The Whispering Swarm

  From back in the passage we heard voices. Had someone discovered the soldier with his throat cut?

  This was an unexpected anticlimax! We stood there like fools, a pile of insensible redcoats at our feet. Rupert’s sword dropped to his side. He could do nothing but obey his king. He stood up, bowed once then turned leaving Jessup where he lay. In a clear, decisive voice he called:

  ‘King’s men. Loyal Englishmen. Order arms.’

  With something resembling military discipline we shouldered our muskets. Without any hesitation the prince gave a curt order and we wheeled left to face the interior of the palace. Then he led us out of the royal apartments into a corridor full of redcoats.

  Again I learned a little of Rupert’s qualities of leadership. Somehow he was able coolly to march us through that press of enemies, some of whom went ahead to push their fellows aside so that our way was made easier. I think many mistook us for the chosen headsmen because of our height. Not once were we stopped. A soldier, recognising Prince Rupert, began to speak, then shook his head, obviously telling himself he must be imagining the likeness.

  At full march we reached the great doors into the courtyard. By then I had begun to feel sick. We pushed the doors open and, still in order, marched on to the next gates. Rupert, Nevison, Porthos and myself expected resistance as we threw our weight against them. They opened easily, almost throwing us off balance. Then, astonished at our prevailing good fortune, we stepped as confidently as possible into a street as packed with Parliamentarians as the palace.

  To ensure no sudden onslaught of the mob, hundreds of soldiers lined the wide, tree-lined thoroughfare. They marched back and forth between St James’s and Whitehall proper. As before, we were saluted but never challenged. When he could, Prince Rupert murmured to us, saying we were heading for Whitehall Stairs. We kept expecting to be stopped. I discovered later that we had the king himself to thank for this lack of pursuit. When asked where those who had tried to free him fled, he told them back into the tunnel. Our pursuers had turned and reversed their steps, probably taking one of the other horrible burrows we had seen on our way in. Not a fate I’d wish on anyone.

  Now we marched through the London crowd itself. They had been walking the distance between the City proper and the palace. All in the hope of saying they had seen a man’s head chopped off. Masses of people pressed towards a large gate on our right. More and more people were moving into that gate. I guessed that it led to the Banqueting House and the scaffold. I learned later that we had created a delay. The tunnels were being scoured by scores of soldiers, leaving fewer to guard other parts of the palace. Poor Charles must prepare himself again to make a dignified death.

  The confusion meant that soldiers were less suspicious when they saw uniformed men they did not recognise. Prince Rupert’s military experience was perfect for our deception. Another ten minutes and we were past the Horse Guard Yard and crossing over into Scotland Yard, the gates of which stood open, attended by a single soldier who saluted us as we marched through. It looked as if the staff had been dismissed or gone to watch history in the making. There was a bleak silence hanging over the vast palace. Blank stone and brick walls rose on all sides of us. We trod cobblestone courtyards, wood-paved pathways, wary of the oddly quiet atmosphere, wondering if we were marching into some sort of trap.

  The big yards were haunted by the spirits of those who had worked in them. They had an abandoned air. Once they had supplied the sprawling palace with all its needs and kept or carried every kind of goods and provisions on every kind of errand. If it had not been for Rupert’s intimate knowledge of the palace we would have been easily lost and doubtless captured simply on account of our uncertainty.

  After a glance around him, the prince led us through a side door and into a wide room which stank of blood. I almost gagged on the smell but the others hardly noticed it. The long glass-roofed shed was hung with game of every kind, from great stags to rabbits, geese and pheasants to skylarks. The place was a deserted butchery, judging by the knives, saws and axes hanging from hooks over broad, shallow stone sinks. Rupert knew his way. He lead us out of the game store into a narrow, flagged passage. This finished in a short flight of stairs which we descended. We were in a dark hall hung with the skins, antlers and other remains of already eaten animals. The place reeked of old blood, fur and scraped hides. This part of the royal kitchens was where food was prepared for banquets. Normally, the prince told us, the whole area bustled with servants, most of whom Cromwell had given leave, dismissed or sent off to work in other parts of the city. I thought privately how so many dismissals would have added to the unemployment figures!

  Royal Whitehall employed hundreds of servants for dozens of functions. All had to be fed, watered and sheltered somewhere. Now they were gone and the palace echoed with their ghosts. But, on the other hand, the halls and rooms were not defended. Few soldiers came and went here. ‘Nobody expects an attack from the king’s game pies,’ murmured Prince Rupert, looking about him as if he wanted to sit down and eat one then and there. He took us up another flight of narrow, winding wooden stairs into a long gallery lit by small, high windows. The gallery ended in more stairs which took us to a set of sparsely furnished low-ceilinged rooms where servants and footmen dressed for work. Footmen’s uniforms filled long wardrobes which Rupert opened and inspected. Almost at the last one he found what he was looking for—heavy winter cloaks of dark homespun. They had wide hoods like monks’ habits.

  ‘Get rid of your armour and wear these,’ he told us in a low voice. ‘Our redcoat garb’s a liability now. They’ll be looking for us.’ He discovered some wide-brimmed hats. Dressed in these we resembled palmers or a group of countrymen. Prince Rupert explained our strange costume to us so that we had a cover story for the Roundheads. ‘We are Puritan brothers, tin miners from near St Ives, in Cornwall. Up to see the execution of the king, if you’re asked,’ he told us. ‘No need to say more. Few here know anything of the West Country so it’s unlikely we’ll be discovered.’

  His ringlets were tied back under his hat, his beard roughened. We did our best to disguise our allegiances. Only the musketeers had some trouble. My own hair was fine, straight and relatively short. I already looked like a Puritan.

  I was glad to be out of the bulky armour. It had begun to rub in all kinds of tender spots. Wearing cloak and hat I felt almost normal and much warmer. We still had on the remains of the Parliamentary uniforms. If caught we would probably be charged as spies, but I was glad to risk it. We now had a better chance of mingling with the crowds. We had heard no church bells ringing. That told us the king remained alive. The time of execution was long past. Prince Rupert said we should wait awhile. He was puzzled, uncertain. He perhaps realised how poorly, with unexpected delays, his original plan would have gone. The plot would have been discovered and we should have been captured, tortured and killed.

  Suddenly, out in the alley, a group of troopers rode past. Rupert thought this over. ‘Best hide until the coast is clearer. Their attention wanders for some reason.’ He muttered something about ‘cursed bad luck’ as if he were angry at himself. Rupert ordered us up another two flights of increasingly narrow stairs until we reached a long, low gallery with rows of narrow beds. A servants’ dormitory. I had never seen anything quite like it. It most closely resembled a hospital ward.

  We sat down on some hard chairs at one end of the attic and drank a little sour wine Rupert found for us while discussing in whispers the king’s decision to accept his fate.

  ‘I can understand him, I think,’ said Aramis. ‘What gentleman would wish his last hours on earth to be represented by that wretch Jessup?’

  Rupert agreed. ‘He takes his kingly position seriously, even if we cannot always understand his interpretations. That office is more important than the individual. Charles is England and England is Charles. Or so we used to think. His Grace could have ruled from France until another army was assembled but that would have made him all the more unpop
ular with his subjects. His queen’s plotting with France has not been taken well. Our civil war has destroyed too much and too many. The people would have resisted his return.’

  ‘But you were surprised by his decision?’ I said.

  ‘If I were not I should not have tried to free him,’ Rupert said bitterly. ‘His other decisions in the conduct of this business led me to assume he would elect to go. I respect him the more for recognising at last his duty to his nation. I think his trial sobered him. A little too late, perhaps.’

  ‘Why did you try to rescue him if you feared the consequences?’ I demanded to know. It seemed to me the prince had led us all on a very dangerous adventure for no great prize.

  He guessed my thoughts. ‘Why did you continue to help me?’ he asked.

  ‘Because—’

  ‘Because you gave me your word. Just as I gave mine to the queen, perhaps rashly, that I would attempt to bring her husband to her if I possibly could. If he could not be saved, I should bring the news myself, together with words from his own lips. Now it is my duty to go back to her and tell her that the king made a good, dignified death and sent his last message to her and his children. Remember.’

  ‘Remember,’ murmured Duval. ‘What better message?’

  I personally thought it a little vague but it clearly meant more to them. I thought briefly about memory and history, the death of friendship, and I was seized with melancholy.

  We found plenty to eat in one of the pantries. Porthos in particular was ravenous. He drank a flagon of Rhine wine and ate the best part of a cold rabbit, then a cooked chicken. His spirits and his bravado rose again. ‘The Protestants might kill us soon,’ he reasoned, ‘and it is always better to meet one’s maker in a contented frame of mind, with a full belly.’

  All along Porthos had called our antagonists ‘Protestants’ and sometimes ‘Huguenots’. Like many Catholics of his day, he believed we supported the ‘high’ church by being on the king’s side. The politics were actually more complicated in England where there were almost as many Anglicans in favour of the king’s executioners as there were Puritans who felt the king should be reprieved.

  The trial had been clear to me. A king who makes war on his own subjects is a traitor to his nation. Once kings made war for a throne, but here for the first time in modern history Parliament, speaking for the people, defended itself against the crown. The trial had been a hard one to structure and had taken skilled lawyers a long time to formulate. Whomever next claimed the crown, a precedent had been established: those who defied the people’s will also defied the nation. It was a radical idea, of course. The men who conceived it laid down a logic which would be echoed more than a hundred years later by the American Constitution. Duval and the Cavaliers, of course, merely wished the king’s courage in accepting his fate to be widely known. It left the way open for his son’s return.

  After a couple of hours Prince Rupert looked out of a window at the weather. There were a few more clouds but the sun was still bright in a cold sky. A family of crows flew croaking overhead, and Nick Nevison grew unhappy. I think he saw the crows as an omen. For my part, I had made them a kind of personal totem.

  47

  PURSUED BY PURITANS

  Rupert thought we’d be best advised to get back to the Alsacia by the river. ‘We should continue on as countrymen up to witness the execution but frustrated by the crowds. We had best use the ice, the route with fewest redcoats. We can mingle with the common folk. With luck they’ll still be looking for us in our soldiers’ garb and we’ll make easy progress.’

  ‘And if we’re caught?’ broad-faced Jemmy Hind asked, his mouth gaping in an honest grin.

  ‘They’ll be unlikely to catch us all. Some of us will get through. It will be Sprye’s duty to take the ship to Holland where a coach to France is waiting. Whichever of us reaches France must inform the queen of her husband’s last words and stress how well His Grace died and how many of his people mourned him, demanding a new Stuart. That will be my duty now, if I’m not captured. But if I’m caught my guess is they’ll not search so hard for you. And so one of us is bound to get through.

  ‘We’ll head for Scotland Dock,’ he continued. ‘It’s unlikely to be heavily guarded. And from there to the ice. Many people go in that direction now. The Puritans don’t object to the Frost Fair today, but we’ll not see another until a British king again sits on England’s throne.’

  We crept back down the stairs, pausing at every window to check for activity in the courtyards. Evidently, if Cromwell were to celebrate his triumph with a feast, this was not where it would take place. From what little I remembered of the period, Cromwell was anxious he not be regarded as the king’s successor. Four or five years would pass before he made Whitehall his residence.

  Aramis looked up suddenly. We heard a familiar sound from outside. Military harness clattered and iron-shod hoofs beat on cobbles. Peering carefully through a window we saw three horsemen ride into the quadrangle. Leaning from their horses, they were looking for a trail. Of course we had left one as far as the house, but it could easily have been made at a different time. We had deliberately walked where the most feet had turned the snow to slush.

  And then one of the riders said something, pointing towards the roof. All three looked up at once, revealing their faces. I knew them well.

  I was stunned. For a moment Colonel Clitch appeared to stare directly into my eyes. His bedraggled hair and beard looked as if they had been too long in the wash. His befeathered hat was pushed back from a face almost as mottled as his grease-stained jerkin. He rode a horse overeager to be on her way, which he had difficulty controlling. He was not a natural rider. On his left sat pinch-lipped, black-clad Love, also having difficulties with his horse, a black stallion too boisterous for him. Borrowed mounts, without a doubt. I heard his heavy Welsh accent drifting up to where we crouched in hiding. I didn’t catch his words.

  The third man was plainly their leader. Though the Whispering Swarm still gabbled in my head, I heard my own gasp clearly enough. I fell back from the window, unable to speak. I doubted any judgment I ever possessed. I experienced feelings of sickening betrayal. How could it be true? The man was none other than that sympathetic and brave friend I first met at the inn. Whom I thought had saved my life! A play actor. Worse!

  Captain St Claire turned in his saddle to call instructions to a trooper who ran up behind him. ‘We’re to St James’s for further orders. Look for men dressed as soldiers. Three or four very tall. They’ll have a woman with them, maybe. Search both yards and the house if necessary. I’d guess they’ve horses and took the road. They’re not the only traitors who plot to save the king! They’ll try to get away overland. Follow us to St James’s when you’re done. Send men to stand guard at all roads into the Alsacia.’

  He commanded those bullies! Fresh fury filled me and I wanted nothing more than to confront St Claire. Of course that would have been folly and would endanger us all. I remembered all our friendly conversations, my confidences. I do not believe I had been especially indiscreet but clearly he had some clue to our whereabouts. I tried hard to recall what I had said. I knew for certain I had never made any direct reference to saving the king or indeed to our plans, which had not then involved Scotland Yard. Drinking at The Swan With Two Necks, the spy must have picked up a little information here, a little there, and passed it on to his masters. They had no doubt commissioned him to find and capture us. Prince Rupert would be a prize almost as valuable as the queen and young prince.

  My anger threatened to choke me. St Claire, a spy! He had seemed so noble. So genuine. His own man. I had trusted him and liked him and confided in him. Some atavistic impulse overwhelmed me. I took my pistol from my sash. I prepared to fire it into the air to get his attention. I wanted to challenge him, fight him to the death. Then I felt a heavy, gloved hand on my right arm. A slight movement of his head, his eyes staring urgently into mine, and common sense prevailed. I heard St Claire give orders
to search the area and to meet back there in a quarter of an hour. From their response he was a man of some authority in their ranks. I heard one of the others address him as ‘Captain Marvell’. The spy had not even given me his real name. Ironically, ‘Captain Marvel’ had been my favourite US comic book hero when I was a boy! We had divided passionately into Superman and Captain Marvel fans. I had always been in the minority.

  ‘I know that name!’ Prince Rupert signed for me to replace the pistol. ‘Would that we’d known the face. That man Marvell is incorruptible.’ We crept back downstairs. Prince Rupert took a key from its hook and locked the door. ‘That will delay the troopers for a little while. We’ll leave by the back. Quickly, there’s little time now.’

  48

  A DEATH

  The air was growing colder as we emerged cautiously into the courtyard. Elegant Athos remarked on it, drawing his hooded cloak around him. ‘The birds must be falling frozen from the branches.’

  ‘The oracles predict the end of the world when King Charles dies,’ said Jemmy Hind drolly. ‘The Lord promised us no further destruction by water. So, mayhap it’s His intention to freeze us and Hell at the same time? That’s what my sweetheart, Judy, thinks…’

  His words faded as we heard horses’ hooves. In my confusion I had hardly listened. Had Marvell, Clitch and Love returned? Then my heart sank, as riding round the corner, at a controlled canter, came a tightly grouped squad of cavalrymen in the full uniform of Cromwell’s famous crack troopers. Troopers, known and feared for their godliness as much as their expert bravery in the field. They carried their helmets on their saddle pommels. All had very short hair. A Puritan zealot makes an excellent soldier. They’re the men with very short haircuts. Those of us who wear our hair long haven’t got a chance against them. Romans, Normans, Huns, Puritans, Iroquois, Zulu and no doubt many others never felt they could properly deal righteous death until sure of their short-back-and-sides. It’s something about soldiering that makes you want to be certain you can, like buzzards, clean the blood off fast.