Women of Courage (178 page)

Ann had fled with the rest to Exmoor, hiding in lonely farms in the deep combes and valleys for a couple of weeks until they judged the first flush of the search would be over. Then she and the others had made their way quietly back, travelling across country by lonely tracks and side roads, often at night, until they came home. But even there some had found they were not safe, for their names were on lists in the hands of the constables and militia, who were still out looking for them.

Ann told her father quietly of the little hut the surgeon and some others had built for themselves in the lonely woods towards Axminster, and the regular journeys of herself or some others from the village to leave food for them. She told him too of the night on the journey when they had been surprised by a party of four dragoons, and only escaped by killing two and mortally wounding the rest; and all the time she spoke she was looking over her shoulder to make sure no jailor or spy was near, and making sure always that she was not too clear about details that could give anyone away. She whispered John Clapp’s name in her father’s ear and then told him how that fat, jovial man had climbed out of bed into the attic when the soldiers had searched his house, and how they had not found him though they knew the bed was warm. At that Adam smiled, but then she told him the less happy story of how William Clegg had got all the way home and then been caught because his six-year-old daughter had thought it was another of her father’s jokes when he had run out suddenly and hid among the cabbages in the garden; so she had clapped her hands and laughed and explained the joke to the nice men with guns who had just come into the kitchen.

Of Roger Satchell Ann had heard nothing, until Adam told her he was in another cell here too; nor had she heard anything of Sergeant Evans or Nathaniel Wade since they had left them on the way to Exmoor.

The jailors began to hustle the visitors out at the end of the day, though it seemed to Adam they were doing so earlier than usual. But then he had not had a visitor before, and time passed quite differently when he was looking into the eyes of his daughter. For a while he had so forgotten the stench and press of humanity around him, that he had thought he had been at home in the kitchen with Ann and Mary, and imagined Simon sitting reading in his chair, and remembered the very smell and sound of Mary coming in with a pile of clean washing in her arms, and the girls and Oliver fussing and playing round her skirts. Then the warder pulled Ann away, and Tom shielded her on the way to the door.

As he watched her go, Adam ached with a huge physical loss that he had not embraced her one last time. He stood for a minute with his empty arms unconsciously, vainly held out in front of him. Then he sat down, numbly, with his back to the wall.

When all the visitors had gone, the great cell door opened again, and a plump, bewigged man in a frock coat came in, with soldiers to guard him. The cell fell silent, and Adam watched dully as he began to speak, only half hearing what he said.

“ … tomorrow you will be tried for the heinous offence of armed rebellion against the King’s Majesty ... in my office as Deputy Clerk of the assizes ... to tell you that the King is very gracious and merciful, and will cause none to be executed but such as have been officers or capital offenders. And if you would render yourselves fit objects of the King’s grace and favour, your only way is to give a full account of where you joined the Duke’s army and in what capacity you served him. Otherwise ... no mercy or favour from the King ... certainly punish all such wilful and obstinate offenders. So think on this, those of you who might have been minded to take up the court’s time with needless and lying pleas of not guilty, for your trial begins tomorrow.”

The man read out a list of a dozen men who were to accompany him now, to give their confessions to him and his clerks, and indicate how they would plead, and the soldiers dragged them to their feet and marched them out. As they left, the heavy cell door slamming behind them, the silent cell burst into an uproar of excited speech. John Spragg clapped Adam enthusiastically on the shoulder.

“What did I tell ‘ee, boy? You see, you see! You’ll be out there before the end of the week, free, as like as not! I knew they couldn’t hang so many as this! We’ll get a pardon, man, a pardon!”

Adam stared at his usually phlegmatic friend as he banged his hand excitedly up and down on his knee, his dirty, bearded face creased with desperate joy. He did not know what to think. It seemed too good to be true.

“You’ve got to plead guilty, though, John,” he said at last. “You’ve got to throw yourself on their mercy and tell ‘em what you done in the war.”

John looked at him, his eyes shining with tears. “There’s no harm in that now, is there, boy? ‘Tis easy enough - I’m not ashamed of it.”

“No harm so long as you don’t tell on your friends, who might still be free.”

John Spragg paused, a frown disfiguring his joy. “They wouldn’t ask us to do that, would they? They’ll just want to know about us.”

“And about what we’ve seen and done, likely, and who with. The whole thing could be a trick, John. You must know that.”

The two men stared at each other, seeking to believe what they had heard and yet afraid, one of fifty similar conversations that buzzed all around them in the cell. Half the night the arguments went on all around them, especially amongst those, like Adam and John, who were not to be interviewed till morning, and few could sleep for thinking.

After midnight a wind got up and swept some of the foul air out through the high-barred windows, disturbing the citizens in the houses nearby and bringing a few prisoners welcome relief. But to others it brought the unsettling, unwelcome scent of life beyond the walls, the smell of stables and the fields beyond, and later, towards morning, the smell of wood fires heating the ovens to provide fresh bread and breakfast for the visiting judge and the other citizens of the town.

The wind blew the seagulls in from the coast, so that in the early morning they cried and screamed over the rooftops, their lonely, free voices reminding Adam of the days when it had blown in over Colyton. He thought of the times as a young man when he had taken Mary and the toddlers down to the little cove at Beer to buy fish, and watch the little boats drop their brown sails and be dragged up onto the pebble beach. He remembered how the gulls had screamed and squabbled over the boats, and how a tiny, red-headed Ann had screamed back and thrown stones to protect what they had bought. It was strange, he could not remember having taken Oliver and Rachel and Sarah there, though it was so near. And now ... now he would never do it.

As the morning light grew on the damp grey walls in the cell, and a shift in the wind brought the stink of the night’s excreta and the hot bodies around, he knew that the little, tormenting light of hope that Ann and the court official had tried to bring him was false, and must be ignored. The only hope could be for a quick trial and a short pain before the end, and a merciful God thereafter.

As John Spragg woke from a troubled, restless sleep, and turned to him with his eager, tormented eyes, Adam screwed his new-found courage up to his final resolve, and listened with pity to the hopes he did not share.

46

“P
RISONERS AT the bar, listen to me, and listen carefully!”

A hush fell over the court, but it was still not silent, despite all the shouts and earnest banging of the gavel by the clerk of the court, and the threatening looks from the pale, bilious judge. People were still trying to push in and out behind Ann and Tom, and those inside were murmuring and shuffling as they tried to find somewhere to see or at least a place to stand, while the chains on the legs of the two dozen prisoners herded into line before the dock clattered and crashed on the wooden floor.

Ann craned her neck desperately to look through the forest of hats and wigs in front of her to see if her father was there.

“In a moment you will be asked how you plead.” The judge winced, as though he were in pain, and took a hurried, deep draught from a bottle in front of him. His voice, when he spoke again, was powerful, yet high and full, more like a woman’s than a man’s.

He paused, to take another swig from the bottle, and a well-dressed woman in front of Ann turned to whisper to her husband.

“Poor man! He suffers terribly from the stone, they say. It must be cruel hard to have to do such a job with that pain.”

Her husband nodded. “Look at that rogue in chains there! He looks a filthy devil enough!”

Ann stood on tiptoe and craned to see where they were pointing, but could only see a few heads that she did not recognise. Tom, to her left, had a better view, but he was separated from her by a further influx of people.

The clerk of the court banged his gavel, and the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys resumed.

“My advice to you is this: that if you will plead Guilty, the King, who is all mercy, will be as ready to forgive you as you were to rebel against him; yea, as ready to pardon you as you are to ask it of him. But if you choose to plead Not Guilty, then justice will take its course. Now the clerk of the court will read the charge and put the question to you.”

Ann saw a gap open in front of her, and pushed her shoulder forward into it, wedging two backs aside. There were cries of surprise and protest, but she was through; she slipped past a little fat man who turned to help his wife, and found herself at the back of the two rows of seats, with an almost clear view of the court ahead.

“Prisoners at the bar, it is hereby charged that you did present yourselves in armed rebellion against His lawful Majesty, King James the Second ... “

Yes! Her father was there, in the middle of the second row, staring quietly at the clerk of the court as he droned on with the formalities of the charge. How still he looked, how small beside some of the other men in the line - even John Spragg who stood beside him. But it was his quietness that impressed and frightened her most; there was an anxiety, a tormented fear and hope on the faces of most of the other men, that was quite absent from her father. It was as though he were dead already.

But had he not heard what the judge had said - that the King was all mercy - ready to pardon, even?

“Now, how do you plead? David Hoskins, first.”

“I? Well, er … “ A big, red-faced man like a farmer shuffled his feet awkwardly, so that his chains rattled.

“Come on, man, don’t make a meal of it!” The voice of the judge stung like a lash, and the man looked up at him, frightened.

“Guilty, my lord.” It was more like a croak from an old man than the deep, resonant voice one might expect.

“Good.” The clerk of the court wrote on the paper in front of him, and moved on to the next. “Daniel Lee?”

“Guilty, my lord.”

As the clerk moved along the line Ann looked away from her father to the watching judge, perched silently behind the great imposing desk, raised high above the rest of the court like the King, or God himself. She could only see his hands, and his young face under the huge wig, and she searched them earnestly for signs of mercy or compassion. The hands, playing with the quill pen and occasionally straying nervously towards the bottle, were thin and surprisingly small, sticking out of his huge sleeves like a child’s or a woman’s. The face, too, seemed dwarfed by the huge wig, and was striking as much for its weakness as its strength; the big nose and wide, heavy-lidded eyes contrasted with the puffy, bilious cheeks and soft lips that he constantly sucked and chewed as he listened, like a baby’s mouth seeking some comfort from the pain of the stone within. His formidable eyes burned their way steadily into each man as the clerk of the court questioned him, ignoring the rising hubbub in the well of the court behind.

“John Spragg, of Colyton?”

“Guilty, my lord.” John Spragg looked up hopefully at the judge, almost smiling as he spoke.

“Adam Carter?”

“Guilty.”

Adam looked briefly at the clerk as he spoke, then back down at the ground.

“Guilty,
my lord
, Mr Carter.” The clerk of the court paused indignantly, his quill poised above the paper.

Adam looked up slowly, surprised that the process had stopped. His quiet, weary voice carried into the hush of the court.

“I plead guilty and there’s an end to it. He would not be anybody’s lord if we’d won.”

The court burst into uproar, cheers and loud laughter mingling with the cries of fury and indignation. The clerk banged loudly with his gavel, and Ann clutched the back of the bench in front of her for support. The judge raised an eyebrow and glared coldly at Adam, waiting for silence to return.

“You are a vile, seditious rogue, Adam Carter. I shall not forget you.”

“Christopher Battiscombe?”

Ann felt sick, as though she had been hit in the stomach. She clutched the back of the bench to avoid falling. How could her father be so foolish as to speak like that? To draw attention to himself out of all the crowd, when after what the judge had said surely only a few at most would be hanged! He must be mad - he must be repenting it by now! But when she looked, she saw him only looking quietly at the ground, while John Spragg stared at him in concern.

“They all plead guilty, my lord.”

“So. I see my advice did not fall on deaf ears, for once.” Judge Jeffreys smiled briefly. “Is there anything any of you wishes to say in his defence before I pass sentence?”

There was a silence, then the clerk of the court picked up a piece of paper in front of him.

“There is one here, Michael Johnson, my lord, who pleads that he is very poor, and maintained by the parish.”

Jeffreys raised his eyebrows. “Indeed? And that is his defence? You need not worry, Mr Johnson. I shall endeavour to relieve the parish of its burden.”

He smiled, and Ann looked around in amazement at the laughter of the court ushers.

“And there is one Edmund Malachi of Axminster who has given most useful information concerning traitors not yet apprehended.” The clerk passed a sheet of paper to the judge, who skimmed through it briefly, shifting uncomfortably in his seat as he did so.