Battle’s Flood

by J. D. Davies

  ‘God willing, Beth, this will put you to rights.’

  Beth Chever, all of thirty months old, stopped coughing for a moment, but only long enough for her to muster a piercing and prolonged scream. Her mother, Anne, a seamstress of Westleton, held her close and stroked her head, but nothing availed. Meg brought the bowl over and held it to her lips. The child screamed again, but finally took a sip of the potion. She grimaced, but did not spit it out. Her mother kissed her and fussed her, so she drank a little more.

  Meg smiled encouragingly, and patted the little girl’s hand. This is what a child feels like, she thought. A living child. And that is Anne Chever’s love for her child. Could I yet feel like that? Did I ever feel like that, in those short days?

  ‘The cough seems a little easier already, mistress,’ said Anne Chever.

  ‘If it is no more than a cough from the chest, this should make her well,’ said Meg. ‘But if it is other…’

  Anne Chever nodded, trying to hold back tears as she did so. Neither of them needed to give voice to the countless, deadly manifestations of what the ‘other’ might be.

  ‘I will make up two jugs for you,’ said Meg. ‘That should suffice for three days, if you heat them as I said. If there is no improvement, bring her back to me. But if she is well, pray send the jugs back by some willing lad.’

  Whether Goodwife Chever would do so was another matter. Perhaps young Beth would recover, but if she did not, it was equally likely that her mother would try one of the other reputed healers in that part of the Sandlings, or even further afield. And if Beth Chever was indeed afflicted by something other than a mere childhood cough in the chest, there was every chance that in three days’ time, the little girl would be wrapped in a winding sheet, waiting to be placed in the ground.

  In any event, Meg had no great expectation of ever getting her jugs back.

  * * *

  Meg stepped out of her tiny cottage in a hollow upon Dunwich Heath and closed the door behind her. She turned for a moment to take in the view to the south, across Minsmere toward Aldringham and Thorpeness. The right half of her view was flat, nearly featureless land, and the left half was sea. High grey clouds scudded across the sky, and a moderate breeze blew from the south-west. In the far distance and away to the south-east, half a dozen ships had full sail set, their courses laid for harbours far across the German Ocean. Perhaps that same wind was bringing her father and brother home safe to England from their latest voyage. Perhaps, Deo gratias, they were already in harbour, carousing in an alehouse and raising their tankards towards her. It was a pleasant thought, and one to hold to, rather than the thoughts of what other fates might have befallen them.

  Meg turned, and as she did so, she noticed a hole in the thatch that had somehow escaped her attention until now. It looked small enough for her to be able to repair it herself. Her spinster aunt Agatha, from whom she had inherited both the cottage and the skill in healing, had never needed to call on a man for any repair to the building, and Meg was determined to maintain the tradition. Stannards were stubborn in that regard, as in so many others, and despite the surname she now bore, Meg was still a Stannard at heart.

  She made her way north by the familiar path across the heath. Now, in summer, it was a glorious carpet of purple heather and yellow gorse. Thomas Ryman, an old man who had meant much to her in her childhood, had once told her that the heath resembled the cloak of a great Roman Caesar. She did not then know what a Roman Caesar was, but later, Luis had told her, and now, every time she crossed the heath, she imagined Claudius or Constantine looking out imperiously from the ramparts of the fort and city the Romans were meant to have founded at Dunwich.

  She entered the town by what people still called the south gate, although it was now no more than a gap in the low, overgrown grassy bank that had once been the Palesdyke, the defence that had surrounded the town for centuries. But there was now no town immediately inside the ancient rampart, only lumps in the grass where houses had stood. There had been a parish here, but as the sea ate away more and more of Dunwich, the entire south end of what had once been termed a city was abandoned. The track on which she walked was still laughably named High Street, but the only visible buildings were still well ahead of her. There, behind the windmill, lay the ruins of the Blackfriars, long since stripped of anything of worth, and a little further inland, the ivy-covered remains of St Mary’s Temple, the old Hospitaller establishment. Then came the houses of Duck Street, now the southernmost street in Dunwich; their original location within the bounds was betrayed by the name of the decayed structure at the west end, the former Middlegate.

  Meg was just considering whether to turn off and make her way to All Saints, a little way beyond Duck Street and King Street, which ran behind it, to light a candle to her mother’s memory, when a young voice hailed her.

  ‘A good day to you, Goody de Andrade!’

  He was a short, grinning, freckled lad of twelve or thirteen, by name Francis Birkes, son of a cobbler over in Scotts Lane. He was not much older than Meg’s son would have been had he lived, and he always reminded Meg of an eager puppy.

  ‘And greetings to you, Goodman Birkes. What brings you out here?’

  ‘Rabbits, mistress. More warrens than you can count in all the old foundations. And what business are you upon today, mistress?’

  Meg would have chided any other boy in Dunwich for their impertinence, but she had cured young Francis of a virulent fever the previous year, and had a soft spot for the lad, especially as he insisted on addressing her by the gentlefolk’s title of ‘mistress’. She reckoned that he was more than a little in love with her.

  ‘To the harbour, Francis. The Stannard account books for the last quarter need making up.’

  Not a few in Dunwich thought it strange beyond all measure that a woman should interest herself in such things, let alone actually do such work, but Francis Birkes was not yet of an age to form prejudices and preconceptions. He merely nodded, as though what Meg de Andrade had said was the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘And are the Masters Stannard returned from their voyage, mistress?’

  ‘No news as yet, alas.’

  ‘I shall pray for them, mistress.’

  Meg doubted it. Francis Birkes was probably the least godly youth in Dunwich, although there were many other contenders for that dubious distinction. On the other hand, he wanted more than anything else not to have to follow his father into the cobbler’s trade, but to be taken on by the Stannards and sail the seven seas with them.

  She made to move off towards the town, but Francis seemed to forget all thought of rabbits and trailed along beside her.

  ‘There’s a coal ship from Newcastle just docked at the Dain quay, mistress, and I heard some of her crew a-mardlin’ to the lads ashore. They say the Queen of Scots has been locked away in a castle on a lake. They say everyone in Scotland calls her a whore and a murderess, for conspiring in her husband’s murder and then allowing the man who killed him to bed and marry her.’

  ‘Lord Bothwell,’ said Meg, who, like every woman in England, was secretly fascinated by the extraordinary doings of Mary Stuart. ‘I’m not sure if it was a case of her allowing him, Francis.’

  ‘Well, that’s what they say, mistress. But do it mean she couldn’t become queen here, if Elizabeth was to die? Men in the alehouses – some say she’s the next heir, others say not because she’s a papist.’

  Meg knew perfectly well that no one was within earshot, but she still stopped and glanced around urgently, then placed her hands on Francis’s shoulders.

  ‘You must never talk of our sovereign lady but with respect, Francis Birkes, and you must never, ever talk of her death. Never. Do you understand me? Do you promise me?’

  The lad nodded gravely. Meg patted him on the head, but felt an utter fraud as she did so. For one thing, she recalled her father and grandfather upbraiding her younger self on many occasions for equally incautious talk about the monarch of the day. For
another, she had her own, very private feelings about the precise status of Mary of Scotland in relation to her cousin Elizabeth.

  ‘Go along now, lad,’ she said, as kindly as she could. ‘Go and snare a rabbit or two, and don’t pay any heed to the drunks in the alehouses.’

  The boy complied, and Meg made her way into the body of the town. She exchanged greetings with acquaintances and distant kin, stopped to speak at length to old Mother Watson, widow of one of the sometime bailiffs, and then made her way across the open area of clifftop that was now all that remained of the market square of Dunwich. She could remember when it had four sides, and when the town’s greatest church, St John’s, stood on the easternmost of them. But it had fallen into the sea during a Christmas Day service in the old King Henry’s time, a disaster that she had barely escaped with her life, and now not a trace of it remained.

  She wondered how long her present church, St Peter’s, a few yards to the west, would survive the onslaught of the sea. Not that she cared for the building itself, nor for the worship conducted within; it had always been smaller and more nondescript than St John’s, but now, like almost every church in the land, it was bereft of its statues and images of the saints, of its rood screen and its colourful wall paintings. Instead, its interior was whitewashed and bleak, a plain so-called communion table standing in the middle as a pale replacement for the altar that had stood at the east end. There was no music, no joy at all to the worship – nothing but interminable and gloomy sermons in English, the glorious mysteries of Latin now no more than increasingly distant memories. But her Luis lay in the graveyard of St Peter’s, and the thought of his bones being swept away by a great wave formed her most persistent nightmare.

  She passed through the other end of Palesdyke at the Guilding Gate, skirted Cock and Hen hills and the ruins of St Francis’s chapel, and finally arrived at the harbour. Apart from the coal ship Birkes had mentioned, no other vessel lay at any of the quays. The port was so much quieter than it had been in her childhood, and she remembered her grandfather telling her how much busier still it had been twenty or thirty years before that. But men were working at the largest of the Stannard warehouses, loading carts full of German goods for the markets of High Suffolk, and they all acknowledged her with waves and smiles.

  One of them, Hugh Ebbes, smiled particularly broadly and called out a cheery greeting. Ebbes made no secret of his ambition for her hand. Meg was flattered, for he was a handsome man with a strong body. But he was penniless, and while, one day, she might perhaps bed him for her own gratification, marriage was out of the question. A pity: at least Ebbes was interested in her and not daunted by her singularity. Several of her suitors in the nine years since Luis’s death had been put off by her reputation for plain speaking, some by the rumours that inevitably attached themselves to women who healed, others by her extraordinary liking for numbers and ledgers, and yet others by the discomfiting fact that she could actually read and write.

  The only other man who was seemingly undeterred by all this, and had made a serious offer for her hand, was a jobbing painter of Norwich, one Philip Grimes by name, who had fallen in love with her after encountering her by chance one day at the market in Saxmundham. Grimes was a handsome and good man who was loyal to the old faith, the principal quality Meg looked for in a potential husband. Had they met in another time, she would certainly have accepted him; but with the churches whitewashed, no more demand for the painting of rood screens or statues of the saints and the Virgin, and the Suffolk gentry determined to have their portraits painted by fashionable Flemings in London, he could only live from hand to mouth, and Meg’s father was reluctant to take on a son-in-law who might be eternally dependent on his wife. Even so, Meg could not find it in her heart to reject Philip Grimes outright, partly because she prayed that his fortunes would turn – as they were sure to do if the true Church was restored once again in England. In the meantime, though, Meg de Andrade remained a widow, possessed of the most exotic surname in the Sandlings.

  She made a cursory check of the loading of the carts, then of the condition of the principal warehouse, before moving on to the old boat shed. This had been abandoned for years, for no craft had been built at Dunwich since the time of Jed Nolloth, a shipwright and once a trusted friend of her father and grandfather, who had taken Southwold’s gold and betrayed Dunwich and the Stannards in the foulest manner imaginable. The shed was very dark and stank of damp wood. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the familiar sight of ancient worked timbers, some intended for top timbers, some for futtocks and knee timbers. There were larger pieces too, their purpose or function now long forgotten. There was one exception to this: a large, nearly rectangular piece, poorly whitewashed and thick with dust; but there were now only two people alive in the world who knew why it was the exception. Meg’s father was one, and she the other.

  She walked over to it, placed her left hand upon it, and with her right, took out an object that had once been beloved of every man, woman and child in England. Now, though, it was proscribed and derided, while the wooden object upon which her left hand rested was even more illegal. If her part in its preservation was to become known, Meg de Andrade might face prison, or worse.

  She crossed herself, fingered her paternoster, and began to repeat the Ave Maria under her breath. As she did so, she recalled the dreadful image that lay beneath the whitewash, the image that had hung for so long above the rood screen in the doomed church of St John. She remembered vividly the penetrating red eyes and terrible black wings of the colossal devil, looming above the churches and houses of Dunwich as they were swept away by the sea, seeming to gloat over all the poor people about to be drowned. She remembered when it had been renowned for miles around. It was perhaps the most famous artefact the town possessed.

  For this had been – this was – the great doom painting, the Doom of Dunwich itself. And Meg Stannard, the widow Margaret de Andrade, was its guardian, solemnly tasked with the duty by her father amid the ruins of St John’s church, the day after most of it fell into the sea.

  It had lain in this dark corner, the memory of its glory forgotten by all but her and a handful of the faithful, for the best part of a quarter century. When Queen Mary was proclaimed, Meg hoped that the Doom might emerge triumphant from its hiding place and be hoisted high once again. But John’s church no longer existed, as its last ruins now perched precariously on the edge of Dunwich cliff. That left just two churches in the town: St Peter’s, now nominally her parish church, and All Saints, where her mother was buried. But William James, the rector of St Peter’s, was a reformer, put in during the reign of the heretical boy-king Edward, and although he complied reluctantly with the restoration of the Mass and the other requirements of Catholicism, he was not prepared to have the Doom installed in his church.

  By contrast, Edrich, then the rector of All Saints, was sound enough in faith, but he was a markedly timid man. He protested that his church was too poor a place for such a great treasure, but in truth, he feared an influx of the faithful from all over Suffolk and beyond, swelling his congregation and making more work for him. So the Doom had remained in the boat shed. Then, after Queen Mary died, it swiftly became apparent that her successor would have no truck with such symbols of what her jackals called popish idolatry. But Meg was patient. She would wait for the reign of the new Queen Mary, when she knew she could easily sway Walkinson, the present rector of All Saints, who was besotted with her – a state of affairs that he managed to conceal from his wife and six children. Until then, the Doom would stay safe…

  She was so deep in her thoughts that she was unaware of another.

  ‘Good day, sister,’ came a voice from behind her.

  She started, but had the presence of mind to pocket her rosary before turning. He was framed in the doorway, but she did not need to see his face. The weak, reedy voice was enough.

  ‘And good day to you, brother Ned,’ she said.

  ‘What brings you in here?’ he asked.
>
  ‘Before he sailed, Father told me he was thinking of having boats built here again,’ she lied. ‘I have a mind to make an inventory of the timbers we have, to see what size and type of craft might be best. But what brings you to the harbour? The alehouses have been open for hours.’

  She sensed his discomfort, and prayed that he had no suspicions about what she might have been doing. But Ned Stannard was comfortably the most stupid of her three half-brothers, as well as the least fervently Protestant. Had it been George or Harry, she might have been more concerned, although Harry, the only one of them that she liked, was surely unlikely to betray her. And if it had been their sister Mary, Meg might already have been in dread for her liberty, even though the girl was the youngest of them all.

  ‘Shall we talk in the light, sister? I can barely see you in here.’

  She followed him out. In daylight, Edward Stannard cut an unimpressive figure. Just past his nineteenth birthday, he was tall but strikingly thin, the consequence of a wasting sickness some years earlier. His face was pale, his yellow hair already thinning, and he had a marked squint. His mother had marked out his brothers for great things, but she despaired of Ned, who was too lumpen even for the Church. This alone made Meg feel a certain sympathy for him. Anyone or anything that caused Jennet Stannard to despair was an unwitting ally of Meg de Andrade.

  ‘So, Ned, what brings you to this land of demons and monsters?’

  ‘It is a harbour, sister, nothing more. But Mother told me to speak to you.’ Ned, who would not have recognised a jest if it slapped him on the cheeks, did not meet his half-sister’s eyes once. ‘She thinks I should become involved in our trades and businesses. She thinks I should learn the state of our affairs. She thinks you should teach me the ledgers – show me bills of lading and the like – so that I might help you with your work.’

  Meg nearly laughed, but somehow kept her face straight. The notion of her stepmother wanting to do anything to help her in any way was as likely as the sun and the moon changing places, but then the same could be said of the prospects of poor Ned being able to count much beyond the number of fingers on his hands. No, Jennet Stannard had some scheme or other in mind, and it would undoubtedly be to Meg’s disadvantage. Fortunate, then, that she had chosen the worst possible instrument for her stratagem. True, Ned was the only instrument her stepmother had at hand, but that did not alter the case.