The King's Spy

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Thomas Hill was not much of a drinking man — half a bottle of claret or a couple of pots of ale might last him an hour or more — but two or three times a week he would close his bookshop and stroll down to the Romsey Arms. The inn was only two hundred and ten paces from the shop and, if there was news of the war, that was where he would hear it. He knew it was two hundred and ten paces because he had counted them. It was the mathematician’s curse — forever counting things.

The war. The wretched war. Bloody and brutal, and seemingly pointless. As far as Thomas could tell from the newsbooks that found their way to Romsey, neither side had yet shown evidence of real determination to win a decisive military victory, or even of a coherent strategy. While talks dragged on between the king and Parliament, the Parliamentarian William Waller and the Royalist Ralph Hopton, best of friends before the war, danced minuets around each other in the West Country, the Earl of Essex had settled comfortably into Windsor, and John Pym, reportedly dying from a cancer in his stomach, was busy building defences around London. Prince Rupert was thundering about the country at the head of his cavalry, attacking Lichfield, Brentford and anywhere else that took his fancy, and now there were rumours that his brother Maurice had joined him for an attack on Bristol. Thomas knew better than to believe all the reports, and in any case they were often contradictory. Sir Jacob Astley had been reported killed at Gloucester two days before arriving in excellent health at Oxford. And there were strange stories of ghostly battles at Edgehill, and witchcraft in East Anglia. In time of war, rational men very easily became irrational.

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