Rebels and Traitors (113 page)

Well, I never agreed to it,’ Tom backed out hastily. ‘Though Uncle Lambert did tell me, I could end up an alderman — or even Lord Mayor of London.’

Orlando Lovell became so distressed and annoyed, that although normally abstemious, he drank a whole bottle of Rhenish wine in half an hour before dinner, and then was ill after it.

He almost refused to bring Tom with him the next time he came back to England. But there was nowhere in unfriendly Flanders where a penniless English boy could be safely left. It was cheaper, and more secure, to bring Tom back. Travelling as a pair also made them less conspicuous.

Thomas seemed compliant. He never asked to return to his mother, never now even wanted to write to her. So father and son slipped ashore at Dover, which Royalists rightly believed was a slack port where unlawful immigrants could easily land. They made their way to London. After several moves to confuse observers, Lovell took them to an inn where they had stayed once before, the Swan in King Street. They had now slipped back into their old skulking life, looking anonymous and unremarkable.

But Thomas had his own ideas about that.

One evening, half an hour’s walk away in Bread Street, Anne Jukes happened to glance out of a small window that overlooked the private yard at the back of her house. Lambert had recently completed his father’s long-ago-planned house-of-easement, in memory of John. It was also to please his wife who, ever since the Ranting incident, believed it her right to exact work around the house at frequent intervals.

Glancing through the pane, Anne suppressed a startled squeak. She saw a boy she recognised, carrying a small bundle, slip into the house-of-easement. He did not come out.

Ten minutes later Anne walked quietly across the yard. She pulled open the door and remarked into the gloom, ‘I made one of my walnut cakes this afternoon. I can bring you some out here — but you have no need to crouch in the dark. There is Gideon’s old room in the house, just waiting to be occupied by somebody who needs a refuge, Thomas.’

The ceremonies for the Protector were held without incident. On July the 24th, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Edward Sexby. That same day a man was plucked off a ship just as it was about to sail for Flanders. He was arrested and taken rapidly back to London. He looked like a countryman, in shabby clothes and with a rough beard; born in Suffolk, he managed a creditable country accent. But customs officers had seen through the disguise.

He was brought to the Tower. The welcoming party regarded him curiously. Following so many doomed world-movers and crown-chasers into that great fortress, was enough to make any heart quake. He showed no reaction as he was dwarfed by the stronghold, a city in itself, with its intimidating curtain walls, numerous towers — some so massive they had towers of their own — silent cannon, working portcullises, ancient chapels where implacable monarchs and governments had laid to rest queens, traitors, pretenders and misfits who offended them. He would know there were torture chambers. Deep in the bowels, out of earshot, was ferocious equipment, developed over centuries, in the keeping of heartless operators who enjoyed their work.

A tall, fair-haired man had been hurriedly sent by Thurloe. He identified the prisoner: ‘Yes, this is Sexby’

Sexby bore no malice. His self-confidence, always only a little short of arrogance, made him proud to be recognised. They were using the Beauchamp and Broad Arrow Towers for political prisoners these days, though there was plenty of choice. Sexby was taken to a cell, a grim lodging but at least it was a room, not a dungeon. Taking a chance, Gideon asked to be allowed time with him.

‘Yes, settle him in — good notion. Soften him up …’ No chance of that, not with Sexby.

It was nine years since Holdenby, eight from the Putney Debates. Gideon found Sexby older, more worn, yet more direct; probably he himself was the same. As a prisoner, Sexby looked tired, withdrawn, accepting. He made no excited protestations of innocence: all classic signs of guilt. Briefly questioned on arrival, he had given very little away. He would be like Sindercombe, never admitting anything. He would positively enjoy holding out. But Gideon did not believe Sexby would kill himself; he would force Cromwell to execute him, intending that Cromwell would look more tyrannical.

The two men stared around the bare, dark cell, with its barred windows, cold stone walls, empty fireplace. There was a narrow bed and an uneven little table. Through the thick stone walls crept sickness, damp, bedbugs and despair. There was a high risk of death.

‘I would offer to bring in necessities, but…’ Gideon was thinking of Sindercombe and the poison. Daring escapes had happened over the Tower’s long history, but Colonel Barkstead was meticulous. He had caught one Royalist soaking his window bars with aqua fortis. He would not lose Sexby.

‘Ink and paper?’

Gideon shook his head. ‘Forbidden. I heard you are married — your wife and any other family will be allowed to visit.’ Sexby gave a faint nod. Mrs Elizabeth Ford, the mistress who effected Sexby’s escape from capture at Weymouth, now called herself Elizabeth Sexby; she had been with him in Flanders and had borne him children.

Gideon felt more demoralised than he had expected. Sexby half unbuttoned his coat, the best he could do to make himself at home. He turned and shared a fatalistic glance with Gideon. Though they had reached different positions, their shared past experiences gave them bonds. Both sighed. Neither blamed the other. The mutual dislike they had felt all those years ago became a matter of indifference.

‘End of an era,’ said Gideon in a grey voice. ‘Walwyn is doctoring the poor, Wildman died of a seizure outside Eltham Jail as he returned from bail, Overton has turned to wild religion.’ Lilburne, turning pragmatist, was still on the loose. Neither Gideon nor Sexby mentioned it. Gideon glanced at the door and lowered his voice as if his purpose was unofficial. ‘My second wife was married to Orlando Lovell, the Royalist known as William Boyes. Will you tell me where to find him?’

Sexby looked at him more keenly. Gideon’s legal quandary did not interest him; he was locked inside his personal predicament, weighing everything that was said to him against that. ‘Have you been told to ask me?’

‘My quest is personal.’

‘I know nothing of him.’ A standard answer. Gideon realised Sexby did not trust him. Even without knowing that Gideon had been ordered to look for the second firework, Sexby would protect Lovell.

‘He has my wife’s son.’

‘His
son, presumably’ Sexby shrugged. Elizabeth would have to bring up their children alone; Gideon wondered just how much — or how little — Sexby had invested in them emotionally.

Still, he tried again. ‘Lambert wanted Thomas to be a grocer.’

Sexby, once a grocer’s apprentice, finally laughed. ‘And how is Lambert?’

‘His health is broken.’ He held up his own arm like a bird’s broken wing. And I too am ruined.’ Gloomily philosophical, Gideon opened up to Sexby, speaking his fears for the future as he would to no one else: ‘We regret nothing. We would do it all again, and gladly. We recite to ourselves that miserable cliché, our fighting achieved so little, yet not to have fought would have been disastrous. It is, of course, no consolation. Failure has lain in wait all along and nothing changes that.’

Sexby was tensed to resist interrogation yet he too seemed prepared to forecast: ‘Cromwell will die. The young Charles Stuart will return. Whatever promises he makes, monarchy restored under him will have a godless, dissolute core.’ He spoke as one who had seen the man at close quarters. ‘He will round up all those who brought his father to account. Liberty, which has died under Cromwell, will be permanently lost then … Well! I shall not see it.’ Gideon could not argue with that bald conclusion. What will you do, Gideon Jukes?’

As I must. Endure it. It has been fifteen years since we took up arms,’ said Gideon. ‘People are tired. Tired of fighting. We did our best, but we cannot continue. We want a normal life. A week of work, a Sunday sermon, a wife and children in the home, peace and prosperity. We want a settled commonwealth.’

‘Your commonwealth is a lost cause,’ Sexby told him.
No thanks to you,
thought Gideon.

He could bear no more and ended the interview. To his surprise, Sexby sent him off with the old Leveller salute: True unto death!’ Gideon could not bring himself to return the same.

It would take until November, four months of mental grind, for the authorities to persuade Edward Sexby to admit he was the author of
Killing no Murder.
Raving and shaking with an ague, he would confess everything — or so it would be said. Sexby would have no trial, but an inquest would decide he had been carried off by jail fever. That, he would have said, was extremely convenient for Cromwell.

His wife, recently delivered of a child, sent her maid with forty shillings to have him buried. Although she was given the opportunity to have his body taken outside, with her husband’s kind of defiance, Elizabeth Sexby told them to inter him in the grounds of the Tower of London where he had died.

Gideon never saw Sexby again. Feeling exhausted and mournful, he had walked out that evening from a gatehouse, into the vast open interior spaces of the Tower of London, bathed in the last filtered twilight of a long July evening. Candles showed high in the constable’s quarters. Military sounds came from the garrison. A breeze carried the smell of the stables; even its pungency failed to eradicate the stench of prison neglect he had absorbed. Chilled to the bone even after so short a visit, he felt his shoulder aching badly.

Somewhere here, Gideon remembered, was a copy of the Magna Carta. It had been shown to Lord Fairfax once, but Gideon Jukes did not request a viewing.

Mrs Maud Tew was well aware that her brother grew more and more to resemble their father. Red in the face, outstanding in the belly, complaining and work-shirking, Nat had happily adopted the traditions of his ancestors. He had become as useless as Emmett always was. Maud Tew squared up to her fate with resignation — a slight, pallid but pert figure, who had made herself formidable in her chosen domain. She looked as if a puff of wind would bowl her over, though she had the wiry strength of all working women who constantly heaved about heavy tubs and barrels. Nat allowed her to do it, unaware that she was perfectly capable of carrying out such work, whilst simultaneously plotting in her nowadays well-ordered mind how to be rid of him.

Her thin brown hair was tied in a tight little topknot, without a cap or headscarf, though she wore an oversized white collar on her tiny shoulders, above a more-or-less fitting grey gown. A capacious apron completed what would have been a respectable ensemble, had not the butt of her pistol been visible in her apron pocket where a lesser woman might carry a housewife-cloth to dust her mantel-shelves.

Mrs Tew had a reputation. Both her brother and her customers respected and admired it. She made no secret that she had been a soldier, in disguise; it was also reported that she had been a highway robber, like the infamous Molly out at the Black Dog Tavern on Blackheath. Maud kept her mouth shut about her history, but for a slightly built woman who kept an alehouse in a hard district, such rumours did no harm. It was one way to impress upon the public the Act against Drunkenness; when the Swan’s customers had supped enough in her opinion, they were encouraged homewards by her gun.

It was, therefore, not sensible for anyone to cause a rumpus in her tavern’s yard. When one of the occasional lodgers lost his temper with an ostler, he was asking for it.
Thomas, the ostler at the Swan, pistolled coming to take their horses …
Hearing the racket, Maud ran up from the brewhouse. She found a swank cove in a suit that annoyed her, yelling that his young son had been permitted to run off. He was attempting to take his horse from the ostler, who kept a good hold of the animal because the reckoning had not been paid.