The Best of Men Read online

  “Shush, not so loud,” Ingram said uneasily.

  “We’re in a graveyard!”

  “All the same, we’re on consecrated ground.”

  “Have another drink. Those are the only spirits I believe in.”

  “I wish you would change your mind about – about that issue. No one can live without faith. It’s inconceivable.”

  “For you it may be. But if I ever had any doubts, what I saw while I was away confirmed to me that there’s no God in heaven. Though hell exists, right here on earth.”

  “You sided with the Protestants, didn’t you? You must have had some attachment to their cause.”

  “I hate to deceive you, but our friend in the taproom wasn’t so far from the truth. When I arrived, I served with the Spanish infantry. Papists to a man.”

  Ingram hesitated, as the information sank in. “You mean – you mean you fought for the Hapsburg Emperor?”

  “Yes, but not for long. At the siege of Breda I discovered I was on the losing side, and probably wouldn’t come out of it alive. So I went over to the Dutch.”

  “Sweet Jesus – you were a turncoat,” Ingram whispered.

  “I wasn’t the only one.”

  “But – I don’t understand – what made you join up in the first place, if you couldn’t care less why you were risking your life?”

  Beaumont took a moment to answer, grabbing the flask from Ingram and tipping it to his lips. “I suppose I wanted to test myself,” he said, after wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “I’d led such a soft, useless life until then.”

  “I won’t dispute that. But how could you throw your lot in with an emperor who stole the Palatinate from the brother-in-law of our own king, and has sent his dearest sister and her family into exile?” Ingram demanded reproachfully.

  “The Spanish happened to be the first troops I encountered. And I wanted to go where I wouldn’t be seen as what I am here: heir to my father’s estate, as you put it. They didn’t give a shit whether I was born in a castle or a pigsty. And they taught me a lot,” Beaumont added, passing over the flask again.

  “Such as?”

  “How to go without sleep for weeks and march day after day with my feet bleeding into my boots. They humbled me. They have great endurance and a sense of humour even in the worst of circumstances.”

  Ingram quaffed from the flask, his head spinning. “Dear God! But weren’t you under suspicion after your abrupt change of allegiance?”

  “Yes, mostly from the other Englishmen over there, though I made some friends amongst them in the Dutch service. Then you’ll be glad to hear that I did end up with a number of English and a mixed contingent of Germans and Swedes who’d been sent to help Charles Louis win back the Palatinate. Not a wise choice of mine, in retrospect.”

  “Why? You were finally fighting for a noble cause.”

  “Noble, perhaps, but doomed to failure, and partly by His Majesty our king, who wasn’t prepared to give his nephew enough funds to succeed. Poor Charles Louis lost hope of ever reclaiming his lands after his army was wiped out at Vlotho. You should have seen it, man. The fields were red with blood.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  Beaumont shrugged. “I fell in with another cavalry regiment under Bernard of Weimar. When he died, we were sold over to French command and pushed all the way south down the Rhine, taking town after town, and then across the river …” He tailed off, as if remembering, then shook himself. “Look, Ingram,” he said, gazing straight at his friend, “as you well know, there aren’t just Protestants fighting the Emperor – the French are as Catholic as the Spanish. And of those that are Protestant, there’s a host of little German states that shift alliances constantly, and of course the Swedes, who are still the most feared of the mercenaries. The destruction they wrought was incredible – most unchristian, you might say. It’s not a religious war any longer, if ever it was,” he concluded, in a bitter tone. “It’s a struggle for power – an obscene game played out all the way from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. So please don’t talk to me about causes. They make no sense to me.”

  Ingram belched more loudly, gagging as the oily taste of the liquor came back up into his throat. “I feel ill.”

  “Has our little talk upset your stomach?” Beaumont inquired, jokingly, but with an edge to his voice. Ingram did not answer, busy attempting to stand. His legs buckled and he nearly toppled over. “Let me help,” Beaumont said, grasping his shoulders to steady him.

  Together they negotiated a circuitous route over holy ground, finding at last the gate through which they had entered the churchyard. They had not gone far when Ingram was violently sick, though it made him no soberer, and he had to lean on Beaumont for the rest of the way. Some time afterwards he was vaguely conscious of a voice raised in argument, and an icy weight crashed over his head, depriving him of breath. Then he was lifted up bodily, and he knew that he was being carried upstairs to his bed.

  II.

  Stretched out on his narrow pallet at the Lamb Inn, in Oxford, Sir Bernard Radcliff was too hot to sleep, and too uncomfortable, for the blankets were alive with vermin. He was also troubled by an irrational foreboding. He had hoped to see Walter Ingram in the city that day, but Ingram had sent a message to explain that he would not be coming until the following afternoon. An old friend of his had got back from the war abroad and they were to meet for the first time in years.

  Radcliff recollected Ingram talking about the friend, whom he had known since he was up at university. Heir to a wealthy lord, Beaumont was apparently a heavy drinker with an eye for women. In all likelihood some insolent, red-faced nobleman, Radcliff thought; just the type he had always envied bitterly for the ease with which they could pay for their vices and escape moral disapprobation, quite apart from punishment under the law. To enjoy their freedom and exalted rank in society he must see his plans come to fruition and meanwhile put up with his lowly status as a country squire, owner of a few boggy acres near Cambridge that he could not even afford to drain and make productive, and that he was half ashamed to show to his future bride. He would have to put up with Ingram’s friend, too: Ingram had insisted they be introduced, and was even hoping that the fellow might join their troop.

  Radcliff turned onto his side, trying to avoid the worst lumps in the mattress. It was true, he acknowledged, that he was in need of experienced recruits who had the money to equip themselves. Nevertheless, he disliked the possibility that this friend, with all the privileges of birth and a longer history with Ingram, might supplant him in Ingram’s affections. He had grown more and more fond of Ingram, and not only because they were soon to be related by marriage; he appreciated Ingram’s warm, open nature and valued his admiration.

  What a peculiar coincidence that the man should be called Beaumont, though of course the name was not uncommon. Radcliff had heard of a John Beaumont enlisted in the King’s army, and then there was the famous playwright, Francis Beaumont, so popular with the Royal Court. In France, it was not an unusual name at all. But it dredged up the nagging worry that had plagued him ever since his fateful night in The Hague.

  Scratching at his chest where he sensed the tickle of fleas, he thought how very unfair it was that such a trivial error, a last bachelorhood indulgence in an expensive Dutch house of pleasure, had drawn such trouble upon him. If only, he had mused countless times; if only he had left his servant to guard his possessions; if only he had not drawn the curtain when he took the whore to bed. He might have seen that other woman creep into the chamber and with quick, adroit fingers steal his purse, snatch his sword, and slip out as silently as she had entered. Lying afterwards to his great patron, the Earl of Pembroke, had filled Radcliff with dread. He had admitted that the thief had taken the beautiful Toledo sword that Pembroke had given him, and all the money that he had been carrying to buy arms for the earl’s personal security. But he could not reveal that she had also made off with something yet more valuable to him, though she would never have known it:
the coded correspondence between him and Pembroke, which he had preserved in case their association turned to enmity or some unanticipated event frustrated their plans. If Pembroke ever found out, Radcliff would not be long for this world.

  Yet it seemed impossible. The thief was thousands of miles away. As Radcliff knew from the brothel-keeper’s grooms, she was an ignorant gypsy paired up with a cardsharp, Monsieur Beaumont, as he had been called at the house, so no doubt a Frenchman, perhaps illiterate too. And even had they discovered the letters tucked inside the lining of Radcliff’s purse, they would have been unable to make head or tail of the code.

  No, surely he was safe, Radcliff comforted himself, as safe as was his reputation with Pembroke, who believed in and depended upon his arcane knowledge and skills to negotiate the complex twists and turns of the road ahead. For in the coming war, he and Pembroke would appear to be on opposite sides, Pembroke on Parliament’s and Radcliff on the King’s, while all along working towards a change of rule that would appall His Majesty’s most virulent opponents. The boldness, the vaunting ambition of it, still dazzled Radcliff, but it was written in the stars, as he had foreseen.

  Again he reflected on the irony that although he could draw up the horoscopes of other men and women, he could not chart his own: his birth had been a lengthy and difficult process costing his mother her life, and no record had been kept of when exactly he had emerged. Pembroke, however, was a different case: his eminent family had set down all the essential details of time and place. And he, as Radcliff had already assured him, would live through the war to a prosperous dotage, so there seemed no reason to believe that he could fail in his political aims.

  Hearing the college bells chime two of the clock, Radcliff began to dwell, more happily, upon Kate. Without her knowledge, he had also cast her horoscope, so that he could at least catch a glimpse of his future from hers. Their union would be fruitful, he had discovered, and her life, like Pembroke’s, would last into old age.

  He had not cared for any woman as much before. He remembered proposing to her last year at Richard Ingram’s house in Newbury, and how, when she accepted, her blue eyes had returned his gaze without coquetry or shyness.

  “I must go abroad again, Kate, to arrange to free myself from my commission with the Dutch,” he had said, expecting some feminine anxiety on his behalf. She had merely nodded and allowed him to kiss her cheek: their first kiss.

  Back in England after the theft, still smarting from Pembroke’s angry disappointment, Radcliff had gone to see her again. He had kissed her once more, on the lips, and she had been equally undemonstrative. “She’s an odd girl, always was,” Ingram had told him. “The ice queen, we used to call her. Doesn’t even gossip with Richard’s wife.”

  “I like that,” Radcliff had said, confident of winning her affection slowly and patiently, in the same way that he hoped to lay the foundations for his own success. She was superior to other women, pure and self-contained, in every way fitted for the honours that he wished to confer upon her. And it was her very iciness that made him yearn to stir her to passion, as soon as they were wed.

  III.

  Ingram’s older brother, Richard, begrudgingly allowed Laurence to stay the night, on two strict conditions: that he share his unconscious friend’s chamber, to keep an eye on him, and leave at once the next day. Laurence agreed. He was himself drunker than he had thought, and ready to sleep.

  Yawning as he took off his doublet, he touched the scar at his right side, a deep trough in the flesh that ached occasionally in damp weather. He could still remember the impact, the intense shock rather than pain, of being shot, and then the stupid sense of injustice, as if his luck should have held indefinitely.

  It happened by the banks of the Rhine during a brief skirmish with the enemy. The musket ball came from nowhere, shattering the edge of Laurence’s light breastplate, almost blasting him from his saddle. He clung to the reins with one hand but would have fallen and been trampled instantly had someone not pulled him out of the fray. Eventually he was thrown with a pile of other groaning men into a cart, the bouncing of which, as it bore him over the torn and broken earth, sent him into oblivion.

  At a nearby village some barns and stables, now emptied of livestock and fodder, had been commandeered as a makeshift hospital for the wounded French and German troops. After regaining consciousness, he waited there, on a floor puddled with blood and human waste, beside a man already dead, until a surgeon could be found to extract the ball. His breastplate had slowed its pace, preventing it from passing cleanly through him and leaving small pieces of metal embedded so deep that they could only be removed by repeated incisions. By the time the surgeon had finished, Laurence was hoarse from screaming. The surgeon stuffed ash into his wound to staunch the bleeding; then he was bandaged inadequately with the remnants of his shirt, fed a cup of sour wine, and abandoned to the clouds of flies.

  Delirious, he lost all awareness of time. Days must have passed before he could walk a few steps, hunched over to protect the hole in his side. He learnt that since the army could not afford to have its progress slowed, it had marched on, taking most of the supplies and all but the most decrepit of horses and oxen. As to the men left behind, scant provision had been made for their comfort. With bowels loosened by rotten food and tainted water, they froze at night, having been robbed long ago of any decent clothing or valuable possessions. Many who might have survived their wounds succumbed to the flux or the ague, while others went more quickly, their injuries putrid and gangrenous in a matter of hours.

  Laurence was fortunate. At last his wound stopped leaking yellow fluid and dried over in a thick scab that itched unbearably. He increased his perambulations to the courtyard and fields beyond, where he would watch the bodies being taken out for burial in a common pit and listen to the dark jokes of those fit enough to perform that unsavoury chore. As the local population began to starve, there was talk of cannibalism. He had witnessed evidence of this after long sieges, once every dog and cat and rat had been hunted down: corpses with hunks of meat neatly removed from the thigh or the buttock. Yet in the hospital there were still victuals, and women came each day to prostitute themselves or their offspring in exchange for food. This, too, was not a new sight, but he found himself in a powerless rage against the men who deliberately chose to copulate with small children, in order to avoid being poxed by their mothers. He was laughed at for his sensitivity, and nor were the children grateful, for he was interfering in their livelihood. After the soldiers were done with them, they would limp away, uncomplaining, blood between their legs, clutching some precious morsel.

  Perhaps he was wrong, he had thought then. In such a place, there was no room for moral indignation: brute survival dictated all. Yet he could not reconcile himself to life on such terms and so, although growing physically stronger, he had felt as though his mind were slowly becoming unhinged.

  IV.

  Laurence woke to the sound of snoring, from Ingram, in the bed beside him. Ingram seemed older in the morning light: small crow’s feet marked the corners of his eyes, and his moustache was threaded with grey. The little tuft of beard between lower lip and chin that had become so fashionable of late gave him a rakish air that belied his true nature.

  “Ingram, I have to go,” Laurence said, shaking him.

  He sighed drowsily. “What a night. I remember something wet on my head.”

  “Your brother threw a bucket of water over you.”

  “He must have given us hell.”

  “He gave me hell. You weren’t in any condition to listen.”

  “Beaumont, your shirt,” Ingram said, indicating the pinkish stains that speckled the front of it. “I’ll lend you another, though it may be a bit short for you in the sleeves. Over there, in the clothes press.” Laurence accepted the offer, and had just stripped off and was about to dress when Ingram pointed to his side and exclaimed, “What on earth did that to you?”

  “A musket ball,” Laurence said, hur
rying to pull on the clean garment.

  “How long ago?”

  “About three years.”

  “Let me see.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Most men are proud of their battle scars.”

  “What’s there to be proud of? The surgeon was worse than a butcher’s apprentice.”

  Ingram sighed again, heavily. “I owe you an apology for last night.”

  “For puking on me?”

  “I’m sorry for that, yes – but what I mean is, I shouldn’t judge you for what you did abroad, when in your situation I might have acted no differently myself.”

  “You would have acted very differently, my friend,” Laurence said, thinking to himself that Ingram did not know the half of it. “Thanks, though, all the same.”

  “Where will you go now, to your family?”

  “I must.” Laurence felt in his doublet for the coded letters he had tucked away there and was relieved to find them safe. “Oh – I meant to ask, do you know if William Seward is still at Merton?”

  “Yes, I believe he is, although he was very old for a tutor even when we had him.”

  “Must be the sight of those fresh-faced boys that’s keeping him alive.”

  “What made you think of him?”

  “Er … no special reason. He was always good to me.”

  “Because he wanted to bugger you. He wasn’t as well disposed to me, but then I wasn’t as pretty as you were, nor as clever. I was rather afraid of him, in fact, with his magical alembics and jars full of concoctions. And those cats he kept, like a witch’s familiars – disgusting!”

  “Too true – his rooms stank of cat piss.” Laurence picked up his saddlebag, about to leave. “When shall I see you next?”

  “I’ll come by Chipping Campden in a few days, to find out how you’re bearing up. I could take you back to Oxford with me, to meet my brother-in-law.” Ingram propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at Laurence. “Are you a little nervous about going home?”