Tidelands

His lordship laughed, as if to say that he did not care about good behavior at harvest home, and stepped up on the mounting block to wait for his horse. His groom brought his charger to the block and held it while his lordship heaved himself into the saddle, gathered up the reins, and nodded to the Millers and the diners in the yard. “Good Harvest!” he said, and smiled when they raised the cups and mugs and repeated the toast. Then he turned and rode away, his groom following him.

Alinor felt her brother’s eyes on her. “What’s the matter?” she demanded.

“It makes my blood boil, how he speaks,” Ned exclaimed. “He lost the war, his king is in our keeping, and yet still he rides around as if he owns the place—because he does still own the place! How can everything change and nothing change? How can he say that Master Walter can take a girl behind the haystacks, as if the girls are at his bidding! As if they are as light as that old goat’s mistress in London town?”

“Hush,” Alinor said swiftly. “Don’t spoil it.”

“It’s spoiled for me already,” he said furiously.

“Why the long face, Ned?” the blacksmith from Birdham called to him. “I’d have thought you’d have been pleased with the news from the North?”

Ned’s head went up like a hound hearing the hunting horn. “I’ve heard no news from the North,” he said. “What’ve you heard?”

A number of men turned to the blacksmith. “And how d’you know anyway?” someone demanded suspiciously.

“Because I shod the horse of a man carrying the newspapers, and he gave me one. He was carrying the Moderate Intelligencer for sale. Showed it to me and read it to me. Gave it me in payment.” He brandished an ill-printed twice-folded paper.

“Read it!” someone exclaimed.

“I don’t read so very well,” he confessed. “But he told me it was good news for parliament.”

“I’ll read it,” Ned said impatiently. “Give it here.”

The men gathered round him as he spread it flat on the table and, ignoring the dishes as they were brought from the mill kitchen, spelled out the words.

“From Warrington, 20th August,” he said slowly. “A godly victory.”

“Victory to the army?” someone asked.

“God be praised. Wait, wait, I’m reading it. Yes. It looks like a true report. Someone reporting from the battle. It says that Oliver Cromwell joined with John Lambert’s Horse—they mean his cavalry—in time to catch the Scots at Preston and split them in two. It’s a victory. God has saved us: the Scots are broken.”

“God bless us: we’re safe?”

“Does it say how?”

“Many dead?”

“Bad weather, hmm hmm, listen . . . I’ll read it . . .”

After a tedious and weary march, enduring many difficulties and pressures, through the unseasonableness of weather and extreme badness of ways: Lieutenant General Cromwell joining with the Northern Brigade, came on Thursday, very early in the morning, our army marched towards Preston, where the enemy lay all about, both Scottish and English. The enemy was sufficiently alarmed by the resolute going on of our men who thereupon drew up on a Moor two miles Eastward from Preston. Our forlorn—

“What?” demanded one of the women reaping gang.

“Our ‘forlorn hope,’ our men in the front, with the hardest job to do,” Ned explained, and went on reading:

. . . with gallant courage, notwithstanding the deepness of the ways and the enclosures which were much to our disadvantage, still pressed on, charged several of the enemies’ bodies, routs them and gains their ground.

“They were fighting alone?”

“Desperately,” Ned said, his brow knotted.

Our forlorn had several encounters and behaved themselves gallantly, and about 4 of the clock in the afternoon, as soon as the narrowness of the lanes and passages would permit, our Infantry comes up to the relief of our forlorn and to the heat of the battle with an extraordinary cheerfulness.

“At Preston?”

“So it says.”

“Isn’t that a long way south for the Scots to come?” someone asked nervously. “Isn’t that far south? Nearly to Manchester?”