by Ann Swinfen
‘King Cromwell!’ said the other, and looked as though he might spit, but restrained himself. ‘If you speak of promises broken, there is a man could be used as a Model indeed! He has solved the problem of the army’s pay in part.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t know? I suppose, if you have been imprisoned these ten months past, there’s much you don’t know. Cromwell desires the utter annihilation of the wretched native Irish, and so he and the Council of State have forced the army to travel overseas to carry out his will. Many of the soldiers protested that they didn’t join the army to fight the Irish but to fight the king. They refused to go. So they were turned away, unpaid and destitute. It was a great economy for the new government! There were mutinies—did you not hear of the mutinies?—months ago now.’
John shook his head.
‘I was told something of the Irish matter, but it came from the mouth of the governor of Stafford, who revealed very little. Before I was taken from London, we heard that Lilburne had fallen out with Cromwell.’
Dafydd gave a laugh tinged with contempt.
‘Poor little John Lilburne! He thought he had Noll Cromwell dancing to his tune, but it was all a sham. Lilburne is imprisoned again, and the promises Cromwell made—that the Leveller proposals would be enforced—are all betrayed.’
‘You don’t think well of Lilburne, then?’ John said. ‘I would have guessed you were one of his followers.’
‘Nay, nay, the man is all for weak half-measures. Some men should have some more land and some more power, and perhaps some better education and some protection under the law. It’s Winstanley has the right of it. Let the land be shared out equally amongst all men and women.’
He saw the expression on John’s face and laughed.
‘Aye, and women also. For we believe that both sexes are equal in God’s eyes. Both should be given the best education they are able for. And if all hold the land in common, why, then, this land of ours is rich enough and fertile enough to feed all equally, and none shall starve.’
John saw suddenly, sharply, as if before his very eyes, the faces of the starving destitute in Shrewsbury. And he thought of the rich lands of his own estates, awaiting him, if he should ever return, at Swinfen. For all his eloquence, he was robbed of words and could find no answer to this. So he tried another tack.
‘You say you would educate women. How far? For it’s known that the brain of a woman is smaller than that of a man, her emotions less stable, her power of reason deficient.’
‘Who has proved this?’ Dafydd asked, leaning nonchalantly on the door jamb, and folding his arms. ‘I have never seen it proved. I had a sister, and I never knew her less than me in intellect, or steadiness of character, or quality of reasoning.’
‘A few women, perhaps,’ John conceded cautiously, for in fairness to Anne . . .
‘In physical courage, likewise, they can be men’s equal,’ said Dafydd. ‘There were women who fought at the siege of Plymouth, my sister amongst them. They carried weapons, not water; they withstood the enemy, and were wounded, and died. My sister amongst them.’
There was a heavy silence in the room. A feeble protest squirmed in John’s mind, and perished.
‘Perhaps you have the right of it,’ he said slowly. ‘But I cannot see how such a world can come to pass. Such millenarian dreams, they leap ahead too fast. Step by step, that is the only way the world will change. You cannot turn it upside down in one swift motion. Too many would be hurt.’
Dafydd sat down on his bed and placed his large hands on his knees.
‘Very well. You are the politician. How would you begin?’
‘With the franchise,’ said John promptly. ‘A wider franchise would give more men some voice in shaping the nation.’
‘Men only?’
‘Of course.’ John was impatient. ‘You couldn’t permit women to vote while many men cannot. Step by step, I said. In time, perhaps, but not in ours. In our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s day it may be that women will be enfranchised. And as for education, I’ve sent my own eldest daughter to school. So you see, I agree with you in part. And my own wife has a good education. She was taught by her brother’s tutor. She’s not perhaps as learned as Lucy, Colonel Hutchinson’s wife, but she knows French and some Latin, and music. She has read the historians and philosophers. She even reads natural philosophy in secret, although she thinks I don’t know.’
He turned away, for the thought of Anne was almost unbearable.
‘Your wife is indeed fortunate,’ said Dafydd gently. ‘And others could benefit from a like education. Well, when you are restored to Parliament, you must work for all these things.’
John laughed harshly.
‘I see no likelihood that I shall ever sit in Parliament again, or be able to serve the country as you suggest. Come now, you’ve led our talk away from how we came to be here in Denbigh. I have told you my story. What of yours?’
Dafydd shrugged.
‘Simple enough. I’m a blacksmith to trade, but I always loved learning. My father sent me to a dame school as a lad, and once I could read and write, I devoured every book I could lay hands on. When I began to earn money of my own, instead of taking a wife and raising a brood of children, I spent my coin on books and paid our parish priest to teach me Latin. He was reluctant to teach such a one as I, but he was willing enough to take my money. I would dearly have loved to learn the Greek tongue as well, but our priest was no scholar, and I could find no one else to teach me.’
This was a strange man indeed, a bookish blacksmith. His trade explained the man’s appearance, but the passion for knowledge was extraordinary.
‘You weren’t imprisoned for a love of books, surely?’ said John.
‘After a fashion, I suppose you might say that I was. For reading led me into the world of ideas, and when a man gets a taste of the ideas of others, he’s apt to develop a few of his own. I began to search out other like-minded men, and to dispute, and discuss.’
Dafydd began to pace about from one end of the cell to the other. He stopped in front of John and laid both hands lightly on the other’s shoulders.
‘This has been a terrible age for war, John, but it has been a wonderful age for ideas. I’ve examined many sects and parties of men—Anabaptists and Quakers, and Levellers and Diggers, and some that had no more than a handful of adherents, and were unknown outside their own town. I travelled to London and heard new men preach there. I became something of a preacher myself, and fell into trouble for preaching at town crosses and on village greens, and tempting people away from church. When war came against the king, I joined the Parliamentary army, of course, for the king stood for everything I despise. And I preached in the army likewise.’
He rolled up his breeches and showed a livid scar in his thigh.
‘I took a musket ball here, and was turned away from the army, sick and penniless and lame, to fend for myself as best I could. That was when I joined one of the Digger colonies in Gloucestershire, and became a kind of leader amongst them, although I didn’t seek to be a leader—it’s an idea which is anathema to me.’
John could imagine that such a man as this would become a leader, whatever his egalitarian views. Could society ever be ordered in such a way that men like Dafydd Williams would not rise to the top, like the cream in the milk? Surely one should never advocate a form of society—to turn the matter upside over—where men like Dafydd would be forcibly held down? These were troubling notions, which had never quite presented themselves to John in this way before. He had believed that the Diggers were fanatical, if not lunatic, sectaries. Yet Dafydd was clearly no lunatic. Hardly even fanatical, for he based his views of the good society on reason, humanity, tolerance and kindliness.
‘So,’ said John, ‘how did it fare, this Digger colony of yours?’
‘Before we could even reap our first harvest—this past July it was, when we had just begun to gather our first vegetables—a hue and cry was ra
ised amongst the local gentry and their tenants, and all our work destroyed: cut down and put to the sword and the fire. Some of us they arrested. Some escaped, myself amongst them.’
He ran his thumb along the scar, then rolled down his breeches again.
‘But I’m somewhat noticeable, being more than six feet tall, not easy of concealment. Besides, I took it ill, what they had done. I stirred up a little trouble for them, amongst the poor of that place. There were some stones thrown, some stock . . . let us say “liberated” for the common good. I fled from there into Monmouthshire, but they caught me at last, and flogged me, and stood me in the pillory. The magistrate was a just man, however. It couldn’t be proved that I had laid my hand on anything, so I was neither branded, maimed, nor hanged. But they couldn’t let me go free, for I was considered an inciter of riots and a destroyer of good order. So, after a cell in Monmouth, from which, as I said, I escaped twice, I’m sent here, to share a cell with a certain John Swynfen, gentleman and landowner.’
He gave a great bellow of laughter.
‘A fine irony indeed,’ said John. ‘For both of us.’
The chess set which John had whittled in odd moments during his time in the King’s Head had travelled with him in the deep pocket of his doublet ever since, but he had found no opponent, and he had never enjoyed playing against himself, for it was difficult to be even-handed when he could always predict what his own next move would be.
It emerged that Dafydd Williams was a chess player, and so John dug about in his pocket and laid out the crude pieces on the deep window embrasure. They found that two of the pawns had been lost on his journeys, but they soon made replacements from fragments of firewood left in the hearth since the previous winter. They used a half-charred stick, left in the hearth from some past fire, to sketch a chess board on Dafydd’s bed, setting aside the straw palliasse he had at last been given.
‘I wonder,’ said Dafydd, ‘whether they intend to allow us a fire? It’s growing mighty chilly, with autumn moving on apace, and no shutters for that window. I thought I was like to freeze last night.’
‘We should ask for blankets at least,’ said John, filling in the last black square on the chess board. ‘Next time we see the young lad. Now, will you draw for white?’
Chess became a passion with them, helping to pass the increasingly cold hours. John was a careful strategist, pondering each move while he calculated in his mind his opponent’s possible responses, and the stages of play that would then ensue. Dafydd was a bold and erratic player, full of bravado, scarcely pausing to think before he made his move, swooping forward to advance his pieces—gallantly but often foolishly—across the board. Surprising John by his unexpected tactics, he often gained the upper hand. Their winnings were about equal.
Neither of the men was sure of the date, but it was clear that autumn was slipping by into winter. The leaves on the trees changed from the first golds and reds interspersed amongst the greens into a blaze of fiery hues, like the final flush of colour on the face of a patient dying of consumption. Then they drifted down—some fading first to tan and tawny, copper and chestnut and roan—till none were left but the persistent beech and oak. At last the prisoners procured a couple of thin blankets each, which brought with them whole colonies and nations of lice and fleas, but the insect life had more sense than to linger in such a cold place. After a few days they had migrated back to the warmer quarters occupied by the soldiers. There were, as Dafydd pointed out, certain advantages to living in a cell as cold as a dairy house.
The big blacksmith had developed a severe cough which he could not shake off, and when next they saw the young soldier—whose name they never learned—John begged him for a supply of firewood, and for a piece of canvas that they could fix over the window to keep out the wind. Once again it was Sergeant Conway who gave permission. The prisoners understood that the foul-mouthed captain had taken to his bed recently with delirium tremens, thus leaving the sergeant with a fair amount of freedom.
They had some difficulty with the canvas, for the guards were naturally reluctant to give them tools. Finally the sergeant himself came and supervised the fixing of a piece of wood above the window, to which the canvas was nailed, with another nail hammered into the wall so that the canvas could be hooked back when they wanted fresh air.
‘I hope you’re satisfied, sir,’ the sergeant said to John with heavy sarcasm. ‘These quarters have always proved acceptable to all our other guests.’
‘We’re grateful to you,’ said John. ‘I know you wouldn’t wish us to die of the cold.’
He was tempted to say: For what use would we be to Cromwell then? But he bit back the words.
After some difficulties, for they had been given little kindling, they made up a good fire in the hearth, and although the smoke was inclined to blow back into the room from the huge, ancient chimney, they warmed their hands and exchanged smiles of satisfaction at another small victory. Dafydd spoiled the effect by starting to cough again, apologising as he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He hurriedly rubbed his hand on his breeches, but not before John had noticed blood.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Harvest was long past before the matter of Agnes Lea came to Anne’s attention again. There had been just sufficient wheat for her to sell some to a corn merchant in Lichfield and use the money to buy in a few beef cattle for slaughter at Martinmas, although not as many as she had hoped. As for the Swinfen stock, she selected for meat only the young bullocks and two of the poorest heifers, keeping the rest to increase the breeding herd. The swine were driven into the forest to fatten on fallen acorns and beechmast before some were chosen to provide the winter hams and bacon.
One afternoon in late October she had Brandy saddled, and rode up to the moor to discuss with Brendan how many ewes they would keep over the winter. She found the Irishman sitting in front of his bothy with a late dinner of barley bannocks, which he cooked on the hot stones beside his fire, eaten with the soft ewe’s milk cheese that he made for himself up here on the moor. The dog Niall watched intently for any scraps that might fall to the ground. Brendan got up slowly, unfolding his long limbs from the boulder on which he had been sitting.
‘This is the best seat I can be offering you, lady,’ he said, ‘unless you wish to sit within.’
Anne shook her head. The bothy was low and windowless, not a place where she would want to sit alone with Brendan Donovan. She accepted a wooden trencher of bannock and cheese.
‘This cheese is of excellent quality, Brendan,’ she said. ‘I think you should make some for the winter store.’
‘Is it worrying you still are, about food for the winter?’ He gave a sardonic smile. ‘I’m thinking house and barns are groaning indeed under the weight of what you have put by, so.’
Anne laughed.
‘I shall not quickly forget what I found when we came home in January. It’s become a passion with me, this storing away of food. I’m like the squirrel, who is driven to hide far more nuts than ever he can eat.’
Brendan looked grave.
‘When a man has starved, and seen his family starve, he is not like to forget it either.’
‘You seem to speak from experience.’
‘There’s been much starvation in Ireland. The land is fine and fertile in some places; in others, the soil is thin over the stone beneath, or riddled with bog. The Old English who came in Queen Elizabeth’s time took much of the best land; the New English, who were sent by King James, took the rest. What should the people of Ireland do but starve?’
‘I fear I know very little of the rights of it,’ said Anne. ‘But I hope I shall not hear that you were one of those Irish who massacred the English settlers.’
‘Then you shall not hear it.’ He looked at her strangely, with a flash of that angry, brooding light in his eyes that she had not seen these many months. A quiver of fear touched her skin and she shuddered.
There was an uncomfortable silence b
etween them, broken only when Brendan gathered up the remains of the food and the trenchers and stowed them inside the bothy. He sat down again on the ground, his arms about his updrawn knees, gazing across the moor and down to where Swinfen lay. The dog sidled up and laid his head on his master’s foot. Seated like this, half turned away from her and without his extravagant hat, he had almost a look of John in the set of his shoulders and the curve from spine to the vulnerable hollow at the back of his neck. His lower arms were bare where he had rolled up his sleeves, and the low autumn sun glinted on the reddish fair hairs. The muscles were tight under the skin, as though his hands were gripping each other convulsively.
‘I did not think,’ he said, slowly and reluctantly, ‘that I should ever see an English landowner treat his people with kindness—no, with generosity. But you have taught me different, Mistress Anne.’
‘I daresay you will find as many different characters amongst landowners as you will amongst any other sort,’ she said. Her words sounded breathless, as though she had been running. ‘Kindness, I suppose, is a sort of instinct.’
She realised that he was speaking again in that educated voice, which she took to be his true voice, for it surfaced only when his attention was concentrated elsewhere.
‘Who, I wonder,’ she said, speaking her thoughts aloud, ‘is Brendan Donovan?’
He flashed her a bright, startled look.
‘Sure, and isn’t he Mistress Swynfen’s hired shepherd, so?’
‘Aye. Sure, and isn’t he something other than what he pretends, so?’ she said, mocking him.
‘Perhaps he was something different once.’
‘I think,’ she said, slowly and carefully, aware that she might be risking great danger, and yet compelled by some need for honesty between them, ‘I think that Brendan Donovan—if that is his name, which I doubt—I think that Brendan Donovan was once a wealthy man, and a landowner himself. I think that Brendan Donovan (or whoever he is) was well born, and educated as a gentleman, perhaps even in England at Oxford or Cambridge. I think that Brendan Donovan lost his land through no fault of his own, and carries the bitterness of that loss still.’