THE CHAINS OF FATE an utterly compelling and romantic historical saga (The Heron Quartet Book 2), page 3
‘Be this your horse, Mistress?’
We whipped round. Standing at the edge of the field was Hobgoblin, sidling and restless, and holding her bridle a small, barefoot girl of about nine or ten years old. She gave us a broad grin, and added, ‘Be they Brereton’s men?’
‘Yes, it’s my horse, and they are Brereton’s — or were,’ I said. The child’s sharp grey eyes took in the scene, the bloodstains and the children and loose horses and sprawled bodies, and then said, ‘Tryin’ to steal your horse, was they, Mistress?’
‘They were indeed,’ I said, ‘and thank you for bringing her back.’
‘She be a nice horse,’ said the child. ‘Nice an’ gentle. What’s wrong wi’ him?’ A jerk of the head indicated Holly.
‘He tried to protect us when the soldiers threatened us,’ said Grainne. ‘And got a broken arm and a bullet through his shoulder for it. Can you tell us of a place where we can take him before those villains come back?’
The girl frowned. ‘Tain’t no good takin’ him into Nantwich. There’s a mort o’ soldiers there, makin’ trouble, fightin’ an’ thievin’ things. They’d string him up for murder most like. But me Mam’d have you.’
‘Your mother …’ I said dubiously. The girl went on enthusiastically. ‘Our farm’s over there, behind those trees. She’d have you, and look after him, she’s good wi’ simples and bonesetting and that, is me Mam. And since me Da’s bin away to the War we’ve bin terrible short-handed, there’s only me and me brother Robin and me Mam and Old Harry.’ Her eyes grew bright as her idea took hold. ‘We could hide you from the soldiers if they came looking, we’ve got a fine big barn … Come on, Mistress, afore they come back!’
Somehow the three of us got Holly, white-lipped with pain and loss of blood, on to his horse. We caught Grainne’s mare and the white cob, and replaced Henrietta in her basket, and collected Drake from the hedgerow whence he had ignominiously fled, and then, leaving the dead captain and the unconscious trooper with their horses in the road, set out across the fields towards the child’s farm. She told us, in her blunt cheerful chatter, that she was eleven years old, and her name was Jennet Morrison. Her brother Robin was fifteen, and attempting just as Holly had once done to run the farm in the absence of his father, save that Jennet’s Da was not dead but away at the wars, a sergeant in Sir Edward Fitton’s Foot. I was not at all sure that Mistress Morrison would be so hospitable in these uncertain times, despite Jennet’s confidence in her generosity: especially as harbouring this particular party of refugees might well incur the wrath of Sir William Brereton’s Horse. But I need not have worried. At first sight of the tall, stout smiling woman at the door of her farmhouse, my forebodings eased, and when Jennet had poured out the whole story in her enthusiastic staccato sentences, she at once took competent charge. Holly was helped down from his mountain of a horse, and managed to get inside the house before succumbing finally to pain and loss of blood and fainting clean away. The four of us somehow, puffing, carried him up the narrow stairs of the stone-built farmhouse and into a spare bedchamber. Mistress Morrison had her daughter fetch dressings and bowls and water and a pair of stout stakes and twine, and while Robin, a tall shy boy with his sister’s fair hair and his mother’s warm brown eyes, stabled and unsaddled and fed our horses, and looked after the children, we worked quickly to set Holly’s arm and change the makeshift dressings before he came to himself.
‘He’ll live,’ said Mistress Morrison at last, binding the splints firmly to the broken arm. It had been a clean simple break, relatively easy to mend, and even the strain and effort of getting on to and off his horse had not seriously started the shoulder bleeding afresh. ‘But it’ll take a couple of months before he’ll be able to ride, I’d say.’ She looked kindly at Grainne and me, standing relieved and suddenly exhausted by the bed, and added, ‘I daresay Jennet’s bespoke a bed for you already, Mistress Heron, Mistress Sewell, but I’ll welcome you on me own account. Those men of Brereton’s be a right menace, especially to them who don’t favour the Round-heads. They’re always here, levying this and that, taking our crops and cutting our timber and thieving our cattle without so much as a by-your-leave and making us buy ’em back at market, and all because my John’s a soldier for the King. That’s the trouble, o’ course, so many round here, gentry and all, have gone away to fight there’s none left for our protection and Brereton’s band of robbers can do what they please, and none to gainsay them. Before they came, we used to go into Nantwich market every Saturday, with things to buy and sell, and now we ain’t got the money to buy nor the corn and cheese to sell; the bastards even took the unripe green cheeses, and I pray nightly it gives ’em gut-rot! So we’re not as rich as we were, but we’re not poor neither, and you’re welcome to share it for as long as you need.’
*
We could not possibly travel on until Holly’s arm and shoulder were mended and so, despite my impatience at the delay, I had perforce to accept it. And in truth, during that autumn, I came to enjoy our sojourn at the Morrison farm; a strange and almost idyllic interlude in my restless life. While Holly recuperated under the watchful eye of Agnes Morrison, feeding resentfully upon nourishing broths and egg custards, Grainne and I assisted Jennet and Robin in the farm and the dairy, helping to milk those cows still yielding, to make butter and cream and the sweet crumbly cheeses for which Nantwich was so justly famous: and Drake was confined to the farmyard as unofficial watch-dog. Our fears about being sought out by the soldiers who had threatened us proved groundless, for although troopers came every week to the farm to demand levy, or excise, or whatever was currently the polite euphemism for their extortions, there was no search, no hue-and-cry, and we saw no one who would have been able to recognize us. Mistress Morrison discovered during her next visit to Nantwich that it had been put about that the dead captain, whose name was Pritchard, had been foully murdered by a company of wicked malignant Cavaliers, doubtless Irish in origin, who were said to be terrorizing parts of Cheshire: this tale presumably was felt to have a more heroic ring to it than the truth.
*
In this quiet backwater, news of the country at large filtered through fitfully and much delayed. We heard of the lifting of the siege of Gloucester, and of the battle at Newbury, which saw the death of so many brave men on either side, Lord Falkland in particular: and I prayed that none of those I knew had suffered the same fate, for as Prince Rupert had been present at the battle, so also must have been Simon and his Suffolk troop. Away from the main armies there was a fight at Winceby, My Lord of Newcastle’s siege of Parliamentarian Hull was abandoned, Sir William Brereton captured Wrexham: and Sir John Byron, veteran of Newbury, Edgehill and the man who had made himself so unpopular at Oxford in the first days of the war by pulling down Botley Bridge, was sent north to assume command of the depressed Cheshire Royalists. With men from regiments who had recently landed in Chester after the truce in Ireland, he was to form a new army.
Brereton’s men had been disliked enough in Nantwich and round about: but Byron and the Irish were a different matter. They outnumbered Brereton, were more experienced, and as a rule more ruthless. Unpleasant stories began to circulate as Byron’s men started to clear the county of Parliamentary soldiers, and Grainne and I began to realize that a farm two miles outside Nantwich was not, after all, the quiet isolated little backwater it had promised to be.
But we could not go without Holly, and Holly’s injuries were slow to mend. He was weak from loss of blood, and feverish, for two or three weeks after our brush with the soldiers, and just as we thought him on the way to recovery, an infection developed in his shoulder. The Nantwich surgeon was brought out, and re-opened the wound to recover shreds of cloth that he said had caused the trouble. It was not enough, however, to prevent Holly from suffering a relapse, with a high fever which lasted almost a week. By the time he was well enough to be escorted downstairs to Agnes’s comfortable parlour, it lacked two weeks to Christmas, and the weather was turning bitterly cold. The cows were huddled together in the fields, frost blighted the last vegetables in Agnes Morrison’s garden, poor cold Drake was allowed into the house at nights for shelter, and Grainne and I discovered that the garments we had brought with us were inadequate against the winter — especially as we only had left two under-petticoats each to our name. Jasper, too, was fast growing out of his baby skirts, and in early December we went into Nantwich, well cloaked and hooded against recognition, and managed to purchase three bolts of humble russets, a deep dark green, a warm brown and the other of mulberry. The long dark evenings by the cheery fire in the parlour, with smoky tallow candles that made my eyes smart until I grew used to them, were then spent in making ourselves warm winter dresses, with a proper boy’s suit, breeches and doublet, for Jasper out of the brown. And each night we lay, Grainne and I, in the bed that had been Jennet’s (she shared now with her mother), with Jasper in the little truckle bed at its foot, and Hen in her cradle, and listened to the chill north wind singing evilly around the chimneys, promising frost and snow and further delay. And each night, as the pigeon returns to its home, so also did my thoughts fly ever to Francis, though I never dreamed that bittersweet dream of welcome again: to wonder whether he was safe, and if he thought at all of me. Again and again my vivid memory summoned scenes from our past lives to cheer and to hearten me: the lovely high swooping sound of his little flageolet, or an image of his long, sensitive fingers playing so exactly, yet with such fire, upon his lute, and the dark tuneful notes of his voice singing the songs we both loved, songs by Byrd or Dowland, and humbler airs which owned no known composer but tradition; quoting the words of Shakespeare to me, in love and mockery — ‘My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun’ — or, in utter seriousness, speaking the lines of the sonnet that was a true reflection of our feelings for each other, and which had come to seem so tragically apposite over the years of our separation: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments’.
But true though our minds were, joined heart and body and soul like two halves of a book, or a painting, there had been too many impediments. My memory avoided those, in my sleeping and waking reveries recalling only the many moments of happiness, with no reality to intrude upon our dreaming: and sometimes also presented to me a vision of the future, bright and vivid and perfect in the darkness behind my eyes, a picture of the reunion we might have. I imagined the joy and delight I would bring him, and his face when he discovered that I was after all true to him, and had rejected my false husband, and the child I had tried not to love, and braved the dangers of war-torn England to be with him. I could not let myself approach the abyss of any less delightful meeting: that way, as Lear had said, lay madness.
It was those dreams that kept me from impatience, and depression, and futile raging against the fate that imprisoned us here. Not once did I dare to consider any other possibility, my face was turned resolutely from the thought that he might even be dead or, the nightmare that had haunted me in Oxford, so estranged from me by my supposed treachery that he would reject me, and retreat within that armour of cynical indifference I knew of old, which few shafts could penetrate. I could not bear to contemplate any such eventuality again: for I had paid my price for him, I had given away my child, and my husband, and my home and friends to have him, and without him I would be nothing, my life would hold no purpose, no meaning, no direction. As Meraud had once said to me, with a truth that, much as I disliked her, I had to admit, a lover dead but true was preferable to one living who had spurned all advances.
I had thought, if the weather did not break, that we might be able to leave before Christmas: but I was proved wrong. Although Holly mended well, and the days though bitter cold withheld the threatened snow, it was the war which intruded to prevent our going. Sir John, now Lord Byron, and his newly-formed Irish army had since early November made great progress against the Parliament men in Cheshire. Gradually, Brereton’s forces were pushed in towards Nantwich as their garrisons were overcome one by one: until by the second week in December, only Nantwich was left. Brereton himself was elsewhere, trying to organize help from Yorkshire, and his troops, under the command of Colonel Sir George Booth, poured into the town and commenced to fortify it as best they could. There were some rudimentary earthworks already thrown up: more were constructed, barricades erected, and provisions brought in for the expected siege. The Morrison farm was one of the many visited by a detachment of urgent troopers who threatened to fire the roof over our heads if they were not instantly supplied with almost all the food we had. Fortunately, a large part of the winter supplies, the casks of salt meat, the tuns of beer, the butter and cheese and honey and hams and sacks of grain and barrels of flour, had been well hidden in a cunningly partitioned-off portion of the cellar. But they took away a dozen fine fat geese, their cackling and hissing stilled for ever by wrung necks, some fodder and whatever was in the larder, all in Agnes’s prized light cart. The horses, the dairy cattle and goats, had been hidden in the nearby copse with Jennet, who had instructions to send them galloping to all points of the compass if soldiers approached. When they had gone with their booty, we sat back in relief, grateful that we appeared to have escaped so lightly, and even managed a joke or two about the animals and provisions moved so abruptly and hastily in and out of hiding.
The next day, Lord Byron’s men came. We had no warning this time: the first we knew of their arrival was Drake’s hysterical barking outside, and we tumbled out of barn and stable and dairy to face a menacing group of Byron’s horses filling the farmyard.
‘Are you the tenant of this farm?’ demanded their captain of Agnes: and with a deferential curtsey she told him that her husband was, but he was absent, fighting for the King. At this news their manner became a trifle less intimidating: the villainous-looking captain, with a scar across his face to rival Byron’s own, even smiled a fraction. ‘Then you will understand our necessity, Mistress. We are by the orders of Lord Byron, the general of our forces, to besiege the Roundheads in Nantwich, and we shall require quarters for our troops in all the farms and villages around until the town can be taken. You have a fine barn and stabling, which could be put to good use aiding the King’s cause in Cheshire, and doubtless you will not object to quartering a dozen of our fine fellows until Nantwich is reduced?’ He smiled again, showing discoloured teeth: and despite his seeming geniality, and the courtesy of his words, it was very obvious that to protest would be most unwise. Agnes curtseyed again, and lying in her teeth said that no, of course, she had no objection.
So twelve of Byron’s ‘Irish’ soldiers were foisted on us, great uncouth men for the most part, though the young corporal in charge of them was at first pleasant enough. They were in actual fact no more Irish than I was, hailing from the Midland Shires, and objected strongly to that epithet. The character of the Irish war had brutalized them; though Agnes laboured long and unwillingly to feed them with what she had, things were forever being pilfered, hens disappeared with monotonous regularity, and they cheerfully chopped down several of her precious apple trees for firewood. Their eyes, greedily assessing in the same manner as Brereton’s captain on the road outside Nantwich, followed us everywhere: and after it became obvious that they had recognized Grainne’s Irish accent, so that shouts of ‘Irish bitch’ or worse, and obscene suggestions, greeted her whenever she went out of doors, Mistress Morrison and I made sure that she was never left alone. But I was less careful of myself, and the outcome of that omission was far from pleasant.
I had gone, one cold December day a week or so from Christmas, to the stables with apples for the horses: a luxury we could ill spare, though these fruits lay shrivelled and brown in my apron, the worst of a poor season’s crop. But I was glad of a chance to escape the chilly comfortless farmhouse with its poor apology for a kitchen fire, Grainne’s white strained face and Jennet’s chilblained fingers struggling with spindle or churn, and even Mistress Morrison’s false cheerfulness as she prepared the scanty meal: and to take refuge for a while in the warm stables, sharply aromatic with the smell of horse.
The Widow Gooch’s old white cob slobbered up his apple with ungrateful greed and returned to searching his manger in a desultory way for the oats we no longer had: Grainne’s ugly mare took her meagre morsel with enthusiasm, and Holly’s feather-legged unwieldy animal nearly had my thumb as well for good measure. The two big farm horses snatched their apples from my hand almost before I had raised it to their noses: and then I wiped my slimy wet palm on a hank of clean straw and turned to the beautiful Hobgoblin, kept in the furthest, darkest corner of the stables out of the notice of Byron’s acquisitive and ruthless men. Francis loved her as he loved Drake, and so both horse and dog were my charge: but I would have loved her too in any case, for her sweet black head with the small enquiring ears and wise dark eyes and fine ridges of bone sweeping down to the flared nostrils, soft and smooth as ebony velvet, her fine close-coupled neat body and swift strong supple legs and feet and proudly carried plumed tail. She and Francis had had an understanding uncanny to anyone not used to the close companionship of an intelligent horse or dog: and now, rubbing her nose as she took the mouldering apple as if it were a gift of rare delicacy, I felt a similar empathy between us. ‘Not long now, my lady,’ I whispered to those neat attentive ears that flicked and turned to catch the sound of my voice, ‘wait till the cold goes and the soldiers go and then we’ll leave for Catholm and you’ll see Francis again.’
Under my hand the warm nose ducked and pushed up as if in agreement, and I laughed softly and wryly, remembering how lightly and cheerfully I had set out on this journey from Oxford to attain my heart’s desire; a journey only meant to last a month that had already taken three times that long, and we were not a fifth of the way there. All my energy had been turned towards reaching that momentous decision to leave Oxford in the first place: I had not given a thought to the dangers that we might encounter on the way, nor considered that I might put my companions in great hazard, for my sake and for Francis. Yet, despite the war, and the hardships and terrors and trials we had faced and, I suspected, had yet to face before we finally reached Catholm; despite these, had I been able to look into the future on the morning I made my choice to leave all my safe security and venture into the unknown, I would still have ridden away: for the sake of a dream, a hope, a vision of future happiness that was far more real to me than my everyday, workaday, briar-full world.
