Lindsey Davis - Rebels and traitors

Gideon felt more demoralised than he had expected. Sexby half unbuttoned his coat, the best he could do to make himself at home. He turned and shared a fatalistic glance with Gideon. Though they had reached different positions, their shared past experiences gave them bonds. Both sighed. Neither blamed the other. The mutual dislike they had felt all those years ago became a matter of indifference.

'End of an era,' said Gideon in a grey voice. 'Walwyn is doctoring the poor, Wildman died of a seizure outside Eltham Jail as he returned from bail, Overton has turned to wild religion.' Lilburne, turning pragmatist, was still on the loose. Neither Gideon nor Sexby mentioned it. Gideon glanced at the door and lowered his voice as if his purpose was unofficial. 'My second wife was married to Orlando Lovell, the Royalist known as William Boyes. Will you tell me where to find him?'

Sexby looked at him more keenly. Gideon's legal quandary did not interest him; he was locked inside his personal predicament, weighing everything that was said to him against that. 'Have you been told to ask me?'

'My quest is personal.'

'I know nothing of him.' A standard answer. Gideon realised Sexby did not trust him. Even without knowing that Gideon had been ordered to look for the second firework, Sexby would protect Lovell.

'He has my wife's son.'

'His son, presumably.' Sexby shrugged. Elizabeth would have to bring up their children alone; Gideon wondered just how much — or how little — Sexby had invested in them emotionally.

Still, he tried again. 'Lambert wanted Thomas to be a grocer.'

Sexby, once a grocer's apprentice, finally laughed. 'And how is Lambert?'

'His health is broken.' He held up his own arm like a bird's broken wing. 'And I too am ruined.' Gloomily philosophical, Gideon opened up to Sexby, speaking his fears for the future as he would to no one else: 'We regret nothing. We would do it all again, and gladly. We recite to ourselves that miserable cliche, our fighting achieved so little, yet not to have fought would have been disastrous. It is, of course, no consolation. Failure has lain in wait all along and nothing changes that.'

Sexby was tensed to resist interrogation yet he too seemed prepared to forecast: 'Cromwell will die. The young Charles Stuart will return. Whatever promises he makes, monarchy restored under him will have a godless, dissolute core.' He spoke as one who had seen the man at close quarters. 'He will round up all those who brought his father to account. Liberty, which has died under Cromwell, will be permanently lost then… Well! I shall not see it.' Gideon could not argue with that bald conclusion. 'What will you do, Gideon Jukes?'

'As I must. Endure it. It has been fifteen years since we took up arms,' said Gideon. 'People are tired. Tired of fighting. We did our best, but we cannot continue. We want a normal life. A week of work, a Sunday sermon, a wife and children in the home, peace and prosperity. We want a settled commonwealth.'

'Your commonwealth is a lost cause,' Sexby told him. No thanks to you, thought Gideon.

He could bear no more and ended the interview. To his surprise, Sexby sent him off with the old Leveller salute: 'True unto death!' Gideon could not bring himself to return the same.

It would take until November, four months of mental grind, for the authorities to persuade Edward Sexby to admit he was the author of Killing no Murder. Raving and shaking with an ague, he would confess everything — or so it would be said. Sexby would have no trial, but an inquest would decide he had been carried off by jail fever. That, he would have said, was extremely convenient for Cromwell.

His wife, recently delivered of a child, sent her maid with forty shillings to have him buried. Although she was given the opportunity to have his body taken outside, with her husband's kind of defiance, Elizabeth Sexby told them to inter him in the grounds of the Tower of London where he had died.

Gideon never saw Sexby again. Feeling exhausted and mournful, he had walked out that evening from a gatehouse, into the vast open interior spaces of the Tower of London, bathed in the last filtered twilight of a long July evening. Candles showed high in the constable's quarters. Military sounds came from the garrison. A breeze carried the smell of the stables; even its pungency failed to eradicate the stench of prison neglect he had absorbed. Chilled to the bone even after so short a visit, he felt his shoulder aching badly.

Somewhere here, Gideon remembered, was a copy of the Magna Carta. It had been shown to Lord Fairfax once, but Gideon Jukes did not request a viewing.

Mrs Maud Tew was well aware that her brother grew more and more to resemble their father. Red in the face, outstanding in the belly, complaining and work- shirking, Nat had happily adopted the traditions of his ancestors. He had become as useless as Emmett always was. Maud Tew squared up to her fate with resignation — a slight, pallid but pert figure, who had made herself formidable in her chosen domain. She looked as if a puff of wind would bowl her over, though she had the wiry strength of all working women who constantly heaved about heavy tubs and barrels. Nat allowed her to do it, unaware that she was perfectly capable of carrying out such work, whilst simultaneously plotting in her nowadays well- ordered mind how to be rid of him.

Her thin brown hair was tied in a tight little topknot, without a cap or headscarf, though she wore an oversized white collar on her tiny shoulders, above a more-or-less fitting grey gown. A capacious apron completed what would have been a respectable ensemble, had not the butt of her pistol been visible in her apron pocket where a lesser woman might carry a housewife-cloth to dust her mantel-shelves.

Mrs Tew had a reputation. Both her brother and her customers respected and admired it. She made no secret that she had been a soldier, in disguise; it was also reported that she had been a highway robber, like the infamous Molly out at the Black Dog Tavern on Blackheath. Maud kept her mouth shut about her history, but for a slightly built woman who kept an alehouse in a hard district, such rumours did no harm. It was one way to impress upon the public the Act against Drunkenness; when the Swan's customers had supped enough in her opinion, they were encouraged homewards by her gun.

It was, therefore, not sensible for anyone to cause a rumpus in her tavern's yard. When one of the occasional lodgers lost his temper with an ostler, he was asking for it. Thomas, the ostler at the Swan, pistolled coming to take their horses… Hearing the racket, Maud ran up from the brewhouse. She found a swank cove in a suit that annoyed her, yelling that his young son had been permitted to run off. He was attempting to take his horse from the ostler, who kept a good hold of the animal because the reckoning had not been paid.

'Now then!' cried Maud.

'You tell him, Maud,' encouraged Nat. Customers came out and jostled one another, eager to see the fun.

'So who is this?' demanded Maud like an actress, with her usual sarcasm, as if the cove were just a woodlouse that crawled under her broom as she swept out the taproom.

'Mr Boyes,' said her brother, pretending this situation was none of his fault.

'I think not!' rounded Maud, who still remembered the man from Birmingham. 'I know you,' she said, speaking directly to Lovell. She was no longer in the least afraid of him. She could not tell whether the cavalier who had once — twice — nearly killed her simply for being in his way now understood. 'This dodger's name is Lovell.'

'Oh!' piped up Nat. At last he spotted the connection. 'Would he be the dangerous cavalier the man Jukes was searching for so urgently?'