1635: A Parcel of Rogues: Chapter Sixteen

    Earith

    “So that’s the Dutchman’s ditch, is it?” Tully looked down from the bridge. Away in the distance, to perhaps half a mile, there was a small settlement of tents and behind that there were earthworks stretching away; from the look of the thing it was more like a pair of embankments than a ditch. “I don’t envy the poor bastards digging in that boggy shite, nor do I.”

    “We’ve to talk to the poor bastards, you can ask them what the life is like,” Finnegan answered. “Best way to be sure of who’s causing trouble is to ask the folk who’re being troubled.”

    “And if they’ll not answer?”

    “Trouble them.”

    In the end, there wasn’t any difficulty in getting the various overseers and so on to talk. Mister Lien, the man-in-charge, wasn’t around today and Finnegan could see why not. Canal-building seemed to consist of mud, and lots of it, being carted from place to place by a small horde of laborers. Everyone else had plenty to say, mostly on the subject of mud, but occasionally on the subject of the fensmen who had all manner of clever tricks to play to interfere with the works. Tools stolen, diggings filled back in, cuttings made over the preceding winter in an attempt to flood the works, cart wheels smashed and a whole series of other petty annoyances. Several of the clerks who were on site grumbled about the cost of hiring watchmen.

    None of them could put a finger on precisely where the fensmen were based out of, but they were all agreed that there was a positive nest of agitation in Ely. In as much as there was a definite grievance — beyond objecting to the earl of Bedford enriching himself — it was that the change in the Great Ouse navigation would cut Ely off from passing trade, and the increased drainage would turn the fens that the fensmen of that vicinity made their living from into summer-land, pasture that only flooded in winter.

    Finnegan waved his commission around a little. The wording of the thing was vague enough that he could use it to elbow his way into the works, follow their line and go hunting for the fensmen and he made sure that he was heard stating he was going to do so. Let him once grab one or two of those and squeeze them a little, they’d get somewhere, and if trailing a little bait to get them to come to him worked, so much the better. The clerks of works were a little disgruntled that the earl of Bedford, whose land this was, hadn’t already sent someone in to investigate the trouble they were having, and Finnegan commiserated heartily. Wasn’t it always the way, that the man in charge didn’t care for the poor souls doing the work? Still, he was here now, with the king’s commission and all, and taking care of business.

    “We’ll be a while nosing around here,” Tully remarked after they’d gone back for luncheon at Earith’s meagre alehouse. “A lot of ground to search, and plenty of it to hide in. Remember the trouble we had last time?”

    “I do at that,” Finnegan said, chasing the last scrap of his stirabout with a hunk of bread, “but what of it? From what Steward said yesterday, he’s found his children and means to be a bandit here until he can raise a rebellion. He’s got to get us off his back, and that means he’ll come to us.”

    Tully grinned. “I get to smiling every time I think of that, so I do. The English, rebelling? Who the fuck will they find for the plantation of them when it fails? The Welsh?”

    “Maybe his noble Earlness will move us all over here?” Truth to tell, Finnegan thought that was pretty funny too. “We’ve still a tricky cross-country ride ahead of us. Plenty of daylight, good weather. We’ll have our plates and helmets on, too, whatever the heat. Those slingstones hurt like the devil.”

    “They did at that. I’ll see the lads all have their water-flasks full, they’ll be sweating like pigs.” That was, of course, why most cavalrymen preferred a buff coat and a soft hat for riding, and even left the buff off if they weren’t expecting trouble. The sturdy leather of a buff was at least good protection without broiling the poor bastard wearing it alive, which a horseman’s cuirass was prone to do in the sunshine. The linen lining ended up drenched in sweat, which was cooling in itself. For helmets, a few of the boyos had old-fashioned morions, still popular in Munster by reason of being cheap — the Spaniards who fled after the Nine Years’ War had left plenty of them behind — but most of them had picked up German zischagge-style cuirassier’s helmets that provided plenty of protection and were, for helmets, fairly comfortable. Most of their armor had come from at least a short spell of service with the Imperial forces in the German wars and were munition-chest quality at best, but Finnegan had spent the money to get a good one made in London by one of the armorers who supplied the trained band companies. If ever there was a fool’s bargain and a false economy, Finnegan reasoned, cheap armor was the one.

    They made easy progress during the course of that afternoon, riding perhaps two or three miles beyond the beginning of the earthworks at Earith. Trotting along the paired embankments was an easy, gentle, pleasant ride with a cooling breeze and a good view of the surrounding greenery, most of which seemed to be at least chest-high if not higher. The clerk of works at Earith had told them there was another encampment at the half-way mark, but after a look at the number of watchmen they had had turning up for duty at the first one, Finnegan had decided that hanging around the camps would be a waste of time. Anyone trying anything there would be doing it by stealth, and definitely avoiding parties of armed men.

    “Boyos,” Finnegan said when he judged them far enough from the major work-sites to start looking for a rest spot. “We’re after the shites that are trying to wreck these works, but only so’s we can get after Cromwell. Now, the last thing they’ll be doing is trying anything clever in broad daylight, they leave that kind of thing to ignorant paddies like us.”

    That got an ironic cheer. Out of the twelve men under him who weren’t in York with O’Hare, eight had at least some grammar school and they were all literate. O’Hare had taken the two besides Finnegan who’d finished grammar school along with the one illiterate in the band. Which reminded Finnegan; if Mackay was, as he suspected, with Cromwell, there was no reason to leave O’Hare cooling his heels there. That royal commission would come in useful again, permitting him access to the Royal Post to get a letter to O’Hare. A task for the day after tomorrow, if they couldn’t turn up any sign of the malcontents that Cromwell’s son had taken up with. And, of course, there was always the possibility that the father had joined the son.

    Realising he was woolgathering, Finnegan collected himself and went on. “We’ll wait here, find a spot of shelter, while the heat of the day dies down. When things get a little cooler we’ll spread out and find what hiding spots there are hereabouts, and poke in them. We’ll likely find nothing, but we’ll know where to look when night falls. It’s a full moon, or near enough, and the promise of a clear night to come. With that we’ll range up and down these works, they’re but ten miles, and sound a shot if we stumble across anything. Remember, I want a captive or two to question, so in with the bata first, if you please.”

    A chorus of acknowledgements and they began seeing to horses and looking for shade.

    Off the embankments that were eventually going to define the new river, there was plenty of that. There weren’t many bushes or trees, but the soft growth was man-height or higher in places and at least waist-height everywhere else. Worse, if anything, than they had dealt with only a couple of weeks previously out nearer the edge of the fen. Well, this time they were armed and armored for it and expecting trouble. Half the difficulty they’d had the last time was they’d started out expecting to arrest children and ended by enduring slingstones from well-hidden fensmen. This time there’d be more grit shown by all, Finnegan included.

    Tully was standing at the top of the embankment on the eastern side, looking down into the fen. The ground was trying to be dry, at least, and overgrown to the height of a man with sedges and low, scrubby trees, hardly more than bushes most of them. There were tracks through it, to be sure, but they were few and narrow and twisting and, if anything, were more of an addition to the hiding places than any means of getting across the country. Anyone with half a mind to move hereabouts, Finnegan decided, would probably do best to ignore the paths and just shove his way through the greenery on horseback.

    “Going to be a bastard searching that lot,” he said, as Finnegan walked over.

    “True, but on the bright side, if I’m right about that American bitch with her rifle, the closer the cover, the less she’ll shoot at us, I’m thinking.” Even in the full daylight of the evening, the long shadows made the fen a riot of patchy shadow and plentiful cover.

    Tully nodded. “Probably as well to be down off this bank before long, I’m sure. Even a regular fowler would be good around here. Sure and you’d see the smoke of a regular piece, but getting there after, through that shite?”

    “True enough. You watch over the lads covering the north-and-west side, there. We’ll work north-and-east bit by bit, see what we don’t flush out, so.” Finnegan was already into a pattern of looking over the undergrowth, thinking about how he’d be best to send men into it to probe the denser patches. Whoever was out there, they and Finnegan’s men would have to stumble over each other, and in that he’d have money on his own gang of brawlers any day of the week. No easy way to see where they’d be coming from, either. The embankment he was on stood maybe six or seven feet above the ground it was dug from, no more than a linear spoil-heap either side of the cut that, even without being connected to the river, was knee-deep in water already. Outside the cut, the country continued flat for miles. Somewhere a couple of miles away he could just see the smoke and church spire of a village on a slight rise of ground. There was another hamlet a little closer on the side he’d given Tully, but apart from that he and his boyos could be the only men in the whole world.

    In other words, prime country for a man after being an English tóraí. A man could vanish, here, and give the authorities the devil’s own work to root him out. And so, for the next few hours, it was the devil’s work for Finnegan’s band, as they scouted, and hoisted themselves up as much as the trees would allow, and swore at the patches of bog that sucked at boots. Twice shots went up as a man, spooked by the shift of light and shadow in the brightly-moonlit fen and the silence they were all maintaining, thought he saw something and emptied a wheel-lock into the shadows.

    Twice, not a trace of human passage did they find either time.

    Around midnight, Darryl McCarthy was perched in the top of a willow tree where Stephen Hamilton had boosted him and scanned the distant earthworks with binoculars. “They look like they’re having fun. They’re going up and down from that levee and beating the bushes. They’d surely find us if we were there.”

    “No need to shout,” Hamilton replied in a definite indoor voice. “And better not to, sound carries at night. I learned that the hard way, poaching, when I was a lad. Nearly got caught.”

    “Gotcha,” Darryl said, lowering his voice a little. “So, are we sticking with leading them through the night?”

    “I think it best. They’re more likely to make stupid decisions in the dark.”

    “Like chasing armed men through a swamp?”

    “Just like that. I’ll use the radio now and get the others on our position. Sting them and fall back, and when we have them moving draw them back toward Ely and Colonel Mackay’s position. Then it’s into the saddle and hell-for-leather for King’s Lynn, and hope someone there has managed to arrange a ship. I don’t want to be stuck there when that lot catch up, I want to be able to give them two fingers from the stern of a departing ship. The aim is to show them that we’ve all left the area, and hopefully, the country, so they leave the locals alone. Not, and I think we’re all agreed on this, get stuck in a fight with children to protect. There’s precious few ways for that to end well.”

    “Julie and Gayle and the kids’ll be there hours before us, you saw how fast that barge went.” Darryl had been surprised as all hell by that. He’d seen barges towed by horses before, the things were common all over Europe. He’d been expecting that for any kind of speed you’d need a rowed boat, though, and Hamilton, Londoner born and bred, had assumed the same. It turned out that they had different ideas on the fens, and the river towpaths were also home to fast trotting horses that pulled boats at a speed that left a substantial wake, pulling the boat up onto a kind of bow wave. Once the horse got the boat moving, it was off at a smart pace quicker than it could have pulled a cart. Passage on the thing had cost far more than just riding or taking a regular barge would have, but it was a smooth ride and a quick one and there was every possibility that even if the menfolk went from Ely to King’s Lynn at a dead gallop, they would still arrive hours behind the advance party.

    They’d finally gotten rid of the wagon, donating it for the use of Ely’s Committee of Correspondence, who didn’t have any pressing need for a wagon right now — they were nearly all river bargees, for a start — but would more than likely come up with something. Nothing else, it’d make it possible to steal more tools from the earthworks for Bedford’s River. Darryl was kind of in two minds about that one. He’d done some reading up on England before he came, and knew that in the future this was going to be some of the best farmland in England, where right now it was — pardon the language — nothing but a fucking swamp. He could appreciate good hunting country as well as the next man, especially if the next man was a hillbilly, but hereabouts was good for fowl and that was about it. Especially, apparently, snipe, and he’d had one pointed out to him earlier after he’d expressed suspicion. Cromwell had laughed at that and informed him that they were indeed a byword for being hard to spot, shy birds that skulked in reed beds and undergrowth.

    Still and all, good hunting was a nice thing, but a lot of the folks hereabouts would be doing better with some good farmland to work.

    While they waited for Cromwell, Welch, Leebrick and Towson to move up to their position, Darryl mentioned as much to Hamilton.

    “Well, I’m not from around here. I was born in Kent and settled in London, but I don’t think it’ll be too different. A lot of that farmland will come from enclosing common land that most of these poor bleeders depend on for their living. And people get very angry about that kind of thing. There was a revolt about it up Northampton way about twenty years ago. I was a green young soldier back then, not doing much more than substitute enlistments in the Trained Bands for fat old merchants who didn’t want to drill, before I took to wandering abroad to find a fight. They had trouble with some bastard of a landowner fencing off the common lands and this mad fellow as called himself Captain Pouch started a revolt. They pulled down the hedges and fences and filled in ditches, and there weren’t many going to stop ’em, since the militia refused to muster for it. So the word went out they wanted hired soldiers to put down the revolt. Well, by the time I got there it was all over. Captain Pouch had been saying he had this magic pouch that would protect everyone with him from bullets and swords, and that worked about as well as you’d expect. When they hanged him, all he had in it was a bit of mouldy cheese.”

    Darryl tried to take that in, and at the same time figure out if he was having his leg pulled. “Cheese?”

    “Cheese,” Hamilton affirmed. “I was there for the hanging, when they finally opened it and showed it to the crowd. Didn’t even look like good cheese. Can’t remember the bugger’s real name, now, and that’s going to nag at me, it surely is.”

    “And you went to join in with puttin’ down that revolt?” Darryl said, wondering how he was going to express this tactfully.

    “Oh, I ain’t proud of that,” Hamilton said. “But I ain’t ashamed neither. It was shovel shit for a penny a day or drill for fourpence, and I was good at the drill. Saved me a few times in the Germanies, all that training I got paid to do, as well. Way I saw it, there was going to be a fight, and I could get maybe sixpence a day and mustering bounty into the bargain if I got there fast enough. I didn’t, end of story. Northamptonshire wasn’t worth sticking around for, so I came home.”

    There was a soft hoot from the darkness. Darryl answered it, they having found out earlier that Hamilton’s bird noises were comical at best. Cromwell and Welch drifted in out of the night — and hadn’t Darryl smirked about that, when it turned out that pairing the Irishman with Cromwell made sense, as they paired off for raw muscle and ability to get up trees to spy out the country. Leebrick and Towson came in shortly after.

    It was time to start the entertainment.