‘Ah. I begin to understand. That’s why you hate Lord Clarendon.’
There were hundreds of these dispossessed clergymen about the country. Since the Restoration, Parliament had insisted on passing a series of penal religious laws, which were designed to strengthen the grip of the Church of England on the country, and to weaken the influence of Roman Catholics and the non-conformists, who were considered politically dangerous. As a result, many Church of England clergy who clung to their old puritanical ways had been ejected from their parishes. The legislation was known collectively as the Clarendon Code, as his lordship was believed to have been behind it.
‘Hate him? You wrong me, sir,’ Veal said. ‘As a Christian, I must oppose Lord Clarendon and all he stands for. It’s true that, for the good of the country, I would cheerfully see him in his grave. But I don’t hate the unhappy man. Indeed, I pray for his immortal soul, though I doubt my prayers will be heard.’
I shrugged, unwilling to debate the point. I sensed that Veal’s need to justify his actions was his weak spot so I gave the sore place another poke: ‘And that’s why they call you the Bishop, I suppose. Because you are, or were, a clergyman.’
He looked sternly at me. ‘The name is intended satirically, sir. I don’t much care for bishops.’
Despite my plight, I almost smiled. I had known so many men like Veal – rigid, honest as the day according to their lights, convinced of their own rectitude and confident that they were serving their God as He wished; yet so strangely devoid of humour.
‘Burbrough and I matriculated at Sidney Sussex College in the same term,’ Veal said. ‘We were inseparable. He was ordained long before me, but he chose to take up a fellowship at Jerusalem, which was then a very godly place, and stay at the university. Why, he might have been vice chancellor by now, had it not been for those men with their harsh laws and Papist ways. But he knows his days are numbered in Cambridge. Warley and his allies are working to have him expelled. That’s why he was willing to help me.’
A blasphemous thought came to me. Religion brought poison into politics. The last twenty-five years had proved that, time and again. Would not the business of government be so much more straightforward and pleasant if one could purge religion from the country? England might well become an earthly paradise, and there would be no need of heaven at all.
‘We must not despair,’ Veal said, his voice growing louder as if he stood in a pulpit. ‘The Lord does not abandon his servants, and He finds new tools for their hands. The righteous shall prevail.’
‘And me?’ The cords were chafing my wrists, and I had shooting pains in my arms. ‘Am I such a tool, sir?’
‘You will find out in due course.’ He cocked his head, and I guessed he was listening for footsteps. Then he added a remark that mystified me: ‘You would be wise to remember the parable of the Prodigal Son. We should make the most of it if we’re offered a second chance. It happens so rarely in life.’
Roger returned. I begged for a pot to piss in and something to drink. Veal agreed to both requests, and even ordered Roger to free my hands that I might better deal with my needs. Roger brought me a pot and a jug of small beer. Veal stood with his back to me while I did what I needed, but Roger watched me while his hand caressed the butt of his pistol. I massaged my aching shoulders and arms.
Afterwards, Veal ordered me to be tied to the ring again. He held a whispered conference with Roger, then bid me be patient and said they would leave me alone with the candle.
‘Wait,’ he said, pausing with his hand on the door. ‘Perhaps you would care to pray with me first?’
‘Thank you, sir, but no,’ I said. ‘I am not in a prayerful state of mind at present.’
He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘In a time of affliction, a man should always open his heart to God.’
I turned my face to the wall and waited for him to leave.
The man who came down to the cellar was tall and well set up. He was dressed in a lawyer’s robe, which concealed his clothes. He wore a black hood over his head, in which holes for the eyes and the mouth had been cut. He carried a candle. He was alone.
He was like a figure of Death in a masque, needing only a scythe to complete the resemblance. The effect could have been theatrical rather than sinister, had he not also been carrying a sword.
He levelled the blade at me. I backed towards the wall until I could go no further. The tip of the sword darted forward and nicked the skin of my throat, just below the jawbone on the right-hand side. It happened so quickly that I had no time even to flinch.
I cried out. The man slowly lowered the sword. The wound smarted. A trickle of blood zigzagged down to my collar. I was trembling. I had come, literally, within an inch of death.
Buckingham, I thought, or someone closely connected to him. After all, Veal and Roger were his servants. Most likely, though, it was the Duke himself. The height fitted, and he was said to be proud of his swordsmanship. Moreover, Whitehall was rife with stories about the pleasure he had derived from disguising himself earlier in the year, when he had been charged with treason and on the run.
‘I’m wondering whether to have you killed outright,’ he said, turning the sword towards me and then raising it in a salute, presumably to himself. ‘It might be simpler. You’ve caused a great deal of trouble.’
The voice was Buckingham’s, too. But if the Duke were pretending to be anonymous, it would be better for me to go along with it.
‘I serve the King, sir,’ I began, ‘and if—’
‘Naturally we all serve the King,’ Buckingham interrupted. ‘When I want you to speak, Marwood, I shall ask you a question. Do you remember a silver box? Small, and with a monogram on the lid.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Of course I did. I had found it in Alderley’s apartments in Farrow Lane; he had probably stolen it from Lord Clarendon’s closet. Everyone seemed interested in it, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know what the monogram’s letters were.
He swung the sword, cutting at the air from side to side; he was like a schoolboy with the switch in his hand. ‘Where is it?’
‘Mr Chiffinch has it, sir.’ I hesitated. ‘The lock’s broken. Someone had forced it open.’
‘Who?’
I shrugged as well as a man can with his arms attached to a ring on the wall behind him. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I want the contents.’
‘It was empty when I found it in Alderley’s lodging.’
‘Are you sure of that? Quite sure? Would you take your Bible oath on it?’
‘Yes, sir.’ I was telling the truth but somehow it sounded like a lie. ‘I don’t know what it contained, either. I know nothing at all.’
Except, of course, I knew this: that all the great ones of the land wanted whatever had been in that box: the King and the Duke of York, Lord Clarendon and the Duke of Buckingham. For some reason it was mortally important: it was probable that whatever was in that box had caused the deaths of three men, and that it was somehow connected with Frances and her scrofula. I had assumed that Veal had broken open the box when he searched Alderley’s lodging, and taken whatever it had contained. But if Buckingham didn’t have it, who did?
‘Is this why I’m here?’ I asked. ‘Is this why I’m tied like a dog? Because of whatever was in that box?’
Buckingham said nothing. The two candle flames wavered, and his shadow danced on the damp walls. ‘Are you content?’ he said suddenly.
‘Sir?’
‘With your lot in life, Marwood.’ He waved a beringed hand, taking in my immediate circumstances. ‘Not just with your present condition, of course, which cannot be agreeable. But in general. You are your father’s son, after all. Isn’t it hard for you to serve men who are destroying all he stood for? They would make every honest Presbyterian a criminal. They hound every Christian who won’t bow and scrape to their bishops. Why, I believe they would hand England over to the Pope in Rome if he made it worth their while.’
Remember the par
able of the Prodigal Son, Veal had said. Be grateful for second chances. Was this what he had meant?
I swallowed. ‘I do what I must, sir, to put food on my table and a roof over my head.’ I thought of Chiffinch and his devious ways. ‘I’m a poor man. I admit that what I have to do is not always to my liking. Or what my masters do.’
Without warning, the blade leapt at me again. The tip outlined an invisible figure of eight barely an inch from my nose.
‘And does that include murder, Marwood?’
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘I have reputable witnesses who will testify that you swore to murder Edward Alderley, and that a day later he was found drowned in that well. I have other witnesses who saw you enter Lord Clarendon’s garden by the gate from the fields on the very afternoon of Alderley’s death.’
‘Then those witnesses lie,’ I said angrily.
‘That’s not the point. These are men who will be believed. One is a clergyman, in fact.’
So Veal would have no objection to seeing me hang for a crime I had not committed if it served his cause. I tried to remain calm. ‘And what possible reason could I have to kill Alderley?’
‘Because you lusted after his cousin, the Regicide’s daughter, and you wanted to protect her. Alderley was threatening to bring her to the gallows.’
‘There’s not a word of truth in that, sir, and you know it.’
‘You are not a fool,’ the Duke said. ‘What I know and you know has nothing to do with it. What matters is what men can be led to believe about you.’
‘I’m not without friends.’
He laughed. ‘Do you really think men like Chiffinch or Williamson would raise a finger to help you if you were accused of murder?’ He paused, watching me. ‘Or even the King. Especially not the King.’
I turned my head away. A moment passed. I heard the sound of Buckingham sheathing his sword.
‘There’s another way open to you,’ he said, his voice gentle, almost coaxing. ‘You know as well as I do that the King and his ministers cannot order things entirely as they wish. The King envies his cousin of France, who rules his kingdom absolutely, with no check on his power. But here we do things differently. Parliament holds the purse strings and I – that is we, or rather our cause – command much support in the Commons and even in the Lords. The common people sympathize with the Presbyterians, not the bishops. They are with us, not the Court. The King is perfectly aware that I could raise the City with a click of my fingers.’
He paused. We both knew that his identity was no longer a secret. But he kept his face disguised, as if the play-acting itself gave him pleasure; and I was wise enough to know that my role in this play was to be the audience.
‘Work for me instead,’ he said softly. ‘For myself and Veal and others like us. For our shared beliefs, our common interests. Keep your present employments, and act as my eyes and ears. Then, when we have gained our ends, you shall have your reward, in this world and the next.’
I hesitated, turning his words over in my mind. There were shooting pains in my arms, and in the sockets of my shoulders. I felt suddenly very tired. If I said no, what were my chances of leaving this cellar alive? And was there not something in what Buckingham had said? Where indeed did my best interests lie?
‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Nothing would give me greater joy than to do my duty to God and to serve you.’
I wasn’t proud of what I had done. But how else could I have managed it? I had time enough to brood, for Buckingham left me alone to think.
In a while, Veal and Roger returned. They untied me. They offered me food and wine.
‘May I go?’ I said – speaking with my heart in my mouth, hoping that the Duke had believed my acceptance of his offer, and that his words had not been part of a game for him, a game whose rules I had no chance of knowing.
‘Of course, sir,’ Veal said. ‘Whenever you wish. Roger will fetch a coach. But you will have to be blindfolded again, I’m afraid. My master insists.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he chooses that it should be so, and that’s enough for me. This place has many uses for him.’
They left me in the cellar again, but free to roam and to stretch my aching limbs. Perhaps half an hour later, they returned, covered my eyes and led me up the steps to the yard. The air smelled wonderfully sweet. I felt the warmth of the sun on my cheek.
Veal took my right arm and Roger my left. I was not a prisoner as before, but my movements were circumscribed. We walked across the yard. I heard the chink of harness ahead.
‘I understand we shall see you again, sir,’ Veal said politely. ‘It will be an honour, I’m sure. A step up here, and you’re into the coach.’
‘I wish to go to the Strand,’ I said.
‘Indeed.’
I knew at once that this vehicle was no hackney, or even a simple private coach like the one in which I had been brought here. I touched a door as I climbed in, not the usual leather curtain. There was a strangely familiar perfume in the air, a hint of musk and freshly watered earth. With a sinking heart, I discovered that I had fallen from one danger into another.
‘Do sit down, sir,’ said Lady Quincy. ‘Allow me to help you to remove your blindfold.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
‘I TOLD BUCKINGHAM you would agree.’ Lady Quincy sat back and looked at me sitting opposite her. She smiled. ‘He didn’t believe me at first. He said his men were going to teach you a lesson, teach you not to poke your nose into his business. But I said no, he misunderstood you and your motives. You could be an ally not an enemy. Besides, I told him you were my friend. I vouched for you.’
In an instant, everything had changed. Nothing could be taken for granted.
The coach moved away. This was not the huge vehicle in which we had travelled down to Cambridgeshire, but the lighter, more elegant coach Lady Quincy used in town. We were the only occupants. I recognized our surroundings. We were rumbling down Snowhill, away from the City. We passed the remains of St Mary Woolnoth on the right.
‘The Duke came to me this morning, quite unexpectedly, with a proposal. We talked tête-à-tête for hours – I told him you were so kind and so obliging with Frances.’ She looked away, perhaps affecting modesty. ‘And … and in other ways, though of course I did not mention that to him.’
Dear God, I thought, she thinks I’m still besotted with her. I said, ‘A proposal, madam? And how could it concern me?’
Lust blinds a man to everything that does not feed it. Once it is stripped away, one sees more clearly. But Lady Quincy did not yet understand that since that night at Hitcham St Martin I was no longer drawn to her as the moth to the candle. That was the one thing I knew and she did not. It was my one advantage.
‘I know you,’ she said, with a faint but deliberate emphasis on the verb, to remind me that we had known each other that night in the biblical sense of the word. ‘You are like me, Marwood. In the end you follow the dictates of duty.’
I inclined my head. ‘One goes where one must.’
For the moment, my safest policy was to echo what she said, or to agree with it. The coach swung sharply round a corner, throwing her skirts against my leg. She took her time disentangling herself. We trundled over Holborn Bridge and began to climb the hill beyond.
‘That is very true,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘We both of us let duty be our guide. I’m not disloyal to the King – of course not, how could I be? – any more than you are, my dear Marwood – but when Buckingham came to me and showed me where the path of my duty lay, the true path, I realized that an alliance with him was my best way to serve the King.’ Her eyelashes fluttered. ‘And in doing so, to serve others. Including, as it happens, Frances.’
I nodded and smiled, hoping my face did not show the confusion I felt. ‘Was it only today you discovered this?’
‘Yes.’ She looked innocently at me, her eyes wide and candid. ‘That’s why he came to see me. It’s not as if we’re stranger
s. I’ve known Bucks for years, since the Court was at Bruges in fact, and we’re old friends.’
Bruges, I thought, that place again. At a time when the King, the Duke of York and the Duke of Buckingham had all three been unmarried. Any of them could have been Frances’s father.
‘He wished to see Frances for himself, so I presented her to him. He was charmed by the child, and I’m persuaded that he has her best interests at heart. He agrees that she should have what is hers by right, and that it will be better for the country if she does. And he’s convinced the King will agree too, once he knows all. He must.’
How old was Frances, exactly? Nine years of age? Ten?
‘Then I was right, madam,’ I said.
‘Right?’ she gave me a sideways look, a half-smile. ‘In what way?’
‘When we talked at Mistress Warley’s.’ I watched her. ‘In your chamber.’
She turned away, pretending an embarrassment I doubted she felt.
‘In supposing that Frances is your daughter.’
‘Yes, you were right, sir. She was born before my first marriage, when I was a waiting woman to my Lady Hyde – my Lady Clarendon, as she later became. I was young and foolish and easily impressed. Easily tempted, too, perhaps, and easily fooled. I had no one to advise me. My father was dead. My mother had remarried and had no time for me.’
‘What happened when she was born?’ I asked.
After a pause, she looked at me again, and for once her face seemed stripped of artifice and calculation. ‘Frances was taken from me directly. Lord Clarendon and his wife saw to everything. They gave me no choice – I was young, and I had no one to speak for me, nowhere to turn for help. She was put to nurse and then taken to England, to the Warleys. I had not seen her since then. Not until the day when you and I went to Hitcham St Martin. But blood tells, does it not? A mother has a duty to her daughter.’
‘So has a father.’
‘Exactly.’ She leaned forward and tapped my hand with her gloved finger. ‘That is the heart of the matter. Which is why, my dear Marwood, if you will be so kind, you will escort me to see my lawyer. I believe you called on him once before, but he was not at leisure to see you.’
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