Page 5 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

The following morning, Jed found Solomon down in the farmyard, with a peaceable bay mare nuzzling his neck over the stable door. He was chuntering to her in an undertone. Jed came to join him, brushing the hay-loft dust from his clothes.

The mare turned her head towards Jed, sniffing and snorting, and Jed rubbed her nose.

“I had a fine bay carthorse,” he said. “I don’t know what became of her when I was pressed.”

He’d probably spent more time with Bess than with any other living creature, driving over the moors in rain and in sunshine. A sudden fear tugged at his heart. Surely Carrie and Aunt Ellen would have kept her—they would need her to keep the business going.

Soon, he promised himself. Soon, he would be sitting on the box once more, reins in his hands and the wind at his back.

“I’ve never been to sea,” Solomon said. “But I don’t imagine you had many horses on board?”

“Pigs, goats, and sheep aplenty, but not much in the way of horses, no. A pangolin once.”

“A pangolin ? What’s that?”

“A sort of gurt beetle, big as a cat. The captain bought it in Madras, and it used to run about the deck on its tiny legs and make a nuisance of itself. It brung us good luck, or so we decided. Though I don’t know how happy it can have been, torn away from its forest and trapped in a floating prison. ”

Solomon said, “Puts me in mind of a gentleman I saw once with a pet monster: an alley-gater, he said it was called. A giant lizard with humongous teeth. It had to be kept chained and caged all the time. That weren’t no proper place for such a beast, poor thing.”

“Where the devil did you see that?”

“At one of the big coaching inns in London. I was an ostler there, up until last week.”

Jed whistled. “That’s a busy life.”

“Never a dull moment, that’s for sure. You get all manner of people on the roads—and all manner of odd things to transport. You must have seen as much yourself, being a carrier.”

“I never had any wild beasts, though. Or no wilder than my neighbour’s geese, leastways.”

That got a grin from Solomon. “Will you take up your carrier’s route again, when you get home?” he asked.

“I hope so, yes.”

“You’re not worried about being pressed out of your village again?”

“A hot press don’t last forever. You just have to avoid being struck by lightning when the storm is rumbling overhead. Then the gang pack up and move on to a fresh hunting ground, and you can breathe again for a space. And I know no one in my village will betray me as a deserter.”

“And the war has to end someday, surely,” Solomon offered.

“Surely.” Sometimes it felt like England had been at war with France almost as long as Jed had been alive. The horse snorted, as if in agreement, and Jed gave her nose a final pat. “We’d best get on. What did we do with the shovels last night?”

The two of them were in such different places, Jed thought as they went to fetch the shovels. Jed would soon be home, but Solomon—as far as Jed understood—was travelling into the unknown. Travelling away from something, perhaps. But that was his own business.

Turn the glass and strike the bell. An endless round, over and over and over.

The ship’s bell tolls. The bosun’s whip cracks. Haul away there. Brace the yards. Man the guns. Get up. Lay down. Fall in. Fall out…

A never-ending hail of orders, and the bosun’s piercing whistle is the worst of it.

“I’d like to shove that pipe up his arse,” Sammy Roberts always says.

He smirks at Jed from his perch on a cannonade in the forecastle, where they’ve all gathered round to while away a Sunday afternoon in glorious, dreamlike sunshine. “Remember how I allus says that?”

But Sammy is dead. Has been for over a year now. Hit by a falling marlinspike and buried at sea off the Azores.

Jed, with a sick sort of puzzlement in his stomach, studies that jolly face. Blood is trickling down Sammy’s temple but he doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes glitter.

“Keep your stations, men!” the midshipman shouts, and now somehow Sammy is at the mainsheet. “You there, Roberts, haul away. Bosun, start that man!”

Sammy flinches—and then Jed isn’t with him anymore. He’s high in the rigging, the deck below the size of a pocket handkerchief. His hands are slick with blood. Grimly, he tightens his grip on the ratlines.

He can’t tell where the blood came from. He isn’t injured. Indeed the battle seems to be over. Or maybe there never was one. The ship is sailing peacefully across the open, empty sea. Jed is almost disappointed. It’s an ordinary day, and there’s nothing to do but wait.

Waiting. Always waiting. Not allowed to do anything but wait for orders. The wind howls in his ears, too loud for talking, save in a bellow. He’s on the yardarm now, and the next man along is lost in a reverie of his own.

Turn the glass and strike the bell…

Jed woke drenched in sweat. At first he only lay there, heart pounding.

Then he struggled into a sitting position.

Solomon was a few yards away, up to his knees in water, shovelling at a steady pace.

When he saw Jed stir, he stopped work. He dug his shovel into the ground and rested his folded arms on it.

Jed drew in a breath. “Christ, I’m sorry. You should have woken me.”

After they’d eaten, he had lain back to rest his eyes for a second. He must have dozed off.

“You don’t sleep very well,” Solomon observed.

Jed scrubbed at dry eyes. He had slept uneasily every night since he ran, but he’d thought that last night, at least, he’d managed to avoid waking Solomon.

This was getting damned tiresome. In five years at sea, he had always slept like a log. Never troubled by the slightest nightmare.

“Well, you know…” he said with a shrug. “I’ve not grown accustomed to the idea of getting a full night’s sleep. At sea, we could be turned out on deck at any hour of the day or night.”

“I wonder if it’s more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve not had an easy time of it, recently. That’s all.”

Jed had no idea how to respond to that. Finally, he said, “Next time, wake me up. Don’t see why you should labour on alone.”

Solomon accepted this with phlegm. He picked up the other shovel and tossed it to Jed. “Here you are, then.”

The land around the rhyne was noticeably drier now.

“Mrs Farley had the right of it when she said ‘twould take us four or five days,” Jed said, surveying their work.

Solomon grunted, a sound that held more annoyance and impatience than satisfaction.

Jed glanced curiously at him. “When is your friend expecting you?”

Solomon looked startled, as though he hadn’t expected Jed to be paying such close attention to his affairs. “He won’t have begun to worry yet about what has delayed me, I don’t think. He left London only a few weeks before I did. Indeed, he may have been delayed on the road himself.”

“You couldn’t travel together?”

“No.”

Jed waited, but no further explanation was forthcoming. Instead, Solomon returned to work, shovelling at an even more determined pace than before.

Well, that was clear enough. And Jed wasn’t one to poke his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. He took his own shovel and followed suit.

Within an hour, however, a heavy fog was rolling in from the sea.

Cold, wet air prickled Jed’s skin, and he put up his shovel. The hedge on the far side of the field was already lost to view. “We’d best get back to the house while the going’s good.”

Solomon frowned, but he could not deny the wisdom of it.

By the time they reached the farmyard, they could barely see three yards in front of them. They ate in the kitchen and then retired to the barn much earlier in the day than usual, lighting their way across the foggy yard with a rush lantern.

The air in the hayloft was chilly, but they had blankets to wrap up in, and the soft, yellow light of the lantern. It was pleasant to be indoors, warm and dry, with a jug of ale from the kitchen. Jed burrowed comfortably into the hay. He was not in the least sleepy.

“Give us a song?” Solomon suggested.

Jed obliged with a rousing rendition of the ‘Stratford Weavers,’ Solomon joining in on the chorus.

“Your turn,” Jed said when he’d finished. He passed him the jug. “Whet your voice on that.”

“I en’t much of a singer. How about a story?

I heard a good one from a coachman before I left London.

So, there’s this shoemaker, and one day a gentleman comes to him to have a pair of boots made, and pays him with a single gold coin, far more nor the boots are worth.

His wife and mother tell him it’s too good to be true, but he won’t listen—”

Solomon told the story well, his voice rising and falling as the cursed gold coin passed from hand to hand, turning low and thrilling when at last, now orphaned, widowed and bereft, the shoemaker put his hand in his pocket to find… the coin lying there again.

Jed whistled appreciatively. “Don’t know if I can come up with a story to top that one.”

He had plenty of yarns of his own from long Sunday evenings spent lounging with his messmates on the forecastle.

But home was on his mind, and instead he found himself telling a story from a much earlier time: one that had been popular among the boys in his village, about the notorious smugglers said to frequent the caves below the headland.

Solomon had installed himself comfortably in the hay, lying on his back with one leg propped on the other. His eyes, dark in the lantern light, were fixed on Jed with an intensity that sent a shiver of heat through him.

If they’d been two strangers sitting in a tavern in some foreign port, Jed would already be shifting subtly closer to press his thigh against the other man’s under the table.

But this was different. No consequence-free risks here. They still had to work together tomorrow morning.

“…and they were never seen again,” he said, coming to the end of the tale. “And neither, more to the point, were the strings of rubies and diamonds!”

Solomon chuckled. “I suppose you spent hours searching for them as a boy.”