Anne of the Fens (10 page)

I heard the church clock from far away, striking ten bells. A great deal had happened since I rose at five that morning, and I was exhausted. I had to sleep, even though there was so little room in the boat. The back of my clothes would be wet and muddy, but I lay down and was asleep in an instant.

I woke to the sound of cursing, and with some sharp pains as bugs bit me. It was dark now, but I could see by the faint light of a half moon that we were stuck, surrounded by reeds. The channel had petered out.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

“W
HAT SHALL WE
do now?” I was groggy from sleep, but it took only a moment to realize our danger.

“God's teeth, this has been an accursed trip if ever there was one.”

John went on, with worse than that. I felt somehow to blame, as though my plan had not been a good one. I bit my tongue. He was with me; that made a difference, didn't it?

“Were there other turnoffs besides that one at the beginning?” I asked.

John shook his head violently, while a steady stream of curses still emerged from his mouth.

“It is so very far.” My voice sounded thin to my ears. “What if the Sheriff's men are around? We must go back now, while it is still dark.” I answered my own question.

John had already turned the punt around and was poling back, struggling. I was able to help with the little pole for a time, until the channel deepened. The evening star had moved quite a ways across the sky, and I estimated I had slept an hour or so. I was still exhausted, and I could not have continued poling even if I were able to reach the bottom.

“I can put you off at the castle,” John said, after a bit.

We had not talked about what I would do. We had not talked much at all. After the night before, so long ago, when words came rolling off my tongue and his as well, it felt odd. Here I was with a strange man in the middle of the night. Most of the men in the county would never marry me now, assuming that a man and a woman could not be in such a situation without intimacy. All day at church I had thought about intimacy, and now that we were alone it had not crossed my mind. Danger drove away softer thoughts, I supposed. And talking about books and food we liked seemed silly at the moment.

I wished I had not got into the boat, and I wished John had taken the first channel that I wanted to take. I did not say these things.

When we had briefly talked of plans, it had been to get John to Boston. What would happen to me was not a part of the plan. I could not go with John unless he married me, and he had not suggested that.

As I reached that point in my thoughts, during the long silence between us, John said, “You cannot go with me except as man and wife, and I am not ready for that. I need to be free in order to escape onto a boat and go to Holland, and then to the New World.”

I said nothing. I did not want to go to the New World. I would have liked him to want me to come.

“I did ... I do care about you, little one.”

“It is night now, the summer day is over,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your poem. You compared me to a summer's day. On a punt lost in the middle of the fens in the middle of the night, we are far from that summer's day.” I was not quite sure what I meant.

We said nothing further for a time. Then he said again, “We will go back to the castle and I will set you out.”

It did seem the best idea. Not a good plan, but the only plan. We rode in silence, except for the sounds of John poling and cursing under his breath.

I helped when the boat came near to the shore. Finally we came back to the point where the current was strong. Before it had helped us, now it was almost impossible to move against it. I tried to use my little pole as an oar, but it hardly made a difference. John swore again, and even in the dark I could see the sweat on his brow and his clothes. It was a good thing the night was warm, because he was as wet as though he had bathed in the stream with his clothes on.

My mind kept going back to our conversation, though we said nothing more. I felt regret that he had not asked me to marry him. I also had a small feeling, in the back of my mind, that if he had asked me I would have had to answer, and I did not know what I would have said. It was partly my fear of the wolves and bears and Indians in the New World, but also partly that I did not know if I wanted to be with him, John, the person he was.

And why not? What was it? That he was swearing so mightily? My father swore worse than the townspeople, and I loved him anyway. Perhaps it was that John had never in any way praised the way I had smuggled him out of the castle and into the boat. Something silly like that. Why had he told me get into the boat with him? He was the older one, the one who should have had better judgment.

I could see the castle tower in the distance, with the moon behind it. We passed the narrow turning that John would need to take to get to Boston. John put his finger to his lips, then gestured with his hand over his eyes for me to keep watch for the Sheriff's men. I strained through the dark as we grew nearer to the moat.

“T
HERE HE IS
!”

I could not see the man who had screamed. My heart began to pound in my chest. My hands felt as wet as John's.

John began to pole furiously, away from the castle, and I began, also frantically, pushing away, away, as fast as ever we could.

An explosion rocked the boat. We had been hit. We heard another, then another huge noise, and finally our boat turned into the little channel, the narrow one that John had rejected the first time. We were out of view.

John let out a gasp of relief, and I began a silent prayer of thanksgiving.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, and you?”

“I have a pain in my shoulder.”

The dim light of the moon showed a black splotch against the white of his shift.

“Shall we bind it?

“Not now, we must get further away. They could follow.”

The boat seemed all right, or at least it kept floating. We continued rafting. I felt fairly safe. The fens were so easy to hide in. If the Sheriff's men caught up with us, all we had to do was get out of the boat and kneel in the reeds. Nobody would find us unless they tripped over us.

It was then we heard the dogs.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

I
KNEW IT
could be all over. If the dogs had our scent they would follow to the ends of the earth, yipping and yelping, and we would be caught for certain.

I poled like a madwoman. I glanced up for a moment and saw John grimace with pain while he poled and poled.

I supposed it was the Earl's dogs the Sheriff had taken, since he had none with him when he arrived. Father and Simon sometimes hunted with the Earl, but I never had. Hunting was not to my taste. I liked dogs, but not these. They never wanted to play or be petted.

The barking was louder. I could see the water moving behind us, and the dark, round shape of heads. They were coming.

John managed to gasp, between strokes, “Smash them on the head with your pole if they catch up.”

I grunted. I did not know how well I could smash a dog, I was so frightened.

John moaned between each rise and fall of the pole.

The narrow passage was hard going, but then it began to widen just a bit. All at once it seemed as though our boat were a seed and the stream were a person who spat that seed away. We were flung into a wider river and were moving very fast.

“Thank you, Lord!” I breathed, and tears of relief began to run down my face.

John had collapsed onto the boat. I crawled forward toward him. The boat was unsteady in the current, going whichever way the river wanted, so it was hard to move. At one point I was almost flung off into the depths. I wished I knew how to swim. Finally I reached John, lying motionless. The black splotch on his shirt had widened, and now that I could see more clearly, I found it reddish black and hard to my touch.

I began to pull up his shift to take it off. A thought flashed through my mind about how intimate the action was, and yet not at all intimate. He groaned. I took hold of the shoulder seam, one hand on either side, and prayed his seamstress had been careless and made big stitches. I had to use my teeth, but the seam gave way, exposing his shoulder. He groaned again as the fabric ripped, and the dried blood also tore. But the wound was seeping anyway.

I had to shut my eyes for a moment. Even in the dark, I could see how much blood he had lost. It was everywhere. Dried blood and fresh oozing blood. The ball of the musket had shot through cruelly, leaving rough edges and black gunpowder marks around it.

I had once seen Father bind up a farmer's wounds after an accident with a scythe. While he did it, he had launched into a story about his war experience and dealing with men who were dying of their wounds. The important thing was to make the bleeding stop.

I looked at what I had. My kerchief was too soft, and the silk of my dress not strong enough, and the linen of my apron too stiff. I pulled my skirt up a bit and began to rip at the soft linen of my shift. I had to use my teeth to get the rip started. I thought that lifting my skirt, as I was, in front of a man, was not like what I had imagined. I was tearing strips of my shift about three inches across. Each time I got to the side seam I had to use my teeth again. One of my fingernails ripped. My shift was getting shorter and shorter.

Then, when I had the strips, I began to bind. Each strip barely reached around his shoulder, and there was only a little of the fabric left to tie. I knew I had to make the binding very tight. It was painstaking work. John groaned in pain each time I touched him, and tears of frustration sprang to my eyes. The first bandages became completely bloody in an instant.

“You must lie completely still.” I wished I had St. John's Wort to reduce the bleeding.

We were speeding along the river, the little raft bouncing up and down with the current. We were in the river's power. John was spent. Even if I tried to use his pole, I would not be able to control it.

John lay on the bottom of the boat, and I sat beside him watching the banks fly by, black in the darkness against the lighter water. Each time the boat jumped through the current, John moaned.

We went for ages, it seemed. The river continued to widen. Finally the current slowed, we began to move at a calmer pace, and John's moans stopped.

There was a dim light in the east. The banks of the river began to take on their rich brown color, and I could see the red of John's spilled blood clearly. A bird or two began to sing.

T
HIS WAS A
new day. I had spent the night alone with a man. Nothing had happened and a great deal had happened.

And then I saw a figure, ahead, on a bend in the river. “Ahoy,” the person called. Squinting, I could see it was the beggar man.

I took up the big pole and pushed it down as far as I could. It touched the bottom, and I was able to direct it a little bit. Twice more, and we were going to make land.

“Well done!” the beggar man shouted as we hit the bank. He grabbed the edge of the boat and began to drag it ashore.

“Of course, the current carries boats in here, it is why I chose this place,” he said, as I climbed off. I felt unsteady on my feet after being on a boat so long.

“And what have we here? God's eyeballs.”

He looked at John, lying pale and bloody in the bottom of the boat, then climbed in himself. He checked my bandaging and grunted, “Not bad. He will live.”

Together we tightened two of the strips. It was so much easier, with one person to hold the strip tight and the other to tie it.

We had barely finished when the beggar said, “We must be off. A packet leaves for Holland this evening.”

“What about her?” John asked.

“You have come a long way on the river but, as the crow flies, you are not so far from the castle. The road is a quarter mile away.” He pointed away from the sun, now higher in the sky. “It is then only a two or three mile walk back to Tattershall.”

“Leave her here, you mean.”

I did not like being talked about as though I were not there.

“Yes,” the beggar man said.

I felt a pang of fear in my stomach. “And what if the Sheriff's men are still around?” I asked.

“It is John they want, not you. You are the Earl's Steward's daughter. You will be safe.”

I was not convinced. I had helped John escape, and my blue dress, covered with dirt and dampness, would tell anyone that I had been on an escapade. The Earl was in prison, and there was no guarantee for the Earl's Steward's daughter.

“No time. We must be off. Should I turn away while you say your good-byes?” His laugh was wicked.

I blushed.

John seemed to turn a paler shade. “Come here,” he said, and I walked to the boat.

He reached his hand to me. I took it. It was warm and red, and my heart moved as I saw and felt the blisters, broken and bloody.

He lifted my hand to his lips. “I am sorry, my sweet.” He spoke low, so the beggar man could not hear. “My loving thoughts go with you.”

I could not make a reply, so many feelings and thoughts rose up in me. Love for him. Longing. Anger that he would leave me, leave me like this in the middle of the fens, and fear for both of us.

When John released my hand, the beggar man pushed the boat off, climbed aboard, and picked up the pole.

“That way.” He pointed again for me, and they were gone down the river.

I did not immediately take his direction. I relieved myself, something I had needed to do for some time. I was horridly hungry and thirsty. I washed my face and hands at the river bank and scooped up water to drink from my hand. I knew that drinking water was dangerous, but this was an emergency, and there was certainly no ale or cider or milk about.

I looked for berries by the river and found a few green ones. They did little for my hunger. I thought that the beggar man had probably been carrying food, and felt new anger that he had not shared any with me.