I destroyed the map with my boot and we finished our drinks in silence. Two weeks and Holles would be in control.
The man with a black eye rose groggily to his feet and began to slur his way through a ballad. ‘I … will beat a plough into a sword … and become a thieving soldier!’
He fell back in his seat. The labourers applauded and thumped the table.
‘There’s a muster in two days’ time,’ Will said. ‘Men are being paid before they march to embark to Ireland.’ He looked at me expectantly. ‘That’s when you should walk in.’
‘Walk in?’
He clapped me on the back. ‘Come on, Tom. You can tell me what Cromwell’s planning.’
I looked away. No wonder he had greeted me so warmly. It was not me he welcomed, so much as the bearer of Cromwell’s instructions. A word from Cromwell would stop the men from leaving. But I knew he would never give it. I shook my head. ‘Cromwell can’t afford to go against Parliament. He serves Parliament, don’t you understand?’
‘No. I don’t. And I don’t understand why you’ve come.’
‘To stop the troops from leaving.’
‘How?’
Will was staring at me, suspicion narrowing his eyes. I would have to take a chance and tell him about Challoner. ‘Go outside. I’ll get another drink.’
Will stopped at the door while I went to the bar. The man with a black eye got there at the same time, pushing against me. He stank of beer and cow clap as he slammed his pot in front of the ones I had already put down. The landlord, when I had arrived, had been perfectly civil but cold, making it clear he did not want me there. He had smiled indulgently during the singing, but now his voice carried a sharp, warning edge.
‘This gentleman was in first, Billy.’
‘Oh, gentleman, is he?’ Billy said. ‘I thought he was a soldier.’
The labourers laughed and thumped the table except one, more sober than the rest, who caught the landlord’s expression and took Billy by the arm.
‘Come on, Billy. You’ve had enough.’
‘Aye. You’re right. Enough of them. Cursing my cow.’
He was a man at the end of his tether. Nobody believed in magic more than these countrymen to whom the death of a cow meant poverty. He shook off the other labourer. There was a sudden tightening of his lips, a shifting of balance, a moment before his fist flew at me. I ducked, taking the blow on my shoulder, before grabbing his left arm and twisting it round his back. He kicked and struggled until the landlord said, ‘He be a guest of Sir Lewis, Billy.’
The name stopped Billy struggling instantly. The other labourer led him away. Will was staring at me bleakly from the door. I followed him as he left, going towards the stables.
‘Will … listen. You don’t understand.’
‘Oh, I understand, all right. A guest of Sir Lewis. You’ve come to persuade the soldiers to go to Ireland.’ He called the boy to get his horse.
‘The reverse! I’ve come because Sir Lewis will tell me what the Presbyterians are planning.’
‘Nice of him. Why would he do that?’
I told him what Lord Stonehouse had told me. Will was dismissive. Anyone with half a brain knew the Presbyterians were plotting something.
‘It’s proof we need! If I can get proof Cromwell will act. Without Cromwell we’re nothing.’
Will tossed the boy a coin and took his horse, but did not mount it, taking it under a sycamore tree where it cropped the grass. The sky had the milky softness of evening. There was not a breath of wind to stir the fields of wheat and barley, green with the hope they always showed in May, only to be dashed in recent harvests by too much rain or too little. Billy lurched out of the inn between two labourers. He tore a branch from the hawthorn hedge and twisted it in our direction, muttering under his breath. We were used to being cursed. They believed God would strike the unjust as firmly as they believed if it rained on St Paul’s day, in mid-June, then corn would be dear.
Will folded the regimental list into his saddle bag. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Tell me where Scogman is.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a liar and a thief. Because I should have let him hang. And because Sir Lewis won’t help me unless I hand him over.’
He could scarcely get the words out. ‘You want me to betray Scogman?’
‘Yes. What’s his life against stopping the Presbyterians?’
There was the creak of a gate. Billy’s fellow labourers tried to stop him but he stumbled into the yard, muttering imprecations.
‘I told you. Scogman’s changed.’ Will lowered his voice, laced with contempt. ‘But even if he had robbed me blind, I wouldn’t turn him in. He’s our link.’
‘Link?’
‘With the other regiments.’
‘Mutiny?’
‘We have no choice.’
I did not know whether to laugh or cry. ‘And your organiser is Scoggy?’
He pushed his face into mine. ‘Judas,’ he said softly, before walking to his horse.
‘Will, listen –’
‘We’ve done enough listening.’
‘You’re doing exactly what Holles wants! He’ll say you’re what you are. An undisciplined mob –’
Will lashed out. The blow caught me full in the face. I staggered and almost fell, the yard swaying round me, cheers from Billy and the labourers ringing in my ears. I could taste the salty blood on my lips. I made a dazed, conciliatory move towards him. Will hit me in the stomach and brought his elbow up into my face. I struck the cobbles to shouts and applause from the labourers as Will galloped away.
Vaguely aware of the sharp smell of torn leaves, I opened my eyes to see Billy twirling the hawthorn branch round and round above my head. ‘God has struck him,’ he said.
But, just to make sure, he brought his boot into my ribs.
13
It was the stable boy who brought me round, squeezing water over me from the cloth he used to rub down horses. Every breath was an excruciating pain but my ribs felt bruised, not broken. There were long shadows across the yard.
I took a few, testing steps, asked the boy for directions to Byford Hall and told him to saddle my horse. There was no time to think about Scogman. I had to get to Sir Lewis and pray that his greed for the land Lord Stonehouse promised him would overcome pride and I would get the evidence I needed. First, from my room, I had to get a letter Lord Stonehouse had written to Sir Lewis.
The room overlooked the yard. Glancing upwards, I glimpsed a movement from it and caught a brief flash of metal in the low evening sun.
Fear is a wonderful antidote to pain. I forgot my aching ribs as I went upstairs. My door was slightly ajar. I was certain I had locked it. A maid? I could see one through the open door of a nearby room, turning back the bed. I loosened my dagger and went softly up to the door of my room. I kicked it open. A man was lying on the bed, partly obscured by the tester. As he scrambled up I held the knife at his throat. With his twisted nose he looked more like a dirty, battered cherub than ever.
Scogman. ‘Sorry, sir. I couldn’t help trying out the bed.’ He brushed flakes of mud hastily away from the coverlet. ‘Beg your pardon, sir.’
Scogman. Slightly filled out, buff jerkin and britches brightened by linen and a flash of red boot-hose, no doubt stolen. Ditto the boots that looked as if they had once belonged to a cavalier, tops turned rakishly down to show off the silk hose. And ditto the useful-looking cavalry sword in his belt.
Scogman. If God had put Billy’s boot into my ribs, he had also delivered me Scogman. At first, that was all my bewildered mind could fathom.
‘Will told me you were coming to help us and I wanted to thank you.’
Not God, but Will, before he knew what I was planning to do, had put Scogman into my hands.
‘Thank me?’
‘For saving my life.’
Saving his life? All I could remember was beating his back into a raw, bloody pulp.
‘From Sir Lewis, sir.’
Dazed from his reply, as much as from the shock of seeing him, I slumped down on the bed while the words poured out of him. He did not just tell me what he had felt like when he had been dragged in chains by Stalker’s horse, he lived it. His frame jerked as if his limbs were being pulled from his body. I could almost hear the tearing of skin, the crack of cartilage.
He told me he had been convinced he was going to die. Die? He thought he was dead. Hell was a ditch of thorns ripping his skin, of stones and dirt filling his mouth and nose as he gasped for breath. Sweat poured from his contorted face.
If it was a performance, it was an extraordinary one. He was like one of those visionaries which the war had thrown up in abundance, making Messianic prophecies that this was the end time. But Scogman’s revelation had a twist. He saw not God, for what use was God if you were not one of the elect, chosen by God from birth, as the Presbyterians had it?
He saw not the end of the earth, but a fresh beginning. His eyes gleamed and his lips shone with spittle. He told me that when I rescued him and lashed him, the soil in his mouth became the earth of Eden. He did not spit it out. He chewed it and swallowed it, stones and all, for the earth belonged to everyone.
His body sagged, his eyes blinked and closed, as if he was being pulled off the fence where I had beaten him. I continued to stare at him, until the birds’ evening calls penetrated through the open window, marvelling at how he had been transformed from a common thief into a visionary. Or, perhaps, how he had dressed up his old tricks in new clothes. There seemed only one way I could bring him out of his trance.
‘Trooper Scogman. Attention!’
He shot up with a start, his eyes still glazed, his hand moving towards his sword. I brought up my dagger.
‘You might fool Will with your visions, but you don’t fool me.’
‘I am far from perfect, sir.’
‘Far from perfect? You’re a liar and a thief.’
He nodded abjectly. I now saw there was a hole in his hose and the sole of his boot was coming away from the upper.
‘You remember I lent you money to send to your wife and starving children in London?’
He nodded again, his tongue passing nervously over his lips. ‘An angel, ten shillings exactly, I do remember that, sir, yes.’
‘When I thrashed you, I thought I had killed you. You are going to wish I had.’ He became still, his eyes fixed on the knife. ‘Thinking you were dead, I was so full of remorse I went to look for your poor, starving family on Bankside. You remember them, do you?’
His head could not possibly have dropped lower on his chest. I could scarcely hear his voice. ‘Those lies have been very much on my conscience, sir.’
On his conscience! My cheeks burned as I remembered what a fool I had felt before the jeering whores. This was going to be easier than I thought. Easier? I was amazed I had any qualms at all about handing over the snivelling wretch to Sir Lewis.
‘Turn round.’
‘Permission to –’
‘Not granted. I’m going to do what I should have done in the first place.’ I prodded him with the knife. ‘Turn round. Hands behind your back.’
When he did so, I lifted his sword belt by the buckle, sliding off the sword in its scabbard. Following it was a purse. Coins rattled as it hit the floor.
‘That’s for you, sir,’ Scogman said.
‘D’you think you can bribe me?’ I yanked the belt tight round his wrists.
He winced as the buckle bit into his skin. ‘It’s the money you lent me, sir.’
‘Don’t give me any more lies,’ I said wearily, shoving him towards the door.
He rounded on me so rapidly I dropped the knife. ‘It’s true! That’s why I came. To thank you. And to pay my debt. It’s all there. Count it. An angel. Ten shillings. Count it.’ He spoke with the despairing injured vehemence of someone who has lied too often to expect to be believed. Then his tone changed, becoming quiet, matter-of-fact. ‘You not only saved my life, sir. You changed it. I would do anything for you, sir, anything.’
I walked right up to him. He looked me straight in the eye. Not a muscle in his face moved. I would be a fool several times over if I believed him. I could not afford to believe him. The sun was going down, the room full of shadows. I had to deliver him to Sir Lewis before nightfall.
He spoke so quietly I could scarce hear the words. ‘Count it, sir, please.’
I flung it on the bed. Money rolled out on the coverlet. Nine, ten eleven shillings.
‘One for interest, sir,’ he said.
He gave me an injured look as I began to laugh. ‘Do you take me for a complete idiot? You’re wanted all over Essex for your thieving! You stole this, just as you stole from me!’
He tugged angrily at his bound hands and advanced on me. I picked up the knife but he kept coming forward. ‘I earned that money. Every penny of it. I earned it by selling meat. Coneys I trapped. Once a deer. They were all on Kingsnorton Common. You know where I mean, sir?’
I nodded. It was land Challoner had enclosed during the war, following bitter disputes with the villagers.
‘They still calls it that. Kingsnorton Common. Villagers got the old manor rolls on it. Kingsnorton Common. I thought common meant common to all but perhaps they changed the meaning of the word as well? I earned that money.’
The knife had gone through his doublet and was pricking his skin. I let the knife fall. I remembered responding with the very same anger to Lord Stonehouse when I was a pamphleteer wearing gentleman’s clothes that he thought I could not possibly afford. Did I not use the very same words? I earned that money from my pamphlets, I said with the same vehemence. It felt like a lifetime ago. More than that. It was another life. I suddenly felt very tired.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
I dropped on the bed. All I wanted to do was to curl up and go to sleep. He turned his back to the door and opened it with his tied hands. I forced myself up, thinking he was escaping, but he had called the maid.
‘Major Stonehouse is not very well. Could you bring some hot water, Mary, and one of your revivers?’
At least that was normal. That was how he had got into my room. He had not lost his charm with women. He told Mary he had got into a bit of a tangle with his belt. She giggled and had a little game with him, pretending it was too difficult, before eventually releasing him. She brought hot water and, as I had still not moved, sponged my face to make it more presentable. The reviver turned out to be a large Dutch brandy with strong spices. One swallow did not so much revive me as make me feel more than ever like sleep. I pushed it away and stared outside. Mary had brought candles, which made the fields disappear and etched trees deep black against a sky streaked with red.
‘Mary,’ I said. ‘Do you know Byford Hall?’
‘Yes, sir. My sister works there. Kitchen maid. Up at the crack to light the fire. Bit different from this is Byford Hall.’ She giggled. She told me the way, and the name of a footman, Murray, her sister was walking out with.
I forced myself to get up. ‘Scogman … you said you would do anything for me?’
He looked up from chafing his wrists where the belt had bit into them. ‘Anything in the world, sir.’
14
For a market town which, in Sir Lewis’s words, was determined to have law and order, pursuing the ungodly, from murderers and thieves to drunkards and sabbath breakers, at whatever cost, Dutton’s End spent very little on its gaols. The Blindhouse was the lockup for drunks, one of whom had recently burned it down. The House of Correction was a cross between a workhouse and a prison where vagrants, unwed mothers and masterless men like runaway apprentices were corrected by beating hemp or being beaten themselves. A child could have broken out of it. The County Gaol was secure enough, holding people on trial for the Assizes, but that was twenty miles away.
That was why, that evening, I stopped my horse outside the third prison in Dutton’s End: Stalker’s house. Thrown over the
back of my horse was Scogman, in a very sorry condition: hands bound, a gag thrust into his mouth.
The house was a more substantial one than I expected. Unlike its thatched neighbours, it had a tiled roof and walls in a herringbone brick pattern. Only the barred windows on the ground floor gave any sign of its use as a prison. It normally held debtors and petty criminals, but serious cases were held overnight before being transferred to the County Gaol. Stalker regularly complained to the bench about the lack of a suitable prison but, since he made his money out of prisoners, I suspected that the complaints paid for the bricks that built his house.
The house was dim and silent, like many others in this Puritan town, giving the impression that its inhabitants were at prayer or asleep. I rang the bell. At the sound Scogman struggled, a strangled whimper coming from his gagged mouth. But I thought of the country being reduced to the huddled grimness of this little town if Holles and his Presbyterians took over, and remembered little Liz with her hurried burial. I steeled myself and rang the bell again.
It sounded like a prison then, with the double unlocking of the door and the drawing back of a bolt. A grumbling maid held up a tallow to inspect me, saying her master was ‘at the Bible’ and I should take the prisoner to the House of Correction. At the end of a passage behind her there was a glimmer of light at the edge of a thick fustian curtain. I hesitated. There was a murmur of voices, which I took to be prayer, until I heard a different litany: ‘Fifteen for two, three for a flush and one for his Nob. Would you believe it. Up again!’
I pushed past the maid and pulled back the curtain. Stalker and a gentleman whose face was as crumpled as his linen were playing cribbage. Stalker scooped up the money from the table in guilty confusion, curtly ordering the gentleman to his room and sweeping the cards out of sight.
‘I have Scogman for you.’
‘Scogman!’
Stalker’s winning streak was nothing to this. He hurried outside, yanked up Scogman’s head by his hair, in order, he said, to identify the prisoner, and drew back his other hand.
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