by Smith, Skye
"Rob, you all right?" Daniel called.
"Yep, you?"
"Right as rain. Let's get out of here,” was the reply and they both kicked their horses to a run to catch up to the coach. It was less than two miles to the first rest stop at the village of Tadlow, and the faster they got there, the better.
There was a cider house in Tadlow, or rather a shed roof where a local wife sold cider. It was raw stuff, too raw to cut the dust, but the coachmen had an aleskin with them so they all drank from that instead. "They were amateur footpads,” Robert told the coachmen.
"They had pistols and a blunderbuss," argued one of the drivers. "Mighty costly weapons for local lads up to no good."
"Still they were amateurs. If I had been leading them, I would have stayed in cover and used the pistols to kill one of your horses. With the coach thus stuck, we could take our time and do the job right. We would have stayed hidden while we reloaded and waited for any outriders to catch up. The blunderbuss was a good enough threat to get you two to climb down, and to make sure the passengers behaved. Instead that lot were just standing around with their fingers up their nose."
"They were telling us to get down and make no trouble when you rode up on them,” replied the other coachmen. "Yep, amateurs I reckon. I'll warn the cider wife about them, and we'll report them in Bedford, but there will be no catching them now." He reached out towards Daniel and fingered the shiny new dent in his breast plate. "That would 'ave gone through your heart. Bastards."
The two women from the carriage, the only women passengers today, had come close to thank the two Pistoleers, and now the younger of them tut tutted and poked her finger through a hole in Robert's fine wool cloak and told him, "I can fix that, given a bit of time with your cloak. I can take some threads from the hem and use them to darn it. It's the least I can do."
Both women were dressed as Puritan wives, meaning in drab-colored woolen smocks with matching cloaks and with black bonnets covering their hair and half-veils covering their cheeks and chin. They even wore dark scarves around their necks which bunched up to hide their throat and cleavage. It meant that the only skin to be seen was their hands and around their eyes.
Robert looked at the hole in his cloak in wonder. He hadn't realized that he had been fired on, never mind that the ball had come that close to him. The hole was at bum height. His armour covered from the waist up only, which allowed him to twist and bend in the saddle, but meant that his bum was unprotected. It was a few moments before he realized that the young woman was still beside him holding his cloak and still staring at him with eyes wide. "Er, thank you ma'am."
The women stayed close by and watched as the two Pistoleers reloaded their weapons. The elder of the women (elder meaning perhaps thirty-five, and therefore probably the mother of a few children) asked if she could hold Daniel's, and he gave her a big smile at her choice of words as he passed it to her. Was it his imagination or did she caress the barrel suggestively as she lifted its weight.
Most of the passengers were students or masters from either Oxford or Cambridge, for the colleges were the reason why this coach made a regular run between the two cities. The student who had picked up the blunderbuss back at the ambush now brought it to Daniel. He was quite careless in the way he carried it, so Daniel was quick to take it from him. It had a Cap-lock workings, so it was likely of Spanish origin. He immediately pulled back the lid from the flash pan and blew away the black powder. With that done he tipped it upside down and tapped it on the ground. Eventually a pile of bits of metal scrap tinkled down the barrel, followed by most of the powder.
The pile of metal bits and gunpowder on the ground was surprisingly large. Daniel told the student, "It's a lucky thing you didn't fire it. Like as not it would have gone off in your face. Never trust a gun that you didn't see being loaded."
"That's yours now, I suppose,” a coachman told Daniel. "You stood in front of it to capture it, so by rights it's yours."
Robert came close enough to run his eyes over the workings. They still had a sheen of oil on them, as did the barrel. Someone had taken good care of it for a long time. "It looks like a ship's gun, like the kind you keep handy on your ship, Dan. A boarding gun. A captain's friend."
"Oooh, are you a ship's captain?" the elder woman cooed as she came to stand closer to Daniel. Much too close for a good wife to be standing next to a strange man. "Captain Dan, then. I am Lady ... uh, I am Margar...Marge, and this is my friend Mary." The younger woman did a slight curtsey. "How may we thank you for saving us from those footpads?"
Robert took a closer look at the two women. There was more to them than just housewives. His guess was that they were traveling incognito. Was that just because they were women traveling alone, or because they carried valuables, or because they were running away? His next guess was that the elder was a Lady and that the younger was her personal maid. He would have asked them, but this was too public a place for the answer.
* * * * *
The coach drove along Bedford High street until it came to Bedford Gaol where they could report the footpads and the death of one of them. There were still some good traveling hours left in the day, but the Gaol Keep would not allow them to leave Bedford until Sheriff Boteler had been fetched to take all their statements. That delayed them until sunset.
With daylight gone, the passengers unnerved by the brush with violence, and the two women missing and likely browsing the famous lace shops of Bedford, the coachmen decided to stop over at Bedford's coaching inn, The Swan, and make an early start in the morning. Though the food and ale were good at the Swan, the building was old and had few private rooms. The two women, of course, laid claim to the best and biggest of the private rooms.
The students and masters bedded down in the dormitory with the coachmen, and the Pistoleers would have too, if they had not shared a dinner table with the two women.
"Our room has a servant's curtain to separate the two small beds from the large one,” Marge said with an eager smile. "I would certainly sleep more easily if you two took the smaller beds, while Mary and I shared the big one." She would not take Robert's prudent Puritan protestations seriously, so Daniel accepted the offer for the both of them.
Everyone bedded down early because the coachmen were determined to make up for lost time by leaving before five in the morning. Bedded down did not mean sleep however, for the Swan's alehouse was popular and quite noisy. Robert and Daniel joined the alehouse crowd for an hour to give the women some privacy in the room before sleep. Unfortunately one of the gaolers was drinking there that night, and he forced them to describe the footpads to the entire tap room.
Luckily the door to the room was on their side, the servant's side, of the curtain that split the room in two, so they were as quiet as too much ale allowed them to be while they washed and changed into their nightshirts. In Dutch inns neither would have worn nightshirts to bed, but here in England they were a necessity because the inns did not provide top sheets to shield your skin from the rough wool blankets. Neither used the blankets in any case, much preferring the vermin of their own woolen cloaks to the vermin of the previous men who had used the blankets.
Robert didn't miss his cloak until he was fully ready for bed and moving the blanket from the end of the bed to a stool. "My cloak. Can you see my cloak? I'm sure I hung it up before we went down to the tap room." He checked over by the pile of saddles and leathers and holsters in the corner. There was no sign of it.
"Ahem,” a soft voice came from the curtain. It was Mary and she had his cloak draped over both her arms. "I fixed the hole. Do you want to see?"
Robert motioned for her to come closer to where he was sitting on the end of his bed. She hesitated, for she was in just her night gown, and these men were in just their night shirts. Daniel saw her shyness, and told her, "I'll wait on the other side of the curtain if you don't want to be penned in by two men."
She smiled at him in relief as they swapped sides of the curtains, and then she came towards the can
dle lantern near Robert in order to show off her hand at darning. It was very neatly done and the weave matched so well that you could not tell there had been a hole if you did not look very closely. She sat on Daniel's bed and threw Robert a warm and pleased smile.
Robert decided that this may be a good time to find out more about these two women. Over the meal, they had talked of many things but the women had managed to steer the topics away from anything that may identify them. "So is your Lady Margaret comfortable? Does she pay you well for your skills with the needle?"
"Oh I am a retainer,” she replied softly without thinking, "so I earn my keep for caring for her, what ever skills that takes. Oh, I shouldn't have said that."
"Don't be frightened, Mary. We wish you no harm, but if your Lady is running away from her husband you should warn us now, for we guard the coach and we would hate to confuse her husband with a brigand."
"Oh no! It's nothing like that. We are on our way home. It's just that she did not want her family name known, you know, for our own safety." Mary gave him another warm smile, and began to stand to leave, but then they both heard the same noises coming from the other side of the curtain. Whispering, and low moans, and gasps. Mary took a long step and a quick peek through the curtains and then returned to the bed. Her face was glowing red. "I fear I will be sleeping in Captain Daniel's bed tonight. Is that all right?"
"Are they..."
"Very..."
"But she is a..."
"A Lady, yes, but still a woman,” Mary explained between quick short breaths. "She's never done this before, I promise you."
"Dan is very attractive and so is Marge. I suppose we should try to get some sleep. Did you want me to..."
"Oh no, sir. No offence sir, but like, see, she has a husband and two daughters who she will see in a few days, and her husband will cover her many times in the next week. It's fine for her, but you see, I am not married. If I were put in the family way it would be the ruin of me."
"I was going to say,” Robert felt a hot flush on his cheeks, "did you want me to snuff the candle?"
"Oh. Oh no," she whispered and went even more scarlet, if that were possible, and shyly looked down at her stocking feet.
"I am a gentle man, Mary. I will keep to my bed and leave you alone in yours. You can trust me."
"Oh I do trust you. Umm, perhaps we could .... would you like to ..." Robert had turned away from her to give her some privacy. "Best not,” she moaned and blew the candle out, then twisted her body to raise her legs up onto the bed. They both lay there in the dark, almost dark because some light came through the curtain, and listened to the hushed sounds of animal lust coming from the big bed.
He thought that he would never fall asleep, not with the sounds of unbridled adultery so close by. He must have slept, however, because the next thing he knew was being awakened by a knock on the door, and when he answered it, he was handed a large morning tray by one of the kitchen girls.
Mary lit the candle for him so he would not fall with the heavy tray. It was still hours to sunrise. She went to wake her Lady while Robert poured himself a pot of very hot and very thin barley gruel and dipped yesterday's stale bread into it to soften it enough to chew. When Mary returned she was blushing redder than ever.
"They need a few more minutes before I may take them the tray,” she mumbled, almost inaudible over the moans that had begun on the other side of the curtain.
* * * * *
The coach made it all the way to Oxford that day, but Robert almost did not. Not because of any more trouble with footpads, but because the coachmen drove the pace hard to make up for the short day to Bedford. It was one thing to be thrown about in a sprung coach for twelve hours, but quite another to sit a trotting horse for that long.
Since they stopped four times for long breaks, it was well after dark before they reached the King's Arms coach house in the center of Oxford. It was only after they had unsaddled their horses that Daniel happened to mention that they would again be sharing a room with the women.
"But do they not live in Oxford?" Robert queried.
"Nah, they live in Shrivenham, so they'll be on the Bristol coach tomorrow with us."
"Then you know who they really are?"
"Well, of course. We shared a lot of intimacies last night, didn't we,” Daniel looked at him as if he were queer. "Oh no. You didn't refuse Mary, did you? She was aching for you. Her very own hero whose cloak she mended after a footpad's pistol ball went through it. That's why I left you two alone. I did not expect to be asked to share Margaret's bed when I sat down on it, but Margaret decided to keep me busy so that you and Mary wouldn't be rushed."
Robert couldn't believe his ears, and could feel his cheeks burning. "So, who are they? I mean, I know that she is Lady Margaret and that Mary is her maid, but Lady Margaret who?"
"She isn't an actual Lady, as in Lord and Lady, and her husband would likely refuse the honor if it were offered. He's a staunch republican. She is Margaret Marten, wife of Henry Marten of Beckett House of Shrivenham. One of the finest houses in Berkshire and it was a wedding gift, no less. Wouldn't it be nice to have rich relatives, eh? Anyway, she fears for her safety because her husband has a careless mouth when it comes to the King and the aristocracy. That is why she travels looking like a Puritan farm wife, and why we must continue to call her Marge."
"She is married? Then, Daniel, you have committed adultery. A deadly sin."
"He is her second husband and she his second wife, and he keeps a mistress in London, so she was not the first in her marriage to tryst. Besides, it is just a woman's natural way of rewarding men who protect her. We did save the coach, remember, at some risk to our own lives. She would have lost a fortune in jewels to those footpads, and perhaps her virtue."
"It is adul..."
"Well, it isn't adultery for you and Mary. Neither of you are married. What are you waiting for? For her to jump on your bone? She is too shy for that."
"Daniel, stop it!"
"Bloody Puritans. What is so wrong with two people making each other feel good?"
"Never mind, heathen. Remember our oath never to argue religion," Robert had to stop this arguement before it got heated, otherwise it might hurt their friendship. "Watch my things while I go and claim my trunk, and don't let my saddle out of your sight."
By the time the luggage of all four of them was safely stored in the room in the King's Arms, they were all more tired than hungry. The room was a giant leap in quality from last night in the Swan. This was a much newer building, and was well taken care of. There was however, no servant's curtain, and only two beds, though both were large enough for two people if they cuddled close.
Mary sat on one of the beds and peered across the room at Robert and then blushed her heart out. She knew the very moment that it dawned on him what the two beds meant, for then he blushed too. That night there were animal moans and muted sounds of lust from both beds, but only one of the beds treated the folk in the room below them to the rhythmical creaking sound of a woman being well ridden.
* * * * *
* * * * *
THE PISTOLEER - HellBurner by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14
Chapter 5 - News from Scotland in Oxford in November 1638
After a good breakfast, served late in the morning, Daniel and Margaret went out together to find out about any Bristol-bound coaches. Not a hard task as Bristol was the second largest and second richest city in the kingdom. This left the other two meekly staring at each other over the remains of the food.
"They were very loud last night,” Mary said softly to the man who had so intimately cuddled her all night. "It was as if they wanted to be heard, and wanted everyone to know what they were doing." Robert came to her side and wrapped his arms around her and kissed her neck.
"Some folks like an audience. Look how many give up everything to become players on the stage,” he whispered into her ear. "Well, I suppose we should begin packing. They will be back soon." He stepped away
from her and sat down. "Though I am still exhausted from yesterday's long ride."
She looked down at the lap of his long night shirt which was standing up like a tent. This man was infuriating. What does it take to get him to use that thing? All night she had rubbed herself against it and had positioned herself to accept it, and all night he had not. She took a deep breath and hiked her night dress and walked forward until she was straddling his lap, and then she guided him in and sat down on it. "Robert Blake, you are infuriatingly proper."
He squirmed to try and stop her from doing this, but there was no escape, and when she pushed her breasts against his face he stopped squirming and allowed himself to enjoy the sensations. "But what of your fears of pregnancy?"
"Shhh"
"But"
"The Master is a horny goat. He has been after me for years. I can always succumb rather than put him off." And with that she began to ride him. And that is what her Lady saw as she came through the door with Daniel.
"No, don't stop,” she said softly. "We will come back in what, an hour? There is no hurry now." She backed quickly out the door in a way that blocked Daniel's view.
There was no hurry because while finding a Bristol coach, they had overheard the news from London, or rather, the news from Scotland. The Scottish Presbyterian parliamentarians, the so-called Covenanters, had rejected King Charles's meddling in the Church of Scotland. They went back out into the street to find out more news.
Daniel followed Margaret's lead, for she was very familiar with the layout of Oxford. They headed for St. Giles triangle, and the squares around it where she hoped there would be intelligent and educated people discussing this latest news. She was not disappointed, for all around there were clumps of folk, masters and students speaking in excited voices.
"I don't understand why all the excitement,” Daniel said as he pulled her back close to him. "So Scotland doesn't want the King reorganizing their church to make it more like the Church of England. So what? So what if they don't use the same prayer book, or have a few more bishops to run things?"
