Treason's Daughter (21 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

H
EN WALKS THROUGH THE TOWER'S GREAT ARCH, PAST THE
guards and the idle gawpers, past the cluster of ravens which gathers at the entrance, past the beggar woman who sits every day begging for coins and lamenting her lost husband. Just a week of this routine. It is incredible how quickly the extraordinary can become commonplace.

She walks under the shadow of the White Tower and ducks into a doorway in one of the further, smaller towers embedded in the wall. Even this place has its hierarchies. Her father is in a small room with a slit for a window and a bare stone floor. But he has the liberty of the Tower and can come and go within its walls. Hen has done her best with cushions and hanging cloths to soften the room. No shelves here, just books in stacks against the walls. A layer of dust is collecting on the surface of the uppermost books – they are horribly undisturbed.

Her father rises to greet her. She hates his forced smile. The light has gone from his dear face, and what's left is a shell, brittle and empty. She lays down her basket of food and kisses him.

‘Dear one,' she says. ‘How did you sleep?'

‘Fair, pudding, fair.'

She looks out of the thin window into the courtyard. A gang of children are playing an intricate game with a ball. Sunlight finds its way through the ramparts in patches; men and women cluster in the dappled light. An old man sits on a bench in the corner, turning his face up to catch the sun. A couple argues in a darker corner, the man waving an angry finger at the woman.

It could be a normal street. If you walk through the cobbled paths quickly, and try not to think about the darker corners, that is. There is talk of the Rats' Dungeon, deep in the Tower's bowels, where high tide floods the cell and draws the rats in, hungry and vicious. There is an old and crooked man who walks the cobbles and tells all who will listen of his time in Little Ease, the four-foot square hole which forces a man into a perpetual bestial crouch.

The Tower is safe enough, for most, above the cobbles and in the daylight. At night, when the ghosts roam, and below street level in its dark recesses, it reeks of evil. Tortured souls wander here, they say. Papists and godly alike, depending on which sister was on the throne. Their souls walk where their bodies were racked and stabbed, pliered and twisted and forced to recant. Every fire, here, carries the echo of flames past, when the kindling was heretics and the spark was a monarch's righteous fury.

They say Archbishop Laud is here somewhere, but Hen has not seen him. The Tower is full to bursting. Thomas Hood, Challoner's warder, wears the perpetual look of a man ordered to feed scores of mouths on two loaves. Not that she pities him; he is an unbending keeper. A man without compassion. He has developed a knack of seeing only the prisoner, and not the man. Perhaps it's a necessary skill for a warder.

She turns back into the room, where her father sits on his bed and gazes at some point in the middle of the room as if it holds some deep significance.

‘Have you eaten?'

‘Yes, child, don't fuss.'

‘What have you eaten?'

‘And would you care to know the secrets of my bowels too? God rot it, Henrietta. Leave off mothering me.'

She turns back to the window, waiting for his anger to blow itself out, and the inevitable contrition to set in.

She watches a small, cheerful man walk across the courtyard, waving his arms about to make a point to the younger man who towers over him. Is that Laud? If so, she wonders, does he feel the shame of helping to bring us all so low? Without Laud, would the country be all ablaze?

She runs through the steps they have taken since her father's arrest. Letters have been sent to Ned and Uncle Robert; the Lord knows if they will arrive. Sam managed to unwind at least some of their father's deals on the sly before news of his imprisonment and looming sequestration reached the Exchange. His face was aglow with his small triumph. He converted what little stock he could into cash, albeit at pitiful prices.

Life continued as normal, otherwise. The servants kept on, and in the dark. The house still lit with full wax candles – no tapers or rushes. Meat on the table. Ale brewed and poured. Washing pummelled and scrubbed. Keeping face. And keeping faith that their father will escape this web.

Tompkins and Waller were arrested too. Let them hang. God, please, let them hang, not him.

‘I will visit Lucy Tompkins and her father later,' she says, still gazing out of the window. ‘Do you have a message for him?'

‘No. But thank you. I will see him later anyway, no doubt. The girl never stops snivelling. Grates on a man's nerves. If her godly relatives refuse to take her in, you may have to, after we swing.'

‘You will not swing,' she says.

Lord, not Lucy. Hen feels the burden already of Grandmother, old and feral. Her wits have never returned. The servants are edgy, too, and needy. She is weary of maintaining her poise, but to let it slip would sow panic. And now Lucy to add to it, who sleeps on a trestle bed in her father's Tower cell. She veers between tears and whining. Hen prefers, on balance, the whining. At least it sometimes has a measure of wit about it, the occasional flash of acerbic spirit.

‘Hen. I will swing, you must know it.'

‘I do not.'

‘My trial starts in one month. It will be absurd, I warn you now. A mock trial, like Strafford's or Laud's.'

He reaches for his wine glass. The sun is still low: hours to go until noon. He sits here all day and drinks, she knows. Waiting to pass out. These hours before lunch are his most lucid.

‘We will be scapegoated. A new Hipponax.'

‘Hipponax?'

‘The
pharmakós
. There's nothing new in man's history, my kitten. In ancient Athens, at times of strife, the Demos would appoint a scapegoat: a human sacrifice to atone for whatever is rotten in the state. Hipponax, the satirist, was one. I am to be another.'

He stands and paces, waving his free arm for emphasis.

‘Sacrificed for the sake of this rotten government, which needs my blood to shore up its waning support. Bastards. And Waller, the bastard, is calling in his friends and favours. Mark this, Hen. His neck will not stretch, while me and Tompkins will dangle like scarecrows. Westminster protects its own.'

‘Stop it, Father, please. Stop. Would you have me snivel like Lucy? I am trying not to break, but you are not helping.'

‘Am I not?' He turns to look at her. She watches him struggle with some internal strife. ‘Aye,' he says, and sits down heavily. ‘I am called a traitor. A traitor! To whom, Hen? The ignorant culls. How can loyalty to the king be treacherous? How can loyalty to being at peace be treacherous? This land is bleeding, and they call me the traitor, God blast their souls.'

He pours a fresh measure. ‘I have a duty to you, my pudding, with what time I have left. Here's the truth, so you at least shall know it. I did arrange for monies to be sent to the king. I did secretly collect gold, and make contact with those loyal to the king in the city.' He drops his voice. ‘Tell nobody of your involvement, Hen. Nobody.'

She nods.

Louder again, he says: ‘I was the channel for the money, and Lady D'Aubigny the boat that took it to Oxford. All else, those wild stories of a deeper plot to kidnap the king's children, or to seize the city walls – that is all fantasy. I wish, now that I am to be condemned anyway, that I had gone further.'

‘Really? Yet you are not such a friend to the king.'

‘Not to the man, perhaps, but to his state. What are we without order, child, but savages? I wanted you to be safe in an ordered world. Instead . . .' He trails off. Then suddenly, rainbow-like, he
smiles, and the rarity of that once familiar act brings tears rushing into Hen's eyes.

‘The indignity of it, my pudding,' he says quietly through his smile. ‘It is cruel to be hanged as a pawn at the start of the game. If I am to be hanged, I could have at least played the knight's part.' He laughs, incredulous. ‘I thought I was a rook, pudding, that's the joke. And yet I was a pawn all along.'

He takes her face in both his hands and looks into it, as if searching for something. ‘Don't let anyone make a pawn of you. The brightest and best of all my children,' he says. ‘And you a girl.'

He kisses her. ‘Did Will ever tell you, or show you, how to look at the sun?'

She starts at Will's name on her father's lips.

‘No, Father.'

‘You cannot look at it straight on. Turns you blind. You must project it onto paper. I have been thinking much of that, in here. No man can look at his own soul, look straight at it with no tricks or artifice, without running mad. So we tell ourselves our own story, and make ourselves heroic, and tell our hearts lies about our baser actions. We project our souls onto paper and garnish the results with bravery or kindness. We have to believe our own stories, pudding.'

He stands and paces to the window, peering out. He stretches a hand through the opening until it finds the sunlight.

‘It's a gift, in a way, pudding, to know that death is coming. I can feel it breathing on me. And I'm looking at my soul, as straight as I can.'

He stops speaking, and she sees the fat tears rolling down his
face. She jumps up and pushes herself into his arms, pressing her head into his chest.

He whispers into her hair: ‘And I've failed. Oh Lord, how I've failed.'

The door opens, banging against the wall, and Sam walks in. He is drawn and pale. He brings with him the stale, hoppy tang of the tavern.

‘No word from Ned?' asks Sam at once.

They both shake their heads. The three stand and look at each other. Ned's absence makes a triangle, where by rights there should be a square. We are aligned all wrong, thinks Hen. No symmetry. She thinks of Will, suddenly, sketching out the universe's thirst for harmony, for parallels. The heavens yearn for beauty, and we blight Earth with our ugliness.

‘The army is close enough. We should have heard by now.' Sam's voice is heavy, dripping with hurt and anger.

Hen looks at her father, who lays a hand on his son's shoulder.

‘It is no great wonder that Ned is silent. You have guessed, Sam, and you, my clever cat, that it was Ned who betrayed me.'

‘No!' She shouts it, even though his words speak to some unacknowledged truth that lies hidden in her mind. ‘No.'

‘Who else?'

‘No,' she repeats again, quietly, as if the repetition will make her will become the truth. She looks at Sam's sullen face, and knows that he believes it. And the three of them sit in silence for a time, watching the shadows lengthen on the walls.

The next morning, Sam and Hen are waiting outside Oliver Chettle's office when the young lawyer arrives for work. A whistle dies on his lips as he sees them standing there, and he looks nervously over his shoulder as he ushers them inside. He is all courtesy, but his unease is obvious.

‘I should tell you I have been asked to help prepare the case against your father,' he says, as soon as he decently can. ‘I will decline, on the grounds of knowing the family. But it may not be so easy to avoid.'

Hen sits in a proffered chair. She is light with hunger.

Sam says: ‘It is kind of you to see us, sir. We do understand, in these times . . .'

Chettle nods. ‘But I'm not sure how I can help.'

Hen breaks in. ‘We do not understand what Father faces. No one will talk to us.'

Chettle squirms a little in his chair. If Hen had any space for laughter left, she would raise a smile at his visible discomfort.

‘Miss Challoner. How blunt do you want me to be?'

‘Blunt.' She pulls herself upright in the chair. ‘I am not a child, nor am I a fool. If you sugar-spin your words, I shall not thank you for it.'

‘Very well.' He stands and paces.

‘This is unofficial, you understand. This conversation is entirely hypothetical.'

Sam and Hen nod.

‘It seems, from what I understand, that there is little doubt
as to your father's involvement in some level of royalist plotting. The question is how far does it go. And a deeper question is how far does Parliament want it to go.'

‘I don't understand,' says Sam.

Chettle looks at him, before continuing slowly and deliberately.

‘Stroud is a new man, and ambitious. He has a direct line to Pym's ear. There are some awkward decisions looming. Your father, and Tompkins and Waller, are public moderates. It would be –' he pauses, searching for the right word – ‘
convenient
for prominent moderates to be unmasked as active royalists, and your father and his friends have played into their hands.'

‘You are saying it may not matter how far the plot has gone, but only how far it can be perceived to have gone,' Hen says.

Chettle nods again, his lawyerly mask slipping a little to reveal some unexpected compassion.