again.”
He tied his horse and entered the cottage with me. Jublain was up, holding a
naked sword.
“Jublain is a soldier,” I explained. “Jublain, my friend from Stamford. He
carries a warning.”
Hasling’s eyes swept the cottage, rested upon the sword. “That will be it, then?
The blade given your father by the Earl?”
“It is,” I said.
“I know the story,” Hasling said, to my surprise. “I was reminded of it when
your name was mentioned. I know a friend of yours.”
“Of mine?”
“The man who buys antiquities. He knew your father.”
“Barnabas has an enemy, too,” Jublain said, irritably. “What of him?”
“Rupert Genester? An evil man, but one with power in many places. You could have
no worse an enemy. He is an ambitious man, an heir, a man filled with pride and
hatred. He was laughed at and that he cannot abide.”
We drank our ale, then Hasling mounted and was gone, returning by a different
route that I suggested.
Standing at the gate, I listened to the beat of hoofs as his horse carried him
away. Walking back to the cottage I belted on a sword and dagger. I charged the
pistols afresh while Jublain watched me, his eyes bright with irony.
“You learn quickly.” He emptied his cup.
We among the fens were an independent lot. We were a people who did, with
contempt for all who did nothing.
For centuries smugglers had used the fens, bringing their craft up the secret
waterways. We paid them no mind, but knew them and their ways. Few of us entered
the army, fewer were impressed into the fleet. We went our ways, content with
them.
From a chest I took a casque that had belonged to my father, and the weapons
from the walls. I took bacon, hams, dried fruit, cheese, and meal. We loaded
them into my punt.
Returning to close the door of the cottage, I was turning from it when they
rushed upon me, a half-dozen armed men. They came at me, and my sword was out.
“Kill him! I want him dead! Do you hear?”
I heard the shout as they closed, but when battle was joined I was not one to
dally about, so I had at them, sidestepping to place one between myself and the
others, parrying his thrust and thrusting my own sword home with one movement.
Quickly withdrawing my blade as the man fell, I had a moment when they
hesitated. Shocked to see one of their own die, for they had come to murder a
farmer, not to die themselves, they paused, appalled. It was the moment I
needed, and with a shout, I went at them.
I feinted, thrust … the sword went deep. Then they were all about me and my
sword was everywhere, parrying, thrusting, knowing I could not continue long,
when suddenly there was a shout from behind.
“Have at them, men!” It was Jublain. “Let not one escape!”
They broke and fled. Murder is one thing, a fight another. They had the stomach
for one, only their heels for the other. They did not wait to see if there were
more than two, but fled, unheeding their master’s angry shouts.
As they fled we ran toward our punt. Three men were down and a fourth had
staggered as they fled. I heard a voice call out: “I know you now! I know you
forever, and you shall not escape!”
It was Rupert Genester.
Chapter 3
The country of the fens was not so large as most of us believed it to be, but to
us it seemed endless, a vast, low-lying, and marshy land where remnants grew of
the once great forest that had covered England.
The Romans, who understood the reclaiming of marshy land, had begun the drainage
of the fens, but once they departed the Saxons let the canals fill and the fens
return to fens.
It was said that even now Queen Bess was talking to a Dutch engineer, a man with
much experience at draining land below sea level. This we did not oppose, for
reclaiming land might make some of us rich.
Myself, for instance. I owned but a few acres of tillable land, but owned by
grant more than two square miles of fen. Once drained, such rich land would make
me wealthy.
Yet I was now a fugitive. Had my case come to trial it might possibly have
turned out well for me. Occasionally a commoner won such a case, but the
occasions were too rare to make me confident. I had the thought that it would
never come to court, for the hand of Rupert Genester could reach even into
prison to kill me, easily.
For some time I rowed until Jublain asked impatiently, “Are you lost, man? You
are rowing in circles.”
“Almost a circle,” I agreed cheerfully, “but not lost.”
Fog lay thick down the tips of the blades of grass. No movement was in the
water, no sound but the chunk of my oars in the locks, and that to be heard no
more than a few feet away.
Where we now went was a place I had played in as a child, visiting but rarely
since. It was an islet of perhaps three acres, cut by several narrow, winding
waterways. It was an outcropping of limestone with a few birch trees and some
ancient, massive oaks, thickly-branched. Reaching the place I sought—where an
old snag of a dead tree projected upward from the bog—I turned past it, parted
the reeds and took the boat into a hidden waterway which I followed for almost a
hundred feet. There, against a limestone shelf, I moored the punt to an iron
ring.
Taking weapons and food we walked the narrow path between limestone boulders and
trees to a small shelf backed up against a fifteen-foot cliff of the same
material. There stood a small hut, also of limestone, thatched and secure.
“This is mine,” I told him.
“You do yourself well,” he admitted grudgingly.
“We may have to drive out bats or water rats,” I said, but we did not. It was
tight and snug as always; a deep fireplace, thick walls, a table, two chairs,
two chests on which to sleep and a bench along the wall. There was also a
cupboard.
Gathering fuel together I kindled a small fire to take off the chill. “It is an
ancient place,” I said, “the men of the fens hid here from the Romans.”
“And well they could do it,” Jublain admitted. “A man would have the devil’s own
time finding a way to come in.”
For the time being we were safe. This had been a snug haven even from the Danes.
When they had finally captured the Isle of Ely after their first defeat they had
never found this place. The house, old as it was, had been rebuilt, patched and
repaired time and again.
Yet I had no idea of hiding forever in the fens, especially with more money in
pocket than I’d ever had before. The events of the past few days had caused me
to reexamine my life and choose a course I could steer with safety.
Pulling an oar through the dark channels had given me time to think and my
thoughts had taken a sudden turn. Perhaps the use of the sword had inspired it;
more likely the jingle of coins!
“We will be quiet and fish for a few days,” I told Jublain. “Then off for
London.”
“London? Are you daft, man? That is where Genester will be, and where he is
strongest.”
“It is a vast city,” I said complacently. “Folk say more than one hundred
thousand people live there. How could I be found among so many?”
“You are a child,” Jublain said angrily. “It is too small a place in which to
hide from hate.”
“I’ve a few coins,” I said, “and I’m of no mind to rot in the fens. I do not
wish to spend my life fishing or hunting with the bow.”
“You are an archer, too?”
“So is every man in the fens. We can live by the bow.”
“Let us off to the wars, then. We might do uncommon well.”
“And lose an arm or an eye? No, I’ll go a-venturing, but with goods, not my
life.”
“You’d become a merchant? A trader?”
“Why not? Buy a packet of goods and ship as a merchant venturer for the New
World. There’s a man named Gosnold, Bartholomew Gosnold, a gentleman from
Suffolk. He has it in mind to start a colony there. There’s wealth in trading
with the Indians, he says.”
“Bah!” Jublain was impatient. “Idle talk! Who knows what is there? The Spanish
have done well, but north of their lands there is nothing but cold forests and
hostile savages.”
“And furs,” I said.
“You live well here,” he said. “You’d be a fool to give it up.”