1635: A Parcel of Rogues: Chapter Seven

PART II

June, 1634

    Finnegan peeled off the second boot and let his feet wave in the breeze. He’d had the innkeeper’s wife bring him a footstool for just this purpose. She’d also fetched beer, bread and cheese, and his lads were behaving themselves. Which was to the good, since he was minded to question the lady further in a short while. She’d been quite forthcoming with the news about the party that’d arrived by boat and left by cart, but there was always some other small detail one could catch in conversation.

    “D’ye have t’ do that, Finnegan?” Tully’d snagged a small barrel to sit on while he munched on a couple of apples. The inn was doing quite well out of travellers this day, it seemed. Everyone had arrived with a hunger and a thirst on him.

    “What?”

    “Have yer sweaty feet in the face of a man about his food, so?”

    “You can always sit elsewhere. Besides, it’s not good for a man to be constantly shod, nor is it. The day’s been a warm one, and what poor oul’ bog paddy likes to wear boots nor shoes?”

    “I can feckin’ tell it’s been a warm day, with the stink of you. Hold on while I move upwind, ye smelly gaimbín.” Tully matched deed to word and dragged his barrel around. “Now I’ve the sun in my eyes instead of warming my back, and all with the feet of you. I hope yer mother’s proud of the son she raised, Finnegan.”

    “Oh, hold your noise. The boyos are all fed and watered, if you’ve time to complain like an Englishman?” Finnegan relied on Tully for details like that. You’d never describe the man as scholar nor saint, but he could see to the beasts and the men alike for their comforts. “Apart from the few that’re still abroad, that is?”

    “O’Hare caught up with us a quarter-hour past. They’ve all found bedding above the stables, there’s rooms for the gentry of us in the inn, yer woman there promises a rich stirabout and dumplings for our supper at a good price for these parts, and the beer’s passable. So until Mulligan and Welch get back from Romford and we’re all together again, things are as settled as they can be.”

    Finnegan raised an eyebrow. “O’Hare’s back from Tilbury and not a word for his chieftain?”

    Tully sneered as he spat a pip across the inn’s yard. “Chieftain my puckered and sweaty ring, Finnegan. He says there was but the one boat at Tilbury, just as you said, and don’t ask him for a civil word until the aching arse of him has had a night’s rest to recover. A hard ride you sent him on, sure, and a long one. He did well to be on us this much before sundown.”

    Finnegan took a pull on his beer. “He did, at that, and I’ll excuse much for a sore arse got by hard riding. If you catch the eye of one of the family here before I do, have them tell you what’s a good spirit hereabouts and to send a half-pint of it to O’Hare, he can soothe his bruised behind at my expense. Did we find out what the craic was with whores hereabouts?”

    “Nothing to mention. I didn’t ask if there was an arrangement to be had with any of the serving girls yet, I told the boyos to get themselves and their horses fed and bedded before they unbuttoned their britches. They know the rules. Leave ’em smiling in unfamiliar country, so, or don’t leave ’em at all where they’ll be found. And we’re too busy to be hiding anything, with what we’re about.”

    “Aye. Let it be known I’ll find some pretty ones out of the earl’s pocket to amuse them when we catch these birds. Until then, nothing that’s not quick and paid for. There’s a trail to pick up, and quarry to get ahead of, romance can wait.”

    There’d been a couple of incidents before Finnegan made the rules. Only one after. He didn’t take much pleasure in disembowelling a castrated, crucified man, but he’d put his hand to the task again at need. You didn’t need to be a savage yourself to lead a crew like his, so long as they had the clear and constant notion that it was something you could do better and more imaginatively than they could if they drove you to it. Like most torai, their instinct about rules was that they were for the sheep, not the wolves. They required education in the matter, and if that took an instructive lecture over the expiring corpse of a gutted rapist, so be it. They’d take that lesson to heart where no amount of holy words would do a bit of good.

    Tully nodded. After a decent interval to separate the subjects of whoring and duty, he went on, “Will ye have a wager on where this Cromwell fellow went to?”

    Finnegan flipped a morsel of cheese — good cheese hereabouts, too — into the air and caught it in his teeth. A moment to chew and organise the thoughts that came so much better with his feet able to breathe. “I will not. For one thing, we don’t know that it was Cromwell came on this boat, for all the king’s got his arse in an uproar over the man. For another, if it is Cromwell, he’s heading for his children.”

    “You’re that sure?”

    “Would you not?” Finnegan shot Tully a sharp look. The man had a few bastards by an assortment of women, and as time and work allowed he saw most of them and cared for them in a rather negligent here’s-a-present-now-leave-your-mammy-and-me-be sort of way. He’d probably be quite irate if someone hurt one of them, even if he hardly did a thing toward their general welfare. It was something Finnegan really disapproved of, in as much as he could bring himself to care much about anything.

    His own da had been as foul a scoundrel as you could turn up in a camp of cattle-thieves anywhere, but he’d actually been attentive in his rough sort of way. He’d sold his loyalty to Boyle — scraped up enough to sell to anyone, was miracle enough — to buy an education for Finnegan himself, for starters.

    A few years paid for at the Cathedral Grammar School in Dublin had helped him enormously. Finnegan’s own sons, for the moment, were too young to need much beyond what the local hedge-school master could provide, and Finnegan made sure the man had a dry room to teach in and enough books to teach from. By happy accident it made him the big man in his home village, with a lot of respect that came in useful in seeing his own family was looked after. He sometimes wondered what it was like for everyone else, to feel that sort of thing was good, rather than just weighing it up and taking a decision. It generally ended with a little mental shrug and the conclusion that what a man never had, he never missed. He cared nothing but for getting on as far and as fast in the world as ruthlessness and a sharp blade would take him.

    Tully busied himself with a tricky bit of apple peel for a moment. “Sure, and I think I would, at that. I’m none of the best of fathers, but there’d be a reckoning if someone hurt my little ones. And God love them, they think the world of me and they’d be sad to see me put away in some castle somewhere, I’d want to let them know Daddy’d got out. I’m after thinking you’re right, so. Do we know where his children are?”

    “Ely, but that was year before last, when he got caught. They weren’t taken, but what happened after that the king’s men didn’t bother their arses over. We’ll have to find out, I think. If it’s Cromwell.” Finnegan picked up the tankard — the innkeeper had given him the good pewter, as fit the chief man of his day’s customers “And I don’t know why he’d have headed out on the road to Chelmsford, nor do I. Wrong direction altogether.”

    “A conundrum and a mystery, so it is,” Tully said. “Unless it’s as simple as this was where the wagon they wanted was left and it was the Chelmsford road or back to London and capture.”

    “Well, when we know more, we’ll know how simple it is or isn’t. For now, I’ve the sun on me, the wind in my toes, and beer to drink. I’ll take the simple pleasures when I can, Tully, and so should you.”

    “I’ll keep to taking them from upwind of the feet of you, Finnegan, whatever else may befall.”

    “As you please, Tully. Now unless Mulligan comes riding in with great news enough to not mind his sore arse, see O’Hare gets his drink and leave me be.” Finnegan reclined against the wall and let his hat tilt forward to shade his eyes.

    He’d spent the days before mostly sat in a public house in Southwark while his boyos went up and down in the world of London’s docks. They’d found plenty, just by being cheerfully ignorant paddies and micks, chatting to people, buying drinks and keeping their ears open. Most Londoners assumed that because they’d been born in the big city, and it certainly was that and smelt like it, they were three times the men and ten times the scholars that anyone from the rest of England could be, and double that for Irishmen, who were well known to all be illiterate thieving vagabond papists. To be fair, that was about two-thirds of Finnegan’s men to the life, but that didn’t mean stupid, it didn’t mean deaf, and didn’t mean not reporting to someone who was smart and well educated and thinking ferociously about how he’d do what had been done that morning. The facts that came to light were simple enough. There’d been shots, explosions within the tower and on the wall, and an explosion on London bridge. Two boats had been seen heading downriver and around the bend past Rotherhithe. After that, picking out the right boats from the general river traffic was impossible, and only a few had watched the boats all the way out of sight. Nobody around the bend in Rotherhithe had paid enough attention to pick one or two boats out of dozens.

    A look at the site of the explosion on London Bridge showed that a lot of smoke and noise had happened, but no real damage. On the one hand, it was a bomb to discourage pursuit south of the river. On the other hand, did it make sense that people clever enough to put everything else together would make a bollocks of such a vital part of the escape? Lots of possibilities. Two escaping parties, one in the boats and one not, the land party’s diversion having failed. Or, two escape routes prepared, and they all went in the boats so the bomb on the bridge had its fuse burn down to cover nothing. Or, the bomb on the bridge was the purest of misdirections, a wild gesture at an escape to the south to get the hounds running that way. The earl had sent men away on all the roads to the south, he had enough to cover everything. Finnegan’s job was to get ahead of the quarry and wait — it was a poor hunter who just chased, after all. All of those king’s men, riding the roads into dusty exhaustion, were as far as Finnegan cared just beaters.

    What decided the matter was collecting enough accounts from enough people. Nobody had really paid full attention to all of it — quite a lot of London Bridge was busy enough that people really hadn’t noticed a bomb going off four hundred yards away, or at least not enough to realise that it was important at the time. But, adding half-story to half-story, Finnegan had pieced together that whoever had placed the charge on the bridge had done it to go off barely a few minutes after the one on the outside of the tower. If it had been intended to stop pursuit after they went past, it had gone off too early and too weak. And nobody had seen any large movement of people between the Tower and the bridge at the right time. It was nearly a quarter mile; someone should have seen something if there’d been a flight that way.

    And, indeed, nobody had seen anyone leave the tower other than by boat by any other route, either. If they had, they’d done it without leaving a trace that could be followed, and Finnegan had reported as much to the earl as soon as he was sure in his own mind, sending a runner with a brief in hand. He had got men far enough down the south bank to have it clear that at some point two boats had indeed become one, and that one had gone all the way down to Chatham and taken ship there. Said ship being one of the USE’s steam-ships that Finnegan didn’t remotely understand, despite the best efforts of a sailor with a beer in him to explain. Big ship, very powerful. Enough understanding for Finnegan’s purposes. So, the escapers had got some or all of themselves away over the water. The “some” was the important bit, and Finnegan felt His Earlship would want an answer on the point. So, nothing landed on the south bank as far as he could find by sending eyes and ears as much as ten miles down, perhaps four as the crow flew, what with the river being so bendy.

    And this was why he’d spent the day at an inn table, enjoying the fine air and good ale while he read the documents the earl had given him. Wentworth would be one candidate to stay, looking to get to his political base in Yorkshire. The Mackays — and some of the shooting said Baroness Mackay had come down from Scotland — would be another, since the king’s agents knew that she’d been in Edinburgh visiting the in-laws. If she’d left, word hadn’t come down yet and reached the Earl of Cork’s spymaster, but it wouldn’t be the first time spies delivered the necessary news late or not at all.

    Cromwell. There was the one to watch. If any man had a grievance against King Charles of England and Scotland, it was he. And, as it happened, a record of looking after the people of his own home. Lord of the Fens, they called him, for his speaking, and his litigation against the king’s project to drain the marshes of that country. Well, it wasn’t like any of his boys were unused to the wet and wild places of the earth. Waterford had no bog country to speak of, except on the mountains here and there, but, well, if you were tired of rain you were tired of Ireland and the bits that weren’t bog were hard to tell from the bits that were, if you came at them in the right season. So, if anyone had split off from the party on the boats, they were going north. As witness the boat left tied up with nobody to say they’d been the owner of it longer than a day. Finnegan slightly wished he’d had the forethought to get more of a description of the boats that left the tower, but it was only a slight wish. Not a one of his boyos had more than a bull’s notion of boats or boating, so any description would have been mangled by lack of understanding. Finnegan himself had seen one or two around Dublin when he’d been there as a boy, but that was about the limit of it. It’d taken them all day to find the thing, and the word they’d had from O’Hare’s ride to Tilbury and back confirmed that this was where the smaller boat had come. Not certain, but certain enough and it fit with everything Finnegan had puzzled out already. In the morning, they’d have word back from Romford, the next town of any note along this road, and he’d decide which way to go.

    It was Welch who arrived first, come the morning, apparently having started back before dawn. After he’d had a bite of bread and a chance to duck his head in the rain-butt, he presented himself to report. “Nothing past Romford, chief, Mulligan’s casting about for sign around there. I’ve come back early to check for any good turn to another road that might be the one they took, but.”

    “Sign of them before Romford?” Finnegan realised he’d be buying another tot of spirits before the day was out, Mulligan having done more than was asked of him. That said, Mulligan was one of the smart ones, who could see that anything Richard Boyle despatched them on personally was likely to see the earl being more open-handed even than his normal generous self if there was a quick end to the matter. Either way being seen to give a reward would be the right thing to do.

    “Sure and a couple of field lads saw a wagon go by. Four horses, so it stood out. Did I hear that that was the wagon that left here?”

    “You did. Get a change of mount, that screw’s had ten miles at the trot and we’re well found for remounts, and we’ll be off in the quarter-hour, so.”

    The conclusion was pretty obvious. They’d set out for Romford and Chelmsford as a feint, probably on the spur of the moment rather than stay near the pursuit in London. Finnegan liked that, it said he was chasing men unused to pursuing or being pursued. A sensible bandit would’ve cut straight away from the main pursuit, rather than running ahead of it. Changed for faster horses — whatever was in the wagon was surely not worth capture — and changed direction again. Split and regrouped several times, anything to confuse the trail of witnesses. Just as hunting was done best by getting ahead of the quarry and waiting, flight was best achieved by not going where the hunters would be waiting. Of course, if both hunter and hunted knew that game it got very confusing very quickly and the hunter would have to fall back on hoping he had enough men to cover every possible avenue of flight.

    Not so today. The escaping party — Finnegan was still very carefully not thinking of them as Cromwell’s party — had sought to feint to the east and turned either north or south. There would be a limited number of places to do so between the last sighting Welch had reported and Romford. Which it might be was the vexed question. All of the possible motivations Finnegan could think of for a party remaining in the country instead of flying by sea said they would go north. South suggested they had a second ship and some errand had delayed them on land, to make a quieter getaway than the main party.

    Or, and this occurred to him as he mused, just as it must have to Mulligan at Romford, they’d skirted that town to carry on east with a broken trail that simply looked like a feint-and-turn. Finnegan grinned. You could never truly think your way through a tangled haystack of needles such as this, but it was fun to try and you could take bets on the outcome. “Somebody open a book!” he shouted. “I’ve got sixpence says they turned north, last road before Romford. Any takers?”

    They found Mulligan an hour later at a turning just before the town. “This way, I found a spot where someone took a heavy load over the river. If I’m any judge, they were after not being seen, and whatever they need that wagon for, they’re not done with it.”

    “And here’s me with no takers for the bet I made that they’d do just this very thing,” Finnegan said. “It fair to makes a man weep that he leads not a single idiot.”

    That got a round of chuckles. Now and then he’d lose a bet like that one, but not often enough that anyone cared to take the wager without serious long-shot odds. A few of the smarter boyos had caught on to it being a polite, pleasant, method of suggesting the boss was wrong, and Finnegan was careful to listen. After all, an opinion a man was willing to put money on was an opinion he’d thought about. Finnegan liked thought, it paid well. And more than once he’d put a man where he could get a feather in his cap for “checking to see if his fool’s wager would pay,” and the good-natured codding was worth it for the credit he could take when reporting to the earl.

    “The sign on the riverbank says yesterday afternoon, if there wasn’t rain overnight, so I fancy they’re after moving as quick as they can with that wagon. Will we go straight after them?”

    Finnegan thought about it. In their boots he’d have kept moving into the night and looked for a change of horses somewhere, which would cost them given the cheap nags they’d had, and that in turn would leave a trace. Also in their boots he’d have taken a few roads off the line they wanted and come at their intended target — either Ely, for Cromwell’s kin and children, or a cut west at some convenient road to get back to the Great North Road and the way to Scotland. It’d be slow work picking up some sense of where they were going, and at this point a wrong guess would be disastrous. Whatever else might befall, a company of stout lads with plenty of cash and remounts could be halfway to Scotland by this time on the morrow, so as soon as their quarry — only probably Cromwell, remember — settled on a destination then a short, hard ride would see them in a proper ambush position. Making that ride too soon would cost them the chase entirely.

    “We will not. Find us a farrier in your town, there, and we’ll see the horses’ feet are good while I talk to whoever knows the roads here. We’ll have a plan, so, and not go at the thing like a bull at a gate. Tully, see to it while Mulligan here shows me the tracks on this riverbank.”