Page 3 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

“Come along, young fellows,” the peddler cried from the crossroads up ahead. “It’s just along this lane.”

Within an hour, they were installed in a comfortable corner of a hay barn. Jed fell asleep almost as soon as he laid his head down.

He woke with a start some hours later, disoriented.

He was not lying in a hammock, gently swaying with the ship’s movement, packed into the darkness with two hundred other men.

Instead, he lay wrapped in a blanket on a bed of hay, with a beam of moonlight falling on his face from a gap above the barn’s door.

It all came rushing back to him. He was free! No more being torn from sleep and chased on deck. No more soul-crushing routine of ship’s bell and cook’s gong, regulating every moment of every day.

A few feet away, Solomon lay asleep in the moonlight. He was almost unrecognisable, his face slack and peaceful in repose. Jed studied him curiously, wondering what caused the tension that seemed a permanent feature of that face in waking life.

Solomon let out a little breath of a sigh, moving in his sleep. The peddler began to snore again, in huge, rattling gusts. His son elbowed him, and he turned over, grunting and settling down.

Jed closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep again. Tomorrow he would be one step closer to home.

“Perhaps we’d have done better to cross the river during the night,” Jed said uneasily.

He and Solomon had said farewell to the peddler and his son upon leaving the farm, and were now skirting the edge of a field shrouded in a thick layer of morning mist. Wrens and thrushes chirped in the hedges, undeterred by the falling drizzle.

Jed had almost forgotten what an English dawn chorus sounded like.

Across the field from them lay the river Parrett, hidden behind the dirt embankment that protected the surrounding fields from salty tidal water.

Beyond the embankment, the roof of a barge came gliding into view, ill-formed and ghostlike in the mist, making its slow, ponderous way up from the sea.

The barge-horse plodded steadily along, head down.

“Come on,” Jed said.

They crossed the field, and Jed scrambled up the embankment to speak to the bargeman leading the horse.

“Heard anything of the press this morning?”

The bargeman scratched his head. “I heard tell they got a handful of merchant seamen in Bridgwater this morning.” The thought didn’t seem to trouble him overmuch. Like all bargemen, he had a letter of protection, the lucky sod.

Bridgwater was only a few miles downstream, and a shiver of unease ran down Jed’s spine.

He slithered back down from the embankment to relay the news to Solomon, whose mouth tightened. “It’s not that I’m afeared of the press, as such, but it’s of great importance to me that I get to Barnstaple, and not only for my own sake.”

Jed felt a flash of curiosity, but there was no time to ask questions now. “If you en’t afeared, you ought to be. But believe me, I don’t mean to let us fall into their hands.”

Hurrying upstream towards the bridge where Jed meant to cross the river, they soon left the slow-moving barge behind.

It had begun to rain, and the long grass soaked their stockings when they left the road and circled around by the fields so as to approach the bridge cautiously, under cover of trees and bushes.

It was an old medieval bridge, its stones slick with rain.

A row of tidy, white-washed cottages stood on the far side of the river, along with a public house.

No one was in sight. The bridge lay waiting. All they had to do was walk across.

Every pressed man in the Navy had his own story, and Jed had heard dozens of them.

Most men were pressed at sea, taken out of fishing boats and merchant vessels.

But of those taken on land, it had often happened at a bridge.

Jed’s messmate Little Dodd loved to tell the tale of how he had avoided capture for over a month before he was obliged to cross the great bridge at Gloucester, and met the press there.

But this quiet country bridge was no turnpike crossing.

It wasn’t much bigger than the numerous little wooden bridges and culverts they had crossed over the marshland’s rhynes and drains the previous day.

No press gang would take the trouble to lurk in the bushes here, surely.

Would they? Uneasily, Jed eyed the thickly growing alders on the river bank.

Nothing moved. Smoke rose peacefully from the cottage chimneys. A woman emerged from the inn, emptied a bucket into the river and disappeared inside the building again.

Jed exchanged glances with Solomon.

They strode briskly across the bridge. Within seconds, they were on the other side and hurrying down a quiet lane. Jed broke into a run, not slowing until they were deep in the marshland, empty fields on either side, and a good mile from the bridge.

He stopped to catch his breath, bending over with his hands on his knees. He cast a sheepish grin up at Solomon, who had kept pace with him easily.

“I’m sorry. Reckon I’m fairly off-kilter today.”

Solomon grinned back. Then they were both laughing for sheer relief, their breaths coming in heavy, exuberant gasps. The rain was falling more heavily now, plastering damp hair across Solomon’s forehead. He had taken off his cap, and his face was bright with laughter.

At last, Jed straightened up, groaning against the stitch in his side. “Not what you had in mind when you said you’d follow me?”

Solomon wiped a hand across his damp face. “Who do you think is at your heels, friend, the press gang or the devil?”

A rain drop had gathered at Solomon’s temple, and now it rolled down his cheek. Jed watched it, seized by a foolish desire to catch it with his finger, to press his lips to its path.

He shook himself, pulling his hat down over his brow to hide his eyes. “Let’s find some shelter from this rain.”

The tavern’s dim and smoky taproom was almost empty. An old man sat drinking porter by the smouldering remains of a fire in the hearth. The two other guests—they appeared to be travellers, from the haversacks at their feet—were eating at a table, engaged in low-voiced conversation.

Jed and Solomon were seated at another table with two pints of ale between them.

A door slammed against a wall, and Jed flinched, his heart leaping into action. But it was only the landlady, returning from the back room bearing a steaming pigeon pie on a platter. She set it down between Jed and Solomon.

Once she had turned away to speak to the other guests, Solomon said quietly, “We needn’t stay if you don’t want. We can take the pie with us.”

Jed had been reluctant to come here in the first place. He had been planning to avoid taverns, favoured targets of the press gangs. But he’d been cold and damp, and this was an out-of-the-way place, fairly far inland.

He shook his head. “Thank ‘ee, but I can’t spend the rest of my days forever looking over my shoulder.”

As he watched Solomon cut the pie and divide it between them, his thoughts were on the road ahead.

He didn’t intend to take the coast road, as he would have done years ago in time of peace.

Instead, they would go up over the moors, where human habitations were far and few between and the press gang never ventured.

“We’ll be in Cheddon by nightfall, if all go well,” he said out loud.

“I’ve stayed at the inn there many a time.

It’s thruppence a night. And then the next day ‘twill be uphill all the way, I’m afraid.

” To his surprise, a smile twitched at the corner of Solomon’s lip.

Jed was starting to like that little smile. “What?”

“Nothing,” Solomon said. “Only—I hear in your voice that you’re happy.”

“That I am. I spent my whole life roving them moors, till I was snatched away. Now I’m going home. Home to my family.”

He had had only one letter from his aunt and sister in all the years he’d been away, written in the polished hand of a local clergyman. He himself had written to them several times with the help of a messmate who had some book learning, but he didn’t know if the letters had ever reached them.

“Back to the village where I was born and reared,” he said aloud.

“Back to my horse and cart. Back to my old life.” He didn’t know what might have changed in his absence, but for now he was just concentrating on getting home.

He could almost smell the crisp, peaty air of the moorland. “Ever been over Exmoor before?”

Solomon shook his head. “But you are much attached to the country, I think.”

“I am that. I expect you’d be of like mind, were you to return to London Town after years away.”

“No doubt I would, though I’m not a Londoner by birth.” Solomon had finished eating and was slouching in his seat, one arm thrown over the back of the bench. “I’ve loved being in London. I wouldn’t have left if I weren’t obliged to.”

“Oh?” Jed said, his curiosity piqued. “Why’s that?”

Solomon looked as though he had said more than he meant to.

“I didn’t mean—my circumstances changed, that’s all.

” He pushed the pie dish across the table to Jed.

One solitary carrot remained to be eaten.

“Go on. I expect you en’t had much in the way of fresh vegetables these past few years.

Not but what to call this one ‘fresh’ is to make myself a liar, I fear. ”

Jed speared the—decidedly old and chewy—carrot with his knife, studying him thoughtfully. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but then stopped, distracted by the traveller at the other table, who was watching them and perhaps even listening.

He was a youngish man with luxuriant chestnut side-whiskers and a sharply whetted gaze that swept up and down over Jed.

He sat alone at the table—his companion seemed to have gone away somewhere.

When he caught Jed’s eye, he leaned over to speak to him.

“I see by your hands that you are a seaman, friend.”

Reflexively, Jed closed his hands into fists. The fingertips were still stained black, despite the thorough scrubbing he’d given them. He searched his mind for some other trade that used tar. “No, I’m a roofer.”

“Ah, I see. I beg your pardon. My mistake.” He turned back to his drink.

Jed shifted restlessly in his chair. The dark, low-ceiling room had closed in oppressively around him, and the door felt dangerously far away.

“Shall we go?” Solomon suggested.

They stepped out into light so bright that Jed’s eyes screwed up. The rain had stopped, and sunlight dappled the distant slopes of the Quantocks.

A peaceful midday calm lay over the countryside as they set off, but less than five minutes later, the quiet was broken by shouts on the road behind them. Jed turned to see the whiskered young man from the taproom racing towards them, his face red and sweaty, desperation in his waving arms.

“The press are coming!” He caught up with them and came to a stop, doubled over to catch his breath. “The press gang… They came through the tavern soon after you left. Oh, Lord help me! They’re on the road behind me.”

Jed froze, the iron hand of fear closing tight around his chest.

“Help me!” the man gasped. “Where can I hide? I must hide and let them go past.”

Jed looked around wildly. On the road up ahead stood a cluster of tumbledown old outbuildings. Most of them were in a sorry state, roofs half off and doorways choked with brambles, but the nearest one was still intact. The man raced towards it and wrenched the door open.

“We can hide in here,” he shouted to Jed and Solomon. “Make haste, quick as you can!”

Jed was hot on his heels. He hurried through the door. The interior was pitch black after the sunlight outside, but some instinct made him stop. A shadow loomed up over him.

He’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

“Run!” he yelled in warning to Solomon, before something solid connected with his skull.

The darkness was familiar to Jed. He’d been here before, and his stomach clenched, sour with dread. This was the darkness of the receiving ship’s hold, locked in with dozens of other men, prisoners waiting to be assigned to a ship, all packed tightly together, the air thick with the stench of fear.

But no. The air here was clear, and someone was moving around nearby.

“Hold still for a minute.” Solomon’s voice came from the darkness. “I’m just going to—”

He scrambled over Jed. Then, with a splintering crash, a door burst open and light flooded in. Solomon stood outlined against the blue sky.

“Thank God,” Jed breathed, letting his head fall back onto the earthen floor. “Thank God.”

Solomon said dryly, “You won’t be thanking God when you find all your money has gone. At least, mine has.”

“I thought we’d been pressed.”

Vaguely, Jed patted himself down. His breeches had been torn open and the pockets cut off. But he could hardly bring himself to care. He still hadn’t recovered from that moment of terror when he’d thought he was in the receiving ship.

He clambered to his feet, set his clothing to rights, and stumbled out of the byre to join Solomon. Several hours had passed, and it was mid-afternoon. No one else was in sight.

He groaned, rubbing the lump on the back of his head. “I’m sorry. I just…”

“Lost your head?” Solomon said coolly, and for a moment Jed wanted to hit him, until he added, just as coolly, “Well, so did I. It can’t be helped.”

“I can’t go back to the Navy.”

Solomon nodded, acknowledging that without comment.

Jed sank down onto the wet grass, the full extent of the disaster only now sinking in. Four days’ journey ahead of them, four damp and hungry nights out in the open, with the chill of winter still in the air. And not a scrap of food to eat, save two hunks of bread.

“Christ. A right simpleton I was.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Better spend our energy on thinking about what to do now.”

Jed was not averse to a spot of poaching, supplemented by foraging, but March was not the best month for filling your belly. Nor the best month for sleeping out of doors.

“We’ll have to find a few days’ work,” he said. He glanced up at Solomon. “Leastways, I say ‘we,’ but I’ll understand if you want us to go our separate ways. I en’t exactly led us very well so far.”

Though he tried not to show it, he found himself caring more than he had expected to about the answer.

Solomon studied him thoughtfully for a moment, then held out a hand to help him to his feet. “Reckon I’ll take my chances with you.”