The Bleeding Land Read online

  ‘I want to carry her this last part,’ Tom said. Mun nodded, stopping to dismount, understanding his brother’s need to take responsibility. For draped over Hector’s rump Martha was somehow less human. More like the prize kill after a hunt. So Mun watched Tom take Martha carefully into his arms whilst he took their mounts’ reins, and then, side by side, they walked towards the house which loomed before them in the purple-tinged dusk.

  Of the family, Lady Mary was the first to realize what had happened. She was in the hall when Isaac opened the door to her sons. When she saw Martha in Tom’s arms her hands flew to her mouth and she shook her head as though refusing to see what her eyes were showing her. Then the parlour door opened, spilling flamelight into the lamp-lit hall, and Bess was there. When she saw the girl’s body she called on God and stumbled, flailing, gripping the doorframe to steady herself.

  Mun glanced at Tom and saw that tears were spilling down his cheeks and so, swallowing down the lump in his own throat, he took it upon himself to explain how they had found Martha at the bridge. That there had been nothing they could do, for the deed was long done by the time they arrived.

  ‘My poor boy,’ Lady Mary said, wringing her hands, ‘my poor, poor boy. Francis! Take Martha and lay her in the parlour. Isaac, have Edward bring some hippocras for the boys. And make it strong,’ she called after the servant.

  Sir Francis stood behind Bess, one hand on her shoulder, the other still gripping a fire iron he had been using a moment before. He stood the poker against the wall, firmed his jaw and nodded, moving towards his younger son, his arms out in readiness to take the burden from him.

  ‘Get away from her!’ Tom yelled, glaring at Sir Francis, who recoiled startled.

  ‘Let your father help you,’ Lady Mary said, eyebrows lifted, the skin beneath them stretched. But Tom ignored her and, tears soaking his face, carried Martha past them all into the parlour.

  Sir Francis looked to Mun who shrugged, and they all followed towards the parlour just as Jacob appeared from behind the screen which ran along the hall towards the kitchen. His thick copper hair stuck up in tufts and his eyebrows met in a suspicious frown as he took in the scene. Bess nodded at Mun to follow their father, then went over and took the young boy’s hand, leading him off towards the dining parlour to break the news of his sister’s death. Mun cursed under his breath because the poor boy now had no family at all, then he closed the parlour door from the inside.

  ‘Let us help you, son,’ Sir Francis said, his arms out towards Tom who had laid Martha on the floor and now knelt beside her, head bowed. The dead girl lay on her side, her body making a grim crescent for it had stiffened, bent as it had been over Hector’s rump. Flamelight played across her face, the warmth raising a stink from her fouled skirts. A knotty log cracked angrily in the grate and Lady Mary nodded at Sir Francis as though he should repeat his offer of help.

  ‘Let me take her, Thomas,’ Sir Francis said softly, stepping closer. Tom’s dishevelled hair hung either side of his face, so that Sir Francis leant in awkwardly, trying to meet his eye. ‘Your mother will wash the girl and—’

  ‘I said get away from her!’ Tom screamed, launching himself at his father, driving him back and sending a table and two glasses flying as he slammed Sir Francis against the wall.

  ‘Tom!’ Lady Mary exclaimed. Then Mun was hauling on his brother’s shoulders as Sir Francis stood wide-eyed, his arms flat against the wall behind him.

  ‘Let him go!’ Mun barked. ‘Step back, Tom!’

  ‘He’s the reason she’s dead!’ Tom yelled, spittle flying from a mouth twisted in fury, his broad shoulders trying to shrug off Mun’s grip. ‘If he’d spoken up for George Green none of this would have happened!’ He was glaring at Sir Francis. ‘He’s a coward!’

  ‘Stand off!’ Mun roared.

  ‘Coward!’ Tom spat into his father’s horrified face.

  Mun wrenched Tom’s right shoulder and Tom let go of their father, twisting and flailing with his arm, but Mun blocked with his right forearm and slammed his left fist into his brother’s face, sending him staggering. Now it was Tom who looked shocked to his very marrow as he stared at his brother from his good eye, the split in his still swollen lip glistening with fresh blood.

  ‘He could have saved her father,’ he said, smearing blood across the back of his hand. With the other hand he pointed accusingly at Sir Francis, and that hand was trembling. ‘Instead that bastard Denton raped her and she could not live with the shame of it.’

  ‘Your father could not have saved the minister!’ Lady Mary said. The parlour door had opened and Bess and Jacob stood there transfixed, both of them weeping.

  ‘I had to keep my family safe,’ Sir Francis said, stepping out from the wall. ‘I could not risk the consequences of going up against Lord Denton and his kind. Don’t be a fool, Thomas.’

  Tom turned back to Sir Francis. ‘You are a coward!’ he spat.

  ‘Hold your damned tongue!’ Mun heard himself yell, feeling his fists become hard knots. ‘He is our father!’

  ‘He is a bastard coward and no better than Denton,’ Tom snarled, the words dripping venom even as his lip dripped blood.

  Mun strode forward and threw up an arm, and the next thing he knew Tom’s throat was in his grip, his brother’s good eye glaring with hate.

  ‘No, Edmund!’ Sir Francis yelled. ‘Let him be.’

  ‘Let him go, Mun! Don’t hurt him!’ Bess screamed like the cry of a hawk, still clasping Jacob’s hand, and that cry cut through Mun’s rage and he felt himself jerk as though he had been the one struck. He let go of Tom and stepped back, raising his palms to show Bess he meant their brother no harm.

  Tom cuffed blood from his lip and turned to Lady Mary. ‘See her buried, Mother,’ he said, tears of heartbreak and rage gleaming in his good eye and lacing the puffy slit of his injured one.

  Lady Mary nodded, frowning. ‘Of course we will, Thomas,’ she said, glancing down at Martha’s corpse, at the blue lips forced apart by the bulging tongue.

  Then without another word Tom strode past Mun, a shoulder knocking him aside. Bess and Jacob stepped out of his way as they would for a passing carriage and Tom stormed from the parlour.

  Lady Mary made as if to follow him.

  ‘Let the boy go,’ Sir Francis growled, ‘let him go. Thomas needs some time to gather himself.’ Then he turned to Mun. ‘You should not have struck him,’ he said, straightening his shirt and doublet as though to shrug off the whole sorry incident. He dipped his chin and looked accusingly at his elder son. ‘That was grievous, Mun. He is your brother.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mun murmured, flexing his right hand to check that none of his finger bones was broken. He wanted to blow across his swelling knuckles, but the hot pain blooming in them was the least he deserved, he thought, eyes resting on Martha Green. Whom poor Tom had loved.

  ‘Fighting as boys is one thing, but to strike your brother as a grown man? It is inexcusable,’ Sir Francis went on. ‘You will apologize to your brother when he is himself again.’

  ‘And will you, Father?’ Mun heard himself ask, his eyes riveted to his father’s now, daring to hold that steely gaze.

  ‘Mun!’ Lady Mary exclaimed, her eyes wide. ‘You forget yourself!’ Sir Francis coloured, crimson rage flooding his cheeks. Mun looked away, readying himself for a barrage that never came. Instead Sir Francis glowered and said nothing, his steel grey eyes puncturing Mun’s defiance, which was worse, Mun thought, than if he had bawled at him.

  ‘Bess, take the poor boy away.’ Lady Mary broke the moment, steering all eyes to Jacob who had not left Bess’s side. The boy’s scowling face glistened with tears and snot, clenched in confused anger as though he was desperate to understand why Martha had left him, whilst despising her for it.

  ‘Come with me, Jacob,’ Bess said, swallowing hard with a resolute nod. And taking his hand in hers she turned him from the grotesquely bent figure on the parlour floor. ‘Let us go and find out what’s keepi
ng Edward with the hippocras,’ she said, catching Mun’s eye before leading Jacob off.

  ‘O’Neill and Marten are not back from Ormskirk yet,’ Lady Mary said to Mun, bailing the silence that was trying to flood in. ‘Knowing those two they’ll still be searching the taverns, looking for Martha in the bottom of their ale cups. I want them back here tonight, not staying in town at your father’s expense.’

  O’Neill and Marten were good men and Mun doubted they would be shirking their responsibilities, but he kept his mouth shut and waited for what he knew was coming next.

  ‘We’ll be lambing before we know it,’ his mother went on. ‘I want the animals pastured closer and the ewes looked after as though they belonged to the King himself. I will not lose as many lambs this year,’ she said, almost accusing Sir Francis, ‘I simply will not.’ Then she turned back to Mun. ‘If you go now you’ll reach town before nightfall. Bring the men back if you find them easily. If not, bring them back first thing in the morning.’ Mun nodded. ‘We shall deal with the poor girl,’ Lady Mary added without looking down at the body.

  ‘He shouldn’t ride in the dark,’ Sir Francis put in, taking a pitcher and glass from a table and pouring himself some wine.

  ‘There’ll be enough moon to see by,’ Mun said to his mother, for he knew her scheme was less about retrieving O’Neill and Marten than it was about putting some distance between her husband and her sons. Which was no bad thing, he supposed.

  ‘And three of us on the road have nothing to fear,’ he went on. ‘O’Neill’s face would put the fear of God into anyone of ill-intent.’ Sir Francis conceded this with an arched brow and Lady Mary seized the advantage, telling her husband to move Martha Green away from the hearth. Because the girl begins to stink, Mun thought, despising himself for not being oblivious of it.

  So his father bent to the task and Mun turned his back on them and prepared to go back out into the freezing dusk. To bring back O’Neill and Marten.

  Three days after Martha hanged herself Tom arrived in Manchester and there spent two nights before moving southward again. Two weeks after leaving Shear House he found himself in London, in a stinking, dingy hostelry on Long Southwark. And he found himself drunk; undoubtedly more drunk than he had ever been. He had considered lodging at the famous Tabard Inn, which his father had spoken of, but then the fact that he’d learned of the place from Sir Francis was reason in itself not to stay there. Besides which, in his haste to flee Shear House he had not considered practicalities and the purse tied to his belt was not nearly heavy enough for the Tabard. It contained halfpennies, pennies, shillings and crowns amounting to a grand total of a little over one pound, roughly a day’s income for a man such as his father. A hostelry like the Tabard and its associated pleasures would leech that money away in no time and so Tom had taken a room at the Leaping Lord, a grubby, run-down place that stank of human waste. A fine drizzle had urged him off Long Southwark’s greasy cobbles and through an archway fronting on the street big enough to accommodate wagons, and there, surrounding a courtyard littered with the rotting scraps of vegetables and scurrying with rats, stood the Leaping Lord and its lodgings. Telling himself he would grow accustomed to the stench, and supposing biting fleas had been the reason for the lord’s leaping, Tom had paid up front for a room for one week and now, feeling the purse against his right thigh, he wondered how long one pound would last him in London. Not long if I keep pissing it away, he thought grimly.

  He took another long draught of beer, nodding in solidarity to another lone drinker across the noisy, fug-filled room. He had brought few belongings from Shear House. He had the clothes on his back and his thick wool cloak that still carried the scent, though faint as mist now, of Martha. He had a rapier scabbarded at his left hip, the inscription on the blade FOR MY CHRIST RESOLVED TO DIE hiding unseen in the dark. Made by the renowned German blademaker Johannes Kinndt, the sword was worth at least ten shillings, perhaps more. The cup around the blade was decorated in relief with the heads of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria and its recurved quillons were ornamented with fine threads of gold and silver.

  And he had two pistols: a fine pair of firelocks twenty-six inches long, eighteen of those inches comprising the octagonal barrels, with long slender butts terminating with a flare for good grip. These he had left in his bare room, wrapped in calfskin and bundled in a spare shirt and jerkin. They were his father’s weapons and he felt a tinge of guilt at having taken them from Sir Francis’s armoury the night he had ridden from Shear House. But only a fool would take the road unarmed, especially on a horse as fine and expensive-looking as Achilles. A horse like that would fetch ten pounds at market. The stallion was stabled a stone’s throw away, feasting on the best hay Tom could buy. He had also paid for fresh stall bedding, so that he suspected of the two of them Achilles had the finer lodgings. The horse deserved it. Achilles had been a faithful friend. He is all I have now, Tom thought, catching a serving girl’s eye and lifting his cup. The girl was plump and golden-haired and almost pretty and she perfected a well-worn coy smile as the beer splashed into Tom’s cup, and three rough-looking men on the next table jeered and winked, sharing their expert opinions that Tom could get a fuck out of the girl later if he had the legs to follow her. But Tom ignored them and nodded his thanks to the girl, then tugged a piece of his cloak up to his nose – the cloak that smelt faintly of Martha – and breathed in.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  23rd April 1642

  COME ST GEORGE’S day Tom was still lodging at the leaping Lord inn. He no longer noticed London’s stink: the coal smoke and the sewers, the iron tang of blood from the slaughter yards and the stench of massed humanity. He barely flinched at the rats that scurried across his path when he walked the thronging streets, and he’d grown almost fond of the mice that shared his damp room, scurrying hither and thither through the old straw.

  His money was gone, long pissed away during dark weeks of self-pity and bitterness and the furious need to forget. Yet he still had a room and one meal a day and Achilles still had a stall, because Abiezer Grey, who kept the Lord, had offered Tom work in exchange for food and board. Tom had bridled at the offer when Grey, with whom he had never spoken more than ten words, proposed it. Tom had been not quite drunk and Grey had thumped a bowl of mutton stew and a slab of cheat bread in front of him and before Tom could say he had not ordered the food the landlord had issued the terms as though he cared not at all what answer came back.

  ‘You think I am a pauper, sir,’ Tom had slurred, ‘that I require employment in this flea-bitten, cow’s arse of a hole?’

  Grey had shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Two weeks past you were drinking ale of the first water. Now you are making small beer last the hour,’ he said in a voice characterized by his flat nose that looked to have been broken more times than even Grey could likely remember. ‘Can’t drink if you can’t pay.’ The landlord shrugged again but this time at Ruth Gell, the almost pretty serving girl who was watching the exchange from a boisterous thicket of drunken apprentices. Then Grey turned his back on Tom and pushed into the press of bodies and was gone. Tom craned his neck and Ruth gave him a curt nod before flashing her smile at a handsome youth whilst simultaneously slapping another man’s hand off her rump, and Tom turned back to his beer, cursing under his breath. He had been sharing Ruth’s bed on and off for a week or so and he knew that it must have been she who had persuaded Grey to make him the offer. He could guess how she’d persuaded him, too, for Tom knew Grey shared Ruth’s bed as often as, if not more often than, he did. But Ruth had a good heart and had shown him kindness, more than once leaving a bowl of leftover pease porridge or mutton stew outside Tom’s room when he had retired for the night having not eaten. She was a hard worker, too, and there was not a man or woman – other than Tom it seemed to him – could sit at a table in the Leaping Lord if they were not drinking or eating, smoking Abiezer Grey’s tobacco or resting from a visit to one of Grey’s girls who were, to Tom’s eyes, rough as rope bu
t undeniably cheap.

  ‘But where will you go when your money runs out?’ Ruth had asked later that same night, pulling up a stool and sitting at Tom’s table. ‘Abi is a good man but he will not let you keep your room and drink for less than a shilling a night.’

  Tom had leant back against a greasy, faded tapestry, scratching his cheek and eyeing the room. He had allowed his beard to grow unkempt and he knew it made him look older than he was but did not care.

  ‘I will find something,’ he said.

  The only patrons left at the tables now were either too drunk to make it back to their rooms or else sat still as the dead and wreathed in tobacco fog, having smoked themselves into oblivion.

  Tom lifted his mug and drained it, then dragged his hand across cracked lips. ‘I will find something,’ he repeated, blinking at the heady, yellow smoke that stung his eyes. Several smouldering pipes sat abandoned on tables, adding to the fug of sweat, meat stew and the sour stench of old ale.

  ‘I worry for you, Tom,’ Ruth said, habit making her snatch up the empty mug and stand to take it away. She glanced around, then with her free hand yanked her bodice a little higher over her plump bosom. No one left worth impressing, Tom thought.

  ‘That’s a shiny, pretty thing,’ she said, nodding at the signet ring on the third finger of his right hand. ‘Gold?’ Tom looked at the thing. A gift from his father, its round face was embossed with a lion’s head. Mun had one exactly the same. He’d not even thought about it, but now supposed he could sell it, if it came to it. ‘Or you could sell your horse,’ she suggested. ‘He’s a fine animal by the looks of him.’

  But Tom could never sell Achilles and so the next day he had accepted Abiezer Grey’s offer and now he worked for his room and board, clearing tables, hefting barrels, making sure the rakers cleaned the horse dung from the street outside the Lord and took the inn’s refuse away. He drew water from Long Southwark’s wells and pumps to save Grey paying men to bring it in tankards on their backs, and he oversaw the cleaning of the privies at night, ensuring the jakes farmers earned their pennies. He had thought he would detest the work because he was the son of a knight and had a right to privileges and finery. But he did not detest it. If anything the labour made him forget who he was, and for this he was thankful. He worked hard, drank much, filled his belly and sometimes, at the end of a long day, he shared Ruth’s bed.