Once, when he was either taking a break or trying to work something out—anyway, he was just sitting and staring—I asked him, more or less the way Sally had asked me, “Is it better for you here?” He blinked at me. “Better than London, I mean. Would you still rather be living in London?”
Tony can look at you sometimes as though he hadn’t quite realized just how stupid you were until right now. “For God’s sake, I could be studying in London. Studying with real dancers, watching real groups every night. Meeting people—learning all the things I’m never going to learn here.” He stalked away from me across the room, and then he turned around and came back to stand really close. “Of course, I’d never have a room like this in London, so whatever I learned wouldn’t do me a bloody bit of good, because I couldn’t take it home and practice. So it’s six of one, half a dozen of another, I suppose. Why do you want to know?”
“No special reason.” I took a deep breath. “About the Manor—I was wondering, just out of curiosity—” God, I’d make a terrible spy. “Do you ever hear any noises at night? I mean, you know—noises?”
Tony practically smiled, which he was not doing a lot of in those days. “The Manor’s a very old house. They make noises.”
“I don’t mean those,” I said. “I mean… I mean feet, damn it! Giggles.”
I was expecting him to laugh at me, but all he did was sit down on the floor and start doing stretching exercises. He said, “When I knew we were positively coming here, no way out of it, I went to the library and got out a lot of books on Dorset. History, agriculture, folklore, the lot. Do you know that there are two whole books on Dorset ghosts alone? The county’s up to its neck in hauntings, revenants—everybody who’s anybody has a Phantom Monk, or a screaming skull, or a White Lady. Noises? I think if this house doesn’t have a ghost, Dad ought to sue the Lovells for breach of contract. Or something like that.”
It was the most he’d ever said to me since we’d been at Stourhead, except for when he was throwing Mister Cat out of the studio. He realized it at the same time I did, and went back to stretching. I was getting up to leave quietly when he added, “A lot of them date from 1685, the Dorset ghosts. Because of the Bloody Assizes, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “What’s an Assizes, and why were these so bloody?”
Tony sighed. “They really don’t teach you anything in those American schools, do they? I thought it was just British chauvinism. You wouldn’t know about Monmouth’s Rebellion, then?” I just shook my head. “Okay. Charles Stuart—that’s King Charles II—had an illegitimate son named James. No big deal, as you’d say—quite common with kings, especially Charles. He acknowledges him, brings him to court, makes him the Duke of Monmouth, all very civil. Not that he’s got a chance of succeeding to the throne—that’s for Charles’s brother, the Duke of York, also named James. You are following this so far?”
“James II,” I said. “The Glorious Revolution, 1688. They teach us a few things.”
“Oh, very good,” Tony said. I couldn’t tell whether he meant it, or was being sarcastic. I can now, usually. “Right. James II becomes king in 1685, over any number of objections—mainly because of his being a Roman Catholic, but also because he was always a nasty, treacherous piece of work. Charming, though, when he wanted, like all the Stuarts—they lived on charm. Anyway, Monmouth— that’s James’s half-brother, the other James—has been hiding out in Holland, because of maybe being involved in the Rye House Plot, but we can skip that part. Well, James II hasn’t been James II for ten minutes before Monmouth’s landed in Lyme Regis and starts raising an army to overthrow him.”
I said, “Wait a minute. Lyme Regis? The tourist place, where we went for Easter?” We spent a weekend, and it rained, and Sally caught cold showing me where they’d filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
“They hadn’t invented tourists then,” Tony said impatiently. “It was a port, they built ships, and Monmouth was big in the West Country, don’t ask me why. He went up to Taunton, in Somerset, and declared himself king, but his real following was right here, the Dorset people who met him on the beach. Farmers, miners, fishermen, a bunch of Dorchester artisans and shopkeepers—they were all mad about Monmouth. That old Stuart charm.”
Most people get flushed and red when they’re telling you something they’re really excited about. Tony always gets very pale, even sort of shaky sometimes. He said, “They really did start a rebellion, Jenny, right here. They were sure the upper classes hated James as much as they did, and they thought the gentry would join them, you see, with their horses and guns and their money and their private armies, and they’d all sweep on to London together. But it didn’t happen.”
He got up again and began moving—turning, stooping, swinging around, not quite dancing, but almost. “It didn’t happen. Most of the noble types just never showed up, and Monmouth scarpered, did a bunk, headed for the border, the way the Stuarts always did. Left his little low-class believers out there, high and dry, and the king’s soldiers came down and crushed them, ate them alive. But James II wasn’t finished with Dorset. He was going to show Dorset, once and for all, why you do not ever, ever mess with a king. He sent them Judge Jeffreys. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys.” A fast spin, not a pirouette, but close to the floor, like a top, pointing at me as he came up out of it. “And that’s your Bloody Assizes.”
When you grow up in New York, and your mother’s absolutely crazy about old movies… Something clicked, and I said, “Captain Blood. Errol Flynn’s a doctor, and he helps someone who’s been hurt—”
“In Monmouth’s Rebellion—”
“And there’s a Judge Jeffreys in a wig, who sends him off to be a slave on a plantation. That Judge Jeffreys?”
“The very same. He set up shop in Dorchester, at the Antelope Hotel, and he had hundreds of people hanged, drawn and quartered—” He stopped, and he looked even paler than before. “You know what that was?”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. I didn’t know, not then, but from his face I knew I didn’t want to.
“No. All right. But he had their bodies boiled and tarred, and their heads stuck up on poles, and there were hundreds more whipped and transported to the West Indies. Oh, he had a grand time in Dorset, Judge Jeffreys did.” Tony leaned against the wall and started putting his shoes on.
“What happened? Afterwards, I mean.” I remember I felt dazed, giddy—maybe from what he’d been telling me, maybe more from the way he told it, the way he looked and sounded. He grinned at me, and this time he definitely was being sarcastic.
“Right, I forgot, you’re an American—there has to be a happy ending around here somewhere. Well, in another three years, here came the old Glorious Revolution, and James II left town hastily, and went into business as a public nuisance, which was the family trade, you might say. Judge Jeffreys suffered agonies from kidney stones, and died in the Tower.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s a happy ending, anyway.”