Treason's Daughter (10 page)

Her father stirs and settles again, and she takes up a blanket and tucks it round his outstretched legs. The effort of flogging the business through the weakening of the City's finances is telling on him. He looks old, worn.

She picks up a tract: ‘The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ'. She notes, with a thrill, that it is written by a woman, Katherine Chidley. Chidley opens with an apology for being ill-educated and female, and yet presuming to write of the State and the Church. She lays out her argument with a beguiling simplicity. It is God who grants the right to worship and petition, not Government. The state church may be the ‘King's Chappel' but it is not the ‘Lord's House'. The Lord's House may be found in separatist congregations, meeting in private houses, anywhere with humble souls and open hearts.

And in those houses, thinks Hen, the women have the right to write petitions, such as this one, and even to preach.

Women have spiritual equality before God, Chidley implies. The thought is intoxicating. Hen dwells on it, turning the proposition over in her mind. She can understand why such a notion would be viewed with fear and suspicion. But is it not true, she asks herself, that the simplest, truest ideas are the ones that make their opponents most afraid?

The door opens, and her grandmother walks in. It is a rare occurrence to see her here, and Hen jumps to her feet. She can see Nurse hovering behind her, and a sudden dread takes hold of her.

Grandmother surveys the scene. Hen is dishevelled, ink spattering her like mud; Challoner is snoring, surrounded by papers piled high on each other in precarious stacks. Grandmother holds out her hand and Hen places the Chidley pamphlet in it. Grandmother reads the cover.

‘Henrietta, this is by a woman.'

‘Yes.'

Grandmother's fist clenches round the paper, scrunching it tight.

‘Christ have mercy on us.'

‘But you would like what she says, Grandmother. That the state can have no monopoly on conscience.'

‘Henrietta, she is a
woman
.' The word, loud and fierce, brings Challoner spluttering to wakefulness.

‘Hey, hey,' he cries, as he sees Henrietta's face, flushed and defiant, facing her grandmother's tight-lipped rage.

‘Richard. This is your work. I come here to find my granddaughter, my daughter's daughter, reading this
filth
, corrupting her young mind with this
nonsense
.'

It is an age since Henrietta has seen Grandmother roused to anger. There is terrifying power in one so small, yet so filled with righteousness.

‘Come now. Henrietta is sensible enough.'

‘For what, pray? To do your work? To read this madwoman's ravings? There are women preaching in this city as we stand here, defying the Lord and their place in the world to stand like harlots in rooms full of men, letting the whore of Babylon enter them. Is that what you want for your daughter? To be the devil's handmaiden? Is that what you want?'

The spittle flies from her furious mouth. ‘The devil is at work in this house. The devil. And he is tempting my Henrietta, my child, with your connivance, you vile, drink-soaked, pox-riddled fool!'

She grips the table as if the force of her anger, and the shock of her language, will overwhelm her. Hen and her father stand speechless in the onslaught. They look at each other helplessly.

‘And you brought that boy into this house! That creeping boy who talks of nothing but stars, as if he can question the Lord's creation. As if there cannot be perfection without understanding. As if it is not enough to know that His ways are perfect and beyond our reach. Idiot boy. You know, I suppose that the girl meets him in secret?'

Oh Lord, thinks Hen, as she sees her father's face change. Oh Lord, help me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HE CRUNCH AND THUNDER OF THE CARRIAGE AND HOOVES
brings the family to the door, where they peer into the darkness trying to make out their visitors. Calls this late bring bad news: reasons to be fearful. Out here, by this isolated house under a vast winter sky, the horses' laboured breath and their hooves raking the stones echo in the silence. Their breath billows in moonlit clouds. There is a shriek, suddenly, as Hen steps down, and Anne darts out from behind the bulky form of her father to give her cousin a tumultuous welcome.

They embrace, and Hen fights hard not to cry again.

‘Many apologies, Aunt Martha, Uncle Robert, for coming unexpectedly like this,' she says, Anne's arm round her waist. ‘This is Mrs Wainwright, who was, is, my nurse,' she says over the questions they all fire at her, from the little ones up.

Nurse drops into a fat bob of greeting.

They are ushered through into the hall. Anne looks into her face in the light of the fire.

‘Hen! What has happened?'

‘Am I that haggard, honey? No one is dead, nor ill,' she says,
to allay the fears manifested in the anxious faces surrounding her.

She hands over the letter to Robert Challoner.

‘I would explain, sir, but it would be better, I think, from my father.'

He takes the letter. ‘I will read it directly,' he says. ‘Martha, find our travellers some food.'

They are taken into the kitchen, fussed over, and fed bread and cheese. Warm spiced wine appears. Hen endeavours to tell Anne with her eyes alone that the bedroom will serve as her confessional. But Anne fails to pick this up, and pesters her with questions, which Hen wearily bats away.

‘Miss Henrietta, the poor lamb, is in trouble with her father,' says Nurse, all tender solicitude. ‘Not her fault, but that boy's, I told the master, but he was in too much of a rage to pay me any heed.'

Hen thinks about contesting the version of events, but finds that she can't be bothered. The faces around her are set in a masque, and a tediously predictable one at that: Martha all thin-lipped Disapproval; Anne all wide-eyed Enthusiasm, and the cook all Anger, on whose behalf Hen can't quite make out. And all the while, Nurse's fat face in the corner, dwelling on the triumph of her timing.

Hen just wants to be alone. Before her uncle comes back from his study, she escapes upstairs, pleading exhaustion from the journey. Anne comes with her, simmering with questions. Was it Will? What happened? Will there be fighting? What happens now? Hen stammers out some unsatisfactory answers, aware that she is disappointing her cousin. This is a moment of high drama, the disgraced cousin arriving from London in the middle of the
night, and Hen knows she is failing to play her part. Her aunt expects contrition, and her cousin high melodrama and romantic gestures; and all Hen can provide is taciturn stonewalling.

The discord between the cousins is tangible when they wake up, and remains so in the days that pass. Hen cannot shake off her misery, and she finds Anne's eagerness to share in the drama wearing. She pines for her house, and her library, and Will, of course. But most of all she misses her father's good opinion.

‘It's not the loving I mind,' he had said, bundling her into the carriage. ‘I mind the lying.'

This house, which the year before had seemed such a paradise, seems now to be a prison. With short days and long nights to fill, and dismal dirty weather keeping them indoors, the walls begin to press in. Oxford is just over the horizon, close enough for her uncle to trot over on his horse for a day's business. Yet out here, they can scarcely see another house.

She feels isolated and trapped. She misses her pamphlets and petitions, the sense of all the tumult of political London piling on her floor to be dissected and discussed. As the first Wednesday of her exile arrives, she awakes almost crushed by the weight of her misery. Does Will know she is not coming? Will he sit in the courtyard anyway, just hoping? She lies in bed, dreaming of how the day could have been and thinking of how the day will be. She will go downstairs for breakfast to find Martha and Robert not talking, with the littleys gabbling in the space their parents leave, and Anne irritably shushing them. Martha is pregnant
again – she looks tired, worn. She is more irascible than ever.

After breakfast, Hen will ask her uncle for permission to use his library, as she does every day, only to be told, every day, that he believes unfettered reading is bad for female minds. He will leave the last half of the sentence unformed: look how you turned out. But they will both stand looking at each other for as long as the phrase would take to be spoken aloud.

So, somehow, she will fill the long morning. Embroidery, perhaps. At least when the needle pokes into her thumb, she feels something. She will hear, she knows, laughter from the corner, where Nurse and Aunt Martha sit plying needles. They have found an unexpected sympathy with each other; an answering sourness in each other's soul, Hen thinks.

Perhaps, if the rain lets up, they will go gathering winter greenery, for Christmas approaches and the house remains undecked. At least that would be a form of escape, particularly if she can lose herself from the others, and find some space to be alone.

Dinner will come, and a picking over of the lives of neighbours, which substitutes for conversation here. How Mr Such-and-Such is promised to the daughter of Mr So-and-So, yet the fathers are falling out over the king's cause. Or how young Fellow-me-lad, you know, him with the ginger hair and the nose like a parsnip, wants to go and be a soldier, yet his father would prefer him to be a parson. A parson!

Hen, who has not met the neighbours, and cares even less about their calling than the secrets of their hearts, will be silent as she eats, knowing that she casts a pall on the table and not caring. The afternoon and evening will stretch ahead, interminable.
Murdering time slowly until bread, cheese and a posset signal bed, and at least the comfort of silence and dreams.

Hen turns over into her blanket, and imagines standing under a kissing bush with Will, his hand cupping her cheek, and the frost turning his nose a comic red.

She will have to get up soon and face it, the unbelievable, unbearable boredom. She feels like her limbs are atrophying, stuck inside here. Perhaps, she thinks, hell is not fire as we are taught, but an eternity spent sitting in a cold, whitewashed room, with nothing to read and the same conversations about strangers' tedious lives playing again and again.

Eventually she rises, and the day plays out as she thought it would, and it is only by pushing her nails deep into her palms that she can stop herself crying out at dinner: ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!'

Christmas comes, and Hen forces herself to be jovial. She is aided, in part, by the arrival of Mathew, her cousin, home from his master's lodgings in Oxford. He is Ned's age, some three years older than Henrietta, and apprenticed to a wine merchant. Mathew acts like a boy liberated from confinement, all jests and merriment. He is cosseted by Martha, softer than Hen has ever seen her, and followed around by the adoring littleys.

Hen finds that the sunnier she pretends to be, the sunnier she feels. Anne is less cloying too, with Mathew around, and they recover some of their old intimacy. On Christmas Eve, the family gathers in the hall, wrapped and muffled against the
cold. Robert holds a bowl of cider, spiked with toast, and they process with mock formality out to the orchard to wassail the apple trees. Robert places toast on the branches of the trees, and pours the cider into the roots, while Mathew sings a song with such exaggerated lack of melody that Hen finds herself laughing along with the others.

She feels cheerier for the laughter, and grateful to Mathew. Back in the house, warm spiced cider brings the colour to their cheeks. Her head aswim, Hen excuses herself to find the pot. In the hall, Mathew accosts her under the kissing bush, grabbing at her arm.

‘Now, cuz, a kiss,' he says.

She laughs. ‘Not if there were a hundred bushes. Kiss Anne.'

‘Can you make a fellow kiss his own sister at Christmas?'

‘One on the cheek, then, for the season's sake.'

He pulls her in and kisses her on the cheek – a great, boozy smack.

‘Now another, and this on the lips, cuz.'

‘No, Mathew, one is your limit.'

She tries to pull away, but he grips her arm tighter.

‘Mathew, let go. You're hurting me.'

‘A kiss, a kiss! My kingdom for a kiss!' He uses his comic song voice again, but this time, Hen does not smile.

‘So serious, cuz. Shall I take my kiss, then?'

‘No!' she says as he leans into her and presses his lips to hers. She bites down on his lip, and he pulls back, letting go of her arm and swearing.

‘You pulled blood,' he says, wiping it from his lip and looking down at his reddened palm, astonished.

‘You deserved it.' Hen is trembling, rage and fright strangely mingling.

‘I heard tell you weren't so damn choosy about who kissed you in London.'

She runs up the stairs, chased by the sound of carols.

28 December 1641

Darling Hen
,

You will be delighted to know I am in disgrace as much as you. We have always shared, you and I, and I thought it only fair that I should have Grandmother bleating at me, and Father furious with me, and the house all in a bedlam-taking and your Sam the villain
.

For, you see, I slipped out with the 'prentice boys, and joined the riots in Westminster. And great fun it was, Hen, though if I see you in company with Father, I shall play the Contrite Sinner and claim it was ruffians and madmen setting themselves up in opposition to the king's choice of Lunsford as lieutenant of the Tower
.

See, the word went round the taverns and the tabernacles alike that Lunsford, a notorious scoundrel, was in league with the French, and meant to storm our city, placing the whore of Rome as master of our souls. The Commons agreed with us that Lunsford must be removed from his post, before he could set London to flames with his popery, but the MPs' attempts to rid London of his popish plottery were foiled by the bishops and the king's peers, who voted down the MPs' good intentions
.

We, not standing for that, rose up and marched to Westminster. ‘No bishops!' we shouted. ‘No popish lords!' It got a
bit rough then, Hen, and they do say the Archbishop of York had his gown torn, and was only saved by Captain David Hyde, a fierce fellow of the Northern Armies, who called us ‘Roundheads'. Was the first time I heard the term, Hen, but 'tis everywhere used against us now, just as we call Hyde and his like ‘Cavaliers'. We sling them about, Hen, but no one knows who coined the terms. Nonetheless, I shall count myself a Roundhead and proud, by the Lord's blessing. Some take against being called Roundhead, Hen, but I and some of my fellows have cropped our hair even closer about the ears, to better earn the name. Father didn't like it – he's growing his down about his ears. With such things we are known now, hey, Hen?

So, Chalk was with me, arm to arm in the throng, and Robert Birch, though not his brother Tom nor Cheese. Cheese claimed to love the bishops, when Chalk and I sought him out to join us. Rot. He loves his own skin too much, not theirs. Our Ned was in the crowd, I was told, though I don't think Father knows it, so play the mummer if he asks
.

So, there we are, shouting and making a fine racket, when Lunsford, the man himself, arrives, leading an armed band of Cavaliers. A plot, we think! A damned papist plot, and here the evidence in front of us. Now we had no arms, Hen, and these fellows all carrying rapiers. So Chalk and I ducked and made to run, but the Cavalier sods had closed the doors behind us. We could only go further into Westminster Hall
.

The Cavaliers behind us, swords aloft, we set to tearing up the floor for bats and, waving these mightily, we ran at Lunsford, and he ran away! What a splendid victory it was, Hen! My hands are torn with splinters. Noble wounds, I count them
.