Flood (The Fenland Series Book 1) Page 24

  Tears sprang into my eyes. I seemed to cry easily these days, as though all my iron control during the torture was breaking down now.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  We sat silent for a long while, watching Huw there on the grass. He was a very noticing child, gazing at a humblebee flying past his face and a yellow butterfly swaying as it perched on the seed head of a grass stem. The sun through the branches of the fruit trees cast dancing leaf shadows over him. I saw his eyes follow their movement.

  ‘I think he is going to be a very clever child, your Huw.’

  ‘Of course.’ She dimpled. ‘How could he not be, with two such parents! But you, Mercy, how do you fare? I think you have been marked by these last terrible weeks.’

  I sighed. ‘I sleep badly and I have dreams. I try to forget, but perhaps I never shall.’

  I watched the yellow butterfly leave the grass stem and hover for a moment over Huw. He smiled and tried to reach out to it, but with a flick of its wings it was gone up into the apple tree overhead.

  ‘Tom says there has been no news of Gideon.’ I did not look at her, but she took my hand.

  ‘Jack has been to Lynn twice, on the excuse of trading there, but really to get word. It seems that after the Brave Endeavour was driven back into port by the storm, she needed repairs, which took several weeks. There were no more ships leaving for the Continent at the time, so Gideon was forced to wait about in the town. That must have been when he was seen by the Dillingworths’ servant.’

  I nodded. ‘But that was back at the end of July.’

  ‘Aye. It seems the Brave Endeavour was ready to sail again about month later, but by then Gideon was not to be found. She sailed without him.’

  ‘What can have become of him?’

  ‘No one knows. Perhaps he saw the manor servant and decided to go into hiding.’

  ‘But then why did he not rejoin the ship? By now he would have been safe from persecution in the Low Countries.’

  She shook her head. ‘Perhaps he found another ship, before the Brave Endeavour was ready to sail, but Jack thinks someone would know.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘You care for him, don’t you?’

  I nodded. Those foolish tears were filling my eyes again. Would I never cease weeping? ‘Aye,’ I whispered, ‘I care for him. I want to be sure he is safe.’ I paused, then I looked at her. I had spoken of it to no one, but if I could not tell Alice, I could hardly acknowledge it to myself. ‘Before he left, he asked me – if he is able to return – he asked if he might speak for me.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve long thought he cared for you, but I was not sure about your feelings for him. You never spoke.’

  ‘I used to think of him as my father’s friend. He is older than I, a learned man . . .’

  She gave a scornful snort that made me laugh through my tears.

  ‘I think it was only when he was so badly injured and like to die, that I realised how much I loved him.’

  ‘It’s when we fear we may lose someone that we understand how much they mean to us,’ she said. ‘How our lives will be the poorer without them. You must be brave. There has been no news that he has come to harm.’

  She gave me a quick hug. ‘It is time that boy is fed, or he will be grizzling. Can you fetch in our cups and plates?’

  I nodded and wiped my eyes.

  Apple harvest came and with the help of Alice and Rafe and Joseph we picked everything, though the cold early spring had meant not all the blossom had been pollinated, so it was a smaller crop than usual. The next few weeks Kitty and I worked from morning to night, slicing apples for drying, preserving apple jelly and apple butter, gathering blackberries for apple and blackberry jam, and making pickles with apples, sloes and rosehips. Tom was able to help by sitting at the kitchen table and sorting out the perfect apples that would keep best. These Nehemiah and Joseph stored, wrapped in straw, in the apple loft over the dairy. Like the dairy it lay on the north side of the farm buildings, which kept it cool except in the hottest weather.

  We had barely finished with the apples when Martinmas was upon us, the traditional season for slaughtering the animals which are not to be kept over winter. Any rams not suitable for breeding would provide mutton, cows past lactation and male calves would provided beef, and most of the pigs would be slaughtered. Pigs are particularly valuable because they are the source of so many different kinds of meat, all of which, if it is properly prepared, keeps best of all.

  As they had promised, Rafe and Jack came to help with the slaughtering, but so did Toby (who had plenty of stock of his own to keep him busy) and Will the blacksmith. Will brought word that his cousin Abel had left his employment as a gaoler in Lincoln and would be coming soon to join him at the smithy.

  ‘His father was a smith too, like mine, and married my father’s sister. Abel grew up at the forge in their village, but went off to better himself in Lincoln.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Not that it proved much of a betterment. He says he is much out of practice at the anvil, but he used to be a great hand at the finer work, making tools and the like. I’ll be glad to have him.’

  It was good news, for ever since he had helped me I had feared that Abel would be discovered and punished, perhaps even hanged.

  With so many men to do the work, I did not have to help in the slaughtering myself, for which I was glad. Not even the most hardened farmer can say that it is a pleasant business, to cut the throat of an animal you have reared and cared for. At least my hens were safe. They were too valuable as layers to be killed for meat.

  As it was, Kitty and I had work enough to keep us busy all the day long and even into the night, with the carving and salting and smoking. Our hands grew chapped and sore from the salt and saltpetre we rubbed into the preserved meat. The fire in the kitchen must be kept burning hot but smoky for the hams and muttons hanging in the chimney, till our eyes smarted and watered and our clothes and hair stank of smoke. For two weeks we could think of nothing but the preserving of the meat, until at last all was done. We ate well all the while, from the scraps and the blood puddings and the humble pies and other produce which would not keep over the winter.

  At last we were able to scrub down the kitchen and wash ourselves and our clothes. All this time my mother had kept to her chamber, where she had continued with her spinning, well away from the smoke and stench of our work. Every day she seemed more confused. She could not remember whether she had eaten, even when she had just left the table. Sometimes we would find her wandering around at night. Once she had crossed the yard and begun to walk towards the Fen. Much of the time she did not recognise us. In particular she seemed not to know me since I had come home, though sometimes she called me ‘Elizabeth’, the name of her sister who had died as a young woman. I was said to resemble her.

  The morning of our great wash-day, Kitty and I carried a heavy buck basket out to the hedge and were spreading out the clothes to dry when I saw a soldier on a horse, followed by six men on foot, approaching up the lane. My hand flew to my mouth. The last time men in uniform had come to the house, it was to arrest me.

  ‘Good morrow, mistress,’ the officer said, doffing his cap to me. His tone was polite but not deferential. ‘Is this Turbary Holm?’

  I dried my hands on my apron, for they were damp from the washing, and walked over to the gate. ‘It is. And who are you, sir?’

  ‘Sergeant Whickers, billeting officer.’

  I realised then that the men wore the uniforms of the Model Army, not the somewhat ostentatious livery of the witchfinders’ guards.

  ‘Billeting officer?’ I looked at the six men in alarm.

  ‘Aye. We have been posted to this neighbourhood because of troubles in the area.’

  ‘Troubles? What troubles?’

  Foolish of me. I had been so caught up in the Martinmas slaughtering I could not think what he meant.

  ‘Attacks on the work of the licensed drainers, mistress. Destruction of property. Injury to persons and works. Riots and disturbances. We
are here to keep the peace.’

  I said nothing. To keep the peace? No, to protect the speculators and enclosers.

  ‘Six men have been allocated to this farm.’ He drew a folded paper from the breast of his buff coat and held it out to me. His expression was condescending, as if he thought I could not read.

  I took the paper and scanned the list. Altogether fifty men were to be quartered in the parish. Fifty! Almost half the entire population of men, women and children in the village! And indeed six were marked down to us. I handed the paper back.

  ‘Fifty men in our parish,’ I said. ‘That is a great many. There are already soldiers at Crowthorne.’

  He was clearly surprised that I could read and that I had calculated the total for the parish so quickly.

  ‘It is felt necessary.’

  ‘And how are they to be fed, these men? The harvest has been poor this year, after the bad weather. And we have lost at least half because the drainers have destroyed our crops in the field.’

  He frowned. It was clear he was not used to a woman standing up to him.

  ‘The billeted soldiers must be fed by the population. It is the ruling of Parliament. You will be issued with chits to reclaim the cost of the soldiers’ food from the military commissariat.’

  He spoke glibly. I could guess what those chits would be worth. Nothing. Even if we could discover where to take them.

  ‘And besides the local riots here,’ he said, ‘there is word that there may be a nest of King’s men nearby.’

  Edmund Dillingworth again. Were we never to be rid of him?

  ‘The only known Royalist hereabouts has disappeared months ago,’ I said coldly. ‘You will find none here.’ And no one too keen to support the Puritan ranters either, I thought, except at Crowthorne.

  He shrugged. ‘I am simply carrying out my orders. These are the men allotted to you.’ He looked down at the soldiers. ‘You will report for duty each morning on the village green in front of the church, starting tomorrow.’ With that he turned his horse and rode back down the lane.

  The men and I looked at each other. They were all quite young, some as young as I or younger, two perhaps of an age with Tom. They looked tired and cold, and as though they did not much care to be marching about the country, billeted amongst civilians to guard foreigners. A bitter November wind was getting up. Kitty would need to weigh down the washing with stones or it would blow away.

  ‘You had best come inside,’ I said grudgingly. ‘This way.’

  And the six of them followed me across the yard to the house.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The billeting of the soldiers in the parish did nothing to promote peace. Instead, the problem of feeding the men put such a strain on our resources that it brought even more anger and restlessness. The previous year had been one of the worst for farming within living memory. It was said that many in the towns had starved to death. I knew of none in our parish who had perished from starvation alone, but disease had also swept through the country in the autumn and the beginning of winter, much of it carried by soldiers coming home from the War. Ague, plague, and sweating sickness had carried off many all over England, especially those who were already weakened by lack of food. In our own parish we had been spared the plague, thank God, but Nehemiah’s brother, another old bachelor fen slodger, had died of ague, and Alice’s cousin, a little girl not yet eight years old, had wasted away from the sweating sickness and the bloody flux. Her father had been press-ganged into the army and blamed himself for bringing the sickness back with him. He had fallen into a melancholia ever since and was hardly ever seen.

  Short supplies during last winter had meant some were forced to eat rye bread made with grain spurred with ergot, a black rot which has terrible effects on those who eat it, causing fits and strange visions. Those afflicted feel that their skin is being pricked all over with pins or, in the worst cases, flayed. The milk of nursing mothers dries up and those who are already weak can develop gangrene which brings on death.

  The wheat crop had been battered in the fields and the grain was thin and lank. Two of the poorest cottars in our village had been forced in despair to eat their seed corn, leaving them with nothing to plant for this year. In the spring, Gideon had given them his, saying that, as a single man living alone, he had plentiful supplies and could go a year without planting, which I now knew was untrue.

  We had all been forced to forage for nettles and dandelions and even beech leaves to eke out our pottage, and some had ground up roots to stretch their flour for bread. And although the weather had been better this year, the loss of so much of our crops to the enclosures meant that we would all need to tighten our belts over the winter. We foresaw a bleak future ahead of us.

  So when fifty soldiers were thrust into our homes, where our precious supplies were limited, and we suspected that we would have to give them free quarter, whatever the talk of ‘chits’, resentment grew quickly. My first concern was to find room for the six allocated to us. I told Kitty to move her belongings down to my room. We would share and I would lodge the soldiers in the two attics. We spent most of the day unpicking a number of the canvas sacks we use for storage and then sewing them together to make large sacks for palliasses. These I handed to the soldiers.

  ‘There is straw in the barn. You can stuff them with that. Then bring them to me and I will sew them shut.’

  I looked at them dubiously. ‘Do you know the difference between straw and hay? You must not take the hay. We need it as winter feed for the cattle.’

  ‘I know the difference, mistress.’ It was a decent-looking fellow, one of the older ones. He seemed less surly than the others.

  ‘Good. Well, make sure you use straw.’

  When they had gone to the barn I returned to the kitchen and sat with my head in my hands.

  ‘How are we going to feed them?’ I said to Tom. ‘Six big hungry fellows. How long do you think they will be here?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Until they think there will be no more attacks on the drainage works, or until they are needed to fight the King’s forces again. It seems the War is not concluded after all. I do not think you need to feed them royally.’

  I gave a bitter laugh. ‘I have no plans to do so. I meant to feed our household enough, but frugally, just enough to get us through the winter. Now we may run out of food before the spring. And spring is always a hungry time.’

  ‘Surely they will be gone by then.’ Kitty looked up from where she was helping my mother who was in a tangle with her spinning. Ever since the men had arrived she had been agitated and frightened.

  ‘I hope so. I must fetch in the washing. It has been so cold, everything will still be damp.’

  As I walked across the yard to the hedge, the soldier who said he knew straw came towards me, with his palliasse hoisted over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ve seen to it that they haven’t touched your hay, mistress.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I’m sorry we’re visited on you like this. Not all of us want to be here, policing our own people and feeding off you. I was forced into the army myself, and so were some of the others.’

  ‘What’s your name, soldier?’

  ‘George Lowe, mistress. I’ve a wife and two children in Middlesex that I’ve not seen for two years. All I want to do is go home. I’m tenant on a smallholding there, and I don’t even know if my wife has been able to pay the rent. We thought the War was over and they would give us leave to return home, but they keep us on. They haven’t paid us a penny for months, and they only feed us by foisting us on people like you.’

  ‘Well, Goodman Lowe, my name is Mercy Bennington, and this affair of draining and enclosing our lands has already cost my father his life and my brother the loss of his leg. I have little sympathy with any who protect the speculators who are stealing our land.’

  ‘No blame to you there.’ He gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘We’ve had trouble with enclosures in my own village, though I kn
ow nothing about the Fens.’

  I turned away to the hedge. ‘Only the fenlanders understand the Fens,’ I said, ‘but these Londoners and Dutchmen will cause a disaster before they are done.’

  ‘Any help you need about the farm,’ he said, ‘you just tell me, and me and the lads will give you a hand.’

  In the next few weeks we were proved fortunate in the men billeted on us, more fortunate than most of the village, where some fights broke out, especially after the men had been drinking in the yel-hus. We had none of that trouble with our men. The other older man was called Seth, and the youngest, a boy of fifteen, was Ben from London. Aaron and Jem were also Londoners, while Col was Lincolnshire born, but had lived all his life in Peterborough and knew nothing of our fenland ways. George himself was a private soldier like the rest, but he was respected by them and kept them in order. Each morning they went off to the village, where they drilled and had weapons practice, or were sent off to guard various portions of the drainage works. This meant that during the day we were mostly free of them, but I had to feed them every evening, and it was beginning to encroach on our winter supplies.

  As December drew in and the weather grew colder, everyone in the parish brought in the stock to the barns and higher ground. The glebe land behind the church – where Gideon would have sown his corn if he had not given it away – was the highest ground in the parish. By long practice, all the parish sheep were wintered there until after spring lambing and the pigs until farrowing. We drove our sheep and pigs there with the rest, Nehemiah and I assisted by George, together with Aaron and Ben. These two knew nothing about stock, but they were willing enough, if a little stupid.

  ‘Why do you put the animals here,’ one of them asked me, the young lad called Ben, with ears like jug handles and big clumsy hands. ‘There’s more room in that field where they were.’

  ‘There used to be much more room, before the drainers dug a ditch across it,’ I said bitterly. ‘We bring them here because in winter all that part floods. The water comes down from the hills and the Fen spreads out over most of the farmland. The village and our farm become a sort of island, though we can sometimes get through the lane to Crowthorne and the Lincoln road. Not always though. Sometimes we’re cut off till spring.’