Cromwell’s Blessing. Peter Ransley

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СКАЧАТЬ a strikingly beautiful woman with greenish eyes. With it was a partly folded letter in which I caught only the opening line: This is a true likeness of …

      ‘Quick!’

      I pulled out a flask and poured him a greenish liquid which smelt pleasantly of cinnamon. He swallowed some, spurted it out, mopped his face and took another sip or two, until the coughing gradually stopped. I moved to return the flask, but he stopped me and did so himself. I had disturbed the miniature so it was on the edge of the cupboard shelf. When he moved away, the miniature was no longer there. It was a clumsy surreptitious movement, and for a moment he did not meet my eyes. He looked almost human for a moment. Surely, I thought, he’s not fallen in love. At his age! The idea brought a smile to my face. It was wiped off immediately when he rounded on me.

      ‘I don’t know what you have to smile about. You have no idea what you’ve done! The informant who was going to tell me what Holles is up to is Sir Lewis Challoner.’

      It was a world upside down in this room too, where nothing was as it seemed.

      ‘You sent me there to keep the army under control,’ I protested. ‘How could I know there was anything else going on!’

      ‘Just so, just so,’ he conceded. ‘I should have told you. But I could not afford to trust you. You and your damned scruples. Your radical views. You might have told anybody! I thought that your desire to be an MP would keep you in check. But now – now, I can’t afford not to trust you.’

      He began coughing again and drank more cordial before he told me that Challoner had been planning to meet him, until the incident with Scogman.

      ‘Challoner knows Holles’s plans. He should do. He’s part of them. Why do you think there is so much trouble between the people and the army in Essex? Challoner is fomenting it.’

      ‘Why should he tell you Holles’s plans? He hates Cromwell.’

      ‘He loves land more.’

      Everything fell into place. I remembered Challoner’s sudden burst of friendliness, his winks and slaps on the back as he rhapsodised about the beauty of the countryside.

      ‘The farm, you mean.’

      ‘Oh, more than that. The estate Parliament seized. I was negotiating to sell it on favourable terms if he came over to us.’

      I winced. ‘And I thought his friendliness was because of my diplomacy.’

      ‘Diplomacy?’ He laughed. He patted the bundle of papers he had taken from the drawer. ‘This is the real diplomacy, Tom. Forget all this nonsense about being an MP. MPs are rhetorical froth. I want you to actually do something. You must apologise.’

      I did not think I was hearing him correctly. ‘Apologise?’

      ‘To Sir Lewis. You made him a laughing stock.’

      ‘You expect me to crawl to that man?’

      ‘It is a matter of honour to him.’

      ‘It is a matter of honour to me! Or do you think I have no honour because of where I come from?’

      He locked his hands together, rested his chin on them and gave me a long stare before opening the file. Whether he got it by money or extortion I had no idea. A creeping sense of unease began to fill me as he read some reports and showed me others, concealing names. There were greasy scraps of paper about secret meetings between Holles and the Governor of the Tower, details of armouries and the strength of soldiers guarding them, which, Lord Stonehouse claimed, had been seized from a spy of Holles. How much was true, how much fabrication, and how much distorted by his own fears, I did not know. But, in a voice growing hoarse with speaking, it was what he said next, in a dead, tired, matter-of-fact tone, that chilled me.

      ‘If there is a coup, Cromwell will be removed. I will be in the Tower. So will you. At the right time there will probably be trumped-up charges. We will be lucky to escape execution. What would happen to your little son, Luke, my grandson, I do not know.’

      His voice petered out. He looked as exhausted as he had been lively earlier, his eyes half-hooded. It was so quiet I could hear a distant hawker cry, and the crackling of the coals in the fireplace. He put the papers away, the keys rattling as he double-locked the drawer, a faint echo of the gloomy litany of sound in the corridors of the Tower where I had once visited a pamphleteer imprisoned for sedition. If there was any chance he was right, what did my honour matter? But then the rattle of those keys he always carried brought back Scogman, in chains, dragged by Stalker’s horse, stumbling, falling, dragged from lane to ditch and back again.

      ‘I will not apologise to that man.’

      ‘You will do as I say!’

      I said nothing.

      ‘Get out.’

      He began coughing again, knocking the glass of cordial over. I went to help him, but he reacted so violently and was so red in the face that, fearing I was doing more harm than good, I went for Mr Cole.

       6

      Anne’s reaction was almost as violent as Lord Stonehouse’s – I had promised to remain on good terms, what if Lord Stonehouse was right, what would happen to us? I told her about the miniature he had concealed, to divert her from fears about the coup, but it only added fresh ones. Who was this woman? This is a true likeness. Wasn’t that the sort of language people used when they were setting up a meeting with a view to marriage. What would happen to us if …

      I got no sleep that night. Lord Stonehouse was old, cantankerous, suspicious to the point of madness, but what if he was right about the coup?

      The fears gradually receded with daylight. I was reassured when I learned a week later that Cromwell had recovered and returned to the House. I wrote to him, in the hope that he might offer me some position. To prepare for an interview, I saw my tailor, Mr Pepys.

      It is humiliating to discover from your tailor you have no money. I was careful with my allowance from Lord Stonehouse, and realised he had stopped it. I could feel myself going a deep red. Mr Pepys was very delicate about it. No doubt Queen Street had made some error? He would happily have made me the new suit I craved for, but I knew he had a large family to support, including the expenses of his son Samuel at St Paul’s, and I would not go into debt with him.

      It was even worse telling Anne.

      ‘And what do we live on?’ she said.

      ‘My army pay.’

      ‘And when do we get that?’

      I did not know. Negotiations were dragging on in Parliament. I had read that Cromwell, still too busy to see me, said the New Model Army would lay down its arms when Parliament commanded it to do so. That did not sound like a political crisis.

      What upset me most was that Adams, our ostler, was taken back to Queen Street by Lord Stonehouse. Luke moped for the loss of his old friend. But he had a habit of inventing creatures of fancy, sometimes talking to Adams as if he was still there. One day Luke cried that he liked СКАЧАТЬ