X.
Soaked by a blinding rainstorm, the royal army had pushed westwards into the Cotswolds through thick mud. They could comfort themselves that the enemy would be even more hampered, as both Essex and Waller were travelling with bigger guns and with baggage trains. After a halt in Burford, they headed on through the spring dusk across the River Windrush to Bourton-on-the-Water, and camped in the fields and meadows surrounding the village. Mindful of Parliamentary patrols from the Gloucester garrison, Laurence then led his scouts on a reconnoitre northwest, fanning them out across the Cotswold Hills. They returned dirty and half asleep in their saddles as the eastern horizon began to glow. One fellow had barely escaped arrest on the outskirts of Tewkesbury, where the King had hoped to quarter by the following night: Parliament had occupied the town. The Royalist army would have to change course and make speed for Evesham, about as long a ride away, through more barren countryside. By the next day, they had covered the nearly twenty miles to Evesham, relieved at least that Oxford was temporarily spared a full siege while Essex and Waller were busy chasing the King. He himself would not be secure until he reached his stronghold at Worcester, another fifteen or so miles to the northwest.
On the sixth of June, Laurence’s thirty-second birthday, the royal army arrived there, to a fervent welcome. Although the Royalists’ spectacular pace had left Waller and Essex trailing behind them, they were incapable of further action; and he was far too tired himself to celebrate either the anniversary of his birth or the relative safety of the King’s new haven.
Two days after, Digby called Laurence to his billet and asked him to encode a letter to Prince Rupert. It was uncharacteristically bleak: “Essex comes upon us one way,” Digby wrote, “Waller likely to go about us on the Welsh side by Gloucester, Massey and the Lord Denbigh towards Kidderminster, both with considerable forces; and when to all this I shall add the uncertainty of your brother’s succeeding before Lyme, and that Oxford is scarce victualled for a month, and for aught we know blocked up in a manner by the enemy’s horse, Your Highness will easily frame for yourself an image of our condition … all the hopes of relief depend upon Your Highness’s happy and timely success.”
Once the courier had ridden out with his dismal communication, Digby told Quayle to fetch wine. He and Laurence sat brooding and drinking, until he broke the silence. “Why is it I have never seen you pray, Mr. Beaumont? Are you not a religious man?”
“Not particularly, my lord.”
“I didn’t think so. Isabella hinted to me that you were an atheist – not something you would want publicly known.” When Laurence merely shrugged, Digby went on, “I wonder whether, in times of adversity, God might listen with greater interest to the prayers of His less observant children than those who pester Him daily with their trivial requests.”
“Are you asking me to pray?”
“It could not hurt, though I’d hazard a guess that there as many men praying in the enemy camp.”
“Rather more, I would hazard a guess. Do you believe that God is a Royalist?”
“His Majesty believes himself anointed by God to rule, so it would appear logical that God should be on his side. What is your view of that doctrine, sir?”
“Why do you care to know, my lord?”
Digby had no chance to reply. One of the scouts had burst in, red-faced and breathless. “My lord, Mr. Beaumont, I’ve come from reporting to His Majesty: Essex is on the move! He’s preparing to march south, to the relief of Lyme Regis.”
Digby and Laurence leapt up from their chairs. “How could this be? When did you find out?” babbled Digby, his voice shrill with eagerness.
“This morning we were spying in his camp, my lord, and saw him loading his heavy cannons onto carts. We learnt that he and Waller had held a conference at Burford with their chief officers, the day before yesterday. It was then that they decided the armies should split up.”
“There’s no shadow of a doubt?” asked Laurence. “You confirmed the reports from several sources, as you were taught?”
“Oh yes, sir,” the scout said, flushing with professional pride.
“Essex must underestimate our strength, to leave the chase to Waller alone, but nevertheless …” Digby beamed incredulously at Laurence, who was as stunned: how could these experienced generals commit an error of such magnitude, when their prey, the greatest prize in the kingdom, was virtually trapped and ready for the taking? “Now we have only Waller to contend with,” Digby chortled, clapping his hands together. “Damn me, Mr. Beaumont, God is a Royalist, after all.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I.
Reclined upon her bed immersed in a book, Lady Hallam looked to Veech as if she were spending a quiet afternoon at her house in the Strand, except that she had not been able to change the high-necked gown in which she had arrived at the Tower, and wore no jewellery save her wedding ring; and her hair was simply dressed. She neither moved nor raised her eyes when he entered.
“What are you reading today, my lady?” he inquired.
“A work of Suetonius about the emperors of Rome. Do you enjoy the study of history, Mr. Veech?”
“To me, all history is the same: the victory of force.” He crossed to the window. “What a clear view you have from here of Traitors Gate.”
“How very subtle you are. Have you come again with your proposition?”
“I’m giving you a last chance to consider it. A few lines in your hand to Lord Digby, and you and your maid can go free. Or you’ll go to trial, and Barlow’s confession will condemn you both.”
“Why have you not shown me this fulsome confession, as I asked you?”
Veech heaved a sigh. In truth, he had not got a single useful thing out of Barlow, and he had admired the man’s fortitude. “You can hear it in court, my lady, if you wish.”
“You must be pleased he’s not alive to bear witness to the falsehoods you extracted from him.”
“On the contrary, his death was tragic – gaol fever is an awful way to perish. And I worry about that sick maid of yours.” Veech glanced around the cell. “She has no featherbed, no fireplace, no bowl and jug for washing, no close stool for her privy needs. And her cell is below ground and damp, and often floods.”
“I have petitioned the governor of the Tower, who promised to bring her to my cell.”
“He won’t. He can’t afford to spread the contagion among his wealthier inmates.”
At last Lady Hallam looked up. Veech caught a shade of fear in her eyes, although none in her voice. “I demand to see my husband’s counsel.”
“He has declined your case, just as your husband has withdrawn his support from you. I told you: we found no proof against him in that house, other than of past immorality. And Barlow named you and you alone as Lord Digby’s agent.”
“Then I must be allowed some other counsel to advise me.”
“Perhaps Mr. Draycott could offer his services.”
“I’ve more respect for my close stool than for that spineless lackey of yours.”
Veech wanted to laugh: it was an accurate description. “As I won’t neglect to inform him. My lady, you may protect Beaumont at the cost of your own life, but is it fair that you should sacrifice your maid’s? In better circumstances and with a physician to tend her, she might still have a hope.”
“I will not succumb to bribery. And you are not king in this place. The governor has promised to—”
“I told you already, the governor won’t abide by his promise,” cut in Veech. “Why else has he kept you apart from the girl these three weeks, when you’ve begged every day for her to join you? The longer you hesitate, the worse for her, and her death will be on your conscience.”
“If the governor will not bring her to me,” said Lady Hallam, “I want to be moved to her cell.”
“Do you, now,” said Veech. “Well he might agree to that.”
II.
After a prodigious midday meal with the Beaumonts, Antonio retired to his ch
amber for a siesta to find Diego sitting on the bed, the wizard’s bowl balanced on his lap. He had filled it with water and was intent upon the surface. “I warned you that thing is cursed,” yelled Antonio, and smacked it to the floor. “Get rid of it, or I shall get rid of you.”
“I understand your rage, Don Antonio,” said Diego sympathetically. “You are a disappointed man. Shall I explain why?” He lowered his voice and began to count on his fingers. “One, you know as little about the true state of Lord Beaumont’s finances as when we first got here. Two, you’ve failed to penetrate the Lady Elena’s chilly indifference. No tears shed when you spoke of her mother’s lingering death, and her brothers slain in the wars. As you said, it’s as though she sliced out her own heart on quitting her native land. She and her eldest son are as similar in temperament as in looks – the opposite from his lordship, who wears his generous, honest heart on his sleeve. He’s more Spanish, in that way, than either of them. Which brings me to three,” went on Diego, still counting. “Like his son Thomas, he is blinded by his emotions – in the case of Thomas, pride, resentment, and greed, and in the case of his lordship, absolute devotion to his wife and to his eldest son. You can shout what you wish into his lordship’s ear about the Lady Elena’s past or Laurence’s paternity and he will take no notice. If he came in upon you in the act of adultery with her, he would retreat blushing from the scene, and excuse it to himself as a moment of cousinly affection. And as to four: rather than being rabidly jealous of you, he relishes your company, which must be the ultimate insult.”
Antonio flung himself down on the bed. “I refuse to admit defeat.”
“Nor should you. As a matter of fact, I’ve made some unexpected progress on the issue of his lordship’s finances.” Diego bent and grabbed the bowl: an obvious challenge. Antonio ignored it and waited for him to continue. “In my conversations with the servants and the grooms, I have occasionally remarked that if I were his lordship I’d keep a portion of my wealth concealed from the enemy, and that there must be plenty of good hiding places about the estate.”
“And what have the servants and grooms told you, monkey?”
“Not a word. Yesterday evening I was drinking beer in the stables with the grooms. All they would talk about was horse colic, and founder, and other such favourite subjects of theirs, so I got bored, and wandered out. As I neared the path that leads to the dovecote, I felt the effect of what I’d drunk, and stepped into the bushes. And as I was happily watering them, Lady Elena hurried along the path with a lantern, stealthy as a thief. The light disappeared – she was inside the dovecote. What could she want there, at past eleven o’clock, I had to wonder?”
“I trust you shook the last drops from your prick and followed her.”
“Yes, I did, and when I looked in, she was on her knees digging at the earthen floor with a trowel. She lifted up a section, reached in her hand, and pulled out a small bag that she tucked into her skirt pocket. I had to hide in the bushes again as she prepared to leave, but as she had gone, I went back to inspect where she had been digging. She had foiled me: the door to the dovecote was stoutly padlocked.”
Antonio whistled between his teeth. “Madre de Dios, they must be precious doves.”
“There are others as precious to her ladyship under this roof.” Diego stroked the rim of his bowl, meditatively. “The hardest to catch will be the tastiest, if you want vengeance.”
“What a sin that would be,” said Antonio, chuckling to himself. “How I wish we had with us our devout Jesuit, Fray Luis Iglesia, to hear my confession afterwards. But in any case, I am tempted. She’s a fresh little bird, the wife of my Lorenzo.”
III.
The Royalists had spent a week recuperating in Worcester from their forced march, and then pushed towards Shrewsbury, in an attempt to lure Waller deeper into hostile territory and separate him further from Essex’s army. The King cherished hopes of support from Rupert, who was now in the north, and had written imploring his nephew to speed to the relief of York from Parliament’s northern regiments and the Scots, but also to tidy matters up as fast as possible and come to his own aid. “His Royal Highness Prince Rupert must be like unto God: everywhere simultaneously,” Digby commented to Laurence. Meanwhile, the Royalists were again low on supplies. Since Waller had not barred their line of retreat, they tailed back to Worcester, and the next day retraced their route through the Cotswolds, in the direction of Oxford.
By dusk on the sixteenth of June, they made camp around the village of Broadway, a short ride from Chipping Campden. Laurence requested leave for an overnight visit. Though he longed to see his father and Catherine, it was Lady Beaumont he needed most urgently to address.
He saw flame flickering by the old stone walls of the dovecote, as he dismounted and tethered his horse in a thicket of trees. He had sent the gatekeeper to forewarn her ladyship, and she was waiting for him, beckoning him into the dovecote like some sentinel guiding him into the netherworld, her shadow alarmingly magnified by the lantern that she held aloft. “Laurence, did you ride from Worcester? We heard His Majesty had escaped there.”
“No, his army lies at Broadway.” Laurence wrinkled his nose at the familiar, acrid smell of pigeon dung. “He’s marching for Oxford to reunite his forces. I haven’t much time: I’m due back in camp before dawn. Thank God I stopped at the gatehouse, or I wouldn’t have known about your Spanish guests! Why didn’t you write to tell me about them?”
“I did write, and sent Geoffrey to Oxford with my letter, but you had already left. In that letter I informed you we had yet worse to distress us.” Lady Beaumont set her lantern down on the clay floor; illuminated from below, her features seemed to him as gaunt as Seward’s. “On the very day our guests arrived, Elizabeth absconded. She is in Oxford, with that man Price.”
Laurence now recalled Price’s distant manner, and his courageous choice to stay in the city. “Damn him. And damn her for being such a fool.”
“Subsequently we received these.” Lady Beaumont delved into the pocket of her skirts and produced two letters, then held up the lantern for him to read.
“Christ! At least he says they won’t marry without your permission.”
“You must bring Elizabeth home, or she will be ruined. We had to lie to Antonio that she had gone to be with friends in Chipping Campden town. His lordship is heartsick.”
“As I can well imagine – I’ll do what I can.” Laurence searched for a way to broach the issue of her and de Zamora. “How is … your cousin?” he said, at length.
“Antonio has not changed a whit. He fawns over his lordship and the girls, and as I suspected, he is penniless. But he has had nothing out of us, thus far, save his bed and board. Antonio is effusive in his praise for you and Thomas. He talked of meeting you last month. He claimed that immediately afterwards he was assaulted by thieves, and then became gravely ill – hence his strange delay in visiting us. Can it be true?”
“Who knows – he’s forever vanishing and surfacing, and vanishing again. But I can guess why he delayed coming to Tom, and to me: he must have been asking round about us, to find some way to play us off against each other.”
“Play you off? But … why?”
Silence descended, apart from the cooing of pigeons high above. “Did you ever love him?” Laurence burst out. “Were you and he lovers? Or did he … did he seduce you, before you were married?”
He felt as if he were shrinking beneath his mother’s glare. “What in heaven’s name has he suggested to you, Laurence?”
“That … I am his son,” answered Laurence, in a feeble voice. “Am I?”
“Was he drunk?”
“No, far from it.” Laurence spilt forth everything, like an evil vomit. Yet even as he spoke, trembling, of that night when a mutual desire had been illicitly slaked, he detected not a trace of shock, pain, or guilt in her expression. Instead, he saw only contempt.
“He is a sad character beneath pity,” she said, at the end.
“He is convinced that I am his.”
“He has probably lost his wits after too many blows to the head in battle. Or else his fabrications may be a form of inherited madness. Amazing that none of the Fuentes and de Capdavilas was born an idiot, given how they married into each other’s families over the generations. The custom is yet more common among Spanish noble houses than it is here in England.”
Thank God there were no such deformities in our family, de Zamora had said. Or were there? Laurence had himself questioned de Zamora’s sanity. “Could you have married him, if your families had agreed?”
“They would never have agreed. My father abhorred him – that much of his story is true. And we were nearly as impoverished, on our side, after my father’s death. I am ashamed to confess that my mother would not have accepted a Protestant foreigner for a son-in-law had she not been desperate for money. Naturally Antonio was envious of your father’s wealth, and he was of the majority in Seville who deplored the match, though he pretended the opposite to your father.”
“Might he have been intimate with you, without your knowing? Could he have come into your chamber and drugged you, or … accosted you while you slept?”
She began to laugh. “You have been misled, I presume by your adventures with my less reputable countrywomen. Virtue was so treasured a commodity in young ladies of my rank that I could not receive any male above the age of fifteen unless my mother’s gentlewomen were inches from me. They guarded me and my sisters, day and night. Your father likened our courtship to besieging a fortress.”
Laurence laughed also, picturing the young Englishman, hat in hand, scaling the ramparts of some formidable Andalusian castle to win his Spanish princess. But then, unexpectedly, his eyes stung with tears. “I thought that if the story was true, it would explain why you … why you and I have always been at odds.”
The Licence of War Page 45
