Rebels and Traitors (74 page)

She had the sword! Annoyed, she remembered that old sword Lovell once gave her to protect herself; it was here in the cart with them. But too late. Always distasteful of it, she had hidden the thing right under their belongings, so she could not reach it now.

Tom wriggled free and jumped down again. In an instant he was at the tailboard, which he unleashed and dropped, very politely. As if afraid that they might still change their minds and leave him, the sick man forced himself forwards and up into the vehicle. He collapsed again, lying face down against their possessions, retreating into his sickness, yet not quite finished, for he made a desperate effort to pull in his legs so Tom could close up the tailboard. Just before he pushed it up, the well-mannered five-year-old introduced himself: ‘My name is Tom Lovell, sir.’ There was some mumbled reply.

The boy rushed back and climbed aboard. Gently, as if to spare their passenger, Juliana made the horse walk on. ‘Watch behind,’ she murmured. ‘Val, Tom — if that man moves, tell me instantly.’

‘His name is
Jukes,’
whispered Tom, as if he was reproving his mother for some discourtesy in speaking of him.

To Juliana it was familiar for some reason.

Anne Jukes was in her apron, with her hands all floury, when Robert Allibone’s journeyman, as Amyas now was, urgently called her from her kitchen. Completely flustered, Anne gesticulated helplessly, not recognising Juliana among the strangers with Amyas. The tailboard was down. Amyas was shaking his head, almost as a warning, and then Anne saw the wasted, barely conscious soldier that this strange family had brought to her. Ah
Lambert!’

Her husband slithered over the edge of the cart. He had grown so thin that Anne Jukes, a brewer’s sturdy daughter, was strong enough to haul his arm over her shoulder and support his weight. She staggered with him indoors. Amyas, bring these people in and look after their things, please. I need to know what has happened …’

So the Lovells gazed up from their ramshackle flatbed at the gracious gables and sash windows of a substantial three-storey London merchant’s house, then they were brought into a warm kitchen that glittered with burnished copper utensils, where they waited to be interviewed by Anne. Upstairs, it took her almost an hour to get Lambert undressed, washed and laid in a clean bed. A maid had been sent running out for a doctor. Downstairs, Juliana Lovell took it upon herself to find a cloth and remove Anne’s nutmeg-scented bread pudding from the oven when it was obviously done. The boys stared with great hope at the pudding until they fell asleep against their mother, who was already dozing in exhaustion on a settle.

So Anne eventually found them, and realised she would have to take them in. She went quietly back upstairs and made up the guest bed. It was a high four-poster, a full tester, with fantastical tapestry hangings and swag ties so heavy they could have knocked a bullock unconscious. There her refugees all slept together that night, the most comfortable night they had had since they left Essex, or perhaps ever.

Next day Anne took the little boys to the Jukes’ shop, where Thomas solemnly helped to weigh things out while Valentine gorged himself on sweet raisins and almonds. Leaving them in safe hands, Anne hurried home. She found Juliana was ready to let her guard down, lulled by the unaccustomed luxury of knowing that her children were warm, fed and secure. It was weeks since she had freely spoken to another adult. It was three years since she last had a close woman friend and longer than that since she had openly discussed anything to do with her family.

Anne Jukes first wanted to find out what had happened to Lambert. All her normal housework was deferred. Upstairs, her husband slumbered and began his recovery. Anne was herself in a state of shock. She welcomed a morning when she could sit idle at the kitchen fireside while she prepared herself for having Lambert home. She was acutely curious about the Lovells too.

Juliana told how they came upon Lambert, some miles beyond Chelmsford. ‘I managed to learn from him that carts were provided to bring the sick and wounded to London,’ Anne said. ‘He says they took a stop to rest and his cart accidentally went on without him — he could not run after it — yet the fool decided he would then walk home … I had been told he had a serious sickness that he could not shake off. Gideon wrote to me that Lambert had the bloody flux —’

Gideon?
wondered Juliana, imagining some pinch-mouthed, fatalistic puritan. Clearly an idiot, if he had told poor Anne her faraway husband was gripped by the generally fatal epidemic.

Once she remembered that she had met a woman called Jukes at the printer’s in Basinghall Street, Juliana had reasoned, rightly, that carrying in a sick New Model Army soldier might persuade the guards at Moorgate to admit her without too many questions. One had been detailed to accompany her to the print shop; he pushed her aside from the driving seat, as if a woman could not be trusted to control a horse, so she let him have the trouble of arguing with it. At the shop Amyas took over, intrigued to see how Anne would react to having Lambert home. Juliana remembered again her curiosity about this woman and the printer, Allibone.
He
had appeared briefly but merely gave Amyas instructions to escort the cart to Bread Street.

There Anne Jukes had greeted her husband’s sudden return with simple surprise. She bounced automatically to wild panic at his dire condition, then she braced herself to tackle it. ‘Well, so, so! I have him back … Now tell me, Mistress Lovell, how were you passing by at that lucky moment?’

Juliana was relieved to unburden herself. First she spoke of why she and the boys had been at Pelham Hall, and what she presumed her husband had been doing. Annoyed at being abandoned, she would not lie to Anne about either his politics or his activities. Then Juliana told how the Pelham family had been so relieved to see the back of her, they equipped her with horse, cart, a hamper for the journey and a travel-pass to Colchester that said, accurately, she was a distressed daughter looking for her invalid father.

‘What was your father’s situation?’

As terrible as it could be.’

Germain Carlill, who had always been a misfit, had prematurely lost his wits like an old man. This was the sad secret Juliana and Mr Gadd had always kept. He began to fail in the 1630s, when Juliana was still a child. All the family were then living in Colchester, the original home of her vanished grandfather the haberdasher, a modest town house in the suburbs. As Germain became more and more vague and in need of constant care, he was placed with a young woman of the town; she was paid for nursing services with the rent from a property that Roxanne bought for the purpose. Germain had wasted most of their money but Roxanne earned some by making the costumes for a court masque. While doing that in London, she acquired the famous ‘estate in Kent, with orchards’ that Mr Gadd later touted as Juliana’s dowry; it was little more than a small house with a market garden and few fruit trees near a village called Lewisham. The deeds were in Germain’s name, for Roxanne wanted to ensure he would always be cared for. ‘It was either that or put him in Bridewell. My father no longer knew us and could not be reasoned with.’ Wiping away a tear, Juliana did not have to tell Anne Jukes that the Bridewell treatment of lunatics was to beat them with rods; it was supposed to drive out their demons and cure them, though it helped but few.

Once her grandmother could no longer bear Germain’s decrepitude, being an intolerant woman who was angered by illness in others, she sold the Colchester house and took Juliana to London. There Roxanne died. Tottering himself, her guardian William Gadd saw his priority as settling Juliana; he never told Orlando Lovell that the ‘Kentish orchards’ were meagre and still belonged to Germain Carlill. Once she married, Juliana had frequently had to make excuses to Lovell for her non-receipt of the rents.

When Juliana went back to Colchester to look for her father after the siege, one of her trials was hearing from his keeper that no money had been received from the Lewisham tenants for some time. Juliana would have to discover why. None of the likely explanations was good.

Far worse news was waiting, however. By the time she arrived at Colchester and talked her way in through the victorious New Model Army soldiers, her father was dead. As she read the news-sheets, she had suspected this. He was too fragile to survive such a siege. His nurse’s house had been lost to fire; the homeless had to shelter in a church. Before then, the poor old man — who was fifty yet more like a man of ninety — had become utterly confused and terrified. Germain knew nothing of the civil war. He lived in his own world, no longer aware who he was, responding to his nurse out of habit. The noise of guns had appalled him; Juliana was told of one wild scene when he escaped to the town walls, half naked, and tried to instruct the soldiers to stop causing such a commotion. Starvation hit him hard. Already weak, he shrank to a wraith, refusing to eat even the unpalatable scraps that were available. His mind deteriorated further, very rapidly. He ranted uncontrollably and accused the poor woman who looked after him of trying to end his life. She had little to give him, and soon knew she could not save him.

‘By the time I found her,’ Juliana poured out to Anne Jukes through tears, ‘she was herself desperately sick. She died, almost overcome by relief at telling me what had happened to Papa. She died apologising for his death — even though I was told by others afterwards that the woman had struggled to look after him long after most would have given up. She had not just shared her pitiful rations with him, but gave him the greater share because his pleas were so heartbreaking…’

Nobody left at Colchester could tell Juliana exactly when Germain Carlill died, or where he was buried. The dead had been disposed of by the fainting population in a random fashion, with no parish records kept. Nobody ever knew the full death toll among civilians.

Juliana had paid for the nurse to be buried. At the funeral, a woman who had probably intended to keep quiet suddenly came forward and told her where to find her father’s remaining possessions. Juliana knew Germain had owned a watch and there had once been pewter, linen, colourful delft platters … she would never see any of those again. She did find sacks of haberdashery. She tracked down one great chair that her father had always sat in. In a chest, surviving because they must have seemed to have no value, were papers covered with her grandmother’s patterns for lace and embroidery. Juliana piled all these onto her cart, with her own possessions.

She had one last task: to discover whether Orlando Lovell had been among the Royalists at Colchester. She was unable to find his name in the lists of prisoners and a few she was allowed to speak to had never heard of him. So she left Colchester, her last link with her own family, for ever.

Juliana confessed to Anne she was glad she never had to show her sons their grandfather without his wits and suffering. Eventually she would be able to tell Tom and Val about Germain, as she remembered him from her short but happy childhood — the affectionate father who had helped her learn her letters and given her a love of literature: gentle, always a little vague, unworldly, maddeningly untouched by common sense or commercial acumen, but also quite lacking in the greed, depravity and ambition that disfigured so many men’s characters.

‘Would he have been for Parliament or the King?’ Anne Jukes asked curiously.

‘I do not think he would have known how to decide.’

‘Would he have wanted equality and liberty?’

Juliana smiled suddenly. She knew from their past meeting that Anne had a subscription to the Levellers. It would not have surprised her to hear that Anne attended meetings where she-preachers stood up. ‘Oh, when he had his wits, my father could not have been for any other cause.’

And you?’ Anne wondered. She had learned enough from the episode yesterday when Juliana quietly removed the pudding from the oven during the crisis of Lambert’s return — and then did not draw attention to her good deed. Anne was glad to have Juliana in her house for a few days. They understood one another, as some women do instinctively. ‘So whom do you support?’

‘I am a wife!’ protested Juliana. The two women’s eyes met.

‘Oh you think as your husband does!’ teased Anne Jukes. ‘You think as your husband
tells
you to think — which is, you do not think at all.’

‘He is the head of my household.’ Juliana was smiling despite herself.

‘You say he is never there.’

‘So now Lambert has returned to you, will you do all he suggests -or will you wrangle?’

Anne smoothed down her apron. ‘There will be fights ahead.’ She let out the words like one who was just admitting it for the first time.

They sat in silence for a while, each pondering her own problems. When the moment came to rebuild the fire then develop a new subject, Juliana prodded, ‘I do not suppose you have had much to do with Royalists?’

‘Is there a family in England that does not have divided loyalties?’ Anne was now in a gossipy mood. ‘The Jukes had a terrible uncle, Bevan Bevan — a man who caused dissension every time he cleared his throat. He recently set himself on a horse and joined in the Kent rebellion. A more ridiculous cavalier the King could not muster; Bevan could hardly move for his weight and his gout, and he was far too old for adventuring. I am waiting to tell Lambert how the silly man advanced upon London with Lord Norwich’s troops, and was with them when they swam their horses across the river by Greenwich. Bevan’s horse managed to shed him and he was carried away by the current. Many were drowned; Bevan was among them. His body was washed ashore downriver. He was recognised by his belly — and his old red suit.’