“A whole troop of cavalry,” Henry said under his breath to Jane.
“Shall we ride on?” she whispered.
“No. It would only draw attention to us if we left now, and besides, there’s no telling how far we would have to ride to find another inn. It’s nearly dark as it is.”
The eyes of some of the officers had lighted on Jane and Henry, and he raised his voice to greet them.
“Good even, gentlemen.”
They nodded to him and bowed to Jane, and she gave them a distracted smile before dropping her eyes.
“I’ll thank you if you would bring our food upstairs,” Henry said to the landlord. “My sister is ill at ease in the presence of so many soldiers.”
“Right enough,” the landlord agreed. “Lucky you came when you did, or there’d have been no room at all.”
JANE LAY AWAKE FAR INTO THE NIGHT, LISTENING TO THE SOUND OF the soldiers drinking and talking below and thinking of Charles. It was a miracle he had got as far as Trent, she thought.
Keep him safe, she prayed. Keep him safe and get him to the coast and France. And let me see him again. But she knew she would not see him again anytime soon, or maybe ever. She clutched the knotted handkerchief to her, inhaling Charles’s scent, holding his precious watch close to her heart.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON’S RIDE BROUGHT THEM DOWN FROM THE HILLS and onto the rolling plains of Salisbury. From far off Jane spotted a strange shape, which as they drew closer she saw was a circle of great standing stones.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Stonehenge,” Henry answered. “The Giants’ Dance, some call it. Very ancient. No one knows why it is there or what it is for, but it will stand long after we are forgotten.”
“Can we ride closer?” she asked as they drew even with the stones.
Henry turned off the road. It was only a short distance to the circle, and he rode around it. Some of the massive pillars had fallen and lay on the ground. Henry reined the horse to a halt and they gazed westward into the blaze of the setting sun, the great upright stones casting long shadows. The wind whipped across the grass of the plain, and Jane shivered.
“Where can they have come from? We’ve passed no stone outcroppings or anything in the land like this.”
Henry shrugged. “Who knows?”
“It seems almost like a church,” Jane mused. “Like the columns down the aisle of the nave, but in a circle.”
“And so it might be.”
Jane stared. The stone circle seemed to draw her in, to emanate some deep sense of power or protection, and she didn’t want to leave.
“Let’s stop for the night,” she suggested.
Henry glanced at the setting sun and at the vast emptiness around them. “It’s not much further to Amesbury,” he said. “With an inn, and beds.”
“There will be beds on other nights. Please?”
Henry shaded his eyes against the setting sun as he gazed silently at the stones, and Jane felt that he, too, sensed their power. He nodded, helped her to dismount, and tethered the horse, and they walked in silence around the perimeter of the great circle. Jane stood and watched in awe as the fiery orb of the sun seemed to balance atop one of the pillars. Deep blue shadows slanted across the grey of the stones. The sun sank towards the horizon, darkness drawing down across the whispering plains.
They gathered brush and wood and built a fire near the centre of the circle, but ate cold food they carried with them. The full moon rose gold in the purple of the sky, and Jane felt somehow, swathed in her blanket beside the fire, with the stones looming black around them, as if she was at the very centre of the universe, and at one with all people since the world had begun.
“Let’s say a prayer for the king,” she whispered. “I almost feel that from here our words will reach straight up to the ear of God.”
Henry nodded, and reached for her hand. They bowed their heads, each in silence offering up their pleas.
They lay down to sleep, huddling close together on the ground, the fire sending its bright sparks heavenward.
Jane woke with first light, the clean autumn air sharp in her nostrils. She gathered her blanket around her, and crept barefoot away from where Henry lay snoring beside the cold remains of the fire. The grass was damp with the dew, and the feel of the moisture on her feet after the days of riding made her feel vibrantly alive.
The horizon to the east was shot with pink and purple, the sun not quite showing above the rim of the plain. She picked her way along the ditch encircling the stones, marvelling at how their appearance changed depending on where she stood. A tall stone stood just outside the northeast perimeter of the circle, leaning in as though pointing the way to the centre.
“Good morning!” Henry’s voice broke the silence. He stood grinning at her, his blanket draped over his shoulders.
“Good morning yourself,” Jane laughed as she went to him. “Isn’t it glorious?”
She twirled, admiring the horizon, still dark purple to the west, and the east now rosy gold.
“Look!” she exclaimed. “How the sun appears just there, in that break between the stones. Almost like a doorway for the sunlight to pass through.”
They watched in silence as the sun rolled higher above the leaning stone just outside the circle.
“What can be the purpose? I wonder,” Jane mused.
“Perhaps we’ll never know,” Henry said. “But I’m glad we stopped.”
“Yes. Here among these stones I feel as though the power of the universe is with me, rising up from the centre of the globe and through my feet, rooting me to the very earth.”
She reached her arms towards the lightening sky, in salutation to the new day.
“I will have to try to keep this power within me. I feel that I could face anything with the strength of the stones flowing through my body.”
The day’s ride took them north to Marlborough and they spent that night in Burford. It was all new country to Jane, but Charles’s absence was a constant ache. She longed to be sharing the journey with him, to have him solidly in front of her on the horse, admiring the view, passing the ride with singing and talking, and warming the nights with love.
On Friday the twenty-second of September they reached Eve-sham. It was only forty miles from Worcester, and had quartered thirty thousand of Cromwell’s soldiers before the battle. Many of them were back again, and here Jane felt more immediately than she had since Charles arrived at Bentley the threat to his life and the completeness of the defeat of the Royalist cause. The royal arms had been chiselled from the stone market stall and lay in a heap of shards of brightly painted plaster, and on the wall was pasted the broadsheet offering a reward of a thousand pounds for the capture of “Charles Stuart, a black-haired man six feet two inches in height”.
The town was full of rumours of the king’s whereabouts. As they ate supper in the taproom of the inn, Jane and Henry listened to three soldiers arguing.
“He’s somewhere not far off, mark my words,” a big fair-headed lad asserted. “In some lurking hole.”
One of the others shook his head vehemently. “Don’t believe it. He’s long since slipped across the border to Scotland.”
“He’d have had to be in disguise to do it,” claimed the third soldier, a little bandy-legged man with a red face.
“And there’s some that say he was,” the first man chuckled. “Dressed as a wench, I’ve heard.”
Jane kept her eyes on her food. Cromwell’s men had not given up the hunt, it was clear, but it also seemed they did not know the truth. She put a hand to the front of her bodice, feeling the lump of the watch pinned there, and said a silent prayer for Charles’s safety.
It would be a long day’s ride to reach Bentley without stopping another night, but both Jane and Henry were eager to be home, so they rose in the dark and set off north, using a different road than the one that had taken them through Bromsgrove.
When they turned off the Wolverhampton Road onto the l
ane that led the quarter mile to Bentley, and the house was at last within sight, Jane felt as though she had been gone for a century. The dogs barked excitedly as they rode into the stable yard, and soon the whole household had come out to greet them.
“Praise be to God, you’re safe!” Jane’s mother cried, kissing her cheeks. “But where is the other horse? And that farmer’s lad?”
“He stayed at Abbots Leigh to work on the harvest.” Now that Jane spoke it, the story she and Henry had concocted to explain the king’s absence seemed feeble and suspicious.
“Then it’s a good thing your cousin was with you!” her mother clucked, hugging Henry. “Else would you have been at the mercy of every ruffian on the road. I didn’t like the looks of that boy from the first I set eyes on him.”
“We did not expect you so soon,” Jane’s father said quietly, embracing her. His grey eyes were worried as he looked into hers. “Is all well?”
“No. Ellen—Ellen lost the baby.”
Tears coursed suddenly down Jane’s cheeks.
“Oh, poor girl,” Nurse cried, enfolding Jane against her capacious bosom. Jane’s strength left her, and she began to sob, for Ellen and her dead child, for Charles, for herself.
“I’m so sorry, Jane.” John was beside her, his eyes full of concern. “For Ellen, of course, and that your journey was harder than it should have been. Go rest yourself now, and Henry can tell me all about it.”
FOR DAYS JANE FELT UTTERLY DRAINED BOTH IN BODY AND SPIRIT. Her whole body was battered and bruised from the many days of riding, and several times she soaked in a tub of hot water, letting it unknot the tension that seemed to grip every part of her. She ached with the loss of Charles, the fear that perhaps he had not got to safety after all, and apprehension that her part in his escape should become known.
And Michaelmas was only a few days away. She had promised Clement Fisher an answer to his proposal on that day, but she felt a sense of helpless despair when she thought of what she could say to him, for her whole life—her very being—had changed irrevocably in the intervening weeks. Her heart and mind were so full of Charles that it was hard to find room for anything else.
And another worry gnawed at the back of her mind, further complicating the question of what to say to Clement. Her monthly courses should have begun, and they had not. She tried to remember exactly when she had last bled. It had been at least a week before they received news of the battle at Worcester, she was sure, but more than that she could not recall. Could she be with child? How would she know? There must be signs, but she didn’t know what they might be. Perhaps the signs were there to see for someone who knew what to look for—Nurse, her mother, Athalia, her other sisters-in-law, the servants. There was no one she could ask.
If she accepted Clement’s offer and married him right away, at least she would have a husband if it proved she was with child. But it would be unkind and ignoble to do so without telling him the truth, and if she told him, it was very likely he would no longer want her. And even if he agreed to take her with another man’s get in her belly, wasn’t it likely that the baby itself would proclaim the truth? Anyone with an eye in his head would look twice at a dark-haired, dark-eyed child of Charles’s, and fair, blue-eyed Clement.
She agonised about what to do, and did not even feel right praying about it. She hoped that she was not with child, and then felt guilty about that. Might it not be even more sinful than lying with a man to wish that no child resulted? Especially if that child was the king’s?
At last Jane wrote to Clement, telling him she was still exhausted from her journey and distraught over Ellen’s loss of the baby, and asked if he would give her another fortnight, until the fifteenth of October, before he came for his answer. Maybe her path would become clearer by then.
In Jane’s absence the family had learned that her brother Richard had been arrested and imprisoned after Worcester. He was likely at Chester Castle, but they did not know what his fate would be.
Bentley was not the only local household left reeling after the battle. Many men had been injured or killed or captured, or had managed to escape arrest but had since fled across the sea.
Jane strolled with John in the orchard one morning, eager to be able to speak privately. The early fruit had been harvested, and only the apple trees were still heavy with their red and gold bounty. A cool breeze rustled through the trees, and russet leaves drifted in the wind.
“Charles Giffard says that Colonel Carlis was at Boscobel when the king was there,” John said, stopping to examine the entrance to a badger sett, the burrowed tunnel leading towards the roots of an apricot tree. “Giffard was under Carlis’s command at Worcester, and they were in the thick of the fighting at Sidbury Gate and High Street. Carlis just got out of the city with his life, and now is gone to the Low Countries.” He dusted his hands on the knees of his breeches, and they resumed their walk. “Giffard was taken with the Earl of Derby, but managed to escape. He fears he may be taken yet, and thinks of going to France.”
“Any word of the king?” Jane whispered.
John shook his head. “In Walsall the other day I heard tales of his being gone to the United Provinces or Scotland. But it’s all rumour. Cromwell’s men are still searching round here, and in Worcestershire.”
“Thank God,” Jane breathed. “He should be in France by now. Will you take me to town next time you go? Perhaps there will be news. And as glad as I was to be home, now I am restless to be out and doing.”
John smiled. “Your journeys have given you a taste for novelty and bustle.”
He had given no indication that he knew what had passed between her and Charles, so Henry must have thought better of his threat to tell him, Jane thought with relief. She could not bear the thought of her adored older brother regarding her with scorn and disapproval as Henry had.
“Maybe so,” she agreed. “All I know is that I feel like a bird in a cage, and long to stretch my wings.”
A LITTLE MORE THAN A WEEK AFTER JANE AND HENRY HAD RETURNED home, Jane accompanied John to market day at Wolverhampton. There had still been no news of Charles, and each day’s passing increased her agitation. If all had gone as he expected, he should be in France, and word should have reached England by now. She was glad of the opportunity to distract herself with such mundane business as matching a colour of embroidery thread for her mother and gazing with admiration at the fine horses for sale. She tried to ignore the troops everywhere throughout the town.
A new book would be a good thing to occupy her mind, Jane thought, and she made for the bookseller’s stall where she and John had agreed to meet. Before she could begin to examine the books, however, her eye was caught by stacks of a broadsheet headed “Last News of the King of Scotland”.
Her eyes raced over the words. The king had fled into Scotland to Lord Belcarris, it said, and Cromwell’s men were in pursuit. Surely it was not possible, Jane thought. He would hardly have left Trent, so close to the southern coast, and ridden north, back into danger.
She bought a copy of the Parliamentary newsbook Mercurius Politicus, but found no comfort there. The Earl of Derby, who had been captured shortly after leaving Charles at Whiteladies in the hours after the battle, had been tried, despite having been given quarter when he was taken, and had been found guilty of treason for aiding the king. Jane thought of Charles gazing out the bedroom window at Trent, staggered with the thought of Derby’s apprehension and what it would mean.
“Jane.”
She turned at the sound of John’s voice, and held the newsbook and the broadsheet up noiselessly.
“I know,” he said. He took her arm and led her away from the bookseller’s stall, glancing over his shoulder to see who might be watching them, and spoke in a low voice. “Francis Yates, who guided the king from Worcester to Whiteladies, was arrested. He’s been—questioned—but refused to tell where he left the king or where His Majesty is like to have gone.”
John’s face was grim, and Jane could
imagine the likely brutality of the interrogation.
“Yates will be hanged here next market day.”
Jane’s eyes went to the gibbet at the centre of the marketplace and a cold knot of fear gripped her stomach. Yates had done far less to help the king than she had, and he would die there in a week’s time. She clamped a hand to her mouth, suddenly faint and nauseated, and John steadied her, his hands on her upper arms, his eyes clouded with worry.
“Here, sit.”
He led her to a stump and sat her down, took his little flask of brandy from his pocket, and handed it to her. Jane grimaced at the smell of the spirits but took a drink, feeling the fire of it warming and calming her belly.
“Jane, I must be here when he dies.”
“Why?” she cried in horror.
“He must have the comfort of friendly faces in the crowd. He served under Carlis at Worcester, but Carlis is gone abroad, as is Giffard and many others who were his comrades. He’s married to a sister of the Penderels, but they would put themselves in grave danger to be there. I would not have him die without knowing that what he did and its consequences are valued and will be remembered.”
How awful it would be to die alone in the midst of a hostile crowd, Jane thought. She shivered at the thought of watching Yates hang, but met John’s eyes.
“Then I shall come with you.”
John looked away from her, his gaze following a knot of red-coated soldiers.
“There’s another reason, too. He’ll need a friend to pull on his legs and hasten his death. A broken neck is better than strangling at a rope’s end for a quarter of an hour.”
Jane felt herself sway on the stump and dropped her head into her arms.
“Take me home, John. Please, get me out of here now.”
THE NEXT MARKET DAY JANE STOOD WITH JOHN, HENRY, AND HER father at the front of the crowd that had come to Wolverhampton to see Francis Yates die. Despite the danger, the Penderel brothers were all there, their weathered faces lined with grief and anger. Many others in the crowd were also there in support of Yates, to let him know that he would not be forgotten. But there was a hostile element, and they were emboldened by the presence of so many Parliamentary soldiers. As the cart carrying Yates approached, a group of boys followed along, shouting derisively and throwing refuse and stones.
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