London - Edward Rutherfurd [379]
“It was you and I, once, who were to have married,” he said quietly.
“I know.” She smiled. “You did not marry either.”
“I am curious about one thing,” he said, after a long silence. “When you first disappeared, when it was supposed you were dead, you could not have gone immediately to Virginia, for the colony had not then begun.” He looked a little awkward. “I had wondered . . . it was so sudden.” He frowned. “There was a pirate . . . a blackamoor . . . “ He trailed off.
And Jane hesitated. She had not intended to mention Orlando to anyone on her return. After all, why should she? No one in London knew. All she had to do now, faced with Meredith’s question, was to lie. So why did she hesitate? Perhaps she wanted to test him a little.
“I ask you to keep this a secret between us,” she said at last. “But if you wish to know, it is true. He abducted me.” She shrugged. “I had no choice. No one knows. It was long ago.”
She watched him now, curiously. She saw him look down, saw something in him wince. Then he looked thoughtful.
“No one,” he murmured, almost to himself, “need ever know.” Was it, Jane wondered, the thought that a blackamoor had physically possessed her, as he certainly had, that made Edmund flinch? Or was it something more?
Yet the process in the Reverend Edmund Meredith’s mind was more finely balanced than that. Certainly, the thought of the Blackamoor was distasteful to him, yet also, since it was now safely past, strangely exciting. But could the Dean of St Paul’s have a wife whom the world could even dream had been touched by a blackamoor? The idea filled him with horror. Thinking of John Dogget, so awkwardly in his very parish, he concluded sadly, in a low voice: “But they might suspect.”
She guessed that it was over then; a few minutes later, with expressions of regard they parted.
In Watling Street, to her surprise, she met John Dogget.
It was during the long, quiet years of the 1630s that Julius Ducket had his brilliant idea. It could keep the king free of Parliament for ever.
The end of parliaments? If, to every free-born Englishman such an idea was abhorrent, to a number of people at King Charles’s court, and in particular to his French wife, Henrietta Maria, such a thing was desirable and natural. Just across the English Channel, Europe’s Catholic monarchs were starting to build up centralized, absolute states. They suffered no indignities from upstart parliaments. Small wonder then if Charles, believing in Divine Right, and Henrietta Maria from France, decided:
“We, too, will build a monarchy like theirs.”
So far it was working. England was at peace. King Charles was managing, just, to live within his income. The parliament men had nothing to say. In 1633, Bishop Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury and embarked, nationwide upon a stern enforcement of the English, episcopal Church which, he promised, would be “thorough”. Soon “Thorough” became the watchword for the king’s entire regime. “The Puritans hate him, but they can always depart for America,” Henry remarked. “Laud’s the best friend the Massachusetts Company ever had.” From 1630, when an energetic gentleman named Winthrop had gone out there, the modest puritan colony in America had been expanding rapidly.
For Julius these had been happy years. He had married a cheerful, blue-eyed girl from a similar family, and soon there were children. Henry, who had shown no desire to marry so far, and who was often at Bocton, had suggested that they occupy the big house behind Mary-le-Bow. Life in London was also agreeable. The absence of Parliament at least meant there had been no new tax demands. There was an atmosphere of progress and prosperity in the city; and outside its walls, just north of Charing Cross two aristocrats, Lord Leicester and Lord Bedford, had started to develop some of their land into large, open squares of houses, with classical façades. One development – Covent Garden – proved fashionable at once and it was to a fine house in Covent Garden that Henry shortly moved,