During the passage of the Velsa, Faulkner had consoled himself that his troubles would be over when they boarded the Blackamoor, but the presence of Judith redoubled his woes, bereft as he now was of the assistance of Armerer and his colleagues. Once the cabin door closed behind them Judith exerted all her strength and withdrew her arm with such ferocity that the release sent her reeling across the cabin. It was a confined, tapering and narrow space, sparsely furnished, as one would expect of an impecunious commander like Sackler. A small, lightly-partitioned sleeping-space led off on the starboard side, the small windows were shuttered and a dim lantern threw more shadows than light. As Judith recovered her balance the Blackamoor heeled to the wind: they were under-way. The sensation of movement released a flood of relief throughout Faulkner’s body. Sackler might consider that the older a man was, the less sleep he needed, but Faulkner was dog-weary. He would have injudiciously tossed off a pint of wine had one been to hand, its ownership notwithstanding, but no such supply was visible. Must he sit guard over his wife for the hours it would take to reach Harwich? Were they going to Harwich, or directly to London? He chid himself; he should have asked Sackler. And had he not ordered old Toshack to meet them at Harwich? He expelled his breath in a sigh of utter exhaustion, slumped into a chair, and withdrew the wheel-lock from his belt, placing it beside him and regarded his wife.
Judith stood, one hand against the bulkhead, the other to her mouth. The sight almost brought a smile to his face: Judith was going to be sea-sick! A moment later the Blackamoor came to his assistance and lurched to leeward before coming upright. They were in the process of going about, Faulkner realized; the pink hovered ‘in-stays’ for a short while and then obligingly lay down on the opposite tack. A thin stream of vomit escaped Judith, who gave a short cry of mortification and slumped back into Sackler’s sleeping-space and fell into the crude bunk. Faulkner got to his feet, discovered a pewter bowl and shoved it into her hands. Pulling the curtain across the entrance he resumed his chair. Ten minutes later he was fast asleep.
Faulkner awoke with a start. The lantern had gone out or been extinguished and light filtered through the window shutters. There was a light knocking at the cabin door. His first thought was for Judith. He leapt to his feet, moved swiftly to the sleeping-space and drew the curtain back. She lay asleep, one hand across her mouth, the bowl beside her. She had fouled Sackler’s bed-linen, and the air stank of vomit. The knock came again at the door, and he went to open it. A small man in a serge jacket and frock confronted him.
‘Cap’n Sackler’s compliments, sir, we have made a fast passage. We’re approaching the Sunk, and would you an’ her leddyship require some breakfast?’
Faulkner shook his head to clear it. ‘That would be most kind,’ he said.
‘We’ve some eggs and burgoo, sir.’
It proved a capital breakfast, and Judith stirred as Sackler’s servant brought it into the cabin. It was followed by Sackler himself; his proboscis wrinkled at the smell of vomit.
‘I give you a good morning, Sir Christopher. I trust Her Ladyship’s night was not too uncomfortable.’ Faulkner explained his wife’s plight, but Sackler waved his apologies aside. ‘No matter, I regret your distress, ma’am,’ he said in Judith’s direction before returning his attention to Faulkner. ‘As you probably guessed I am making for Harwich, where I shall land Lieutenant Clarke with despatches as my orders require. I shall then await orders. If the wind serves I am to proceed directly to Deptford, otherwise I am to discharge three of my passengers at Harwich, whither, I am given to understand, a squadron of cavalry will shortly arrive. As I am also expected to serve under your direction, Sir Christopher, perhaps you will tell me what you expect of me.’
‘Of course. I regret that you have been placed in so awkward a position. The fourth man is my own prisoner, a charge I am laid under by the highest authority. As I told you, I have my own vessel at Harwich and should wish to transfer into her on arrival.’ He paused, weighing up Sackler, who thus far had behaved with impeccable propriety. However, it occurred to Faulkner that if he wished, once he had gone, Sackler could weigh anchor and do as he wished with the three Regicides. Both men’s eyes met, and it was clear that Sackler divined Faulkner’s train of thought for he smiled that curiously attractive smile of his and said, ‘I gave you my word, Sir Christopher.’
Faulkner nodded. ‘Yes, you did, but …’ He glanced at Judith. He had once trusted her. She stared back at him, her face pale from her discomfiture. It was clear she had withdrawn into herself, biding her time, Faulkner suspected, until she was ashore and could determine which way the wind blew. ‘Well, no matter. I shall remember Septimus Clarke, Captain Sackler, as I shall remember you.’
Sackler nodded and made his excuses. ‘I am needed on deck, as you will understand.’
To the surprise of both Faulkner and Sackler, a troop of cavalry was already awaiting their arrival in Harwich; so too was the Hawk. By the end of that day the three Regicides had been placed inside a locked coach, surrounded by the troopers, and had left Harwich by the town gate on the Colchester Road. Faulkner, Henry and Judith had been pulled across to the Hawk in the Blackamoor’s boat, and the little pink had slipped out to sea, to resume her duty of protecting the fisheries.
As Faulkner had taken his departure from Sackler, the latter had asked, ‘Who is the fourth man, Sir Christopher?’ Faulkner had looked at him, and Sackler had added, ‘Forgive my curiosity.’
Faulkner had expelled a long sigh. ‘He is my son, Captain Sackler; as to his condition as a prisoner, I beg you not to press me. I recall you too have dependants; sometimes they are a mixed blessing.’
‘They are certainly a burden,’ Sackler had observed drily. ‘I apologize for asking.’
‘Not at all.’ They had shaken hands and taken their leave of one another.
Once aboard the Hawk, where to his annoyance Faulkner found the lively and expectant figure of Charlie Hargreaves, he addressed Toshack without any greeting. ‘Have my son confined amidships, Mr Toshack, and ask me no damned questions.’ He turned to Judith. ‘You are to settle in the after cabin. I will be down shortly.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do not try to be clever, Judith. Save all your arguments for later, when we are ashore. I would not have your linen washed in public.’
He watched as she involuntarily bit her lip, the very picture of chagrin.
‘There’s a gale brewing,’ Toshack offered. ‘A good ’un from the sou’-west.’
Faulkner looked up at the western sky. It was full of dark clouds while overhead streamed the harbingers of wind, long white and curling mare’s tails. He cursed under his breath. ‘Watch for the shifting of the wind; the instant it veers I want us under canvas. Why did you bring the lad?’
‘Mr Gooding ordered it, sir.’
The wind veered into the north-west at noon the following day after a twelve-hour blow from the south-west. It came with a clearing of the sky, and Toshack wasted no time; by noon the following day they lay off Blackwall. As they secured to a mooring-buoy Faulkner thought of his splendid Indiaman. Toshack had told him her masts were in and the business of fully rigging her was in hand. He looked upstream for her then postponed the matter.
‘Time enough for that tomorrow,’ he muttered to himself; there were more pressing matters. As he gathered his wits it occurred to him that he had no idea where his wheel-lock was. A visceral fear constricted him as a suspicion formed in his mind: Judith!
He tumbled below into the cabin, his face flushed. She rose at the intrusion and saw the look on his face. ‘I think you left it aboard the Blackamoor,’ she said coolly, guessing exactly what was worrying him.
Faulkner thought for a few moments and then nodded. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. He needed her explanation to be correct. ‘A boat is being made ready. It is time to go on deck, but before we do, I must speak to you and have your agreement.’ He paused, staring at her intently. She remained stubbornly quiescent. ‘You will find things changed at home. Hannah has been mistress of the house since you left. I wish that matters remain so arranged. I shall not restrain you once we are ashore, but your continued freedom rests entirely upon your conforming to my wishes. Your liberty is assured but is conditional upon your obedience. As you are aware, the King has a long arm and I am bound to it. So too are you, if you wish to live in liberty. You have it in your power still to ruin me, but I promise you that I will not submit without a fight. As to Henry, the best I can offer you is that I shall plead that his youthful enthusiasm and indiscretion were regretted … Judith?’
She made no reply, merely making a gesture as of resignation. Faulkner stared at her a moment, willing her to commit to his intention, but there was no sign of compromise, still less of goodwill. ‘Very well, then,’ he said, turning away. He picked his sword and baldric, then glanced at his portmanteau. ‘Hargreaves can follow with my traps,’ he mumbled to himself, then to Judith: ‘Let us go on deck.’
He scrambled up the steep companionway steps and, at the top, laid his sword down, turned about, offering Judith his hand. She seemed to hesitate deliberately, and as the worm of suspicion suddenly uncoiled in his belly, Faulkner felt the ball before he heard the explosion of the wheel-lock’s detonation. He roared with pain and fury, spinning round as the shattered glass of the amidships sky-light fell tinkling to the deck, sparkling in the sunlight. Through the shattered glass Faulkner saw Henry, lowering the wheel-lock. He turned and bent over it, as though re-loading it. Faulkner swung round, Toshack, Hargreaves and the Hawk’s crew staring at him, shocked at the incident. The shock of the sharp pain had passed, and Faulkner felt the onset of the deep throbbing that would require the services of a surgeon to dig the wheel-lock’s large projectile out of his buttock. He could feel the blood streaming down his leg but ignored it.
‘Toshack! Hargreaves! A boat-hook!’ He snatched up his sword and stabbed it down through the skylight. Below, Henry had almost completed reloading and priming the wheel-lock but was out of Faulkner’s reach. Having completed his task, Henry turned, the loaded wheel-lock in his right hand. Instinctively, Faulkner drew back, out of Henry’s line of sight; a split-second later the loud bang of the weapon’s second discharge was ringing in their ears – then there was complete silence.
Cautiously, Faulkner peered down the skylight. A faint coil of smoke rose through the broken glass, the interior of which was splattered by blood. What remained of Henry lay slumped below, and Faulkner could see his brains.
The house in Wapping was an unhappy place for some weeks. Hannah’s welcoming smile froze on her face when she saw her mother and had learned of Henry’s suicide. Judith, expressionless, made no sign of greeting Hannah or of even recognizing her, retiring to her room, while Faulkner had stood awkwardly in the parlour, whither both Hannah and Gooding attended him in the hope of understanding what had happened. He waved their questions aside to demand a surgeon, calling out that Hannah should: ‘Boil water before the rogue touches me with a knife.’
When the man arrived, Faulkner insisted the barber-surgeon washed his instruments before he laid a finger upon his person and then, the others having withdrawn, he dropped his breeches and submitted to the humiliating probing and extraction of the lead ball.
‘You are lucky, Sir Christopher,’ the man remarked as he suppressed his patient’s groans with professional commentary. ‘Both that your muscles are strong, preventing the ball from going deep, and that the ball does not seem to have found its mark very effectively.’ It did not feel like a ricochet to Faulkner, though he thought of the route it had travelled and told the man to look for glass. After a further debasing struggle, the barber-surgeon straightened up, holding a piece of glass in his forceps. ‘But a single shard, Sir Christopher,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Now, you will likely have a fever for a few days, but if you keep warm, drink regularly and pray that the Almighty will favour you, I have no doubt of your recovery.’
His wound plugged and the surgeon dismissed with yet more money, Faulkner slumped awkwardly into his chair. Hannah came in and slid a cushion under him, for which he kissed her and fondled her hair.
‘Do not cry for Henry, my dearest,’ he said sadly. ‘He is in a far better place and sent there by his own hand before the King’s butchers got to work upon him.’ If his words were meant to comfort Henry’s sister they failed, for Hannah withdrew weeping inconsolably as Faulkner waved aside her demand that he should go to bed. Instead, in defiance of his surgeon and his daughter, Faulkner sat staring into the fire. He would have done what he could for the boy, but the matter had never been certain, a matter of the King’s whimsy. But that was not the King’s fault: Henry had made his own bed and must, perforce, lie upon it.
Except that Judith had made that bed up for her son in every detail, of that Faulkner was now convinced. Judith was obviously caught up in the conspiracy, and whatever she had done herself or persuaded Henry to do, only Judith herself could have possibly seized the wheel-lock, which she must have accomplished when he slept aboard the Blackamoor, assuming she was prostrated by sea-sickness. How she passed it to Henry was as yet a mystery, but she had managed it, as the puncture in his buttocks bore painful testimony.
Thus night fell upon the unhappy house.
It was in the small hours that Faulkner, still in his chair, cold and cramped, woke to a full comprehension of the previous day’s events. He was furious with Judith for betraying him and placing in Henry’s hands the means to destroy her husband and, that having failed, kill himself. Despite his discomfort and pain, his mind seemed to see things with the utmost clarity. He did not recognize in this the onset of fever, the consequence of infection in his wound, but he said his farewells to Henry, regretting much – as fathers of wayward boys do – but consumed with a fiery hatred of his meddling wife. As his temperature rose, his fury kept pace, so that when an anxious Hannah came down at daylight, she found her father writhing in a delirium on the floor, mired in ash from the extinguished fire.
Henry was buried in unhallowed ground. Only Hannah and Gooding attended him as Faulkner still lay in bed, feverish and too weak to leave it. In an adjacent chamber the dead man’s mother lay prostrated in a world of her own fashioning.
Of Faulkner’s kin it was Hannah who came best out of the events of the month of March 1662, for she had risen to the challenge of the sudden burden of responsibility for the house. Hannah displayed that spirit of swift resolution that had made Faulkner’s inactivity in the house in Delft so irksome, and that Henry possessed in perverted form. Too like his mother in his inflexible acceptance of dogma, of his insistence upon ‘right’ and ‘justice’, among other philosophical forms, his version of Faulkner’s resolve had led him into a death-trap.
Hannah had too practical a turn of mind to be ensnared so easily. Besides, her father had not only left her the house to manage, but an uncle whose sense of moral self had received a body-blow, together with a curious mission to contact her own father’s lover. It was this last which had proved the true challenge. At first she had recoiled from the task, constantly postponing the decision until her sense of equivocation, and a horror of addressing a scarlet-woman, had been replaced by curiosity.
When at last she had walked to Leicester House and asked for a letter to be placed in the hands of Mistress Villiers, she had plucked up courage to inform the footman that she would await a reply. This bold initiative had aroused a reciprocal curiosity in Katherine, who had ushered Hannah into the same chamber into which she had shown her father. Alone, she had immediately seized Hannah’s hands and, drawing back and smiling, had looked her up and down.
‘I am charmed, Mistress, charmed,’ she had said regardless of Hannah’s blushes. ‘I can see why your father speaks so highly of you. Now, tell me what news you have of him.’
A beguiled and confused Hannah had left an hour later, the taste of sweetmeats still in her mouth, mixed with the tang of Bohea tea. Her ears had rung with the delightful invitation to come again and Katherine’s advice that, insofar as the future was concerned, ‘Matters may rest where they presently lie until your father is returned from foreign service.’
As Hannah had lain in bed that night, thinking over the day’s excitement, the words ‘foreign service’ had come back to her. They seemed extraordinarily powerful, a window on the world inhabited by such powerful figures as Katherine Villiers, whose very importance was confirmed by her position as confidential lady-in-waiting to the late Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. That the legendary Prince Rupert of the Rhine also occupied Leicester House, along with its owner Lord Craven – neither of whom she had seen, but the presence of footmen clearly guaranteed – only added a frisson to the day.
Katherine had so completely won Hannah over that she saw beyond her father’s occupation with his ships and the Brethren of Trinity House – all things which, though acknowledged to be men’s affairs, had impinged upon Hannah’s life – another, grander world, associated in Hannah’s young mind with the stirring events of national upheaval to which she was heir, but in which her father had been, and still was, immersed. From her encounter with Katherine Villiers she caught again the tremendous excitement of life, an excitement that she had known when Edmund Drinkwater first declared his love for her but which, in the months since his departure, had withered and shrunk her soul.
During the absence of her father, Hannah had twice returned to Leicester House. On both occasions Katherine had received her warmly and they had retired to Katherine’s own modest chamber. The affairs of the late Queen were complicated and, while much of the work was in the hands of Lord Craven, Katherine found herself involved, not least with Elizabeth’s correspondence. All took time, so Hannah’s occasional visits, though they interrupted Katherine’s duties, proved welcome diversions for them both.
Katherine’s interest in Hannah was unfeigned and swiftly grew into affection so that when she saw off her visitor at the end of her second visit, Katherine was able to ask that Hannah let her know as soon as her father returned home. ‘I know there will be difficulties with your mother,’ she had said, ‘but I beg of you not to let that conceal his arrival, my dear.’
Hannah had acquiesced, though on her homeward journey she feared Katherine’s charm and apparent friendship might have seduced her from her duty to her mother. In the succeeding days this troubled her but, in regarding the state in which she found her father that morning and with her mother apparently gone mad, she had little hesitation in writing to Katherine, explaining the situation, once she found the leisure to do so.
Thus it was that after Faulkner’s fever had broken, he woke, weak and sweat-soaked, to find Katherine sitting beside his bed.
‘Where am I?’ he asked, confused.
‘At home, my love,’ she said gently, taking his hand.
‘At home..? But you … Judith … Oh, God, Henry …’ The events of the recent past flooded back to him in all their horror. He moved, the pain of his wound making him wince, then he realized fully who it was who held his hand.
‘How is that you are here?’ His voice was full of wonder; her face seemed to wash away something of his fears.
‘I am here at your daughter’s invitation. Hannah and I are friends, and your wife is in the next room. I fear she has lost her reason, or is in some form of deep catalepsy, though I have not seen her. You must rest and get better.’
‘And you?’
‘I am still resident at Lord Craven’s pleasure. The late Queen’s affairs are taking time to conclude and His Lordship has offered me accommodation; permanently, if I wish.’
‘Do you wish it?’
‘I must live somewhere.’
‘You must live here.’
‘We shall see.’
They remained gazing at each other in silence for some time, then Katherine laughed.
‘What amuses you?’
‘I was thinking that the last time you lay in bed in my company, it was to attend your arse!’
Faulkner chuckled. ‘To be shot in one’s posterior is an indignity not to be borne. I would it had not been my troubled boy, though.’ The humour had drained from him, though she said nothing, allowing him time to recover. ‘He was, alas, corrupted by his mother.’
Silence fell again between them, this time less comfortable, as though the presence in the adjacent room thrust its dire influence through the very wall. ‘She is a witch,’ Faulkner said, his voice low and accusatory.
Katherine leaned forward and placed a cool finger across his lips. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Who knows? Though I doubt it. What is more certain is that if your surgeon had been better acquainted with his business, he would have inserted a bristle into your wound and allowed the poison to escape. Your fever would have been less malevolent too. As it was we had to reopen the wound and drain it, after which you improved quickly.’
‘We?’
‘Hannah and I.’
‘And how do you know these things better than my surgeon?’
‘You forget, I followed the drum.’ Katherine cut short her explanation for at that moment they heard urgent footfalls upon the stair. A second later Hannah burst into the room. She was waving a letter, her face a picture of happiness.
‘Father! Oh, Father … Katherine, news of Edmund!’
‘My, my; I have not seen you so light-hearted in an age, my dearest,’ Faulkner said, patting the bed beside him. As Hannah settled herself, Faulkner turned to Katherine. ‘Edmund Drinkwater is—’
‘I know, my dear. Hannah has told me all about him. Come, tell us, Hannah, what exactly is this news?’
‘This letter,’ she said, almost waving it with delight, ‘is from Portsmouth. The Eagle will be in the Thames within the week, and it has been a most successful voyage! He will be home soon!’ Her face glowed with delight as she smiled at them both.
Faulkner looked from his daughter to Katherine and said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for the three of them to discuss, ‘Then we have a wedding to arrange, banns to be called and you two had better discuss a suitable day.’