The Best of Men

by Claire Letemendia

  “It has not so far.” She seemed about to continue in this vein, then said abruptly, “I thought we both wanted Hoare destroyed.”

  “Nothing would delight me as much. We have been hampered, however, by the Secretary of State’s ill-conceived chit-chat with Parliament.”

  “How can you believe Hoare has any evidence of that! You have probed Falkland endlessly, trying to make him admit something of the sort, and he has proved himself loyal to the King.”

  “Yes, but I think he has his moments of doubt.” Digby began to imitate Falkland’s high-pitched, squeaky voice. “‘We must put an end to the violence! This country is being torn apart, the earth soaked in English blood!’ How many times have I had to listen to him vent his moral indignation – and how it bores me,” he concluded, in a tone that would usually make her laugh.

  “Falkland is an honest man,” she said, almost angrily. “That is why you must stand up for him – and get rid of his enemy.”

  “My dear, you are so staunch in his defence, and yet I have an idea that it is not his fate that most concerns you,” Digby said, watching her face. “Are you by any chance smitten with Mr. Beaumont? Was I wise to leave you alone together in Wilmot’s quarters last October?”

  “How trivial you can be! If Falkland goes, you and Prince Rupert will be open rivals in Council with no one to keep the peace between you, and after the Prince’s glittering record in this past campaign, you will lose out. Moreover, Hoare will only gain in status, as one of the Prince’s most devoted and experienced officers.”

  “Not necessarily; his fate will depend on who might succeed Falkland as Secretary.”

  “If Rupert has the King’s ear, that would certainly not be you.”

  Digby conceded with a nod. “Well, what of Mr. Beaumont? Have you fallen for him?”

  “Are you jealous, Digby?” she inquired, her eyes flashing at him. “You are never jealous.”

  “I have always been content for you to take whomsoever you desire to your bed,” he replied, with complete honesty, although for the first time he felt a trifle insecure in his influence over her. He knew what passion could inspire in a woman’s heart, as in a man’s. “You are not about to marry him, for God’s sake,” he went on, rather vindictively. “Lord and Lady Beaumont would take a fit, in their Palladian mansion! I can just imagine them.” He started to giggle but stopped on seeing her expression, which had grown closed and cold.

  “Who shall I marry?” she said. “I am twenty-six years of age, far from virgin, and in all likelihood barren. My face and body have been my fortune, but they cannot last forever.”

  “I’ll find you someone, as soon as you wish to surrender the title of Mistress and call yourself a wife. Though, of course, you can be both wife, and mistress to whom you choose, if we find an agreeable husband.” Digby saw her mouth tighten and was instantly full of remorse. “Please forgive me, Isabella,” he said. “You know how much I love you. I shall always look after you as I would my own sister.”

  “Yes, I do know that.” Isabella gave him a kiss on the cheek and turned to leave.

  “Where are you going now, my dear?” he asked.

  “Oh, nowhere you should follow,” she told him, and let herself out of the chapel before he realised that she had not answered his question about Beaumont.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I.

  For three days after Laurence’s preliminary interrogation, Danvers visited the cell regularly, squatting outside with a handkerchief pressed to his mouth. He claimed that he had gone to Falkland begging him to intercede, and that Falkland had said he could do nothing for Laurence. This seemed hard to believe, but if it were true, Laurence did not like the consequences for himself. He was utterly furious still to be in captivity.

  On the fourth day, Danvers condescended to move closer to him, braving the stench. “What’s the point of you rotting away here, Beaumont?” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see how futile it is? Think of what Hoare might inflict on you if you keep being so pigheaded.”

  “I won’t let him take Falkland down,” Laurence said. “And he’d be a fool to try and extort a confession from me. I don’t even think he has the authority to hold me here.”

  “Then why hasn’t Falkland come to your aid by now?” Laurence had no reply to this. “Besides, Falkland won’t come to any grief if he’s demoted,” Danvers went on. “He hates his office, as I’m sure he must have told you. Everyone says he’s not suited to it –”

  “What are you, Hoare’s parrot?” Laurence interrupted coldly.

  Danvers flushed. “You have to change your mind, Beaumont, before it’s too late. Don’t you remember, in the other war, that fellow who got his prick shot off in battle? We both agreed we’d rather be dead than be unable to fuck any more, and to have to make water through a straw. You’ll suffer if you don’t talk. Hoare could hurt you badly – perhaps beyond repair.”

  Just as he finished speaking, Private Wright leant in through the cell door and beckoned to him. They muttered together in subdued tones, then he returned with a panicked look on his face. “Beaumont, I have to go. We must say goodbye.” He put out his right hand but Laurence would not take it.

  Soon after his departure, the clump of boots echoed up the stairwell. The bolt was shot, and the door swung wide. “Mr. Beaumont,” called out Hoare, “my patience with you has not been rewarded as I’d hoped. It is now time for me to change tactics.”

  The guards wrestled Laurence downstairs and through a low corridor, dark except for a few guttering torches, into a chamber as evil-smelling as his cell. Inside, neatly arranged, were a vertical rack, a barrel full of water, and a selection of whips and stout wooden sticks. They tied Laurence to the rack with his arms in front, and hoisted him aloft. The wrenching on his shoulders and the bonds cutting into his wrists made him gasp with pain.

  “You have no right to do this to me!” he yelled at Hoare.

  “I can do as I please,” Hoare said, smiling. “For you are now like one of those poor souls wandering in limbo: everyone has washed their hands of you. Even my Lord Falkland is staying away, anxious not to compromise himself. I shall give you one more chance, sir.” He ordered the rack to be lowered, so that he and Laurence were face to face. “I want the truth about your exchange with Falkland that night, and I want the names of the regicides. That is all. I am not attempting to unseat his lordship. In fact, I am protecting him. If you also desire to protect him, you will answer me.”

  “I’ve told you the truth.”

  “Not about the regicides.” Laurence stared him in the eye, as he had on their very first meeting, and again Hoare looked away. “Go ahead, lads,” he ordered the guards, and Laurence was hoisted up once more.

  He took a deep breath, knowing that he must feign yet greater distress than he felt. After a series of blows to the chest, stomach, and groin, however, he was no longer pretending. One of his ribs cracked, and he cried out so loudly that Hoare called off the guards, drew a cup of water from the barrel and approached to hold it to Laurence’s lips, but Laurence would not drink.

  “Who are the conspirators?” Hoare demanded.

  “I’ve told you all I know,” Laurence repeated, between gritted teeth.

  “Stubborn, aren’t you,” Hoare said. “We’ll see how long you can last.”

  He signalled to the guards, and as the beating started again, Laurence felt the crack of a second rib, and burning in his chest. He forced himself to relax in the bonds, although they were eating into his skin, and let his head flop down and his eyes close. The tension on his wrists and shoulders lessened suddenly as he was lowered from the rack; then the guards dunked him head-first, up to the waist, in the barrel, sending liquid coursing up his nose and down his throat. Plunged into this aqueous hell, he seemed to see red, as if his brain had become suffused with blood. At length, he was pulled out and thrown to the floor. He did not move or make a sound, though he was dying to rid his lungs of water. Then came a pressure on his stomach a
nd chest that made the fluid surge up out of him; and he tried not to choke or open his eyes, for if he did, the torture would continue.

  “Not a touch of the whip,” he heard Hoare say, “and he’s fainted like a girl with the green sickness. That’s it for now, boys. Put him back in the cell.”

  Laurence bit his tongue to keep himself from groaning as they lifted him up, and he must indeed have fainted then, for he knew no more.

  II.

  Diana had reached her fifth month of pregnancy without incident, which delighted Sir Robert, and he was in even greater transports of joy when he received an invitation, for the sixteenth of January, to pledge his services in person to His Majesty at a banquet at Christ Church College for all the most important Oxfordshire gentry.

  “You shall accompany me, my dear,” he told Diana, “for you are not so big with child as to appear ugly yet.”

  As she and Robert queued to perform their obeisance before the High Table, where the royal party was seated, he distracted her with an exclamation. At one end of the long board was Isabella Savage, conversing with the man to her left. “My Lord Digby,” Robert whispered in Diana’s ear. “And that is my Lord Falkland on her right. Yet what is she doing here?” he added, as though Isabella were some cheap dross masquerading as gold.

  “You know very well that she is Digby’s friend,” Diana said, trying to catch Isabella’s eye; and finally Isabella noticed her and smiled, but with a peculiar lack of assurance.

  When the feast drew to an end, the dancing began. His Majesty’s partner was a lovely young brunette as pregnant as Diana. “My Lady d’Aubigny,” Robert informed her. “She was married to His Majesty’s late cousin who was killed at Edgehill.”

  “How very sad that he will never see his baby.” Diana was looking elsewhere: Isabella had just left the hall. “Pray excuse me, sir. I must go and find the privy offices.”

  “Why now? They are playing the pavane, which we may join in without harm to your health, if Lady d’Aubigny is any example.”

  “I cannot wait,” she insisted.

  “Oh, go, then, and hurry back. We might catch the last of it.”

  Threading her way through the crowd, Diana felt a pang of nostalgia as she remembered slipping away from another state occasion on that hot summer evening when she and Beaumont had first made love. Then her child stirred a little within her, as though issuing a mute reproof, and she forced herself to dismiss the memory.

  At the doors, Isabella was talking with a blond man, tall and slim, of martial bearing. They were obviously in some argument, yet drew apart when Diana approached. Isabella looked pale and harassed. “Lady Stratton, may I present Captain Milne,” she said. “She is a friend from Court, whom I have not seen in an age,” she told Milne, who bowed, then inspected Diana with rather too bold an interest. His face, although otherwise comely, was marred from the smallpox.

  “Captain,” Diana said, “would you be so obliging as to permit us ladies a moment together?”

  “Only if I may claim Mistress Savage for a dance later this evening,” he replied, as though the word had some special significance, his gaze on Isabella. “I believe you said you owed that to me, madam, for my services.”

  “Yes, sir,” Isabella said, in a strained tone. “I always keep a promise.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Milne said, and after giving Diana a last swift appraisal, he walked away.

  “Of what services was he speaking?” Diana asked.

  “He is being of assistance in a … ah, well, a political matter.”

  “Isabella, how could you disappear like that from Wytham?” Diana reproached her. “It caused us such trouble!”

  “Robert must think very badly of me, even more so than before.”

  “I’m afraid he does, though it has not changed my opinion of you.” Diana hesitated. “Have you by chance heard the news about Mr. Beaumont?” she asked next, without exactly knowing why. “Laurence Beaumont, that is.”

  A veiled expression came into Isabella’s eyes. “What news?”

  “He is to be married. Sir Robert learnt of it while he was at Chipping Campden last month.”

  Isabella frowned, as if digesting this information, then smiled gently at Diana. “You were in love with Beaumont, weren’t you.”

  “Who told you –”

  “No one had to. I guessed from you, who are as open as a book.”

  “It was no more than a … a youthful flirtation,” Diana murmured, caught out.

  “I see. My dear, you are blessed with so much, in your husband and your children. Never forget that,” concluded Isabella; and she glanced towards Captain Milne, who was watching them from the doors.

  “Is he importuning you?” Diana asked, disliking the man’s predatory air.

  “He is one of many nuisances that I must contend with. But nothing in life is perfect. Now you should go back to Sir Robert, or he will be worried.” With the same gentle smile, Isabella gave her a kiss on the cheek and they said goodbye.

  In the hall, the pavane had ended, and the musicians had struck up a more vigorous tune. “What kept you?” Robert complained, as Diana returned to her seat.

  Annoyed by his tone, she answered frankly. “I encountered Isabella Savage on my way. I could not be so rude as to ignore her.”

  At once he reddened and seized Diana by the wrist. “As your husband and master, I forbid you absolutely to associate with that – that whore ever again!”

  “Sir Robert, please! You may detest her, but you have no justification to insult her so.”

  “My wife,” Robert retorted, “I should perhaps have mentioned to you before – it was she who Mr. Beaumont had in his chamber, on the night of his sister’s wedding.”

  Diana could not look at her husband. Suddenly she recalled Isabella’s questioning her about Beaumont at Wytham, asking whether she found him handsome, and then the tender counsel of a few moments ago. How long had Isabella and he been lovers, she wondered to herself, agonized, inadvertently brushing her cheek as though to wipe away Isabella’s kiss.

  III.

  Laurence felt too muddled to calculate how many days had gone by since his return to the cell, where he no longer noticed the stink. He leant his head against the slimy wall, taking shallow breaths through his nose to stop himself from coughing, which was excruciating to his broken ribs. As waves of fever passed through him, he shivered, wrapped in his inadequate blanket, teeth chattering. Dreadfully thirsty, he reached for the bowl of brackish water that Wright delivered to his door each morning, but it was dry.

  Then he heard the familiar tromp of boots outside, and shrank back in his corner as the door opened. Hoare stood in the entrance flanked by his guards; with the light behind him, his face remained in shadow. “How are you faring, Mr. Beaumont?” he inquired, his tone courteous.

  “How do you think,” Laurence whispered back.

  “Not too well, I’d imagine. I have a surgeon waiting to attend to you, and then I shall release you – if you will only answer my questions.” Laurence shook his head. “Dear me,” Hoare said quietly, “and I considered you an intelligent man.”

  He motioned to the guards. Laurence could not suppress a cry as they bore him once again down the stairs.

  This time he was stripped of everything but his breeches and strung him up by the ankles. His chest burned so much that he could hardly draw breath. The soles of his feet were subjected to Hoare’s whip while the guards beat him about the body. With the blood rushing to his head and stinging his eyes, he was entering what seemed to him a new dimension of consciousness: very little mattered except where the next blow would land and how he could endure it. Hoare’s repeated questions were drowned out by his own yells. Then the beating stopped and he saw Hoare’s face upside down, pushed up against his.

  “Look at you now, Mr. Beaumont,” Hoare said. “Drenched in your own sweat and blood and piss. I doubt Mistress Savage will fancy your sorry arse by the time I’m finished with you. That’
s good for today,” he told the guards; and Laurence felt the rope slacken.

  IV.

  Lord Beaumont strode into his wife’s office, a letter in his hand. “I must go at once to Oxford,” he announced.

  She looked up from her account book with a startled frown. “Why, my lord?” He gave her Dr. Seward’s letter, which she scanned in dismay. “What mischief has Laurence done this time,” she murmured as she read on. “But there is no explanation here as to why he is under arrest!”

  “Seward will tell me when I arrive, as he says. I doubt he would alarm me unnecessarily, my dear. Our son is in trouble, and my presence is requested. That should be sufficient reason for me to go.”

  She set aside the letter, still frowning. “Why not write first to Dr. Seward and ask what offence Laurence has committed before you involve yourself? My lord,” she continued, “you know how wayward he has always been, keeping low company and drinking, and brawling – and God knows what else that we did not hear about. On his last visit, he showed us that he has not altered one whit over the years. Such a shameful scandal he caused! In that instance he did not pay as he should have, and yet again he has disappeared without so much as a word of apology to us. Now he may be receiving his just deserts for some other misdeed, the nature of which Seward is probably too ashamed to disclose on paper. But may I remind you that our son is a grown man, not a child to be rescued by his father! He must learn to take responsibility for his actions.”

  “I see your point,” Lord Beaumont admitted, though he was not fully convinced. “Very well, my dear, I shall write. It will mean only a day or two’s delay, in any case, if he truly needs my help.”