by Smith, Skye
Meanwhile we would take a rest, reload, and then make another charge on their rear. Again and again, until they were more heavy infantry than heavy cavalry. Meanwhile, one of our riders would have gone to lead the closest regular infantry to them, and then the real battle would begin. The real killing would begin. The infantry called us their flying squad.
Nah, you can keep your muskets. Give me a pistol and a fast horse any day. I don't like getting close to swordsmen. That is how you lose pieces of your body." Daniel looked at the sleepy smile on Rob's face. "Come on, Rob. Bedtime."
"Wait," Henry said, suddenly wide awake. "If I could raise a local militia of horsemen, and paid you to supply them with pistols, would you be willing to train them as a flying squad?"
"When?" Robert asked it because Daniel was not thinking clearly. "I have problems at home to see to, and a family to take care of. Dan has to go home to take over the running of a ship. It all depends on when."
"I don't know when, not yet. This is a new idea to me. It all depends on Scotland. I have your address in Bridgwater. I will keep you posted, ... er, ... or, perhaps you would be willing to answer a call to Parliament. Would you come to London and explain your flying squads to my friends there?"
"Again, it all depends on when." Robert yawned. He looked over at Daniel and realized that he would have to help him up the stairs. He knew why Daniel had drunk so much, of course. He always drank heavily after a mortal danger had passed and he could relax again. In this case the mortal danger had been the chance that this weasel-faced husband would have been told by his wife that he had been cuckolded. The good news was that Margaret had said nothing, yet. Perhaps she didn't want to become a rich widow after all.
* * * * *
* * * * *
THE PISTOLEER - HellBurner by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14
Chapter 6 - The road to Bridgwater, Somerset in November 1638
Henry Marten's carriage was fully sprung and much smaller and lighter than the highway post coaches, and therefore could be drawn by one large horse. The trip from Longworth House to Beckett House was a route well known to the coachmen, and was only ten miles, so they reached the Marten family's other palace shortly after noon. The Pistoleers were invited to stay overnight and get an early start towards Bristol in the morning. They did not refuse.
They barely saw the women for the rest of that day. After being away from house and children, including stepchildren, for over a week, Margaret had immediately become very busy. Mary, as her right hand and confidant, was even busier.
After exploring the palace, and then the grounds, and eating with the men of the household because the women were eating with the children, they decided on an early bed. The room they had been given did not seem like a guest room but more like an office with beds moved into it. They assumed this was because the spare bedrooms would already have been closed up for the winter. In their wanderings they had noticed that the children had all been moved into one large bedroom. A large bedroom with a fireplace.
They were in bed and about to blow out the candle lamp, when they heard a click, and when they looked towards the click, a panel of the wainscot opened and Margaret ducked through. "Sorry to surprise you,” she told them as she stood and brushed her nightgown back down her thighs, "but I cannot be caught doing scandalous things in my own home."
"So,” Robert looked between Margaret and Daniel, "do you want me to go and find a snack in the kitchen?"
"Actually," she replied, "it is you who I want." Her words caused Robert to blush red, and Daniel to stand and throw his cloak over his nakedness so he could leave to find a snack. She giggled and added, "to speak with, I mean." At these words, Robert relaxed, and Daniel hung his cloak back up and moved over to give her a hug.
"No,” she pushed him away. "Not in my own home. Behave." After Daniel had slipped back under the warmth of the blankets, she sat beside him on the bed but still slapped his roving hands away. "Robert, what are your intentions with Mary?"
Robert groaned and searched for words.
"You do realize that if you ask her to go with you, she will?"
"I cannot take her. I don't know what is waiting for me at home. The news that my mother is dying is stale. My family may already be in dire straits if she has died in the meantime."
"Then are you married after all?" she stared at him with a hand in front of her mouth while she waited for his answer.
"I am neither married nor betrothed. Even if I were seeking a wife, I would need to find one with a fat dowry."
"Good. That is very good news,” she whispered. "I so was fearful of losing my Mary. She is my closest companion, my closest friend, my confidant in all things."
"Of course, if she carries my child, I will do the right thing by her,” Robert whispered back. Daniel moaned and threw a pillow at him.
"There is no need. As insurance she arranged to be accidentally caught alone with my husband in the library at Longworth. She fought his advances just enough to tease him into a full lust, but then allowed him to fulfill his lust with her bent over the table." She had whispered this matter-of-factly, but now Robert looked like he was having trouble catching his breath. "What ails you?"
"Where do I start?" Robert caught his breath. "That your husband is so vile that he takes your maid, or that your maid allows it, or that she tells you all about it afterwards. Most of all, I am in shock that you aren't ordering Mary to leave with me."
"He's a Puritan, love,” Daniel apologized for Robert. "Even the loose morals in Rotterdam did not loosen his tight collar, but at least he learned to ignore them. Puritans who can't learn to ignore the easy ways, tend not to linger long in the Netherlands."
"As for my husband,” she explained, "I am his second wife and he is my second husband, and we have daughters from each union. He spends much time in London and therefore he keeps a townhouse there, which is fully equipped with a live-in bedwarmer to clean and cook for him. The arrangement does not displease me because he is a lustful man, and the alternatives are all far worse. My greatest fear is that someday he will take his lust to the city’s poxy doxies.
As for Mary, she is very proper. Before she seduced Henry she asked my permission, and I gave it freely. I cannot begrudge any woman the chance of making a wealthy man believe that he is the father of her child. As for her telling me the details afterwards, well, that did make me envious. Whenever my husband does his duty by me, it is always in my bed with him on top. I envy her being taken on the library table while there were guests in residence. How exciting! How naughty!"
Robert was speechless. Daniel wasn't. He pulled her down onto the pillow and whispered things into her ear that made her smile, and for a while she did not fight his wandering hands. Eventually she slapped them away. "No, not in my home with servants and children to overhear our moans."
"You can pretend that the moans were Mary's," Daniel pleaded.
"Not if she ever needs to claim a baby by Henry. Here, one more kiss for each of you, and then I must go and look in on my girls." Daniel's kiss left her breathless, so she in turn left Robert breathless. Then she stood and clicked the wainscot open, and her last words were, "If the weather is bad in the morning, you are welcome to stay longer. If not, then ask at the stable for a man with a cart to take your trunk to meet the Bristol coach." She blew them a kiss and was gone.
"What a woman,” Robert sighed.
"Aye, a lot of the goddess in that one." Daniel instantly regretted the reference because it caused Rob to bend on his knees and pray for the next half hour.
* * * * *
They left the Bristol coach at Bath in hopes of catching a Taunton coach as far as Bridgwater, which was a far shorter route than going all the way into Bristol and then out again. It was all hope and no coach. There was only one coach a day in the winter and it had already left. Robert grumbled that if it weren't for his bloody trunk they would have been at Bridgwater days ago.
"I bless your trunk, Rob,” was Daniel's reply.
"If not for your trunk, think of the living and loving and interesting company we would have missed along the way. You may even be offered a political seat because of meeting Henry."
"Not likely,” grumbled Robert, but Daniel's words had lightened his mood. His grandfather had been the Mayor of Bridgwater at one time, and his family still had political connections. That is, so long as he could clear the family name of debt. "I wonder if I should have brought Mary after all?"
"Drop it, Rob, she was happy where she was. It was for the best. She likes living with Margaret and Margaret likes her living there. Not a bad fate for a poor woman, not bad at all."
"But I feel so guilty about leaving her. I mean, we did have feelings for each other. And what if she is with my child?"
"Aye, well there is that,” Daniel said while he took a breather from carrying the trunk up the stairs of the Westgate Inn where they had taken a room for the night. "Well, for sure she'll have a child by next year and that will please her a lot more than having a husband. After all, the child will be raised with Margaret's daughters."
"So you think that I have left her in the family way?" Robert looked aghast. "I must go back for her."
"Naw, she ain't yet, but she soon will be. Think about it. Margaret has given her permission not just to bonk Henry, but to have a child by him. I live in a Fens village remember? I know too well that women want children more than they want husbands, so long as there is a good nest to raise them in. Don't you be worrying about Mary Ward. She'll have a good life."
* * * * *
"I can't believe how much better the weather is here in the South West,” Daniel repeated yet again, as again he was seeing crops and plants that just would not grow in the East of the kingdom, never mind the North. "The ealderwomen in my villages, you know, the ones that the priests would burn as witches, our seers say that the winters are getting longer and colder every year. We are planting barley now instead of wheat because the barley still has time enough to ripen."
"It's one of the reasons that Bristol is getting so large now,” Robert replied. "Northerners moving south, I mean. The shorter the growing season, the bigger the cities get. It's the same in the Netherlands. The canals freeze over in the winter now, and each winter more folk with Nordic tongues move south into Friesland."
"What kind of tree is that?" Daniel pointed.
"Some kind of palm tree from the Mediterranean, but that is one of the last to survive. At one time every manor house hereabouts had a few growing, just because they could. One of the benefits of the Bristol trade with the rest of the world is the odd things that are unloaded from the ships."
"Like rats and plague?"
"Well, there is that, but I meant more positive things." The coach they followed was passing through the low and marshy land which lay to the north and east of Bridgwater, but it was not such useful land as that of the Fens. "Around here is where old king Alfred hid from the Danes in the early days of the Danelaw,” Robert told Daniel.
"As you said when we passed Glastonbury."
"Ah, so you were listening. Well, that low ridge over there has an ancient fort on it, and at the end of the ridge is Knowle Hill. My family used to own Crandon Manor and the farm on that hill, and hopefully it will be ours again after I pay off my mother's debts owed in the hamlet of Bawdrip."
Daniel shrugged his shoulders. The history of kings and queens did not fascinate him the way it did his friend. Robert had spent many years reading subjects such as history in Oxford. Daniel could read and write and cipher enough in two languages to run a trade ship, and that was enough. Admittedly it was because he was one of the few in his village who could do these things that he had been elected as the next captain of the Freisburn to replace Cleff, despite other men having more experience at running ships. "How much further?"
"The next place is Eastover. It is not a large village but it is spread out because of the crossroads it straddles. Then over the river bridge and up Fore Street to the coach inn. We are almost there."
"So tell me Rob, why are there so many Dutch speakers on the Taunton coach?"
"They would call themselves Flemish. During one of the Papist purges in the Netherlands, some protestant Flemish weavers moved their families to Taunton and Bridgwater. They even changed the name of the cloth they made to Taunton. Even though there is little chance of them going back, they still hold on to their culture and to their language."
Eastover was not so much a village or a town, as the rambling overflow from Bridgewater. There were fields and brickyards and millworks interspersed with houses and barns and warehouses. The coach was going up the slope of the stone bridge, and Robert called to Daniel, "You stop at the top and have a good look around, while I keep up with the coach and my trunk." He pointed up river to a row of tall trees on the other bank. "Those trees mark my house. If you can't find me at the coach inn, The Swan, then look for me at my home."
Daniel took a good look both up river and down. The town was built on the first high land up river from the Severn estuary. Not that it was high, but high enough not to be mud like the rest of this corner of Somerset. There were small quays upriver, but large ones down stream, which meant that this bridge was as far as large ships could navigate. There was a castle defending the bridge made of a red stone, but its wall was half missing, so the stone from it was likely being re-used elsewhere. Perhaps to build the bridge.
The neat row of shops and houses that ran along the river quays made the river look like a Dutch canal through a Dutch town. In truth the whole area had a feeling of Flanders or Holland to it. Tall narrow brick buildings overlooking a muddy river and low muddy land all around. The bridge, however, was certainly not Dutch. No Dutchman in his right mind would block this shipping channel with such a low and heavy stone bridge. They would have built a draw bridge here instead.
He hurried his horse to catch up to the coach, and was just in time to help guard the coach's baggage from the boys and men who were crowding around looking for porter work, or looking like porters in hopes of an opportunity to pick a pocket or a parcel. Robert's heavy trunk was unloaded last. They used some lashings to secure the trunk to his horse, and then he walked ahead leading the trunk and his friend towards his mother's home. "My mother still lives,” he was praying over and over again.
The Blake house was not large inside despite its two stories, but there were many other outbuildings on their riverbank land, some of which were used for storage, others for animals, and some as cottages. The land stretched from Saint Mary's Street to the river, and from Dampiet Street to a muddy stream. It had at one time been a part of a large farm. Robert's forefathers had carved up the farm and sold off lots as Bridgwater expanded, which probably explained why those same men had served as mayors of the town.
As soon as Robert stepped foot on the land, he was surrounded by his kin. The house did not have a great room, as would a manor house, so there was no one room where all of the kin could sit together to talk or to eat. Instead there was a thatch roof supported on posts just beyond the house towards the river and under it were two long bench tables. This was where large meals were served and where the kin could all meet. Daniel was being ignored so he found himself a stool and carried it to a tree beside the river bank and rested and snoozed until sunset when he was sought out to join in the evening meal.
* * * * *
After two days of trying, Daniel still couldn't keep straight the names of all of Robert's brothers and sisters and their spouses. His mother Sarah seemed to have had one child every two years for decades, though many had died in infancy. His father Humphrey had been a trader on ships to France and Ireland in the early years of their marriage, so they would have had many long separations and many warm reunions, which explained the size of the family. Once the aging Humphrey began staying home, they seemed to have stopped having children.
Robert's old mother was determinedly clinging on to life as if waiting for all her children to gather around her, but now finally, he
r eldest son was home to take charge. Daniel counted out the brothers on his fingers. Humphrey was the factor for the family trade business here in Bridgewater. Bill did the same in Lyme. George he had met before in Schiedam, for he was the master of the family's remaining ship 'The Bridget', a small pinnacle. Sam was the brother who traveled to Ireland to bring back raw wool which the family sold to the weavers of Taunton; the same weavers who shipped their products to Schiedam on the Bridget. Then there were the younger brothers Nick, Ben, and Alex, all of whom were learning the business now that their studies were finished. Alex was but eighteen, but the rest were between mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Robert was the eldest at almost forty.
The two sisters were endlessly busy. Bridget, as in the ship, was the eldest at twenty-two and was already three years married to a man from down country near the town of Chard, but she had come back to Bridgwater to help care for her ailing mother. She was a handsome woman and still had her figure so Daniel assumed that the couple were still childless.
Alice, only seventeen and the youngest of the family, was a young and innocent beauty. She was quite slim and fair of hair and her face and had dimples when she smiled, which was constantly. Though both sisters were comely, they could not have been more different in their work habits. Bridget was always hard at it, keeping house and men clean while she cared for her ailing mother. Alice always seemed lost in a dream, and disappeared regularly during the day, as if hiding from the work her sister would otherwise assign to her.
Even with her eldest son now arrived, the mother was not letting go of life. She was determined to last until Christmas so that her funeral could be well-attended by the extended family. That Sarah must have been a good mother was shown by her family mourning her as if she were already gone, except of course for Alice who was always smiling. Sometimes there were cheerful words, as there would be during any family reunion, and happiness would bubble forth, but any happiness was short-lived because Bridget would send dour glances at such frivolity, and find jobs for those who had dared a sunny look.
