by Ann Swinfen
She smiled back at him complacently.
When they heaved him at last on to the floor of the cart and it moved off along the track, he turned onto his side and buried his head in his arms before a great darkness rolled over him and shut out the world.
Dick Swynfen lay beneath a hedge, trying not to breathe too loudly and hoping that none of the dogs he could see in the field in front of him would nose him out or betray him to the company making camp there. He had been on the road for days now, and had lost count of the time. Somewhere he had missed his way, but he persuaded himself that if he continued to head north, sooner or later he would reach Staffordshire. At first things had gone well. Although the weather was abominable, and his clothes were soon soaked through, he had food enough, and the walking was not too strenuous. He had slept in barns when the chance offered, but no longer asked the farmers’ permission. On the second day of his journey, when he had approached a farm, cheerfully hoping for a bite of food and the chance to sleep under cover that night, the farmer had turned the dogs on him, taking him for a renegade soldier or some passing, roguish tramp. He had escaped with no more than a small bite on his ankle, but he knew he had been lucky. Men had been killed by packs of half-wild farm dogs before now.
Apart from this misadventure, he was happy at first with the distance he was covering, despite the bad weather and his failure to persuade any carter to convey him a part of the way. He had escaped school, and he felt himself a man at last, embarked on a great adventure. As he walked, he sang the song with which students celebrated the start of the long summer vacation and the flight from study to haymaking:
Hang Brerewood and Carter, in Crakenthorp’s garter,
Let Keckermann too bemoan us,
I’ll no more be beaten for greasy Jack Seaton
Or conning of Sandersonus.
Then, at the end of a week or so, his food had run out. He regretted now the careless way he had stuffed his mouth with dried fruit whenever the whim took him. He should have parcelled it out and made it last longer. Now, whenever he passed a farm, he skulked about and raided the hen house for eggs, which he ate raw, screwing up his face in disgust, but too hungry to pass up the chance of nourishment. At one farm, a prosperous place attached to a large manor house, he had even stolen kitchen scraps from the pigs’ trough. Bits of broken pie crust and half-gnawed bones and scraps of onion. But the swine had set up such an indignant squealing that he had fled from the spot and run until his breath was gone and he had to lie under a dripping hedge, sweating with terror.
He had a very small amount of money, but a sort of superstitious fear made him cling to it, as if its loss would reduce him truly to the vagabond state. From time to time he passed through a village or small market town, where he might have been able to buy food, but his few pennies would not go far, in these times of unprecedented prices. Besides, the shopkeepers would probably have driven him away at sight, for he knew he looked like the veriest beggar. His hat was broken, his clothes and person filthy, and one of his shoes was tied about with a piece of string, because the sole was half fallen off.
Now that he had made his way a little further north, he could see for himself the damage the war had wrought on the countryside. There were good fields left untended, where great weeds or unharvested crops poked up through the snow. Many of the country manors had suffered attack from one army or the other, gaping like toothless jaws where cannon balls had torn through their stonework, while cottages lay at the side of the road, burnt out and uninhabited, their blank windows staring like the eyes of the dead. He had spent a night in one, huddled in a corner where a bit of roof still gave some shelter. It had teemed with sleety rain that night, there was no whole barn or shed to be found, and the thickest of hedgerows would not have kept him dry, but he had hated the cottage. There were a few pathetic possessions still scattered about—a three-footed pot with a hole in the bottom, some filthy rags on a bed of rotten straw, and a torn baby’s cap.
The cottage had kept him from the storm that night, but he had not dared to sleep, fearing the ghosts of the people who had almost certainly died at the hands of passing soldiers before their house was set afire. He found a dead chicken outside the back door, but, hungry as he was, could not bring himself to eat it. It was crawling with maggots, and its glazed eyes seemed to gaze at him sorrowfully. When the dawn came, the place seemed less terrible, and because he was exhausted, he lay down, thinking he would rest for a few minutes.
He woke with a start some time later, and his heart gave a horrible lurch. Something had brushed against his face. Shaking with terror, he pressed his eyes shut, but when it came again they flew open and he yelled in panic. Something bounded away from him, and paused at the gaping hole where the door of the cottage had been. He was still shaking, his very hands trembling as if he had the palsy, when he realised that it was a half-grown kitten. With a weak laugh, he scrambled up and went towards it, but his yell had frightened it, and it ran off into the snowy undergrowth behind the cottage.
In his knapsack he had two shrunken apples he had found still clinging to a tree he had passed the day before, so he sat down and ate one of them slowly, trying to persuade his stomach that the apple was bigger than it was. It was hours since he had drunk anything, and despite the apple his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. It was one of his greatest difficulties, to find water to drink on the road. But the cottagers must have had a water supply. Searching around what had been their small plot of land, he could find no sign of a well, but a faint sound of running water led him to an ice-fringed brook, where he lay on his stomach and scooped the water into his parched mouth. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. As he lay there, his hands growing numb from the cold, he caught sight of a movement out of the corner of his eye. It was the kitten again. Clearly it was pining for companionship, for in spite of the fright he had given it, it gradually approached him, and at last allowed him to take it on his knee. It was a young female cat, pitifully thin, but affectionate and unafraid. Perhaps she alone had escaped the attack on the house, or perhaps she had been left behind when the family fled.
‘You must have a name,’ Dick said, finding the sound of his own voice strange, for he had not heard it for days. ‘How do you like the name . . . Ginger? For you have patches of fur that are the very colour of the spice my mother uses in her winter cordials.’
The cat kneaded his breeches with her paws and seemed quite content with the name.
‘I must warn you, however,’ said Dick, ‘if you come with me, you’ll probably starve, as I’m like to do. If you stay here, you’ll have mice and frogs to feast on, but there’s little food for a cat on the road.’
He set the cat on the ground and got to his feet. She looked up at him questioningly.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you shall choose for yourself. If you want to join with me, you must follow.’
With that he swung his knapsack on his back and started off along the road again. He would not allow himself to look back until he reached the first bend. The cat was trotting behind, but stopped when he stopped.
‘Well, then, Ginger, do you come?’ he said.
At the sound of his voice, she scampered towards him, and rubbed against his ankles. With a grin he picked her up.
‘Very well. I’ll not oblige you to walk, for it’s a long road.’
He tucked her in the front of his doublet, where her head poked out under his chin and her warmth gave him the first comfort he had felt for a long time.
Now, as he lay under the hedge a week later, he buttoned Ginger firmly out of sight inside his doublet, where she squirmed about and then settled quietly. The dogs in the field were, he feared, vicious and would probably kill her with a single snap of their great yellow teeth.
Peering out from his hiding place, he watched the curious collection of people in some puzzlement as they set up their camp. He had woken from his sleep under the thick hedge to the sound of voices and the c
latter of pans hanging from three dilapidated carts with canvas tilts. At first, he thought they were a group of renegade soldiers, making off from the army with their women. The country was swarming with such groups, and he knew they should be avoided at all costs, for they had nothing to lose and all to gain from slitting your throat and stealing your every possession, down to the clothes on your back, however ragged.
Half an hour must now have passed since they had begun to make camp at the side of the road, and as he watched them he grew less sure they were soldiers. Partly, it was the way they carried themselves. They had neither the swaggering arrogance of the army, nor the furtive look of fugitives. Instead they moved with an odd grace, not only the women but the men as well. They were all dark of colouring. Then, also, there was the large number of children. Dick knew the camp followers often included children, but surely not so many in proportion to the adults. These people looked like families, not like a group of deserters thrown together by chance and followed by their whores and wives, with a few babes at the breast. They went about their tasks efficiently, each knowing what to do, down to the youngest. While the men unharnessed and fed the horses and the women skinned rabbits and cut up onions, carrots and turnips, the children went off to a nearby copse and soon came back hauling dry branches for the fires. Three of the bigger boys returned each carrying two buckets of water. They had been so quick about it, they must have known exactly where to find some stream or pond, as if they had come this way before. The boys passed quite close by the hedge, where Dick lay shaking with fear that they would find him and set about him. They were talking together, but he could not make out any of the words. At last he decided they must be speaking some foreign language. There were many bands of Huguenot refugees fleeing into England these days, but Huguenots would have been speaking French, and he had a fair knowledge of French. No, it was not French, that he was sure. He wondered if they might be Dutch spies, but dismissed the idea as fanciful. Spies would not travel so openly and in such a large group. There must be thirty of them.
The women began to cook their rabbit stew in a huge iron pot fixed over one of the fires, and turned to making some kind of flat bannocks with coarse brown flour mixed with water. They flattened the lumps of dough between their hands, as they laughed and sang together, tossing circles of the paste spinning into the air, and catching them, and slapping them down on hot stones at the side of the fire to bake. Dick crouched under the dripping hedge, feeling miserably alone as the scent of the baking bannocks and the seductive aroma of the rabbit stew floated towards him.
He was wondering how long it would be before dark, and he might have some chance of slipping past without exciting the notice of the dogs, when one of the men, taller and more thickset than the others, with grizzled hair hanging below his hat, came walking straight towards the hedge where Dick lay hidden. From the first, this man had stood out from the rest. While the others worked, he sat on the step of one of the carts, apparently giving an occasional order. He carried a slender stick like a cane, with a top elaborately carved. When he reached the hedge he stopped, not six feet from where Dick lay. Dick held his breath, and felt the sweat trickle down his back with fear. The man reached out with his stick and lifted away the branches of elder and bramble which had concealed Dick’s hiding place. He regarded Dick with an expression that showed no emotion at all.
‘Well, boy,’ he said at last, in a curious accent, ‘are you friend or foe? Do you plan to spy on us all night? Or have you the courage to show yourself?’
Dick flushed at this slight to his character, and got up stiffly, brushing dead leaves and twigs from his clothes. The man had a low, musical voice, despite his strange way of speaking, and his eyes were compelling. Dick was grateful, at least, that he spoke English.
‘I am alone and you are many,’ he said, with as much dignity as he could contrive. ‘I couldn’t tell if you meant me harm. These are strange times, and there are dangers on the road for one who travels alone. I’m no spy. I am nothing but a traveller making my way home.’
‘Come and eat,’ said the man simply. ‘We would not leave any boy to starve when we have food.’
With that he turned his back and walked away, certain that Dick would follow.
Chapter Twenty
The soldiers had trussed John like a sheep’s pelt, winding him round and about with a rope they had had off the innkeeper at the tavern where they had stopped for the night. John hardly knew what had happened from the time they threw him back into the cart until he woke the following morning to worse pain than he had ever known in his life. His injured leg was caked with dried blood, and when he tried to move it, the pain shot through his whole body, so he decided it was better to lie still and wait to see whether they would leave him in peace, or whether they were going to beat him again. His clothes were stained with vomit, and his mouth was dry as barren rock in a desert.
They had not made a very good hand at binding him. The ropes were slack enough for him to shift a little, but he was not fool enough to try to untie himself. They would only bind him the tighter once they discovered it. His arms were still wrapped around his pack, so he was roped to it, but at least they had not robbed him of his few paltry possessions. Had he been hungry, he might have tried to work free some of the stale bread and cheese hidden there, but the thought of food made his stomach rise. All he wanted was water.
He was lying in an attic room with a sloping roof, and he could hear from below the sound of voices and of much activity in the stableyard. This was a better place than the taverns they had visited before. The attic room, though small, was well swept and clean. He had some vague memory from the previous night of glimpsing a large inn built round a stableyard overlooked by balconies on two storeys, the kind of place travelling players would choose to put on their play. Beyond that, he had no idea where he was.
How much a man’s perception of himself, of his very being, depends on knowing just what part he fills in the world around him. Beggar or king, waterman or innkeeper or yeoman, if he knows his position, his family, his village or town, he can be comfortable in his knowledge of his place. Stripped of his position in the world, robbed of family and friends, humiliated, beaten, betrayed and wounded, John found his sense of who he was slipping away from him. Not knowing where he was, in what village or town or county, sent him spinning down into a vortex of loss and confusion.
Only a few weeks ago he had been John Swynfen, distinguished young Member of Parliament, a man who could sway the country’s rulers by the power of his words and the sweetness of his eloquence. Now he was dirty and sick, a helpless bundle, a nameless prisoner. He realised that never once, since they had set out from Whitehall Palace, had the soldiers used his name. He was ‘you’ or ‘him’. Perhaps they did not know his name, who and what he was. To them he was no more than a job to be done, a tedious job, like delivering the ammunition to the army camps. They must deliver him somewhere, preferably intact, but if he was somewhat damaged in the process, they were indifferent, as long as they were not to lose by it.
Anne, he thought, oh beloved! I may never see you again, and we parted on such bitter terms. If I had only reached out to you that last morning, put my arms around you and held you close! He struggled against his bonds, as if reaching out his arms now he could somehow conjure her out of thin air. He fell back, biting his lip in helpless fury.
He tried to roll into a more comfortable position, but only succeeded in twisting his back. Then there came the sound of a key grating in the lock, and the door was pushed open. A young servant girl backed into the room, carrying a tray. When she turned and looked at him, she seemed startled. Probably his appearance was not calculated to inspire confidence. She set the tray down near him on the floor, and began to back away.
‘Wait!’ he said desperately. ‘I’m tied, I cannot eat or drink. Can’t you help me?’
‘I was told to leave the food and lock the door again,’ she said, speaking slowly and rather loud, as if he
were deaf or simple.
‘I don’t ask you to set me free,’ he said, ‘but you can see I can’t eat with my arms tied to my body. I beg of you, give me to drink, if nothing else.’
Cautiously, she drew nearer. She was very young, not more than twelve years old, not yet hardened with years of serving rough men with more drink than they could stomach, and evading their groping hands. Her hair was pale and soft as a brown moth’s wing, her bones as fragile as a young bird’s. She stopped beside the tray, which held half a loaf of bread, a small flagon of ale, and a hot meat pie, whose aroma tempted John to think perhaps he might be able to eat after all.
‘My mouth is so parched, I would beg of you some water. Also, my leg is hurt and needs bathing.’
After a moment’s consideration, she went out again, locking the door behind her, but she was soon back, bringing a jug of water, a basin and a cloth. She poured some of the water into the pewter tankard that was inverted over the flagon of ale, and, squatting down beside him on the floor, held it for him to drink. He drank greedily, some of the water running down his chin, but most flooding his grateful throat. He drank full three tankards before he stopped.
‘I know it’s none of your task,’ he said humbly, ‘but could you wash the dried blood off my leg, and tell me how bad is the injury?’
Again without speaking, she wetted her cloth, but first she washed his face, and as much of his hands as she could reach between the coils of rope. She worked earnestly and slowly, as if she were washing an infant brother or sister. Without lifting her eyes, she set about cleaning his leg. He tried hard not to wince, but the wound was hot and painful, and he flinched when she touched the place where the hurt was worst.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m trying not to hurt you.’
‘You’re doing very well. Ignore me if I recoil, it’s quite involuntary.’