This Rough Ocean

by Ann Swinfen

  She gave him a quick startled look through her lashes, then turned to bathing his leg again.

  ‘Your stocking is quite shredded away. Shall I take it off for you?’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘I think so. I can free your shoe and pull off the stocking.’

  She worked the stocking down behind the strands of rope, peeled it off carefully and put it aside as she eased his shoe on again. He realised that his foot had swollen. She peered closely at the injury, then leaned forward and sniffed it.

  ‘I think it’s quite clean. There’s no putrefying smell.’

  ‘Where did you learn to do that?’

  She gave him a shy smile.

  ‘I was one of fourteen children. I’ve often had wounds to bind. And sometimes my father would hurt himself about the farm, perhaps with the scythe at harvest time.’

  ‘You live on a farm?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘All that was destroyed in the war. And our lord was for the king, so we were turned off our land. Then my father was killed. This hurt was done by a musket ball, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was. How did you know that?’

  ‘There’s been much fighting in these parts. Yours is not the first wound I’ve cleaned, nor I don’t suppose the last. The ball has passed right through the flesh of your calf, so you’ve been lucky. I think it should heal, but I’ll bind it with what’s left of your stocking.’

  When she had finished dressing his leg, she helped him to eat and drink, which John did doggedly, knowing he must eat to fight off weakness. The pie was good—rich with thick gravy and tender pieces of beef and mushrooms. When he had eaten everything, and she had gathered up the tray to leave, he stopped her.

  ‘Wait a moment. I’m grateful to you for your care. For binding my wound and for feeding me like the pelican in her piety. What’s your name?’

  ‘Martha.’

  ‘A fitting name.’

  She gave him the ghost of a smile.

  ‘Martha or Mary? I’ve washed your leg, not your feet, and I’ve no oil for anointing. And truly I’m more Martha than Mary.’

  He was startled.

  ‘I don’t cast myself in that role, though truly I am abused by mine enemies. You know your scripture.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘My eldest brother was very clever, he was to enter the church. Our lord was his patron. But both were killed fighting for the king. Now all my family is dead or scattered.’

  She went to the door, then paused and said softly, ‘Are you for the king? Is that why the soldiers use you so?’

  ‘Nay, Martha, I am a Parliamentman. But I refused to countenance the killing of the king. So I am imprisoned and beaten. I believe in the middle way, the way to peace, but that’s a dangerous philosophy in a time of passions so extreme. He was God’s anointed, Charles Stuart, but he was arrogant and stubborn and blind to the changed times in which we live now.’

  ‘He is dead, then, the king?’

  ‘He is dead.’

  Tears welled up in her eyes, and her shoulders slumped. John could think of no words to comfort her, but he said, ‘The men who have seized the government of this land claim to act in the name of the people, but they too are corrupted by power. It will not always be so, Martha. Someday, this land must be healed. We cannot for ever tear each other apart in such hatred. ‘

  ‘I pray you are right, sir.’

  ‘Martha, tell me, where is this place? For I have no idea where we have been, or where they are taking me.’

  ‘Why, this is Bicester, sir. ’Tis a market town in Oxfordshire.’

  ‘I know it. So, we are heading north.’

  ‘I must go, sir, or I shall be scolded for staying so long. Will you tell me your name?’

  ‘My name is John. That’s probably all that it’s wise for you to know.’

  ‘John. Who came to show the way.’

  John shook his head.

  ‘I cannot see my own way, Martha. Do not imagine me capable of showing the way to others.’

  She was turning away and he longed to call her back again, the first person to have shown him kindness for weeks.

  ‘Martha, wait!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Will you . . . will you touch my hand, Martha? I would take yours if I could.’

  She knelt down beside him, setting aside the tray, and laid her two hands over his where they were imprisoned under the rope. As she came near, he could smell her sweet clean skin. She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips with her soft child’s mouth. Then she scrambled to her feet, taking up the tray, and before John could speak she had slipped away, closing and locking the door behind her. John heard her swift steps descending the stairs and then suddenly a man’s voice, shouting, and the crash of falling dishes and the crunch of a fist on flesh. And a girl’s sharp cry, broken off.

  

  The journey continued later that same day. When John was pushed into the cart again, he found that more of the wooden crates had been loaded on board, so it seemed they were to deliver further supplies to the army. While he was in the cart under the eye of the four soldiers, they loosened the bonds about his arms, though not about his legs, so he was able to eat the scraps of food they threw him, which were increasingly poor and sparse. The good meal he had enjoyed at the inn must have been the gift of the innkeeper, or of the girl Martha. Now he had to survive on dry cheese rinds and ends of bread so stale he needed to soak them in the sour ale they allowed him before he could risk biting on them. The blows he had received to his face had loosened several of his teeth. He had constantly to remind himself not to worry at them with his tongue, in the hope that if he let them be, they might in time sit firm in their sockets again.

  The cart and its occupants continued their rambling way northwards, zigzagging across the countryside and stopping from time to time to deliver crates to camps sited at strategic crossroads, or to garrisons in towns or in manor houses seized from Royalists and now fortified against further attack. It seemed Cromwell and the generals were not yet sure whether the king’s execution would provoke an uprising. John decided that the wandering route followed by the cart was an attempt to avoid detection by Royalist sympathisers, who might have attacked them and seized the military supplies for their own use.

  Although Martha’s care of his wound had probably saved his leg from festering, it did not heal quickly. A day or two after leaving Bicester, John developed a fever, which left him confused, so that afterwards he was never sure how long the journey had lasted. In some ways he was glad of the fever, for it sent him into a kind of half-sleep, which saved him the trouble of thinking about his plight, and helped the tedious hours pass more quickly, but it also had the effect of making him perpetually thirsty, and the soldiers would never give him enough to drink. In his more lucid moments, he noticed that his hands seemed to be withering, the skin dry and slack, the bones and sinews clearly visible. On the parts of his face not covered by stubble, the skin flaked off, making him wonder how strange he must look. Enough to frighten even a girl with as stout a heart as Martha. His head itched constantly from the lice and fleas that infested his hair, having migrated there from the straw in the bottom of the cart, and the wound on his leg continued to ooze, attracting flies. He was thankful the weather was still almost as cold as winter. In summer the insect life would have tormented him almost beyond bearing.

  In the long shapeless hours lying in the cart, drifting in and out of feverish sleep, he found himself thinking constantly of Anne. Theirs had always been a marriage of minds as much as of bodies, for they had been friends long before they were lovers. When his father had first suggested to John Brandreth that a marriage between the families would be a good plan, Anne and he had smiled secretly at each other, for they had known since they were twelve years old that they would marry.

  They had first seen each other as babies, carried to Weeford church every Sunday by their nursemaids,
he from Swinfen Hall by carriage, she from Weeford Hall, a stone’s throw from the church. They must have eyed each other even then, in their adjacent pews at the front of the church, each seeing the other as a fixed part of their shared lives of family and village and manor. No, he could not remember their first meeting. As small children, he and Anne and his sister Mary had played together, then she had gone for a while to live with relatives in Kent.

  The spring when they were both nine, she had come home again, and that meeting he did remember, a memory as clear and bright as a cut jewel. He had gone down to the Swinfen lake one early morning with his fishing rod. The mist was rising from the grass, as it often did in the water meadow, so that the cows appeared to be wading up to their knees in clouds. As he neared the lake, he was indignant to see that there was someone already standing with a rod at his favourite place, a figure in breeches and a hat too large for his head, who turned and watched as he approached.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing, poaching on our lake? Be off with you, before I set the servants on you.’

  She was dressed in her brother’s clothes, and she gave him an impudent smile. He glowered back, trying to appear threatening, then he snatched her rod and threw it aside. At that, she flew at him and began pummelling him with her fists. In a moment they were rolling over and over on the wet ground amongst the rushes, fighting like two lads.

  ‘Nay, stop, stop, Anne,’ he cried, for she was near to getting the better of him. ‘I did but tease you. I know who you are.’

  She was sitting astride him by now, her fingers twined in his hair, preparing to bang his head on the ground. Her hat had fallen off, her hair was tangled over her face, and she glowed with a mixture of anger and laughter.

  ‘Apologise!’ she demanded.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said at once. ‘But it was an easy mistake. A scruffy lad, fishing where he had no right . . .’

  She gave his head a small thump.

  ‘Pax, pax, magistra! I’m sorry.’ He heaved her off and sat up. ‘Oh, it’s good to have you home, Anne.’

  She lay back amongst the rushes and gazed up through the shimmer of mist at the sky.

  ‘I’ve missed all this so much. I’ve even missed you, John Swynfen.’ She broke off the stem of a rush and began idly peeling it. ‘My brother wouldn’t thank you for calling his clothes scruffy.’

  ‘Perhaps it was the wearer . . . Nay, nay! I’ll have done.’

  Suddenly, a look of alarm came over her face, and she tried to sit up, but thrashed about like a foundered calf.

  ‘Oh, help me, John! I’m sinking into the marsh.’

  He thought at first she was teasing him in her turn, then realised from her scared look that she was really in trouble. He lay on his stomach and reached out to her. The mud was already sucking her down, but as she struggled and he pulled, she came away from the marsh with a sucking sound and they both rolled over on to dry land.

  ‘You owe me your life now,’ he said.

  That was when he first became aware of her as a separate person, when she had fought him like a boy, and he had pulled her out of the marsh. It was hard to believe, when he looked at the beautiful woman in her Westminster house, dressed in the finest Levantine silks, with jewels in her ears and clasped about her neck, that this was the same Anne who had fought him in the mud of the marsh. He had not reminded himself often enough that the two people were the same.

  

  At last the day came when the fever seemed to have subsided somewhat, and he began to take more notice of his surroundings. There had been two days of late snow which lay deep on the fields which he could see out of the back of the cart. He overheard Tize and Ed talking about a final delivery to a detachment of horse stationed just north of the little town of Birmingham, and his heart leapt. A man might walk from Birmingham to Swinfen in less than a day; a man, that is, with two sound legs. Two sound legs, which John had not. Although the skin was beginning to close over his wound at last, he found when he climbed down from the cart at night that he could barely stand. The long confinement, and the ropes that tied his legs together all day long, were making him as crippled as an old man with the rheumatics. There was no danger than he might run away from his guards any more. He could barely hobble from cart to inn door and back again next morning.

  But wasn’t this a good omen? That they were near to Birmingham? Perhaps these men were to deliver him home, and the rigours of the journey had been meant merely as a punishment, to show the extent of the displeasure Cromwell and Ireton felt against him, for standing up so determinedly as an advocate for peace.

  The army encampment where the soldiers unloaded the last of the crates was at a place called Whitehouse Common. It seemed to John that his guards, having kept him ignorant of his whereabouts for so long, were now deliberately allowing him to overhear their route as they neared his home, enough to arouse his suspicions. Given their natures and their behaviour towards him, they were more likely to be tormenting him with this knowledge than holding it out as a happy promise of his journey’s end. Leaving Whitehouse Common very early one morning, before dawn, they took the road that would lead past Weeford and Swinfen and so to Lichfield.

  Sitting at the back of the cart, John watched the road unroll away behind them with growing excitement, which he attempted to hide. These woods, these small hills, were as familiar to him as his own fields. It was a bright morning when they passed Weeford and Thickbroome, where the Sylvesters now farmed. On the Weeford side of the road he caught sight of figures moving near the stables of the Wyatts’ Blackbrook Farm, but no one turned to watch the cart passing on the road. Should he cry out? If the men of Patience’s family realised he was being carrying past under their very noses, a bound prisoner, they would rush to his rescue, but Tize was sitting with that deadly musket across his knees. A man who could wing John a hundred yards away in the treacherous light of the moon could bring down any man running towards the cart in daylight. He glanced sideways at Tize and saw that the man was watching him, with a smile twitching his lips. The other soldiers might not make any connection between their prisoner and the country they were passing through, but Tize knew.

  The cart passed over the crossroads and continued ahead. Unable to contain himself, John strained over the edge of the cart to catch a glimpse of the Swinfen lands as they passed. Patches of snow still lay on the ground, but the trees wore their first elusive shimmer of lime or gold or crimson, where the buds of the new leaves were forcing their way through the tough bark into the light. His heart was filled with a chaos of emotions; he longed to hold Anne in his arms again, to play with his children in the meadow beside the lake, to ride over his land and assure himself that all was in good heart, to climb the great oak in Simon’s Piece and sit there as he had done as a boy, rocking gently in the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a man-of-war.

  Tize leaned forward and clouted him on the side of the head with the butt of his musket.

  ‘Don’t lean out so far. Thinking of trying to run off, are you? I’ll have that other leg of yours, if you do.’

  John sank back and rested his forehead on his folded arms. His head throbbed with the blow, but he would not give the man the satisfaction of showing it.

  Before long they were passing through Lichfield, where they stopped in the Market Square just long enough to demand food by the simple expedient of threatening the stallholders, then they were through the town and out again on the open road. For a moment John had hoped they were going to deliver him up to the magistrates in Lichfield, most of whom were old friends. Indeed, he was himself still a justice of the peace here, unless someone had thought to deprive him of that office. He cursed himself for a fool as they headed into the country. If he had simply rolled out of the cart in Lichfield, there would have been little the soldiers could have done. They were not likely to start shooting in the midst of a busy town on market day. Surely? Even if they had recaptured him—and he might have been able to seek the help of fri
ends first—then the people of Lichfield would have known what was happening. Someone might have attempted to rescue him.

  Or perhaps they would not. Would any in Lichfield recognise him in his present state? Filthy, bearded, limping, gaunt, in clothes as dirty as a tramp’s, he bore little resemblance to the gentleman of Swinfen Hall, who used to ride into town to conduct manor business or county affairs with the other great men of the shire. He slumped down again, only occasionally glancing out to see how far from Lichfield they had travelled.

  By mid-afternoon, they were heading along the eastern edge of Cannock Chase, and the driver was urging the great horses to a faster place. The Chase had long been the resort of outlaws and highwaymen; there was no doubting he wanted to be beyond its edge by the time night fell. Since the war had begun, this wild area had become notorious as a place of refuge for deserters and broken men of every sort. The only place of safety where the cart could stop now was Stafford, and that was some way off yet, the road in between shattered and ill-maintained during the bad years.

  John sensed that the soldiers were growing nervous. Tize handed out muskets to the other three and bade them load, and light their slow matches, to be ready in case of any trouble. He himself bound John’s arms again, so that he lay like an old hen trussed for the pot, only able to see one small corner of sky between the canvas flaps. Tize climbed through with his own musket to sit beside the driver. The horses, who rarely went at more than a walk, broke into a trot and then a slow canter, sending the cart, now lightened by the absence of its load of ammunition, swinging from side to side and pitching about. John bit his lip to stop himself crying out with pain as he was thrown from side to side, his wounded leg dashed against the rough framework of the cart. When he looked down, he saw that it was bleeding again.

  To add to their troubles, the patch of sky showed that heavy clouds were building. If the rain came, the kind of rain that had flooded England since the king’s execution, the cart might become hopelessly bogged down. If it fell as snow—and the day was cold enough—they could become snow-bound on the Chase. Many a man, native to this country and born within five miles of the Chase, had perished here.