‘On what charge?’
‘Regicide.’
‘King killing?’ I laughed. ‘We are still a commonwealth. There is no King yet. And I know Sir Charles. He has never been a Royalist. He hanged a number of Royalist commanders.’
‘That is why he needs Justice Cooke. For his royal pardon. Excuse me. I must finish this. We cannot stay here long.’
He glanced out of the window, took a fresh piece of paper and began writing again. I stared out through the dirty glass, tattered with the skeletons of cobwebs. The grounds were empty, apart from Thurloe’s clerk, pacing restlessly, eyes never leaving the entrance. Gradually the words sank in. Royal pardon. Coote was saving his skin. Even if you did not have to take such extreme measures, the empty courtyard was an eloquent testimony to people rewriting their own histories before the King’s return. The lawyers and clerks of Gray’s Inn had seen the notice on Cooke’s door and Thurloe’s visit, and made themselves scarce. Cooke’s presence had helped the chambers to flourish in Cromwell’s time, but now no one wanted to be associated with the man who had prosecuted the King.
Thurloe finished the note. ‘The Irish. The fools jumped the gun when they seized Cooke.’
In that stale room I could almost smell the stink of prison. I might have been there now. Like Cooke, I had been enticed to Moorfields that night. I began to tell Thurloe, but he cut me short irritably.
‘Your father is another of those fools who jumped the gun. They had to be reined in.’
I had taken nothing that morning except bread and small beer. The taste of it came back into my throat. I groped for a chair at the side of his desk.
‘You were part of the coup all the time.’
He put the note in his pocket and replaced the file he had taken it from. There was no change in his expression or his tone of voice. ‘I was asked by General Monck for my advice and I gave it. That is all.’
‘That is why I have two soldiers at my door. I must thank you for that, at least,’ I said bitterly.
Thurloe shrugged as if to dismiss any idea of sentiment. ‘The King could never even step on board a ship let alone cross the Channel if there were acts of blood beforehand. Edward Hyde, who is advising him in the Netherlands, knows that. Monck needed someone on this side of the Channel who knows what he’s doing, who knows London is crying out not for blood, but maypoles. So the King invaded the country, if I can put it that way, not with troops, but maypoles. The blood will come later.’
From force of habit he began to tidy the desk, levelling the edges of some papers to leave them in a neat pile, closing the lid of the inkhorn. Maypoles, not blood. Of course. The fireworks. The fires. What I thought had been spontaneous, what Sam Pepys had marvelled at for ‘its greatness and suddenness’, had been carefully orchestrated. To rule England, you had to rule London. And to rule London you had to first rule the London crowd.
‘Later,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You said the blood will come later.’
‘There is a list –’
‘The King’s List. I have seen it.’ I thought of his name, scored through. ‘And I noticed it is possible to have one’s name struck off …’
He returned my stare levelly. Not a muscle in his face moved before he answered with his usual care. ‘I would not work under that assumption, Sir Thomas. Richard is clumsy, but he has been fiercely loyal to the King and he has his ear. He wants you on the scaffold as much as he wants Highpoint.’ A measure of irritation crept into his voice. ‘I was surprised to find you still here when I returned to London.’
‘How long have we got?’
‘A month or two at the most. Perhaps less. You will have to travel under a false name. Monck will protect you here, but Richard and other Royalists who want their estates back are watching the ports.’
Somewhere there was the rattle of a carriage, the shout of a coachman. He rose and began buttoning his overcoat. I stood up and clutched at the desk. My legs felt as weak as water. I had not expected it to happen so quickly. Thurloe gave a little grunt of annoyance. He had put the buttons in the wrong holes. With fumbling fingers he began rebuttoning it, turning away to do so, as if he hated to admit even such a trivial mistake. That, and a glance through the window, were his only signs of nervousness. He would not want to be seen with a regicide.
I jumped as the door went and there was a creak on the stairs. I felt a sudden dart of suspicion. For Thurloe to tell me this so directly, instead of through one of his oblique signals, was completely out of character. It was not a risk he would take – unless it was another trap.
There was a knock at the door. My hand went fruitlessly to my empty belt again.
‘Your carriage, sir,’ the clerk said.
‘Tell him to wait.’
Thurloe saw my hand at my belt and gave me a dry smile. He patted the last button on his coat into place. He coughed and cleared his throat.
‘Sir Thomas … while I was in the country, my clerk burned some papers which were of no further use to me. When I returned a neighbour, a lawyer of some discretion, told me there had been a chimney fire. He gave me some half-burned letters which came into his possession and, in the present circumstances, might prove embarrassing. You were there, I believe?’
When I nodded, he said his clerk had confessed I returned another such letter. Had I, by any chance, come across any other letters on the way to my horse? It was delicately put. He was now openly anxious, although few except me, who knew him so well, would have noticed it. His tongue continually slipped over his lips. He had put himself in my shoes. Angry and disconcerted that his colleague had deserted him, he would have kept some of the letters. He could not afford to take such a chance. That was why he was helping me now: for his own safety. I found that oddly comforting. And his awkward, unexpected anxiety oddly warming.
‘As a matter of fact I did come across one or two more,’ I lied. ‘Shall I return them to you?’
He blanched. ‘No, no. The post is not secure. Nothing is. Burn them. And anything else you find that might be … misinterpreted.’
We went down the stairs. The clerk locked the door and put a Parliamentary seal on it forbidding entry. I saw Thurloe to his coach. There was some life, a brighter green in the muddy grass. The fat buds of an oak tree were still tightly furled, but in its shadow were groups of purple and yellow crocus. I was seeing an English spring, of which I would not see the summer. He shifted from one foot to another, anxious to see me go. I did not know then and I do not know now how much he had been involved in the coup. I felt no resentment. In his own words, in the face of all the rhetoric and grandiose plans, London needed someone who knew what he was doing.
‘I don’t expect we will see each other again,’ I said.
He looked relieved, but at the same time took off his glove and shook my hand with an unexpected warmth. ‘Safe voyage,’ he said.
25
I suppose it was the sugar loaf hat and the ruffled linen that did it – that and Anne ordering stewed carp and ox tongues and roasted pigeons and a special sugar cake for just the two of us, together with the deep-pointed dark-blue velvet bodice she wore, which gave her pale skin the lustre of ivory. All this told the servants I was in office again. They expected it. The Stonehouses were always in office. The last six months were an aberration. The soldiers at the door looked less like guards and more like a symbol of honour as they crisply saluted. The servants had a spring in their step as they served the meal. Only when they had served the meal and I took the unprecedented step of dismissing them did I feel the mood of the house change.
When I told her she listened in silence, drinking wine and eating carp. She was particularly fond of its strong flavour and urged me to eat, but I could not touch a morsel until I had told her everything.
She dipped a piece of carp in caper sauce. ‘No chance of office?’
‘None.’
‘Well, that is a relief,’ she said, eating the carp and finishing her wine.
>
‘A relief?’ I feared that her illness had unhinged her.
‘We would have lost each other again.’
It was part bravado, part the wine, part that it had not sunk in yet. The servants had set us at the correct formal distance and she moved her place next to me. She raised her glass. Bemused, I raised mine and we clinked them together.
‘Now eat,’ she commanded.
I was suddenly hungry. The carp was good, strong and meaty. The sugar cake burst in our mouths with flavour. The wine went to our heads. We ate and drank as we used to during the war when we never knew where the next meal was coming from, laughing as we remembered things we thought we had long forgotten. The serving men, who had stationed themselves outside the room, must have been totally confused. Only when they came to clear away and we took coffee in the drawing room did reality seem to strike her.
‘A month?’
‘Better say three weeks.’
‘I must go to Highpoint tomorrow.’
‘Richard will have thought of that. It’s too dangerous.’
She stared into space. ‘Everything I have done there … my pictures,’ she said. ‘I shall be sorry not to see them again.’ She gazed at one of the few paintings she had brought with her, of Luke on his favourite horse and Highpoint in the background. ‘Nothing from Luke?’
Three days before there had been a letter from Luke to her. Mr Cole had given it to me and I locked it in my drawer with the others. I could not bear the thought of her reading a letter like the one he had sent to me. I shook my head.
‘Well, he made his choice,’ she said. ‘But I thought he would have written to me at least.’
That night she did something she had never done before. She came to my bed. It must have been well after midnight. She said she could not sleep and it was driving her mad. Gradually I quietened her and in the darkness I painted a rosy picture of where we would go, where Matthew, the cunning man who had brought me up, had promised me I would sail to one day, where the sun shone and there were strange fantastic animals and everyone was equal and there was peace, for there was nothing to quarrel about.
‘Why, Tom,’ she murmured sleepily, ‘that is one of those stupid stories you used to tell me when you came to my father as an apprentice, with the biggest feet I had ever seen.’
‘They were not big,’ I protested. ‘They stood out because I had no boots. Look –’
But she was fast asleep. She slept in my arms like a child.
We told the servants we were going to the country. They assumed we meant Highpoint. I felt certain that would reach Richard. Only Agnes and Scogman, who would travel with us, knew the truth, and they did not know where we were going because we did not know ourselves. At first Scogman was reluctant to go.
‘I haven’t been on no water, sir, except the Thames,’ Scogman said. ‘Bit wider than the Thames, I reckon?’
He was remarkably ignorant about what was no use to him. When I told him we might be days or even months without seeing land he looked seasick at the thought of it. Even worse was the thought of leaving London for ever.
‘What about my properties?’
‘Properties?’ I said innocently.
‘The little savings I scraped together I put into a few hovels Shoreditch way.’
‘Put them into gold.’
‘Gold?’ His eyes lit up. ‘I never stole gold. Too heavy.’
The gold did it. The Stonehouses had always had an account with goldsmiths in Amsterdam. When Cromwell died and the future began to look problematic, I had sold land at Highpoint and London properties and transferred the proceeds to Amsterdam in the name of Thomas Black. The thought of a gold account in Amsterdam confirmed to Scogman that he was on his way to being a gentleman and banished all fear of the water. We fixed on going to Geneva; a free city and a republic. The problem was how to get across the Channel. Knowing that various members of the Rota Club were in the same position, I went there. It was closed. A notice read: The Rota Club will be closed until further notice. J. Harrington. 13th March 1660.
A dirty grey cloth was draped over the debating table. The floor was littered with the remains of broken clay pipes and coffee grounds. Next to a pile of pamphlets, The Rota, or Model of a Free State, was the overturned ballot box. I jumped as a hand touched my shoulder. It was Mr Pepys.
Being Mr Pepys, he confessed that when he had seen me, he had been tempted to creep away. But, being Mr Pepys, he felt he owed me a last chop. His patron, Lord Montague, had been appointed to run the navy and he was his Secretary.
As soon as we had broached the first bottle and ordered our chops, I told him I needed a berth across the Channel. His manner changed. He was sober in a second. He glanced round at the nearby stalls, lowering his voice so I could scarcely hear him above the yells, laughter and clattering of pewter plates.
‘I am scarce warm in the seat.’
It was a measure of the desperation I was beginning to feel that I could not stop the request becoming a plea. ‘A safe port will do.’
To escape attention I was wearing my oldest clothes. For the first time he took in the tear in my grease-stained jump jacket, my cap with a round crown and flap brim which was losing some of its fur, while I registered his silver hatband and cravat of finest Venetian lace. They were probably gifts. People on the rise were showered with them.
A hard edge entered his voice. ‘I am sorry, Tom. I cannot help you.’
I recognised the tone. I had used it often enough myself. In a society oiled by patronage anyone in office was bombarded with requests for favours. I was not surprised he had become impervious; only that he had reached it so soon.
He looked round and lowered his voice. ‘No port is safe.’
Things were moving quickly, he said. Customs officers, some in the pay of Royalists, were active in Gravesend, making the journey down river hazardous. Any regicide was worth a price as the unfortunate Cooke had found out in Dublin. Harwich? That was where Richard was expecting me. The Kentish ports were, if anything, worse. They were a hive of activity. He was in charge of it there re-equipping a ship to carry the King. No agreement had yet been reached with him – Monck was still seeking assurances from Edward Hyde. But Lord Montague did not want to be caught with his britches down. The Royalist flag was made, but not yet run up.
Mr Pepys finally had his position. I watched him go with a pang, bustling out, worried that he had said too much; that apprehension, however, rapidly giving way to pleasure as people made way respectfully for the silver hatband and the lace cravat.
The only hope now was to find a route used by less reputable traders who sailed to the edge of the law and beyond. It was a sellers’ market. People who feared the King’s return were being charged up to eighteen pounds a head to cross the Atlantic, whereas normally it cost five or six. From the look of the traders it was impossible to tell whether we would get there, or if they would cut our throats or sell us on to make even more money. Scogman saw them at a tavern. There was one particularly disreputable trader who gave his name as Ferryman. Scogman said he was the most disrespectful cur who ever lived. He had crossed him off immediately, for he charged only three pounds and a few shillings, suspiciously low, but he would not go away, he said, until he saw me.
He was curled up like a bundle of rags on the steps of the tavern. The Quaker Stephen Butcher’s sailor’s slops looked a little more worn and torn, but he wore his flat seaman’s cap at as rakish an angle as ever.
Scogman kicked him. ‘Up! You may not take your hat off to me, but by God you will doff it to Sir Thomas.’
‘Leave him,’ I said. I turned to Stephen Butcher. ‘I thought you had gone to the New World.’
He told me one boat had left in February, but there had been such demand he was fitting out another.
‘I am to take you on it,’ Butcher said.
‘Take me? Where?’
‘The New World.’
I laughed at him. ‘I wish to go to Geneva.’
&n
bsp; He shook his head. ‘You will go to the New World. With the Quakers.’
Nothing is more irritating than a man who believes you need to be saved and who will not listen to you when you say you prefer to go to hell in your own way. I was at the end of my tether and had had enough of men making money out of people fleeing the country. Using it to capture their souls was even worse.
‘Knock his hat off,’ I said to Scogman. ‘It might knock some sense in him.’
Scogman duly obliged, but when I came to leave he was still sitting on the step, his hat firmly back on his head. Patiently, he rose to his feet, a little unsteadily, but his voice was as even as ever.
‘I said with the Quakers. Not one of them.’
26
The more I thought of it, the more it made sense. Governments may have changed but the regulations for emigration, both to Europe and New England, changed little. It gave too many jobs to petty officials and yielded too much tax from Customs. Would-be émigrés took their papers to Haberdasher’s Hall for scrutiny. There were searchers and customs men at Gravesend and more at Deal to extract their fees. Among these the Royalists would certainly have planted men on the lookout for me. But while they would use all kinds of pretexts to stop regicides boarding, they could not wait to see Quakers, loathed as radical disturbers of the peace, leave the country.
It was the perfect cover.
To my astonishment, Anne preferred New England to Geneva. Mostly it was because she preferred country to city, but it was also partly the name, partly the language, and partly that she had an even vaguer idea of distance and size than I had.
‘It is two or three times bigger than this country?’
‘Nobody knows the end of it.’
She sat in silent amazement at the enormity of what we were doing. But there was too much to do in too little time to dwell on it. She got Agnes to dress her in black with a falling white collar and a large hat over a coif. Old Mr Tooley, who had married us, came over to sign our papers for Haberdasher’s Hall. He disapproved of what we were doing, but his disapproval of the King’s return was even greater. He was able to salve his conscience by giving her back her maiden name.
The King's List Page 16
