by Ann Swinfen
‘There’s a house called Brampton Bryan,’ said Waldo, ‘where we’ll stay a while. It was a grand place once, and there are deer and pheasants a-plenty. But it stood for the Parliament, when all around were for the king. It held out against the siege for a long time, and my lady Brilliana defended it without her lord, who was away from home at the Parliament. She used to be kind to us, but she’s dead now. Some say the siege broke her heart, and then the house was taken at last and destroyed.’
Dick knew the story. How that gallant lady, not young but as courageous as any man, had held out for months against bombardment and starvation, with her small band of loyal women and servants. And he himself knew Lady Brilliana’s husband, Sir Robert Harley, and their son Edward.
‘My father knows . . .’ he began, then clamped his mouth shut.
Waldo nodded.
‘Better not to speak of such things, eh, boy? We don’t ask your business, and you don’t ask ours.’
‘But I do wonder,’ said Dick, ‘which side you favour in the war.’
Waldo laughed.
‘We take no sides, we people of the road. We slip between the spaces in the lives of such people as yourself, and you never notice us. Better that way. Better to take no sides. Better to save your skin and survive.’
‘But have you remained quite unscathed in all the fighting?’
‘Not altogether. When we hear an army coming, we fade away into the forest. And it’s not hard to hear an army coming, even when they’re some miles away, when the earth itself echoes with the feet of men and horses. We haven’t always been so lucky when we’ve stumbled on small groups of men. But mostly we’ve escaped unnoticed.’
There was, thought Dick, much to commend itself in such an attitude. Where had his father’s idealism led, when all was said and done? Failure and prison. Now that he was in the company of the gypsies, he was gaining a taste for the open road. With a good fire and hot food in the evening, and a blanket to roll himself in when they were packed warmly together in the carts at night, he was far happier than when he had been wandering alone. The blankets—and his companions—might be somewhat verminous, and he might need to keep a sharp eye that his cat was not mauled by one of the great watch dogs, but he was safe and free from hunger. Common sense told him, however, that he must part company with his friends some day and make his way to Staffordshire.
‘After you have been to Brampton Bryan,’ he said to Waldo, ‘where will you go then? For my road lies further east.’
‘We may stay in Herefordshire till spring. We often find work there, for the crops are seasonal, and the farmers always hire extra hands. We won’t go further west, for Wales is a bitter place in winter. Or we may go east, the way you want to travel. All the farms are short-handed since the war. We shall see what we shall see.’
And with that Dick had to be content.
Brampton Bryan was a wretched sight. Fire had gutted the beautiful castle after it was seized and looted, the roof had fallen in, and the windows had shattered in the heat. In the six years since the siege, good building stone had been prised from the broken walls, and plants had taken root in crevices. A rowan sprouted just inside the carved framework of the front door, and the brown skeletons of last year’s weeds poked through the drifts of snow still lying on the few gables which remained intact.
Dick prowled around the house, ignoring for once the general order to the children to gather firewood. What if he were to reach home and find that Swinfen Hall was reduced to such a ruin, burnt timbers lying in the great hall, barns and stables razed to the ground, his parents’ bed fallen through the floor and smashed into the parlour table? Would that be the price of his father’s long struggle to do what was right? It all rose so clearly in his mind, that it seemed like a vision of what had truly happened. For a moment he was filled with blind horror. Perhaps his whole family was already slaughtered, and he was alone in the world, doomed to roam as a gypsy for the rest of his days. Suddenly this vagabond life seemed a terrible thing, a flight from his own real life of warmth and family and friends, a flight from the cruel face of war, truly, but also a flight from all he had been taught about a man’s purpose in life. The gypsies had been good to him, but there was something cold about them. He was not of the same blood, nor held the same beliefs. He could never be one with them, never be altogether trusted, never be loved. He wanted to feel his mother’s arms around him, as if he were a little boy again.
Because his eyes blurred for a moment with unshed tears, he did not notice where he was putting his feet, and he tripped over something sticking up from the part-melted snow. He bent to pick it up. It was a little wooden figure, a mother and child. Not a Madonna, surely, for the Harleys were as Protestant as the Swynfens. No, simply a woman, any woman, a cottager perhaps, seated and cradling her baby on her lap. It was finely carved from a pale smooth wood he could not name, but valueless to the soldiers who had destroyed Brampton Bryan and brought about the lady Brilliana’s death. Not being made of precious metal or adorned in any way, it had been ignored by the looters. Dick crouched down and ran his dirty thumb over the smooth contours of the woman’s mantle. It might be worthless, but it took his fancy. And it seemed like some kind of omen. He slipped it into his pocket, where he could finger it, and if he felt guilty at behaving no better than those other looters, he consoled himself that he could always return it to the Harleys when next he saw them. He patted Ginger, who was curled up in her usual place inside his shirt, and went in search of firewood. He was lucky enough to find a long piece of linen-fold panelling, only partially charred at one end. Split into smaller pieces, it would keep the cookfire going for some time this evening.
So winter ended and the snow melted, while the gypsies remained encamped in the woods near Brampton Bryan. As Waldo had foretold, the pickings were good. They ate meat two or three times a day, there was abundant firewood, and there were pheasants and partridges to be trapped in the gypsies’ cunning snares. Dick knew that, as a gentleman bred, he should despise such low practices, but with every day that passed, he was thinking more like a gypsy and less like a gentleman. Why hunt game with all the noise and disturbance of men and dogs, and the habitual inaccuracy of the gun, when both deer and birds could be killed silently, and with far less trouble, by means of the arrow or the snare? The gypsies were not precisely lazy, Dick decided, but practical. Their skills were directed towards living their lives with little fruitless effort. Where the gentleman landowner despised the snaring of pheasants, the itinerant gypsy despised the ceremony and parade of the leisurely shoot. Perhaps if the gentleman were always dependent on his own skills to feed his family, he would not be so ready to condemn the methods of the gypsy. Dick remembered the poachers at home in Staffordshire, who would sometimes be brought before his father, who was a justice of the peace. He had once been taken to watch a session of the court, that he might learn what his own duties would be when he inherited the land. His father was known as a just and indeed a merciful man, but even with the most gentle interpretation, the laws against poaching were fearsome. Not even John could always spare the malefactor.
As spring began to turn the wood green, Waldo made several journeys away from the camp, sometimes staying overnight. Then one evening he called all his people together after the evening meal had been eaten. He spoke in Romany, but repeated his words in English, for Dick’s benefit.
‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that many of those who’ve hired us in the past are either gone away or dead or come to poverty. Last year’s bad harvests mean those who remain have no coin to hire outsiders such as ourselves. They’ll give work only to those of their neighbours who are reduced to beggary or become masterless men, and who’re ready to work for no more than food or to pay off their debts. We can look for nothing here, so we’ll return into the heart of the country, where the estates are larger and richer, and may have fared less ill from the disasters of war and weather. Our young friend here, who comes from those parts,’ he pointed to Dick,
‘may be some help to us in finding those farmers who are willing to take on day labourers.’
Dick smiled and nodded, but secretly he feared that he was in no position to give such help. He had been away in London for more than three years. Much would have changed in that time. Some would have lost their lands during the war, new men would have made profitable purchases when such opportunities offered. He was also certain that his own grandfather would have no dealings with the gypsies. For the first time he felt guilty that, in this carefree life he had been leading, he had given no thought to how worried his mother and his grandparents would be. By now Charterhouse must have reported his absence. His mother would believe him dead, or imprisoned like his father. He felt a mixture of relief and sadness when Waldo announced that the next day they would trap as much food as possible for their journey, then on the following morning pack up their camp and head north and eastwards, into Shropshire first, and then on to the county of Stafford.
The cell in Stafford Castle was damp and chill, the bed painfully hard, and the shackle on his leg both degrading and tormenting, but it was the lack of human contact which distressed John most. Rob a man of human company and his world is peopled with the spectres of his own feverish imaginings. He caught himself muttering aloud as he dragged his chain back and forth across the few yards of stone flags, yet the words floated without meaning in the dank air. His very thoughts flitted like may-bugs. Moments after some word or question or idea passed through his mind, it had vanished irrecoverably into grey fog. If a man cannot even follow the movements of his own mind, is he going mad?
Twice a day, a silent guard brought him food, always the same—a squat earthenware jug of water, a small loaf of bread (fresh in the morning, stale in the evening), and a lump of hard, dry cheese. He thought that if ever he left this place, he would never eat cheese again in his life. The chain allowed him movement enough to walk back and forth a short way in his cell, but not to come near either the door or the window, which was, in any case, out of reach above his head. He had made of the tattered remains of his stocking a pad to protect his wound from the chafing of the leg iron. The rough journey around Cannock Chase had opened the sore again and it was slow to heal, oozing a sticky yellow puss, streaked with blood. Surely the balance of humours in his body had been badly disturbed by his bitter time in the cart. A black melancholy settled on him.
No colour, no sound, no movement.
Within the grey stone walls of his prison, grey dust. Within the blank hollows of his mind, grey lethargy. He lay for hours staring up at the rough ceiling of his cell, trying to trace patterns in the cracks and lumps of stone, until he thought he could make out some meaning there, and then the pattern would vanish and he would cry out in pain, for he could not hold together in his mind even the simple map of the stone.
Deep underground, with nothing but that narrow slit high above his head to hint at any other world but this closeted space, he could hear no noise from outside. There were no sounds except those he made himself, or the soft footfall of rats, or the metallic rattle of cockroaches. Once, he tried to sing a psalm, as they had done in the cellar of Hell, but his voice emerged so harsh and broken that it frightened him and he ceased at once and never tried again.
As time passed, he even welcomed the scurry of the cockroaches across the floor, since it was a movement outside himself. He watched them attentively as they searched for any crumbs he might have dropped, then slithered back into the dusty cracks where they hid.
He could not breathe and woke often from sleep, fighting for air to fill his drowning lungs. Is this how a caught fish feels, gasping on the bank, waiting to die?
The wound in his leg had begun to fester, and a fever invaded his body. Hot in the cold cell, he tossed on the narrow shelf in half-sleep, sometimes waking on the floor amongst the straw and the rats. Into his ill-defended mind, unwelcome thoughts began to creep, like engineers cutting a mine beneath the wall of a besieged town.
God had surely abandoned him, as God had abandoned England. There was a contagion in the land itself, a festering sore, worse than any plague, a sickness of the mind.
There is no God. Fool that I was, ever to have believed in Him.
But who is this ‘I’, who does not believe? Do I believe in this I? Bone and sinew and blood and skin, but that is not I. Surely I must be more than this bag of rotting flesh?
In disgust, he could no longer put food into his mouth to rot there. The water was tepid and brackish and dribbled down his chin.
Slowly a boiling, furious anger began to build in him. He grew restless and could no longer sit or lie on the bed, but paced back and forth as far as the chain would allow, coming up with a jerk at one end and then back and then a jerk at the other end. Back and forth, not only by day but by night as well. He no longer wanted to sleep, for if he closed his eyes, this ‘I’, who might not exist except for the bag of rotting flesh, would disappear for ever. Only by staying awake and watchful could he be sure that it did not perish.
One morning the gaoler came with food and put it down on the shelf as usual. John lunged forward, grabbing the man around the throat. Taken by surprise, the gaoler went down on one knee, but in a moment had thrown John off and retreated to the door. John gave a howl like a hungry animal and flung the water jug at him. It smashed against the wall and the pieces fell musically to the floor amongst the joyous splashing of the water.
‘I know who I am!’ John cried, in a voice too high-pitched to be his own.
Then the man was gone and the water sank into the dust. And once again there was no colour, no sound, no movement.
For two days the light came and went in the high window slit, but no one entered his cell, and all the time John sat hunched on the floor, his head on his knees and his arms over his head, as if to ward off blows. Gradually his heartbeats slowed, his anger soaked away like the lost water.
On the third day he went as close to the door as he could reach and shouted, begging for water. Some hours later, they brought it. When he had drunk, he lay down on the shelf. Images and words swirled in his brain, but made no sense, held no structure. He knew he was descending into the hell of madness, and the fragile self would be lost for ever.
And then, one day without warning, everything changed.
One of the guards arrived during the morning, about an hour after his breakfast had been brought. Normally he would not expect to see anyone for another eight hours or so.
‘Fetch your belongings,’ said the man, kneeling down to unlock the leg iron. ‘You are to come with me.’
His manner was subtly less harsh than usual. What could it mean? John picked up his bundle, which had remained tied and serving as a pillow since he had arrived here. He had not even bothered to change his filthy, stinking clothes for the others which, however creased and musty, must be cleaner than those he was wearing. The man led the way out of the cell and back up the stairs to the open courtyard, with John limping after him. Out in the air, he screwed up his eyes against the unaccustomed light and breathed deeply. There was a scent of spring and new growth in the air, even here in the enclosed castle. He felt weak and dizzy, but struggled to gather strength for what might lie ahead.
He was not dead. This was his hand before his face, this was his cheek on which the rays of the sun fell.
‘Move along,’ said the guard, not unkindly. ‘You mustn’t keep the governor waiting.’
So he was to see the governor of the castle. If he was no longer to be held as a nameless prisoner in the dungeons, this marked a change in his fortunes, but whether for good or ill, it was difficult to judge. Since he had been told to bring his belongings, he might not be sent back there.
They entered a door on the opposite side of the courtyard and climbed a flight of wide shallow steps. John had been here before, when the Committee for Stafford had inspected the place, and had even stayed as a guest here later, when his friend Captain Henry Stone was governo
r. They crossed the Great Hall of the castle, then beyond it climbed more stairs and entered a small room, which the governor used as his private office. John was ushered in and told to wait.
When he had waited for perhaps half an hour—long enough to make him feel his humble status, but not long enough to allow him to contemplate the possibilities of escape—he heard the ring of booted feet on the stairs and his heart jumped painfully. The door opened, and a man entered. John recognised him, but said nothing, judging it best to guide his own behaviour by the demeanour of the governor. He clasped his hands behind his back to steady their shaking.
The man checked for the merest moment, then continued across the room to where John turned from looking out of the window, cherishing the sight of something beyond four damp stone walls. It was only by a flicker in his eyes that the governor betrayed his reaction to John’s appearance.
‘Good day to you, Master Swynfen,’ he said, shaking John by the hand, ‘the Lord be with you.’
‘And with you, Colonel Danvers,’ said John.
‘I trust I find you well?’ The governor looked embarrassed.
‘As well as can be expected,’ said John gravely, aware that the stench of his unwashed body and clothes must be offensive to Danvers, who was something of a dandy in his person, despite his extreme religious views, which tended to millenarianism. John’s hair and beard were matted, for he had nothing to comb them with but his fingers. His torn stocking was still wrapped around his wound, which had continued to ooze after it had opened again and which gave off its own sickly stink.
‘Please, sit down,’ said Danvers, indicating a high-backed carved chair with a cushioned seat.
‘I fear I may mark the velvet,’ said John, but Danvers waved aside his comment and gave orders to the servant at the door to bring wine and food.