Cromwell’s Blessing. Peter Ransley

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СКАЧАТЬ spoke. It was that time in the afternoon when people have just eaten, and are reluctant to get up from the table or the fireside. The stable yard was empty. Not even a dog appeared.

      He slid from the horse first, holding up his hand for the reins. I did not give them to him, nor look at him.

      ‘He would have killed you,’ he said.

      I could scarcely get the words out. ‘Only because you wouldn’t stop!’

      He spread out his hands. He looked far more vulnerable than I remembered. ‘You would have given me up.’

      ‘Yes. Yes. I would,’ I shouted.

      There was no sign of a stable boy. While I tethered the horse, Richard drifted aimlessly over to a neglected bowling alley at the corner of the yard. I remembered once losing my boots in a bet there. The Presbyterians, who condemned gambling, had closed it, along with shutting down the theatres. The wooden box with the bowls and jack had been broken into. Richard tossed the jack on to the green. It bumped through the overgrown grass to rest against a stone. He half-knelt and sent a bowl after it, curving it to knock away the stone and rest against the jack. He tossed a bowl to me. Dazed by what had happened, and the incongruity of the green, I flung the bowl down. It bounced crazily, before finishing up in the ditch. Richard pursed his lips and shook his head. In a burst of irritation I seized another bowl, adjusting the bias so it swung in, knocking away his bowl and rolling back nearer to the jack.

      He raised his eyebrows. ‘Not bad.’ He picked up another bowl. ‘I shall never get one like it,’ he said. ‘My sword, I mean. The balance was perfect. It was made in Bologna by Fabris himself –’

      Suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what had happened, I knocked the bowl from his hand. ‘You killed him. Cromwell’s soldier. You killed him. I work for Cromwell. Worked. Wanted to –’

      The words choked in my throat. All my hopes, all my ambitions, my future had disappeared with that one thrust of his sword.

      ‘No one would have recognised you. Not in that dark alley. The confusion.’

      I became incoherent, one word jamming into another. ‘They know who you are. You left your sword in him. They’ll work out I was with you. You killed him. You –’

      He put out a hand in a comforting, reassuring gesture. ‘He was one of the rabble, Tom.’

      I grabbed him by the doublet, tearing his collar, and drove him across the yard against the stable door. It was not just the speed of my attack that shocked him. Five years of war, including a period in the infantry, had given me a ferocity in hand-to-hand combat that he could not match. He was half the man without his sword. I was at the height of my strength, while he was in decline. I saw the realisation of this in his face, and the fear in his eyes when he found he could not release my grip as I held him with one hand and reached for my knife.

      I brought back the knife. ‘I am one of the rabble!’

      ‘Behind you,’ Richard said frantically.

      I almost laughed at him thinking I would fall for that one but, to be sure, kneed him in the groin and glanced round. A stable boy, knuckling his eyes, straw still sticking to his hair from where he had been sleeping, was gazing at us open-mouthed. When I had lived on coins given to me by gentlemen, a penny would buy a good loaf and my silence. Now it was nearer twopence. I held out sixpence.

      ‘You heard nothing.’

      His eyes bulged. He cupped his hand round his ear. ‘What, sir? I bin deaf as a post since birth, sir.’

      The coin disappeared into his pocket. Whistling, he took the horse to water. I pushed my dagger back into its scabbard, went to the pump and sluiced water over my face.

      Slowly, painfully, Richard straightened himself up. His right cheek was streaked with blood. ‘You fight like one of the rabble.’

      I pumped water over my handkerchief and walked across the yard towards him. Stone chips from the wall had scoured his cheek. One was still embedded in his lip. In the stable the boy murmured to the horse as he rubbed her down. Richard kept his eye on my dagger as I approached, and jumped as I held out the dripping handkerchief. He hesitated before taking, it, then wiped his face, watching me all the time, wincing as he dislodged the stone fragment from his lip.

      By some silent agreement, we said nothing more as we walked through the yard. Richard went into the inn first and I followed close at his heels, afraid he might make a bolt for it.

      The Pot was now patronised by a mixture of market traders, scriveners and pamphleteers who traded gossip over lamb pies at tables shut off from one another by high wooden stalls. It was as gloomy as night. What little light crept through the narrow windows was snuffed out by the smoke from ill-swept chimneys.

      We found a table cluttered with dirty plates and I bought sack for him and a small beer for myself. He looked disparagingly at the beer.

      ‘Keeping your wits about you?’

      I said nothing. Under the banter, when he ate a piece of fat from one of the dirty plates, I saw again the fear in his eyes when I had rammed him against the stable door. As he flirted with the serving maid, saying that if the lean of her mutton was as good as her fat he must have a leg of it, I scarcely took in how charming he was with women. I was still seeing the shock on his face when I drew the knife and he realised I was stronger than him. I would have been a fool to kill him. I had done something far better. I had killed the nightmare of my late childhood, the man who had hired men to kill me, terrifying me because they came out of the darkness, for no reason, like bad dreams. It was as if I had awoken from a long, disturbed sleep to see the nightmare had a paunch, with skin beginning to slacken into jowls, and that, although he was kissing the serving maid’s hand, she was looking at me.

      I could not believe I had been moved to tears by his letter. Anne was right. All I had to do was hand him over. What had happened made no difference. I had been colluding with him only to find out what his plans were. To take those plans to Cromwell would put Ireton’s nose out of joint and be a great feather in my cap. The maid served him his leg of mutton. As he tried to grab her again I gave her a smile of sympathy, which she returned with interest. He saw our glance. Again there was that moment of disorientation, of seeing himself in the mirror of other people’s eyes. Recovering, he fell on his mutton, declaring it the best he had ever tasted. And the raisin and gooseberry sauce!

      He swallowed half of a second glass of sack. ‘Come. Our first meal together and you are not eating?’

      I told him my only appetite was to know what he was doing in London. All the false joviality left him. He jumped up, glancing at the nearby stalls. The only diner in sight was asleep, and the maid was throwing scraps from his plate to a dog. ‘Serving my King,’ he said. ‘Cromwell is planning to take the King from the Presbyterians and exile him.’

      I laughed. ‘Rubbish. Disobey Parliament? Cromwell would never do that.’

      We spoke across one another in an increasingly heated argument, laying bare our feelings about politics in a way we could not do about each other. I said passionately that Cromwell did not want to exile the King. The people wanted both King and Parliament. Richard thought Cromwell a great ogre, but I was as fervent about Cromwell as he was about the King. The arguments got nowhere, petering out into an exhausted silence. Neither of us had talked in any depth before to someone on the opposite side and, in spite of our violently different opinions, they drew us closer in a way I would never have СКАЧАТЬ