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“That coaster from the west country that came in this morning—captain told me that all of the west is expecting the duke any day. Every chapel and alehouse thinks he’s coming; there was a riot at Wellington fair and another at Taunton.” He smiled at her anxious face. “Don’t you worry! Looks like your uncle picked the winning side! Captain said they’re calling out the militia, but nobody’s volunteering. There’s no love for this king, as there was for his brother. And even King Charles played us false and was a papist all along. God knows, they’re not a trustworthy family.”
“But what about us?” she asked. “What about the business?”
He rose to his feet. “Duke or king, people still want trade,” he reassured her. “As long as there’s no privateering, and no warships coming upriver, we trade as usual.”
“Did the captain say when?”
“Soon,” Abel Shore told her. “Before June is out. God bless him, he could be landing in Plymouth right now.”
“Maybe Livia Avery will need that berth in your ship,” Alys said with rare spite. “Her and her papist queen.”
“So there’s another one that thinks the Stuarts will be on their travels again. And she should know.”
AT SEA, SUMMER 1685
The little flotilla sailed slowly, against a contrary wind, past the Isle of Wight and onward to the west. Monmouth ordered the two accompanying ships to drop back, in case of any English naval patrols coming from Portsmouth harbor, or lookouts from the cliffs of the island. But no warning guns were fired, and no beacons lit up the evening sky. It was as if they slipped by on invisible tides.
“Where’s the king’s navy?” Monmouth demanded of Ned Ferryman. They were both scanning the darkening horizon. “I felt sure he’d have lookouts.”
“Happen he can’t trust the navy,” Ned offered. “Half of them signed on under Cromwell, they’ve no love of a papist king and his officers.”
“Lord!” Monmouth said happily. “I knew the army was half mine, but I didn’t hope for the navy too! But it looks like they won’t trouble us. We’re safely past Portsmouth and we’ll go ashore before Dartmouth. Mr. Ferryman, I know you’re off watch—go and get your share of dinner before it’s all gone.”
“My lad saves mine,” Ned said, climbing down the companionway to the deck to find Rowan seated on a coil of rope before the mast with a bowl of stew, a heel of new-baked bread, and a cup of rum and water.
“Thanks,” he said. “Have you eaten?”
Rowan nodded. “It’s good,” she said. “I killed the chicken for the cook and plucked it for him.”
Ned smiled. “Why’re you helping in the galley?”
“He was going at it with a cleaver. He would have hammered it to death and ruined the meat.”
“And you wrung its neck?”
“I said farewell and thanked it, and wrung its neck,” she confirmed. “It was quick.”
Ned sat beside Rowan and took the food. “It’s good,” he agreed. “Would you like to learn to cook, Rowan? You could make a good living as a cook?”
She shook her head with a little smile. “No.”
Ned ate his stew in silence and then wiped out the bowl with the bread and ate that too.
“Is there nowhere in England that I can live in the forest and hunt?” she asked. “Somewhere in the east that faces the dawn?”
He felt his heart ache for her homesickness. “There’s wasteland and commonland especially in the north of the country. But even there, people live in small cottages and shanties, and I doubt they’d welcome an incomer. There are no long strands and forests that run for hundreds of miles in this country.”
“Deer?”
He shook his head, silenced by his remorse that he had brought her to such a strange land. “They all belong to the king, and he hunts them for sport in the royal parks. They hang people for poaching.”
She was silent for a moment. “Killing is a sport?”
“For the king.”
She nodded, taking it in. “In a park? Fenced in? So the deer are not free? The king has slaved them?”
“Yes—in a way.” He glanced at her downcast face. “Would you go back to America, if I bought you a passage? Could you join another People?”
