It could not last. One night she awoke in her bed, horrified to feel a man lying on top of her. His great weight and beery gusts of breath confirmed it was not Lovell. While the fellow fumbled in the dark, Juliana screamed. Though he tried to silence her, she managed to avoid the fat hand scrabbling for her mouth. She kept screaming, even though she thought nobody would come to her aid — and was amazed when Smithers the glover rushed up the stairs and burst in with a candle, shouting.
In the dim light she saw that her assailant was the cooper who lodged upstairs. He rolled one way, spitting curses at her; she tumbled off the bed the other.
In the tiny house this coarse man had to pass right through her room on the staircase by the fireplace every time he came and went. Juliana hated it, though she had lived in similar situations with her grandmother. She had barely exchanged nods, preferring to keep a kind of privacy by pretending the barrel-cooper did not exist. He certainly knew that Lovell was away with Prince Rupert. This night, returning drunk from the Mitre or the Angel, he had seized his moment.
The cooper shambled off upstairs. The glover became nobly indignant, though it was hypocritical. Both men matter-of-factly assumed that any lone female was available to those who wanted her, whatever her own morals or her husband's potential jealousy. There was never a suggestion that the landlord might evict the culprit. Only his embarrassment at being seen stumbling over the hem of his ridiculously voluminous nightshirt made Smithers withdraw from Juliana's room.
She had been saved from rape, or whatever abuse the cooper could have managed in his drunken state. Juliana now found herself having to be grateful to Wakelyn Smithers. This was a nuisance to both of them, because for at least a week the glover felt obliged to maintain his role as honest pillar of respectability.
That did not last. Now the glover was aware of the cooper's interest and brooding over his permitted thoroughfare through the Lovells' room. Smithers became determined not to see another man get to Juliana before him.
The weeks were passing more slowly than the nervous girl could bear. Occasionally news filtered in of Prince Rupert's campaigns. Satisfaction greeted the sack of Birmingham, less joy when it was reported that Colonel Russell, the Parliamentary governor at Lichfield, had refused to surrender to Prince Rupert, on the grounds that his atrocities were 'not becoming a gentlemen, a Christian, or an Englishman, much less a prince'. About three weeks after the cavaliers first left Oxford, Juliana heard someone at market maintaining the King was at Wallingford (she noted it particularly, thinking fondly of her time there with her guardian, Mr Gadd) where it was said Prince Rupert was 'imminently expected'. She had already learned to distrust hearsay. It was not until the 21 of April that the prince took Lichfield, which he accomplished through undermining the Close, a novelty in warfare in England, the tunnels being dug by miners Rupert had summoned specially from Nottingham. A few days later he was indeed back in the neighbourhood of Oxford, but he and the King moved east in an attempt to relieve Reading. Reading was a key garrison between the King's headquarters and London. It had provided equipment to the Royalists, but its townsmen were of shifting allegiance and it was impossible to defend. Eventually the King retreated to Wallingford, where the castle could be well fortified, and Reading surrendered to the Earl of Essex and the Parliamentary army.
On the last day of April, the glover made his move. Everyone else was out of the house, but Juliana was seated at her table, frowning over some embroidery in the low afternoon light. On the pretence of pleading for rent money — which he knew he had no hope of getting — Wakelyn Smithers climbed the stairs to her room. Pretence then faded. Smithers meant business. He came straight across towards her, and when she jumped to her feet he took the opportunity to embrace her.
Although Juliana had dreaded this, she panicked and could summon up no strategy to deal with it. For a wild moment she struggled, leaning back to avoid the glover's bristly attempts at kissing. So far he was more bothersome than brutal; he was feigning love and she was managing to fend off that soiled commodity by vigorous use of knees and elbows.
Then he abruptly released her. She kept her feet with an effort.
'Why here is my husband, returned from the wars!' Juliana gasped.
Orlando Lovell had walked into the room. He had his usual casual air, as if he had left his wife only that morning on an errand to a tobacconist. In benign mood after a successful month of skirmishing and plundering, Lovell was taking the scene calmly. For a moment Juliana thought he would ignore her beseeching look; he seemed about to greet the glover as a friend. She was in a second danger: the two men could easily become drinking, dining, boasting, grumbling and gaming partners, which would leave her more than ever prey to the glover's advances whenever Lovell was absent. Smithers knew it too. He reckoned that the cavalier would overlook or even condone his overtures. She saw complacence settle on him — but then she saw it slide away. Orlando Lovell had decided to defend his own.
He swept off his hat. The peacock feather was bedraggled, but the silk band Juliana had made for him remained in place; Orlando's long fingers stroked the bright hatband as his eyes settled on the glover. He spoke quietly, but his voice was rich with menace: 'Master Smithers! What do I find? Are you perturbing my wife, sir?'
The glover scuttled from the room like a cellar rat.
Juliana closed her eyes, feeling faint. She turned away as she tried to recover, leaning on her table for support. Lovell came up behind her, put both arms around her, then as his hands played over her midriff he noticed her swollen body. 'You are with child!' She heard shock — and a fear of responsibility. 'Is it mine?' Spinning back towards him as he released her, Juliana bit back a furious retort. Orlando Lovell, ever the strategist, capitulated fast. 'Oh I am a dog! Of course it is — Come, come to me, sweetheart — '
Juliana fell into his arms, and allowed herself a rare moment of relief. As she shook with tears and he soothed her, Lovell seemed lost in thought. Perhaps he felt chastened by the trials his young wife had endured alone. Soon recovering her composure, Juliana observed that the lace-edged shirt collar she had wet with her tears was not one she recognised from her husband's previously meagre wardrobe — nor, she fancied, was this otherwise handsome garment very clean. His coat was new. He had a more expensive rapier, suspended in elaborate malmsey-red velvet carriers, and an enormous ruby finger-ring.
'This will not do,' said Lovell. 'I have a sword I shall give you.' Juliana was shaking her head but he overruled her. 'Nay, do not trouble yourself. I have no use for it; the thing sits in the hand poorly, but it will serve to protect yourself, should you be accosted.'
It was the weapon that Lovell had acquired in Birmingham from Kinchin Tew. He hung it on the wall by the window near Juliana's work table. She was to keep the sword dutifully for years, never used and always disliked. He offered to show her how to defend herself with it, but Juliana shrank from that idea.
Then, though he did nothing about it, Orlando promised to find them a better place to stay.
Chapter Twenty-Three — Oxford: 1643
The rest of the first year of her marriage, and her first pregnancy, passed in similar style for Juliana. Orlando came and went, as the princes came and went. Usually he was with Prince Rupert, though once, when Rupert went to the Midlands to escort the Queen to Oxford, Lovell despised that task and stayed behind on some excuse. When Prince Maurice then dashed into Oxford desperately calling for reinforcements for General Hopton, Lovell volunteered; as a result, he fought at the battle of Roundway Down when the Royalists trounced Waller, which gave him a violently low opinion of Waller and, being Lovell, a not particularly high one of Prince Maurice. He returned to Oxford, rode to the West Country and was with Rupert at the storming of Bristol, where he received a slight shoulder wound.
Lovell gave Juliana nothing to live on. The three shillings he left when he rode with Prince Rupert in April was apparently supposed to last her through her lying-in and into the next decade. He, by contrast, seemed to have some store of chattels. On his first return he had presented his bemused wife with a curious mixture of household goods, strings of sausage, a half-wheel of cheese, together with a fashionable necklet of large pearls which he said was a gift for her birthday. 'Don't look so surprised. Mr Gadd wrote and ordered me to remember your anniversary'
'You knew when it was?' Juliana let him see her surprise.
