The Crimson Ribbon (3 page)

He laughs. ‘And you were coping with those louts so well on your own.’

‘I’m grateful to you, but that is all.’

He holds up his hands in supplication.

I drain my second cup of wine. On an empty stomach it makes my head swim but I draw courage from it.

‘I travel to London too,’ he says. ‘I’ve a place on a carter’s wagon, leaving at dawn tomorrow. It has taken three days to find someone willing to take passengers. And thank God I did – if I’m to have Lytham breathing down my neck, I think I’d best be on my way. You’ll travel with me.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Why?’

‘I do not know you.’

‘That’s easily remedied. I’m Joseph. Joseph Oakes.’ He holds out his hand for me to shake it, as if I am a man and his equal. I ignore it.

‘I can find my own way to London,’ I say.

‘Forgive me, but even before those scoundrels approached, I noticed you cowering in the corner, like a frightened lamb. You’re easy prey. You’ll not last a day on the London road.’

‘And you would be my protector, I suppose?’

He shrugs. ‘I can help you.’

‘So that I may become further indebted to you?’

‘I have need of a travelling companion and you’re as good as any. We can travel as brother and sister. I won’t lay a finger on you. Think on it. You’re unlikely to find a better offer.’

‘Brother and sister?’

‘Why not? Yours is a Fenland accent like my own. No one will suspect us.’

Until then I had not noticed the familiar round tones in his voice.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Hilgay. A small village, not four miles from Downham Market. And you?’

‘Ely.’

He smiles to himself. ‘I knew it. You have the look of a Fenlander.’ He pours the last of the wine into his cup, without offering it to me. ‘Ely is a fine town. I know a little of it. I’ve friends from there. Why leave?’

I am silent.

‘Ah, more secrets,’ he says, holding up his cup as if to make a toast. ‘Well, it has been interesting, but I have business to attend to and if you’re determined to reject my offer . . .’ He stands to leave and turns away from me.

‘Wait,’ I say, thinking of brigands and bandits on the journey ahead, or worse yet, a second night at the Devil Inn. ‘Will you promise that no harm will come to me? That we will travel as brother and sister? That you will make no claim on me once we reach London?’

He pulls up the hood of his cloak and leans close. ‘I can promise you only this. No harm will come to you by my hand.’

‘Then . . . I will come with you.’

He smiles. ‘Good. The cart leaves at dawn. I’ll call here for you at first light. Be ready to leave.’

Again he holds out his hand and this time I take it.

‘And what is my new sister’s name?’ he asks.

‘Ruth. Ruth Flowers.’

‘Ruth.’ He lingers over my name, as though savouring it on his tongue. ‘Have you a bed here tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I suggest you retire to it. And bolt your door.’

I nod.

‘Until morning, then.’

Before I can reply, he turns and sweeps out of the inn, leaving me staring at the empty flagon and wondering what I have done.

Chapter 4

Joseph Oakes keeps his word and comes for me a quarter-hour after the first crow of the cockerel. I am awake and dressed. I have snatched only moments of sleep, plagued by hot, fervid dreams and the topers in the taproom until the early hours.

Joseph takes me away from the Devil Inn and leads me through a maze of alleyways with high red-brick walls, speckled with leaded casements, until I have quite lost my way.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I ask, but get no reply.

I make a silent prayer for mercy. If I am walking to my death, then at least make it a swift one. I notice that Joseph carries a sword, the one he used to threaten Lytham, strapped to his pack. The slash of a blade across the throat is preferable to the end that haunts me. I have no desire to jerk and jump at the end of a hangman’s rope. Whether that rope belongs to Isaac Tuttle or some deceitful stranger makes no real difference.

But then we come to an open tract of land that adjoins one of the colleges and beyond it a road, stretching south. Sure enough, a cart waits there: an open wagon, loaded with barrels and pelts, all tied over with canvas. A sore-looking nag stamps and snorts snatches of breath that float up and away to meet the dawning clouds.

Joseph greets the carter with a handshake – a welcome more civil than any I have received. ‘Siddal, this is my sister, Ruth,’ he says, rough-handling me forwards. ‘She will come with us.’

Siddal is the sort of man who stays ruddy and rotund against the odds. I wonder how much of his cargo he siphons to keep his belly so plump.

He takes off his hat, displaying a round bald spot on his crown. The skin there is as red as fresh beef. ‘Well, now, Mister Oakes, this is not part of our bargain.’

‘We will make it worth your while.’

‘A man who can handle a weapon is a useful thing, but a woman?’

‘She’s small, as you can see, so she won’t add much to the load. And, besides, she has a pass, issued by her mistress.’

Siddal raises an eyebrow and holds out his hand expectantly. I push Old Bess’s note, my one safeguard, into his rough fingers and he looks it over, his eyes flickering to my face. I doubt that he can read it. ‘I’ll need extra, for the trouble,’ he says, passing the document back to me.

‘Two shillings more a day,’ Joseph offers.

‘I’ll have you understand that I can’t answer for her safety. It’s work enough travelling with a load, these days, with all the trouble on the roads. She’s your sister. You look after her.’

‘Understood.’

‘Make it two crown all in and I’ll take her.’

‘Do you have it?’ Joseph whispers to me. I nod, even though it will leave me with very little. I will be a beggar by the time I reach London.

‘You are a kind and generous man, Master Siddal,’ Joseph says, clapping the carter on the back.

The London road passes through lush, rolling country. Not half a day out of Cambridge and we meet with views very different from any I have seen before. The carter hauls us up hills and plunges down slopes, making me queasy. The day has turned hot for May and I swelter in my winter layers, imagining myself seasick. I am glad when we stop at an inn and I can buy bread to still my stomach. It is the first I’ve eaten in two days yet I am not hungry and have to force it down.

It is well into the afternoon, once Siddal has handed the reins to Joseph and snores among the skins in the back of the cart, that I dare to make comment on our progress.

‘I don’t see any bandits, Mister Oakes.’

‘Pray God we don’t. What Siddal said is true. The roads are crawling with troublemakers. Beggars, gypsies, soldiers.’

‘Soldiers?’

‘Aye, the worst of the lot. Runaways mostly. Parliament men, disaffected and run wild. The King’s men tend to drunkenness and whoring, as they’ve always done, but the rebels? They’ve had no pay, no thanks and little satisfaction. Desperate times make desperate men.’

‘How do you know?’

He looks off into the distance. ‘I was one of them.’

‘You’re a soldier?’

He turns to check that Siddal is still sleeping, and lowers his voice. ‘I was.’

‘For Parliament?’

‘Yes. Eastern Association. Under Cromwell and Rainsborough.’

At the mention of Master Oliver I feel a thin vine of fear twist up my spine. I remember him discussing discipline among the troops with his guests at table. ‘Once a soldier, always a soldier,’ he had said, talking of duty and honour. He thought deserters were godless men and should be punished, even given a traitor’s death.

‘Are you a runaway?’

‘Injured at Naseby Fight.’ He pats his chest, just below his ribs, to illustrate. ‘Never went back.’

‘So that’s why you need me,’ I say. ‘You have no pass to travel so you need mine, and my purse too, no doubt.’

‘Something like that. Naseby was my first battle. God willing, it was my last.’

I’ve heard tales of Naseby Fight. Accounts swept through the Fens in the wake of the battle. Parliament men rejoiced at stories of such conquest. Master Oliver had returned home not long after and had been grave and silent on the matter of the multitudes of dead. But those who visited him, Eastern Association men in leather coats with booming voices, slapped him on the back and drank to bravery and daring. They had all thanked Providence for the result.

‘But it was a great victory, was it not?’ I say.

Joseph shrugs. ‘Victory comes at a cost.’

‘But to fight for God’s cause, to die by God’s will, surely—’

The fire in his eyes cuts me short.

‘What do you know about it?’ he snaps. ‘You know nothing.’

‘I know what will happen if you are caught.’

‘London is a big place, or so I’m told. Big enough to hide me. Besides, I might be done with army life, but I’m not giving up the fight.’

With one hand holding the reins, he reaches into his pack and pulls out a sheaf of papers. They are dirty and ragged, looped with string. He unties the bundle and passes the first few pages to me. Printed in black ink, the front page is torn almost in two; he must have been carrying them for some time. They remind me of the pamphlets strewn about Master Oliver’s desk. Across the frontispiece, dark, lopsided letters spell out ‘England’s Birth Right Justified’. I turn the first page and read, ‘To all the Free-born people of England . . .’

I am no stranger to pamphlets such as this. Many of the apprentices and labourers about Ely trade in them on market days. Sometimes a man would read aloud from such a piece in the market square or outside one of the taverns. In the first days of war, Parliament recruiters seduced our local boys with such talk.

‘Can you read?’ he asks me.

‘Yes.’

‘So, you understand?’

At my blank expression he reaches across and points to the smallest words at the very bottom of the page. They are smudged and difficult to make out but I read aloud: ‘Printed in London, 1645.’

‘I aim to be a printer’s apprentice,’ he says. ‘London is where the presses are. I’ll carry on the fight in a different way.’

‘So, you believe that words will win the war?’

‘The war is almost won. They say that Oxford will surrender any day now. And once the King’s strongest centre is taken, there is nowhere for him to go. What comes next is the fight for people’s sympathies.’

I brandish the pamphlet. ‘And you think people want this Levelling talk?’

‘Aye. Don’t you?’

‘I think people want food on their tables and their men at home.’

He snorts and gives me a mocking smile. ‘Tell me, what do you do in Ely? How did you earn those pennies in your purse?’

‘I’m a servant. You know that.’

‘And do you like it?’

I shrug. ‘It is my lot.’

‘Would you change it if you could?’

‘I . . . I don’t know.’

‘Would you like your own home, your own piece of land to work? No mistress with a hold over you, telling you what you can and can’t do? How would you like that?’

‘That’s impossible. Things have always been this way.’

‘It
was
impossible. But this is what we’re fighting for. The world is turning and now is our chance.’ He turns to me, animated. ‘There are men in the army, good, honest men, who would secure such things for the people. A voice for the common man in Parliament, rights for the common man and everything in its natural place. No longer will Englishmen be held down by kings and lords and squires.’

He sounds just like the guests at Master Oliver’s table, sloshing their wine and rattling the pewter in heated debate. I hush him as Siddal stirs. ‘I do not know politics,’ I say.

‘But you are alive. To be alive in this time is to witness the changing of the world. You cannot help but be caught up in it. The army has such power now and the people are ripe for change. The King will have to compromise. You’ll see. Soon things will be better and we will all be glad of this war.’

How blind he is.

‘I will never be glad of this war,’ I say.

He snatches the paper from my lap. ‘Those who fight must have something to believe in. Would you take that away from them?’

‘It has already taken too much from me.’ It was the war that took Master Oliver away and, with him, the protection that might have saved my mother.

Joseph’s eyes are scornful. ‘And what of those who have lost everything – even their lives? Would you have all this blood spilled for nothing?’

‘I just wish . . . I wish it had never begun. I wish things were as before.’

‘Then you prefer the old order? You prefer to stay a slave? Pray God, tell me my new sister is not a Royalist.’

I do not have the courage to tell him the truth. I know little of politics, understand few of the arguments that led Charles Stuart to wage war on his own people, but even so, I belong at the very centre of it all.

I have tended the man who led those poor soldiers to die in the fields for God and for Parliament. I have laundered his war-soiled clothes, scrubbed the blood from his breeches and scoured the battlefield mud from his boots. I have endured the lecherous stares of his army friends. I have played sister to his children and tended his wife when she was sick. I have been privy to his private rages and his tormented prayers. I know better than most what it means to be loyal to Oliver Cromwell.

But what does it matter? That part of my life is over and I cannot trust this deserter with the truth of it. I am not ready to answer the questions that will follow. I understand that much at least.

Despite my companion’s stories, we make good time that day, free from the threat of vagabonds and highway robbers. I wonder if Joseph has been telling tales to frighten me, to bind me to him. The contents of my purse have already proved valuable. Only God knows what other uses he might have in mind for me. It seems that every man I meet wants to take something from me. Still, there is something in Joseph Oakes, something in his manner, that seems more like truth than deceit.

By nightfall we reach Puckeridge and stop at an inn there to rest the horse and find a bed for the night. The Old Bell is a place made for travellers, worn out and filthy, populated by transients. The innkeeper saves his best rooms for those with the coin to pay and the rest are forced to make do with a draughty chamber, tightly packed with pallets and barely warmed by a sputtering central hearth.

I claim my place, between Joseph and Siddal, and pull my skirts and shawl tight around me. I lie still for some time and listen as it begins to rain. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Filled with the human stench of unwashed bodies, the snores and grunts of the sleeping, the room makes me uneasy. But despite my wakefulness, Nature gets the better of me and, before long, I sleep.

It is still dark when I wake. The fire in the room has faded to embers and the air is chill and damp. The rain is still pouring, in that way saved for summer storms. Water drips from the eaves and pools under the window where the paper covering has come loose. At that moment a great crack of lightning brightens the room, a roll of thunder answering it. The storm is close.

The others stir and shift in their beds, burrowing under blankets and huddling together where they can. And then I notice – the pallet next to me is empty: Joseph is gone.