by Smith, Skye
"The English retreat at Newbourne was so panicked that the gunners didn't even spike their cannons. The officers did not destroy their maps and plans. The generals and their lords did not have time to burn all of their letters. This was with those letters." He passed a crinkled and soiled scrap of paper to Pym. "Read the circled paragraph out to Oliver."
Pym found the pencil circle and squinted his eyes to read the blurred ink. "If you cannot capture and imprison the leaders of my detractors in the Commons, then they must be silenced by other means. A permanent solution would not displease me. As usual, I must be able to deny any involvement."
Pym slumped into the closest chair and stared at the scrap. "My God! Has it come to this?" He stared up at Daniel. "Where is the rest of this letter?"
"See the burnt edges? Alex had his clerks search through all the burned scraps trying to mate the quality of paper. That is all we have. No letterhead, no salutation, no signature. Nothing to tell us who it was to, although I can take a good guess as to who it was from. Charlie himself. If by 'come to this' you mean politicide, well, that began last year when Charlie sent his army to punish his Scottish subjects."
Oliver stared at his friend with interest. Daniel was not an educated man, and yet he had just used a word that was unknown to him. "Is 'politicide' a Dutch word?"
"No, English. Your Betty invented it in her kitchen this morning. I needed a word for when a king kills his own people. You know, the opposite of regicide. In truth, I did not come to your rally to make a speech, I came to shoot any bugger who took a bead on John."
"Ahh, that explains much,” said Pym as he stood and stuffed the letter and the scrap into an inside pocket of his jacket. "And now I must go down and make my closing remarks."
"Is it worth the risk?" Daniel asked as he stayed him with a strong grip on his arm.
"Hmm, you are worried about assassin balls. Charlie needs his deniability, so my risk is not an assassin's ball, but a tragic accident. I promise I will be short, and I will ask for an orderly end to the rally. You can hear how restless they are down there. If there is a brawl, folk will be crushed as they flee the court." He gave a short stiff bow to Daniel, and then was through the door.
"Well, that is the second bravest fool I have met this hour." He looked at Oliver. "All of you should stay up here until the mob is on their way. I will escort you all to The George. Are you all carrying?"
Oliver leaned forward to reach behind him and pull out a small wheel-lock pistol. "We all still have the guns that Henry Marten gave us the last time Parliament sat. What did he call them? Our right to say no."
As soon as Oliver left the room to go back to the windows, another man approached him carrying yet another list of names. "Thank you, Teller. Very good of you to take the time."
The name Teller made Daniel take note of the man. That was the name of Sarah's twelve-year-old son, now his own twelve-year-old son. Was it a coincidence? "Pardon me, but are you Teller Paget?"
"Indeed I am,” replied the elderly man, "and who might you be?"
"Oh forgive me,” Oliver said hurriedly, "I should have introduced you. May I present Da..."
"I'm Daniel, Sarah's new husband in Wellenhay,” Daniel interrupted, and made a point of stroking the scrollwork of the double-barreled dragon that was under his belt. "She is no longer a widow, but protected by me, and she is no longer of Cambridge, but is again a clanswoman of Wellenhay."
Teller's eyes squinted and became cunning, but his next words were spoken in a tone of anger, "This is about my grandson. Well, she cannot have him. I will fight it in the courts."
"Where the lawyers will turn you and Sarah into enemies so that they can earn more out of you. After you lose, Sarah will never let you see him again."
"Then I have nothing more to say to you until I have legal advice."
"I'm not finished yet,” Daniel told him. "You and Sarah have old issues between you, whereas I just want what is best for the boy. That includes an education and time with his grandfather. I propose that he live with you in Cambridge on schooldays, but otherwise in Wellenhay where I can teach him some manly skills. Sarah, of course, will expect to be welcomed into your house to visit him at her convenience."
"I want more time with the boy than that."
"Then you had better make sure that he goes to college then, hadn't you?" Daniel said while locking his eyes on the elder man's. Neither blinked. Neither spoke. He held out his hand to shake on the agreement, and after a moment's hesitation it was accepted.
"My wife hated that my son took a peasant wife from Wellenhay. Now she must face the possibility of her grandson also having such a wife." Teller saw a flash of anger cross Daniel's face, and added hastily, "no offense meant, it's just that my wife is a devout Puritan."
"I can think of worse fates than having a wife from Wellenhay,” Oliver interrupted, trying to lighten the mood. "Almost all other fates would be worse." He smiled at Daniel. "So you have finally taken a wife. Congratulations. Which one is Sarah?"
"Venka's younger sister. The pretty sister."
"Ah, so a formidable woman then, and handsome. Yes, congratulations."
"If my wife needs to speak to you, where can we find you?" Teller asked.
"At The George with Pym,” Daniel replied. He took a deep breath in relief. That had gone very well compared to a drawn-out battle in the courts. He now had a son, and a son who would attend college.
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The Pistoleer - Slavers by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14
Chapter 11 - A bomb at The George Inn in September 1640
It took a lot to leave a member of parliament speechless, never mind five of them, but speechless they were as they watched the fairest of damsels float across the grounds towards them, calling to one of them. Each of them hoped to be the one she was calling, and they kept their silence trying to catch her words.
Daniel had not yet followed them through the gate. Oliver had arranged for some of his helpers from the rally to lead the way to The George, and to check the perimeter of the hedges and low walls for skulkers before John Pym arrived. He took a quick look for himself and then trotted to catch up to the rest of them in the grounds of the inn.
"Daniel,” Britta called, recognizing the floppy hat as he came through the gate. She dashed passed the five guests and swung herself on Daniel's arm. "Come quickly! We are run off our feet. We need you on the taps." He looked across at the garden, which was bustling with folk. It was a lovely fall evening and the drinkers had dragged all the tables out of the various stuffy low public rooms of the inn and into its delightful garden.
She dragged him back past the five guests and as she did so she said to them, "The kitchen is busy tonight, but if you order something simple I will make sure that you get the next plate of it, no matter who in fact ordered it." Her smile to each of them was so fresh and becoming and personal that still they did not speak, not wanting to break the spell.
"Mr. Pym,” she bathed him in her radiant smile. "Where is your man Trevor? He promised to help."
"On the London coach, lass, carrying messages to ... ah ... to some friends."
She sighed and went back to hurrying Daniel along.
Oliver spoke up, "I can help at the taps, or with the serving. Your customers are my constituents." He followed along after the tall couple, but stopped when he reached the first table to thank some of the masters from Sidney Sussex for accommodating the rally. Britta stared back at him and shrugged as if to say, 'yet another broken promise from a politician'.
Once inside the tap room, Daniel hung his cloak and hat on a peg, shoved his dragon under the bar, and moved his wheel-lock from the inside pocket of his cloak to the inside pocket of his jacket. While he rolled up his sleeves and washed and wiped his hands, Britta pointed out and named the tapped kegs for him. A dish-girl brought him a tray of clean jugs, so he began to draw the ale, jug after jug of it. The inn wife noticed him and immediately changed her course
so she could walk behind him and plant a kiss on the back of his neck.
For twenty minutes he did nothing else but pull jugs of ale as fast as he could. So long as the filled jugs kept being taken away by those serving, he kept pulling. Eventually, he got ahead of them and took a breather. Finally he had a chance to go outside and lean against the door post and set an eye wandering through the tables of men. The George was doing a week's worth of business in this one evening.
Britta rushed by carrying two steaming plates of blood sausage and turnip mash, good solid alehouse food. Moments later she rushed by again carrying three more plates of the same. He watched her as she swung and danced between the tables. She was delight in motion. Unfortunately, with her hands holding two hot plates on which was balanced a third, she could not employ her usual tactic of slapping away any hand that reached for her. As he watched, she jerked sharply and almost lost the third plate. She stopped only long enough to rebalance the plate and to scold a student. He marked the lad. He had either slapped or grabbed her bum.
Daniel went back to the bar, wiped his hands, put on his hat, and then sauntered over to the lad's crowded table. He was sitting on a chair rather than on one of the long benches, and he was leaning in it so that it was balanced on the back two legs. Daniel reach over him to clear some empty jugs, and somehow the bum-slapper lost his balance and landed on the ground with a thunk and a whump of lost breath.
"Oye,” Daniel said while looking down at him,. "don't you be breaking the chairs. They don't come cheap."
"You pushed me." The lad just lay where he had fallen and stared up at the sky. His words came out in a wheeze.
Daniel gazed over to the table where Britta had taken the three plates. It was the table taken by the five parliamentarians. The two who had already been served were shoveling the sweet turnip mash into their mouths, or rather, they had stopped shoveling mash for a moment so they could stare down Britta's cleavage as she stooped very low to slide the balanced plate onto the table. Not one of the men lifted a hand to help her, for that would have shortened their pleasure. Daniel cursed to himself and swore that he would find other work for Britta, now his daughter. Working at this inn had even respectable married men lusting after her in public.
"I said you pushed me,” repeated the student who was now climbing to his feet and testing the chair.
Daniel swung around and showed him the three empty jugs in each hand. "And what did I push you with, my third hand?" He made a show of looking at the lad's back and bum. "Come with me. I have a clothes brush behind the bar that will clean up your clothes right smartly." The lad fell in step behind him, and Daniel yelled his over shoulder to him, "Hey Useless, grab some empty jugs!"
The lad looked like he was about to say something snide, but he finally noticed the size of this man made even taller by the hat, so instead he picked up an empty jug in each hand, and followed to the bar. True to his word, Daniel did have a brush, and he did pull the lad behind the bar to do a fast job of brushing him down.
"I know you. You are the soldier from the rally, aren't you?" the lad asked. He spotted the big dragon under the bar. "May I see your pistol?"
"Aye, no harm in that, so long as we duck down behind the bar so that no one sees us waving it about."
The lad squatted immediately and almost drooled as Daniel drew out his double-barreled dragon with the scrolling silverwork. He then almost fainted as Daniel twisted it sideways so that he could stick a barrel into each of his nostrils. "I am that soldier, lad, but do you know who else I am? I'm Britta's father. I saw what you did to her bum, and worse, did so while she was balancing three steaming plates."
"Please don't hurt me! I meant no harm,” the lad stammered, almost in tears.
"Fair enough, but I only ever give one warning. You've had yours. Now get back to your table and behave yourself. And tell your friends to behave themselves, too." He pushed the dragon back under the bar and then stood up and followed the lad outside. He stayed there for a moment so he could watch the lad scamper back to his table, and then watch the effect as he told his mates what had just happened.
When they were all looking his way, he lifted his hand as if the index and middle fingers were the barrel of a pistol and the thumb the flint hammer, took aim at them, and then flicked his hand as if the mock pistol had fired. He was sure they all ducked a little. The wife came up behind him and whispered, "and just what was all that?"
"Oh, just trying to make Britta's work a little easier for her." As he said the words, lads from the table were moving to other tables and telling something to rapt audiences. Whatever they were telling, it included hidden pointing gestures to both he and to Britta. He chuckled to himself and went back to pulling jugs.
Eventually the evening chilled and the drinkers thinned as they went to their homes or colleges. Those that remained moved the chairs and tables back into the warm fug of the ancient tap room. With the cry for fresh jugs now slowed to a crawl, Daniel was ready to call it a night. The women had already gone to their beds, for the innkeep and the night watcher always did the close. Old George had been the watcher at The George for as long as anyone could remember.
Before they had left Sidney Sussex that afternoon, Daniel had sat in on the after-rally discussions by the politicians, and he was looking forward to hearing more of what they had to say. The parliamentarians had gone upstairs shortly after they had finished eating, and were probably still discussing the day's events. Despite his intentions of joining them, he didn't make it to the staircase, before he was being dragged back to the tap room by the pleas of some students to tell them some war stories from the Tyne.
By the time he did get upstairs, there were no lights or sounds other than snoring from the bedrooms, so he unlocked and entered room six and slung his gear onto an overstuffed chair. This was a small room with a small window and a small bed, but at least it had a wash stand. He bumped his head four times on the ceiling beam while undressing and washing, and stubbed his toe twice trying to squeeze by the rickety table to reach the bed. The bed was so short that his feet stuck out of the end, and so feather soft that his back began to ache almost immediately. His usual bed was a thick reed mat on a wooden deck or on a floor.
After a few hours of tossing and turning and not sleeping, he heard a key turn in his door, and he went still and quiet, and reached his hand down to his boots, each of which had a pistol propped up in it. As the door opened, a little light spilled in from the hallway and he knew who his visitor was just by the shine of the candlelight through long yellow hair. "Britta, I bloody hate this room," he whispered to her.
She walked in clutching her cloak closed. She was carrying a small candle lantern and came towards the bed. "Ouch!" she hissed as she stubbed her toe on a table leg. "I just came to make sure you were comfortable."
"Surely you jest," he laughed as he pointed to his two feet sticking out of the end of the bed. "I bloody hate this bed."
"Then come and sleep with me. Helen is out for the night with one of her lovers, so I have the whole big bed to myself."
This was a bad idea, for he did not trust himself in bed with her, but his back ached and his feet were cold and he so needed some sleep. He scrambled off the end of the bed to save his toes from the table legs, and threw his cloak over his nightshirt, grabbed his boots and followed her light to the door. As an after thought he backtracked to grab his most valuable possession, his dragon, and once out in the hallway he locked the door on the rest of his gear.
Britta shared her room with the other alewench, Helen. It was around the back between the main staircase that led down to the front door, and the back door that led out to the kitchen shed. It was a misshapen room because the first landing of the staircase formed a low ceiling over the bed. That was why the bed was so large, because the low ceiling made the space useless for anything else.
Her bed was much like the winter beds in their village huts. A low frame webbed by taut rope and covered first by rush mats, and then
by a thin mattress stuffed with duck feathers. She set the lamp down on a stool beside the bed, hung her cloak on a peg, and then dived under the stuffed quilt before her bare skin could feel the chill of the air.
He caught his breath at the view of so much of her silky skin. This was a very bad idea. He took a sniff of the air in the room. It hung heavy with the smell of must and the odour of damp masonry. Why did the girl prefer a cold, dank, smelly room in a brick building, to a warm, fresh, clean hut in his village. He just didn't understand.
"How can you live in such a room? If you still lived in Wellenhay you would have your own hut by now." In his village every woman over eighteen was built a new hut. In his village all of the huts belonged to the women, so if a man was not invited to sleep in a hut, then he would sleep in the longhouse. A normal hut was larger than this room, and was easy to keep fresh and clean and dry. When the thatch roof was past its prime, the hut's roof and walls would be pulled down and burned to increase the height of its foundation mound, and it was then rebuilt using the same posts and beams but using fresh thatch and sedge and rush mats. The whole process took but two days.
"I don't want a hut. I don't want this room. I want a rich husband with a big house. Now come to bed. I'm cold."
He stripped down to his night shirt, blew out the candle lamp, and crawled in behind her, but not touching. She wriggled closer to him so that they were spooning. It was her mother Venka's favourite position, and her aunt Sarah's, and just last night he had slept between the two of them. Out of habit he reached around Britta and cupped her breasts to pull her closer. She slapped one of his hands away.
Ooops. He released her breasts and cuddled into her without touching them. Too late. He had a throbbing hard-on. There was only one way he knew off to soften it again. He thought of football, everything football. The plays, the rules, the games. There was nothing like the thought of grown men rooting around in the mud like pigs to take away all lusty urges. Good, she hadn't noticed. She was breathing softly with the most gentle of snores, while he was dreaming of mud and pigs.
