Dawnlands, page 17
“Would the king spare him if he turned papis—” Livia nipped off the word. “If he turned to the true faith? Our faith?”
Mary Beatrice nodded. “Yes, he would. But he’d have to name his allies. The king would grant his life if he would name all of them.”
“Betray his friends to death?” Livia asked. “To save his own skin?”
Mary Beatrice nodded. “A full confession before God,” she said piously. “Then we could execute them instead of him.”
Livia took a breath. “D’you think he will betray his friends?” she asked.
Mary Beatrice’s dark eyes were filled with tears. “No,” she said desolately. “I think he is lost to us. I think he is lost to us, and—even worse—he is lost to God.”
WEST COUNTRY, SUMMER 1685
Johnnie, in his hired carriage, jolting down the ill-maintained winding roads of the west country, learned he was approaching his destination not by the signposts, but because outside every village there was a fresh corpse on the gibbet. Outside the towns there were tarred and salted heads on spikes, their lips drawn back in a perpetual silent scream, the empty sockets of their eyes pecked out by crows, glaring down on the travelers who rode swiftly past, burying their faces in their sleeves to shield them from the butcher-shop smell of freshly killed human flesh. Some villages had strange cages at their crossroads, where the bodies of the village men were hanged forever. Their children ran under them when they were late for school.
Johnnie made himself look at every crow-pecked skull to see if he could recognize his uncle Ned. It might be the only way to find him. Only the people who left a flower at the foot of the scaffold, or wore a hidden black ribbon, knew who they had lost; the royalists had hanged hundreds of Monmouth’s defeated army wherever they were captured, without trial, without bothering to record their names. A stranger from London would never be able to find a single man, whether he was imprisoned with hundreds of others starving for food and water, injured and dying in hiding, or beheaded and strung up as a warning to anyone who might defy the king.
The farther west Johnnie went, the more he understood the impossibility of his task. After days on rutted and winding roads, held up for hours behind wagons bringing in the harvest, haggling at strange stables for a change of horses, delayed by a broken wheel spoke, he dismissed the carriage and hired a horse. He gave up asking for his uncle Ned Ferryman. It was treason to help an escaping rebel, punishable by death. It was treason to nurse a dying rebel. Nobody would admit to even seeing a soldier of Monmouth’s army, or hearing their jaunty drums, or picking a green leaf for freedom. In any case, Johnnie might be asking for his uncle Ned; but all his hopes were on finding Rowan.
He did not know where to begin. He could not ask any of the country people if they had seen her—nobody would even speak to him, and when he bribed a plowman, or a shepherd, walking down the drover road to market, they replied in accents so thick that he could not understand them, and he suspected that they were mocking him. Everyone stared with blank hostility as he rode by, on his hired horse. He thought that all he could do was to stay for a few nights as near to the battlefield as might be safe for him, perhaps Bridgwater, perhaps Taunton, and announce that he was looking for a native lad, a servant mislaid—and hope that she might hear of him, and come to him for help. The thought of rescuing her made his head swim with desire. But as he traveled farther and farther west, through grieving towns that smelled of death, he became more and more certain that Uncle Ned was dead and rotting on a battlefield, in a ditch, or on a gibbet. And Rowan—innocent of everything—was dead beside him.
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, AUTUMN 1685
Matthew attended church with his foster mother Alys. They gave thanks for the royal family and their miraculous preservation from rebellion. The vicar—normally a stout defender of the church against popish plots—had changed his tune at the threat of another civil war. Not even a Protestant claimant to the throne could persuade the vicar of the parish of St. Olave’s that any cause was worth the disruption of trade. He spoke for God and for His English church, His trade, and His dominance of the high seas. Anything that disrupted business was against the will of God, whose main ambition was—must always be—the prosperity of the English merchant and the victory of the English adventurers.
Alys heard the note of self-serving patriotism, and disregarded it. She followed to the letter the rising and kneeling, singing the hymns and reciting the English prayers from memory, following the readings in her own King James Bible. This was her faith, but also a show. Alys had learned from her mother, a wise woman, who had learned from hers, to follow the ritual of the service so precisely that no neighbor ever had an excuse to report them for any sort of suspicious behavior that meant popery, or dissenting, or dark arts.
Matthew followed the service as he had been taught, seated in the family pew, which had, over the years, moved closer and closer to the front of the church, as their business improved and their payment of the vicar’s tithe increased. Now they were the third pew from the front, on the right, and only two wharfinger families took precedence over the family from Reekie Wharf. When Matthew put up his plate as a lawyer, or announced that he was lord of Foulmire, his foster mother would be able to claim a new place, at the very front of the church—as landed gentry and the undisputed leaders of the parish.
They walked home together, her hand on his arm, the household servants and some of the warehouse clerks demurely following, past the yard gate to enter at the front door.
Alinor was in the parlor waiting for their return from church.
“Are you ready to go to Foulmire this week?” Matthew asked.
“It’s fit for us to live there? It’s not been left empty?”
“It was a royal lodge, kept ready for a visit from the queen.”
Alinor gave a little laugh. “Since I never went beyond the kitchen door, that should be good enough for me.”
“We’ll take our own sheets…” Alys raised her head at a noise. “Is that a wagon? There shouldn’t be a delivery on a Sunday?”
It was a carriage, drawing up on the cobbled quay outside the front door, the Avery crest bold on the doorway, the driver and footmen in the Avery livery. One jumped down from his place at the back of the carriage and came to the front door, a letter in his hand.
“Oh no,” Alys said. “Not her again.”
“I’ll go,” Matthew said, not waiting for the knock. He opened the front door and the footman bowed to him and handed him the letter addressed to Mrs. Shore.
“Wait here,” he said and took the letter into the parlor, where his mother was looking out of the window at the imposing carriage.
“It’s not the Nobildonna,” he told her. “It’s a letter for you.”
“For me?” Puzzled, she broke the seal and saw the signature. “It’s him,” she said, glancing towards her mother.
“And what does Sir James say?” Alinor asked steadily.
“He says: ‘I hope you will accept the loan of my carriage and servants to take you and your mother to Foulmire and home after your visit. I do not presume to hope for any future correspondence; but I would be glad to know if your mother is well. Please accept this as a small gesture of my respect for your mother, to whom I send my humblest service, as always. James Avery.’ Well!” She put down the letter and looked from her mother to her foster son. “Well!”
“We may as well use it,” Alinor remarked prosaically. “It’ll be far more comfortable than a hired coach.”
“We don’t want favors from either of them. Especially not from him,” Alys snapped.
Matthew knew there was no point in asking why. His foster mother had always regarded his birth mother with deep suspicion, and would not even speak of his stepfather.
“It was a long time ago. We can use their carriage,” Alinor overruled.
“Ma—”
“We can accept the Avery carriage to get there and back to the house the Nobildonna got for Matthew. It’s no more than hiring one. Go and tell the coachman what time you want him tomorrow morning, Matthew. They can put up at the Holly Bush overnight.”
Matthew glanced at his mother.
“Very well,” Alys said. “But we’ll send them straight back to London as soon as we arrive. I don’t want them at Foulmire, picking up gossip.”
Alinor smiled at her daughter. “We’ll be long forgotten,” she said gently. “The name on the deeds is Peachey, and we’ll be known as Matthew’s foster family. I doubt there’s anyone left to recognize us. Half of them’ll be dead of old age and buried in the churchyard. The king then, Charles the First, is dead, and his son, Charles the Second, dead too. And now they’ve killed his poor boy James Monmouth. It’s all long long ago. And we’ll never speak of it.”
TAUNTON, SOMERSET, AUTUMN 1685
Johnnie rode into the little county town of Taunton a few days ahead of the judge from London. The entourage of judge, prosecutors, clerks, and hangmen were working their way west, holding mass trials at all the market towns, leaving a trail of grief wherever they halted. Johnnie had to try three inns before he could find a bed for the night and stabling for his horse. The town was crowded with the families of the five hundred prisoners who were held in the town jail and in the cellars and dungeons of Taunton Castle. The London judge, George Jeffreys, the prosecutor, Henry Pollexfen, and scores of clerks, lawyers, reporters, the hangman, and his assistant had requisitioned chambers in the castle and in the town and were expected any day.
It was as busy as an annual fair, but there was none of the cheerful jostling and clatter of setting up stalls, or hucksters calling in the streets. It was a surly crowd that milled around the castle, the town hall, and the jail, asking for news. There was a shanty town of anxious families camped in the grassy outer ward of the castle, hoping for the chance to see their loved ones, praying that they would be freed.
It was impossible for Johnnie to make himself visible among so many people, all of them seeking information and losing hope; but as soon as he had secured his room and stabled his horse, he went out to walk the streets and ask people if they had seen a native, a servant, a slight dark boy by the name of Rowan. Half the people ignored him, turned away from any question, fearful that he was one of the many spies or ex-soldiers who were putting together evidence against a private enemy or to curry favor with the coming court. Other men seeking information were lawyers, appointed by desperate families, trying to show that a young man had joined Monmouth by mistake, or was not there at all. Nobody had any time for Johnnie, though he showed the gleam of a silver coin in his hand.
They all knew that death was coming to Taunton. The judge, himself crippled by the spleen, had hanged men at every stop on his way to the west country, had left hundreds more in jails awaiting execution. His clerk told the accused men that there was no time to hear pleas of innocence; they had better own themselves guilty and hope for mercy. Jeffreys himself had sworn he would break the heart of the west country. The families who crowded around the jail, begging to have a moment—just one moment—with a beloved son, knew that it was only to say good-bye. In Winchester, Jeffreys had sentenced a seventy-year-old woman to be burned alive. In Dorchester, he condemned nearly three hundred men to death.
Johnnie scanned the long list of prisoners’ names, looking for Ned Ferryman or any name that Ned might have adopted.
“That list is no good,” someone said at his shoulder.
“They don’t bother to take everyone’s name, and they’re not true names either,” a woman told him.
“I’m looking for a young lad, a servant, from the Americas,” Johnnie said. “Goes by the name of Rowan. He wasn’t in the rebellion, he was on his way to London and I think he got lost.”
Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying for days, but her laugh was hard and bitter. “You’ll find that none was in the rebellion,” she told him. “We was all on the way to London and got lost.”
“But have you seen him?” Johnnie asked in an undertone. A coin went from his hand to hers.
She took the coin for nothing. “No,” she said. “I haven’t even seen my husband and the father of my children.”
“If you see him, or hear of him, I am Mr. John Stoney at the New Inn,” he told her.
“Lawyer?” she asked, suddenly hopeful.
“No.”
She turned away and left him scanning the page. A clerk, dressed in a well-worn black suit, came up to him. “Were you asking after a prisoner?”
Johnnie turned. “No, a lost servant,” he said. “A young lad, dark-haired and slight, brown skin, from the Americas.”
“A savage?”
Johnnie grimaced. “He’s a Christian. But he’s an Indian by birth.”
The man shrugged. “If you need a lawyer, I can serve you. I am here buying prisoners.”
Johnnie frowned. “Buying them?”
“The king gifts the guilty prisoners to his friends, to courtiers, or to the queen or her household,” the man explained, his eyes taking in the expensive cloth of Johnnie’s suit and his good linen. “They are selling them on. I can broker that for you.”
“Is it profitable?” Johnnie could not stop himself asking.
“Like all slaving—it’s a fortune.”
“Unless they die on the way,” Johnnie interpolated.
“Yes.” The man smiled. “But if you get a sturdy traitor, you will make twenty percent. Think of that over a hundred prisoners.”
“They’re sold as slaves?”
“No! No!” the man corrected him. “A ten-year indenture. And then they can come home.” He paused. “If they’re still alive,” he said fairly. “Not many survive the sugar plantations.”
“I can buy a rebel?” Johnnie demanded.
“I can broker it, sir,” the man said eagerly. “How many would you want? Ten? Twenty? His Majesty owns them all, and he has already given many to Her Majesty, to her ladies, to her secretary, and to favorites. But there are hundreds and hundreds of men going spare. They can’t all be executed—still, many hundreds must be shipped.”
“Can I buy a named man?” Johnnie asked.
He shook his head. “No, this is not for the poor fools who hope to buy their brothers and fathers.” He made a contemptuous gesture at the crowd around the jail. “It’s not to free guilty men, nor ease their suffering. It’s so that the king’s court makes a profit from justice.”
“I’d like to buy perhaps ten,” Johnnie said, tempted by the profit. “Come to my inn, the New Inn, at six o’clock tonight. And also watch out for my servant.”
“Is he a slave?” the man asked. “If I see him, do I capture him?”
“No, no,” Johnnie said hastily. “He’s a free man, as free as you or I. But I fear he is lost. If you see him, tell him to come to me at the New Inn, and ask him where he is lodged so I can find him.”
The man shrugged, surprised at the effort Johnnie was investing in someone as unimportant as a brown-skinned servant while there were white-skinned prisoners to buy. “Six o’clock, your honor,” he agreed.
FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685
The sun was setting on the right of the Avery carriage as it jolted down the Birdham Straight, the long straight lane, hedged on either side, that led due south on the Manhood Peninsula. Alinor, who had been dozing for much of the journey, woke as if she knew that she was entering the landscape of her dreams. She opened her gray eyes and smiled at Matthew as she recognized the fields and hedgerows that they were passing through.
“Are we here?” Matthew asked, as impatient as a child.
“Nearly.” She leaned forward to look out of the window, as if to greet a friend.
Matthew, seeing the radiance of her face, followed her gaze and wondered at her joy in the low flat fields of stubble straw, and beyond them the rising slopes of dried-out meadowland. He was struck most by the wideness of the horizon and the lightness of the sky, which arched above them like a great bowl.
“It goes on forever,” he said.
“I used to think I’d never get away,” Alys said grimly.
Matthew had been raised in a town, his view always blocked by buildings and walls and chimneys. This was a landscape with nothing higher than a twisted wind-bent tree: marshland, tidal land from sea to sea. Through the dusty window he could see for miles.
“Are we nearly here?” he asked. “Is this it?”
Alinor’s slate-gray eyes flicked to his face. “Not long now. Your lands start at Sidlesham. The next village down this road.”
“It’s very flat,” he said. “Not what I expected.” He tried to sound judicious, a landowner surveying his fields, but he could not keep the excitement from his voice. The road, now little more than a track, wound through a small village of old cottages, some with thatched roofs slipping down over the poky windows, some with gardens of vegetables and some late-blooming flowers, some in a mess of mud and rubble.
“Nearly there.” Alinor took a little breath to steady herself. “That is Mill Farm, and the tide mill.”
Matthew looked at the cluster of buildings and the tall granary behind them.
“We worked there,” Alys said, and her mouth shut tight as if she would never speak another word.
Matthew felt the carriage slow to a walk and then stop. “Is something wrong?” He leaned forward to see out of the window.
“It’s the Broad Rife,” Alinor said, as if she were naming a great stretch of water, instead of a sluggish river between muddy banks.
“There’s a wadeway,” Alys told him. “And a ferry for high tide. It was our ferry—my uncle Ned’s ferry. But it’s low tide now, the carriage can go through the water. The coachman’s probably having a look at it.”
“If it’s not washed away,” Alinor reminded her. “It’s been a long time since we crossed it.”
“At dawn,” Alys said with a sudden secretive smile. “In a stolen wagon.”
