Rebels and Traitors (41 page)

Gideon tried to ignore his relief. His problems did not end. Now he felt guilty for leaving them.

Joining up at Newport Pagnell in order to forget his troubles now seemed pointless — even though Gideon knew he had an aptitude and a liking for his new work. At fifty miles’ distance from London it could have been easy to put his bereavement from his mind. Yet as he rode around, often solitary, he had time and opportunity to wrestle all the more fiercely with his doubts.

Had Lacy Keevil been already with child — and had she known it — when he married her? Had he been singled out as a fool? Who was the child’s father? What was the Bevans’ involvement? Remembering how eagerly they had pressed for the union, they must have known the situation. So were Bevan and Elizabeth simply Lacy’s keepers at the time of her disgrace, adults forced to scurry round to find a solution when a young girl in their household had behaved foolishly? Or was there a darker motive in their rush to find her a husband?

Gideon was not entirely pitiless. He saw that perhaps Lacy herself had been cruelly used. All of their lives had been soured by whatever his wife had done — or had had done to her. Now Lacy was dead, along with her four-month-old baby, and she left Gideon damaged. He might never really find the answers to his suspicions, but he had lost all faith in women.

He threw himself into scouting as if to court danger and seek oblivion. He went forwards, but he rode in a grim mood.

Gideon came to recognise many of the people who lived and worked in the districts through which he regularly rode. Some he knew well. Clergymen, innkeepers, market women and beggars were useful sources of information; after a season he recognised regular faces and exchanged greetings with many. He also took keen notice of strangers. Occasionally, he reported criminal activities to the authorities.

His remit covered the area towards Northampton. While looking out for Royalist fugitives after the battle of Marston Moor, he spotted a ragged young woman, lurking in a church porch. It was a medieval chapel-of-ease that lay alongside Watling Street on the west side of Stony Stratford. The waif was slightly built, her face hidden in a grubby shawl. Gideon watched her enter the ancient door to the square tower. A bundle in her arms aroused his immediate suspicions. He waited. As he had feared, when she emerged a few minutes later, she was carrying nothing.

She set off fast, heading away from the historic town. After a moment’s consideration, Gideon urged his horse forward and overtook her. Dismounting, he stopped her.

What are you doing?’

‘Looking for horse mushrooms.’

‘Too early! Don’t lie or you’ll be taken up for spying.’ It was August. Gideon had been intently watching the hedgerows to which she clung, since that was where ambushes were laid; they were still overgrown and green. Nuts and berries had yet to ripen; spiders’ webs did not yet glisten between the twigs; autumn mists had yet to bring up mushrooms, puffballs or fairy rings in wet fields and cowpats. Soldiers and scouts were still abroad. Battles yet lay ahead in the calendar.

Barely more than a child, the girl with the poor knowledge of nature was colourless, skinny and showed signs of perpetual hardship. She looked intensely agitated. She knew enough to control her truculence at being apprehended, however. Nor did she try to run away, although while she talked to Gideon she kept dodging out of arm’s reach. She admitted to being a traveller; she claimed she earned her living by knocking on doors and begging for work.

‘You mean knocking on doors and hoping to steal something! Where have you come from?’

‘North …’ She became vague, acting simple-minded.

‘Don’t play the loon,’ Gideon snapped. ‘I’ll have to send you to Bedlam.’ Mention of Bedlam chilled her, for reasons he could not imagine. ‘Where are you going?’

‘London!’ exclaimed the vagrant, as if she thought herself on a highway to paradise.

‘Ha!’

The girl stared. She saw a tall, fair-haired man in a well-filled buff coat, worsted britches and riding boots, a dragoon in his twenties who had an air of easy competence. Unperturbed by her attitude, he behaved as if he were in charge of this stretch of road. Unlike other soldiers she met, he made no move to threaten her, either with the sword in hangers from his belt or the musket which he had left beside his saddle. However, he kept himself between her and the horse, which was a grey mare, now stretching its neck after lush roadside grass, rather knock-kneed but well cared for.

There was no chance of stealing the gun, or the beaver hat which also hung on the saddle. The mare wasn’t worth any risk. A three-shilling reject; good horses cost ten times that. The man noticed her looking at the gun. Having taken his measure, she decided not to try anything. His lips compressed slightly, as if he read her decision.

‘Do you walk alone?’ She nodded, almost too weary to speak. ‘Always?’

‘I met a pedlar woman, carrying a great pack of needles and threads, ribbons, peg dolls, shoelaces, buttons and buckles …’ The wonders of the pack had held her in thrall. ‘She took me along with her and talked of God and such —’ Perhaps a Parliamentary soldier would be softened by mention of God, she thought, though he stood listening with the same quizzical look. He was in fact struggling to follow her sing-song whining accent. ‘She told me of her life, selling to the rich then saving pennies of her profit. She swore she would one day be greatly rich herself, after this life of careful toil, and would leave all her money to the poor.’

Gideon reckoned the pedlar must have been a travelling Quaker or similar. ‘Does she preach?’

That would be shocking!’

‘Perhaps not. The women who do it say they follow Hannah and Abigail.’

Biblical names meant nothing to the vagrant. ‘She preaches, but I never heard her … She is a married woman, but left her husband to shift for himself while she takes the word of God along the roads. I wonder what her husband thinks!’ For once the girl showed a trace of amusement. Gideon let himself grin back.

Now she acquired a more calculating expression, as she noticed he was good-looking when he relaxed. He ignored it. Women’s wiles only hardened his heart now. He was a betrayed man; he knew all their tricks. ‘So why did you leave this honest woman’s company?’
And where is she? Has the vagabond murdered the preaching ribbon-seller? — No, or this scruff would be humping the pack of haberdashery herself and trying to sell me shoelaces…
When there came no answer, Gideon suggested, ‘I suspect you bore a child.’

‘You think I killed it!’ flared the girl, denying nothing. That surprised him. Gideon was always unnerved by how much authority he carried, how readily people answered his questions.

‘I believe you left it in the church.’

Infanticide was the last resort of single mothers. Abandoning a child for the parish was much more common. To a harassed churchwarden, stuck with finding a wet-nurse and paying for the child’s upkeep at sixpence a week from scarce parish funds, that too was iniquitous, but Gideon could see this waif was barely able to keep herself alive. She stood no chance of bringing up a child; she ought to be in parish care herself. ‘Maybe you put it in the safest place you could. Was it born in a barn?’

‘It was born in a ditch.’

‘You might both have died there.’

‘Oh easily!’ With a wry private smile, the girl reflected on how close they came. The baby had emerged tiny and blue. Although people of superior rank thought beggars gave birth easily, she had lain quite exhausted for a long time afterwards. She was revolted by the mess of the afterbirth and had to force herself somehow to cut the umbilical cord with a flint. When the snuffling child was free, she had then been severely tempted to leave it naked in the ditch-water and walk away. Instead, she sneaked into the church with it, because the baby had reminded her of carrying little Robert Lucas in her arms.

‘Male or female?’ asked the soldier, worming the truth out. ‘Did you trouble to look?’

Very reluctantly, the young mother admitted, ‘Male.’

‘Who was the father?’ It was the question unmarried mothers were pressed to answer — on their bed of labour, when possible — because the named father then had to pay to maintain the child. The girl lost patience with this inquisition. She squared her shoulders and quickly, fluently, contemptuously, summed up her past few months: in disguise as a boy in two different garrisons, then ‘befriended’ by men who obtained carnal knowledge of her frail body, seducing her in secret by offering apparent kindness. She had never known men’s kindness before. She could not judge whether their overtures were genuine or false. So she had been coerced and betrayed — yet now she accepted her fate without rancour.

‘You should be sent back to your home parish.’ That did terrify her. Though she refused to name where she came from, she railed agitatedly against cavaliers on a killing spree, then plundering, raping and burning. Gideon guessed: ‘Birmingham?’

Round-eyed, she gasped, ‘You know?’

‘From a news pamphlet.’

Was
I
in that?’ The thought both horrified and fascinated her.

‘Only the dead were named.’

Patiently Gideon began to explain how news was gathered, written up and printed, why pamphlets were produced. He told her of his own part, then he tried to recruit her for Robert Allibone’s network of news distributors.

She said she would do it; he had doubts. Small sums were paid to the beggars who moved the bundles of news-sheets from London to Oxford and elsewhere, but when he mentioned the figure he sensed that it was insufficient to tempt this free spirit. She would loathe the necessary supervision. So great was her anxiety to leave the vicinity where she had abandoned her baby, she was pretending to co-operate. But Gideon saw she was unreliable, so the conversation petered out.

Gideon also left the question of the baby. If the young mother was fifteen, as she told him, she would be only a year less than Lacy Keevil when she too found herself about to bear a child by a man she could not, or would not, name. He had bitter fellow-feeling for the waif’s plight.

He might have ridden back to the church porch and looked for the whimpering bundle, but if he was discovered doing that he could be accused of fathering the infant himself. He had an informant to meet that afternoon; he was beginning to resent delays.

Before he left her, he asked her name. She gave him the defiantly straight stare that vagabonds used when they were lying. ‘Dorothy Groome.’

‘I think that was the pedlar woman’s name,’ Gideon rebuked her mildly.

‘It is a good name!’ The girl rounded on him defiantly. ‘What is
your
name?’

‘Gideon Jukes.’ He was already mounting his three-shilling horse, routinely cursing as the idiotic beast tried to wander away from him.

‘What place is this?’ the waif called after him.

‘Stony Stratford — Calverton parish, should you wish to reclaim your child.’

The girl dragged her tired feet, setting off on her long walk towards London. If she ever reached the city, Gideon thought, she would be sucked into the competing multitude. Among the starved masses on the hostile streets, her youth and her innocence could only tell against her. She would be lucky to last a week.

He did not see the waif in his area again. They had had a chance encounter. Neither expected to remember it.

By that time in late 1644, Gideon was greatly anxious about the progress of the war. After the great Parliamentary victory at Marston Moor the King achieved a personal triumph in shattering one of his opponents’ armies, that of Sir William Waller at Cropredy Bridge, and outmanoeuvred the Earl of Essex in the pointless disaster of Lostwithiel. Charles spent the summer pottering, relieving garrisons that could well have been left to their own devices and languorously guesting in loyal gentlemen’s houses as if the war could wait on his pleasure.

At Newport, Sir Samuel Luke was twitchy. The town’s defences were in a bad way; he could obtain neither money men nor tools for renewal works. His garrison muttered mutinously. Soldiers were unpaid. He was in poor health and feeling the cold; he sent to London for his fur coat.

Throughout that autumn, Gideon and the other scouts kept nervous watch on the area between Oxford and London. In October, the remnants of Essex’s army and the relics of Waller’s both joined Manchester in a blockade to prevent the King advancing to London. It was an unhappy merger. The Parliamentary commanders bickered. The troops were mutinous and demoralised. Essex was constantly sending to Parliament with recriminations against others; then he conveniently ‘fell ill’, when the Parliamentary forces, united in name though not in spirit, faced battle with the King at Newbury. Parliament’s forces failed to co-operate. There was confusion and stalemate; after sundown, the King and his men were allowed to slip away through a gap and escape.

Charles would spend the winter of 1644-5 in Oxford, while his opponents reviewed their lacklustre efforts of the previous year. The baffling ineptitude at the second battle of Newbury achieved one useful result: men of energy, headed by Oliver Cromwell, urged Parliament to change their military affairs.