The King's Mistress (23 page)

He handed her the weapon and she was surprised at its weight.

“You can hold it with both hands,” he said, demonstrating. “Or brace the barrel against your left forearm. Try it both ways.”

There was a quince tree nearby, and he set one of the golden-green fruits, heavy with ripeness, on a boulder.

“Aim for that,” he said. “Both arms out straight this time. Squeeze the trigger slowly. And keep your feet well apart and braced; that pistol has quite a kick.”

Jane did as he said but was still astonished at the power of the weapon’s recoil and the deafening roar. But the quince was gone, blown into pulpy pieces.

John whistled and grinned at her. “Do that again and you can take Cromwell’s shilling and join the army.”

Jane warmed at her brother’s praise. He had made quite a name for himself during the wars, leading such successful raids on supply trains that the Parliamentary army had ordered that travel be suspended on the road from London to Coventry.

Jane sent four more quinces to meet their Maker before she and John repaired to the shepherd’s hut, where John laid small branches and kindling for a fire and lit it with his flint and steel. They ate cold meat and bread, but heated water in a small tin pan and mixed it with brandy, and Jane felt more comfortable as the drink blurred the edges of her mind. She thought about the soldiers they had encountered that afternoon, and the pistol and the dagger she wore sheathed at her waist.

“Have you killed men?” she asked.

John picked up a branch and poked the fire, and they watched the sparks fly upward to the black hole in the roof before he spoke.

“Aye. It would be hard to see as much fighting as I did and not have it so.”

“Was it hard? Were you afraid?”

“The first time I had no time to be afraid or to think whether it was hard. We had taken Rushall Hall, but the rebels wanted it back, and badly. They scaled the wall and charged the house after dark when we were not expecting them. I was in bed, but fortunately I was reading and had the lantern still lit. I heard footsteps outside the door and had my pistol in hand when he came through. He had the light in his eyes and the split second it took for him to spot me was enough time for me to shoot him before he could shoot me.”

Jane tried to imagine herself in John’s place, firing on a stranger to save her own life. Her stomach tightened with fear and she hoped she would never be in those circumstances.

“I caught him full in the breast,” John said, “And he looked at me with such surprise. Almost with outrage, as though I had taken some unfair advantage. Then he fell. I could hear shouting and pistol shots and I knew I should reload, but my hands were shaking so badly that I could not. So I stood there and looked upon him. He was very young, and resembled our Richard a bit. He didn’t move and I thought at first that perhaps he was only shamming. But then blood ran from his mouth, down his cheek and onto the floor, and I knew he was dead.”

He poured more brandy into their tin cups and topped it up with hot water. Jane wrapped her fingers around the cup, feeling its warmth. Her stomach was fluttering, and she rubbed the cup over her belly.

“Feeling ill?”

“Just a little queasy,” Jane said. “It’ll pass.”
Please let it pass,
she thought. Whatever would she do if she was with child? She pushed the worry to the back of her mind. She would face that trouble when she had to. She drank, feeling the brandy lighting its way down her throat.

“The first time, you said. There were more, then.”

“The next was the hardest,” John said. “For I knew him.”

Jane thought of Geoff Stone, and pictured him and John facing each other over loaded pistols.

“We had word of a convoy of wagons heading for Coventry and were lying in wait just off the road. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, the kind of day that would have been well spent fishing. We heard the rumble of the wagons and waited until they came around a bend in the road. I could hear them laughing. One of our lads got off a shot just as they came into sight. Then all was merry hell. There was an armed man next to the driver of each wagon, and they were shooting at us, and our men were shooting at them from both sides of the road. I saw one of our lads go down, a blossom of blood on his belly, and aimed at the man who had shot him. He turned and took aim at me just as I was squeezing the trigger, and I saw that it was Christopher Hobbs, from Walsall. He had been in my mind not a quarter of an hour past, for I had spent just such an afternoon fishing with him. He knew me, too. The recognition flashed in his eyes. But he fired. He missed. I fired. It took his jaw away. He dropped the gun and fell to the road and a wagon ran over him as he lay there, and that finished him if he wasn’t dead already.”

John exhaled hard and closed his eyes, and Jane saw his mouth tighten with the effort not to weep.

“I pray the king is safely in France,” he said. “And if he comes back to England with an army at his back, I’ll go to his side once more. But I thank God now that He sent me eight girls, and only the one boy, so I don’t have to fear I’ll see them fight and die.”

He looked at Jane, her hair, loosened from its tie, falling free over her shoulders, but her shape hidden by her heavy wool waistcoat, and he bowed his head.

“Oh, Jane, I did wrong to bring you into this. You should be comfortable at home.”

“No,” Jane said. “You did right. For what is my comfort, or my life, come to that, against the safety of the king and kingdom?”

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON A DRIZZLING RAIN BEGAN
. J
ANE WAS CHILLED
to her bones and her feet were in agony. They had passed no houses since midday and she was beginning to fear they might have to sleep out of doors, when John gestured to a pinpoint of light in the deepening dusk ahead. As they came closer they could see that the light shone from a tiny alehouse with the sign of a red lion swinging above the door, and that there were a few houses scattered nearby.

“We’d best stop here if we can,” John said. “It’ll be full night soon.”

They entered the little tavern to find a dozen men gathered at a few tables. Having passed herself off as a boy for three days, Jane was much more at ease than she had been when they entered the alehouse on their first night travelling. Still, she left most of the talking to John. Over supper he exchanged pleasantries with the locals and then asked for any news. They told of a cavalry patrol that had come through the previous afternoon, surely the same that John and Jane had seen. They had stopped and questioned the village folk, looking for a man and a woman travelling together on horseback, and for the king, a tall dark-haired man in disguise.

“Charles Stuart they called him,” a lean-faced farmer scoffed.

He eyed Jane and John, and apparently thought better of speaking further.

“What place might this be?” John asked, when they had finished their supper.

“Bosworth,” the landlord said. “Where Richard the Third lost his crown, and Henry Tudor found it.”

Jane thought back to Francis Wyndham’s tale of his father, exhorting his sons to honour the crown though it hung on a bush. The bush might be right outside the door, and it was Charles’s several-times-great-grandfather who had put on that crown and passed it down.

They were in luck that night, as the inn boasted a room to let. It had but one bed, but it was warm and dry, and to Jane it was a welcome refuge. She bundled herself in her cloak and blanket by John’s side and was soon asleep.

The grey light of dawn woke Jane, and she groaned, feeling all too plainly now the effects of three days of walking. Her whole body felt odd, too, she thought. Her breasts were tender, and the rough fabric of her shirt chafed against her nipples. She was exhausted, and bathed her face in cold water to rouse herself.

“We’ll reach Leicester today,” John said as the road took them along between fields dotted with sheep. “But there’s like to be many troops there, perhaps even handbills with your description, so it’s probably safest for us to pass through and get as far past it as we can tonight.”

Jane didn’t argue with that logic, and John was right—the town was full of soldiers. The proclamation offering a reward of a thousand pounds for the king’s capture was posted in the market, and Jane blanched at the heading of another broadsheet fluttering from a post, “The True Speech Delivered on the Scaffold by James, Earl of Derby.” She went closer, and was even more startled by the second heading in smaller letters—“Likewise, the Manner How the King of Scots took Shipping at Gravesend on the Fourth of this Instant October with Captain Hind, Disguised in Seaman’s Apparel and Safely Arrived at the Hague.” She beckoned wordlessly to John, and he came and read over her shoulder.

“It couldn’t be,” she said. “Could it?”

He shook his head, frowning as he read over the notice. “Hard to see how. Gravesend is at the mouth of the Thames near London. A very long way from Trent.”

“Perhaps it’s just another rumour.”

“Like enough.” He glanced around and kept his voice low. “Too many soldiers about for my comfort. Let’s buy what provisions we need and be on our way. If it’s true, no doubt we’ll hear more about it soon.”

They stayed in the marketplace just long enough to buy some pies to eat and bread, sausages, cheese, fruit, and nuts to carry with them, and Jane was relieved when they passed through the city’s eastern gates and were once more in open countryside.

The road between Leicester and Peterborough was much more heavily used than their way had been so far, and a small roadside alehouse gave them the opportunity to exchange news with other travellers.

“Aye, I heard of that same broadsheet,” said an old farmer in a dirty smock. “But I don’t believe it myself. I fear the king was killed at Worcester fight.”

Jane looked around the little taproom, and reflected that as John had not shaved since they left and neither he nor Jane had bathed or changed their clothes, they were beginning to look authentically the country folk they pretended to be.

“I heard in Peterborough,” asserted an itinerant mender of pots, “that the king is hiding under a red periwig, and acting as serving man to a soldier in Cromwell’s army.”

“Don’t believe that flimflam,” scoffed a stout woman with a goose under her arm. “I spoke to a man yesterday swore he had seen the king dressed as a woman in London not a week ago.”

“If he’s taller than two yards and as swarthy as they say”—John smiled—“he must make a very ugly wench.”

“It’s the truth you speak,” the woman cackled. “But perhaps in London the girls are so ugly that the people there take no notice!”

John and Jane walked on, through barren fields and bare-branched trees and scattered villages, the north wind biting through the layers of their clothes as they grew nearer the sea. The days were getting colder and wetter. Frequently now the road was muddy or even flooded when it was near a stream, and then they had to make their way as best they could, sometimes leaving the road altogether to find dry ground. On their eighth day walking John fell ill of an ague, miserable with running eyes and nose, aches, and a cough deep in his chest. In the late afternoon they came upon a great house, and going to the kitchen door, asked to sleep in the stables. The round-faced cook clucked in sympathy at John’s red nose and wan complexion.

“Sit you down and I’ll feed you up well, poor dear,” she exclaimed, and in the heat of the great fireplace John’s shivering ceased.

The stables were warm with the heat of a dozen horses, and nests of straw provided a more comfortable bed than they had had in days. In the morning John was no better but insisted he could press on.

“It’s Sunday,” Jane pointed out, looking at him in dismay as he forced himself to a sitting position. “A day of rest, and heaven knows we deserve one. Besides, we’d likely draw attention to ourselves, travelling on the Lord’s Day.”

“You’re right there,” John agreed, blowing his nose. “Perhaps we should plan to lie low on Sundays.”

They slept for most of the day, and at mealtimes Jane slipped back to the kitchen, where for a few pence the cook was happy to feed her and send hot food back to John. After two nights of rest John was well enough to travel, and they set forth again.

In Peterborough they heard more rumours of the king’s whereabouts—he had gone to the Isle of Man, he was in disguise and in the company of a highwayman near Coventry—and saw another broadsheet, “The Declaration of Major General Massey Upon His Deathbed at Leicester and the Manner How Charles Stuart Forced His Passage and so Escaped Toward Scotland.”

“At least we have not heard of his capture,” Jane said as they made ready for bed on a cold night in the village of Eye, just north of Peterborough. “That argues that perhaps he is safely abroad. And yet I wonder why there is no word of his being in France if he has reached there?”

“No telling,” John said, frowning as he studied his map book. He had been silent and glum that evening.

“Are you feeling ill again?” Jane asked, searching his face.

He shook his head wearily. “Just thinking of Athalia and the girls.” His voice was thick with emotion, and Jane put a hand on his shoulder and kissed the top of his head.

After they had blown out the candle, she lay awake for a time, thinking of her parents and family, of Nurse and the rest of the household, of Jack’s odd creaking call when he greeted her. They were all so far away, and no telling when she would see them again. She wondered where Henry was, and said a prayer for his safety and comfort.

The confusion of rumour about Charles worried her, too. Surely he should have reached France long ago? Why had the news not come to England? Perhaps he had wished to keep his presence secret for some time. But what if he had been apprehended? Or been forced to change his plans? If he really had gone to Scotland or London, then what would become of her and John when they reached France—if they reached it? They had not yet gone half the way to Yarmouth, and the thought of walking another hundred weary miles with winter coming on brought a chill to her heart.

Another fear was becoming hard to put from her mind. She had still not had her monthly courses, and in so many ways, her body felt different. She felt thicker at the middle and heavy somehow, her lower body ached, and she was exhausted. But of course, she tried to reassure herself, the aches and tiredness could be put down to the endless miles, sometimes scant food, uncomfortable sleeping conditions, and constant worry. John would likely know how a woman felt in the first weeks of being with child, but she could certainly not ask him. She dreaded the thought that if she was carrying Charles’s baby, they would not reach France before her condition became obvious.