The campaign was made exciting only by Feversham’s narcolepsy. That, combined with his inability to come to grips with matters even when he was awake, made it seem for a day or two as if Monmouth had a chance. I spent most of the time lying on my stomach recovering from the pitchfork-wound. And I count myself fortunate in that, because I had, and have, no love for the King, and I liked those rustic Nonconformists with their sickles and blunderbusses.

In the end Monmouth deserted those men even as they were fighting and dying for him. We found him cowering in a ditch. He was shipped off to the Tower of London and died groveling.

The farmers and tradesmen of Lyme Regis and Taunton who had made up Monmouth’s army were Englishmen through and through, which is to say not only were they level-headed decent sensible moderate folk, but they could not conceive of, and did not know about, any other way of being. It simply did not occur to them that Monmouth would abandon them and try to flee the island. But it had occurred to me, because I had spent years fighting on the Continent.

Likewise they never imagined the repression that followed. Living in that open green countryside or settled in their sleepy market-towns, they had no understanding of the feverish minds of the Londoners. If you go to a lot of plays, as Jack and I used to do, you notice, soon enough, that the playwrights only have so many stories to go around. So they use them over and over. Oftimes when you sneak into a play that has just opened, the characters and situations will seem oddly familiar, and by the time the first scene has played out, you will recall that you’ve already seen this one several times before-except that it was in Tuscany instead of Flanders, and the schoolmaster was a parson, and the senile colonel was a daft admiral. In like manner, the high and mighty of England have the story of Cromwell stuck in their heads, and whenever anything the least bit upsetting happens-especially if it’s in the country, and involves Nonconformists-they decide, in an instant, that it’s the Civil War all over again. All they want is to figure out which one is playing the role of Cromwell, and put his head on a stick. The rest must be put down. And so it will continue until the men who run England come up with a new story.

Worse, Feversham was a French nobleman to whom peasants (as he construed these people) were faggots to be stuffed into the fireplace. By the time he was finished, every tree in Dorset had dead yeomen, wheelwrights, coopers, and miners hanging from its branches.

Churchill wanted no part of this. He got himself back to London as directly as possible, along with his regiments-myself included. Feversham had not been slow to spread tales of the glorious fight. He had already made himself into a hero, and every other part of the tale was likewise made into something much grander than it really was. The ditch in which we captured Monmouth was swollen, by the tale-tellers, into a raging freshet called the Black Torrent. The King was so taken with this part of the story that he has given my regiment a new name: we are now, and forever, the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards.

Now at last I can speak to you of slavery, which according to Jack is a practice on which you harbor strong opinions.

The Lord Chief Justice is a fellow name of Jeffreys, who was reputed for cruelty and bloody-mindedness even in the best of times. He has spent his life currying favor with the Cavaliers, the Catholics, and the Frenchified court, and when King James II came to the throne Jeffreys got his reward and became the highest judge of England. Monmouth’s rebellion brought a whiff of blood on the west wind, and Jeffreys followed it like a slavering hound and established a Court of Assizes in that part of the country. He has executed no fewer than four hundred persons-that is, four hundred in addition to those slain in battle or strung up by Feversham. In some parts of the Continent, four hundred executions would go nearly unnoticed, but in Dorset it is reckoned a high figure.

As you can see, Jeffreys has been ingenious in finding grounds for putting men to death. But there are many cases where not even he could justify capital punishment, and so instead the defendants were sentenced to slavery. It says something about his mind that he considers slavery a lighter punishment than death! Jeffreys has sold twelve hundred ordinary West Country Protestants into chattel slavery in the Caribbean. They are on their way to Barbados even now, where they and their descendants will chop sugar cane forever among neegers and Irishmen, with no hope of ever knowing freedom.

The girl I love, Abigail Frome, has been made a slave. All the schoolgirls of Taunton have been. For the most part these girls have not been sold to sugar plantations; they would never survive the voyage. Instead they have been parceled out to various courtiers in London. Lord Jeffreys gives ’em away like oysters in a pub. Their families in Taunton then have no choice but to buy them back, at whatever price their owners demand.

Abigail is now the property of an old college chum of Lord Jeffreys: Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor. Her father has been hanged and her mother died years ago; of her cousins, aunts, and uncles, many have been sent to Barbados, and the ones who remain do not have the money to buy Abigail back. Upnor has amassed heavy gambling debts, which drove his own father to bankruptcy and forced him to sell his house years ago; now Upnor hopes to repay some of those debts by selling Abigail.

It goes without saying that I want to kill Upnor. One day, God willing, I shall. But this would not help Abigail-she’d only be inherited by Upnor’s heirs. Only money will buy her freedom. I think that you are skilled where money is concerned. I ask you now to buy Abigail. In return, I give you myself. I know you hate slavery and do not want a slave, but if you do this for me I will be your slave in all but name.

ASBOBSHAFTOE HAD TOLDhis story, he had led Eliza through a maze of paths through the lee woods, which he appeared to know quite well. Before long they had reached the edge of a canal that ran from the city out to the shore at Scheveningen. This canal was not lined with sharp edges of stone, as in the city, but was soft and sloping at the edges, and in some places lined with rushes. Cows stood chewing on these, and watched Bob and Eliza walk by, interrupting him from time to time with their weird, pointless lamentations. As they had drawn closer to the Hague, Bob had begun to show uncertainty at certain canal-intersections, and Eliza had stepped into the lead. The scenery did not change very much, except that houses and small feeder canals become more frequent. Woods appeared to their left side, and continued for some distance. The Hague sneaked up on them. For it was not a fortified city, and at no point did they pass through anything like a wall or gate. But suddenly Eliza turned to the right on the bank of another canal-a proper stone-edged one-and Bob realized that they had penetrated into something that could be called a neighborhood. And not just any neighborhood, but the Hofgebied. Another few minutes’ walk would take them to the very foundations of the Binnenhof.

In the woods by the sea, it might have been foolhardy for Eliza to speak frankly; but here she could summon the St. George Guild from their clubhouse with a shout. “Your willingness to repay me is of no account,” she told Bob.

This was a cold answer, but it was a cold day, and William of Orange had treated her coldly, and Bob Shaftoe had knocked her off her horse. Now Bob looked dismayed. He was not accustomed to being beholden to anyone save his master, John Churchill, and now he was in the power of two girls not yet twenty: Abigail, who owned his heart, and Eliza, who (or so he imagined) had it in her power to own Abigail. A man more accustomed to helplessness would have put up more of a struggle. But Bob Shaftoe had gone limp, like the Janissaries before Vienna when it had come clear to them that their Turkish masters were all dead. All he could do was look with watery eyes at Eliza and shake his head amazed. She kept walking. He had no choice but to follow.