1635: A Parcel of Rogues: Chapter Twelve

    “No, totally burnt to the ground,” Towson confirmed. “Not too long ago, by the looks, there’s still a lot of ash and charcoal about the place, but we couldn’t go too close to be sure. Not a lot we could see from the road, but every building in and around the farmhouse is burnt back to a shell. And, just in case we thought this was a coincidence, a couple of smiling lads happened to be around the place for us to ask what had happened as we ambled along, nothing but a couple of idle old soldiers home from the Germanies, off to visit an old friend up the road a ways. Well, they didn’t have a lot to tell us, but they’re not local boys. Irishmen, the pair of them.”

    “And since your humble servant here kept his mouth firmly shut,” Welch added, “they had the fool notion of thinking talking in Irish would be private to them. They’re watching the place and decided that their chief ought to know as soon as Mulligan, whoever that was, came round in a short while. So that’s why we’re late, we’d to find another way back since they’d certain sure be waiting for us.”

    Darryl could see the pain on Cromwell’s face. He’d only been a tenant on that farm, slowly and carefully working his fortunes back up from what sounded like near-bankruptcy, but it had been his home for more than three years. And whoever was tenant there now might have been able to tell him where his children had ended up. “Did they say aught of the children that once lived there?”

    “Nothing,” Welch said. “They had a little to say of the family that was there most recently, though. Two, very little. Run off with their ma and da and two farmhands, they said, when the farm was burnt.”

    “Did they say why?” Darryl asked, beginning to feel a cold, hollow feeling he wasn’t sure would be warmed other than by administering some righteous hillbilly justice. He’d been along with the scouting parties that’d gone out right after the Ring of Fire and seen some of the shit guys down-time could and did pull on ordinary folks in their own homes, and the fury’d never really left him. Seems like some of it got out in his voice, since both Cromwell and Hamilton were giving him funny looks.

    “Order of the justice of the peace, under commission from the king, they said. Sounds like lies to me, though. Even across the water the justices can’t just have someone’s home burnt, especially if it’s tenanted and not freehold. They’ve punished the landlord as much as anyone.” Welch shrugged. “I think we’d need more than the word of those two ruffians to get to the bottom of it.”

    “True enough,” Cromwell said. “I never completed my studies for the bar, but I can tell you that much. Fines and seizures can be compassed by a justice of the peace, but burning a farm and driving the tenant off? I never heard the like before and never thought to.”

    Darryl felt a moment of grim humor come over him. “You know, Oliver, with all the grief I gave you over what you would’ve done in Ireland, I never stopped to think about the bit where you rebelled against the king. And if this is the kind of thing you have to put up with from His Royal Assholeness, I can’t say it wasn’t purely the right thing to do.”

    “If it was not before, it is now,” Cromwell said, and there didn’t seem to be trace of jest in his words. “It remains that we should find them. Robert and Oliver will have come back from school by now, if they had not already. I cannot recall where I stood with the school in the matter of fees. I can only hope that God’s grace guided them to find the little ones and the friends I have in this county.”

    “Robert’s your oldest, yes?” Hamilton said, “Fourteen now?”

    “But a month past. He and Oliver were away at school when I was captured, or they might have been shot. Oliver will be thirteen come November. Bridget, Henry and Elizabeth are the little ones. Bridget will be eleven years old soon.”

    They’d all heard Cromwell speak of his children, the hope in his voice a thin veneer over a chasm of worry. On the one hand, the Cromwells were a rich and influential family in Huntingdonshire, and there would have been no shortage of relatives to take them in. On the other hand, it would have taken time to get word to any of those relatives, and much could have happened to them in the meantime. And between Cromwell’s children and his relatives there were all the enemies he’d made only a couple of years before in Huntingdon itself, speaking his mind clearly and vociferously against the terms of the town’s charter of 1630.

    To Darryl’s amusement, the man had had no idea of the name “Lord of the Fens” and still less of any plan to drain the Fens that he might have helped anyone with. He’d certainly made himself popular among the poor of Huntingdon by what he’d publicly called the mayor of that town over the terms of the new charter, which more-or-less allowed the mayor and aldermen to help themselves to town property intended for poor relief. He’d had to apologise in privy council for his language, but the council itself had sustained his objections to the terms of the new charter and amended it. It probably hadn’t helped that he’d accepted a post as justice of the peace under the new charter to get himself a public platform to say those things. Darryl was, quietly, looking forward to twitting Miz Mailey over that one, to be sure. And learning that Cromwell had deliberately gotten inside City Hall to fight City Hall, and won, took him up a notch or two in Darryl’s estimation. That shit was tactical.

    If the absolute worst hadn’t happened, and Cromwell had enough trust in his neighbours that it hadn’t — with plenty of credit given to Divine Providence along the way, of course — the next possibility was that through sheer carelessness they’d fallen on the tender mercies of the poor-law system for the parish of St. Ives. That had the potential for real disaster: a poorhouse orphanage was a chancy proposition at best. Bridget might have been old enough to go out maintained as a needleworker in some gentry home, but little Henry and Elizabeth, who’d be six and five by now, might or might not have survived in an orphanage. Farm children in the here and now, even offspring of a gentleman farmer, had no easy life, but from there into a parish orphanage would be a terrible blow for them.

    And, while Cromwell didn’t think any of the enemies he’d made hereabouts were that petty, there was every possibility that they’d have gotten one of the less pleasant deals that the already-savage English poor law could hand out purely out of ignorance. There was even the possibility that someone, meaning well enough, would have split them up and moved them on to other parishes, or fostered them somewhere in secret, seeking to preserve their lives from a capricious monarch apparently bent on slaughtering his subjects at random. Who was to say he’d stop at the parents and one of the elder brothers? Cromwell had spent enough time as a justice of the peace, part of the administration of these things, to know that even with the best of intentions it was entirely possible to make some shockingly harsh decisions even in respect of the impotent and deserving poor. Under pressure of the need to preserve the lives of children? It would be all too easy for a man to find it in himself to do the children a little injustice now to preserve them from murder later.

    “I suppose there’s some good reason why we can’t go back, grab those two boyos and beat a bit more than a half-story out of them?”

    Welch plainly shared some, if not all, of Darryl McCarthy’s concerns in the matter. Darryl had talked to him plenty over the last couple of weeks and discovered that whatever Strafford and Cromwell might’ve done in the future, it would’ve been little more than a garnish on what was the ordinary lot of the Catholic Irish, and a fair number of the Protestant Irish who’d gone native enough to count, in this day and age. And, under the hardened and cynical mercenary exterior, there was a firebrand who’d only been dampened by recognising there wasn’t anything he could do by himself. Presented with a couple of hired thugs at the sharp end of repressing the people? They could probably tie those two goons to a chair apiece and let them listen to him and Darryl argue over who got to work them over. They’d sing like canaries out of fear.

    Stephen Hamilton had plainly figured out what was making the grin spread across Darryl’s face. “No, and don’t tell me you weren’t thinking it. It speaks well of you that it’s your first thought, Darryl, but just thundering in with your kicking boots on ain’t the right move, not yet.”

    “Oh, I figured that,” Darryl said. “I was just taking a moment to enjoy the thought.”

    “Well enough,” Hamilton said. “Mister Cromwell, who should we talk to first? While I’m with Lieutenant Welch here on the subject of beatings, I want to make sure we’re breaking the right heads.”

    Cromwell sighed. “I also. There wasn’t a lad could stand against me in singlestick at Cambridge, and the thought of giving in to the deadly sin of wrath is a sore temptation now. We must speak with Esquire Pedley. My first thought was one of the Montagus, but they’ll be taking the king’s part in all this if I’m not mistaken. Even if I am, why take the chance when there are other choices? If he has knowledge of my family’s whereabouts, then we may talk to them. I have better and closer friends, it must be said, but none so local or more likely to know what has happened here.”

    In the end, Cromwell surprised Darryl by asking him to come along to Squire Pedley’s house. “Save only this, young Mister McCarthy, hold your tongue and listen, and think on what might be said and, more importantly, not said. I know you have no love for me, so let not my distress distract you, but think on the fate of my little girls. The boys might manage for themselves, in time and by God’s grace, but this is no world for a girl-child to be alone in.” Darryl had been touched by that much trust, and had wondered aloud whether or not he’d rather have Gayle along for that.

    Cromwell had smiled ruefully. “If we are seen and ambushed, Mister McCarthy, that fine set of pistols you carry will serve well, and I shall not worry for your survival. God has granted you a strong hand, if I am any judge of such matters, and my mind will be clear to cut my own way free, sure you shall give a good account of yourself. Gayle? I should worry too much that I might lose one of whom I have become fond. I cannot bring myself to believe in my heart she would survive a scrimmage. And you don’t carry yourself like a soldier, so if we’re seen near Squire Pedley’s house you’ll not attract notice the way Leebrick or Hamilton or the others will.”

    Darryl’d nodded at the implied compliment. “Ain’t gonna argue, but I reckon Gayle’d fool you on that score.”

    They’d left it at that. They’d found a barn that a tenant farmer Cromwell only vaguely knew was willing to rent out. The wagon was there, with Gayle to make the reports in the evening’s radio window, with Leebrick, Towson, Welch and Hamilton to stand guard. Hamilton had to stay behind to make sure Vicky did, of course. Alex and Julie had ridden along part of the way and set up an ambush point just off the road to Pedley’s house. If they were attacked, that would be where they fell back to, with Julie to ensure that the assailants got the shock of their suddenly-very-brief lives. The summer evening had the sun low in the western sky, so if Darryl and Cromwell rode hell-for-leather along the road back to St. Ives their pursuers would be beautifully illuminated from Julie’s vantage. No need for signals; if they were at the gallop, whoever was chasing them was fair game.

    The precautions seemed to have been unnecessary, though. Darryl wasn’t ever going to be the horseman Cromwell plainly was, but he was comfortable enough to look around plenty. Since his role for today seemed to be “younger guy along for the ride” he felt he could get away with gawking, and played his role to the hilt. If they were being followed or watched, whoever was doing it was being subtler than he knew how to spot.

    Pedley himself turned out to be exactly what Darryl would’ve assumed if you’d said English Country Squire to him, right down to the glass of what smelt like sherry in his hand — not a small glass, either — and the buttons down his front straining to contain a truly impressive gut. “Oliver,” the man had said, without a note of exclamation in his voice, “I knew you were at large again, but it does me good to see you safe.”

    “Nicholas,” Cromwell said, “permit me to name Mister Darryl McCarthy to you, who was most solicitous of my health during my captivity and helped me to my liberty after.”

    “Pleased to meet you,” Darryl said, remembering to have his glove off before offering his hand.

    “A friend to Oliver is a friend to me,” Pedley said, shaking his hand and waving to his manservant. “Peter will have chairs and drink for you momentarily, I’m sure. Not that I think you’ll be staying long, Oliver. If that scoundrel Finnegan hasn’t eyes on this place one way or another you may call me the most startled man in Christendom. Best you be away as soon as I’ve satisfied you as to your childrens’ fate.”

    “You know?”

    “Aye, I know, and Finnegan can bloody choke on it, him with his justice’s commission with the ink wet on it and all his talk of misprision. Prison-break’s no felony if you weren’t in there lawfully in the first place, and His Royal Majesty can buy all the bench and their dogs too for all I care, it won’t change the law of the land in the matter. Be that as it may, Sir Henry saw a roof over the three little ones before that day was out, and Elizabeth and poor young Richard decently buried at St. Ives. The headstone says Bourchier, after Elizabeth’s people. They paid for the stone, once they’d heard, and thought it best not to have your name on it in case the king decided they be disinterred for ignominious burial.”

    “He’d do that?” Darryl couldn’t contain himself.

    “Why take the chance?” Pedley answered. “We knew he was all set to carry on like some French tyrant once poor Oliver here was taken. Perhaps we should have seen it coming with the refusal of parliament and all these novel imposts he kept making, but how would we know that he’d take French gold and hire foreign troops? We’ll not be caught unawares twice.”

    Darryl was getting a serious case of mental whiplash, here. He shouldn’t have, of course. Portly old Squire Nicholas, here, was exactly the kind of guy who, a few years from now, would saddle up and go to war against his own king over royal misdeeds not nearly so bad as what had actually been done. He might look like a genial old soak with his drink and a warm fire and a comfortable chair, but like Gayle, he’d fool you. Sat right there in that easy chair with his boots off, looking the very picture of Rural Conservative Gentleman, was a no-kidding revolutionary in the making. And, of course, accustomed to leadership, long- and short-term planning, the logistics of farming — not too different, in the seventeenth century, from the logistics of a military campaign — and with a keen understanding of life on the wrong side of the tracks on account of it being dragged before him for judgement on a regular basis. Darryl began to realise that there were damned good reasons why Parliament won the civil war.

    “Where are they now, Nicholas?” Cromwell was plainly having trouble keeping himself in check. “I saw that the farm I rented from Sir Henry was burnt.”

    “A bad business, that, and no mistake. Your Robert and Oliver were there, earning their keep and something for their sisters. They weren’t recognised, praise God for that mercy, but the ruffians they’d sent out to have their heads broke by some breedlings took offence at that little jape. They came back and burnt the place down. Sir Henry’s fit to be tied over it, you may count on him for all the help you might need — that farm is sixty pound a year to him, tenanted, and now he has to find for the family driven off it. He has no objection to Christian charity, but the necessity of it he blames firmly on Finnegan.”

    “So, this Finnegan?” Cromwell said, in a voice that said that he, too, was coming round to Darryl’s views on heads and the breaking thereof.

    “King’s man, by commission, but the Earl of Cork’s creature in every way that counts. Set after you when you escaped, I gather, and came here to get ahead of you. He was seen and marked for what he was, and your Robert seems to be made much of by the breedlings for your sake, so he arranged with them to set up an ambuscade out in the fens. He and Oliver the Younger were already working for the Sewsters on your old farm at St. Ives –”

    “Sewster?” Cromwell asked.

    “Yes, the same Sewsters your brother married into,” Pedley said, and launched into a rapid summary of how they’d been related, by marriage and various obscure bits of ancestry that Darryl didn’t follow, not knowing any of the names. Of course, he’d probably have been able to give a fair account in the same vein of a lot of his neighbours in Grantville and neither of these two English squires would’ve been able to follow it. Even if he never felt right at home in this part of the world, Darryl figured, he’d probably just found a bit of its culture he could understand. If it turned out they liked shooting and could keep a feud alive for generations, he’d be back as soon as he could with a truckload of gimme caps that these people plainly needed to complete their evolution into proper hillbillies.

    With the explanation finished, Pedley finished up by explaining that Finnegan had had a justice’s commission sent from London, sworn his gang of cut-throats in as constables, and begun throwing his weight about. “And you may depend on it that every worthless half-vagrant and rogue from St. Ives to Godmanchester is getting money from them. Our real constables are hearing of far less in the way of casual theft and public drunkenness. What happens when that scoundrel finally leaves them enough time to return to their former mischief I dread to think. For the time being, Robert and young Oliver are making themselves useful for Sir Henry. Good lads that they are, they’ll not take charity while they’ve strength in them. They’ve been kind enough not to burden me with knowledge of where the little ones are, and they’re all Finnegan’s asked after thus far. You know me for an incompetent in the art of lying, so I do like to be telling the truth when I deny knowing anything.”

    “I’ll have some mischief of my own to work, Nicholas,” Cromwell said, after a little smile at Pedley’s disclaimer. “I fancy you may impress on your regular constables that there are some matters they may find strike them temporarily blind?”

    “You fancy correctly, Oliver. It might be we can drag a fish or two across your trail in any event. Finnegan’s not the only one who can pay for informants, you know, and my coin spends a lot better in these parts than his. You’re not the only fugitives we have in the parish. Some fellows wanted in connection with the attempt on the king have been seen; one of Finnegan’s ruffians recognised him, a mercenary named Towson. There’s three on that warrant, him and two other soldiers returned from foreign service, and I fancy –”

    “No, Sir Nicholas. Those men are with me. Innocent of any wrongdoing in the matter of the king, the Earl of Cork sought to use them as scapegoats. It may be that they can be used to confuse the trail, but I beg of you consult with me first — if I have need of their arms to spirit my children to safety, that need will come first.”

    “Ah. I had given no orders in the matter, and you may depend on me, Oliver, depend on me entirely. Now, finish up your drinks!” Pedley rapped on his chair arm for his manservant, “Peter! Our guests’ horses to the back door, if you please, and see if any of the little birds perched in the trees are singing of unfriendly eyes about our garden.”

    It turned out there weren’t, and they took the ride back to Julie and Alex at the trot. Darryl found watching Cromwell’s smile on the way educational. It had started relieved, turned joyous, and by the time they were out of sight of Squire Nicholas’s house, positively predatory.

    He wondered what Cromwell would be praying about before bed tonight. Thanks for his childrens’ safety? Or forgiveness for his bloodthirsty thoughts? Probably both. Darryl couldn’t see where any decent god wouldn’t forgive a man in Cromwell’s position a few happy daydreams of carnage, but Cromwell felt the Almighty hewed to a higher standard of conduct in thought and deed.