Exchange of Love, page 13
John hated himself for acting like an overprotective parent, but he couldn’t stop crying out, “Don’t climb on the side netting! Don’t rock the rope bridge! Keep your arms in on the drop slide!”
“God, John. You sound like an old granny,” Judith said with a laugh.
“Like that one?” He pointed to a small, elderly lady racing her grandchildren across the rope bridge to shouts of ‘go, Granny, go!’ from a group of young adults beneath.
“That’s where you should be!”
“I have been up there four times already but Bonnie wanted to do it ‘all on her own’, so I’m grounded.”
Throughout the weekend Judith and John had tried their best to put their painful midweek row behind them, and Sunday was so far turning out to be enjoyable and relaxing for them both. John had almost forgotten all the angst that had been building up.
Sensing Charlie was growing bored with the adventure park, John ruffled the boy’s hair fondly and said with a grin, “Right, you up for a bike ride?”
“If you can keep up, Uncle John.”
“It’s about three miles,” warned John, not sure Charlie would appreciate the distance, but the boy seemed quite happy with the idea. He started off well, but riding up a gradient and on the grassy path was harder going than Charlie expected. After a mile he suggested a stop for a drink and a snack.
Halfway through his salt and vinegar Monster Munch, Charlie asked seriously, “Are you going to marry Aunty Judith?”
John froze in shock for a moment, recovering quickly. “I don’t know. If I do, it won’t be for a while.” John fished around in the rucksack and brought out some apples, offering one to the boy, hoping that food would distract him.
“Do you like her?” Charlie pressed on.
“Yes, very much.”
“If you do bad things to her, my daddy will put a contract on you,” Charlie said in a menacing voice, as he ignored the apple and produced a chocolate bar from his own bag.
“Well I shall have to make sure I don’t do that then.”
Charlie nodded. “That’s what Daddy did with Mark. Mark was horrible. Never did fun things like today. So Daddy had him contracted.”
May as well play along, thought John. “Well it sounds like your daddy did the right thing if he wasn’t any fun.”
“Daddy told Mummy that he didn’t think Mark was right for Aunty Judith, and that he would pay him off. That’s what contract him means. Mark went away after that. No one knows where, except me and Daddy’s men.”
“Oh, sounds like a big secret.”
“It’s not a joke,” Charlie insisted. “Daddy is a very dangerous man.”
John conjured up a picture of placid, amiable Simon. John didn’t think he’d say boo to a goose, but he was known as a ruthless businessman, a different character altogether when building up his ‘empire’ and wealth over the years. Still, hardly a Mafioso!
“His hitmen killed Mark and disposed of his body.”
“A secret grave?”
“No, too dangerous.” Charlie was warming to his story. “They took him to Mendip Quarry and fed him through the stone crusher!”
“Gosh!”
“I think they would have killed him first but he might have been fed in alive.” Charlie shuddered in delight. “Daddy took me to the quarry to meet the men who work there.” Charlie leaned close to John. “They were quite friendly but hadn’t cleaned it up very well. There was dried blood all over the crushed bed.”
John gulped; the boy really was convinced. “It’s hematite in the limestone. Soluble iron oxide like rust, makes it a ruddy colour.”
“That’s what they said, but then they would, wouldn’t they? I know the difference between rust and blood. Have you got any Haribos? I’m still starving—”
“Hey, can I have a word?” said a voice from behind them. Unnoticed, a groundsman had come towards them, looking rather annoyed.
“Hi,” responded John, carefully putting Charlie’s crumpled crisp bag back into the rucksack.
“Did you pay to come in?” the man asked.
“Sure,” replied John. “The ticket’s in the motor on display and—”
“Then you would have seen the notice about—”
“Yeah, no dogs, fires – nothing about food.”
“It also said no bikes, scooters, skates or any other wheeled vehicles other than prams or invalid wheelchairs.
“I’m very sorry,” said John. “I stopped reading at dogs and horses. The kids were so excited about the aerial adventure walk.”
The groundsman explained the problems of bike tyres cutting up wet paths and kids on scooters playing havoc in the grounds. “I don’t want to spoil your fun though, so if you wheel the bikes through that glade and then take our service road to the car park, you can ride on that without being seen.”
It was only when Bonnie and Charlie were safe in bed that John remembered Charlie’s story and raised it with Judith.
“Oh no! He’s not off on that again?” she said, with amusement.
“He warned me to be nice to you. Or else!”
“Good lad! Seriously, it’s a bit of a problem. Perhaps if he were to see Mark…”
“He’d think it was a ghost or a zombie!” joked John.
“I’ll mention it to Simon,” Judith chuckled.
CHAPTER 18
Penny realised that it would be far from easy to travel from the Royalist southwest to her father and sister, Rita, in Parliamentarian East Anglia. Her first impulse was to flee Peverell House on horseback, but she would need several remounts to complete the journey and places to stay overnight. A single woman travelling alone would be very vulnerable.
It was therefore several days after Edward’s devastating confession that Penny rode out of Peverell House courtyard for the last time in a hired carriage with a driver, guard and two mounted outriders as escorts. The Civil War had created a huge demand for riding and draught animals, and the two horses pulling the semi-closed carriage were ill-matched and unimpressive. The carriage itself was rather dilapidated but quite comfortable with a good roof and side screens that shielded off most of the drizzle. She took nothing of Edward’s and nothing Edward had given her. Ornaments and jewellery such as necklaces and rings were left behind. She had some money of her own and of course her clothes, but nothing more. She had left a curt note for him if he did return to Peverell. Inside the carriage, her maid Carol was sobbing in distress, but refused to explain why.
Summer rain fell steadily, sufficient to water crops but not flatten corn. It was so unlike the time when she and Edward had first arrived. From their wedding in Suffolk they had waited in Devizes for a bright spring day to arrive at Peverell; an omen for their life of sunshine and love together. Tears filled Penny’s eyes, but there was no going back; no possibility of forgiveness; no children to consider – despite their efforts. Just that ancient puritan hag carrying Edward’s child. Carol handed Penny a small handkerchief and she dried her eyes. Seeking composure in detail, she opened her lap bag and took out Edward’s letter. It was in two parts. One was a factual note saying that Nick Stanning, one of their closest friends, was badly shot and dying. There was little hope of recovery and he was too ill to move. Edward had promised to stay with Nick until the end came. The letter hardly mentioned the attack on Bristol and said nothing of Edward’s part in it.
The second parchment was an impassioned plea for Penny to forgive him. The letter was immaculately written, unlike Edward’s usually strained, barely legible penmanship. Its phrases were carefully correct, written in Edward’s style but probably copied again and again until near perfect. It had almost persuaded her to stay. Edward hardly ever apologised and never grovelled. In the letter he did both, but she would not weaken.
Her reverie was broken by the sound of two horsemen galloping off.
“The outriders, ma’am,” called her coachman in alarm, “they have fled!”
It was hard to follow events from the confusion, and with the coach shutters drawn against the drizzling rain, she could see little.
From up ahead a new voice bellowed, “Stop your horses, driver. Leave your weapons, or we shoot!”
“Don’t fight!” shouted Penny, “I want no blood spilled.”
The carriage rocked to a halt and there was a thud as the guard’s musket was thrown to the ground.
“A sensible action, my brave sir.”
From the now half-raised blind, Penny cringed as the mounted hooded figure approached.
He threw open the door and boomed, “Lady Peverell and mistress Carol.”
He knew their names. This was planned; their escort in collusion with the robbers.
“Come over here, Robin,” the man called. “We have two pretty skirts to lift!”
Suddenly, the carriage was filled with the flash, bang and smoke of Penny’s pistol. Small but deadly accurate, it hit the masked robber in the throat. Blood spurted, and the near decapitated head lolled back as his horse shied. The carriage surged forward against the brake as the horses took fright. A shot sounded from above; the coach guard had a second, hidden gun. Penny grabbed for the large military-style pistol hanging in the corner of her carriage. Outside, more shooting. Her guard screamed in agony and fell from the box.
Penny was hanging perilously in the carriage doorway as the driver whipped up his team to flee. Partially off balance, she fired the massive pistol. Its recoil knocked her headlong onto the grass verge. She was aware the carriage had stopped its short dash and saw her second target loll sideways and fall from his horse.
“Don’t move,” she cried. “I have a second pistol. Move and I kill you.” It was a lie – both her pistols were fired. The small wheel lock with its rifled barrel took an age to reload; the big flintlock gun was gone God knows where. She remembered: the guard had thrown down his musket. Desperately she sprinted back down the road and snatched up the weapon. It was not discharged, not even cocked. Now re-armed she advanced on the injured would-be robber.
The driver showed no such caution. He had jumped down from the driver’s box and lumbered across to the injured man who was now squirming in pain, trying to rise. An expertly aimed cudgel blow sent him sprawling and, almost in the same arc, came around to strike the back of his head.
“Bastard! Bastard’s done for Jem! I’ll kill ’ee!”
“Stop!” shouted Penny. “Don’t kill him. We take him alive – he must face the full force of the law.” The musket was now pointed towards the driver, who realised that this trembling gentlewoman had already shot two men and might easily kill him if he did not obey her.
“Full force of the law,” he said with a growl. “Full force of the law. Aye. A trial and a long, slow hangin’s much better. I know’s the ’angman.”
The wounded man was now quite still, either from the blows or loss of blood. When they turned him over and removed the hood, he was a boy of about sixteen. As she had tumbled from the carriage, Penny’s shot had hit him sideways in the left shoulder, crushing bones and muscle, forcing a patch of clothing deep inside the wound where the ball was lodged.
“Better get ’ee to the magistrate quick, he’ll not last long.”
The boy began to scream and writhe as Carol staunched the blood flow with a hand towel and made a makeshift bandage. Penny held the gun’s muzzle low down against the boy’s gut to deter any sudden bid for escape, unlikely as it was in his condition. The coachman was right: no one would survive for long with such a wound.
Curled up in a guest bed at the mayor’s townhouse, Penny alternately sobbed and replayed the events of the day over and over. Somehow the driver had packed the two dead men and the dying boy into the carriage while Penny rode back into Calne on one of the robber’s horses. This alone was an embarrassment; she had to cut her long skirt from hem to thigh before she could get into the man’s saddle. Her maid, Carol, sat beside the driver in total shock, not speaking or moving for the whole journey.
The mayor, one of the town’s biggest producers of broadcloth, was also magistrate and chief justice. He and his wife knew the Peverells well; he had sat in justice with Edward and had often entertained them at his home. Even as Penny sat with the justice’s wife during the evening, she could hear piteous screams from a distant part of the house. The boy was being interrogated violently, tortured until he gave the names of the accomplices and the innkeeper who had set up the robbery. The justice was enraged that a woman of quality, a friend, could be betrayed by a dishonest innkeeper and attacked on the road so close to ‘his’ town. Justice had to be swift and severe in these troubled times; the boy would hang tomorrow along with the innkeeper and his son.
Tossing and turning, restless and unhappy in her bed, Penny could still see the distraught mother of the boy as she pleaded for his life. No one bothered to listen; the law was the law and he was a murderer, whatever his age. The wife of the guard who had been killed defending the carriage was trying to claim his body for burial. Another woman cursed Penny for killing her man; ran at her screaming with hands outstretched, only to be knocked down by a town watchmen. It had become a wretched, ugly scene; a scene that Penny couldn’t get out of her mind, haunting her, no matter how hard she tried to sleep. If only she had given up her possessions, the men would be alive and the boy not sentenced to hang.
All she wanted was Edward; Edward to hold her and love her and make her feel at peace with herself.
CHAPTER 19
Penny didn’t go to the hanging, but the house gossip ensured she could not ignore the grisly details of how the barely conscious boy was carried out in a chair for his long slow death. The festival-like atmosphere, so usual at these events, was totally sickening to her.
The innkeeper, who had seemed so helpful to Penny in arranging the carriage, had been first to be seized on the basis of the hanged boy’s confession. In a desperate attempt to ‘save his own neck’ the innkeeper had in turn given up the names of the others involved, including his own son.
“It will be of no avail,” the mayor had told Penny with a laugh. “I must still show the law applies to all. After a new trial we will have a multiple hanging in the town square, after all!”
She had tried to shut all this out of her mind but the shock of the attack on her carriage had almost overwhelmed her. She had fired on the first highway robber in self-preservation, but now she could not erase the picture of his shattered neck and lolling head. The sight of the injuries to the second robber, the now hanged boy, was even worse. She and Carol had tried to bandage him as he wrestled in agony, sobbing incoherent words and cloaked in the mud of the roadside. He had been a mere boy, and dying, but they had hanged him, anyway.
Penny was required to give evidence at the travesty of a hastily set up second trial. The jury were a dozen men, handpicked by the magistrate, many of whom stood to benefit from the innkeeper’s death – either by taking the trade or buying the property. Four guilty verdicts in half an hour, and already bets were being taken on who would struggle the longest at the ropes’ end. As she left the guildhall after the trial, a woman again screamed that it was Penny who was a murderer, who had shot ‘her man’. More refined, wealthy ladies applauded Penny’s defence of virtue and property, enquiring if she would visit their homes.
Death was common and often visible in this violent and brutal age, but Penny was still horrified by the attack on her carriage and the savagery of the summary justice. As she hastened back through the town, she realised that Edward had seen worse, much worse than this, at the battles of Lansdown and Bristol. He had seen friends killed and had faced the risk of death or maiming many times. Even now, he was with their dying friend Nick Stanning – Nick whose wife, Gertie, had a month-old son. Against this backdrop of tragedy, what importance was a night of lust in a squalid inn bedroom with that hypocritical, middle-aged puritan Margaret Ransom? She remembered Edward’s pleading letter again and felt a twinge of remorse.
As Penny was wrestling with her emotions and trauma in Calne, Edward was finally leaving Bristol. He had stayed with Nick until the end; several days of pain and delirium that even the opium could not quench until the apothecary was bribed to administer a near-lethal dose and end the suffering. In a world of vicious execution, murder and sudden death in battle, the priests still insisted that a dying man’s agony could not be ended. To Hell with them.
Between the hours he sat at Nick’s bedside, Edward had worked tirelessly to set up the production of muskets and guns in the Bristol workshops, promising payment that he knew King Charles could not make; anything to keep his mind from the trauma of war. There was still no letter from Penny; no word or sight of her since that terrible morning in Bath when he had confessed his adultery with Margaret.
Now with the words of Nick’s funeral service still clogging his mind, he prepared to ride away from Bristol for Bath and Peverell. Where should he look for Penny? Would she stay in Bath or return to the estate? He hoped above all that she would not attempt the journey back to Suffolk and her family. That was what she had threatened as she slapped his face and threw her wedding ring to the floor. She had the courage and resolve to do anything, however hazardous.
As he led his horse from the stables to join Phil and the waiting troops, a rough hand seized his shoulder.
“Hold, sir! I order you do not leave your post!”
It was Prince Rupert.
A sudden rage flared in Edward. “Take your hand from me, sir!” Edward bellowed with no respect for rank or protocol. “Touch me again and I will strike you down.”
“I will have you hanged.”
“Out of jealousy! Out of jealousy that I forced my way into Bristol with fifty men while you, sir, wasted half the king’s army.”
“Insolence! It is not true.”
“It is what men believe. They know I was there first, sir. I am not of the army. I am a private gentleman. Call me out, if you dare.”
