by Ann Swinfen
After handing over Susanna’s letter to Nan, Anne walked alone down to the lakeside, near the spot where she and John had once tussled as children at the edge of the marsh. The late afternoon sky was dark and heavy with imminent rain and the lake lay still and dull as a pewter plate. A yard or two into the reeds a solitary heron stood, angular and articulated as a puppet contrived from twigs, one scaly leg thrust down into the water as if its body grew from this stem, the other tucked into its feathers, with only the claws curled into view. Its glassy eye was fixed on her without acknowledging her presence, its thoughts withdrawn, concentrated inwards, as though it listened for its prey within the hollow of its skull. The woman standing with her shoes pressing rings of water from the mud was no more to him than the belt of willows beyond her or the boat up-turned for the winter between them. He had the air of an anchorite who, if he noticed her at all, deplored her interruption of his self-contained contemplation. Something about his solitary purposefulness reminded her of the Irish shepherd.
The days, little by little, were beginning to lengthen, and the pace of work on the estate quickened. Josiah had decided that the Irishman could be trusted with the sheep, and left most of the lambing to him, with the occasional assistance of Roland Heathe, who walked over every morning from Weeford. As Josiah had warned, he was a weak sort of man, not able for heavy work, but he and Brendan established some sort of trust in each other, and lost but a single lamb, one of a pair of twins. In the meanwhile, Josiah and Christopher Fletcher set to the spring ploughing, Josiah leading the team, who were accustomed to him, and Christopher guiding the heavy plough through the rich red soil of the Swinfen fields. All the household had been cheered when Christopher had agreed to hire on, for he was a strong young man in his twenties, beside whom Josiah and Peter looked the old men they were. Christopher, too, walked over from Weeford, and went home in the evening to hoe and plant his own holding, while his young wife tended their one cow and one pig. The boy Isaac was left to the tasks about the yard, feeding the sows and the cattle, and milking, with Brendan and Roland lending a hand when they were not occupied with the sheep. The shepherd would stay on the home farm until calving and sowing and shearing were finished, then, in the warmer weather, he would drive the shorn flock of sheep up to Packington Moor and live in the bothy.
Josiah was still reluctant to take decisions about the work of the farm, so Anne received him every morning after milking, when they would sit together in the small parlour and puzzle out between them what to do. They decided which field must be left fallow, where to plant wheat, oats, barley and peas, when to move the cattle into the meadow beside the lake, and the sheep into the smaller meadow beyond, on the rising ground between the lake and the woods. On the day the cows, heavy with calf, were moved down to the meadow, Anne felt as though the worst trials of winter could at last be put behind her.
On that same day also, Brendan and Roland docked the tails of the lambs. It must be done, but Anne found she was not quite farmer enough to watch. Instead she took out paper and pen, and planned the planting of her vegetables. Nan, who had been beside herself with excitement at receiving her first letter, begged to be allowed to sit beside her at the parlour table and write a reply to Susanna, so that Anne’s thoughts on onions, carrots, pompions, leeks, and lettuces were constantly being interrupted as her daughter laboriously penned an account of all that was happening at Swinfen. When Anne looked the letter over, with its blots and misspelling, she realised with a sense of guilt that she had been neglecting the children’s lessons.
Hester made a hotpot of the lambs’ tails, stewed with ale and onions and a few carrots stored in sand since last year, and the whole household sat down that night to the first fresh meat, apart from rabbit, that they had eaten for months.
‘I’m sorry for the little lambs,’ Nan said, her mouth full of stew, ‘but this is very good.’
‘It’s stupid to be sorry for them,’ said Jack. ‘Brendan does it so quick, they don’t feel anything. Then he tars the stumps and they run back to their dams.’
‘Were you watching?’ Nan said, aghast.
‘Of course. A gentleman must know about everything on his estate.’
‘You won’t inherit Swinfen. It will belong to Dick.’
‘I shall get an estate of my own. I’ll marry a rich heiress.’
‘First you’ll need to find one,’ said Patience.
‘Anyway,’ said Jack, ‘tomorrow Brendan is going to make me a fishing rod, so I can fish in the lake, or up in the high pool. Brendan says now spring has come, sure the fish are just waiting to jump on to the hook.’
Anne hid her smile, for Jack had fallen into the Irishman’s very way of speaking.
‘You must take care, Jack, if you go fishing. There are some dangerous boggy places around the lake.’
‘Of course I’ll be careful, Mama. But now I am the man of the family, I must try to provide for you.’
Was this what the child believed? He had just passed his eighth birthday, he should be enjoying childhood with a light heart. Yet with both his father and his eldest brother absent, he had some reason for regarding himself as the head of the family. She was, after all, merely his mother, and a woman.
Ever since her visit to Weeford Hall to bring Bridget back to Swinfen, Anne had been uneasy about the way matters had been left with Mary, for Mary was her oldest friend and she longed not to quarrel with her. One morning, after the day’s discussion with Josiah, she rode the mare over to Weeford, with a gift of some of the peppercorns she had brought home from London and a few of the rarer ingredients she had purchased from the apothecary in Oxford. Mary was wandering about her flower garden in a large straw hat, cutting early blooms for the house and passing them to a maid to carry in a basket. Anne fell in beside her, admiring the formal beds edged with box which her mother had laid out and Mary had filled with a riotous abundance of foxgloves, hollyhocks and delphiniums, which had begun to thrust their tall heads up towards the warmer rays of the sun.
‘I’ve brought you these,’ said Anne awkwardly, handing over her gifts.
Mary nodded, her face turned away, and handed the spices to the maid.
‘I’ve come to apologise,’ said Anne.
Mary flashed her a look from under the brim of her hat.
‘Take the basket in, Tess,’ she said, ‘and these scissors. Put the flowers in water in the pantry and I will see to them later.’
The girl curtseyed and turned back to the house, while Mary headed swiftly away down the garden, with Anne following humbly at her heels. They sat down on a turf seat under an arbour, where a white climbing rose was coming into bud.
‘Well?’ said Mary, uncompromisingly.
Anne flushed at this brusque response, but continue gamely. ‘You’ve always been my dearest friend, Mary, and I hope our last meeting has not marred that.’
Mary said nothing.
‘I’m not certain why you are angry with me,’ Anne went on, somewhat desperately. ‘I am only endeavouring my best for Swinfen and the family. And you did not truly want Bridget here with you, did you? As a servant? You said it was difficult for you both. She’s needed at Swinfen. She has taken over most of the nursing of your parents.’
‘No doubt you are glad of her, then.’
‘Yes. I am glad of her.’
‘And do you still think you are fit and capable to run my father’s estate? It is Thomas who should take charge.’
Anne felt a little spurt of anger.
‘Mary, you know that Thomas has enough to do, managing the Weeford estate. I know that if I need help I can turn to him, and I know that his advice will be valuable, and kindly given.’
‘Indeed it will.’ Mary’s tone was somewhat softened.
‘Oh, Mary, let us be friends again!’ Tears came into Anne’s eyes as she threw her arms around her sister-in-law.
Mary pushed back her straw hat and Anne saw that tears were also running down her cheeks. She leaned
forward and kissed Anne. ‘Anne, my dear, I never wanted to quarrel with you! Of course we are friends. How could we be other than dearest friends!’
She hugged Anne and laughed.
‘I’ve have been trying to pluck up my courage to come and apologise to you! Come inside, the sun is growing too hot. We’ll have some small ale I have cooling in the dairy, and you shall tell me what you have been doing these weeks past.’
The men all being occupied with work about the manor, Anne decided next morning that she would ride to Lichfield to purchase the seeds for her vegetable garden. Roland had been set to dig it over with Isaac’s help. And she had warned Brendan to have his eye on Jack at the lake after he had made the fishing rod, to ensure that the young fisherman did not fall in, carried away by his new enthusiasm.
‘Sure, and does the lad not know how to swim?’ said Brendan. ‘Then it’s the teaching of him I should have, and the other laddies.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Anne. ‘They’ve been living in Westminster these three years past, with nowhere safe for them to swim. When the weather is warmer, we shall see.’ She was not sure that she would trust the Irishman alone with her children. There was something calculating in this offer to teach the boys to swim.
The ride to town on Brandy was very different from the cold journey to buy hay just after her return to Swinfen. The air was full of birds and birdsong, the rich scent of freshly turned earth rose from the fields, and the leaves on the trees were unfolding like clenched hands opening out their fingers to the sun. She rode first to Hill Hall Farm to speak to Mistress Turner, where she learned that one of the chimneys had partially fallen during a winter storm. She promised to hire a stonemason from Lichfield once she had ridden round the rest of the tenant properties to see what other work there might be for him.
In Lichfield there was a reliable seedsman, William Johnson, from whom Anne had always bought her vegetable seed when she lived at Thickbroome, and she soon had the packets made up, labelled, and tied into a parcel. The lad who worked in the shop looked at her with a curious smile as he handed it to her, and she realised, with a shiver, that he was one of those who had followed her, jeering, when she had tried to do business with Sylvester and the other farmers. She was glad to leave the shop. In the street she greeted a few of the townsfolk, but their replies were reserved, even curt. One man, a yeoman farmer whose land lay to the northeast of Swinfen, turned away without a word and spat into the dust. Anne recoiled from him, shocked.
This was not a market day, so the town was quieter than usual. Despite her uneasy sense of half-hidden hostility, it was pleasant to be free of work and decisions about the farm for one morning, so she decided to stroll about the streets in the spring sunshine. It was the first time she had done so since her return from London and she found the town a bitter sight.
The third siege of Lichfield, almost three years ago, had wreaked terrible destruction. Many houses bore the scars of shelling and musket fire, and most of Beacon Street had been burnt to the ground. But worse, far worse: during those same months of siege, the plague had raged through Lichfield, spreading its inexorable, insidious terror, killing a third of the townsfolk. In the past, the town had been mercifully spared the scourge of the plague, but the two armies had brought the infection with them as they crowded into the narrow old streets. Within the space of a few years, the quiet country town of her girlhood, slumbering in its dreams of vanished mediaeval glory, had been visited with an apocalypse of war, fire, plague, and famine. Many of the people stared at her with haunted eyes, and moved with the fearful, hunched gait of those who walk amongst the dead and dying.
She went past the Minster Pool and through the cathedral close. The Royalist garrison had turned the cathedral into a fortified stronghold, and Sir William Brereton, at the head of the Parliamentary troops, had shelled it from all sides. The bishop’s palace and the canons’ houses, nearly demolished in the bombardment, cowered empty as skulls, the close was strewn with the debris of war, the cathedral glass shattered, the grass cratered with shell holes. The two smaller spires of the cathedral were still intact, but Royalist snipers had used the great central spire as a vantage point from which to pick off their enemies. Brereton had pounded it with his Parliamentary guns until it collapsed into the nave. When she stepped inside, the once beautiful building seemed cold and forbidding, stripped down to Puritan austerity. The altar had been moved down into the body of the nave, as empty of meaning as a tavern table, and all the embroidered cloths and vestments had disappeared. The rubble from the spire was still strewn over the chancel and nave, and stone dust had drifted everywhere. Most of the roof gaped open to the sky. When she saw a minister in stark Puritan dress hurrying towards her from the ruined choir, with a forbidding expression on his face, she slipped away and almost ran back to the Market Square.
She had left Brandy in the stable of the Black Swan, and she called in now to collect her horse and also to ask whether any letters had by chance come for Swinfen.
‘There’s one come yesterday,’ said Robert Verey. ‘I have business in Tamworth next week, and if no one from Swinfen had come to collect it, I was going to bring it and see how you were all faring.’
‘Thanks to your help with buying the hay, the stock have endured the winter and are just turned out to pasture. I think we shall survive after all.’
‘Excellent, excellent!’ He beamed at her. ‘Now, where is that letter?’
He rummaged amongst the papers on his desk.
‘Here it is. That’s sixpence to pay, I’m afraid, Mistress Swynfen. It has come a long journey.’
She paid it gladly, and bought a glass of ale, too, to drink while she sat and read the letter. It was from Samuel Gott.
Battle, Sussex
Deare ffreind, Mistress Swynfen
I crave yr pardon on two counts — ye longe delay in replying to yrs & ye having to sende this by public mail (I feare wee may no longer speake of royal mail) for which yu must paye, I no longer having ye right to free passage of mail being seclud’d as a member of Parlyament. Yr lettre missing mee in London, it follow’d mee at ye last to Sussex, where wee live verie quietly away from ye busyness of London. It therefore being difficult for mee to get worde of yr husband. Ye most I can lerne is this, that ye moste part of ye prisoners taken by ye army are now set free, some to a kinde of prison within theire owne houses. One is escap’d abroad, Col. Ed Massey, who has nowe declar’d for ye young king. Still held at Windsor are those that were taken there in decembre last, viz. Waller, Browne, Clotworthy, & Copley, & Sir Wm Lewis sente there afterwards, all held without trial. Of some I can get noe news, & I greive that my deare ffreind John is amongst them. He was last seen taken to Whitehall Palace with v or vi otheres, & was then put into a kind of cart. None have seene him since. I praye you, do not greive, for I beleive that if ye worst had befallen him, his many ffreinds would have worde of it. I beseeche yu, keep up yur courage in these terrible times & I will send any further worde when I have them.
I beg yu give my remembrance to Master & Mistress Swynfen. My wife sends yu her lovinge regards.
Yr constant & true ffreind,
Saml Gott
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dick had been travelling for some time now with the gypsies. For that was what they were, he had learned, these dark, secretive people with their strange language, though they called themselves the Romany people. They were kind to him, but distant. They accepted him into their company because their leader Waldo had said it was to be so, but they showed neither pleasure nor resentment. Dick was determined that he should not seem like a beggar amongst them, so he strove his hardest to make himself useful, although he soon realised that boys much younger than he found some amusement at his efforts, even if they were careful to hide it from their elders. They had such multifarious skills, these vagabond children. Any one of them above the age of four or five could catch the half-wild ponies, leap on to their backs and gallop about a meadow without either saddle o
r bridle. By twisting their fingers in a horse’s mane and guiding it with their knees, they could perform complex manoeuvres like the riders he had once seen at a fair in London.
The women treated him like the other boys, sending him to fetch water or steal a chicken, but he usually came back empty-handed, a failure which shamed him more than the thought of stealing. Even the very small children could slip a hand under a hen and remove her eggs without causing her to stir. The only time Dick tried this, the hen set up such a squawking that he ruined the expedition for the other children, so they all had to run away and find another farm to raid. He was bigger than most of those who were counted as boys still, but he came to realise, humbly, that the boys of his own age were indeed already men by the gypsies’ standards, several of them married. They could shoot a deer silently with bow and arrow, and have it gralloched and hidden away before any keeper came near. The punishment for killing a deer was death or branding or the loss of an ear, but this seemed not to concern them. Dick had hunted deer at home, for there were deer in the Swinfen forests, but he had hunted with a gun, accompanied by servants to cut up the carcass. Now he watched the business carefully, since he might need these skills once he left the gypsies.
For they were not travelling in the right direction. Waldo told Dick they were headed westward for Herefordshire, where there were a few landowners who would allow them to encamp for a while, and other manors that had been so overthrown by the war that there were good pickings amongst the game, the families who had lived there having been killed or gone away.