by Ann Swinfen
Betrayal
Ann Swinfen
Shakenoak Press
Copyright © Ann Swinfen 2015
Shakenoak Press
Ann Swinfen has asserted her moral right under the
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as the author of this work.
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Cover design by JD Smith www.jdsmith-design.co.uk
For
Nikki & Pascal
Chapter One
Mercy
The flood was receding at last. We had been nearly a week in the village church, after that terrible day of flood and blizzard, all of us huddled together hugger-mugger: villagers, soldiers, and foreign settlers. The rising ground where the church stood, together with the rectory, its glebe lands and farm buildings, had been our Mount Ararat, the church itself our Ark, but just as the voyagers on that first Ark must have suffered, we were all feeling the strain of our confinement, although every soul in that church was thankful to be alive.
Two braziers, at either end of the nave, provided us with some warmth, but only if you were close by. Besides, they were dangerous for the small children, so we had constructed a sort of pen out of pews to confine them in safety. Fortunately the kitchen of the rectory was but a short distance away, where several of the village women, including my friend Alice Cox and her mother, Mistress Morton, were now preparing meals for everyone, gathering together whatever food had been rescued in time before the waters flooded the village houses.
I confess I was of little use those first few days. The long journey from the sluice which the soldiers and I had demolished, fighting the blizzard and wading through icy water sometimes up to our waists, had brought on a fever and chest congestion which laid me so low that I took little notice of my surroundings until nearly a week had passed, but at last I was well enough to make my way to the church door. I wanted to see how bad was the world outside.
The door was flung open just as I reached it, and Jack Sawyer, my brother Tom’s friend, came in, stamping the snow off his boots. Over his shoulder I saw a landscape of glassy plains and hills of snow. The flood waters had frozen. The snow which had begun on the night of the flood had lasted several days and now blanketed the half-submerged houses and barns of the village. It lay along the bare branches of the trees, and crusted thinly those shallower parts of the flood water which had frozen first. Where the waters lay deeper, the snow had ceased before they froze.
‘The flood is going down,’ Jack announced to the faces which turned towards him. He brandished a stout stick. ‘I smashed the ice in some of the hollows and the water has seeped away somewhat, leaving a space under the frozen layer.’
‘God be praised!’ someone cried out.
Jack made a face. ‘Do not be in too much of a hurry with your praise,’ he said. ‘I could not reach the village. At the bottom of this hill there is a great frozen lake between us and the houses. I’d not risk trying to cross it yet.’
To anyone familiar with other parts of England, our Mount Ararat would hardly have counted as a hill, but here in the Fens any ground more than a few yards above sea level is regarded as a hill.
‘No need to take risks,’ Gideon Clarke said. ‘We have food enough for ourselves and feed enough for the livestock to survive another two weeks, if we are careful.’
‘Do you think the men of Crowthorne have halted the pumping mill on their land?’ Tom asked.
‘Must have done,’ Jack said, flinging himself down on the nearest pew and pulling off his boots. ‘With the one built in our medland out of action, and theirs too, it’s to be hoped that the excess water pumped out of the moss will drain back, instead of forcing the river and Baker’s Lode to burst their banks again and drown us.’
There was silence. One man had been drowned in the flood, George Lowe, who had leapt into the raging waters of the Lode to save Tom, when – crippled by the loss of his amputated leg – he had slipped off the sodden bank. George was an outsider, one of the soldiers billeted at our farm, but everyone had been both shocked and humbled by his heroic action and we grieved for him. Our days together, sitting out the flood here in the village church, had created a curious comradeship between natural enemies. The soldiers had been brought here in order to put a stop to our resistance against the drainers trying to steal our common lands, but we had come to recognise that they were just young men like our own, many of them impressed into the Model Army and anxious to go home. As for the Dutch tenant farmers, illegally installed in settlements on our land, they had been misused by the adventurers as much as we had been. Their houses had been erected on land which normally flooded in winter, as anyone local could have warned them. In this latest terrible flood, more widespread than even the oldest villagers could remember, they had lost their homes, their livestock and most of their possessions, except for what they had been able to catch up as they fled before the rising waters. Few of them spoke much English, but we made ourselves understood to each other and they had shared the tasks of our common home, the women cooking, washing and minding the children, the men trudging through the snow to feed the livestock and milk the cows. That milk, thin and wintery as it was, had been a godsend in feeding the children.
Jack stood his sodden boots near one of the braziers to dry. ‘If the water continues to go down,’ he said, ‘I am minded to try for the village in a day or two. There are cheeses stored in our attic, and turnips, and oats. Hay in the loft of our barn. The flood seems only to have reached halfway up the ground floor.’
‘If you go,’ Gideon said, ‘you shall not go alone. We will make up a party. No need to run risks.’ He reached out and took my hand. He knew I could not forget the sight of George being swept away, when he had been but inches from our reaching arms.
The next moment Alice’s mother touched my shoulder. ‘Mercy, your mother is wanting you.’ She gave me a sympathetic look. It was rare these days for my mother even to know who I was, so if she was indeed asking for me, I must go. I left the men discussing a foray into the village. Tom watched and listened, his face tight with frustration. With but a single leg and one of his crutches lost in the flood, he knew he could take no part in it.
If my mother had indeed asked for me, she had forgotten it now.
‘See, Abigail,’ Mistress Morton said gently, ‘here is Mercy come to you.’
My mother’s vacant look must have been nearly as distressing for Mistress Morton as it was for me, for they had been close friends since childhood, just as Alice and I had been. Now my mother sometimes knew the companion of her youth, for her memory was better for things long past than for an hour ago, but me she sometimes took for her long-dead sister Elizabeth, sometimes for someone quite unknown. She looked at me now as at a stranger, and shook her head.
‘I do not know this girl,’ she said defiantly. Then her face crumpled.
It was impossible to predict her moods. Sometimes she would grow angry and violent, sometimes she was piteously lost in some dark world that no one could penetrate. Now she began to sob, rocking back and forth on the narrow pew, clutching her arms around her body, as if that way she could hold her world and her mind together. I tried to put my arms about her to comfort her, but she pushed me away.
‘I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are.’
Mistress Morton shook her head.
‘Leave her to me,’ she said.
I turned blindly away, unable to hold back the tears spilling down my cheeks. Gideon was there beside me. He had left the other men and followed me, knowing what I was likely to find. He handed me a handkerchief and I tried to blot away the tears.
‘She is so unhappy, Gideon, and I cannot help her.’
‘I know, my love. All you can do is to be ready at those moments when she does recognise you.’
‘They are so few.’
He put his arms around me and I leaned my cheek against the rough homespun of his jacket. When he had returned secretly to the village, he had discarded his clerical dress so that no outsider should recognise him as our exiled rector, driven out by the Puritan regime now in control of England. But there was no privacy here in our Ark. Not only our own friends knew who he was, so now did all the soldiers and the Dutchmen. And since we had declared our love openly here in the church, our intended betrothal was common knowledge also. How we were to live in future, he an exile, and I now the owner of a farm marooned in the floods, we could hardly bear to think.
In the end, it was another four days before the men considered it safe to make the attempt to reach the houses of the village. Further smashing of the icy surface in the smaller depressions in the glebe land showed that in these areas the standing water had seeped away, although the ground below was near as boggy as the Fen. Venturing through deep snow as far as the margin of the frozen lake which lay between the church lands and the village, Jack Sawyer and Toby Ashford had taken axes to the ice and found that here too the water was beginning to diminish, although it would be some while yet before the flood waters retreated altogether.
They made quite a large party setting out for the village: Gideon, Jack, and Toby, Will Keane, the village blacksmith, Rafe Cox, Alice’s husband, two of the soldiers who had been billeted with us, Seth and Aaron, and the Dutchman who had the most English and acted as their spokesman. His name, I had learned, was Hans Leiden. Gideon was determined that they should run no unnecessary risks. Will had found a length of strong rope in the rectory barn and with this the eight of them roped themselves together. Although the level of the water was not much above a man’s height, and the frozen lake might appear motionless, yet if one of them should fall through the ice, he could be sucked away under that fatal frozen roof before the others could reach him. Joined together, they could not lose one of their number. Had we but had a rope when Tom fell into the Lode, George might have survived.
Soon after sun-up they set off, carrying heavy sticks and with knapsacks on their backs to fetch what goods they might find that were worth saving. The flood waters had risen almost to the top of the ground floor of most of the houses. The Coxes’ house and Jack’s and the smithy stood on slightly higher ground on the other side of the village green, so the water had reached just to halfway up the windows, but everything on the ground floor, unless it was exceptionally sturdy, would be ruined. At the far end of the village, out of sight from the church, there was a cluster of poorer cottages where the road to Crowthorne dipped down toward a delph which flowed into the Lode and was crossed by a simple plank bridge. This bridge had been swept away in the early hours of the flood and the one-roomed cottages had been swamped entirely, consisting as they did of a single rough-built storey topped with a low gable roof which allowed no more than a small space for limited storage. Although something might be salvaged at the upper end of the village, the poorest of our neighbours would, like the settlers, have lost everything. The cottages themselves were probably gone.
I stood at the church door, watching the exploring party set off. If you did not know of the terrible damage that had been done, the sight would have seemed quite beautiful. There had been a hoar frost in the night, so that every twig coruscated like a diamond necklace in the low fingers of the early sun. The sky was a cloudless dome of chilly blue, reflected in the ice of the lake which lay where the village green and street should have been. Even the snow looked almost blue, lying in a smooth blanket over the glebe land, except where the men’s feet had trodden a path around the church to the farm buildings and now down the hill to the lake.
‘What will they find, do you think, mistress?’
I turned round, startled. It was a woman who had spoken in accented but perfectly clear English. I recognised her as the wife of Hans Leiden, a woman a few years older than myself. Months ago I had seen her in the Dutch settlement, spreading out washing to dry, while her little boy, not much bigger than Alice’s son Huw, had played at her feet. I found myself blushing. Mevrouw Leiden had worked amongst the other women while I was lying ill, but I had never spoken to her. What I remembered all too clearly was that hers had been one of the houses Tom and I and the other young people of the village had half torn down in our rage at the building of the settlement on our barley field. I knew now that she also had a daughter of about five. It was this child who had screamed when I ripped the thatch off their roof.
If Mevrouw Leiden knew I had been of that company, she gave no sign of it now as she smiled at me shyly.
‘They will find little that has not been destroyed by the flood, I fear,’ I said, ‘except perhaps in the upper rooms of the houses on this side of the village. The cottages over there–’ I waved with my right hand towards the far end of the street, ‘they will probably be destroyed altogether.’
I turned back to watch the men. They were gingerly testing whether the ice would take their weight.
‘We are used to floods at home,’ the woman said, ‘but usually they come from the sea.’
‘We are used to our own normal floods,’ I said bitterly, ‘for they bring fertile soil down from the wolds to feed our fields, but this is a man-made disaster, caused by men who understand nothing of how the Fens themselves absorb our flood waters. For generations we have managed and understood the fenlands, but now your people have destroyed us.’
It was unkind of me to blame her for the misdeeds of Piet van Slyke and his party of drainers, but the sight of what lay in front of me in the village, and the fear of what we might find when we returned to the farm at Turbary Holm, made me unforgiving.
Then, ashamed of my words, I held my hand out to her. ‘I am Mercy Bennington.’
She nodded, taking my hand briefly and dropping a curtsey. ‘Aye, I know. I have heard you spoken of. I am Griet Leiden.’
The men had tested the ice first with their sticks, then with tentative steps. Now Seth, who was the lightest weight, took a few hesitant paces out over the frozen lake.
‘Shut that door,’ someone shouted from within the church. ‘We shall all freeze to death.’
I heaved the heavy door closed. Ever since the attack of the soldiers, egged on by Edmund Dillingworth the previous summer, the door had dragged on the stone threshold. As Griet Leiden and I turned back into the nave, I said, ‘You speak very good English. Better even than your husband.’
She made a little deprecating gesture. ‘My father was a merchant in Amsterdam and I was sent to a good school there. We were taught English. Then my father lost two ships and died soon after.’
She stopped, as though she thought her story would be of no interest to me.
‘But now you are farmers?’ I prompted. I could not keep a note of incredulity from my voice.
She smiled sadly. ‘Hans worked for my father as a clerk, and had invested in the business. We were married not long before my father died and we lost everything. Hans found some work in the city, and we struggled to live there for a few years, but we were very poor. Then there came this offer of land and a farm here in England. As a boy, Hans had sometimes helped on his uncle’s farm and he thought we should take our chance, so we borrowed some money from his uncle for the passage to England, and for the rent of the farm. He also gave us a cow and six sheep. It would be a start, we thought.’
I wondered that anyone could suppose that it would be so easy to set up as farmers, w
ith no experience and little livestock, in a foreign country where you knew nothing of the land and no more of how to farm. Yet there were tales of settlers travelling from England to the New World just as ill prepared. Were all these settlers as naïve as children?
‘I suppose you lost the cow and the sheep in the flood,’ I said.
Her eyes filled with tears and she nodded.
‘My little girl loved the cow. It has broken her heart.’
Even I was not immune from a feeling for animals. I would have wept myself if Blackthorn, my favourite amongst our cows, had been drowned in the flood. But we had seen it coming and had known we must move the livestock to the higher ground of the glebe lands.
‘What will you do now?’ I said. ‘When the flood goes down and we are able to leave the church?’
She shook her head. The tears were falling freely now. ‘I do not know,’ she whispered. ‘We have no money left. The animals are gone, and our seeds for next year. We had very few possessions, but most of those are lost, even our cookpots.’
We sat down together on one of the pews near the font.
‘You know that you should never have been allowed to build where you did,’ I said, but I said it quietly. It seemed to me that these people had been treated even worse than we had. ‘That is common land. What that means is that it belongs to all of us commoners, the people of the village. We have a right to it in perpetuity.’
She frowned. The word must be unfamiliar to her.
‘We own it forever,’ I explained. ‘Our ancestors owned it. Our descendents will own it. There is a charter, made centuries ago and granted to us by the king. The men who have made these drainage schemes and flooded the land, they have been breaking the law and stealing our land.’
‘But,’ she said, ‘how can that be? If it is the law, you must go to court.’