Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“I can see that she does, sir,” Johnnie said gravely, a quiver of laughter in his voice.

“She does indeed,” John repeated.

Hester subsided into her seat again, her hands holding the edge of the table as if physical force was the only way she could restrain her speech.

“And you will promise me not to run off without my permission and blessing,” John stipulated. “You’ve been to war now, Johnnie, you know how hard it is. You know it’s a hundred times harder for a man without some money in his pocket and the right equipment: a good sword, a warm cloak, a strong horse. If you wait until the Scots have reached York you can join them as an officer. Do I have your word?”

Johnnie hesitated for only a moment. “You have,” he said. “But I will start preparing today, so that I am ready the moment I can go.”

“How can you?” Frances interrupted passionately. “How can you even think of it, Johnnie? After the last time?”

He fired up at the challenge in her voice. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “You’re a girl.”

“I understand that you nearly broke Mother’s heart last time and that we have none of us been happy since you came back from Colchester,” she said hotly. “I understand that you have been sick to death ever since that defeat. Why go? Why go all that way to feel despair again? What if you are hurt so far from home? We’d never even know! What if your luck runs out and you get killed in one of these stupid battles at a village where we never even know the name?”

Alexander Norman, looking from his angry young wife to her younger brother, still not yet seventeen years old, hoped for a moment that the two might quarrel like the children they once were and the whole issue be lost in the confusion of words and temper. Johnnie leaped to his feet, ready to blaze back at Frances, but then he reined in his temper and looked at his father.

“I thank you for your permission, sir,” he said formally, and left the room.

Hester waited in silence until they heard his footsteps cross the hall and go out of the back door. Then she spoke bitterly to her husband. “How could you? How could you agree that he should go?”

John looked at his son-in-law over a mug of small ale. “Ask Alexander,” he advised. “He knows how I could.”

Hester, her cheeks blazing, turned to Alexander. “What?” she spat out.

“They’ll never get to York,” Alexander predicted. “Cromwell can’t risk having a foreign army on English soil. He can’t even risk having a Scottish army on the march against him. Not after having bloodied his sword in Ireland to keep the people down. He has to bring peace to the kingdom or lose everything. Lose one kingdom and he has lost all four. He’ll fight them in Scotland and he’ll defeat them in Scotland. He’ll never let them come south.”

“But the king will bring out the clans,” Hester whispered. “Men who would march all night to die for him and for their clan chief. Wild men who won’t count the price, who will fight like savages.”

“The clans won’t leave Scotland, they never do,” John predicted. “They’ll come no farther south than a raiding party.”

“And they’ll be poorly equipped,” Alexander agreed. “They’ll come out with daggers and pitchforks and meet Cromwell and Lambert and the Model Army with its cavalry and cannon and muskets and pikes. I’ll have to go back to London today, there will be new orders for barrels. But you can be sure that my orders will be to send the ordnance by sea to Scotland to meet the army there – that’s where Cromwell will choose his battlefield.”

Hester turned to the window and looked out over the garden. The flower beds before the house were filled with pinks, gillyflowers, and the new star-faced spiderwort in pink. The roses on the walls were shedding petals as they bloomed. Johnnie was striding down the avenue, his head up, his shoulders back, his listlessness and sadness quite gone.

“How can we bear it?” she asked softly. “How could you give him permission and your blessing to go into danger again?”

John was beside her, he slid his arm around her waist and half-reluctantly she let him hold her. “I am doing the very thing that I think will keep him safe,” he said. “That is my only intention.”

All July and all August Johnnie was in a fever for news, desperate to be ready to go the moment his father said he might leave. He persuaded John to buy him a horse, a reliable old war charger called Caesar with big, strong haunches and broad shoulders that looked as if it would carry Johnnie’s light weight for hundreds of miles.

He tied a sack stuffed with hay into the low branch of a tree and practiced charging it and stabbing at it with his lance. The first few practices he followed his horse back to the stable after a couple of hard tumbles; but then he learned the knack of thrusting and withdrawing the lance in one smooth motion so the horse and he could go on together.

He bought a traveling cape and a bag that he could strap on the back of the saddle and he kept them packed with everything he might need so that he was ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He was alive and vital with excitement and determination, and the whole house rang with the noise of him singing, whistling, running up and down the wooden stairs in his riding boots, shedding mud and creating confusion out of sheer energy.

John had made him promise that he would not tell anyone of the agreement they had made, and Johnnie, who remembered well enough the danger of living as suspected royalists when the king’s army was on the march, was careful to make no direct reference as to which side he would be joining as soon as his father said he might go. He was as excited as a child, but he was no fool. Never again did he let slip to visitors or guests that he was only waiting for news from Yorkshire to saddle up his war horse and ride north to join the new, uncrowned king.

The family depended on Alexander Norman to tell them how the war was going. Living in the center of the city and near the Tower he always had the first of the rumors anyway; but filling Cromwell’s orders for supplies of munitions he always knew the latest position of the Model Army, though it might be impossible to tell how they were faring.

“But that’s not the point,” Johnnie reminded his father anxiously, finding him in the rarities room, with a tray of recently purchased foreign coins.

“We’re running out of space,” John said. “We have to buy new items, and people like to see different things when they visit. But we cannot show everything we have now properly. We should think about building another room, perhaps.”

“The point was not whether the Scots are winning or losing, it was how far they are advanced,” Johnnie persisted. “That was our agreement, wasn’t it? Because Mother is saying that if they have advanced to York but been defeated then I shouldn’t go. But we didn’t say that, did we?”

John looked at his son’s eager face. “The letter of our agreement was certainly that you might go if they reached York,” he said. “But surely, Johnnie, you wouldn’t want to join a defeated army. You wouldn’t want to volunteer for a lost cause?”

The young man did not hesitate for a moment. “Of course I would,” he said simply. “This is not about calculating which side might win and joining that. This is not about trying to end up on the winning side like half the men now in Parliament. This is about serving the king, whether he is winning or losing. His father did not recant when he saw the scaffold. Neither will I.”

John pushed the tray of coins roughly into his son’s hands. “Find a little corner for these, and write out new labels for them,” he said. “They need to be dusted and polished too. And don’t talk to me about scaffolds.”

“But if they get to York, even if they are in retreat-”

“Yes, yes,” John said. “I remember what we agreed.”

For all of Alexander Norman’s confidence in the New Model Army, it was a desperate gamble that John was taking with his son’s safety. Sometimes he thought of Charles Stuart and himself, at opposite ends of the country, both taking their desperate gambles – one for the crown of England, one for the life of his son. It did not trouble John that he was gambling on Charles Stuart’s failure. John’s loyalty to the kings, never a strong flame, had flickered fitfully all through the first king’s war, and been blown out altogether when the war had been renewed not once, but twice, after defeat. His vigil at the courtroom and scaffold had been a farewell to a man he had served, not the act of a loyal royalist. John’s sympathies had always been independent, now, a citizen of a republic, he could call himself a republican.

More than anything else he wanted peace, a society in which he could garden, in which he could watch his children grow to adulthood, make marriages and have children of their own. He would have been hard-pressed to forgive any man for breaking the peace of the new state. And Charles Stuart did not sound like an exceptional man. Cromwell himself complained that the prince was so debauched that he would undo the whole country. All the news of the prince’s court over the water had been of popery, folly, and vice.

But it was a close thing. The Scots army first met the English just south of Edinburgh for the battle on Scottish soil that Alexander had predicted. The Scots were in fine form, and filled with confidence at the presence of the young king. The English army were tired from the long march north, and were losing men all the way as individual soldiers changed their minds and turned south for home. The commander-in-chief, Cromwell, was in one of his dark moods when he doubted his men’s abilities and, worse than that, doubted his own. The voice of God which guided him so clearly had suddenly gone silent and Cromwell was spiraling down into one of his disabling fits of despair. It was only John Lambert’s unshakable optimism that kept the army marching north.