The King's Exile (Thomas Hill Trilogy 2)

by Andrew Swanston

  ‘Polly Taylor, sir. If you are a friend of our mother, did you know our uncle, Thomas Hill?’

  Rush suppressed a grin. The woman had done as she was instructed and told them he was dead. ‘I did not.’

  The door opened and Margaret walked in carrying a basket. She took one look at Rush and immediately put herself between him and Polly. ‘Where is Lucy?’

  ‘She is in the bedroom,’ replied Polly from behind her. ‘Master Rush wanted to wait for you.’

  ‘Go and join her. I will speak privately to Master Rush.’ When Polly had gone, Margaret continued, ‘Have you brought the word?’ Rush took the torn-out paper from a pocket and handed it to her. Margaret looked at it and, satisfied, tucked it into her basket. ‘So he is alive.’

  ‘He certainly was when I last saw him, and being well looked after.’

  ‘Rubbish. As an indentured man he will be treated like a slave. It is all I can do not to kill you where you sit.’ She took the pistol from her basket and aimed it at Rush’s forehead. He did not move.

  ‘If you do, you will never find out where he is.’

  ‘I know he is in Barbados.’

  Rush smiled. ‘In fact, you do not. It is true that he was taken there, but there are other colonies crying out for indentured men – Jamaica, Virginia, Grenada – and he might have been sold on to a planter in one of them.’

  Margaret was horrified. Thomas ‘sold on’ like an animal and the little knowledge she had of him now in doubt. ‘Has he been?’

  ‘Perhaps. Why not make more enquiries? You were so clever before.’

  Margaret replaced the pistol in the basket. Much as she wanted to, killing the creature would not get Thomas back.

  ‘Very wise.’ Rush stood up. ‘Such a pleasure to meet your daughters. Delightful children. Do take care of them, won’t you?’

  Without waiting for a response, he opened the door and was gone.

  Margaret went to the kitchen and wept.

  Since Rush had been away London had become quieter. The war had taken its toll – shops had closed, the streets were empty and there were few vendors hawking their wares. He had been clever enough to profit from the war, others had not. Now, however, he must look for pastures new. The only serious fighting going on was in Scotland, so demand for soldiers’ woollen jackets had dried up, and land prices had yet to recover their former levels. They would, of course, and his venture in Barbados was doing splendidly. Nevertheless it was time to try something new.

  When his black carriage drew up outside the house in Seething Lane, Rush ordered the coachman to return in an hour and jumped out. He was admitted at once and shown into the living room. No fire had been lit but the thin-faced man sat in the same chair in front of the hearth, smoking a pipe. ‘Tobias Rush,’ he said, without rising, ‘to what do I owe this pleasure?’

  ‘I have a proposition for you.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  Rush took the seat opposite him. ‘I have recently returned from Barbados, where sugar is making men rich.’

  ‘So I believe. Excellent sugar it is too. Greatly superior to the Egyptian stuff.’

  ‘Quite. Demand for it increases by the week. There is only one thing preventing the planters from getting even richer.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘The useful life of an African slave or an indentured man is short. The work breaks them quickly. There is profit to be had from supplying them with younger bodies.’

  The man scratched his chin. ‘I can see that. Boys who will adjust more easily to the work and last longer. But this is not my sort of work. What do you propose?’

  ‘I would prefer not to be personally involved in the harvesting. I propose that you hire a man who will assist us and that we share the profits of the venture. Do you know such a man?’

  ‘Perhaps. Let us discuss terms.’

  For an hour they thrashed out an agreement. When Rush rose to leave, they had agreed a price he would pay for each healthy boy between eight and twelve years old harvested from the streets of London. The boys would be loaded on to a ship at Rotherhithe and held on it until the cargo was complete. Rush would arrange the transportation and disposal of the cargo in Barbados. It was a venture with great potential.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE FIRST NEWS of serious trouble came on the day of the dinner party, when Charles arrived at the Lytes’ house to find Thomas sitting in the parlour with Adam and Mary.

  ‘There’s been a raid on the Morgan estate in St Lucy,’ he reported, ‘a bad one. Three men killed and two house slaves with their throats cut. Three heads left impaled on stakes. Morgan was away. They took muskets and powder. One of Morgan’s men reported that there were about thirty of them, armed with flintlocks to bill hooks.’

  ‘It was bound to happen,’ said Mary. ‘Private militias, unguarded estates, runaway slaves. We’ve only ourselves to blame. Swearing oaths, indeed. What’s the point? Walrond’s caused nothing but trouble and trouble breeds trouble.’

  ‘It could easily happen to us. We must be prepared.’

  ‘What are you doing about defences, Charles?’ asked Adam.

  ‘As you know, after the rebellion three years ago I took certain precautions and I’ve posted sentries around the estate and made sure my men are adequately armed. I am content to leave matters in the hands of my steward, who is so ferocious that I suspect he was once a pirate. You’re much more vulnerable and there’s Mary to think of. These men are vicious.’

  ‘What do you suggest we do?’

  ‘I suggest that as soon as we’ve finished the excellent dinner that I can smell cooking, we make plans. Then we can get to work tomorrow. No time to lose with those savages on the loose.’

  While they enjoyed Patrick’s roast leg of lamb, they talked of Walrond and the Assembly, of his absurd insistence on oaths of loyalty, of the inevitability of the island now being dragged into the war at home and of the likely effects on trade.

  ‘The man’s a dangerous lunatic,’ said Charles, mopping up claret sauce with a hunk of bread. ‘He’s putting it about that anyone who opposes him is plotting to murder every Royalist on the island and turn us into some form of Parliamentary tyranny. He’s even accusing Drax and Middleton of being in league with Cromwell.’

  ‘All he’s done,’ agreed Adam, ‘is to set landowner against landowner, freeman against freeman and servant against servant. What’s more, landowners leave their estates to take up arms and their slaves and indentured men run off into the woods.’

  ‘And attack the rest of us,’ said Mary. ‘What do you make of it, Thomas?’

  ‘At Newbury I saw two armies blasting and hacking each other to pieces for no obvious reason. When they’d finished, the king went back to Oxford and Essex marched on to London. All was much as it had been a few weeks earlier except that several thousand men had been killed or wounded. For such a thing to happen on an island as small and as prosperous as this would be even more absurd.’

  ‘No doubt you are right, Thomas,’ agreed Adam, ‘but war will not be averted by such sentiments. We need common ground and common sense. Alas, I fear that the Walronds have no interest in either.’

  ‘Our immediate concern is Thomas.’ Mary smiled at him. ‘And if there is to be bloodshed, the sooner he goes home the better. Have you made any progress, Adam?’

  ‘Not yet. I have been busy. He is safe here for the moment.’

  ‘Not only safe. The food is good and the company excellent. Apart from my family, I could not ask for more,’ replied Thomas, thinking that he would trade both for news of Margaret and the girls.

  ‘None of us will be safe if we’re attacked by runaways,’ said Charles. ‘Now let’s discuss what’s to be done. What arms have you got?’

  ‘Not much,’ admitted Adam. ‘A few matchlocks, powder, shot, a sword or two.’

  ‘Right. I shall visit a Dutch friend in Bridgetown. He will equip us.’

  ‘What shall I do?’ asked Mary.

&nbs
p; ‘You, my dear, shall be our quartermaster. Or should that be quartermistress?’

  ‘What does a quartermistress do, Charles?’

  ‘She lays in ample stocks of food and drink in case of a long siege. She also prepares bandages and splints for wounds and sets aside a room where the wounded can be tended.’

  ‘Thomas will assist me in planning our defences,’ said Adam. ‘Guard posts, lines of fire, barricades, that sort of thing. What do you think, Thomas?’

  ‘Of course I should be pleased to,’ replied Thomas. ‘Perhaps Patrick and I could also help Mary with the wounded, if there are any.’

  ‘Thank you, Thomas,’ replied Mary, ‘I should be glad of your help. Otherwise we might have to send for Sprot.’

  ‘Couldn’t we recommend him to the enemy?’ asked Charles. ‘He’d soon render them incapable.’

  ‘What about our men?’ asked Adam. ‘Who will train them?’

  ‘My job, I think,’ said Charles. ‘I’ll soon have them up to standard.’

  ‘And I will remain here until the danger has passed. The Assembly will have to manage without me.’

  Preparations began immediately. Thomas and Adam surveyed the ground and Charles visited the Dutch merchant who was delighted to provide muskets, powder, shot and swords, and confided that business was brisk. So brisk, in fact, that he thought he might spend a little time in Holland until things had quietened down.

  ‘Wealthy is good,’ he told Charles, ‘but healthy is better. In Holland I can be both, but here in Barbados, who knows? I must have armed the whole island by now.’

  What was more, he had wisely imported a consignment of new French flintlocks which were an advance on matchlocks and wheel locks. He had not been able to obtain any of the new cartridges which came already primed, so powder still had to be measured out and tipped in, but the chances of a misfire were greatly reduced.

  Naturally, they were more expensive, but ‘How much is a life worth, Mr Carrington? You’d not want to take a risk for the sake of a few shillings.’ No, Mr Carrington told him, he’d not want to and happily parted with the extra shillings.

  Within a week the Lytes’ storeroom was full. Not another sack of flour or salted piglet or box of eggs or churn of butter could be squeezed in. Barrels of water stood in rows in the parlour and turkeys and chickens, newly bought, scratched about in a pen beside the house. Mary had promised that ‘Muskets might kill us, but hunger won’t.’

  Having thoroughly inspected the ground, Adam and Thomas worked out a strategy. They would bring in all their men and their families from their quarters and set up fortifications around the house. The men, fully armed and provisioned, would have to sleep in the open. The women and children would be quartered in the house.

  While they worked, Adam and Thomas also talked of other things. They spoke of sugar and trade, of king and Parliament, of peace and war. Most of all though, they talked of people. Of men and women, some born to wealth and luxury, others to poverty, misery and an early death. And others still to slavery. ‘If I’d been taken forcibly from my home, shipped to a strange land and worked to death with no hope of ever returning to my family,’ said Thomas, emphasizing the ‘ever’, ‘I too would try to escape. I might even be driven to maim and kill. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.’

  ‘I doubt our Africans are familiar with the Old Testament, Thomas,’ replied Adam, ‘and many were born here.’

  ‘Like Patrick, yes. Well treated, healthy and happy. And unusual. Most are not. They’re here against their will. I almost feel one of them.’

  ‘Would you join them, Thomas?’

  ‘Had I still been at the mercy of the Gibbes, I might have. My lot was not so different from theirs. And imagine, if you can, that you had been shipped to Africa to be the slave of an African merchant. What would you have done? Thanked him warmly for his kindness or done whatever you could to escape? Killed him if necessary?’

  ‘Thomas,’ said Adam with a sigh, ‘I cannot conceive of such a thing. Please tell me that you will help us defend ourselves against those who threaten us.’

  ‘I will. A man must be allowed to defend himself and his family, whatever the circumstances. And I owe you and Mary my life. That is enough to overcome my scruples.’

  When they met again at the Lytes’ house for what Mary now disparagingly referred to as their ‘council of war’, Charles reported first. ‘We have a total of twenty-eight men at our disposal, including indentured servants, loyal slaves and ourselves. Not many.’

  ‘Twenty-eight willing men are better than a hundred pressed into service. What will they be like when you’ve trained them, Charles?’ asked Adam.

  ‘Oh, first class, my dear fellow. Highly trained infantrymen and excellent swordsmen, every one. The king would have been proud of them.’

  ‘Yes, Charles. If you say so.’

  ‘Oh, come, come. I’ll soon knock them into shape. One look at them and the enemy will turn and run.’

  ‘I have purchased enough food for fifty men for a year,’ said Mary. ‘If the enemy turn and run, you will have to tell me what to do with it.’

  ‘And Thomas and I have worked out a defence strategy. Let me show you.’ Adam picked up a stick and drew a square in the dirt with a semi-circle at each corner.

  ‘This is the house,’ he explained, pointing at the square, ‘and these marks are the redoubts. As you can see, each is in the shape of a semi-circle, giving a clear line of fire all around the house. We’ll set them twenty yards out, which will leave some thirty yards further to the tree line. Anyone trying to reach the house will have to cross open space with fire coming at them from both sides. I suggest we put four men with muskets behind each one with instructions to fire in pairs. That way the pair reloading will always be covered. We haven’t any pikemen to cover them and they wouldn’t be much use if we had.’

  ‘Excellent, Adam, you should have been a colonel. Or is the plan Colonel Hill’s?’ Charles was enjoying himself. ‘But that accounts for only sixteen men. What about the others?’

  ‘We’ll need to see how the training goes but I had thought we would keep them in reserve, with orders to fill any gaps that might appear.’

  ‘A good plan. Casualties have a habit of occuring in battle. Damned nuisance but there it is. We’re fully armed, thanks to my Dutch friend. And so, according to him, is everyone else. He has practically nothing left to sell. Better get on with training the infantry, then. I’ll start immediately.’ Charles sounded as if he could hardly wait.

  They soon found, however, that the training was not easy. Assembling the slaves and servants in sufficient numbers to make an exercise worthwhile was the first problem. The cane would not wait for a convenient moment to be ready for cutting and once cut, it had to be milled, boiled and cured without delay, or it would rot. Even with the cooperation of Adam and Mary, Charles had a frustrating time of it. Watching from a discreet distance, Thomas saw that endlessly repeating himself to groups of two or three had become thoroughly irksome.

  Charles had divided the troop into three platoons. The first two, each consisting of eight indentured men, he named red platoon and green platoon. The third, the slaves’ platoon, with twelve men, he had rather unimaginatively named black platoon. Mary and Adam’s slaves, who had all been born in Barbados, were likely to be loyal, especially when they realized that they would be just as vulnerable in the event of an attack as anyone else. They would simply be treated as the enemy, and marauding parties of militiamen, Irishmen or Africans would take no prisoners. Discipline came easily to black platoon, less so to red and green.

  ‘If your commander orders you to run to those trees over there,’ Charles tried endlessly to drum into them, ‘he means you to run NOW. Not after you’ve scratched your backside or had a piss. By then you might find yourself pissing out of a new hole. If he says run, RUN.’

  It was the other way round with flintlock training. Poachers and countrymen were used to muskets and pistols and s
ome were deadly with them. Bringing down a rabbit or a pheasant called for speed and skill. And as he was told more than once, ‘Once you’ve got it, Mr Carrington, you isn’t going to lose it.’

  He had tried teaching black platoon how to prime and load a musket but it was no use. The main problem was that with no experience of muskets at all, in the excitement of battle or even imaginary battle they lost track of the amount of powder they had tipped in. Sometimes they forgot to tip any in at all and had to start again, by which time they might have been skewered; sometimes two or even three times the required charge disappeared down the barrel. There had been the inevitable accidents – so far, two badly burned hands and a blinded eye – and the platoon strength was already down to nine.

  Unwilling to risk more casualties, Charles had converted black platoon into swordsmen and chosen to command them himself. At this, they quickly proved themselves more adept. Wielding a heavy sword was not so different from wielding a machete in the cane fields, although the cane was unlikely to fight back, and these were strong men, accustomed to hard work and slow to tire.

  Under Charles’s expert eye, they had learned the rudiments of thrust and parry, how to strike at an enemy’s weak spot and how to slash at his ankles and hands. They would never be accomplished with the rapier but, on balance, Charles thought he’d rather be with them than against them. He would hold them back while the musketeers were in action and only throw them at the enemy if needed.

  Charles himself was seen practising with a sword in either hand. When Thomas asked him about this, Charles told him proudly that from the age of twelve he had been schooled in the art of swordsmanship by one of the finest fencing masters in England and his daily regime of practice and training would have put any of the king’s lifeguards to shame. The skipping rope had encouraged nimbleness of foot, lifting clay bricks and holding them for long periods in outstretched hands had strengthened the wrists and forearms and thrusting the rapier repeatedly at targets no larger than a man’s fingernail had sharpened the eye.