that. He was both smooth and clever. He knew Gideon Jukes would assist for his own reasons.
Thurloe was right. Throughout the summer months, Gideon spent long hours searching. His mission was to find the explosive device, but he believed this would bring him close to Lovell.
He was given access to Cecil and Toope, whom he found less chastened than they should have been, in his opinion. They were as suspicious of him as he of them. Still, they helped him put together a list of places they had frequented with Miles Sindercombe. They also confirmed that the person they knew as Boyes had had a lad with him, a typical lad, who needed a wash and a haircut, who moped around taverns as they huddled at meetings or scuffled after his father looking bored. The lad had even helped Boyes carry the first firework, when it was brought in its hand- basket to Sindercombe.
'So Boyes made it?'
The second-hand glimpse of Thomas kept Gideon's interest from flagging. Hearing of it made Juliana tolerate his frequent absences from home and made Miles lenient when left to work in the print shop alone. Gideon did not mention Lovell's supposed second firework.
Cecil and Toope had never known where Boyes lodged. But they said he was easily able to come to assignations, so his room could not have been far away, certainly nearer than Sindercombe's room with Daniel Stockwell on London Bridge. Their regular haunts had been in the streets around Whitehall and Westminster. Gideon made house-to-house enquiries, undeterred by hostility from locals, who hated officialdom. Where he knew for certain that conspirators had stayed in particular houses or inns, he insisted on seeing the rooms they had occupied and searching for the missing firework. He went to all the drinking houses — and in King Street these were numerous. There he talked not only to landlords, but ostlers and tapsters. With Thurloe's approval, he promised money — either for details of the previous plots or reports about anyone suspicious who might turn up now.
The area where Gideon was searching had inns and ordinaries — the places where cheap meals could be bought — that he knew Robert Allibone had frequented when he winkled out subjects for his Public Corranto. Robert was always secretive, but Gideon used his name as an introduction. Once an ostler asked laughingly, 'Have you still got that silly old horse, Rumour? He liked his quart of ale!'
A landlord elsewhere rightly pointed out that Gideon was searching for ex-soldiers, but half the male population of London had fought in the civil wars at some time. They all knew how to swagger, and many had hoarded weapons since their time in service. The man Gideon was trying to track down would never stand out.
'You are asking us to remember a customer from January, and it is now high summer? Impossible. Besides, anyone who ever has a drink looks suspicious by the light of the wrong candle-end. We give him a stare, thinking he seems a bit odd, then he's guaranteed to glare back, looking even worse. You want to give up, Captain, before you're worn out!'
At yet another inn, Gideon met a bandy-legged landlord called Tew, an ex-sailor, now cultivating his beer belly. Like the rest, he denied any knowledge of Lovell; like the rest he gave the impression he knew something that he would not say. Tew ran the Swan, he said, with his sister. She was far too busy brewing to be called out for an interview, so Gideon did not meet her.
The Swan was a name- change; Robert would have known it as the Two Tuns. It seemed to thrive and had good ale. Gideon said so to the landlord. 'Well, pass on to your sister my praise — and what I said about the Delinquent, Lovell. If she ever does emerge into daylight from her brewhouse, she may see him.'
'Oh I'll tell her — but I give nowt for your chances, Captain,' answered Nat Tew in his lugubrious sing-song accent, enjoying the hopelessness. It made Gideon hunch his shoulders and move on. London landlords were bad enough; northerners, with their world-weary pessimism, made him truly depressed.
King Street had inns from end to end. These were all dark, unwelcoming holes, full of unhelpful, untrustworthy, dangerous-looking people, none of whom wanted to have anything to do with the government. At least Gideon knew they would have been the same, whatever government held power. They had all heard about Sindercombe's firework — the one placed in the palace chapel. A few even made vague claims, which rapidly collapsed under scrutiny, that they knew a man who knew someone else who had seen the device sitting on a tavern table… Nobody had ever heard of a second firework — or so they said.
In June, Thurloe received information that Sexby might be making one of his secret trips back to England.
There was no mention of Lovell. However, according to intelligence, Charles Stuart was sending his own would-be assassins. Gideon believed Lovell would be among them, perhaps the leading one. Everything he had learned about the man suggested he was too restless to hang around some hostile European town in a rundown regiment of the King's or Duke of York's, waiting to take part in a hypothetical invasion that might never happen. Lovell would be up to mischief. Lovell would return to England.
Lovell was indeed back. After the failure of the firework plot, he had fled to the Continent, taking Thomas. It was now almost a year since Tom had joined his father. He had had his thirteenth birthday, in November, and it was not lost on him that his father had been quite unaware of this anniversary. Tom knew his mother would have been thinking of him. In his heart, he knew she thought about him every day. Being thirteen had made Tom wonder what his life would be. As Royalist exiles, he and his father were living on their uppers, with no real social place and no prospects. Tom loathed being in a foreign country, unable to speak the language, uncertain of his way around, frightened he might never see his home again. Other sons of cavaliers were sent back to England to live on their fathers' estates with their mothers; arrangements were made for these sons to have education and careers. Tom Lovell realised that no such life was planned for him. When he tried to talk to his father, Orlando merely said, 'We have to shift for ourselves, lad.' Tom mentioned cautiously how Lambert Jukes had once offered him an apprenticeship. His father's reaction was dramatic: 'Damme, I'd sooner have you dead in a ditch than a manufacturer of ships' biscuit!'
'Well, I never agreed to it,' Tom backed out hastily. 'Though Uncle Lambert did tell me, I could end up an alderman — or even Lord Mayor of London.'
Orlando Lovell became so distressed and annoyed, that although normally abstemious, he drank a whole bottle of Rhenish wine in half an hour before dinner, and then was ill after it.
He almost refused to bring Tom with him the next time he came back to England. But there was nowhere in unfriendly Flanders where a penniless English boy could be safely left. It was cheaper, and more secure, to bring Tom back. Travelling as a pair also made them less conspicuous.
Thomas seemed compliant. He never asked to return to his mother, never now even wanted to write to her. So father and son slipped ashore at Dover, which Royalists rightly believed was a slack port where unlawful immigrants could easily land. They made their way to London. After several moves to confuse observers, Lovell took them to an inn where they had stayed once before, the Swan in King Street. They had now slipped back into their old skulking life, looking anonymous and unremarkable.
But Thomas had his own ideas about that.
One evening, half an hour's walk away in Bread Street, Anne Jukes happened to glance out of a small window that overlooked the private yard at the back of her house. Lambert had recently completed his father's long-ago- planned house-of-easement, in memory of John. It was also to please his wife who, ever since the Ranting incident, believed it her right to exact work around the house at frequent intervals.
Glancing through the pane, Anne suppressed a startled squeak. She saw a boy she recognised, carrying a small bundle, slip into the house-of-easement. He did not come out.
Ten minutes later Anne walked quietly across the yard. She pulled open the door and remarked into the gloom, 'I made one of my walnut cakes this afternoon. I can bring you some out here — but you have no need to crouch in the dark. There is Gideon's old room in the house, just waiting to be occupied by somebody who needs a refuge, Thomas.'
Chapter Eighty- Four — The Tower of London: July 1657
The ceremonies for the Protector were held without incident. On July the 24th, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Edward Sexby. That same day, a man was plucked off a ship just as it was about to sail for Flanders. He was arrested and taken rapidly back to London. He looked like a countryman, in shabby clothes and with a rough beard; born in Suffolk, he managed a creditable country accent. But customs officers had seen through the
