Rebels and traitors

Chapter Eighty- Five — The Swan Tavern, King Street: July 1657

Mrs Maud Tew was well aware that her brother grew more and more to resemble their father. Red in the face, outstanding in the belly, complaining and work- shirking, Nat had happily adopted the traditions of his ancestors. He had become as useless as Emmett always was. Maud Tew squared up to her fate with resignation — a slight, pallid but pert figure, who had made herself formidable in her chosen domain. She looked as if a puff of wind would bowl her over, though she had the wiry strength of all working women who constantly heaved about heavy tubs and barrels. Nat allowed her to do it, unaware that she was perfectly capable of carrying out such work, whilst simultaneously plotting in her nowadays well- ordered mind how to be rid of him.

Her thin brown hair was tied in a tight little topknot, without a cap or headscarf, though she wore an oversized white collar on her tiny shoulders, above a more-or-less fitting grey gown. A capacious apron completed what would have been a respectable ensemble, had not the butt of her pistol been visible in her apron pocket where a lesser woman might carry a housewife-cloth to dust her mantel-shelves.

Mrs Tew had a reputation. Both her brother and her customers respected and admired it. She made no secret that she had been a soldier, in disguise; it was also reported that she had been a highway robber, like the infamous Molly out at the Black Dog Tavern on Blackheath. Maud kept her mouth shut about her history, but for a slightly built woman who kept an alehouse in a hard district, such rumours did no harm. It was one way to impress upon the public the Act against Drunkenness; when the Swan's customers had supped enough in her opinion, they were encouraged homewards by her gun.

It was, therefore, not sensible for anyone to cause a rumpus in her tavern's yard. When one of the occasional lodgers lost his temper with an ostler, he was asking for it. Thomas, the ostler at the Swan, pistolled coming to take their horses… Hearing the racket, Maud ran up from the brewhouse. She found a swank cove in a suit that annoyed her, yelling that his young son had been permitted to run off. He was attempting to take his horse from the ostler, who kept a good hold of the animal because the reckoning had not been paid.

'Now then!' cried Maud.

'You tell him, Maud,' encouraged Nat. Customers came out and jostled one another, eager to see the fun.

'So who is this?' demanded Maud like an actress, with her usual sarcasm, as if the cove were just a woodlouse that crawled under her broom as she swept out the taproom.

'Mr Boyes,' said her brother, pretending this situation was none of his fault.

'I think not!' rounded Maud, who still remembered the man from Birmingham. 'I know you,' she said, speaking directly to Lovell. She was no longer in the least afraid of him. She could not tell whether the cavalier who had once — twice — nearly killed her simply for being in his way now understood. 'This dodger's name is Lovell.'

'Oh!' piped up Nat. At last he spotted the connection. 'Would he be the dangerous cavalier the man Jukes was searching for so urgently?'

'Your head is as soft as a poached egg, Nat,' his sister informed him. 'None the less, it is true, and Master Jukes will pay us a fine ransom.'

Colonel Orlando Lovell cursed her to hell and back, very fluently like a true cavalier. Then he abandoned his horse — which was valuable — and his luggage — which was not. As he turned on his heel with a derogatory expression, ready to make his getaway without paying his bill, Maud did what she notoriously did to bolters. She advised him to stay where he was. To make sure he listened to her kind words, she drew out her pistol and threatened to shoot him.

When Orlando Lovell kept walking, she fired.

'That never happened before!' marvelled Nat. It was unlikely to be necessary again. Word would soon spread.

Lovell took her ball in the shoulder. He did not stop, but loped off into King Street. Keeping well back in case of trouble, Nat followed the blood spots all the way to the Cockpit Gate before the trail petered out.

Afraid to report he had lost the debtor, Nat drank ale at several other taverns, then crept home guiltily. Maud ticked him off on principle, then sold Lovell's horse, weapons and various disguises all within the next half-hour. She knew that unless Lovell found a surgeon very quickly, he was a dead man walking.

On the same morning, Lambert Jukes had gone to see his brother at the print shop. He sent Miles out to buy muffins. Then Lambert, broad as a gate and unusually sombre, seated himself on a joint-stool with his knees apart and his arms folded.

'Now listen to me, young Gideon, and do not interrupt. Tom Lovell is safe. We have him at home with us. You are not to visit, or let his mother visit, or do anything that will lead an observer to our house — ' As the startled Gideon made to interject, Lambert held up his hand. 'Now, be calm in your spirits and thankful for this boy's intelligence. He came to us because his father will look for him — and the first place Lovell will come to is your house.'

Gideon was still resisting: 'Lambert, Thomas holds information. Enquiries must be made of him.'

Both brothers were silent, loathing the unpalatable thought of subjecting a child to formal interrogation.

'I will not allow it,' decided Lambert.

Gideon laid a hand on his brother's shoulder; Lambert shook him off. 'Lambert — '

'We shall lose him — he will run away back to his father.'

'Listen to me, Lambert. There may have been a second great firework for killing the Protector. Lovell made them. Thomas can tell us where they were living, where Lovell has perhaps left the device in a box — '

Lambert stood up. 'They stayed at the Swan, in King Street. Lovell brought them back again this week.' Gideon realised Lambert had in fact gently questioned the boy. 'Tom has mentioned no firework — but he is anxious because his viol, which Anne gave him, was left behind when they fled. His father told him not to ask after it.'

Gideon at once put on his coat. 'Go home, Lambert.'

'Not I!' Lambert scoffed. 'Do not argue. This is not Holdenby House. This time I am coming with you!'

They were too late. By the time they rolled up at the Swan, with Lambert puffing badly as Gideon hustled him, they were informed by the landlady that Lovell had left. Gideon swore. 'I talked about the gentleman before, with Master Tew — ' He remembered Nat Tew as gloatingly unhelpful.

'I've sent that fool to buy meat pies for the ordinary. If you must speak, speak to me.' The sister eyed up Gideon with an attitude he could not place.

'I told your brother I was looking for a fugitive, William Boyes.'

'Lovell,' Mrs Tew agreed placidly. 'I knew him when he was a filthy cavalier in Prince Rupert's bloody army. I saw him at Birmingham. He never remembered me — but I knew him. Nat gave him the room, more fool him. I had not seen him myself until today, and I never saw the young boy. They were here for two days without any trouble. Then the boy vanished and the man caused a commotion. I shot him.'

'That must have surprised him,' said Gideon, feeling surprised himself.

'I know you too; you are Gideon Jukes,' said the woman coolly. 'Does that surprise you?'

She was pleased how astonished it made him. 'You know me from where?'

'On the road by Stony Stratford. Calverton — you wanted me to know the parish. I had another name then — '

'Dorothy Groome!'

"Well, I am Mrs Maud Tew now, and that's for real.'

'I am amazed she still remembers you,' commented Lambert to his brother.

'I remember the day I gave birth in a ditch!' asserted Maud Tew without embarrassment. 'Your brother was just a big stripling on a saggy- backed old horse — though he was spying for Sir Sam Luke then, and Nat says he's spying for John Thurloe now'

Gideon was terse. 'I need to search Colonel Lovell's room.'

Maud Tew shrugged her narrow shoulders. 'Nothing there. As soon as he scarpered, I galloped to look. Just the usual full piss-pot and a smell of trouble.'

'Would that trouble smell like brimstone, pitch and tar?'

'What?'

'I must search your whole house. I apologise, but it may save you being blown up. While I am looking, please ask all your staff again: do they remember Lovell before? And when he went away then, did he leave behind a box?'

'He did not,' asserted Mrs Tew, jauntily. 'I would have looked in it.'

'A musical instrument?' asked Lambert.

'That would have been sold! But I would remember.'

'Could he have hidden something?'

'Where? Up the chimney with the jackdaw nests?'

'This would cause more than a soot-fire!' chortled Lambert.

'Cellars? Attic?' Gideon persisted.

'We are in and out of the cellars all the time, so no. The public never rummage in my attics; if he went up there, he's a cheeky beggar.'

'Oh Lovell is that!' Gideon confirmed. She knew he was right. 'Madam, take me to your garrets, if you will.'

In a low roof space at the Swan Tavern, Gideon and Lambert discovered Tom Lovell's missing viol. Its dead weight immediately revealed that it had been meddled with. When they lifted it down and found space and light in a low corridor to examine the thing, they could see its gut strings had been removed and the high bridge was missing. The silenced instrument was not one of the older designs that had a central sound hole; it resonated through two elegant F-shaped scrolls; they were too narrow to admit material in any quantity. So someone had spent time very skilfully removing the flat back of the viol's polished body, either prising it free or cutting it around the edge with a slim knife. The body, with its elegant waist, had been taken apart carefully, packed full and reassembled — glued and tied around with pack- thread, tightly in the first instance, though since it was done, the material inside had dried out the wood and made it gape slightly at the seams. 'Like an old powder barrel!' Lambert said meaningfully.

This size of viol was meant to be bowed by a seated performer, balancing it on the floor. Its neck would extend above the player's head. If such a large instrument was stuffed full of explosives, it was quite a bomb.

The Jukes brothers were both spirited. Gideon looked at Lambert; Lambert grinned back. Rather than wait for soldiers to remove the device officially, they each grabbed an end and lugged the viol downstairs between them, keeping it as horizontal as possible, which was how it had been stored. Outside, they put it down on its back in the middle of the small stable yard. A lad was sent to the Whitehall Mews for Lifeguards to take the device into custody.

Puffing out their cheeks with relief, Lambert and Gideon retired to a doorway; they calmed their nerves with pewter tankards of Maud Tew's excellent ale. Soon, she called them indoors for refills. While they were inside, one of Maud's more stupid customers wandered up to have a look. Detecting nothing of interest, he tapped out his pipe on the viol. Sparks fell through the sound- holes. Inside, a mass of combustible material was connected to gunpowder which was contained, for extra power, in a metal tube. Since the attic had been extremely dry, this still retained enough viability to produce a great flash and sheets of flame.

The mighty bang was not so large as the explosion of the magazine at Edgehill, into which a soldier put his hand while holding a lighted match. Nor so terrible as the eruption of eighty-four barrels of gunpowder at Torrington Church that nearly killed Sir Thomas Fairfax in a shower of blazing timbers, bricks and molten lead. Nor yet so enormous as the old gatehouse at Colchester that the two Jukes brothers had watched burst apart, showering severed limbs and shattered stone for many yards. But it was larger than anybody present ever wanted to experience.

The customer was killed outright. Fragments of him were flung across the yard. His clay pipe was seen later, stranded up on the thatch, mysteriously unbroken by its flight. Flames in the courtyard leapt as high as the second- floor balcony. Daubs of molten pitch flew in all directions, sticking to people and dribbling down walls, doors and windows. Small fires started where burning substances landed. Horses in the stables panicked. Women put aprons over their heads and ran away screaming. Men quickly sobered, picked themselves up and ran for water buckets. Mrs Tew flew among them, rapping out orders as she tried to save her tavern.

Lambert threw himself into fire- fighting. As if he had suddenly realised just what they were dealing with in Orlando Lovell, he roared at his brother to run, run home at once to where he might be sorely needed. So as the fire at the Swan came under control, Gideon Jukes raced off in pursuit of the man who had caused it. As fast as he could, Gideon set off back to Shoe Lane. He was too late there too.