In the King's Absence Read online

  Colonel Ogilvy bowed, murmuring formal expressions of consent and gratitude. He knew why the King had spoken of his family, for Lord Wilmot, who was about his own age or a few years younger, had met and known him in the army of the Prince of Orange. They had talked the night before, after the King had gone to bed. Ogilvy had heard the details of the long escape after the battle of Worcester, though Wilmot had not stressed the many near-disasters of that adventure, due mainly to the impetuous mistakes he had himself made. No doubt Lord Wilmot had told the King all he knew of Ogilvy’s family, his wife who had been Lady Anne Wolmer, daughter of Lord Aldborough, his two surviving sous of whom Alan was the younger and three daughters, still mere children.

  The colonel spoke to Alan about the King’s command, which, he explained, must be accepted.

  ‘If your brother had been in England when these events were in train I would have set him on to serve His Majesty in the last stage of the rescue,’ he said. ‘But he was with me in Paris on a message from the Princess of Orange to the Queen Henrietta Maria, her mother. There we had news the King had not been taken at Worcester. Poor Gordon is bitterly disappointed he has had no part to play. He is a soldier like his grandfather Ogilvy.’

  ‘And you too, sir,’ Alan protested.

  ‘Maybe. But the will to it did not come at birth as it has with Gordon. You have more the spirit of your great-grandfather, old Doctor Ogilvy of the Charterhouse.’

  Alan laughed,

  ‘I may have been set on scholarship because my lady mother would have me at Oxford with my great-uncle Richard, but I can tell you now I was very greatly pleased to have your orders, sir. Oxford is a sad place these days. Sad and fearful since the great wickedness of the Royal Martyr’s death.’

  The two men bowed their heads. The shock and horror of that end was still, two years later, fresh in their minds and hearts. But they parted in contentment and hope, for Alan was only nineteen, young and strong and romantic, as his father had been when he devoted himself to the exiled Queen of Bohemia.

  He sat beside the coachman of the hired vehicle as they clattered out of Rouen, his master, the King, chatting merrily behind with his admired, fond friend and fellow adventurer.

  Chapter Three

  Luscombe Manor on the outskirts of Oxford lay peaceful, very quiet, almost as if deserted, on the day in early November when the two Ogilvys, Alan and his father, passed through the open, iron-wrought gates at the entrance to the long drive.

  A low sun sent its orange rays flickering through the branches of the trees, turning the dying leaves to flame. Upon the weathered brick of the buildings a still deeper crimson-red showed where a strange creeper from the new settlement in West Virginia, sent as a cutting from that distant land, had taken root and prospered, a matter of wonderment to all who saw it. The sun lighted it too and flashed from the many windows of the house as the two horsemen drew close.

  As if to welcome them, Alan said wonderingly, uplifted by the beauty of the scene.

  ‘Or to warn us of our peril,’ his father argued, for he was tired after two days of hard riding from Bridport, where they had landed from a Dutch fishing boat, with no questions asked.

  The colonel drew up at the front door of the house and took his son’s rein white Alan dismounted to pull the long iron bell chain beside the carved oak door. He tugged it vigorously and was soon answered by the creaking of bolts drawn back. Half the heavy door opened to disclose a whitehaired, stooping old man.

  ‘Is Sir Francis at home, if you please?’ Alan asked politely.

  ‘He be in Oxford, young sir,’ the old man said. ‘Her ladyship is within. Is that not Colonel Francis Ogilvy I see mounted yonder?’

  ‘Your eyes are as good as ever, William,’ the colonel answered.

  ‘Here, Alan, take the horses while I go in to pay my respects to the Lady Leslie. Will my son find grooms in the yard, William?”

  ‘Two lumping boys, sir. My eyes grow dim, begging your pardon, for I did not recognize Master Gordon.’

  ‘This is Alan, William, not his elder brother.’

  ‘God’s mercy, but he grows apace, he doth indeed, sir.’ Raising his voice to a shaky treble he called out, ‘You may take the horses to the yard, Master Alan. The lads are there to serve you, for I saw them at work on some harness not a quarter hour since.’

  Alan moved away, leading both horses. He had not been in England for over a year before his visit in connection with the King’s flight. And then had spent a mere week in London to hear a true account of Worcester and the latest news of the King’s whereabouts before hastening back to Holland. For the flight itself he had spent but one night in Brighthelmston. But in the untroubled years of his childhood before the Civil Wars there had been several visits to Oxford and to his maternal grandfather’s great house near Banbury. So he knew his way to the yard at Luscombe and having handed over the horses to the boys he found there, and taken the luggage from behind their saddles, he made his way into the house with it to find his hostess.

  Lady Leslie was pleased to welcome the visitors. She had loved Colonel Ogilvy when he was a little child, abused and tormented by his mother who had been her husband’s first wife. She had grieved for him when he was sent away to the Leslie family at Kilessie near Falkland in Fife. She had done her best to reconcile him with Sir Francis when he had to be told of his bastardy, with all that it meant in social shame if not degradation. His later success in arms and service to the ex-king and queen of Bohemia and above all his later adoption by Colonel Arthur Ogilvy, his natural uncle, had brought the families together again, while the colonel’s marriage to a daughter of Lord Aldborough, former friend of the great if dastardly first Duke of Buckingham, put his social position, a matter of the greatest importance in those days, quite beyond doubt.

  ‘Sir Francis should be here within the hour,’ she said. ‘I trust you are in no manner of haste?’ Seeing them hesitate she added, ‘Doubtless you intend to visit your uncle the Doctor, Francis. Has he made the acquaintance of this – I cannot call him boy, for he hath all the appearance of a man –?’

  ‘If it please you, my lady, call me Alan, as always,’ said the young man, blushing.

  ‘And so I will, Alan,’ answered Lady Leslie, with, a very sweet smile.

  ‘But my Uncle Richard is in London, is he not, my lady?’ the colonel said. ‘Has been, I believe, since before Worcester.’

  ‘But is now returned these ten days. You had no news of this?’

  Colonel Ogilvy laughed.

  ‘I – we – Alan and I, have had little time to pick up foreign news these two weeks and more. Have we, Alan?’

  ‘That is so. At sea one is spared the news, good or ill.’

  His father frowned at him.

  ‘You confuse my Lady Leslie. And border on dangerous matters.’

  ‘Not here in my parlour,’ she protested. ‘William is most careful, though he does grow old, alas.’

  Not wishing to alarm her Colonel Ogilvy said no more about his doubts. Besides, almost directly afterwards Sir Francis rode in from Oxford where he had been lecturing. The surprise caused by the visitors’ arrival was gone over again and the guests were pressed to stay at Luscombe as long as they could.

  ‘I hear that Doctor Richard is returned from Paternoster Row,’ Colonel Ogilvy said.

  ‘Lucy’s mother begged him to stay,’ Sir Francis replied. ‘But he insists upon his true legal rights here. He hath been mixed in no ploys or schemes to restrict the usurping powers of our present Masters.’

  ‘But they drove him out of the University for being a Royalist, did they not?’

  Sir Francis turned his head away, but Lady Leslie explained in her quiet voice that this order was made because Doctor Ogilyy’s eldest son had fought at Naseby, two more sons were under arms, but concealed their whereabouts.

  ‘That is not the root of the matter,’ Sir Francis interrupted, turning with some bitterness. ‘Cynthia, your cousin, Francis, was like to be betrothed to my
eldest son, George, Kate’s son. But Cynthia preferred a fellow member of that Parliament George was elected to. He hath never forgiven her for that injury. He still seeks to be revenged by persecuting any member of her family.’

  ‘Or his own, for that matter,’ Lady Leslie added sorrowfully.

  The colonel made no comment and the subject was allowed to drop.

  The next day Alan and his father rode over to Doctor Richard’s house. They found it sadly changed from the days before the Wars, when Uncle Richard’s cheerful energetic wife was still alive, still caring for those surviving members of her large brood of children, one of whom, a daughter, was still unmarried, being of rather feeble mind. There were also there, very often, Cynthia’s children, brought up on those natural lines followed by Celia with such marked early success. Four of them still lived, but the whole family had stayed in London when the Civil Wars began and had never been to Oxford since.

  So now the house was quiet, the garden neglected. As with Sir Francis Leslie’s establishment the serving men in house and garden had gone, some as soldiers to the wars, some to the growing trades in mills and cloth weaving. Many were used to the fashioning of uniforms for the New Model Army of Cromwell and his generals, many to armouries to make swords, cutlasses, muskets, pistols, together with the ammunition, bullets, powder, shot and cannon-balls. Not forgetting the furnishing of horses, stirrups, spurs, bits, bridles, saddles, reins. There was no lack of a good position for any man to serve the rebels and little, it seemed, to be found among the loyal gentry, except defeat in battles, followed by poverty, harder work for less reward in the old domestic jobs upon estates and in houses that might at any time be taken from their owners and themselves turned out of doors, with a taint upon them, too. There was little incentive for young men to develop loyalty: only the old men clung to it.

  Doctor Richard was sitting by himself in the library. There was no fire though the day was cold with a chill east wind. An untidily dressed middle-aged woman had opened the door to the visitors, taken them to the library and left them to announce themselves.

  Doctor Ogilvy was a few years younger than Sir Francis Leslie but looked now very much older. He had little to say to his nephew the colonel and hardly seemed aware of Alan’s presence. Unlike Sir Francis he asked no questions at all about the reason for their visit to Oxford at the present time, with winter coming on and few students in the colleges. He did not speak of the King at all, but his black clothes showed he was still in mourning for the Royal Martyr and was still very much a Royalist. But when Colonel Ogilvy remarked, a little reproachfully, that he had hoped his Uncle Richard would continue to live in comfort and security at the house in Paternoster Row that had belonged to his schoolmaster grandfather, Doctor George Ogilvy, Richard lost his sad listlessness and answered almost angrily, ‘Comfort! Security! What use have for either? What right to them? What pleasure in them, with Celia gone these ten years and the boys – all gone –’

  ‘Surely Thomas and James have but wisely hid themselves?’

  ‘I hear nothing. I believe them dead. I am alone.’

  ‘You have Sarah. Then Sir Francis sees you often, surely?’

  ‘As often as his son, that snake, that devil, that servant of murderers!’

  ‘George Leslie. He was a friend to all of us, was he not, until his suit for your Cynthia came to nought. I had great sympathy for him then, because I thought his love deserved to prosper.’

  ‘And so did I. But she chose his friend, Cromwell’s man, God forgive her! I overlooked it until the wars started but not now – not now.’

  ‘I have no sympathy with George now, but can you not forget him, uncle? Why come back to Oxford where he continually lurks, hoping to do us all injury?’

  ‘Further injury. You know that he bore false witness against my Cynthia’s husband, so that he was suspected by Cromwell’s Secretary of State, Thurloe, the spy master. And had difficulty in proving his loyalty to his misguided party.’

  Doctor Ogilvy looked so enraged that the colonel hurried on.

  ‘But Sarah? I thought she was your housekeeper?’

  ‘She prefers to live with her sister. In that nest of rebel traitors!’

  ‘Then why are you here? Why endure this life, alone, uncared for, when old Mistress Leslie would make you most comfortable in London?’

  ‘Because this is my life, this place of learning. Without my old friends and the new young minds, I am more dead than alive. You are a soldier, Francis, not a scholar. You do not know, maybe, that we have that original, John Wilkins, the only good fruit of that dire pruning of our ranks in the so-called Visitation? Or that others are here, men of great brilliance, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and the rest. They are in process of making fresh, astonishing discoveries. In this awful continuing holocaust, this darkness of bigotry, this ruthless hunt to destroy everything of joy, of beauty, simply because they are excellent and give pleasure, our circle of scholars, a rampart against total savagery, is my only light arid I would hold to it if I may.’

  The old man spoke with such passion that Colonel Ogilvy was again anxious for his uncle’s health. They left the house in a state of depression, very much alarmed for Doctor Ogilvy’s future. Which feeling was in truth shared by Sir Francis Leslie who deplored his eldest son’s bitter resentment, that really dated from the introduction of his gentle step-mother to Luscombe.

  On the way back from Doctor Ogilvy’s house Alan asked his father for the true facts about George Leslie’s behaviour. The colonel was reluctant to bring up the sad past, but he remembered how shocked he had himself been when the story was first told to him at the age Alan had now reached. it was many years since he had felt any bitterness himself and George was less than two years his junior.

  ‘I have told Gordon the bare bones of the tragedy,’ he began. ‘I think I need not repeat them to you for Gordon will not have hidden them up. He showed no grief when I told him, but rather relished the tale.’

  Alan could not control a wide smile, remembering his brother’s bawdy version of their grandmother’s lapse from virtue.

  ‘My mother betrayed Sir Francis,’ the colonel went on. ‘But he brought me up as a Leslie, even with his own first name, though in Scotland at the house of the laird of Kilessie, his father. In gratitude or fear or to conceal her true nature, my mother bore Sir Francis two children, a boy, this George, and a girl, Kirstie, who died in childhood, poor mite. I never saw her. But George survived the dangers and diseases he encountered and when his mother fled the country, but took the plague and died miserably at sea, he was a healthy, lively schoolboy of between seven and eight years old.’

  ‘It was then – as soon as Sir Francis became free, that he married the present Lady Leslie?’

  ‘That was the trouble with George. When your grandmother ran away from Luscombe, disappeared from the country, in fact, they had to tell George that his mother had gone abroad to stay with friends. They could not tell him she was proscribed, in danger of being found guilty of conspiring with the Lady Frances Howard to poison and murder a poor prisoner in the Tower.’

  ‘I know the story of that infamy,’ Alan said in a grave voice. ‘But I think they did not pay the full price for it, though their hired accomplices all did.’

  ‘They paid well enough, those evil Somersets. Banished to a country estate and forbidden to go above three miles from the house. They lived in mutual hate, in miserable boredom, above ten years, I think.’

  Colonel Ogilvy fell silent, unwilling to pursue these old criminal acts any further. But Alan wanted to hear more of George, so after a few minutes he asked, ‘What then, of this half-uncle of mine? He did well at school, at his college, did he not? What then?’

  ‘He had looked for his mother’s return as I told you. When his father married Lucy Butters and brought her to Luscombe he learned that his mother was dead, had died during the voyage overseas. He knew this step-mother, daughter of Mistress Butters who looked after the London merchant, Angus Les
lie, a kinsman of Sir Francis, and later married to the old man. As Lucy Butters George had found her kind and gentle at Master Leslie’s big City house. But his mother, he remembered, had despised her as a menial, a servant of the household, which she most certainly never was. Though Sir Francis had not understood it, George had adored his beautiful mother, her uncertain temper and frequent cruelties matched his own temperament. Alas, I think I have had it too, in some part. Though they tell me my quick temper comes from my true father.’

  ‘So George began to resent his father’s new wife, his new mother? It is natural, but I cannot think my Lady Leslie is in any way to blame.’

  ‘Nor is she. But George hath never relented. Sir Francis and his greatest friends in Oxford, the Ogilvys, were always Royalist, by custom until the troubles started, by conviction when the late King was in peril. Doctor Richard, as you have seen, puts himself in peril continually. Sir Francis buries himself, as always, in his books. He never troubled his head with affairs of state. His second family have been unremarkable; a divine, a schoolmaster, two daughters married into commerce. I think by minding their own business they look to passing though this hideous upheaval untouched except by increasing poverty, which they will bear with meekness but a tough fibre of spiritual strength. An irresistible combination I would have you note, Alan.’

  This time Alan laughed aloud and his father allowed himself a rather guilty grin.

  ‘I do not mean to disparage them,’ he said. ‘And I feel a grudging admiration for their steadiness. Besides, there was another boy, a true rebel, who left Luscombe before the Wars to go into Scotland and has not been heard from since.’

  ‘So there was a modicum of wildness after all?’ Alan said. ‘A pity we know nought of it. But George. You still have not told me his actions, only his state of mind and his expressed feelings.’