A Cruel Necessity (A John Grey Historical Mystery)

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘They were forewarned?’

  ‘It would have been inconvenient for a lot of people if they had actually been arrested.’

  ‘Inconvenient for Morland, you mean?’

  ‘Mr Morland. Me. And others perhaps. For you most certainly. The Cliffords would have been well on their way to Dover before the soldiers even reached the village. And once at Dover, controls there are shockingly lax.’

  ‘But even so . . .’

  ‘Oh tush. Aminta will come to no harm at the King’s court.’

  ‘I fear she will not forgive the choice I made, nor perhaps will Roger Pole when he discovers what has happened . . .’

  ‘Lord! There is no reason why Roger should ever know that. Or that you accused him of being the writer of the letters – yes, Mr Morland did tell me. He can be quite amusing . . . And Aminta herself believed that it was Dickon Grice who had denounced her to Thurloe; I obviously did nothing to discourage that view, and I doubt if Dickon will deny it now he’s dead. Roger said anyway that he had seen Dickon hiding in a doorway near Thurloe’s office, so it all fitted together rather nicely. Your secret is quite safe with your mother, dear. And with Mr Morland. It is perhaps as well to remember that too, in case you were thinking of writing a long, tedious letter to Mr Thurloe. In any case, Mr Morland may be a good Republican by next week – his principles seem somewhat changeable. As for Aminta, I think she is rather enjoying Bruges . . . particularly now that Roger has joined her. There is more to entertain her there than ever there was in a small village in Essex.’

  ‘Roger Pole has fled to Bruges?’

  ‘Not exactly. He simply decided that his chances of regaining his estates were better if he threw his lot in with the King. Cromwell proved slow to appreciate Roger’s arguments so I advised Roger to visit Mr Morland. I think he may have provided him with useful contacts in Bruges. Roger left for the Spanish Netherlands the day after he brought you home.’

  ‘So, all is well with the Cliffords?’

  ‘Yes, all is well, and when they return they shall move into the New House.’

  ‘That is most generous. But where shall we go then? Oh no, don’t tell me . . . you are going to marry Sir Felix!’

  ‘Of course not,’ says my mother. ‘I’m to marry Colonel Payne. We shall live in the Big House again, you and I, not in this pitiful cottage with its overgrown walks. Let the Cliffords have it – house, garden, damsons and all. And Sir Felix won’t have use of the Colonel’s gardener once I am running the Big House again. Or access to the wine cellar. No servant of mine shall be allowed to stoop to such knavish tricks. My first act as Mistress Payne will be to sack that butler. I’ve waited a long time for this, but the Wests are finally back in the Big House.’

  There is one minor detail concerning this arrangement that worries me.

  ‘Is this wise?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says my mother. ‘Mr Morland assures me that the Colonel will most certainly keep the manor after the King is restored. You were quite right about the Law. The sale was perfectly legal. Have no fear that we shall be ejected again.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ I say. ‘Mother, consider: my father is still alive. You are proposing to marry the Colonel. Bigamy is a capital offence.’

  ‘We don’t know your father is alive,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, we do. He may not have been the murderer as I feared, but I certainly saw him, as you know well. He came from Bruges with a message for the Sealed Knot in Essex. He was riding a grey horse. He was wearing a cloak. His voice was very familiar. He threw me a shilling. I always knew the rider was far too old to be Marius. Once I realised that you were 472, his identity was plain.’

  ‘A shilling? Well, it was time your father sent us some money, I must say.’

  ‘You saw him too. You saw him at the inn, and for all I know here at the house. You actually let slip to me that you had had news of him. He came to see you as well as the Sealed Knot. Then the following day he rode off on Henderson’s horse, leaving his own in the stable.’

  ‘Possibly,’ says my mother. ‘My memory isn’t what it was.’ Again I think of Probert’s rules for lying. She would do well to have a properly rehearsed story for the Rector when she comes to be wed to the Colonel. ‘Anyway, your father will hardly object when he has married again himself.’

  ‘To Bess Clifford?’

  ‘No, to some young strumpet he met in Bruges. I think that was what he really came to tell me. Perhaps we might denounce him as the murderer after all. As you say, it was the sort of wound a surgeon might have inflicted. A left-handed surgeon.’

  We both consider this from all points of view while the rain drips onto the windowsill.

  ‘Or we could just tell the Rector that we have a sincere and reasonable belief that my father is dead,’ I say. ‘That would be simpler.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see him living long anyway,’ says my mother. ‘Can you? Not at his age. Not married to a young Flemish strumpet.’

  Of course, there are plenty in the village who would be able to say at my mother’s forthcoming wedding why this man and this woman might not lawfully be joined together in holy matrimony. But it will be difficult for them to explain themselves clearly without admitting to being an accessory to murder.

  Then I ask: ‘How long have you known Mr Morland?’

  ‘Some years,’ says my mother. ‘He came here first when you were at Cambridge. I think he must have only just been appointed by Mr Thurloe then. He was asking questions about the Sealed Knot. We got on quite well – well enough that I suggested to him that perhaps he might overlook my occasional letters to Bruges, and that in return I would mention him favourably to Hyde when the time came. He saw very quickly that he had almost nothing to lose and a great deal to gain. I do hope that his allegiance to the King is not as temporary as I fear it may be.’

  ‘Is that also how I was invited to join his department?’

  ‘You never seemed entirely happy with the Law. So, I might have suggested something to Dr Grahame, and he might have suggested something to Mr Morland. Or perhaps I wrote to Mr Morland and he wrote to Dr Grahame. Sam Morland promised to look after you anyway. And I think he kept his promise too. I mean, you are not in chains in the Tower of London, are you?’

  Sir Felix. Roger Pole. Colonel Payne. And Samuel Morland. Yes, truly, I am beginning to see my mother in a new light. Then I ask: ‘Do you know why Probert changed his mind about the murder?’

  ‘Oh, I made him see sense,’ says my mother. ‘Footpads from Suffolk are something everyone can believe in. A bit like hobgoblins or chastity. Of course, I would not have minded seeing Dickon arrested, especially after Jem’s death, but it is unlikely that he would have gone to the scaffold without implicating everyone else in the village.’

  ‘How did you make Probert see sense?’ I ask.

  ‘The usual way,’ she says. ‘He is a prudent man who understands that the restoration is inevitable. He became unreasonable when he heard I was to marry the Colonel and wrote quite unpleasantly to Mr Thurloe, but I smoothed things over.’

  Just for a moment I have a vision of a small grubby boy asking me: ‘Don’t you want to do it with my ma?’

  ‘Are you cold, dear?’ my mother asks.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘I thought I saw you shudder.’

  I decide that perhaps my mother spoke the truth when she said I might not wish to know everything.

  ‘The weather is improving,’ she adds. ‘I think the sun may actually break through soon. And very soon we shall have the King back with us. Those of us who have been loyal to him will be rewarded when he returns. The Colonel is happy that he has been able to help with the negotiations between General Monck and His Majesty. And Mr Morland will certainly have Thurloe’s job when the King is back. If he does nothing stupid in the meantime. And, as I say, Roger is now in Bruges too. That seems sensible. His family has done the King good service here, but it is better to be close to the court to remind the King, who
can sometimes be a little forgetful, I am told. Viscount Pole sounds so well, does it not? And Viscountess Pole, of course. Yes, I think that this may work out handsomely for us all. Except perhaps for you. What a shame you threw away your career with Mr Morland and your chance to marry Aminta. All you had to do was keep quiet about one silly little letter.’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ I say.

  ‘Did I send as many as that? . . . But look! The sun is shining again on the garden. We shall have a splendid evening.’

  ‘You are right, Mother,’ I say. ‘The air is chill, and my shoulder still troubles me. I’ll sleep now, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘That is very wise,’ says my mother, pulling the sheet back over me and fussing with my pillow. ‘Then, tomorrow or when you are stronger, you should go and lay flowers on Dickon Grice’s grave. We buried him next to Jem. Dickon was, after all, a good friend of yours. You mustn’t hold it against him that he informed on you and then shot you in the back. These things happen, my dear John. Cruel necessity.’

  Acknowledgements

  When I was very much younger, I was able to declare at the end of a composition that it was ‘all my own work’. I cannot make any such claim for A Cruel Necessity. Many people have helped me along the way, and I need to acknowledge at least some of them here.

  I received a lot of helpful advice on various drafts of this book. Will Atkins, once my editor but now sadly reduced to writing books for a living like the rest of us, gave me some invaluable comments early on. Eliza Graham, whose own writing I much admire, persuaded me with some difficulty that one prologue was more than enough for any book. My agent, David Headley, revived my interest in this project and much else in my writing career. My editor at Constable & Robinson, Krystyna Green, and my copy editor, Marcus Trower, finally knocked it into shape and made John Grey a nicer person. My thanks are due to all of them – and, of course, as ever to my family, who have, during this book’s production, had to live far more in the seventeenth century than any normal person would wish to do.

  Many writers like at this point to list a few reference books to show that they haven’t made it all up. Since A Cruel Necessity is a work of fiction, I have in fact made most of it up, but readers who wish to check whether some of my more outrageous statements are correct may like to refer to some of the following. First, though both deal with the period that begins a year or two after my narrative, I drew heavily on Lisa Picard’s excellent book Restoration London and also on the diaries of Samuel Pepys in various editions. For information on the Sealed Knot and the politics of the 1650s, Geoffrey Smith’s The Cavaliers in Exile is a very thorough and readable account, as is his Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies and David Underdown’s Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–60. In creating individual characters in my novel, I owe a debt in particular to H. W. Dickinson’s Sir Samuel Morland: Diplomat and Inventor, 1625–1695, D. L. Hobman’s Cromwell’s Master Spy: A study of John Thurloe and Philip Aubrey’s Mr Secretary Thurloe. Jeffrey Forgeng’s Daily Life in Stuart England and Miriam Slater’s Family Life in the Seventeenth Century provided a lot of the detail about what my characters did and thought and ate. For what they said, Charles Barber’s Early Modern English is a detailed study of the evolution of the English language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Essex dialect words, I drew not so much on my own childhood in Southend as on Edward Gepp’s A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary, which contains an interesting definition for the word ‘wanked’. J. A. Sharpe’s Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 provided an excellent account of the roles of the various officials and the process of investigation of murders at that time, as did Malcolm Gaskill’s Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England and Eleanor Trotter’s Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish with Special Reference to Local Government. Two websites also need to be mentioned – in addition to that essential writers’ resource Wikipedia: www.englishcivilwar.org is fascinating and contains a great deal of information that it is not easy to find elsewhere; www.pepysdiary.com provides not only the text of the famous diary but also helpful comment and clarification.

  Finally, my thanks to the staff of the British Library for locating many of the above books and delivering them to me so efficiently, and to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum for helping me understand some of the practicalities of living in a seventeenth-century house.

  Other than that, it’s all my own work.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Night, June 1657

  A Little Earlier

  Dawn

  I Am Introduced to Death – 1646 or Thereabouts

  Morning, June 1657

  Late Morning

  Midday

  Afternoon

  Late Afternoon

  Early Evening

  Westminster

  Another Dawn

  Another Evening

  Letters

  At the New House, and Afterwards

  At Home with the Charcoal Burners

  Pole’s Hat

  Pole’s Promises

  At the Church, and Afterwards

  At the Inn, and Afterwards

  Another Letter

  At the Stables, and Afterwards

  London

  A Traveller Requests a Room for the Night

  London

  More Letters

  A Problem

  To Southwark

  A Summer’s Day

  More Letters

  Night in Southwark

  Westminster, July 1657

  More Letters

  A Visit

  A Discovery

  Endgame, Late Summer 1657

  Acknowledgements