since losing his money.
“Dolphin Street,” said the bailiff curtly as they reached its corner. Not in the direction of the Cooper’s Arms, then, but north across the Froom. Well, that made sense. The Gloucester Turnpike ran north.
Which led to a new thought: who was paying for all this? He and Willy were being extradited from one county to another, and the importing county was the one had to pay. Were he and Willy so significant to Gloucestershire, then, that it was willing to disburse several pounds on forty miles of travel and the cost of their bailiff escort? Or was it Ceely paying? Yes, of course it was Ceely paying. With pleasure, Richard imagined.
From Dolphin Street it was left into Broadmead and the wagon yard of Michael Henshaw, who operated freight wagons to Gloucester, Monmouth and Wales, Oxford, Birmingham, and even Liverpool. There they were shoved into an alcove full of horse dung and allowed to put their boxes down, Willy gasping in distress.
At least, thought Richard, three months of inertia have not stripped me of all my strength. Poor Willy is not strong, is all. But three months more will see me reduced to Willy’s plight unless Gloucester Gaol offers me the opportunity to work and feeds me enough to work on. But if I do work, who will guard my box, keep thieving hands out of it? I will not lose things like my oil of tar and dripstone, but my rags and clothes will vanish in a second and someone might find the hollow compartment holding my golden guineas.
The huge wagon Willy and Richard climbed into was provided with a canvas cover stretched taut across iron half-hoops; they would be protected from the worst of the elements, including what looked like a coming snow- storm bound to be more severe away from the heat of Bristol’s chimneys. A team of eight big horses were harnessed to the wagon, and looked fit to struggle through the mud and mire of the Gloucester Turnpike. The interior was jammed with so many barrels and crates that there was nowhere to put their feet, and the wagoneer began to insist that their boxes stay behind.
“They has their property, man, that is the Law,” said the bailiff in a tone brooking no argument. He climbed into the wagon to unlock the chains between their ankles and waists, fastening them instead to the half-hoops supporting the canvas shroud. The best they could do was dispose themselves among the cargo with legs stretched out. The bailiff jumped down, and for a moment Richard wondered if he was leaving them here. The wagon jerked into motion; the bailiff’s back was ranged alongside the wagoneer’s on the driver’s seat, over which an adequate shelter was rigged.
“Willy, stir yourself,” said Richard to his doleful companion, clearly dying to burst into tears. “Help me shift my box to rest against this sack, then I will do the same for you. We will have something to lean against. And do not cry! Cry, and ye’re dead.”
The pace was tormentingly slow on that completely plastic, unpaved road, and from time to time the wagon bogged to its axles in mud. Richard and Willy would be unchained and unloaded and set to digging and pushing-as was, Richard noted with amusement, the indignant bailiff. The snow was coming down hard, but the temperature was not low enough to freeze the surface. By the end of the first day, unfed and unwatered save by mouthfuls of snow, they had covered eight of the forty miles.
Which pleased the wagoneer, disembarking in front of the Stars and Plough in Almondsbury.
“I owe ye a bed and blankets,” he said to the prisoners with a great deal more good humor than he had displayed in Bristol. “ ’Twere your efforts got us out of the muck half a dozen times. And as for you, Tom, ye deserve a quart of ale-’tis good here, the landlord makes his own brew.”
He and Tom the bailiff disappeared, leaving Richard and Willy inside the wagon wondering what happened now. Then Tom the bailiff came to unlock the chains binding them to the hoops, cudgel at the ready, and conducted them to a stone barn wherein lay straw. He found a beam with several iron staples in it close to the floor, and locked them to that. After which he vanished.
“I am so hungry!” whimpered Willy.
“Ye may pray, Willy, but do not cry.”
The barn smelled clean and the straw was dry, a better nest than any which had come Richard’s way for three months, he thought, burrowing around. In the midst of this, the landlord and a hefty yokel walked in, the landlord bearing a tray upon which reposed two tankards, bread, butter, and two big bowls of steaming soup. The yokel went to an empty stall and reappeared with horse blankets.
“John says ye helped the wagon considerable,” said Mine Host, putting down his tray where they could reach it and then stepping backward quickly. “Have ye money to pay more than the penny each the bailiff will for ye? Otherwise I am out of pocket and must charge John’s firm, since he says ye’ve earned laborer’s wages.”
“How much?” Richard asked.
“Threepence each, including the quarts of ale.”
Richard produced a sixpence from his waistcoat pocket.
Three pence got them bread and small beer at dawn, then it was back into the wagon for a second day of eight miles, broken by much digging, pushing and heaving. A blissful night’s rest amid straw and blankets combined with the nourishing hot food had worked wonders for Richard’s frame, ache though it did from his exertions. Even Willy was more cheerful, put more heart into the work. It had ceased to snow and snapped colder, though never cold enough to freeze the ground; eight miles in one day were as many as they could go, a progress which perfectly satisfied John the wagoneer-and probably enabled him to put up each night at his regular stop.
Thus Richard expected to be deposited at Gloucester Gaol on the evening of the fifth day. The wagon, however, ceased to roll when it reached the Harvest Moon on Gloucester’s outskirts.
“I am not of a mind to put ye into that foul place in the dark,” John the wagoneer explained. “Ye have paid your way like gentlemen, and I feel sorry for ye, very. This will be your last night of decent rest and decent food for only God can say how long. ’Tis hard to think of ye as felons, so good luck, both of ye.”
At dawn the next day the wagon crossed the Severn River on the drawbridge and entered the town of Gloucester through its west gate. In many ways it was still medieval, had retained most of its walls, ditches, drawbridges and cloisters, half-timbered houses. His view of the town was limited to what he could see through the uncovered back of the wagon, but that was sufficient to tell him that Gloucester was a minnow to Bristol’s whale.
The wagon drew up to a gate in a heavy, ancient wall; Richard and Willy were unloaded and conducted, together with Tom the bailiff, into a large open space which seemed given over to the cultivation of plants only spring would name. In front of them was Gloucester Castle, which was also Gloucester Gaol. A place of frowning stone turrets, towers and barred windows, yet more of a ruin than a fortress last defended in the time of Oliver Cromwell. They did not enter it, but went instead to a fairly large stone house set against the outer wall and ditch surrounding the castle. Here lived the head gaoler.
The real reason they had been escorted from Bristol, Richard decided here, lay more in the fact that the Bristol Newgate wanted its irons back than cared about escaping prisoners. They were divested of every piece of iron they wore, Tom the bailiff gathering them to himself like a woman her new baby. As soon as all were accounted and signed for, he strolled off with his cargo in a sack to catch the cheap coach home. Leaving Richard and Willy to be put into fresh sets of the familiar locked fetters with a two-foot length of chain between. This deed done, a gaoler- they never saw the head gaoler himself-hustled them, carrying their precious boxes, to the castle.
What little of it was still habitable was such a crush of prisoners that sitting down with the legs stretched out was quite impossible. If these wretches sat, it was with knees drawn up beneath their chins. The chamber was exactly twelve feet square and contained around thirty men and ten women. The gaoler who had escorted them bawled an incomprehensible order and everybody who had managed to find enough space to sit got to their feet. They then filed outside, Richard and a weeping Willy in their midst, still carrying their boxes, and came to a halt in a freezing yard where twenty more men and women already stood.
It was Sunday, and the complement of Gloucester Gaol were to receive God’s message from the Reverend Mr. Evans, a gentleman so old that his reedy voice drifted into the winds eddying around the roughly rectangular space and rendered his words of repentance, hope and piety-if such they were-unintelligible. Luckily he considered that a ten-minute service and another twenty minutes spent sermonizing constituted adequate labor for the ?40 per annum he was paid as prison chaplain, especially because he also had to do this on Wednesdays and Fridays.
After, they were herded back to the felons’ common-room, far smaller than that for debtors, of whom there were only half as many.
“It ain’t as bad as this Monday to Saturday,” said a voice as Richard put his box down by shoving someone else
