Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [484]
“Servants too?” Obadiah’s face clouded. He knew all about these radicals – Levellers they called themselves. They had stated their obnoxious views for decades, but no one took any notice of them. If the army was breeding such ideas, the sooner it was disbanded the better.
“And you, Edmund, do you condone these Levellers?”
Edmund considered.
“To give the vote to every man,” he said, “cannot be right. But if a man has an interest in his country – in the land or in a corporation – then I cannot see the harm in it. Indeed,” he concluded, “I think it should be a natural right.”
Was it possible that Edmund, head of the Shockley household, was expressing such views?
“This will lead to nothing but an heretical democracy, a monster, chaos,” Obadiah cried. “If that were the result of our battle, why then I’d sooner have fought for the king,” he exploded.
“And there are those in Parliament who would still prefer the king to the rule of free men,” Edmund replied with shrewdness.
“You have changed,” Obadiah said bitterly.
“It is true,” Edmund admitted. “But it seems to me that we have fought a war against the tyranny of the king, only to replace it with another of Presbyters.”
Obadiah came to Sarum less after that.
It was not until he was a man that anyone explained to Samuel what had really happened on that warm June day a week after Obadiah had left.
He remembered only seeing a mud-spattered figure ride up to the house and that he had run outside and across the field to where Edmund was speaking to Jacob Godfrey. He remembered eagerly leading Edmund by the hand to see who the visitor was. And he remembered their entering the hall.
Charles Moody had ridden straight from Oxford. Ever since Naseby he had faithfully followed the king, but now the cause was lost, he was returning home.
“I could not go to my own house without first coming here,” he explained.
He had come to pay his respects to Nathaniel’s family. And he had brought Nathaniel’s sword.
He had been carrying it reverently for a year, and now, at last, he laid it on the table in front of her, together with a lock of Nathaniel’s hair.
Having done this important duty, he stepped back.
“Forgive me,” he went on, “but after Naseby, I could not write.” And he seemed to swallow.
Margaret smiled. She understood. He looked so tired, so pale. There were lines of hurt around his eyes. It was sad to see how the war had marked its young men.
It was strange; she had almost forgotten Nathaniel that day. It was a deliberate act of forgetting, to lessen her pain, but now, seeing young Charles who had ridden away with him the year before, it was as if Nathaniel were back in the room with her. She smelled his pipe, heard his laugh.
What was young Moody speaking of? His condolences, of course. She nodded absently and thanked him.
“I was with him, you know,” he said softly.
With him. At the moment. Suddenly that moment seemed so near, so vivid.
“Was it . . . did he suffer?” She felt she should not ask, but suddenly had to know.
“It was quick, thank God.” He paused then resting his hand on her arm: “But that it should have been Edmund who . . .”
What was he saying? She stared at him, trying to make sense of his words. It was Edmund who . . . ?
“Edmund?”
My God. She did not know. Why had he assumed . . . ? Had Edmund never . . . ?
Thirty seconds later, as Samuel happily led Edmund into the room he stared in astonishment at his sister, white as he had never seen her before, and at the young man in his filthy leather doublet who turned, eyes blazing with scorn and shouted at Edmund, “Murderer!” before storming out of the house.
She was still shaking an hour later as she strode along the edge of the river above the valley.
Several times she had stopped, staring blankly across the ridges that lay on her right, empty and baked in the June sun. The blue summer sky seemed harsh. The ground was hard and dry.
No, she could not go back. She did not know what to do. Each time she walked on.
It was half an hour more before she finally halted. On her left was the beech wood that