Rebels and traitors

Chapter Twenty-Nine — Newport Pagnell and Stony Stratford: 1644

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.

Now Sir Samuel Luke's scouts kept a closer than ever watch on Oxford. He had a paranoid fear that the King intended to strike at his garrison: 'There is some treacherous plot against us at present, for they never had that confidence and cheerfulness at Oxford as they have now…'Luke's men were deserting; they knew the rival garrison at Aylesbury was better supported and more regularly paid than theirs. When Sir Samuel was recalled to sit in Parliament along with all the other members, he protested that he needed to stay at Newport or his unhappy soldiers would disband themselves.

None the less, he was forced to go up to Westminster. A new army was being proposed, in which no members of Parliament would hold commissions. At Newport Pagnell there was much troubled discussion of the impact this would have; Sir Samuel might never return.

He might be forced, as a member of Parliament, to 'volunteer' to give up his command. So it happened that during the lull in fighting at the end of the year, Gideon Jukes was given leave to visit his family. The vexed officers at Newport Pagnell had written Sir Samuel Luke a letter of support: 'Sir, we your poor and discontented officers are desirous you take notice how ready and cheerful we shall be to serve under you or any other body…' Gideon thought it muddled and misguided, but he did not demur when his captain chose him to convey the letter. While Sir Samuel Luke was in London, he occupied a property that had been part of the King's Printing House at Blackfriars. 'You're a printer, Trooper Jukes; I can trust you to find the house.'

Gideon was told he could spend a week among his family. 'I'll try and bring back new britches!' he promised, for uniforms were in short supply.

'The devil with britches; we can fight the King bare-arsed. Bring bullets!' chortled a sergeant, sucking on an empty pipe as if the memory of old smoke that imbued the browned clay would bring him comfort. 'And remember, Cheapside boy, if you run into a great beast, square and bellowing, with a leg at each corner, it is a cow.'

Jokes about Londoners never having seen cattle gave endless entertainment to the country-born.

There were more jests about whether Gideon could find his way back to London, but thanks to the ancient Romans, it was a perfectly straight ride for two days down Watling Street until he passed under the shadow of Old St Paul's. He then simply had to turn off into Bread Street where his parents lived.

Approaching the city, when he came up to the Wardour Street Fort in the Lines of Communication, the sentries' cadences of London speech gave him a deep pang. 'Let him in, lads! It's Private Jukes, wandering home from market with a bag of magic beans…'

Gideon had adapted his City vowels while at Newport. The Northamptonshire turnips pretended they could not understand him otherwise. As he thanked the sentries, grinning at their badinage, he heard his natural accent return and felt he had become himself again after living in a kind of disguise for many months.

Homesickness swept over him. He realised how tired he was of riding around alone among woods, fields and beggarly villages. He turned in through the city gate. As he entered the metropolitan clamour and bustle, an enormous yearning to be back here struck. Encountering the smoke from thousands of chimneys in coal-burning homes and businesses, Gideon Jukes took the deepest breath he could and let the old familiar choking smog of London fill every cranny of his lungs.