London in Chains (28 page)

Ned came over with three mugs of beer and, after a glance over his shoulder to check that his staff were coping without him, sat down at the table with them. ‘You're speaking of
The Case of the Army
?' he asked them. ‘I heard Noll Cromwell's been promised the earldom of Essex for his part in suppressing it!'

Wildman nodded impatiently. ‘I heard the rumour. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Whenever people are required to make sacrifices for the common good, somehow it always happens that other people make the sacrifices and Noll Cromwell gets the good.' He picked up his beer, had a long drink, then gave Ned a direct look. ‘We'll press on, never fear! If they won't accept
The Case of the Army
, we'll try them with
The Agreement of the People.
'

The Agreement of the People
was the newly proposed
Leveller
settlement, the result of the committee the Levellers had set up to work with the Agitators back in July. Drafts of it had been circulated around all the Leveller chapters in London, and the initial glut of proposals had been sifted and winnowed out to basics: Parliaments freely elected every two years on a reformed franchise; a set of reserves guaranteeing religious tolerance and equality before the law. The hope was that it could be submitted to the people for ratification, and that the people could be convinced that it really could supply what it offered – ‘a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right and freedom' – and abandon their insistence on a king. The latter objective looked more difficult even than the first. There were now more unlicensed Royalist newsbooks in London than legal ones.

‘God send you good fortune!' said Ned in a low voice.

‘Amen!' Wildman had another drink of beer, then glanced from Ned to Lucy and back again. ‘Ned, there's another matter I wished to speak of. Jamie Hudson asked me to ask you about his letters.'

‘Oh, Jesu!' exclaimed Ned, with a look of shocked guilt.

‘What's this?' asked Lucy.

‘Only that Jamie wondered that he'd received no answer to his letters from either of you,' said Wildman. ‘He feared they may have gone astray.'

Wildman spoke in a carefully casual tone, but Lucy understood the whole situation instantly. Jamie
had
after all sent her word of how he was, but he had sent the letters to
Ned
, and Ned hadn't passed them on.

‘I, uh, I intended to reply,' Ned told Wildman. ‘And to show them to Lucy, too. But . . . Lucy, I've scarcely
seen
you since Mr Tew took back the press, and when I do see you I'm so cursed busy that it goes from my mind!'

This was true, of course, but Lucy doubted it was the whole truth. She didn't think Ned would deliberately suppress the letters – but ignoring and ‘forgetting' them was another matter. He might be in two minds about presenting himself as a suitor, but that didn't mean he wanted to see another man in that position.

‘I know I might have written to him myself,' Ned continued, ‘but I
thought
I would see you often, as I used to do. I thought we might send our replies together.'

‘Where are these letters?' Lucy demanded coldly.

Ned jumped up and hurried out; Nancy Shorby tried to catch his arm as he did, but he brushed her off impatiently.

Wildman gave Lucy a speculative look. His eyes were very bright. ‘Tell me quick: how stand things between you and Ned Trebet?'

‘That's no affair of yours!' Lucy hissed indignantly. ‘But his friends would be offended if he made addresses to a girl without a dowry.'

‘And he defers to them?' Wildman replied, grinning. ‘I wouldn't have thought him so craven! Were I in his place, I would tell my “friends” to go hang! But I will hold my peace, seeing that it would not serve Jamie's interests to say as much.'

She glared in affront. It occurred to her that any impartial observer would say that marriage to Ned would be very much in
her
interest. Wildman was clearly eager to see his friend win the fair maiden, but he was indifferent to what that might mean for the maiden. She wondered what Jamie had actually said to him about her.

She wondered, in fact, what Jamie
meant
by writing to her jointly with Ned. He had spoken that time as though he expected Ned to propose: was he trying to encourage him? She would, she recognized coldly, do very much better to encourage Ned herself. He was an honest and decent man who could give her a comfortable and prosperous life.

‘It's true that Ned's been busy every time he's seen me of late,' Lucy said. ‘His people have taken pains to ensure it.'

‘Oh!' said Wildman, with an oblivious grin. ‘That's how it stands, is it?'

Ned returned with some folded papers. ‘Here are the letters!' he panted. ‘And I beg your pardon that you did not see them sooner.'

‘I know you've been busy,' said Lucy appeasingly, taking the letters. ‘Whenever I come here, there are always half dozen matters clamouring for your attention.'

‘Aye!' agreed Ned, relieved.

There were only three letters. They were unsealed, brief, proper and addressed to Ned first and Lucy afterwards. The first said merely that Wildman had promised Jamie a place with an army blacksmith; the second, that he was now working with Edmund Davis, attached to Colonel Harrison's regiment of Horse; the third . . .

Lucy read it, then read it again, smiling: he might as well not have bothered addressing it to Ned! She looked up, saw Ned watching her closely with a frown, and was instantly certain that he'd noticed that too, and wasn't sure whether or not he should be jealous. She folded it with the others and handed them back. ‘Thank you, Ned,' she said. ‘I was troubled for Jamie. I knew he would get no more work printing, and I feared he'd end a miserable drunkard, as he was when first he came to us.'

Ned blinked at her uncertainly. Nancy Shorby came over and touched his shoulder. ‘Ned, Rafe says—'

Ned groaned angrily. ‘Can't you let me be for half an hour?'

‘Well, but Rafe says we're out of beef, should he use the bacon?'

‘Out of – that's not possible! We've a whole side in the larder!'

‘Where?'

‘In the . . . oh, let me!' He jumped to his feet and strode out of the room.

Wildman shook his head. ‘As you said! Why do his people mislike you?'

‘Would your friends wish
you
to marry a pauper, Major Wildman?'

He was silent a moment. ‘My friends were very pleased with my bride. She is of a wealthy, noble and distinguished family, and the marriage did much to further my career. Her family are all Royalists, she
despises
my politics and we have not spent one happy hour together since I took up the sword against tyranny.'

‘Oh,' said Lucy. She hadn't even known that Wildman was married: he'd never mentioned his wife.

‘Ned is not your equal,' said Wildman, looking her in the eye, ‘either in wit or in spirit. I think you know it: else you would not let his friends cozen him.'

‘Jamie,' replied Lucy, ‘is as poor as I am myself,
and
he's said nothing to
me
of what I take to be your meaning.'

Wildman blinked. ‘Has he not?' He hesitated, frowning. ‘I think he must be ashamed to approach you while he can offer you so little. He is a proud man. But I hope you will take no offence if I, as his friend, speak in his place. He has a true and faithful heart, and it is yours entirely.'

Walking back to Southwark she pondered love, marriage and whether to reply to Jamie's letter. She was sure it would be unwise to do so, but she suspected that she'd do it anyway.

She drafted several replies over the next couple of weeks: they ranged from a chilly ‘It is not fitt for me to write you further', to a warm ‘I thought you had gonne away and left no worde, and when Ned showed me your letters I hadde such joye!' She tore all of them up – except the warm one, which she tore up
and
burned in the kitchen fire. Eventually she sent a brief missive sufficiently impersonal to pass muster.

The copy of
The Moderate
which she enclosed had coverage of the debates at Putney, where the Council of the Army was discussing whether or not to adopt
The Agreement of the People.
Wildman and the Agitators had indeed tried the Army with it, and
The Agreement
had garnered widespread support. Cromwell and his supporters were obliged to bring it to the Council and meet its proponents in debate. Most of the London newsbooks were covering the meeting, but the licensed ones did so with their usual cautious subservience.

It was left to the Levellers and
The Moderate
to reveal the strength of support for
The Agreement
, and the bitter clash it had engendered between the Grandees and the Leveller Agitators over whether all free men should be permitted to vote. Cromwell intervened to say that a wide suffrage ‘tended very much to anarchy', and that ‘they that are most yielding have the greatest wisdom', but it failed to carry the debate. Seeing this, Cromwell tried to refer the whole question to another committee. Colonel Rainsborough, however – the highest-ranking officer to side with the Levellers – called for a general rendezvous of the Army to decide the matter. The Council of the Army agreed to both the committee and – to Cromwell's dismay – to the rendezvous. By this time it was early November, dark, wet and miserably cold. Snow fell early, and the puddles in the streets were skimmed with ice. The price of coal soared and it was impossible to keep warm. In Thomas's house the only fire was in the kitchen: the loft, with its papered window, was freezing. Lucy and Susan slept with the bed pushed up against the chimney-piece, huddled under piles of Uncle Thomas's unsold woollens, and in the morning had to break the ice on their washbasin. The beggars in the streets grew gaunt and few, as all who could scrabbled a place in poorhouse, workhouse or prison, leaving the drunk and the hopeless and the deranged. A beggar woman was found dead in the Southwark stable just up the road, curled protectively around her starved child, both frozen stiff; how many others like her died in the city, no one could tell.

With cold and hunger came disease. Lucy came home from work on the sixth of November to find that Uncle Thomas was in bed with a feverish cold. She brought him a dish of soup from the kitchen.

‘Thank you, child,' he said with an apologetic smile, ‘but I've an uneasy stomach and I fear even that soup would turn it.' He sat up in bed, however, and asked her the day's news, exclaiming at the Army's plans for a rendezvous. ‘If the Army supports
The Agreement
, the Grandees will have no choice but to put it before the people!' he said eagerly. ‘God willing, it will be settled before the new year!'

Although he was still unwell the next morning, he got up, saying that he must see to his shop, but when Lucy returned that evening he was in bed again. Agnes was disgusted with him.

‘All this to-do about a cold!' she said angrily. ‘It's alarming my gentlewoman-lodger.'

When Lucy returned home the following evening, the gentlewoman-lodger had a carriage standing outside the house, and her serving-maid was helping the driver to stow her mistress's gear. Agnes was in the parlour, pleading with Mrs Penington. ‘It's but a fever!' she protested. ‘
And
it's gone down!'

The gentlewoman shook her head. ‘That's the smallpox, Mrs Stevens; the rash will come before morning, mark my words. I'll not stay the night!'

Lucy gave her aunt a horrified stare, then ran up the stairs.

The master bedroom was dark and chill; she couldn't make out the bed, let alone her uncle, and had to go back to the kitchen for a candle. When she returned, shielding it with one hand, she found Thomas almost invisible under the quilts. His face turned towards her as she approached, however, and he gave her a tired smile. After what Mrs Penington had said, she'd expected to see him covered with ugly pustules and she sighed in relief at the sight of his unmarked skin. ‘How do you do, Uncle?'