But this was no time to linger. As soon as Gideon returned to the feast, he was gathered up, chivvied and badgered, for his bride was by now waiting in the wedding chamber and he must hasten to her. The quicker he went of his own accord, the less danger that he would be escorted by a throng of tipsy, titillated onlookers. His mother kissed him, shedding a tear. Lambert tagged after him, playing the wise older brother.
'Let me at it, Lambert; this is one thing I must do for myself — '
Lambert blearily cited the musketeer's drill: 'Just ram home and withdraw your scouring stick.'
What? Shivering inside his new shirt, Gideon walked upstairs, aware of every creak in the treads. Downstairs he could hear good-humoured cheers and knew his health was being drunk. Sackbuts hooted hoarsely. 'That is just the rude advice I would expect from a Blue Regiment pikeman.'
Leaning on the lowest baluster, Lambert continued, 'Draw forth your match, boy. Blow the ash from your coal and open your pan…'
'Plug your mouth, fool; you have the drill all arsy-versy'
'Pray the weather be fair, so your weapon will fire — Nay, in the heat of engagement, brother, there is no more to it than this simple order: prepare, present and give fire!'
Groaning, Gideon quickly turned a corner out of sight. In his embarrassment, he opened the wrong door. Fortunately that room was empty.
Some kind soul had indicated the bridal bedroom with a wreath of flowers, hung on a nail outside. Still flustered, he grasped the handle and marched straight in. Lacy's almond eyes glared at him, above a dark coverlet. His new wife had just learned that husbands never knock. 'They cannot be changed!' her aunt had scoffed. Elizabeth should know, thought Lacy, with a hardness that would have astonished her new husband.
Gideon crossed to a chest beneath a window where he sat to pull off his shoes and stockings. He was unknotting the thin, tangled ties of his shirt when a commotion below distracted him so much he opened the leaded casement and leaned out. The noise brought Lacy to his side and they hung over the sill together. Parthenope, weeping with laughter, looked up and waved them impatiently back to their bower, though not before Anne shouted: 'Bevan Bevan has been put in the horse-trough by your friend Allibone!'
Gideon barked with laughter. 'Well that has done for the scarlet suit at last!' Anne gazed up at him fondly. Lacy, she thought, would be well served in her wedding bed, whereas lovemaking with Lambert made his wife feel like a damp sheet being flattened in a mangle…
Gideon turned to his bride. She was behind him again, kneeling on the bed, pulling off her nightgown over her head with both arms. The only other naked woman Gideon had ever seen was Mother Eve in a picture. He had pored over the woodcut — yet it bore little relation to real anatomy.
Lacy glared at him. Her long chestnut hair went right down to her
… She could sit on it. Gideon closed his eyes.
A man may look at his wife.
He opened his eyes again, now fully to attention for what he had to do.
Chapter Nineteen — London: May 1643
The next day, Gideon walked into the print shop with what he hoped was a debonair step. It was late to start work. He had already endured teasing quips about newly-weds lying abed, for he had come from home. It had been decreed, in the way families decide things, that Lacy and he would lodge with his parents temporarily, or 'until your first child comes'.
The notion of a child worried him. Gideon knew what really happened with babies but let himself envisage a small boy in a creased brown suit arriving on the doorstep, aged about five, with his belongings in a tidy snapsack. This imaginary child would 'come' as if ordered from abroad through a long-distance merchant, in the same way that Lambert and his father arranged imports of sultanas and allspice, not expecting word of the produce — or demands for full payment — for many months, if not a year…
The couple had money, though it needed careful management. Parthenope and John had given Gideon a generous wedding gift. For a second son he felt secure. Lacy brought a small marriage portion, which seemed to be largess from Bevan and Elizabeth rather than her own parents. With Gideon's printing income, even though it fluctuated crazily, the pair could have rented accommodation straightaway, but it was deemed better to save their shillings and let Lacy be taught housewifery by Parthenope and Anne. 'Not just better, but necessary!' was Parthenope's tart verdict. According to Lacy, in Eltham nobody baked, while Elizabeth Bevan had mislaid her pudding bowl for the past two years.
Dumping Lacy at Bread Street, Gideon fled to work. Finding himself ravenous, he bought a muffin. In their tiny premises in Basinghall Street, he discovered Robert Allibone sunk in gloom. 'All well?'
'Aye. And with you?'
'Of course,' muttered Gideon through muffin crumbs.
Allibone gave him a benign nod. 'It gets easier.'
Gideon held back from grumpily demanding, 'What does?' He flushed scarlet, remembering, then he cursed his fair complexion that so easily gave away his thoughts. Private unease struck him. As he walked through Cheapside and Ironmongers Lane that morning, accompanied by Lambert's terrible sackbuts whose belching valve music had stayed in his head, he had been troubled by memories: Lacy's anxiety, his uncertainty, their fumbled failures at union, his irritation and shame, then her patient suggestions: 'Will it perhaps go here more fittingly…?'
He wanted to be a good husband; Lacy seemed more distant than he had hoped. Gideon feared it was due to his deficiencies as a lover. All the same, he was a man, and as he had transferred Lacy from the inn to his parents' house he had put on a show of equilibrium.
'Tell me about the horse-trough!' he instructed Robert briskly.
Allibone always opened up at his own pace. He busied himself with routine tasks, preparing the press for operation. He drew out from his doublet the pages Gideon had glimpsed yesterday. As the pamphlet lay on the flat bed of the press, Gideon saw the frontispiece bore a woodcut of a long-haired horseman, in full cavalry armour, a dog with a leonine mane cavorting at a rampant steed's heels.
'Your uncle picks his moments.' Robert's pamphlet looked lengthy for a news publication; Gideon rapidly assessed it was over thirty pages. 'Out he sailed, so full of incendiary disputatiousness he was fit to pop. He bearded me on the wrong day, Gideon. It was my journeyman's wedding. I desired to be in cheerful mood, but was already downcast. Bevan began boasting how he is contributing funds to a Royalist regiment and that with such help the King must return to his palace in the next twelvemonth… I was dodging these black bombardilloes, when your brother Lambert came out, with that stranger of his — Saxby? Sextant?'
'Sexby' Lambert had talked of it with Gideon that morning — anything to avoid discussing his bridal night. 'Lambert knew him as an apprentice. He is going to East Anglia, where a kinsman has raised a troop of horse. Sexby was tempting Lambert to join him, but Anne fixed her cool eye upon my brother and that was the end of any elopement.'
'Well, Bevan set upon Lambert,' Robert growled. 'His new beef was the Lines of Communication: 'Oh, nephew, I hear that you and your mad hothead wife are excavating frozen earth, alongside a thousand oyster- women! You go digging fortifications with mattocks and picks, among confectioners and tailors, with those calumnious rogues from the Common Council, drums thundering and colours flying'
After Turnham Green, Parliament had decided that the King's army would inevitably be back to attack London again. They had to increase their earlier hurried fortifications. Citizens rallied and turned out enthusiastically again. New barriers arose that were said to be eighteen Kentish miles long; Kentish miles were famously longer than the legal statute mile. The Lines of Communication surrounded much more of London than the ancient city walls ever had: from Constitution Hill to Whitechapel, going as far north as Islington, and taking in Southwark on the South Bank. The Houses of Parliament, the Tower, part of the River Thames and the docks at Wapping were all now safely enclosed in the citadel. Dutch engineers who were acknowledged experts in military earthworks had been summoned to advise. A complicated system of trenches, dykes and ramparts linked twenty-four substantial forts and redoubts. There were single and double ditches, then single or double palisades, the latter set with sharp pointed stakes facing outwards, a foot apart. The forts, shaped like four- and five-pointed stars for all-round vision,
