‘An antidote to the Tudor domination of recent years’ –
Annabel Gaskell
‘JP Flintoff brings to light the life and troubled times of Queen Anne, and he does so with considerable grace and aplomb’ –
Rachel Stirling
‘The book gets better and better as it proceeds, becoming very tense and gripping at the finale’ – Simon Kingston
‘Fast paced, hilarious and unexpected . . . Should be made into a play, or TV mini-series’ – Ella Jakobson
‘Loved it! The drama, the pace, the intrigue, the comedy, the weaving together of history and plausible invention’ –
Philip Stewart
‘The descriptions of eighteenth-century life will be with me for years. It had never occurred to me that losing a king or queen could be like losing a parent . . . Fantastic’ – Kylie Rixon
‘I found the book intriguing, joyously difficult to put down. It kept calling me back from whatever I was doing, urging me to read on. The form feels anarchic yet sumptuous. A feast for readers who enjoy their books stylishly written and cleverly plotted’ –
Victoria Lambert
‘Queen Anne cuts at times a pathetic figure, at the mercy of those around her, but also touched by deep tragedy – and when the time comes, shows her strength’ – Claire Murray
‘It brings the characters of the great writers – Swift, Pope and Defoe – to life’ – Hazel Stevens
‘Defoe progresses from a man looking to redeem himself in the eyes of his family and society to a man who changes the course of history’ – Jenny O’Gorman
‘Memorably vivid, a flair for dialogue, exceptional talent’ –
Ita Marquess
‘I loved the book. Really thrilling. Truly wonderful’ – Mark Vent
‘Brilliant and amusing’ – Camille Sharma
‘I loved the information at the end, as to how he completed the book, using improvisation and crowd-funding. Great to show the struggle – as all good stories do’ – Lizzie Palmer
‘Quirky, unique . . . a book that is really about the art of storytelling. It has left me bedazzled’ – Una Lynch
John-Paul Flintoff is an award-winning writer and performer. His books have been published in 14 languages. He has worked as a bin man, executive PA, scuba diver, poet, taxi driver, tailor, gardener, ice-cream salesman, film-maker, assistant undertaker, ceramics designer, bit-part player in pantomime, waiter, illustrator, high-wire window cleaner, painter and decorator, karaoke singer, rat catcher and executive coach. But writing comes first.
Comp: A Survivor’s Tale
Sew Your Own
How To Change The World
The Family Project (with Harriet Green)
by John-Paul Flintoff
‘Very good. Very funny . . . In fact, it made me laugh’ – Harold Pinter
‘Makes The Lord of the Flies look like a soft-soap cover-up’ – Guardian
‘Very readable’ – Spectator
‘Often funny in the blackest way imaginable’ –
Times Educational Supplement
‘Fun and honest’ – Literary Review
‘Both supremely entertaining and an invaluable social document’ – Daily Telegraph
‘Entertaining and thoughtful’ – Financial Times
‘Faint echoes of Catcher in the Rye and a nod to the wicked young [Martin] Amis, but mostly Flintoff writes as his own likeable, transparent self’ – New Statesman
‘Very honest and human and moving’ – Nick Rosen
‘Wonderful, amazing, funny and warm’ – Tom Hodgkinson
Uphill!
(To M.B.)
What, and how great, the virtue and the art
That’s manifested by my old friend Mart.
A student, once, in sleep, you cried, ‘Uphill!’
Today you stand in pedals by me still:
Your own pledge made, you deftly fetched another
From Uncle Stephen first, and then your mother.
What moved them, by their pledge, to be so kind,
What words you used – in this I’m deaf, and blind.
Whatever! The point is, by expanding
My small crowd, you helped me get the funding.
Now Baxter is a factor, and you, Brookes,
Do make it possible to print my books.
Mapologists
(To T.B. and M.A.)
At Tina’s flat now let us pass one day,
And see what might emerge from hours of play.
With ease, like Tina scootering through traffic,
We’ll take an abstract concept, make it graphic.
Mike finds a strategy, ruse, tactic – all
To make the thing we build more practical.
Mapologists, your colourful displays
Make plain the hidden path through any maze:
Like, overcome What’s Bugging You. Find presents.
Choose pets: cat, cockerpoo, mouse, snail or pheasant?
Collaborators, when I asked aloud
You read my thoughts on funding by the crowd,
Helped shape a plan, encouraged: ‘Try Unbound!’
I then was lost, map-makers. Now I’m found.
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type thequeen in the promo code box when you check out.
Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, Unbound
Professor John Mullan, UCL
This period should interest anybody who’s interested in literature, because many of the genres we enjoy today were either invented then, or transformed. It’s a time of incredible invention in writing. The invention of journalism. Pope composed the most gorgeous, intricate satirical poetry ever written. Swift wrote the most deadly, frightening satirical prose. Daniel Defoe invented the novel.
The eighteenth century was an age of unparalleled irreverence and wit. The first book that really did it for me was something written later than Pope and Swift but very much influenced by them: Tristram Shandy was as weird and funny and clever as anything that anybody wrote in the twentieth century. It completely cured me of the inclination to condescend to the past – as if people in the past were ‘like us but knew less’. No, no! In the eighteenth century they were cleverer than us, funnier than us, more brilliant than us. They used words better than us.
I wouldn’t want to live then – too smelly, no analgesics – but their literature is better than anything we can imagine.
(main characters)
QUEEN ANNE. Protestant daughter of the late Catholic King James II, whom she helped to depose and exiled, along with her baby brother. James cursed Anne, and afterwards all of her children died before her. As she prepares for her own death, she must decide whether to make up for past wrongs and acknowledge her younger brother at last.
ABIGAIL, LADY MASHAM. Senior lady-in-waiting, thirty-five. Lady Masham knows she will not keep her prominence after the Queen dies, regardless of who inherits the crown. So Lady Masham steals from her mistress. A cousin of Oxford, whom she hates, and mistress of the much younger Bolingbroke.
LADY MARY ARDEN. Younger lady-in-waiting, aged seventeen. Overlooked by her seniors, Lady Mary hears and sees more than people realise. Her father is a Catholic who converted, reluctantly, to get ahead. Her sweetheart, Samuel Holland, is from a Protestant family that helped to remove King James.
DANIEL DEFOE. Failed businessman and occasional pamphleteer, mid-fifties. Has worked for years as a spy for the Earl of Oxford (even his wife has no idea about his secret life).
EARL OF OXFORD. The Queen’s chief minister, mid-fifties, a Whig minister in coalition with Tory Bolingbroke (whom he hates). A personal friend to literary talents Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.
VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE. Mid-thirties. Once Oxford’s close friend but now a bitter rival. A great mind. Also a philanderer: Lady Masham is his mistress.
JAMES STUART, THE PRETENDER. Queen Anne’s half-brother. Mid-twenties. Only son of Catholic James II. The Pretender was taken to France as a baby when his father was deposed.
JONATHAN SWIFT. Church of England priest, mid-forties. Writes propaganda for Oxford. Dreads being sent home to Ireland – the back of beyond.
ALEXANDER POPE. Fashionable, successful poet, mid-twenties. Severely affected by ill health: abdominal pain, inflamed eyes, stunted growth. As a Catholic, Pope is excluded from many careers and not allowed to live within ten miles of London.
SAMUEL HOLLAND. Lady Mary’s sweetheart, aged eighteen. From a prominent Protestant family who helped to depose King James. He knows Mary’s father will not want him as son-in-law.
WHAT IF THE QUEEN SHOULD DIE?
Daniel Defoe had been lying in bed, counting the minutes in his head until his wife’s breathing had told him she was sleeping. And then he must have fallen asleep. What time was it? He had to be ready, and leave before daybreak. Even now, to do what he needed to do, it might be too late.
He could only guess at the hour because there was no light in the room, and he’d recently had to sell off his pocket-watch. He reckoned it must be almost three in the morning.
He hadn’t imagined it would be possible to fall asleep tonight, because he’d gone to bed so disturbed. Shortly after sunset, he’d sensed the presence of a stranger outside the house, and gone outside with a candle.
‘Who’s there?’ he asked, looking towards the great elm.
A tall man stepped towards him.
‘We have found you, sir.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I know you, sir.’
The man’s accent was from the north somewhere. But not far north. Stoke? Derby?
‘What do you know of me?’ asked Defoe.
‘I know you owe a thousand pounds. The man you borrowed from has sold the debt to the Earl of Nottingham, and the Earl would like to see you hang. You have a week to pay.’
Nottingham! Of course.
Defoe heard the door open and his wife stepped outside.
‘Daniel, is there a problem?’
‘Madam,’ the man said with a false smile. ‘Forgive the intrusion.’ He seemed about to speak more – but before he could continue Defoe interrupted.
‘Dearest heart, I beg you to go back inside. I shall be with you shortly.’
Sarah wavered. Their middle son came to the door, then their youngest daughter looked out too. Sarah looked back and caught sight of their anxious faces – then stepped back into the house, closing the door behind her.
‘You have a week,’ the man repeated.
‘A week! Impossible.’
The man put his hand on his sword.
‘I have no sword, but if you give me a minute to fetch one I shall fight you or any man.’
The man let go of the sword. ‘I don’t mean to fight you now. But we have found you, and we shall come armed next week to remove you. You shall hang. Your wife must find work in service. Your son must go to sea. And your daughter . . .’ He paused. ‘Well, we can help you to find work for her.’
‘You threaten me, sir?’
‘The Earl wants his money. And he shall have it.’
‘I have powerful friends.’
The man sneered. ‘But for how long can Oxford continue to help you? His power is draining away. He may lose the white staff tomorrow.’
This hit a nerve. Defoe exploded. ‘Are you no Christian? What kind of man are you, to do this? To threaten a man, his wife and his children. Have you no feelings? No sense of what is right? The Lord looks down in judgement on us all . . .’
‘They told me you have a way with words, sir. My work is valuable to the man who pays me. Look to yourself, sir. You have overspent, sir. You don’t know how to live your life within your means. The work you do is worthless. Nobody wants what you have to sell, sir. I tell you once more: find the money in a week, or you shall hear from me again.’
Hours later, the devil pushed the man’s words round and round Defoe’s head while Sarah slept soundly beside him. Was it true? Defoe had once felt certain that people valued him, and his work. More recently, he felt less confident. How could he possibly raise the necessary money in a week?
It simply would not have occurred to him, then, that he could share his difficulty with his wife. So he kept it to himself. And he wondered at times if he might turn lunatic, fit only for Bedlam.
Carefully, he slid his legs out of bed on to the bare wooden floorboards and spread his fingers out before him, so that he would not bump into anything. He stood up straight. He knew the rooms well enough, after two months in this new home, and had taken care the night before not to leave anything on the floor.
He moved towards the wall, and, using his hands, felt ahead for the cupboard in which he had piled his clothes neatly so he could find them in the darkness.
A floorboard creaked beneath his foot and he stopped moving for a moment, to be sure his wife had not woken. She didn’t stir. So he opened the cupboard door and counted the items in the heap of clothes to be sure he left nothing. Then he felt underneath the cupboard for his buckled shoes and, clutching the lot to his chest, he slid along the wall to the door.
He knew the latch would make a noise, but there was nothing he could do – on retiring to bed Sarah insisted on closing it, to reduce any chance of their talking disturbing the children next door.
He put the clothes on the floor with the shoes on top, and carefully felt for the latch. It made a loud scraping sound, so he stood still again and listened for his wife, then when he was confident she still slept he picked up his pile of clothes and walked on to the landing.
But here he kicked by chance against some object – a child’s shoe? – which clattered noisily across the wooden floor. He cursed, then asked God’s forgiveness, felt renewed contempt for himself, and started moving carefully – his feet sweeping the floor gently for any other surprises – towards the stairs.
At the bottom, his feet felt the cold of the stone floor. He placed his bundle on the stairs and started to dress. But still he moved silently because sometimes his sister, if she couldn’t fall asleep with the youngest children upstairs, retired to the rocking chair in the kitchen. Despite the full moon, Defoe could see nothing because he’d taken the precaution of closing the shutters against intruders.
Having dressed, he picked up his shoes – which would make too much noise if he wore them – and tiptoed to the window by the door. He placed them out of the way, and then turned behind him to feel for the kitchen table.
Usually there was a candle to be found there somewhere, but he couldn’t feel anything, so he crept around the table, feeling his way from one chair back to the next, going the long way around to avoid the rocking chair, just in case, and finally reached the shelf where the candles and candlesticks were kept. He took out his tinder box and struck for light.
At that moment a sound of movement told him that someone was in the room with him. He abandoned the idea of lighting a candle, for now, but took one with him towards the front door, and having opened it, he stepped outside.
Here, the full moon blazed over his garden – there was enough light to read by, if he’d needed to. He lit the candle and went back inside. It flickered – cheap candles! What would his father have said! – but gave enough light to show him his sister. Poor thing, he thought. She can’t stay here much longer. She too must be turned out to find work. At her age! There was always someone who needed a governess, or a lady’s maid. But let’s not think about that. The problem could still be avoided.
He walked past her more swiftly this time, towards a high shelf where he had hidden a key. He put the key in his pocket, and went towards the pantry, where three chests stood by the door. For safe-keeping, he kept his papers in the bottom one, so had first to remove the ones above in which his wife had used to store, among other things, scraps of cloth she’d managed to save, and hoped one day to stitch into a bedcover as a wedding gift for their oldest girl. It would not be long now.
In the bottom chest, he found a great heap of printed papers. They were bound together with ribbon and fixed with a wax seal, so he snapped it open to check that these were the papers he needed.
As he started to open the paper – a broadsheet – he thought he heard a creaking floorboard upstairs. He stood motionless again, watching his sister sleeping with her mouth slightly open, and waited to hear more. But again everything seemed to be still. Perhaps someone had woken, and risen to use their pot, then got back in bed.
He opened up the broadsheet. In large letters, its title read, ‘What if the Queen Should Die?’ He cast his eye over the smaller text below.
The Queen raises no money without Act of Parliament, keeps up no standing army in time of peace, disseizes no man of his property or estate: but every man sits in safety under his own vine and his fig-tree; and we shall do for as long as Her Majesty lives. BUT what if the Queen should die? The safety and the lasting happiness of the nation is so far secured, BUT what if the Queen should die? The Queen is mortal, tho’ crowned with all that flattering courtiers can bring together, to make her appear Great, Glorious, Famous or what you please; yes, the Queen, yea, the Queen herself, is mortal and MUST die. None of us know how near the fatal blow may befall us: today it may come, while the cavilling reader is objecting against our putting this question and calling it needless and unreasonable; while the word is in thy very mouth mayest thou hear the fatal and melancholy news, the Queen is dead. Now that must at one time or other be heard. How can anyone say then that it is improper to ask what shall be our case? What shall we do, or what shall be done with us, if the Queen should DIE? The people of Britain want only to be shewed what imminent danger they are in – how much their safety and felicity depends upon the life of Her Majesty and what a state of confusion, distress and all sorts of dreaded calamities they will fall into at Her Majesty’s death, if something be not done to settle them before her death.
It was urgent when he wrote it, and it was even more urgent today. Who could say if she would live another week?
He felt tears in his eyes. Ridiculous! But the loss of a monarch is no ordinary upheaval, for the relationship of the queen to her subjects is like that of a mother to her children. Without her, life could never be the same. And for Defoe, as for many others, everything depended on what happened next.
And on who should be king. Some three inches from the top was an engraving, showing a young man in fine clothes with a long face and full lips. ‘A true likeness of the Pretender’, it said beneath. He had stared at this picture so often, and for so long, in order to imprint it on his memory, that it had started to invade his dreams.
He folded the paper and put it back into the bundle, which he squeezed into his saddlebag by the door. He went to fetch his goose-feather quill – very short now – and wrapped that carefully, along with a jar of ink. Then he closed the chest, replaced the other chests on top, and went to fetch his weapons.
In the garden, Defoe walked to the old plum tree. Among its branches he found the spade he had hidden there on Sunday. He walked towards the wall farthest from the house and found a prickly gooseberry bush.
He had planted the bush himself, soon after they moved here, working at night as he did now. Any bush would do, but the prickles provided a useful means to keep people away from what was buried beneath it.
He had bare hands, and felt the sharp pain of the prickles against his skin as he used the spade to lift the bush. He put it carefully to one side and started to dig.
Even at the old house, with all the space inside, he had kept this particular chest buried in the garden. It was easier that way to hide it from the servants. Now there were no servants – they’d all been dismissed when the money ran out – but there was nowhere to hide a big chest from his family either.
It didn’t take long to reach the top of the chest, but digging around it, carefully, was a slow process. He knew he could not keep this same chest underground much longer, it was already rotting, but he felt attached to it. He’d been given it by a pirate who needed help writing a letter. ‘This chest has been around the world,’ the pirate had said. ‘Use it well, and it will bring you luck.’
After fifteen minutes, he was able to pull the chest out of the ground. He felt in his pocket for the key, and unlocked it. The lock had rusted, so it would not open. He poked at the rust with the key, and banged on the side of the chest, conscious that the noise might wake someone but having little alternative, and hoping that the plum tree might muffle the sound.
At last, the chest opened. Inside it was a pistol, and a bag containing powder and balls. He took them out and wondered where to put them. He should have brought out his greatcoat, with pockets so big they could hide anything – but he had not. So he tied the bag to the keychain at his waist and shoved the pistol into the top of his breeches, pirate fashion. Reaching down into the chest again, he pulled out a box containing a small jar of arsenic. He checked the jar for any sign it might be broken, and put it in his pocket. Then he pulled out a roll of cloth, which he carefully unrolled to reveal, inside, a handsome sword in a simple scabbard.
He put this on the floor beside him and found a belt inside the chest. And that was all he needed. He locked the chest again, lowered it back into the ground and filled the hole with the undamaged gooseberry bush.
Each of these weapons had been given him by somebody he had come to respect – somebody who had later been killed as a result of their attachment to the cause of the righteous. They were no longer alive to carry out that work, but he could do it for them.
The pistol was something he had been given in Somerset, on his way home from the disastrous Monmouth Rebellion. A rebel by the name of Leonard Digges had found it in the hands of a dead trooper in the King’s army, and had then taken to hiding in long grass while great fires burned all around.
‘Stop, friend!’ he said when Defoe ran past. ‘Here’s a pistol. They’re hanging any rebels they find.’
‘Thank you, friend.’ Defoe stopped running and hid in the grass beside the man. He had not recognised him yet.
‘You’re Daniel Defoe. We spoke before the battle. I’m Leonard Digges.’
‘Do not use my real name,’ Defoe replied. ‘Call me Moreton. And here – take one of these bags. I found them. They’re full of hosiery. I’m selling them from house to house. Let me do the talking.’ And that’s when Digges had given him the pistol.
The sword was a gift from a Scotsman, grateful for his work preparing the Scots for the Act of Union – a friend who would later be torn to pieces by the savage mob in Edinburgh.
But this sword had not been sharpened for years, if ever. Sharpening it now was, obviously, out of the question – far too loud – but perhaps he might find a stone and sharpen it on his journey.
He took the sword from its sheath and waved it in the air before him, as if fighting an imaginary enemy. Then he swung it at the gooseberry bush, which bent and snapped beneath the blow. He cringed at the noise, as he wondered exactly how sharp the sword really was.
Hoping to find out, he wandered round the garden under the full moon, looking for a better target. And his eye fell on the cabbages.
He stood before them and thought of beheading them. He remembered riding with Digges through the towns in Somerset, watching scenes of unimaginable cruelty. ‘See how this Catholic king loves his subjects,’ Digges said. Defoe remembered one particular trooper, who seemed to take great pleasure in torturing rebel farmers and their young sons before hanging them, slicing off their ears, and noses, and cutting out their guts while they still lived. Defoe would happily have killed the man to put an end to it.
The cabbages were too low to swing at. So he got down on his knees, then took in a deep breath and – swoosh – he cut the head off the nearest one. The sword cut through cleanly. He lifted the cabbage with one hand and held it up as if he were inspecting the severed head of that black-hearted trooper.
And then his wife’s voice from just behind him said, ‘Daniel, what are you doing to those cabbages?’
He dropped the sword and the cabbage and leapt to his feet. He turned to see Sarah’s silhouette – the moon was behind her. He could not imagine what to say.
‘And where did you get that sword?’
Defoe’s friends told him he should have known better than to marry a girl with a dowry. A man like him should have married an honest woman who knew poverty first-hand, because otherwise he would always be indebted to her, as indeed he was.
Even leaving aside the dowry he had wasted, he knew himself lucky to have married such a woman – a shining light in the paths of righteousness. The pretty young thing he’d wed decades before had proved a loving mother to their handsome and obedient children, two of them now parents themselves; and with him too Sarah was patient and encouraging; perhaps more so. She always supported his projects, no matter how outlandish, and forgave the consequences, all too often catastrophic. As a girl she had grown up in comfort – more comfortable, at any rate, than she’d been since she married him, even when he had been at the height of his commercial success – but she never complained. This patient, cheerful endurance was harder on him than a less forgiving woman’s reproaches might have been. It required him likewise to put on a brave face, when what he really wanted to say was: ‘What about me? Don’t you think my failures have hurt me too?’ Instead, every morning on waking, after thanking his Creator, he would kiss Sarah’s forehead and tell her that today he would make up to her, and to the children, everything he’d put them through. He would buy back what they had lost, build a new home, clothe them all properly and – most importantly – give Sarah the rest and tranquillity she deserved. But he had to act at once, before it was too late. In another ten years even the youngest of the children would have left home and Sarah would be an old woman. She’d grown thin, already her hair was grey and the ankle she had broken many years ago, carrying one of the children downstairs, troubled her more than ever.
To see the woman you love in difficulty, to be unable to relieve her, and to know that you have brought her to this situation, is a horror that nobody can imagine till they feel it themselves. Defoe put on at all times an air of cheerful resolution, but it was hard, sometimes, to fend off the sensation, suffocating already and getting stronger by the day, that the best of his life was already behind him.
Lately, he saw in her parents and even sometimes in the unguarded expressions of his children, particularly his oldest boy, hints of disappointment and even resentment that were more painful than outright reproach.
He had tried many trades. Most recently, with help from his father-in-law, he’d been a merchant in tobacco, beer, wine, silks, muslins, cochineal, wax, dates, tea and ostrich feathers. He bought from Portugal and America and resold across Britain. But gradually he’d accumulated vast debts, and borrowed from others in order to repay them. He pledged and pawned, sold his goods at a loss, all the while hoping for one spectacular trade to liberate him – to pay off everybody at once. Earlier this year, he sustained the heaviest blow: a consignment of Maryland tobacco was captured by French pirates. The ship’s master had declined to pay protection money to his naval escort, which responded by pressing into service a good portion of the crew, and the remainder was unable to protect the cargo when pirates appeared. Suddenly unable to repay his creditors, Defoe was bankrupted and imprisoned, for the vast sum of £17,000. The business was taken from him, the servants dismissed and the family ejected from their house. He himself was thrown into debtor’s prison, not once but three times, by creditors who refused to agree on how best to deal with him.
Despite being a proud man, he’d been obliged to get out, eventually, by sending his eldest son to plead for money from the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Oxford, who had once been kind enough to notice something Defoe wrote. It was a desperate measure, unlikely to produce results. But Oxford showed greater kindness than Defoe had dared to hope for, and by handing over the necessary sum, the Lord Treasurer earned his everlasting loyalty. ‘My lord,’ Defoe promised Oxford at the time. ‘I shall always be your most devoted supporter, pleased to serve you in any way I can.’
With that promise in mind, he’d written to Oxford with a specific proposal, but had heard nothing for weeks. It was said, though nobody could remember who proposed it first, that the law of inertia was the law of nature that had the most devastating effect on the Lord Treasurer, but Defoe could wait no more. He was desperate. He had to do something.
‘I got it from a friend.’
‘What friend?’
‘How long have you been watching?’
He walked around her so that she turned her head and he could see her expression in the moonlight.
‘Daniel, what are you doing?’
He couldn’t possibly tell her the truth. Not after all these years, no matter how much he wished he could. It would be too great a shock. She would never again believe anything he told her.
‘I have to go on a journey. I am taking a sword because I shall be mixing with people who have pretensions of quality.’
‘Who gave it to you? What friend?’
‘A man named Murray. He was a friend to me when I was working in Scotland.’
‘Is that a pistol in your belt? Gentlemen don’t carry pistols like that. Only highwaymen, and privateers, and boys at their games. What kind of people are going on this journey? Tell me, Daniel. Please. Tell me the truth.’
She had never spoken to him like that – not once in all these years had she given any hint of suspicion or distrust. What could he say?
‘We live in dangerous times, my sweet.’
‘Tell me, Daniel. Tell me about the pistol.’
‘I have never used it.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘In the West Country.’
There was a very long silence. Defoe could hold a silence as well as any horse trader, but this was agony.
‘Daniel, I have never asked you before, but tell me truthfully, did you fight for the Duke of Monmouth?’
He was astonished. In all their marriage she had said nothing.
‘If I said yes, that would be to admit treason.’
‘I knew it. How could you be so foolish?’
‘Our cause was just. We were fighting to rid the country of a Catholic tyrant.’
‘It didn’t work. If you had fallen into the hands of the King’s troops your children would have lost their father.’
‘They might have been better off,’ he said.
‘Why did you wake?’
She got down on her knees, still clutching his hand. ‘Please, tell me.’
Throughout his career, alongside the more conventional forays into commerce, spycraft and writing were the two things that brought him the most satisfaction. Before the union with Scotland, he had travelled extensively north of the border, investigating the views of the natives. That work, which Oxford told him had resulted in the deaths of other agents before him, greatly facilitated the Act of Union – to Scotland’s disadvantage, as many there now realised. But he’d told Sarah he went to Scotland for trade, and had merely used the opportunity to write a little while he was there. For several years he had written and published his own newspaper, the Review, which provided a forum for his opinions and also sold well. Indeed, his greatest financial success to date was the poem he wrote in celebration of the mongrel origins of the English, written in defence of the Queen’s immediate predecessor, her Dutch-born brother-in-law William of Orange. ‘The True-Born Englishman’ was extensively reprinted, and Defoe had had the pleasure of hearing people repeat it in his presence.
He had published many pamphlets, but he knew what she was referring to.
‘I wish I could be sure.’
‘My love, you must trust me.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ he said, ignoring her request. ‘You can help me to pack and leave before the others wake up.’
He started his journey to Windsor before sunrise. His Elizabethan costume finally folded neatly away in his saddlebags, he pulled a hat low over his face and tucked a pair of pistols inside his horseman’s coat, ‘borrowed’ long ago from a corporal in Marlborough’s army.
He crossed the fields dividing Islington from London while they were still covered in darkness. In the city, he’d found little sign of life: windows stood open against the hot summer nights, but from only a few did faint candlelight flicker, where families watched over the sick or dying. Otherwise, all was still.