“Please, sit down,” I said, letting her go, and again she obeyed me.

“You ask me to stay, and to sit down,” she began when I said nothing. “Do you have something to say to me?”

“I love you,” I said in a rush. She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You do not. How can you?”

“But two days ago… Was that not something? Are you so coarse that it meant nothing to you?”

“Something, yes. But what would you have me do? Wilt in the despair of love? Become your woman, twice a week instead of cleaning? And you? Are you going to offer me your hand? Of course not. So what is there to be done or said?”

It was her practicality which maddened me; I wanted her to suffer as much as I, to rail against the unkindness of fate that so separated us, yet her robust common sense did not allow that.

“So what are you? You have had so many men that one more has no effect on you?”

“Many? Perhaps so, if that is what you want to think. But not as you mean; only ever for affection’s sake, when I was given the choice.”

I hated her for that frankness; had I taken her virtue, and had she been weeping with remorse at her fall in value, I would have understood and comforted her; I knew the words for that because I had read them somewhere. But to regard her loss as of so little moment, and to discover that it had not been given to me but to someone else was more than I could endure. Later, although I could never condone something so obviously in contradiction to God’s word, I accepted it, as much as possible, for she was her own law. However much she might obey my orders, she would never be obedient.

“Anthony,” she said gently, seeing my distress, “you are a good man, I think, and you try to be Christian. But I know what you have been doing. You see me as a fitting recipient of your charity. You want me to be good, and virtuous, at the same time that you want to roll with me in Paradise Fields before you go off and marry a woman with as much of an estate as you can find. Then you will convert me into a harlot who tempted you to sin while you were in drink, if that makes your prayers easier and gives your soul comfort.”

“You think that of me?”

“I do. You manage easily enough when you are talking to me about your work. Then your eyes light up and you forget what I am, in your pleasure at talking. Then you treat me honestly, without foolishness or awkwardness. Only one person has ever done this before.”

“And he was?”

“My father. And I have just learned that he is dead.”

I felt a wave of compassion for her as I heard her words, and saw the sadness in her eyes; it was something I understood well, as I had lost my own father when I was scarcely ten, and I knew well how painful it is to be brushed by such grief. I felt even more sad when she told me the details, for she was told (cruelly and falsely, it now seems) that her father had been killed when going back to his old habits of disobedience and troublemaking.

The details were unclear, and likely to remain so; the army was never punctilious about giving details to the families in such cases. But it seemed then that Ned Blundy’s agitations had finally become too much—he was arrested, given a military trial, and hanged forthwith, the body cast into an unmarked grave. The courage of his last moments, which Thurloe knew of, and Wallis discovered, was concealed from the family even though they would have taken great solace in it. Even worse, neither Sarah nor her mother were told where he rested, and did not even discover for some months that it had happened.

I sent her home to be with her mother, and told my own that she was not well. She appreciated the kindness, I think, but presented herself again the next morning, and never mentioned the matter again. Her mourning and grief she kept entirely within her and only I, who knew her better than most, caught the occasional glimpse of a distant sadness as she worked.

Thus my love for the girl had its birth, and my misery should be talked of no more. I still waited eagerly for her twice a week so that I could talk to her and, for a while, she went with me on occasion to Paradise Fields. No one ever knew of this, and my discretion was not because I was ashamed to consort with her; it was too precious to be the occasion of laughter in a tavern. I know how other people consider me; the ridicule of my fellows, even those I have helped, is a cross I have borne all my life. Cola, in his manuscript, repeats the remarks of Locke and even Lower, both of whom were pleasant to my face, and whom I still count almost as friends. Prestcott took my help, and laughed behind my back, Wallis did the same. I would not tarnish my affections with the scorn of others, and my regard for that girl would certainly have excited great ridicule.

It was, in any case, only one part of my life; much of my time I continued with my work and, discouraged by my growing doubts about what I was doing, I found myself turning more and more to the collection of facts, no longer daring to say what they meant. My work on the siege languished, and I turned instead to memorials; facts carved in stone and brass, so that I could assemble a list of the most important families of the county back through the ages. It sounds commonplace now, but I was the first even to consider the idea.

And I wandered through all the archives, cataloguing manuscripts that no hand had touched for generations as a way of earning small money and making myself useful. For what are we but our past? If that is lost, we become nothing. Even though I had no immediate intention of making use of the material myself, it was my duty and my pleasure to ensure that others could do so, if they were so minded. All the libraries of Oxford were in a dreadful state, their most precious treasures neglected for decades as men had turned their minds to the passion of faction, and learned to despise the old wisdom because they could not read it afresh. In my small way, I preserved and catalogued, and dipped into the vast ocean of learning that awaited, knowing all the time that the life of one man was insufficient for even the smallest part of the wonders that lay within. It is cruel that we are granted the desire to know, but denied the time to do so properly. We all die frustrated; it is the greatest lesson we have to learn.

It was through work such as this that I met Dr. Wallis, as he was keeper of the university archives when I most needed access to them, even though, as professor, he should never have been allowed the post. Although I grant his methodical mind did impose some order on documents which had been sadly neglected for years, nonetheless I could have done better (doing most of the work, unrecognized) and better deserved the salary of £30 a year.

I had heard rumors, of course, about his occult activities—his abilities as a decipherer of documents were no secret; indeed, he rather boasted of them. But I knew nothing, until I opened his manuscript, of his dark work for the government; had I known the full extent, I think that everything might have become very much simpler. Wallis was defeated (even if he only realized it when he in his turn saw Cola’s narrative) by his own cleverness and his obsession with secrecy. He saw enemies everywhere, and trusted no one. Read his words and see the motives he imputes to all who came into contact with him. Does he say anything good about anyone? He lived in a world where everyone was a fool, a liar, a murderer, a cheat or a traitor. He even sneers at Mr. Newton, denigrates Mr. Boyle, exploits the weaknesses of Lower.

All men were there to be twisted to serve his ends. Poor man, to think of his fellows thus; poor church, to have him as minister; poor England, to have him as its defender. He lambastes everyone, but who caused more death and destruction than he? But even Wallis could love, it seems, though when he lost the one person in his life he held dear, his reaction was not to come back to God in prayer and repentance, but to unleash still more cruelty on the world, and find that it served no purpose. I had encountered this Matthew of his on several occasions, and always felt sympathy for him. The obsession was clear to anyone, for Wallis could never be in a room with the lad without constantly looking at him, and making comments in his direction. But nothing gave me greater surprise than to read of Wallis’s affection, for he treated the boy abominably and all wondered how the lad endured such cruelty.