The Midwife and the Assassin Page 10

  “Know what?”

  “How do you know the man I saw was John Lilburne? I didn’t even know it was him.”

  Tom grinned. “You are not the only spy in the Cheap, Mrs. Hodgson.”

  “If you knew all this, then why did you ask?” Even as the words escaped my lips, I knew the answer. “You were testing me. You knew what John Lilburne said, and you knew that Daniel Chidley spoke. You wanted to be sure I would tell the truth about the Chidleys.”

  Tom nodded curtly. “I did not want to test you. But I had to know that I could trust you on such matters.”

  “What if I’d lied?”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “So it does not matter.”

  “I have been in the Cheap for weeks; why are you testing me now?”

  Tom thought for a moment before answering. “Two reasons. First, now you are friends with Mrs. Chidley, and we had to be sure that you had not joined her faction. You proved that by telling the truth about last night.

  “Second, and more important,” he continued, “we have reached the final act of our nation’s bloody play. Next month the King will be brought to London. To what end I cannot say. Perhaps he will be King once more. Perhaps be will be tried for treason.”

  If Tom’s expression had not been so serious I would have laughed aloud. I looked around the room to ensure nobody had heard him.

  “You cannot try the King for treason,” I whispered. Merely saying the words roiled my guts. “Who has the right to do such a thing? Parliament? He is the King.”

  “Whether they have the right to try him is not the issue,” Tom replied. “They have the power to do so, and that is all that matters.” He pushed back from the table. “I have said enough already, and have lost my appetite.”

  He left a few coins on the table for the food we’d never received—probably for the best, I told myself—and we returned to the churchyard. We saw Martha and Will from a distance, walking the cathedral grounds, arm in arm.

  “Will has not said much of his life before coming to London,” Tom said. “But he loves the two of you.”

  “Aye,” I said. Will whispered in Martha’s ear, and she threw her head back in laughter.

  “What happened to the three of you?”

  I looked up at Tom, wondering if this might be another test, but his eyes were open and guileless.

  “When we were in York, Martha and I…” I paused for a moment. “We hurt Will very badly.”

  “The business with the witch hunts?”

  “Aye,” I said. “We had no choice, but Will did not see it that way. We left the city, and he stayed. Grievous wounds do not heal quickly.”

  When Martha leaned toward Will and bussed him on the cheek, Tom laughed. Once again my stomach wheeled in a circle. “They seem to have rediscovered each other,” Tom said.

  “Aye.” Without thinking, I took Tom’s arm in mine, and my ears pinked at my own audacity. I did not dare look up to see his reaction, but at least he did not pull away.

  As Will and Martha approached, Tom called out. “I’m sorry, Will. I have pressing business, and you must come with me.”

  Will nodded and turned to Martha to bid her farewell. I glanced at Tom, and found him gazing at me with the strangest expression. I looked away with the faint hope that my face did not redden too much.

  After Will and Tom disappeared into the crowd, Martha turned to me, a smile on her face. “And how did you come to be holding his arm? You make a fair couple, you do.”

  “Oh, stop. I did nothing untoward.” I knew that by now my neck was as red as my face. “Let us go home.”

  Martha and I started back to the Cheap.

  “Will told me that they knew what happened at the Nag’s Head,” Martha said. “Colonel Reynolds was testing you.”

  “Aye,” I replied. “I saw the trap just in time. I remembered Will’s note and told him the truth.”

  “Thank God,” Martha said. “I do not want to know what revenge Mr. Marlowe would seek if he thought we had betrayed him.”

  “Nor do I,” I said.

  We reached the Little Conduit, where those living on the west end of the Cheap came for water. When I arrived in London, I found the system of conduits to be nothing short of miraculous, as they carried water by pipes and troughs all the way from springs at Tyburn, north of the city wall. At nearly every hour of the day a crowd gathered there, waiting for a turn at the spigot and gossiping about the news of the town. So it was on this day, as a chapman stood on the street corner crying his wares.

  “Tell me, good people,” he called out. “Do I need to remind you of the day? Surely you have not forgotten what anniversary this is?”

  Martha and I glanced at each other. Neither of us had the faintest idea.

  The chapman pulled a sheet from his pack and burst into song. His voice was so clear and pleasing, in a moment I found myself entirely in his thrall.

  Full forty years ago it was, in sixteen hundred and five

  When papists zealous for the Mass in England did contrive,

  The King, and Queen, and Prince, and Lords, and every English knight,

  With fire and powder, and a match, at a single blow to smite

  I realized then that the chapman was singing of the Gunpowder Plot, when Guy Fawkes and his traitorous brethren had plotted to destroy the nation by blowing up Parliament while King James was inside. It was a story every English child knew: The plotters had rented a cellar beneath Parliament’s meeting place, and then begun their nefarious work.

  They laid their powder in this vault, full six and thirty barrels,

  With one unheard-of deep assault, to end their former quarrels.

  Luckily, Parliament’s sergeant-at-arms discovered the plot.

  The vault was searched by honest men, and then appeared quite plain,

  The iron, stones, and gunpowder tubs, and all the powder-train.

  At this hell-mouth, with triple match, a lantern in his hand,

  Stood Guy Fawkes in dead of night, all comers to withstand.

  Fawkes and his band were executed as traitors, of course, but the fear of a popish plot endured, a fact visible in the number of sheets the chapman sold once he had finished his song.

  That evening I reflected on the plot, and began to see my work for Mr. Marlowe from his position. On that night in 1605, one man—the sergeant-at-arms—had prevented the destruction of both King and Parliament and captured the worst traitor in England’s long history. What if the sergeant-at-arms had not visited the cellar, choosing instead to join his friends in an alehouse? What if he had decided to go home to his wife? In that instant, he would have condemned King and Parliament to be altogether destroyed, and God only knew what would have followed such a catastrophe. The Protestant cause had survived—indeed England herself had survived—because one man had done his job to the utmost of his ability.

  Of course I did not think that Katherine Chidley could pose such a danger to the nation, but what of those around her? Tom had said that the Nag’s Head mob were more talk than deed, but what of their comrades in the army? If, thanks to my neglect, they plunged the nation into civil war and anarchy, how would I excuse myself?

  I resolved then to be more watchful around the Levellers, but I could not help feeling that the greater danger lay with the King’s men. After all, it was they whom Parliament had defeated so recently, and it was they who swore they would die for their sovereign’s sake.

  * * *

  As November turned to December, changes came over the city, and not merely the coming of winter. It turned out that Tom Reynolds had been right about the fate of the King, for just a few weeks before Christmas he was brought from the Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle in the south, where the army kept him under close guard until he could be brought to London. Upon this news, rumors and conspiracies raced through the city like a wind-driven fire, and nowhere did the flames burn hotter than at the Nag’s Head.

  There were, of course, the rumors that the King would be
tried for treason, but there were plenty of others as well. Some claimed that Cromwell planned to put King Charles back on the throne, and then rule over him as if he were a child. Others hoped that the King might have been chastened by the late civil wars, and could be restored to the throne not as a tyrant but as a benevolent sovereign. Some of the wilder spirits in the Nag’s Head conjured a more frightening possibility. They claimed that Cromwell so feared the Levellers that he would restore the King in order to pacify the Royalists, and then use his free hand to destroy the Levellers once and for all.

  Each night I prayed that King and Parliament would find a way to resolve their dispute without shedding any more blood. The Lord, however, answered my prayers in the negative. According to the news-books that soon flooded the streets, Cromwell placed guards of the army on the stairs leading to the Commons House and seized all the moderate men from Parliament. These poor souls were carried to Queens Court, leaving behind only those who were hottest against King Charles. If Cromwell intended to restore the King, this was an unlikely crew to do the work. From that day forward, the talk against the King became ever more violent. Preachers shouted that his word could not be trusted, and that any man who spoke in His Majesty’s favor was a traitor to England. I wondered at a world in which men who did nothing more than defend their sovereign could be called traitors.

  The strangest thing was that even as the kingdom stumbled toward anarchy, my life in the Cheap had never been better. My reputation and Martha’s spread even beyond our neighborhood as more and more women in the city invited us to deliver them. Soon we were busier than we’d ever been in York. I wrote to Elizabeth at every opportunity, but with each passing week my promises that I soon would return rang more hollow. What good is ‘soon’ if that day never comes? To my relief, Elizabeth continued to send letters to me, and her anger was gradually replaced by a surliness that I entirely understood. I realized that in order for me to be a true mother to Elizabeth, either she would have to come to London or I would have to find my way back to Pontrilas. I hoped that once the King’s fate was settled, one of these might come to pass.

  Early that winter, one final change came over our household when it became clear that Martha was no longer my deputy, but my comrade. A woman named Mary Moffat signaled the change when she came to our home and, in my presence, asked Martha to attend her in her travail.

  Martha fumbled for an answer before stammering out her acceptance. After Mary had gone, Martha turned to me, her eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them.

  “It seems you’ve been my deputy long enough,” I said. “Now you are a midwife. Congratulations and well done!”

  Martha burst into a mixture of laughter and tears as we embraced. I thought back to the moment when, many years before, I had had the same experience. Becoming a midwife was an awesome and terrifying charge, and Martha would remember that day for the rest of her life.

  And so, our little piece of Watling Street became known as Midwife’s Row, for within just a few steps you could find three of us: Katherine Chidley, me, and now Martha. And the three of us became closer gossips as a result, calling each other for advice and relief in difficult or prolonged labors, and sending mothers to one another when we were overburdened by births, baptisms, and churchings.

  As we traveled around the Cheap on the business of midwifery, we noticed the neighborhood’s women had become no less fascinated by politics than the men had. Indeed, gossips now asked each other questions usually heard only in the halls of Parliament: What would Cromwell do with the King? If he were tried, who would sit in judgment? If he were restored, how would it be managed? Rumors and gossip changed hands faster than a well-clipped coin.

  At least that was the case until January ninth—a cold day it was—when all these matters came to a head. Martha and I were walking past the Little Conduit when four ranks of trumpeters surrounded by a company of pikemen marched into Cheapside Street. Blaring horns announced the arrival of Parliament’s sergeant-at-arms. Within minutes the crowd around the soldiers had grown to the hundreds, if not thousands.

  When the sergeant thought the crowd large enough, he climbed atop a pulpit of sorts, produced a sheet of paper, and began to read.

  “By order of the Parliament of England.” His voice boomed as the crowd fell silent. “It is notorious that Charles Stuart, now King of England, has endeavored to destroy the ancient liberties of this nation, and to introduce a tyrannical government in their place. He has prosecuted this malicious design with fire and sword, and traitorously made war against his own subjects. The country has been wasted, the treasury exhausted, thousands of people murdered. All of this has been done in the name of the King.”

  The people stood in silence as the sergeant took a breath.

  “The present Parliament hoped that the King’s imprisonment might quiet the tumult that has so gripped this nation. Instead, their mercy served only to encourage the said Charles Stuart in his evil schemes, as he has raised both rebellions and invasions.”

  My chest constricted as I realized what could be the only conclusion of this speech.

  “It has thus been ordered that the said Charles Stuart be tried before a High Court of Justice for the crime of treason.”

  I held my breath and waited for the crowd’s reaction.

  Chapter 11

  Even as the sergeant finished his pronouncement, the crowd began to shout. It quickly became clear that the Cheap was no less divided than the rest of England. Cries of “Shame, shame!” and “Long live good King Charles!” vied with “God be praised!” and “Amen, amen!”

  As Martha and I fled the tumult, I remembered Tom’s observation that no matter how many times Parliament’s armies defeated the King, he would remain King. And if Charles won but once, all his enemies would be hanged. If these propositions were true—and who could deny them?—how could our wars end with anything other than trials and executions? The only question was which party would do the beheading.

  That night, Martha and I resorted to the Nag’s Head, eager to hear how the news of the King’s trial had been received. I assumed the Levellers would rejoice at the prospect, for it seemed to me that the King’s death would bring their hopes for a new England that much closer. By the time we arrived at the tavern, the discussion—or to be more precise, the argument—had already begun. Katherine Chidley sat at a table on the far side of the room, and we crossed to join her. The main dispute was, naturally enough, over the fate of the King. Some argued that the King’s mendacity—not to mention his decision to raise an army of barbarous Scots—had left Parliament with no options other than a trial and execution. Others, including Daniel Chidley, took a more difficult position.

  “There is no question that the King is an evil man.” Daniel’s voice rang out clear and loud despite the general hubbub. He was a tall, handsome man, and when he spoke every ear in the tavern belonged to him. I could see why Katherine had married him, for the two were well matched. “And I would not deny that a true Parliament could try him for any crime it saw fit. But this is not a true Parliament. A true Parliament would be selected by all Englishmen. This Parliament—or rump of a Parliament, I should say—is made up entirely of Cromwell’s creatures.”

  Many heads nodded in agreement, though a few seemed less pleased at Daniel’s words. I looked more closely at Daniel and wondered if he might be so fervent as to rebel against Cromwell.

  Daniel continued, “Oliver Cromwell would reduce us all to mere servants, quaking before the power of the sword. With Cromwell as our sole sovereign, England would become a place where the strong rule over the weak and none of us is truly free. Mark my words: If the King is tried by this unlawful Parliament, all of England will be reduced to a state of slavery. And we will be the architects of our own servitude.”

  “What then would you propose?” The challenge came from the tapster who stood behind the bar. From the lines on his face I put his age around fifty years, but a lifetime of lifting and tapping barrels of ale had lef
t him well muscled, and every bit as strong as the youths who frequented the Nag’s Head. “The King has left us no option other than to try him. If we do not, he will cobble together an army of papists—whether French or Irish, it matters not—and return England to the slaughter of the civil wars.”

  I leaned to Katherine and said into her ear, “Who is he?”

  “Jeremiah Goodkey,” Katherine replied. “He owns the Nag’s Head, and is as fiery a soul as you’ll find in all London. I will answer him.”

  To my surprise, Katherine climbed onto our table and raised her hands for quiet. “Jeremiah Goodkey, you are my friend, but in this matter you are wrong. If we are to try the King, we must have a true Parliament, a Parliament that has been elected by all Englishmen, no matter their wealth.” She paused, waiting until the cheers and hisses faded into quiet. Then she said, “And it must also be elected by all Englishwomen, no matter their wealth.”

  For a time it seemed as if Katherine’s words had begun the revolt that Mr. Marlowe so feared, for in their wake no mouth remained closed. Every soul in the tavern cried out either for or against the idea of allowing women to vote, and a few men appeared ready to cross the line from arguing to fighting. A smile flitted across Katherine’s lips as she ducked a chicken leg that someone hurled in her direction, and she made for the street. I followed her with Martha close behind.

  “You knew the trouble your words would cause,” I cried when we were outside. “Why would you say such a thing?” She was already laughing, and I joined with her.

  “I said it because I believe it, and because it is true,” she said. “The Lord’s prophets do not always receive a warm welcome. And they invariably bring trouble with them.”

  “Do you truly believe this?” Martha asked. “That women should vote?” I could hear the wonder in her voice at such a prospect.

  “Of course I do,” Katherine answered. “Else I would not have said it.”

  “But look at the trouble you have caused,” I objected. “How can that be for the good? Who would allow such an idea to come to pass if it causes such divisions?”