Treason's Daughter Read online

  Treason’s Daughter

  Antonia Senior is a writer and journalist. After many years at The Times, she is now freelance. She writes columns, book reviews and features for various national publications, including The Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times. Antonia lives in London with her husband and two children.

  Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2014 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Antonia Senior, 2014

  The moral right of Antonia Senior to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 264 4

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 265 1

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For my mother

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Historical Note

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  January 1640

  HENRIETTA KNOWS WHAT IS COMING. SHE WATCHES THE candle’s shadow dancing on the dressing table. She looks for the familiar patterns in the wood panelling on the walls, the knotted whorls that can be made into maps. Concentrate, she tells herself. Find the mountains, the valleys, river gorges, the great seas that stretch to America. But she cannot do it; she cannot block out the woman behind her and the eyes she is trying to avoid in the mirror.

  Here it is, the relentless voice. Her mind scuttles sideways, trying to escape. But she is pushed into the chair by a firm hand, her limbs made heavy by a familiar misery. At last, as she always knew she would, she meets the eyes in the glass and watches them widen with triumph.

  ‘It was just there, young mistress, in that bed,’ says Nurse, jerking her head backwards to the bed behind them. ‘Oh, how she screamed and wailed, your mother. Didn’t bear it well, not like some I know. Hours she was at it, a’screaming and a’crying, and your poor father pacing up and pacing down while the screaming ran up and down the whole house. Never heard the like, we hadn’t. And then at last the middy came down to tell him – a boy! She shouts it out. “A boy!” he shouts, and his happiness ran up and down the corridors where the screaming had been afore.’

  She is well practised in this bedtime story, and she winds herself towards the crescendo. Henrietta tries to escape again, into the gnarled patterns on the wall. That pitted panel is the desert, Sam says. Uncle crossed it on a camel, which swayed like a boat and turned to spit at him. Great green spit that slid down his face, Sam said, giggling. Henrietta smiles at the thought of his laughter. Nurse sees the smile in the mirror and she responds with a ferocious pulling of the hairbrush that snaps Henrietta’s head backwards.

  Leaning in closer, so her breath creeps on Henrietta’s ear, she says: ‘And they thought she was fine, your poor mother, and delivered of a lil’ boy. A lil’ boy, Samuel, to grow in the shadow of his big brother, Edward, God bless his godly heart, and be a great merchant like his old daddy, with a doting ma to love him and a’cuddle him on his way. But something wasn’t right. “How’s my wife?” your poor father cried, and he saw the answer on the face of the middy, and he ran and knocked on the door, hollering for his love.

  ‘The screams didn’t die like they should have done, but stretched and stretched on and on, till your poor daddy was sobbing in sympathy, and his new minted boy all forgotten in a corner. And then they said to him, “There’s another coming”.’

  Nurse stands up and moves over to the bed, pulling back the blankets. She gestures impatiently at Henrietta, who walks over to the bed and climbs in. Nurse pulls the blankets up around her, tucking them under her chin. She bends down and kisses Henrietta’s forehead with cool, dry lips. Bustling around the room, snuffing out lights and folding up clothes and prodding at the fire, she finishes her bedtime story.

  ‘“Another?” your poor daddy shouts. “But I got me beautiful boy and I want me beautiful wife.” But then there came another scream, a different one. The boy twin came in the world with a big smile on his little face, but this one came out crying and screaming. Perhaps she knew she were a girl. Perhaps she knew what were coming next.’

  Henrietta pulls the blanket up over her head, but Nurse yanks it back. She folds the edges under the mattress, so the girl is held tightly in bed.

  ‘“A girl!” the middy shouted. “A girl?” your dad said. All quiet, like, and confused. “Yeh, a girl.” “Twins,” he said, wondering. “Yeh, twins.” One a bonny smiling boy, the other a screaming girl, all covered in little red blotches, like her skin’s in a rage from meeting the air. Then there’s another big old scream from your mother. Then there’s a rushing about. And then your old daddy hears wailing from his wife’s mother, and he knows then, my darling, that you killed your mother, you did. Dead, she was, with blood all over the mattress and some spattered up onto this old canopy.’

  Nurse pats the roof of the four-poster.

  Don’t look, don’t look.

  It is too late. Hen looks up at the fat fingers lingering on the green silk. Nurse has won; they both know it. Yet she can’t resist a last shot, a final malicious dart.

  ‘Milly, little Milly as she was then, scrubbed and scrubbed, but the stains, they wouldn’t never come out. Never.’

  She blows out the candle by Hen’s bed and picks up the last light. She carries the flame to the door, where it throws its golden glow on her face, softening it and rubbing out the lines.

  ‘Goodnight then, my darling child,’ she says as she closes the door, leaving Henrietta in the darkness.

  She has looked for the blood in the daylight and never found it. She has inched all over this bed, half hoping, half fearing to see the stains. But at night-time, in the darkness,
she knows the blood is there. She can feel it pressing damply through her nightclothes. Great ribbons of glistening blood cling to the roof of the bed, dripping down from the frame and onto the covers in soft, regular exhalations. Henrietta, fifteen years old and brave enough by daylight, lies in the darkness, trapped.

  A scrabbling at the door; a whisper. She recognizes the voice and feels the misery lifting. The door opens, and Sam’s thin body flits into the room.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he whispers. ‘Pox on her, the witch. Attack, Hen. Attack!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That thing we’ve talked of. Sebastian and Viola. Sebastian and Cesario. I’ve brought clothes.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘He’s out. She’s down in the kitchen talking about the Greatness of our Ned’s Blessed Soul.’

  She grins, and he squeezes her hand.

  Hen jumps from the ledge first, landing in a suck of mud. Sam lingers behind, wedging the window open with a knotted cloth. While she is waiting, she looks down the dark alley towards Fetter Lane and the bobbing lights beckoning them on. I spend hours waiting, she thinks. Waiting for Sam to come home, for Father to talk to me, for Grandmother to be like she used to. Waiting for the end of the day, and waiting for the morning to come, and all the while measuring out time, filling days, chopping the hours into bite-size chunks, like the gobbets of stale bread Cook leaves out for the birds. Not tonight. Not now.

  A sense of limitless freedom fizzes inside her.

  Sam lands beside her with a squelch, breaking into her reverie. He grabs her hand, pulling her towards the lights. They round into Fetter Lane and on into the hubbub of Fleet Street. A carriage creaks past, the horses’ hooves scraping on the stones. Beyond it, a huddle of apprentices, arms linked, pull back from the mud-spattering wheels, laughing. The linkboys jostle for business, their torches jumping and shaking. A pie-seller calls, ‘Hot and fresh’, and the smell of the stewed meat rises above the hum from the nearby piss-alley. A tub-preacher shouts his disapproval to indifferent drinkers, who spill in a jovial froth from the open doors of the packed-out Crown. There is more laughter and singing, and somewhere a voice raised in anger. After the quiet of Hen’s house, it is shockingly busy. Bewildering.

  She stands for a pace, reaching out a hand to the brick wall to steady herself, letting the noise and the life wash over her. She is a pebble on the foreshore wanting to be sucked up by the mighty tide. It trembles in her again, this freedom, this fear-edged joy, and she turns to let Sam read it all in her wide grin.

  He grins back at her, a mirror. They begin to run, feeling the call of a London night, its promise of adventure and danger, and the fug of coal and booze and chatter. After an initial stunned muteness, she hollers and whoops as she runs through the city’s glorious, rancid streets. Her call is lost in the mix, swallowed up in a London burr that rises to the coal-smeared sky.

  They run and run, Sam ahead of her, showing her the way in the dusk. They follow the curve of the Thames as it wraps around the raucous city. Along Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, Henrietta inhales swirls of coal smoke as she fights for breath. Down Watling Street, past the spilling-out drunks at the inn at the bottom, past the shifty punters emerging blinking from the stews, past the scavenging urchins of the Blackfriars slums.

  They run until her chest heaves, and she has to fight to keep Sam’s back in sight as he threads in and out of people, of horses, of carts, of puddles. Through the shadowy gaps in the torchlight, skipping through the pigs rooting in the filth that froths over the banks of the Wallbrook. The pigs squeal as they scatter, flicking mud and worse onto Hen’s stockinged legs. Still she runs, wanting to laugh, but too short of breath; wanting to stop, but desperate to run on and on. Until, at last, they come to the great bridge, and Sam stops, halfway across, and flings out his arms to catch her.

  They lean over a low, soot-black wall on London Bridge, looking up the river towards home. At their backs, the masts of trading ships moored in the Pool jostle and sway, black against the darkening sky. The wind blows up the shivering river, bringing with it the smell of pitch from the shipyards and the fierce creaking and clanking of the working rigging.

  Hen and Sam perch between rows of crooked houses in the space left by a fire – a sooted gash handmade for boys to hang out over the river and jeer at the boatmen’s attempts to shoot the bridge. No boats now. This late, they won’t attempt the bridge’s currents, but gather at the steps either side to fight and tout for customers. Hen leans over, a little too far, peering into the darkness of the river. She can just make out the flow and eddy of the water, and the bubbling white ferment where the Thames fights the legs of the bridge. The river is more beautiful than she has ever seen it. But she has rarely seen it by night, and always before she has been hurried past, swept along in a sedan chair or a coach. Now, revelling in the anonymity proffered by the city at its night-time play, she can savour it, dawdle, just look. Filthy and utilitarian by daylight, by night the great river reflects London’s tipsy beauty. Torchlight dances across its choppy black waves, and the cold night air subdues its stink.

  Behind them, the Tower squats malevolently on the river’s edge. But in front of them the city stretches all the way to Temple, where lights dance in innumerable windows, at unimaginable cost. They can hear the roar of the crowd at one of the theatres on their left. The south side of the river is a place of the night: of artifice and theatricals, of punks and their pimps, of vicious dogs and fighting cocks. A man’s realm. And yet somehow, straddling the river between the raucous south side and the tumultuous north, Hen feels at peace. Her heart has stopped hammering in her chest. There is space to relish the beauty of the dark river and the torchlight. And there is Sam.

  ‘Is it always like this, at night?’ she asks him. He hears the barely suppressed excitement in her voice.

  ‘It is, it is!’ he cries, dropping into a low bow. She laughs and curtsies, and they both collapse to the squelching floor, helpless with happiness.

  ‘Oh, Sam,’ she says, when the laughter subsides. ‘Thank you for bringing me.’

  ‘S’all right. I shall get such a beating if we’re caught.’

  ‘Well, we must not be caught then.’

  He rises to his feet and pulls her up from the floor. ‘We’d best get back.’

  ‘Yes. Slowly though, Sam. The long way round.’

  ‘You’d better let go of my hand. You’re supposed to be a boy, remember.’ He squeezes her hand before he drops it.

  Sauntering home again, they are quieter. The wild joy has faded, and they find the time to stop and stare at small novelties: the gleam of a great glass vase in a shop front; the pendulous breasts of a doxy hanging out of a window, trying to distract potential customers from the syphilitic rotting of her nose; a dwarf lying drunk in the mud while two barefoot boys strip him of his silk-edged coat.

  ‘I hate to see you crying, Hen. Was it her again?’ he asks as they walk, the tower of St Paul’s guiding them home as they meander through narrow streets.

  Hen nods. ‘Why does she hate me?’

  ‘You should tell Father.’

  ‘I did. He took her side. Said she was his nurse, and she loved all of us, and I should be grateful to her. The old bitch.’

  ‘Hen!’

  ‘She is.’

  Hen explores the unfamiliar sensation of a boy’s clothes. She takes wide strides, watching her brother. She jumps over dark puddles and kicks at loose stones, delighted by her freedom from heavy skirts, which trail in the mud and filth. How she hates dressing in her best dresses, and the measures needed to protect the precious fabrics from London’s oozing streets. Dressed in her finery, she is forced to sit entombed in a sedan chair, heavy curtains blocking out the urban hubbub. Forced to totter on wooden platforms, which slip and slide in the mud, threatening to throw her to the floor. Free from all that, she jumps and lands with a delicious splash in the mud. Sam’s boots are encased with mud to the ankles.

  Bells ring out from churc
h towers all around them. Nine o’clock.

  Sam grabs her hand suddenly. ‘I know something you’ll love,’ he says, pulling her down Fenchurch Street, in the opposite direction to their house. He ducks into an alley.

  ‘How do you know all these little streets?’

  ‘I explore by day, so I’ll know them by night. Rough, you being a girl. I’d howl with boredom if I sat at home all day. Here. We need to climb that wall. Can you hear anything yet?’

  Hen can hear a low hum of chatter coming from the big building next to the wall Sam is now perched on top of. She scrambles up next to him.

  ‘Now, Hen, you have to lean over, holding out your arms, making an arch over the alley. Do you see?’ He falls away from her, his weight leaning on the wall opposite. Hen copies him and finds that she can see into the window of the building she is leaning against. Below her, a procession of rats stalks under their arched bodies.

  Inside, at long benches, sit lines of men and women, red with warmth and wine, talking and laughing.

  ‘What is this place, Sam?’

  ‘Clothworkers’ hall,’ he says. ‘Wait, though. The best bit’s coming.’

  The roar of scores of conversations suddenly dies to a hum. At the top end of the hall a man and a woman are standing, arms outstretched, demanding the attention of the diners. They are dressed ornately, and the woman’s hair is piled on her head in waves. Her dress is low-cut, aping the fashion at court. Unfashionably large breasts threaten to breach the scalloped edge of her bodice. She opens her mouth, and a sound of extraordinary beauty floats over the heads of the diners, across the hall, and through the gaps in the window, leading to where Hen, astonished, gazes on.

  ‘Is she an angel?’

  Sam sniggers. ‘Of sorts. An angel of the punks. One who’ll let any rich, old man poke her. ’Tis just singing.’

  Hen elbows him in the ribs. ‘Don’t laugh at me!’

  Hen thinks back over the singing voices she knows: her grandmother’s creaking lullabies; her father’s bellow as he sits in the tin tub by the fire; apprentices, arms linked and weaving drunk beneath her window, singing of women and wine; Lucy Tompkins, sitting at a virginal, singing smugly in French. But this is a different sound entirely. And then the man joins in.