“What?” she snapped.
“Just to say your carriage has arrived, my lady,” he stammered. “And this letter for you.”
“Please excuse me—it is a letter from my husband,” Livia said and curtseyed to the queen.
“Has he been overrun? Has Argyll reached Yorkshire?”
Livia broke the seal and unfolded the single page. James Avery was even briefer than before:
Madam,
Here is your carriage, I expect you to return to your home at once.
Your husband,
James Avery
“Is Argyll there already?” the queen demanded? “Is he coming south?”
“No, no.” Livia looked around; people were staring at them. “Smile, Your Majesty,” she said. “Sir James writes nothing that is of any interest.” Livia lowered her voice. “But he has sent his carriage.”
“For us to run away?”
“Yes. If the ship fails us, we have the carriage.”
TAUNTON, SOMERSET, SUMMER 1685
The Lord Lieutenant of the county, Christopher Monck, Duke of Albemarle, had his militia at full muster, at a safe distance outside Taunton, waiting for his chance to attack.
“Drunk Monck,” Monmouth said dismissively. “He’s not sober enough to ride a charge.”
Ned glanced at Nathaniel Wade and the young man winked.
“Did you know him from before, sire?”
“We were roaring boys together,” Monmouth said. “Difference is: I grew up and stopped drinking like a drain, and he married a madwoman and didn’t.”
“I doubt he can hold his men,” Wade exclaimed. “They’re coming over to us, dozens at a time and bringing the weapons he bought for them.”
It was true. Monmouth’s army on the march had become a joyous parade. The local militia declared for Monmouth as soon as they saw him high on his horse, under his banner of liberty. At every stop from Lyme to Taunton, the county town of Somerset, Ned and the other sergeants signed up more and more men until he estimated that the rebel army was about four thousand strong.
“And the royal army is raw recruits,” Wade said. “Many of them convicts, pulled out of the prisons. They’ll run for their homes.”
Monmouth’s men were farm workers or traders, weavers and brewers and merchants, devout in their religion, radical in their politics. They came with weapons from the civil war when their fathers and grandfathers had marched for Cromwell. Farmworkers brought their tools, scythes, sickles, axes, even spades. The armory master had the blacksmiths hammer the blades and set them in long poles like pikes.
“Actually, these are far more deadly than a real pike,” Ned said, looking at the jagged length of the blade. He devised training exercises for the men, wheeling and going forward as a troop together. Every evening, after they had marched all day, he would have them charge hay bales and practice running together, holding the line, and attacking together.
“Going well,” Colonel Venner praised Ned in a meadow outside Taunton.
“As long as we meet with hay bales,” Ned said wryly.
“The royal army won’t stand like hay bales—better than that, I think they’ll run away. The mood is all for Monmouth. They just hailed him as a king in the town and asked him to take the throne.”
“King Monmouth? That wasn’t supposed to happen?”
The camp watchman gave a warning shout and Ned’s troop scrambled to their feet. Ned noted the men who had to pull on their boots and find their weapons, forgetting his coaching that they should always lie down ready to spring up and fight. “Fall in!” he shouted.
“Holloah!” Venner yelled. “Pretty maids by the look of it. Nothing to fear.” He took Ned by the arm. “You’ll remind your men: no looting, no raping, Sergeant.”