Betrayal (The Fenland Series Book 2)

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘Can I do aught to aid you, Mercy?’

  Her eyes were wide with fear and horror. I think if those devils, the witchfinders Hopkins and Stearne, had still haunted our fenlands, they would have carried Kitty off at once to hang, for surely no Christian soul could rave like this.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I think it is coming to a crisis, Griet. If she outlives this night, then I believe she will recover.’

  I stood up, stretching my cramped limbs. ‘I will just fetch a bucket of fresh water from the well. It is coldest when drawn fresh. If only she will let me bathe her.’

  We both looked at the emaciated girl, her hair soaking with sweat, her body shuddering as if with cold, yet her flesh was burning to the touch.

  Griet reached out and took the bucket from me. ‘I will fetch the water. Do you eat and drink something while you may. Take a slice of that cold ham pie Alice brought this morning. You cannot live like this. You have no sleep.’

  ‘I doze a little when she is quiet. You cannot fetch the water, you are wearing nothing but your shift.’

  She shook her head and laughed. ‘Who is to see me? The hens? Nehemiah is busy with the ewes.’

  She threw a shawl around her shoulders and was out of the door before I could stop her. I cut myself a slice of the pie, poured a cup of small ale, and went back to Kitty. When Griet returned with the water, Kitty had quietened and seemed to be sleeping, though her breathing was very fast and shallow.

  ‘I think she is a little better, not so?’ Griet set down the bucket just on the kitchen side of the doorway, for I would not allow her to risk coming near Kitty.

  ‘She is no longer raving, certainly. I shall try bathing her again. Thank you for fetching the water. You must go to bed.’

  She smiled and slipped away, her bare feet soundless on the floor.

  That night we passed the point of danger. The following morning, when I laid my hand on Kitty’s forehead, she felt cool, but not cold, and lay exhausted. I prayed that the fever had finally passed. It was still very early, barely past dawn, and she seemed to be sleeping normally. I made my way out of the house, across the yard and a little way along the lane, toward the arable fields. I had heard the men of the village passing along the lane yesterday with the ox-drawn plough. By climbing the shallow bank at the side of the lane, I could look out across the field which had been sown for wheat last year, but would be planted with beans this year. It was already ploughed and sown.

  The yoke of oxen had belonged to Turbary Holm, but when we had needed money for my father’s court fine, Tom had sold them to Jack, who promised to sell them back to us when we had raised the money again, though that time had not yet come. They were used by all the village in any case, and I had been promised that our shared of the common lands would be ploughed and sown for us, while we were in such troubles.

  The freshly turned earth had not dried yet but gleamed like brown satin in the low rays of the early sun. I remembered how Alice and I had clung to each other, laughing, as we sat on the harrow last year. It seemed a lifetime ago. I turned to where I could see part of the medland where our sheep were grazing. Alice had said yesterday that much of the drainers’ ditch, which they had dug right across it, had collapsed in the flood. I could not see their pumping mill from here, there was a clump of sallows in the way, but it had been disabled by Will and others, to stop it pumping water out of the Fen to augment the flood. It had never functioned since.

  Beyond the medland I could make out the rushes of the Fen, constantly rippling in gold-green waves. Even from where I stood I could hear their constant shushing, like a mother soothing her babe to sleep. The wind carries the voice of the Fens, and if you are a fenlander born and bred, you are never happy out of the sound of it. I thought how much Tom would be missing that sound amidst the violence and noise of London.

  A blackbird had already begun his song before I came out to steal these few precious moments for myself. Now the other birds began to join in – a blue tit in the hedge not three feet away, a thrush somewhere over amongst our apple trees, a robin perched on the gate post. From the Fen I heard the booming call of a butter bump and with a rush of wings a flight of swans swept over, no more than a few feet above my head, with that strange whistling of the wind in their wings.

  I must go back. My patient would need me. Perhaps she could be persuaded to eat a proper meal today. Then I must take over the day’s lambing. We were nearly done. We had lost two more, stillborn, but the rest were healthy. Soon they could all be driven to the medland, and the cows too. The sowing of the crops would be late this year, but God willing, we would have a harvest. I turned back to the house.

  The following day, Jack rode out to Turbary Holm. When he had asked after Kitty and looked over the last of our lambs, who were doing well, he came to sit in the kitchen. My mother had not yet risen, but Kitty was out of her bed for the first time, wrapped in blankets and tucked into the large chair where my father used to sit. She had taken up her knitting, but after a few rows her hands had dropped into her laps. I saw that she was still too exhausted even to ply her needles. She revived a little on seeing a new face.

  ‘Well, Kitty lass,’ Jack said, ‘you have given us all a fright, have you not? And how are you now?’

  ‘Much better, Master Jack,’ she said, blushing at having so much attention paid to her. ‘I shall be back about my work tomorrow.’

  ‘You will not,’ I said, poured Jack a cup of ale. ‘You are weaker than those newborn lambs. You will be allowed to stay out of bed for a little longer each day until I think you are strong enough.’

  As if to reinforce my words, Hannah’s cat Tobit leapt on to Kitty’s lap, turned round a few times and then settled comfortably in a nest of blankets and wool.

  ‘You see. Even Tobit knows you must sit quietly.’

  I took up my own knitting, for ever since last year all the women of the household had made finished woollen goods to send to market, instead of merely selling our fleeces as we used to do.

  ‘This is more than a neighbourly visit,’ Jack said, drinking deeply of his ale and setting the cup down on the table.

  ‘You have come from Hans, to fetch Griet home?’ I asked. ‘She is out collecting the eggs now, but she is coming home this evening anyway.’

  ‘I am sure Hans will be glad to see her, but he knows that she was needed here. Nay, I went over to Crowthorne yesterday, after we sowed the beans, and I thought I would bring you the news.’

  Jack had a few friends in the other village, amongst those who were not such dedicated Puritans as the rest, in particular the two men, Joshua and Ephraim, who had worked with us to rescue our confiscated stock last autumn.

  ‘And there is news?’ For a moment my heart leapt. News of Gideon? But the people of Crowthorne knew nothing of his whereabouts, or so I hoped.

  ‘Piet van Slyke has discovered how they disabled the pumping mill on their land at the time of the flood, and is threatening all kinds of vengeance against them. It will not be long before he discovers that we did the same.’

  ‘But what right has he to take vengeance?’ I said.

  ‘His property, he claims, or at any rate the property of the company of adventurers which employs him.’

  ‘Erected on our land. Without our consent. Nay, rather in defiance of our will. And neglected all through the winter.’

  ‘Indeed. And I do not believe any serious damage was done, at least not to the one they built here where Hannah’s cottage used to stand. Will knew what he was about. He disabled it, but did it no harm. If any harm has been done to it, it was the flood. I have not been inside it since, though I have seen that the sails of the windmill are badly damaged.’

  ‘Aye, we saw that, Nehemiah and I, when we drove our ewes up to the medland. But was it not to be expected, when the whole mill was left unattended all these months? Surely van Slyke and his men are to blame?’

  ‘I’ll not argue with that,’ Jack said. ‘However, I thought I sho
uld warn you, in case van Slyke comes nosing about here again.’

  ‘If he is looking for Tom, he will not find him.’

  ‘Have you any word of him?’

  ‘He has sent one letter. Gray’s Inn has accepted him again as a student and happily he has met an old friend who has invited him to share his rooms – “chambers” they are called – at Gray’s. He has even found some work in the library there, so all seems to be well.’

  ‘Any word of the charter?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nay. But the letter was written soon after he arrived and the weather was still bitter, the roads icy.’

  ‘He would find it difficult to get about.’

  Privately, I did not know how Tom hoped to search for the charter, hampered as he was by the loss of his leg, but I had not wanted to discourage him. His spirits had been so low since the amputation that I was glad of his plan to take up his studies in the law again. It had lifted his heart, to have a possible future before him, instead of wasting away idly on the farm.

  Jack rose to his feet just as Griet came in with her basket of eggs and they greeted one another.

  ‘One other thing I learned in Crowthorne,’ he said, fastening his cloak and pulling on his hat. ‘It seems we are to have a new rector. Rumour in Crowthorne has it that some ranting friend of the Reverend Edgemont’s has yielded to his persuasions to give up his position in one of the London parishes and take up the cure of the poor benighted souls of our village. Though why either he or Edgemont should care, since by their lights we are already damned, that I cannot know.’

  Griet looked puzzled at this. We had never discussed religion and I knew nothing of her faith, save that she was Protestant. But this was bad news indeed. If Gideon and I were to be married in church, it must take place before this new man came.

  ‘When does he come,’ I asked, ‘this new rector from London?’

  ‘Some time in May, so my friends believe, but that is but hearsay.’ He looked at me gravely. ‘Let us hope that Gideon returns before then.’

  Griet went home to her family. Kitty began to regain her strength, though slowly. And the last of the lambs were born. We had lost just two more. Finally, along with the rest of the village, we drove the remaining sheep and then the cows out to pasture. We had only two sows this year, each with a litter, so the care of the beasts became less demanding. Once the crops were planted, at least three weeks later than usual, the weeds began to grow as fast as the grain, so like everyone else I took my turn at hoeing out the weeds, backbreaking work. The new cottages in the village were completed, though barely furnished, and the settlers were hard at work creating their vegetable beds, which were fenced in with boards and raised above the ground, with a generous addition of manure dug in. They planted very close together, which seemed strange to us, but they cared for their young plants as carefully as if they were children.

  I had walked one afternoon into the village to return Mistress Sawyer’s baskets which had been left at Turbary Holm since Alice’s first visit. I had had no opportunity to take them before, but Kitty was well enough now to look after my mother, Nehemiah was busy about the farmyard, and I had baked the day’s bread before I set out. Outside Will’s smithy a man was shoeing a horse, bent forward, with the horse’s hoof gripped between his knees. As I came nearer I saw that the man turning over the points of the nails to hold the shoe in place was not Will, but his cousin Abel, the man who had helped me – who had, in truth, saved my life – in Lincoln. He had arrived in the village just as Tom left and I moved back to the farm, so that I had hardly exchanged two words with him since he had come to the village.

  He set the horse’s hoof gently on the ground and straightened up, laying aside the pincers he had used on the nails.

  ‘That’s done then, Ned,’ he said. ‘I’ve cleaned the hoof, too. She had some hard clay wedged between the old shoe and the frog.’

  It was Ned Broadley, the carpenter, with his old mare. He handed Abel some coins, which chinked faintly, then they both caught sight of me.

  After I had answered their questions about Kitty and the lambing and the state of the farm, Ned patted his mare and led her away.

  ‘Abel,’ I said, ‘I am glad to see you well settled here with Will and at work in the smithy. I shall never forget what you did for me.’

  He looked embarrassed and shifted from foot to foot. ‘It was your own courage as much as anything I did, Mistress Mercy. You kept your head, when many would have drowned. And I hear you took very ill on your long walk home.’

  ‘That is all over now,’ I said. ‘And forget the “Mistress”. I am but “Mercy” to my friends. I hope I may count you among them.’

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ he said, with a sudden grin.

  ‘And how are you liking the return to smithing?’

  ‘Ah, well, I am somewhat out of practice, but it is coming back to me. Cousin Will trusts me with the simple jobs.’

  I laughed. ‘Will was boasting of your skills before ever you came.’

  ‘Then he was too forward. I hope my hands will find those skills again.’

  He removed his thick leather apron and laid it aside. ‘Will you step into the house? I know that Will and Liz will be glad to see you.’

  ‘Nay,’ I said. ‘I must return these baskets to Mistress Sawyer and then hurry home, or Kitty will be trying to do too much. She has not got all her strength back yet.’

  I bade him farewell and was about to turn aside to the Sawyers’ house when I saw the carter Edy trundling up the village street from the direction of the new bridge. Carters always bring news, so I waited. Then I saw that there was someone sitting up beside him. And I threw down the baskets and flew down the street, heedless of those who looked after me, gaping.

  ‘Gideon!’

  He jumped down before the cart had stopped and we fell against each other – and nearly down in the mud – clinging together, half laughing, half crying. It was most unseemly behaviour, and my mother would have been shocked. Or she would once have been.

  For the next half hour I was forced to share him with the village, but at last we were able to set out for the farm, after I had rescued the baskets and thrust them at Jack to be given to his mother.

  As soon as we were alone around the bend in the lane, he took me in his arms and kissed me.

  ‘Oh, Gideon,’ I said, when I could breathe again, ‘you have been gone so long. What has happened?’

  He tucked my arm under his and we began to walk on toward the farm.

  ‘First, I had some difficulty hiring a horse in Peterborough, for the army had commandeered nearly everything on four legs. At last I secured an old nag who went so slowly it took me twice as long as it should to reach Oxford. Once I was there, I must tread carefully. Since the siege it has remained in the hands of the Parliamentary army, so one could not go about loudly seeking the whereabouts of an Anglican clergyman.’

  ‘I feared you might be in danger.’ I squeezed his arm. ‘I have been imagining everything from prison to press ganging.’

  ‘It did not come to that, though I had one or two bad moments.’ He smiled down at me. ‘Eventually I had word of an old college friend, Amyas Cooper. Like me he took orders after graduating and he had a parish in Kent, but he was driven out three years ago. I heard he was now in Burford.’

  ‘You found him?’

  He nodded. ‘I rode my nag slowly over to Burford and made discreet enquiries. He was working as a clerk to one of the leading wool merchants there. All that area is very important in the wool trade, and this man is one of the great men in the wool business. And a Puritan. So I had to be careful.’

  He shifted the knapsack he was carrying, and I realised he was very tired, but we had not much further to go.

  ‘Eventually I was able to meet him and ask if he would perform the ceremony for us. He agreed, but he needed to get leave from his master, on the excuse of some family trouble.’

  ‘He will come!’ I cried.

  ‘
He will come.’ He stopped and kissed me again. ‘Do you remember last May Day, my village queen?’

  I smiled, feeling again the weight of the ancient May queen’s cloak on my shoulders. Our last celebration of May Day, and I the last queen. I remembered the touch of Gideon’s hand as he led me to my flower-decked throne on the village green, and the shock it sent through me.

  I could see that Gideon too was remembering. He smiled. ‘Amyas will reach the village on the last day of April. This year you shall become mine. We shall be wed on the first day of May.’

  Chapter Six

  Tom

  ‘There is nothing for it,’ Anthony said, ‘but to search the state records for the reign of Henry III. I have scoured to the bottom of the barrel with Henry II. Or rather, I have climbed up among the cobwebbed rafters of his reign’s documents, and the charter is not there.’

  ‘I feel guilty,’ I said uncomfortably, ‘that you should have all this trouble. It is not your case, nor your common lands.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but like the proverbial runaway horse, I have seized the bit between my teeth, and I shall run with this.’

  He lifted a large beaker of ale and drank most of it down in a single draught.

  ‘Ah, that is good. I feel as though I have swallowed half the cobwebs and most of the dust in that place.’

  We were sitting in a small tavern which stood not many yards along Gray’s Inn Lane from the gatehouse. It was the first time I had ventured out of the Inn since I had arrived in London. With the last of the snow gone and the roads dry, I had decided I must make my way about more, now that I could move more safely. I was progressing well with my studies. Bencher Whittaker even gave me a few words of praise from time to time. In the library we had started to shelve the first of the books we had catalogued, so that it had begun to look more like a place of scholarship and less like a chaotic merchant’s warehouse. Now that we had a better idea of how much space might be needed for each category of books, Master Hansen and I had put up temporary labels on the shelves, and under my direction a servant had carried books and shelved them according to our labels. Nevertheless, I was impatient that the Rolls House was too far away for me to accompany Anthony and help in the search.