Mercy Tulk had fallen asleep with the children. Juliana gritted her teeth for one last meal at the inn with Bonalleck.
Now it emerged that he had spent the whole week of their journey in trepidation, believing that he was escorting a Roman Catholic. 'Oh no. I would have tried to convert you!' exclaimed Juliana heartlessly. She gave up her meal after a few grim mites of tasteless bacon and carrots. Bonalleck was munching on; she told him how, when she was pregnant with Tom and had a bad landlord, she had attended sermons in High Anglican Oxford churches and found them too autocratic.
'Maybe you are a puritan,' commented Bonalleck, without much hope of it. He wiped his mouth with a fourpenny napkin fastidiously; the innkeeper's wife hovered close by, anxious to keep tally of her now very worn table-linen. Mr Bonalleck was already beginning to worry whether the bacon, or more likely the carrots, would give him his usual gales of wind but, encouraged by Juliana, he defined the term for her: 'A puritan yearns for the pure word of God, as revealed in Scripture and in his own prayers; that is, without any additions or falsifications from man — I mean, from diocesans — the Pope and his servants, or detestable bishops. A puritan declines all that is ceremonious in worship. They seek, therefore, a plain, convincing way of preaching which must be put before them in their familiar language. Natural speech, delivered as in a conversation, keeps the attention. Just as railing-off an altar puts separation between a congregation and God, so does the use of inexplicable language, drearily read by some highflown cleric who keeps his head down over his notes. Icons and pomp, statues and surplices, all create mystery, whereas the serious man of God in meek simplicity seeks, through days and hours of scriptural study and his own sober prayer, to see through darkness to the truth.' The need to contain wind forced Mr Bonalleck to a stop.
Juliana had swallowed a tankard of small ale, along with insufficient food; it made her reckless. 'You preach — men and women also? Does your wife preach, Mr Bonalleck, or is she content merely to be an ornament to her husband?'
Bonalleck stared at her. 'My wife has offended you.'
'Absolutely the contrary. Your wife has had nothing to do with me. I am married to her brother and she hates him — yet should she hate me too, without even seeing me? Where in this cold demeanour is "testing truth according to her conscience", which I have always been told is the Protestant ideal, or examining the "pure" evidence?'
'My wife,' said Bridget's husband heavily (he had drunk little; he was studiously godly), 'spent many hours in prayer, asking the Lord to show her a way to deal with you.'
Juliana scoffed angrily. 'If, after so much strict deliberation between the two of them, our Lord informs Mrs Bridget Bonalleck that I am not fit company, then I am as damned as a cockatrice and must take the straight path to hell. Your wife's worthy disapproval makes me feel like a court lady-in-waiting I once observed, making her presence felt in the pews by wearing transparent cobweb lawn.'
In Oxford, she had once seen two such young women float into church in low-cut white gowns, with their breasts barely concealed; among male Royalists they won themselves a reputation of dressing 'like angels', though Nerissa had been outraged. 'All the morals of a rag of old rope!'
Juliana eased herself wearily to her feet. Exhaustion made her disputatious. 'Here is an awkwardness, Mr Bonalleck. For while Mrs Bridget is informed I am so dangerous that merely to greet me politely would threaten her zealous soul, then the Lord comes tiptoeing from her chamber into my own where He tells me with His enduring compassion that I am an honest woman who has many troubles, yet who leads a decent life, with a true conscience. I bid you goodnight, Mr Bonalleck!'
Next morning Juliana, Mercy and the children were permitted to enter Oxford. There was never much difficulty getting into a beleaguered city; the enemy wanted the largest numbers possible inside, using up resources, in order to cause hardship and encourage surrender.
Nervously, Juliana went to the St Aldate's house. The key Nerissa had given her still worked. As soon as she entered, she knew Lovell was there. On his return, he had done what she ought to have done herself: sub-let. He had filled the spare rooms with lodgers, thus enabling himself both to pay the landlord and to obtain some weekly rents. With this income, he had bought new spurs and a brown corded suit, then hired a bootboy. Juliana found him in the parlour, his stockinged feet on the fender before a roaring fire, reading a news-sheet.
She gazed at him for a second before he became aware of her. Then he dropped the paper and spun to his feet. He was a very pretty little man… Oh yes. Under the sometimes-harsh exterior his attractiveness remained. When he smiled at a woman, it was clear he knew that perfectly.
Yet Juliana was his woman. His face lit. Her expression joyfully answered his. In an instant, the two were in each other's arms, clasped hard. Orlando felt very much leaner. Six months in prison had left him thin, weak and drained. 'Oh thank God!' he exclaimed as he held her, speaking with such force that Juliana believed he meant it honestly.
Next moment Tom burst in on them, screaming with delight at the father he must have only half remembered. Tom flung himself at Orlando; Orlando roared and tossed the child up to the smoke-stained kitchen ceiling while Juliana hung back, wincing in case her husband lost his grip and dropped her boy into the fire.
Various things emerged over the next days. Orlando now styled himself major. 'I had to bump myself up a rank to gain better quarters.' Even now he was back in Oxford, no one seemed to query it. He called himself a 'reformado', an officer whose regiment had been disbanded or merged into another, with no position left for him. 'First I was dumped in a hideous prison, the Compter in Southwark. But I managed to be moved to Lambeth Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury's suites were excellent. Sir Roger Twysden's wife shared three rooms there with her husband, having a study and a fair chamber with a chimney. Not being a knight or baronet, I rated one room only — sometimes forced to share that with another prisoner,' Lovell added hastily, seeing that Juliana was wondering why she had not been allowed to come to him.
And you had only enough ink to write to your father!' she sniffed.
Lovell gazed at her. 'Now you have met all the family, you are judging me as they do!'
'I am your wife. Judging you is my special privilege. So, dear heart, how did you escape from the ecclesiastical palace? Was there a crusty one-legged jailor with a beautiful unmarried daughter?'
'Of course!' teased Lovell.
'So you quickly won her confidence and unscrupulously seduced her?'
'Well, to be truthful, the dame was built like a woolsack with three bristly chins and she smelt of piss. Even the rats were scared of her. It took six months just to get her to let me out of a postern and I drew the line at the deed.'
'But she liked you?'
'I liked her more — for having a cousin who was a waterman. He rowed me all the way from Lambeth up to Richmond.'
'Then you walked home?'
'I found a horse.'
He stole the horse, undoubtedly.
He had not been captured after Naseby. He had not even fought at Naseby.
'But Edmund said you were seen!'
Treves must have been so expecting to see me, he imagined me there
… The sad truth is, sweetheart, some of Fairfax's damned new noddlers came into the village the evening before. Ireton and his boys, I think. They captured men of ours who were playing skittles in a tavern garden, then they burst in on us officers, as we sat eating our dinner. Instead of saying grace' — Instead of what? scoffed Juliana silently at this unlikely decoration — 'we were surprised and taken, before the fight ever began.'