A few days later Juliana set off with her sons on their travels again. This time, she was taking them to the house with the orchard, which was — though Juliana carefully did not excite the boys with this thought — a possibility of somewhere to call home. Anxieties over what she might find kept her silent. It was far-sighted.
The journey took longer than she had hoped; they were frequently stopped and questioned by soldiers. They crossed over London Bridge, then travelled through Southwark and Deptford, on the old Woolwich Road, which ran out through Greenwich, although they turned off just before the cobbled highway passed through the middle of the still uncompleted Queen's House in the royal park. They went away from the river, following directions on a faint, tattered paper left by Juliana's grandmother. She at least had been here once; Roxanne Carlill was not a woman to buy property unseen. She probably lay with the land agent, thought Juliana, admitting the truth about her grandmother. Juliana understood now. Roxanne was a widow, and a widow in a foreign country, struggling to put bread on the table for her child — Germain, that wide-eyed innocent. The Levellers might say all men were born equal, yet Germain had been born both more affable and less able to help himself than most. Juliana's own children seemed to have escaped that — although she sometimes feared she saw a trace of her father in Valentine.
Perhaps not. It was Val who first spotted the overgrown path leading from the rutted lane where they had nearly bogged down. The day had been long enough for him; he jumped out of the cart and strutted off, announcing, 'I am going down there.' They had found the house, which was a large cottage with a collection of by now extremely gnarled mixed fruit trees. Immediately her heart failed, for she could see through the twilight that no lights showed and no smoke rose from the chimneys, yet the door was standing open.
The tenants must have left months before. Juliana never found out when, nor where they went. Why they left was obvious. The house had been vandalised. It could be by serving soldiers, disbanded troops, or local people who had decided that the property was owned by a Royalist. Plundering had taken place. Pointless plundering, mindless damage where fences were broken down, cupboard doors were wrenched off their hinges, firejacks were bent, mattresses and pillows were slit open and voided of their feathers, goods from the larder were not even stolen, but emptied upon the floor and kicked about.
The abandoned house had then reverted to nature. As damp entered the building, food remnants that were not taken by rats grew skeins and crowns of mould. Juliana found chairs where baby mice teemed squalidly in the seat-padding. Birds had hopped in through windows and nested in the upper rooms. Beetles of all types ran everywhere with the spiders. Wind and rain did their worst to the fabric.
Even then, the destruction continued. Someone had lived here, after the tenants' abandonment. Brutish people, with the lowest of standards, had occupied the dwelling not long ago; had caused more damage; strewn more rubbish; lit fires — not always in the hearths — and deposited human shit in room corners.
'I do not like it here,' mumbled Val nervously.
'I like it!' shouted Tom, running from room to filthy room like a true boy.
Juliana sat on a broken chair, thought better of it, then stood up again. In what had once been a tiny parlour, now with no door and all its shutters torn away, she gave way to despair and cried her eyes out.
Deciding that they would have to leave, she wrapped the boys in cloaks and blankets and sheltered with them beside their cart through a long, sleepless night in the open. Only in the pale light of next morning did she accept that they had nowhere else to go. Dispirited and almost broken, she began the task of clearing out her little house.
She had made one room just about habitable when, a few weeks after they arrived, they had a completely unexpected visitor. Juliana knew that she knew him, but out of context it took her a moment to remember who he was: he had ridden up on a squat pony, with a satchel slung around his body and a long birding gun, a solid man in a russet coat — 'Jolly Jack, mistress.' John Jolley! Squire Lovell's land agent.
Through her surprise, Juliana gasped questions about how he had known he might find her here — only to discover an offensive truth. Jolley had come to find Orlando, not her. Orlando had asked him to sell his Hampshire estates.
'So did you expect to find him here?'
'Not really. This was the only address I had.'
Juliana gritted her teeth. 'He wants to sell his land to finance revolt? Well, it is too late, Master Jolley. The uprising has failed.'
'That I know,' replied the agent calmly. 'But in conscience I wanted to explain to him face to face that I cannot sell. His activities — ' John Jolley hesitated over his words. Jolley supported Parliament, Juliana knew without ever asking. 'What they call his malignancy has become well known. By going into Kent in arms against Parliament, he is adjudged to have broken his parole. The estate is absolutely taken from him. The lands will be sold to pay New Model Army soldiers.'
'No appeal?'
'None, you may believe it.'
The agent gave Juliana a small amount of money, which he had managed to wrest from the Hampshire Committee as her 'fifth' for the previous year. Would he have given my fifth to Orlando, had Orlando been here…?
Jolley then stayed a few days, presumably out of loyalty to the Lovell family. He shot rabbits and birds to hang up for meat. Looking around at the conditions in which she was living, he himself made some basic repairs for her, then he found a local carpenter to help patch up doors, windows and the roof.
'I cannot afford to pay him,' Juliana protested frankly.
'I have squared him for two weeks' work for you.'
'With your own money?' She was horrified, yet she was desperate to have the work done.
'I shall mention it to the squire on my return. He will most likely see his way to reimbursing me.'
'Does he soften towards Orlando?'
'No, mistress. But the squire will be too proud to see me out of pocket for his son.'
For a blinding moment Juliana wondered if she was expected to make John Jolley an offer of payment in kind — she and Nerissa Mcllwaine used to joke about women with loose morals who 'never had to pay a tradesman'. She felt hot. Setting her jaw against the very thought, she thanked the man sincerely but briefly. The moment passed.
'Has any word of my husband reached Hampshire?'
'None. And none has reached you, Mistress Lovell?'
'No.' Except that because of John Jolley's visit, Juliana now knew for sure Lovell had been here. Mr Gadd would have told him years ago where the house was. So it must have been Lovell and his Royalist associates who wrecked it. That smacked into her like a betrayal.
To have the house linked to Lovell was dangerous. Juliana inherited it when her father died but, as a wife, everything of hers legally belonged to her husband. Lovell could, now that she owned it, sell the house and land and leave her destitute. Even more simply, Parliament could remove it from her because her husband was a Royalist. Enquiry discovered that John Jolley had not mentioned this property to any committee, for which she was thankful.
After Jolley left, their living conditions improved. The carpenter made the house sound. Juliana swept, washed, even found one or two usable tools and utensils, hidden in outhouses or discarded in undergrowth. They lived frugally, but they survived. It was a hard winter for the poor. As she eked out their meagre funds, sometimes they had no dinner on the table. Eventually, though, they had a larder that would sustain them through the spring, because when Juliana wrote to confirm that she was settled, Anne Jukes sent one of the grocery carriers with a great quantity of goods, out of gratitude for saving Lambert. Now they had flour, sugar, butter, currants, almonds, even spices.
They still had to outwit the iron-cold English winter. They dressed in layers, sometimes wearing almost everything they owned. They slept some nights all huddled together, when even a hot brick wrapped in old rags would not keep the bed warm. Even on the mildest days, they woke to find a thick layer of frost on their one window with glass, and the frost would stay all day, never melting. When Juliana made the boys nightshirts, they would put them on beside the fire, then dive into bed shrieking; they soon learned how to dress in their day clothes next morning while huddled underneath the bedclothes. Laundry froze solid on the washing line. Milk came from the farm with lumps of ice in it. The boys paddled through slush in the lane, then scampered home with their fingers red-raw and their wet stockings stiff on their chilblained little feet.
When she could, Juliana followed the news. Apart from wanting information about Lovell's fate, she knew this
