Betrayal (The Fenland Series Book 2)

by Ann Swinfen

  When he had me sitting on the bench again, he suddenly struck his forehead with the heel of his hand.

  ‘I am a fool! I forgot to tell you to bring a left shoe!’

  I looked at him blankly. ‘I have no left shoes in London. What I had, I did not bring with me. Why do I need a shoe?’

  ‘I have tried to be too clever,’ he said with a groan. ‘Usually we make a mechanical leg so that it is complete in itself, but I have made this so that it is an exact pair to your own right leg. I hoped to make it possible to conceal the mechanical leg from view, because so many – like you – feel ashamed of an amputation. Though, I may say, there is nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘But, a shoe?’ I prompted.

  ‘Without a shoe, you are unbalanced, so naturally you fell. Let us remove your right shoe and try again.’

  I was not sure if he was proposing that I should walk about London with my right foot bare, but I did as he asked and removed my shoe. This time when I stood, I felt much steadier. With great care I took one step with my right foot, then swung the artificial leg forward as I had swung the wooden one. I did not fall. I took several more steps until I reached the opposite wall, when I hopped around until I was facing back the way I had come and managed to reach the bench again.

  ‘Excellent,’ Bolton said. ‘Now your balance is right, but you must not swing this leg like the wooden one. It has a jointed knee. Try to imagine it bending. Lean down on it slightly, and forward, as you step. It should bend.’

  I tried hard, but the leg would not bend.

  ‘I think I have the mechanism too tight.’ Bolton inserted a thin probe into the knee joint through a small aperture in the leather and turned something. ‘Try again now.’

  This time the leg flapped loosely, like the limb of a cloth doll.

  ‘Too much,’ he said, adjusting the joint once more.

  Now I felt the knee flex slightly as I walked. It was a strange sensation which almost caused me to lose my balance, but I managed to reach the other side of the room without falling.

  ‘I think the ankle is still a little tight.’

  Bolton made some adjustments to the ankle joint until he was satisfied, and I practised walking up and down the room. I still leaned heavily on the crutch, but the leg felt a little less strange.

  ‘Now try sitting down and getting up.’

  When I sat down, the leg remained sticking out straight, so that I took hold of the knee and bent it with my hands. Getting up was more difficult and I nearly tipped forward on to my face again, but by pushing myself upright with my crutch I was able to regain my balance and took a few steps.

  ‘That is good. You are growing accustomed to it, but you must practise, practise, practise.’

  ‘I cannot walk about London with my right foot bare,’ I said.

  ‘Nay, you cannot. You must have a left shoe made to match your right shoe. Until then . . .’ he took off his own left shoe. ‘Our feet are much the same size. I think this will fit the mechanical leg, and the heel is the same height as yours, so you will maintain your balance.’

  ‘You cannot give me your shoe.’

  ‘I am merely lending it, until you have a shoe made. I have another pair of shoes. Did you bring your left stocking?’

  ‘Aye.’ I pulled it out of my pocket. ‘The foot is cut away, so that I could roll it up.’

  ‘It will suffice for now.’

  He helped me pull the stocking over the mechanical leg and then put on my breeches, before I put my right shoe on again and we fitted his shoe on to the mechanical leg. The two unmatched shoes looked strange, but for the rest, if you did not peer too closely, it nearly seemed as though I had two sound legs again. Despite the ache in my back and a throbbing in my left thigh, I began to feel a stirring of excitement. I would always walk awkwardly. I would never run again. Yet I might almost begin to look like a normal man.

  ‘Shall I ever be able to discard the crutch?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘Much will depend on how well you learn to manage the leg. Some have walked with an iron leg, but found it tiring. My hope is that this design will come nearer to replacing what you have lost, but you must practise, practise. In the meantime, I shall work on a better design for the foot.’

  When the carter arrived to take me back to Gray’s Inn, his eyes widened as I walked out of Bolton’s shop, apparently on two sound legs. I saw his hand twitch as he came near to crossing himself, a gesture that would have had him seized as a Catholic.

  ‘God’s bones, sir!’ He said, looking furtively from me to Bolton, who stood in the doorway, watching to see how well I managed the climb into the cart.

  ‘Nay,’ I said, as I heaved myself awkwardly up. ‘Merely a better artificial limb.’

  When I reached Gray’s Inn, I was glad to see that the gatekeeper Potter was deep in conversation with one of the clerks and did not glance my way. I had no wish to discuss my new appearance with him. I was disappointed that Anthony was not in our chambers, but at least it meant that I could practise walking back and forth, in and out of the rooms, sitting down on my bed, on chairs, and getting up again. I was still awkward and I thought I should always need a crutch, but I found I did not lurch quite so much when I walked. Sitting and standing smoothly were very difficult.

  Anthony was amazed when he arrived, and wanted to examine the mechanism of the leg.

  ‘Not possible, I am afraid,’ I said. ‘It is all concealed inside the leather sheath. If I can remember, I might be able to draw you a rough sketch.’

  I did my best, but I am no artist, nor could I remember the Paré illustration in detail.

  ‘Something like this,’ I said, handing Anthony the paper. ‘It is very ingenious, and supports me much better than the wooden leg, but I am not sure how well I shall be able to manage it.’

  ‘Astonishing,’ Anthony said, as I did my best to demonstrate the leg. ‘And shall you be able to keep it?’

  ‘I do not know. But as it was made to my precise measurements, I cannot suppose it would be of use to anyone else.’

  The next morning we made our way once again to Lincoln’s Inn. As Anthony wanted to spare me the fatigue of walking both ways, he persuaded my friend the carter to go a little out of his way and carry us as far as Chancery Lane before he set off for the City. I was grateful for his forethought. I had spent longer than I should the previous evening following Gilbert Bolton’s instructions to ‘Practise! Practise!’

  The library at Lincoln’s Inn was impressive. The librarian assured us that the building had been erected in the fifteenth century and the Inn had been accumulating books and manuscripts ever since. It would be some while yet before we could match this comprehensive collection at Gray’s, though the recent legacies by former Members (perhaps prompted by comparison with Lincoln’s Inn) would go some way to improving our literary collection.

  Aware of this difference, the librarian did not seem at all surprised that we might wish to consult his superior resources. He showed us the great ledgers in which all the books were recorded, and which were arranged very like the ones Master Hansen and I were creating. The books were shelved according to the subjects they dealt with, and it seemed relatively easy to locate them.

  ‘My senior has sent me to search through your oldest records,’ Anthony said. ‘The earliest centuries of the Normans, and anything you may have from before their invasion. These will almost certainly be scrolls rather than folios. How do you catalogue and arrange those?’

  ‘As you know,’ the librarian gave me a brief nod, as one engaged on a similar task, ‘scrolls are particularly difficult to accommodate. They cannot be shelved like books, and they have no spines to make them easy to locate. Like the Rolls House, we keep them stored horizontally, stacked up in divided shelves like open boxes. Insofar as we can, we group related material together, but it is a nightmare, a true nightmare. I have suggested to the Benchers that we should donate them to the Rolls House and rid ourselves of the problem, but they wish
to retain them in our own library.’

  ‘We shall just have to do the best we can,’ Anthony said. ‘If you would be good enough to direct us?’

  ‘They are stored in this room at the back,’ the librarian said. ‘Follow me.’

  Anthony winked at me, and we followed.

  My first reaction was dismay. Lincoln’s Inn’s collection of parchment scrolls filled shelf after shelf, with nothing to distinguish one from another but an occasional seal which had been left to dangle over the edge of a shelf. They were piled up about six deep in each box-like compartment, with nothing showing but the tattered edges of the rolled up parchments, some with fragments hanging loose. No one ever dusted or swept here, so some of the parchment fragments lay scattered about the floor. I wondered whether mice presented a problem.

  Anthony seemed undaunted, but I supposed his searches in the Rolls House had prepared him for this. The librarian had carried in the ledger recording the scrolls and set it on a table for us, before returning to his work in the other room.

  ‘This will take us days!’ I murmured in dismay to Anthony. ‘Although . . . look, this whole section in covered in cobwebs. Thick cobwebs. No one had disturbed them for some time. I think we may ignore those.’

  ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘At least a third of the shelves are in a like state. This section here, someone has been consulting these. And that section over to the right. You start looking at those and I’ll search these. All you need to do is unroll the top section of each scroll and check the first few lines.’

  He had brought a small notebook with him, to keep up the pretence that he was looking for information for his senior. He laid this down beside the ledger and as he worked his way through the scrolls he made occasional notes. I started on the section he had pointed out and began lifting out the scrolls and checking them, one by one. It seemed to me, although they were not covered with cobwebs, that they looked as though they had not been disturbed for a long time.

  I had made little use of my Latin in recent years, but it had been well drilled into us at school, while at Cambridge many of our books were in Latin. The Latin formula at the beginning of each scroll was easy enough to read. Almost all were legal documents of some kind, as was only to be expected in the library of one of the Inns of Court, so their opening words followed a standard form, the type of case, the parties involved and the year of the current reigning monarch.

  Time passed slowly as we worked our way through the only sections which appeared to have been searched at some recent date. A drowsy bluebottle buzzed in a corner and occasionally made a sluggish flight from one side of the room to the other. Once it made a heavy landing on my face, startling me. I batted it away in disgust. Although there were few or no cobwebs amongst the scrolls I was examining, there was dust everywhere and as we disturbed it, it began to float about in the air, so that we both suffered bouts of coughing.

  I found a few documents from the time of the first two Henrys, and a few dealing with land transactions, but no charter granting rights in common land. I did turn up one scroll from the twelfth century which I thought might be of interest to Anthony’s senior, and he made a note of it.

  ‘I’m am replacing it here,’ I said, ‘on the top row of this top shelf, at the far right, should he want to consult it.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I have found – let me see – eleven other documents for him. But no sign of your charter.’

  We looked about us. There was nowhere else. We had checked every shelf which was not cloaked in a thick accumulation of cobwebs. It was dispiriting.

  ‘We guessed wrongly, then,’ I said.

  Anthony shrugged. ‘It was worth a try. At least we now know one place where it is not.’

  I was tired from standing, but not as tired as I would have been either leaning on two crutches alone or on the wooden leg. I realised that because my balance was much better with the mechanical leg, my back was not twisted. Before, I had suffered a good deal of back pain.

  Anthony carried the large ledger back to the librarian, who looked up, surprised, as though he had forgotten we were there.

  ‘Did you discover anything of use?’ He sounded as if he thought it unlikely.

  Anthony held up his notebook, open at the page where he had been taking notes. ‘About a dozen documents. We thank you for your assistance.’

  We bowed and took our leave.

  I had to use caution in walking down the few steps to the court, not being quite certain of the new leg on steps, and I kept my eyes on my feet, so I did not notice the man approaching us until he was nearly upon us.

  ‘Tom Bennington! What do you here? Who is your friend?’

  I looked up to see someone I could hardly have expected to meet here in one of the Inns of Court.

  For a moment I was too startled to speak.

  ‘Anthony,’ I said, clearing my throat of the dust, ‘this is Edmund Dillingworth, son of our neighbour at home, Sir John Dillingworth. He is a sort of distant cousin. Edmund, this is Anthony Thirkettle, barrister of Gray’s Inn.’

  The two men bowed. Anthony looked alert, for he knew of Edmund Dillingworth’s attempted rape of Mercy and how he had brought a band of rogue soldiers to smash our church and beat Gideon Clarke nearly to death. And also how we suspected that he had been behind the accusation made to Matthew Hopkins, that Mercy and Hannah had practised witchcraft, for he claimed they had raised Gideon from the dead. Anthony’s face held a look of reserved politeness.

  I also realised that Edmund resented my addressing him with such familiarity, and my reminder that we were cousins, though I cared little for that. I despised the man. He had fought for the king, but now tried to ingratiate himself with the followers of Cromwell. I despise any man who turns his coat instead of keeping faith with his beliefs and his friends.

  ‘But what are you doing in Lincoln’s Inn, Tom?’

  ‘I might say the same of you,’ I said. ‘I have returned to the study of the law. I spent a year at Gray’s Inn after Cambridge, but then the war came. I am now accepted back as a student and we have been working in the library here. But you – are you now studying at Lincoln’s Inn?’

  I doubted it. I knew that Edmund had been one year at Cambridge, which he spent drinking and whoring, after which he was sent down. He was never a university man. And indeed men from his background sometimes spent a year or two at one of the Inns to gain a smattering of the law, but I could not imagine Edmund Dillingworth accomplishing even that much.

  He laughed, eying our lawyers’ gowns with a supercilious air. He was himself richly dressed in a velvet doublet more suited to the king’s court than Presbyterian London. If he wished to join the Cromwellians, he would need to learn to dress differently.

  ‘Nay, I am merely here on some business for my father.’

  ‘Perhaps with your father’s man of law, Master Blakiston?’ I asked, and saw him give a start.

  ‘What do you know of Master Blakiston?’ His tone was aggressive.

  ‘Why, we all have an interest in the matter of the common lands,’ I said smoothly. ‘Your family has a small share in them, though your living does not depend on them, as ours does. It is more than a year now, since my father and his friends came to see your father. He promised to help in the matter of the drainage works and – so he said – briefed his lawyer, Master Blakiston.’

  We had not known the lawyer’s name last year, but Edmund would not be aware of that. I felt Anthony touch my arm and realised that he was warning me not to go too far. I bit back my words. He was right. I could feel my anger growing, but I must take care what I said to Edmund Dillingworth, who was probably on his way to see Blakiston.

  ‘Are you still pursuing that hopeless cause?’ he said, with a smirk. ‘The land improvers will have their way, you know. Why not accept it?’

  I clenched my fists, but did my best to keep my voice level.

  ‘A charter was granted by the king to our parish and four others, giving us the rights t
o the common land in perpetuity. At one time, your family held one copy of the charter, although you seem to have lost it. The other would have been lodged with other royal charters. With the charter in our hands, we can fight these invaders in the courts. Even the Dillingworths have some interest in that.’

  He gave an odd smile. ‘Indeed we have. Well, perhaps I can assist you. I shall see what I can discover from Blakiston. He’s a tight mouthed old woman, but I will find out what he knows.’

  I saw that he was eyeing the mechanical leg with its odd shoe. He must have been wondering at it, but he said nothing.

  ‘Let me think.’ He tapped his chin in a parody of deep thought, though I suspected he already knew what he was going to say.

  ‘I will speak to Blakiston, find out what I can. Do you know the Black Eagle? Down a side turn, just off the top of Chancery Lane.’

  ‘I can find it,’ I said.

  ‘Meet me there – on Friday, let us say, at nine of the evening. I shall be occupied all day. If Blakiston has managed to lay hands on the charter, I will bring it with me and we can put our heads together, consider what is to be done next.’

  My heart gave a leap of hope. If Blakiston did have the charter, Edmund Dillingworth was likely to have some influence over him, for Sir John was a rich man, with powerful friends. Perhaps we were nearing the end of the hunt.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘The Black Eagle, nine, Friday evening.’

  ‘Best come alone,’ he said, flicking a glance at Anthony. ‘I may need to bring Blakiston, and he will not like another lawyer present.’

  We all bowed. Edmund turned toward Blakiston’s chambers, while Anthony and I made our way out of the gatehouse.

  ‘You never spoke a word,’ I said, as we headed up Chancery Lane.

  ‘Do you trust him?’ Anthony said. ‘I thought he was a very blackguard.’

  ‘So he is, but it is in the Dillingworths’ interests to send these adventurers packing.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He shook his head. ‘Why does he wish to see you alone, and after dark? I know the Black Eagle. It’s a lowlife tavern, not at all the sort of place I should imagine your fine cousin choosing.’