and five in the afternoon of the same day, with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your sufficient warrant. And these are to require all officers, soldiers, and others, the good people of this nation of England, to be assisting unto you in this service.
It was on the Monday evening that Gideon took himself to Colonel Okey's house.
Okey had a ship's-chandler's business near the Tower of London and his local church was St Giles in the Fields. He lived in Mare Street, Hackney, out on the eastern edges of London, at the opposite end from the enormous mansions of grander men who clustered near Westminster and Whitehall. Okey's chosen location, not far from London Fields, was a large, leased three-storeyed gabled house, called Barber's Barn. It stood among pasture and pleasant lanes, close enough to London to do business in the city, yet countrified. Gideon borrowed Robert's horse and rode out there, full of curiosity and as keen as always to be associated with any historic event.
'Yet another!' exclaimed Susanna Okey, the colonel's wife. She was soberly dressed in the Baptist style. She cannot have seen much of her husband during the latter years of their marriage. When Gideon introduced himself, she herself led him to Okey, as if to get him out from under her feet.
There were uniformed soldiers already in the house. In civilian dress, Gideon was taken past them, receiving odd glances. Okey was in tense conversation with a second man; they looked up sharply on Gideon's entrance to the room. A tray of bread and butter and beer, the staples of Parliamentarian housewives when they were suddenly called upon to feed committees, stood half-demolished on the table near to them. A jumble of papers covered the rest of the board.
'Come in, lad — this is Captain Jukes, who served under me. Colonel John Fox, commander of Bradshaw's guard in court.'
The man was a stranger to Gideon, unlike others congregated in London for the trial, familiar faces from the old campaigns. 'I held a garrison near Birmingham, in Warwickshire,' he said, perhaps rather stiffly.
'Edgbaston.' Gideon astonished the colonel, and was pleased by it. He gave no sign he knew Fox had been nicknamed the Jovial Tinker. 'I worked for Sir Samuel Luke, Essex's scoutmaster. We had your despatches often through our hands.'
'I tried to give good intelligence.'
'Your work was always valued, sir.'
'Would that the paymasters gave me some credit!'
Like Okey, Fox looked to be in his forties, though he could be younger. He was self-confident, bouncy and a little too open for Londoners to take him well, with an untuneful Midlands accent. Gideon found it whining. Someone had once told him that was how Shakespeare would have sounded — and if those were the terrible vowels of England's greatest playwright, he was glad to have abandoned any connection with the theatre.
The two colonels resumed their conversation. Gideon rapidly grasped its urgency. Richard Brandon, the public executioner, had refused to kill the King. He had cut off the heads of Strafford and Laud, but baulked at this.
'Does it have to be Brandon? Or does anybody else have the expertise?' Gideon asked, catching up with the implications. Once a mere captain would have stayed silent, but the war had changed that. He spoke the unthinkable. 'Must the King be beheaded?'
'Shortening it is!' Fox's grin confirmed that Midlanders had an odd sense of humour.
Okey shrugged restively. 'We cannot hang, draw and quarter a monarch, Captain Jukes. For the nobility, an axe is traditional. Besides,' he added glumly, with the bent logic of any man recently mired in bureaucracy, 'the death warrant is written now'
Always realistical, Gideon accepted they could not swing King Charles on a gibbet like a horse-thief.
'We need surgical despatch. You ask about expertise,' Colonel Fox dropped his laconic derision and spoke as if he had looked into this rather practically. 'The prisoner's neck must be severed correctly, with a heavy, single blow through the fourth vertebra. When the Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle, it was terribly mangled — we cannot have such butchery tomorrow. The King of England will not run around the scaffold bleeding like a half-dead capon.'
'Any hitch will suggest that the deed is not well done,' Gideon agreed. 'This must not be botched.'
'We have a bright axe specially brought from the Tower,' Okey said anxiously, trying to reassure himself.
'Colonel Hewson has sworn his officers to secrecy and offered a hundred pounds to the man who will do the job.' Fox was calming Okey. Hewson was one of the officers charged with fulfilling the death warrant. 'He has identified two possibles, Hulet and Jackson. He says Sergeant Hulet is well-metalled.'
'If Hulet is up for the business,' Gideon suggested, 'he should be our fallback — call him an understudy — take the part of the axeman's assistant — '
'An assistant?' queried Fox.
'It is normal,' said Okey.
'It would be a lonely profession otherwise,' Gideon commented. 'This works to our advantage. A man we trust can be standing by, in case at the last moment Brandon fails. But the main man must be Brandon. He has practised a few times — ' They all laughed, a little hoarsely.
There was a short silence.
'If he is afraid, he should be offered anonymity,' Gideon continued quietly. 'He could be masked, like an actor in the theatre. He can be assured that his name will never be revealed. Indeed, I think it right it should not be.'
'And he will be well paid,' added Fox, who had blunt standards. Gideon remembered Tinker Fox's reputation for extracting money by illegal methods.
'Well,' Okey decided, 'Colonel Axtell will take a troop to Brandon's house first thing in the morning and bring him.'
Gideon and Colonel Fox exchanged glances. They seemed to have formed an unlikely alliance. 'It must not look as if the executioner is our prisoner,' warned Fox. 'Besides, duress will make him unreliable.'
'Someone should first try patiently to win Brandon over.' After seeing how Axtell had run affairs at the King's trial, Gideon thought the man too brutal for this. Axtell was the coarse colonel with the straight-line moustache who had had muskets aimed at women in the gallery, then encouraged his men to blow smoke at the King and insult him.
Fox agreed. 'Not Daniel Axtell. He would lower the tone of a curate's breakfast… I suppose I shall volunteer!' he said, with the lugubrious world-weariness of his home district. 'Where does this Brandon live?'
'By the Tower of London.' Okey sounded unhappy. 'St Katharine's by the Tower… 'Rosemary Lane.' Gideon pulled a face.
'You know this street?' Fox turned and asked him.
'Rough!' exclaimed Gideon.
Again their eyes met. Colonel Fox nodded. 'Be here at first light, mounted. You shall be my guide, Captain Jukes.'
It was a bitterly cold morning. The strangely matched pair rode south from Hackney through mists and near darkness, down past the tenter-fields where newly dyed cloth was hung on endless parallel ropes. Robert's horse was a knock-kneed grey called Rumour, a city horse, puzzled by the sight of growing grass; he preferred to amble over cobbles, with time to look in shop windows. At one point he stopped dead unexpectedly. There had been nothing to cause him fear. In this weather most of the tenter-lines were empty. Nothing flapped at him; the few lengths of pegged-out cloth were frozen solid.
'Rumour flies… My partner, who is a whimsical spirit, named his horse in irony' Fox looked on, while Gideon struggled. This curmudgeonly nag knows his way to a certain inn in King Street at Westminster, then he knows his way home to the stable even with his rider beery — ' Drowsiness from overwork, Robert always claimed. 'But he despises me and he hates strange places.'
'He wants a carrot.'
'Well, he is not getting one!' snarled Gideon. Wishing he had worn a cloak against the cold, he kicked up the beast — though he did it warily because he knew that in the back yard behind the print shop Amyas had been naughtily training Rumour to rear up suddenly on his back legs and perform an upright levade, as if carrying a marquis in full armour, posing for Van Dyke. 'I am in the wrong suit for portraiture!' muttered Gideon in Rumour's ear, as the horse for no reason moved off and now trotted sedately.
He guided them on, through Brick Lane and into the airy pleasaunce of Spitalfield, where many small cottages with gardens occupied lanes beyond the city wall among the fields and bowling alleys around the great road that
