The Butterfly in Amber (15 page)

Rather to the Finch family's discomfort, Sir Hugh had offered them a rundown cottage in the village to live in, and regular employment on the manor farm. They had not wanted to offend him, when he had always been kind enough to let them camp out in the forest, but Jacob shook his head, and said, ‘Thank you kindly, sir, but I think we'll stay where we are.'

‘But why?' Tom said, obviously taken aback and disappointed. ‘Your caravans are so small, so dark. They leak when it rains. You're hungry more often than not. Why would you not take a house when it's offered to you?'

‘We're Rom,' Luka said shortly.

‘I don't understand it,' Tom said.

‘I don't understand why you would stay shut up in a stuffy old house when you could be travelling where the wind takes you,' Luka flashed back.

‘Well, when you put it like that . . .' Tom laughed.

‘We're wanderers on this earth. Our hearts are full of wonder, and our souls are deep with dreams,' Emilia said softly, translating the words that had been engraved upon her heart since she was a baby.

Tom gazed at her in surprise. She grinned at him. ‘You wouldn't like it, Tom. Well, not in winter, anyway.'

‘No, that's for sure,' he replied. ‘Well, Father says to tell you that you and your family are always welcome on our land.'

‘Could he put it in writing for us?' Luka asked, in earnest despite his flashing grin.

‘Absolutely,' Tom replied solemnly. ‘And I'll get him to ask the pastor to put you in the parish records too. No more getting arrested for vagrancy!'

The sun had set, and a pleasing smell of roast lamb filled the clearing. Once the moon had risen, the wedding would begin. Sebastien and Beatrice would eat bread dribbled with their own blood
and swear to live by the three laws of the Rom. Only then would the feasting and music and dancing begin. Emilia could hardly wait.

Milosh the smuggler and his men appeared as soon as it was dark, their long string of ponies walking as silently as cats on their muffled hooves. Milosh had brought gifts – a fine silken quilt for the married couple, embroidered in France; a cask of brandy for the groom's father; a long, dark wig for Van, just like the king's, as he had promised Emilia; a new crystal ball, not so large and clear as Baba's lost one, but still round and heavy and full of promise; and for Luka, a new violin from Italy, sweet and curved and golden.

‘Milly told me about how you gave away your old one to Joe's nephew, who hadn't spoken a word since his father died,' Milosh said with his crooked grin. ‘That was a good thing to do.'

‘But . . . it must have cost a fortune,' Luka said, hardly daring to touch it.

‘I got it from a Spaniard in return for some cannon that Stevo gave me,' Milosh said. ‘He wanted to get you something, to say thank you for all you've done for Van.'

Emilia cast a wondering look at Stevo, a dark hulking shadow at the edge of the merry group. He nodded his head to her, and she saw a brief flash of a smile from the midst of his thicket of beard.

Luka, speechless, clutched the violin to him, stroking its svelte shape; then he lifted it to his chin, drew the bow over its strings, and began to play. Never had he played so beautifully, a tune that made you want to weep and smile at once. Everyone fell silent, spellbound. There was only the firelight dancing in the leaves, the moonlight gleaming upon the water, the circle of rapt faces, listening as the music lilted and swayed and danced. Emilia swallowed a lump in her throat. She thought of her mother and her father, wishing they could be here to see Beatrice, so beautiful in
her happiness. She felt a small hand grope for hers. It was Noah, tears bright in his sightless eyes.

A new music wove its silver cadences into the violin's cavatina, a long fall of warbling notes, then a high whistling crescendo. A nightingale
had flown down out of the darkness and was perched on a branch above Luka's head. Small and plain and brown, its throat swelled with the largeness of its song. Luka's eyes were shining, his face full of joy, as he and his violin wrought their own kind of magic.

‘When your father Amberline played, the birds flew down out of the trees to listen,' Maggie said softly.

‘I thought that was just a story,' Emilia whispered back.

‘There is often more truth in stories than you know, darling girl,' Maggie replied.

Emilia nodded, knowing this to be true.

T
here was indeed a great hurricane on the 30th August 1658, and many writers interpreted it as a harbinger for Cromwell's death. Samuel Butler wrote:

‘Tossed in a furious hurricane,

Did Oliver give up his reign.'

After his death, his son Richard ruled for a short while, but so badly he was eventually hustled away, giving birth to the expression ‘Tumbledown Dick'.

King Charles II was playing tennis when he heard the news of Cromwell's death. Twenty months later – on the 29th May 1660, the day of his thirtieth birthday – he rode back into London through cheering crowds, his throne and his crown restored.

King Charles II did indeed have the bodies of Cromwell and his right-hand men dug up, hanged in chains at Tyburn Hill, then hacked into quarters.
It took the axeman eight blows to sever Cromwell's mummified head from his body. It was set on a pole upon the roof of the palace at Whitehall, gazing at the spot where King Charles I had been beheaded, nine years earlier.

Two years later Cromwell's head mysteriously disappeared. No one quite knows the truth, but one story goes it fell off in a storm and then was used as a football by some street urchins. It reappeared some years later as a curiosity in a circus show (but failed to make money) and was eventually sold. In the 1800s a parson bought Cromwell's head for the princely sum of £200 (just to give you an idea of its value, you could have bought a house for about £50 pounds at that time).

There was some argument that the purchased head could not really be Cromwell's, but it was ruled genuine as it had a wart above the right eye just as Cromwell did (Cromwell had famously demanded that he be painted ‘warts and all', unlike most court
portraits that flattered the subject). Some generations later, in the 1930s, the descendant of the pastor who had bought the head allowed extensive scientific examination of it which confirmed it was indeed the mummified head of Oliver Cromwell. It was subsequently given to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where it was buried in a secret location on the 25th March 1960 – almost exactly three hundred years after the Lord Protector was first dug up.

Cromwell was not the only one to suffer the vengeance of the restored king. Charles II also arrested many of the men who had signed his father's execution order. Most of them died the terrible punishment for traitors – death by hanging, drawing and quartering. A few escaped to Europe or to America but were hunted down by vengeful Royalists and murdered. Only a few of the fifty-nine regicides managed to escape.

Apart from this terrible and bloody vengeance, King Charles II worked hard to bring peace and
prosperity to England. He did his best to work with his puritanical parliament, and allowed his kingly powers to be greatly curbed (Cromwell actually had more power in England than King Charles II ever had). Charles II rewarded those who had helped him, and did not punish those who had stood against him. For the rest of his rule, England was as peaceful as a land could be in those turbulent times.

Meanwhile, no one ever wondered aloud what had caused the death of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Yet at the time Cromwell's sickness caused a great deal of puzzlement, for even though he was known to suffer from English malaria – called ague at the time – this was not a fatal illness, and many of his symptoms – especially the agonising pains and vomiting – were not
consistent with ague. Many people were suspicious, and a few suggested that he had been the victim of witchcraft or poison.

Certainly, it was not the first time Cromwell had faced the danger of assassination. It had become clear to the Royalists that the only way the king could ever be returned to his throne was if Cromwell should die. One of the exiled king's secretaries of state wrote at the time, ‘There will be little hope for the K to do much good in order to his Restoration until that villain be knockt in the head', and Cromwell's doctor, George Bate, wrote how Cromwell ‘never was at ease' and was ‘suspicious of all Strangers, especially if they seemed joyful'. Cromwell wore armour under his clothes at all times, and was accompanied everywhere by bodyguards.

Dr Bate had been King Charles I's physician, and after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration, became Charles II's doctor too. He
was also given a large sum of money by the restored king, and his family were rewarded with important jobs. A few years later a friend recorded in his diary that ‘Dr Bate died in London of the French pox and confessed on his death bed that he poisoned Oliver Cromwell . . . and his majestie was privi to it.'

Many people discount this alleged confession as a mere rumour, or perhaps spiteful gossip, but mystery still hangs around Cromwell's death, and over the years many people have come up with different explanations for it, such as kidney failure. The truth is none of us will ever be sure – but I have always found the mysterious death of Oliver Cromwell, and the story of the ignored deathbed confession, intriguing. If Oliver Cromwell was to be assassinated, to clear the way for the return of the king, who better to administer the fatal dose than his own doctor? And certainly any unease over the death of the great dictator would be
discouraged by those who benefited most from his death – the king and his exiled court.

Similarly, the story of Elizabeth, the Countess of Dysart, is a fascinating one. It seems clear now that she was a secret agent on behalf of King Charles II, living in England during the time of the Protectorate and befriending Cromwell and his family and friends, while secretly sending news to the exiled court. It is known she wrote many letters in code, or with concealed messages written in invisible ink, and she worked on developing a new type of invisible ink that could not be easily discovered.

At the time of Oliver Cromwell, she was married to Sir Lionel Tollemache, but used her own title, which she had inherited from her Royalist father, who went into exile with the king. However, after
the Restoration – and the death of her husband and his wife – she married the Duke of Lauderdale, one of the king's most trusted councillors, and became a very wealthy and influential woman. There were many whisperings about her – that she had poisoned her husband or the duke's wife – and that she was a witch. Certainly she was always very interested in the occult.

Interestingly, a portrait of her second cousin, Mrs Henderson, has the words ‘the celebrated poisoner' inscribed upon it by some unknown hand.