AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’ll have to get a reduction,” Ned decided. “We’ll separate, and go about our work in our two worlds. I’ll go to Bristol, and find a magistrate who will listen, tell him that we’ve got an innocent lad imprisoned. You go back to Sir James and get a reduction on the pardon. Bring it to Bristol, as soon as you can.”
“I’ll try and get a reduction,” Johnnie agreed. “It’s the only way.”
“Wait—how much of this wine have you got in your cellar?” Ned demanded, holding up his glass. “And what else do you have down there?”
“A couple of casks.”
“What are they worth?”
“Now, Uncle!”
“What are they worth?”
“About four pounds,” Johnnie said sulkily.
“Well, you can sell them tomorrow, for a start.”
Johnnie was about to argue and then, suddenly, he laughed. “Lord, what a Cromwell you are!” he said. “I’ll sell them back to my wine merchant on the way to St. James’s, and we’ll see what price the queen has put on Rowan’s freedom.”
Ned took a gulp from his glass.
“For Christ’s sake, make it last,” Johnnie said. “This is our last bottle.”
BRISTOL JAIL, AUTUMN 1685
Rowan, locked in a stone-walled room with twenty other prisoners, had no idea that Ned was ceaselessly trying to find a way out for her, did not think of the outer world at all.
When they had been led into the cold church, she had flinched from the high walls and the vaulted ceiling, but she thought that it would be a hard place to guard and there would be a chance for her to slip away. They were still chained one to another, like slaves, but her eyes darted around the shadowy corners, taking in the great nave, the wooden pews, the stained glass windows, and the many doors leading to vestry and chapel and cloisters.
Then she saw they were being driven and dragged to a great metal enclosure at the side of the church and inside that was a narrow stone stair, winding down into darkness. She hesitated, peering into the cold shadows below her, but the man ahead of her in the line jerked on the cuffs on her wrists and the man behind her pushed her on. There was nothing that she could do but go down, her chains clanking on the stone, her way lit by the flickering of a torch held high by one of the guards.
The flaring light showed a huge square room, hollowed from the reddish rock beneath the church, the walls perforated by dark doorways, and inside them, stone slabs holding rows of coffins. It was the crypt of the church, where the nobility of Bristol had their family tombs.
“God save us,” one of the men said to the guard. “You’ll never leave us down here with the dead!”
“You’ll be fed,” the young guard said.
“For pity’s sake!”
Rowan looked around: there was only a single source of light, a grating high up in the wall, the early morning light shining through in a narrow beam. She kept her eye on it as she seated herself, her back against the cold stone, and let it dazzle her, so that she could forget where she was.
The stone of the walls, the stone on the floor, the roughly carved ceiling above them was a dull red color, the only sound was a booming echo of the shouted orders in the hall. They were not chained, asblack slaves would have been chained, waiting for a voyage. And they were not beaten, as black slaves would have been beaten. And there were no children, dying of hunger, crying for pain, or calling for their mothers. Rowan told herself that it could have been worse.
She let her eyes get accustomed to the shadowy light as if she would never see daylight again. She taught herself not to listen for anything, but to let her ears fill with the sound of defeated men in a hollowed-out stone cave. She could not rid her mouth of the bland taste of oats and water, and she never thought of spicy hot meat, or the piercing sweetness of fresh-picked berries. Her sense of touch—when her fingers only found cold stone walls—her strength that had let her run all day, her joy that made her laugh at nothing, her optimism that turned her to the sun every morning, slowly drained away and Rowan let herself quieten, like an animal in captivity goes as weak as death, when it cannot bear its life. Rowan surrendered one sense and then another; and the men around her knew her only as the lad who never spoke, never listened, and never looked up.
FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685
Mia and Gabrielle, determined to explore all of Sealsea Island, persuaded their grandmother to hire two steady horses with pillion saddles and went behind two grooms down the road to Sealsea village, across to the fishermen’s hovels at East Beach, deep into Sealsea Forest, and north across the wadeway to visit Tide Mill Farm.
Everywhere they went, they were greeted with smiles and courtesies, as the foreign cousins of the landlord’s family. Nobody had known before that the Peacheys had Italian cousins, but with a foreignqueen on the throne and a papist school opening in Chichester, it was impossible to be sure of anything, anymore. And the girls were smiling and pretty and spoke English as well as any Londoner—which was to say fancy, and without the Sussex drawl—but they could be understood and they said “hello” and “please,” waved at the tenants’ children, and paid for crossing the wadeway or for cups of ale, which by rights they need not have done.
The girls rode behind the grooms along one of the logging tracks through Sealsea Forest, looking at the boughs overhead interlaced, and the yellowing leaves sifting silently down through the quiet afternoon air. It was still, as only an autumn afternoon in England can be still, the air cool but unmoving, the leaves the only movement in the vaulted wood, the flicker of their fall the only sound. The regular scrunch of the horses’ hooves on the track, and the occasional cry of a seagull from the nearby shore sounded strangely loud: as if the whole world—trees, birds, and little animals—were settling themselves down for the sleep of winter.
They pulled up the horses in a clearing and stood for a moment, taking in the tall trunks, the silence, the glimpses of the unending sky through the gold and yellow leaves that still clung to the tops of the trees.
Mia lifted her head. “What’s that smell?” she asked the stable boy.
“Woodsmoke,” he said. “Charcoal burning.”
