At last a man came in with burnt wine and biscuits. The prisoners fell to as if it were a feast, scattering around the chamber with their food, like dogs protecting the bones they gnawed upon. Antony waited, letting others take their share first, until at last the man came around to him.
“Lord Antony,” the fellow said in an undertone, “her Majesty sent me. I am to try and get you out.”
Antony blinked. He’d never seen the soldier before, but that meant nothing; he simply could not believe she would risk sending a faerie into the Puritan teeth of the Army.
And so she hadn’t. “Ben,” the man whispered, jerking his thumb surreptitiously toward himself.
There was no reason one couldn’t put a glamour on a mortal; Antony had just never thought to do so. He cast a swift glance around. Only one guard was looking his way, but that was already too many; they could not talk for long. “We’ve been kept in Hell.”
“I know.”
“Too closely guarded there and here. You’ll never manage a rescue. Do it politically.”
That was all he dared say; Ben had to move on with his wine jug. Antony spoke in hope; he didn’t know if there was any way to free him through legitimate efforts. But any attempt to do so by more arcane means would attract too much attention, if only by his sudden absence.
So he sat in the room with his fellow prisoners until long after the sun had set and an officer came in to say the General Council was too busy to see them until the morrow. “Back to Hell we go,” Soame muttered, but no; a troop of musketeers took them into custody and marched them to the Strand. Antony suffered himself to be hauled along by the arm, ignored the insults of the soldiers, and thought, Very well. I am a prisoner, as I chose. But what can I accomplish from here?
I can speak my mind.
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: December 11, 1648
“What is he doing? ” Lune exploded, hurling down the papers she held.
Benjamin Hipley wisely waited until the fluttering pages had settled before he said, “Making a point, madam.”
“He does us no good there. Cromwell has his minions running about, planning who knows what against Ireton—certainly I do not know. And why not? Because Sir Antony Ware, who should be helping me, chose to go to prison!”
It was unfair to shout at Hipley, who was doing everything he could. But the man was the son of a cooper; his contacts were apprentices and laborers and dockhands on the streets of London, not the gentry and officers who would decide the fate of the kingdom. Antony was her eyes and ears when it came to such matters, and he was under guard in the King’s Head, one of two inns to which the secluded members of Parliament had been moved.
Hipley coughed discreetly and, bowing, offered her a slender sheaf of papers.
She regarded them with deep suspicion. “What are these?” “The good Lord Antony is doing,” Hipley said. “Not alone; I’m given to understand one William Prynne did much of the scribing. But the Prince wishes it published, as soon as may be.”
Lune accepted the sheaf. Across the top, in a bold hand she did not recognize, was a title: A Solemn Protestation of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members. The rest was less clear to the eye, but she glanced over it, and marked many calls for action against the Army, which had sinned so gravely against the liberties of Parliament.
“Will it do any good?” she asked, half to herself.
Hipley paused before answering, unsure whether she addressed him. “It may, madam. Short of an armed revolt at the King’s Head, or a bald-faced theft of him by faerie magic, I see little else we can do.”
Stir up anger against the Army. It might work. The officers were losing the support of the men beneath them, who wanted outrageous reforms even Ireton balked at, and the common people hated them, even before the purge of the Commons. General Fairfax, the beloved hero of the New Model Army, was no fool; he had done what he could to quarter his soldiers in warehouses and other empty places. But nothing could hide that London was under martial occupation. There were even troops inside St. Paul’s itself. Lune had little care for the houses of the Almighty, but the cathedral was a sorry sight, shorn of its grandeur, its choir stalls and paneling reduced to firewood for the soldiers.
Opponents of the Army were plentiful; what they were not was unified. If they could be joined to this cause, though, however briefly—
It might at least free Antony. And Lune needed that, if she were to do anything about the rest of it.
Lune handed the Solemn Protestation back to Hipley. “Have a fair copy made; then take those to Lady Ware. This protestation should be printed above, where people can hear of it. And talk to Marchamont Nedham. His Mercurius Pragmaticus is too Parliamentarian for my taste, but it’s the most effective news-sheet in London; we may as well make use of it.”
Hipley bowed. “And for Lord Antony?”
She gritted her teeth. “If his voice is all he has left himself, then bid him use it well.”
WESTMINSTER AND LONDON: December 25, 1648
The guarded rooms in the Swan and the King’s Head made a more tolerable prison than Hell even when they had over forty men crammed into them; now, with half that number freed, they almost passed for comfortable.
Prynne sat at the table, scratching away at yet another lawyerly condemnation of the Army’s actions. “What other word can I use than villainous? ” he asked, frowning at his page.
“Working still?” Antony said, sitting with one boot propped against the wall. “Today is Christmas, you know.”
“What of it?”
Antony sighed. Why must so many Puritan Independents follow a vision of God that has no room in it for beauty or celebration?
Prynne chewed on the battered end of his quill, then scribbled a few more words. “It is madness,” he muttered to himself, as if it had not been said a thousand times before, by every man here. “If they had simply dissolved Parliament—”
“It would still have been an outrage.” Antony took down his boot and shook his head. “Parliament cannot be dissolved except by its own consent; we created that law years ago.” But Prynne was right: it would have had some savor of legitimacy about it, with a new Parliament elected to replace it. Arresting the dissenting members was possibly the worst course of action Ireton could have followed, comparable to Charles’s smaller, failed attempt before the outbreak of war.
An uneasy thought came, lifting him to his feet. “Prynne—you hear things, as I do. Did Ireton intend this purge?”
“What?” Prynne blinked up at him. The firelight was not kind to him, highlighting the scars where his ears had been, the brand on his cheek. Before he devoted his energies to arguing against the Army, it had been the Presbyterians, and before that the godly Independents he later joined, but it was his opposition to the King that had earned him repeated sentences from the Court of Star Chamber. “No, he wanted a new Parliament. Edmund Ludlow insisted on the purge.”
And where had Ludlow gotten that notion? Antony did not realize he had said it out loud until Prynne shrugged and said, “Villainy, no matter who its author. But I keep using that word; surely there must be others. For variety, you see.”