Page 7 of By Marsh and By Moor (Marsh and Moor #1)

Solomon said very little as they set off the following morning. Jed eyed him covertly, wishing he knew what to say to dispel that tight-lipped frown. But he had a feeling that, if spoken to, Solomon would snap like a frayed rope.

They made good time on the road, in part thanks to a dairyman who took them up in his cart and left them six miles further west. By mid-afternoon, the marshy Levels lay behind them, and the road climbed, slowly but steadily, under a clear blue sky.

Jed’s heart lifted as the road climbed. He had a sturdy pair of boots on his feet, coins in his pocket, and a haversack laden with food from Mrs Farley. Around them, everything was peaceful. There was no sign of the press gang in these parts. Men worked without fear in the fields.

Solomon had been mostly silent all day, but when they stopped by the roadside to eat, he asked, “Do you know Barnstaple well? What manner of town is it? A place where a man might easily find a situation?”

“It’s a fair-sized town. A river port. You’ll have no trouble finding work, by my count.”

“And the press?”

“The magistrate and aldermen are no friends of the gang. Ran them out of town, I mind, when they came pressing five or six years ago.” He studied Solomon with curiosity. “How comes it that you’re bound for Barnstaple, if you know nothing about the place? Is it your friend who’s a local man?”

“No, no more nor I am. But—we wanted to leave London, and we had heard mention of the town, and it seemed as good a place as any.” He shrugged. “What of yourself? What awaits you at journey’s end?”

Jed eyed him. Two hundred miles was a long way to travel to reach a town that most Londoners had never heard of.

But he recognised Solomon’s question for the redirection that it was, and did not insist. Instead, he said, “I lived with my sister, my aunt, and her son. I expect Carrie—that’s my sister—will have took over my carrier’s route with our cousin Robert’s help.

He must be nigh on eighteen years old by now. ”

They both fell silent. Jed was thinking about Carrie, imagining her face when he would knock on the cottage door.

How had she fared, since last they met? Perhaps she would have married.

She had sometimes seemed to have an understanding with the youngest of the three brothers who had grown up in the cottage next door.

He was impatient to see her again, to lift her up and swing her round like when they were children. To tell her of everything that had befallen him, and hear all her own news.

It was a painful thing, howsomever, to have been away five years and be coming home with only a few shillings in his pockets. When he thought that the King owed him almost thirty pounds in back pay, and he’d never see the colour of it—!

But he couldn’t be downcast, not when he was so close to home.

That night, they stopped at an inn on the far side of the Quantocks.

Jed had slept here before on occasion. It still had the cracked pane in one of the front windows, and the set of three gleaming horseshoes over the taproom fireplace.

Jed let his hand linger on the worn wooden counter where he had often sat and enjoyed a drink after a long drive.

Every day was bringing him closer to home.

And closer to the day when he would bid Solomon farewell. His heart pinched at the thought of it.

They slept comfortably that night, sharing a wide bed with an impoverished curate on his way between parishes, and woke to a heavy downpour.

The yard had been transformed into a sea of dirt, and at the front door Jed met two miserable travellers tracking mud into the house.

Their coats were soaked through, poor sods.

“This is foul weather, God rot it,” Solomon said in greeting when Jed joined him in the taproom. Through the window, he was watching rain pouring from dark grey clouds. “Another bloody delay.” His fingers drummed nervously on the table.

“It’ll only hold us up a few hours, you’ll see,” Jed said confidently. “?‘Twill be dry by noon.”

Solomon only grunted in answer.

The maid had brought them bread and a platter of sausages. Jed speared one. “We won’t get to the Cross Keys by nightfall,” he said, deliberately cheerful. “But never mind—I know a farm where we can sleep instead.”

Solomon took a deep breath. He forced himself to meet Jed’s eyes, and his lips twisted in a rueful smile. “I beg your pardon. I’m in a foul mood this morning.”

“It’s all right. I know you’re in a hurry.” He held out the knife. “Sausage?”

“Thanks.”

They ate in silence for a minute or two.

Then Solomon said, “My friend was… unwell, you see, directly before he left London. I never liked the idea of us travelling down separately, but it couldn’t be avoided. I’d like to be sure he reached Barnstaple all right.”

Jed accepted this explanation with a nod, and offered Solomon another sausage.

They spent the morning holed up in the taproom with other travellers in similar straits, and did not set off until the rain slackened—as Jed had predicted—in the early afternoon.

The road climbed steeply after they left the inn, and soon they were crossing open moorland, surrounded by blue-brown hills, bright and crisp in the pure, cold air.

The Levels had been familiar enough ground, but the moors were Jed’s home country, the land he had driven across every day.

He had spent hours on these roads, alone with his thoughts, no one to trouble him or hold him to account.

It was all he asked for in life: a horse, the wide open sky above, and the wind at his back.

Solomon seemed more cheerful too, now that they were on the move. They walked steadily, taking only short breaks. Often, two or three hours would go by in which they met no one but the wild sheep and ponies that roamed the open moorland.

Afterwards, Jed remembered those three days as one long, common stream of good conversation and comfortable silences.

Walking through sun and wind and drizzle.

Leaving the road when the winter’s ravages had made it impassable, to follow sheep tracks instead.

Laughing over Solomon’s anecdotes from the coaching inn where he’d worked—he had a sharp eye and a clever tongue.

Sitting in a crowded taproom with other travellers, their eyes meeting across the table in a private joke.

Solomon’s occasional half-smile; his sleep-tousled head in the morning; his wet torso under a courtyard pump, and the heat that coiled in Jed’s gut at the sight.

The morning of their last day travelling together, they were overtaken on the road by a farm boy who offered them a lift in his cart. He chatted without cease until he left them at a crossroads some ten miles further down the road, waving a cheery goodbye as he drove off.

“That was a stroke of luck,” Jed said. “Knocked a good few hours off our journey.” Somehow it didn’t feel all that lucky.

The time remaining to them as fellow travellers had telescoped down to almost nothing.

“You’ll be in Barnstaple tomorrow. We’ll have to separate today—my village is off to the north, on the coast. But I’ll set you on the right path. ”

“Thank ‘ee.” Solomon opened his mouth as if to add something else, then shut it again.

Some measure of constraint had fallen between them at the mention of their parting. They walked in a silence broken only by the wail of a curlew far overhead.

“Deer tracks,” Solomon said after some time, pointing to the spoors that crossed their path.

“But not for us.” Jed drew a finger across his throat. “Them’s the King’s deer.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, we’re in the kingswood now.”

Solomon looked around at the scrubby, windswept moorland, raising an eyebrow. “This is the kingswood? Chopped down all the trees, have they?”

Jed laughed, the awkwardness between them melting away. “You know, I don’t remember as there ever were any.”

The ground fell away to the left of the track they were following, and at the bottom of the slope, a narrow stream ran through a thicket-filled vale. Jed pointed it out.

“Think the King’ll notice if I make use of his water? I’d as lief not arrive home looking like a vagabond.”

They left the track and made their way down through low-growing hazel thickets to the stream, there to strip off and wash in the icy water, then dress hurriedly again.

They scrubbed their muddy stockings and stretched them on a bush to dry, while they sat on its leeward side to eat a meal of bread and cheese.

Jed ran a hand over his chin. He had been shaving with a blade Solomon lent him, and, using the same knife, he had shortened the untidy shanks left over from hacking off his pigtail.

How much had he changed in five years? Carrie and Aunt Ellen would recognise him, of course—but his cousin Robert might not.

The sun came out from behind a cloud. Jed had been more than half expecting Solomon to want to press on immediately—he’d made no secret of his hurry to reach Barnstaple.

But Solomon showed no signs of moving, so neither did Jed.

A dragonfly swooped over their heads and down to a point where the stream widened.

Idly, Jed watched it flit across the water’s surface.

“This would be a good spot for swimming in summer,” he remarked.

“You can swim?” Solomon said, and then, “Stupid of me. Of course you can.”

“I couldn’t, before. I only learnt in the hope that it would help me escape. And it did. That was a lucky day.”

“A lucky day for me too.”

There was a weighty note in his voice that drew Jed’s eyes to his face.

Solomon was stretched out on his back in the grass, shoulders propped up on his haversack, one foot thrown carelessly over the other knee. His gaze met Jed’s, and something in its depths sent desire prickling down Jed’s spine.

He’d been picturing it for days now: Solomon sprawled beneath him, those long, lean thighs coming up to wrap around him, the tight little smile slackening in bliss…