The Bleeding Land (18 page)

He took another long draught of beer, nodding in solidarity to another lone drinker across the noisy, fug-filled room. He had brought few belongings from Shear House. He had the clothes on his back and his thick wool cloak that still carried the scent, though faint as mist now, of Martha. He had a rapier scabbarded at his left hip, the inscription on the blade
FOR MY CHRIST RESOLVED TO DIE
hiding unseen in the dark. Made by the renowned German blademaker Johannes Kinndt, the sword was worth at least ten shillings, perhaps more. The cup around the blade was decorated in relief with the heads of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria and its recurved quillons were ornamented with fine threads of gold and silver.

And he had two pistols: a fine pair of firelocks twenty-six inches long, eighteen of those inches comprising the octagonal barrels, with long slender butts terminating with a flare for good grip. These he had left in his bare room, wrapped in calfskin and bundled in a spare shirt and jerkin. They were his father’s weapons and he felt a tinge of guilt at having taken them from Sir Francis’s armoury the night he had ridden from Shear House. But only a fool would take the road unarmed,
especially
on a horse as fine and expensive-looking as Achilles. A horse like that would fetch ten pounds at market. The stallion was stabled a stone’s throw away, feasting on the best hay Tom could buy. He had also paid for fresh stall bedding, so that he suspected of the two of them Achilles had the finer lodgings. The horse deserved it. Achilles had been a faithful friend. He is all I have now, Tom thought, catching a serving girl’s eye and lifting his cup. The girl was plump and golden-haired and almost pretty and she perfected a well-worn coy smile as the beer splashed into Tom’s cup, and three rough-looking men on the next table jeered and winked, sharing their expert opinions that Tom could get a fuck out of the girl later if he had the legs to follow her. But Tom ignored them and nodded his thanks to the girl, then tugged a piece of his cloak up to his nose – the cloak that smelt faintly of Martha – and breathed in.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

23rd April 1642

COME ST GEORGE’S
day Tom was still lodging at the leaping Lord inn. He no longer noticed London’s stink: the coal smoke and the sewers, the iron tang of blood from the slaughter yards and the stench of massed humanity. He barely flinched at the rats that scurried across his path when he walked the thronging streets, and he’d grown almost fond of the mice that shared his damp room, scurrying hither and thither through the old straw.

His money was gone, long pissed away during dark weeks of self-pity and bitterness and the furious need to forget. Yet he still had a room and one meal a day and Achilles still had a stall, because Abiezer Grey, who kept the Lord, had offered Tom work in exchange for food and board. Tom had bridled at the offer when Grey, with whom he had never spoken more than ten words, proposed it. Tom had been not quite drunk and Grey had thumped a bowl of mutton stew and a slab of cheat bread in front of him and before Tom could say he had not ordered the food the landlord had issued the terms as though he cared not at all what answer came back.

‘You think I am a pauper, sir,’ Tom had slurred, ‘that I
require
employment in this flea-bitten, cow’s arse of a hole?’

Grey had shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Two weeks past you were drinking ale of the first water. Now you are making small beer last the hour,’ he said in a voice characterized by his flat nose that looked to have been broken more times than even Grey could likely remember. ‘Can’t drink if you can’t pay.’ The landlord shrugged again but this time at Ruth Gell, the almost pretty serving girl who was watching the exchange from a boisterous thicket of drunken apprentices. Then Grey turned his back on Tom and pushed into the press of bodies and was gone. Tom craned his neck and Ruth gave him a curt nod before flashing her smile at a handsome youth whilst simultaneously slapping another man’s hand off her rump, and Tom turned back to his beer, cursing under his breath. He had been sharing Ruth’s bed on and off for a week or so and he knew that it must have been she who had persuaded Grey to make him the offer. He could guess how she’d persuaded him, too, for Tom knew Grey shared Ruth’s bed as often as, if not more often than, he did. But Ruth had a good heart and had shown him kindness, more than once leaving a bowl of leftover pease porridge or mutton stew outside Tom’s room when he had retired for the night having not eaten. She was a hard worker, too, and there was not a man or woman – other than Tom it seemed to him – could sit at a table in the Leaping Lord if they were not drinking or eating, smoking Abiezer Grey’s tobacco or resting from a visit to one of Grey’s girls who were, to Tom’s eyes, rough as rope but undeniably cheap.

‘But where will you go when your money runs out?’ Ruth had asked later that same night, pulling up a stool and sitting at Tom’s table. ‘Abi is a good man but he will not let you keep your room and drink for less than a shilling a night.’

Tom had leant back against a greasy, faded tapestry, scratching his cheek and eyeing the room. He had allowed his beard to grow unkempt and he knew it made him look older than he was but did not care.

‘I will find something,’ he said.

The only patrons left at the tables now were either too drunk to make it back to their rooms or else sat still as the dead and wreathed in tobacco fog, having smoked themselves into oblivion.

Tom lifted his mug and drained it, then dragged his hand across cracked lips. ‘I will find something,’ he repeated, blinking at the heady, yellow smoke that stung his eyes. Several smouldering pipes sat abandoned on tables, adding to the fug of sweat, meat stew and the sour stench of old ale.

‘I worry for you, Tom,’ Ruth said, habit making her snatch up the empty mug and stand to take it away. She glanced around, then with her free hand yanked her bodice a little higher over her plump bosom. No one left worth impressing, Tom thought.

‘That’s a shiny, pretty thing,’ she said, nodding at the signet ring on the third finger of his right hand. ‘Gold?’ Tom looked at the thing. A gift from his father, its round face was embossed with a lion’s head. Mun had one exactly the same. He’d not even thought about it, but now supposed he could sell it, if it came to it. ‘Or you could sell your horse,’ she suggested. ‘He’s a fine animal by the looks of him.’

But Tom could never sell Achilles and so the next day he had accepted Abiezer Grey’s offer and now he worked for his room and board, clearing tables, hefting barrels, making sure the rakers cleaned the horse dung from the street outside the Lord and took the inn’s refuse away. He drew water from Long Southwark’s wells and pumps to save Grey paying men to bring it in tankards on their backs, and he oversaw the cleaning of the privies at night, ensuring the jakes farmers earned their pennies. He had thought he would detest the work because he was the son of a knight and had a right to privileges and finery. But he did not detest it. If anything the labour made him forget who he was, and for this he was thankful. He worked hard, drank much, filled his belly and sometimes, at the end of a long day, he shared Ruth’s bed.

And he met Matthew Penn.

Penn was one of a gang of men who met regularly in the Lord to rail bitterly and loudly against the King’s advisers and did not seem to mind who heard. Not that they need fear many of the King’s men lodging or drinking in the Leaping Lord. Everyone knew that in February King Charles had placed Queen Henrietta Maria on a boat to Holland with their daughters and the crown jewels. Charles himself had ridden to York and most of London’s nobility had fled the broiling anger round Westminster and Whitehall for their country estates. Now, in the absence of any real voice of opposition, dissent had grown bold and Tom had heard the
vox populi
turn, sure as the Thames tide, against the King. He worked and he drank and he listened to men such as Matthew Penn, an apprentice lawyer, reading and distributing inflammatory pamphlets, inciting men to take up arms for the sake and safety of all Englishmen, with whom the King had broken his contract. Some clamoured against the clergy and some against the King’s courtiers. One of Penn’s associates, a slab-faced, bald-headed Puritan named Will Trencher, would tremble viciously when proclaiming that King Charles himself was orchestrating a Catholic plot that would see an Irish army sweep through the land butchering all God-fearing folk whether man, woman or child.

‘Parliament has issued the Militia Ordinance to preserve us from malignant threats!’ Trencher had blazed to the drunk and nearly drunk, ‘and it is our duty, gentlemen, to sharpen our blades!’

But the whetstone upon whose edge Penn sharpened his ire was the gentry and highborn who, he regularly announced, used their position to intimidate and oppress others. Men such as Colonel Thomas Lunsford, whom Tom had watched assaulting the crowds outside Westminster the first time he had come to London.

‘I for one will rise in General Skippon’s new army of the people,’ Tom had heard Penn vow, ‘and I shall teach haughty
bastards
like Lunsford a rare lesson. I’ll whip that one-eyed whoreson from Westminster to London Bridge and there we’ll string the bastard up and watch him dance like the devil he is.’

For men had begun to whisper of war between Parliament and the King. At first it had seemed impossible but now the trained bands and militias were beginning to form. The craftsmen and tradesmen of London were laying down their hammers and chisels and the clerks their pens and their papers. The brewers and leather-makers of the Boroughside, the glass-blowers and soap-makers of St Saviour’s, the dyers of the Bankside and the cloth-makers of St Olave’s were arming themselves. The bakers and the vendors of fruits, flowers and vegetables were locking their shops and being drawn into companies.

Tom was in the midst of it all. At first he had felt completely alone, helpless and unmoving as a rock around which the waters were beginning to rise and roil. Yet he watched and he listened to the likes of Matthew Penn and Will Trencher and eventually their zeal began to seep into his own being. Their passions and their fury ignited the embers in his own soul. For Tom was angry. Somewhere deep within him, in his stomach and his heart and in the marrow of his bones, baleful serpents writhed and sought release to deliver their venom.

And when Tom listened to Penn rail against men such as Lunsford, in his mind he saw Lord Denton.

22nd August 1642

‘I met some unsavoury fellows last night,’ Emmanuel Bright said, slapping his mare’s rain-slick neck. The beast snorted, spraying water. ‘Mercenaries from the Low Countries and base villains to a man. One of them actually told me he cared nothing for the cause but only for His Majesty’s half crowns and our handsome women.’ The look on Emmanuel’s face told Mun that he was perhaps as impressed by these foreign soldiers as he was appalled.

‘War attracts such men as a corpse brings crows,’ Sir Francis muttered, looking up to the slate-grey sky for signs of blue. There were none.

‘I have seen such fellows too,’ Mun put in, watching those armed with pike or musket or nothing at all gather to the desultory beat of a lone drum, swelling the nevertheless contemptible throng before them. ‘They squawk loudly enough to anyone who will listen.’

Emmanuel ignored Mun’s suggestion that he indulged the mercenaries and their glory-adorned tales of war. ‘It would appear His Majesty’s divine right to rule his people holds no sway with such types,’ he said, ‘but rather that profit – a thing as changeable as the wind, it seems to me – is their only master.’

‘Take my word for it, such men are as dangerous as those now massing against us under Essex’s banner,’ Sir Francis said, nodding southwards. ‘I would rather be without them.’ His lip curled. ‘And yet we need them,’ he admitted.

Mun had ofttimes heard his father criticize the profligacy of the Court, had even heard him talk disapprovingly of the King, and in the days before they had ridden from Shear House Mun had looked for signs in Sir Francis that he wavered in his enthusiasm for the cause. There had been doubts, Mun sensed, but doubts about war itself as a means to set things straight, rather than questions of his father’s loyalty to King Charles.

‘War is a horror beyond the man’s imagining who has not seen it with his own eyes,’ Sir Francis had said.

‘But you believe the crown was put on the King’s head by God, Father?’ Mun had asked. ‘So we shall have God on our side if it comes to war. Our cause is right.’

‘I fear God does not sully Himself in men’s wars,’ Sir Francis had replied. ‘And neither does war decide who is right. Only who remains. In some ways I cannot blame those in Parliament who seek to limit the King’s power, to dismantle the instruments of his Personal Rule. They wonder why they should support Charles’s financial expedients whilst he ignores
their
grievances.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘I can even accept that some believe the Reformation was a job only half done and would see the Church rid of the rags and patches of Rome. Though the Puritans are too zealous for my liking.’ He puffed life into his pipe, the tobacco releasing a languid curl of white smoke. ‘But we have made our place in this world, with no little help from the Crown, and I would protect that place.’ He frowned. ‘We shall do what we must.’