Treason's Daughter (20 page)

The door sounds loud as it swings shut behind Ned. Hen and Challoner look at each other, stricken.

Will opens the door, and Ned watches with relief as a smile spreads across his friend's face. He did not know where else to go.

‘Sorry to come late,' he says.

‘Nonsense. Come in!' The room is lit by one guttering candle, by which Will is reading. Ned sits down on the bed as Will bustles around, laying a fire and unearthing some ale and a mouldy-looking cheese.

Will waves a hand at his bare room, and the pathetic fire catching in the grate. ‘Much like Oxford, you see, Ned. Father's allowance doesn't stretch far.'

‘Still, brother, you'll be a lawyer soon.'

‘Aye, so the bastards tell me.'

‘I'll swap you for being a soldier.'

‘No fear, Ned. I'll not go for a soldier.'

‘Can you stay out of it?'

‘I keep my head down; no one bothers me. I have perfected the art of the non-committal nod.' He demonstrates, and Ned laughs. ‘I find that it serves. If I am quiet, and nod, people are easily persuaded I agree with them, and leave me to my own thoughts. My master is convinced I am puritan to the soul, as he is.'

‘And what are you?'

‘Ah, you see, only you know me well enough to ask directly, and even to you I cannot be candid. Because the truth is I don't think on it much. I have enough to think about.' He waves at the stack of books balanced precariously against the wall. ‘And those,' he says, grinning, pointing to a far smaller stack sitting forlorn in a darker corner, ‘are my law books.'

‘The country is at war, all our souls are at risk, and you are content with the stars.'

‘Yes. I am too simple to understand my own soul, let alone anyone else's.'

‘I envy you.'

‘You do not.' Will smiles at his friend.

They settle down in front of the fire to talk quietly and companionably about friends and acquaintances. There is a reckoning of who has joined which side, and who has lost limbs or life for the sake of King or Parliament. Ned tells Will about Brentford and Reading, and the searing horror of an army loose on the rampage after a battle. He tells him a little, too, of the night spent in the field of corpses after Edgehill.

‘It's different now, already. That first battle was strange, Will. It was as if both sides were boys playing at soldiers, then one
drew blood and both ran home crying. Now, enough has passed to make it bitter and personal. We are harder, and tougher, and angrier.'

‘Aye, but to what end? Where can it end? If he wins, you are a traitor, a marked man. If you win, he will still be king. The king will always be the king.'

Ned turns the sentence round in his head. He can't find a hole in it.

Will says: ‘Let us talk of other things. How is your family? Your sister?'

‘Well enough. Poor Hen sat there while we fought tonight. She's a good girl. I think Oliver Chettle has a sweetness for her.'

He notes the sudden stiffening of his friend, a subtle recalibration of the room's warmth. ‘You too, Will?'

‘You didn't know?'

Ned thinks of his grandmother's bony finger pointing at Hen, telling her she will die a maid. He wonders at his own blindness and Grandmother's mistake. He remembers, suddenly, that he never passed on Chettle's warning. But you can't creep back in after you've slammed a door in anger, not without losing pride. Chettle is over-worried, he convinces himself. He has a fancy for Hen, yet can't marry the daughter of anyone uncommitted to the side of God and Parliament. That is all. That must be all.

‘No,' he says, touched by the look of misery on Will's normally guileless face. ‘I didn't know.'

Later, head to toe in Will's narrow bed, Ned cannot sleep. He thinks over the scene he witnessed earlier. How far has it gone? Where does my duty lie? If my father is funding my enemy, does he not become my enemy too? He can tell that Will is not asleep
either; he lies there with the too-still mien of a man awake but conscious of his bedfellow. He's probably thinking about Hen.

Hen. What will happen to her if their father's scheming is laid bare? Should her fate inform any decision? He wishes he were alone, to toss and turn as the thoughts jumble in his head. He lies still, and turns to his God. Oh Lord, show me the light. Show me the right path.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

May 1643

T
HEY COME AT DUSK. A CLATTER OF SOLDIERS BURSTING
into the house, separating into pairs and running at the stairs, barging through doors and shouting. Hen is in the library, reading by the open window. She has been relishing the warm spring air and the quiet that falls on the city between the end of the working day and the start of the evening jaunting.

The roaring of the soldiers breaks in on her dreaming. She struggles to understand it, at first. The crunch of their feet and the bellowed orders make no sense. The house is unused to these sounds. Then she realizes, with sudden desperation, why they are here. She grabs a fistful of papers from the royalist pamphlets pile and shoves them up her skirt, wedging them fast in her stays. She spots the pile of newsbooks, including the
Mercurius Aulicus
, on the table. They are smuggled from Oxford on the rare barges that make it down the Thames, and Hen buys them at three times the cover price from a bookseller's desperate widow who lurks in St Paul's churchyard.

Hen scoops them up and bundles them under the cushions of the window seat, sitting down on top of the lumpy fabric just as the door bursts open and two soldiers tumble in.

They see her sitting there and they halt, with almost comical awkwardness, in the doorway.

‘Beg your pardon, miss,' says one, a little sheepish.

Hen remembers the carriage of Lady D'Aubigny, her extraordinary poise. She draws herself up and lifts her chin, and then says in a voice infused with as much steadiness as she can manage: ‘How dare you burst into my room like this. Who are you? What business can you have here?'

They mutter something inaudible. Behind them, she can hear her father's voice. Though she can't hear his words, she can tell from his tone that he is blustering. He's turning on the boozy charm, and she prays to God it will work.

The soldiers continue to stand foolishly in the doorway. They look like apprentices from the rougher trades, scooped up from the tanner's workshop or the smithy, handed a sword and told to be fierce. Hen holds her pose. A man comes in behind the pair.

‘Miss Challoner?' he says. He is expensively and soberly dressed. His coat is cut from fine midnight-black cloth. His hair is sparse on top but long at the back, where it curls almost foppishly over his gleaming white collar. His eyes are pale and unblinking. There is something at once clammy and fleshy about his skin, like hot-crust dough slipping from its mould.

She nods. The man – around her father's age she would estimate, perhaps a little younger – bows.

‘Nehemiah Stroud, Miss Challoner, at your service.'

‘If so, my service demands you leave this house immediately,
whoever you are.'

He bares his teeth in a semblance of a smile. ‘Wit, good lady? We are taking your father.'

Hen feels her poise slipping away. ‘Where to?'

‘The Tower, of course.'

She closes her eyes. The Tower. Dear Lord, protect us.

‘What for?'

‘Treason.'

‘Against whom?'

‘Very droll, again, dear girl.' He inclines his head in a demibow. ‘And now I must ask you to leave. We must search the house.'

Hen pulls the poise back, tucking herself up in it like a blanket on a cold night.

‘And if I refuse to leave my own house?'

‘You cannot, I'm afraid.'

‘Mr Stroud, is it? I have nowhere to go. One brother lives at home, and is out somewhere. The other is marching with Phillip Skippon. His right-hand man. Ned was at Edgehill and at Reading.'

Stroud smiles again, and she realizes that he knows all this. He knows all about her, and all she has is his name. This imbalance of power unsettles her.

‘Your admirable brother will, I fear, be distraught when he hears of your father's betrayal.'

There is something she does not like about the way he says it, something knowing and snide about his tone. Her father has come into the room behind the soldiers and she wonders if he caught the off-key tone in Stroud's voice. His face is impassive; only a nervous adjustment and readjustment of his cuffs suggests he is aware that a troop of armed soldiers is raiding his house and
threatening him with the Tower. He can walk, at least. The gout is in abeyance, for now. She wants to run over and stand by him, but she fears the rustling of the paper in her skirts and the exposure of the lumpy cushions.

Challoner's eyes dart to the table where the
Mercurius
had been sitting, and the space where the newest royalist pamphlets were sitting. Others – the oldest ones – are held in a chest he has buried in the garden.

Stroud picks up a murder pamphlet from the table, from amid the towering stacks of papers. It is a lurid account of a crypto-Catholic's slaughter of his wife and child. He looks at the woodcut on the front and turns it sideways, to better establish that it is indeed the child's headless, spurting trunk on the floor. He tosses it to one side.

‘I will go through these later,' he says. ‘And now, Miss Challoner, you may, if you prefer, wait in the kitchen with the servants.'

‘I would prefer to stay here,' she says.

Challoner walks towards her.

‘Pudding cat. Do as the man says.'

She tries to speak to him with her eyes. ‘I would have a minute alone with my father.'

Stroud, visibly impatient, waves a dismissive hand. ‘Miss Challoner. Enough. Move now.'

Challoner holds out a hand and she takes it. Standing, she watches Stroud as his eyes move past her to the lumpy cushions now laid bare. He walks over in short, sharp strides and pulls a cushion away from the seat with one violent motion. The newsbooks tumble to the floor. Loose papers float like leaves and settle on the library's rush-strewn floor.

Stroud stoops down and picks one up. The front page, in bold type, spells out its aims: ‘Communicating the Intelligence and Affairs of the Court to the rest of the Kingdom'.

Hen is still holding her father's hand, and he squeezes it tightly.

‘Will we have to stretch that pretty neck too?' says Stroud. ‘Quite a collection, Miss Challoner.'

‘They're clearly mine, Stroud,' says Challoner. ‘Now, can we get on with this? Hen, go to the kitchen. Go on, child.'

Hen walks stiffly to the door, trying not to dislodge any of the papers. A sudden thought comes to her.

‘My grandmother,' she says to Stroud. ‘Please. She's upstairs. She's too scared to leave her room. Please don't make her. She'll be terrified.'

Stroud just slides his face into a strange, bloodless smile.

In the kitchen, Hen sits with Sally, Nurse and Milly at the table. Harmsworth faces the fire, his face hidden from view. The boy Wayneman cries, frightened.

‘Stop that noise, you wretched sniveller,' spits Nurse.

Milly holds out an arm and the boy comes to hide his head in her skirts.

‘Fool boy,' says Nurse.

Silence again. They listen to the tramp of the soldiers' boots overhead, echoing through the floors.

‘They said they were taking him to the Tower,' says Hen.

‘Jesus wept,' says Sally under her breath.

‘What will become of us!' cries Nurse. ‘We shall be turfed out to beg, to pimp, God help us.'

Suddenly they hear screaming. A high-pitched wail pierces through the house.

‘Grandmother,' whispers Hen. She stands and walks to the kitchen door, pulling it open. A soldier stands, blocking the way.

The screaming fades into a low whimpering. Hen watches as three soldiers carry her grandmother down the stairs, gripping her thin wrists and ankles. Carrying her like a sack of coal, they toss her into the kitchen, and she scampers into the corner furthest from the fire. There she crouches, her grey hair loose and tangled around her face, her thin arms clutching her knees. Hen can see the purple fingermarks of the soldiers on her skin.

‘Grandmother,' she says quietly, and crouches down next to the old lady. She reaches a tentative hand out to touch her shoulder.

Quickly, spitefully, her grandmother twists and spits at her.

‘Did you ever see the like?' whispers Sally. ‘Wits set adrift by fear, poor thing.'

Hen remains crouching down, not sure of what to do next. Her back is pressed against the wall, and she leans her head against it. Lord, give me strength, she prays. Please, please, give me strength.

‘Look at her,' says Nurse. ‘Looks like she's right all along. Damned. Clearly damned. Would our Good Lord send one of his own to such a state?'

Hen finds herself standing, fury blinding her. Before she recognizes her own actions, she has slapped Nurse across the face – a full, open-handed slap, which sends Nurse's head cracking backwards, her mouth frozen into an ‘Oh!' of astonishment. The noise of the slap ricochets around the kitchen, and even Harmsworth turns round. Milly smothers a smile, and the boy registers amazement amid his still-flowing tears.

Ashamed of her violence, yet fiercely refusing to regret it, Hen retreats into the corner. Nurse puts a hand to her red cheek, looking at Hen all the while. She opens her mouth as if to speak, but then closes it. They look at each other, and then both look away.

The door is closed again, the soldier on the other side. Hen stands up and walks over to the fire. Ignoring Harmsworth, she reaches under her skirts and pulls out the sheaves of paper concealed there. She throws them into the fire in batches. They catch and burn, the black charred edges spreading to devour the words. Rants against rebels and radical plots. Warnings of women preachers and social sedition in all its devilish guises. Exhortations of loyalty to the king, paeans of praise to Prince Rupert and the warrior Queen Henrietta, who shared a ditch with the king's soldiers at Edgehill as the cannonballs whistled over her head.

All the words crumple and burn in the flames. It is a gesture towards helping her father, but it is too little, too late. Destroying the words will not help, she knows that. Stroud knows. And after all, her father is clearly guilty. Of something, anyway. He is not the only one. Fear prickles across her skin in a familiar pattern. Jesus, keep me. Please, God.

Hen feels herself faltering. She could too easily curl into the corner next to Grandmother and start whimpering. If I lose my mind, she thinks, who will help Father? I am to be tested, like Peter at the cock-crow, and I fear that I will fail.

At last, the door opens, and Stroud appears. His pale eyes sweep the room until he finds her.

‘Miss Challoner. We are taking your father. I have no doubt he will be given liberty of the Tower soon, and you will be allowed to visit.'

‘I must come to say goodbye.'

‘Too late, I fear,' he says with a smirk. She feels her fingers itching to deal out another slap.

Hen waits until she hears the front door thud shut before she emerges from the kitchen. The house is turned upside down. Chairs are upended, chests emptied, beds stripped. In the hall, her father's great chair lies tipped on its side, amid the chaos. The chest where the dining service is kept lies open, its contents thrown across the floor. In the library, the books are pulled from the shelves. Loose pages litter the floor; countless spines lay cracked, broken underfoot.

Something crunches under her feet – glass. She looks down and, with infinite care, picks up the broken pieces of The Object, her father's microscope. She sits, cross-legged on the floor, trying to piece the bits together. Behind her, there are footsteps.

‘Hen, thank the Lord you're safe. What in Christ's name happened here?'

‘Sam! Sam, I can't fix it. It's broken, Sam. I can't do it.'

She breaks then, spilling great, heaving sobs into Sam's shoulder as he crouches on the floor next to her, looking around at the chaos in the gathering darkness.