1635: A Parcel of Rogues: Chapter Eight

    “Top of the morning!” Finnegan knew as well as any man how to come the cheery Irishman. It certainly did better than what most of the folk here across the water thought about his countrymen. In a lot of cases, of course, they were right, but letting that get in the way while he was about his chief’s business was not to be borne. “And how might you be this fine morning?”

    “Right enough,” said the thatcher whom they were overtaking. The fellow had a cart full of rushes, which apparently was the thing for roofs hereabouts. To Finnegan they looked odd; he was used to seeing straw, both at home and in the parts of England he’d seen so far. English roofs looked a little different without the layer of turf scraw he was used to seeing, but that was about the limit of it. The reed roofs were somehow less bulky and looked like they’d not be as warm in bad weather. It was a measure of how tedious the last week of riding up and down every bastard road in eastern England had been that he was thinking about roofs, of all things.

    “Can ye say what town is that, up ahead?” Finnegan asked the man.

    “Bishop’s Stortford, but there’s no market there today, if it’s horses you’re after. Some good inns, though.”

    “That’ll do,” Finnegan said. “We’re well found for horses. Do you know how much further Ely is from there?”

    “Ely? Can’t rightly say. It’s over past Cambridge, if I do recall rightly, but Cambridge is as far as I’ve been that way, and that when I were but a boy. Ask in town for Cambridge, and ask in Cambridge for Ely, would be my advice to you, sir. Have you room to pass, there?”

    “Sure we’ve enough, and it’s a fine day for a slow ride. One more thing, mind. Have you seen a lot of travellers, maybe a dozen, perhaps less, travelling with a four-horse wagon?”

    “No, sir. If I had I’d ask you for a penny for the tale, but I don’t even know anyone who owns such a wagon that’d be about with it at this time of year. Not a lot going even to the small markets about now, let alone up to London such as you’d take a wagon for. Now, I know a squire over by Much Hadham, he’d a fancy to go to parliament and nothing would do but he got a two-horse coach to go in.” The thatcher laughed uproariously. “Bless the poor fellow, the year after he came back down from parliament, there’s never been another one since, and he’s never used his coach again but to go to church of a Sunday.”

    “Ah, but there’s no rare ould fool like a fool with land and money to his name, I’m thinking,” Finnegan said, horribly aware that he’d shortly be faced with choice between more of this or stabbing the culchie in the cart. The stabbing was looking awful attractive, at that. But, no.

    “Well, I’ve business of my master’s to be about, so I’ll bid ye good day.” With that, he urged his horse out of the walk.

    A half mile down the road, Tully nudged his mount up alongside as Finnegan let his own come back to the walk, safely out of reach of further rural anecdote. “No use, then?”

    “But that we’ve reached our final marker, no.” Finnegan let that hang a moment, and then, “Is it me or is this country full of fucking amiable amadáin? Back home they’d have been just as cheerful, but we’d’ve been lied clear out of the fucking county, worse if we’d offered money.”

    Tully shrugged, “They don’t see trouble, nor do they. Such as us could do well in country this soft, had we a mind. Or if His Lordship ever falls on hard times and we have to shift for ourselves.”

    “That we could, but for now we’ve a purse and a task. And I think it’s time to go to the next part of it. We’ve missed them, do you not think?”

    “They’ve made a turn we missed. With twenty men, there’s much we’ve not seen. Or we missed the one fellow who saw which way they went. Do you still think Ely?”

    “I do, at that. We got nothing to the west, not at all. That says they don’t want the North Road, and that means not Yorkshire and not Scotland, not for their first. They’ve kept the wagon, too, and God love them for it. Everyone that saw it remembered it.”

    Tully tossed his head. “Whoever planned this wasn’t a country boy, that’s for sure. I don’t think I saw a wagon before I was ten, at all. It says they’re after a long trip, though, or a heavy load.”

    “I think a long trip, before they’re done. That wagon’s been mithering of me, while I think on who it is we’re after. Does it not seem to you that there’s nothing to say it’s just Cromwell, or just Wentworth, or just the Mackays?”

    Tully gave that some thought, taking a moment to get his hat off and the wind through his thin and sandy hair. “Now that you say it out loud, nothing at all. All three? Or which two? And are we to open a book for this?”

    Finnegan laughed. “It could be that we should. See what odds the boyos give, maybe one of them has thought of something we haven’t?”

    “Wouldn’t be the first time, rare though it is. I’ll pass the word when we get bedded down. We wait at this Bishop’s Stortford, then?” The two of them were speaking Irish between themselves, there being no English ears around to mark them as foreigners. They’d long since discovered that most people assumed their accents were simply from a distant part of England. One fellow in London had been sure they were all from Lancashire. Finnegan had been there, briefly, having come over from Ireland via Liverpool, and been forced to conclude that the fellow had never met a Lancastrian or some other Irishman had told him the lie to avoid being damned for a papist savage. The English place names sounded funny in the stream of Irish, to Finnegan’s ear, especially the way Tully tended to mangle them; there were lads who could switch from one tongue to the other easily, but not Tully. He needed a pause between one language and another, as if his brain had to change horses, stopping for a piss the while.

    Finnegan nodded, and then added: “Until all the boys are back in, and then we’ll send a few to York to cover the Great North road, I think O’Hare, while the rest of us head for Ely and try and track down Cromwell’s wee ones. And there should be letters from His Earlship waiting for us in town, he should have a man there waiting for us. Unless someone’s been lucky and caught sight of our prey, that is.”

    “Okay, let’s see how she goes.” Darryl was laid under the wagon, watching the suspension bars he’d made and fitted over the last day. He’d put a couple of tracks of broken bricks, small branches, and general trash in the way of the wheels to see how they handled it, and Cromwell, as it turned out far and away the best wagon-driver among them, as befit a farmer, urged the horses on.

    Some minutes later, Cromwell came back to find Darryl still on the ground, beaming happily. “Totally worked. Let’s go back and show off to the ladies.”

    Cromwell reached down to give him a hand up. “The ride is much smoother, and I fancy the nags found it less effort. Will we tell Colonel Mackay that it was a Scotsman’s invention?” Cromwell’s grin was impish. Hard-core fundamentalist Puritan he might be, but he had a barbed, dry wit. And truthfully, it seemed the closer they got to Scotland, the prouder Alex became of his homeland.

    “He’ll claim it for them anyway, I reckon,” Darryl answered, deadpan for deadpan, “so it’s not like we’d be sparing him any effort. Besides, having the Scotsman’s invention in there meant I really couldn’t put Ackerman steering in there, and that’s an Austrian or a German invention, I think. Sounds like it, anyway. Or an American with folks in that part of the world, I guess. There’s definitely a way to do both at the same time, most automobiles have both, but without one to copy, I don’t know enough geometry to just make one up. Suspension linkages just have to be strong enough and have enough springs in ’em.”

    “Aye, once I saw the model you made, the principle was clear enough. I’ve no great mechanical learning, but the geometry is easy enough with what my schoolmaster beat into me.”

    “Yep. One of those ideas, when you see it, you kick yourself you didn’t think of it first. Took a genius like Watt to think of it at all. I’m glad, now, I spent all that time listening to the steam nuts right after the Ring of Fire, they’re a goldmine of useful stuff like this. I thought I understood autos before, from tinkering and such, but those guys, they could blow a guy away with the theory. Thing was, he didn’t invent that for suspension, it just turned out useful that way. Father Mazzare told me all the things you could find it in once, he musta gone on a quarter hour with it all. The only one I recognised was the suspension arms, which I could take apart and put back together before, but now I understand ’em well enough I can build a simple one like this.”

    “It is, as you say, ‘cool’,” Cromwell said, “and so easy to hide.”

    “Yep. She still don’t look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, now.”

    “Right enough,” Cromwell said. “God be praised.” He took himself off a ways to kneel and say a prayer to, Darryl assumed, that effect.

    Darryl himself didn’t bother much with praying, being at most a Christmas, Easter, weddings-and-funerals kind of guy when it came to church, and Cromwell didn’t seem to be pushing it on him. Gayle took that moment to wander into the empty ground out the back of the inn that they were using to test the repaired wagon.

    “So, is he praying thanks for a successful test?” she asked quietly.

    “That, and James Watt in general, I think. It works just fine. And we went back to plain wooden axles. Sticking a reinforcing rod down ’em is what broke the one we lost. There’s bearings in the wheels, and a lot more wood in there now, so I don’t think we need worry so much. And I got that old geezer to cut us a spare set of everything.”

    Their first weeks on the road had been utterly frantic. Every sight of horsemen on their back trail had sent them picking random turns off the course they wanted. Alex and Julie had taken turns with their scopes and binoculars, staying behind to watch for pursuit and galloping forward whenever they saw horsemen. Four days of that and they’d made sure they were unobserved as they manhandled the wagon and load up a narrow track to camp in a small coppice. They’d run into an old bodger there, damned near incomprehensible over his treadle-lathe, but surprisingly hospitable with his campsite that he shared with a small crew of charcoal burners, whose smoke was fine cover. Cromwell had spoken quietly but urgently with the men when the horsemen — they’d long passed the stage of suspicion by then and knew they were being tracked — appeared nearby. Whoever they were, though, they’d taken one look at the narrow track from the main road and assumed that no wagon was going up that. Of course, it damned near hadn’t, and Towson was still nursing bruises from where they’d accidentally rammed him into a hedge with the wagon bed while lugging it between four up to the campsite. They’d been more careful coming down, two days after the horsemen had left, and being at that point thoroughly lost, aimed for ‘generally north’.

    Both Darryl and Gayle had privately agreed that what England really needed was someone to completely rebuild its road network, someone who actually understood the concept of straight lines and right angles. Roads that maintained the same direction for more than fifty yards at a time, and preferably aligned neatly with the cardinal points of the compass. And, as the roadside vegetation grew apparently by the hour as spring hit its peak and summer made its presence felt, Darryl quietly thought a few planeloads of Agent Orange would be right handy. The natives — Alex and Patrick assured him that the roads in Scotland and Ireland were, if anything, even twistier — didn’t mind the lack of straight lines so much, but the fact that even standing up in the wagon bed visibility was half a mile at best across the rapidly-greening countryside was getting to them. The occasional milestone would have helped if they’d had a map that even showed these tiny hamlets and villages; knowing that you were half a mile from Creeting St. Mary did you not a damned bit of good if, when you got there, it turned out even the inhabitants didn’t have a clue where they were.

    For the best part of ten days they’d wandered lost in the wilderness of Hertfordshire, Suffolk and, later, Norfolk. As near as Darryl could figure it, Hertfordshire was reasonably dry and comprehensible, Suffolk was wetter and a bit less comprehensible, and Norfolk averaged ankle-deep in fen with an option on bottomless and if it wasn’t for Cromwell translating the local accent and dialect, they’d not have had a chance. Gayle had remarked that it sounded like they’d been taxed their every last consonant by the king.

    They’d manage to replace the horses, one by one, depleting their money in the process as they went; they’d proven beasts of stamina and absolutely damn all else. They had one pace, dead slow, but they could keep it up more or less forever. Eventually they had everyone mounted and the wagon pulled by somewhat more decent draught animals that could maybe be ridden in a pinch, and were making progress having finally picked up the Ipswich-Norwich road. Wildly off course, but at least they had a grasp of where they were and Cromwell was now within forty miles of his home country. Darryl now clearly understood why that counted as a long way hereabouts.

    Of course, that’d been too much for the Demon Murphy to tolerate, and they’d broken down about a mile short of Diss, when the clever reinforcement of the axles turned out to be too clever, and the front offside had decided to separate into wood and iron. That meant a pair of new axles, but it seemed Diss was a town of some note hereabouts, possibly having a population of as many as a whole thousand. It even had a market square, proudly named as such despite being triangular, although by this time Darryl was past being surprised by the wild disregard for geometry the English countryfolk seemed to have. There was also a really big lake the townsfolk were quite proud of, a carpenter’s shop, a farrier, and, the Friday after they arrived, a market where they could pick up a healthy supply of what was in season to pack for the road. Mostly greens and the last of the over-wintered roots among the things that would keep, but there were plenty of eggs, a few assorted poultry they could keep caged on the wagon for eggs until they got barbecued, and a flitch of bacon that was nearly as big as Vicky. Darryl figured he’d investigate the greens right after the bacon and eggs ran out; for the time being they were doing all right eating at the inn. It was variations on stew and dumplings, mostly, since none of the really fresh crops were in yet, but it filled a hole.

    “So,” Gayle said, “are we good to go tomorrow?”

    “Pretty much. Any word from back home?” Part of the torment of being lost in Norfolk had been, whenever they found the privacy and the right conditions to radio back in, was the mockery that the radio-room geeks engaged in. Turned out you could get a lot of sarcasm into sixty seconds of Morse, and Gayle used it all in every return volley. There wasn’t much she could report except to confirm they weren’t dead yet, but she never failed to point out that there was damn all Magdeburg could do to help or advise, so they could stuff it.

    “Nothing significant. Word from Amsterdam is that the Warders and their folks have gotten settled in with Becky and Mike as more or less their private security, so that’s nice to see.”

    Darryl nodded. That had been a bit of a concern for him. Stephen Hamilton, the patriarch of the group of Yeoman Warders who’d helped them escape from the Tower, had come along as being up for one last adventure before he had to retire, and to watch over his niece-by-courtesy Vicky, who wasn’t going to let Darryl out of her sight if she could help it. But the rest of them had had to up stakes and leave their homeland. Darryl knew their monarch had betrayed them first, but there was no way any king of England was ever going to see it that way, so they’d never be able to come home. And the position of a royal military elite, which was what the Yeoman Warders really were at this time, was always going to be a ticklish one after they defected. Mike had solved it.

    “Good. Have you told Stephen and Vicky yet?”

    “They were right there with me when the messages came in. Vicky’s getting pretty good at helping out, and Stephen doesn’t mind pedalling as it gets him out of spending all day down by the mere fishing with the other boys.”

    Darryl chuckled. “They catch anything yet?”

    “Nope.”

    “Guess that fuss was over nothing, then.”

    “Guess so. Although I figure they’d do better if they had bait on them lines.”

    Darryl snorted again. Towson, Leebrick and Welch had decided that, lacking any better way to occupy their time, they’d enjoy the fresh air of what was shaping up to be a fine English summer down by the mere, relaxing. A few lunchtime ales, and they decided to cut ash poles, hunt up some string and hooks, and go fishing. Their reaction to being told they couldn’t had involved big smiles and cocked pistols, which they assured everyone they were carrying because the pike in some of these village ponds could grow to monstrous sizes. There’d been grumbling over that until one of the sharper-eyed locals had spotted the lack of bait, and Darryl, to whom the three mercenaries had been a bit of an unknown quantity, had let out the breath he’d been bating. Slightly loopy behavior due to mild boredom he could well understand. Hell, cooped up in the Tower of London all those months, he’d agreed to get married, for Christ’s sake.

    Getting those boys on the road before they started on the practical jokes would be a fine thing. And here came Cromwell, his prayers done for the moment. “Oliver,” Darryl said, “any advance on Thetford as our next stop?”

    “Nay. I know the way from there, and from here ’tis but fifteen miles of high road, a peddler who came from there was here this morning and firmed it in my mind. We shall be there on Wednesday, if we start early morning. Thereafter, three, perhaps four days to Ely, for there is no straight road.”

    “I’m kinda looking forward to what counts as not straight in roads hereabouts,” Gayle remarked, earning a grin from Cromwell.

    “Aye, the roads are crooked, Gayle, but the hearts are straight enough.”

    “Aaaand I’ll leave you guys to it,” Darryl said, heading over to where the horses were awaiting attention. “I’ll get one of the stable guys to give me a hand with the horses. You go take a walk in the sunset.”

    “Darryl?” Gayle called after him, “What’s it worth to keep that nice streak you got quiet?”

    He blew a raspberry and flipped her off, which didn’t offend anyone hereabouts. Doing it with two fingers, now, that could get you in trouble. One finger was catching on as a friendly get-outta-town-you gesture, since nobody hereabouts had ever seen it except as between friends. Some liberal-arts professor in about a hundred years’ time was going to come through here documenting folk gestures and get really, really weirded out.

    Of course, the nice streak came with a price, but what the hell, he’d already earned his beers today. Be good to earn a couple more. And the inn had a nice little nook next to the fireplace where the innkeeper’s wife figured he and Vicky looked so sweet, she’d bring them a little jug of mulled sack as a nightcap. And, yes, they had a room to themselves. Darryl was, all things considered, very well disposed to notions of romance right at the minute.

    And would remain so as long as the rubbers held out.