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.
Chapter Eighty- Five — The Swan Tavern, King Street: July 1657
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?'
'Your head is as soft as a poached egg, Nat,' his sister informed him. 'None the less, it is true, and Master Jukes will pay us a fine ransom.'
Colonel Orlando Lovell cursed her to hell and back, very fluently like a true cavalier. Then he abandoned his horse — which was valuable — and his luggage — which was not. As he turned on his heel with a derogatory expression, ready to make his getaway without paying his bill, Maud did what she notoriously did to bolters. She advised him to stay where he was. To make sure he listened to her kind words, she drew out her pistol and threatened to shoot him.
When Orlando Lovell kept walking, she fired.
'That never happened before!' marvelled Nat. It was unlikely to be necessary again. Word would soon spread.
Lovell took her ball in the shoulder. He did not stop, but loped off into King Street. Keeping well back in case of trouble, Nat followed the blood spots all the way to the Cockpit Gate before the trail petered out.
Afraid to report he had lost the debtor, Nat drank ale at several other taverns, then crept home guiltily. Maud ticked him off on principle, then sold Lovell's horse, weapons and various disguises all within the next half-hour. She knew that unless Lovell found a surgeon very quickly, he was a dead man walking.
On the same morning, Lambert Jukes had gone to see his brother at the print shop. He sent Miles out to buy muffins. Then Lambert, broad as a gate and unusually sombre, seated himself on a joint-stool with his knees apart and his arms folded.
'Now listen to me, young Gideon, and do not interrupt. Tom Lovell is safe. We have him at home with us. You are not to visit, or let his mother visit, or do anything that will lead an observer to our house — ' As the startled Gideon made to interject, Lambert held up his hand. 'Now, be calm in your spirits and thankful for this boy's intelligence. He came to us because his father will look for him — and the first place Lovell will come to is your house.'
Gideon was still resisting: 'Lambert, Thomas holds information. Enquiries must be made of him.'
Both brothers were silent, loathing the unpalatable thought of subjecting a child to formal interrogation.
'I will not allow it,' decided Lambert.
Gideon laid a hand on his brother's shoulder; Lambert shook him off. 'Lambert — '
'We shall lose him — he will run away back to his father.'
'Listen to me, Lambert. There may have been a second great firework for killing the Protector. Lovell made them. Thomas can tell us where they were living, where Lovell has perhaps left the device in a box — '
Lambert stood up. 'They stayed at the Swan, in King Street. Lovell brought them back again this week.' Gideon realised Lambert had in fact gently questioned the boy. 'Tom has mentioned no firework — but he is anxious because his viol, which Anne gave him, was left behind when they fled. His father told him not to ask after it.'
Gideon at once put on his coat. 'Go home, Lambert.'
'Not I!' Lambert scoffed. 'Do not argue. This is not Holdenby House. This time I am coming with you!'
They were too late. By the time they rolled up at the Swan, with Lambert puffing badly as Gideon hustled him, they were informed by the landlady that Lovell had left. Gideon swore. 'I talked about the gentleman before, with Master Tew — ' He remembered Nat Tew as gloatingly unhelpful.
'I've sent that fool to buy meat pies for the ordinary. If you must speak, speak to me.' The sister eyed up Gideon with an attitude he could not place.
'I told your brother I was looking for a fugitive, William Boyes.'
'Lovell,' Mrs Tew agreed placidly. 'I knew him when he was a filthy cavalier in Prince Rupert's bloody army. I saw him at Birmingham. He never remembered me — but I knew him. Nat gave him the room, more fool him. I had not seen him myself until today, and I never saw the young boy. They were here for two days without any trouble. Then the boy vanished and the man caused a commotion. I shot him.'