Prince

Chapter 15

For hours, as daylight turned to night, Boltfoot watched the stockade of Godstone powdermill from the woods. He observed the comings and goings of those who worked there and those who visited until, in the end, exhaustion took him and he slept beneath a blanket of leaves.

He was startled awake by a sound of cracking twigs and rustling leaves. He did not move but listened. There were whispers. In the thin light he could make out the shapes of two men carrying what looked like heavy staves. Were they charcoal-colliers? Unlikely. Honest workmen would not lower their voices so. They were ten yards from him, moving stealthily away, towards the powdermill. He allowed them to go on further, then followed, silently, as a bowman stalks a deer.

From their manner of walking he took one to be an older man and one a youth. Close by the stockade they stopped. The older one stood in the shelter of a tree. On the outside of the stockade there was a series of pitch lanterns, the flames safely enclosed in sides of thin, translucent horn so that no errant sparks should fly. Boltfoot could see now that the men did not carry staves but muskets. They were dressed in common countrymen’s clothes; coarse wool breeches, frayed and torn jerkins of hide and felt caps about their heads and ears. The older man waited at the tree with both the muskets while the younger crawled forward on his belly. Boltfoot saw immediately that he was making his way towards a hole in the palisade. He disappeared through it like a fox going to earth.

Boltfoot watched them from cover fifteen yards away. After two or three minutes the younger man emerged from the stockade, scrabbling to his feet and hastening at a crouch to his comrade. He held something out to show him, then they melted back into the woods. Boltfoot stayed on their trail.

When the men thought they were safe away, they stopped again, sat on the ground and unslung their muskets and bags. The older man, grey-bearded and weathered, took out his tinderbox and sparked up a rushlight, which cast a weak glow on the scene. His young copesmate — Boltfoot thought it could have been his son, for their features were alike — took a flagon and bread from his bag and the two began to eat and drink.

‘Hold still.’ Boltfoot stood behind them with his caliver loaded and aimed at the back of the older man. ‘I am armed.’

The men twisted around in alarm, rising to their feet, and found themselves looking into the octagonal muzzle of Boltfoot’s fine-wrought weapon. The younger man, who had no more than a few wisps to warm his chin, reached to his belt for his dagger.

‘Touch the knife and it will be the last thing you do,’ Boltfoot said.

‘Take a little bread and be on your way,’ the greybeard growled. ‘We have nothing for you.’

Boltfoot looked at their muskets. ‘What about those?’

‘They put rabbit and fowl on our table. I’ll die before you have either of them.’

‘I don’t want them, nor your bread. I want information. What were you doing at the powdermill?’ As he spoke, Boltfoot realised that the men were losing their fear of him, even though he had them at his mercy.

‘Reckon it out for yourself. What would a man want at a powdermill?’

The younger one laughed at his father’s drollness.

‘Just enough powder corn to fire your hagbuts?’

‘And a little left over to make a gunpowder pudding.’ The older man was smirking now.

‘So you just walk in and take it? Or does someone sell it to you?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I need powder myself, that’s what. I been watching the place, wondering how to get some. Can I slip in the way you did — or will I meet a mastiff on the other side?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘How much can you get me?’ Boltfoot demanded.

‘I didn’t say I could get you any. I’m not a trader in gunpowder. Just a freeborn Englishman trying to keep my family alive in hard days.’

‘A poacher.’

‘And what are you? You don’t look like no constable nor any honest man I’ve ever seen, with your dragging foot and your outlandish weapon in the forest at witching time. Is that a hagbut or a pistol? Ain’t never seen its like.’

‘Could you get me a hundredweight of powder?’

‘A hundredweight!’ the younger one exclaimed. He had been silent until then. ‘What do you want a hundredweight for?’

‘I do reckon he’s a Spaniard mercenary, Jed. Come to blow up our queen.’

On an impulse, Boltfoot lowered the muzzle of his wheel-lock caliver. ‘I don’t want powder and I don’t care a maggot for your poaching, but I do want your help. And I’ll pay you for it.’

The greybeard grinned. ‘We could do for you now you’ve dropped your weapon.’

‘Aye, you could,’ Boltfoot said. ‘But you won’t, will you? Because you’re honest men. Honest poachers…’

The older man’s grin turned into a laugh and he put out his bare hand. ‘Well then, now you’re talking like a civil man. No need for threats. Come break bread and take some ale with us and let’s find out who you are.’

Boltfoot shook the hand. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you this, I am no Spanish mercenary but you may not be far out with your talk. And I will tell you that my name is Boltfoot Cooper.’

‘And we’re both called Jed Brooker, father and son, if you hadn’t divined the similarity for yourself. Most folks do. Now then, Mr Cooper, talk on. Weave your tale of intrigue and tell us your business in Godstone woods.’

Boltfoot told them of the powder blast at the Dutch church and of his commission from Sir Robert Cecil’s office to find the source of the gunpowder. ‘And I’m thinking that if you and your son here manage to get in and out for powder for your poaching, another might be able to acquire a barrel of the stuff and use it for attacking Dutchmen.’

‘If I talk to you, Mr Cooper, what assurance do I have that my name goes no further, that none of this comes back to me and my boy?’ Jed the elder said.

‘My word, Mr Brooker.’

‘We’re good huntsmen, Mr Cooper. We could track down and snare a man that had betrayed us as well as we could take duck or hare.’

‘You’ll have no need. My word is unbreakable.’

Jed the elder nodded slowly, as if he saw something of himself in Boltfoot Cooper, a rough honesty, perhaps, or a shared belief in the freedom of the spirit. ‘Well then, I will tell you what I know. Jed, pass the flagon to Mr Cooper and let him sup more ale.’

The three men squatted in the darkness of the wood, lit only by the rushlight and a thin slice of moon that now and then pierced through the clouds and the canopy of trees.

‘My daughter’s husbandman, Tom Jackson, works there at the Godstone mill. He passes us a little fine-ground musket powder, just enough, but he’d never do more than that — never pass a keg of the stuff to no man. And I reckon the others as works there would be the same. They’d all pass a little to their kinfolk to powder their hagbuts, but no more.’

‘So you’re saying the place is secure. No leaks?’

‘No leaks that I’ve heard of, Mr Cooper, but there is something you should know. Tom told me there was an attempt most recently to breach the stockade. Two men trying to force their way in by night. But they were spotted and driven away by the mastiffs. I did think at first that you must have been one of them, Mr Cooper.’

Boltfoot said nothing.

‘I know different now, don’t I. Unless I’m the biggest doddypoll in the whole county of Surrey.’

‘I am sure you are not, Mr Brooker.’

‘But what I can tell you is that the attempt on the mill was not the first. About a month ago, a stranger was hanging around the Mill Tavern buying drinks for the men, asking whether powder ever went missing, asking whether a man might acquire some for a good price. But he quickly disappeared when he saw Tom, for Tom knew him.’

‘Who was this man?’

‘I’m coming to that. Before Tom married my lass, he worked at another mill at Bromley-by-Bow, on the river Lea, east of London town. And this man worked there, too. He was a good powderman, Tom says, but he was a rabble-rouser and a hedge-priest. Believed that Christ intended all men to be equal and that the lands should be taken from the lords and shared out between God-fearing Englishmen whatever their birth. He would try to stir up the mill workers, get them along to his mad sermonising and meetings. But word got back to the miller, who dismissed him on the spot.’

‘Had there been any suggestion that this man tried to obtain powder from the Bromley-by-Bow mill?’

‘I couldn’t say, but I can tell you the man’s name if you like, for it is such a name as I could never forget. Holy Trinity Curl. That’s what Tom called him. Holy Trinity! Now what sort of name is that for a man?’