Page 75 of Dawnlands

She was wearing her old ragged boys’ clothes underneath, as tattered as those of the prisoners. She pulled off her laundress’s cap and bundled it with the apron. Still no one in the cramped little room spoke; the men watched her in silence, knowing that she had not come for them, knowing that nothing could save them. Even Ned, who had risen to his feet at her entrance, was silent, watching her intently, as she pushed the gown and the apron into the basket and thrust it under the bench.

A shout from outside made him shoot a questioning look at her. “Line up inside!” the guardsman yelled. “Hands out in front of you! No moving! No talking!”

The prisoners stumbled into two lines, Ned in the back row. Rowan slipped out of sight behind him.

“What’s to do?” he asked her, his voice low.

“Put on the clothes and walk out,” she whispered to him.

He turned incredulously to her—“What?”—as she struck him, a clenched fist directly on the bandage at his injured ear. She felled him like an ox under a hammer. Silently, he crashed down to the stone floor, and she rolled his limp body under the bench. She pulled off his bandage and wrapped it around her own head, half covering her face and her whitened hair. She took his place in the back row and held out her roughened hands as the others did, when the wooden door opened and a new guardsman came in with shackles and chains.

She kept her head down as he went along the line locking on shackles and slipping the chain from one prisoner to another.

“Register!” the first guard shouted from the wagon outside.

The prisoners told off their names as they shuffled past the guard and climbed into the wagon.

“Robert Batt.”

“Richard Dyke.”

“John Jolliffe.”

“Bernard Loman.”

“George Ebden.”

“John Hooper.”

Then the second row went through the narrow doorway and climbed on the wagon.

“John Johnson.”

“Ned Ferryman,” Rowan said gruffly.

“John Denham.”

“John Meade.”

“Peter Ticken.”

“Nathanial Beaten.”

“Thomas Chin.”

“John Gould.”

The local blacksmith had made an iron cage and nailed it around the wagon. Their wrist chains were hammered into a staple set in the wooden floor. Rowan, looking at it, thought if they all pulled at once they might get it free, but then they would have to lever off the cage, jump together off the wagon, and all run together, still chained, matching their strides and all going in the same direction without pulling or checking. She would have done it with her own people, who learned how to move as one from their earliest days hunting, but she knew it could not be done with these broken men who had, each one, been raised to think of himself as a solitary man, alone. She settled herself on the seat, dropped her head, and set herself to dream of her home, knowing that she would never see it again.

Minutes later in the guardhouse, Ned came round under the bench, to hear the rattle of the departing wagon, and saw at once the door of the empty room had been left wide open to air it from the stink of the prisoners, and that Rowan was gone. Cautiously, he rolled out and drewout the washerwoman’s basket. Hiding behind the shelter of the open door he pulled on the big gown and tied the white apron. The wound in his head was bleeding again, but he tied the cap over it to staunch the flow and crammed the big sunbonnet on top of that. Deliberately, he did not think of his cold horror that she had taken his place, since her sacrifice would be for nothing if he did not get free. He did not give himself time to think, nor to feel fear. He hefted the basket on his arm, leaned it against his hip, and stepped out of the door into the gateway.

The new guards were coming on duty, across the inner keep of the castle, complaining that they were not getting a ride to Bristol and back, complaining that everywhere in the town, everywhere in the whole country, smelled of death.

Ned did not shrink away from them to the town gate; instead he headed towards them, limping towards the inner keep of the castle, the basket on his arm, the wings of the big bonnet shading his face, praying that the blood from his head wound was not staining through the white cap. He ducked a little curtsey as he went past them, but they ignored him completely.

Ned went slowly across the inner keep and then swerved between the kitchen and the bakery. There was a broken wooden door, an old sallyport, set into a wall. Ned slipped through it. A small one-plank drawbridge crossed a nettle-filled ditch that was all that was left of the old moat. Ned hobbled across the marketplace and down a cobbled alleyway to a stable yard at the back of one of the grand merchant’s houses. Ned looked left and right and then ducked into the yard and slipped through the wide doors of a hay barn.

It was piled high with stooks of fresh hay. Ned scrambled over them towards the back wall and dropped down behind them. He listened. It was all quiet in the yard: the horses were out at work, the stable boys mucking out the stables and barrowing the dung to the midden. He could hear the sound of someone working a pump and a gush of water. Carefully, he peeled the washerwoman’s cap from his head, ripped it into strips, and retied it as a bandage, ignoring the throbbing pain. He looked into Rowan’s basket.