1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC Read Free Page A

entrance to his burrow, mark you well, the weasel always has a back entrance.”
    “My lord, the Americans, Cromwell—”
    “Are Wentworth’s bargaining counters. Do not let me learn you have said otherwise in the matter, sir. Do not let me learn it. We have our traitor, and he has compounded his treason with misprision and flight. That is the truth of the matter, whatever else you may have heard or inferred from a too-hasty consideration of the evidence before you.”
    Of course, the earl himself had been here only minutes, himself, and now stood before the wholly-slighted St. Stephen’s Tower looking at the havoc wrought on the medieval structure by the explosions. If he was condemning other interpretations as “hasty” it was for form’s sake.
    “As you say, m’lord,” Holderness agreed, hastily.
    “Cromwell will have been taken as a weapon to use against the rightful power in England. The man would have been Wentworth’s competition in the other history, so for certain sure that was why he was locked up so readily. Now that Wentworth is exposed and scotched, well, the devil will use what tools come to hand. The Americans, there to gain him entree at the Swede’s court, no doubt. Or possibly as hostages to win him favor with Richelieu. We shall see where he appears next.” Boyle sighed. “Nevertheless, the stable door is open, the horse is bolted, we should at least try and chase the beast.”
    * * *
    The next day, Boyle greeted James Graham, fifth earl of Montrose, at his London town house. Like so many such meetings since the Ring of Fire, they exchanged a look. Any man of notability in these times had something of a record of what he would have done in the future that never was, and whether a man believed in the truth of those histories that had poured out of Thuringia over the past three years, they were always present in mind.
    Montrose had tried, in the civil war that would have been, to fight at first for royal power against the Scots churches, episcopal and presbyterian alike, and for all his military successes, had made no progress in getting the divines to stick to spiritual matters. He’d fought for the covenanters against the bishops to break their power, and switched sides to the royalists to keep the presbyters from securing more political power. He’d led highland regiments to great effect, during the times when he could keep the prospect of plunder in front of them, and led disciplined Irish mercenaries when the highlanders failed him.
    Here and now, he was a handsome man in his early twenties, hereditary chief of Clan Graham and, after a shaky start—acceding to the earldom at the age of fourteen was hardly an auspicious start—now a serious figure in Scots politics. And, if he’d read his own future biography, he had his mind concentrated wonderfully by the knowledge that his eventual fate had been to be hung, drawn and quartered by the king’s enemies, his head on a spike for ten years.
    If that weighed heavily on his mind on this bright afternoon in London, however, he gave no sign. “Things have changed mightily since I received your invitation to visit, my lord Cork,” he said. The faintest hint of a smile was about his lips as he spoke.
    “If all this were happening to some other nation, my lord Montrose, I’d laugh heartily at their misfortune. And I take no pleasure in having the king’s confidence in times like these, I assure you.”
    There was a bitter truth. Charles’s own folly had put him firmly in Boyle’s hands, given England an eminence grise to match the one that had been an easy target for the pamphleteers of France’s enemies for so long, and Boyle found himself frantically working to keep a fracturing nation together rather than advancing his own wealth and power. It would take all the cunning at his disposal not to end up with his own head on a spike. Even with Cromwell in the Tower, there had been more than enough discontented gentry to foment rebellion.