The Bleeding Land Read online

  ‘You think God cares about one of His mistakes?’ Henry asked, lips warping into a smile. ‘Why do you care, anyway, whore? What’s this cripple to you? Surely he can’t screw. He can barely walk!’

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ Martha screamed, tears in her eyes.

  ‘Mun,’ Tom hissed. ‘Edmund.’ But Mun was staring at Henry.

  ‘Hobbes, have you got a halfpenny?’ Henry asked the pale, skinny boy. ‘They say Martha Green will open her legs for a farthing, but seeing as there are three of us, I’d happily stretch to the price of a quart of good ale.’

  Without thinking what he was doing Mun dismounted, taking the reins in his right hand and offering them up to Tom, whose eyes were round as coins in a bone-white face.

  ‘Ride home, Tom,’ Mun said calmly. ‘I’ll be along.’

  Tom shook his head, glancing at Martha Green whom he thought the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

  ‘Do as I say or I’ll take Father’s crop to you myself,’ Mun threatened, thrusting his mount’s reins into his brother’s hand. Tom hesitated a moment, then turned his horse and led Mun’s from the clearing, half twisting his neck off his shoulders as he went.

  ‘You mean to fight us, Mun?’ Henry asked and, grinning, threw his two foot of beech to the ground.

  ‘They’ll kill you, Mun,’ Martha warned, hands clasped as Henry’s cronies came and stood behind their leader, one at each shoulder.

  ‘I would rather be dead than a coward,’ Mun said, pleased with the way it sounded, though he was terrified enough that his whole body had begun to tremble.

  He did not even see the first blow. It crashed against his ear in a burst of white-hot pain, sending him staggering, but before he could fall more blows were raining down, scuffing across his head and shoulders. Mun threw his forearms up, trying to protect his face, but he could do nothing about the kicks that were gouging into his shins and larruping the muscles of his thighs. He was aware of Martha screaming and Henry yelling curses, some of which Mun had never heard before, but mostly he was aware of terrible pain coming from all parts of his body at once. He was certain that one of the boys still had a club and he desperately hoped that the boy would not strike his head, for surely he must know you could kill a man like that.

  Then he threw his fists forward, feeling the left one crunch against a nose. A boy yelped and Mun gouged at an eye but then his right leg buckled and he fell to one knee, tasting blood and fearing that they would not stop until he was dead. Another cry, this from Henry Denton perhaps, and then Henry was holding his head and yelling and there was blood between his fingers. Mun called out, blood flying from his lips, his ears ringing so that all sound was muffled. Tom!

  Tom was there, wielding his own stick, wild as a boar, teeth bared. He struck Henry again but then the fat boy managed to grab the stick with both hands and yank it from Tom’s grasp, turning the weapon on his younger, smaller opponent with a glancing blow that sent Tom reeling.

  Mun yelled and charged, half stumbling into the fat boy, knocking the wind from him and falling with him in a tangle of thrashing limbs, and now Martha was amongst the fray too, screaming and clawing at the older boys like a bird of prey.

  As suddenly as it had started it was all over. Mun sat against the trunk of an ancient oak watching in a daze a cloud of hornets and moths diving to feed off several glistening dribbles of sap leaking from the tree. This tree is slowly bleeding to death like me, he thought, feeling like a fallen hero, cuffing snot and blood from his nose and smearing it across his cheek. Nearby, little more than shadows in the half light, Martha was nursing Zachariah, who looked like the most wretched thing Mun had ever seen, but then Mun looked down at himself and was unimpressed with what he saw. His doublet was ripped and blood-spattered and his breeches were filthy. As for his face, it felt lumpy and puffed-up and he suspected only his mother would recognize him.

  Tom entered the clearing leading both of their horses and wearing a smile. Apart from a slight limp and a sore-looking graze at his temple he appeared quite unhurt.

  ‘Well that put paid to them,’ Mun muttered, wincing from a dozen aches and cuts, for Henry Denton and his cronies had gone, vanished into the trees with the last of the daylight. Now the clearing was streaked with the tarnished silver light of a waxing moon. ‘We taught those villains a lesson they won’t forget,’ he added for Martha’s benefit. In truth Mun knew they had lost. He suspected that not even Henry Denton would stoop so low as to fight a girl and so it was more likely that Martha had saved them by joining the skirmish. She was the hero, he realized, though there was no need to say as much, especially as his split lip made talking smart like the devil.

  ‘We squashed that fat toad, didn’t we, Mun?’ Tom said, bringing the horses up to his brother, who rose on unsteady legs and began to brush himself down with his hands, wincing because his knuckles were grazed.

  ‘I told you to ride home, Tom,’ Mun said sternly. Zachariah was on his feet now and seemed mostly unhurt, though you wouldn’t know it from the way Martha was fussing round him.

  ‘You were outnumbered, Mun,’ Tom said, ‘and they had sticks.’ Then he smiled again, gingerly touching the bloody graze on his head. ‘And anyway, we’re brothers.’

  Mun glanced at Zachariah again, knowing it would not be long before the poor boy took another beating. As for himself and Tom, they would receive one as soon as Sir Francis returned from London. That was as sure as night following day.

  ‘Tell them that we will see them home,’ he said, nodding towards Martha and Zachariah.

  ‘But we shall be home very late then,’ Tom said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Mun replied, patting his horse’s neck.

  Tom grinned and limped across to the others and Mun felt his own lips curl, stretching the bloody split so that it stung awfully. It had been some fight after all and even though they had lost, their cuts and bruises the proof of that, they had stood together until their enemies had fled.

  Because they were brothers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  November 1641, London

  TOM RIVERS HAD spoken barely a word since breaking fast in the Ship Inn. There were too many questions; so much to say that he feared to start talking now would be to never stop. And so he kept his tongue still and let his eyes work, glutting themselves with each and every wonder they could cram in. And what a feast it was! At once wonderful and terrifying and like nothing they had ever known. Besides, though he was amongst more people than he had ever seen, he knew not one of them and did not imagine any would be the least bit interested in anything he had to say.

  Standing on the south bank he stared through the drizzle across the Thames, taking in the sprawled mass of humanity cloaked in November grey before him. The western end of the city was topped by the great mass of St Paul’s Cathedral, seat of the bishop of London. Tom recalled his father telling him that the church had once boasted an enormous spire, but that had been destroyed by lightning some eighty years ago – a sure sign of the Almighty’s displeasure with the papists, Sir Francis had said ominously. To the east at the opposite end of the city stood the Tower, England’s fortress. Arsenal, prison, government storehouse, royal palace and site of the national mint, its sprawling complex was London’s most important centre of state. Cathedral and Tower dominated the city’s skyline, but it was what lay in between them that sent Tom’s mind reeling, filled his nose with its stench with every gust from across the river. Market areas, wharves, guildhalls, monuments, myriad church spires, houses, and the city gates were linked by a tangle of meandering streets all crammed with people. So many people!

  Rag-and-bone men soliciting folks’ saleable waste, pedlars crying their wares, woodcutters offering their skills, food vendors transporting fresh victuals. Animals, too, choked the thoroughfares; draught horses drawing carts and coaches, riding horses carrying travellers and messengers, dogs, pigs and poultry running loose in the streets. Then there were the cattle and sheep that were daily driven into the city o
n their way to rich men’s tables. Along with the stench of people and manure, the hearth smoke slung in dirty brown clouds above the buildings added its muscle to this assault on Tom’s senses. It was a seething, reeking clutter, a scene of chaos that half intrigued and half terrified him, so that for now he was glad that the sluggish brown river lay as a barrier between him and it.

  He took the wide-brimmed hat from his head and shook the water from it, watching a ship trawling for eels, pushing its way against the tide past the Old Swan inn and the Fishmongers’ Hall. The Thames was choked with all manner of craft, from the tall ships moored in the Pool of London before the yeomen warders of the Tower, to the rowboats, or wherries as he had heard men call them, and barges that ferried passengers hither and thither.

  Yet Tom knew he must soon immerse himself in the flow of folk joining the southern end of London Bridge and make his way along that most important of arteries into the city’s beating heart, where he would meet his father and brother. He would leave Southwark behind, passing through Bridge Gate upon whose crown the heads of traitors were skewered as ghastly reminders of what awaited such men. To Tom such barbarity reinforced his image of London as a living thing, an anarchic beast to which sacrifices must be made if some semblance of civilization were to be maintained. Many of the heads were little more than skulls now in which not even the crows would be interested, scraps of leathery skin and wisps of hair stirring in the chill breeze. That morning, when Sir Francis and Mun had left their lodgings early to be about their business in the city, Tom had walked with them as far as the bridge, there telling them he would join them later after he had explored Southwark. But the heads on London Bridge had bound him for a while with their macabre allure. He had simply stared at them, even though he knew such fascination marked him clearly as a countryman. He had stared and wondered what kind of men they had been in life and what offence had led them to that bad end. He’d wondered too how it must feel to cut off another man’s head.

  Now, peering up through the grey at the pale sun, rain falling softly on his face, Tom reckoned it was approaching midday. Time to cross the bridge then and walk the two miles upstream to Westminster, the other major suburb outside London proper and where, last morning, he had marvelled at the great buildings of Westminster Hall and the royal palace of Whitehall. His father and Mun would be expecting him, for as MP for Ormskirk Sir Francis had privileged access to Westminster Hall and had promised to show Tom its famous roof today, made, Mun had announced proudly, from six hundred and fifty tons of English oak. It irked Tom that his brother knew all these things before him, but that was ever likely, seeing as their father had taken Mun to London several times even before his elder son had become a resident of the Inns of Court.

  An appreciation of the complexities of English law was an essential quality in any gentleman, even one owning but a modest acreage, their father had explained when it had been decided that Mun, just turned eighteen, would lodge in London for two years. But this was Tom’s first experience of the city and it had not proved disappointing. He drank it in like a parched man. Yet, for all its vibrancy and chaos it was a bitter draught, because Tom knew his fate lay in the Church, where order and hierarchy suppressed instinct and channelled impulse. Such was the lot of many second sons, he knew, young men who could not inherit their father’s wealth and power. Mun would get Shear House and its estate and the Church would get Tom. First, though, he would spend four years at Oxford with Homer, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil and Cicero, honing his skills in grammar and logic, history and mathematics. He would gain the degree of Bachelor of Arts and perhaps even go on to achieve Master of Arts. But all that could wait. For now there was London.

  Tom clinched the neck of his coat in a fist and tilted his hat against the rain before stepping back into the road. Then, avoiding two oxen driven by a young man whose face was a mass of pustules, he turned left and made his way towards the bridge.

  ‘How is the debate proceeding, Father?’ Tom asked, banging his slipware cup against his brother’s before downing a great wash of beer. Pushing through the sopping crowds thronging Westminster had been thirsty work. Sir Francis shook his head and put his own cup to his lips, sipping carefully. His face was gaunt and the reeking tallow candles of the Three Cranes only emphasized the dark pools under his eyes.

  ‘I cannot get a taste for beer,’ he said, dragging his hand across his lips, ‘I find it too bitter. Let me have my ale and all is well.’ Mun rolled his eyes and Tom grinned, drinking again. ‘I fear it has gone ill for the King,’ their father said, returning to the question and glancing round to make sure he was not overheard. The inn was glutted with drinkers, all types of men so it seemed, and though it thrummed with noise it paid to be discreet about matters to do with the great debate. The Three Cranes being so close to the corridors and alcoves of Westminster Hall, some of those enjoying wine and beer were, Tom knew, bound to be men involved with the Grand Remonstrance in one way or another. ‘It’s fair to say the Commons is split on the issue,’ Sir Francis went on, smoothing his short beard between ringed finger and thumb, ‘with many who find it abhorrent that at times like these we should arraign the King and, furthermore, accuse His Majesty of misrule.’ He frowned darkly. ‘It is preposterous.’

  ‘The Irish rebels must be rubbing their hands at the thought of us all at each other’s throats,’ Mun put in, shaking his head, so that a damp curl of fair hair fell across his right eye. He took a lump of cheese from the plate between them and bit into it.

  ‘Indeed they must,’ Sir Francis said. ‘But Pym is persuasive. And determined to boot. Neither does he lack for supporters. Unfortunately. Their strength grows daily and those that are against them begin to fear for themselves.’ He shook his head. ‘They are all too keen to drag old skeletons from their graves.’ At that Tom thought again of the heads spiked on London Bridge. ‘Pym would have us believe there are Jesuits lurking in every shadow, waiting behind every tree. The man is a fear-monger and the thing about fear, boys, is that it binds folk. Prevents a man from pursuing his hopes.’

  ‘But what if he’s right, Father, and the Catholics are preparing to strike?’ Mun asked, chewing. ‘You only have to look to Ireland. There is no smoke without fire. Don’t you always say as much?’

  ‘Aye, perhaps,’ Sir Francis admitted. ‘And yet, instead of rallying support and raising an army to retake Ireland we are railing against our king.’ He scowled as though hit by a foul odour. ‘There are those who love chaos. Who would turn the world upside down.’ Sir Francis leant closer to his sons, his face tired and drawn; a mask of sharp angles in the dim fug. ‘Remember this, boys, fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.’ He shook his head and grimaced. ‘And I am guilty enough. This night we have even stopped a motion that would have seen much-needed arms put in the hands of our brave and loyal men in Ireland.’

  ‘Poor bastards,’ Mun muttered, earning a reproving glance from their father. ‘As if it wasn’t bad enough them being sent there in the first place.’

  Tom had heard it said that Protestants were being savaged in Ireland. Men were being butchered, women were being raped, and children were being skewered with pitchforks and roasted in flames. And fear and chaos, he knew, were very much like fire. They were flames that devoured and spread.

  ‘Aye,’ Sir Francis said again, nodding, ‘God save their souls.’ Mun mumbled a curse as Sir Francis sat back, picking up his cup again. ‘And damn Pym for that.’

  ‘If you are too tired, Father,’ Tom began, ‘we can see Westminster another day. I have already seen so much that I fear I shall not sleep for a week once we return home.’ He rubbed his knees, trying to rein in the grin that was running away with his lips. ‘Besides, Mother says these days your bones object to London’s streets and the flagstones of Westminster’s grand halls. She says this is a young man’s city.’

  Sir Francis’s brows arched, bridging bewildered eyes, then he slammed his cup down. ‘Nonsense!’ he declared. ‘I have not begun to patc
h up this old body for Heaven yet, despite your mother’s . . . concerns. We shall go there this very moment. What say you, Edmund?’

  Mun finished his own beer and belched into a fist. ‘Oh if we must,’ he conceded, though there was a half smile playing on his lips. ‘We cannot have these country folk being entirely ignorant of how the kingdom is run.’ He jabbed a finger at his younger brother. ‘So long as you get back to Parbold in time to plant the wheat before Martinmas. And we’ve hogs that need slaughtering before the snows. London is not for the likes of you, young Master Rivers,’ he mocked in a quavering voice, repeating the very words their parish churchwarden had used when Sir Francis had first made public his intention for Tom to take the cloth.

  ‘I’ll slaughter you if you don’t watch your tongue,’ Tom threatened, presenting his eating knife to his elder brother before stabbing a chunk of cheese with it. Several slices of cured meat lay untouched beside a pot of fruit preserve, but Tom was too excited to eat properly.

  ‘Father, isn’t it today that they shall present the Root and Branch again?’ Mun asked, thumbing towards the inn’s door, which yawned open, vomiting a crowd of drunken apprentices into the afternoon grey. Many such men had been given the day off in light of the furore that gripped the city.

  ‘Root and Branch?’ Tom said, feeling light-headed because the beer was strong, of the first water he guessed.

  ‘A petition that seeks the exclusion of the bishops and papists from the House of Lords,’ Sir Francis explained soberly. ‘Many would take it further still and have us rid of bishops altogether.’

  Tom lifted his head, understanding. ‘On the way here I heard men protesting loud enough to wake the dead. Though I’ll be damned if I could fathom their grievance. Is London always like this?’

  Sir Francis shook his head, teeth dragging a small portion of beard across his bottom lip. ‘Not like this,’ he said, sharing a knowing look with Mun. ‘There’s a storm brewing, boys, and someone ought to reef the sail before we are all drowned.’