Flood (The Fenland Series Book 1)

  Flood

  Ann Swinfen

  Shakenoak Press

  Published in Great Britain by Shakenoak Press, 2014

  ISBN 978-0-9928228-0-4

  Copyright © Ann Swinfen 2014

  First Edition

  Ann Swinfen has asserted her moral right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified

  as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than

  that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design by JD Smith www.jdsmith-design.co.uk

  For

  Heather, Falco, Hazel and Willow

  Chapter One

  We are known for troublemakers in my family. Some fifteen years ago my grandfather led two hundred commoners in an attack on Lord Bedford’s drainage works in the Great Level. They made songs about him – sung to this day around the fenlands – and his very name is still famous hereabouts. In my earliest memory I was taken, with my brother Tom, to see him where he was kept in a filthy pit in Cambridge Castle. I know that I screamed, sure that the monstrous shape crouched in a corner was not my grandfather, but one of those fearful boggarts who haunt the Fens in darkness and in fog. I was three years old and impressionable.

  My mother carried me outside and I remember the smooth lawns and the students in their gowns, all of which was as baffling to me as the prison. My brother Tom, nine years old and stout of heart, stayed behind with my father and the basket of food we had brought for my grandfather. He told me years later that he’d also been afraid of the gaunt figure with its wild hair and unkempt beard.

  ‘I wanted to run,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t shame myself before Father.’

  I never saw my grandfather again, for he died soon afterwards, still waiting for his chance to appear before a court and demand justice, yet his fame in the eyes of fenlanders has never diminished and washes over us still. A chancy legacy.

  Not that you would think it now. Here sat my father, who made one of those two hundred rioters all those years ago. He was a young man then and filled with outrage at the theft of our lands by the projectors and drainers – King and courtiers among them. Our own lands were not threatened then, it was away to the south, but we people of the Fens have strong loyalties and never much loved the King.

  Yet here my father now sat with his cronies beside the fire, in our farm at Turbary Holm, like any contented old man wreathed in the tar scent of the peat, and I had just gone round again with a jug of my mother’s best ale. That would be the third time and they had hardly started yet. They would pause in their drinking to eat, then carry on well into the night, for there is nothing like a belly full of food to make a man savour his drink.

  ‘Here’s thanks to you, Nehemiah,’ said my father, raising his cup, ‘for the gift of those eels. Mercy, our neighbour needs more ale.’

  I obliged, though the stink on my hands from skinning the eels must have wafted a distinct flavour over the drink. Probably Nehemiah Socket wasn’t aware of yet another layer of eel added on top of his permanent cloak of the smell. He was the most successful eeler in the village and spent more time weaving his traps and harvesting his catch than he devoted to all his crops and beasts together. Still, when he had more than enough sticks of eels to sell in Lincoln market, he was generous to us and in return my father and Tom kept an eye on his cattle and sheep out on the commons.

  ‘Over here, Mercy.’ Joseph Waters waved his cup at me. An old man whose watery eyes were still sharp enough to detect when there was a free meal to be enjoyed, he was one of the poorest of our neighbours, living by day labour on the farms. When he followed Nehemiah and his eels through the door, my parents had not the heart to turn him away. In any case, he was like to turn up here at least once in every week, eels or no, bringing with him the earth and sweat of his clothes which I swear had never been washed since his wife died. Aye, they were an odoriferous company.

  ‘Test those eels, to see if they’re cooked,’ my mother called across from the table where she was sawing great hunks of bread off a loaf I had baked that morning. We would soak up the juice with it, chasing every last drop around our bowls.

  ‘Done,’ I said, when I had prodded them with the tip of my knife. Cut into short lengths, the eels were no longer swimming in the pure waters of Baker’s Lode but in a rich brew of onions, carrots, parsley and ale. The meat was falling into soft flakes and the rising steam filled my nose with anticipation. My stomach groaned so loudly I was afraid the others would hear it, so I made a great clatter as I lifted the stewpot off its hook over the fire and carried it to the table, where I stirred in a jugful of rich cream.

  ‘I’ll fetch Tom.’

  My mouth was watering as I crossed the yard to the cowbarn. Times had been somewhat lean for the last two years, with cold winters, late springs and sodden summers. My family was comfortable enough, but several poor harvests had meant starvation for some and we had gone short ourselves to help our neighbours. Nehemiah’s eels were a welcome addition in these hungry months of spring, when the winter stores were nearly exhausted.

  I leaned through the cowbarn door, drawing in the sweet meadow scent of the cows’ breath.

  ‘Supper, Tom.’

  ‘Coming.’ He hung the milking stool on a peg and patted the rump of Blackthorn, our favourite cow ever since the two of us had raised her by hand after her mother died.

  ‘I can smell the eels.’ He grinned as he wiped his hands on the seat of his breeches. ‘Did I see Joseph Waters sidling in?’

  ‘You did. That man will never miss a free meal.’

  I turned as my eye was caught by a figure briefly silhouetted again the setting sun in the lane.

  ‘Master Clarke!’ I called, ‘will you come sup with us?’

  ‘Is there enough?’ Tom whispered.

  ‘Aye, plenty. I know Mother would want us to ask him. Since his housekeeper died she thinks he hardly eats.’

  ‘I thank you, Mercy.’ The rector opened the gate and came across the yard to us. ‘Do I smell eel pottage?’

  An uncharitable thought crossed my mind that perhaps Gideon Clarke, like Joseph Waters, had seen Nehemiah arriving with his basket of eels, but I dismissed it. The rector was bound to be hungry, but he was too uncomplicated a man to be so cunning. His simple faith and unworldliness would get him into trouble one of these days. Still, I had a great affection for him. It was Gideon Clarke who had taught me to read and write, when my father sent me to be schooled by him at the age of twelve. And it was to him that I owed my love of books. Even when I was a child he had let me borrow precious volumes of his own.

  Around the table we were a more sober company now that Gideon had joined us and said a blessing over the meal, but we were all soon spooning up the stew eagerly and wiping out our bowls with my good bread until they gleamed in the candlelight as if fresh come from the kiln.

  I glanced round at the comfortable faces, a little shiny from grease, a little flushed with drink. No, you would not have suspected that we were the kin of the local hero and troublemaker Nathaniel Bennington. During these late war years, we had kept our heads down in this corner of the Fens, though a few young men went for Parliament, and the son of the manor went for the King. It was our fellow fenlander, Cromwell, who was come to power now, and my father had left off rioting and attacks on the drainers. In any case, those fine gentlemen, courti
ers and landowners, who were bent on stealing the Fens before the War, had gone into exile now, or were lying low, watching to see which way Cromwell’s wind would blow.

  With a stomach warmed by eel pottage and mashed turnips, followed by a pie I had made from last year’s dried apple rings, I slumped sleepily on the bench for a few minutes before I needed to clear away the litter from the table.

  ‘I was in Cambridge today,’ Gideon said slowly, gazing down into the dregs of his ale as if he was reluctant to look at the other men. ‘I wanted to make sure that what I had heard about the new rules was true.’

  So that was why Gideon’s clothes were dust-stained and he looked weary. It is a long ride back from Cambridge.

  ‘What rules?’ Tom said. He always pricked his ears at the mention of Cambridge, where he had gone to school until the War put an end to his studies.

  ‘We are no longer allowed to marry in church, or to baptise our infants.’ Gideon’s voice broke on the words, but looking up I noticed a flash of anger in his eye and felt a lurch in my stomach.

  There was a sharp intake of breath from my mother, but it was my father who spoke.

  ‘What? Are our young couples to live in sin? And our children to be exiled from holy church?’

  ‘They have devised some ungodly rites.’ I had never heard Gideon’s voice so bitter. ‘Which they, being Saints here on earth, claim are more godly that the rites of our English church. And as well, there is to be more destruction of our churches.’

  In the moment of silence I remembered what had happened in Suffolk. Beautiful windows of ancient glass smashed to powder. Ancient statues of the Virgin and the saints, which had survived the other Cromwell’s destruction, decapitated. Altars axed to splinters. Altar rails thrown on bonfires. The man sent to direct all that destruction, one William Dowsing, had gone off, no one knew where, but there were plenty more of like mind.

  I knew we were all thinking of our own church. It was a simple cross with four small side bays, a square tower and a single bell, but there was one window of singular beauty at the east end, put up three hundred years ago to the memory of his wife, who died young, by Sir Anthony Dillingworth, ancestor of our local gentry. I had known that window all my life. The Virgin, in a robe as blue as a hot summer sky, was holding out a white dove to the Christ child, who was a toddler on fat legs, clutching a handful of daisies. Just ordinary daisies. I had loved that, ever since I was small. A bunch of daisies like the ones I could pick myself from the hem of the churchyard. At morning services the window glowed like the jewels of fabled Arabia, but I liked it better at evensong when the branches of an old oak, shivering in the diffused light, made the Virgin and Child stir into life, as though they would step down from their stone frame and walk amongst us.

  ‘They would not dare to come here.’ Tom voiced all our thoughts. ‘Not with the Dillingworths still in the manor.’

  Gideon shrugged. ‘Sir John may be for Cromwell, since he’s some sort of distant cousin, but Cromwell and his men will not forget that Edmund Dillingworth fought for the King.’

  That silenced us again.

  ‘And I heard something else in Cambridge.’ Gideon glanced up at my father, then down again at his empty cup.

  I rose to fetch the jug and fill it. For some reason my stomach had clenched again at his words.

  ‘Something of more concern to you, Isaac. Indeed, to all the commoners.’

  ‘You’re a commoner yourself, Gideon,’ my father said.

  He nodded, but did not allow the acknowledgement to put him off his stride.

  ‘I heard that there is a new projection got up, to drain and enclose our lands.’

  ‘Our own village commons?’ Tom shot up from his seat. ‘Here? If they enclose our commons and destroy centuries of our work with their useless drains, people will starve. Even our family is not secure. We need those lands. Without them, we’ll be brought to beggary.’

  ‘Furthermore,’ said Gideon, looking keenly now at my father, ‘it seems that Cromwell himself is behind the scheme.’

  Then the talk exploded.

  ‘I do not believe it,’ my father said, thumping the table with his fist. His face was red now with more than drink. ‘Cromwell has always said he will support the fenlanders against the drainers. He would not betray us.’

  ‘He was not the almost-king then, Father,’ said Tom. He would have been wiser to keep his tongue behind his teeth, for Father turned on him.

  ‘Mind your manners, boy!’ he shouted. ‘You know nothing of such a man as Cromwell.’ He turned to Gideon. ‘Where did you hear such lies?’

  Tom kept silence, but I could see him biting back his anger at being called ‘boy’. At four and twenty, he now carried most of the burden of labour on the farm as our father grew older.

  Gideon shrugged again and sighed. I think he wished he too had stayed silent on the matter. He must have forgotten the strength of my father’s belief in Cromwell.

  ‘The news was everywhere. But I was told it as a fact by a friend of mine who is a magistrate. We were lads together at Trinity and he’s not a man to spread gossip. He has seen the plans for the projection. It takes in the whole of our commons and beyond.’

  Nehemiah ran his hand through his unkempt mop of hair.

  ‘They will destroy us for sure, whoever is behind it. Look what has happened to those schemes from your father’s day, Isaac. The natural winter floods drained away from the croplands, so they’re not fed with the washings. The peat moors sucked dry till they cave in like an old man’s toothless cheeks. Useless now. The peat turned to dust instead of fuel.’

  ‘Our rushes and sedges dying away for lack of water in the Fen.’ Tom could not stay quiet. ‘Whole villages on safe ground flooded, homes destroyed. People drowned.’

  Before my father could chide him, Joseph Waters joined in mournfully. ‘That will be an end to your eel fishing, Nehemiah. And we’ll lose the water fowl. And the fish. And I’ve heard they steal the commoners’ cattle if they find them straying on to the land they’ve enclosed.’

  I was sitting there with my mouth agape, but now I saw my mother, her face tense with distress, signing to me to help our little maid, Kitty, clear the dishes and broken meats from the table. There was a general movement of the men back to the fire and as I was sweeping the crumbs into my apron, Tom murmured to me, ‘Come out to the yard.’

  I nodded.

  ‘We’ll just shut up the stock, Father,’ he said.

  Father waved a dismissive hand at him, for he was deep in argument with the others. I pouched my apron and added a few more scraps for the hens, then followed my brother outside.

  After I had shaken the scraps into the hen-hus and shut the hens away, Tom beckoned me into the cowbarn. It was warm and quiet in there, out of the niggling March wind that had sprung up at dusk, plucking at my skirt and cap. The only sounds were the familiar rhythmic chewing of the cud and the rustle of straw as one of the cows shifted or else some small creature – rat or mouse – made its stealthy way through the barn in search of food.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I asked. ‘Secrets or mischief?’ My brother was known for both, though Cambridge had sobered his mischief somewhat. However, his six months at Grey’s Inn in London, soon after Parliament and King locked horns, had increased his appetite for secrets.

  ‘I believe what Gideon told us is true.’

  ‘About the ban on church marriages and baptism?’

  ‘That too. There’s no end to the tyranny of these Puritans. No, I meant Cromwell and the projectors.’

  ‘Father doesn’t believe it.’

  ‘Father is blind to what that man has become. He wooed us when he wanted a seat in Parliament. Now he has got it, and made himself king in all but name, he is greedy for our land to support him in fine state.’

  I looked at him dubiously.

  ‘We still have a king.’

  ‘A king without a throne, without power, prisoner of Parliament.’

  ‘But
– ’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no love of Charles, but I’m not such a fool as to trust Cromwell either. I saw what they are like, these new men scrambling for power, during those months I was in London. They are no more friends of the common man than the King. Did you read those pamphlets of John Lilburne’s that I gave you?’

  ‘Aye. And what he says is a fine dream, but when will such a dream become reality in England? And besides, Father is no fool either.’

  Tom picked up a hazel branch from the floor and began swishing it angrily against his leg.

  ‘I don’t say he is a fool, but he has put his trust in a man who shifts like fog. They say Cromwell acts always as God’s voice directs. Perhaps he even believes that. But why does the voice of God forever prompt him to work for the greater glory of Oliver Cromwell? If he has it in mind to drain our Fens and enclose our commons for his own possession, is that God’s will? It seems to me it is Cromwell’s will.’

  I did not answer him at once. Because he was so much older than I, Tom had always led and I had always trotted along behind, trying to keep up. When I was small, I had believed him wise and invincible. And my father? He was a man of standing in our village, a substantial yeoman farmer, held in some awe by the poorer cottagers and labourers. Besides, he was Nathaniel Bennington’s son. Troublemaker and hero. The quarrels that had flared up recently between my brother and my father had left me floundering. They could not both be right.

  Still, there was no sign yet of surveyors laying their cordon of instruments around our commons. And until there was . . .

  ‘You will see,’ Tom said, reading my thoughts, as so often he did. ‘Once the surveyors come, you will see the truth of it.’

  ‘And what shall we do then?

  ‘What shall we do?’ He stepped out into the yard and I followed him. ‘What do you think?’ He leaned over to close and bolt the door.