The Whispering Swarm (55 page)

We spent another hour or two familiarising ourselves with the plans. The light had gone out of Moll's face, replaced by an unfamiliar heat. I had made up my mind to say nothing to her. I didn't want to do anything to jeopardise Prince Rupert's plot to save the king. As it was, I could imagine everything likely to go wrong. We could be arrested the moment we left Alsacia. Feeling a little as if I were already condemned, I ate a hearty lunch. There was a time when I couldn't board a plane until I had a large helping of steak and kidney pudding, apple pie and custard, and a bottle of decent claret inside me.

Molly was careful to keep clear of Prince Rupert. He seemed wholly uninterested in her. Was this acting on both their parts for my behalf? I refused to speculate. In Rupert's private room at the Swan we continued to debate our plans until I made my excuses. I was just beginning to understand the full import of what could happen if we were arrested. Guy Fawkes and Co had discovered the folly of relying on tunnels. Very nasty. Barbaric. Feeling a little queasy, I left them all, slipped out of the gates and made my way up Shoe Lane into Farringdon Road and Brookgate.

I wanted to see my mum.

 

45

SETTING THE COMPASS

The Swarm assaulted me savagely as soon as I was through the gates. I almost wept with the furious pain of it. I was barely sane. I made a huge effort to relax. Mum would be bound to notice if I was tense. I invented a story about migraines and bad dreams. That would explain any anxiety she detected. I really did think I might never see her or my girls again. I'd written Sally and Kitty a letter which I'd leave with Mum. I'd thought enough about time paradoxes and the like to know that by tomorrow, even if we were successful, I might have vanished from the face of the earth.

Mum was in the living room, on the sofa watching TV. She turned it off when I walked in. ‘Hello, love,' she said. ‘Anything wrong? You look a bit peaky.'

‘I'm all right,' I said. ‘Shall I make a cup of tea?'

‘If you like, love, though I haven't got any of that insipid stuff you drink.' She had it in her head that Assam had no body to it. She also hated tea bags. She had enjoyed a brand loyalty to Brooke Bond tea for as long as I remembered. I didn't mind. I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned cuppa. As the water boiled I called from the kitchen, ‘I'm going to be gone a few days, Mum. I've got a job that'll take me out of town.'

‘What? America again?'

I knew I wouldn't have much chance of being transported if I was caught but I said, ‘That's right,' and got the teapot down. I fed off the comforting familiarity of the house and the little bit of yard outside backing on to St Odhran's graveyard. Very little had changed since I was a boy. The smell was the same. Comforting. She had got new furniture, carpets and wallpaper from time to time but they always seemed identical to the old.

‘How's the girls?' she asked.

I said they were doing fine.

‘And Helena?' asked Mum. ‘Everything okay?'

‘Not bad.' Waiting for the kettle to boil, I sat across from her on the other side of the fireplace.

She said nothing as she tidied up the coffee table. I could tell she was getting ready to listen.

In the state I was in, a little support from my mum was very welcome. I finished making the tea and found the McVitie's chocolate digestives. I put everything on a tray and took it in. She had the gas fire on full and it was a bit warm, but her overheated room, with its familiar photographs and knickknacks, was comforting.

‘I was thinking of telling Helena I'd take the children for a couple of days,' she said.

‘She'd like that.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘I haven't seen them since Christmas. It would be nice for me and would give her a break.'

‘Smashing,' I said.

‘You all right for money, love'? She was trying to find out what she sensed was wrong. I laughed.

‘Honest, Mum! I'm rolling in it. I just sold a couple more novels in France.'

She didn't really approve of France. She thought I had to be writing something racy. But I think it was mostly because my dad had gone astray there.

‘Well,' she said dubiously, ‘you know best. How's Barry doing?'

Once again I thought she was stuck in her own little time warp. I reminded her that Barry was back in Shropshire these days. Telford. The ugliest settlement in England. She was fond of Barry but couldn't remember from one day to the next what I'd said about him. ‘He's fine.'

‘I bet he misses London!'

‘Who wouldn't?' I said.

We agreed on that. Few Londoners could ever work out why someone would live anywhere else. At least until they were sixty-five and migrated south to the nearest bit of coast.

‘Have you ever thought of leaving, love?' she asked me. I think she worried that we might move away from her. I told her I never wanted to live anywhere but London.

‘Cockneys get sick out of the Smoke,' I said. She enjoyed that.

I stayed another hour or so. ‘I've got to get up bright and early tomorrow morning,' I said.

‘Look after yourself, love,' she said as I left. She blew me a worried kiss.

I walked back to the Sanctuary considering the next day's plan. Could we really convince the king's guard that Jessup was their man? It was very cold now. Too cold for snow. That would explain any bulky clothing, at least, but the day was likely to be bright. What on earth was I getting myself into? Something in me really didn't care what happened. I rarely felt as powerless as I did then. Or as responsible for so many. The children and my mum would miss me if something happened. I wondered if Helena would care. Maybe she'd be relieved to see the last of me.

 

46

SECRETS AND SURPRISES

I went back via Ludgate Circus. This part of the city was pretty dead at that time of night. The caf
é
across the road from the Old King Lud still had its lights on. I couldn't see any customers. The pubs were all full, of course. Many journalists were just starting the serious drinking of the evening. Later, they would stagger along to the expensive late-night chocolate shop near El Vino which did a thriving trade in their guilt, selling massive boxes to anyone who needed to take a peace offering home or had forgotten someone's birthday. In that profusion of grey office stone, undecorated sandwich shops and no-nonsense masculine chophouses, the place was as incongruous as a diamond in a bag of licorice allsorts.

I turned off at Carmelite Street. The
News of the World
bloomed with yellow light, shadows came and went in the windows, but everything else, apart from the steadily throbbing printers, was dark. The streets grew even darker and narrower the closer I came to Carmelite Inn Chambers and the gates of the Sanctuary. The Whispering Swarm filled my head like a great gallery of quarreling men and women, growing increasingly urgent the closer I got to the gates. The Alsacia was calling me home. I slipped through into welcome silence. I left the Swarm on the other side of the gate and crossed the square to have a quick drink in the Swan.

By now the tavern was quiet. There were only a few people there, most of them talking quietly in the booths, but I was glad to recognise that mass of dark auburn hair. Captain St Claire stood at the bar finishing a glass of brandy. His hat was set back on his head. He wore a suit of dark blue wool, linen shirt, a suede waistcoat to his knees, military-style overcoat hanging open, his belt and sword strap secured by heavy brass buckles, tall riding boots folded at the tops. Into a blue sash around his waist he had stuck his pistols. As usual he wore both a basket-hilted longsword and his shorter-bladed sword, one on the left, the other on the right. These days I recognised him as a professional soldier. Perhaps a Dutch mercenary. He might have fought on either side. Foot on the rail, he lifted a brandy glass to his lips.

He seemed pleased to see me. ‘A cold night, Master Moorcock!' Would I care for a drink? I accepted a half-shant because I'd be going early to bed.

He said he'd join me in that for the same reason. When we had our pints we took them to the long, empty table opposite the bar.

‘I hear the Thames has frozen,' I said. ‘I've never seen that.'

‘Nor I, until now. I grew up near the Humber and she did not freeze in my time. Of course, she's a faster-running river.' He was probably talking about a beautiful rural river and not the industrial one I knew.

‘Is it true establishments of every kind are actually built on the ice?' I asked.

He laughed. ‘Shopkeepers have set up tents and stalls in a long row from the Temple to Lambeth right across the river. I'm told it's frozen all the way down to the bed. Boys pull carts with the wheels removed, sliding passengers across. The boatmen charge folk to walk the ice, since their livings are threatened. There are mummers acting plays pretending to tell the story of the king's trial, and sellers of hot codlings, sausages, meat pies and the like, taking every advantage for commerce. They allow it, of course, because it will distract the commons from any thought of rebellion against Cromwell. How can folk be blamed in these impoverished times?'

I heard a note of familiar disenchantment in his Humberside burr. ‘You don't approve of commerce, Captain St Claire?'

‘I'm not among those who say it's demeaning to practise trade. Men who affect disdain for merchants are mere hypocrites, since all depend upon trade. It's trade, not kings and their schemes, have made this land wealthy. For all we grumble, we're paying the lowest taxes in Christendom. That a man should make a fair profit for his efforts is only just. English cloth warms kings and commoners worldwide. But I share the general view condemning unfair profit at the expense of the hard-working weaver!'

I heard in his reply an argument still fueling revolution.

‘Neither am I of the Leveller persuasion,' St Claire insisted. ‘But could not inherited wealth and excessive profits be examined by Parliament and a tax be implemented to spread wealth more justly? It is surely a sin in God's eye for the commonwealth to let poor folk starve or afford no doctors for their ailments, no food for their children, no roof, no hearth to warm elderly bones. Perhaps the answer is to levy a tax on all to provide for all. Thus no citizen need go hungry or sick or unlettered. We could build more workhouses which do not separate families. Schools could be attached to them. Children could be educated to read and figure for themselves, read their Bibles and reckon their own accounts the better to practise intelligent frugality. These are not sinful ideas, I think, but truly Christian ones following the teachings of our Lord. Every right-thinking creature in this sad kingdom holds some version of these views.'

‘So you
are
of the party that would execute the king and make commoners of all highborn lords and ladies?'

‘I lean, it is true, towards support of the Puritan cause. I do not hold extreme versions of those views, though it is hard to disagree with folk who look to the Bible for their guide. Unjust tyrants are dealt with swiftly in the Old Testament. Psalm 149 admonishes us to bind our king with chains and his nobles with iron fetters. I believe God empowers us to curb the king and his court. We must always be wary of popery in disguise. However, I do not believe we should do murder in the name of the commonwealth.' He took a long pull of his pint and threw me a searching look as if he feared he had said too much. But I was simply relieved because it had begun to occur to me that Captain St Claire might be a Parliament's man searching for information. A spy, in other words. What they still called an intelligencer.

Then I remembered standing beside him as we met the aggression of Messrs Clitch and Love. I knew, somehow, that I could trust him with my life.

‘Do you go tomorrow to witness the execution of the king?' I spoke as casually as I could. Most of London must have been asking that question. ‘Or shall you take advantage of the public holiday to enjoy some other pursuit?'

He smiled a little unhappily. ‘What else is more involving? But I'm told Whitehall and much of the City itself will be so packed with Puritan soldiery it will be impossible to do or witness anything. I pray that poor devil's soul goes quickly to its maker.'

‘You're a praying man, Captain St Claire?'

‘Aren't we all?'

I was amused. ‘Not where I come from.'

‘You come from a godless land indeed.'

‘I think so,' I agreed. Here, almost everyone accepted the Bible as the last word on any argument, whether moral, legal or political. Many Puritans found in it a clear admonition to put the king on trial and to execute him. They did this reluctantly, but in God's name. My growing preparedness to believe in God's existence didn't extend to taking as true all the conflicting messages of a myth cycle to the letter. I found deism as close as I came to having a religion. I had that in common with many signers of the American Declaration. I was confused again. I knew I couldn't match Captain St Claire in any theological debate. I finished my pint and said that I was now ready for bed. ‘Do you stay at the inn, Captain St Claire?'

‘I have quarters not far from here.'

‘Then I wish you goodnight and Godspeed!'

‘And to you, Master Moorcock. I trust you will fare well tomorrow.'

I left him in a thoughtful mood. I knew how important God was to these people in determining actions or inspiring their best and bravest deeds. To understand their reasoning, I needed to understand their God. I thought Captain St Claire might be a good teacher. Meanwhile I'd read a bit more of Milton's
Paradise Lost
in the hope of interpreting the Cromwellian mind-set at its most brilliant. When I got back to my room I opened the book again. Milton seemed even more profound and complex than I had originally thought, but while I was impressed by his vision of God I still had no coherent ideas of my own. God was not necessarily benign. Indeed the majority of His supporters seemed to regard Him as entirely otherwise; a rather cruel and intolerant entity. In the Old Testament, God's smiting record bettered Hitler's. The 1960s and '70s had been years of intense optimism, when together we had fought and won a few battles for local issues as well as national ones. I was living at the end of a generally optimistic period when our efforts to introduce a little more justice in the world seemed to be paying off. A distinct plus for the Prince of Peace. But what if Jesus was just another guy who defied that terrible old tyrant of the Old Testament? Eventually, and still reading Milton, I fell into a deep sleep.