‘I know not, exactly,’ she answered. ‘There was a message brought to me from Bristol, by the hand of a seaman, one that had gone forth with Will to a settlement of the Plymouth Company, as they called it, but I know not what that may be.’
‘A written message? From thy brother?’
‘Will canna write, nor I. Nor read, neither. It had been told by Will to one that could write. So the seaman told me. It was given him by the scribe, that lay dying on the ship that bore them home.’
‘But this faithful sailor found you out to deliver it? That is a miracle,’ said Alec, gravely.
Mistress Sugden crossed herself, rather to his surprise until he remembered that the old faith persisted in these northern parts of England, though the church at Witton and the parson there were reformed.
‘How comes it he found thee? Hath the message a direction to this place?’
‘That it hath. I took it to Doctor Ogden, our parson, who reads his learned books in print. But he could scarce make out the superscription. And as for the contents of the message he made no sense of it but that it was spoke by William Trent, my brother, who was alive and well when the scribe took ship from the settlement.’
‘Hae ye still the message?’ asked Alec, very Scottish in his excitement.
‘Why so?’
‘I can read,’ Alec told her. ‘I was at the university at St Andrews.’
‘Lord sakes!’ Mistress Sugden exclaimed. ‘Be you some young good-for-nothing of degree, or some traitor cast out—’
‘Calm thyself, madam,’ Alec broke in, laughing. ‘I am nobbut a fishmerchant’s son who looked to find a fortune in London, but ill came of it and I seek a different road.’
‘I’ll fetch thee the message,’ Mistress Sugden said, rising to go into the house.
It was not surprising that the parson, whose eyesight Alec knew was failing, should have found a difficulty over the poor scrawl, dog-eared, faded, creased from travel and much opening and folding. But Alec made out the gist of it in the end.
‘’Tis writ by a poor soul that was entrusted with a message to thee but feared he would not live to reach England. So he sent these words, Mistress, to thee and others to his own folk by the hand of one bound for Hexham. It is all set down here.’
‘It must be so,’ Mistress Sugden told him. ‘For the seaman spake in those very words. He was determined never to put foot on board ship again, so he told me. With many other complaints that made me think him a poor silly fellow. But what of my brother? What of Will?’
‘It is a very confused account as the poor soul put it down. Mayhap his bodily ills had affected his memory. It seems your brother left that settlement of the Plymouth Company in a small boat with four others to make south to a better clime and to a settlement made many years since by the great Sir Walter Raleigh. They did not return. He gave his message to the scribe or ever he left. He would have his sister know that he lives, that he hopes to prosper, where he be gone. And that is all.’
‘Little enough,’ Mistress Sugden said. ‘The sailor told me as much. It seems the scribe, like our Will, had gone out with one Captain Popham of the Plymouth Company of adventurers, as they call themselves. From Bristol, it seems. But the settlement they made was not prospering, so he had made his way by ship, fishing, to the New Found Land and thence would have returned, but died or ever he reached our shores.’
Mistress Sugden put away her precious letter and appeared to think no more of it, for she spoke no more of her brother. But in her mind a plan was forming, so strange, so daring, that it astonished her even more than it did Polly, when at last she explained it to her.
‘Go overseas!’ the girl exclaimed. ‘To Uncle William in a settlement we know nothing of? Happen we fail to find him, what then? And alone? Moother mine, thee must be daft to plan so!’
But her opinion, so daunting in its common sense to her mother’s extravagant ideas, was altered one day in late June when she was picking wild strawberries at the edge of a little wood near the hayfield. In the field Alec and the other men were taking in the hay crop, an operation that had been delayed by constant rain over the last two weeks. They had a flat board on wheels, upon which the big rounded stooks were lifted, to be pulled away by the new stout farm pony to the stack Master Sugden was building.
From time to time Polly straightened her back to look at Alec, to admire his easy movements, lifting the whole stack while the others pushed the flat board under it. Leave Witton, leave Alec, for an unknown place in an unknown country across dangerous seas, with mad dangerous men to guide the frail ship! Never, she vowed, never in the world!
But just at that moment the dangers her imagination presented took shape in fact, the adventures were upon her in the known, the abhorred Ben Flinders, who, creeping through the wood, had seen her stooping over the strawberries, vulnerable and unaware.
He had his arms round her and was dragging her into the wood, one hand over her mouth and nose before she recovered from the first shock of surprise. But she was not without spirit. She shook her head free, screamed once, bit the hand that came at her mouth again, kicked out at the legs that stumbled among the trees.
‘Vixen!’ the man panted, wringing his bitten hand before seizing her again with it while he raised the other fist to strike her. I’ll quiet thee! Thou’ll wed me sure enough when I’ll have done wi’ ’ee!’
In his fury and lust he had not heard the pounding steps behind him, nor the distant shouts. The first thing he knew was Alec’s hand on his collar wrenching him away from Polly so powerfully that the strong hessian tore across and split the length of his smock. The next instant Alec’s blow to his chin stretched him unconscious on the ground. Paying no further heed to him the young man, without looking at Polly, who was rearranging her disordered dress, picked up her fallen basket and began to gather the little strawberries back into it.
The girl, with a pale face and trembling lips, but no tears, took the basket from him.
‘I’ll take thee to thy mother,’ he said, gently. But she drew herself up. His act of gallantry, so clearly impersonal, had chilled her heart in spite of her gratitude for the rescue.
‘No need,’ she managed to say. ‘He’ll not trouble me now.’ She looked with hatred and contempt at the fallen man. ‘Thou’st not killed him? I would not have him dead and thee in danger for it.’
‘He is not dead,’ Alec assured her, but he stood over the prostrate brute until he saw her reach the farmhouse and turn towards the door.
The village was divided over this incident Those who favoured Ben Flinders and had considered him promised to Polly Sugden resented his overthrow by a great lout of a foreigner, a Scot moreover, still generically an enemy. Those who disliked the devious Ben or had suffered from his sly, dishonest ways and bullying attitude to girls, were pleased he had found more than his match.
All the same Polly’s independence was regretted and her mother blamed for it. And Alec found a growing coldness at the inn, on the farm, even in the church. All those thoughts and wishes and hopes, stifled for a time by the comforts of the Cow and Calf, roused up again by William Trent’s message, began to take possession of him. He knew that his time at Witton was coming to an end.
When he began to break this news gently to Mistress Sugden she suddenly realised that here lay the answer to all her perplexities.
‘I too would go from hence,’ she said, quite as if she had made up her mind weeks ago and was only now telling him of it. ‘Witton hath become hateful to me and to my girl. I would join my brother in that new settlement where he saith he hopes to prosper. If we might journey to Bristol under thy protection, Master Bridie—’
‘Indeed ye may, mistress,’ Alec told her, seeing a good many of his problems begin to dissipate and fade away. ‘And in all matters concerning the finding of a ship—my true calling, remember.’
‘Just so,’ said Mistress Sugden with dignity. ‘My brother here may do as he please in t’ farm, so he pay me my share o’t.
’
That evening, when the Sugdens were gathered in the farm parlour for supper, Mistress Sugden announced her intention, joining it with Alec’s suggestion that a fortnight should be sufficient to realise her personal property and make ready to go.
It took a little longer than that, but all went smoothly and in the last week of July the village turned out to see them leave, riding on three stout horses with a pack mule for their gear. There were many who grieved to lose them, even the stranger, who would be much missed by Master Sugden for his strength and knowledge. There were many among the younger men who envied them their courage and high hopes, and a few among the boys who determined there and then to follow if they could contrive to escape from the tedium of their homes and the work in the fields. But on the whole the village welcomed the new peace following their departure and before the year was out had almost forgotten them.
Chapter Seven
The travellers reached Bristol in mid-August after a tedious but uneventful journey.
The Sugdens found the city and its surroundings astonishing. After the peace, the familiar landscape, the well-known neighbours at Witton, this great collection of houses, so close-set, so overshadowing, above all so strange, at first terrified them. Especially as the people, though used to travellers and many kinds of conveyors of goods for shipment, found this small country cavalcade remarkable. A big strong young man with a shock of red curls to his shoulders and a short-clipped curly red beard, invited a second if not a third glance. The two country women with him commanded less attention but were so significantly superior in health and looks to the underfed, pale workers living in hovels just outside the city as to draw them out to the road with envious eyes and hands outstretched for alms.
Alec remembered the wynds near the castle at Edinburgh and when Mistress Sugden, after a glance of pity and another of fear, put her hand to her waist to find her purse, he said quickly, ‘Nay, mistress, for God’s sake show them no coin or we are like to be robbed of all we have, even our lives an they call out to their menfolk.’
Polly was shocked rather than frightened.
We were told that Bristol was a great rich town where fortunes were made and ships came with spoils taken from our enemies at sea.’
‘So they may be. The merchants will be rich; they be so in London, that other great port. But where the lion is there come the jackals, some less fortunate than others. But ride we on faster for we must come nearer to the harbour and find lodgings where ye may rest and I may put up the beasts until we know our further plans!’
‘I mean to sell them when we have secured passage,’ Mistress Sugden told him.
‘But not before,’ Alec warned her, for he already guessed that it would not be easy to find a ship that would take them, if indeed any such lay already in the harbour.
They had left the hovels behind and guided by Alec were making for a spot he had noted where tall masts rose over the red-tiled roofs of houses. Presently they came out upon a long wharf beside a river or canal of still, or perhaps very slow-moving, water. There were barges tied up with stout rope to bollards on the quay; there were a few masted ships of small size and low draught. There was a multitude of row-boats of all kinds, from old-fashioned coracles to strange smooth-sided canoes propelled by paddles at each end of a long spar.
Alec was excited by these darting craft, mostly conducted by young boys at great speed. He drew rein to ask a man beside the water what they were called and who made them.
‘Birch-bark canoe,’ the man answered. ‘Made by the heathen in the new lands over the sea. Captain George Popham brought them over together with the native savage he took as well. Some outlandish name he had and brown, reddish-brown skin, clad in furs and beaded leather.’
‘Where be he now?’ Alec asked. ‘I’d fain get a sight of him.’
‘In London, they say,’ the man answered, turning to spit into the water. As he continued to stand with his back turned Alec rode on, but stopped after another half mile to ask if Captain Popham’s ship was still in Bristol and if so where she lay.
This man could not speak for certain about Captain Popham nor his vessel, Gift of God. But there were others of the Plymouth Company, he said, and not put in to Bristol as did all the stouter fishing vessels that went for cod to the Great Banks of New Found Land, using the same northern route that the adventurers of former times sailed. He walked by Alec’s horse, continuing to talk volubly until he could see him in the right way to come near the main harbour.
‘But I warn ye to keep a good distance from that anchorage,’ he said as he turned to go.
‘Why so?’ Alec asked.
But the man only shook his head and walked away.
‘I think we should give heed to his words,’ Mistress Sugden said thoughtfully. ‘That seaman who brought Will’s message stayed with us overnight and had wild stories of the bad men in ports everywhere he’d ventured.’
‘I think ye said he was out of affection for the sea,’ Alec answered with a laugh. But he had seen much in the Port of London during the years he had worked there. Bristol, as great a thoroughfare as the capital, must have a like dangerous crowd of bullies, robbers, murderers, despoilers of women.
So though they moved on until they saw from raised ground a distant view of sea and sails that stirred Alec’s blood and made him shout aloud for joy, he turned away and in due course discovered a clean small house, quite near an inn that recommended it, where a widow of about Mistress Sugden’s age with an apprentice son and a daughter younger than Polly, was pleased to take them in. She provided a small room for the Sugdens and put Alec with the apprentice son. When the son came home from his work he helped to unload the mule, attend to the three horses and take all four to the stables belonging to the inn, where they watered and fed them and hung up their leather before going back to the widow’s house.
For the next two days Alec went out alone to discover all he could about the activities of the Plymouth Company. He carried his dirk at his belt below the skirt of his coat, for he had taken the stranger’s warning seriously for all he made light of it to the women in order not to frighten them.
If he had been alone he would have had no difficulty in finding himself a berth on any one of several deep-water fishing craft in port. He spoke to their crews, to confirm that they crossed by the northern route, sometimes forced south by great icebergs—or ice islands as they called them, sometimes in danger from huge fish that spurted water from their heads.
‘Whales,’ Alec agreed. ‘They be washed up at times on our coasts in Scotland. But tell me of the settlements.’
The fishing vessels could tell him very little. They went across to fish; they dried or salted their catch at stages on the very edge of the ocean; then bore it home again. They described the freezing cold of these shores, the storms, the dangerous shoals where there were not rocks close inshore. They spoke of wide seas running west into a great river or perhaps leading far west to come at last to the East Indies as those fabled adventurers had attempted to find and had failed. The legend was strong in this town, Alec thought, whereas in London, apart from Sir Walter Raleigh, those explorers had been scarcely mentioned.
The fishermen had no wish to settle.
‘Mark ’ee, this new land is claimed for England,’ they told him. ‘In the Queen’s time, when ships went there to discover that way to the Indies. But nought came of it and many were lost in the attempt.’
There was however, Alec discovered, a settlement of a sort promoted by Captain Popham at a place much farther south with the outlandish name of Sagadahoc. He had built a fort there called by the name of St George. It seemed to Alec that this might be the community William Trent had left to travel south again to a more temperate clime. But of that southern settlement he could get no clear news except that it might have been prompted by the London Company. He had a vague recollection of the name spoken once or twice by Master Angus Leslie, for whom he had worked in and about the wharves of the Pool of Lond
on.
He reported all his findings and his memories to Mistress Sugden when he returned to the lodgings in the evening, begging the women not to become despondent, though he began to feel his responsibility towards them as a heavy chain about his neck.
Unencumbered he would now, he thought, be already engaged upon a fishing trip to those fabulous waters that teemed with splendid fish. The season was in full spate, the vessels constantly arriving, re-fitting and setting out again. But with no other purpose than to return. And certainly no place in their holds for two women in search of a lost brother and uncle, who might well be dead by now, though he seemed to have survived a perilous journey to Sagadahoc, and set out in even more hazardous fashion to that other place which rumour had it was called in Raleigh’s time Roanoke, but thought by the people here to have been abandoned long since.
But there was neither time for, nor purpose in, brooding over what might have been had he not stayed so long in the Yorkshire Riding. Mistress Sugden was becoming anxious; they must clearly move on. The question was now where to find a ship of the London Company? Not in London, Alec swore to himself. He was still subject to the law for that killing of his twelve months ago. He had to dissuade Mistress Sugden from setting out for the capital.
‘If ye squander your whole substance, mistress, in a fruitless journey thither, for it is many miles and there be great perils on the way, how will ye fare if ever we get ship and do arrive where Master Trent is to be found? With God’s help and protection,’ he added, piously.
‘Which we do surely need,’ said Polly, who was heartily sick of their restricted life in Bristol, though it had only just come into the third day.
For Mistress Sugden had ventured very little abroad from the widow’s house and never without the latter’s guidance. Both the countrywomen attracted attention when they did so, which frightened the older one and her guide, but rather pleased Polly‘s vanity.
In this uncertainty they continued for another three days, but at the end of that time Alec had discovered a piece of news that sent him hurrying back to his companions with plans for immediate action.
Over the Seas Page 8
