Rebels and Traitors (12 page)

There, Edmund had a historic room in the old quadrangle, a fair-sized chamber up an ancient stair, where he was looked after by a scout with skinny legs who could hardly mount the steps with a coal scuttle. Edmund’s scout despised scholars, and he positively loathed the intruder Lovell. Lovell knew himself to be exposed. He showed no perturbation. He came most days, daring the scout to report them for smoking. In fairness, Lovell did supply the tobacco. However, that was because he deduced that Edmund had no idea how to buy a palatable leaf, while sending out the crabby scout to the tobacconist was never an option.

To his credit, Edmund did wrestle with a perceived problem. Education had not been wasted on him. ‘I should much like to be a man securely enjoying his wife’s estates, but I do not see, Lovell, why an heiress of this calibre should ever take me on.’

‘Nothing to it,’ said Lovell. ‘You must carry yourself like a fellow who has much gallant farmland of his own — but it is all temporarily entailed on your Anabaptistical second cousin.’

‘And how will I manage that?’

‘With meekness,’ laughed Lovell. Then he added as if he knew at first hand, ‘And dismally’

Juliana Carlill and her guardian were living at Wallingford in a house which the guardian, William Gadd, had borrowed. After a brief exchange of letters, Edmund Treves, supported by Lovell in the role of groomsman, travelled to see them there.

Wallingford was a spry market town, its moated castle decently held by Royalists, with lovers’ walks along the river banks and a great bridge where William the Conqueror had forded the Thames on his way to be crowned. Wallingford went back in history longer than that. A fortified Saxon burgh founded by King Alfred, it had once been larger than Oxford; it was still strategic and remained very sure of itself. It was a typical English county town, which would soon be fought over bitterly.

Lovell and Treves were thrilled to learn from local intelligence that the house they had to visit was owned by a judge. This put Mr Gadd in a highly respectable context — just as Mr Gadd intended, had they known it.

One fine autumn afternoon in 1642, Juliana Carlill was summoned by her guardian’s all-duties maid, Little Prue.

Juliana had custody of various heavy tomes which had belonged to her father, who spent more money than he should on books. She had been enjoying her reading, an accomplishment her father had taught her. He had collected utopias’; she was deep in one called
The Man in the Moon
by Francis Godwin, where a shipwrecked Spanish nobleman was towed to the moon in a chariot drawn by trained geese; there he discovered a benign social paradise, with fantastic, futuristic features.

Lost to the real world, Juliana did not hear Little Prue knock at the bedchamber door, nor did she immediately notice her standing in the room. Little Prue, a vague, pale mite who came from a farming background, stared at the book as if its spellbinding hold on the young lady suggested Juliana was a witch. In seventeenth-century Europe, that could be a serious mistake. A spinster who wanted to avoid disaster never lived reclusively nor kept a black cat, nor gave her neighbour — or her neighbour’s cow — a lingering look. Otherwise, the next step was having voyeuristic men inspecting breasts and genitals for devil’s teats. No witch-finder ever conceded he had made a mistake: invariably accusation led to a guilty verdict and the penalty was hanging.

Juliana smiled at Little Prue reassuringly.

On being informed that she was being visited by two strange gentlemen, Juliana went through all the sudden shifts of emotion that would overwhelm any young girl. She did not want to put down her book in mid-chapter, for one thing. Domingo Gonsales, the utopian voyager, was about to return to earth, where he landed in China … Yes, Juliana Carlill was a reader who peeked ahead.

Her next thoughts were for her appearance. Fortunately she was wearing a neat gown of pale yellow, sprigged with tiny flowers. Little Prue, whose memory was no bigger than a bluetit’s, forgot her fears of witchcraft and took it upon herself to straighten Juliana’s soft collar, with its falls of delicate lace from high in the throat then down across her shoulders. Juliana’s lace was always good. It had been mended in many places, but the mends were invisible, she was entirely confident of that, having reworked the threads painstakingly herself. Her hair, too, was fashionable and smart. When a young lady is staying with an elderly bachelor guardian who refuses to hear of her assisting his all-duties maid in anything more than genteel gathering of herbs from the kitchen garden (which at Wallingford was not well stocked), she finds nothing much to do with herself except mope in her bedroom arranging her hair. So Juliana had a very neat flat bun on the crown of her head, with tendrils of curl framing her face and long loose ringlets at each side.

She stepped down the dog-leg staircase, pointing her toes as she took the wooden boards, so she would not trip on the long folds of her gown. This was a Tudor house, maybe a hundred years old, built in mixed materials, with some brick. Juliana descended into a small hall, with a low plaster ceiling rather than the great hammer-beamed caverns of earlier periods, though this one boasted a heavy rent table — too heavy to move easily, and so left to gather dust here while the house stood unoccupied.

Mr Gadd, shrunken but twinkling with excitement, waited for her outside the door to a withdrawing room or parlour. Skinny legs in old-fashioned black hose capered beneath a full-bottomed doublet in a style from the time of King James. He was mostly bald, but lengthy strands of grey hair dragged on his quaint outfit’s tired brocade. With his elderly, watery eyes, this gave him an off-putting, slightly seedy impression. That was misleading.

He was, Juliana had discovered, extremely intelligent. At eighty years of age he had retired from the Inns of Court with a healthy pension; it was paid by several grateful lawyers whose careers he had burnished by steering clients their way by discovering long-forgotten points of law, by tracing — or otherwise procuring — essential witnesses, and by knowing where to buy good malmsey. He had no formal qualifications; he was a pig-keeper’s son. He knew more law than most judges, but he had not been born a gentleman so could not use this knowledge directly. Juliana’s grandmother had pretended to think he was legally qualified, though in truth Roxanne recognised exactly what he was, just as
he
understood
her
position. They were outsiders. They had invaded a level of society that was theoretically closed to them — and they stuck there tenaciously. Roxanne had intended that something should be done about this for Juliana — and Mr Gadd concurred.

So here they were.

‘What do we have, Master Gadd?’

‘A pink-and-white mother’s boy — manageable. And there’s his supporter — who needs watching.’

Juliana and her guardian had had a sensible exchange of views on her future. They were prepared to deal with any wooers who came to call. ‘If he looks sound husband material, we’ll drop him!’ chirruped Mr Gadd, pretending to level a firing piece at some unwary bird in a coppice. Juliana, who feared that shooting down a husband might be the only way to catch one, smiled as if she too were enjoying the chase.

Two
gentlemen was more than they hoped for. Mr Gadd whispered quickly that it was only to be expected that the scholar-suitor would be nervous and would bring a friend. Juliana would have liked an encouraging friend of her own. But she had never had friends. Her grandmother had thought English children were nasty creatures.

All the same, she was not alone. She was lucky to have found herself placed in the care of a guardian with whom she could converse on a practical level. Their good humour together only increased her sense of obligation. She did not wish to burden Mr Gadd. Besides, Juliana might be only seventeen, but she had a keen sense of how the world worked; she preferred not to be alone in his care too long. So far, he was sheltering her with the gravest of good manners, but he was a man. Roxanne had been a man’s woman — and Juliana knew what that meant. Her grandmother remained flirtatious right until she died; Mr Gadd had been a conquest, undoubtedly. Mr Gadd on his stick-thin legs might yet launch some tottering sally against Juliana’s honour. Girls who have other girls as friends give themselves courage against unwanted amorousness, but Juliana had no such confidante. Her chaperone was Little Prue, though she suspected instinctively that Little Prue
might
beat off an attacker with a warming pan — yet might as easily decide it was not her place to interfere.

So one reason Juliana welcomed marriage, marriage to anyone who seemed suitable, was that she wanted her own home, where she would have standing as the housewife and could enforce rules for her own protection.

Juliana and Mr Gadd knew in advance that Edmund Treves had a widowed mother, to whom he was close, and also siblings. This could entail married life with the Treves family. While Juliana might find herself immediate soulmates with her mother-in-law, she could equally end up in thrall to a harridan. She had been surprised when Mr Gadd discussed this. He actually warned her against life as a young bride in another, older, woman’s home. His unfashionable attitude, which had a ring of experience, was her one glimpse of his personal background.

Until three months beforehand Juliana and her guardian had never met. He knew her grandmother only briefly in London, and although he prepared Roxanne’s will on that occasion, nine years later when Roxanne died he was initially alarmed to find himself left in charge of Juliana. He took to the responsibility, however. Roxanne had foreseen this. Mr Gadd, who had never had dependants, was thoroughly enjoying himself as Juliana’s guardian. Still, even though she knew Roxanne had vetted him, Juliana could not absolutely depend on him. When it came to accepting or rejecting the suitor, he would advise, but she had to decide.

Mr Gadd paused, with his hand on the latch, winked, then opened the door. Juliana took one hard look at the two men in the parlour, before she cast down her grey eyes modestly as a young girl was supposed to do.

Once she thought she could do so discreetly, naturally she then peeked.

Orlando Lovell — sombrely clad, heavy spurs, uptwirled moustache, pinched lips — had taken possession of one of the solid square wooden armchairs, whence he had been eyeing the room. Edmund Treves — shaved until he bled and blushing pink — was standing. His gaze fluttered on her guardian but then came directly to Juliana. He wanted to know what was being offered to him. Juliana felt equally determined to assess her suitor: the younger, taller man, who wore a braided cherry suit slashed over silver satin (the main colour clashing with his red hair) and a billowing satin cloak wrapped over one arm. Mr Gadd had led her to expect someone wimpish, though in fact Treves’s features were firm, with a forward-thrust chin, and his build was chunky. He appeared more athletic than scholarly. Juliana, who could not afford to make mistakes here, immediately assessed him as good-natured, but too young.

She felt more wary of the other man, who was so coolly assessing his surroundings. The room had linenfold oak panelling and contained only two monumental box chairs, plus a rather ugly fifty-year-old buffet, a long side table with two open levels, which currently displayed no plate, not even second-best pewter. There was an open hearth, where a modest log fire blazed, but it had made little encroachment on the chill that gripped the long-empty house. Nobody present, however, would have challenged the fact that a judge should own more houses than he could live in, and should be able to abandon a fine property, without tenants, for years at a time.

Juliana was introduced. For this, Lovell rose rather reluctantly; both visitors swept off their broad-brimmed beaver hats. Everyone uttered polite nonsense for the briefest time possible. Lovell returned to his great chair, leaving Mr Gadd to occupy the other, while Juliana and Edmund took separate window seats. It left both of them relegated to the sidelines, with a pillar between them. If Juliana had foreseen this, before the meeting she would have dragged in a couple of leather-backed dining chairs. She wanted to peer at the suitor, while the others talked.