Dawn brought the certainty that we had failed. The search revealed nothing; wherever the Horsemen had hidden themselves for days and weeks, it was not in the village itself. The citizens of Leigh, outraged at the disturbance of their sleep and the invasion of their homes, stood in groups in the street and on the foreshore, complaining loudly of the illegality of what we had done. They were momentarily shocked and cowed by the reappearance from their hiding place in the flyboat of Lovell’s Marines, now properly uniformed and fully armed, but it did not take long for their outrage to reassert itself. I then had to endure an uncomfortable meeting with a Justice of the Peace from nearby Benfleet, a portly fellow who evidently did not take kindly to having been woken in the small hours and forced to ride through the darkness.
‘Arbitrary beyond measure, Sir Matthew!’ cried Musk, doing a passable impression of the Justice as we rode back west, through the scrublands of coastal Essex. ‘This is not France, Sir Matthew! We shall proceed to law, Sir Matthew! I’d give him arbitrary – I’d hang him arbitrarily for being an arse.’
The Marines marched in yellow-uniformed file behind us, escorting their prisoners. For all Musk’s bluster – much of it, I suspected, born of embarrassment at having been the unwitting cause of our near-demise – the scene must have had more than a hint of France about it.
‘He was right, though,’ I said. ‘Soldiers bursting into the homes of innocent, God-fearing people – we saw enough of that in England, in Cromwell’s time.’
‘The means to an end, Matthew,’ said Aphra. ‘A pity we did not achieve the end, but I doubt if the King will condemn us for trying. And, as I recall, the Lord Lieutenant of Essex, who no doubt can mollify the magistrate, is a friend of your brother.’
He was, though the thought of him did little to ease my troubled mind. Aubrey, twentieth Earl of Oxford, the last of the De Veres, spent his every waking hour gloomily contemplating the extinction of one of the most ancient bloodlines in England: a state of affairs uncomfortably similar to my own.
‘What did he want, do you think?’ I asked. ‘Schermer. The Precious Man. Retribution for Holmes’ bonfire, and a new dawn of freedom of England. What would Vandervoort’s money have paid for?’
‘Whatever it is,’ said Aphra, ‘they have been planning it for a long time. Schermer and Goodman must have had their plan in place to get De Wildt out of Chelsea College before news of the bonfire reached England. Whatever they have in mind, revenge is only one part of it, and a newly added part. Their scheme is deeply laid – talk of Mene Tekel and the Precious Man began back in the spring, at the time of the Rathbone Plot.’
‘For men like them, and for Rathbone, a new dawn of freedom would mean only one thing,’ I said. ‘The overthrow of the monarchy, the re-establishment of the Commonwealth. Their notion of freedom being every right-thinking Englishman’s notion of slavery, as Cromwell’s time proved.’
‘One fewer target for them, though,’ said Musk.
‘Crave pardon, Musk?’ I said.
‘Rathbone and his crew planned to kill Monck, the Duke of Albemarle. No need to do that now, as the fat, gouty old – very well, Sir Matthew, His Grace – he’s at sea, so well out of the way.’
So he was. George Monck, who as Lord General of the army had secured London ahead of the Restoration of the King, and then kept it secure for him. Any conspirator worth his salt would surely attempt to carry out his plot before Albemarle returned from sea and resumed his iron if lumpen grip on the capital.
‘What else did Rathbone seek to do, Musk?’ said Aphra Behn. ‘Neither Sir Matthew nor I were in London when it happened.’
‘Not a bad plot, as these things go,’ he said, ‘and your brother and I have fair experience of such things, Sir Matthew. Kill the King – naturally – and Monck, then fire London to create panic and confusion. If it was me, I’d have put knives in the Duke of York, Clarendon and Arlington too, and any other lords or gentlemen I could get my hands on. A new Sicilian Vespers, or a second Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre if you prefer, only this time in Whitehall.’
‘God help England if you ever turn rebel, Musk,’ said Aphra.
‘Not in a dozen lifetimes, Mistress,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, they planned to surround and disarm the Life Guards, get across the Tower moat in boats, scale the walls, then break open the arsenal and arm every old New Model trooper and canting conventicler within a dozen miles of London. Chances are, they’d have had an army of fifty thousand by dawn and your neck would soon have been on a block waiting for the axe to fall, Sir Matthew.’
‘But such a plot would need money,’ I said, ignoring the prospect of my beheading, and thinking aloud. ‘Ready money, for bribes to the necessary parties, and then to establish the government of the new republic. Ah, of course! When it began, the old Commonwealth already had control of Parliament, which voted it money every step of the way it took. Any sudden revolution, like the one Rathbone plotted, would need credit until it could convene some sort of new Rump or Barebones Parliament, a puppet assembly of fanatics to give it a semblance of legality – and above all, to vote it taxes. That’s why the Precious Man was so keen to meet Meinheer Vandervoort.’
‘Bravo,’ said Aphra. ‘Now that truly is Lord Percival thinking and speaking.’
‘Bit obvious, though,’ said Musk, ‘for these Horsemen to attempt exactly the same thing as Rathbone.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘they’ll have a different plan, that’s for certain. But it’ll still come back to the same thing, Musk. Money. They’ll need money to erect their utopia, the new paradise of the godly saints upon earth. Perhaps they can get it from another source, but the fact that they were so keen to get it from Meinheer Vandervoort suggest they don’t have it yet. That being so, all they can do is destroy, to wreak havoc – to avenge what Holmes and I did at the Vlie and Terschelling.’
A strange, unwelcome thought then came to me: that my very own, recently ruined father-in-law might have been a likely candidate to supply the Horsemen with funds.
‘Or else,’ said Musk, ‘maybe we’ve given them such an almighty fright that they’ve turned tail and gone off to find a different war. One with plenty of walls they can blow up and towns they can fire.’
‘Remember, Musk, I know these men,’ said Aphra. ‘They’ll seek to complete what they have started. Nothing is more certain.’
‘Then we must find some other way to stop them,’ I said.
The Horsemen had eluded us, but at least we had Sallows. The other men we had captured in Leigh churchyard were clearly ignorant fellows, brought along only to provide strength in numbers. I was content to release them to the local magistrate as a sop. But Sallows was too valuable; he was the one chance we had of finding the trail of the Horsemen once again. Knowing the treacherous reputation of such vile dens of rebellion as Rainham and Barking, we went by way of the road closest to the river whenever possible, and put up overnight at Tilbury blockhouse, where the garrison, augmented by Lovell’s Marines, ensured there would be no attempt to rescue the villain before he could tell us anything of value.
Not that Sallows was talking. I had threatened him with the gallows. Aphra Behn had attempted to bribe him. But the man seemed an inveterate fanatic, one of those whose eyes were fixed firmly on the life to come, the eternal and markedly dour rule of the Saints, as they called themselves. The certainty of predestination made men insufferable, but it also made them difficult to break.
‘One hour,’ said Musk.
‘Beg your pardon, Musk?’
‘One hour, Sir Matthew. That’s all I’d need with him. Lord Percival – the real Lord Percival – would know that, and grant me that.’
I forced myself to glance at Aphra – something I had tried to avoid doing – and she nodded grimly.
‘And what will you do to him in that hour, Musk?’
His round face was unreadable.
‘Best not to ask questions like that, Sir Matthew. Best to be well out of earshot, too.’
I averted my eyes, and thought hard upon the issue. But in truth, it was not so difficult a decision. God alone knew what monstrous crime the Horsemen might inflict – how many innocents might die, for instance. I also knew full well what Sallows and his kind would do to the likes of me and mine, if they ever held power in the land once again. Above all, I knew exactly what my brother would say, and I was there, in that room, in that fortress, merely as his substitute. His mouthpiece.
‘Very well, Musk,’ I said, my throat dry. ‘Go to it.’
In the event, it did not take an hour. It did not quite take fifty minutes, during which interval Aphra and I at first discussed the remarkably dry and hot weather, albeit in a somewhat intermittent fashion, until she somehow wheedled out of me tales of my days in the likes of Naples, Sicily and Venice, when I commanded in the Middle Sea, even of my visit to Madrid in my youth. She had a way of getting men to talk, whether they wanted to or not; of getting men to do many things, whether they wanted to or not. And above all, she had a way of getting men to forget, if only for a few precious minutes, those otherwise nearly unbearable burdens called sin and guilt. Of getting men to forget that they had wives.
When Musk returned, he was in exactly the same unperturbed state as before, with no sign of his having been about any business of any kind whatsoever.
‘He doesn’t know where they are, and what they’re planning. I’d stake my life on that.’ Then it had to be true. Phineas Musk rarely staked his life, even in jest. ‘But he’s seen papers of theirs that mention a ship. A Swedish ship, with one Peterson as skipper. Lying at Saint Katherine’s, he says, hard by the wharf for Corsellis’ brewhouse, the Hartshorn.’
I knew the Hartshorn; it was close by the Navy’s victualling yard, in East Smithfield, which I had often had cause to visit. But it was close by something else, too.
‘Adjacent to the Tower,’ I said. ‘Rathbone planned to seize the Tower. Anyone seeking control of London must surely possess it, or destroy it.’
‘Then, Sir Matthew,’ said Aphra, ‘surely Saint Katherine’s is where we should go?’
I mustered as good a grace, and as positive an air, as I could manage.
‘Indeed so, My Lady Astraea. That is precisely where we should go.’