Page 1 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

Jed lay flat on his face, fingers digging into the sand. He’d made it. That was dry land under his hands. Those were the sharp pebbles of the beach digging into his palms, and that was gritty, dry seaweed scraping his cheek. It was the most wonderful sensation in the world.

He had swallowed bucketfuls of seawater, and his lungs burned. His soaking wet, freezing cold shirt was plastered uncomfortably over his arse. But he was still alive, still breathing, and not lying at the bottom of the Bristol Channel.

Gradually, he became aware of a voice shouting nearby.

“Hey! Hey! Are you all right down there?”

Jed groaned and rolled over onto his back. He had come ashore at the top of a sandy beach at high tide. Above him, a low line of grass-covered dunes cast a shadow against the rising sun. High up on the dunes, outlined against the pale, dawn-streaked sky, stood a man.

“Need a hand?” the man shouted.

Jed tried to answer and found himself coughing up seawater instead.

The man came scrambling down the dunes in a rush of sand, and then he was standing over Jed. He had a shock of dark hair under a soft felt cap, and a narrow, angular face, handsome in a way that would have won him admirers among a certain section of the Nonsuch ’s seamen.

As for Jed, he probably looked like exactly what he was: a wet and bedraggled seaman who’d run from his ship. He struggled into a sitting position. A stiff breeze blew across the beach, and he shivered, teeth rattling like a loose belaying pin.

“Are you all right?” the man asked again.

“What does it look like?” Jed growled, amid coughs.

The man raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon. I should have realised you were lying there for the good of your health. Sea bathing, en’t that what they call it?”

Jed let out a surprised bark of a laugh.

The man’s lip twitched. “Give us a minute,” he said, taking off the small haversack he carried and crouching to rummage inside it. Soon, he was holding out a dry woollen blanket. “Take off your shirt.”

“I’ll get your blanket all wet,” Jed said weakly.

The man only shook his head. “Don’t you worry about that.” He proffered the blanket again, more forcefully this time.

“All right. Thank ‘ee. Sorry.”

The blanket was very welcome. Jed had gone over the side of the Nonsuch in shirt and trowsers, knowing that shoes and other clothes would be fatal in the water.

Now, the brisk sea breeze raised pebbles on his skin.

The sand under his bare feet was cold and damp.

Somerset sand. A Somerset beach. He was in England, for the first time in five years. It was too good to be true.

The beach stretched out to the south, a long, narrow strip of silver sand lapped by the receding tide. To the north it ended abruptly in a rocky headland, the morning sun glistening on wet sandstone. It was beautiful.

It was also bloody exposed, with nowhere to hide.

Out to sea, the last and slowest members of the convoy were straggling along the horizon—slow and ponderous merchant ships bound for the East Indies.

The Nonsuch was nowhere in sight. She must already be over the horizon, at the convoy’s head.

But he could see the single-reefed topsails of the Rose , bringing up the rear.

He had jumped from the Nonsuch ’s afterdeck at the changing of the watch, dropping into the water as silently as he could, clutching an inflated sheep’s bladder to his chest. Even now, the bosun, that vicious whoreson, was probably raising the alarm.

But Jed was counting on the fact that the whole convoy—twenty merchant ships and three men-of-war as escorts—was far too consequent to put about only to send a search party ashore for one deserter.

But there were the signal flags that could send “Man Run” from ship to ship and ship to shore. And on the Rose ’s deck stood the officer of the watch, no doubt a sharp-eyed bastard, with a glass that could be trained on the shore at any moment. Jed’s skin prickled.

He twisted around to squint up at the dunes.

The Nonsuch had been two hours out of Bristol Deep when he jumped, which meant he must have come ashore somewhere in the Somerset Levels.

Years ago, in another lifetime, he had driven his carrier’s cart back and forth over that marshy land.

He could easily find his way across the Levels and over the moors, and thence to the fishing village he hailed from.

Christ, to think he would soon be home! It would be no more than four or five days’ walk, weather permitting. Less, if he could hitch a lift.

But on the road he would be at the mercy of every neighbourhood busybody who crossed his path, eager to report him as a deserting seaman.

He’d left his short seaman’s jacket on board, but in his wide-bottomed trowsers no one could possibly mistake him for a landsman. Wet clothes, bare head, bare feet, seaman’s trowsers and pigtail… He might as well have an anchor tattooed on his forehead.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to have gone. He had prepared for this day for years, and then been rushed into it—but there was no point thinking about that now.

“You’ll have to get away from the shoreline,” the other man said, as though reading his thoughts. “But you won’t get very far in them there clothes you wear.”

“I know.”

Jed climbed to his feet and then nearly pitched face-forward into the sand. The man caught his arm, hauling him back upright. For a moment, Jed thought he was going to throw up again. But the feeling passed.

“Just water in my ears,” he muttered.

The dry land underneath him didn’t help either: it rocked under his feet like the rolling of the waves.

“There’s some bushes up there. Get in out of the wind, eh?” The man slung Jed’s arm around his shoulder. “Come on.”

With help, Jed scrambled up the dunes until they came to a rough, grassy track that followed the shoreline.

Beyond that, the flat and fertile marshland stretched out into the distance, crisscrossed by rhynes, the drainage channels that had reclaimed it from the sea.

A low hedge enclosed the nearest field. Sitting behind it, Jed would be out of sight of both ships at sea and anyone that might go past on the track.

And, just as importantly, sheltered from the wind. He shivered, hitching the blanket around his shoulders as the wind chilled his bones.

“You’d better sit down with that blanket and warm up a bit. I’m in no hurry.” The man held out his hand. “My name’s Solomon, by the way.”

Jed took it, and a warm, dry grasp enclosed his cold hand. “I’m Jedediah.”

“Do you want to cut that pigtail off? I have a knife.”

Jed eyed him warily. With the blanket warm and cosy around his shoulders, he regretted his earlier irritability. But you couldn’t be too careful.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Let’s say I’m no friend of the Navy’s.” Solomon dug in his pocket and held out a small, workmanlike pocket knife.

After a moment’s hesitation, Jed accepted it. He hacked off his pigtail and buried it under the hedge. Impatiently, he pushed aside the strands of wet hair that now fell into his eyes.

He glanced at the other man, who was calmly tucking the knife away. An idea—a dangerous one—floated into Jed’s head.

“You said as how you were in no hurry?” he asked cautiously.

“Well, no, I en’t. I’ve five days’ walk ahead of me, so a few hours here or there won’t make a deal of difference. I don’t mind waiting.”

He dropped onto the grass, giving every appearance of being willing to wait. His haversack was on his knees, and he bent his head over it, setting to rights the belongings he had disturbed when he pulled out the blanket.

Jed sat down beside him, studying him covertly. You couldn’t read a man’s character on his face, but you could judge him by his actions, and so far Solomon had been nothing but helpful. Why? Out of the goodness of his heart? That wasn’t something Jed believed in anymore. He hesitated.

On board ship, he had seen men lose a year’s wages on one roll of the dice. But he never played, no matter how much his messmates cajoled him. That was a fool’s game. For five years he had hoarded any coin he could lay his hands on, with one goal in mind: escape the Navy. He’d never gambled.

He’d have to gamble now.

“If I give you six shillings, do you think you could lay your hands on a pair of breeches for me?”

“En’t you afraid I’d make off with your money and you’d never see me again?”

“Aye, ‘course I am.”

A wry, sympathetic smile crossed Solomon’s face. “A pair of breeches and maybe a hat? You can’t go about the place without a hat.”

Jed put his hand to his bare head. “If you can get ahold of one, yes.”

“All right. You’ll hide here while you’re waiting, will you?”

Jed nodded. He ripped open the little bag he had sewn into his trowsers for the swim and—heart in his throat—counted out six shillings into the other man’s palm.

“I’ll be gone half an hour or more, I think, so don’t fret,” Solomon said. “I’ll be back.”

After Solomon’s departure, Jed spread his shirt on the hedge to dry in the wind, then huddled down on the leeward side under the blanket.

Was he half-witted to trust a complete stranger?

Only because the fellow had been kind to him and had a comely face.

He would probably never see those six shillings again.

He let his eyes fall shut. Six hours ago he had been on the dark, airless orlop deck, tumbling from his hammock, chased by the bosun’s whip. Groping his way in the darkness, with two hundred other men, towards another day under the sharp eye of the officer of the watch.

Now he was ashore. No lash, no bosun’s starter. His spirits lifted.

It was less than half an hour later when Solomon appeared around the bushes, a bundle of clothes under his arm. Jed scrambled to his feet, the knot of fear in his chest finally loosening.

Solomon was out of breath.

“The press gang is out in these parts,” he announced. “The word is they came down from Bristol in a tender yesterday and set up their Rondy at the Blacksmith’s Arms in Minehead. They already pressed ten men this morning, or so I was told.”

Jed’s heart turned over. He had been worried about the Nonsuch sending a signal onshore to spread the news of an escaped seaman.

But this was worse. Minehead was just across the bay from here, an easy journey in a swift Naval tender.

The shoreline would be crawling with gangers, swarming over the coastline like maggots over old meat.

There would be a midshipman or lieutenant, and a band of strong men with clubs and cutlasses, scouring the countryside for any unwary man who might be said to ‘use the sea,’ as the law put it.

That was how Jed had been pressed in the first place, five years ago.

Hit over the head while picking cockles on the stony beach of the village where he’d lived his whole life.

“Where did they press the men this morning?” he asked.

“At Huntspill. Leastways, so the woman who sold me the breeches said. Her own menfolk have already cleared off to her sister’s further inland to lie low until the gangers leave the neighbourhood.”

“They have the right idea of it,” Jed said grimly.

Solomon crouched, opening the bundle and spreading out its contents. As well as a pair of buckskin breeches, worn but clean, there was also a pair of worsted stockings, some broken-down old shoes, and a rough square of brown felt that could be fashioned into a hat.

“You never got all that for six bob,” Jed said, half pleased and half dismayed.

“Well… no. It was a tanner over. But I couldn’t let you go barefoot at this time of year.

There’s frost in the mornings still.” When Jed began to rummage in his pocket for sixpence, Solomon said quickly, “Let’s not linger here so close to the shore.

I feel like the press gang’s tender could heave into view at any minute, and I’ve no desire to fall into their hands. ”

Neither had Jed. He scrambled into the clothes. As he settled the hat on his head, he looked the other man up and down.

Solomon lounged against the hedge, his hands in his pockets. Only the tension around his eyes betrayed the anxiety that Jed also felt.

Jed’s gaze lingered on Solomon’s frame: tall and wiry, not particularly broad-shouldered but sturdy nonetheless. Even if the man had never been to sea in his life, he was exactly what the Navy wanted: a labouring man, young and healthy—and damned handsome, not that the Navy cared about that.

“You’re not from these parts, are you?” Indeed, that much was obvious from his accent. “Where are you bound?”

“Barnstaple,” Solomon said. “I was planning to follow the turnpike road to Bridgwater, and maybe hitch a lift there. But I lost my way.”

“I wouldn’t go by Bridgwater, if I were you. There’ll be a press gang lurking under every bridge if they’re out in force, and Bridgwater is where the high road goes through.”

“You know the roads hereabouts?”

“I was a carrier before I was pressed. Had my own horse and cart. I’ve been to and fro across the Levels many a time, and up over the moors. I know all the highways and byways.”

“Then it may be as you can set me on the right road?”

Jed came to a quick decision. Barnstaple was only twenty miles or so from his own village.

And travelling in company was usually safer than travelling alone.

“I can do better nor that. I’m going nigh on the same direction as you.

Come along of me, and I’ll show you the way. Repay you the service you’ve done me.”

Solomon studied him for a moment. His eyes were cool and grey. Then he shrugged, his lips twitching into a little smile that warmed his eyes.

“All right. Why not? Thank you.”

They shook hands on it.

“In that case, you’d best keep the blanket for now,” Solomon added.

“Put it about you in guise of a coat.” His gaze ran over Jed—who had to repress a sudden, foolish wish that he was in his Sunday finery—and his half-smile widened into a warm grin.

“They won’t take you for a seaman, but a vagabond. ”

Jed grinned back. “If any man likes to run me out of his parish for vagrancy, he’s welcome to do it. I’m going back to my own parish.”

And so he was. As they set off walking, his heart was light. He was master of his own destiny again at last.