Tidelands Page 36

  “Red’s missing,” Alys said as Alinor climbed cautiously aboard, the ferry rocking on the ebbing tide. “He didn’t come out to the pier this morning and he wasn’t in his corner at noon.”

  “Yes, I know,” Alinor spoke unguardedly. “Poor Red. I said good-bye to him this morning.”

  “You knew the dog would go missing?” the farmer’s wife demanded. “How did you know?”

  “She didn’t know,” Alys interrupted rudely. “It’s just an old dog and he was lazy getting up this morning. She didn’t know.”

  Alinor looked up, surprised at Alys’s harsh tone.

  “Nobody could know such a thing,” Alys ruled.

  The farmer’s wife remarked that sometimes she had premonitions herself, and her mother had been a terrible one for dreaming. “And of course your grandma had the sight,” she reminded Alys.

  “Not us,” Alys declared roundly, bringing the ferry to the pier as Alinor got off, and turned to help the woman off the ferry. “We don’t believe in stuff like that. Good night!” she called. “See you tomorrow.”

  “I did know about Red,” Alinor remarked mildly as Alys tied the ferry up and came up the steps.

  “I know you did; but we can’t say things like that,” Alys said abruptly. “Not even to Mrs. Bellman. Anyway, I suppose he’s under a hedge somewhere,” she said.

  “We’ll look,” Alinor promised her. “And I have an egg for your tea. A dove egg.”

  “Lord, she exceeded herself!” Alys exclaimed. “How lucky are we? Two tiny eggs! She’s spoiling us. You go that way, I’ll go this. We’ll find him.”

  The dog was not far from the house. He had gone quietly, as wise old dogs do, to die alone. It was Alinor who found him, as she knew she would, curled as if he was asleep; but his coat was cool and his nose was cold and his eyes were shut.

  “The ground’s too hard for us to bury him,” Alys said. “What’ll we do? It doesn’t seem right to burn him, or put him on the midden.”

  “I’ll dig a hole in the soft mud of the mire,” Alinor said. “You go and start dinner. I won’t be long.”

  She took a shovel from the lean-to in the fruit garden and went out on one of the little shingle paths that led out into the deep mire. It would be flooded at high tide, but now, as the moon came up and the cold wind blew across the water, it was dry enough for her to walk along and to dig a deep hole in the soft mud at the side of the track.

  When the pit was broad enough and deep enough she took the stiffening body, which now seemed so small and light, and laid it in the bottom of the hole. She knew that Ned would ask her if his dog had been properly buried, and that he would trust her. She filled the grave with shingle from the path to keep the body deep under the moving silt of the harbor floor. “Good-bye, Red,” she said gently. “You’re a very good dog.”

  She shoveled a pile of silt and went to tamp it down when a glint of silver caught her eye, bright as a star in the dark night sky. She knelt down and found a tiny coin, shaved and thin but twinkling brightly in the mud. It was faerie gold, a coin from the old people, from the old days, with a crest on one side and a crown on the other, too rubbed and worn to be deciphered, too old to be recognized, too light to be valuable.

  “Thank you,” Alinor said to Red. She accepted without a second thought that this was his burial fee, which he had sent to her from the other side, a country as far away and as misty as the distant side of the mire. “God bless, good dog. Godspeed.”

  She put the coin in her pocket and the shovel over her shoulder, and she went heavily up the freezing shingle path to where the lights of the ferry-house gleamed over the cold waters.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 1649

  The two men went through the crowded streets, stepping over the dirty gutters in the cobbled ways, picking their way down muddy lanes till the great walls of the palace were before them and they could see the soldiers of the New Model Army on guard before the gates. There was a small crowd outside the gates, looking towards the gray carved stone walls and the snow on the slate roof.

  “Where is the king housed now?” James asked, keeping his voice down.

  “In St. James’s Palace. They’ve called a hundred and thirty-five judges to London to sit in a high court to try him. But I swear half of them won’t dare to come. And even if they do, he won’t answer to them. How are they even going to get him into court?”

  “But if they come, and if he answers—”

  The nameless man interrupted him. “He won’t,” he insisted. “By what rights can they summon him? You can’t summon a king. Nobody’s ever summoned a king. Would his father, King James, have come to the parliament whistle? Would Queen Elizabeth have trotted obediently along? No country in the world has ever called their king into a court. No English monarch has ever obeyed parliament.”

  James nodded; it was incredible that the conflict between king and parliament, which should have been resolved on the first battlefield, or at least at Newport, had come so quickly to this unimaginable state. “But suppose they do,” he said. “Have they named a day and a time?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I get the names of the judges?”

  “You can get the names of those who were called. But nobody knows who will come. They won’t know themselves. More than one will be sleepless tonight, trying to decide what he should do.”

  “Is it possible that none of them will come, and the trial collapse?”

  James’s guide spat into the frozen gutter. “The devil knows. It’s his idea, surely. But I would think Noll Cromwell will be there, wouldn’t you? And men who are faithful to him, and those that go beyond him?”

  “The trial is open to the public?”

  “Yes, but don’t think you can burst out of the crowd and save him. He’ll be so closely guarded, no one will get near him. They’ll be expecting a rescue attempt. They’ll take no risks.”

  “The best time to get him away would be when he comes from his rooms at St. James’s to here at Westminster.” James was thinking aloud. “Probably by barge . . .”

  The man ducked his head. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. And I have no opinion.”

  “I have none either,” James said. “I’m whistling in the dark. Let’s get the names of the judges.”

  TIDELANDS, JANUARY 1649

  At dawn, the late cold dawn of January, Alinor woke to hear the cracking of ice and the sound of horses splashing through the cold waters as a carriage skidded down the wadeway and forded the ebbing tide. She rubbed the frost flowers off the inside of her bedroom window and squinted to her left. In the half-light she could see the lumbering bulk of the Peachey carriage.

  “Alys! The Peachey carriage is going over the wadeway,” she said to the girl still sleeping in the bed behind her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Alys replied, unmoving. “He doesn’t pay.”

  “I wonder if Rob is with them. And where they’re going.”

  “To London, I expect, chasing after the king, like everyone else.”

  “They’ll have left Rob at the Priory then,” Alinor said. “Surely, they wouldn’t take him?”

  The rattle of the front door answered her. “That’ll be him now!” Alinor said gladly. She called down the ladder stairs: “Is that you, Rob?”

  “Aye, Mother,” he shouted cheerfully. “I’m to stay with you till Candlemas and then Mr. Tudeley is to take me to Chichester. I’m to go to Mr. Sharpe, the Chichester apothecary. My term starts with him then.”

  Alinor tied her shawl around her thickening waist, and climbed down the stair. She hugged Rob and stepped back to admire him. “I swear you’ve grown again.”

  “In the three weeks since Christmas Day?” he teased her.

  “You’re becoming a man,” she said. “Think of you going as an apprentice!”

  He dropped to his knee for her blessing and when he rose up he asked, “Have you breakfasted?”


  “Of course not. Alys isn’t even up yet. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving,” he said.

  “Sit down then and I’ll light the fire.” Alinor pressed him into the fireside chair, lifted the cover off the embers, and put the kindling driftwood and twigs on the red glow.

  “Is Sir William going to London about the king?” she asked.

  “Yes, he’s called to be a judge. He’s taking Walter on to Cambridge.”

  “Is there really to be a trial of the king?”

  “Everyone says so, but I don’t think Sir William’ll attend the court. He’s going to see if he can be excused.”

  “How will the king get a fair hearing if the only men who judge him are parliament men?” Alys asked, coming down the stairs.

  “That’s it,” Rob said. “He won’t.”

  “He won’t?” repeated Alinor.

  “He won’t get a fair hearing,” Rob predicted. “That’s what Sir William says. If they can get him into trial at all, there’ll be no justice for him.”

  “So the royalists won’t be there?” Alinor asked, thinking of James.

  “They’ll stay away.”

  LONDON, JANUARY 1649

  James, reading the list of the men who had been called as judges, saw Sir William’s name, and went, his hat pulled low over his face, to the Golden Cross, at Charing Cross, the inn that the Sussex gentry favored on their trips to London. The landlord, rushed by the arrival of so many country gentlemen, shouted, “Yes! He’s upstairs in the private sitting room!” and went by without looking twice at James or asking for a name. James was able to go up the stairs and tap at the door without anyone noticing him.

  “God bless,” Sir William said shortly as James came in. “I didn’t think to see you here.” He glanced at the closed door. “You’re sure you’ve not been followed? These are terrible times. Every man is a spy.”

  “I am certain that I’m not being followed. I pass as a French tutor on this trip, and I’m not visiting any of our old friends. I’m only gathering news on the streets. His wife and her friends—you know who I mean—want to know what’s happening.”

  “Damned if anyone knows, do they?” Sir William asked. “Oh, sit down, sit down, we’ll have a glass of something. Walter’s out with my steward, seeing the sights. We’re alone.”

  “Did you bring Robert Reekie with you?”

  “No, left the lad at Sealsea Island with his mother.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No,” Sir William said, surprised at the question. “No, why?”

  “Nothing,” James tried to recover. “I just hoped that she didn’t take my sickness.”

  “I don’t think so. I’d have heard.” Sir William opened the door and shouted down the stairs for a bottle of red wine and two glasses. “Now,” he said, closing the door carefully, “d’you know what’s going to happen to the king?”

  “I think only one man knows, and that’s Cromwell,” James replied. “He’s behind it all. And unless someone does something to stop him, I think it’ll all go his way.”

  “He’s a fair man, Cromwell. He wouldn’t be unjust.”

  “He thinks this is justice. And he’s got to satisfy the army, as well as the parliament.”

  “Can he muster enough judges to find the king guilty?”

  James nodded. “That must be his intention. He’s called in more than a hundred gentlemen. Won’t you serve?”

  “How can I? As far as anyone knows, I’ve turned my coat. I’m a parliament man now. I’ve paid my fine and promised my son that his inheritance is safe. I can’t now turn again and join the king’s side. I’ve got too much to lose.”

  A rap on the door was followed by the taproom boy with a bottle of wine and two glasses. The men were silent as he put the glasses and bottle on the table and went out again.

  “But what if they find him guilty?” James asked quietly, checking that the door was shut.

  “Of what?” Sir William scoffed. “And then what? Exile him? I doubt the French would want him; the Scots handed him back last time. Lock him up somewhere? Back to Carisbrooke Castle? How does that solve the mire that they’re stuck in? They’ve fought him for six years and had him under arrest for two—they need to change everything, if they want to change anything at all.”

  “I don’t know,” James said, taking a glass of wine. “I really don’t know.”

  Sir William held up his glass. “His Majesty the king,” he said very quietly, and the two men put their glasses together and then drank. It struck James that the toast was as quiet and as solemn as it would be at a wake.

  “Sir, I am sure that nobody knows what will happen but Cromwell. But clearly he is planning a trial and he must be hoping for a finding of guilt. Why else do it?”

  “The trial will never happen,” Sir William predicted stoutly. “And I shan’t be part of it. I won’t even witness it. I’m taking Walter to Cambridge to start the Lent term. I won’t witness and I won’t judge on it. And no good man will witness and judge, so they won’t get their trial, for they won’t get their commissioners. No Englishman can try his king. You’d do better to come to Cambridge with us and teach Walter there.”

  “I have to stay,” James said quietly. “His wife and her friends sent me to report.”

  “You’ll have nothing to report,” Sir William assured him. “It’ll not come to that. But come to me when it’s all over. Come to the Priory before you go abroad again?”

  James hesitated, thinking of his promise to his mother not to go to Alinor. “I am bound to go straight back to my seminary.”

  “You can leave from the tide-mill quay,” Sir William assured him. “You can get a French-bound coaster from there, if you want to come for a visit?”

  “Yes,” James said. He longed to see Alinor. “I do.”

  James elbowed his way into Westminster Hall, paid a fee for a place in the stand so he could see over the heads of the halberdiers that lined a cleared square in the center of the hall. The vaulted ceiling echoed the noise as people pushed and argued and thrust themselves into the standing room. Above, in the galleries, people were taking their seats and urging each other to move up to make space on the benches. In the center of the cleared space was a great table draped in a tapestry, with a sword and a mace mounted before the Lord President of the court. Behind him were benches of judges, sixty-eight of them, gravely sitting as an extraordinary court, though more than a hundred had been called and refused to come, or had hidden themselves away. Before the Lord President, standing alone like a little island of self-importance, was a red velvet chair with a side table equipped with paper, pen, and ink, enclosed by a carved wooden partition. James could not believe that the king, who had owned all of England, would be brought into this court of his enemies, like an ordinary man. Although judges had been sworn, witnesses prepared, and the courtroom made ready, half the people had come expecting to see the trial called off.

  There was a sudden increase in noise and then an awed silence spread from the judges, who turned their heads all at once, like players in a masque, and looked towards the entrance. At once, the deafening chatter in the stone hall was stilled as everyone leaned forward and craned their necks to look to the entrance door. Charles, the king, stood in the great doorway, like a dancer pausing before making a grand entrance, dressed all in black, with a collar of finest white linen trimmed with rich lace. He came in slowly, as if to make his presence felt, his hat on his head, his cane in his hand, walked towards the chair in the enclosure, and halted before it. He was waiting for someone to open the door for him; he looked around at the hall, the judges, the Lord President, the soldiers, the audience, the gallery, and the stands. There was a long awkward pause and when nobody moved to open the door for him, he swung it open for himself and sat, without invitation, on the velvet chair, as calm and relaxed as if he was in his grand banqueting suite at Whitehall. He did not remove his hat before the court. He would doff it for nobody. He kept it on, as if it were
his crown.

  James saw at once a difference between the man who sat so calmly before the staring judges and the man he had begged to escape from Newport. The king had aged. His thick dark hair had threads of silver, his face was rounder and weary, deeply grooved with lines. No longer was he lighthearted, like a man certain to outwit his enemies. Now he looked like a saint, priding himself on persecution. The king, who had delighted in double-dealing with his parliament, who had boasted of cheating them, had finished his careless play. Now he was relishing defeat. The comedy was over; he was anticipating a tragedy.

  “God help us,” James said under his breath, recognizing the signs of a man longing for the morbid importance of martyrdom.

  There was a rustle of alarm as the king suddenly got to his feet as if he would leave. James and everyone around him rose to their feet in habitual respect. James thought that if the king walked out as proudly as he had walked in, nobody would dare to stop him. The trial would be over before it had begun.

  But the king turned his back on the bench, and looked all around the hall, at the people in the stands, at the judges, at the people who had paid for their seats, some who had risen at his entry and now stood again, looking awkward. He looked at them all, as if he were inspecting a guard of honor. James ducked his head as the mournful dark gaze raked the hall. He did not trust the king not to exclaim in recognition. He did not trust him at all.

  The king turned back to the front and seated himself again, and everyone who had risen with him and taken off their hats also subsided again into their places.

  A man rose to address the court.

  “Who’s that?” James asked his neighbor, a well-to-do London merchant.

  “John Cook,” came the muttered reply. “Prosecutor.”

  Cook rose to his feet and started reading a list of charges, facing the Lord President and the table with the ornate tapestry, his back half turned to the king.

  “Hold a little,” the king said. He had never sat behind anyone, since the death of his father, James, the previous king. Court etiquette demanded that everyone face the king to make their bow, and walk backwards, bowing once more at the door. He had not seen the back of a head for twenty-three years. James himself, humiliated and afraid, had awkwardly reversed out of the door at Newport. He flushed at the memory and realized that he must have looked ridiculous. Every time anyone left Charles’s presence, the king was reminded of their inferiority, and his own greatness. At this, the lowest point of his life, he was still insisting on deference.