by Ann Swinfen
‘And three of the sails were past mending,’ Joshua said, ‘though they cannot hold us at fault for that, it was the winter storms. There was a corn mill, about five miles north of here, that was left unattended, and the sails there were destroyed, or so I’ve heard. A man must care for his property.’
‘The sails of the mill the drainers built here were badly damaged as well,’ Rafe said, ‘but we did not smash the pump. They will try to make you pay for that.’
‘Let them try,’ Joshua said. ‘They shall need take us to court first, for we have no coin. The flood has cost us dear.’
‘And the damage the flood did we owe to the drainers,’ Jack said. ‘It is the drainers who should be paying us. Well, let them come. We have a few surprises prepared for them.’
Soon after this, the men went off to the yel-hus, Gideon and Rafe with them. I said that I would stay with Alice for a time. We walked slowly back toward the Coxes’ house, Alice taking her time and Huw hopping about us, in and out of the puddles on the village street.
‘Huw, come away! Grandmother Cox does not want all that mud on her clean floors!’ Alice gave me a despairing look and I smiled sympathetically.
‘Things are difficult?’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘She is fond of Huw when he is quiet and biddable, which is not very often, I fear. They are both pleased to have an heir, Master Cox is particularly glad I gave them a boy, but it is difficult stop Huw breaking things and causing havoc, now he can go everywhere.’
‘They had a son themselves. Do they not remember when Rafe was a child?’
‘To hear Mistress Cox speak, he was no ordinary child. He was a little angel, come down to earth.’
‘And what does Rafe say?’
‘He does not recognise himself.’ She grinned. ‘He does not contradict his mother to her face, but he has recounted one or two little stories to me . . .Though I think myself that he was kept on a tight rein, poor little lad. Do you not remember how he must always keep his clothes clean, when the rest of us were roaming through the fields? It is hard for him to be obliged to go on living in the same house, and to submit to his parents’ orders as if he were still a boy. Our freedom while we lived at Jack’s house has opened his eyes.’
‘Well, you shall soon have your own house. I will send over the fleeces tomorrow, so set up your spinning wheel and get to work. If Rafe sells one or two fleeces in the raw, he can buy the timbers for the foundations, then when you have spun the rest, he will get a good price. Kitty and I are hard at work already, spinning, weaving and knitting. In another month or two I shall hope to sell at market again.’
We had reached the Coxes’ door, and although Alice invited me in I realised it would be difficult for us to gossip freely, with Mistress Cox in attendance. Normally at this time of year we would have sat out in the orchard, but it was far too cold for that.
‘How fares your mother?’ Alice asked, as she tried to scrape some of the mud from Huw’s shoes with a stick. Most of the village children went barefoot, but Rafe had stitched a pair of small shoes for Huw, once he could walk.
‘Not well, I fear.’ I looked at her bleakly. Alice might need to endure living with Rafe’s parents, but both of her own parents were strong and healthy and she had a brother too. With my father dead, my brother gone, and my mother lost somewhere in the darkness of her mind, I had some cause to feel bereft. I gave thanks daily for Gideon, but he too had lost his parents.
‘Do you think she will ever come to her wits again?’ Alice asked gently.
I shook my head. ‘Do you remember Jack’s grandmother? She was the same. She just slipped away, until she could barely speak. My mother is losing her words too, and she grows so angry. Sometimes I think she hates me. And now she is refusing to eat. She told Kitty that we were trying to poison her.’
I turned away, so that Alice should not see my tears. She put her arm around my shoulders.
‘You have so much to burden you, Mercy. Gideon is a truly good man, but he is no farmer. Nehemiah is growing old and Kitty is scarcely more than a child.’
I shook my head. ‘Gideon is learning every day. He even demanded that I should teach him to make cheese!’
We both laughed.
‘As for Nehemiah, he works as hard as a man twenty years younger. And without his eels and fish and an occasional duck, I think we should have starved by now. Kitty does the work of a grown woman. I have asked Gideon to teach her to read, but the days are so full of work, there has been little time for it.’
‘Why should she learn to read? What use will it be to her?’
‘You and I will always disagree about this!’
‘Never mind,’ Alice said. ‘I will ask my mother to come and see Abigail. I think she is some comfort to her.’
‘Indeed she is. My mother is much calmer when your mother is with her. Perhaps she may even persuade her to eat.’
Alice kept her word, and the next day Mistress Morton arrived, bearing a basket of her own baking. My mother never left her room now. When I tried to lead her downstairs, she backed away, frightened, and retreated to her room. It was better, I suppose, than when she had gone wandering in the night.
‘Now, Mercy,’ Mistress Morton said, when I offered her a chair and one of Kitty’s gingerbreads, ‘I am here to look after Abigail, I am not a guest. Away with you to your work and forget about me. Abigail is not come down this morning?’
I shook my head. ‘She seems afraid to leave her chamber. And she is refusing to eat.’
‘Poor soul. She is so confused, I do not suppose she even knows where she is any more. And not eating? Well, we shall see. I have brought her some of my raspberry cakes, made with some of our few raspberries. They were always her favourites when she was a girl.’
With that she bustled away upstairs, and soon I could hear the murmur of her voice, although I did not hear my mother answering. However, my attention was soon drawn by voices out in the yard.
‘Mercy!’ It was Jack calling.
I went out to him.
‘What’s to do?’ I said.
‘Van Slyke has come, with a dozen of his men. I wanted to warn you to be prepared, in case he storms over here again.’
Gideon came out of the barn, carrying two full buckets of milk.
‘There is little we can do,’ he said.
‘Well.’ Jack grinned. ‘We shall see whether they enjoy the little surprises we have prepared for them. I thought I would call and tell you before Gideon comes to the village to help with the digging of the foundations for Rafe’s house.’
‘He has laid it out, then?’
‘He has been busy with pegs and string and scribbles on paper since dawn.’
‘I will just put these in the dairy,’ Gideon said, ‘then I will come with you. Nehemiah went off fishing at dawn, but he will be back soon.’
‘I have loaded the fleeces on to the handcart,’ I said. ‘You can take them with you. Then Alice can make a start on her spinning.’
When Gideon and Nehemiah came home that evening, Jack came with them, and they trundled the hand cart into the barn. They were all tired, and grubby from digging in the damp soil, but seemed pleased with the day’s work.
‘There is no time to rest yet,’ Jack said. ‘The drainers have just gone back to their camp at Crowthorne, so we must not waste this opportunity. They will be making camp here, as they did last year. This may be our last chance to work unhindered. The others are already away to the ditches, but we wanted to bring the cart back first.’
‘What are you planning to do?’ I asked.
‘Undermine the mill,’ Jack said. ‘We need any spades and mattocks you have.’
‘I’ll fetch ’un,’ Nehemiah said, and headed for the barn.
‘I am going to make sure there is no violence, if the drainers return.’ Gideon looked at me seriously. Did he think I would condemn him for joining in the sabotage?
‘I am sure you have as good a pair of arms as any of them,’ I said
cheerfully. ‘And I am coming with you.’
Gideon opened his mouth – to protest at this, I was certain – but then he had the good sense to close it again.
‘I will just see whether Mistress Morton needs anything. She is still sitting with my mother.’
I ran up the stairs and looked into my mother’s room. Mistress Morton put her finger to her lips.
‘She is sleeping, but I’ll bide with her. If you do not mind, Mercy, I will stay the night. She has been very weak but restless all day.’
‘Of course I do not mind. Did she eat your raspberry cakes?’
She shook her head sadly. ‘She did but take a single bite of one. She said she could not eat, her stomach was full.’
‘Yet she has hardly eaten for days,’ I said, pressing my hands to my chest, for I could feel a dull ache there. The bedclothes scarcely showed the gaunt shape of my mother lying beneath them.
‘Aye. I can see that. You must be prepared, Mercy. I do not think she has long. But I may be wrong. It may be no more than a passing fancy, that she will not eat.’
I left them there, my mother sleeping, Mistress Morton quietly knitting as she sat in a chair by the bed, and I flew into the room I now shared with Gideon, which had once been Tom’s. I dropped my skirt and petticoat on the floor and found a pair of Tom’s old breeches in his coffer. I had worn them before and knew that with a tight belt, and folded over at the waist, they would serve well enough. I ran down the stairs again.
‘Shall I come, Mistress Mercy?’
Kitty stood at the door, her face alive with excitement. I ought to tell her to stay, in case Mistress Morton needed anything, but I could not disappoint her.
‘Bring a candle lantern and a strike-a-light,’ I said. ‘It is so dull these days it will be dark coming back. You can keep watch for us.’
I did not expect the drainers would return tonight, they were probably gorging on stolen Crowthorne mutton, but it would do no harm to be sure.
The men had already started along the lane, perhaps thinking I was not coming, but I picked up a spade, and Kitty and I hurried after them.
All through that evening’s work, I kept thinking of Tom and how we had defied the drainers together last year. He had been a leader of the young men then, one of the fastest runners, a fine horseman. Where was he now? Would he ever come back to us? The loss of his leg had hurt him very deeply, I knew. It was more than a mere physical injury. It had destroyed his whole life and his place here amongst us. I brushed away angry tears, which no one was likely to see in the gathering dark, as I thought how these unknown speculators had been the cause of everything that had happened to Tom, and to all of us later in the flood.
On inspecting the previous work Jack and the others had done in cutting away under the banks of the ditch across the medland, we found that the banks had indeed collapsed when the men walked on them, just as Jack had planned. Tonight one group set to work to damage more of the banks – Will and Abel, along with Joseph Waters and his two nephews, and a few more. The rest of us crossed to the far end of the medland, where Hannah’s cottage had once stood. It was here that van Slyke had built his mill to pump water out of the Fen, and feed it along their ditch to Baker’s Lode. The pumping mill stood on the very edge of the field, where it dropped a few feet into the beginning of the Fen.
All the wet weather we had endured over the past weeks had done little good to the crops, since there had been no intervals of sun, but the reeds were flourishing. The whispering of the reeds is the song of the Fens, and it sings to us fenlanders from birth to death. It is so much a part of our lives that I suppose we almost forget that we are hearing it, and only notice it when it stops, which is hardly ever. Only when a truly hard frost turns even the reeds into upright pillars of ice, and one of those bitter still nights of a frozen winter kills any breath of the wind, does the music of the reeds cease.
I missed it too when I was carried off for trial in Lincoln. The town was full of noises: harsh noises of people shouting and dogs barking and iron-clad wheels clattering over cobbles. But no song of the reeds.
‘Now,’ Jack said, when we had gathered beside the mill. ‘What we want to do is leave the mill looking exactly as it did earlier today when van Slyke inspected it, so we will do no obvious damage to the mill itself. We need to go out on to the moss and dig away into the bank, underneath the mill. We will fill the holes with loose rushes, just to keep the earth in place for the moment. What I hope will happen is that, as soon as men begin climbing about in there, the extra weight will cause the earth to collapse. It may not work, but it is worth a try.’
‘How do we know it is safe to walk on the moss just there? With all the rain, it may be treacherous.’ It was the carpenter, Ned Broadley.
‘We’ll test it carefully first, not all rush on to it together. The causeway into the marsh starts here, and it will give us access to the left side of the mill. If we can’t go further, we must just undermine the one side.’
‘The earth we dig out,’ Gideon said. ‘Won’t they see that? It will be quite clear in daylight.’
‘Aye,’ someone said.
‘Well thought of,’ Jack said. ‘We must just make sure we heave it well away into the marsh. No being idle and dropping it at our feet.’
‘I will test how firm the ground is, under the bank,’ I said. ‘I am the lightest.’
‘I am the lightest.’ It was unusual for Kitty to speak out in such a large company, but she was wild with the excitement of it all.
‘You are supposed to be keeping watch,’ I said severely. ‘Besides, I know this part of the Fen better than most of you. I used to go out along the causeway with Hannah.’
Before anyone could stop me, I had pulled off my shoes and stockings and stepped down on to the beginning of the causeway. Mud oozed up between my toes, but the causeway held. The last time I had stood here it was with George Lowe, when I fetched him out of the Fen. But I must not think of George, drowned in the flood. I began to take my first precarious steps off the edge of the causeway onto the surface of the moss.
‘It is quaking,’ I called up to those leaning over the bank above me, ‘but it is holding. I think those of us who are lightest should work at this end, the heavier ones keep to the causeway.’
Soon we were at work, a row of us like a colony of badgers, digging tunnels under the mill and throwing the waste soil as far as we could heave it into the wetter parts of the Fen, in the hope that it would be drawn down and out of sight before the drainers returned.
Gradually I became aware of whispered voices above us, and turned to Ned, who was next to me.
‘Who is that, up there?’
He was taller than I and could just see over the top of the bank. He clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘It is Rob and some of the other children. They must have followed us. I’ll send them off.’
He was about to climb the bank, but I laid a hand on his arm.
‘They could be useful. We still need reeds to stuff into our tunnels. Tell them to go and gather armfuls of reeds. We should not cut them here, it will just draw the drainers’ attention. Tell them to go over to the mere, where Nehemiah’s cottage used to stand, and gather them there. And to take care not to fall in!’
I knew it was unlikely they would, and most of them could swim like fish, but it was getting very dark.
Soon, from the rustling and the giggling, we knew that the children were back. Jack declared that he thought we had done enough.
‘We do not want it to collapse too soon,’ he said. ‘We want them to think it is their fault. Now, you young ’uns, pass us down those reeds and let us finish the work. Not a single reed to be left lying about, do you hear?’
We shoved bundles of reeds into the damp burrows we had dug into the bank, until each one was stoppered like a bottle and we were all of us covered from top to toe in mud. As we clambered up on to the bank, I realised I could hardly feel my feet, they were so numb with the cold. I began to grope about on th
e ground where I thought I had left my shoes, and stubbed my toe painfully on something in the dark.
I let out an involuntary yelp, which brought Kitty over to me, carrying the candle lantern.
‘What’s amiss?’ she said. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’
‘Stubbed my toe.’ It was quite painful. ‘Here are my shoes.’
I picked them up. What had I stumbled over?
‘Give me the lantern a moment, Kitty.’
I swung it around, trying to find the cause of the pain. A large stone? A tool left behind by the drainers? I crouched down, the better to see.
‘It is a tree,’ I said. ‘At least, there is a hummock here, which must cover an old stump. That is what I banged into. And there is a new young tree growing up from it.’
I sat back on my heels. Hannah’s cottage had stood just there. And here?
‘It is Hannah’s cider apple tree.’ My voice was shaking. ‘Her tree. It is growing again.’
I think every one of us would have liked to see what happened when the drainers came back, but we could not all stand about staring at them. It was agreed that Jack, as instigator of the plan, along with one of the Waters boys, would make a pretence of tending some of the sheep in the medland, where they could observe what happened when the drainers entered the mill. In the meantime, every man in the village was helping with the building of Rafe’s house, digging the ditches for the foundations and filling them with stones, packed down hard, on which the base timbers could be laid. These must be stout beams of well weathered oak, for they would need to support all the weight of the house. Ned would then drill and chisel out the sockets for the mortise and tenon joints, where the upright timbers would be fitted.
Rafe himself had set off before dawn to sell two of the fleeces and buy these first vital beams. There was a woodsman halfway to Lincoln who might be willing to take the fleeces in exchange instead of coin, which would save Rafe the journey all the way to Lincoln and back. Since the war had brought so much uncertainty, including suspicion about the quality of the coins circulating through the country, many people preferred goods in their hands instead of metal coinage of sometimes dubious value.
