In the King's Absence Read online

  ‘He found his way into the Parliament. He joined the factions for reform. He was always against the King. Always supporting one sect or another, against the Anglican religion, against the bishops, certainly for the New Model Army and when Cromwell rose to the top as a military commander of genius, a fervent follower, though never a soldier.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now,’ said Colonel Ogilvy, slapping his horse affectionately, for the beast was walking more and more slowly and seemed to be going to sleep as it moved, ‘and now my half-brother, I believe, hath taken work from that Thurloe, Secretary of State, who boasts that he knows every move of our new true king, Charles, and will overcome him in God’s good time.’

  ‘They are very certain, are they not, that God is on their side and fights for them day and night? You are telling me that George Leslie is Thurloe’s spy?’

  ‘One of many such. I have no proof. But George was appointed a Visitor when Oxford was purged of Royalists and Sir Francis was in great danger for a time. George would have delighted to bring about his own father’s fall, but had little success at that time. He had to content himself with ending his Uncle Richard’s work in the university.’

  ‘I think they watch Luscombe still,’ Alan said. ‘In the stables when we arrived there was one ran off at once, as if with news that must be carried.’

  ‘You saw that?’ Colonel Ogilvy’s eyes shone suddenly with a light his son had seen often when a prospect of action was before him. ‘I ask because as I waited at the door of the house I saw a lurking figure in the shrubberies come to inspect me.’

  ‘You made no move to accost him, or to tell Sir Francis?’

  ‘I would know him again. Accost him? At a fitting time, my son. When I shall dispose of him.’

  ‘The colonel laid spur to his laggard horse as he spoke and the pair of them cantered on up the approach to Luscombe, leaving behind the man who had waited in the bushes beside the gates and had managed to hear the last remark Ogilvy had made, as the colonel, who had seen him there, had intended that he should.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning Colonel Ogilvy and his son rode away from Luscombe. Their next visit was to the great house near Banbury where Lord Aldborough, young Alan’s grandfather, still lived, suffering yet one more setback in his long, confused life.

  Thinking matters over in these late years of his age he used to wonder why he had seemed to be picked out for misfortune while all the time doing his best to please and serve. First there had been his good breeding and poor fortune. Then came the opportunity to marry much sought wealth, together with a cousin of that wealth, no less than the great Duke of Buckingham, the first duke of that name.

  But this dizzy height did little for him, since when the great peak fell to the assassin’s knife, he fell with it. Charles the First wanted none of him when Steenie was gone. But he had remained loyal to the monarchy, saving up the wealth he had gained, his sons for a time joining the Royal army, though they did seem to fade out of the battles after the First Civil War and sent no messages to him. However, his daughter Anne still gave him news of their further careers in Germany.

  And now, however much he tried to sink from Parliamentary sight near Banbury, harassment still threatened him. He heard the jangle of harness and the scraping of hooves before the house and trembled inwardly as he heard it.

  ‘Do not look from the window, sir,’ he ordered the man who was with him. ‘Whoever it may be we must not appear to be alarmed.’

  ‘The two without do not raise matter for alarm,’ the black-frocked man said, turning from the window with a smile. ‘For it is Colonel Ogilvy, your son-in-law, and one of your grandsons, I believe.’

  ‘Bold, rash man to come thus openly!’ Lord Aldborough cried distractedly.

  ‘Surely not, my lord. He holds his command from the Prince of Orange. He has no part in our English quarrels.’

  ‘But he may have soon. The Prince is dead, the Princess is the Martyr’s daughter –’

  But the parson was already at the door of the room and motioning for caution.

  Lord Aldborough was pleased to see the visitors and have some news from abroad, though Colonel Ogilvy knew his father-in-law well enough not to entrust him with any very vital items. Though it was by now guessed that Charles the Second had escaped from the country, the method used and those involved were not yet known. In fact Charles himself already and for many years after his Restoration, forbore to give the correct details for fear of betraying his friends. The colonel had said he came to England to see his son in Oxford, but finding him able to do little study and so to be wasting his time, had decided to take him back to the Low Countries with him.

  ‘But first, my lord, I bring you fond messages from Anne and the younger children. My elder son, Gordon, sends you affectionate respects. He will make a soldier too, sir.’

  ‘I have never thought otherwise, Francis,’ Lord Aldborough agreed. ‘Grandfather, father and son. What of you, young man?’ he asked sharply, turning upon Alan.

  ‘The young man was not confused.

  ‘I think I may take after my great-grandfather, Doctor George Ogilvy, my lord. He was a schoolmaster.’

  ‘A schoolmaster? In these stirring times? Have you no higher aim?’

  Alan reddened, but with his father’s eye on him did not attempt an answer aloud. The parson, however, came to his rescue by leading him away to look at some fine books in Lord Aldborough’s library.

  ‘We must not all be soldiers,’ he said kindly to the young man. ‘You are right to follow where your heart leads.’

  ‘I think it is less my heart than my head,’ Alan said bluntly, for he was angered by Lord Aldborough’s comments which seemed to him both out of place for one of his family record and also basically stupid.

  ‘Both in balance, is best,’ said the parson, serenely.

  Alan apologized.

  Some of the books were very fine and the finest had been sorted out and placed by themselves.

  ‘They are to be given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford,’ the parson said. ‘I have persuaded his lordship to give them that protection. They will find it with Master Wilkins, Cromwell’s brother-in-law.’

  ‘Will they need protection?’ Alan was horrified.

  Indeed they may. My Lord Aldborough is – indiscreet. If his house here by ill chance be sequestrated I fear those puritanical soldiers will have no respect for any book in a Royalist house, Church of England or Catholic.’

  ‘They went back to the others in time to hear Colonel Ogilvy accept hospitality for the night, but explain that he must be on his way to Harwich early in the morning, while Alan would return to Oxford and make some attempt to continue his studies there.

  They boy said nothing more then, but after they had left Lord Aldborough to make ready for the evening meal, Alan asked why he had changed his plans and that so soon after he had told his grandfather he was not going back to the university.

  ‘Nor will you,’ the colonel said. ‘But we will go severally in the morning and that early. Then you must turn a short ways off and make for the river. Leave your horse near the bank; it will be found. Some will think you drowned and so much the better. Work your way south from there to the coast. The drover roads would be best. Take ship from any small port.’

  ‘I am to take off your spy from you, then?’ Alan asked with a laughing gleam in his eye.

  ‘Unmannerly lout!’ his father cried, giving him a hard slap on the shoulder. ‘Nay, seriously, it is to save yourself. So far afield I think George may have been superseded, but they try always for news of the escape.’

  He whispered the last words and they did not speak on that subject again that night.

  They met briefly the next morning, before Lord Aldborough was stirring, as they thought at first. Colonel Ogilvy came to Alan’s room with a small pair of hand shears, the same that he used on his own locks. He had always kept his sons’ hair trimmed. As a soldier he had followed his u
ncle, Arthur Ogilvy, in this, purely for comfort under the helmet of the day. Therefore he had imposed it upon his own boys until Alan went to Oxford to study.

  ‘We had those locks trimmed for your service to the King,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to look a proper peasant again if you are to reach the coast safely.’

  Alan submitted easily enough. He was not vain. Besides, his own hair, unlike his elder brother’s that was the same bright chestnut his father’s had been before it faded with a too liberal dusting of grey, was of a very usual brown, neither thick nor thin, neither curled nor yet perfectly straight.

  They finished their business quickly. The colonel deliberately made an uneven job of it, to fit Alan’s impersonation of a working man when they should break company. They took up their bundles and went to the staircase. There they stopped dead, confronted by two unwelcome things, a sight and a sound.

  In the distance, coming out of the morning mist that lay across the entrance to the drive before the house, a troop of Parliament horse trotted steadily forward. From below stairs, coming up from the closed door of the library, rose the sound of prayers, the parson leading, a mixed male and female response.

  ‘Good God!’ cried Colonel Ogilvy. They will be discovered!’

  He rushed down, flung open the library door and addressing Lord Aldborough cried, ‘Hold, my lord! There be visitors at your gates. Disperse! Disperse, with no delay at all!’

  For the small gathering seemed to be frozen with horror and incapable of action. They stumbled to their feet, but stood with white faces, staring from one to another.

  All except the parson, who was gathering up the sacrament into a bag, wrapping the wine vessel in a cloth, and preparing to make off with both.

  Ogilvy stopped him.

  ‘I beg you wait, reverend sir,’ he urged in a whisper. ‘Your pardon, my lord. Military action needed! Bid them disperse about their usual business.’

  Lord Aldborough did so in a shaking voice. There were not more than eight present, five old weathered retainers and three young half-wits, Alan decided. All loyal but liable to confusion and breakdown if pressed. He waited for his father’s plan, hoping it might succeed but feeling a cold knot in his stomach as the moments passed.

  When the family was alone Colonel Ogilvy swept those separated books from their place at the end of the long table, the books destined for the Bodleian Library. Then he took the communion bread and wine from the priest and disposing them at the other end of the table sat down there, directed Alan to a place beside him with Lord and Lady Aldborough and the parson, now stripped of his vestments, opposite.

  A loud knocking sounded through the house.

  ‘The door must be opened to them,’ Ogilvy said. ‘Listen. We are here to dispose of these books. We have been taking breakfast.’

  The parson winced, but said nothing.

  ‘We are not Catholics,’ went on Ogilvy. ‘Besides, sir, you had not consecrated the bread and wine. Crumble some. It will look like an ampler feast, newly finished. Speak little. I will lead.’ He turned to Alan. ‘Go find one of the old men. Now, or they will knock in the door. Bring their captain to us here.’

  It was old Lady Aldborough who said, ‘We will support you, Colonel. It is a way, please God.’

  Alan found the old man struggling with the bolts on the great door and joined his strength. They opened it so suddenly and fully that the front rank of three dismounted soldiers fell forward, one to his knees. An ugly snarl rose from the rest, but they fell silent when Alan said in a loud voice, ‘Produce your captain and state your business with Lord Aldborough who owns this house and lives here at this time.’

  It was not an expected reception but it was heard by the leader of the men, who was a sergeant in the New Model Army, with some training and a great deal of self-importance in his new rank.

  ‘We seek a spy, known to have travelled to this place or nearby it.’

  ‘Then I think you are mistaken,’ Alan said. ‘But come within and you may speak to Lord Aldborough.’

  After a short discussion with his next in command the sergeant ordered the rest of his troop to dismount before the house but not to disperse. He then followed Alan to the library where the latter found the group exactly as he had left them, Colonel Ogilvy drinking from a beaker he had pulled out of his own bundle and Lord Aldborough taking a shuddering sip from Alan’s mug.

  The matter of the books explained the presence of the parson. No foreign priest, this, just the village incumbent, of help to the lord in his library, now church services were suspended. The full complement – much reduced – of servants were about the house. The two visitors, relations of the family, explained themselves, with papers to prove their identity, produced at once by Colonel Ogilvy. They were just about to leave but were at the sergeant’s service with advice if asked.

  The sergeant had a very strong sense of something rigged, something far far more innocent than was humanly possible, but he was up against the natural limit of his sturdy imagination, the blank wall of his lack of learning. He was barely literate so he did not even know if these books were really valuable. He felt very strongly that Lord Aldborough was not a clever man, not even a strong man, but he knew the lord was not a physical coward, that he was watching him now as a great lord should, as he had been brought up to expect a great lord to look at him. It infuriated him, but short of physical attack, useless, perhaps reprehensible, he had no redress. He did not know how to bully any other coward but a physical coward.

  So he listened to Colonel Ogilvy, who was clearly a fine military man whom he understood.

  ‘I would be very much obliged, Captain,’ the colonel was saying, ‘if you could relieve the Lord Aldborough of these fine books which he wishes to present to Master John Wilkins, the warden of Wadham College at Oxford. If you return there from any false trail you have travelled in this direction you may in fact find considerable praise for making this present over to Master Wilkins.’

  The hard light in the colonel’s eye was unmistakable. The sergeant knew where he was with Ogilvy. He was not on either side of the fence in England: he was unassailable as long as Holland was at peace with England. But a word dropped in high places. The great ones all knew one another. He was climbing now, but he could not afford to slip once until he had risen to a safer rung.

  The parson made the books into a parcel. Lord Aldborough wrote a letter. Colonel Ogilvy added a note claiming responsibility for handing the books to the troop who seemed ‘a well-conducted body of men worthy of trust in this matter’.

  ‘Though what the poor louts could do with the things should they not deliver them to Wilkins is hard to imagine,’ Colonel Oligvy said later to Alan. ‘Parchment does not come a soldier’s way, so even the coarser uses –’

  They had ridden away at last, walking their horses, guarding the parson between them until they left him at his parsonage door, with an appropriate warning.

  ‘Aldborough is a fool, though he is your mother’s father,’ Ogilvy said as they trotted forward after seeing the door close upon the frightened face of the parson’s wife.

  ‘Even the Church of England is proscribed now?’

  ‘Oh yes. The Puritans of all kinds rage furiously together. Almost a little Europe as I have known it this quarter century. But now to our business.’

  They arranged together that Colonel Ogilvy would go on to Harwich to take ship to The Hague in the usual way, as they had already decided. It was useless for Alan to go with him and unsafe, for the former spy had been with them to Banbury, it seemed, and might be just waiting to catch up with them again.

  ‘You must not be arrested at the port when supposed to be returned to Oxford to study,’ said the colonel.

  ‘But go abroad again I must,’ Alan agreed, ‘and if not Harwich then London maybe.’

  ‘The roads will all be watched – double-guarded.’

  ‘And the river?’

  Colonel Ogilvy nodded vigorously.

  ‘Aye, my
son, the river indeed! Our first arrangement there too. Your young wits beat my doddering old brains.’

  Alan laughed.

  ‘Not so doddering just now, sir, giving the enemy his orders to such good effect he set him off on your errand in the opposite direction to that you would follow. With my Lord Aldborough in dignified total misunderstanding in the midst, but his property unharmed and unthreatened.’

  ‘So we hope.’

  ‘And all on a crust of bread and a sip of wine –’

  ‘No blasphemy!’ ordered Colonel Ogilvy. ‘We will press on over this hill before us and part on the other side. You may follow the sun south to the woods above the river near Wallingford. If you succeed in getting down to London by water and disappear from these parts and are believed drowned, the hunt will be off. Go to Paternoster Row. Mistress Leslie will send you back to us in Holland. You have money?’

  ‘Enough. I look to earn my way.’

  ‘Then go with God. Your mother should see one or other of us for news. I pray both.’

  ‘Amen to that, father.’

  ‘Amen, my son.’

  They put spurs to their horses and were gone in a matter of seconds, confounding the spy who had been marching behind with a bundle of sticks on his back and a couple of companions for cover. The three of them ran but when they came to the brow of the hill the road before them going winding down into the valley was bare of riders or farm carts or indeed any kind of traffic.

  On this the spy turned back, muttering angrily, to retrieve his sticks, but the other two with agreeing glances, left the road and by paths known only to themselves, made their way home to the village. It was one thing to waylay an unsuspecting traveller in these lawless days. There might be profit in it and no questions asked. Long dead corpses caused no particular stir with recent battles so plentiful in the neighbourhood. But this fellow who had asked for their help was not the starving unfortunate he had given himself out to be. He was a secret, mean, abhorrent thing, to be avoided – or else destroyed.