by Ann Swinfen
Dick looked embarrassed. ‘Indeed, sir, I did think to do it, but my aunt wouldn’t lend me a gown. She feared I would be imprisoned too.’
John looked at him, torn between pride and exasperation. He could well imagine Dick carrying out such a caper, which would have landed them both in worse trouble.
‘Don’t think of such a thing,’ he said quietly, as Dick was called away by the guard. ‘These are no boys’ games. Men have died for less.’
‘Nay, sir. I will not, if you don’t wish it.’ He flushed like a girl, as if his father had humiliated him.
‘Oh Dick,’ said John, embracing him and trying to keep his voice steady, ‘you’re my dear boy. I’m not scolding you. But have a care in these perilous times.’
He stood at the window, watching as Dick walked away from the inn, and wondered why he was headed for Whitehall and not Holborn. Perhaps he had some errand for his uncle.
Dick Swynfen, however, was not on an errand for his uncle. Grace Coleman had given him permission to visit his father at the King’s Head, on the understanding that he would then return immediately to school. She had packed his knapsack with his clean linen, the school books that he had not once opened over Christmas, and a selection of the foods she had also sent to John, suspecting that the schoolboy’s diet was probably little better than the prisoner’s, and perhaps worse. When her back was turned, Dick had visited the larder, where he had helped himself to a loaf of bread, another piece of cheese, and as many dried figs and raisins as he could cram into his pockets and the corners of the knapsack. He was strong and healthy, now that he had shaken off the influenza that had affected him over Christmas. He had a thick cloak and a warm pair of boots. He was fifteen years old and wild to be out in the world. In his own eyes, he was a man grown. He had no intention of returning to Charterhouse. He was going to walk home to Swinfen. His notions of geography were somewhat hazy, but he knew the coach journey should take four days. He could surely walk in a week or less the distance a coach could cover in a day. Therefore, it should be possible for him to reach home before the end of February.
The fact that it was the middle of a bitter winter, that mutinous soldiers and broken men were roaming the land, worried him no more than the fact that he had only a few shillings in his purse. He intended to beg a lift with any willing carter travelling his way. He would sleep in barns or haystacks. When his food ran out, he was sure he could beg a crust and a drink from the farmhouses he would pass.
He set off at a good swinging pace. The first part of his route was familiar, more or less, because he had travelled to Windsor with his father twice since they had come to London. After that, he knew he must head north. If he kept to the main highways, they should take him where he wanted to go, and if he lost his way, he could always ask directions. The city snow was heaped in dirty piles, and the sky lowered, but there was no snow falling and little wind. Before long he grew warm with the exercise, and flung his cloak back over his shoulders. Whistling cheerfully, he followed the road to the west, leaving Whitehall and Westminster behind him.
John, believing Dick to be safely back at school and Anne, with the rest of the family, to be in the care of his father in Staffordshire, was himself more occupied with events in London. Soon after Dick’s visit, he received a letter from Sir John Clotworthy, written in his familiar flamboyant hand, though upon execrable paper, and with a pen that spattered the ink like a sprinkling of black pepper over it all. It appeared to have been written in haste, from St James’s Palace.
My Most Deare & Honour’d Friend,
Wee have rec’d Word that wee are to be mov’d this Day to Windsor & are there like to be confin’d even more scurvily that at this prsnt Place. Massey is gone, escap’d like ye bold Fellow he is, & wth our hearty goode Wishes for a Fortunate Outcome. Held here still, besides myself, are Copley, Browne, & Waller, but wee know not whether wee shall be imprison’d together or apart when wee are convey’d to Windsor. I beg yu send Word how yu & our Friends fare. Wee hear little, but tis suggest’d that some are free’d.
In haste these prsnts, from yr Always Deare Friend
John Clotworthy
This move to Windsor was ominous. Away from London, the prisoners were far from the possibility of rescue by their friends. Massey, in escaping, had secured freedom for himself, but had almost certainly bought it at the price of the others’ more wretched imprisonment. John knew of no rooms for close confinement at St James’s Palace. Probably the prisoners there had been held, like those at the King’s Head, in ordinary chambers. Windsor, however, had been built as a fortress. Windsor possessed dungeons.
Chapter Fifteen
Anne walked carefully to the end of Broad Street, which had been cleared of snow to ease the passage of carriages. She had come out alone, resisting Patience’s offers to accompany her, for she knew she would have ended by leaning upon her waiting woman’s arm, and the purpose of the walk was to help her regain her strength. Almost a month had passed since that fearful night when they had reached Oxford to the tintinnabulation of the midnight bells, she not knowing whether the baby would be born in a broken coach in the midst of strangers. The strangers had proved kind, despite these suspicious times, and the Mitre had provided a refuge from a world of storm and disaster, but until she reached the manor of Swinfen, she would not feel entirely safe. A quiet, fragile Christmas had passed and a quiet January crept in before she had ventured out of the warm embrace of the inn.
The haunted city of Oxford still had a strange atmosphere. After several years when it had served as the seat of the king’s court in exile, its people—both town and gown—wore an uneasy air. Oxford had been in Parliamentary hands for a little over two years now, but in its streets Anne felt, as she had not felt in London, the tension of divided loyalties, a sense of the great chasm that had split apart families and neighbours.
Her health had been more overset than usual by this confinement, perhaps because of the journey and her fears for John, perhaps because of her cracked ribs, which were recovering but slowly. Her supply of money, too, had been rapidly diminished in providing lodging and food for her large household at swollen wartime prices. She had hoped to resume the journey to Staffordshire at least two weeks ago, but the physician had forbidden it.
‘You may think yourself strong enough, Mistress Swynfen,’ he said severely, rubbing his bald pate in irritation, ‘but you are not. You tire easily, merely staying quietly here at the inn. I can’t answer for your condition if you undertake the journey too soon. You must think of the baby and the rest of your family. It’s not a matter simply of your own desires.’
Anne had chafed under his rule, but he was a competent man and she knew he spoke the truth. So for the last three days she had been walking about the town, a little further each time, and although she was tired when she returned to the inn, she felt herself growing stronger. Today she had walked up the Turl to Broad Street, then along that fine wide avenue, as handsome as any in London. Now she turned into a narrow winding lane, which she had been told led past New College and down again to the High Street, where she planned to visit Master Clarke, the apothecary. Doctor Hadley, who had taken to calling on her, had told her that Clarke was celebrated for his preparations devised to strengthen the blood after illness.
The lane past New College was vile and shabby, the very place for cut-purses after dark. But it was afternoon now, a thin winter sun was shining, and groups of students could be seen hurrying in and out of a mean gateway, which she supposed must be the entrance to the college. Making her way past piles of rotting food and excrement, lifting her skirts to avoid the carcass of a dog, she reached the church of St-Peter-at-the-East-Gate, an ancient foundation, said to be the oldest in Oxford, first built in Saxon times, though much altered since. She looked in at the door, but did not enter. It was a fine building, larger than their own parish church at home, but without the grandeur of the London churches. It breathed a kind of ancient dignity, the ve
ry stones rapt, the windows glowing with ardour. The Puritan Elect would strip away and destroy every vestige of such beauty and colour and grace from England’s places of worship.
Idly pondering this thought, she stepped out from the end of the lane and found herself, as she had been assured, in the High Street. Master Clarke’s shop was a short way along the street to her right. She opened the door and set a cluster of small bells tinkling, like some dancing mummer’s costume. The scents in the shop were pleasantly familiar to Anne, who kept a well-stocked stillroom herself, and had long been interested in preparing her own simples. Had she been a man, and born to the middling rank in society, she thought she might well have become an apothecary. Or she might have followed the scholar’s path and become one of the new breed of men of her own rank who called themselves ‘natural philosophers’. The study of the worlds terrestrial and celestial, the workings of nature and the remarkable healing properties of plants and minerals, promised greater benison to mankind than the more violent methods of the surgeons with their bleeding bowls and cutting knives. To her mind, more patients died as a result of their butcheries than recovered. In London she had purchased a few books of the new science, which she read surreptitiously, fearing that John would not approve of such studies for a woman.
She looked around the shop, breathing in the mingled perfumes: dried sage, the ‘saviour’ as the ancients called it, good for heating and quickening the blood; sweet cicely, myrrhis odorata, the poor man’s myrrh, excellent for old people and a comfort to the heart; thyme, with its soothing properties, healing headaches and sore throats, rheumatic swellings and the falling sickness; and all the other herbs hanging from the beams overhead—parsley and pennyroyal, monk’s hood and lavender, peppermint and feverfew, rosemary and rue, honeysuckle and camomile, sweet marjoram and pellitory—compounded with the scents of cinnamon, liquorice, cloves, wormwood, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, flowers of brimstone, orris root, oil of Spanish orange, and other aromas she could not name. Ranged on shelves along the walls, jars and phials were labelled with the names of other substances, both common and exotic—honey, mandragora, galingal, frankincense, mugwort, pearls, rhubarb, dragon’s blood, dates, spikenard, asafoetida, grains of paradise, cardamom, aloe, pistachio, tansy, tamarind, serpentaria minor, and syrup of roses. On the counter, gallipots stood in rows, beside scales large and small. Everything was as clean and neat as her own stillroom, and Master Clarke proved to be quite a young man, shining and rosy, a wonderful advertisement for the quality of his cures.
‘I have been recommended to you,’ Anne explained, ‘by Doctor Hadley of Christ Church College, ‘who advised your strengthening elixir.’
‘I shall be honoured, mistress, to help in any way I can. I shall need to know all you can tell me of your state of health.’
‘A recent premature confinement,’ said Anne, ‘shortly after the overturning of a coach, in which I cracked three ribs.’
Clarke clucked his tongue sympathetically and showed her to a seat in his back room amongst the stills and alembics, the mortars, crucibles, retorts and bottles, where he questioned her closely about her present condition, her previous health, and her future plans, then listened carefully to her answers. Soon they were exchanging views on the efficacy of their own favourite ingredients. She emerged an hour later, with a phial of his recommended remedy and her basket filled with a supply of those ingredients she found most difficult to obtain in Lichfield. As she walked back along the High to the Mitre, through crowds of students released for the day from their lectures and eagerly making their way to the cheaper taverns, she found herself as much strengthened by the conversation as by the exercise. Within the next few days, she would make arrangements for continuing home to Staffordshire.
The coach to Lichfield stopped for the night at Warwick. The journey from Oxford had lasted fifteen hours, along roads churned into an unholy mire of half-melted snow and mud. All day, the rain pelted down, sometimes turning to sleet, and towards evening to snow again. Whenever they broke the journey to bate or change the horses, the passengers scurried for shelter to the staging inn, but these were a mean collection of hostelries, sunk into dirty and careless ways after years of quartering the troops of both sides, as they marched back and forth across the mutilated midland counties of England. If these inns had ever possessed dishes of pewter, they had been looted long ago. Food was served on discoloured platters of treen, ill-washed between meals, while the thin, almost colourless ale was poured into wooden beakers, which age and damp and proximity to fires had twisted until they resembled galls hacked off diseased trees.
When they reached Warwick at last, long past dark, the children tumbled into bed, too tired to eat. Anne sat up only long enough to feed the new baby, who was still—through some strange superstitious reluctance on her part—unnamed and unchristened, known only as ‘the baby’, before she stretched out on the bed next to Patience.
‘Shall we truly be at home tomorrow?’ Patience asked, as if she no longer believed their journey would ever end.
‘Aye,’ said Anne, ‘if we reach Lichfield in time to hire a carriage to take us to Swinfen. The stage will pass along the road that edges our estate, but there would be no use in asking to be set down there. We should be abandoned at the side of the road with all our luggage, and with no means of carrying it up to the Hall. Indeed, the coach will drive directly past Blackbrook Farm, but I’m afraid I can’t leave you there to see your people. I shall need your help in Lichfield.’
‘I hadn’t realised we should pass Blackbrook,’ said Patience, smiling at the thought of seeing her home once more. She turned on to her side, with a rustling of the coarse, straw-filled mattress, and soon fell asleep.
Anne lay awake longer, imagining the comfort of a deep feather bed again. The day’s rough journey had set her sore ribs aching, and the pain made it difficult for her to relax. Tomorrow, God willing, she would be relieved of her cares when they reached Swinfen. The children would no longer be fretting and tormenting each other. There would be good, nourishing country meals of home-cured beef and ham and preserves. She would not even have the responsibility of running the household, which would be in the capable hands of her mother-in-law, Mistress Joane Swynfen. The management of accounts and the moneys she had carried from London could be handed over to John’s father. She would have nothing to do but rest, and to feed the baby. Even that task would be spared her if she could find a wet nurse. There was but one matter which cast a blight over these thoughts: neither the letter to her father-in-law sent from London nor the two from Oxford, warning of her arrival, had been answered. She had no means of knowing whether they had ever reached their destination. Perhaps even now a letter might pass her by on the road, heading towards Oxford. She yawned and eased herself awkwardly into a different position. Only one more day, and she could rest.
On the next day, the journey from Warwick to Lichfield passed a little more easily. The snow, while it continued to fall, was not as heavy, and the wind had dropped, so that less of the weather found its way inside the coach. When at last they drew near Weeford, the village whose church served Swinfen, it was as dark as it had been on the previous night when they had arrived in Warwick, but the road passed very close to the Wyatts’ home at Blackbrook Farm, and all of the party watched eagerly out of the right hand side of the coach, looking for its lights.
‘There!’ cried Nan at last. ‘That must be Blackbrook!’
She was right. Light showed in the parlour window and in one of the bedrooms. Patience leaned out and stared until they were past, then she sat back, glowing. Anne smiled at her. Patience had come to London hoping for adventure, but the events of the last two months had not been the kind of adventure she had been expecting.
‘I can’t see Weeford village,’ Jack complained. ‘You said Weeford was just by Patience’s house.’
‘Nay,’ said Anne. ‘You’ll not be able to see it. The village is clustered down in
a hollow, away from the road. And anyway, the trees would hide it. We’ll be passing Swinfen soon, but the trees are too thick for us to see the Hall, even at this time of the year with all the leaves fallen. You might see a light in one of our farms or cottages.’
No one managed to pick out any lights as they passed Swinfen. However, husbandmen go early to bed, particularly in winter, when candles or even rush dips seem too costly a price for extending the day. During the last two miles to Lichfield, they gathered up their baskets and bundles, so they could disembark as quickly as possible, to go in search of a private carriage. Since the last staging post, they had been the only passengers in the coach, and Peter had been able to join the others inside, to warm himself a little.
In Lichfield, they were fortunate. While Patience and Peter oversaw the unloading of the luggage from the roof of the coach, Anne went into the Black Swan inn in the Market Square, to see if she could bespeak a carriage to convey her party back along the road to Swinfen. It was but two miles, and though it was now full dark, it was not yet half past seven by St Mary’s clock. She was welcomed heartily at the inn, with many exclamations at the sight of her in Lichfield, when everyone thought her many miles away in London. Robert Verey, the innkeeper, who had been a young stable boy at Swinfen in the time of John’s grandfather, promised that he himself would drive them over to the manor in the inn carriage. The luggage which could not be accommodated in the smaller vehicle could be left at the inn and sent for the next morning. While the horses were being made ready, he insisted on treating the entire party to a dish of lamb collops, while his wife whipped up a syllabub.
‘’Tis not how I like to make it,’ she said apologetically. ‘You are best to milk the cow straight into the dish of cider and sugar, but tonight the milking is long finished. And there’s no time for the curd to set, so I’ve used a lemon to thicken it.’