by Ann Swinfen
‘Thank you,’ said Anne, looking down and speaking softly, that she might not embarrass him further. ‘I’m so grateful for your kindness. I wish, though, that he need not travel through the mountains of Wales in winter.’
Cold kindness indeed, and Moreton’s manner warned her of what she might expect in future from her neighbours. She dared not let her mind dwell on his news of John, for fear that once again it would all come to nothing.
It took some time to force their way through the crowd and into the carriage, but at last they reached it, and eased the old woman on to the seat, recovered from her faint but still confused and shaken. Thomas had climbed into the carriage to help Agnes, but as he reached out his hand to Anne, the crowd suddenly surged forward around her. Men were spitting and cursing her. A woman struck her on the cheek. Suddenly a hail of stones and horse dung fell upon her, so that she stumbled against the carriage step and fell to her knees. Terrified, she crossed her arms over her head to protect herself, as someone kicked her in the ribs. Then Thomas managed to seize her below the elbows and drag her into the carriage, slamming the door behind her. Before she could sit, Josiah had whipped up the horses and broken through the howling crowd.
Agnes stared about her in confusion.
‘Is it over, child?’
‘It is over, Agnes,’ said Anne, leaning forward to kiss the withered cheek. ‘We are going home to Swinfen now.’
She sank back on to the seat, but she was shaking so that her teeth rattled, and her palms were clammy with sweat.
It was dark by the time they reached home, and Thomas decided to spend the night at Swinfen. Anne gave Agnes into the care of Biddy, that she might be washed and fed and given clean clothes, free of the prison taint. She climbed wearily to her own chamber, where she shed her clothes, muddied and torn and tainted also with the stench of that hostile crowd. She washed herself all over, but could not rid herself of the shock of the attack on her person. Later that evening, she found Biddy and Agnes in the kitchen together, sitting by the fire. Hester had taken herself off to bed, muttered about evil women. Anne had released Peterkin from his garret and Agnes was cradling him on her lap. He had abandoned his restless prowling now that his mistress was here, and he opened one sleepy eye at Anne with a look that seemed to say that he forgave her. She was determined to keep both of them at Swinfen until winter was past. The memory of the trial would surely disappear from men’s minds by the spring, once the hard work began at the start of the new farming year. Before that time she did not trust Edward Goodens and William Slater not to harm Agnes if she were left alone up on the moor.
While she had been occupied with the trial, the children, under the guidance of Patience and Bridget, had been making their preparations for Christmas. Richard and Dick had hauled in the trunk of a fallen beech tree to serve as the Yule log, and had placed it ready beside the hall fireplace. Nan was carefully stringing holly berries on threads, and weaving garlands of ivy and pine, while Bridget bloodied her hands making a complicated kissing ring of holly, mistletoe and ivy. Anne went to admire their work amongst a litter of branches and berries in the hall, where she found Jack was demanding that Dick should allow him to climb the ladder and help to fasten up the garlands, and Francis had just prevented Mary from eating a handful of holly berries. Quietly absorbed, Ralph and Dorothea were fashioning scraps of raw pastry into miniature Christmas pies.
The baby Jane sat on the floor by Patience’s chair, hindering her from the difficult task of weaving together a large garland for the main door of the house. When she saw her mother, she pulled herself upright by clutching Patience’s skirt, then wobbled three or four steps towards Anne, before sitting down suddenly at her mother’s feet.
‘My clever poppet!’ Anne cried, bending down to lift her up. ‘Walking already, and you barely a year old.’
She held her youngest daughter close, remembering last Christmas, stranded at the Mitre in Oxford, where, apart from the good meal they were served by the inn, the festivity was marked only by the toys she had bought at the New Exchange on that visit with Grace. It seemed far longer than a year ago, nearer half a lifetime. She had never completed the embroidered doublet for John. Sudden sadness came over her that he had never seen this child, did not even know that he had another daughter. Jane patted her face, then held it firmly between her two plump palms and kissed her mother on the nose. Anne kissed her back. I have so much to be thankful for, she thought. And surely John will come home to me soon. A just God cannot deny these children their father.
The next morning, Anne asked Thomas to ride up to Packington Moor with her to look at Agnes’s cottage, before he went home to Weeford.
‘I’d like your counsel on how I might make the cottage more comfortable for her,’ Anne said. ‘I know you’ve done much to improve the cottages on your land.’
It was a bright, cold morning, the grass sparkling in sheathes of ice, and the trees draped in the frozen lace of hoar-frost. Since their journey to the trial, Anne felt happier in Thomas’s company, and no longer suspected that he wanted to oust her from her guardianship of Swinfen. She could ask him for help now, if she should need it, and not feel that she was somehow failing.
As they neared the cottage, Thomas pointed ahead. There was a drift of smoke rising from the shrubby trees behind which the cottage stood.
‘I fear there may be a squatter in the squatters’ cottage,’ he said.
Angrily, Anne urged Brandy into a canter, until, rounding the stand of trees, she came on the full sight of what had happened. Agnes’s cottage, so lovingly and illegally erected by Nick Lea more than half a century before, was gone. The rough stone walls of Agnes’s home were torn down and scattered, the thatch and wooden beams reduced to ashes and charred ends of timber, still smouldering amongst the frosted grass, her fence broken, her chicken house smashed, her winter vegetables ripped from the ground and trampled.
‘Oh, Thomas,’ Anne cried, in anger and guilt, ‘I should have been able to prevent this. I should have foreseen it.’
‘Anne,’ he said, riding over until he was close enough to reach across and lay his hand on her arm, ‘you cannot take the whole burden of the world upon your shoulders. The men of Hints are no better and no worse than those in any other village in England. But there will always be a few rotten ones, just as, when you pick the apples from the tree, a few are already rotten at the core, although they grew on the same branch, with the same sun and rain to nourish them. And men of that kind will always find a way to do such evil as this.’
John huddled into the hollowed base of a great oak tree, which formed a sort of shallow cave, and watched the snow sweep down like folds of cloth, piling up outside his temporary refuge until he wondered whether he might be trapped here. It no longer seemed to matter. He was lost in this wilderness of tumbled mountains and thick forests, unable, in the unending snowstorms, to make out which direction was south and which north. Day only differed from night in the faint, bluish light which took the place of impenetrable dark, but so deep was the layer of cloud above the earth, so constant the falling snow, that he could not distinguish where the sun rose or where it set.
His store of food was nearly gone. He had been reduced to eating snow for water. The soles of his boots were worn into great holes. He had padded them from within with pieces roughly hacked off one of his blankets with his knife. Although these protected his feet a little from the sharp stones of the mountain tracks, they soon grew sodden from the snow, so that his feet were as wet as if he walked barefoot. The lower parts of his stockings having worn away, he had ripped the lace from his shirt cuffs and wrapped it around his feet. For a time he had worried about his feet, fearing they were beginning to rot like the hoofs of an ill-kept horse, but now he no longer cared.
With numb fingers he prised off his left boot, where a pulpy mass of paper had disintegrated into blots and scraps of words: freedom . . . power . . . wife and children . . . I wou
ld not sing . . . a just man . . . write . . . temptations . . . words . . . God help me . . . He prodded the lumps flat and pulled on the boot again. One of the fragments clung to his fingers and he scraped it off. The true happiness of man.
He was so tired. He had slept a little during the darkness, but had woken to the sound of a snow-laden branch cracking and crashing to the ground. That faint blue-grey light enabled him to see a short way beyond his refuge, but there was nothing in this matted forest of great trees and thick undergrowth to indicate which way he should take. The forest tracks he had been following for the last weeks led nowhere. Finally he decided they were not the paths of men but of wild beasts, for there was neither habitation nor any other sign of human life along their length. Perhaps there were no men in these mountains. Lost and without food, he could not live much longer.
For the first part of his journey, he had followed Dafydd’s directions, working his way up the valley, going south into the mountains and following the river Clwyd upstream. It was grim travelling even then, for the snow was falling when he left Denbigh, and a bitter north wind blew at his back. It was when he was nearing the top of the valley that his journey had taken a different turn, for he had spied a band of mounted men on the track some distance away but coming up fast behind him, who did not look like regular army troopers. He withdrew into the edge of the forest, which here lay quite close to the track, and hid himself within a thicket of broom.
It was wise, he found, to have done so. For as the men drew near, he saw that they were a desperate group of thievish cut-throats, heavily armed. Crouched behind the concealing bushes, John waited for them to pass, but a mocking fate had decreed they would make camp just below his hiding-place. He watched them hobble their horses and build a great fire to cook a deer—no doubt unlawfully killed—which one of them carried slung across his horse’s rump. While the meat cooked, skewered on green sticks over the fire, they passed around great jugs of earthenware which must have contained a particularly potent brew, for by the time the venison was cooked they were so drunken and clumsy that one of them scorched his hand in grabbing for his share of their dinner. John was too far away to catch their words, though it was evident from their swaggering manner that they were violent braggarts. He was near enough, however, to smell the roast venison, and he lay with his mouth watering, for he had eaten nothing but stale bread, dry cheese and raisins for several days.
Despite the poached deer, despite the pieces of old army uniform worn by some, declaring them to be deserters, the outlaws seemed unconcerned about halting at the side of the road, in full view from both directions along the valley. Either they were recklessly confident of their own safety, or they knew themselves a match for any army patrol that might ride along the road. When it became clear that they proposed to stay where they were for the night, John withdrew stealthily into the woods, moving as carefully and quietly as if he were himself stalking a deer, though perhaps his caution was wasted, for by now the men were stupefied with food and drink. That night he nibbled a dry crust before rolling himself in his blankets and lying down under some bushes to sleep. He hoped that by morning the men would be gone.
When he crept down to the bank overlooking the road the next morning, he found that the men were still there, some asleep, some awake and quarrelling. They gave no sign of moving, so he decided that he would have to continue his journey by working his way through the woods, keeping parallel with the road but out of sight. Once the outlaws had overtaken him, he could climb down to the road and make his way onwards by the easier route.
For the next two days, it seemed as though the outlaws were playing some kind of game with him. He was sure they had not noticed him there above them in the woods, but they moved along the road at an amble, their horses keeping pace with his slow and difficult scramble through the undergrowth and around thick stands of ancient trees. The valley had grown very narrow, and he was forced nearer to them as the road wound into the mountains, which were closing in on both sides.
On the third day, John, who had started early and was ahead of the outlaws, came over a shoulder of the mountains and saw a small village ahead, nestled in a curve at the top of the valley where track, river and squat cottages jostled for space on the narrow ribbon of land. He was kneeling, looking down over the village and wondering whether he should seek help there, when he heard the jingle of harness and saw the outlaws come into sight below, riding now at a canter, some with pistols in their hands, some with drawn swords.
It all happened so quickly that John seemed to hold his breath throughout. The outlaws broke into a gallop, riding up and around the cottages as though this was a manoeuvre they had perfected through practice. Any person out in the open, man, woman or child, they cut down or shot at once, despite pleas for mercy, many of the villagers falling on their knees and praying, young children standing and staring open-mouthed. All about the cottages the white snow was daubed with spreading patches of crimson, which steamed in the icy air. Then the outlaws rounded up the villagers who had taken refuge in their homes. Like a herd of beasts at slaughter time, they were swiftly massacred. Except for some of the women.
There was one young woman who fought them. Tall, amongst these small dark Welshmen, she had a beautiful wild bush of black hair which one of the outlaws used to drag her to one side, away from the killing. She fought like a wild animal, biting the man’s hand, scratching his face, and struggling until he managed to force her to the ground. For a moment she seemed to go limp, but John, who was watching in horror, saw her hand creep towards the knife sticking out of the outlaw’s belt. With a sudden twist she pulled it free and thrust it upwards into his stomach. As he fell, she threw him off and scrambled to her feet. The outlaw was beyond help, but as two more ran towards her, she raised the knife in both hands and plunged it into her own breast.
John turned away, retching. When he was able to look back, he saw that the men had piled up a pathetic collection of possessions looted from the village, and were setting the cottages on fire. As soon as these were well alight, they bundled up their booty and rode off laughing, leaving their comrade’s body lying amongst the miserable villagers.
After the assault on the village, John was determined to follow another route. As long as he clung to the road the outlaws were following, he was in danger of being taken by them. They seemed in no hurry to go elsewhere, and perhaps intended to spend the rest of the winter in the valley, living off what they could seize from the neighbouring cottages and farms. The only way to escape them was to find another way through the mountains to Llangollen. And so the following day he had turned his back on the nearest thing to a road in this remote country, and made his way deeper into the mountains, thinking that if he travelled south for a time and then turned east, he must come, sooner or later, to a road that would take him to the town, or a friendly village where the people would direct him.
John, however, was a stranger to mountain country. His plan might have served amongst the gentler hills of Staffordshire. Here, amid the mountains of Berwyn, he was hopelessly confused within a day. Then the blizzards began, and he lost all sense of where he was, and where he should direct his steps. Now as he lay partly sheltered by the hollowed oak tree, he knew that his strength had nearly given out. If he remained here, then the outcome was certain. With his food gone in a few days, he would die in this nameless forest. If he struggled on, he could more easily choose the wrong way than the right one, for in all this dense, deserted country, all ways but one would lead him to death.
He spent the rest of the day unable to decide whether to stay and give himself up to the creeping tiredness which was overtaking him, or whether to try to summon up the very last of his feeble strength and walk for one more day, in the hope of finding some sign of human life. For the last week he had felt the gaol fever seizing hold of him again, and as that snow-laden day drew towards evening, he began to slip into the twilight of the soul which he had known after Dafydd’s death at Denbigh. The mem
ory of the outlaws’ murderous assault on the village haunted him, however much he struggled to force the images from his mind. Over and over again he saw, as in an horrific vision that was neither dream nor living sight, the killings, the burning of the poor cottages. And above all, the death of the young woman with black hair, who had taken her own life rather than fall into their hands.
As he twisted and turned in the agony of his fever, he thought his head must burst with the pain that crushed the very brain within his skull. And as the darkness deepened, shutting out all sight of the snow which fell, and fell, and fell, silent and unceasing, it seemed that the girl with the dark hair leaned over him, the knife in her hand. And he tried to cry out to her to kill him and free him from the pain. And as her face drew near his, it was Anne’s face, though it was lost in the wiry bush of that strange dark hair, so different from Anne’s soft tresses. And the girl plunged the knife into her own breast and fell, as slowly and silently as the snow, until she lay at his feet. And when he reached out to touch her, there came a roaring in his ears like the sea whipped up by a mighty storm. And when he touched her, it was not the girl, but the big blacksmith, lying waxy and cold, his hands folded upon his breast, his eyes open and staring blankly at John.
Chapter Thirty-One
The festival of Christmas 1649 was observed somewhat furtively at Swinfen lest their rebellion against the new Puritan strictures might be reported to the powers in the land. Anne had become recklessly defiant since her intervention in the witch trial. She would dare all in defence of her family, her household, and her dependants, yet there were other things also which must be defended. Without pausing to reason out such matters, she knew in her heart that the simple beliefs and customs of the countryside would wither under the fiery breath of the Puritan dragon, and if they did, the spirit of the people would turn to ashes. She saw no hurt to the Christ Child in the burning of a Yule log and the hanging of a kissing ring to celebrate his birth. He had brought light to the world, and was this not symbolised by the Yule fire? And he had brought love to mankind, love woven into the kissing ring itself. What matter if the log and the ring had their origin in more ancient times? Should we not treasure what is good, and only cast out what is bad?