The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [216]
‘And?’
‘Well …’ He looked awkward now. ‘The regicides are to be tried. Executed probably. The king will decide, but I think it likely.’
She stared at him blankly for a moment, before saying quietly: ‘You are a regicide, John.’
‘Ah.’ He put on his professional smile. ‘That can be disputed. You must remember, Alice, I did not in fact sign the king’s death warrant. I think it could be said that I am not a regicide.’
‘Said by whom, John? They have always called you one. You were with Cromwell, you argued for the king’s death. You helped draw up the accusations, the papers …’
‘True. Yet even so …’
Was he trying to give her hope, break the news to her gently, or was it possible that her clever husband, faced by this crisis, was suddenly unable to face the obvious truth?
‘They will hang you, John,’ she said. He did not reply. ‘What will you do?’
‘I think I should go abroad. It would not be for long. A few months at most, I suppose.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘I have friends. They will speak to the king. As soon as this matter of the regicides is over I can return. It seems wisest. What do you think?’
What could she say? No, stay here with your wife and children until they come to hang you? Obviously not. She nodded slowly. ‘I am sorry for it, John,’ she said miserably, then forced herself to smile. ‘We should rather have you alive, though. When shall you leave?’
‘At dawn tomorrow.’ He looked at her earnestly. ‘It will not be for long.’
She never saw him again.
He had been right about the king. Young King Charles II, whatever his faults, had no appetite for vengeance. After twenty-six surviving regicides had been hanged in October that year he quietly told his council not to look for any more. If they appeared they would have to hang, but if they stayed out of sight he was content to leave them alone. This vengeance being not quite enough for the king’s royalist supporters, however, they hit upon what seemed to them a happy idea. The following January the corpses of Cromwell and his son-in-law Ireton were dug up from their graves, brought to the Tyburn gallows in London and hanged there for all to see. Much wisdom was shown, no doubt, in choosing January, rather than a warmer season of the year.
But Lisle had been wrong if he believed that he mightn’t be viewed as a regicide. As he waited in Switzerland for news, it soon became clear: he had too many enemies.
‘My dearest husband,’ Alice wrote sadly, ‘you cannot return.’
There was talk, each year, of her going to join him in Lausanne, where he was now living. But it was not so easy. For a start, money was short. Most of John Lisle’s property had been confiscated or removed. One estate had been given to some of his own relations on the Isle of Wight who had remained faithful to the royalist cause. Another went to the new king’s younger brother James, Duke of York. The London house was gone. Alice alone had to support the family now on her New Forest inheritance and try to send money to her poor husband too.
‘We must live quietly,’ she told her children. With the estate to look after, and the children, it was hard to see how she could go to live in Switzerland.
The family was quite extensive. There were John’s two sons from his previous marriage. They were young men now, but she had always brought them up like her own and with their father’s fortune gone and his name in disgrace, how were they to make good marriages? As for her own children, her son, to her great grief, had died at sixteen, but there were three surviving daughters, Margaret, Bridget and Tryphena who would all be needing to find husbands.
And then there was little Betty – bright-eyed Betty, so small and full of life. She had been conceived that last night before her husband departed: that night when she had clung to him, praying that he would return, so afraid that he would not. Little Betty: the child John Lisle had never seen; the child she would remember him by.
Two years passed. Then another. And another. The baby had