Act of Faith (2 page)

‘We could go abroad,’ I suggested. ‘Italy?’

‘Italy is even more dangerous.’

‘Then Amsterdam. You have friends there, people who write to you — that monk, Clement, and those men who printed
Discourse on Liberty
.’

‘Amsterdam is a modern city,’ he conceded. ‘It is wealthy. Sensible.’

‘You see?’ I said brightly. ‘Utopia.’

‘Utopia is whenever my daughter is quiet.’

‘Be serious.’

‘I am, believe me.’

‘Nanny says I am too quiet,’ I retorted. ‘She says other girls shriek and giggle, and there should be more noise in our house.’

He pretended to pray. ‘God save us from Nanny and her notions.’

I ignored him. ‘She says other girls —’

He ignored me right back. We could go on like this for hours.

‘Are you discontented?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Would you rather spend your time discussing babies and ribbons than the condition of man and the future of our nation?’

‘Your rhetoric is extreme.’

‘And yet?’

‘Of course not. There is no point asking the question.’

‘Then my argument rests.’

He turned another page of his book; Mister Wilkins’s silly little treatise about men living on the moon, I believe it was. He smiled as he read.

‘All very well,’ I muttered, ‘but a little giggle here and there wouldn’t be the end of the earth, surely?’

He tapped his finger on the table and spoke without looking up. ‘Why don’t you go into town tomorrow? Buy yourself a new … I don’t know — whatever those other girls buy.’

I smiled. ‘Thank you, Father. I shall.’

‘Call on Doctor Hull. He has daughters, does he not?’

‘Yes, but I hardly know them. One can’t just call on people one barely knows.’

He looked up. ‘Why ever not?’

‘They would consider it strange.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Truly.’

He sat back in his chair. ‘How extraordinary.’ He laughed.

‘May I still go into town?’

‘Of course. But you can pick up a parcel from the college for me and come straight home.’

It was a normal market day, I remember. Well before dawn, cart wheels and cattle had sounded in the laneway behind our house. By the time I reached town, the market ought to have been busy
with farmers shouting, and cooks and maids gossiping while they weighed the turnips.

Not today.

I knew something was amiss straightaway. Farmers’ wagons streamed in the wrong direction along the main road, heading out of town. A troop of cavalry stormed past, driving me and everyone else into the hedgerow.

‘Out of the way!’ they shouted. ‘In the name of General Cromwell.’

Somehow our local Member of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, had become a general in the Puritan army. At least, we’d all agreed, it meant he would protect his own from harm. If his troopers were here, then all should be well.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

But nobody knew.

I caught my sleeve on a hawthorn branch, and by the time I got free the cavalry was well past. I walked on.

The edges of town were quiet, but as I drew near to the colleges the world changed before my eyes. All around me, men shouted: at each other, at their horses, at other townsfolk. The cloisters and lanes filled up with troops surging first one way, then another. It was all chaotic, frantic movement and sound, to no apparent purpose — or, perhaps, a dozen conflicting purposes. There was no way to tell.

An unpleasant disquiet curdled in my belly. I decided to pick up Father’s parcel and get home as fast as possible. I turned the last corner, into St Mary’s Street. In front of Father’s college stood a long line of soldiers.

The nearest, a wrinkled man holding a long pike, snarled at me. ‘What do you want?’

I wasn’t sure what was most shocking: the tone of his voice or the fury in his face.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Young lady like you — what’re you doing here?’

‘May I not walk freely in my own town?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not today. Get off home.’

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

‘Purge.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Nothing made any sense.

‘It’s orders. We’re purging the universities.’

‘Of what?’

‘Discontents,’ he spat. ‘Dissenters. Maybe spies. It’s a cesspit. We’re here to clean it out.’

I stared at him, not sure if it were him or me who was utterly demented. ‘Spies? Here?’

He took my arm. ‘What’s it to you, eh?’

‘It just all sounds rather illogical,’ I said, trying to wriggle free of his grasp. ‘Please let go of me.’

‘You could be one of ’em for all I know,’ he said. ‘Sympathiser, eh?’

‘Sympathetic to whom?’

‘King. Catholics. I don’t know.’

‘That’s absurd.’

‘Then get yourself home!’ He put his face so close to mine I could smell the ale he’d had for breakfast. And every breakfast for a month. ‘Be off!’

I wrenched my arm from his grip, opened my mouth to retort and — finally — thought better of it. His face was set into the
oddest expression of impatience and spite. I looked around me. All the men’s faces were the same.

I would like to say I strode away confidently and gracefully, but that’s not true. I was, for the first time in my life, very scared. I ran.

Through the crowded laneways, across the bridge, and all along the riverbank until I reached home.

Father heard me shouting a mile off. I hardly remember what I told him, but he set off for town straightaway with some wild idea of defending his college from Philistines. He returned hours later with a splash of blood under one eye. Nanny helped him take off his torn gown and I poured him a goblet of wine.

‘Sit down, sir,’ Nanny urged, but he wouldn’t.

‘They are animals, surely, not men,’ he said. He stared out the window towards the spires in the distance. ‘I saw what they did. Prayer books torn to shreds.’ Nanny gasped. ‘Stained-glass church windows smashed, even wooden crosses splintered and burned. All the carvings.’ He shook his head. ‘All that beauty, centuries old, chopped into pieces.’

‘They’ve gone mad,’ I said. ‘It can’t be the army — just looters.’

‘No,’ said Father. ‘It was all done by order of General Cromwell. They read out his proclamation. Hundreds of men were thrown out of their rooms. Heads of houses, provosts, fellows, great scholars, poets — anyone who won’t sign their Covenant — all expelled from the colleges, even from the town itself.’

Nanny wept quietly.

‘What will happen to us?’ I asked. ‘Will you sign the Covenant?’

Father straightened his back a little so he could hold his head higher. ‘No.’

I knew it, of course. And, though I felt prouder of him than I
had ever felt in my life, I can admit now that I also wished, secretly, shamefully, that he had answered differently.

‘I will not sign the Covenant, and they have given me today even more reasons to refuse them. Cromwell has banned my book — it is now a crime to own or sell a copy of
Discourse on Liberty
. I fear the irony of that has escaped him.’

He looked at me. ‘Do not fear. If they will not let me teach, I will earn my living with my pen. Or yours.’

He patted Nanny’s shoulder. ‘This is my house, as it was my father’s. No one can throw a man out of his own house.’

The rampage continued for days. Father’s students vanished; some were thrown out of their colleges, others fled to their country homes. Justinian Jonson escaped to London without saying goodbye.

Father had written so many of the pamphlets and books that were now banned or burned. He wrote — or he dictated and I wrote  — letters by the dozen to men and women imprisoned without charge in the Tower of London. He protested and proclaimed, just like everyone else. He would not take their oath or sign his name to their Covenant. Yet I never dreamed they’d come for us.

We were in Father’s library. He didn’t look up when the knock sounded, nor appear to hear the boots in the hallway after dear old Nanny answered the door.

But then he closed his book and stood up to face the library door as it crashed open.

‘Don’t let them take my papers,’ he said quietly.

A man stood in the doorway, dressed just like the soldiers I had seen in town: long leather boots and a breastplate strapped tightly over a brown jacket.

‘Professor Hawkins?’ he asked.

‘I am indeed,’ Father said. ‘And you, sir?’

‘My name is not important.’

‘Are good manners also against the law now?’

The soldier shrugged. ‘I have papers here,’ he pulled them from inside his jacket, ‘for your arrest.’

He held out a wad of documents.

Father ignored it. ‘I feel your face is familiar.’

‘My brother, I believe, is a student of yours — or, at least, he was.’

‘Of course! Justinian Jonson. I see the likeness now.’

I couldn’t see it at all; in fact, I would have sworn on a Bible that this sweaty, close-cropped man was no relation to anyone I had ever met in my entire life.

‘But I thought you were in the King’s army?’ I blurted out.

He glared at me. ‘That is my eldest brother, James. My misguided brother.’

‘Heavens above,’ Father said. ‘Your poor family. You must be the youngest boy, then.’

‘Who I am is of no concern to you,’ the soldier snapped. ‘I am instructed to say that if you are willing to sign the Covenant and declare your loyalty, you will go free.’

‘Loyalty to whom?’ asked Father.

‘To the Parliament, of course. To God. To General Cromwell.’

‘Indeed.’

‘You will sign, then?’

Justinian could have told his brother it would never be that easy.

‘My only loyalty is to freedom,’ said Father.

‘You will lose your own freedom, sir, if you do not take the oath.’

‘Does that matter?’

‘Father,’ I began, but got no further.

‘Young man,’ he said. ‘I pity you, really I do.’

I groaned. I knew exactly what would happen next.

‘You wish to create a free England, Master Jonson?’ said Father.

‘Captain.’

‘Thank you — Captain Jonson. We all cherish that dream of freedom — I do, and so does Justinian.’

‘Will you sign?’ Captain Jonson thrust the papers in Father’s face.

‘But I put it to you that tyranny cannot replace tyranny, that love of God does not excuse treachery, that differences of faith are just that — differences. That freedoms are many and must all be cherished, but cannot be forced on people by violence.’

‘Very well,’ said Captain Jonson, no longer attempting to hide his impatience. ‘I put it to you that you must choose which of these two freedoms you most value: freedom of thought, or freedom of your own person.’

‘It is a choice between two wrong-headed causes. That is not a decision I need to make.’

‘There you are wrong.’

My father stared into the eyes of the young man. I held my breath.

‘I thought this country had finished burning those who disagree with it,’ said Father.

‘God’s will must be done.’

‘You are confusing faith with politics, sir. The two do not mix happily.’

‘They are one, sir, enshrined in the law and enforced by the army.’ Captain Jonson shoved the papers back inside his jacket. ‘So you will stop this wretched debate and come with me, or I will have my men drag you from this house — by the feet, if need be.’

There was a moment’s silence that felt like an hour. Then Father sighed.

‘Isabella,’ he said. ‘Fetch my coat.’

Nanny wept for hours afterwards. I didn’t. It seemed to me as if the past few days were some kind of madness that would pass, and, in the meantime, we had work to do.

By the time Captain Jonson came back the next day for Father’s papers, the letters and manuscripts had been sorted and filed, and anything not to the taste of General Cromwell was in a chest buried in the vegetable garden with an extra layer of manure on top.

After the troopers left, the house settled into an uneasy silence, and Nanny and I sat down to wait.

I had no idea where the troopers had taken Father. I wrote to some of his friends in London, and to his lawyer, Master Pritchett, but they replied that they had heard nothing. There was nobody left at his college who could help me. Cambridge was deserted. His colleagues were either in gaol themselves or had been thrown out of town.

So we waited.

At last, an answer came — in a hand I didn’t recognise, nor expect: a letter from Justinian Jonson.

So, not the Tower. That was something.

I can do better than that, I decided.

‘Nanny!’ I shouted down the hallway. ‘We’re going to London.’

The journey in the stagecoach took twice as long as usual. Every few miles we were stopped by soldiers, Cromwell’s troopers, who stared at us as if we had committed some terrible crime — stared so hard, in fact, that I started to feel as if I were indeed a felon fleeing the noose. The coach was crammed with passengers fleeing Cambridge: grim-faced women with children wriggling in their arms, and pale students for whom the world had suddenly altered beyond recognition. None of us spoke. None of us dared.

At the gates of London we halted again, and the city’s watchmen searched the coach.

‘Get out!’ they yelled, pushing us onto the roadside while they turned over the bundles of clothing and stuck filthy hands into baskets of fruit and cheese.

Nanny and I peered out of the stagecoach windows as we drove through unfamiliar streets to find some safe inn near the prison.

I’d visited London many times as a child, staying with old friends of Father’s near Whitehall, in an enormous house with a walled orchard running down to the Thames. I remembered lazy afternoons in the garden, candlelit suppers of quail and swan and brightly coloured sweetmeats, and liveried servants in green stockings. The city I knew was calm and dignified and smelled like orange rind and rose petals.

This London — war-torn, discontented — was a world apart. Perhaps it had always been there, teeming and stinking, and I had simply never seen nor smelled it. Perhaps my memories had led my mind astray. Perhaps the city had changed.

Some things were definitely different. The house with the orchard was a barracks now; the trees pulled out to make way for wagons. Our friends had fled to the country long ago. Soldiers and militiamen were everywhere: standing on street corners, searching carts, or pushing through the crowded streets in small squads.

Everyone shouted — or so it seemed — all the time. The noise began well before dawn and ended — well, it never really ended, because even in the dark depths of night the watchmen called out the hours and drunken laughter filled the streets in spite of the curfew.

I slept little that first night, listening to the sounds of the city and alternating between anticipation and dread at the thought of my visit to the prison the next day. I imagined Father sitting alone in a stone cell, like Walter Raleigh in the Tower: praying; writing a little, perhaps, if he were allowed quill and paper; sleeping fitfully on a hard floor; sucking on bread crusts; the terrifying boot-steps of armed guards echoing through the night.

By the time the carriage arrived the next morning to take us to
Newgate prison, I could barely breathe from fear. You can smell the prison before you see it: a dank, rotting pile of a place as old as the city. Nanny whispered a little prayer as the gates closed fast behind us. I heard her mutter all the way along the dark corridor, through a foetid courtyard, and up the stairs to the cells. At the top, I took a deep breath and prepared to face my fear.

Nanny pulled at my clothes. ‘Oh, your lovely lace collar. Ruined. Heaven help us. London is such a filthy town. And look at your hem.’

The guard wrote my name in a battered book, checked our baskets for weapons, perhaps, though all he found were clothes and carefully wrapped food parcels. He grunted some kind of approval and swung the door wide.

It was a circus. Fires burned fiercely in each corner, and lamps spluttered along one wall. Prisoners and dozens of visitors strolled and chatted, or gathered in noisy crowds around the fires. Babies screamed and crawled all over the floor, playing with the dogs that seemed to be everywhere. An elderly woman sang loudly in one corner while she stirred food in a pot over the flames. It smelled like some kind of rich stew.

‘Isabella!’ My father strode towards me, smiling broadly, holding his arms out wide. ‘I knew you’d come.’ He kissed my cheeks. ‘Welcome, Nanny. Let me find you a seat. Isabella, come, meet my friends.’

He shouted to a man with a mop of white hair. ‘Wallace! Here’s my daughter.’

‘Father …’

‘Mistress Hammer, look! This is my daughter. Just like I told you.’

‘Father …’

‘See that sunshine, Isabella,’ he said. ‘Through the window there.’

‘Father!’

I took his hand and drew him away from Nanny and Wallace and the clamour. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘You’re enjoying yourself here.’

At last, he looked at me. He cupped my face in his hands and bent close.

‘Don’t mistake me, child. I don’t want to be in here, away from you, for a moment longer than needs be. But I find — I am, indeed, amazed — how interesting people are, really, and how glorious every moment of the day appears.’

‘You are not yourself.’

‘No, I am not,’ he said. ‘This astonishes you.’

‘I —’

‘Listen to me, Isabella. It may be that these are my last weeks on this earth.’

‘No!’

His hands slid to my shoulders. ‘We must acknowledge the truth. I hear Cromwell wants me dead, or at least silent. Since Cromwell’s word is now revered throughout the land, I expect his wishes to be carried out.’

‘But the courts —’

‘There will be no trial, at least not in a public court. I am too troublesome, too noisy.’

He actually giggled.

‘Father! How can you?’

‘I can’t explain it to you,’ he said slowly. ‘I can only say that as I face my Creator, I also see more clearly. I have been, literally, in the pit of despair. But as I ready myself to bid this world goodbye, I  realise how deeply I love every detail of it — the flames in a
fireplace, that sweet-smelling spot just at the base of a baby’s neck — all of it — do you see?’

‘Papa.’ I hadn’t called him that for years. ‘Please.’

He stroked my cheek. ‘And you, my dearest girl.’

Tears prickled in my eyes.

‘That does it,’ I said. ‘I’m getting you out of here.’

The next morning I visited Father’s lawyer, Master Pritchett, the moment his offices opened for business. His clerks were so alarmed at the sight of me they ushered me straight in.

Master Pritchett was a very old, very bent, very grizzled man, whose curly grey wig was almost as tall as me. I had known him since I was tiny. He greeted me politely, hiding his surprise, and asked after my father. We spent a few moments recalling a long-past Christmas he had spent with us in Cambridge — or he recalled it. I had no memory of it, but smiled encouragingly until I could stand it no longer.

‘What will happen to my father?’

‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘It’s up to the courts to decide. Perhaps Parliament.’

‘General Cromwell wants him dead,’ I said.

He shifted in his seat as if I had poked him.

‘Does Cromwell really have the power to pass judgement himself?’ I asked.

‘How can I express this?’ He pondered for a moment, tapping his fingertips against one clean-scraped cheek. ‘In certain circumstances, the General would make his wishes clear.’

‘Such as?’

‘Treason. Serious cases of blasphemy.’

‘I see.’ I paused. ‘So can you tell me what charges my father faces?’

He was silent, staring down at the papers on his desk.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s what I needed to know.’

I ordered a late breakfast at the inn and sent a boy to find Justinian Jonson. Both stumbled in from the street two exceedingly tedious hours later. Justinian was wearing his best green coat and breeches, although he looked as though he’d dressed hurriedly. He seemed not to have shaved for days.

He bowed deeply. ‘At your service, Mistress Hawkins.’

I flung him my best smile. ‘I do hope so, Master Jonson.’

He looked rather pleased.

‘I hope you have an errand for me,’ he said. ‘I would be honoured to perform it.’

‘You are very kind, sir.’ I motioned him to a seat and tried to make my face look pathetic. ‘My father is sending me away,’ I began.

‘With all due respect, that’s probably for the best.’

‘Perhaps, but I am so worried for him.’

He moved his chair a trifle closer to mine.

‘Do not fret, Mistress Hawkins. His friends will care for him.’

‘You have my gratitude.’

‘But where will you go?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘I hardly know. Paris, I suppose. Yes, that would be best.’

‘You cannot travel alone. If you would allow —’

‘Of course not. Nanny will be with me, and I’m sure my father will join us one day, once he is freed.’

If he felt crestfallen, he hid it well.

‘The thing is …’ I went on.

‘Yes, Mistress Hawkins?’

‘I must book my passage, but I do not know how to go about it.’