Page 29 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

When Solomon finally reached the end of the story, his voice was hoarse. He had done most of the talking, with Wallace speaking up only now and then to remind him of some detail.

“Well… there you have it,” Solomon said at last.

The room fell silent. Jed was sitting on one of the beds, and Solomon and Wallace were on the other, facing him. They were both limp with exhaustion. Wallace’s skin was a wan grey, and Solomon’s features were sharp and pinched.

There was a look that mingled shame and defiance in Wallace’s eyes, and Jed wanted to say something to put him at his ease.

But he couldn’t think what: the whole thing was too big for him.

Instead, he asked the most straightforward and obvious question.

“So how did this Vaughan fellow come to be down here in Devon?”

Solomon and Wallace exchanged glances.

“We’ve talked and talked about it,” Solomon said. “Trying to guess where he picked up our trail.”

“We know where,” Wallace said to him. “You were clever enough to walk out of Bristol, and I was stupid enough to get on a carrier’s cart to Taunton.” He slumped back against the wall. “I never really thought he’d follow me.”

The two of them were sitting shoulder to shoulder, and Solomon gave Wallace a gentle bump. “We’ve slept fairly soundly up until now,” he said to Jed. “Even if he knew we were somewhere west of Taunton, it seemed unlikely that he could find us.”

“I won’t be sleeping soundly tonight,” Wallace said. He gave Jed a questioning look. “Solomon says you thought he might track the cart to Barnstaple.”

Jed rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe. It en’t as though we were on one of Mrs Drake’s regular routes, happily enough.

Nobody can point us out as the Barnstaple carrier.

But… he did have a bloody good look at our load.

If he’s really determined, he could make enquiries at every brewery in the district. And also—” He hesitated.

“What?”

“Well, tracking down people is what the press gang does. It’s their specialty.”

A heavy silence fell between them.

“You must think me a pitiful fellow,” Wallace said abruptly. “Fleeing across the country like this. I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t just tough it out. Put up my fists and knock him down.”

Jed shook his head. “I’m running away too, you know.”

“That’s not the same. Everyone runs from the press gang.”

Jed couldn’t deny it.

“He won’t be in the area forever,” Solomon said.

It sounded like something he had repeated many times before.

“He may have contrived to be sent here on the impressment service, but he won’t be at Minehead forever.

He’ll get orders to move to another part of the country.

We only have to stay out of his way until then. ”

Wallace looked unconvinced.

There came a quick, determined step in the corridor, and then a rap on the door. It was Emma Yates, with an armful of linen.

“You’ll have a new fellow in your room,” she said to Jed, shooing Solomon and Wallace off the bed so she could change the sheets. “He’s a wool merchant’s clerk, in town for a week or so.”

She glanced curiously at the other two men as she spoke.

“I’ve told him,” Wallace said to her. “Told him everything.”

“Ah.” She straightened up and directed a sharp, swift glance at Jed, as though searching his face for—what? What did she expect to see there? Jed stared back, bemused.

“All right,” she said at last, and went back to making the bed up. Over her shoulder, she said to Jed, “So you saw this Vaughan fellow today, I collect? Should I expect to find him on the doorstep tomorrow?”

“I, ah…” So Emma knew the whole story too? Jed glanced uncertainly from her to Wallace. “On my life, I don’t know.”

“What did you tell him?”

“As little as I could. Nothing that’d lead him directly here.”

She gave the sheets a final sharp tug, then turned to study him, lips pursed.

“We can trust him,” Solomon put in. “If he says he told us everything that happened, he did.”

“Very well, then,” Emma said, the suspicion disappearing from her expression. She looked from Jed to Solomon and said in a lighter tone, “So, I’m guessing I was right that you two are…?” She gestured between them.

Jed froze, the breath driven from his lungs. He didn’t dare look at Solomon.

“Sorry, sorry!” Emma put up a hand. “You don’t have to answer that.

None of my affair. Live and let live, eh?

” She gathered up the old sheets. “We’d best get them barrels up from the cellar, Wallace.

The goldsmiths’ guild will be in tonight, and you know how much they get through.

Come and find me downstairs in a few minutes, eh? ”

She went out. Jed drew in a long, shuddering breath.

“I’m sorry,” Wallace said. “I only told her about, well, about myself, but she must have guessed… She won’t make any trouble for you, Master Trevithick, I promise. We can trust her.”

“All right, never mind that now,” Jed said, though it wasn’t at all easy to put aside. “About this man Vaughan—what are the two of you planning to do? I mean, are you staying here in this part of the country, or—” He was afraid of what the answer might be.

They exchanged glances. They’d clearly had this discussion already.

“I’m not going to run anymore,” Wallace said. “I’ve reasons for wanting to stay here. Plans for the future.” He swallowed. “I don’t care if I risk seeing him again.” He sounded as though he were trying to persuade himself of that.

Solomon met Jed’s eye. “I’ll be here as long as you two are.”

The knot of worry in Jed’s chest loosened. “All right, then. Good.”

Jed slept badly that night. Every time he woke from confused dreams of the sea, the merchant’s clerk was snoring away cheerfully in the other bed.

He lay on his back, staring up into the darkness, the clash of steel and the boom of musket-fire still ringing in his ears.

Carefully, he flexed his fingers. They ached as though he really had been gripping that boarding cutlass, the blade still unbloodied.

All he’d ever wanted to do was survive each battle without killing any of the poor sods from the other ship.

But when it was you or him, when you lashed out and the other man crumpled, and you plunged on, not even knowing whether you’d left him alive or dead—

He tossed restlessly in sweat-soaked sheets. In the dream, he hadn’t been fighting. He’d been trying to slip away to some quiet corner. But every time, a hand fell on his shoulder and forced him to turn. And every time, he was looking into the face of Lieutenant Vaughan.

When he’d lain in his hammock on board ship, dreaming of escape, he had never pictured anything like this: the unsettled nights, the nerves during the day, the constant dread in the pit of his stomach.

He felt a sudden sharp longing to be back in Ledcombe, and for none of this to have ever happened.

Abruptly, he sat up in bed, throwing back the covers. He was free, and he had to live like a free man, not like this, a prisoner of his fears.

He rose and went downstairs. At the foot of the stairs he met Wallace, also on his way to the kitchens in search of tea.

“Morning,” Wallace said. At first he didn’t meet Jed’s eyes; then, determinedly, he looked at him directly.

“Morning,” Jed said. “Er, listen, Master Acton… I wanted to say how sorry I am I pushed Solomon to tell me everything as happened in London. I was that angry with him… But it weren’t his story to tell.”

“Oh. No, think no more of it. I couldn’t ask Solomon to tell lies on my behalf—and particularly not to you.” His awkward smile turned into a genuine one. “Solomon holds you in high regard, you know.”

To his amazement, Jed felt himself turn red—something he was not at all prone to do. “He’s been a good friend to me,” he said gruffly.

“To me, too.”

They stood there for a moment, the silence not quite comfortable and not quite awkward.

“You, er, think there’s already tea in the kitchen?” Jed said.

They went in together. Emma Yates was there, busy instructing one of the other maids.

“That’s for the gentleman in the private parlour; these three plates are for the taproom.

” She cast a warm smile at Wallace, including Jed in it too, and waved them towards the pot of tea.

“And mind you go running to the private parlour first, Sally.” She picked up a coffeepot and hurried out, then stuck her head back into the room to address Jed.

“Master Trevithick, I set some paper aside for that letter of your’n. ”

Then she was gone.

Jed swallowed. As soon as the shock of Carrie’s letter had lessened, he had begun to think about what he would say in reply, turning different phrases over in his head. But when he and Emma finally sat down together in a quiet corner, it wasn’t easy.

Jed had never composed a letter before. When he had written to Carrie and his aunt when he was at sea, the actual writing had been done by a messmate of his, who had been a clerk before he ended up in debtor’s prison, and who proposed exactly the same model of letter to all his messmates.

“ Dear sister, I have received your letter, ” Jed began, pausing to let Emma write it down.

“ Since I was pressed, I have wanted nothing more than to return home to my family— ” He stopped.

There didn’t seem to be much chance of that anymore.

“No, better just put, to Ledcombe.” He chewed his lip.

“And then will you put… I know that I could live peacefully and happily there, if only Penwick hadn’t took against me.

” He thought it over for a moment. “Better make that Mr Penwick. Have you got that? Thank ‘ee, Mistress Yates. And then, um… It seems to me that you are happy in your marriage, and I’ve no wish or intent to do anything to disturb that. But I must tell you that— ”

“Wait up, wait up,” Emma said. “ …no wish or intent… Yes, go on.”

When Jed first heard Carrie’s letter to him, a cold, sick lump had settled in his stomach, and now it was back with a vengeance. There were so many things he wanted to say—to protest, to plead. But he couldn’t do it like this, with pen and ink, and Carrie twenty miles away.

“ —I must tell you that I’m determined to take up the traces of my old life again, soon as may be…

No, put soon as the press cools off .” He rubbed the back of his neck, watching Emma’s nib scratch slowly across the page.

“And then tell her: Can you manage to wish me well, at least? I don’t like to be at odds with my own sister. It en’t right. ”

They managed to get the whole thing down on paper. Emma folded the sheet over and sealed it with a drop of candle wax. “What’s the direction?”

“Mrs Caroline Penwick at the Manor House in Ledcombe.”

She wrote that on the outside in slow, careful strokes.

Jed reached out, brushing the letter with his fingertips. It was such a poor way to communicate. When would he be able to return to Ledcombe and speak to his sister directly?

Mrs Drake had not given Jed or Solomon a regular route.

Instead, she called on them to fill the gaps in her roster when her other waggoners were ill or delayed.

That morning, Jed was sent out with a cart to meet the Exeter waggon, which had lost a wheel four miles south of Barnstaple and was stuck, lopsided, in the mud.

As Jed helped transfer sacks and parcels to the cart, he had to fight the impulse to look over his shoulder every few minutes.

Until today, he had felt fairly safe in Barnstaple and on the inland routes.

But now, his skin crawled in anticipation of the heavy hand landing on his shoulder.

When Jed arrived back at the yard, Solomon was helping unload the Taunton waggon. Jed caught Solomon’s eye and jerked his head towards the isolated corner where they usually met to talk. Solomon nodded.

Ten minutes later, Jed found Solomon waiting for him there, propped against the whitewashed wall, hands in his pockets.

They looked at each other.

“You look like you slept as little as I did,” Solomon said.

“Yes. Probably.” Though he felt better just for seeing Solomon. He longed to touch him.

Around them, the yard was unusually calm. It was the lull in the middle of the day: the morning waggons had all left and the evening waggons had not yet started to arrive.

“You have to go back out again?” Solomon asked.

“Not for another few hours.”

“Come upstairs?”

They went to Solomon and Wallace’s empty room and came together in the space between the beds, the afternoon sun creeping in through the narrow window, and the lump of tension in Jed’s gut melting a little more with every kiss.

He slid his hands into Solomon’s hair, pulling him close, lengthening each kiss.

When they finally broke off, Jed jammed the room’s only chair under the door handle, while Solomon began to tug off his neckerchief.

“No, leave that,” Jed ordered. “On your back on the bed. I’ll see to your clothes myself.”

“You’re calling the shots,” Solomon murmured, flopping obediently back onto the bed.

Jed paused, his hands on the buttons of his own breeches. “Is that—all right?”

“I like it. It’s not something I’ve been able to indulge very often. I mean, if you—?”

“I like it too.”

Solomon relaxed. He folded one arm behind his head, looking up at Jed. “Well, then.”

A little smile was hovering about his lips. Jed bent to kiss it, a burst of tenderness welling up inside him.

It was a precious gift, he thought. That Solomon would trust him, of all the men in all the world. He wanted to nurture that trust, to embrace it, to be worthy of it. He wanted to hang onto Solomon and never let go.

He swallowed around the tight lump of happiness in his throat, his hands moving over Solomon’s body, unbuttoning and untying.

For a few minutes, nothing mattered but the man in his arms. Solomon’s body beneath him, eagerly yielding. Solomon’s mouth surging up to meet his. The light in his eyes, the rasp of his cheek against Jed’s, the hand that closed tight on his.

Worldly pain and labour seemed far away, here in this hallowed place. At that moment, Jed wouldn’t have wished to take any other path in life but the one that brought him here, to this room, to this man’s body and soul.

“Jed,” Solomon breathed, and they thrust together, moving as one body, until they were spent.

The room was still, the mattress soft, Solomon’s arm warm and heavy across Jed’s chest.

After some time, Jed stirred. “I’d better go,” he said sleepily, though the stableyard clock had struck noon not long ago, and he didn’t have to be in the yard until one.

“Stay if you like.”

“Wallace—”

“He’s with Emma. They’ve gone out for a walk together.”

“Gone for a walk together?” Jed repeated, intrigued.

Solomon stifled a yawn. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he said, rolling over to pillow his head on Jed’s chest and drift off to sleep.