Page 74 of Dawnlands

“Someone in the crowd?”

“Someone in the crowd,” Johnnie said swiftly.

“Lord! These are wicked times. You’d think with a scaffold on every corner and a rotting leg at every gateway that men would reform.”

“You would,” Johnnie said quietly, a cold misery spreading through him.

“Best go to the magistrate. As if he didn’t have enough to do.”

“Yes,” Johnnie agreed numbly.

“How will you pay your shot at the inn?”

“I have goods, I’ll have to ask them to take my linen… I have a watch, I’ll have to pawn it.”

The misery of having no money opened before Johnnie and reminded him of his mother’s fanatical care that the warehouse should always turn a profit, that there should always be coin in the box. He felt the weight of a childhood fear of poverty, that sick sense that nothing could be done without money—and there was no money to be had. But even worse than that was his certainty that it was Rowan who had robbed him.

“You’ll need someone to vouch for you. D’you have a friend in town who can speak for you? Someone who knows you. Is anyone staying with you?”

Johnnie shook his head. “I have no friend in this town,” he said miserably, knowing she was gone. “I am here alone. I am quite alone.”

FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1685

Alinor opened the door in the flint garden wall and closed it carefully behind her. The meadow before her was bare of stooks; all the hay was piled into a clumsy hayrick for autumn, the shorn stubble dry and rough under her walking boots. She took the path to the sea bank,thinking that she was walking through time as well as meadow grass. Years ago, she had run through this door to find the man she loved and tell him he was safe; she had risked her life to find him a refuge. James had said that he did not expect to find a woman like her in a place like this, and she had never known what he had meant. She had treasured the words of love and turned them over in her mind, but never asked him what he meant.

She smiled. Here they had climbed the bank together, and this was the path he had run, when he had come to see her in the darkness. To her left, too far for her to walk now, the winding track led under the down-swinging branches of the oak tree to her little cottage—little more than a shed, the pier extending out into the Broad Rife, her rowing boat bobbing at the end. They had gone fishing. They had lit a fire. He had been dazzled by her, and for the first time in her life she had known herself to be desirable. For the first time in her life she had felt desire.

It was a lifetime ago, a long lifetime; and yet it felt to Alinor as if no time at all had passed, and she was still the young woman who had run along the shingle beach to meet him. Even now, decades later, she could remember the smell of his skin when she pressed her face to his naked chest, the heat of his fever. Even now, she felt her heart jump at the thought of his touch.

Now he was no longer a hidden priest and royalist spy in a wartime country, now he was a landowner and a gentleman, a married man, and his past forgotten. She expected nothing of him. All he could honorably do for her now was to loan her his carriage and send the note that she had crushed in her pocket. It read:

Thank you for accepting my carriage. I am glad to be able to take you to your home. I will come and visit you—unless you forbid me. You have my heart in your hands. Let me see you once more…

James Avery

TAUNTON CASTLE JAIL, SOMERSET, AUTUMN 1685

Rowan hobbled into the outer keep of Taunton Castle as an old laundry woman with sore feet, her head bowed, unnoticed among the other market women and traders.

The men at the gatehouse to the inner ward, left behind to guard the prisoners while the main force rattled triumphantly back up the road to London, were miserable under the hatred of the local people. None of them could stand the stink of Taunton marketplace, where trade was slight under the rotting corpses in the iron cages, and the tradeswomen treated them like invaders, pretended not to understand their speech, and sold them spoiled food.

The trooper on guard swung open the wicket gate for Rowan, her newly cropped hair white with dusted flour under a big sunbonnet, a basket of linen on her arm and a big white apron wrapped around her bulky gown. “Laundry for the prisoners,” she said to him in a voice that quavered a little with old age. “Do they leave today, sir?”

“Some of ’em do, Grandma.” He was surprised by her smile. “I’m prisoner escort. Off to Bristol with them.”

“Lord! I nearly missed them! And I’ve been paid by their wives to bring clean linen to take with them.”

“Any good shirts?” he asked.

She gave him a knowing wink. “You come down to the washhouse and pick out your own when you get back from Bristol. The poor dears won’t miss one or two,” she promised him. “Can I take these in now?”

“That’s the wagon!” he said, as the wagon rumbled up from the castle stables and halted in the gateway. “You’ve left it too late.”

“It wouldn’t dry!” she exclaimed. “Oh, do let me run in and give them their linen quick.”

“Quick then,” he told her. “And remember you owe me a shirt for this!”

“Bless you, bless you,” she said over her shoulder, as he opened the thick wooden door to the inner room and bolted it behind her. There were more than a dozen men crowded into the tiny space of the guard room. Rowan scanned every face and then saw the tattered bandage and the lined face of Ned Ferryman at the back. He was slumped on the bench. She said not a word but untied her apron and silently tore off her bulky gown.