The King's Spy (Thomas Hill Trilogy 1) (39 page)

Slow it was, and Thomas became increasingly impatient. Any thought of arriving by midday was abandoned, and by the time they reached Hursley he
was beginning to wonder if they would even make Winchester before dark.

A coach stood outside the Shepherd and Flock in Hursley. Had it been going to Winchester, it would have passed Thomas on the road. So unless he could persuade its passengers to turn round and go back where they had come from, it would be no use to him. He led the horse to the smithy behind the inn, asked for it to be reshod as quickly as possible and went in search of refreshment.

The coach party were sitting at a table in the inn – two men facing the door, and two ladies with their backs to it. The coachmen, both armed, sat at a separate table. ‘A tankard of ale, please,’ said Thomas to a man wiping down tables, ‘and some bread and cheese.’ From the corner of his eye, he saw the men in the coach party look up at the sound of his voice, and one of the ladies turn to inspect the new arrival. For a second or two, she stared at him, then rose suddenly from her seat and launched herself across the room. She threw her arms around his neck and held on as if her life depended upon it. Eventually he was able gently to ease her off. He put his hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. Tears were pouring down her cheeks. He was weeping and laughing at the same time. ‘Good Lord, Margaret,’ he managed, ‘this is not quite where I had expected to
find you.’ Unable to speak, Margaret nodded and smiled. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To Romsey,’ she whispered, wiping away a tear.

‘And where are the girls?’

‘At Emily’s house.’

‘I thought they might be. I was on my way there. Are they well?’

‘Quite well. And you, Thomas, are you well?’

‘Well enough, thank you. And relieved to be home. Or almost home.’

In reply, Margaret started sobbing again. ‘I’m sorry, Thomas,’ she said, ‘it’s just such a relief to see you.’ She studied him. ‘You look well. A little thinner, perhaps, and the beard will have to go, but otherwise well.’

Margaret’s travelling companions had been watching with interest, wondering if this could be a prodigal husband. ‘Does this mean you will be travelling on with us, madam,’ asked one of the men, ‘or returning to Winchester?’

‘My apologies,’ she replied. ‘This is my brother, Thomas Hill, whom I haven’t seen for some weeks.’ Thomas bowed politely. ‘Well, brother,’ she went on, ‘Winchester or Romsey? Which shall it be?’

After some discussion, it was agreed that Thomas would follow behind the coach to Romsey, and Margaret would set off again to Winchester the next
day. That would give them the chance to talk before the girls demanded all Thomas’s attention, and enable Margaret to prepare them for their uncle’s return.

While his horse was being shod, Thomas sat beside Margaret and ate his bread and cheese. When she asked about the cuts on his neck and around his eye, he said merely that he would tell her everything later. She explained that they had been living with Emily for a month, and that she was making her second trip to ensure that the shop was secure and all was in order.

‘It’s certainly secure,’ he said. ‘Even the owner can’t get in.’

The bookshop was indeed in order. Thomas’s quills, ink and papers stood on his writing table, the shelves were tidy and the floor swept. Margaret told him to sit while she fetched something from her bedroom. She returned with a handful of letters. ‘There are six of them. The last one arrived two weeks ago. They were all pushed under the door at night, for me to find in the morning. Read them, please.’

It did not take Thomas long. They were short letters, and very much to the point, each one more threatening than the one before. Their message was the same. In time of war, a young widow and her daughters were not safe alone, and should take particular care.
Who knew what awful things might otherwise happen to them? Who knew what vile ideas might enter the heads of drunken soldiers? The letters were all in the same hand, and unsigned. Thomas looked up. ‘Are these why you took the girls away?’

‘Yes. I thought they’d be safer.’

‘You were probably wise. However, I know why these letters were written, and I know who was behind them. The writer himself is actually of no account. It was the man who composed them who was dangerous.’

‘Was?’

‘Happily, yes.’ It took Thomas over an hour to relate the story. He told Margaret about Tobias Rush, and about Abraham’s death. He missed out the worst of the gaol, and left a certain amount unsaid about Jane Romilly. Otherwise, his account was full and accurate. ‘So,’ he ended, ‘there is nothing now to be frightened of. The girls can come home, and we can reopen the shop. Tobias Rush is dead. The king himself saw his body.’

The next morning, Margaret set off in the coach back to Winchester to collect the girls. After a busy time pottering about in the shop, Thomas wandered down to the Romsey Arms to see what news there was, and for a little refreshment. At the junction of Love Lane and Market Street, he stopped to admire the view. The
autumn leaves were turning red and orange, the fields a deep green. He could hear voices coming from Market Square, and guessed that the inn was busy.

There were no drinkers outside, but inside it was noisy and crowded. A troop of the king’s dragoons, in their multicoloured coats and feathered hats, had arrived and were keeping the serving girls busy.

When she saw Thomas, Sarah shrieked a greeting. ‘Master ’ill, ’aven’t see you for ages. Where ’ave you been?’

‘Nowhere much, Sarah. How’s Rose?’

‘Much too big to work, silly cow. Baby’ll drop any day.’

‘You’re busy today.’

‘Soldiers on their way to Oxford. Same lot as was ’ere a few weeks ago.’

Thomas looked around. Sure enough, there was the fat dragoon who had sat on him, and there was Captain Brooke. He took his ale and found a seat in the corner, from where he could watch and listen. He was not in the mood for argument or banter. Or for being sat upon. He heard the dragoons recounting their experiences in Lord Goring’s army, which had consisted mostly of monumental bouts of drinking and whoring, his lordship setting an excellent example to his men in both pursuits, and he watched them spending a good many shillings on
ale, shillings they had doubtless removed, without consent, from their owners. He was about to leave when the captain noticed him in the corner.

‘Well, well. If it isn’t our friend the bookseller. Hill, isn’t it? We met when we last visited Romsey.’

Thomas rose. ‘Thomas Hill, sir. Your memory does you credit. I gather you and your men have been serving with Lord Goring.’

‘That we have, the drunken old goat. Now we’re on our way to Oxford. The king has demanded reinforcements. Do you know Oxford?’

‘I was a student there many years ago. It’s a beautiful town.’

‘Then let’s hope we don’t have to defend it from rampaging Puritans. And what have you been doing since last we met, Master Hill?’

‘Oh, business as usual, captain.’

‘The quiet life, eh? I envy you. And what about that French fellow of yours? Mountain.’

‘Montaigne, captain. Michel de Montaigne.’

‘What was it he said? I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’

‘
To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing; we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are all blockheads
.’

‘That was it. Damned odd.’

Thomas grinned. ‘Not so odd, captain, when you think about it. Now I must escape before one of your men knocks me down and sits on me. Goodbye, captain.’

‘Goodbye, Master Hill.’

By the seventeenth century, the game of Hazard had become popular at all levels of society. Francis Fayne and his companions played a version in which the ‘caster’ or thrower of the dice chooses the ‘main’; in other versions the caster may throw the dice to establish the main.

The rules of the game are such that a sensible caster always chooses a main of seven; Francis Fayne did not always choose seven because the odds against the caster winning with a main of five, six, eight, or nine are slightly longer and thus yield a better return if he is successful.

An explanation of the game can be found in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia.

In cases of unnatural death the ancient office of Coroner
combined the duties of policeman, detective, forensic scientist and magistrate. The Coroner summoned a jury to consider such cases, which might then be referred to a higher court. It was the duty of anyone finding a dead body to report it to the Coroner, although during the Civil War this of course did not always happen.

Having been tipped off by Tobias Rush, Henry Pearson ordered Thomas’s detention until a jury could be summoned. Deaths among prisoners in Oxford gaol awaiting trial were very common, thus saving the courts time and money.

The bloody catholic uprising in Ireland in 1641 sparked a return to the persecution of English Catholics and by a Proclamation of that year all catholic priests were ordered to leave the country. But there were an estimated 30,000 practising catholics in England, and the fact that nine priests (including Franciscans) were executed in 1642 shows that some of the bravest were prepared to stay. When he could, the king invariably commuted death sentences on priests to deportation.

There were brutal attacks on ‘as well protestants as papists’ – by looters and vandals as often as by religious fanatics – and there was fear in many parts of the country of a return to catholic rule. Yet catholics rallied
around both king and parliament. The devout Marquess of Winchester, for example, led a regiment of practising catholics, ministered to by a catholic priest for the king, and the controversial priest Thomas White (Blacklo) led a group of catholics who supported Parliament. The fearless and devoted Simon de Pointz actually left England with the queen in 1641 and returned with her and her catholic court two years later. Simon not only clings to the old Franciscan way of poverty (as some did), but also insists on wearing his habit. Perhaps he thinks that his ‘pragmatism and humour’, as well as the queen, will keep him safe. Thomas Hill, who at Oxford ‘attends chapel only because he has to’ and has no conventional faith, is a man of fiercely independent mind and is not prepared to be told with whom he may or may not consort. Perverse or not, they are men who, like the Quakers, Baptists, Ranters and others, lived by their own principles, not someone else’s. And they did make it safely to Oxford.

Although Thomas Cromwell, on the orders of Henry VIII, masterminded the dissolution of all the religious houses in England, a number of abbey buildings, especially near large towns, did survive. Some, like Romsey, were purchased by the local people and used as
their church; others were bought by wealthy landowners seeking to expand their estates.

I have taken the liberty of assuming that the abbey house near Norwich which sheltered a young Simon de Pointz, and the abbey near Botley at which Thomas was hidden, were among those that survived, and that, a hundred years later, friars and monks had quietly returned to them. They would certainly have had the blessing of the devout Queen Henrietta Maria.

The Vigenère square, which gave Thomas so much trouble, was perfected by Blaise de Vigenère, a French cryptographer, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Other than Thomas, no one found a way of breaking the cipher until the nineteenth century, when the remarkable and eccentric Charles Babbage did so, using much the same technique, just to prove that he could.

In fact, the cipher was never used very much, partly because it is laborious to encrypt and decrypt, and partly because other, equally secure ciphers were developed.

Thomas was fortunate in three respects. In the first message he found as many as eight repeated letter sequences, and the key letters E, A and T were easily found. Having identified these, he was able to find the
displacement and thus the keyword, PARIS. It might not have been so.

He was also fortunate in missing a ninth repetition – EKW – which, by chance, was an anomaly. It is possible for different sequences of plain-text letters to be encrypted with the same cipher-text letters, and in this case the letter distance between the two appearances of EKW was sixty-four, which is not divisible by five, and might therefore have delayed Thomas further or even thrown him off the scent entirely. Of such small things history is sometimes made.

The second, much shorter message he could not decrypt by analysis, and managed it only with an inspired guess.

In addition to cannon and mortars, the principal weapons used by both sides in the war were muskets – both flintlocks and matchlocks – light calivers, flintlock pistols, swords, halberds and pikes. Pikes could be any length from ten feet to twenty and were often cut down by the pikemen to make them more manageable. Only a very strong man could wield a twenty-foot pike effectively.

Uniforms, usually in the form of coats dyed the same colour, were worn by both sides from the start of
the war. The King’s Lifeguards, for example, wore red coats and Prince Rupert’s Regiment blue coats. These were typically made of wool, although officers might wear cotton or linen in any colour they liked. Sometimes coloured sashes were worn in battle to make telling friend from foe less hazardous, although in the heat and dust almost everything turned black or grey.

Among the many books and other sources I consulted, I should mention:

Charles Carlton,
Charles I: The Personal Monarch

Ivan Roots,
The Great Rebellion 1642–1660

Diane Purkiss,
The English Civil War: A People’s History

Michael Braddick,
God’s Fury, England’s Fire

Iris Brooke,
English Costume of the Seventeenth Century

Simon Singh,
The Code Book

Stephen Pincock,
Codebreaker: The History of Codes and Ciphers