The King's Mistress (5 page)

“It was a year ago today that young King Charles met Cromwell’s forces at Dunbar,” Thomas Lane commented, and Jane shivered, recalling her despair at the news of the terrible rout, and Cromwell’s subsequent subjugation of Scotland.

Jane felt restless all afternoon. She tried to read but found no pleasure in it and could not make herself sit still, so she gave up and went outside. Clouds hung overhead and the air seemed to crackle with tension. She felt lonely, but there was no one to talk to, no one who would satisfy her longing for easy companionship. Maybe she would stay with Ellen for a month or more, she thought. Maybe she would feel happier with a change of scene.
And perhaps,
a voice at the back of her head whispered,
perhaps you will meet a man there
.

J
ANE LAY AWAKE THAT NIGHT, HER MIND AND SPIRIT DISTURBED
. S
HE
had only begun to drop off to sleep when she was startled into wakefulness by the furious pounding of horses’ hooves and dogs barking. She ran to the window. There was no moon, and by the silver starlight she could barely make out fleeting shapes in the blackness as several men on horseback pelted into the yard as though the forces of hell were after them.

“All of them into the stable!” It was John’s voice calling out hoarsely.

“Quick, man, quickly, away!” And that voice was Henry’s, low and urgent. Something must be terribly wrong, that they should be back so soon.

Her heart pounding, Jane threw a heavy shawl around her shoulders and ran downstairs, meeting her parents, Athalia, Withy, and Withy’s husband, John Petre, as they converged in the kitchen just as John slammed the door shut and dropped the bar into place. Henry had collapsed onto a stool at the great table, and was slumped forward, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

“What is it, John?” Thomas Lane asked, striking a flint and lighting the lantern. Its blue glass panes bathed the kitchen in a spectral glow.

“There’s been a great defeat at Worcester,” John said, his face haggard. “We got no further than Kidderminster before we began to meet soldiers fleeing. We left it too late to join the king. The battle started this morning.”

“Richard!” Jane’s mother shrieked. “What of Richard? Is he with you?”

“Alas, no,” John said. “We turned back as soon as it was clear there was no longer a battle to go to.”

“Cromwell’s men are scouring the country for the king’s soldiers even now,” Henry said. “It was all we could do to get back before we met any of them.”

“And the king?” Jane cried. “What of the king?”

John and Henry exchanged glances.

“We heard that he was killed,” John said heavily. “But also that he had been taken prisoner.”

Jane’s heart sank. If young King Charles had been captured, he would surely be executed as his father had been, and the Royalist cause would be lost indeed.

“Everything is chaos.” Jane thought Henry seemed near tears. “All that is certain is that the king’s forces were greatly outnumbered, and the day was lost after fierce and terrible fighting.”

Outside a gust of wind shook the trees, and Jane heard the patter of rain against the window, invisible against the icy blackness.

“I’ll go into Wolverhampton for news tomorrow,” Thomas said at last. “Though I fear me none of it will be good.”

A
LL THROUGH THE NIGHT AND INTO THE NEXT DAY IT RAINED
. I
N
the grey light of dawn, Jane stood huddled in her shawl, staring out an upstairs window. A quarter of a mile away, the Wolverhampton Road was thick with the traffic of the disaster. Wounded men limped or were carried by their fellows. The rain beat down relentlessly, turning the road into a sucking stew of mud. Jane hoped against hope that she would see Richard walking up the lane to the house, and prayed that he was alive and unwounded. She turned as John came to stand beside her, unshaven and with dark circles under his eyes. She was startled to see how grey was the stubble on his cheeks.

“Can we not help those poor men?” she asked. “Give them water and food, at least? Perhaps somewhere someone is doing the same for Richard.”

In a short time the bake house behind Bentley Hall was bustling as servants dispensed water, hot soup, bread, and ale to the stream of refugees, along with bread, cheese, sausages, and apples to carry away with them. In the kitchen, the women of the house did what they could for the wounded. Washing away the blood and mud and binding the men’s wounds with strips of linen and herbal decoctions to slow the bleeding and soothe the pain made Jane feel that she was making some difference, and it gave her the opportunity to ask about Richard.

“Richard Lane? No, Mistress, I don’t know him.” The young soldier, one arm in a bloody sling and his face grey with pain and dirt, shook his head. Jane closed her eyes and tried not to imagine Richard’s body stiffening in the cold rain.

“Though to be sure,” the lad continued, gulping water from a tin cup, “by the end it was like hell itself, and I would have been hard-pressed to know what happened to any man.”

“Tell me,” Jane begged. She sat beside him on the bench next to the big kitchen table. Across from her, Nurse was sponging blood from the ragged scrap of flesh that was all that remained of the right ear of a redheaded boy who was doing his best not to cry.

“I was just to the north of Fort Royal, up on the hill,” the young soldier said, “and when the rebels captured the fort, we were cut off from the rest of the king’s forces. Outflanked, and trapped outside the city walls. We tried to get to St Martin’s Gate, but Cromwell’s men—the Essex militia it was—came after us.”

He shook his head, as if trying to puzzle something out, and his voice was hollow as he continued.

“There was no question of capture. They just wanted to slaughter all of us they could. Of course, once they overran the fort, they had our cannons. Men were falling all about me and the dead were huddled in piles against the city walls. By some miracle I reached the gate and got through.”

A heavy rumble of thunder sounded, rattling the windows, and the rain seemed to renew its fury.

“And then?” Jane prompted gently.

“All was confusion. The enemy must have broached the other gates of the city, for they seemed to be coming from all directions. They were riding men down, cutting them down as they fled. I saw the king almost trampled by our own horse, running in so great disorder that he could not stop them, though he used all the means he could.”

“Alas,” Jane said. “Would they not stand and fight?”

“I’m sure most did as well as they were able, Mistress. But by that time even those who still had muskets had no shot, and were trying to hold off the enemy horse with fire pikes—burning tar in leather jacks fixed to the ends of their pikes. Dusk was falling and with it the end of any hope. I fled out the gate, my only thought to head northward.”

He drained the last of the water and stood, slinging his canvas sack on his shoulders.

“I thank you for your kindness, Mistress. And I hope your brother is safe and on his way home.”

Jane heard similar stories throughout the day. The king’s army had known to begin with that they were outnumbered, but fought with the desperation born of the knowledge that today was their only hope. At the fort, at the city walls and gates, in the streets, it had been brutal, exhausting, confusing mayhem, ending in defeat and despair.

“We were beat,” a grizzled sergeant said. “It was not for want of spirit, nor for want of effort by the king. Certainly a braver prince never lived.”

“What does he look like, the king?” Jane asked.

The sergeant blew out his cheeks. “Like a king ought to, you might say. I was proud to look on him, and to be sure, I could tell that all around me felt the same.”

Jane thought of Kent in
King Lear
.
You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master … Authority.

“What else?” she asked.

“He’s a big man, over six feet, and well formed.” He noted the look in her eyes and smiled. “Yes, and handsome, too, lass.” Jane blushed. “Of a dark complexion, darker than the king his father. He was wearing a buff coat, with an armour breastplate and back over it, like any officer, but finer, you know. And some jewel on a great red ribbon that sparkled like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Although the fight must have been terrible, Jane wished desperately that she could have seen the king.

“He was right there among the men in the battle?” she asked.

“Oh, to be sure, Mistress. He hazarded his person much more than any officer, riding from regiment to regiment and calling the officers by name, and when all seemed lost urging the men to stand and fight once more.”

Exactly like King Henry V, Jane thought.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead …

“He had two horses shot from under him, he did.”

Jane could imagine the young king so clearly, and she choked back a sob as she remembered that he might well be dead.

“I was there to near the end, I think,” the old sergeant went on. “When there remained just a few of us by the town hall.”

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers …

“All that kept us going was the word that the king had not been killed or captured, so far as any could tell. It was full dark by then, and I was able to slip away by St Martin’s Gate, which our horse still held.”

M
ANY OF THE FLEEING SOLDIERS WERE
S
COTTISH
H
IGHLANDERS
, the upper part of their great kilts drawn up over their heads against the rain, and Jane fancied she saw in their faces bleak despair that went beyond their hunger, discomfort, and defeat in battle. By midday Parliamentary cavalry patrols thundered by on the now-deserted road, and in the afternoon Jane watched a detachment pass with a string of captured Royalist soldiers, their wrists bound, soaked to the knees in mud.

“What will happen to them?” she asked John.

“The Scots will likely be transported to Barbados, or maybe the American colonies. As slaves, more or less, to work on plantations.”

“Inhuman,” Jane whispered in horror. “And the English?”

“Prison. Likely execution for the officers. The men may be spared their lives.”

“Richard,” Jane said. “It breaks my heart to think where he may be. Wounded, perhaps, lying in some field, wet and hungry and in pain.”

Or worse, she thought, but did not speak the words, as if giving them voice had the power to make them real. John put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her closer to him.

“Let’s not think that yet. It may well be that he escaped in safety and is on his way to us even now.”

He kissed the top of her head, and the familiar scent of him, the pungent smell of tobacco smoke, mingled with his own sweat and a slight layering of horse, made Jane feel calm and safe.

T
HROUGHOUT THE DAY AND EVENING, NEIGHBOURS CAME TO CALL
at Bentley to exchange news.

“A Scottish soldier that passed this morning said he had heard the king had been taken prisoner near sunset,” said John’s friend Matt Haggard from Lichfield. “But another swore he had seen the king with his own eyes well after dark.”

“A Parliamentary patrol stopped at the house just at dawn,” said old Mr Smithton. “The captain said he’d seen the king dead, wounded through the breast by a sword. But he looked like a lying whoreson to me.”

Jane chose to believe what the grey-haired sergeant had heard late in the evening, that the king was still free and unharmed. For to let herself think anything else overwhelmed her with grief and terror.

After supper Jane and her father sat side by side reading before the fire in his little study. His companionship, and the persisting in everyday activities, comforted her, helped her believe that all was well or yet might be. The rain beat down outside, and she tried not to think of where Richard might be. John came to the door, and smiled to see his father and sister look up with identical expectant expressions.

“Mother’s gone to bed,” he said. “And Athalia and the girls.”

“Good,” Thomas said. “Better to take comfort in sleep than worry needlessly.”

Jane was surprised to hear the whinny of a horse outside. She ran to the window and peered out, and in a flash of lightning could make out a rider on the drive, leading a second horse behind him.

“It’s not Richard,” she said.

“Who can that be, now?” her father wondered.

“I’ll see to it,” John said, and to Jane’s alarm he took a pistol from a drawer of the desk before he made his way downstairs. He reappeared a few minutes later with William Walker, an old Papist priest that Jane knew as a friend of Father John Huddleston, the young priest who acted as tutor to the boys at neighbouring Moseley Hall.

“You’re wet to the bone, sir,” Thomas cried. “Come down to the kitchen to dry yourself.”

“I thank you, Mr Lane.” The old man shivered. “But better I ask the favour I’ve come for and be on my way.” He glanced at Jane.

“You can speak before my sister,” John assured him. “And to tell you true, if I send her away she’ll only pester any news out of me once you’ve gone.”

Old Father William smiled at Jane, as a drop of water gathered on his nose and fell to the carpet.

“Well, then. I’ve two horses below, and Mr Whitgreaves asks if you would take them into your stable for the night, and mayhap for a few days.” He lowered his voice. “There’s a gentleman at Moseley who’s come from Worcester fight. He can be hid well enough, but the house lies so close to the road that any strange horses are like to be noted.”

“Of course,” said John, with a glance at his father.

“Maybe this gentleman will know news of Richard,” Jane cried.

“Just what I was thinking.” John nodded. “Of course we’ll take the horses, sir. But as Jane says, the household is in great fear for my brother, who was at Worcester. Pray tell Mr Whitgreaves that I’ll ride over tomorrow night, to learn what I can of the battle, and how we may help his fugitive. But come, let’s get those horses out of sight.”