Nayler nodded. ‘To encourage others to follow their example.’

  ‘Well, we may take it as certain that none of these fugitives will ever give themselves up willingly, otherwise they would have done so by now. Therefore, it is time to move to the next step.’

  ‘Meaning what, my lord?’

  ‘We should transfer the prisoners directly to the Tower and bring them to trial as quickly as possible.’

  Ashley-Cooper said, ‘So there’s to be no pardon for any of them?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And yet they gave themselves up in the expectation of mercy.’

  ‘Then they were fools. I would have preferred it otherwise – God knows I warned the King what would happen – but the present mood in Parliament will not permit it. Do you disagree?’

  Annesley said quickly, ‘No, we all agree, my lord.’

  ‘Mr Nayler?’

  ‘They showed no mercy to the King; why should any be shown to them?’

  ‘Well put. Then I shall recommend to the King and full Council that that is how we shall proceed.’

  Nayler said, ‘And the catching of the rest?’

  ‘That can be your responsibility, Mr Nayler, since the work is plainly to your taste.’ Hyde held out the warrant at arm’s length and turned his head away, as if he found it distasteful merely to touch it. ‘You had better deliver this to the Tower.’ Nayler rose from his seat and went round the table to collect it. ‘Keep us informed of your progress. Now I have a sensitive matter I wish to discuss with my colleagues.’

  Nayler gathered he was dismissed. He picked up his bag and bowed to the committee. ‘My lords.’

  Outside the room, he lingered for a moment, ostensibly to put away the warrant but actually to listen.

  He heard Morice’s voice, approving: ‘Now he’s a zealous fellow.’

  And then Hyde’s high-pitched, wheezing rejoinder: ‘A very zealous fellow. Two hundred miles in four days? What makes him run so hard, I wonder.’

  He would have liked to have lingered to hear more, but Mr Secretary-Fop was waiting to escort him off the premises, obliging him to walk away from the open door, straining his ears in frustration as the voices behind him faded to a drone.

  All along the south side of the Strand, for a distance of a mile, the great palaces and gardens of the nobility ran down to the Thames – first Somerset House in the east, then Worcester House, Arundel House and York House, right the way to Northumberland House on the edge of Whitehall. In the midst of these stately piles, dilapidated by civil war and the lean years of the Protectorate, stood Essex House, the Elizabethan mansion that served as the London residence of William Seymour, 1st Marquess of Hertford. It was not so much a house nowadays as a warren of lodgings spread across several buildings – forty-two bedrooms in all, mostly let to tenants to raise some income – and it was here, in this monument to Royalist decay, that Nayler had lived rent-free for the past fourteen years as part of the marquess’s household.

  He passed across the cobbled courtyard, through drifts of refuse rustling with rats, to a heavy oak door in the west wing, produced a bunch of keys, unlocked it, and climbed the staircase to the top floor. At the end of a dark passage, he unlocked a second door. None of the servants was allowed a key. The heat of four days’ shut-up air struck his face like the opening of an oven. A column of flies circled in the centre of the room that served as his study. Others buzzed helplessly against the leaded windows. Every surface was covered with spreading heaps of yellowing papers – the case against the regicides, letters and minutes seized under warrant from neglected corners of lawyers’ libraries and family archives, from hiding places in cellars and attics and rubbish heaps. Powdery with reddish dust and dirt and decay, they gave the room its peculiar aroma of mould and dryness. As he crossed to the window, treading carefully between the piles, his legs brushed against them. They rustled like dead leaves, and his footsteps on the carpet seemed to raise clouds of black spores. His nostrils clogged, and he sensed another of his nauseous headaches coming on, spreading from the back of his nose to behind his eyes.

  He opened the window. The Thames flowed past sluggishly barely a hundred yards away. The tide was out, exposing black humps of oozing mud streaked with green weed. In the hot sunshine, it reeked of the sea and of decay. Figures were picking through it in the hope of finding something they could use or sell. Gulls wheeled and cried above their heads, occasionally swooping down, settling for an instant and lifting off again. At the bottom of the garden at the water’s edge, an arch led to a private jetty. He craned his neck. The marquess’s boat was gone. He guessed the old man must have been rowed upriver to see the King at Hampton Court.

  In the hope of creating a draught, he went through to his small corner bedroom and opened another window. This was at the side of the house and looked down onto Milford Lane, which ran between Essex House and Arundel House – a notorious narrow street of alehouses, cheap shops, whorehouses and tenements that even the Cromwellians had not been able to bring to God. It was unusually quiet on this Sunday afternoon, whores and tapsters in his experience observing the Sabbath as keenly as anyone else. He had descended there a few times himself over the past couple of years, when his solitariness and the ache of desire had become too much to bear.

  He continued to stare for a few more minutes, then turned and confronted the room. He kept it free of paper and bare of decoration, save for a miniature of his wife that hung above his dressing table. There was a candle beneath it that he liked to light at night so that he could fall asleep in her company. She gazed at him now from beneath her dark ringlets, somewhat in the manner of Sir Edward Hyde at the council table, her head in profile and half turned towards him, wearing a quizzical expression; intelligent, amused.

  He had seen her last on Christmas Day 1657, when the household had gathered illegally in the private chapel to celebrate the Nativity. Just as the sermon ended and the priest was administering the Holy Sacrament at the altar rail – an ornament that was itself illegal – the doors banged open and a file of soldiers marched in and surrounded the congregation. They aimed their muskets but permitted the communicants to finish receiving their wine and wafers. There were no officers amongst them, Nayler noted as he escorted Sarah back to their pew, and he guessed those must be their orders. When they were seated, she took his hand and placed it on her belly. He felt the kick beneath his palm – he could feel it now, two and a half years later, a sharp thump, like a heartbeat. He realised afterwards it was her way of telling him not to do anything foolish, and he resolved as such.

  But when after several hours of sitting as prisoners two officers – both colonels – did at last appear, and strutted up the aisle to the altar demanding to know the reason for this unlawful assembly, he felt a rage begin to rise within him.

  ‘This is but a common Tuesday,’ said the younger of the pair, ‘an ordinary weekday like any other. To celebrate the superstition of the Nativity is forbidden by Act of Parliament. You are all liable for arrest.’

  No one said a word, not even the marquess, sitting quietly at the front. In the silence, Nayler found himself muttering, ‘It is not illegal to worship God.’

  ‘What was that, sir?’ demanded the officer.

  ‘I said,’ he repeated more loudly, ‘it is not illegal to worship God.’

  ‘It is illegal to use the Book of Common Prayer, which is but the Catholic Mass in English.’

  He felt Sarah clutching at his arm, but he could not stop himself. ‘And yet I thought you fought the war for liberty of conscience.’

  ‘Liberty of conscience, sir, not treason. The Book of Common Prayer means you pray particularly for Charles Stuart – do you deny it?’

  ‘We pray for all Christian kings, princes and governors.’

  The older officer said, ‘Then you pray for the King of Spain, who is an enemy and a papist.’

  ‘We pray only to God to bless all rulers. There are no papists here.’

  The colonels had had enough. ‘Arrest him.’

  He had no time to say goodbye to Sarah, or even properly to look at her. A pair of soldiers had already come up behind him, but he had been too full of anger to notice them. He heard her cry out, but before he could register what was happening, he felt himself hauled up and away, shoved and marched to the back of the chapel and out into the December cold, all the way through the empty streets – deserted because of Christmas Day, which was what had outraged the army – until they came to Newgate prison, where he was thrown into a cell and left to rot for the next six months, and when he came out he learned that the baby, a boy, had been born dead on the night of his arrest, the premature labour brought on by the shock, and that Sarah had died giving birth to him.

  What makes him run so hard, I wonder.

  Well, that would make a man run pretty hard, would you not say, your lordship? Especially when the two officers who had ordered his arrest were Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe, wanted for the murder of the King and still at liberty somewhere on God’s fair earth – but not for long, sir; not if Mr Richard Nayler had anything to do with it.

  Chapter Five

  AS SOON AS it was light that Lord’s Day morning, Will – barefoot, wearing shirt and breeches – slid out of bed so as not to wake his father-in-law and seated himself at the table. He took from his pocket a sheet of yellowing paper torn from the back of an old almanac, dipped his pen into the inkpot, and after some hesitation wrote across the top of the blank page – in the same carefully elaborate, curling script that he had used to sign the King’s death warrant – A Humble Petition to the Christian Congregation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by William Goffe, Esq.

  He paused and looked up, searching the shadows of the slanting roof for inspiration. Plant him before an audience, however large, even with Cromwell himself in attendance, and the Lord would pour such a torrent of words into his head that he had only to open his mouth and they would gush forth like a fountain. Writing was a different matter. Perhaps if he had gone to Oxford like his two elder brothers, he would have been more confident. But by the time he was of age, his father had lost his living, and instead he had been apprenticed as a salter to ‘Praying William’ Vaughan, a Puritan grocer in London, and his education had come to an end. Still, after a while his thoughts began to form, and eventually his nib started to scratch across the paper.

  It took him the best part of an hour to finish. It was stilted and poorly punctuated but sincere, and it conveyed what he wished to say. He blew on the paper then sat back and waited until the sun was fully risen and he could hear sounds of movement downstairs before he went over to the bed and shook Ned gently by the shoulder.

  ‘I have written something.’

  ‘Let me see it then.’ Ned took the petition, held it at arm’s length and squinted at it through eyes still half asleep.

  Having received much mercy from the Lord, at his leaving his native country, and in his passage through the great deeps; as also in this land; wherein he is a stranger; Now before the Lord in the congregation of his people, doth humbly desire that the praises due unto God, – may be rendered on his behalf. And that the Lord may be entreated yet to follow his poor unworthy servant with goodness and mercy; that he may walk as becomes the gospel, and forever cleave to the Lord; and love him, and serve him, in all conditions.

  When he had finished reading, he nodded. ‘That is well put.’

  ‘And the grammar is good?’

  ‘It will pass.’

  ‘So, we are agreed? We shall reveal ourselves?’

  Ned returned the petition. They had argued the matter back and forth for the whole of the previous day. He said, ‘What would Oliver do in our place? He would not skulk up here in an attic, you may be sure. He would walk out with his head erect, and on the Lord’s Day he would join in public worship.’

  ‘Then I shall give it to our friend.’

  Will pulled on his boots.

  He found the Gookins downstairs in the parlour, preparing to leave for the meeting house. He gave the paper to Daniel, together with the testimonials of their ministers in London affirming that they had both experienced a revelation.

  Gookin read the petition, frowning, chewing the inside of his lip. ‘You understand I must be honest as to your true identities, and the reason why you have come to America?’

  ‘We understand.’

  ‘Mary, what is your opinion?’

  Mary’s opinion was that it was a little late in the day for him to start soliciting her views. But she was developing a fondness for Will – his quiet earnestness, his piety, the care he took in talking to the children. She did not wish to dishearten him. ‘Whatever you feel best.’

  In the distance, a bell began to toll. Gookin stuffed the papers into his pocket. ‘I’ll send word as soon as the members have voted.’

  They left in an orderly procession, with Daniel at the head and little Nathaniel bringing up the rear. Will retreated to the attic.

  ‘They have gone.’

  Ned – stripped to the waist, bent over the basin, washing – grunted.

  Will resumed his seat, closed his eyes, inserted his finger into the Bible and opened it at random. Somehow God always guided him to an appropriate passage, and so it was this morning. Hear the right, O Lord, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips.

  Ned put on his shirt. He went over to the window and scanned the river through his spyglass. The ferry was approaching, carrying a horse-drawn cart laden with passengers and half a dozen men and women on foot. All middle-aged. No children. They looked to be in a hurry. As soon as they reached the Cambridge side and the ramp was lowered, they made haste up the road across the marshland, over the creek, past the house and out of sight. Not long afterwards, the bell ceased tolling and there was silence.

  He closed the telescope and went and stretched out on the bed. In eighteen years as an officer, he had learned the importance of conveying confidence even when he didn’t feel it. He was fairly sure they were right to reveal themselves, if only because so many people knew their true identities already – Captain Pierce, some of their fellow passengers on the Prudent Mary, Governor Endecott, the Gookin family . . . They could hardly expect talkative children to maintain such a secret. On the other hand, he was not convinced the Cambridge community would welcome them. And if the decision went against them – what then? They would have exposed themselves for nothing, and would have to move on quickly. But where? For such a vast land, it seemed to him at that moment mightily short of hiding places, at least for a man of sixty and another of forty-two with few practical skills and little money.

  He was no further forward in devising an alternative plan a half-hour later, when he heard the front door open and footsteps come running up the stairs. He reached under his pillow and curled his finger around the trigger of his pistol, but when the door opened, it was only young Sam Gookin, bursting with self-importance.

  ‘Father says you are to come at once!’

  They picked up their Bibles and followed him downstairs, out onto the road and up the slope towards the village. They stared about them with curiosity. Half a dozen timber houses, identical to the Gookins’, were set back from the road, spread far apart in their own fenced lots, all gleaming fresh in the morning sun. Ahead, the high roofs and chimneys of the college loomed above the settlement. No people were about, and the effect of such space and newness and emptiness was peculiarly disconcerting, like walking through a dream. Ned felt suddenly hollowed by homesickness. Dear God, he thought, I shall never get used to this.

  Sam scampered on ahead.

  The meeting house was a modest building, forty feet by forty, of two windowed storeys, clad in wooden shingles that had weathered to a silvery fish-scale grey, with a square pointed roof capped by a little hive-shaped belfry. A profusion of horses, carts and traps were drawn up outside it; but from inside came no sound. The only noise was birdsong. Sam opened the door and they passed into a chilly, well-lit space with a gallery. The ground floor and the upper section were packed with silent figures – men on one side, women on the other, children at the back – who all turned to stare as the two colonels entered, and at that moment, Ned was as certain as he had been of anything in his life that the vote had gone against them. But then Daniel Gookin stood and began to clap, and a moment later the others joined in, and suddenly the wooden building was filled with applause as the minister came down from the pulpit and advanced along the aisle towards them, smiling, his arms stretched wide in welcome.

  The minister preached a sermon that began with a quotation from Deuteronomy about the need to be ready to die at any moment. ‘Sinners should consider of death, that the thing is certain, and only the time uncertain, and that they run an infinite hazard if they neglect making sure of an interest in Christ one day longer.’ He spoke in a strong, deep voice with a Yorkshire accent, his palms and eyes cast up to Heaven as he exhorted his listeners to seek God’s grace in the act of hospitality.

  As honoured visitors, Ned and Will were seated at the front. Will listened with his eyes closed throughout, nodding and murmuring in agreement, but Ned, after the first half-hour, found his attention wandering. Moving his head only slightly, he glanced surreptitiously from side to side along the pew, first at the rapt faces and then up to the crowded gallery above the preacher. Finally he returned his gaze to the minister. He was in his thirties, thickset, dark-haired, with a short black beard and eyebrows that met to form a continuous line across his forehead. Ned had a sudden instinct that he had seen him before, and then it occurred to him that this was the man who had watched them bathing.