Gideon was startled when this personage suddenly approached him. 'You are Gideon Jukes?'
Gideon altered his grip on his musket. 'I am Gideon Jukes, and I have work to do here, sir.'
'I am Mr Blakeby'
'And what is your business?' demanded Robert, becoming defensive of Gideon.
Mr Blakeby kept up his peculiar scrutiny, 'I am told you are steadfast and have good judgement. Also that you have experience as an actor?' He barely lowered his voice, so heads turned. Gideon cringed.
'I once donned feathers in an entertainment, sir. I was a boy. It was a trifle. I was misguided.'
'But were you any good?' Mr Blakeby asked with a smile, keeping his gaze fixed upon him.
Gideon wondered with annoyance if his brother Lambert had given him this unwelcome character-reference, and whether his brother had brought the man here on purpose — perhaps to escape Blakeby's attentions himself. Lambert tended to attract notice because he was seen as a 'hearty lad', yet he was conservative. He would not want to be singled out. 'I am recruiting trusted men for special tasks,' offered Blakeby.
'Then please trouble yourself elsewhere.'
Though Gideon had answered back in such a forthright manner, Mr Blakeby was certain now that the scowling young man had a dark side that would suit his purposes. Jukes was too tall and his fair hair worked against him, but his intelligence and spirit showed.
The place was too public for argument. Mr Blakeby accepted the refusal, merely saying as he left, 'I should like to meet and talk again, Master Jukes.'
'What did that man want with you?' Amyas whispered.
"Whatever it was, Blakeby has slipped up with it,' muttered Robert. Slipping up was when lines of type shifted in the form and went askew.
The afternoon drew into evening, which came early as it was November. The men slowly realised there was unlikely to be an engagement. The Parliamentary regiments continued their stand, drums beating and colours flying. There were twenty-four thousand. It was a brave show, and the King had only half their numbers.
The Royalists havered in anguish, but the odds against them were too great. This was the King's one chance of taking London, and he had been out-faced. After hours of stand-off and hurried war councils, the Royalists accepted the situation. They withdrew, without a shot fired.
Essex's army and the Trained Bands heard the trumpeters' recall and watched the King's troops leaving. The Parliamentarians breathed and relaxed, but stayed fast. That night they remained at Turnham Green, where they spent their victory evening tucking into a great feast that the women of London sent out on carts for them. Holding a pie in one hand and bottled beer in the other, Gideon found himself reminiscing about that other feast he had once attended, after The Triumph of Peace. With a sense of rightness and victory, he was enjoying this far more.
A young woman approached, carrying a basket of bread and a board on which she cut slices from a huge hard cheese. She had contrived to hold the board against her apron-clad hip so her skirt was caught up to reveal a slim ankle in a pale knitted stocking. Her eye lighted on Gideon and she smiled at him. Robert and Amyas watched them frankly; Gideon felt his fair skin blush. A big slice of cheese for you, brave boy?'
'I'll have one!' Amyas reached for it annoyingly. She glanced at him: big teeth, big ears, about fourteen. Almost without seeming to do so, she summed up Robert Allibone too, sensing the widower's reticence with women, judging him to be beyond her reach. Her gaze returned to Gideon, who put down his beer carefully against a grass tussock, and quietly accepted her offering. The young woman looked willing to be detained for conversation.
Unluckily for Gideon, that was when his brother reappeared. 'Here's to a bloodless victory — and to a beautiful maiden, bearing bounty!' Cheese was immediately lavished upon Lambert, who received it as his birthright. He winked conspiratorially in Gideon's direction. 'Watch that one! He's a heart-breaker.'
'The quiet ones are the worst!' The young woman, who was not quite as young as Gideon had first supposed, looked unfazed by the warning. 'And you are another pretty hero,' she simpered at Lambert shamelessly.
'Oh, I am handy at push of pike!' he replied, with open innuendo, twirling the blond moustache against which Gideon had taken so badly.
'Your wife will hate to hear you have been flirting, Lambert!' As soon as Gideon spoke, he felt that this was mean-spirited. He noticed that Lambert hardly reacted. Nor did the cheese-bearer.
'Lambert!' she noted.
And Gideon! said Lambert, who had always been more generous than his brother deserved.
Lambert had left her free to choose between them, but the dynamics had changed. Two men in play was more than the woman wanted; she lost interest in both. The elder brother now seemed too cocky to tolerate, the younger too shy to educate. There were twenty-four thousand troops here and she let herself believe that her role was congratulating them. She moved off.
Lambert seemed disinclined to follow, though Gideon spotted that his brother watched which way she went. Had Gideon been older, more experienced, less inhibited by his companions, he might have gone along with her: offered to carry her basket, engaged in harmless conversation, waited to see what might happen. Inexperienced though he was, he felt it would have worked to his advantage.
He did not know how to manage this. He was not even sure that such an encounter was what he wanted. Gideon favoured what the Grand Remonstrance had called 'comfort and conversation' between men and women — even though his loins told him 'comfort' could have a wide meaning. With his partner, his apprentice and his brother all gawping like costermongers, it was easiest to remember he had been brought up in decent morality.
The pie in his hand was not as good as those his mother baked. He knew Parthenope would have sent provisions to the troops. Some other lucky bastard must be munching those. Like a true soldier already, he enjoyed the moment of repose and did not allow regret to linger.
The bloodless encounter at Turnham Green had saved London, though it solved nothing. The civil war had barely started yet.
Chapter Six — Oxford: September, 1642
When Edmund Treves was nearly killed by the head of the Virgin Mary, he took his first step towards marriage.
In truth his first step was very shaky. The soldiers' pot-shots had cracked into the stone Virgin, shearing off her veiled head. That smashed down on to the pavement, narrowly missing him. Oxford townspeople shouted with delight at the decapitation; their applause mingled with mutters of horror from robed university men. Treves saw in confusion that a stone shard from the statue had sliced across his wrist, causing blood to flow. Another shot rang out. It was his first time under fire. The familiar wide main street called the High, with its ancient university buildings, suddenly became a place of terror. As Treves realised the danger, his knees buckled and he nearly fainted.
Among the noisy onlookers, one man watched in silence. Orlando Lovell weighed up how the old feuds between town and gown festered with new complications. Freshly returned from the Continent after some years away, he saw with astonishment that tradesmen were openly jeering at frightened dons. Buff-coated troops had clustered in the gateway of Oriel College, threatening to manhandle gawping college servants and then firing at the University Church.
He knew it was the second wave of soldiers. These Parliamentarian hooligans had driven out a Royalist force only a few days previously, each group finding a welcome in some quarters but each fearing reprisals. Barely controlled by their officers, the newcomers were skittish. Already some had mutinied at a muster in the University Parks; dragoons had gone armed to church on Sunday, in fear of the townsmen's hostility; rival gangs had become drunk and caused chaos in running street-fights.
Today's soldiers were vandalising the ancient church of St Mary, to take out their spite against Archbishop William Laud. Authoritarian and ceremonial, he had enclosed altars with railings, repaired crucifixes, set up statues, imposed a uniform Prayer Book and, worst of all, insisted on the c
ontrolling power of bishops. Independent free thinkers were outraged. Now Laud languished in the Tower and these raucous London rebels were shooting at 'scandalous images', those hated statues with which Laud's chaplain had embellished a provocative new porch on St Mary's Church. To Lovell, as he stood watching, such scenes in England were astonishing. The anger Laud's measures had caused was distasteful, because it seemed pointless.
People in the crowd had told him one puritan alderman had claimed he witnessed people bowing to these statues: Nixon, a grocer. Nixon had interceded for All Souls College — to which he supplied figs and sugar — when the Puritans proposed to batter at religious images on the gate. Churches did not buy food in bulk, however, so at St Mary's the soldiers were doing what they liked. Lovell found their indiscipline a grave offence.
The endangered scholar was an idiot. With a curse, Lovell strode across the road, caught the swooning Treves roughly under the elbow and dragged him upright. Jeers came from the Parliamentary soldiers. The rescuer kicked Mary's head away, as he hauled the young scholar across the frontage of the church and the two of them stumbled out of danger. The troopers held fire, following their progress with aimed muskets, though the gesture was merely to intimidate; the football kick had pleased them — as had been intended.
'Take more care!' ordered a mounted officer crisply. Lovell assessed the rebel commander curiously: in his sixties, receding hair, thin, upswept moustache, tasselled baldric. This was Lord Saye and Sele himself, one of the leading Parliamentarians. He was a colonial financier, a campaigner against Ship Money, a plotter at his Broughton home with some prime enemies of the King. A man of great political skill, Saye and Sele had been nicknamed 'Old Subtlety' by King Charles.
Lovell passed muster, then Treves was waved away, assessed as a dreamy scholar who had ambled into the line of fire whilst in a world of his own.
'I could have been shot!' He nearly collapsed again.
Lovell walked him towards the Cornmarket, then wheeled him into an alehouse. He had taken command, setting the pattern of their future relationship. Pushed onto a straight-backed settle, Edmund first suspected the man was about to insist on some very strong beverage, yet Lovell quietly ordered small beer, the same watery brew that children drank.
He was sturdy and tanned. It was mid-September and still mild, but he kept a heavy black cloak close around him like a spy. He had been wearing a dark hat with a lowish crown and a long thin feather, which he now tossed aside on a table. He raised his tankard and held it steady. 'I'll drink to your health when I know your name.'
Ridiculously, Edmund felt tempted to supply a false one but he owned up to his identity. Lovell grunted. He enjoyed the fact he appeared threatening. He leached out danger with every move. Though a stranger to Oxford, yet he was at ease in his surroundings. He looked to Edmund as if he must smell of sweat and horseflesh, though in fact only a faint hint of old tobacco had smoked his dark garments, garments that were more serviceable than rich. He seemed liable to put up those well-travelled boots on a bench, while leaning back in a relaxed pose and calling for ripe cheese, clay pipes and available wenches…
Yet he remained sitting neatly. His light brown eyes gave nothing away, as he stated: 'Orlando Lovell.'
The tapster was glaring at them. Lovell ignored it. Treves had scrubbled up his gown and shoved it under the bench on their arrival; scholars were barred from alehouses. Since the colleges owned most of the inns in Oxford, there was a good chance that breaking the rule would be reported by an innkeeper anxious to preserve his lease.
'So you are a scholar!' said Lovell, smiling. It was perfectly obvious from the young man's sober dress. Having red hair and the pale colouring that goes with it, Edmund looked innocent as a child, though he was now made a little raffish by blood staining his linen cuff where the stone fragment had struck him.
Without seeming to do so, Orlando Lovell expertly drew out the scholar's history. He was a good-humoured youth from a family of minor gentry who would be hard pushed to secure him a position in life. In peacetime, his options were to become a country squire (difficult, with no estate of his own), a lawyer (though he lacked friends and family who could push for him as patrons) or a clergyman (not advisable while religion was causing such strife in the kingdom). His father had died some years before; his mother struggled. The family lacked sufficient funds or influence to send children into royal service at court. Edmund was too well born to undertake labour or trade, yet did not possess enough land to live off. Money had been scraped together to send him to the Merchant Taylors School, which his mother's brothers had attended. Somehow, with a smattering of the classics and the Merchant Taylors' influence, he had gained a place as an exhibitioner at St John's College in Oxford. If Oxford was not precisely educating him for a career, that was simply the way things had been through the centuries — and, cynics might say, how things would always be.
'Are you a university man, Master Lovell?'
'I never had that privilege.'
Lovell deduced Treves would probably leave without taking his degree. That was relatively common; he would be following many who had nonetheless become great men in political or literary life. 'It may be, dearest Ned,' wrote his mother in one of her weekly letters, seeking to console herself, 'that receiving education at a great university is a benefit in itself, and should you achieve something of note in your life to come, the record will state that you were once present at that seat of learning and none will think badly of you.. ' This feeble sentence whimpered to a close and Alice Treves snapped out her true feelings: 'Though in truth, I should be heartily glad to see you properly set up with a degree.'
Treves gloomily explained new regulations instituted by the all-controlling Archbishop Laud. To obtain a degree, it was no longer enough to attend a few lectures and hand in occasional written work. He must pass an examination.
'You have time to study harder.'
'Yes, but there is a war now!' Edmund burst out excitedly. Like most scholars, he paid as much attention to politics and religion as to his books — which meant, as little as he could get away with. He had been born the year before King Charles was crowned. He grew up in an England that was stable and prosperous, where he had been innocently unaware of trouble. The headmaster at his school and the dons he encountered at university were all loyal to the King; he took his lead from them. His college had benefited by an enormously expensive new quadrangle, paid for by Archbishop Laud, who had been President of St John's and also the university's Chancellor. Laud was impeached the first year Edmund went up to Oxford. At St John's, the threat of their President being executed was a talking point even scholars could not ignore.
Lovell's interest focused. 'Your college is pricelessly endowed, I think?' he quizzed. 'There must be an excellent cellar. Do you enjoy a good kitchen?'
'Colleges are expecting to lose their treasures,' was the cautious reply. Even Treves could spot a chancer.
All over the kingdom, Lovell knew, men were seizing the initiative and taking control of weapon stores, town magazines, ships and money. In Cambridge a member of Parliament called Oliver Cromwell was adroitly removing the university silver for melting down. When Royalist forces had occupied Oxford under Sir John Byron, Byron afterwards thought it prudent to take away with him much of the Oxford university plate, lest it too fall into Parliament's hands'. The Christ Church plate was refused him, only to be discovered hidden behind wall-panelling. Whatever Byron left was now being tracked down by Lord Saye and Sele. But he, like Byron, had studied at Oxford and was diffident about looting his alma mater. He burned popish books and pictures in the streets, yet he had accepted the pleas of the Master of Trinity that the college pictures were not worth destroying — 'We esteem them no more than a dishcloth' — so those old masters were left, discreetly turned against the wall.
'Lectures are cancelled while all becomes muster, drill and fortify,' trilled Edmund.
'Don't you spend all hours swearing and gaming?' Lovell wa
s teasing, to some extent.
'No, our statutes forbid gambling for money — more of Laud's reforms. We must keep our hair trim, dress plain, and not loiter in the streets in loathsome boots. There is to be no hunting with dogs or ferrets, and we may not carry weapons — '
'And what do you do for — ' Lovell spoke in his usual polite timbre though the undertone was feral. Edmund looked alarmed. Lovell merely rubbed one cheekbone beneath his hooded eye, with the tip of a languid finger.
'For entertainment? We write Greek graces and solve Latin riddles,' Edmund replied solemnly.
The gentle jest puzzled Lovell. He reviewed it, considering how he should answer, or whether any answer was needed. Young Treves was accustomed to rapid banter, hurled to and fro by disrespectful students. Curious, he took it upon himself to ask what Lovell was doing in Oxford.
'I came with Byron.' Had Lovell been left behind here as a Royalist spy?
'Are you a professional soldier?'
'I have served in arms since I was younger than you.'
'How long is that?'
'A decade.' As Edmund looked impressed, Lovell turned the conversation. 'So, master scholar — no weapons! How does that suit in the present upsets?'
Then, while Lovell listened in amused silence, Edmund explained how many scholars and some dons had left Oxford, never to return; the normal new intake of students had dried up. Those who remained were drilling and helping to fortify the town.
As the risk of action increased, Edmund Treves had helped dig trenches, fortify Magdalen Bridge and carry stones to the top of Magdalen Tower to be thrown down upon any attackers. Lovell belched derisively. Treves pleaded with him for advice on how to join up in the King's service and Lovell agreed to help him.
Lovell set down his empty tankard and collected his hat. 'So what does your mother think of your warlike aims? Do you correspond?' Edmund admitted that his mother wrote to him very fondly every week. 'And you reply…?'
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