Virgin Earth

Summer 1644, England

Alexander’s predictions seemed correct. Through the spring and early summer gossip, wild surmise and news filtered back to London, and finally to Lambeth, of small battles all around the country and then finally, in July, a dreadful battle at Marston Moor. Alexander wrote to Hester:

I cannot come out to see you, I am so busy with the demands of the ordnance. There has been a major battle in Yorkshire and it has gone the way of Parliament. I hear that Prince Rupert has met Cromwell himself, and it was Cromwell that triumphed. In haste… Alexander

Hester waited for news for another few days and then one of her neighbors rapped on the door to say that she was going up to the House of Commons to see the king’s standards. “Forty-eight royal standards laid for all to see on the bar of the House,” she said. “I’ll take Johnnie along with me. The boy should see it.”

Johnnie shook his head. “Is Prince Rupert’s standard taken?” he asked.

“You shall see it,” the woman promised. “Stained with his own blood.”

Johnnie’s brown eyes grew bigger in his pale face. “I don’t want to see it,” he said stubbornly, and then remembered his manners. “But thank you very much for inviting me, Mrs. Goodall.”

She bridled for a moment. “I hope you’re not siding with the enemy?” she said sharply. “The king has forced us to this battle and now he is defeated and good riddance to him.”

Hester stepped forward and laid her hand on her stepson’s shoulder. “He’s still the king,” she said.

Mrs. Goodall looked angrily at her. “Some say that a king who is his people’s woe is no king. The law that says he is king says that he rules for our good, not for our regret. If he does not please us then he is no king at all. There are those who are saying that he should die in one of his bitter battles and we would be a happier land without him.”

“Then his son would be king,” Hester said steadily. “There would still be a king.”

“Of course you were at court,” the woman remarked pointedly. “Enriched by the pack of them.”

“I worked there as many did,” Hester said. She sounded defensive and her hand tightened on Johnnie’s shoulder as if to draw courage from his narrow little bones. “But I have taken neither one side nor the other. All I have wanted from the beginning is peace.”

“So do we all,” the woman agreed. “And there can be no peace with that man or his son on the throne again.”

“You may be right,” Hester said, swiftly stepping back and drawing Johnnie back with her. “Please God we shall have peace at last and our men can come home.”