Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

Hester woke on the morning of 31 May to the sound of gravel rattling against her bedroom window. For a moment she had the absurd thought that it was John, locked out of his own house, summoning her to let him in, to a reconciliation, a return, and to the end of her loneliness and waiting.

She jumped out of bed, ran to the window and looked down. It was a man, wrapped to the eyes in a cape, but she would have recognized the hat, heavy with plumes, anywhere.

“God rot him,” Hester swore under her breath, threw a jacket over her nightdress and ran barefoot down the stairs to let him in at the back door. In the stable yard a dog barked briefly. Hester let the man slip inside and then closed the door behind him.

“What is it?” she asked tersely.

“It’s gone awry,” he said. He dropped the cape from his face and she saw he was drawn and anxious. “I need a horse to get away from here to warn the king.”

“I don’t have one,” Hester said instantly.

“Liar,” he shot back.

“I don’t have one to spare.”

“This is the king’s business. His Majesty shall hear how I am served.”

Hester bit her lip. “Will you send the horse back to me?” she asked. “She’s my husband’s horse and the saddle horse for my children, and she works on the land as well. I need her.”

“The king’s need is greater.”

“Keep your voice down,” Hester hissed. “D’you want to wake the whole house?”

“Then give me the horse!”

She led the way down the hall to the kitchen at the back. He hesitated when he saw the fire banked in for the night. “I need food,” he said.

“You’re going to Oxford, not to America!” Hester said impatiently. “Eat there!”

“Give me some bread and some cheese, and I’ll drink a glass of ale while you are saddling the horse.”

Hester waved him toward the larder. “Eat what you want,” she said. “And come out into the yard as soon as you are done.”

She stepped into a pair of clogs which were on the stone doorstep and unlocked the kitchen door. She pulled the jacket around her shoulders and did up the buttons. John’s mare was in her loosebox, she whinnied when she saw Hester and the dog barked again.

“Hush!” Hester called to them both as she went into the tack room to fetch John’s heavy saddle and bridle. The mare stood obediently while Hester struggled with her tack, and then shifted when a shadow fell over the stable. Hester looked up, instantly afraid that it was Parliament men come to arrest the royalist, and arrest her too as a conspirator. But it was the cavalier, his hands full of bread and cheese, his hat tipped back on his head.

Hester led the horse out into the yard. “Give me that,” she said suddenly and snatched the hat from his head. He was too surprised to protest. With one swift movement she plucked the feathers from the hat band and tossed them into the midden heap. “Why not carry the king’s colors while you’re about it?” she demanded.

He nodded. “I shall tell His Majesty that the Tradescant house remembers their master. You will be rewarded for this.”

“The only reward I want is for you to send the horse back,” Hester said. “D’you promise you will send her back to me?”

“I do.”

Hester stood away from the mare’s head as she stepped delicately on the cobbles, and out of the yard and around the house to the road. Hester stood very still and quiet, listening. If the man had been sighted she would hear the horses’ hooves on the Lambeth road as they chased him. There was silence. Somewhere in the garden a thrush was starting to sing.

Hester realized that she was shivering with cold and with apprehension. She turned and crept across the yard to the kitchen door, slipped off the muddy clogs and went to the fireside. If he was captured and named her as his ally and the Ark as a safe royalist house, then she could face arrest for treason against Parliament, and the punishment for treason was death. The cavalier might ride with feathers in his hat and a light heart even in the middle of defeat; but Hester was only too well aware that the country was at war, and it was becoming a war in which there was no quarter given.

She waited by the fire until the little square kitchen window became light and then she went upstairs and woke Frances and Johnnie.

“What is it, Mother?” Johnnie asked, seeing her grave face.

“We’re going on a visit to Uncle Norman,” she said. “Today.”

They took a boat down the river and the boatman was full of news of a royalist plot which had been uncovered only yesterday. Hester nodded. “I have no interest in politics,” she said.

“You’ll be interested soon enough if these traitors hand the city back to the king,” the boatman said. “If the king brings in murdering Irishmen and damned Frenchmen to cut the throats of honest Englishmen!”

“Yes,” Hester said politely. “I suppose I will be then.”

The boatman hawked and spat in the water and rowed steadily on.

Alexander Norman greeted them as if their visit had been planned for months instead of thrown together in Hester’s panic. His housekeeper had prepared two rooms in his small town house next to his work yard in the Minories in the shadow of the Tower. Frances and Hester would share a bed and Johnnie was to have a little attic room.

“My cousin has long promised me this visit,” he said to his housekeeper as she showed Hester into the front parlor and took her hat and cape. “I insisted it should be May before the City is too hot and unhealthy.”

“There’s nothing worth having in the shops,” the housekeeper remarked to Hester. “So if you were thinking of new fashions you might as well have stayed at home. There are more tailors out of business than you could name.”

Hester nodded. “My husband’s first wife’s family are haberdashers,” she said. “I thought they would let me see if they have anything left in stock.”

The housekeeper nodded. “They’ll surely have some silk saved for the little miss here. Isn’t she a beauty?”

Hester nodded. Frances was struggling out of the thick cape and the big bonnet which Hester had insisted she wear. “Yes, she is.”

“Looking for a husband for her?”

Hester shook her head. “Not yet.”

The woman nodded and bustled off. “I shall serve you with your dinner in a few minutes,” she promised.

Alexander drew a chair near the fire for Hester. “Was it cold on the river?”

“A little,” she said, sitting down.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked very quietly.

“A royalist officer came and took John’s horse. He was looking for John to help them in a plot to claim Lambeth for the king.”

Alexander looked shocked. “When was this?”

“He left this morning. But he came for the first time two weeks ago.”

He nodded. “Did he get safe away?”

Hester shook her head. “I don’t know. There was no one waiting outside the house, at any rate, and no one seemed to be watching us leave today. But he was headed for Oxford and the king. I don’t know if he got there.”

He turned away from her for a moment.

“What is it?” she asked. “The boatman said there was some kind of plot.”

“It’s Lady d’Aubigny,” Alexander said.

Hester gave a little gasp.

“You knew her name?”

“It was a name I heard when he was swearing me to secrecy two weeks ago. I didn’t think that everyone would know it so soon.”

“She’s a fool. Edmund Waller and she were plotting together to seize London for the king. They were going to seize the Tower and arrest Parliament and the House of Lords was to gather behind them and royalists were to rise up.”

Hester’s face was pale. “And?”

“And nothing. Everyone in the plot spoke about it from the assemblies to the taverns, and they were arrested this morning. Lady d’Aubigny has disappeared, no one knows where yet; but Waller is arrested, and half a dozen others.” He paused for a moment. “Who knows you’re here?”

“The household. I said we were coming for a visit. I thought it might look worse if we went into hiding.”

He nodded. “You were right. But I am wondering if you should leave London.”

“All of us?”

“Just you. D’you have family somewhere outside the City? Somewhere you can go until this panic is over?”

She shook her head. “John said I was to go to Oatlands if I was in danger. He still has his house there. He is still gardener there.”

The housekeeper put her head around the door. “Dinner is on the table,” she said.

“I’m starving!” Johnnie exclaimed, and he and Frances, who had been sitting in the windowseat looking at the street below, went to the dining room. Alexander took Hester’s cold hand.

“Come and have something to eat,” he said. “Nothing is going to happen in the next ten minutes. And I will send one of my clerks to Westminster to see what is happening.”

Hester ate nothing at dinner, and every time a cart went by in the street outside she found she was listening, waiting for the knock at the door.

“What is the matter, Mother?” Frances asked. “I can tell that something is wrong.”

Hester looked at Alexander.

“You should tell them,” he said. “They have a right to know.”

“A royalist spy came in the night and took Father’s mare,” Hester said.

Frances and Johnnie looked stunned at the news.

“A royalist spy?” Johnnie demanded.

“What was he wearing?” Frances asked.

“Oh, why didn’t you wake me?” Johnnie cried. “And I could have helped him!”

“He was wearing a cape and…” Hester’s voice quavered on a reluctant laugh. “And an absurd hat with feathers.”

“Oh!” Frances breathed. “What colors?”

“What does that matter!” Johnnie exclaimed. “Oh, Mother! Why didn’t you tell me? I could have guided him! I could have gone with him and been his page!”

“I expect that’s why she didn’t tell you,” Alexander said gently. “Your place is at home, guarding your mother and the Ark.”

“I know,” Johnnie said. “But I could have gone with him for a battle or two and then come home again. I am a Tradescant! It is my duty to serve the king!”

“It is your duty to protect your mother,” Alexander said, suddenly grim. “So be silent, Johnnie.”

“But why have we come here?” Frances asked, abandoning interest in the color of the royalist’s hat feathers. “What is happening? Is Parliament after us?”

“Not after you,” Hester said quietly. “But if they know that he came to the Ark for help then I may be in trouble.”

Frances turned at once to Alexander Norman and put her hands out to him. “You’ll look after us, won’t you?” she demanded. “You won’t let them take Mother away?”

He took her hands, and Hester saw that he had to stop himself from drawing her close. “Of course I will,” he said. “And if she’s in any danger at all I shall find somewhere safe for her, and for you all.”

Frances, still hand-clasped with Alexander, turned to her stepmother and Hester saw them, for the first time, as a couple; saw the tilt of his head toward her, saw her trust in him.

“Should you go into hiding?” Frances asked her.

“I’ll go to the Tower now,” Alexander decided, “and see what news there is. You keep the door locked until I return. They can hardly have found your name and traced you here so soon. We must be a day ahead at least.”

Hester found that her mouth was dry and reached for a glass of small ale. Alexander gave her a quick, encouraging smile. “Be of stout heart,” he said. “I will be back within the hour.”

The little family went back into the parlor and Frances and Johnnie took up their posts in the windowseat again, but this time they were not commenting on the passersby, they were on lookout. Hester sat, in uneasy idleness, by the fireside. The housekeeper coming in with fresh coal made them jump. “I’d have thought you would want to go out and walk around.”

“Perhaps later,” Hester said.

Inside the hour, true to his word, Alexander Norman came strolling down the street, stopping for a chat with his neighbor, who had a small goldsmith’s shop, and then opened his front door and stepped inside. At once his air of leisured cheerfulness deserted him.

“It’s bad news,” he said, checking that the parlor door was closed behind him. “Lady d’Aubigny took sanctuary in the French embassy under the pretext that her husband’s family is French. But Parliament has ordered that the French hand her over and they have done so. She’ll be tried for treason, she was carrying the king’s Commission of Array. She was trying to raise an army in the very City itself.”

“The French ambassador handed over an English lady of the king’s party to Parliament?” Hester demanded, incredulously.

“Yes,” Alexander said, looking grave. “Perhaps His Majesty has fewer friends in Paris than he thinks. Perhaps the French are preparing to deal with Parliament direct.”