Page 56 of Dawnlands

“I provided a ship for her!” she said triumphantly. “No one else did! I got her a passage on a ship to Rome to go to her mother. If Argyll had marched on London, I would have got her safely away. The king himself was glad of it. He has rewarded me.”

He was astounded. “But how did you get a ship?”

She widened her eyes at him as if he were a fool. “Of course you remember that I shipped my family treasures from Venice to London?”

“I remember you shipping stolen goods and fakes at a profit!”

She turned her head, as if she cared nothing for his contempt, and looked out of the window towards the river. “I suppose that you remember the wharf?”

He was suddenly intent. “Of course I remember them. But I said that neither of us would ever go there again.”

“I had to! I commissioned a passage on their ship. I took the queen to the wharf to wait for the tide. Then I got news that Argyll’s army had deserted, and I brought her back to the palace.”

He was deeply troubled. “Livia! We both of us gave our word that we would never trouble them again.”

“When the Queen of England’s safety depended on it?”

He could think only of the woman whom he had loved and had last seen more than fourteen years ago. “Were they…? Is she…?”

She let him flounder.

“Is she still alive?”

“Allora!You don’t even know that?”

“I keep my word. I have not seen her or heard of her since I married you. I begged her pardon. I told her I loved her. And I walked away from her and have never seen her since.”

“An odd way to treat the love of your life!”

“The right thing to do. And it was what she wanted. She wanted me to leave her there—at the wharf—and never speak to her again. And so I have.”

She almost laughed at his discomfiture. “Toll-loll! Well, I can tell you she is alive. And now, I have given her the one thing she wanted: her old home. She is very grateful to me. You—of course—she will never see again. But she will live for the rest of her life on my bounty, as a guest in my house. I am her greatest benefactor.”

He drew out a chair and sat down as if he could not stand.

“The queen gave me the manor of Foulmire.” Her voice was ringing with triumph. “You never thought of that for her? Alinor’s childhood home, that she loves so much? I got it for Matteo. The boy who had no inheritance from you. It will be his, and he can take her and take her daughter—take all of them, for all I care—to live there.”

“She accepted?”

“With tears of joy.”

He doubted it; but he had no strength to argue with her. He rested his arms on the table and felt the old impotent rage shake his heart.

“She will live in the manor where she was nothing but a servant. And she will be buried in the graveyard though she was denounced as a witch,” Livia announced. “I have restored her. Not you; just me. You ruined her but I have made all things well. They are grateful to me; I have been nothing but good for them.”

He put his bowed head on his arms as if he would sleep. “They forgive you for all that you did? But they still do not even speak of me?”

“Allora!” Livia remarked as if this had just become apparent to her. “As you say! It is just so. Quite unfair on you, is it not?”

WESTONZOYLAND, SOMERSET, SUMMER 1685

Ned, lit only by the moon, watching his footing on the rutted path, guided his troop along the wagon track called Marsh Lane that ran between the low-lying fields. Mist breathed from every ditch and stream that intersected the landscape, swirling around them so Ned, looking back, could hardly see his troop. As Monmouth’s own regiment, the Red regiment, they led the way; ahead of them, Godfrey the guide walked beside the mounted officers. The track was little more than beaten mud through wet fields. The deep wagon ruts made it impossible for more than two men to march abreast, so they went in double file, sometimes splashing through standing water, or dragging their feet out of deep mud, past Peasey Farm, which sat squat in the low-lying fields like a becalmed brig with no lights showing. They circled it in silence, like a ghost army in the mist.

Past the farm, the way was even less used and harder going: a sheep track through a water meadow. In winter, all these fields would be drowned; in this damp summer, the grass was sodden, the reeds as sharp as skewers poking through the puddles, the ditches overflowing. Only when the moon broke through the clouds could they see lakes of silver;when it went dark, the land and water were an unrelenting black. They could have been creeping along a void with nothing all around them.

They were muffled by the mist—two miles of silently marching men—with officers riding up and down the train muttering “Silence” and “Not far now, lads!” A nightjar called, like an eerie creaking door, and one of Ned’s troop started and fumbled for his pike. “Hush,” Ned whispered to him. “It’s nowt.”

The moon shone on the silvery water of the Langmoor Rhine on their right-hand side, the only feature in the inky landscape that could guide them, and it took an uncertain path, arching away from the track, deep as a lake in parts, reedy in the shallows. The gray horizon, unbroken by trees, stretched all around them, rising up over one little hill, paler to the east but pitch-black overhead, the moon coming and going like an uncertain friend. Ditches and streams breathed out banks of mist that reared up like troops of waiting horsemen. Every now and then, there was a sudden bleat from a sheep, or the deep suspicious lowing of cattle marooned on the higher ground. Each time Ned felt his own grip on his weapon tighten, each time he said “Steady, steady” to his men, knowing that their nerves were as ragged as his own in the half-light of these waterlands.