Cromwell’s Blessing

I tried to help Sir Lewis up, but he shoved me away, lips, jowls shaking in a face so puce with rage I thought he had had a stroke. I apologised to him and said I thought a mistake had been made.

For a moment he could not trust himself to speak. Then his face gradually resumed its normal dull red colour and he found his chilling, courtroom voice. ‘A mistake! Sir, you have made the mistake of your life! I will have you in the same cell as him,’ and he pointed at Scogman, who was coming round, staring up at us in bewilderment.

‘He may not have committed a felony.’

‘May not …? May not …? He stole silver, sir!’

‘Blake!’ I shouted across the field. ‘Where is Trooper Blake?’

Blake pushed his way through the soldiers, who had by now spilled into the lane ahead of us. He was an odd man, prematurely bald, slightly hunchbacked, but the soldiers respected him because he could fix almost anything, from a leaking pot to a broken flintlock.

‘Trade?’ I said.

‘Journeyman silversmith, sir,’ Blake said with a salute. ‘City of London, Goldsmiths’ Guild.’

He straightened, losing some of his stoop, and his eyes gleamed with pride, a pride that began to be reflected in many of the sullen, punch-drunk faces around him. These were men who had almost forgotten they had trades, and another life, and were beginning to wonder, in this purgatory of waiting, whether they would ever return to them. They began to grin as I handed the spoon to Blake.

‘What do you think this is, Blake?’

‘A – it’s a spoon, sir.’

There was a volley of laughter from the men until Sergeant Potter shouted them into some kind of order.

‘No, man! I mean, is it silver?’

Challoner snarled at me for what he called my equivocation but then, in spite of himself, watched as Blake bit the spoon, polished it and bent it. Finally he peered short-sightedly at the leopard’s head on the back of the handle. There was complete silence, except for the rattle of chains as Scogman stumbled to his feet. Blake seemed wholly concerned with making as honest and accurate a judgement as he could, no matter that a man’s life was at stake.

‘Mmm. It’s difficult to say, sir.’

‘Your opinion, man!’

Blake caught the sharpness of my tone and slowly it dawned on him that I wanted him to perjure his craftsman’s judgement. ‘Well … the leopard’s head mark is very crude … I would say it’s a fake.’

Someone held Scogman up as he almost collapsed. Challoner tried to grab the silver spoon before it disappeared into my pocket again. ‘Give it to me! I’ll have it assayed!’

‘Lieutenant Gage!’ I shouted.

Gage cottoned on much more quickly than Blake. Stepping forward into my makeshift court, he declared himself to be from Gray’s Inn, giving the impression of a lawyer, rather than the clerk he was. Blake valued the spoon at a few pence. Thefts above a shilling were a hanging offence. Whether a soldier might be punished by the army or the civil courts for a lesser offence was a grey area. I told Challoner I would punish Scogman myself. By this time he was almost incoherent with rage.

‘Justice? You call this New Model Justice? I’ll give you justice!’

On one side I had Challoner threatening me. On the other, the grinning soldiers and Will whispering in my ear that I had the judgement of Solomon. I could not stand either of them. I could not stand myself. I had fondly imagined I would bring both sides closer with my diplomacy. Now they were so far apart there would be open warfare between town and soldiers. I was filled with a cold ferocious anger which I could scarcely keep under control. Stalker was helping Challoner back on his horse when I stopped him.

‘Justice? I will show you justice!’

I snatched the whip from Stalker’s saddle and told Sergeant Potter to unchain Scogman.

‘Strip him.’

There was not much to strip. His britches were in shreds from being dragged along the lane and his jerkin came off in two pieces. His fair hair was dark with matted blood and weals stood out on his ankles and wrists. He stumbled groggily as Sergeant Potter spreadeagled him against a fence. Still he grinned at his mates and, when he saw Daisy peering from the edge of the crowd, waggled his sex at her. Cheers rose when she fled into the farmhouse.

Challoner watched from his horse, his curled lip indicating he believed this to be as much a masquerade as the spoon.

I tossed the whip to Bennet, the man I believed had held the musket, which had disappeared. ‘Twenty lashes.’

In spite of his bravado, Scogman would scarcely have been able to stand without the ropes that tied his hands to the fence. His knees buckled. Blood ran from a fresh head wound and trickled slowly down his back. Ben, the surgeon, took a step towards me, but turned away when he saw my expression. He knew this mood of mine.

Bennet smoothed the lash between his fingers. He measured his stance. The crowd fell silent. The whip cracked. Scogman winced and his eyes jerked shut, although the tip of the whip barely touched his flesh. Bennet’s natural love of violence was held in check by the feeling of his watching colleagues. Perhaps, instead, he gained a perverse pleasure from taunting Stalker and Challoner by not drawing blood. The whip cracked harmlessly again, and this time there was no doubt about it, Scogman joined in the masquerade, jerking and writhing theatrically.

Challoner turned his horse away in contempt and disgust.

I wrenched the whip from Bennet’s hand and lashed out clumsily at Scogman’s back. He gave one startled cry and then fell silent. I wanted him to cry out, to scream, but where he had performed for Bennet, he would not perform for me. After the first line of blood the watching faces disappeared and I saw nothing and heard nothing, until my arm was gripped and Ben pulled me away. I stared at him blankly, then at the whip, then at what I at first took to be a piece of raw meat in front of me. It was all I could do to swallow back the vomit that rose in my throat.

I flung the whip back at Challoner.

‘Satisfied?’

3

Over the next few days Challoner continued hounding me to hand Scogman over, but I refused. Ben told me he was not expected to live. The least I could do was let him die under Daisy’s care for, while there was a shred of life left in him, Challoner would certainly hang him.

Ben wanted to purge me, saying my humours were severely out of balance, but I would have none of it. I had a curt letter from Lord Stonehouse in Newcastle, ordering me to go home. Colonel Greaves had recovered, and was returning to the regiment.

I rode alone from Essex to London. The countryside was bare, many fields overgrown with weeds, while all the troop movements had left the roads looking as though a giant plough had been taken to them. In a world upside down, even the seasons had not escaped. Spring was not merely late; it looked as if it would never appear. Most of the trees had been chopped down for firewood, during the Royalist blockade of Newcastle that had stopped coal ships coming to London.

All I could see was Scogman’s raw, bleeding back and the sullen resentful faces of my men. No – no longer my men. I had lost them. Lost myself. By the time I arrived in London, those memories had left me in total darkness. My wife Anne knew the mood, the strange blackness that came over me, and saw it in my face when I half-fell from my horse into her arms. Her embrace was more soothing than any physic, blotting out the memory of that bleeding back.

For days I slept or wandered in the garden of our house in Drury Lane, where Anne’s green fingers had planted an apple tree. The one in Half Moon Court where we had played as children, then snatched our first kisses, had been chopped down in the last bitter winter of the war. I felt the first, tight swelling of the buds on the young tree, still black, waiting for the warmth of the sun. There would be spring in this little garden; perhaps the tree would bear its first fruit.

Cromwell lived in the same lane and I screwed up my courage to go and see him, but was told he was ill, with an abscess in the head which would not clear. The news made me even more disconsolate.

‘You are not yourself, sir,’ said Jane, the housekeeper.

I tried to laugh it off. ‘Exactly, Jane! I am not myself. I must find myself! Where am I?’

Was I with the sullen resentful men, or was I, could I ever be, with people like Challoner?

‘Where am I?’ I said to my son Luke, who, when I had arrived, had stared in wonder at this strange man tumbling from a horse into his mother’s arms. ‘Am I under the chair, Luke? No! The table?’

Luke ran to Jane, covering his face in her skirts. ‘Come, sir!’ she laughed. ‘Tom is your father!’

‘Fath-er?’

It grieved me that I had spent half my life finding out who my father was, and now Luke did not know his. He had dark curls, in which I fancied there was a trace of red, and the Stonehouse nose; what in my plebeian days I called hooked, but Lord Stonehouse called aquiline. Although Luke’s grandfather doted on him, he treated the boy very sternly. Perhaps because of that, Luke often ran to him, as he did to the ostler, Adams, who would level a bitten fingernail at him and order him to keep clear of his horses, or he would not answer for the consequences. Luke would run away yelling, then creep quietly back for another levelled nail before at last Adams would snatch him up screaming and plonk him in the saddle. I felt a stab of petty resentment he would not play these games with me, and went upstairs to the nursery to find my daughter Elizabeth.

She was a few months old. Anne had been bitterly disappointed she was not a boy. It was a rare week which did not see at least one child buried in our old church of St Mark’s and Anne wanted as many male heirs as possible to reinforce Lord Stonehouse’s promise I should inherit.

Lord Stonehouse’s first son, Richard, had gone over to the Royalists, and when Lord Stonehouse had declared I would inherit I had fondly imagined it was because of my own merit. In part, perhaps it was. But it was also because he had been discovered helping Richard escape to France. Declaring me as his heir not only saved Lord Stonehouse’s skin. It enabled him to back both horses: whoever ruled, it was the estate that mattered, keeping and expanding the magnificent seat at Highpoint and preserving the Stonehouse name at the centre of power.

Elizabeth, little Liz, did not look a Stonehouse. In my present, rebellious mood, she was my secret companion. Or was it weapon?

‘Liz Neave,’ I whispered to her, giving her the name I had grown up with when I was a bastard in Poplar, and knew nothing of the Stonehouses. She had scraps of hair, still black, but I fancied I could see a reddish tinge. Her nose was not aquiline, or hooked, but a delicious little snub. Anne called her fractious, but her crying reminded me of my own wildness.

When I held out my finger she stopped crying, gripping it with her hand so tightly, I could not stop laughing. Her lips, blowing little bubbles of spit, formed their first laugh. I swept her up, and hugged her and kissed her. Fractious? She was not fractious! I rocked her in my arms until she fell asleep.

I went to our old church, St Mark’s, to see the minister, Mr Tooley, about Liz’s baptism. Anne wanted it done in the old way, with water from the font in which she had been baptised, and godparents. Mr Tooley still did it, although the Presbyterians, who were tightening their grip on the Church, frowned on both.

The church was empty, apart from an old man in a front pew, his clasped hands trembling in some private grief. The familiar pew drew out of me my first prayer for a long time. I feared Scogman was dead. I prayed for forgiveness for my evil temper. For Scogman’s soul. He was a thief, but he stole for others, as much, if not more than for himself. There was much good in him, he was kind and cheered others – by the time I had finished he was near sainthood and I was the devil incarnate. One thing came to me. I determined to find Scogman’s wife and children and do what I could for them. I swore I would never again let my black temper gain control of me.

The man rose at the same time as I did. It was my old master, Mr Black, Anne’s father. I had never before seen tears on his face. He drew his sleeve over his face when he saw me.

‘Tom … my lord …’

I wore a black velvet cloak edged with silver. My short sword had a silver pommel and my favourite plumed hat was set at a rakish angle.

‘No, no, master … not lord yet … and always Tom to thee.’

I embraced him and asked him what was the matter. He told me he might be suspended from the Lord’s Table.

‘Thrown out of the Church? Why?’

He told me the Presbyterians were setting up a council of lay elders. The most virulent of the elders, who morosely policed moral discipline in the parish, was none other than Mr Black’s previous journeyman printer, my old enemy Gloomy George.

I could not believe it. We had fought a long, bloody war for freedom and tolerance, and what we had at the end of it was Gloomy George. I began to laugh at the absurdity of it, but stopped when I saw what distress Mr Black was in. The Mr Black I knew would have laughed too, but this one trembled in bewilderment so much that I sat him down.

I could see how the church had changed. Mr Tooley had allowed a few images, like a picture of the Trinity, because they comforted older members of the congregation. Now it was stripped so bare and stark even the light seemed afraid to enter. Mr Black said that when Mr Tooley used to preach, stern as he was, you left counting your blessings. Now, with the Presbyterians breathing down his neck, his sermons left you counting your sins.

‘But what sin could he possibly find in you?’ I cried.

‘Nehemiah.’

‘Your apprentice? He is as devout as you are.’

‘More so. But he has become a Baptist, and refuses to come here.’

‘If he refuses you, he has broken his bond. You could dismiss him.’

Mr Black’s watery eyes flashed with some of his old fire. ‘He is a good apprentice. And he is devout. I will not dismiss a man for his beliefs.’

We sat in silence for a while. He stared at the blank wall where the Trinity had been. All his life he had been a staunch member of the congregation and the community. He was as responsible for Nehemiah as a father for his children. But the Presbyterians condemned all sects like Baptists as heresies and unless Mr Black brought Nehemiah back into the fold, he would be refused the sacraments. Friends and business would melt away. Even threatened with hell, he stuck stubbornly to his old beliefs in loyalty and duty.

‘How long has Nehemiah’s indenture to run?’

‘Nine months.’

I pretended to calculate, then frowned. ‘You are surely mistaken, master. It ends next week.’ I stared at him, keeping my face straight. ‘Once he’s indentured he can leave. Get another job.’

He returned my stare with interest. He needed no abacus or record where figures were concerned. ‘I don’t know what you’re suggesting,’ he snapped, ‘but I know when he’s indentured. To the day.’ He picked up his stick and I flinched, an apprentice again, fearing a beating. He limped out of the church and stood among the gravestones as if he was gazing into the pit.

‘The Stationery Office has his full record,’ he said.

‘Records can be lost. Once he has completed his apprenticeship he is not your responsibility. Is he good enough to be indentured?’

‘Better than most journeymen.’

‘Well then. When he is indentured I can help him get work elsewhere and you can take on another apprentice.’

‘It is most irregular,’ he muttered.

‘If everything had been regular, master, we would not have won the war. There were not half enough qualified armourers and blacksmiths to make all the arms we needed.’

He still looked troubled but said: ‘Well, well, if that is the way the world is now … But I would not know what to say to him.’

‘I will do it. We got on well, and he will listen to me.’

Elated with what I hoped would be a better attempt at diplomacy, I went to see Mr Tooley about Liz’s baptism. He was engaged in a room across the corridor. I waited in a small anteroom. A cupboard, I remembered, contained books I might occupy myself with. It was locked, but I knew where the key was hidden for I used to borrow books to improve my reading. When I opened it, out spilled a number of objects that had once been part of the church.

There were old, mouldering copies of the Book of Common Prayer which the Presbyterians had banned, brass candlesticks spotted with green mildew, the picture of the Trinity I had missed in the church, cracked and torn, and a rolled-up linen surplice. Everything that had once brought light and colour into the church had been buried here. An ineffable sense of sadness crept over me as I opened a prayer book and the musty smell brought back to me the light and comfort of the old church.

A nearby door opened and a chill ran through me as I heard the unmistakable voice of the man who had beaten me so often as a child – for the good of my soul, as he put it. I put the prayer book down on a chair and went to the door, beginning to open it so they would know I was there. But they were too intent on their argument to see me.

George was in the doorway of Mr Tooley’s study, his back to me. He was almost bald, his head gleaming as though polished.

‘You must name Nehemiah a heretic in church on Sunday, Mr Tooley.’

George used to address Mr Tooley with wheedling deference. I was amazed at his hectoring tone. Even more so by Mr Tooley accepting it, although his face was flushed and he struggled to keep his voice even. ‘I will see Mr Black again.’

‘He is obdurate. Stiffnecked. As the Proverbs have it, Mr Tooley: “Comes want, comes shame from warnings unheeded.”’

The years dropped away. He could have been talking to me when I was an apprentice. My nails bit into my palms and my cheeks were burning.

‘What irks a man more than vinegar on his tooth? A lingering messenger,’ Mr Tooley responded. ‘As the Proverbs have it.’

I gave a silent cheer. As George turned to go, I saw I had left the cupboard door wide open. Mr Tooley’s old surplice lay unrolled on the floor. Hastily, I crammed things back into the cupboard, shut the door and hid the key. During this, George fired his parting shot. It was couched more in sorrow than in anger.

‘The warning is not just for the sheep, Mr Tooley, but for the shepherd.’

‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’

Mr Tooley was livid with anger. George, seeing his point had struck home, twisted the knife. ‘Oh, it is not me, a humble sinner, talking. I am but the poor messenger of the council of elders, which by the 1646 ordinance …’

Ordinance! As well as proverbs, George was stuffed with ordinances, which listed the scandalous offences of renouncers of the true Protestant faith. Mr Tooley took a step towards George. His fist was clenched and a pulse in his forehead was beating. George did not move away. He cocked his head with a look of sorrow on his face, almost as if he was inviting a blow.

Afraid Mr Tooley would strike him – and afraid, for some reason, that this was exactly what George wanted – I stepped out into the corridor.

The effect on the two men could not have been more different. Mr Tooley plainly saw me as he had always seen me.

‘The prodigal son,’ he said, with a wry smile, holding out his hand.

George bowed. ‘My lord, congratulations on your good fortune. I beg to hope that your lordship realises that, in a small measure, it is due to me not sparing the rod, however much that grieved me.’

There was more of this, but I took the unction as I used to take the blows. I had promised God I would not lose my temper. There were to be no more Scogmans. Diplomacy, not confrontation. I told them there was now no need to name Nehemiah a heretic in church.

‘He has recanted?’ George said.

‘He will be leaving Mr Black.’

‘He’s been dismissed?’

I bowed almost as deeply as he did. ‘I believe people should worship according to their conscience, but the law is the law. Nehemiah will be replaced by another apprentice who will attend church in a proper manner.’

I winced as he clasped his hands and lifted his eyes. ‘God be praised! I shrank from putting Mr Black through so much distress, as I did when I applied the rod to you, but it was for the good of both your souls.’

He put out his hand. It felt as cold and slippery as the skin of a toad. I arranged the baptism with Mr Tooley in two weeks’ time. When I left I still had the clammy feeling of George’s grip. Matthew, the cunning man who had brought me up, would say I had been touched. It was a stupid superstition, but all the same I wiped my hand on the grass.

My spirits rose again when I rode into Half Moon Court. The apple tree was a sad, withered stump, but from the shop came the familiar thump and sigh of the printing press. Sarah, the servant, came out to greet me. She walked with a limp now, but her banter had not changed since she used to rub pig’s fat into my aching bruises.

‘What has tha’ done to master, Tom?’

‘Done?’ I cried in alarm.

‘He’s had a face like a wet Monday for weeks. Now he’s skipped off like a two-year-old with mistress to buy her a new hat for the baptism.’

‘I only talked to him about his problems,’ I said modestly.

‘I wish you could talk to my rheumatism. My knee’s giving me gyp.’

‘Which knee?’ I said, stretching out my hand.

‘Getaway! I know you. Think you can cure the world one minute, and need curing yourself the next.’

She hugged me just as she did when I was a child, then walked back into the house quite normally, before stopping to stare at me. ‘Why, Tom! Tha’s cured my knee!’

I stared at her, my heart beating faster. Perhaps it was something to do with my prayers that morning.

Sarah laughed, then winced at the effort she had made to walk normally. She flexed her knee and rubbed it ruefully, before limping back into the house. ‘Oh, Tom, dear Tom. If tha believes that, tha’ll believe anything.’

Nehemiah was as good as any journeyman, I could see that. He was too absorbed in what had once been my daily task, to see me watching from the door. He was taller than me, and would have been handsome but for spots that erupted round his mouth and neck. It was a hard task for one man to feed the paper in the press and bring down the platen, but he did it with ease.

I wondered why he did not put the sheets out to dry, as he should have done. Instead, he interleaved them with more absorbent paper before putting them carefully in an old knapsack. I gave a cry of surprise when I saw it was my old army knapsack. Nehemiah whirled round, dropping a printed sheet, and grabbed hold of me. I thought I was strong and fit but he twisted my arms into a lock and bent me double. His strong smell of sweat and ink was overpowering. I yelled out who I was. Only then did he release me with a confused apology.

‘I – I did not recognise you. I thought you were a spy, sir,’ he muttered.

I laughed. The Half Moon printed the most boring of government ordinances. ‘A spy. What has Mr Black got to hide?’

I bent to pick up the sheet he had dropped but he snatched it up and put it in the knapsack. I shrugged. While his master was out he was doing some printing of his own. I thought him none the worse for that. Most apprentices of any enterprise did so. When I was going to be a great poet I had secretly printed my poems to Anne on that very press.

I gazed fondly at the battered knapsack, which I thought had been thrown away.

‘You do not want it, sir?’

I shook my head, and he thanked me so profusely for it my heart went out to him, for I remembered when, in my crazy wanderings, it once contained everything I had in the world.

‘How would you like to be a journeyman, Nehemiah?’