This Rough Ocean

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘What now?’ said Brendan. ‘Do you suppose those boys are here?’

  It was the sheep, all twelve of them, huddled against the door of the bothy and watching their arrival with pathetic foolish eyes. Anne gave an incredulous laugh.

  ‘So they came straight here. They must have been here all the time.’

  And it came to her with a cold sense of shock, that if they had come here first, instead of going up the other side of the moor, they would never have found John. They lifted him down and carried him in to Brendan’s straw mattress at the back of the bothy. The sheep tried to crowd in behind them, and Anne batted them away with her hands.

  ‘Nay, let them come in,’ said Brendan. ‘It’s small, but there’s room enough for all. Their body heat will help to warm the place.’

  There was a store of firewood beside the hearth, and he soon had a fire going, while Anne continued to rub John’s frozen limbs. His flesh felt clammy and chill, like dead meat stored in the cold outhouse at Swinfen. Once Brendan was satisfied that the fire had caught, he helped her rub John, and he pummelled his chest, as if his beating hands could force the heart within to beat more strongly. The bothy began to heat up, and to smell strongly of wet, greasy sheep, and at last John moved again and groaned.

  ‘Pass me my flask,’ said Brendan.

  Anne reached across to where he had left it warming by the fire and gave it to him. John’s eyes opened again, and this time he looked directly at her.

  ‘Anne? Is it you?’

  She smiled at him, though she was near weeping again.

  ‘You’re home, dear heart, or nearly. You’re safe now.’

  ‘Lift him up,’ said Brendan, so she slid her arm under John’s shoulders and raised him to a sitting position. Brendan forced a little of the uisge beatha between John’s lips. Like Anne, he coughed and choked, but then he drank again and seemed glad of it.

  ‘I must go for help,’ said Brendan. ‘We need warm food for him to eat, and thick dry clothes for him to wear. Keep the fire as high as you can. If you can warm him through, I think he’ll live. I’ve seen this happen with fishermen in Ireland. They may be pulled from the sea all but frozen to death, but if they can be warmed quickly enough, they recover.’

  ‘Take the horse.’

  ‘Aye, I shall be quicker then. Give him a sip of the uisge beatha from time to time, but not too much, not until he has eaten.’

  ‘It would make him drunk as a lord,’ said Anne merrily.

  ‘I was thinking it might prove too much for the weakness of his heart,’ he said dryly.

  ‘I think you will find,’ she said, ‘that he has as stout a heart as any man living.’

  Brendan Donovan stood looking down at them.

  ‘Aye, I can see that. And I think his wife has a heart to match it.’

  He ducked under the low lintel, and pushed the door closed. A moment later she heard him riding away.

  ‘Who was that?’ John asked, in a weak voice.

  ‘That?’ said Anne. ‘That was my Irish shepherd.’

  She built up the fire and the sheep settled down, huddled together in one corner of the bothy, not altogether trusting the strange creature on their shepherd’s bed and watching Anne with their vacuous amber eyes. Despite the warmth of the fire, John continued to shiver. None of Brendan’s bedding had been left here for the winter, so there was nothing to cover him with but the threadbare blanket and the two cloaks. Two cloaks! Anne realised that Brendan had ridden off without his. She comforted herself with the thought that he would soon be in Swinfen. John shivered again.

  ‘Do you not feel warm at all?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘I feel cold deep inside,’ he said. ‘And I’m so filthy and louse-ridden, I could not ask you to lie beside me.’

  She gave a little cry.

  ‘Oh, my beloved, my dearest one! I don’t care how louse-ridden you are! What foolish talk!’

  She lay down beside him on Brendan’s rough, prickling mattress, and put her arms around him. He caressed her cheek, as he had always loved to do.

  ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,’ he said. ‘I thought I should never see you again.’

  ‘And I,’ she said. ‘You had vanished into darkness.’

  He laid his head on her breast and sighed.

  ‘I am growing warm at last.’

  They lay in silence, each warming the other.

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Anne, ‘when we were children, we used to ride up here, to the bothy? It was strictly forbidden.’

  ‘Aye. It was here I first kissed you. Very clumsily, as I recall. We must have been ten years old.’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘You slapped me.’

  ‘Of course.’ She gave one of those rich, warm laughs he had missed so much. ‘Think what our parents would have done, had they known! I would have been beaten, for sure. And sent away again to my aunt in Kent.’

  ‘I think I’m better skilled at it now.’

  He kissed her long and soft. They were too tired for passion, but both craved kindness.

  ‘When we are very old,’ said Anne, ‘old and bent and grey, I want you to bring me up here once more, that we may remember this.’

  ‘I promise you that,’ he said, kissing her again.

  ‘Oh, John,’ she said, burying her face in his matted hair, ‘thank God it is over!’

  ‘Over?’ he said, smiling secretly. ‘Oh, my love, it is only just beginning.’

  Envoi

  Samuel Pepys, Diary, 10 November, 1662

  ‘By and by came in great Mr. Swinfen, the parliament-man.’

  

  Historical Note

  This Rough Ocean is a work of fiction, not of history, but it is based on the real experiences of John Swynfen (1613-1694) and Anne Swynfen (1613-90) during the period from December 1648 to February 1650. John was indeed imprisoned after Pride’s Purge, because, as a Moderate, he believed in constitutional monarchy and the rights and power of Parliament, especially the elected Commons (although the electorate was then much smaller than it is now). However he was opposed to the killing of the king by the extremist republicans, which led to his falling-out with Cromwell and Ireton. Eventually he would go on to become one of the founders of what became the Whig (or Liberal) Party. During John’s absence it fell to Anne, as to many women in the Civil War period, to run the family’s large estates in Staffordshire. From the tone of their letters, it seems to have been a love match, and the marriage lasted for fifty-eight years, from the time when they were both nineteen until her death, four years before her husband.

  There are many gaps in the historical record, but where the facts are known, I have retained them. For example, John’s political allies are known, his parliamentary career is a matter of public record, the family lived at Thickbroome in their early married life and in St. Ann’s Lane, Westminster, in the 1640s. Parish records for the period are chaotic, so that the dates when some of the Swynfens’ children were born are conjectural. John’s younger brother Richard was in trouble after the Restoration for his dissenting views, so I have used this to shape his character. John’s eldest son Dick’s happy-go-lucky nature is revealed in the letters he wrote home while a student at Oxford (usually asking for money). The tone and spelling of the letters in the text are based on actual surviving family letters.

  A quirk in the spelling of the family name: the place-name always seems to have been spelled ‘Swinfen’ and the family name usually has the ‘i’. John in fact appears in his baptismal record as ‘John Swinfen’. At some point in his adult life he took to spelling it ‘Swynfen’. His wife was baptised ‘Ann Brandreth’, so on marriage she became ‘Ann Swinfen’, my exact namesake. However, her name also changed later to ‘Anne’. Our shared name has always drawn me to her, together with her courage and her strong family feeling – she cared not only for her own large family but also for most of her grandchildren. One of the grandsons, Dr Samuel Swynfen, wa
s godfather to Dr Samuel Johnson.

  Another oddity: the strange practice of burning the moss off the orchard trees is actually recorded. Late in life, John was visited by a gentleman who was making a survey of the county of Staffordshire, and described this odd Swinfen custom to him. Was it a gentle leg-pull? His sense of humour was noted by Pepys amongst others.

  Sadly, the original Swinfen Hall, where Anne and John lived, was pulled down when it was replaced by the present Georgian manor house in the mid-eighteenth century. This was designed and built by local builder Benjamin Wyatt of Blackbrook Farm by Weeford, founder of the distinguished dynasty of architects and artists. Swinfen Hall was their first major building.

  The Envoi to this story is one of several mentions of John in Pepys’s Diary (together with one reference to his eldest son). Pepys had reason to be grateful to John, for when Pepys was accused in Parliament of being a crypto-Catholic, it was John who came to his defence and had the accusation thrown out.

  It was only one of many kindnesses to friends and colleagues, who sought his help and advice throughout his life. Based on what I have learned about them both, I felt compelled to write Anne and John’s story.

  More by This Author

  The Anniversary

  The Travellers

  A Running Tide

  The Testament of Mariam

  Flood

  The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

  The Enterprise of England

  The Portuguese Affair

  Bartholomew Fair

  Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels

  ‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’

  Victoria Glendinning

  ‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’

  Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph

  'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'

  Publishing News

  ‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’

  Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser

  ‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’

  Peter Rhodes, Express and Star

  Other Books by Ann Swinfen You Might Enjoy

  The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

  (The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez Book 1)

  It is the year 1586. England is awash with traitors, plotting to assassinate the Queen and bring about a foreign invasion. The young physician Christoval Alvarez, a refugee from the horrors of the Portuguese Inquisition, is coerced into becoming a code-breaker and agent in Sir Francis Walsingham’s secret service. In the race to thwart the plot, who will triumph – the ruthless conspirators or the equally ruthless State?

  Buy Now on UK Kindle

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  Flood

  Violence, greed and betrayal threaten the remote communities of East Anglia in the seventeenth century, when ruthless and unscrupulous speculators steal their common lands, while fanatic Puritans bring accusations of heresy and witchcraft. Granddaughter of a local hero, Mercy Bennington moves out of the shadow of her elder brother to become a leader of the protestors, finding the strength to confront the enemies who endanger the survival of her village and her own life. Yet the violence wreaked upon the fragile fenlands unleashes a force no one can control – flood.

  Buy Now on UK Kindle

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  The Testament of Mariam

  Today I had word that my brother Ya‘aqôb is dead.

  When this news reaches Mariam, living in exile in the province of Gaul, memories of her girlhood in faraway Palestine are painfully awakened. For years she has blocked them from her mind, but as illness and old age overtake her, she begins to relive the time when she defied all propriety and convention and followed her charismatic brother Yeshûa and her betrothed Yehûdâ in their daring but perilous adventure.

  We were young. We were going to change the world.

  Mariam shared the excitement, the fear and the mystery of the mission, but cannot forget the horror of its ending. With powerful resonances for today, The Testament of Mariam takes us into the turbulent world of rebellious Galilee under Roman occupation, and the courageous lives that altered the course of history.

  Buy Now on UK Kindle

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  The Author

  Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.

  Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.

  Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, the second is The Enterprise of England, the third is The Portuguese Affair and the fourth is Bartholomew Fair.

  This Rough Ocean is based on the real-life experiences of the Swinfen family during the 1640s, at the time of the English Civil War.

  She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and a rescue kitten.

  www.annswinfen.com