by Ann Swinfen
There was not long to wait. The following day the Dutch surveyor returned with a large group of his men – Dutchmen like himself, a few of the Scots prisoners, and some disreputable Englishmen who were jeered through the village. I had gone to the village myself to see just how strong was the party of the enemy. In a body we followed the men in silence as they made their way to the medland where they had dug their first ditch, running from the Fen to join Baker’s Lode. At the junction they had installed a sluice, now shattered, partly by some of our own actions, partly by the flood.
At the far end of the ditch, by the marsh, the pumping mill had been built on the spot where Hannah’s cottage had once stood. It was powered by wind, like a grain mill, but instead of producing flour for nourishing daily bread, it drove a pump whose function was to suck the water out of the Fen, robbing fish and eels and waterfowl of their homes and turning the precious peat into useless dust.
Still in silence we stood at the edge of our medland while van Slyke strode about, growing angrier and angrier, swearing in English and Dutch. Our beasts grazing there took fright and retreated to the hedge at the far side of the medland, till they could go no further. Finally he turned on us.
‘You will pay for this, you filthy peasants!’ He was so angry that spittle flew from his mouth. ‘All this damage, this work destroyed, I will see that you pay for it! My masters will take you to court and strip you of everything you own, down to the shirts off your backs.’
Jack took a step forward, but I grabbed his arm and shook my head.
‘Not here,’ I whispered. ‘Let him rant. What can he do? It is clear most of the damage was done by the flood and the winter storms. Be patient. We will defeat him yet.’
Jack was breathing heavily, but he nodded.
‘At least he will find we have not smashed his pumping machine, unlike the people of Crowthorne.’ He gave a small smile. ‘Though Will promises it will not work, without the piece he has removed, and it will take them some time to discover why.’
As van Slyke made his way to the mill, we melted away, each to our own homes. The settlers had stayed well away from the confrontation, for they were in an unenviable position. I wondered what would happen when the adventurers’ bailiff came to collect their rents for the plots of land they no longer occupied. That might mean more trouble.
Back at the farm I hurried to catch up with my neglected tasks, but an hour or so later the door to the kitchen was thrown open and van Slyke walked in, without so much as a by your leave. My mother was spinning, Kitty was chopping onions and I had just hung the pot for the midday soup over the fire. Gideon was sitting on my father’s chair, prising off his boots.
‘You!’ Van Slyke pointed at Gideon. ‘You, Bennington, you are behind all this trouble!’
He started toward Gideon, but I moved from the fire and blocked his way.
‘Meneer van Slyke,’ I said coldly, ‘you enter our home with little courtesy. In your country, do you not knock and wait to be invited to enter?’
He stopped and glared at me.
‘You! You hoyden, you are no better than your brother.’
He pointed again at Gideon.
‘That is my husband, Master Chandler. If you seek my brother, Master Bennington, he is gone to London.’
Gideon stood up. Even without his boots he was a good handspan taller than van Slyke. He laid his hands on my shoulders and moved me gently to one side before stepping so close to van Slyke that the man backed away a step.
‘You have invaded our home without leave, fellow,’ Gideon said, taking another step forward, ‘and you have insulted my wife. Your behaviour is unpardonable. Get out.’
In his anger, Gideon sounded more aristocratic than I had ever heard him. I was not sure whether van Slyke’s ear was attuned to English voices, but he could not mistake the tone. He muttered something in Dutch, which it was as well we could not understand, and turned to the door.
As he went out, he flung over his shoulder, ‘You will hear more of this. I will have the law on you.’
Just before he moved away, Seth and Col, on their way to the kitchen for their midday meal, came near to colliding with him in the yard.
‘Is this man troubling you, Mistress Mercy?’ Col said.
‘Do your duty, damn you!’ van Slyke said. ‘You are here to ensure that these rogues do not interfere with our work.’ With that he stormed off.
The two soldiers came in, looking somewhat embarrassed. Gideon laughed and clapped Col on the shoulder. ‘Well spoken, Col. Come and take your dinner.’
Later, when Gideon and I were alone, I said, ‘I do not think I should delay any longer. Tomorrow I will visit Sir John and urge him to support us. That man means trouble.’
Chapter Eight
Tom
After our visit to James Blakiston at Lincoln’s Inn, I needed to rest, for the long walk had exhausted me. I had also rubbed the skin of my stump raw, so that I was obliged to remove my wooden prop and resort to two crutches again. I sat in one of our cushioned chairs with my eyes closed, too tired and in too much pain to think clearly. Anthony had papers to prepare for his senior, so he spent the rest of the day in the office working on them, while I alternately dozed and fretted. I had work to do for Bencher Whittaker, but I had not the heart for it.
The meeting with Blakiston had left me confused, and I wished we could have questioned him more closely, but it would have contravened the accepted courtesies between barristers. Who were the adventurers for whom he was acting? Were they the company bent on stealing our land, or some other company altogether? The Fens cover a large area, from Essex northwards, even touching the southern parts of Yorkshire. The company he represented might be carrying out their unscrupulous schemes as far away as Cambridgeshire, where my grandfather had led the resistance to their activities nearly twenty years before. In any case, why had Sir John Dillingworth engaged Blakiston on the other side of the quarrel? Was it simply because the Dillingworths had employed him before?
That seemed to make little sense. Had Blakiston already been employed by Sir John when he undertook work for the drainers? Or was it the other way about? In either case, it would mean a conflict of interests, not merely if he were to deal with Anthony, as Blakiston himself had pointed out, but in dealing with two such opposed clients of his own. Was Sir John aware of these other clients? Perhaps Blakiston had kept him in the dark. Or was Blakiston playing a double game, as Anthony had suggested, hoping to use information or evidence from one side to benefit the other? It resembled one of my two-handed tasks for Bencher Whittaker, arguing first for one side and then for the other, except that this was no student exercise. The fortunes of real people were in danger here. If Blakiston was engaged in some kind of treachery, we would be the ones to suffer. Had he already found and hidden the charter?
Anthony delivered the papers he had prepared to his senior and returned to our chambers in the late afternoon.
‘I have sent for a meal from the Peacock,’ he said as he flung himself down in a chair. ‘I think neither of us is in the mood for dinner in Hall tonight.’
‘Hardly,’ I agreed. ‘What did you make of James Blakiston?’
Anthony clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Arrogant. Supercilious. Deceitful. Sly.’
‘But does he have the charter?’
‘Like you, I suspect he has. Or else he knows where it is. But he has not chosen to use it yet.’
‘The only way he can use it,’ I said slowly, ‘is either to hand it over to the company of adventurers who covet our land, so they can withhold it if we take them to court. Or else he can destroy it.’
‘I wonder.’ Anthony got up and poured us each a cup of beer. ‘I think for any lawyer, even a corrupt one, as I suspect Blakiston to be, the destruction of a royal charter would take a great deal of courage. What if he should be found out? I think he would be debarred from ever practising at law again. Nay, I think he is more likely to conceal it.’
‘But where?’
I sipped my beer. I realised that I needed it, as I needed the dinner Anthony had ordered.
‘In his chambers? But then one of his clerks or his junior might come across it. Or else . . . I wonder.’
‘What?’
‘Do they not say that the best place to hide something is where it is least suspected, in plain view? If you wish to hide a book, place it between many other books on a shelf. If you wish to hide a paper, slip it into a pile of similar papers.’
‘But a charter?’
‘Amongst other old parchment scrolls. It would need to be somewhere he could lay his hand on it when he wanted it.’
He thought for a moment.
‘Perhaps amongst the old parchments in Lincoln’s Inn library? Their library is better organised than ours. While we still kept our books in one of the Bencher’s rooms, they had a separate building for their books and manuscripts. Someone told me they have had a library building for more than a century and a half. I wonder–’
He began to pace about, but before he could say what was on his mind, the servant arrived with our dinner. When we had satisfied the first pangs of hunger – for I realised that I had eaten nothing since early morning – Anthony wiped his mouth on his napkin and took a long drink of his beer.
‘Supposing he has hidden the charter amongst the old scrolls kept in their library,’ he said. ‘I expect few people need to consult them, and he could lay his hand on it whenever he wished.’
‘That is little help to us,’ I said.
‘Bear with me. My senior has another case involving ancient land laws, some of which date from before the Normans came. Some were still cited several centuries later. He is something of a scholar, my senior, and loves finding these old cases, whether they are of any practical use or not. I think I might persuade him that I could make a search in the Lincoln’s Inn library, to see whether there might be anything of interest to him there. He could gain us permission to use their library. Now that you have become an assistant to our librarian, that would be reason enough for me to say I needed your help.’
‘It might be worth a try.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘What if Blakiston should catch us there?’
‘We would be there quite legitimately. The Inns do cooperate, when it is in their interests to do so. Besides, we could choose a time when he is in court. That should not be too difficult to discover.’
It was agreed, therefore, that Anthony would try to arrange for us to visit Lincoln’s Inn library some time the following week, after I had seen Gilbert Bolton on Monday afternoon, to try the mechanical leg. In the meantime I must complete my task for Bencher Whittaker and serve my two days in the library. We were progressing slowly with our catalogue of the books, but there was work enough to keep me occupied for many weeks yet.
On Monday I attended my usual session with Bencher Whittaker, having completed my assigned task with more enthusiasm now that Anthony and I had something definite planned. We were to go to Lincoln’s Inn the following day. Anthony had been able to discover that Blakiston would be in the Court of Chancery, in a case that would last most of the day.
As I was leaving Bencher Whittaker’s chambers, I asked, ‘Master Thirkettle and I were discussing a theoretical case. If someone were to conceal or destroy a royal charter, what crime would that constitute?’
He tapped his fingers on his desk and gazed out of the window.
‘It is not something I have ever come across.’
‘Might it be lèse-majesté? A form of treason?’
‘Indeed, it might count as such. An interesting point. I shall need to think about it.’
So, I thought, as I made my way back to our chambers, it is probably not something Blakiston would risk.
I could not travel to Bucklersbury with the wine carter this time, for he would have gone early in the morning, but he had agreed to collect me for the homeward trip. In order to reach Gilbert Bolton’s shop, I was obliged to hire a man to take me. I had not the coin for one of the hackney carriages the gentry used in their journeys between the City and their homes along the Strand, but I found a jobbing carter who was prepared to convey me for a tenth of the cost. When I stepped inside the shop at the sign of the Golden Ram, the surgeon was already there, eating bread and cheese with one hand and turning over the pages of Paré’s book with the other.
‘Ah, Master Bennington!’ he cried, leaping up. A shower of breadcrumbs spilled on to the floor from his lap. ‘Come through, come through. The leg is ready for you to try.’
He watched me keenly as I hobbled into the back room, using just one crutch. In the days since our walk to Lincoln’s Inn my skin had healed again, but I had also added some extra padding at the top of the prop, a soft folded cloth Goodwife Gorley had given me. I had discovered that her fierce manner was no more than a pretence. Underneath it all she reminded me – although she was much younger – of Hannah Greene, who had comforted us after our scrapes and tumbles in childhood.
‘Good,’ Bolton said. ‘Your balance is much improved, I see. Now let us examine the muscles of that left leg.’
I noticed that he always spoke of it as a ‘leg’, although less than half of it remained. I must learn to do the same, and stop thinking of it as a pitiful stump of the leg I had once possessed.
Again I sat on the bench, after removing the wooden leg and my breeches. I had not worn a left stocking, but Bolton had told me to bring one. He leaned over and began probing my left thigh with firm but gentle fingers.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘It has been – what? – two weeks? And already the muscles are stronger. Can you feel it?’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘At first I found it very difficult to lift or move the wooden leg, but it is much easier now.’
‘This is what I hoped. You will need to use those muscles even more with the mechanical leg. Let me see you clench and relax the muscles of your thigh.’
At first I was not sure I could do as he asked, but after a few minutes he said, ‘Imagine that your whole leg is still there. Stretch out your leg. Point your toe. Then draw your leg back, with your knee bent.’
I looked at him as if he were mad. Then I remembered than when my leg was first amputated, I kept imagining it was still there. My foot would itch, so that I longed to scratch it. Yet the foot was not there. I would feel a pain in my calf, but my calf was gone. Even now, usually when I was in that dim land between waking and sleep, I would think I could feel my leg. So I did what he asked. I closed my eyes and moved the leg which no longer existed, while he laid his hand on my thigh. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was beaming.
‘You see! You still have the memory of your leg.’
‘It’s true,’ I said, ‘I sometimes feel that it is there, but why? Is it some kind of devil’s deception?’
He gave a scornful snort. ‘What nonsense! The human body is God’s most beautiful and complex design. This memory which remains when a part of the body is lost bears witness to that beauty. We do not yet known why it is so, or how it happens, but we can make use of it. I have seen a man who lost a hand use a mechanical one to pick up and wield a sword, guide his horse by the reins, lift a cup to his lips. What you will learn to do is much simpler, just as a leg is much simpler than a hand.’
He removed a cloth from something which was lying on his workbench. It startled me, for it looked much more like a severed human leg than the metal ones displayed in his shop windows. I realised, of course, that this was because the outer layer was made of some soft leather, probably calf skin. He lifted the leg carefully and brought it over to where I sat.
‘I have made this to the exact measurements of your right leg. It is braced within by a metal tube in sections, replacing the bones which give rigidity to the human leg. The foot is weighted, as I think that will give you more stability.’
He placed the foot in my hand, so I could feel the weight.
‘The knee and ankle are jointed, as you have seen in my metal legs and in Paré�
��s illustrations. You will manipulate them partly by flexing your thigh muscles and drawing on your memory, and partly by the way you lean forward and back.’
He moved the joints of the leg so I could see. The leather, being soft and pliable, moved quite easily.
‘The foot is not yet perfected,’ he said. ‘When we walk, we use our toes more than we realise. Watch my foot.’
He discarded his shoes and walked slowly up and down the room so that I could see the movement of the toes. He pulled on his shoes again, but left the laces untied. I was still holding the leg and saw that the toes were made in one simple piece, hinged to the rest of the foot. He sat down on the bench.
‘I am sure I can improve on the toes, but I want you to try this for now. We will practise until your carter arrives, then I want you to practise further – shall we say for another week? – before I see you again. I would like you to send me a message every day or two to tell me how you are faring, how well the leg is performing. Can you do that?’
‘Of course,’ I said, although I was feeling a little overcome by all of this.
‘And if you have any problems, any at all, you must return and I will try to solve them.’
With his help, I strapped on the leg, which fitted much like the wooden one, though the leather meant that it was more pleasant to handle. I took up my crutch and stood up, somewhat unsteadily.
‘Good,’ Bolton said. ‘Now try a step or two.’
I took a single step with my good leg, managed to swing the new leg forward to take a second step. Toppled forward and fell flat on my face.
‘Oh, my dear sir!’ Bolton was kneeling on the floor, peering at me anxiously. ‘Are you hurt!’
The crutch had struck me an unpleasant blow on the chin, and I had twisted my right leg slightly, but I shook my head as best I could, with my face on the floor, a few inches from his dangling shoe laces.
‘Is the leg broken?’ I gasped, for the unexpected fall had winded me.
‘Nay, I do not think so. Let me help you up.’