1635: A Parcel of Rogues: Chapter Nine

    “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Mulligan was busily kicking in the wattle walls of the tiny house, bellowing his rage at the innocent timber and daub.

    Finnegan had to admit that, crude as the sentiment was, he could see the point of it. They’d come on the place just before dawn, barely a murmur in the morning dew. Every man in Finnegan’s band had got his start as a livestock thief in country far better guarded than this. Or at least, far better guarded than they thought this was.

    They’d taken their time around Huntingdon, split up, tried not to act like an organised search party, watched carefully until they got the right place — old hand off Cromwell’s farm, right part of the world, right ages of children, answering the meagre descriptions they had. Questions, innocent enough, were asked and answered wherever folk grew expansive over their beer.

    Finnegan himself had found and talked to a man who’d worked for Cromwell on the farm he rented out toward St. Ives a way, and visited the place. New tenants now, it seemed, and they’d been perfectly happy to talk with him about the famous fellow who’d been hauled away the year before last.

    More questions, more patient watching, more careful hiding of the attachment of one group of men to another. Finnegan had made sure, or so he thought, that no one lot of them looked like they were getting close. It would take a cunning fellow to add up all that was being seen and learnt and deduce that they were getting closer day by day to whoever had given Cromwell’s children shelter.

    He’d even let two groups of the lads blow off steam in a tavern brawl one night, trying to make a show of them being rival groups of mercenaries after the same bounty. If it looked like they were working across each other, they might not scare away their prey. Finnegan and Tully had laughed together at how over-careful he was being as he finally narrowed the search step by step to a fensman’s cabin seven or eight miles out of town down the local river, the Great Ouse it was called, and into the edges of the real fens.

    Slipping by night through the fringes of the fen country, boggy as it was, proved no great hardship. The height of the growth, even this early in the summer, would have covered regiments.

    Finnegan had been sure he’d had the place properly surrounded, and blown his whistle as soon as he could be sure of enough light to rush the house properly. With the door kicked in and the place surrounded, five men in, and seven to stand watch around would be enough to make sure nobody showed fight. The last thing he wanted was dead children; corpses were poor hostages and wonderful for provoking a man to revenge, so every man had gone in with bata in hand in place of sword or pistol. A cracked head would put the fight out of a man or woman and wouldn’t kill a child, and he’d sent in the five best stick-fighters in the band.

    Except it had turned out that whoever had been left inside that hut had had a gun, a dubious-looking old matchlock, probably a fowling piece older than its owner. The ambush-party-of-one had let drive with a load of bent nails, chips of gravel and cheap, sulphurous powder and then run in the confusion. It was a miracle that nobody had lost an eye to the thing; O’Halloran was missing a tooth and a piece of moustache where one of the bits of stone had taken him in the top lip.

    That had been the signal for slingers — slingers! in this day and age! — to rise from the undergrowth and start pelting Finnegan’s men with rocks. Even the smaller ones had been enough to raise painful welts through buff-coats. There were a couple of broken fingers and Tully wouldn’t be seeing much out of his left eye nor standing up without an attack of dizziness for a week or two. A volley of stones, and the slingers had vanished altogether. How they’d done that in very near plain sight was between them and the devil, that was for sure.

    Finnegan had had his lads out into the smallholding that surrounded the cabin, and beyond into the fens all morning and half the afternoon, but caught sight of nobody. From time to time a stone would hurtle out of nowhere and knock one of them arse-over-end into the muck. No smoke, no noise, just sudden pain. Occasionally they’d catch sight of some ragged figure whirling his sling. Of course, they’d be vanished by the time anyone reached the spot. Finnegan had, eventually, fallen them back on the cabin.

    “Sure and we were spotted coming,” Tully said, holding a wet kerchief to the side of his head, the linen slightly pink where the cut was still oozing. “And we should’ve brought helmets and breastplates.”

    “Spotted before that,” Finnegan growled. “They’re not as soft nor as foolish as we fooled ourselves they were. Burn this. We lay up and wait for Cromwell back near town. He’s to come here to start finding his children, we’ll have him then.”

    Finnegan wasn’t one who gloried in the wreck and destruction of war, but there was a satisfaction in watching the cabin go up, the thatch tinder-dry in the warm breezes of summer. It might’ve been a little more fun to do it at night, but you took your entertainment where you found it.

    “Mulligan!” Finnegan called the man over. With O’Hare up at York, and no word from him yet, Mulligan was his best for sending off for independent action. “Take six fellows and get over to Cromwell’s old farm and put that to the torch as well. Turn out the people before you burn it, it’s them that led me here, so it must be them that warned of us. See Cromwell’s friends suffer for aiding him. I want that man with no safe place when he comes here.”

    Mulligan frowned. “We’ve to leave witnesses alive? Arson, that they hang a fellow for?”

    Finnegan waved it aside. “I’m away to find a justice of the peace. I’ve a letter of commission from the king, given me by the earl. He’ll not have constables after us for what’s done at the command of the king, not without us being able to go before a court, at least. I’ve money for lawyers and the king has more, to attend that matter for us. Even if they can find a judge who’ll hear it quickly, we can be gone before it comes to gaols and rope. Just see there’s no dead, a hue and cry for murder we don’t need at all.”

    “I’ll be about it. Consider the place burnt before sundown.” Mulligan turned to pick his usual cronies for such things, and Finnegan left him to it. Now he thought on the matter, there were other things a king could commission besides a manhunt. Was it the king who appointed constables, or the justices? Or, and here was a simple next step for you, get himself appointed justice of the peace for this locality and the boyos — or at least the smarter of them — as constables and he could go about his manhunt with no need for lawyers at all. For, when all was said and done, prison-breaking, escape and rescue were all felonies, and all of the concealment that was going on was misprision. If he got a commission as justice of the peace he could arrest, and sentence for that himself. The fines would help cover his expenses, and the threat of a whipping, branding or the pillory might loosen a few tongues. The earl would like that as a solution, since he’d complained bitterly about the lawyers and the courts hampering things he wanted to do. Finnegan could turn that on its head and make them regret all their careful precedent and argument while it served the king’s need.

    “You look like you’re thinking,” Tully said, still with the cloth clamped to his head. “And not about anything pleasant, either.”

    “Nor am I,” Finnegan replied. “I think some of you boyos are going to have to be constables for a time.”

    Tully laughed, a bark before he stopped, wincing. “Don’t make jokes, man, my head’s fit to murther me. This lot, constables?”

    “Constables. There’s a lot of blather in this land about tyranny, Tully, and I think it’s time they learned the meaning of the word from Irishmen, that know it.” Finnegan stamped his soggy boots to try and fit them a little better. “I’ll pay a call on a squire or two this evening after I’ve sent to the earl for the commission I’ll need. We’ll see how badly the king wants this Cromwell brought to justice for his prison-breaking, when the earl asks him to commission a lot of torai as constables and their chief as a justice of the peace.”

    Tully barked again and winced, and the other boyos around laughed too. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Finnegan, have mercy on a wounded man. It’s like a spike in my head to laugh right now. You, a fuckin’ justice of the peace?”

    Finnegan grinned. “Let’s be back to that fleapit we’re staying in, I’ve letters to write.”

    He spent the afternoon in the taproom of the Falcon in Huntingdon composing his letter to the earl. He didn’t think he’d have to argue too hard to get himself appointed as a justice; the mere fact that it would jam sideways in the throat of every one of the country gentlemen who got in the way of the king’s plans for the country would be argument enough. Still and all, he’d learned proper rhetoric in the grammar school and it wasn’t in him to make less than the best case he could.

    Mulligan returned just about as he was done, smelling faintly of smoke and grinning. “Sure and it felt good to do that, fair put me in mind of us getting evicted when I was a little boy. I ran the family off from town a ways, since I thought you’d want to get to the justices before they did.”

    “You thought right, Mulligan, and before you sit down to your supper after a good day’s work, you get to pick who rides back to London with my letters to the earl. Charge him to bring back an answer as quick as he can.”

    Mulligan nodded and took the packet, and Finnegan set out to see the local justice.

    “Mister Pedley, Esquire, I presume,” Finnegan said, when he was let in to the man’s house.

    “I am,” said the old fellow who’d risen from his seat by the fire to greet his visitor, “and who might you be?”

    “William Finnegan, of County Waterford, in service to the Earl of Cork and His Majesty the king, squire. I’ve fetched my letter of commission for you to see. I’m after the man that broke out of the Tower of London last month, and I’ve cause to believe he’ll come here within the next few days.”

    “I’d heard talk of questions being asked. You’re in charge of that lot of Irishmen about town, then?”

    “They are indeed my sworn men, sir, and in the course of executing my commission this morning two of them were wounded. By the grace of God and His providence, sir, not grievously, but I’m after laying information before you all the same as soon as I have names to give. There’s also the matter of me and my men being given false information regarding the fugitive, sir, and so soon as I can find time to furnish full particulars there’s information to be laid in that matter too. In furtherance of my commission” — he paused to lay the document on the side table beside Pedley’s chair, noting the while that he’d not been invited to sit at all — “I exacted punitive measures on those most directly responsible for the misprision, sir.”

    Pedley regarded him levelly. “Am I to understand that this commission, sir, is like to the French carte blanche?”

    Finnegan reached the obvious conclusion that here was a man who’d have been for parliament in the future that never was. “I’d know nothing of the French, sir,” he said. “It is a plain commission from the king to take a felon and a traitor in flight wheresoever he may be found. And if you care to tell me, sir, that when he was arrested he was no felon, by his prison-break he became one.”

    Pedley harrumphed. “I dare say there’s a lawyer who’d make a pretty mess of that case, and likely another who’d make a pretty present of it. My duty, sir, is to keep the peace, and since I hear not a quarter hour since that your brigands have burnt a farmhouse and barn, showing mercy only to the lives of the family therein, I have to wonder what best to do for that duty. And now you tell me the king commands it? That’s a color for your actions, sir, but not the color of law.”

    Finnegan smiled gently. “I am in pursuit of a felon and a traitor, sir. Hot pursuit, if you will, for all I’ve got ahead of my man. And while it may be that there’s a bench somewhere that might convict me for my actions, I’m told His Majesty is much fond of exercising his prerogatives, one of which is the prerogative of pardon. Things would have to change greatly in London before I’ll face gallows or gaol for anything I might do short of murder in my commission, sir.”

    “I suppose, in these times, a man should be grateful for fair warning before the royal tyranny buggers him again?” Pedley’s tone was acid, sour and sharp. Finnegan had to give him credit; he had an armed man in his home explaining that he’d been given license to do all short of killing and he wasn’t acting the craven.

    “Ah, now tyranny I understand, sir, and tyranny this is not. Rough and ready justice for a traitor and a felon, and all those who aid him, but not tyranny.” He was careful to keep his tone soft. He knew what had happened to his country under the plantations, and had some idea of what would have happened to it over the next few years. For his own part, he cared nothing for it, so long as he and his suffered little or nothing. But it struck him as monstrous that this fat old fool in his fine warm house with, yes, his bottle of sack, could complain of tyranny. “I’ll take my leave of you, sir, and ask you to expect my information laid within the week. In the meantime I await further commands from the king.”

    “As you say. See yourself out, commissioner,” Pedley said, handing the king’s letter back to Finnegan unread. “I’m sure I’ll be hearing more from and about you.”

    “Just until I have my man in hand, squire Pedley, just until I have my man in hand.”

    Tully was waiting outside, minding the horses. There might be a surprising lack of thievery hereabouts, but old habits died hard. “From the face of you I take it that went as poorly as could be expected?”

    Finnegan shrugged. “We knew the Cromwells were a big family hereabouts, and before he was arrested our man was making himself popular with the bog folk. Something about drainage schemes, as I recall. Seems he was a known man with the gentry as well, because that man wouldn’t have given me the steam off his turds without I had the king’s letter in my hand. Which he troubled not to read, mark you.”

    Tully snorted. He’d stopped groaning hours before, so Finnegan supposed the buffet to his head wasn’t so bad as all that. “The talk of you after you’ve spoken to gentry is always such a delight to hear, so.”

    Finnegan rolled his eyes. “I had the learning of it at school, it never leaves a man. And it pays to talk to the bastards the way they expect or you’re just another fucking bog-trotter they can safely ignore, king’s letter or no king’s letter. Well, we’ve been handed a fine opportunity to shove the bog firmly up their arses, one way or another, doubled if the earl persuades the king. More than one of the boyos will welcome the chance to have at the Saxons, torai though they be. It’s one thing to have your countrymen to chase you for the sake of stolen cattle, quite another to be run off your land by foreign soldiers for the sake of other foreigners.”

    Memories of the confiscations and plantations of colonists after the Nine Years’ War were still raw. Boys who’d grown up dirt poor, paying hard rent on good land their grandfathers had owned — in some cases were still around to complain bitterly about — could and did turn to thieving to keep body and soul together. Caught, and offered a pardon by the earl, they carried on as the enforcers of the order that had broken their families. It put money in a man’s pocket, but in the small hours of the night he could be excused a certain amount of resentment. Oh, indeed, there’d be some relish in getting the whip hand over the Saxons. Tully, for example, was from around Kinsale. His grandfather had died the year after the siege there was broken, driven off his land entirely for plantation as punishment for a rebellion he’d had no part in, or so he insisted. Tully’s father had fought through the courts for years to recover the land, only to have the title he’d recovered called into question because he was a Catholic. He’d gotten something of a price for it from the earl, who’d been plain Richard Boyle back then, and probably more than he’d have had from any other buyer. The poor old fool had been pathetically grateful.

    The younger Tully had been less impressed with the deal, but he could at least see that Boyle was the best of a bad lot among plantationers — he’d got his first stake in Ireland by marrying an Irish lady, or at least one of the Old English, who’d come over in peace and settled. The fact that he’d been imprisoned several times on suspicion of aiding the rebel side in the Nine Years’ War helped, too.

    That had never impressed Finnegan overmuch. Any man on the rise as Boyle had been would make enemies, and collusion with rebels and foreigners was a useful handful of mud to throw at such.

    Still, Tully was grinning in the last light of the day. “That will be a true nightmare for the Saxons, to be sure. An Irishman with a constable’s warrant set over them? We’ll have to hold their reins tight, so we will.”