The Tyrant’s Shadow Read online

  Captain Jacques whistles between his teeth. ‘Your brother, hey? You will kill him now.’

  Sam thinks of the letter he received from Henrietta’s husband Will. The crumpled edges of it after he had scrunched it and smoothed it again. The terse, bemused prose. Ned killed in the fighting in Ireland. An English casualty sinking into the blood- soaked ground of Drogheda, where Cromwell slaughtered the rebellious papists in their hundreds. Behind the brevity of Will’s note, he imagined a similar maelstrom of reactions. Grief. Confusion and anger, certainly. Relief, too, that the reckoning was no longer coming. A simultaneous sense of being cheated out of that same reckoning.

  ‘He is dead now.’

  ‘So many dead,’ says Captain Jacques. Sam can see him shaking his head in the amber glow from the fire. He looks up at the huge, star-stippled sky and the sharp moon. The sail is not visible now that night has fallen. But it is out there somewhere. And at dawn they will launch a boat, and welcome him back into the brotherhood. Backs will be slapped and tales exchanged, and the chief might ask him to share a bottle of captured port.

  Sam sighs, closing his eyes. It is grand to be alive.

  But I am alone, he thinks. He wonders idly if somewhere there is a girl waiting for him. A girl not paid for in a passing port. A girl he can laugh with. To whom he can say, one night I was lost under an African sky and I dreamed of you.

  Fool. You are alone, he tells himself. You have no one to call your own. It’s an easy truth to forget in the dank of the ship, where men and officers crowd and stoop in tiny spaces. Where the way a man laughs can grate on your nerves so sharp you think you might have to kill him. Where the laughter with your mates in the still air of a night watch is bolder and brighter than any possible on shore.

  Here, surrounded by foreign tongues and a foreign land and noises and smells that make no sense to him, his emptiness is clearer.

  I am alone, thinks Sam. Alone.

  LONDON

  May 1652

  THE PREACHER’S NAME IS SIDRACH SIMMONDS. SIDRACH Simmonds. She twists it on her tongue in the hour before dawn, when Blackberry and Will are asleep. Trying it out like a new gown. He is a teacher at a gathered church that meets in Swan Alley. He was an officer in the New Model Army from its inception, but left after the recent campaigns in Ireland.

  This much she has found out from Hattie, the butcher’s wife. She is an old friend of Will and his dead wife Henrietta; and she knows people across the city.

  ‘He’s a Fifth Monarchist,’ says Hattie, looking up at Patience over the sausage casings. Everyone calls her the butcher’s wife, but it has become a hollow title. The butcher never came back from the wars, so Hattie runs the business. Her seven-year-old daughter Anne helps. She holds the long loop of cleaned intestine straight as Hattie squeezes in the mixture of meat, crumbed bread and herbs. Anne’s face is thin and serious. She straightens a kink, looking quickly at her mother, who says: ‘Good girl.’

  Patience watches Anne’s face melt into a gap-toothed smile. It is one of the girl’s most endearing qualities – her still face is drawn to the point of melancholy, but her happy face is infectiously joyful. Patience grins back at the child and feels as if it is the first unforced smile she has known since she saw Sidrach Simmonds stride down the sunlit street and call to her soul.

  She should be doing something already in answer to that call. She should be living her bigger life. Not skulking. Not trapped in a perpetual dress rehearsal for life’s colourful masque.

  Hattie is recounting the degrees by which she has gained the information. Someone’s sister’s husband. Patience is not really listening. The trail does not matter, only the treasure.

  She hoards each nugget she learns of his life. She takes them out when she is alone. Buffs them and ponders them. Is this the clue to him? How can I get close to him? Her plan is vague, unformed. She dare not think of exactly how Sidrach Simmonds is going to unlock her future; she just knows that it will be so. God’s whisper in her heart on that fateful day has not left her. The elation she experienced with the returning sun may have faded, but the resolution remains; the absolute determination to count.

  ‘A Fifth Monarchist,’ says Hattie again, squeezing the meat into its casing with each emphasized syllable. ‘You know. Them that believe in the rule of saints. The coming of Christ.’

  ‘We know He is coming, Hattie. The Bible says so. Many believe He will come soon,’ says Patience.

  ‘Many prate nonsense, true. But these folk believe that they alone are the saints. And they must prepare the land for Christ’s coming. By force if needs must. As if blood enough has not been spilled. Noddle-heads the lot of ’em.’

  Patience makes a non-committal noise. She has learned from her brother to be guarded about her beliefs. Anyway, she is not yet convinced that she knows what those beliefs are. She thought she knew everything. Then she came to London. What a child she was, what a fool. Now she is twenty, she knows better.

  ‘Listen, Patience,’ says Hattie, straightening. She puts her hands in the small of her back to stretch it out as she says: ‘Be careful. They say he is a man of great and forceful character. Great charm. Handsome, too, in his way.’

  Patience thinks about the eyes that met hers; the fierce burn of them. The even planes of his face. His broad shoulders. She shakes her head, exasperated. It is not his form she finds compelling. Not frivolous concerns of face or muscles. It is his soul she admires. His great and Christian soul.

  ‘Do not worry about me, Hattie. He does not know I am alive.’

  ‘Best keep it that way. These radicals, dangerous, they are. All that certainty, all that conviction. It chews up a man’s kindness. Heartless, some of ’em. The charmers, they’re the worst.’

  ‘He is godly, Hattie. How can you think he would not be good?’

  Hattie smiles at her. ‘There’s goodness and there’s kindness, and they ain’t always the same thing.’

  Hattie looks down the long stuffed line of intestine, prodding it in places, looking for weaknesses. Satisfied, she nods to Anne. The little girl, with great seriousness, ties the knot in the end.

  ‘You’re so green, Patience. He’s a man grown. About thirty, I’m told. You are a girl. You don’t know the world.’

  Hattie is measuring out the links by eye, twisting them deftly to create the sausage and pack the filling still tighter. Concentrating, she doesn’t see the flush in Patience’s cheek. She doesn’t see the girl’s clenched fists, her frown.

  ‘Talk to your brother,’ she says, folding the links into a neat loop. ‘He will tell you.’

  Patience thinks she might scream. ‘I must be off, Hattie,’ she says tightly. She turns and pushes her way outside, into the sunlight.

  Too young, too simple to understand? Does God talk only to old people? Is wisdom earned by years alone? It is preposterous. Outside, she unclenches her fists, suddenly aware that her fury could seem like a spate of adolescent temper. It is more than that. It is a justified rage. She clasps her hands lightly behind her back. Determined on her course.

  She will go to Swan Alley. She will attend the meetings of this gathered church. And she will make up her own mind about the beliefs and the character of Sidrach Simmonds.

  John Bradshaw stops to contemplate a pigeon. A grey, miserable thing. ‘Well, Johnson,’ he says to Will. ‘Even the pigeons are woebegone.’

  ‘And can we blame them?’ Will starts walking onwards. They are not the only strollers in the park this morning; the first warm day of summer has drawn Londoners out to wander the grass like escaped moles, twitching their pallid faces towards the sun.

  Bradshaw lengthens his stride to catch up.

  ‘How fares the Rump Parliament?’ asks Will. ‘I have not been following events as I should.’

  ‘Safer for a man’s sanity to look the other way.’ Bradshaw emits a strangled noise that Will interprets as derision. ‘More than three years since we removed the monarchy, and still they have done nothing. Nothing.’ />
  Will remembers Bradshaw, who was the presiding judge at the king’s trial, pronouncing the sentence. The look of bullish awe on his face as he laid the sentence of death on his own sovereign. He has since been president of the Council of State, the body charged with implementing the will of the Rump Parliament. An important man – a rich and powerful one now. Why has he summoned me here? wonders Will. To take the air with him? There must be something deeper.

  Bradshaw sighs. ‘We had the chance, Johnson, to remake the world. And what do we do? We squabble. We plot. We intrigue. The reform of the Church has stalled. The legal reforms have stalled. The blasted MPs cannot even agree on how to dissolve themselves and call new elections.’

  Will raises his face to the sun, trying to draw from it the energy to care. ‘Little wonder,’ he says. ‘How many MPs stayed away while we tried the king, only to creep back when the cruel work was done and resume their seats? How many? So now we have the same old brew of independents, radicals, demi-royalists and Presbyterians growling at each other. Few true republicans.’

  ‘Aye,’ says Bradshaw. ‘But there ought to be some ground for agreement. You know my views, Johnson. Complete freedom of worship. Let men choose their path to salvation. I accept that is too heady for most to stomach. But can we not at least agree on the iniquity of tithes? It’s common ground. Yet even that recedes the instant the Rump turns to it.’

  ‘But ministers of God cannot live on prayer alone, sir,’ says Will.

  Bradshaw waves an arm, as if this is accepted but irrelevant. He has the politician’s disdain for detail, Will thinks.

  Will does not point out the Rump’s fatal weakness to Bradshaw. The Rump must fail. Its primary purpose now is to dissolve itself in favour of a new settlement. The army, stuffed as it is with republicans and religious radicals, is implacable on this point. But if the Rump goes to the people to elect a successor, the people will not choose the republicans and radicals who will satisfy the army or most of the Rumpers. Stalemate.

  The players in this great political game perpetually act in the name of the people, Will thinks. Who are the people?

  In London, this great fury of a city, some questions burn violently. Who shall rule? Who shall check that rule? How shall we worship? He imagines the questions bellowed straight down the old Roman roads that escape the city – and how they must lose their heat the further they travel. Smaller questions must burn with a lesser intensity away from London’s flame. What shall we eat? Whom shall we love? How shall we face death?

  Burning questions to the questioner; irrelevant to the body politic.

  So, thinks Will, the Rump Parliament is penniless, divided and unpopular. But what else do we have?

  They turn inwards to retrace their steps. Beyond those trees is the place the king died. Will shivers. He remembers again the sound of the falling axe, the grind as it sliced through flesh, the thwack as it landed on the block. He remembers the groan that rose from the crowd – a great spontaneous sigh of grief and fear and awe. It seems to him sometimes as if that groan has never really ended; as if the sad tail of it stretched and stretches still, echoing softly under all their furious scrabbling for a settlement.

  He shakes his head to clear it of fancies. He realizes they have been silent for too long, each mulling their own perspective on the deadlock.

  He asks: ‘What of the army? General Cromwell?’

  ‘Furious,’ says Bradshaw. ‘Wondering why we fought and toiled and died so that the Rumpers can sit idle.’

  ‘Some stir themselves quick enough when there are sequestered Royalist lands to be bought cheap,’ says Will.

  Bradshaw looks pained, and nods his head sadly.

  ‘True enough,’ he says. ‘Well, Johnson. You are wondering why I asked to meet. A friend has need of a secretary. He wants a young man. A lawyer not wedded to the law as it stands. A friend to reform. One with friends in the Temple and at Westminster.’

  ‘I am not in need of a salary,’ says Will. ‘My practice is in reasonable health. Although I thank you for thinking of me.’

  Bradshaw stops and looks at him. The sun is on his face, drawing out the lines and the strain around his eyes, the silver threaded through his thinning hair.

  ‘Stay, Johnson. Do not be so quick. You have not yet heard on whose behalf I am acting.’

  Will wants to shrug. It cannot matter which of the city’s grandees needs a dogsbody. He quells the gesture – it would be impertinent. He respects Bradshaw. He smiles instead and inclines his head, inviting the completion of the offer.

  ‘I am acting for the general himself, Johnson. He would have you in his service. It is Cromwell who needs a man.’

  The room is close-packed. The plain whitewashed walls leap with mingled shadows, arms raised, palms outstretched. A range of people. Artisans and goodwives, soldiers and poets. The first preacher is the pastor, Jeremiah Capp. A dry, bookish man with watery blue eyes. Patience watches him gather himself as he begins to talk – the nervous clearing of his throat, the anxious swivelling eyes.

  His voice is stronger than expected. He talks with great sense of the coming of Christ, of the responsibility of the elect to prepare a path for Him. He talks of the king’s death and the vanquishing of the Pope in England, this blessed land. The slaying of the Antichrist paving the way for the Lord’s return.

  Patience finds herself nodding her agreement. But she is aware of the length of his talk; aware of the shifting of her weight from foot to foot, aware of the creeping pain in her lower back. Her thoughts drift, to her lovely, sad brother. To Blackberry, whom she loves, and his serious face as he sounds out his letters. She thinks of her chores; her instructions to Mary, the one maid they keep in the household. The new linen they need; the airing of the cupboards for moths. It is an effort to pull herself back to the words.

  There is a pause when the pastor finishes. A swell of expectation in the room. A whispering and shuffling. It makes her think of the May Days of her childhood: that moment as the band prepares itself to play and feet ready for dancing begin to judder and tap. Here, there is something powerful in the containment of the excitement. Like a poacher’s trap wound to breaking point.

  On to the box steps Sidrach Simmonds.

  He begins quietly. There are no nerves here, no awkward throat-clearing. A quiet certainty; a graceful confidence. The room sucks in its breath to hear his words.

  Yours is the power, he says.

  Yours is the duty.

  You carry the Lord’s hopes with you, His breath in your ear, His hand in yours.

  You are the chosen. Only you.

  His voice rises up and up, drawing them in, holding them. The first preacher spoke to their intellect; Sidrach Simmonds calls to their souls.

  In the candlelight he looks young, innocent. The light glides across the dark sheen of his coat. In the pauses, his eyes drink in the room. Once, they alight on her and she feels lifted – as if by looking at her he is pulling her on to tiptoes, stretching her.

  His voice is sinuous. She finds herself trying to work out if it is the words themselves that enfold the listener, or the voice, or some alchemical combination of the two.

  The Lord will guide you, he says.

  He will find His place in your heart.

  You will know His joy as your own.

  She looks around her and sees the rapture in other faces. For a heartbeat she is disappointed. His power is not for her alone. But she upbraids herself quickly. These are my brothers and sisters in Christ. She closes her eyes to concentrate.

  You are the light amid a crooked generation, he says.

  The words dance in her head as if they have always belonged there. As if he is not talking, but merely shining light on the words already alive inside her. The joy Patience feels is unexpected. She looks around at the weeping, shaking crowd and feels a great surge of love. She is unmade and she is made again.

  Yes. I am the light. I am the light.

  Afterwards, still reeling, she ho
vers by the door. She knows no one, but she wants to talk, to share what she has felt. Besides, she cannot bear to go home yet. Blackberry is in bed, asleep, and the adults will not be able to borrow his gaiety. She will sit with Will, his unhappiness lolling by the hearth with them like an uninvited guest. She will talk too brightly, too loudly. If she talks of this evening, of Sidrach Simmonds, which is all that she can bear to speak of, he will lean back and lift his brows and roll his eyes. She cannot go back, not yet.

  Shyly, she looks about her, trying to invite conversation

  A middle-aged woman catches her eyes and smiles. Her dress is plain but of good quality, with a deepness to the black. There are tiny stitches at the shoulder in a colour that does not quite match. Her hair is drawn back from her face, pulling her thick eyebrows upwards into a curve. She has kind eyes, Patience decides, as the woman peels away from her conversation and comes over to her. ‘You are new here,’ she says. As Patience nods, she smiles. ‘I am Marigold Capp,’ she says. ‘My husband is the pastor.’

  ‘I am happy to meet you,’ says Patience. ‘My name is Patience Johnson.’

  She feels bolder now she has spoken.

  ‘I saw you, caught in Mr Simmonds’ words, Mistress Johnson. He is a persuasive teacher.’

  ‘He is inspired by the divine,’ says Patience, with a rush of enthusiasm. Marigold Capp looks awkward.

  ‘Sidrach is a man of much . . .’ She waves her hands, and runs out of words.

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ Patience says. ‘Is it allowed, that I just came in? I didn’t know anyone to invite me.’

  Marigold lays a hand on her arm. ‘Allowed, yes. Encouraged even. But to join our congregation takes a little more. You must prove your state of grace, my dear. Only the elect are permitted.’

  ‘How do I know? If I am elect?’

  Marigold looks baffled momentarily. Patience bites her lip. That was the wrong question, obviously. Only the elect reach heaven; their presence called by the divine. The elect know they are elect, among the godly – she knows this much.