Edmund rose early. He saddled the bay and rode slowly down the High Street. St John’s, where he was baptized, in its grove of yews; the Grammar School in the old monastic hospital, where Dr Beard taught him Latin and sums and Scripture. The squat pile of All Soul’s in the market square, the Cromwell crypt beneath the chancel. Someone sweeping out the Falcon Inn, someone beating a rug out the first-floor window. A fat sheep painted on a creaking sign hanging from the Shire Hall.  A drunk snoring in the doorway of the Three Tuns; Edmund clenched his jaw, looked away down Cobbler’s Lane where prisoners, beneath the bored gaze of  a yawning beadle, shoveled filth into a barrow. The bay nickered, disapprovingly it seemed.

He halted at the bridge. It was not quite straight; legend had it the builders had begun at either end and failed to meet in the middle. The air smelled of dust, of drying grass, of corn ripening to harvest in the heat of August. Ducks paddling against the sluggish current of the muddy Ouse. He took off his hat, drew a forearm over his brow, rubbed his eyes hard. Squeezed them shut, opened slowly, and blinked the landscape of his childhood back into focus. Castle Hill, where a windmill rose from the fallen stones of the motte built by William the Conqueror. The broad green of Portholme Meadow. Godmanchester across the Ouse,  the slender tower and spire of St Mary’s.

That’s where he’d first seen her. 1623, when they were rebuilding the tower. He and Sydney had gone to watch. Sarah’s father, the architect, was supervising the work and she was with him that day, one hand holding his, a canary in a cage in her other, honey-blond hair spilling from her bonnet. Syd shouted. She turned. Edmund went breathless. She came to them.  Syd asked how much she had paid for the bird and said cats were much better then went to the builders watched the bird first, fluttering in the cage and twittering. When she turned he forgot the bird and went breathless, swallowed. She smiled and came over. Sydney said he liked cats better and went to watch the masons stir burnt lime and sand into mortar. Sarah asked if he liked the bird. He said he did. Sarah said it was a talking bird and they spent the rest of the day trying to teach it to speak.

Crossing the bridge back to Huntingdon that night, ignoring Syd’s babble about pulleys and winches, Edmund knew that he loved her, and her only, and that his heart would be forever restless until it found its rest with her. That summer they met daily on the bridge, threw crumbs to the ducks, walked to the windmill, Her hands were warm and damp, and holding them he could imagine their melting into his own.

Then it was 1635, the Arabella’s timbers creaking in the swells; he a stowaway discovered thirty days off Southampton. America a dim line of cloud on the horizon, an undertone of pine and earth beneath the salt sea. Faces pale, thin, worn from the passage, the foul air belowdecks, the storms, the sickness. But all of them, man woman and child, unbowed, unbeaten, unafraid, Winthrop’s voice hoarse but strong: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

Sarah crossed the deck to stand beside him. Her hand was damp, and chilled, but he could feel the warm blood beating and he knew whatever was in that land, they would conquer.

Then it was America, the Connecticut colony. The great emptiness of the wilderness; the darkness of the brooding forest: at night the creaking trees, the breaking branches, the wind groaning through the lonely valleys, the howling of the wolves and wild things. It drowned speech, thought, could terrify, overwhelm, overawe. They had lost four children. Three miscarriages, a little girl that died of cough after three days. Sarah tending flowers in the beds below their windows, thinking as he watched her: I have dealt falsely, God has withdrawn his help from her because of me, then Sarah looking up, seeing him, knowing his thoughts, gently smiling and singing:

The roses will bloom again one morning

No matter how long the winter has been

When you see the Rose of Sharon in the beautiful graden

It’s going to be springtime again.

He thanked Providence he remembered her so.

That the way the Pequots left her was locked away deep, deep inside him.

The clotted sticky blood on her hands.

The baby boy torn and dangling from her womb.

The Papist beads looped and twisted about her neck.

So torn, so ravaged, so burned he would never know how exactly the savages had killed her.

He led the muster of the English and led them into the wilderness. He destroyed the Pequot settlement at Misisituck.  He joined with the Mohegans and tracked the remnant to a swamp where he killed even more. The few that escaped sought refuge among the Mohawk. The Mohawk, fearing the wrath of the English, killed them and sent scalps, as a sign of peace and friendship.

He burned the scalps. But the beads were in a leather bag around his neck. One day he would find their owner.

“Edmund.”

He blinked.

Cromwell, astride a grey stallion. In riding boots that rose over his knees, a suit of rough black cloth, a spot of blood on his collar. How long he had been there, Edmund had no idea, but it felt a long time.

Cromwell looked from the windmill to the spire of St Mary’s then back to Edmund. A leonine quality about the man, a broad-faced, long-nosed lion, the sense of a lion coiled and ready spring.

“Uncle,”  Edmund said.

Cromwell laughed.  “Captain, you mean. Lieutenant Holyfen.” He slapped his pocket. “We are duly commissioned by Parliament.”

Over the Ouse, through wakening Godmanchester, Ermine Street and east toward Holyfen. The track skirted the edge of the fen.  Warblers and bitterns twittered and called among the rustling reeds; butterflys drifted, and dragonflies darted too and fro.  Cromwell remarked that the hawking remained splendid here. It was a bright, clear day; the mountains of cloud drifting lazily east, toward the horizon where then fen and the sky dissolved into the sea.

“When you went to war against the savages,” Cromwell said as they passed Hemingford Gray. “How did you prepare?”

“Uncle?” Edmund said. He was lost in thought. Eager to see the village where he’d spent so much of his boyhood and youth, afraid of what he would find there.

“Lieutenant Holyfen,” Cromwell said. “When you marched against the savages in America, how did you prepare your men? Did you drill? Did you practice evolutions of arms described by such military authorities as Corso? Did you form yourself into companies and regiments and march according to the order developed by the great Gustav of Sweden? Or did you just charge the savages and hope for the best?”

“No,” Edmund said. “It was nothing like that, really.”

“Care to share the wisdom of your experience, then?”

“It. . .” Edmund said. He pursed his lips. “It wasn’t like you read in the books, The Swedish Intelligencer or those. It’s not armies meeting in a fields, at the base of a mountain, on a plain. Pikes in the center, cavalry on the flanks. You creep through the woods, silent as you can. You find them where they don’t expect to be found. And you kill them, all of them. It’s all they do, the savages. One band seeks to destroy another, with all possible cruelty. Cruelty beyond even the Spaniards. They relish it in ways . . . it can’t be described.”

“I’ve a mind,” Cromwell said, “that the difference between soldiers and rabble is that soldiers prepare. Rabble do not. And that it’s an advantage, if the soldiers are sober-minded men. Who aren’t fighting for swag and drink.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not that money isn’t important,”  Cromwell said. “Your grandfather told me this. I’m sure he told you too; if he told me ten times, you much have heard it a hundred.  The campaign the Scots in the time of Elizabeth.  Good Queen Bess sent the soldiers crawling before the walls of Edinburgh, to collect the cannonballs they’d fired during the day. The economy is, like so much else Bess did, laudable, but it seems a considerable advantage to have enough powder and shot to render that sort of crawling around unnecessary. Don’t you agree, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Cromwell laughed. “Powder and shot, which of course requires money.”

“Yes sir, it does.”

“You do study Scripture regularly, do you not, Lieutenant?”

“I . . . yes, of course.”

“I mean to start a small group, among those of us who’ve come to this service. Study, pray together.  Desborough, your cousin; will be there; Walton, father and son. James Berry. He is a clerk at an ironworks and I believe would be most suitable for this business.  Thursdays at six, in King’s College. And six means six, Lieutenant. If you don’t have a watch, please get one.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You seem distracted, Lieutenant.”

“No sir, it’s . . . merely thinking. . .”

“Of what?”

“Nothing.”

All at once, Cromwell cracked the rein across the hindquarters of his grey and wheeled into Edmund. Edmund’s mount, startled, made to rear; Cromwell grabbed the bridle, dragged him down and close.

“Thinking of nothing, Lieutenant? How about, why we are fighting: do you think of that?”

Their faces separated by less than two feet — still points in the warm air, the struggling horses held close by Cromwell.

“Sir . . . no . . .”

Cromwell flushed. His eyes flared.

“No? What do you mean, no? You’ve no idea? You’re just looking for a bit of adventure?”

“No, Uncle . . . Captain, it’s not that . . .”

“Then tell me.”

"It's . . ."

“Well, Lieutenant?

“Popery. . .”

“Popery? Oh really? Why, Lieutenant? Whatever’s wrong with popery? They worship the same God as we English, do they not? Whatever reason could we have for objecting to popery?”

“Sir, it’s . . . it’s what they do, sir . . .”

“What they do? And whatever do they do? Pulling on a surplice, a bit of bowing at the name of Jesus, whatever’s wrong with that?"

“It’s not that . . . it’s . . .”

“What, Lieutenant, what?”

"They . . ."

"They they they they they what?” Cromwell bellowed. “They what, Lieutenant, they what?"

“They . . . They kidnap. They. . .” Edmund swallowed. “They torture, sir. They murder. What we love, Captain. What we love.”

Cromwell released the bay’s bridle, grabbed Edmund’s collar and pulled him close.

“It began small,” Cromwell said. “It always begins small. Small things. Who could possibly object to bowing here? To kneeling here? To reciting this prayer at this point? Until one day, one day you wake, and you realize, that the three small things are three thousand, and everything you do, everything you think, is within a web of little thing. Do you understand, Lieutenant? What that is? What it does?”

Edmund nodded quickly.

“The King would squeeze us in a hundred little ways,” Cromwell said. “A thousand little ways. In ways that are none of his business, that have never been the business of any King of England. Squeezed until we’re as dumb and decayed and baffled as any Spaniard. Till we’re no longer Englishmen, but sheep: rendered mute and dumb by mystery and miracle, a bell to call us to church, a bell to signal when we pray what we’ve been taught to memorize, to plant what we’re told, to buy what we’re told.”

Edmund nodded.

“Christ called us brothers,” Cromwell said. “He would have us men. ‘Sheep’ is a metaphor. That’s well known. But popery would make the metaphor the thing. Do you understand?”

Edmund nodded again.

“Speak up, Lieutenant. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s why we fight, Lieutenant,” Cromwell said. “I understand you wish revenge. But it's not the reason. If you don’t understand this, you do not ride with me.”

“I understand, sir.”

Cromwell smiled. “Good.”

He clapped Edmund’s shoulder. He spurred his mount and galloped east.

Edmund watched. He was, he realized, shaking slightly.

He looked over his shoulder: the spires of Godmanchester and Huntingdon.

Then he spurred the bay, whipped it after Cromwell, toward Holyfen.

Holyfen was so-named for the Benedictine monastery founded in 921 on a narrow table of land that rose along a bend in the Ouse midway between St Ives and Ely.  William the Conqueror's assessors visited in 1086. “18 hides to the geld,” they wrote in Domesday. “Land for 57 plows. 76 villans and 15 bordars have 23 plows. There is a priest and a church, and three mills, and 150 acres of meadow and 50 acres of woodland pasture.”  In 1204 King John granted it a weekly market, to be held on the square outside St Aethelbert’s Church; three years later, he gave the assent to an annual fair, on the feast-day of St. Benedict, in the green beside the abbey. This was during the tenure, and due largely to the constant lobbying, of Abbot Cedric, an energetic sort who dug eel-ponds, drained vast tracts of fen and on the meadows thus reclaimed grazed sheep. He brewed a beer known as Cedric’s, which became quite popular at alehouses from Lowestoft to Bedford. He discovered the clay upon which the village stood could be molded into a handsome and durable red-ochre brick, and indeed had been done by those master builders the Romans; the output of his brickwords became a byword for quality throughout East Anglia, preferred to that  imported from the Low Countries. And he widened the Ouse to make more efficient the transport of his eels, wool, beer, and bricks to Ely, King’s Lynn, and St Ives.

At the Dissolution, one Edward Holyfen, of Podington in Bedfordshire, husband to Lucy of the ancient Orlebar family, presented himself to Thomas Cromwell, the Chief Minister of Henry VIII. He was, Edward said, the descendant of the Edbert Holyfen and Heward Holyfen, whose mournful chain-mailed faces brooded sorrowfully on the brass plates in the chancel of St Aethelbert’s, and who with others Holyfens resided in a crypt beneath it, and he had the documents to prove it. The Abbey’s lands were rightfully his family’s, claimed Thomas; they had been seized by the Normans and given to the monks; Cedric’s so-called improvements were no more than continuations of projects undertaken by the Holyfens. Edward’s claim was accepted without question by Sir Thomas, who found this thrusting, presumptuous individual, whose interests just so happened to correspond with his own, a man after his own heart. Edward received the abbey and its lands and was knighted by Henry. After that he disappeared into the fen. He rebuilt the brickworks, expanded the brewery, dug new eel-ponds, drained more fed and there grazed cattle, further widened the Ouse, built barges, and shipped his goods to St Ives and Lowestoft and for a fee would ship any else’s who might so desire. He avoided court like the plague, distanced himself from Sir Thomas and so avoided any unpleasant repercussion that might have attended the great man’s downfall. He wrote Henry fawning letters at decent intervals and sent gifts of eel and beer yearly, at the time of the St Benedict’s fair.  Some speculated these presents were intended to show Henry the sort of rude entertainment he should expect were he and his hugely expensive court to descend upon Holyfen. He had reasons for not wanting attention, other than the huge outlays a royal visit would entail.  He and Lucy Orlebar Holyfen were devoted to the ideas of the more radical Reformers in Germany and Switzerland, distributed Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible throughout East Anglia, and endowed a fund for Cambridge scholars who wished to study in with Calvin in Geneva. Lucy founded a grammar school whose curriculum, which she designed, included Greek, Latin, astronomy, and the English Bible. It was free for the children of Holyfen and the surrounding countryside. They sheltered Protestants during Queen Mary’s thankfully brief reign and ignored her requests they “explain themselves.” On dying, Edward endowed a chair at Jesus College, Cambridge, named for Lucy, with the holder required to give an annual sermon “against idols.”

Thomas, their first son and heir, continued the tradition of heterodoxy, helping to distribute the Marprelate tracts and even allowing them to be printed in the bricksworks. The family fortune expanded modestly during his time, and less so during that of his son, named Henry. Then came Edmund’s father, who with little interest in improving the holdings, or radical ideas, took up soldiering, and frittered much of the fortune away.

Riders approaching Holyfen from the west will first observe a long hill, in the shape of an upended barge, rising from the fen. As they draw closer the green patina will differentiate into stands of trees: ancient oaks, yews, pines, birches, above them rising the Perpendicular spire of St Ethelbert’s, the squat Gothic tower of the abbey. The track will widen, the boggy fen give way to damp meadows where sheep graze and cattle chew cud stoically. They will ride past a deep and handsome mere, lined with willows, frogs croacking among the rushes in the shallows, where ducklings splash beneath the disapproving eyes of vicious geese. Both Cedric and Sir Edward, it’s said, came here to pray, to fish, and to cook up new schemes of improvement, and in the case of Sir Edward, litigation.

A boy shaded by a willow was fishing in the mere.  Cromwell waved. The boy stood, leaned his pole carefully against the tree, and darted up the track. The village came into view among the trees as they ascended the hill: timber-framed houses, the sooty bricks of the manufactury’s kilns, and the red of buildings constructed from its output. Edmund was home.