Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (15 page)

Was that meant as an affront? Bess wondered vaguely, or was the man’s
agreeable company
alluding to some village harlot? ‘Are you afraid of the King’s men?’ she asked, steering her mount around a deep hole in the road that was fast filling with water.

‘Not afraid, my lady,’ he said, ‘but I have no desire to get myself recruited. And believe me, if some jackanapes sergeant lays eyes on young Joseph here, he’ll be whipped off to fill some poor tosspot’s boots in a company of musketeers before you can blink. He’s got that lamb to the slaughter look and don’t say you hadn’t noticed.’

‘I have fought,’ Joe said, eyeballing Dane. ‘I’ve killed a man.’

Dane removed his hat and looked up at the sky, letting the rain hammer against his face and cascade through hanks of dark hair. ‘Killing is the easy part,’ he said, rain spitting from his lip. ‘It’s the not being killed that takes practice.’

‘Well, it seems you have perfected the art simply by being a man of no conviction,’ Bess said, sorry for Joe who clearly felt at a disadvantage in Dane’s company. ‘For you do not fight for the King?’

‘I do not,’ Dane admitted. ‘Nor can Parliament claim the honour of commanding my sword arm.’

‘It would seem that modesty is another quality to which
you
may not lay claim, sir,’ Bess said.

Dane shrugged, water spilling from the cape about his shoulders. ‘Modesty perhaps not, but honesty? That you will not find in short supply here, madam.’

Bess cocked an eyebrow at Joe but the young man was staring at Dane, his disapproving glare laced with a dash of awe. ‘You think yourself so skilled at arms?’ Joe asked him.

For the first time since they had set off from Lord Heylyn’s house Dane smiled, and to Bess’s surprise it was a comely smile, much warmer than the rain beating upon her broad-hat. ‘Oh
I am a fucking killer, Joe,’ he said. ‘And neither the King nor Parliament shall waste my talent in a mad rush on the field or a disease-ridden camp.’

Bess’s menfolk had waded into the fray, had stood in the storm of lead. But not all men were men of honour. Perhaps he is a coward, she thought, watching Dane sway on his cob like a boat wallowing in a swell.

‘And neither shall I freeze to death in the pissing rain,’ Dane muttered, as the village emerged from the hissing downpour and the horses nickered softly at the prospect of a warm stable and dry fodder.

‘That at least is one ambition we share,’ Bess said, inhaling the sweet, resinous smell of the smoke slung above the village like a dark pall in the still air. Instinctively she tilted her hat to partly obscure her face, for men on the road were less worthy of remark than a woman and the last thing they needed was an abundance of questions.

‘Turn around and go back!’ a voice bellowed out of the gloom. ‘There’s a fork in the road a half mile back. Take it and go around.’

Dane stopped his horse and Bess and Joe did likewise, as the body to whom the voice belonged materialized.

Dane clicked his tongue and the cob ambled forward.

‘Are you deaf, sir?’ the man asked, booted feet squelching in the mud. Bess moved up too and saw that the man who had challenged them was not alone. It seemed a whole welcoming committee had turned out.

‘Clubmen,’ Dane murmured to Bess, who noticed that every man in the assembly brandished some sort of crude weapon, from cudgels and flails to sickles and scythes, though none so far as she could see owned a pistol or even a sword. Most had wrapped scarves around their faces so that only suspicious eyes showed beneath the sodden rims of their hats, but the band’s spokesman was bare-faced,
his
eyes marked more by intelligence, Bess thought, than by fear.

‘We are not deaf, sir,’ Dane replied, holding his hands out wide in an unthreatening gesture, the rain bouncing off his palms, ‘simply in need of a roof over our heads and a plate of hot food.’

‘You’ll find neither here,’ the man said. ‘Now go. We do not welcome outsiders.’

Dane leant over, turning his face from the crowd towards Bess. ‘Remove your hat if you want a hot dinner, my lady,’ he growled. Bess did not remove the hat but she did push the brim up away from her face and she saw several pairs of eyes flicker in her direction. ‘We will give you no trouble and have coin to pay for your hospitality,’ Dane said to the man, in whose right fist and left palm sat a smooth cudgel, recently oiled so that the rain rolled off it or sat on the bulbous head in fat drops.

One of the other men leant in to their leader to speak, but against the rain’s hiss and the patter of it striking the muddy track, Bess could hear none of what was being said.

‘How do we know you are not the King’s spies? Or Parliament’s?’ the spokesman asked, pointing the cudgel at Dane and sweeping it across towards Joe and then Bess. ‘Come here to eye up our resources or count the men you will return to conscript against their will? We have had crops and property seized before now,’ he added to a chorus of sullen ayes from his companions, ‘sometimes by soldiers, other times by deserters.’ His lip curled. ‘We have all heard the fates of other villages, of wives and daughters raped and of the depravities which attend armies and make rabid dogs of young men.’

‘I can assure you, sir, that I have no love for armies whichever ensign they march beneath, and neither do I have a heart for the quarrel, which I have so far managed to avoid. We want bed and board,’ Dane said, ‘wine if you have it. At first light we will be on the road again.’

‘Show me,’ the leader of the clubmen demanded. ‘Your coin.’ He glanced at Bess but she kept her eyes downcast so as not to
encourage him. ‘You must understand that trust in strangers is a little thin on the ground these days.’

‘Thin as cat piss,’ another man announced, having hauled down his scarf to cuff snot from his nose. Bess’s horse snorted impatiently, its breath fogging in the wet air.

‘We need to know you can pay,’ the leader said, ‘that you will not creep off before sun-up like some conscience-stung adulterer.’

‘Of course,’ Dane said with a nod, then reached into the hidden layers of his clothing and pulled out a leather purse, letting its weight speak for itself in the palm of his outstretched hand. For good measure he gave it a shake so that the coins within clinked gently. There were more murmurs within the group and Bess noticed arms and hands relax, the flails and scythes looking like agricultural tools again rather than the weapons of desperate folk.

‘You can stay one night,’ the leader said. ‘Then you’ll move on and you will not speak of this village to anyone.’

‘Agreed,’ Dane said, and though it irked Bess to have him speak for them all, she was more keen to be under a roof.

‘You may eat together but you will sleep apart,’ the other went on, then gestured to Bess, ‘unless this is your wife?’ Bess almost felt the flush in Joe’s face at the clubman’s presumption that Dane, if either of them, would be Bess’s husband.

‘The lady is this young man’s sister,’ Dane said. ‘We are bound for London to bury their brother who was recently killed fighting in Parliament’s army, may God receive his soul.’ Bess flinched, not at the lie but rather at the tale’s propinquity to her own tragedy.

‘And you?’ the clubman asked Dane.

Dane blinked once, slowly, as though behind his eyelids was some fond but bitter memory. ‘Their brother was my friend,’ he said with a pathos that could have seen him on some Southwark stage.

The clubman nodded. ‘The war is an open sore upon this
land. But it will not infect us here.’ He gestured to his companions with his cudgel. ‘We happy few, we band of brothers,’ he said, the quote by Bess’s reckoning utterly lost on the other clubmen, ‘will defend our liberties and livelihoods against all comers.’ He singled out a broad, squat man who gripped two sickles, one in either hand. ‘Take them to Greenleafe’s. Tell him I sent them.’ Then he turned back to Dane. ‘You’ll be well fed and watered and Greenleafe’s boy will see to your horses.’

‘I wouldn’t have the mutton pie,’ one of the others put in, pulling the scarf down to reveal his grin, ‘not unless you like dog.’

‘The mutton tastes like dog?’ Joe asked, the first time he had spoken.

‘The mutton
is
dog!’ the man said, stirring a damp peal of laughter from the others.

‘You will pay for three rooms, which will be found for you by the time you’ve eaten,’ the clubmen’s leader said.

Joe shook his head, rain flying from his broad-hat’s rim. ‘I will not have my sister left alone, sir,’ Joe said, the steel in his voice impressing as much as surprising Bess.

The clubman nodded. ‘Very well, as you two are kin you may share a room, though you’ll still pay for three.’

‘Agreed,’ Dane said, then clicked his tongue and his cob moved off, feet squelching in the mud. Bess and Joe started forward too, all of them following the squat man with the sickles who was already on his way back to the village.

‘One more thing,’ the clubman said, his band dispersing, tramping off to get out of the rain. ‘Your weapons. Folk here are not used to swords and firearms and I will not have you terrifying them.’

They stopped and Joe looked at Dane who nodded, drawing his fine flintlocks and flipping them over in his hands to give them butt-first to a spotty-faced stripling who held them gingerly, as though afraid they might go off at any moment, and then passed them to his leader. Then they handed over
their swords, Dane his plain rapier and Joe his short hanger, to another of the drenched clubmen who took them in one hand, his scythe in the other.

‘And your blunderbuss, lad.’ Joe hesitated then, reluctant to give up the weapon with which he had for many freezing nights stood sentry outside Shear House and without which Bess had never seen him. ‘Unless you want to turn around and ride four miles through this pissing rain to the next village.’ The clubman shrugged, as though he cared not either way.

‘It’s all right, Joe,’ Bess said. She had begun to shiver again now and could barely remember what it felt like to be warm and dry. Frowning, Joe lifted the blunderbuss on its belt over his head and gave it to the spotty youth, who grinned this time, gripping the weapon as though he wanted nothing more than for it to roar.

‘Powder and shot, if you please,’ the clubman said, and Joe reached for the bag of musket balls strung on a belt across his other shoulder but Dane stopped him with a raised hand.

‘No, sir,’ he said to the clubman, ‘we shall keep those things with us.’ He pointed at the spotty young man who was still grinning and pointing the blunderbuss at an imaginary foe. ‘I wouldn’t want the lad there to shoot his foot off.’

The clubman held Dane’s eye for a long moment and then nodded, lifting the pistols. ‘I shall hold them for you till the morning. Now go and get yourselves dry.’ They moved off again, drawn by the scent of wood smoke and the promise of a hot meal. ‘And spend that coin,’ the clubman called after them.

According to the short, squat man who had led them through the deluge to the alehouse on the muddy bank of the Trent, Allen Greenleafe and his wife had both been servants at the nearby Shugborough estate for upwards of twenty years. But a fall whilst replacing old slate on the house’s roof had left Allen lame and Cecily sick with worry that, she being frequently struck with colds, they would spend their last years on God’s
earth starving and miserable. But in recognition of their long and faithful service (and more likely, said the squat man, because he had known Allen wasn’t up to the job and should never have been sent up on the roof) their employer, the lawyer William Anson, had come to their rescue. Anson had bought the Greenleafes the modest cottage in which Bess, Joe and Dane now huddled by a roaring fire which raised a stink from their wet woollen clothes.

‘A simple fire is the most wondrous of life’s free pleasures,’ Joe said, his smooth cheeks flushed with drink. ‘Well, other than going for a piss when you’re bursting.’

He suddenly looked at Bess, horrified to have spoken thus in her company, but she smiled gently and looked back into the flames and the awkwardness was swept away by the raucous, barking laugh of another of the Greenleafes’ guests, one of three men at a table behind them who nursed their ale pots protectively, pipes clamped in their lips. In one dark corner a young cooing couple sat oblivious to all, and in another corner two old men seemed asleep but for the occasional gruff comment or squeaking fart. Two dogs – an old spaniel and a thick-haired mongrel – lay asleep near the fire, their heads on their paws and the mongrel’s back legs twitching so that Joe said it must be dreaming of chasing rabbits.

‘Either that or it’s a nightmare about being put in a pie and served up as mutton,’ Dane suggested, and Bess hushed him lest he offend their hosts. ‘You are quite right,’ he mumbled into his mug. ‘We haven’t seen where we shall sleep yet.’

The air was thick with pipe and hearth smoke, the stench of wet clothes, wet dog, old sour beer and the more pleasant aroma of cooked food. In the little kitchen adjoining the parlour the Greenleafes were clattering pots and scraping scraps, and Bess felt renewed and strong, confident that a full belly and a good night’s sleep would brace her for another day on the road come rain or shine. Avoiding the mutton pie, they had wolfed down a meat and onion stew, cheat bread and
pancakes spiced with cloves, mace, cinnamon and nutmeg. Their outer garments hung drying on a frame by the fire and Allen’s home-brewed ale was disappearing almost as fast as the man could pour it, though that was mostly Dane’s doing. Bess wondered how a man could drink so much and yet still stand on steady legs, as Dane did now, having risen to go back out into the rain to check that their horses were being well looked after.

‘Order another jug, lad,’ he said to Joe. ‘As it appears there are to be no other amusements,’ he added, scratching the scalp beneath his long black hair, ‘we may as well drink properly.’

‘You will both make for poor company tomorrow,’ Bess said as Joe signalled to Allen that their cups were empty, and Dane opened the door, so that for a brief moment Bess could hear and smell the rain that was still sheeting down outside.

‘The less he says the more I like him,’ Joe said, thumbing back towards the door, and Bess nodded in agreement with that as Allen Greenleafe appeared with more ale.