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not enough money even to rent some lowly rooms in a less fashionable part of London for Cornelia and myself; and while the earl favoured his solitude so keenly, no invitation would be forthcoming to join him at Ravensden House–even if all but a few sparse rooms were not boarded up and infested with rats. So we stayed cooped up at the abbey, and although Cornelia and my mother could get on well enough when the mood took them, they were at once too alike and too different to make matters entirely comfortable. Certainly not comfortable enough for the husband and son who sought to keep the peace between them.
    Charles turned to Phineas Musk. 'Summon a boat to the stairs, Musk. We'll not take the road at this time of night, there are roaring boys and apprentices with too much ale in their bellies facing down the constables at the Charing Cross.'
    Musk set off, and I helped my brother with his wig, jacket, sword belt and cloak. Charles had always seemed slight and unwell, even in my few and distant recollections of him before he left for the wars. The three Roundhead musket balls that had lodged in his thin frame at Worcester fight in '51 had compounded the damage. The earl moved with difficulty, his left arm next to useless. He stood and walked as little as possible, and was out of breath within minutes. But it was just a little way to the river, and there were always watermen anxious for the honour of rowing great lords to the privy stairs of Whitehall Palace. Ours was a rude mechanic from the Hackney Marsh who wished to engage us in discourse about the iniquities of the new fashion for coffee, being convinced it was the end of beer and thus of old England; but we ignored his ranting, and eventually he fell silent. As we pulled away from the wharf, I could see light pouring from the windows of the shops and houses crowding along the length of London Bridge, just downstream. A herd of cattle was being forced, protesting, over the bridge to the south bank, bound for the slaughterhouses of Southwark, and their terrified lowing almost drowned out the laughter and screams of the people milling across the bridge.
    We sat side by side in the stern of the boat, and Charles talked of family, and the state of our houses, and the tenants whose rent was in arrears. As ever, he said nothing of himself. We were those twelve years apart in age, so a certain distance between us was inevitable. But when I was only five, just before our father's death, Charles had gone off to Oxford, intending both to study and to attend the royal court, which was then encamped in the city. Within weeks, though, he was the tenth Earl of Ravensden, a man with terrible new responsibilities and a new programme for his life. Charles had joined the old king's army then, and was in time to ride out proudly at the head of his company in the Battle of Stow, in March of the year '46. It was the last battle that army ever fought: its pathetic surrender, followed shortly by that of Oxford itself, marked the inglorious end of the king's cause. At my mother's urging, Charles, then seventeen, joined the young Prince of Wales in Jersey. From there, he was to follow him on all his adventures, culminating in the desperate wounds he sustained at Worcester.
    In all that time, as I grew through boyhood, I never saw my brother. We met again only in '56, ten years later, when my mother finally obtained leave from the Protector for us to go abroad. We Quintons met in a room in Bruges, among a crowd of people gathered about that lofty, impoverished, and exiled young man whom we all believed had become the rightful King of England through the fall of a headsman's axe on a bitter January day in 1649. It took me many minutes to recognize my brother. His wounds, and his travels, and much else, had made him a man old before his time. How I had longed for that moment; for Charles, in my child's mind, had become a mythic hero standing alongside our father and grandfather. He soon made it