. Do all the printed words that talk of papist plots make those plots real? Where do words and actions meet? Is there a space where it is impossible to tell the difference?

As Parliament opened in October, a pamphlet appeared which set the city ablaze with talk and gossip. ‘
A damnable treason by a contagious plaster of a plague-sore, wrapt in a letter and sent to Mr Pym.'

Inside, a dark tale of a letter to Pym, the leader of the reform party in the Commons. He opened it, and out dropped a plaster with a plague-sore stuck to it. The letter condemned Pym as a traitor and promised to kill him: ‘
I have sent a paper messenger to you, and if this does not touch your heart, a dagger shall, so soon as I am recovered of my plague-sore. Repent, Traytor.'

The horror of the first reading stays with her now. The word ‘plague' is a powerful one; imbued with history and horror and all a crowded city's fear.

‘It isn't true, kitten,' said her father contemptuously when she showed him the tract.

‘How not?'

‘Pym needs a plot to rally his friends and demonize his enemies. It's nonsense. Everyone says so.'

‘Everyone with reason to hate Pym.'

‘Perhaps.'

But the realization that troubles Hen is that it does not matter, in effect, if the story is true or not. Those who want to believe it do; those who don't, likewise. And the story is so strong, so powerful, that it rises above truth and falsehood, to become something else. It is a heavy-shotted broadside in the war of words, in which people sift the noise to find the nuggets they already believe in.

Ambiguity in words troubles her too. The Protestation, Parliament's attempt to forge new unity, is riddled with ambiguity. Her father swore it, and Ned swore it, both with good faith. All grown men must, now it is enshrined in law. Yet if both could swear it, what use was it?

‘I, Richard Challoner, do, in the presence of Almighty God, promise, vow and protest to maintain and defend, as far as lawfully I may with my life, power and estate, the true reformed Protestant religion, expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all popery and popish innovations within this realm, contrary to the same doctrine, and according to the duty of my allegiance to His Majesty's royal person, honour and estate; as also the power and privileges of Parliament, the lawful rights and liberties of the subject, and every person that maketh this Protestation, in whatsoever he shall do in the lawful pursuance of the same.'

Afterwards, she said to him: ‘But Father, what is, as you see it, “the true reformed Protestant religion”? What are the “power and privileges of Parliament”? You and Ned have both sworn and vowed to defend these things; yet, if I sat you both in a room for a month, you could not agree on a definition of each.'

Challoner nodded ruefully. ‘I know it. We let this document give us succour, and yet . . .'

‘It is meaningless.'

‘Not meaningless. Desperate, perhaps.'

She stops now, remembering the conversation, and looks across at him asleep in the chair. Now he would not sign. The Protestation has become the symbol of the reformers. The ‘true reformed Protestant religion' is now defined by custom and partisanship as a non-Laudian one. It is pared back and Calvinistic. The Laudians rally around the
Book of Common Prayer
, Charles' approved version of church services. The Scottish Covenanters and their English sympathizers believed the book ‘emerged from the bowels of the whore of Babylon'. More commonly quoted rhetoric to add to the maelstrom.

There is a notable rise in pamphlets, bills and posters calling for ‘No Bishops; No Popish Lords'. As the moderates in the Lords increasingly find themselves backed into the king's corner, the votes of the bishops in the Upper House are carrying ever greater weight. The Commons' reformist zeal is repeatedly punctured by the Lords. While the reforms are blocked by the Lords, the reformers rankle. The more strident they become, the further the moderates are pushed towards the king.

The fire burns fierce in the grate. It is bitterly cold outside, this December. Sam is upstairs, sleeping off last night's outing with his fellow apprentices. She heard him come in, late and stumbling. It is hard to imagine, in this cheerful room, the trouble fermenting on the streets, fuelled by the innocuous piles of paper lying across this floor. She knows her sense of peace is an illusion. In May, not long after Will first kissed her, the family sat huddled
at the back of the house while the windows at the front were broken, systematically, by apprentices cheering Strafford's death. She buried her head in her father's arm and realized, for the first time and with a sickening lurch, that he could not keep her safe. That the words he used to whisper to the little Hen – ‘Daddy's here. You're safe now, pudding. Safe –' were empty lies. She cried then, and he thought it was fear, and he whispered in her ear more sugar-spun empty promises as the mob bayed outside and the glass shattered.

She wishes now, on this calm winter evening, that she could keep the world at bay, draw an unbreakable line round her family. She wishes she could daub lamb's blood on the doorpost, so the Angel of Death will fly straight past.