by Ann Swinfen
Then he turned to me and gave an odd smile, half rueful, half eager.
‘Why then we will fight!’
We had not long to wait. March blew itself out on a wet wind and, as the feeble April sun came in, the winter-flooded fields dried out. We drove the cattle and sheep and horses out on to the lay-lands delegated for pasture this year, and the pigs into the copses. As soon as the ground was fit, we ploughed the remaining fields, turning in the rich silt washed down from the inland wolds, which nourishes our land and makes it, so I’ve been told, the richest arable in England. The air was full of the scent of the tilth, heady as a Christmas plum cake. The blackbird and the mavis were building their nests in the hedgerows, while herons high-stepped along the runnels and the lace of meres that stretched across the peat moors, dignified as magistrates strolling to a Lincoln courthouse. Until an unlucky fish or frog caught their eye and they swooped, sudden as a blue hawk.
After Gideon Clarke’s announcement, the matter of Cromwell’s projection was not mentioned again in our house, as if an unspoken truce held between Tom and Father. Still, there was a kind of quivering tension in the air. As for marriages and baptisms, the rector carried on just as before. A quiet, gentle man, he could be stubborn as a pig in defence of what he believed. Unless he could perform the traditional rites of the church, he would not consider a couple married in God’s sight or a child accepted into the holy company of Christians.
The first marriage to take place in the village after the Puritan decree was to be between my friend Alice Morton and Rafe Cox. And, because Alice had whispered it to me, I knew it would not be long before there would be a baptism too. The wedding would be held after the ploughing and the planting of the spring wheat. When the common field was harrowed after sowing, to spread and bury the seed wheat, Alice and I sat side-by-side to weigh down the flint-toothed harrow as we had done since we were six years old. Jealous of our rights as the harrow girls, we had not yielded our place to the youngsters of the village, but this would be our last year, and we knew it. Two great girls sitting, knees up, our skirts gathered about us, barely finding room on the harrow unless we clutched at each other, we giggled at our own folly, but felt a touch of melancholy at the passing of our girlhood. It was as we bumped across the field, drawn by my father’s yoke of plough oxen, that Alice confided to me that she was gone with child, who would be born in the summer. Her plump form, snug and homely as a new-baked loaf, concealed any sign of the baby yet, but I could see in her eyes a faraway look, as though she was watching something I could not see. Marriage would put an end to our closest ties, warmer than sisters.
‘Will you stand for the babe, Mercy,’ she whispered, ‘when he is baptised?’
‘Of course I’ll be his gossip,’ I said, giving her arm a small squeeze. ‘So, it’s to be a boy, is it?’
She grinned. ‘That’s what Rafe hopes. His father is so bent with rheumatism that he wants to see an heir growing up for the farm. I’ll hope to satisfy him. But for myself, I’ll be as happy with a girl.’
‘We work as hard as the men,’ I said. ‘In the fields as well as at home. A girl could be as good an heir for Master Cox.’
She smiled and shook her head. She knew I read pamphlets and entertained some of the dangerous ideas brewing in the air, but she could not read, nor could she agree with me.
‘And will you attend me on my marriage day?’
‘Would you dare to ask anyone else?’
We fell to discussing the wedding, to take place the following week, until the harrow reached the end of its last turn at the adland and we climbed off, stiff and dusty, and a little ashamed of our childish behaviour. Let the young girls take over the task in future. Our lives were changing.
I went early to Alice’s house on the marriage day and helped her into her best bodice and skirt, noticing as I laced her in that they were both tighter than they should be. We had gathered flowers the previous evening and kept them overnight in water in her mother’s stillroom. It was too early for many to be found, but I wove together forget-me-nots, and pale ladysmock, and a few hearts-at-ease to make her a crown, which I pinned in place on her piled-up hair. This one day she would let the full glory of its red-gold curls be seen. I had always envied it, a burst of dawn sunlight compared to my dun brown hair of dusk. Still, when she persuaded me that in my role as attendant maid I should uncover my hair and dress it with the leftover flowers, I felt a curiously guilty pleasure in laying aside my headcloth and cap, and feeling freedom like a soft wind on my head.
Around her shoulders I draped a silk shawl of my mother’s, which had once belonged to her grandmother, born a Dillingworth and therefore gentry. The colour feasted the eye amongst our village greys and browns; it was the very shade sported on the breasts of the peacocks which strutted on the manor lawn. I stroked it delicately with tender fingertips. Usually it was kept hidden in my mother’s coffer, layered with lavender and rosemary, whose scent filled the air around us as I tucked the points into Alice’s too-tight waistband.
‘One day you’ll wear this yourself,’ Alice said, ‘when you marry.’
‘If I marry.’
No young man of the village meant anything to me.
Alice and Rafe were married by custom at the church door, and then we all processed inside for the service of blessing. Alice was lovely as apple blossom, while Rafe looked like a smug fireside cat at having secured the prettiest girl in the village. In the usual fashion at every wedding, some of the mothers wept a little and the men shifted uncomfortably in their Sunday clothes, surreptitiously loosening their shirt strings at the neck and turning their felt hats on their knees while Gideon preached a brief sermon on the joys and responsibilities of marriage. He had not, I was sure, noticed Alice’s increased plumpness.
After the wedding, we gathered in the village tithe barn to celebrate. Empty now except for a few piles of hay and straw, and the sacks of seed beans and peas and barley we would be planting next week, it was our largest covered space, apart from the great hall of the manor house, but the Dillingworths had no part in the wedding of Alice Morton and Rafe Cox.
Every one of our neighbours had contributed what they could. The last of the dried fruits had been baked into pies, the first of the spring-rich cream had been curdled into syllabubs, and sweet frumenty had been flavoured with almonds and orange-flower water. Alice’s father had brought his final and finest ham from last autumn’s slaughtering. Even Joseph Waters had trapped a wild duck, and old Hannah Green, who lived by herself out on the edge of the Fen, had brought a pot of her precious honey.
After the bulk of the feasting, there was dancing. Alice’s brother Robin played the fiddle, while Johnny Samson was the best piper in the whole hundred round about. They struck up with Fair-Haired Maid in honour of Alice as Rafe led her into the space which had been cleared in the centre of the barn for round dances.
No doubt our country gambols would seem like the clumsy clod-hoppings of peasants, with no more grace than cattle, in the eyes of the grand folk Tom had mixed with in Cambridge and London, but I doubt whether their fine marriage feasts could have showered more love and generous hope on the bridal pair than was in the air that evening.
I joined in with the rest, dancing with Tom and some of his friends, until Gideon Clarke approached me. His clerical bands were slightly askew and in the friendly candlelight he looked younger than his near thirty years, closer to Tom and the others. He adjusted my garland, which had slipped down, and held out his hand.
‘Will you dance with me, Mercy?’
‘I will, gladly,’ I said, taking his hand. My heart jumped at its touch, cool and strong in mine. We have no mincing manners here. A grown girl may dance with whom she chooses, even the rector, let the godly Saints frown how they will. We danced to fiddle and pipe till we gasped for breath, and Gideon trod on my toes as readily as the rest.
‘Pax!’ I cried at last. ‘Give me to drink of beer before I melt like butter in the sun!’
&nb
sp; He brought wooden cups of beer for us both – a somewhat strong brew from Mistress Cox’s still room – which we drained thankfully as the figures spun across the barn and out into the moonlit night. Setting our cups aside, we followed them, out under the clear sky where the stars throbbed to the beat of the music flowing from the barn and our feet moved noiseless over the grass of the village green. Gideon’s arm around my waist whirled me away under the trees until the milk-white gleam of the moon above and its shivering reflection in the village pond seemed to join into one shaft of silver light spinning around my head.
Was there something frantic in our merriment? Did we sense, somehow, that this was not a beginning, but an ending? That after this night, when we had roared and teased Alice and Rafe to bed by lantern light, then blown out our frugal candles to make our way home through familiar lumps and shadows in the dark, nothing would be the same when the sun rose in the morrow on our thick heads and heavy limbs?
Chapter Two
No, we had not long to wait. We made a sluggish start, the morning after Alice’s wedding day. Heads were sore and not a little fogged. It was a few days until we planned to sow the barley and after the barley, the beans and peas. No need to rush out into the unfriendly brightness of day. I took my time letting out the chickens and cleaning the hen-hus. My head and stomach lurched at the stench of the dirty straw, so I was glad to escape to the morning milking. Tom had driven the cows in from the common, but then gone out again with Father and the other men to take a leisurely look at the barley field. There was no need for this. It was ploughed and ready, unchanged from yesterday, but it gave them the excuse to seem busy, while airing their boozy heads. For us women, the daily chores went on.
I had milked four of our ten cows, glad to be sitting down, leaning my head against the friendly flank of the fifth cow, Elderberry. My eyes crept shut, the rhythmic movements so schooled into my fingers that I could half-sleep and still continue milking. When Tom burst through the door with a clatter that made Elderberry jump sideways, I opened my eyes with a start to see my hands spurting milk into the straw.
‘Tom! What are you about?’ I was angry at the wasted milk and the frightened cow. It would take me time to persuade her to let down the milk again.
‘Come with me.’ Tom was shaking my shoulder. ‘Leave the milking.’
‘I cannot–’
‘This is important.’
There was something in his voice that made me lift the milk pail on to a shelf and follow him across the yard and out of the gate. He was striding so fast ahead of me that I broke into a half run to keep up with him. We took the path from the farm in the direction of the common fields, not the barley field, as I had expected, but the newly sown wheat field where Alice and I had so recently perched on the harrow. In the week and more since then, there had been two nights of soft rain and several days of surprising April warmth, which had nursed the grain and drawn it into life. In the morning light, with the sun still low in the sky, a faint blush of yellow-green lay over the soil, like the shimmer on a flooded field when a breeze passes over it. A promise of bread for our future.
‘Wheat’s sprouting already,’ I called to Tom’s back.
‘Little gain that will be for us.’ He spat the words over his shoulder.
‘What do you mean?’
He gave no answer.
‘Tom, wait.’ I was wearing my light house shoes of felt and hobbled over the clods and stones of the lane like a cripple.
He stopped abruptly, not in response to my plea, but because we had reached what passes for high ground in a our fenlands, the bank beside Baker’s Lode where it skirted the edge of the wheat field. This bank was built to hold back the winter floods to the beneficial depth and allow the soil washed down from the wolds to settle. When the water reaches a certain level, the excess drains away into the Lode, leaving the watery porridge to feed the field throughout the winter months until it soaks away in the spring. We jumped the small sock-dike, which was dry at this time of year, and climbed the bank. From the top we could look across the wheat field with its greenish wash brushed over the chestnut brown of the soil.
Tom pointed, wordless.
Following the line of his finger, I could see, on the far side of the field, a group of six or eight men. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted into the distance. Even across that wide reach of land, I could tell they were not local men. There was something unfamiliar in the way they moved, stiff and precise, without the loose, easy gait of the Fens. And instead of our broad-brimmed hats of straw or our knitted caps, both of which we women make in the long hours of winter, these men wore dark, high-crowned hats, which looked – as far as I could make out at this distance – as though they were made of felt. There was something strange, alien, in their tall shape.
The men were not standing idle. They were busy about some contraption of poles, and then two began to walk towards us, across the new-planted wheat, while another two set off at a right angle, also stamping their heedless boots amongst the tender shoots, walking parallel to the far edge of the field.
‘They’re walking across the wheat!’ I was so shocked, I cried out what any child could have seen. ‘Trampling it down. We must stop them.’
‘That is the least of what they will trample under foot.’
‘But who are they? What are they doing?’
‘They are the enemy,’ Tom said. ‘And they are surveying our land, to work our destruction.’
‘We must stop them,’ I said again.
He shook his head. ‘They will pay you no heed. We have challenged them already, but all they did was shake a parchment under our noses, got up in a finery of ribbons and seals of red wax. I glimpsed only a word or two written on it, but it is an authorisation from a company of projectors to survey our commons for the “better improvement of the land”. Father and the others have gone off to Sir John for help. He must have a lawyer in his pocket, they think, who will act for us.’
‘So we need not fear?’
‘What aid did the law give our grandfather? The only thing these robbers understand is force.’
‘Why do they look so strange? Their clothes . . .’
The men were approaching nearer now, and I could see that besides their odd tall hats, they wore breeches much baggier than those our men wore, and waistcoats with long skirts, like a woman’s bodice.
‘They’re Hollanders, brought over because of their knowledge of draining land. Half their country, it’s said, is reclaimed from the sea.’
‘But we’re ten miles from the sea. We already own our land, solid land, and farm it. What has the sea to do with us?’
‘What indeed?’
The men approaching us looked up, but never slowed their pace. One, bigger and somehow more affluent looking than the other, even raised his hand to the brim of his strange hat and gave us a smile. I did not care for that smile. There was something condescending about it, as if he were already in possession of our lands and we were his serfs, awaiting his bidding. I tugged at Tom’s sleeve.
‘Let us go home.’
He nodded and we turned away.
All the way back we were silent until we reached the farm.
‘What shall we do?’ I would not have voiced my thoughts, but that careless smile had alarmed me more than any threat, compelling me to speak.
Tom stopped with his hand on the latch of the gate.
‘There is nothing we can do. Yet. They have dug no ditches, erected no fences, built no pump mills. They merely have a parchment in their hands and they are wielding their surveying instruments.’
‘They have damaged our young wheat!’
He shrugged. ‘A few strides along the borders of a field? No law court meeting months from now will care a farthing for that.’
He thumped the gatepost angrily.
‘No, we must wait until there is some solid evidence of what they intend.’
‘Then take them to law?’
He gave a bark of
impatient laughter. ‘Have you no eyes and ears, Mercy? No memory? You know what happened before the War. Now that the fighting has ceased and the King is in custody, a new breed of scavenger rats has arisen to prey on our land.’
‘They won’t have the power of those other projectors,’ I protested, trying to push away the thought of what drainage and enclosure would mean for us. ‘They were noblemen and courtiers, with the law courts at their bidding.’
‘You think that Cromwell and his fellows will play by the law? I think not.’
‘Perhaps Sir John will help.’ I clung to the belief that the Dillingworths, the greatest family in the neighbourhood, would have the power to overcome half a dozen Hollanders.
The milking was done, the cows driven out to pasture, and we had broken our fast by the time Father and the other men returned. They gathered in our kitchen, crowding in, their shoulders jostling our hanging pans, their boots casting gobbets of mud over the flags I had just scrubbed. Not everyone was there. Not the old and feeble. Not Nathaniel Sprocket who would have been away at his eel traps a mile or two along Baker’s Lode before dawn.
Tom folded his arms and confronted Father.
‘What help from Sir John?’
Father smiled broadly. ‘He writes to his London lawyer today. And to Cromwell himself. There will be no enclosing our land, you may be sure. Sir John knows that Cromwell will put a stop to it, as he promised us, years back. His cousin Cromwell.’
Tom flicked a glance aside to me. This cousinage was much talked of, but no one was quite sure how close it was. Not close, Tom said. But of importance to Sir John since Edmund Dillingworth had fought for the King and come home a beaten pup, tail between legs. I wondered how much Sir John dared trade upon this thin cousinage. The safety of his son would outweigh all else.
It seemed some of the men shared Tom’s doubts, for they looked at each other uneasily, but nothing could mar Father’s confidence. His smile warmed the room.
‘Come, Abigail, we’ve had a hungry walk to the manor. What can we give our neighbours? Mercy, fetch the good beer.’
