Alan conveyed this message to the brothers who had kept very quiet all day, partly because they did not want to pester their present rescuer and partly because Thomas, who had borne the earlier excitement and danger with great fortitude using his good arm and not complaining when the small boat’s movement jarred his wounded shoulder, had fainted away on being helped into the drifter. Alan had attended to him and had quickly found his wound had begun to bleed again. He wished he had seen to it before they set out, but at least there was sea water in plenty to cleanse it again and an assortment of reasonably clean linen pieces among the clothes of the three gentlemen to make a fresh dressing, aided by ship’s tow to pad it for comfort. Alan fixed the arm in a sling made from the sash Thomas had worn at his waist. He had taken a hot drink and then slept, on and off, for most of the day, with James dozing beside him.
Towards nightfall the skipper called Alan to him. They were now out of sight of land with the horizon a circle round them and no other vessel in sight. The skipper had lighted a hurricane lantern which he had hung from the stay which passed between his short mizzen mast and the poop. He was still drifting, the great net dragging lazily from the stern. His three crew, members of his family, were asleep under the half-decked part of the bows. A gentle breeze filled the short sail on the mizzen; the mainsail was down but bunched and tied loosely. Silas was nowhere to be seen.
‘Young sir,’ the skipper said. ‘I think you would leave the country. You and those two cavaliers.’
He spoke the word with grim disdain, which made Alan flush.
‘They have fought for the King these many years,’ he said. ‘They would fight for his son, to restore him his throne.’
‘But chose a wrong time. Now we shall all suffer for it.’
‘They did not choose the time. Thomas suffers sorely already.’
The skipper looked at him with interest and liking.
‘You must study to heal wounds, I think, young sir.’
‘I would become a physician as well.’
The skipper was plainly impressed.
‘When Silas told me where you had gone and what had befallen them and you both, I was certain we had heard the end of you. Those mad creatures they call Diggers –’
‘Are simple good folk who lack the religion they look for, since it hath been put down. So they make their own, after the rule of our Lord Jesus Christ. They generally fail or are dispersed or even destroyed. These have prospered, solely because they have taken to the sea.’
‘I was astonished they showed such skill in coming alongside me.’
The skipper stopped speaking. He pointed towards the south, but Alan could see nothing new there.
‘If that mast out yonder comes our way, it may be I can arrange a passage for you,’ he said.
‘All four of us?’ Alan asked. He was careful to show no surprise until he heard more.
The skipper’s mouth widened in a grin like Silas’s own manifestation of mirth.
‘I take it you pay for your passage?’ he said.
‘How much?’
Alan made no move to disclose his purse. He had watched his father’s bargaining upon several occasions. The soldier knew how to hire himself as well as others. He kept his money close until the terms were settled.
So it was now. As darkness fell and the other ship, after growing from masthead to sail, to hull, to brigantine, faded to a row of lights as the sky darkened, Alan and the skipper progressed from number to number, from sum to sum and settled, subject to the oncomer’s approval, upon am amount that should satisfy them all round.
Silas joined them during this period but did not interfere. It was he, however, who suggested that Alan should give him the purse to hold after they had closed the larger vessel. Silas would make the final share-out.
Alan then went away to tell his cousins what he had done and to have them shade him from view while he slit the seam of his belt to get out the coins he had carried from Oxford.
Before dawn the travellers had transferred once more, to the deck of the Dutch brig and the comfortable cabin where Thomas could stretch out on a bunk with cushions to prop his shoulder instead of the sash. Alan massaged his hand and forearm, cramped by the long hours in the drifter. He changed the outer dressings on the wound but he dared not do more, for the patient was flushed and restless and he feared greatly for the future.
And rightly so. Thomas was in a high fever and delirious before the next night. There were times when they all despaired of his life. Alan was forced to inspect the wound, warned, if only by the foetid smell of it, that there would be greater danger in not doing so. He found decaying flesh and splinters of bone from the wrecked shoulder blade and torn shoulder muscle. But there was no further haemorrhage and when five days later the brigantine came into harbour at Ijmuiden, the fever had nearly subsided and the gaping wound was beginning to close in at the sides.
Within a week from their landing, after they had moved to Amsterdam, messages had reached Colonel Ogilvy, who came promptly to make arrangements for his cousins. The Dutch surgeon who was now attending Thomas was full of praise for Alan.
‘Having no exact knowledge he hath used an excellent common sense,’ he told the colonel. The man is strong and in his prime, but to survive that constant removal from place to place is a miracle.’
Alone with his son Colonel Ogilvy was able to tell him that the King was now staying with his sister, the widowed Princess of Orange, at Spa in the Rhineland. He was living on a small allowance from his potential allies and was beginning to gather about him an increased number of emigrant followers.
‘Whom he sees as a future army,’ the colonel said, sighing. ‘But they are far from any promise of that. I will take James to him, but Thomas must stay here. I think you should go back to Oxford at once. Try to persuade my Uncle Richard to come over to be with him. He must now be in danger again from George Leslie and you too, perhaps, from the same source.’
Alan explained his position in Oxford. He spoke with admiration and respect of Warden Wilkins and the men of science about him, Colonel Ogilvy smiled grimly.
‘Do not let His Majesty hear such words,’ he said.
‘How can I, sir, since I go back to England on your orders?’
Two weeks later Alan was again in London, landed from a Danish ship that had picked him up from The Hague and put him down from a ship’s boat off the Isle of Thanet.
He went to the house in Paternoster Row, carrying a letter, from his father to Mistress Leslie. She was delighted to see him but he told her nothing of his recent adventures, only that his father had sent for him, that two of Doctor Richard Ogilvy’s sons had reached Holland and wished their father to join them and that he was on his way back to Oxford with that message.
He longed to ask for news of the Phillips family, but though he approached the subject several times Mistress Leslie gave him no encouragement. This he discovered was deliberate when she said to him the next morning, ‘Alan, I must know if you will be here this day or if you will be gone by noon, because I have Mistress Phillips and Susan bidden to take dinner with me and perhaps you would wish to meet them again and perhaps you would not.’
She said this with laughter in her eyes but in a very demure voice. Alan blushed hotly.
‘I think you know well I have a great regard for that family, though I cannot be of Master Phillips’s opinions,’ he said stiffly, and then gave up the struggle to preserve his dignity and agreed that nothing would please him more than to see Mistress Phillips and her daughter, whose beauty and charm had never left his mind since he had last seen her in that house.
It was a halting, conventional speech in the gallant manner. Alan had never attempted such an artificial invention before in his life and Mistress Leslie regarded him with pity and amusement, but no unkindness.
‘Nay, Alan,’ she said. ‘Tell me you love the wench an you will. That is honest and true, I think. Nor would Mistress Phillips look hardly upon you, being a sort of
cousin. And as for Master Phillips –’
‘As for politics,’ Alan cried angrily, ‘I have lived too much abroad to be aware of our English quarrels when I was a child Or get embroiled in them as I grew up. I find I owe allegiance to our young King Charles, who is clever and wise and patient and kind.’
‘But self-willed and self-indulgent and lazy, they say,’ Mistress Leslie protested.
‘When there is ought for him to do that can truly engage him, he concerns himself fully in the matter,’ Alan answered. ‘He loves pleasure, he is very active. I cannot see harm in that. He attracts affection.’
‘Particularly the affection of women. Would you model yourself upon his young Majesty’s example?’
Alan, reasonable as always, even where his feelings were concerned, laughed aloud but made no answer in words to his kind hostess.
Mistress Phillips and her daughter came the next day to Paternoster Row. It was two years since they had met Alan upon the occasion of his brief arrest and as swift release. Susan found Alan broader, handsomer, far more assured. He thought her lovelier than ever. Mistress Phillips was most interested to hear that he had been abroad to see his family and that he had found her two youngest brothers in Holland, from where they proposed to join the King in exile.
‘I have a letter to bring to the Doctor from James,’ Alan told her. ‘They would have him join them, since they cannot now return home.’
‘I think he will refuse,’ she answered. ‘He hath never wished to live since my mother died. Yet when we were young we were such a great and happy family.’
She went on in this strain for a time, until Mistress Leslie persuaded her to move to her little parlour upstairs and sent the two young people out into the garden.
Susan was shy, but Alan had lived an undergraduate life in Oxford for long enough to manage a conversation with a young woman to his advantage, apart from wishing to stay with her as long as possible. She got over her shyness very easily in his company, finding as she had before that their minds matched without difficulty upon most topics, so that in the end Alan exclaimed, ‘How senseless it is that our two families should be considered enemies, as if we were not related. That poor bitter soul, George Leslie, still seeks to ruin us both, I on account of my father’s success, and you because your mother preferred your father to himself. Yet we are friends, are we not, Mistress Susan? True friends, I would have us and more than friends.’
They had come to the side wall of the small garden, near the house, out of sight of the rounded window of the parlour upstairs. Lifting her right hand in his Alan kissed it upon the back and then, more lingeringly, upon the palm.
‘I love you, Susan,’ he said. ‘I dare tell you so, for the times are dangerous and we shall not know when we may meet again or what will happen to either of us. I go to Oxford tomorrow. After that, your grandfather will decide.’
She looked up at him with honest, glowing pleasure.
‘I have loved you since we first met in this garden,’ she said. ‘But we must not tell my father yet. He would not forgive you for speaking to me of love in times such as these. Perhaps not at all. He is a very strict puritan, though my mother is not.’
Alan’s mind and heart alike told him her father was wrong, sadly, perversely wrong. But he understood why the cloth maker had wished to marry the scholar’s daughter. Doctor Ogilvy’s wife, Celia, had been just such another as Cynthia, her daughter, and now again her grand-daughter, Susan. The same clear beauty, the same gentle, honest, brave spirit. He understood and he was prepared to wait.
‘I will not approach him while the country lies under this oppression,’ he told her. ‘I think the people will not endure it for very long. Cromwell is hated upon all sides. The generals envy him and one another. The Levellers think he betrays their ideals. The common people miss their pleasures, their ale shops, their theatres, their church services. The loyalists want their king again.’
She heard him out, half laughing.
‘And you that swore you took no interest in politics,’ she scolded gently. ‘Tell me about the Lady Anne, your mother, and about the King’s Court and the great ladies he favours.’
‘I have not seen His Majesty since he left Paris,’ Alan answered. ‘But if the Doctor will go with me to his sons I may take up my post again in his household.’
He set out for Oxford again the next day and though Doctor Ogilvy was astonished and relieved to hear of his son’s narrow escape from death in the failure of the Penruddock rising, nothing Alan could say would persuade him to join them abroad. His house would be sequestered, he declared, if he was not there to be thrown into prison. That Leslie fiend would be at their throats to ruin them all if he got so much as a hint of, the whereabouts of Thomas and James. He thanked Alan for all he had done: he wished he could reward Silas, but that must be the end of the matter until the country rose in earnest. And that would not be in his own lifetime, he felt certain.
Chapter Fourteen
Though King Charles had no body of trained spies to equal in cunning and efficiency Master Thurloe’s organization based on London, he did manage to have news brought to him from England and Scotland whenever the indignant peoples there rose against the oppressor. Or this was how it was presented to him. To Cromwell the same news was given by Thurloe as yet another wicked rebellion against progress, law and order.
Colonel Ogilvy begged leave to present his cousin James, with excuses for his cousin Thomas. Leave was graciously granted for an audience.
‘We will have the full Council to attend it with us,’ Charles told Lord Clarendon. ‘We look to hear a true account of poor Penruddock’s failure and the whole progress of that calamity.’
‘The colonel’s son, Alan, brought them off with the help of some local gamekeeper or fisherman that went to Oxford, sent by his master, to bring help into the west country. Young Ogilvy obeyed the call.’
Charles frowned a little.
‘Our page, you mean? Who has not attended us this twelve month but sends me regular reports, very confidential, yet quite openly conveyed. We would like well to know what Thurloe thinks of them, what he concludes we must think of them, and how much Alan knows of Thurloe.’
‘Young Ogilvy has been well advised to stay in England and study at Oxford. He works well there and would follow the great Doctor Harvey in his researches in natural philosophy.’
Charles gave Lord Clarendon a quick glance and nod.
‘He hath gone back to his studies, they tell us, at his father’s orders.’
‘With Your Majesty’s approval that would appear the best way he may conduct himself at present. The colonel is here still under military orders, his family, apart from Alan, is with him. And now these two cousins.’
‘Who still wait for us to receive them. Pray fetch them in, my lord.’
Charles welcomed James Ogilvy graciously, with kind inquiries for his brother’s progress. Thomas was making a slow recovery, James told him. He went on, ‘We have been fortunate in having with us our dead friend’s personal servant, former gamekeeper, veteran soldier, sometime fisherman, master of many trades and known throughout the west country for his exploits.’
‘And named Silas, we have been told,’ Charles said, smiling. ‘We have had him recommended to us as one who can arrange a passage to England at short notice or a passage from there with little more delay.’
‘Indeed, sire, there is a regular trade in these passages with a number of ships of several nations. Silas left us to return to Devon, but comes again to make a full report to Your Majesty of how the people fared after Penruddock’s troops dispersed.’
Colonel Ogilvy was astonished by the arrogant tone of this speech. He saw the King’s face darken beyond its usual swarthiness and his black eyes sparkle in anger. James Ogilvy was past thirty and so considerably older than the King, but Charles was no longer the inexperienced young man he had been when he finally escaped from England after Worcester. He could not be approached as such.
> But with experience of misfortune had come patience. Charles controlled his anger while bringing the audience to a swift end, rather to James Ogilvy’s surprise, who thought he had enlightened the exile most profitably.
Enlightenment was on its way. From accustomed sources that brought news regularly to the King, he was told that Cromwell had been infuriated and alarmed both by a minor rebellion in Scotland easily put down by General Monck, now in charge of that province, and also by this latest mismanaged affair in the west. The country must settle, Cromwell swore: it was not enough to defeat rebellion when it broke out; it must not even appear. So he had the whole land divided into eleven regions, over each of which a major-general with effective troops was set. Their duty was to patrol, to inspect, to discipline, to subdue, to punish. The land was become a prison camp, the people groaned in misery.
‘The tyrant murderer acts as he would in conquest of a foreign land,’ Charles complained. ‘As he did in Ireland, in revenge because they would be loyal to my father. It will not advantage him. Already more than half his own army hates him. The landowners hate him. The churchmen deprived of their living hate him. The common people resent his severity.’
For some days the King nursed his distress, refusing all comfort in private and keeping aloof from the public entertainments his Court considered necessary for his welfare. Not that his Council devised expensive plays, masques or balls. They could not afford such things. The royal purse could not always provide enough food to satisfy a young man’s appetite, far less his pleasures. But Charles was gay by nature and his present depression was unusual. It came to the notice of his widowed sister, who in turn discussed it with their cousin, the Princess Sophia, youngest daughter of the still exiled Queen of Bohemia.
Mary, Princess of Orange, sent for her cousin, to consult her about Charles.
In the King's Absence Page 14
