The Flood-Tide

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Dear Flora, compose yourself,' he said gently. 'You see the Admiral says it is only a slight wound. He will be well by and by.’

  She shook her head. 'That is not it,' she said, so low that he had to stoop to hear her. 'You know that is not what distresses me.’

  He did not answer at once, but pressed her hand closer to his side, and their steps slowed. At last he said, 'Yes, I know.' Now they stopped altogether, and he said, 'I have to confess to you that when I first began taking notice of you I did it out of sheer mischief. Oh, I can't excuse myself - I was a peevish boy, I resented my father's happiness with my stepmother, I wanted to make trouble. But I was very soon caught in my own trap. My feelings for you, dearest Flora—'

  ‘Oh, don't!' she whispered in belated alarm, but he went on.

  ‘My feelings for you grew, first to a warm friendship and a lively interest - and then - oh Flora, you know, you must have known for a long time, that I love you.'

  ‘Charles—' she began, and then realized that refutation was useless now. 'Yes, I know, and I should not have done what I did. As soon as I felt myself in danger from you, I should have quitted your company. And now it's too late. I love you too. Oh Charles, what shall we do?’

  He could make no answer for the moment, except to press her hand.

  ‘This report,' she said after a short silence, 'it brings it home to me. Oh Charles, I am a married woman. Thomas - I was so young when I married, hardly more than a child. He is older than me, I never really knew him. But when I saw he was wounded, I suddenly thought - what if he should hear? What if he should find out? It would wound him far more than anything the French can do.'

  ‘But we have done nothing wrong,' Charles said urgently. 'You must keep reminding yourself, Flora, that we have done nothing wrong. We have been together in public, we have been as brother and sister. Gossip may surmise what it likes, but we know it is false.'

  ‘We don't!' she cried. 'Whatever our actions have been, our feelings are wrong. Oh Charles, what can we do?' There was a silence in which they looked at each other, and all the impossible possibilities passed through their minds and were dismissed. In the end he said sadly, ‘Nothing. There is nothing we can do, except to be together.' He turned her, and they walked on, turning at the end of the room along the front of the orchestra.

  ‘I'm so afraid he will be killed,' Flora whispered, 'and then I will never know if I wished for it or not.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Act of Parliament for the enclosure of the Morland lands went through in July 1781, just before the end of the session, but the fact had anticipated the Act, and already the three largest open fields had been ploughed and levelled. The levelling and laying-in of drains was an important part of enclosure, for under the strip system, cross-ploughing was impossible, and so the only method of draining had been the building up of the centre of the field into a crown. Over the years, moreover, the rigs and baulks changed levels drastically, so that the furrows were sometimes feet deep.

  ‘It's a wonder to me,' Allen said to Jemima, 'that we ever grew anything at all under the old system. Now you will see the difference - a level field, well-drained, with a uniformity of soil and moisture, and nothing wasted in dividing up the holdings! Then imagine that field, well manured from grazing our wintering cattle on a turnip crop, well bound together with a crop of good clover grass, sewn with row upon row of strong, clean corn.'

  ‘My darling,' Jemima laughed, 'you do not have to convince me, remember.’

  But there had been moments when she had had her doubts about the business, especially when, earlier that year, two of the smaller tenants had come to her seeking an interview.

  ‘About this enclosure, mistress,' they said.

  ‘Are you sure it is not Sir Allen you should be speaking to?' Jemima asked.

  They looked embarrassed, and shifted their feet, and then one of them, a man called Fosdyck, said, 'Well, mistress, it's this way - the master's so set on it that he'd never listen to us. And we reckoned that, after all, it's you that's really the owner and if you said - if you made up your mind—'

  ‘But what is it that troubles you? I understood that everything had been agreed, that you had all been advised of your allocations, and were contented.'

  ‘T'isn't the allocation, mistress,' said the other, Master Black. 'Master explained all to us, and how if we put our strips together, and took a piece more for grazing rights, it would come to such and such an amount, and we couldn't say it weren't right—'

  ‘The master wouldn't stint us wrong, we know that,' Fosdyck put in anxiously. 'But once we've got our allocation, what are we do to with it? We can't afford to plant hedges round it, nor to build fences.'

  ‘Then there's drains to lay in, and a road to be built,' Black added. 'And my little bit is on the far side o' the beck, and I can't afford to build a bridge over it. How am Ito get my ox and my plough over the beck?’

  Jemima stared at them helplessly. 'Oh dear. I can't begin to answer your questions. But I will say this to you, I am sure Sir Allen has thought of all these things and will have some answer for you. And I will put your questions to him, on your behalf.’

  But Allen had had no answer, in the sense of a solution. ‘I'm afraid that it's true, that the smaller holdings will hardly be worth the expense of fencing,' he said, 'but what's to be done? The enclosure must go through, for the greater good, and if the allocations are fair, one has done all one can.'

  ‘But what will happen to people like Black and Fosdyck?' Jemima asked. Allen shrugged.

  ‘They will find a way round their problems, or they will sell their holdings. The latter is the most likely.'

  ‘Sell to whom?' Jemima asked in a small voice. Allen tried not to look guilty.

  ‘To me,' he said. ‘I'm sorry, Jemima, it can't be helped. I'll give them a good price, and you know that the land will be better farmed by me than by them. And that will mean more meat and corn for everyone in the country.' ‘But then what will happen to them?'

  ‘They will find work - don't forget, there will be plenty to do in the new system, and I will employ them, if they ask me, and give them a fair wage.'

  ‘I see,' Jemima said, and she had nothing more to say about it. She could see, she agreed with him, as to the necessity of it, but it saddened her all the same. She remembered when she had been a young girl and her father had taken her out to meet the tenants and labourers and outworkers, and had explained to her how their independence was precious to them. They liked to have their own little patch of land, however poor, and their own cow, however sway-backed, and to work in their own way and in their own time. It was inefficient, of course, led to poor husbandry, unequal work, sometimes destitution - but, as her father had said, 'A little freedom is as precious to a weaver as to any man.' She could see both sides of the problem, and it gave her pain.

  But the worst thing was the loss of common rights to those cottagers who had them by right of tenancy of a certain dwelling. There was one old man called Horace Truman - Gaffer Truman, as he was known. He lived in a cottage on the edge of the common just beyond the Ten Thorns, and in that tiny, odiferous cottage he had raised fifteen children by a succession of three wives, and had outlived all of them. They had none of them ever been much above the level of starvation - and sometimes below it, when a pig died or a cow went dry. But he had survived, heating his hovel and cooking his food by the turf and firewood he collected on the commons, feeding his pigs with the acorns, his cow with the grazing and loppings, keeping a few chickens or a goose, doing the odd day's labour when he was badly off, and 'taking a holiday'. -getting drunk - when things were going well.

  And now he was a knotty old man - how old, nobody knew - gnarled and stunted with years of poverty, but upright still. He lived all alone now, and since he had never been out of his clothes since they were new, he smelled strong enough to make the eyes water, and the dirt had settled in the lines of his face like soil filling furrows. But he regarded Sir Allen
that day with a bright and steady eye while the master explained to him, in person, what was happening in the matter of the enclosure.

  Jemima, sitting her horse a little way off - upwind of him - saw the disbelief on his face, followed by the bewilderment. How could anyone take away his commons, that he had had all his life? he was asking. He had always, time out of mind, had the firewood and the grazing and acorns - and his father before him, that no one now alive could remember. Patiently, Allen explained it all again, but Jemima could see he did not understand, and that when he came to believe it was to happen, he could only think the master and mistress had betrayed him.

  ‘But we'll give you compensation,' Allen said.

  ‘Compensation?' Gaffer Truman didn't understand the word.

  ‘Money - gold,' Allen said. 'Money to make up for losing the rights.’

  And the old man again looked from Allen to Jemima, and said, 'But what use is money to me? I can't graze my cow and pigs on money.’

  And when eventually they rode away, Jemima could not rid her mind of the memory of the last look he sent after them, bewildered and hurt.

  Old Gaffer Truman could not adapt to the new life. He continued to exercise his rights until the common was fenced off, and then he broke through the fence and carried on as before until the plough was brought in, and the grazing ploughed up. Then from time to time he and his animals would be found trespassing on some other piece of grass, and he would be brought up before Allen, as Justice of the Peace, who would try again to explain to him. The compensation money had gone within a fortnight of payment on the longest and most glorious 'holiday' of Truman's life, a debauch which would have killed a less hardened constitution.

  ‘What am Ito do with him?' Allen asked Jemima. 'He's drunk away the money, and he won't understand that he can't graze his animals where he likes.'

  ‘He can't help it,' Jemima said, remembering the old man's words - 'what use is money to me?' Money was an alien substance to the cottager, who lived by what he grew and made himself, and who had rarely owned more than a couple of shillings at any one time, usually not more than a few pence. 'Can't you give him a little bit of land?' she begged.

  ‘But he's had his compensation,' Allen pointed out.

  ‘He doesn't understand money - land is what he knows. Just half an acre, Allen - it wouldn't be for long. He can't live for ever.'

  ‘Don't be so sure,' Allen said, but in the end he agreed with her, and decided to offer the old man a corner of the West Field under the slope of Bachelor Hill, where he could gather firewood as well. He went in person to the rank cottage by the Ten Thorns to tell Truman of his decision, and found the old man looking a great deal older and more frail than he had remembered him. Truman listened in silence as Allen told him of his plan, and for a long time he did not answer, but looked away, past Allen, towards the land he had known all his life, but not as if he saw it. Some inner landscape filled his mind, some memory from his long, long life.

  Then, ‘Thankee, sir,' he said. 'You're right kindly, I'm sure, master. But I've never took charity from no man, not in all my life, and that's what it is, when all's said. No, master, if I can't have my bit o'grazing and such back, then I'll take no one else's land from him. I've lived free, and I'll die free, not beholden.'

  ‘But what will you do, man?' Allen asked, exasperated. ‘You can't go grazing your beasts wherever you please.'

  ‘I knaw that, master,' he said. 'I've come to see that it's stealing, and I'm no gypsy, and I won't do it namore. If I can't feed my beasts, I's'l sell 'em.'

  ‘But then how will you live?' Allen asked. The old man continued to look past him with calm dignity.

  ‘The Lord will provide, master, for me as for the sparrow.’

  A few days later Allen heard that the old man had indeed sold his beasts, one gaunt cow, three wiry sows and a young litter, and half a dozen laying hens of dubious vintage. A few days after that Allen was riding past Ten Thorn Gap and decided to turn out of his way to see how the old man was faring, and found the cottage deserted. The hearth was cold, and though the few sticks of furniture were still there, there did not appear to be any personal belongings left - if, indeed, the old man had ever had any. Though he made inquiries, he could not find anyone who knew where Gaffer Truman had gone, and as far as he knew, no one ever saw him again.

  *

  William and Thomas were together again in the summer of 1781. Thomas, as a result of Rodney's report after the battle off Martinique, had been promoted in September 178o to command of the Daring, 64, his first ship of the line, under Admiral Sir Samuel Hood. William at that time had been lying in hospital in Port Royal, recovering from the fever which had caused him to be left behind when Parker's flagship had returned to England, and on Thomas's request, William had been allowed to rejoin him.

  He presented a very different aspect from the puny, seasick boy who had sailed from Spithead with him back in '75. At eighteen, William had reached a respectable five foot-eight, had filled out with muscle. He had grown, Thomas thought, very handsome, his weather-browned face showing firmness and thoughtfulness, years of responsibility in his level gaze. His pale hair had never darkened, and he wore it in an old-fashioned pigtail almost a foot long. Thomas found him very able, well-versed in both the practical and theoretical aspects of his trade. It was a pity, he thought, that he was still a midshipman - but, besides ability, the requirements for lieutenancy were a minimum of six years at sea, and the attainment of the age of twenty.

  ‘The moment you are old enough,' Thomas said, 'you must take your examination. There is no doubt in the world that you will pass it.’

  In May of that year, General Cornwallis, who had been moderately successful in South Carolina and moderately unsuccessful in North Carolina, was ordered by the commander-in-chief Clinton to join up with the force under Patriot-turned-loyalist Benedict Arnold in Virginia. Virginia had remained largely in the hands of the Patriots since the beginning of the war, and General Cornwallis was eager to reverse this situation, but Clinton, growing more weary and discouraged with every year the war dragged on, was more interested in defence. He wanted a safe anchorage for the navy in Chesapeake Bay, and Cornwallis was ordered to fortify Yorktown for this purpose.

  In this the close interdependence of the army and navy was exhibited, for while it was necessary to have a military base in Yorktown to make the Bay safe for ships, it was necessary to have the navy on hand in the Bay to make it possible to take and fortify Yorktown. And it was equally true for the French/American forces: they would have to march men into Virginia and request the French navy to sail into the Bay at the same time.

  All these things were known in general terms but, as through the whole of the war, communication of detail was sadly lacking. Clinton's request for ships caused Admiral Hood to sail from the West Indies to New York with fourteen ships, Daring amongst them. They arrived in August to meet up with Admiral Graves and collect five more ships of the line in support. The 'all captains' flag was hung out in the Royal Oak, and Thomas called away his gig to go on board the flagship and receive information and orders.

  ‘General Cornwallis had six thousand men at Yorktown,’

  Admiral Graves told the assembled captains, 'but Yorktown, though it commands the Bay, will be hard to defend from the landward, and we know that Washington is marching towards Virginia with seven thousand men, so it is imperative that we sail at once to Chesapeake Bay to support Cornwallis.'

  ‘And the French, sir? Do we know what ships they have in the area?' one of the captains asked.

  ‘The Rhode Island fleet has left its base, and our observers think that they had siege equipment aboard, so it is logical to assume that they have gone to Chesapeake. I think we may expect them to be waiting for us. But we will be more ships than they.'

  ‘And what of De Grasse and the rest of the French fleet, sir? Will they go to the aid of their companions?' asked another captain, Hammond of the Achilles. It was Admiral Hood who answered
.

  ‘Admiral Rodney assured us that De Grasse will not send more than a few ships to Chesapeake, if he sends any at all. The situation in the West Indies is far too delicate for the French to risk sending their whole fleet.’

  A few more questions were asked and answered, and then Graves dismissed them.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen. We sail at first light.’

  Thomas returned to his ship thoughtfully, his mind naturally turning to the question of Charles. What would happen to him, when Virginia was taken? Would he make any attempt to fight against the British? The family at home, as they revealed in their letters to Thomas, had begun to worry about Charles, for he no longer wrote to them, or replied to their letters, and though Jemima and Allen were supposing to themselves that the war had disrupted the already fragile postal services between England and Maryland, Thomas did not believe it. Charles had gone over to the other side; Flora was disporting herself publicly with another man. I was mistaken in that family, he thought bitterly. His best friend, and his wife - brother and sister both had proved false to him.

  At first light on the following day the fleet sailed majestically out of New York harbour to take up their stations in rigid line-ahead, following the two flagships. Royal Oak, London, Invincible, Monarch, Ajax, Achilles, Intrepid; Thomas took station on Intrepid, and Daring filled her sails and ploughed along in the creamy wake directly astern. Behind him came Minotaur, Montagu, Centaur, Vulture, Terrible and the rest of them, making a line of ships, a death-dealing creature, five miles long. Two frigates, and the sloop Ariadne, held station out on the flank of the line, keeping watch on the horizons for the French.

  At dawn on 5 September the lookouts sighted the outcrop of Cape Henry, the southerly point of the mouth of the Bay, and simultaneously came the cry of 'Sail ho!' Between the points of Cape Henry and the northern barrier, Cape Charles, lay the waiting French fleet.

  ‘Get aloft with a glass, boy,' Thomas said tersely to William. 'Tell me what you see.’