I was determined, but felt my resolution ebb with every step he took toward me. For months now, lying awake at night, I had imagined myself whipping out my father’s sword and thrusting it into his heart, intoning some suitable words as he expired with a look of cowardly terror on his face, crying for mercy, slobbering with fear, while I stood implacable over him. I had no sword, but Grove’s knife would do as well.
Easy to imagine, harder to accomplish. Killing a man in battle when the blood is hot is one thing; dispatching one in a peaceful parlor, with the fire crackling comfortably in the grate and the smell of burning apple logs in the air, is quite another. Doubt assailed me for the first time—Would killing a man unable to defend himself not suddenly lower me to his level? Would not my great act be demeaned if it was performed in an unseemly manner?
I suspect I would not be so bothered now, although as it is unlikely that I will ever be in such a situation again (the Lord having smiled on me) it is easy to say and difficult to prove. Perhaps, indeed, it was my doubt and my hesitation which earned me that divine forbearance.
“Good morning, sir, you are welcome,” he said quietly, examining me curiously all the while. “I see you are cold; pray let me get you some refreshment.”
I wanted to spit at him, and say I would not drink with a man like him. But the words stuck in my throat, and in my weakness and confusion I stood there mute while he clapped his hands and asked the servant to bring some ale.
“Do sit, sir,” he said, after another long silence when he had again examined me carefully, for I had, with my normal politeness, jumped up to bow to him when he entered. “And please be careful you do not impale yourself on your dagger.”
All this he said with a wry smile, and I blushed and stammered like a schoolchild caught throwing things in class.
“What is your name? I believe I know your face, although I see so few people now that I trick myself into recognizing total strangers.” He had a soft, gentle and educated voice, quite unlike anything I had expected.
“You do not know me. My name is Prestcott.”
“Ah. And you have come to kill me, is that right?”
“It is,” I said stiffly, feeling more and more confused.
There was another long pause, as Thurloe sat, marked the page in his book, closed it and laid it neatly on the table. Then he placed his hands in his lap and looked at me once more.
“Well? Go ahead. I would hate to detain you unnecessarily.”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
He seemed almost puzzled at the question, and shook his head. “Only if you wish to tell me. As far as I am concerned, compared with meeting the Lord and His standing in judgment of me, of what importance is the why or the wherefore of men? Do take some ale,” he added, pouring out a glass from the broad earthenware pot the servant had brought.
I shrugged the glass aside. “It’s very important,” I said petulantly, realizing as I spoke that I was drifting further and further away from my imagined behavior.
“In that case I am listening,” he said. “Although 1 cannot understand what injury I may have done you. You are surely too young to be my enemy?”
“You killed my father.”
He looked worried at the statement. “Did I? I don’t recall it.”
At last he was talking in a way which angered me, which I knew was necessary if I was going to accomplish my aim.
“You damnable liar. Of course you do. Sir James Prestcott, my father.”
“Oh,” he said quietly. “Yes. Of course I remember him. But I thought you must have meant someone else—I never harmed your father. I tried to at one stage, of course; he was one of the handful of the king’s servants who was not a fool.”
“That was why you destroyed him. You couldn’t catch him, or do battle with him, so you poisoned men’s minds against him with lies and clawed him down that way.”
“You hold me responsible?”
“You were.”
“Very well, then. If you say so,” he said calmly, and lapsed into silence.
Again he had wrong-footed me. I don’t know what I expected—either a vehement denial or an outrageous justification of his deeds. I certainly did not anticipate him not seeming to care one way or the other.
“Defend yourself,” I said hotly.
“With what? I do not have your knife or your strength, so if you want to kill me, you will not find it a difficult task.”
“I mean defend what you did.”
“Why? You have already decided that I am guilty, so I fear that my feeble replies will not sway you.”
“That’s not fair,” I cried, realizing as I spoke that this was the sort of childish remark a man like my father would never have made.
“Few things are,” he said.
“My father was no traitor,” I said.
“That may be the case.”
“Are you saying you didn’t destroy him? You expect me to believe that?”
“I haven’t said anything. But since you ask, no. I did not. Of course, I have little influence over whether you believe me.”
Later in life—too late to be of use to me then—I understood how John Thurloe had risen to such an eminence that he was the one person in the land who dared contradict Cromwell. You punched, Thurloe rose up again, sweetly reasonable and soft-voiced. You kept on punching, he kept on getting up, always gentle and never losing his temper, until you felt ashamed of yourself and listened to him instead. Then, when you were off balance, he simply persuaded you around to his point of view. He never thrust himself forward, never forced his opinions on you but, sooner or later, the anger and opposition exhausted themselves by dashing against his persistence.
“You did it to others, and you expect me to believe that you didn’t to my father?”
“Which others?”
“You didn’t say he was innocent. You had the chance.”
“It was not my job to ensure that my enemies were strong and unified. Besides, who would have believed me? Do you think a certificate of honesty from me would have cleared his reputation? If the king’s party wished to tear into themselves and chase ghosts, what was that to me? The weaker they were, the better.”
“So weak that the king is on his throne and you are here in obscurity,” I sneered, conscious not only that his arguments were good, but also that I had never even considered them before, so clear and obvious had his guilt appeared to me.
“Only because the Protector died, and he thought…Well, no matter,” he said softly. “There was a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Charles didn’t win his throne back; he was sucked back by forces far greater than he could have mustered on his own. And it remains to be seen whether he is strong enough to keep his seat.”
“You must have been delighted,” I said with heavy sarcasm.
“Delighted?” he repeated thoughtfully. “No; of course not. I had worked for ten years to make England stable and free from tyranny and it was no pleasure to see that blown away on the winds. But I was not as upset as you might imagine. The armies were on the march, and the factions only Cromwell could have controlled were forming again. It was the king or war. I did not oppose Charles. And I could have done so, you know. Had I so wished, Charles would have been in his grave for years by now.”
He said it in such a calm and matter-of-fact way that for a moment I didn’t grasp the full horror of what he was saying. Then I gasped. This little man had gravely decided, as a matter of policy, whether his rightful monarch, anointed by God, would live or die. Charles, by grace of Thurloe, King of England. And I knew that he was saying nothing more than the truth—I was sure that he and the Protector had considered such a course. If they had rejected it, it was not because they recoiled from such a crime—they had committed so many already—but because it was not to their convenience.