I opened my eyes and saw Mari then; stars were about the curve of her shawl as she knelt by the hurdle and put her arms around me.
“O, Jethro,” she said, and kissed me. “Jethro!”
Men turning away to bury the dead.
CHAPTER 26
THEY GOT Abel Flannigan in bed, said Mari, on the night after the march on Carmarthen city: clanking horses and sabres drawn in his shippon, she said, heaving down the door and bursting up the stairs with Biddy screaming murder and heaving pans at them, yelling like a mad thing at Abel to hoof it through the window, but she yelled too late. Back to the wall in his nightshirt went Abel Flannigan, with a dragoon on his back and a constable on his legs, hitting off helmets with one hand and smacking them out with the other; five on the floor at one time, said Biddy, bleeding, ragged, tormented as a Spanish bull, was Abel, roaring to Biddy to saddle his mare while he settled all fifteen. They could have shot him, cut him down, but they didn’t, to their credit. But they thumped him to his knees and tied his wrists behind him and booted him out on the end of a rope, haltered as a wife being sold at market. Biddy’s screams could be heard from here, said Mari.
“And then?” I asked, flat.
“Then they went for Toby Maudlin.”
Toby went easy, Mari said, thumped black and blue by his misery missus at the first clank of the sabres; kicked out through the door into the arms of the constables, his face still blackened, still wearing her nightdress, for he had taken a gate in his stride on the way back from Carmarthen.
“Justin Slaughterer was taken in Carmarthen workhouse,” she said now. “He forced his way in there a yard behind John Harries Rebecca and two hundred following them, overturned the tables, smashed down the doors to free the inmates so they could put the place to flames. But the dragoons came galloping in and slammed the gates behind them.”
“Got the lot,” I said.
“Rebecca John Harries made back home,” she answered, “but not poor Justin.”
“A damned fine way to end a page of history,” I said.
“Then they came here,” said Mari, kneeling by the bed.
This raised me on the pillow.
“Six dragoons and a captain, Jethro. Looking for a man with broken hands, a man who had murdered one of their soldiers.”
I stared at her.
“Found drowned in a brook in the woods near St Clears – beaten, and left to die, left to roll about, and drown.”
“O, God,” I said, sweating.
So small and unequal she looked standing there in profile, one hand gripping the sill. Hard on women, this business. She had lost one man to rebellion. She looked like losing another. Murder now. Sick, I felt.
“What … what did you tell them?” I whispered.
“What Gower told me – that you and Morfydd were dead. O, God,” she said.
I thought of the ship, tranquil on the calm sea, waiting, waiting.
She said, “Then they went to the pit to get the truth of it and Liam Muldooney told them the same.”
I covered my face with my hands.
“Jethro, you must get away,” she said. “Every man under sixty in the village has been taken. Special magistrates are being sworn in to try them – hundreds and hundreds have been taken – even men who have never seen a Rebecca just in case. They will come back for you, you cannot stay here.”
“Yes.”
This was the Chartists all over again. With victory coming closer they had bungled it by moving too soon – men like my brother who had listened to John Frost; men like Flannigan who had followed the hothead John Harries. And now murder.
“Thank God Mam isn’t here,” she said.
“And if I go … what of you?”
“I will manage,” she said.
“Cae White, on your own?”
“I have Richard and Jonathon for help. I will manage.”
“You will starve, the three of you. You first,” I replied.
“Perhaps for the good,” she said, empty. “Not much of a life as things stand, is it?”
“Mari,” I said, and put out my hand to her and she came obediently and stood above me, looking down, before she went on her knees beside the bed and into my arms. Just held her for a bit. I knew she was sobbing for Morfydd; that the grief was cutting as a knife. Then the door came open silently and the faces of Jonathon and Richard peeped round. Jonathon as Mari, dark as Richard was fair. And I saw in Richard’s eyes the unspoken question as Mari rose like lightning and went to Jonathon. I glanced at Mari, my eyebrows raised and she shook her head and hurried Jonathon through the door.
“The soldiers came, Uncle Jethro,” Richard said by the bed. “You heard one of them’s been killed?”
“Yes.”
“And Aunt Mari did say that you didn’t do it and that you and my mam be dead, anyway, then
