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He swims upward slowly from a complex dream of gunfire and shadows and water-lilies, to find a cool cloth on his brow, and her own familiar voice murmuring as though from a vast distance: "I thought I had lost you."
He takes it for a memory; but when he manages to force his eyes open at last, she is there, her face pale and distressed and luminous. She holds the compress to his head, leaning over the bed.
"Sexby," Angelica says quietly, "do you know me?"
His voice is a thin, scratchy thing, but he forces it to do his purpose. "How could I not?"
She lifts a glass of water to his lips, and makes him drink it slowly. "It is a long time since you have known either me or yourself. I am glad to see you wake at last."
"Where are we?" He glances around, but the room is nondescript -- shabby wood furniture, a bare floor, the window half-shuttered. It could be anywhere; though it does not pass for Heaven.
"Calais," she says. "I had to get you out of England."
"Cromwell?"
"He lives, and has made himself King in all but name." Angelica's eyes are dark with concern, for him, and it is still a wonder and a joy for him to see it. Has he really won her regard at last, or was that only another part of the dream?
"I don't remember," Sexby admits. "I don't remember any of it. Not after arranging the pistols…"
She reaches for his hand and grasps it tightly. "You were betrayed, dear. Cromwell was not in the carriage. You told me all this, over and over in fragments, while you have lain here -- how you knew that they would come for you, how you managed to run, how they chased you through the streets of London. By the time you reached me, your eyes were so wild -- you only talked of how you had failed, how you could feel Thomas Rainsborough watching you….But we got away, and it was not until we reached Calais that the real crisis came. The physician I called in said that rest was the only cure for it; we have been here ever since."
He cannot take his eyes off her -- so long-missed, so long-beloved -- and does not miss it when her other hand strays to her belly. The bodice of her gown is unlaced over a growing swell there.
"How long?" he croaks.
"You have been in a fever three months, Sexby." She glanced down at where her hand is resting. "But I knew even before I was with child. If it is a boy, I meant to name him after you; and if a girl, Elizabeth."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"And deter you from your purpose?" She smiles, faintly. "If my love could not do that, then what hope had this unborn life within me? It was a comfort to me, to know that I might still have something of you if you failed."
"Yet I have failed." The knowledge is heavy within him, even now. "And still I live. Are we safe here, think you?"
"The French will not give us up." Angelica hesitates. There are, he notices now, a few fine strands of grey in her dark hair; and he mourns anew for the time that they have lost. "There are Royalists here, and the Prince."
"Do you mean to join them?" Sexby asks after a moment.
She shakes her head briefly. "I do not. I have had enough of causes in my lifetime, and seen them all turn to blood and ashes before me. Thomas Rainsborough and John Lilburn are dead; the Levellers and the Diggers and the Ranters are all overthrown; Oliver Cromwell is become a monster. I nearly lost you, as well, in fighting him. I do not regret it, but I have done."
His hand tightens around hers. "What mean you to do, then?"
"Wait for you to be healed. And then -- I thought there might be a new start for us in America. We can never return to England."
"You could," Sexby forces himself to say. "You have land there -- Cromwell will believe that I acted alone."
"And leave you?" She frowns down at him fondly. "Nay, Edward. There is nothing I wish but to stay with you, and raise our child -- if you will be so content."
"Do you doubt it?" he asks, hardly able to believe what he is hearing.
"Cromwell told me that you were suited for nothing but fighting. That I should not go to join you in exile, for you were not for me."
"You should not have believed him." He lifts the handless arm where it lies beneath the covers. "I, too, have spilt enough blood. I will come with you, if you will have me."
"Always." Her eyes are wet, and a few tears spill over onto the shadows beneath them, and the two-sharp bones of her cheeks. What sorrows has she known, he wonders, while the madness of his failure took him? What dangers was he unable to protect her from?
"You are tired, madam," he says. "Will you not go and rest?" Though he knows if she once passes from his presence, it will be too easy to lose it all again in the maddening dance of his fancy.
Angelica rises from her chair and lies down in the bed beside him. He circles her waist with his arm, and feels her lips gentle on his mouth and eyelids and brow. Sleep is tugging him downward again, but her warm body is like an anchor, and will not let him sink into evil dreams.
"We shall live, my love," she whispers. "Here, now, we shall live."
*
We were in Providence already when we had word that Oliver Cromwell was dead and the monarchy restored; and my daughter had been born. It had been a near thing on shipboard, but I was determined that she should be an American, and she consented to wait for the new world that she was entering to show over the horizon.
If there had been a last weight on Sexby's face, after that, I saw it lift when we received the news of the tyrant's death. For Time, in the end, succeeds where our own small efforts have failed; and the turned world turns round again, whether or not our hand tries to halt it.
We might have returned to England then, but there would be no living freely for us, among its fields of blood. I could not let them take anything more from me. And the Devil, who has not followed me to Providence, would wait for me in the branches of the trees at Fanshawe House.
Some will say that all these years of struggle have been wasted, now that England has a king again. But they have been my life.
I write this for you, Elizabeth, that you may know who your father and mother were, and what battles they fought in what names, until they finally won peace with each other. That you may know that there is love in the world, amid the struggle; and always those twin daggers, of hope and of joy.