Tombland

‘I’ve noticed you’ve hardly been drinking since we got here. Though I’ve heard some rowdiness in the camp round the fires.’

‘Need to keep a clear head.’

‘And you have something to take your mind off Tamasin. Will they let you write to her?’

‘I haven’t asked yet. I want to let things settle down for a day or two.’ He looked at me intently. ‘You recognize the justice in what these men are doing now?’

‘I’m not quite sure, not yet.’ I sighed. ‘I have taken an oath to help with the trials, but no more. I still fear that, one way or another, this could end in terrible violence.’

He smiled. ‘Always somewhere in the middle, as usual.’ Then his look became serious. ‘You’ll have to come down off that fence before too long.’

I looked down at the city. ‘What do you think of Captain Kett?’

‘I think he’s the most remarkable man I’ve met since Lord Cromwell. He has Cromwell’s force, his negotiating skills – he’s been a local politician and guildsman for years – and his confidence. But none of Cromwell’s cruelty, or bullying. Charisma too, practical organizing skills, and from the way he’s shaping this camp, a genuine belief in equality.’

It was unusual for Barak to praise someone so unequivocally. I smiled. ‘Remember, he is an enterprising businessman and landowner himself. Perhaps angry he has never been allowed gentleman status.’

‘Well, it’s the commons he wants to help now. And he’s no man of violence. And that’s not easy in the circumstances. His plans to hold these trials prove that.’

I nodded. ‘I wonder what his religious views are?’

Barak shrugged. ‘Protestant, I’d guess. Much of Norfolk is.’ He looked down at the city. ‘The councillors and aldermen must be shitting themselves down there.’

‘Yes.’ Looking down, it struck me that Norwich, bounded by the walls and the river, had the shape of a great teardrop. I thought again of those we knew down there – Josephine and Edward Brown, Isabella and Chawry, Sooty Scambler, John Boleyn in Norwich Castle. What would happen to them all now?

Away to the west, I heard church bells start to ring, then more, out across the countryside. I saw a beacon lit, then another further off, and another. The whole commons of Norfolk were being rung to Mousehold.

Part Four

MOUSEHOLD HEATH

Chapter Forty-three

It was late on Sunday afternoon, two days later. I sat with Nicholas and Barak in the doorway of a lean-to hut built of fresh-smelling wood planks, roofed with turf and with bracken for bedding. Here, at night, the three of us had to ‘croodle up’, in the Norfolk phrase, to sleep. The hut was only four feet high, too low to stand, but provided basic shelter. Hundreds of such huts had been erected in the last two days, stretching across the heath. From Thorpe Wood to the south came the constant sound of sawing, dozens of carpenters busy cutting newly felled tree trunks into planks. There were numerous carpenters among the rebels, and many members of the Norwich carpenters’ guild had come up to help.

The huts were grouped in circles accommodating a village or hamlet or group of men who had come to Kett’s camp, within larger organizations representing the old divisions of Norfolk, the ‘Hundreds’. Ex-soldiers had supervised their physical placing, together with ‘governors’ elected by members of the camp on the basis of each Hundred, usually people with experience of local politics. Pathways had been left to allow access. Barak and I, joined the day before by a newly released Nicholas, had remained with the people from Swardeston, along with young Natty and the ex-soldier Hector Johnson. Those two stayed with us, I thought, partly to keep an eye on us, but also because they were alone, with no local group of their own. The villagers were friendly with Barak but reserved towards me and even more so towards Nicholas, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since he had been passed into my care.

Each group of huts had a central cooking area, flints placed round it lest fire spread across the tinder-dry yellow grass of Mousehold. Water had been brought up from the Wensum and even ferried on horseback from the River Yare some eight miles distant. Our cooking pot had been set to boil and we had learned that this evening our dinner was to be, of all things, swan.