Captain Crafte had said nothing of The Scot other than that he would supply the black powder and then be the one to see them safely away from Oxford when the job was done. But Tom did not need Crafte to tell him that the man now sitting opposite him was every inch a soldier. Though he was not a big man, his face was hard and unforgiving, reminding Tom of the effigy of some long-dead knight sculpted into a sarcophagus lid. But for the eyes. The eyes were big and alive and blazed with the zeal of a man who has lived amidst death.
‘They get younger,’ The Scot said. ‘They’ll be sending bairns and bantlings to do men’s jobs next.’
‘You know why we’re here?’ Tom asked.
‘Nae, laddie,’ The Scot said, raising his cup to his lips and downing a wash of ale. ‘I neither know nor care what they’ve got you sticking your neck in the noose for, but I’ve done what was agreed.’
‘Then you must have risked your own neck,’ Tom said. ‘With respect you risk it now by sitting here with us, for I’d wager you were at Kineton Fight and cannot have killed every man who saw your face.’
The Scot’s eyes widened still further as though his mind recalled the events. ‘Aye, I was there and at Brentford too, under Philip, Lord Wharton.’ Tom saw Penn wince and glance about to see if anyone had reacted. It seemed that no one had. ‘And I’ve made enemies in Germany and the Lowlands and even in Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, in my own damn parish,’ The Scot went on, not caring who heard. ‘But I’ve friends, too, laddie, and some of them are in this stinking hole now and would kill any man who so much as offended my eye.’
Tom found himself liking the soldier, admiring his cold indifference to danger even though it could get them all hanged for spies.
‘Where is it?’ Tom asked.
The Scot jerked his chin at Penn. ‘This one got no tongue?’ he asked, turning those callous eyes on Tom’s friend.
‘I’m just here for the beer and the laced mutton,’ Penn said, holding the man’s eye long enough to hint at a belligerence that defied his affable grin.
‘Spoken like a true stonemason,’ The Scot said with a satisfied nod, then looked back to Tom, leaning closer now. ‘You’ll find it stashed with a farrier at the north end of Grope Lane. The man’s a simpleton and won’t give you any trouble. I’ll be waiting at the footbridge that crosses the Cherwell north-east of the city. I’ll wait as long as I can but I’ll be gone before first light, with or without you.’
‘We’ll be there,’ Tom said. The Scot nodded, finished his ale and slammed the cup down, then stood from the table and left without another word.
‘So what now?’ Penn asked, his eye drawn to Hester who stood at the foot of the stairs hoiking up her full breasts so that the white flesh bulged clear of her low-cut bodice. ‘Seems we’ve got some time to kill waiting for dark.’
‘Even if we had the silver,’ Tom began, nodding at Penn’s right shoulder made thick and bulky by the linen wrapped round the arm beneath the shirt and doublet, ‘a crump-backed labourer like you paying for a wench like that would raise eyebrows, even in a flea-pit such as this.’
Penn looked crestfallen, a condition exacerbated by the emptiness of his beer cup.
‘What are your orders then, general?’ he asked, head tilted, one eye still watching Hester.
‘Now, Matthew, we find out where John Birkenhead drinks,’ Tom replied straight-faced, ‘for a Fellow of All Souls and editor of the King’s newsbook does not drink here.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOU WOULDN’T KNOW there was a war on,’ Joe said, watching a line of women working in the field beside them, faces obscured by broad-hats, the hems of their skirts and their white hands caked in mud. They were setting seeds in neat rows and none even deigned to glance up at the riders making their way south along a road churned by hooves and wheel-rutted. ‘Mind, they’re late to be planting peas. S’pose the war might account for that,’ Joe suggested. ‘Perhaps they had meant to leave it fallow. But now, what with the way things are …’
Bess had thought the same thing, had been surprised not to see more evidence of the great struggle, more debris from the conflict that had stripped her own family of so much. She had watched men and women spreading manure across the fallow fields and ewes suckling their young. She had seen livestock being herded from home pasturage to the communal pens and women tending fruit trees and she had resented it all. For how could the world go on as normal when somewhere, perhaps in many places throughout the kingdom, men were killing other men? Brothers, fathers and sons were being butchered, their carcasses left as carrion, unburied, without the meagre comfort of a prayer said over them.
‘You think they should be cowering indoors?’ Dane put in, uncharacteristically joining a conversation. ‘Do you resent them for trying to survive?’ Bess felt a pang of guilt clench in her chest at that, felt annoyed with Dane for putting it there.
‘I think they are lucky if this cursed war has not touched them,’ Bess said. ‘And if it has, I pity them, whichever side they are on.’
Dane looked back towards the bent-over women. ‘The first army that marches past this field come the harvest will leave nothing behind but the worms and maybe not even them. Those folk know it but they’ll still break their backs now. The world is sliding into chaos and they plant peas.’ He shrugged. ‘I admire them for their hope if nothing else.’
‘I pray this war will be over before the harvest,’ Joe said.
‘And you believe your prayers will make any difference?’ Dane asked, looking straight ahead.
‘Yes, Mr Dane,’ Joe said, sitting tall and rigid.
‘Then you are a fool, lad. Even if you promised me a thousand hands clasped in prayer, I’d sooner take two hands on two good firelocks.’ Even the way the man rode, casually swaying from side to side on his sorry-looking horse, annoyed Bess.
‘You do not believe in prayer, Mr Dane?’ she asked.
‘I do not, my lady,’ he said, deliberately baiting her by not calling her Bess as she had told him to. ‘To my ear, praying is too much like begging.’
‘Praying is nothing like begging,’ Bess snapped, annoyed with herself for reacting to the man’s nonsense.
‘Whatever you ask in My name, this I will do,’ Dane said, ‘that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.’ He leant over in the saddle, hawked and spat a gobbet onto the mud track.
‘Book of John?’ Bess asked, surprised to hear the man quote from the Scriptures. Even Joe had raised an eyebrow though he did not turn his head from the road before them.
Dane nodded. ‘I’d wager a barrel of good wine that my mother could recite the whole damn lot of it.’
‘Do not let the Puritans hear you talk of gambling, drinking and the book of God’s True Law in the same breath,’ Joe advised, still not looking at him.
‘I do not think Mr Dane spends much time in the company of godly men, Joe,’ Bess said.
Dane did not contradict her, nor did he give some frivolous reply, and from his absent air she saw that his thoughts were elsewhere.
‘Line after line she knew by rote,’ he said. ‘My father would have her deliver whole parables to guests at our table.’ He grimaced. ‘I was a bantling with ears stuffed full of damned prayers.’
Bess did not know what to say to that and neither did Joe have anything to add, and so they continued into the grey day, the empty sky blending into the colourless earth like an ashen veil. It was a windless day and Bess watched a lone bird of prey coursing low over the fields, gliding and twisting, unhurried yet resolute. Her stomach ached with loss. It seemed like forever since she and Joe had left Shear House and she wondered how little Francis was. Was his wet-nurse feeding him enough? She imagined her mother’s fury, or worse still sadness, and supposed she might have sent someone out to find her, end her folly and bring her back to Shear House.
The hen harrier was covering the ground in sharp sweeps and turns as it came towards them, its wings forming a V so that s
he noticed their tips were black, as though they had been dipped in the ink pot that still sat on her father’s writing table at home. Then suddenly the bird rose and twisted over them, making no sound at all in the still, moist air, and was gone, lost in the grey.
Where are you, Thomas? her mind whispered. Where are you?
It was raining now: a lashing deluge that had seemed to come from nowhere and soaked them to the bone even as they threw capes around themselves and rode slump-shouldered as though by making themselves smaller they might escape the worst. They had meant to ride further, perhaps making another five miles before dusk and thieves or treacherous footing made it too dangerous to be on the road, but the rain made such an imitation of twilight that when Dane suggested they stop at the next village neither Bess nor Joe had protested.
‘It will be good to get by a fire,’ Joe said, clenching and unclenching cold hands on the reins.
Bess agreed wholeheartedly, though did not say as much. She had been shivering for the last three miles but had resolved to clamp her teeth shut and say nothing rather than be seen as the weak one. She was the weakest. She knew that, of course: weakest not only by virtue of her sex but also because hers had been a life of privilege and she was unused to hardship. She could change none of that. But not to reveal her weakness by showing that she could not endure what the men could endure, nor, God forbid, to engender their pity – that much was yet within her control and it would take more than a week of being saddle-sore, cold and tired to erode her purpose. Had she not watched her mother, attired for war in Mun’s old back-and-breast, ride out on her grey mare Hecuba and bleed the villains besieging Shear House? Had Lady Mary not stood with Major Radcliffe’s musketeers when all had seemed lost and the rebels were closing in?
If Mother has such steel in her spine then perhaps I do too, she dared to ponder.
‘What village is that?’ Joe said, breaking the spell of her thoughts and nodding through the gloom. ‘Stone? Some other place?’
‘Matters not, so long as neither side of this damned quarrel has soldiers billeted there,’ Dane called above the seething rain, water cascading from the rim of his broad-hat. ‘We have her ladyship’s money,’ he said with a sour glance at Bess, ‘and they …’ he dipped his head towards the cluster of thatched houses ahead, ‘they have food, fire, ale and … agreeable company.’
Was that meant as an affront? Bess wondered vaguely, or was the man’s agreeable company alluding to some village harlot? ‘Are you afraid of the King’s men?’ she asked, steering her mount around a deep hole in the road that was fast filling with water.
‘Not afraid, my lady,’ he said, ‘but I have no desire to get myself recruited. And believe me, if some jackanapes sergeant lays eyes on young Joseph here, he’ll be whipped off to fill some poor tosspot’s boots in a company of musketeers before you can blink. He’s got that lamb to the slaughter look and don’t say you hadn’t noticed.’
‘I have fought,’ Joe said, eyeballing Dane. ‘I’ve killed a man.’
Dane removed his hat and looked up at the sky, letting the rain hammer against his face and cascade through hanks of dark hair. ‘Killing is the easy part,’ he said, rain spitting from his lip. ‘It’s the not being killed that takes practice.’
‘Well, it seems you have perfected the art simply by being a man of no conviction,’ Bess said, sorry for Joe who clearly felt at a disadvantage in Dane’s company. ‘For you do not fight for the King?’
‘I do not,’ Dane admitted. ‘Nor can Parliament claim the honour of commanding my sword arm.’
‘It would seem that modesty is another quality to which you may not lay claim, sir,’ Bess said.
Dane shrugged, water spilling from the cape about his shoulders. ‘Modesty perhaps not, but honesty? That you will not find in short supply here, madam.’
Bess cocked an eyebrow at Joe but the young man was staring at Dane, his disapproving glare laced with a dash of awe. ‘You think yourself so skilled at arms?’ Joe asked him.
For the first time since they had set off from Lord Heylyn’s house Dane smiled, and to Bess’s surprise it was a comely smile, much warmer than the rain beating upon her broad-hat. ‘Oh I am a fucking killer, Joe,’ he said. ‘And neither the King nor Parliament shall waste my talent in a mad rush on the field or a disease-ridden camp.’
Bess’s menfolk had waded into the fray, had stood in the storm of lead. But not all men were men of honour. Perhaps he is a coward, she thought, watching Dane sway on his cob like a boat wallowing in a swell.
‘And neither shall I freeze to death in the pissing rain,’ Dane muttered, as the village emerged from the hissing downpour and the horses nickered softly at the prospect of a warm stable and dry fodder.
‘That at least is one ambition we share,’ Bess said, inhaling the sweet, resinous smell of the smoke slung above the village like a dark pall in the still air. Instinctively she tilted her hat to partly obscure her face, for men on the road were less worthy of remark than a woman and the last thing they needed was an abundance of questions.
‘Turn around and go back!’ a voice bellowed out of the gloom. ‘There’s a fork in the road a half mile back. Take it and go around.’
Dane stopped his horse and Bess and Joe did likewise, as the body to whom the voice belonged materialized.
Dane clicked his tongue and the cob ambled forward.
‘Are you deaf, sir?’ the man asked, booted feet squelching in the mud. Bess moved up too and saw that the man who had challenged them was not alone. It seemed a whole welcoming committee had turned out.
‘Clubmen,’ Dane murmured to Bess, who noticed that every man in the assembly brandished some sort of crude weapon, from cudgels and flails to sickles and scythes, though none so far as she could see owned a pistol or even a sword. Most had wrapped scarves around their faces so that only suspicious eyes showed beneath the sodden rims of their hats, but the band’s spokesman was bare-faced, his eyes marked more by intelligence, Bess thought, than by fear.
‘We are not deaf, sir,’ Dane replied, holding his hands out wide in an unthreatening gesture, the rain bouncing off his palms, ‘simply in need of a roof over our heads and a plate of hot food.’
‘You’ll find neither here,’ the man said. ‘Now go. We do not welcome outsiders.’
Dane leant over, turning his face from the crowd towards Bess. ‘Remove your hat if you want a hot dinner, my lady,’ he growled. Bess did not remove the hat but she did push the brim up away from her face and she saw several pairs of eyes flicker in her direction. ‘We will give you no trouble and have coin to pay for your hospitality,’ Dane said to the man, in whose right fist and left palm sat a smooth cudgel, recently oiled so that the rain rolled off it or sat on the bulbous head in fat drops.
One of the other men leant in to their leader to speak, but against the rain’s hiss and the patter of it striking the muddy track, Bess could hear none of what was being said.
‘How do we know you are not the King’s spies? Or Parliament’s?’ the spokesman asked, pointing the cudgel at Dane and sweeping it across towards Joe and then Bess. ‘Come here to eye up our resources or count the men you will return to conscript against their will? We have had crops and property seized before now,’ he added to a chorus of sullen ayes from his companions, ‘sometimes by soldiers, other times by deserters.’ His lip curled. ‘We have all heard the fates of other villages, of wives and daughters raped and of the depravities which attend armies and make rabid dogs of young men.’
‘I can assure you, sir, that I have no love for armies whichever ensign they march beneath, and neither do I have a heart for the quarrel, which I have so far managed to avoid. We want bed and board,’ Dane said, ‘wine if you have it. At first light we will be on the road again.’
‘Show me,’ the leader of the clubmen demanded. ‘Your coin.’ He glanced at Bess but she kept her eyes downcast so as not to encourage him. ‘You must understand that trust in strangers is a little thin on the ground the
se days.’
‘Thin as cat piss,’ another man announced, having hauled down his scarf to cuff snot from his nose. Bess’s horse snorted impatiently, its breath fogging in the wet air.
‘We need to know you can pay,’ the leader said, ‘that you will not creep off before sun-up like some conscience-stung adulterer.’
‘Of course,’ Dane said with a nod, then reached into the hidden layers of his clothing and pulled out a leather purse, letting its weight speak for itself in the palm of his outstretched hand. For good measure he gave it a shake so that the coins within clinked gently. There were more murmurs within the group and Bess noticed arms and hands relax, the flails and scythes looking like agricultural tools again rather than the weapons of desperate folk.
‘You can stay one night,’ the leader said. ‘Then you’ll move on and you will not speak of this village to anyone.’
‘Agreed,’ Dane said, and though it irked Bess to have him speak for them all, she was more keen to be under a roof.
‘You may eat together but you will sleep apart,’ the other went on, then gestured to Bess, ‘unless this is your wife?’ Bess almost felt the flush in Joe’s face at the clubman’s presumption that Dane, if either of them, would be Bess’s husband.
‘The lady is this young man’s sister,’ Dane said. ‘We are bound for London to bury their brother who was recently killed fighting in Parliament’s army, may God receive his soul.’ Bess flinched, not at the lie but rather at the tale’s propinquity to her own tragedy.
‘And you?’ the clubman asked Dane.
Dane blinked once, slowly, as though behind his eyelids was some fond but bitter memory. ‘Their brother was my friend,’ he said with a pathos that could have seen him on some Southwark stage.
The clubman nodded. ‘The war is an open sore upon this land. But it will not infect us here.’ He gestured to his companions with his cudgel. ‘We happy few, we band of brothers,’ he said, the quote by Bess’s reckoning utterly lost on the other clubmen, ‘will defend our liberties and livelihoods against all comers.’ He singled out a broad, squat man who gripped two sickles, one in either hand. ‘Take them to Greenleafe’s. Tell him I sent them.’ Then he turned back to Dane. ‘You’ll be well fed and watered and Greenleafe’s boy will see to your horses.’
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 11