Page 82 of By the Sword
‘Aye, they say Charles Stuart’s on the run and all.’
Suddenly amidst the chatter, a woman’s voice rose shrilly. ‘What did those soldiers say?’ Silence fell on the gathering as she continued. ‘A dark man over two yards high? Look at his hands, he ain’t no labourer.’
Jonathan’s sharp mind, dulled by the events of the past week, failed him and before he could react his arms were seized and pinioned. A dark man over two yards high? He fitted that description and the mood of the crowd swung.
Two men hauled him to his feet, sending the empty platter clattering to the stone floor. Another grabbed his hands, holding them out for inspection. He flinched as they twisted his injured hand with the filthy bandage. Despite the long years as a soldier, there was no disguising the swordsman’s hands. Calloused though they were by long hours holding reins, they were not the hands of a common labourer.
‘What did they say the reward was?’ someone else shouted.
‘One thousand pounds,’ came the answer.
One thousand pounds for the King–a fortune to these people. Jonathan’s heart sank. An ignominious end to his freedom, he thought.
A bearded face thrust itself into Jonathan’s. ‘Be you Charles Stuart?’
‘I am not,’ he protested. ‘Lost everything in the war and I’m just looking for work to keep body and soul together.’
All memory of Jonathan’s selfless act of courage had been forgotten and despite his protestations of innocence, all they could see was the rich reward. His denial fell on deaf ears.
They dispatched someone called Ezra to fetch the soldiers from the nearest garrison, and Jonathan’s eyes flicked around the now hostile faces, looking for an escape. The grip on his arms had slackened in the general excitement and he seized his chance.
Throwing off his captors, he dived into a gap in the crowd only to be brought up short in the door of the inn by a solid man in a leather apron, clearly the blacksmith come late upon the scene. Before he could dodge, a mighty fist flashed out, catching him squarely under the left eye. The last thing he saw before the world went black was the blacksmith’s grimy face.
***
He came back to his senses with a raging thirst, matched only by a thudding headache. He lay face down on a cold, slimy stone floor. No chances had been taken; his hands and feet had been firmly and securely tied and it took an effort to manoeuvre himself into a sitting position with his back against some barrels of wine.
A low evening light filtered through a small window, high up in the wall, and illuminated his prison which he judged, by the barrels and the sacks against which he sat, to be the cellar of the inn. Well-trodden stone steps led up to the stout oak door that he supposed would be firmly barred on the outside.
He licked his dry lips and thought longingly of the wine in the barrels. With grim humour, he told himself this must be some sort of hell where one could die of thirst in a cellar of wine barrels. He called out but his shouts went unheeded. He concluded the inn’s occupants must be toasting their success and dividing the reward between themselves.
If ‘Ezra’ had ridden for the soldiers, he probably only had a couple of hours before they showed up to take him away. Hisonly consolation in the whole sorry affair was that the ungrateful villagers would not receive a thousand pounds once his true identity had been ascertained.
He allowed himself some ungracious thoughts about his captors as he shivered in his damp clothes. With his arms twisted behind his back, his fingers had begun to lose feeling and the muscles cramped. His shoulder hurt like the devil and from the ache above his cheekbone, his eye would be blackened and closed by morning. As the last streaks of light faded from the small window he shut his eyes against the thumping pain in his head and shoulder and drifted into an uncomfortable and fitful doze.
He woke with a start and strained his eyes against the uncompromising blackness of the cellar. A scrabbling noise came from behind a pile of barrels in the corner of the cellar. It seemed to be made by an animal, but something considerably larger than a rat.
He strained his ears but silence descended and he thought he must have imagined it.
As he allowed himself to relax, the scrabbling noise came again, only this time a small, wavering light could be seen above the barrels and a young girl of about seven or eight, holding a small lantern, crawled out from behind the debris at the very back of the cellar.
She stood and held up the lantern, illuminating a thin, pointed face. For a brief moment, Jonathan wondered if he was conjuring up delirious visions of the fairy folk. Seeing him, she crept across the floor and crouched in front of him.
‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ she said with such gravity that Jonathan almost laughed at the idea of this tiny child rescuing him from his present predicament.
However, the girl had access to his prison from somewhere above the ground and that gave him hope.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Sarah Morgan,’ she said. ‘It was my brother, Hew, you saved today.’ She paused and held up the lantern, examining his face with open curiosity, her eyes as round as plates in her small face.
‘Are you the King?’ she asked.
Jonathan shook his head. ‘No, Sarah, I’m not the King.’
She sighed. ‘Mother said you weren’t. She said you were too old.’ Then her face brightened. ‘But are you an escaped Royalist?’
There seemed no point denying it and he nodded.
