by Ann Swinfen
While they waited for this to arrive, Danvers talked inconsequentially, about the state of the castle’s defences, about the spring ploughing—anything, it seemed, to fill the awkward minutes. After he had poured wine for them both, he sat back in his chair with the air of a man about to proceed to business.
‘Now— ,’ he said.
‘Wine,’ said John, interrupting him and turning the fine Venetian glass in his hand, so that the sunlight winked in the pale gold liquid, throwing a gleam over the engrained filth on his skin. ‘I have not drunk wine for these . . . three months past, is it? Or would it be four? Or five? I’m not sure of the date. Not since the last evening in my own home. The seventh day of December, that would have been.’
He was physically weak, and sick; he had been shot, beaten and humiliated. His mind had trembled on the brink of disintegration. But he knew from his time in the political life of the nation that it is a wise man who takes control of the tone of a conversation from the start. He tasted the wine.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘From France, of course. None of our weak English stuff. My grandfather used to say that in his grandfather’s view, the art of wine-making was lost to us with the dissolution of the monasteries by King Harry.’
He took another sip.
‘I would judge this to be from the Loire region, am I right? A very fresh, delightful wine.’
‘Yes, near Amboise, I understand.’ Danvers was clearly disconcerted by the direction the conversation was taking. ‘I had a crate of it sent up from London.’
‘And some excellent cold meats,’ John continued remorselessly, eating some ham baked with a crust of mustard and Barbados sugar. ‘It’s good to taste something other than dry cheese. And I must temper this wine with food, must I not? For I should take care to keep a clear head, in considering whatever it is that you are going to propose.’
Danvers appeared relieved at last to find an opening.
‘You are right. I have indeed a number of things to propose to you.’
‘And before you do that—incidentally, this pickled beef is delicious, please convey my compliments to your cook. Yes, before you do that, perhaps you would do me the courtesy of explaining who now rules England? I have been . . . somewhat out of touch with affairs lately. A regrettable lapse on my part, I am sure you will agree.’
He calmly helped himself to more meat, and some of the fashionable cold sallat which accompanied it.
‘Damn it, Swynfen!’ Danvers jumped up and began to pace the room. John kept his face expressionless, but inwardly he smiled. He waited.
The governor stopped in front of him and stood with hands on hips.
‘My orders are to move you to a comfortable chamber and provide all that you require, while you are given time to consider your position.’
‘I am very well aware of my position,’ said John.
Danvers gave an exasperated sigh.
‘His Highness suggests that you might find it in your interest to abandon your previous political stance, and write a statement supporting the present government.’
John felt a shock of surprise. His Highness. Who did Danvers mean? Charles, Prince of Wales, was His Royal Highness, but perhaps, since the Monarchy had been abolished, the epithet ‘royal’ no longer applied? Had Cromwell come to some agreement with the prince? Surely not. Not after all his trouble in seizing London and destroying Parliament.
‘His Highness?’ said John cautiously.
‘General Cromwell.’ Danvers looked a little confused, as if he had let slip something he should not have said.
‘General Cromwell believes you should be given time to reconsider. He has generously decided to allow you to show your support for the de facto government.’
‘De facto, but not de jure,’ John murmured, but Danvers chose not to hear him. ‘He has decided that, has he? That was generous of him, certainly.’
‘Most of your friends have accepted the present situation, and the need to restore the country to a state of order and stability. They have engaged with the government, and will take their seats again in Parliament.’
John gazed at him stonily. Danvers was making himself very busy about pouring out wine and helping John to more of the food, so that his face was averted. It was impossible to read his expression, but Danvers was not a subtle man, not a man to lie with the silky ease of certain politicians of his acquaintance. No, on the whole, John was suspicious of this last assertion. He was certain Danvers was lying. However, he thought it wiser not to air his suspicions. Better to accept this offer of more comfortable accommodation and await developments.
After his interview with the governor, John was conducted to a chamber on the same floor, a tower chamber which differed from the others in this part of the castle only in having a lock newly affixed to the outside of the door. A good fire was burning in the hearth, with plenty of wood to keep it stoked. There was a great carved bed, as comfortable as any at Swinfen Hall, a kist, some chairs and joint stools, a table, even a basin and jug for washing, and a towel.
The servant who had brought him to the chamber—a servant, not a soldier—asked whether there was anything else he required. John thought rapidly.
‘A razor and glass,’ he said, ‘that I may shave. Writing materials. When I have changed my clothes, I would have the soiled ones washed and mended.’
The servant looked at John’s leg. ‘I’ll send one of the women to dress your wound.’
An hour later, John felt as though he had undergone some kind of baptism into a new life. He was clean and shaved, and his leg had been bathed and salved with some skill by one of the women servants. She was not as gentle as the child Martha, but she knew her work, and clucked with indignation over the filth of the makeshift bandage and the state of the injury.
‘I’ll leave it open to the air, sir, once I’ve salved it,’ she said, ‘and look at it again tomorrow.’
She had taken away his dirty clothes for washing and mending, and he was now dressed in clothes from his bundle, which were hardly clean, for they had been wrapped around the bread and cheese which he had hidden there when he made his attempt to escape. The bread had turned as hard as a iron, and the cheese had seeped grease into the clothes, now adorned with strange, irregular patches, which the woman promised she would scrub out after she returned the clothes he had been wearing. Once he was alone, he used the razor to nick the stitches that held his remaining coins in place in his shirt bands, and knotted them in the tail of the shirt he was wearing.
After this washing of his person and sorting of his apparel, he felt suddenly overcome with exhaustion. All these past weeks he had been trying to hold himself under tight control; now that he was no longer treated to the physical abuse of a criminal, he could at last relax. His body screamed for rest, his joints hurt, his head ached. He went to the window and looked out. The room had been chosen with care. Below the window, the wall of the castle dropped sheer to the ramparts. The grass which clothed them was a bright and vigorous green, and John realised that, while he had been confined in a blind cell, spring had arrived. There was no chance of escape by way of this window. Not that he would even contemplate escape for the moment. He was too weak, too tired. Whatever game Danvers was playing with him, at the orders of the men in power, John’s own aim now was to regain his health and strength. In this chess game of political recantations and imprisonment, he would play for time until he felt himself strong enough to attempt escape or face worse imprisonment again.
He saw a flutter of movement, and from a stone corbel in the wall adjacent to his window, a thrush swooped down and landed on the sill beside the open casement. It regarded him with a bright eye, knowing but unafraid.
‘Unwise,’ John murmured, ‘for I have known men quick as a cat, who would have you, and your neck rung, before you could raise your wings.’
The bird hopped a little nearer. John backed slowly away from the window to the table where he had left the stale bread. He broke off a piece, and moving carefully back
to the window, crumbled the bread and scattered it on the sill. The bird began to peck at it, seemingly unconcerned that it was so hard. John leaned his shoulder against the stone transom of the window, watching it eat, quick and efficient.
‘It’s a happy man,’ he said, ‘who has food enough to share with the dumb creatures of the field and forest.’
At the sound of his voice, the thrush froze, and eyed him carefully before it resumed its pecking. Soon, all the crumbs were gone. The bird hopped along the sill, leaned slightly forward and launched itself out over the void. John watched it as it swooped away and was lost to sight amongst the trees clothing the lower slopes of the castle hill.
‘And happy the bird, who is free of this cage, with the liberty to move about the sky and the earth as it will.’
He felt suddenly such a longing for freedom, with this first sight of the world after his weeks in the dungeon, that he had to seize hold of the transom to avoid flinging himself out after the bird. Sweating with the wave of heat that rushed through his body, he walked unsteadily back to the table and stood gripping the edge of it. Then he took more of the bread, and crumbled it, and strewed it over the window sill in the hope that the thrush might return. After watching in vain for the bird, he went back to the table and laid out paper, ink and pen. Danvers had said that he might write to his family and friends, but where to begin? He decided in the end that it was best to spare Anne the details of his ordeal, and simply relay the facts: that he was alive and in reasonable health, and that he was in Stafford, not many miles from Swinfen. He did not flatter himself that Danvers would send the letter by private messenger. But even by the slowest of public mails, Anne should receive his letter within the week, so near at hand was she. The thought gave his heart a lift. Why, if he were released, he could walk home in a few days, provided he could survive the thieves and cut-throats of Cannock Chase.
My dearest hearte, my love, my all,
I feare yu will thinke mee dead by all this time that has pass’d, & yu hearing nothing of mee. Believe mee, deare hearte, had I any means of writing yu should have hear’d tell of mee ere this. I am now held at Stafford castle, whither I was brought from London by a somewhat tardy route. Col. Danvers is governor heere, & hee has lodg’d mee in a comfortable chamber for this time, where I have meate & drinke & all things proper for my care, & physicke for a wounde I receiv’d on ye journey, but I am held faste & cannot come to yu. I trust in God that all will bee well. I trust also that yu & ye children are safe in my father’s care by this, & that yu may reste from all yur labour, for it is right that the woman should dwell under ye shielde of a man’s arm. Since yur husband cannot bee at your side, I take comfort knowing that my father is able to stand in his place. From my windowe I see ye ploughs about their worke in ye feilds, & in ye eye of my hearte I see ye feilds of Swinfen turned by ye plough & receiving seed for ye new seasons crop. I thank ye Lord for His manifold goodness, & pray that He keeps yu & all our kin in His blessed care.
I am always yur moste loving husband who lack nothing but to lie in yur armes once again, my moste beeloved.
John Swynfen
When this letter was brought to Colonel Danvers in his office, he warmed a thin knife in the flame of his candle, then with great care slid it under the seal which held the folded sheet of paper closed. The letter was addressed, not to one of Swynfen’s political allies as he had hoped, but to the man’s wife, at Swinfen near Lichfield. It was known that Swynfen’s wife and children had slipped through the fingers of the army in those first confused days of the occupation of London, but when they had eventually turned up in Staffordshire, after an inexplicable delay on their journey, it had been decided to leave them be for the moment. As long as they kept quiet at Swinfen, they were unlikely to cause any trouble to the new government, which had more important matters to deal with. Anne Swynfen had been riding about the country in a most unseemly fashion, but it appeared that she was concerned merely with estate matters, and was not trying to rally support for her husband. However, if she knew he was so close by, she might persuade their friends to make some attempt to release him.
Danvers read quickly through the letter, and pulled a face at the tone of it. This kind of letter could be of no use to him or to his masters. It seemed he would need to wait a while before Swynfen ventured to write frankly to his political friends. With a sigh of impatience, he refolded the letter and pressed down the seal, which was still warm and soft, until it stuck to the paper. Then he balanced the letter on his fingertips until he decided what to do. It might be dangerous to send the letter. It could be kept for possible future use, or it could be destroyed. He got up and walked over to the fire, holding the letter by a corner, as if to spin it into the flames, but then he shrugged and locked it into his strong box instead. It had alerted him, however, to possible danger. It would be advisable to give Mistress Anne Swynfen good cause to remain quiet on her estate, lest she cause trouble. He opened the door and called for the captain of the guard to attend him. It was time to teach Mistress Swynfen a lesson.
At a fork in the road, the raggle-tailed procession of carts and horses and ranging dogs halted, where one road ran southeast towards Tamworth and the other south to Swinfen. Dick jumped to the ground. One of the gypsy lads handed down his knapsack with a quick grin, showing the gaps where teeth had been knocked out in some brawl. Dick walked forward along the dusty verge of the road to the leading cart, where Waldo sat high above him, the reins of his fine pair of matched dapple-greys loose in his hand.
‘Thank you for your many kindnesses, Waldo,’ said Dick, reaching up to shake his hand.
The gypsy took it, with a faint light of amusement in his eyes.
‘I hope you have gained something by it.’
Dick regarded him seriously.
‘Aye. I’ve come to value your people and know something of your life and your ways, but they are not my life, nor my ways. I wish I could offer you work, but my grandfather will long since have hired any day labourers he needs.’
‘Don’t trouble yourself, lad. We’ll find work near Tamworth, or else we’ll head into the fens. There’s work there where they’re draining the marshes, or, if the war is still putting an end to that, then there will be plenty of food to be snared in the wild country.’
‘God be with you,’ said Dick, though he had never heard any mention of God in all the time he had travelled with the gypsies.
‘May the sun shine on you,’ said Waldo, with an ironic smile, ‘and good fortune go with you.’
He clucked to the horses and the cart began to move again along the eastern road. Dick turned his back on them and headed south. He had made his choice.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The fields put down to wheat shone like silk in the low-lying sun of early morning, for it had rained during the night, turning the red soil of the tilth the colour of ripe plums where it showed between the first tender green of the shoots. Anne had watched Josiah and Christopher sowing the precious seed wheat broadcast, each man carrying a satchel of seed slung from his shoulders on a leather strap. As they paced slowly up and down the fields, their arms swinging alternately in the beautiful ancient rhythm of the sower of seed, she had seen the wheat fall in great golden arcs upon the soil. Now that the young wheat was growing, it patterned the field in the painted image of those aerial arcs, sweeping across the soil like the swirls of colour on a damask brocade. But how much lovelier than damask was this fertile, this changing fabric of earth and grain, man and nature.
She knelt down at the edge of the wheat field and scanned it from the angle of a mouse. From here, the tiny stems of wheat resembled a green forest stretching away for miles, yet they were slender as grass, tender as breath, and no more than two or three inches high. It was frightening to think that the life or death of her household might depend on the survival of something so fragile. She patted the soil as she might have patted a child’s head, for encouragement.
‘S
ure, are you praying to the wheat, lady? Best not be seen doing it, or folk will take you for a witch or a heretic, so.’
Anne sprang to her feet, her heart pounding. Brendan had a way of coming up silently behind her which constantly unnerved her. And his manner of speaking to her was intolerably familiar. She had not seen again that curiously hostile look he had given her the day he arrived, but the memory of it troubled her and she did not altogether trust him. Yet she needed him and the hard days’ work he put in. She had tried to hint, without severely reprimanding, that he should not speak to her as he did, but he blithely ignored her. There was something deeply disturbing about the man. His speech, which at times was a broad peasant Irish, would at other times change utterly, so that he spoke almost like an English gentleman. And the way he eyed her, with such a knowing look: it was an expression at once intimate and assessing, ruthless yet pitying. If she permitted herself to think about it, she was frightened. They were far now from the house and the farm, alone in the early morning light. She did not like to be alone with him, so far from other people.
‘I was checking the growth of the wheat,’ she said, as coldly as possible, ‘and feeling the warmth in the soil.’
He merely smiled at her, and did not answer her directly.
‘Ach, in Ireland, ’tis the little people we’re always placating indeed, hoping they’ll not blight the crops because they’re angry with us. A manchet of bread and a bowl of cream, we put out, for the little fellows.’
‘The godly would say such practices are blasphemous,’ said Anne sternly, ‘but if Hester has something to spare for Robin Goodfellow, I wink my eye.’
‘Have a care, nevertheless, that a little harmless kindness to the fairies be not taken for dealing with the master of darkness.’
There it was again, the seeming-false accent dissolving and slipping away. Before she could think how to answer this, he shaded his eyes with his hand, looking into the distance where the carriage drive to the house first came into sight through the trees.