“Come along, young fellows,” the peddler cried from the crossroads up ahead.“It’s just along this lane.”
Within an hour, they were installed in a comfortable corner of a hay barn.Jed fell asleep almost as soon as he laid his head down.
He woke with a start some hours later, disoriented.He was not lying in a hammock, gently swaying with the ship’s movement, packed into the darkness with two hundred other men.Instead, he lay wrapped in a blanket on a bed of hay, with a beam of moonlight falling on his face from a gap above the barn’s door.
It all came rushing back to him.He was free!No more being torn from sleep and chased on deck.No more soul-crushing routine of ship’s bell and cook’s gong, regulating every moment of every day.
A few feet away, Solomon lay asleep in the moonlight.He was almost unrecognisable, his face slack and peaceful in repose.Jed studied him curiously, wondering what caused the tension that seemed a permanent feature of that face in waking life.
Solomon let out a little breath of a sigh, moving in his sleep.The peddler began to snore again, in huge, rattling gusts.His son elbowed him, and he turned over, grunting and settling down.
Jed closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep again.Tomorrow he would be one step closer to home.
“Perhaps we’d have done better to cross the river during the night,” Jed said uneasily.
He and Solomon had said farewell to the peddler and his son upon leaving the farm, and were now skirting the edge of a field shrouded in a thick layer of morning mist.Wrens and thrushes chirped in the hedges, undeterred by the falling drizzle.Jed had almost forgotten what an English dawn chorus sounded like.
Across the field from them lay the river Parrett, hidden behind the dirt embankment that protected the surrounding fields from salty tidal water.Beyond the embankment, the roof of a barge came gliding into view, ill-formed and ghostlike in the mist, making its slow, ponderous way up from the sea.The barge-horse plodded steadily along, head down.
“Come on,” Jed said.
They crossed the field, and Jed scrambled up the embankment to speak to the bargeman leading the horse.
“Heard anything of the press this morning?”
The bargeman scratched his head.“I heard tell they got a handful of merchant seamen in Bridgwater this morning.”The thought didn’t seem to trouble him overmuch.Like all bargemen, he had a letter of protection, the lucky sod.
Bridgwater was only a few miles downstream, and a shiver of unease ran down Jed’s spine.
He slithered back down from the embankment to relay the news to Solomon, whose mouth tightened.“It’s not that I’m afeared of the press, as such, but it’s of great importance to me that I get to Barnstaple, and not only for my own sake.”
Jed felt a flash of curiosity, but there was no time to ask questions now.“If you en’t afeared, you ought to be.But believe me, I don’t mean to let us fall into their hands.”
Hurrying upstream towards the bridge where Jed meant to cross the river, they soon left the slow-moving barge behind.It had begun to rain, and the long grass soaked their stockings when they left the road and circled around by the fields so as to approach the bridge cautiously, under cover of trees and bushes.It was an old medieval bridge, its stones slick with rain.A row of tidy, white-washed cottages stood on the far side of the river, along with a public house.No one was in sight.The bridge lay waiting.All they had to do was walk across.
Every pressed man in the Navy had his own story, and Jed had heard dozens of them.Most men were pressed at sea, taken out of fishing boats and merchant vessels.But of those taken on land, it had often happened at a bridge.Jed’s messmate Little Dodd loved to tell the tale of how he had avoided capture for over a month before he was obliged to cross the great bridge at Gloucester, and met the press there.
But this quiet country bridge was no turnpike crossing.It wasn’t much bigger than the numerous little wooden bridges and culverts they had crossed over the marshland’s rhynes and drains the previous day.No press gang would take the trouble to lurk in the bushes here, surely.Would they?Uneasily, Jed eyed the thickly growing alders on the river bank.
Nothing moved.Smoke rose peacefully from the cottage chimneys.A woman emerged from the inn, emptied a bucket into the river and disappeared inside the building again.
Jed exchanged glances with Solomon.
They strode briskly across the bridge.Within seconds, they were on the other side and hurrying down a quiet lane.Jed broke into a run, not slowing until they were deep in the marshland, empty fields on either side, and a good mile from the bridge.
He stopped to catch his breath, bending over with his hands on his knees.He cast a sheepish grin up at Solomon, who had kept pace with him easily.
“I’m sorry.Reckon I’m fairly off-kilter today.”
Solomon grinned back.Then they were both laughing for sheer relief, their breaths coming in heavy, exuberant gasps.The rain was falling more heavily now, plastering damp hair across Solomon’s forehead.He had taken off his cap, and his face was bright with laughter.
At last, Jed straightened up, groaning against the stitch in his side.“Not what you had in mind when you said you’d follow me?”
Solomon wiped a hand across his damp face.“Who do you think is at your heels, friend, the press gang or the devil?”
A rain drop had gathered at Solomon’s temple, and now it rolled down his cheek.Jed watched it, seized by a foolish desire to catch it with his finger, to press his lips to its path.
He shook himself, pulling his hat down over his brow to hide his eyes.“Let’s find some shelter from this rain.”
