Flood (The Fenland Series Book 1)

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was hesitant, unsure how much he guessed.

  ‘You have tried valiantly to deceive me, but I know those men may have blinded me.’ He reached out a hand in my direction and I took it. ‘Don’t grieve, Mercy. You and Hannah have done your best. If I am to be blind, it is God’s will. Though I shall miss my books sadly. Perhaps you will read to me.’

  I could not answer, thinking that soon he would be gone far away. My eyes filled with tears and I was grateful that he could not see me. Yet I also longed for his sight to be healed again, even though it would set the seal on his departure. My thoughts were in turmoil and I tried to concentrate on the task ahead of us.

  Hannah came back and laid out her pots and bottles while I brought a basin of warm water to the table. She stirred in some honey for healing and something from one of her bottles, then nodded to me.

  ‘I’m going to soak the bandages, Gideon,’ I said, ‘so they will come away more easily, but I’m afraid we may hurt you.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Don’t trouble yourselves. I know you will do your best.’

  It was a messy and grim business. Once the cloth was soaking, I cut through the knots with a sharp knife and began to peel it off. The first layer came away quite easily, but as I came closer to the skin, the bandage was stiff and rigid with hardened blood. I took my sewing scissors and cut away as much as had come free, then soaked the inner layer. Nothing would soften the caked blood.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I could not keep a sob out of my voice. ‘I will have to cut it away piece by piece. It is going to hurt.’

  He tried to pat my hand, but missed. I drew my hand away, for I could not bear him to touch me. I must think of this as a task to be done, like assisting the birth of a lamb or slaughtering a pig. This was not the flesh of the man I loved which I was going to tear.

  Hannah looked at me in concern. ‘Shall I do it, Mercy?’

  ‘No.’ I gritted my teeth. I must not be a coward.

  Little by little I cut the rest of the bandage away from the back of Gideon’s head. He bowed forward to help me, and I found myself forced to cut away large patches of his hair as well. At last it was clear, and we could see the wound. I gave a sigh of relief. It looked clean. Part of the scab had come away with the cloth and it was bleeding, but there was no pus, no foul matter. Hannah leaned over and sniffed.

  ‘Good,’ she said. She scooped up one of the salves and spread it over the wound.

  Gideon gave an involuntary grunt. ‘That stings!’

  ‘It stings,’ she said, ‘but it will speed the healing. ‘Now your face.’

  This was what I was dreading. The cloth around the sides of his face came off quite easily as I cut it away, but that left the part over his eyes. My hands were shaking now, and Hannah laid her hand on my arm.

  ‘Are you sure you can do this?’

  ‘Aye.’

  I took a deep breath. Again I soaked the cloth until it was sodden, but it was still stiff with blood.

  ‘I cannot cut away any more, Gideon. It is too close to your eyes. I will have to peel it away. I’m afraid it will hurt.’

  ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘You must.’

  He managed to speak quite calmly, but I saw that he clenched his fists.

  Carefully, slowly, I peeled away the stiffened cloth over his right eye. It was free at last. The skin around the eye was bruised and blackened, but the eye itself looked intact, although it was shut. I threw the dirty cloth into the fire and began to ease back the remaining portion of bandage over the left eye. This was more stubborn. Gideon caught his breath and bit down on his lower lip. He was trying not to cry out and I struggled to hold back the whimper that rose in my throat. At last it came free.

  The left eye was horribly swollen, the upper and lower lid stuck together with a mass of yellow crusted matter. Some of the lashes had been torn away by the bandage, which as well as being bloody was also caked with the same yellow matter, some kind of hardened pus.

  The whimper broke through my lips in spite of myself. Slowly Gideon opened his right eye. He smiled.

  ‘I can see,’ he said. ‘One eye at least is sound. How is the other?’

  ‘Not good,’ I said.

  Hannah examined it carefully. ‘You must wash away all that yellow matter, Mercy. I will make up more of the potion, a little stronger this time.’

  When she brought the fresh mixture I sat facing Gideon and slowly began to soften and wash away the hideous crust. All the while he watched me steadily from his good eye, which I found unnerving. At last it was done and with difficulty he managed to open his left eye, although it was still badly swollen. The white of his eye was bloodshot.

  ‘Can you see with that eye?’ Hannah asked.

  I could not speak. I sat with my hands fallen useless in my lap, trembling from fear of what I might have done. I could not believe that the bandages were off at last.

  Gideon covered his right eye with his hand.

  ‘I can see a little with the left eye, but it is blurred.’

  ‘Give it time,’ Hannah said. ‘It will be better when the swelling goes down.’

  Gideon let his hand drop over mine.

  ‘It is over, Mercy. Thank you for your courage.’

  Then he smiled radiantly. ‘I can see! And why are you wearing that milk parsley in your hair?’

  Foolishly I began to weep. I ran from the room, that they might not see me.

  I needed to escape from the house, from the farm. I headed up the lane, then turned off along the edge of the wheat field, following the raised bank of the drainers’ new ditch. Since I had returned from the manor I had ventured nowhere but the farm and the village, so the changes here were startling. In the centre of the field the wheat was growing strongly and turning gold. Harvest would not be long away. But here where the drainers had been at work a wide swathe of the field along the drain was churned to mud, the wheat stalks trampled under foot, the unripe grain spilt and smashed. At the very least, a third of the wheat crop would be lost.

  Standing with my feet amongst the spoilage, I gazed over the field in dismay. What gave these men the right to destroy our food in this way? The last few years had seen terrible harvests. This year the spring had been late and cold, and we needed every ear of wheat, every grain of barley and pod of beans to stave off starvation. With the hem of my apron, I dried my tears, as anger flooded me. In my fury, I tore off my garland and threw it in the ditch, where it floated on the muddy water, spun slowly round, then began to drift in the direction of Baker’s Lode. That meant water was moving from further up the ditch, from the Fen where Hannah’s cottage had stood, and draining down towards the Lode and thence to the river and the sea.

  I tried to imagine what the Fen would look like if all the water was drained away. Its marshy land, home to thousands of water fowl, would become, I supposed, some sort of grassland, with here and there the raised clumps which were now islands. The open meres, dotted across the marsh, would be hollow dips in the grassland, the fish and eels dead or driven away. I looked down again at the ditch. The water was dense with mud, unlike the clear streams running along the natural ditches and ancient lodes. It struck me suddenly that this new ditch might also be draining water from the wheat field where I stood. That would mean that the crop was starved of the moisture it needed for the grain to plump up.

  Picking my way through the wheat until I was in amongst the undamaged stalks, I bent down and scooped up a handful of the soil. It ran dry through my fingers like sand. I broke an ear off the nearest stalk. The leaves were beginning to take on that yellowish tint of ripeness. The ear was small, and as I ran my thumbnail along it, breaking off the individual grains, they fell on my open palm like tiny hard peppercorns, withered and dry. So even the scarce wheat they had left us would be poor.

  Back at the edge of the ditch, I followed it down to Baker’s Lode and climbed the bank, near where Tom and I had stood all those months ago, watching van Slyke and his
men begin their surveying. From here I had a clear view of the barley field, over the narrow bridge, on the far side of the Lode. I caught my breath.

  The further half of the barley field had vanished. Like the work of genii in an old tale, a village had appeared. There was a neat row of houses, well spaced. I counted eight. Beyond the furthest one, two more were being built. Not some ramshackle huts erected by wandering folk. These were sturdy half-timbered houses with lathe and plaster infill. Smoke rose from brick chimneys. And, unbelievably, each house had an enclosed small-holding of land fenced in around it, cut out of our barley field. There were cows. There were pigs. I saw children. A woman spreading washing on a fence.

  Thinking I must be dreaming, I rubbed my eyes. No, it was all still there. What was more, I saw van Slyke come out of one of the houses and stand talking to someone in the doorway. He gestured with his arm in the direction beyond the houses and I saw that the drainers were now at work there, cutting across the very centre of the field planted half with beans and half with peas.

  I was suddenly very afraid. Not only was our land being torn apart, but now there were strangers suddenly settled upon it, as though they had every right to be there. I turned and stumbled down the bank, heading back towards the farm. Did Tom know of this? He had said nothing. But then, we had all been so preoccupied with other matters. I needed to get home as quickly as possible.

  ‘Jack saw two houses,’ Tom said. ‘Just before you came home. He challenged them, asked what they were doing there, but could not make them understand. They spoke no English. He thought they were Dutchmen, or maybe French.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Jesu, eight houses! And two more building.’

  ‘But where have they come from, these people?’ I asked. ‘They are not the drainers. I saw women and children. Livestock. They are making farms.’

  ‘It’s what they did on the Bedford Level,’ said Nehemiah. ‘Brought in foreign settlers. Gave them lands to rent, all the rents to be paid to the adventurers.’

  ‘That is the whole purpose of these schemes,’ Gideon said. ‘The investors have no intention of farming the land themselves. They bring in these land-hungry foreigners as tenants. For the small investment of draining our land, they have rich rewards.’

  I had never heard Gideon speak so worldly-wise before. The four of us were sitting around the table in the kitchen, where my mother was continuing to teach Kitty to spin. Hannah had gone out to fetch in the eggs.

  ‘How do you know this?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘There was much talk of it in Cambridge when I was there. Do you remember that I told your father that a friend of mine had seen the documents authorising the new drainage plans? He has been following the activities of these adventurers for ten years now. He explained it to me. And riding down to Cambridge I have seen some of these new settlements.’

  ‘How can they do such a thing?’ I felt helpless in the face of this outrage.

  Tom shrugged. ‘With authorisation from Parliament, they can do as they please. And even Parliament is losing control of the nation’s affairs. A few men of power can ride roughshod over all the rest.’

  ‘But what must we do?’

  ‘Best to move carefully for the time being,’ Gideon advised. ‘We must work to free your father before all else. Leave the drainers until that is done.’

  I was glad that he said ‘we’, but how much longer would he be with us? And how long would it take us to pay Father’s fine? During that time these Hollanders could build a whole town on our fields.

  Nothing was heard from the manor about my absence, nor was there any word from Sir John about his London lawyer. I think by then we all knew that it would come to nothing. We wondered whether Sir John had ever written to his lawyer at all. In the meantime we lived frugally, attending Reverend Edgemont’s hellfire services on Sunday. Gideon regained his strength and most of the sight in his left eye, though it would always be affected by the soldiers’ beating. He was restless.

  ‘You must keep out of sight,’ I told him anxiously, when I found him wandering up toward the Dutchmen’s settlement. ‘You know that we have reported you dead. It will spoil everything if you are seen.’

  ‘I do try to occupy myself with my books, Mercy,’ he said, turning back with me toward the farm, ‘but I feel so useless when all of you are working so hard.’

  ‘You must get your strength back,’ I said, swallowing painfully, ‘if you are to sail for the Continent.’

  He took my hand. ‘I do not want to go, Mercy.’ He looked at me so keenly I felt weak. His eyes were clear now, with no visible sign of injury.

  ‘I do not want you to go,’ I said, ‘but it is the safest way, for all of us.’

  The previous evening Tom and Jack had opened to him their plan that they should take him to Lynn, where Jack’s friends amongst the seamen would help him find a ship to travel to France or the Low Countries. There he could join the other exiles who had fled there after the War. From the start it was clear that Gideon was reluctant to go, saying that it was a kind of desertion and he had never been a King’s man, but Tom pointed out at once that now we had spread the news of his death, we should be in danger if it was discovered that we had lied.

  We still spoke of ‘after the War’ as if it were done with, but from time to time news filtered in that perhaps the War was not finished after all. There was other bad news. The witchfinders were busy again, crisscrossing the Fen country, hunting out those they believed to be witches and condemning them on the flimsiest of evidence, often nothing more than some tall story by a spiteful neighbour.

  All of this seemed far away, however, when what concerned us most was Father’s continued imprisonment and his poor health. And there was the wheat harvest to gather in, what was left of it. After that, the barley and the beans and the peas, if the interlopers had not stolen everything. Until the wheat was ready, we all worked hard at doing everything we could to raise money for the fine. Kitty knitted caps from her spun wool, Mother and Hannah wove lengths of woollen broadcloth. I made cheeses until my arms ached, and in the evenings knitted several fine shawls like the one I had made for little Huw. Tom and Nehemiah continued with their making of baskets and hurdles, and even recruited Gideon, though he was not a man of his hands and proved uneppen. Hannah’s bees were well established in a skep in our small orchard and she had hopes to take a fair quantity of honey soon. Each week Tom and Nehemiah travelled to Lincoln market, carrying our produce, together with the eels and any waterfowl they had managed to net or shoot. Instead of depending on Nehemiah’s carter friend, they now borrowed a cart from Rafe and harnessed Blaze to draw it, since our own cart had been confiscated by the sheriff’s men. The money for the fine grew slowly. We all pretended it would be enough, but knew in our hearts it would not.

  When it came time for harvesting the wheat, everything else was set aside. As for the hay harvest, every able-bodied soul from the village turned out. Most of the women and older men had not seen the damage to the wheat, for it was the younger men who hoed it to keep it free of weeds. We were a sober and silent company as we set to, without the usual banter and jollity. At least the weather kept fine. As the crop was so much smaller than usual, we finished the whole field in two days, and at the end of the second day I stood in the adland where Alice and I had climbed off the harrow, all those long months ago, and looked out over the rows of stooks standing amongst the stubbs. Once the sheaves had been carried in and the gleaners had finished, we would turn the stock on to the field to graze on the stubbs and manure the soil, but would we be able to crop this land next year? Perhaps even now some surveyor was marking out boundaries on a map, allocating this part to one rich man, that part to another, and subdividing it into holdings for strangers.

  Threshing and winnowing the grain would last many weeks and we would all take our turn at it, but it had hardly begun when Jack arrived at our house one evening. He pulled a folded paper out of the breast of his jacket.

  ‘I have
heard from one of my friends,’ he said. ‘There will be a packet leaving Lynn for the Low Countries in three days’ time. We must make ready to take you there, Master Clarke.’

  Gideon gave me a troubled glance and I lowered my eyes to the shawl I was knitting. Though my heart beat fast, I would say nothing. What mattered was that he should be safe.

  ‘Let us go tomorrow, then,’ said Tom. ‘What do you say, Gideon?’

  ‘If you think it best.’ Gideon was polite, but not eager.

  ‘I have thought,’ said Jack, ‘if you borrow Rafe’s cart, and load it with your goods as you do when you go to Lincoln, we can carry them to Lynn market. Say that you think you will get a better price there and I go with you because I know people in the town.’

  ‘That seems a good plan.’ Tom nodded. ‘It’s a fair way, though.’

  ‘Aye. It will take us two or three days altogether, going and returning, with time between to find the ship and sell our goods. I’ll bring some of my fleeces as well, to make it all the more convincing.’ He grinned. I could see that for him it was no more than an adventure, like the months he had spent at sea.

  ‘Will you need to conceal Gideon?’ I asked.

  ‘At first, aye. Until we’re well away from here. But it should be easy. We can hollow out a space amongst the goods. Then once we are out of the parish and on the road for Lynn, you can come up for air.’ He sketched a little bow at Gideon, who smiled, catching a little of Jack’s light-hearted enthusiasm.

  I slept badly that night and rose early. Jack would come soon after dawn, driving Rafe’s cart with his own horse. They would then harness Blaze and later in the day I would ride Jack’s horse back to the village. I set about putting up a basket of food and a flagon of ale to help them on their journey, but my heart was full of regret.

  When I had covered the basket with a cloth and stirred up the fire to make breakfast, Gideon came out of his bedroom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘I slept very little,’ he said, sitting down at the table. ‘I do not like this running away, but I see that it may be safer for you all if I go.’