This goes too far. He craned his neck and caught the eye of a starveling beggar child on the roof, crouching on the shadowed balcony of the clock tower; the puck gestured helplessly in response. Fae were much better at sowing chaos than stopping it. Christ. I’ve started a riot—just as Vidar used to.
Then the child shrieked a warning, his thin voice unintelligible over the clamor.
Antony cupped one hand to his ear, uselessly. The child was waving his arms wildly. What does he—
A shot shattered the air, deafening in the confines of the courtyard. Someone screamed. Antony ducked, instinctively sheltering behind the brawny apprentice in front of him.
God help us all. The soldiers were firing on the crowd.
The mass of bodies became a flood of rats, battling their way toward the arch that led to the street. Antony was buffeted from all sides, stumbling, keeping his feet only because to fall was to die, in this madness. Out onto Cornhill; he went with the current, which took him left, toward Gracechurch Street. All around him, apprentices split off into alleys and byways; he kept on straight, thinking vaguely to lose himself in the Leadenhall Market up ahead, and to hide among the patrons there—should the soldiers follow so far.
But it seemed no one was pursuing them. Antony staggered to a halt at the entrance to Leadenhall, air rasping in his lungs, and bent nearly double with coughing. One of the young men had followed his same path, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Careful, old man.”
Spasm ended, Antony forced himself upright. “I am perfectly—” He choked on the last word and nearly started coughing again. If a soldier had ridden by and poleaxed Henry in passing, Antony’s son could not have looked more stunned. “Father?”
The boy sounded disbelieving, as well he might. Antony was dressed to blend in with the apprentices; the Court of Aldermen would need to believe they were telling the truth when they promised the Army they had nothing to do with the riot. Henry’s face settled into sardonic lines. “I didn’t know you fought for the good old cause.”
Antony almost laughed. Good old cause? Henry was scarcely old enough to remember the days when that phrase had been coined, and he was hardly an Army man, to talk of fighting for it. “The Commonwealth? Not hardly—nor the Rump, neither. I’d fight for my seat in Parliament back, if I thought it might do any good. But since it will not, I side with your apprentice friends: our soldier-masters should at least arrange a new and free election.”
What possessed him to say it, he did not know. Even supposing he wanted to break their tradition of never discussing politics, the entrance to Leadenhall was hardly the place to do it. But Henry had caught him off guard.
Predictably, his son’s expression turned mutinous. “Of course you wish your old place. You and your friends would vote for the restoration of the monarchy before the opening prayers were done.”
Henry had no sense of discretion—but then neither did he, it seemed. They were far too public. Antony took his son by the arm and dragged him, protesting, around the corner of the market, into a narrow alley reeking of piss. After years of skulking about London, hiding from Vidar and Cromwell alike, he knew all the hidden byways.
“Do not speak so openly,” he growled at his eldest, voice echoing off the overhanging jetties of the houses. “Unless you wish me disbarred from the aldermen again, and perhaps imprisoned.”
“You’ve created that danger yourself,” Henry said, jerking free. “Why, Father? I once thought you too wise to have a romantic view of the past, yet you cling to it more with every passing year.”
“Romance?” This time, Antony did laugh. “Say rather ‘cold-eyed practicality.’ A body cannot live without its head.”
Henry scowled, at the words or the laughter, perhaps both. “It has lived so far. And what if that head be diseased? For the love of God—you remember that man of blood.”
More Army phrases from his son’s lips. Did Henry realize how much he parroted them? Antony doubted it. Henry was a Commonwealth man, to the bone. He hated the Army, but did not see how it was the only force propping up the Rump—and then only when it chose. “I remember a great deal more than King Charles. At least in those days, we knew the tools in our hands; we knew the ways in which King, Lords, and Commons could be made to balance one another. If at times we failed, at least the ground we fought on was familiar.”
How old had Henry been, when Charles fled London? Not even breeched. He did not remember a world in which that pattern held true. He had never known a King on the throne.
Nor did he wish to, by the contempt on his face. “So you would hold fast to what you know, for fear of anything different.”
“If the men peddling difference had any plan,” Antony said, answering contempt with contempt, “I might see it differently. But ask yourself: when was the last time you heard someone argue for a republic, and provide a notion of how to create it? I do not mean some Utopian dream of government; I mean a practical, practicable scheme for getting from here to there.”
Hotheaded Henry might be, but he had a brain. He opened his mouth, but when he found no answer inside, shut it again. The Commonwealthsmen kept believing that success lay simply in finding the right design for England’s government; they did not see the obstacles along the way. So long as that was true, they would only tear the realm down again and again, and never build anything stable in its place.
“Give us time,” Henry said at last.
Antony shook his head. “There is no more time. The hunt for that dream has let in a wolf worse than the one killed ten years ago. Do you know the Protectorate sold Englishmen into slavery in Barbados? Do you know how many men have been imprisoned without proper trials? I do not; God Himself might not be able to count them.”
“But the monarchy—”
“Is what the people want.”
“Then the people are fools,” Henry cried, full of young fury. “Blind, damnable fools, who do not see what they are asking for!”
The wall behind Antony was filthy with coal smoke, but his doublet was of no consequence; he leaned against the surface and crossed his arms. “Then you must make a choice,” he said flatly. “A republic is guided by the will of its people, is it not? And the people want the world they had before. They may be fools, but if you stand by your principles, then you must support a new election and accept its consequences. Your only alternative is oligarchy, under the false name of republic.”
His declaration carried a certain necessary cruelty. Henry called the people of England blind, but so was he, in his own way. And Antony could not let his son blunder onward, ignorant of the tangled, bloody truth. Change was coming. Henry must be prepared.
The question was whether, having laid his own sympathies out so plainly, he had lost his eldest son.
Henry was floundering for words. Antony decided to play one final card. “General Monck is moving in support of Parliament. If the Army does not comply, there’s a good chance he will bring his troops down from Scotland and ensure a Parliament free from their control. Paradoxical, yes, that military force should free us from military force—but he is possibly the only honest leader the Army has. This much, I think, we can agree on: that a free Parliament must be England’s next step.”
The step after it might be indeed restoration of the monarchy. Antony hoped so. It was to that end that he and Lune worked now, not controlling, simply helping the people where they could. The same people Henry railed against just a moment ago. But principles won out over ideals; Henry nodded, reluctantly. The right of the people to elect their representatives was his paramount concern.