I lost my patience. ‘How many men do the Royalists have?’
She was in the middle of a low bow in which, perhaps, she imagined the King was receiving her. She stopped abruptly, staring for a moment as if she did not recognise me. The heel of her shoe went over and she would have lost her balance if I had not caught her. She sat down heavily on the chaise longue, staring at me in bewilderment.
‘How many … There were plans. Before your father was killed in some stupid brawl he had plans for a great army. A final thrust!’ She gave a sweeping gesture, mirroring Richard Stonehouse’s grandiose manner. ‘But the little bitch told me Edward Hyde squashed them. The King wanted no more defeats. Richard found himself as out of favour as the rest of us. I was told that was why he got drunk one night and fell into some stupid quarrel where he was killed.’
My father, who had revered his King, out of office! Out of favour. Eventually out of touch. Had I really been as out of touch as my father that I had believed his pretentious plans for a great rising? Or did I just use it as an excuse to kill him because of the threat to me and my estate? Either way his murder now seemed pointless, like so many other decisions made in a welter of others across that torn, leather-topped desk.
It had gone quiet again. Slivers of moonlight broke through the thick cloud and a number of carts, which might have been part of an army baggage train, came from the direction of Smithfield. The fires had settled from the first bright blazes to dull glows, whose reflections were broken up in the river. I was reminded of so many times during the war, of that uneasy calm before battle when men had what might be their last meal, and were praying, or drinking, or in a stupor, having no idea what was in front of them. It was a lifetime since I had been in that position, knowing no more than the common soldier.
The little charade of her first appearance at court had exhausted Lucy, who lay slumped back against the chaise longue.
‘What were the figures you sent me?’
‘Richard’s figures that the King rejected. They were phantom armies, Tom. Paper soldiers. I had to send you something. Live on something. I thought … You didn’t really believe me, did you, Tom? I thought Thurloe at least would –’
‘Thurloe has gone. Defected.’
‘Thurloe?’ Lucy sat up. At least it was a change to drop the bombshell on her. ‘John Thurloe? Joined the King?’
‘I believe so. I don’t know. I’m beginning to realise how little I do know. If the figures you sent me were false where have all these men come from?’
Lucy shook her head helplessly.
Anne peered through the window. ‘Where is Monck’s army?’
‘The City,’ I said. ‘They will protect the City. Money. A pity they burned down the gates.’
There was an explosion and a flash. Near the river, just out of range of a fire, a group of men appeared to be setting up a battery. ‘A cannon,’ I said. I did not need to see what other men were carrying up to the battery. Soon there would be the acrid smell of powder, the whistle of a ball, a moment’s silence, then the scream of dying soldiers. Never in ten years of war had the Royalists penetrated into the heart of London. I told them to get away from the window. I ordered Scogman and two servants who had been in the war to prime pistols I had obtained for such an emergency and to lock and guard the stables. I told others to snuff out candles to reduce being a target.
‘She said they did not need an army,’ Lucy muttered.
‘Who?’
‘The King’s bitch. She came to see me before they left for Breda. Out of pity. She left me dresses they had no room to take. She said they would soon have plenty of dresses. Plenty of money. They were going home. The King had had a letter which simply told him to go to Breda. He and Hyde got so excited and the King immediately told her to pack. She did not know who sent the letter but she had overheard Hyde say to the King the man was so obscure, buried in some dreadful place like Cornwall, or Somerset, where London would never dream of intercepting his mail.’
‘Somerset.’ It meant something to me. Something in a conversation just as trivial as the one Lucy had had with the King’s mistress: so inconsequential I could not remember it. I paced about the room, struggling to recall it. Once Lord Stonehouse had said to me that only the small things were true. It was the large picture built up from them that distorted the truth: the bigger the picture, the bigger the lies. Sitting at that leather desk I had lost my edge: Lucy had sent me what I wanted to read.
‘Thurloe,’ I said. ‘Just before he left, Thurloe asked me if I knew a gentleman from Somerset. Sir Richard Grenton … Grenson … Does it mean anything to you?’
Lucy became alive. The names of everyone in the courts of the executed King ran in her blood. ‘Somerset? Grenton? … Grenson …’ She shook her head. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right name?’
‘Brenton? … Brenville …’
An explosion and a flash of light through the room, followed by a crackle of firing, made us duck instinctively. There were more explosions before a great burst of cheering. Slowly we raised our heads. A bang shook the windows, lighting up the sky over London with coloured stars, rising and drifting over St Paul’s before winking out one by one.
Anne clutched at my arm. In that bemused and bewildered moment we were like children, half enchanted by the sight, half fearful that London, frozen so long in gloomy dissension, had, as Quakers and other sects long predicted, met its end and that God’s wrath was about to descend on it, as it had on Sodom and Gomorrah.
‘Look! A dragon,’ Lucy cried.
She laughed wildly. It was not the Great Beast of the Apocalypse but a raft of light wood propelled by fireworks. As rocket after rocket set each other off in sequence, it whipped and dipped and twisted like a demented kite. What I had convinced myself was a cannon being set up to fire balls at the City was a battery filling the sky with exploding colour. Puritan London had not seen such a sight for twenty years. Lucy knew them all from old court extravaganzas. In the dark room, lit in flashes from bursting cascades, she had the verve and energy I was in awe of when I first met her.
‘Firedrakes … Tumbling balls … Petards … Oh, I remember them … what do you call them …? Dolphins!’
She pointed to a group of what looked like brilliantly coloured fish, darting and skipping over the water, before they fizzed and sank, only to be followed by another shoal. The last one hissed and plunged into the river, the last brightly coloured star winked out in the sky. There was an astonished silence in which, for a moment, London returned to its grey, huddled grimness. It was followed by a great roar. Fires were blazing up higher and higher and in their light we could see crowds swelling, people shaking hands with Monck’s soldiers.
‘Not Grenston, Grenville,’ Lucy said. ‘Not Richard, but John.’
I stared at her blankly, numbed by the sight, my ears still ringing from the explosions.
‘The obscure gentleman in Somerset.’
I snapped my fingers. ‘That’s it. That’s the name Thurloe dropped to me. Sir John Grenville.’
What I once thought was dead lived on as brightly as the fireworks, in Lucy’s head. No one knew better than she did the peerage of the pre-Protectorate court, with its complex network of kinship and marriage. Her livelihood had depended on it.
‘Sir John Grenville, third son of Sir Bevil, sometime Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles Stuart when he was Prince, gave the living of Kilkhampton Church to a certain cleric Nicholas Monck, brother of George Monck, and George Monck is cousin – no, not quite right – second cousin to Sir John Grenville. Charles Stuart has been in correspondence with George Monck all along.’
Somewhere in the City church bells began ringing. I sat down heavily on the chaise longue. ‘Oh, Lucy, dear, dear Lucy, you are sharp as ever. Would you had sent that to me instead of all the make-believe. Thurloe knew. He was working with them all the time. He couldn’t risk jeopardising his own safety by warning a regicide directly. He could deny he ever told me anything. H
e dropped me a hint. He told me what was going on. I missed it. I was too busy on other things. There were no soldiers. They didn’t need any. It’s not a rebellion. It’s a coup. From the moment George Monck rode over the border.’
PART THREE
The Burning of the Rump
February–April 1660
21
What began it was a mystery only London could answer. After being paralysed in indecision for month after frozen month, as if winter had not only chilled people’s fingers but numbed their thoughts and stopped their tongues, London, in an hour or two – it could not have been more – made up its mind. Impossible to describe it in any other way. People lost their individuality in the crowds that gathered round bonfires burning in every other street. No one was immune. With scarcely a word, we put on coats against the night air to get into Lucy’s coach. Only Scogman retained any sense.
‘Not the ring, sir.’
He was right. Even so, I did not take it off immediately. The ring had become as much a part of me as my fingers, the staring jewelled eyes of the falcon a symbol of my power. It was not only my power that finally slipped away that evening, but the last vestiges of the Protectorate itself. The word spread, as quickly as the fires. Scogman picked it up from the crowd as he rode down Holborn ahead of us. Monck had done a deal. What deal he had done was unclear, except for one thing. He had cut himself off from the hated Rump Parliament. You could smell it. People were burning the Rump, not in effigy, but in meat.
The normal London stench, made worse by scavengers not clearing the streets, was overwhelmed by another smell. Roast meat.
At the old maypole in the Strand butchers rang a peal with their knives. They turned spitting and sizzling joints, roasted steaks on hastily rigged-up spits, or sliced off bleeding chunks, skewering them and searing them over the open fires. Hawkers who had done little business for months yelled themselves hoarse as they sold the charred steaks. ‘Eat your Rump and vote for a Free Parliament!’
On Cheapside the heat was so intense it blistered the paintwork on the coach and I ordered the coachman to wait with Lucy and Anne near the Guildhall, guarded by Monck’s soldiers, where there was some semblance of order. I pressed on with Scogman to the Royal Exchange, where the crowd was thickest. Everyone was celebrating, whether or not they knew what they were celebrating. We cheered with the rest when a juggler tossed cubes of meat in the air, catching and swallowing them.
Before a turning spit I saw the familiar, rotund shape of Sam Pepys, with other people from the Rota Club. As well as butchers, prigs were busy that night. One was dipping Sam’s cloak. I yelled a warning, but he was slow to react and the thief wriggled through the crowd towards Cornhill.
He was remarkably sanguine about his loss. ‘He will find very little in it. This morning I felt poor in purse and office but now I feel rich in both.’ He beamed at me and embraced me, his cheeks shining with grease from the lump of meat he was clutching. ‘General Monck has come out for the City. The Rump is finished. The empty seats in Parliament are to be filled. My patron, Montague, will be back.’ He saw my expression. ‘I am sorry, Tom. This is not good news for you. I’ll get you some meat. You’ll take it rare?’
‘Very rare,’ I said.
Earlier the Rota Club had been debating the form of government for a republic. Now, most that I saw were toasting the return of the King. Only William Clarke looked how I felt. He stood dazed like a soldier when a ball has exploded near him. Smuts from a brazier smeared his cheeks and his cuffs. He looked very like his former self, Mr Ink, as I had thought of him then, who had smuggled speeches for me to print to depose the old King. And, in his immaculate shorthand, he had recorded every twist and turn of government ever since.
He drew me to one side, his voice wounded, accusing. ‘You knew what was going on, didn’t you, Tom?’
He refused to believe me when I told him I had no idea. Why else had I saved Lord Montague from the Tower? Of course. That was why Thurloe had followed my suggestion. Not because he accepted my reasoning, but to save his own skin. I tried to change the subject by tapping into his intricate knowledge of politics.
‘Where is Breda? The King has moved there.’
‘Breda … Dutch Netherlands … Ah. Yes. That bears the mark of the King’s adviser, Edward Hyde. Breda is in the Dutch Republic, while Brussels is in the Spanish Netherlands.’
‘No King wanting to be invited back would stay in a country with whom we are at war.’
‘Exactly.’ More fireworks went off. He stared as they coloured the sky and the crowd gasped and cheered. ‘Edward Hyde hates me. You might put in a word with Montague.’
He was still convinced I was involved, in some way, in the coup and had influence. Just like me, he believed what he wanted to believe.
Outside the Guildhall Monck’s soldiers trod reassuringly, keeping order. Scogman spotted the coach on the corner of Milk Street. Only when Ralph, the coachman, was pulling down the steps did I realise Anne was not there. Lucy was dozing in a corner.
‘I thought she was with you, sir,’ Ralph said. ‘Her ladyship was worried – I could not stop her going to look for you.’
Lucy’s eyes jerked open. ‘She’s on the Guildhall steps. She said she would not move beyond the soldiers.’
There was a large crowd before the Guildhall, waiting for Monck to appear with the Mayor. Soldiers from Monck’s Life Guard held them back.
‘Lady with a red cloak, sir? She was here.’
Another soldier said he saw her going down Coleman Street towards Moorfields. I went a little way down but could see no sign of her. Nor had she returned to the coach. Increasingly anxious, I went further up Coleman Street as far as St Stephen’s Church. Most women would never go unaccompanied in a crowd like this, but Anne was not most women. Two butchers, bare-chested before a roaring fire, were spearing a huge joint on a spit.
‘Tom! Tom!’
I could hear her but not see her. I fought to get through the heaving, solid mass of bodies. Men eager for their meat turned angrily as they believed I was trying to take their places at the spit. Grease from the fatty side of the turning meat dripped on the fire, hissing and throwing up splashes of light. One of them lit up Anne’s red cloak. A man was clutching at it, offering her a drink from a flask. She pulled away. He staggered backwards, red wine splashing over his doublet, before lurching after her angrily. The turning meat reached the lean side and I lost sight of her in the dark of the street.
‘My wife. I must get through to my wife.’
As well try to get through a stone wall. I was wedged against a heaving mass of bodies stinking of sweat, wine and meat, trapped so I could not move arm or leg. People were struggling to get through to the spit, others trying to get away with their meat. A woman was crying out for a lost child.
‘Has anyone seen her? Her name is –’
The rotating meat sent up another flare, catching a flicker of red disappearing round the corner. I stamped on a foot, kneed, kicked, elbowed, clawed, butted: all the vicious in-fighting I thought I had forgotten since I was an apprentice in a brawl, until I broke through and rounded the corner to see Anne in the grip of a man, and in the same burst of frenzy dragged him off and found myself staring at Luke.
22
Impossible. She was impossible to understand. She had renounced him. Cleared his room, removed every trace of him from the house, but the moment she had seen him from the Guildhall steps she had fought her way through the milling chaos of Coleman Street to embrace him.
Impossible? Was I not the same? The prodigal son. Had I not been a prodigal son myself, running away and returning to my old master? The words poured out of him. He could not get them out fast enough. It began to seem that he had told me the truth that day. It had the ring of it, in the sense of its mixture of the unexpected and the obvious and, above all, muddle and misunderstanding.
He had met Sarah in his Sealed Knot days. He had nothing to do with the Royalist books in the priest’s ho
le, he said. He was only interested in one thing. He saw his mother’s expression and avoided her eyes, but, I think, she was too happy to see him and said nothing. Sarah’s room was the one above the priest’s hole. She would leave him a message in the coffee shop, telling him when her father, a widower, was out and it was safe.
One day he had picked up such a message. The chest was withdrawn from the trapdoor – she had the help of the maid I had met – but her room was empty. He waited. He opened the door and listened. The house was silent. He crept downstairs to the next floor. A floor or two below he could hear a faint murmur of voices. He reached a room where the door was open. Flung on the bed was a travelling bag. From it had been taken some papers and nightclothes. He saw the seal of the King’s court on one but it was another he picked up. It was a scrawled copy of the King’s List with my name on it and John Thurloe’s deleted.
A door had opened downstairs and he heard the sound of two men arguing. As he fled down the corridor he caught sight of one of them. It was a blur from above and he was wearing a wig, but he thought he had seen him before. The panic-stricken maid ran up the stairs and told him to go. Sarah’s father had returned with an unexpected visitor. She had tried to change the message but had been too late.
Luke was breathing heavily as if it had just happened. Anne put her hand out to him but stopped short of touching him. We were sitting on tree stumps near what, in the open space of Moorfields, must have been one of the biggest fires in London. Two butchers and their boys, sweat running down their bare chests in the heat, were, as fast as they could slice it, selling a whole roast pig, killed that night.
I wanted to take him home but hesitated to interrupt him. And there was no sign of Lucy’s carriage or Scogman. He knew we had gone in the direction of Moorfields, and I hoped he would search for us. I bought small beer and a hot cordial for Anne from enterprising hawkers, who picked up the cheap pewter and chipped pots littering the common on their return to a tavern. Luke drank his beer almost in one draught.
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