Page 36 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

Jed sawed harder. Finally, he felt the rope give way.

The other man picked up the short lengths of rope, looking at the frayed edges in a satisfied way. He shrugged.

“Well, go on, then.”

Before the man could change his mind, Jed scrambled up over the gunwale and onto the schooner—and into the middle of a pitched battle.

Men were pouring out of the hold, running for the starboard gunwale where the two boats awaited them.

Other men were fighting. He saw moonlight glint on a pitchfork, a billhook, a threshing flail—men holding off the ship’s crew just long enough to let the prisoners get away.

In the dark, it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe, but it seemed to Jed as though the prisoners and their friends vastly outnumbered the schooner’s crew.

Who were the rescuers? Friends of the Ilfracombe longshoremen, perhaps? There’d be time enough to find out later. Now, Jed had a more pressing problem: he was on the wrong side of the battle, on the port side of the ship.

A shadow loomed up out of the darkness, slashing a cutlass, and Jed ducked out of the way.

Hurriedly, he began to make his way around the edge of the deck, his head down, ears battered by the familiar clashes and shouts and cries of armed combat. Then a beam of lanternlight fell on something that sent a shock running through him: Wallace, just a few yards away, carrying a pitchfork.

He blinked, unable to believe his eyes, then ran across the deck.

“What the devil are you doing here?”

Wallace gasped. “Jed. Thank God. I’m looking for you two. I didn’t realise everything would be so—confused.” He flinched as metal clashed on metal nearby. From the awkward way he was holding the pitchfork, Jed guessed that he hadn’t made much use of it.

“Have you seen Solomon?”

“Yes. He went looking for you.”

The deck was clearing now. Most of the prisoners had escaped into the boats.

Two men were bending over another near the mainmast. One man was half-carrying, half-dragging his injured friend across the deck to the boats.

Three burly longshoremen were forcing seamen down into the hold at cutlass point.

Jed looked around desperately. And thank God, there he was, abaft the mainmast. Solomon. At the same moment, Solomon saw him. They met in the middle of the near-empty deck.

“God, I thought you’d gone to the Ossory .”

“I almost did.” They were clutching each other, and Jed felt something sticky under his hands. “You’re bleeding!”

“Yes, I think so. I didn’t even notice…”

Solomon’s voice was faint, and Jed remembered the shock of his own first battle. He pulled Solomon into a patch of moonlight. Blood was oozing from a small gash on Solomon’s arm. “It’s not serious. Thank God. Here”—he tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt—“we’ll bind it up with this.”

The deck was nearly empty by now, a stillness as shocking as the abrupt outbreak of pitched battle.

Wallace caught them both by the arm, tugging at them. “This way, this way! The boats are going up the coast to let everybody off in some remote cove.”

“How in heaven did you come to be here?” Solomon demanded.

“Clear the deck, clear the deck!” a man in a fisherman’s cap was shouting from his position on the gunwale. “Look lively there! We’re leaving.”

“I’ll tell you later,” Wallace said in answer to Solomon’s question. “Let’s go.”

They turned to dash across the deck and ran headlong into a man coming up through the hatchway. Jed recognised him as one of the longshoremen who’d been in the cellar with him, a short, grey-bearded man.

“Have you seen the register?” the man demanded. “It’s got all our names in it. We have to destroy it before we go.”

“Especially if someone’s been killed,” Jed said, a chill running down his spine. “Have they?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. We’ve locked the officers and men in the hold.”

One of the younger longshoremen came running up, carrying a ledger. “I have it! I have it!”

“There’s a copy back at the Blacksmith’s Arms, I make sure,” Jed pointed out, as the man tore the most recent pages from the ledger, crumpled them up around a holystone, and dropped them over the side.

“Yes, dammit, you’re right,” the first man said.

The two longshoremen exchanged glances. “Think you can find your way there through the town, Godfrey?” the older one said doubtfully. They were from Ilfracombe, Jed remembered, a village a good thirty-five miles away along the coast.

“I’ll go,” Jed said. “I know Minehead well.”

“It’s too risky,” Solomon said instantly. “And your name’s not even on the register.”

“No. But yours is.”

“We’re leaving!” the man by the gunwale shouted again.

They settled quickly that Jed, Solomon, and the younger longshoreman—his name was Godfrey—should go to the Blacksmith’s Arms. Wallace would come ashore with them—“Emma’s in Minehead,” he said.

Understandably, he didn’t want to enter the inn or any other place where Vaughan might be.

Jed thought it was damned courageous of him to have come this far.

They hurried to the boats, and soon the schooner, silent now, was receding into the distance behind them.

One of the boats put Jed and the three others ashore near the hamlet of Warren, a mile east of the harbour.

Looking along the beach, Jed saw a cluster of bobbing, moving lights near the harbour—townsfolk drawn by the commotion on the schooner.

With any bit of luck, Lieutenant Vaughan was there commandeering a force to take out to the schooner, leaving the Rondy deserted.

He wouldn’t have an easy task of it, for the tide was out and the boats in the harbour all aground.

“Follow me,” Jed said, leading the way in the short scramble up from the beach to the low-lying fields. He meant to take them into town from the east, staying well clear of the harbour.

The moon was veiled behind clouds now, and the sleeping streets were shrouded in darkness. Only the occasional light shone through a mullioned window. Jed had to stop every so often to get his bearings on the way to the Blacksmith’s Arms.

While in the boat, Wallace had explained how he and the rescuers came to be there.

When he fled the Rose and Crown, almost two days ago now, he had gone directly to Barnstaple and found some fishermen he knew who drank at the Boar on market day.

They had already heard of the pressing at Ilfracombe, and brought him around the coast to that village, where friends of the pressed men were planning a rescue.

“They got a message into the cellar to warn us,” Solomon said. “We were to be ready to break out at eight bells in the first watch. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

Jed met his eye, reliving those moments when he’d been in the gig on the way to the Ossory and feared he had missed his chance.

Now, the four of them hurried through the dark and silent town, Jed leading the way. Their footsteps were deadened by the hard-packed mud of the unpaved streets, and the only sound was the distant hooting of an owl, somewhere in the inland woods.

Wallace fell into step beside Jed, speaking breathlessly as they hurried along.

“Emma spoke to your sister yesterday. A Mrs Penwick, I collect?”

Jed was too surprised to do more than nod.

“Emma came with us in the lugger from Barnstaple—we put into Ledcombe to let her ashore there. She said your sister lives there and is married to a man who’s friendly with the local magistrate and might have been willing to intervene on your behalf, somehow.”

“And was he?” Jed asked, already knowing the answer.

Wallace sounded apologetic. “No. I’m sorry. She did say, well, she thought it would probably be something of a long shot.”

Jed grunted. Emma had read Carrie’s letter. She must have known just how much of a long shot it was. It warmed his heart to think that she had tried anyway.

“But Mrs Penwick did mention something about Hugo Vaughan as might be of use to us—” Wallace broke off as Jed came to a halt, holding up a hand. They had reached the end of the street where the Blacksmith’s Arms stood. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Wallace, you want to stay here?” Solomon suggested. “Keep watch for anyone coming up from the harbour?”

Jed, Solomon and the longshoreman left Wallace hidden in the shadow of a gatepost and advanced towards the inn. To Jed’s immense relief, the wing used by the press gang seemed entirely deserted. No lights burned in any of the windows.

They pushed open the front door. The large downstairs room was empty.

“Christ, will we have to search the whole house?” the longshoreman said. Until now, he had seen no part of the building but the ground floor and the cellar. But Jed and Solomon could lead him directly to the room Vaughan used as an office.

It was a matter of a few minutes to break down the door, and then to break open the locked chest where Vaughan stored all his papers. Solomon kept watch at the top of the stairs while Jed and the longshoreman knelt to rifle through them.

Jed found what looked like a list of names, dates and ages.

“Give us a look,” the longshoreman said. He cast a quick glance over it. “This is it. There are about three dozen names here, dates going back two weeks—I think that must be everyone.”

Jed took the candle they had been using to light their way and crouched at the empty hearth to feed the papers into the flame.

“Hey, look at this,” said the longshoreman, who had continued to rummage in the chest. Jed looked over his shoulder to see the man holding up a locked money-box.

“That belongs to the Crown,” Jed said. “I’m not touching that. We’d be lucky to escape with our necks.”

So far tonight, nothing they had done had crossed the line that was sure to bring the retribution of the law down on their heads. Many other men had fought the press gang and got away with it. Jed had no intention of doing anything that might cross that line.

“You know what don’t belong to the Crown?” the longshoreman said wistfully. “That leather pouch they were putting the bribe money in.”