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“It was good for my uncle Rob. It was the saving of his life. Anyway, I’ll go up and see her. Is she still in bed?”
“She’s up. She’s had breakfast, but she says she won’t rest until she sees you.”
“Well, here I am!” Johnnie said matter-of-factly.
“She’s going to ask you to go after your uncle Ned,” she burst out. “It’s to go straight towards danger. Johnnie, you’ve got to tell her no.”
He put his arm around his mother and hugged her. “I’ll see what she says. Don’t be upset, Ma. All old ladies get fancies. I’ll see what she wants of me and put her mind at rest.”
She let him go alone, reassured that he would soothe his grandmother. But then she caught sight of his bag beside his traveling cloak hanging by the warehouse door, and she knew he had already decided to go.
ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1685
“He has written to me.” Mary Beatrice held out a letter to show Livia. “James, James Monmouth, that beautiful boy, has written to me, to ask me to plead mercy for him.”
“Will you?” Livia took the letter and scanned the urgent writing. Monmouth, captured in a ditch and imprisoned in the Tower, begged the queen’s pardon, said that he had never meant to declare himself as king, that all he had wanted to do was to protect the Church of England—that he knew now that he had been wrong, that he begged her to save him from the scaffold.
“How can I?” Her pale face was twisted with strain. “How can I save him? He says himself that he was opposing the true faith. How can I ask for mercy for a man who is an enemy of Rome? By rights, he should be burned alive.”
Livia widened her eyes. “I don’t think a man can be burned for defending the Church of England.”
“No, of course not. Not here. Not until we change the law. He’ll have to be hanged and drawn and quartered for treason. It’s justice.”
Livia folded the anguished letter begging for mercy and put it away among the queen’s papers. “So, no reply?”
“What can I say?” the queen demanded. “How can I write to him and tell him that he has to die?”
“Would the king spare him if he turned papis—” Livia nipped off the word. “If he turned to the true faith? Our faith?”
Mary Beatrice nodded. “Yes, he would. But he’d have to name his allies. The king would grant his life if he would name all of them.”
“Betray his friends to death?” Livia asked. “To save his own skin?”
Mary Beatrice nodded. “A full confession before God,” she said piously. “Then we could execute them instead of him.”
Livia took a breath. “D’you think he will betray his friends?” she asked.
Mary Beatrice’s dark eyes were filled with tears. “No,” she said desolately. “I think he is lost to us. I think he is lost to us, and—even worse—he is lost to God.”
WEST COUNTRY, SUMMER 1685
Johnnie, in his hired carriage, jolting down the ill-maintained winding roads of the west country, learned he was approaching his destination not by the signposts, but because outside every village there was a fresh corpse on the gibbet. Outside the towns there were tarredand salted heads on spikes, their lips drawn back in a perpetual silent scream, the empty sockets of their eyes pecked out by crows, glaring down on the travelers who rode swiftly past, burying their faces in their sleeves to shield them from the butcher-shop smell of freshly killed human flesh. Some villages had strange cages at their crossroads, where the bodies of the village men were hanged forever. Their children ran under them when they were late for school.
Johnnie made himself look at every crow-pecked skull to see if he could recognize his uncle Ned. It might be the only way to find him. Only the people who left a flower at the foot of the scaffold, or wore a hidden black ribbon, knew who they had lost; the royalists had hanged hundreds of Monmouth’s defeated army wherever they were captured, without trial, without bothering to record their names. A stranger from London would never be able to find a single man, whether he was imprisoned with hundreds of others starving for food and water, injured and dying in hiding, or beheaded and strung up as a warning to anyone who might defy the king.
The farther west Johnnie went, the more he understood the impossibility of his task. After days on rutted and winding roads, held up for hours behind wagons bringing in the harvest, haggling at strange stables for a change of horses, delayed by a broken wheel spoke, he dismissed the carriage and hired a horse. He gave up asking for his uncle Ned Ferryman. It was treason to help an escaping rebel, punishable by death. It was treason to nurse a dying rebel. Nobody would admit to even seeing a soldier of Monmouth’s army, or hearing their jaunty drums, or picking a green leaf for freedom. In any case, Johnnie might be asking for his uncle Ned; but all his hopes were on finding Rowan.
He did not know where to begin. He could not ask any of the country people if they had seen her—nobody would even speak to him, and when he bribed a plowman, or a shepherd, walking down the drover road to market, they replied in accents so thick that he could not understand them, and he suspected that they were mocking him. Everyone stared with blank hostility as he rode by, on his hired horse. He thought that all he could do was to stay for a fewnights as near to the battlefield as might be safe for him, perhaps Bridgwater, perhaps Taunton, and announce that he was looking for a native lad, a servant mislaid—and hope that she might hear of him, and come to him for help. The thought of rescuing her made his head swim with desire. But as he traveled farther and farther west, through grieving towns that smelled of death, he became more and more certain that Uncle Ned was dead and rotting on a battlefield, in a ditch, or on a gibbet. And Rowan—innocent of everything—was dead beside him.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, AUTUMN 1685
Matthew attended church with his foster mother Alys. They gave thanks for the royal family and their miraculous preservation from rebellion. The vicar—normally a stout defender of the church against popish plots—had changed his tune at the threat of another civil war. Not even a Protestant claimant to the throne could persuade the vicar of the parish of St. Olave’s that any cause was worth the disruption of trade. He spoke for God and for His English church, His trade, and His dominance of the high seas. Anything that disrupted business was against the will of God, whose main ambition was—must always be—the prosperity of the English merchant and the victory of the English adventurers.
Alys heard the note of self-serving patriotism, and disregarded it. She followed to the letter the rising and kneeling, singing the hymns and reciting the English prayers from memory, following the readings in her own King James Bible. This was her faith, but also a show. Alys had learned from her mother, a wise woman, who had learned from hers, to follow the ritual of the service so precisely that no neighbor ever had an excuse to report them for any sort of suspicious behavior that meant popery, or dissenting, or dark arts.
Matthew followed the service as he had been taught, seated in the family pew, which had, over the years, moved closer and closer to the front of the church, as their business improved and their payment of the vicar’s tithe increased. Now they were the third pew from the front, on the right, and only two wharfinger families took precedence over the family from Reekie Wharf. When Matthew put up his plate as a lawyer, or announced that he was lord of Foulmire, his foster mother would be able to claim a new place, at the very front of the church—as landed gentry and the undisputed leaders of the parish.
They walked home together, her hand on his arm, the household servants and some of the warehouse clerks demurely following, past the yard gate to enter at the front door.
