In Ashes Lie (20 page)

Lune was playing cards with her ladies when Ben Hipley slammed through the door, trailing an offended usher. “They’ve taken him.”

She stared at the man. Where had he been for the last week? She had quarreled with Antony over sending Hipley to St. Albans; she had another use for their mortal spymaster. But she had been willing to accept it so long as Hipley was sending useful information. For days, though, nothing—and now he showed up utterly without warning, unwashed and bristling with unshaved stubble.

Then his words sank in. “What? Who?”

“Antony,” Hipley said, confirming the fear already forming in her mind. “The Army. They were waiting at Westminster. They’ve taken Antony to Hell.”

The cards slipped from Lune’s nerveless fingers and fluttered to the carpet; she had stood without realizing. Her body felt very far away. All she could hear was that final word, echoing like thunder.

“It’s an eating house!” Hipley exclaimed, putting his hands up.

Lune returned to herself with the crack of a bone popping back into its socket. “In Westminster. There’s three of them—Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. Someone with a twisted sense of humor put them in Hell. Lord Antony, and about forty others.”

Nianna fluttered at Lune’s side, fan in hand as if she thought her Queen would faint. Lune gestured her away, irritable now that the fear was gone—or at least reduced. Her trembling, she hoped, was hardly noticeable. “Members of Parliament?”

He nodded. “Anybody with a record of voting against the Army’s desires has been excluded from the Commons; the worst offenders are arrested. But there’s more, madam. They’ve moved the King to Hurst Castle, under strict guard. They’re going to try him.”

Hence the arrest of those in opposition. Even with the open Royalists driven out these past years, and recruiters elected to fill their places, the full Commons would not vote for the Army’s desired aims—not to the extent of putting their anointed sovereign on trial like a common criminal.

And what sentence would they pass?

That was a concern, but not the first one. Lune had no immediate way to stop this coup; she had to focus on getting Antony out. She cursed the choice of Westminster. The Onyx Hall did not extend beyond the walls of the City. But the Army had already occupied London once, during the later part of the war, creating much ill will; they would not be so stupid as to imprison their opponents among their enemies.

The cards were long forgotten; all her ladies were on their feet, hovering uselessly.
I let myself be caught here, idle, while outside the world changed irrevocably.
“Get out!” Lune spat, flinging her fury at them; as one, they curtsied and fled.

Leaving just her and Hipley. Lune paced the chamber, fingers curled under the point of her bodice. “Can you get in to see him?”

The plan taking shape in her mind collapsed when he shook his head. “I’ve already been caught asking too many questions around St. Albans.”

He made no explanation beyond that, but the mystery of his absence was solved. Small wonder they had no warning of this beforehand. Snarling, Lune spun back to the nearest table and grabbed a mask Nianna had left behind, intending to hurl it across the room. Then she paused.

“You can still go,” she said, fingering the mask, and gave Hipley a thin smile. “You only need a different face.”

“Wallingford House, my lily-white arse.”

Soame muttered the words under his breath, a profane counterpoint to the psalms some of the other men were singing. The holy music grated on Antony’s nerves, but there was little else to do; more than two score men were crammed into a pair of upstairs chambers, with nowhere to sleep but benches or the floor. A few read, by the light of what candles they had been grudgingly allotted; others talked in low voices in the corners. Prynne was pacing, threading his way carefully amongst those trying to rest.

Antony wondered if it was a misunderstanding or a deliberate lie that made Hugh Peter promise they were to be taken from Westminster Hall to suitable lodgings at Wallingford. Instead the coaches deposited them scarcely a street away, at the aptly named Hell. A handful of the prisoners had been offered their parole and leave to go home, but to a man they had refused. He was not the only one taking a martyr’s pleasure in facing this outrage.

Morning light peeped through the shutters, lending slivers of brightness to the otherwise gloomy chamber. Light-headed from lack of food and sleep, Antony nevertheless crossed the room and threw open the door.

The pair of soldiers outside jerked around, hands on their pistols as if eager to strike. Antony carefully stayed inside the threshold, making no threatening move. “You have been holding us since yesterday morning with no food, and little to drink. Unless it is your officers’ intention to starve us, we need breakfast.”

“And if it
is
your intention to starve us, at least have the decency to admit it, so we can begin trapping pigeons and rats.” Thomas Soame had come up behind his right shoulder, and his stomach rumbled loudly in accompaniment.

The soldiers merely glared. “Get back inside.”

The hostility was nothing new. Who spread the rumor, Antony did not know, but their guards believed them to have pocketed the coin that should have covered the Army’s arrears of pay.
I can no longer even tell what might be faerie interference, and what is simply the madness of our own world.

“Some of these men are ill,” Antony said. As if to demonstrate, Sir Robert Harley sneezed miserably, huddled on his bench. He was one who could have gone home, but refused. “I do not imagine your Provost-Marshal would be glad to hear that anyone came to great harm while under your watch.”

One soldier sneered, but the other said, “We’ll ask,” and slammed the door shut.

The Provost-Marshal agreed to request food, but was gone for hours, and when he returned it was not to give them breakfast. Instead the arrested members were shoved back into the coaches and taken to Whitehall. Nor was there anything waiting for them on the other end but a cold room without a fire, where they waited for hours longer. Supposedly the General Council intended to interview them, but Antony suspected that message was nothing more than a delaying tactic, something to give hope to the men who still believed that if they just protested the illegality of their treatment loudly enough, the officers would come to their senses.

At last a man came in with burnt wine and biscuits. The prisoners fell to as if it were a feast, scattering around the chamber with their food, like dogs protecting the bones they gnawed upon. Antony waited, letting others take their share first, until at last the man came around to him.

“Lord Antony,” the fellow said in an undertone, “her Majesty sent me. I am to try and get you out.”

Antony blinked. He’d never seen the soldier before, but that meant nothing; he simply could not believe she would risk sending a faerie into the Puritan teeth of the Army.

And so she hadn’t. “Ben,” the man whispered, jerking his thumb surreptitiously toward himself.

There was no reason one couldn’t put a glamour on a mortal; Antony had just never thought to do so. He cast a swift glance around. Only one guard was looking his way, but that was already too many; they could not talk for long. “We’ve been kept in Hell.”

“I know.”

“Too closely guarded there and here. You’ll never manage a rescue. Do it politically.”

That was all he dared say; Ben had to move on with his wine jug. Antony spoke in hope; he didn’t know if there was any way to free him through legitimate efforts. But any attempt to do so by more arcane means would attract too much attention, if only by his sudden absence.

So he sat in the room with his fellow prisoners until long after the sun had set and an officer came in to say the General Council was too busy to see them until the morrow. “Back to Hell we go,” Soame muttered, but no; a troop of musketeers took them into custody and marched them to the Strand. Antony suffered himself to be hauled along by the arm, ignored the insults of the soldiers, and thought,
Very well. I am a prisoner, as I chose. But what can I accomplish from here?

I can speak my mind.

“What is he
doing?
” Lune exploded, hurling down the papers she held.

Benjamin Hipley wisely waited until the fluttering pages had settled before he said, “Making a point, madam.”

“He does us
no good
there. Cromwell has his minions running about, planning who knows
what
against Ireton—certainly
I
do not know. And why not? Because Sir Antony Ware, who
should
be helping me, chose to go to prison!”

It was unfair to shout at Hipley, who was doing everything he could. But the man was the son of a cooper; his contacts were apprentices and laborers and dockhands on the streets of London, not the gentry and officers who would decide the fate of the kingdom. Antony was her eyes and ears when it came to such matters, and he was under guard in the King’s Head, one of two inns to which the secluded members of Parliament had been moved.

Hipley coughed discreetly and, bowing, offered her a slender sheaf of papers.

She regarded them with deep suspicion. “What are these?” “The good Lord Antony is doing,” Hipley said. “Not alone; I’m given to understand one William Prynne did much of the scribing. But the Prince wishes it published, as soon as may be.”

Lune accepted the sheaf. Across the top, in a bold hand she did not recognize, was a title:
A Solemn Protestation of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members.
The rest was less clear to the eye, but she glanced over it, and marked many calls for action against the Army, which had sinned so gravely against the liberties of Parliament.

“Will it do any good?” she asked, half to herself.

Hipley paused before answering, unsure whether she addressed him. “It may, madam. Short of an armed revolt at the King’s Head, or a bald-faced theft of him by faerie magic, I see little else we can do.”

Stir up anger against the Army. It
might
work. The officers were losing the support of the men beneath them, who wanted outrageous reforms even Ireton balked at, and the common people hated them, even before the purge of the Commons. General Fairfax, the beloved hero of the New Model Army, was no fool; he had done what he could to quarter his soldiers in warehouses and other empty places. But nothing could hide that London was under martial occupation. There were even troops inside St. Paul’s itself. Lune had little care for the houses of the Almighty, but the cathedral was a sorry sight, shorn of its grandeur, its choir stalls and paneling reduced to firewood for the soldiers.

Opponents of the Army were plentiful; what they were
not
was unified. If they could be joined to this cause, though, however briefly—

It might at least free Antony. And Lune needed that, if she were to do anything about the rest of it.

Lune handed the
Solemn Protestation
back to Hipley. “Have a fair copy made; then take those to Lady Ware. This protestation should be printed above, where people can hear of it. And talk to Marchamont Nedham. His
Mercurius Pragmaticus
is too Parliamentarian for my taste, but it’s the most effective news-sheet in London; we may as well make use of it.”

Hipley bowed. “And for Lord Antony?”

She gritted her teeth. “If his voice is all he has left himself, then bid him use it well.”

The guarded rooms in the Swan and the King’s Head made a more tolerable prison than Hell even when they had over forty men crammed into them; now, with half that number freed, they almost passed for comfortable.

Prynne sat at the table, scratching away at yet another lawyerly condemnation of the Army’s actions. “What other word can I use than
villainous?
” he asked, frowning at his page.

“Working still?” Antony said, sitting with one boot propped against the wall. “Today is Christmas, you know.”

“What of it?”

Antony sighed.
Why must so many Puritan Independents follow a vision of God that has no room in it for beauty or celebration?

Prynne chewed on the battered end of his quill, then scribbled a few more words. “It is madness,” he muttered to himself, as if it had not been said a thousand times before, by every man here. “If they had simply dissolved Parliament—”

“It would still have been an outrage.” Antony took down his boot and shook his head. “Parliament cannot be dissolved except by its own consent; we created that law years ago.” But Prynne was right: it would have had some savor of legitimacy about it, with a new Parliament elected to replace it. Arresting the dissenting members was possibly the worst course of action Ireton could have followed, comparable to Charles’s smaller, failed attempt before the outbreak of war.

An uneasy thought came, lifting him to his feet. “Prynne—you hear things, as I do. Did Ireton intend this purge?”

“What?” Prynne blinked up at him. The firelight was not kind to him, highlighting the scars where his ears had been, the brand on his cheek. Before he devoted his energies to arguing against the Army, it had been the Presbyterians, and before that the godly Independents he later joined, but it was his opposition to the King that had earned him repeated sentences from the Court of Star Chamber. “No, he wanted a new Parliament. Edmund Ludlow insisted on the purge.”

And where had Ludlow gotten that notion? Antony did not realize he had said it out loud until Prynne shrugged and said, “Villainy, no matter who its author. But I keep using that word; surely there must be others. For variety, you see.”

“Try Harley downstairs,” Antony said, distracted. “He has a talent for words.”