Page 67 of Dawnlands

In mute answer, Mr. Pollexfen waved a thick sheaf of papers but did not trouble himself to show them.

“There’s no time for me to hear them,” Jeffreys told the lawyer andthe mayor. “And certainly no time to read all this. I assume you don’t want to be here for years? They are almost certainly guilty, and so I find.” He raised the gavel and smartly banged it down.

“My lord!” the mayor interrupted. “This man is known to me as an honest tailor and is certainly innocent. He was nowhere near—”

“You brought him up before me, ahead of all the rest.” The judge turned on the mayor, suddenly enraged. “It was you brought him before me! If he’s innocent, then it’s on you—delaying the court. And telling lies! All lies! He can hang on Monday, and his blood is on your head.”

The prisoner buckled at the knees, and the man beside him held him up.

“My lord!” the mayor expostulated. “You can’t hang a man for pleading not guilty!”

“No!” someone cried from the gallery, a young woman, her face stained with tears. At once, a guard barged through the crowd and thrust her out of the door. Everyone heard the clatter of her wooden clogs as he pushed her down the stone stairs.

The judge turned to the prosecutor. “Isn’t that evidence of guilt?” he demanded. “Crying out? Contempt of court?” Hastily, he pulled on his black cap. “Sentenced to be hanged and then drawn and quartered, the parts to be displayed at the gates or crossroads of their hometowns,” he said briskly. “All of ’em. Now bring up those who plead guilty.”

Johnnie thought there must be protest, but instead there was a sigh, a quiet indrawing of breath. Everyone in the gallery, everyone in the courtroom, even the condemned men had their eyes fixed on the judge, but no one else cried out.

These were men whose hopes had gone down in the mud at Westonzoyland, whose future was ended in Judge Jeffreys’s court, and whose last step would be taken on makeshift gallows. Some of them had marched with Monmouth from deep conviction, some had hoped to be on the winning side, some had gone thoughtlessly—as they might run after a fair. Some had not been there at all. No one had imagined that the king would take murderous revenge on the humblest men of his kingdom. No one could believe that the Lord ChiefJustice of England, the greatest lawyer in the land, would come all the way from London to Taunton to hang a tailor.

FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685

Matthew, up early, walked through the herb garden and out through the little door set in the flint-knapped wall. He found himself in a low-lying hay meadow, and beyond that a bank which rose steeply, to make a rough sea wall. Beyond it was a long, sloping shingle beach and the mud, reeds, and shingle islands of the harbor.

A scrawny haystack in the meadow showed the damp saltiness of the soil, but Matthew—a city-raised child—counted the stooks and thought himself rich: hay in the field, corn in the barns, sheep in the meadows, fish in the sea. And—more than all of these—rents every quarter day.

He strode towards the far drainage ditch, where it was crossed by a single plank, and saw his grandmother, poised on the little bridge, light on her feet as a ghost, looking out to the east, where the sun was burning off the early morning mist.

“Ma Alinor? I didn’t expect to see you up this early.”

She smiled at him, one hand resting on the rickety handrail, the other shading her eyes as she looked towards the mouth of the harbor, where the gilded crests of the waves showed that the tide was coming in. “Oh, I always used to get up early—we started work at first light. I thought I’d remembered it so well, but I had forgotten just how…” Her gesture took in the rising sun, etching shadows into the drainage ditches, sparkling on the ripples of the central channel. A thick flock of birds wheeled past them, calling in bright high voices, the sunlight on their silvery wings flickering to white and then back to silver.

“What work did you get up for? I thought you were ferrymen.”

She smiled at him. “Ferrymen and fishermen, and we gathered and poached and gardened and spun wool and did chores, whatever came to hand, anything to make a living. Alys and I worked at Mill Farm—which we passed yesterday evening—and I was a midwife to women all over the island.”

He had only ever known the two women in the warehouse in their London life: his mother intent over the books, saving every penny, out on the quayside in all weathers, sending out carts to the shops and markets, watching the ships unload; his grandmother upstairs, too frail to work downstairs, grinding the herbs and distilling the potions that sold for a petty profit at the kitchen door.

“You were poor then?” he asked diffidently.

She nodded. “Dirt poor. Your ma went to bed hungry more than once, Rob too. God forgive me.”

“I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“We left here so that no one would ever know. And no one need know that it’s us who’ve come back. We left as the poor Reekie family, two women accused and Ned unable to bear our shame; and—see—we come back as Peacheys—lords of the manor.”

“Accused?” he said nervously. “What were you accused of?”

In the bright sunlight of the morning, she laughed as if her old life had been a nightmare, forgotten at dawn. “They said I danced with faeries, that your mother paid her dowry in faerie gold. They thought I was a mermaid or a witch. It was thirty-five years ago. It’s forgotten.”

“I knew you were poor, but not accused. Ma never told me.”

Her smile was as bright as the morning light. “Of course we never told you such a thing! You came to us years later as a baby, and it was long ago and far away. We meant to never come back, though I missed it like an ache.”

He heard her Sussex accent, and recognized it for the first time in his life. “You’ll tell no one that you’ve returned? You have no friends here?”

“I met the man that I loved here,” she confided. “I brought him down this path, to this very field. When I came out this morning, I half expected to meet him. But I’m not the young woman I was then, and he is long ago and far away too. There’s nobody else that I’d wantto see again. It isn’t the people I came back for…” She gestured to the brightening horizon and the birds running at the water edge, in and out with the little waves. “I’ve come back to the land, and the water, and the sky.”

“People don’t have… anything against you?” he asked tentatively. “Are there any old scores to be settled?”