by Smith, Skye
"And those eight scouts are shadowing us to make sure that we do return. Well, there is nothing to be done until we reach Farthinghoe. When we don't turn back, then the trouble will begin. Where are you three making for?"
"We are on our way to Buckingham."
"Good, then we can ride together," Daniel said. "I'm on my way to Cambridge."
The trouble did begin at Farthinghoe. Once it was obvious that Daniel's party were not turning back to Banbury, Compton and his scouts hurried forward to head them off and turn them through force of arms. Or at least that is what they tried to do. They ran their expensive horses and easily caught up to Daniel's group. Once they were within hailing range, they called out a warning that they must turn back or they would be taken back hung over their saddles. They weren't to know that Femke was a trick pony or that Daniel was a seasoned pistoleer from the Dutch wars.
As Compton's band drew closer, Daniel pulled his carbine out of its holster and did the 'wrist twist'. This was a quick flick of the wrist which turned the covered flash pan on end to make sure that some of the flash powder fell into the breach vent. This would insure that when the flint sparked there would be no 'flash in the pan' misfire. All of this was done while keeping the carbine in front of him and out of sight of the riders behind him. To his party he yelled out, "Get ahead of me and keep up the pace no matter what happens."
Daniel bided his time until Compton was not twenty yards behind him and then he rapped Femke lightly on the head to get her attention so she knew to listen for spoken commands. She twitched her ears and snorted, for she was every bit a trick pony who loved to show off.
"Stride," Daniel told her in Frisian. She had been trained to respond only to commands spoken in Frisian, the mother tongue of his village. She slowed from a canter to a quick step stride that did not bounce her rider. As soon as she was settled into the smooth stride, Daniel twisted around in the saddle, found his target and fired.
"Run," he told her and he hung on as she leaped forward to a gallop. Only once she was loping along did he ease his hold and re-holster his carbine and take up his dragon instead. With the dragon cocked and ready to fire he again twisted around in the saddle.
The trailing horsemen had all stopped. The heavy ball of the carbine had hit the chest of Compton's horse, and had hit it hard enough to bring the animal down. The road dust from its collapse was still rising. Compton was crumpled on the road beyond the horse and all of the other men were dismounting and running to help him. It was much as he had expected. It made sense that when the son of an Earl was injured, the primary duty of all of the Earl's men would be to help him.
Femke caught up to the rest of Daniel’s party and Daniel yelled to them to keep running. "I've bought us some space and time, but I don't know how much. There is a bend in the road coming up. Once we are hidden by that bend we will turn off on the next bridle path we see."
The first bridle path was but fifty yards beyond the bend and it forked off towards a wood. The four of them turned on to it, but the MP's son complained, "They are scouts. They will be expecting this. We've just left fresh hoof marks at the turn, so they will know we have taken this path. We should go back and cover our tracks."
"Good thinking, but we haven't the time," Daniel told him. "Keep going until we enter the woods." As he expected, the path narrowed where it entered the shade of the woods because brambles had grown up on each side of it in a search for the sun. It was there that Daniel stopped and dismounted and bent down to the leaves on the path.
"It's no good hiding our tracks here," the MP's son told Daniel and shot him a look like he was the town fool. "They will already know we are on this path."
"I'm not hiding the tracks," Daniel said from where he was stooped over. "I'm hiding the caltrops." He stood and handed one of them to the lad to see. Each caltrop was simply four nails welded together in such a way that one nail would always point straight up no matter how it fell to the ground. "These were a parting gift from Colonel Meldrum's sergeant."
The man shivered involuntarily at the sight of the vicious thing and at the thought of how much it would hurt to step on one. "So their lead horse will lame himself and throw the rider into the brambles."
"Hopefully. These woods are a tangle and there is but one path through them and it is thick with fallen leaves. They won't know where else we have laid caltrops so they will have to lead the horses through this wood as they sweep the leaves away to make sure there are no caltrops. I'm counting on it being enough of a deterrent for them to give up and go back to Banbury to report our escape. At least I hope that is what they will do, because I've used up all the caltrops. If Compton is not badly hurt, then he may keep coming for me."
"Why? What is between you and this Compton. The son of an earl you say?"
"He is the third son of Spencer Compton, the Earl of Northampton and I've unhorsed him three times in four days. In truth he should be grateful to me for aiming at his horses rather than at him, but I doubt that he will agree with my logic. Now mount up. We still have some hard riding ahead of us."
The bridle path bypassed the village of Brackley and led them to another road further south that took them to Buckingham. They ate up the miles by alternating between walking and cantering. It would have been faster and easier on their backs, and the horses backs, if they had quick-stepped all the way, but only Femke was trained in the quick-step. They never did see William Compton or his men again.
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The Pistoleer - Brentford by Skye Smith Copyright 2014
Chapter 5 - Home to Wellenhay in November 1642
It was a relief to get east of Cambridge. The whole of the midlands seemed to have gone mad what with the war and the weakening of rule-by-law that the war had caused. When they had been riding to Buckingham as a group of four well armed men, everyone else on the road politely kept their distance. Once Daniel was riding alone, it seemed that every group of men he passed were eying him up and down like vultures eying an injured beast. Each time the groups passed by with no trouble he scratched Femke under her ear. It was her doing that the groups ignored him, for she didn't look worth thieving.
It was because of Femke that he rode passed Ely rather than dropping her and the saddle off at the Ely stable which was partially owned by his village. Femke was his step-daughter Teesa's trick pony, and he wanted to show Teesa that the horse survived the battles with nary a scratch. In the fens around Ely it was as if there was no war raging in the midlands. Women still went about their business in safety, children still played, and men did not turn and reach for weapons at the sound of an approaching horse.
He supposed he had the Eastern Trained Bands to thank for that. The trainbands of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge and Hertford had joined forces into a loose association with the aim of keeping the king and his supporters far away from their fields. Parliament allowed it because those fields were the bread basket of London. Daniel had been at the meeting in London where all of the officers agreed to the union, and he now wondered if parliament had made it official yet. The folk of those counties had no idea how lucky they were to have escaped the vicious raids of the devil prince and his flying army of vultures.
By not dropping Femke off at the Ely stable he was gambling that the animal ford would still be in place at his village of Wellenhay. Each year just before the winter rains began and raised the water levels around the island village, his clan would throw down bundles of sedge across the narrowest channel separating the island from the commons east of Ely. With enough bundles the sucking ooze on the bottom became solid enough to walk draft animals across.
The most valuable of the animals, the breeding stock that the clan kept in the commons all summer, were then herded across the sedge ford onto the village's island where they would be looked after for the duration of the winter. This year the rains were late and the weather was still dry, though cold, so the sedge bundles would not yet have been swept away by a floods, or so
he hoped. The ford meant that he could ride Femke right up to Teesa's door and hand the mare back to her.
He crossed the ford in the early evening twilight. The weather had been so very dry that the ford was still passable. In truth it was strong enough to carry him across while still mounted, so he didn't even have to remove his riding boots and wade across behind the mare. From the ford he could see masts sticking up higher than the reeds, bush, and stunted trees of the damp island. Only three masts. His heart soared. His clan had followed his orders and had taken most of the ships and begun their voyage to the New World.
For three years he had been trying to convince his clan to leave this damp island and move to a warmer place. He had even taken their largest ship, the Swift, all the way to the Caribbean to find them another island to move to. A tropical island with the easy life that endless warm weather, plentiful fish, and coconut trees could provide them. Up until now there had always been something to delay the venture. That there were only three single masts in the ships pool meant that they were away.
This would have been Anso's doing. While Daniel was away from the village, Anso was the warlord, and when Daniel was not on the Swift, Anso was her skipper. Anso had promised him that he would get the clan away before the winter westerlies began, and he had made good on his promise. He would have taken the Swift and six of their smaller Freisburn class of ships first to Lyme on the Dorset coast, and from there sailed south to Portugal to await the start of the trade winds that would take them to Bermuda. If Daniel left here first thing in the morning and caught the post coach out of Cambridge, he may still catch up to them at Lyme.
He grinned to himself at the thought of there being "only" three masts. For most of his life in this village, the clan had owned only two ships, both of them small, single masted, square rigged coastal ships. A few years ago one of those ships had sunk with all hands, and that tragedy pushed a bleak cloud across the future of the village and of the clan. Bleak, oh so bleak, as they had lost a third of the able bodied men of the village to that one sinking.
But then King Charles had gone to war against the Covenanters of Scotland. Using Daniels contacts in Holland the clan had earned well from the increased trade in guns and aqua vitae. A few favours to the Dutch Navy had earned them possession of the Spanish prize galliot "Saint Daniel", which they had renamed the Swift Daniel. The Swift had immediately boosted their trade and their profits so they had bought up more small coastal trading ships. Now they had nine of them in all and they were the envy of every other village on the coast of The Wash.
The other villages called them lucky, but it wasn't luck. Know how perhaps. Hard work for sure. All that combined with the need to take risks in order to secure the clan's future. The Wyred Sisters of the Fates had approved of their risk taking. If Daniel hadn't taken the Swift to the New World to find another island to live on, he would have never gone to Bermuda. If he hadn't gone to Bermuda, he would have never seen the wondrous new fore-aft sailing rig a Bermudan had invented. If he hadn't been a coastal trader, he wouldn't have immediately seen the advantage of the rig and re-rigged the Swift. If he hadn't bought up some unwanted hulls when he returned to the Wash, and then re-rigged them Bermuda style, then their trade with Holland would not have been so extremely profitable.
And all of it, all that planning, all that work, all of it had one eventual aim ... to move his clan to a warmer island. The oldest woman in their clan, Oudje the Seer, had warned them repeatedly that they must leave the fens before the age of ice came to the fens. She was the keeper of the clan's history and she had told them that their forefathers had made a similar move the last time the age of ice came to the North Sea. That was fifty generations ago and at that time their forefathers had fled the endless winters of Friesland for the longer growing season of these Fens. Now it was all happening again.
Oudje had told them that this age of ice would bring them longer, colder winters and shorter cooler summers, which would cause crop failure and hunger. Hunger would cause fighting and lawlessness which would lead to wars. Wars would lead to famine, and famine to plagues and pestilence ... and the only escape was to move to a warmer place. Unfortunately there was no warmer place in England that was not already over crowded. Nor was there place for them in France or in Spain or in Portugal.
In the New World however, there were great empty spaces, and in the Caribbean there were empty islands that were warm all year round. Even if the age of ice brought longer winters to all of the North, including to places like Massachusetts in the North of the New World, those Caribbean islands would still be warm. Anywhere with coconut trees would still be warm. Bermuda had coconut trees, and if Bermuda did not suit his clanfolk, then he had found other islands. Islands further away from England near the English island of Saint Kits.
Daniel's euphoria in knowing that his clan were moving somewhere warm lasted only until he reached the actual village, for it was filled with women and children. One of the young children screamed in fright at the sight of him, for his long winter cloak was dark with filth, and he had the hood up to keep his ears warm. To the little one he must have looked like some kind of bogeyman.
The child’s mother swept her into her arms, and calmed her with a hug and a kiss. Daniel pushed his hood down and asked her, "Why are you still here? Why didn't you go with the ships to Bermuda?"
"Daniel, is that you? You're filthy;" the mother replied with a curled lip and a wrinkled up nose. "You'd better get yourself to the bath house before you even think of knocking on Venka's door." Venka was the eldest of Daniel's two wives. She was also the clan's 'chosen' woman, the spokeswoman of the village.
"Answer me. Why aren't you with the ships? Why did they leave so many women and children behind?"
"The ships? Bermuda? You have been away a long time. The smaller ships have been chartered by the Earl of Manchester to patrol the coastline. The Swift is busy running guns and genever in from Rotterdam."
Daniel dismounted and dropped Femke's reins to the ground as a signal to her that she could fend for herself. His mind was spinning from finding out that his clan were not sailing away from the wars of this kingdom. His head was spinning from exhaustion for he had been in the saddle for days. He took a few steps towards the communal bath house but his legs were stiff and he stumbled.
"Pew," the little one pronounced, "you don't half pong." Her mom called some other women to her and together they half carried half guided Daniel towards the bath house. The bathhouse was a clean place, so they stripped off his boots and cloak, his armour and britches and left them in a stinking pile outside the door, with his soiled white silk shirt on top of it. Then they rinsed and scrubbed the worst of the muck from his naked body before they would allow him the warmth of the building.
Inside the village's bath house they rinsed him again, this time with warm water, and then they led him into the half of the bath house that was the sweat lodge. Later, it was there that his two wives, the sisters Venka and Sarah, found him asleep on a bench, taking a rest from telling stories. By this time the sweat lodge was filled with folk all eager to hear more of Daniel's stories about adventures. Daniel always had the best adventures, so he always told the best stories. That night they were all left calling for more, because Venka had him carried by stretcher to her house.
* * * * *
"But I'm not wounded and I'm not sick," Daniel complained after waking at about noon and being told to stay in bed. "Between the washing and combing the women gave me last night, and the heat of the sweatlodge, I must be now free of vermin. Why must I stay in this bed?" It wasn't even their big bed, but a thin pallet over by the door.
"Why? Why?" Sarah replied impatiently. "Well to begin with your breath is foul and your shit smells foul so you aren't moving from that pallet until Oudje has taken a look at you."
"So where is she? I have things to do. I must speak with the men."
"Venka has gone to find Oudje and I've sent a lad to find Cleff."
Cleff was
the elder who had been the clan's warlord and the main ships captain before they had lost so many men to a sinking. He could understand having to send someone to search for Cleff. He could be anywhere. But Oudje never left her small house. At her age she had trouble walking. "What do you mean find Oudje?" he asked. "She'll either be in her house or in the longhouse." This was not a Christian village so the main communal building was not a church, but a longhouse. It was a cross between an alehouse, a guesthouse, and a theatre ... in other words an inn-come-meeting hall.
"She is off somewhere with Teesa. She has selected Teesa," Sarah replied.
Daniel was silent at the news. "Not Venka?" Venka was Teesa's mother and everyone had expected that Oudje would have trained Venka to be the next Seer of the clan since she was already the 'chosen woman'. "Teesa is too young. How can the clan have a Seer and an elder who is younger than most of the adults?"
"Oudje says that of all of us, Teesa has the strongest gift," Sarah told him. "Anyone with experience and wits can become an elder, but you must be gifted to become a seer."
"What does Venka think about that?" Venka had been Oudje's right hand for five years now, and knew almost as much about healing as did the crone.
"She agreed with the choice," Sarah replied. "Face it, we all knew that Teesa had special gifts. Why do you think she is so successful at hunting and fishing. Her senses are as acute as those of a dog. She knows plants and animals, almost naturally she knows them. I think that Oudje has known for years that it would be Teesa, she just wasn't saying. Perhaps she was waiting for Teesa to mature."
"Well she did kill a man when we were taking the fortress at Dover," Daniel added. "That would have matured her."
"Typical man. You all think that fighting and humping are a sign of maturity. I think Oudje was waiting to see if Teesa was the kind of woman who wanted to be a mother more than anything else. Oudje follows the old ways and believes that a seer loses her powers once she bears children."
