The South Lawn Plot Read Free

in the day with the house servant charged with keeping the fire fueled through the night. The knave had clearly fallen asleep and neglected his duty.
    Cole thought about slipping under his bed covers again. However cold it was within their embrace, it was a far grimmer prospect without. Nevertheless, he decided to rise and pushing his legs to one side and downwards his stocking feet made contact with the course woolen rug lately donated for his comfort by an old friend.
    Cole regarded his legs and feet. It occurred to him that he had not changed his stockings for three days and three nights and that they had all but become part of him. He resolved to put on a new set once the day was advanced enough to permit exposure of his skin.
    With a little more purpose, Cole stood and, with a blanket about his shoulders, walked towards the faint glimmer of light that signaled the morning of the fourteenth day of the month.
    Cole stood with his face almost touching the window. He pulled his fingertip in a line through the frost covering the inside of the pane. He repeated this with another chilled finger. He brought his face to the glass and stared beyond it. His warm breath only succeeded in clouding the glass and his narrow lines of view once more. So he blew hard again and rubbed the window vigorously with his sleeve. Now he could more easily see the world outside.
    The moon, a creamy ball of light, was slipping away to the west. The sky to the east was fast brightening. The sun would soon win its battle with the night. Half a full glass at most and it would be fully light, Cole thought.
    â€œAnother day, and where might you be, sir?” he said in a whisper.
    Outside, a wispy blanket of mist covered the fields that spanned the half- mile of open ground between the moat surrounding the great house to the boundary wood. Essex still slumbered, though both county and broader England would shortly rise with all the confidence and bluster that was, even Cole would reluctantly admit, the legacy of Elizabeth though not, he was certain, the rightful inheritance of her successor, James.
    Cole gazed down the narrow road leading from the front of the house to the point where it met the wider highway to Colchester. It was deserted though some would be out by this hour.
    He was conscious now of a bird, a redbreast, which had started to sing in the bush beneath his room. He leaned forward and rubbed against more of the glass, this time with his blanket. Tiny flecks of ice fell to the floor.
    In this way he had stood for mornings stretching back almost to the day that the great plot had been discovered and the fate of Fawkes and his fellow patriots sealed. But this morning would be different. The messenger he had sent out in search of the man had brought advance word.
    Cole turned and looked back to the bed. The woman lay still and coiled. She made a soft whistling sound as the air escaped her partly opened mouth. Cole stared at her for a moment, but his eyes returned to the window, the open ground, the road and the trees that were just beginning to show signs of awakening from a long winter.
    His one-handed grip on the blanket tightened as the pain moved again through his body. He no longer knew where it started. It mattered little anyway. It could find no way out.
    The dawn light was beginning to reach the corners of the room. It was a spacious chamber, one that displayed trappings of a prosperous life.
    Cole shuffled slowly back to the bed and sat down heavily. He regarded his feet, now numb, and sniffed. The clamor of birds outside was rising. He raised his right hand and pulled his left arm closer to his body.
    It would no longer move of its own accord. He would rub some compound into it later. With an effort, he pulled himself back into the bed. The woman stirred. She muttered a few words he could not quite decipher.
    She was carrying his child. A child he would never live to see.
    Cole had concluded, with no sense of particular fear,