1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (40 page)

“Hold on,” Darryl said, “the fucker throws grenades into a house and he ain’t gonna hang, but you’re gonna arrest him for
stampeding cattle
?”

Campbell’s smile had no more warmth in it than a highland winter. “Mister McCarthy, if I don’t miss my guess? Aye. I take it this ‘stampeding’ means the same as furious driving?”

“Prob’ly,” Darryl admitted. “And yeah, that’s who I am.”

“Well, perchance you’ve no’ lived in so great a city as Edinburgh, but startled cattle in confined streets are a great terror to the people. In the country, a man might run before such, find shelter, and still drovers die when their charges get out of hand. In city streets,
there is no escape.
So, aye, I’m here to take him under arrest for the furious driving of cattle. And I have every fear that the people will storm the Tolbooth to hang him themselves. There’s the small matter of the robbery he and his men did as they left Balgreen, but I see we’re likely past that at this point.”

“Well, shit,” Darryl said.

“So, does Finnegan live?” Campbell asked.

“No,” came Alex’s voice. They were finally arriving.
Thanks for the heads-up, Darryl
, Julie thought, although she could see where what Campbell had said was kind of distracting. And looked at like he’d put it, stampeding those cattle was a pretty big deal. She’d seen the aftermath on the way out of town, and assumed that it had been the riot that had done the damage.

“Colonel Mackay,” Campbell said. “do you give me to understand that Finnegan resisted arrest?”

“Aye,” Alex said, “and I’ve the hurts to prove it.”

Julie took her eyes off Campbell for the first time.
So much blood
.

“Oh, Alex,” she said, “we need a doctor.”

“That we do, love, that we do.”

* * *

Suddenly Campbell was all business. Directing his muscle—who didn’t, apparently, think anything of taking orders from a guy half their size—to take charge of the two prisoners and get Alex back to the inn at Balgreen. Willie—Campbell had known the boy’s name where Julie hadn’t, and how that had come about she had no idea. Some kind of secret Dark Political Power, no doubt—had been sent with messages back to Edinburgh to bring a doctor. Thomas followed him shortly after, with letters to lawyers, to Campbell’s men back in town and the Tolbooth to the effect that Alex was out of the Tolbooth on Campbell’s own recognizance, that he would be too ill for court on Monday, and that his pursuer was now dead and he would be presenting an intervening motion to have Finnegan’s prosecution dropped.

When the flurry of activity was over, with Alex being tended by Darryl and his small aid kit—the wound was a through-and-through under his right arm, no lung puncture, a probable broken rib and a lot of blood loss—Campbell drew her aside.

“I can do much to settle all this,” he said, “but it were better if you returned over the seas, and that right soon.”

“I’d figured on that anyhow,” she said. She knew she was going to be no use to anybody tomorrow. Hell, probably not much use tonight. She just wanted to use what strength she had left to get back to Alexi. And yeah, pack. They’d planned on stopping Finnegan in the courtroom to get him away long enough that Oliver would be free and clear. They’d figured that Finnegan’s assault would have enough bullshit flying about to make that possible anyway. She’d gone far enough today that Oliver could probably march out of town with a band playing and a big banner with his name on and nobody would care.

Campbell kept his silence while she thought, watching her face and all the expressions that flickered on it intently. Not even troubling to disguise what he was doing, which Julie figured was open and honest for a guy like that. “I’m under a commission to keep the peace. For the moment, I can claim to be acting in that commission, settling disputes and determining the common good in all of this. The pretense will hold a few days—a few weeks, even—but your presence beyond Monday will be more than Jamie Montrose will wink at.”

Julie snorted. “Thought you guys were deadly enemies.”

Campbell’s grin was that of the tiger contemplating a fresh carcass. “Oh, aye. No reason not to be civil to the fellow. And I fancy we’ll have common cause to make afore long. I mean to keep your Major Lennox by me. He’s a Mackay man through-and-through, for all he wasnae born to it. And you’re a Mackay by marriage. And there’s a regiment entire of Mackays over the water. Whatever may come to pass, those men will have a part to play, and no small one. I’ve no settled plan, you understand, but whatever schemes and plots may arise, I’d be a pure fool to not presume on the acquaintance.”

Julie was amazed to hear
and you owe me, big time
, in all that. Her grasp of political maneuvering had pretty much stopped at the high-school level. Where, anyone who’d been a cheerleader could tell you, it got pretty vicious. This guy wasn’t just out of her league, he was practically playing a different game. But, as she’d remarked before, the difference between Scots clan politics and a high-school he-said-she-said hissy-fit was mostly in the level of actual as opposed to metaphorical bloodshed. And Campbell had recognized all of that on the strength of knowing her an hour, and pitched what he was saying just right to get the message across without saying anything he could be called on later.

“I reckon I’d go further than acquaintance, after today,” Julie said, simply, and let him make of that what he would.

She was going to have to have a word or two—letters, probably—with her brother-in-law the new Baron Mackay. The Mackay clan chief, who was back in Germany right now, so that one was going to be face-to-face. And a whole bunch of guys in the government of the USE. It was time and past time she got up to speed on this baronessing business.

Epilogue

January 1635

Darryl had just finished paying off the carters he’d unexpectedly had to hire at Ellenfoot, when Oliver showed up. Even after all the weeks they’d spent at Carlisle, just about getting in tune with the accent there, he was having trouble with the way the boys spoke who were from, like, thirty miles down the coast, so it was a bit of a pain in the ass. Fortunately, both he and the guys he’d hired to drive the carts were having a bit of fun with it, talking loudly and slowly and mocking each other’s accents. They were having as much trouble with his West Virginia as he was with their Cumberland.

Oliver was chuckling. “I’ve as much trouble,” he said. “These northerners are all of a piece with their strange manner of talking.”

Darryl snorted. “I reckon the old U.S. inherited that problem. Still, we’re plenty supplied now. We’re going to have to get some guys who’re going to come south with us.”

“The fellows you hired?” Cromwell nodded to where the carters from Ellenfoot were hurrying in out of the wind and sleet to the taproom of the inn.

“I did ask,” Darryl said, “but they don’t want to leave. They’re doing just fine smuggling graphite out—sold me some, as it happens, bound to come in handy—and whatever comes in. With King Charles squeezing everything till it squeaks because he’s got no Parliament to vote him funds, the smugglers are doing a hell of a trade.”

He’d not been able to follow the figures he’d been quoted, since it wasn’t just money, but a whole complicated web of barter and trade that the smugglers were feeding into the bargain. The gist was that one good smuggling run in winter would keep the crew that pulled it off comfortable for a year. Two, and they could afford to be generous to the landsmen who helped. Some ships were getting three or four cargoes each winter and spring, and spending the summer and autumn when the landsmen were busy on the farms landing cargoes at legitimate ports.

Of course, the ones that weren’t getting that many runs were dying at sea.

Cromwell chuckled. “Leave it to the criminals to know the affairs of state they can profit by,” he said. “and aye, the ancient customs of the ports are among the few royal incomes the Stuart needs no Parliament to levy. He has every gowned fool that passed the bar reading ancient books to find lapsed fees and fines to levy, too.”

“You’re getting more information now?” They’d come down from Edinburgh in November. With Finnegan dead and no sign of more men to come from either Cork or the king, they’d decided to take it easy. Alex and Julie had spent the bare minimum of time needed to attend to the old baron’s affairs and get Alex fit enough to travel—he wasn’t going to be entirely right for months yet, if Darryl was any judge, and Vicky had been pretty forceful on the subject—before taking ship back to Hamburg. That had cost a pretty penny, the North Sea being nobody’s idea of a pleasure cruise in winter. The smugglers only went for it because the profits were frankly ridiculous and justified the risk.

With Alex and Julie gone, Darryl, Vicky, Oliver, Gayle and Stephen had set out for England, cutting across to the west coast, which Oliver said would be less well watched and a better route to the parts of the country he needed. They’d made good time to Carlisle, whereupon Oliver had had them stop for the worst of the winter weather. Darryl hadn’t argued. It had already been closing in—sleet, hail, rain, gales, and the tops of the surrounding hills white when they weren’t covered by cloud. Oliver had then started getting in touch with every old friend he could remember the address of, to find out what was what in England these days, because making a plan without that would’ve been dumb. Darryl didn’t even slightly envy the guys they’d paid to ride with their messages.

“Aye. I’ve every hope of being in Manchester by the end of March. There are a good many of the godly among the weavers. I had thought we might be poor relations in need of shelter, especially since I declined the aid of the United States, but—” He waved a hand over the carts.

They’d been in radio contact with
Someone At The State Department Who Was Totally Not Don Francisco Honest
. They’d been offered support and funding for a good run at starting the English Civil War a few years ahead of schedule.

That had come as a bit of shock. Darryl had asked, through channels, for a bit of a resupply and some tools and gear he couldn’t get locally, plus his and Gayle’s year of back pay from when they were in the Tower. They were going to be helping out against an enemy of the USE, after all, and didn’t want to be dependent on handouts while they did it.

Oliver had been kind of okay with that, but really didn’t want to be seen to be taking foreign money—he’d been quite firm in his opposition to taking the offer that had come back. For pretty good reason. He was busy writing, it looked like, to pretty much everyone to the effect that King Charles, bought and paid for with French gold, wasn’t fit to be on the throne. Therefore, he’d argued, the nation needed to skip forward a couple of hundred years to where the king was a figurehead and England was mostly a democracy.

If Charles and his henchmen could say Cromwell was a paid agent of the USE, that was not going to fly quite as well.

Not-Don-Francisco had taken that on board and said he’d not intervene, then, but he’d send through a few boxes of stuff—documents and reference books et cetera, he’d not been specific—that might prove useful, and that he’d talk to some guys in the Committees of Correspondence about an aid package.

By the time the load came ashore, it filled three carts. There were crates of books, measuring instruments, tools, and cash. All of it down-time makes, none of it obviously from the USE. Some of it was French-made, for crying out loud. A bunch of mail as well, going back over a year. Darryl had been promoted, put up a pay-grade or two, and his pay back-dated to, as it happens, the month before he’d gone into the Tower. With hazard and combat pay upgrades from the date they’d been made prisoners. There was probably something similar for Gayle in the oilskin packet with her name on it. The dates on those promotions and raises were months previous, and Darryl was willing to bet that there were records to that effect somewhere in Magdeburg. He’d even bet that there wasn’t any evidence at all that the whole thing had been ginned up in the first week of December or thereabouts.

Darryl shrugged. “We got what we asked for. Turns out mine and Gayle’s back pay was more’n we thought. And that last etcetera in that last message, I think that might’ve been an excuse. There’s some pretty useful stuff though. Tools especially.”

“I am sure I said I’d not be the USE’s hireling—” Cromwell began, his voice giving away that he was feeling his temper coming on.

“Don’t think this’ll look like that,” Darryl said. “I’ve had a chance to go through most of it, ’cept what’s addressed to Gayle, and it’s all down-time stuff and not all of it’s from the USE. And there’s papers to say we were owed a lot more back pay than I thought.”

Cromwell gave him a hard and piercing stare in return.

Darryl shrugged. “I didn’t ask for any of it. All I said—all we said, come right to it, you were there by the radio with us—was we didn’t want no official USE help.”

That got a snort of amusement. “This Don Francisco hasn’t earned his name in idleness, has he? They’re a famous family, and him a known man among them. Remind me to consider carefully my exact words when next I converse with the man.”

Darryl was about to let it go, when some perverse notion—whim? or maybe it was the most serious thought he’d ever had—led him to speak up again.

“Look, Oliver, whether or not you accept any direct help from the USE is your business. But you may as well face the fact that in this universe nothing is going to happen with the British Isles—not Ireland and Scotland, for sure, and I don’t think it’ll be any different with England—without the USE being involved in it one way or another.”

Cromwell gave him that level, calm, considering gaze that he did so well and was all the more intimidating that there was no overt menace in it. But Darryl had gotten used to it by now.

“And what is your point?” Cromwell asked.

Gayle chimed in. “One way or the other, is what he said, my dear husband. So the point is that you should also start thinking about
which
way
you’d like the USE to get involved instead of just repeating again and again that you’ll take no foreign gold and be no foreign hireling. Which I don’t remember anybody asking you to do or be.”

“What she said,” was the only thing Darryl could think to add.

* * *

That evening, in the room he and Vicky shared, Darryl found himself looking out the window. Such as it was—small, multi-paned, the glass of inferior quality—but it hardly mattered since there was nothing to see out there anyway. Carlisle’s latitude was as far north as Canada and didn’t get much more than eight hours of daylight in January. The sun had gone down long since.

Through a glass, darkly.
But that wasn’t really true any longer, he realized. For the first time, Darryl McCarthy’s life was something he possessed, not just something he was passing through while having as much fun as he could manage.

He had a wife, whom he loved. Yeah, she was great-looking but that wasn’t something he thought much about anymore. And he had a goal and a purpose. Oliver Cromwell had become his best friend, something he could admit to himself if not yet say it to anyone else. He was good as friend as Harry Lefferts had ever been; better in some ways, if not in others.

Darryl wondered how Harry was doing, these days. No way to know, of course.

But Cromwell was more than just a friend. Somehow, in some fashion he didn’t really understand clearly, as time passed Darryl had stopped being Oliver Cromwell’s watchdog and become his partner. He wasn’t worried any longer what Cromwell might or might not do in Ireland, because that wasn’t the issue any longer. What were
they
going to do in Ireland—and England, and Scotland? Because he’d have an influence on all those things; which might even, in the passing of time, become a very great influence.

His life
mattered.
He would make it matter.

“God help me,” he said. “I’m growing up.”

“I always knew you would,” said Vicky, looking up from the book she was reading by candlelight. She half-sitting, half-lying in bed, propped up against the headboard. “Or I wouldn’t have married you in the first place.”

He left the window and went to sit beside her. “What’s the book?” he asked.

“I got it from Miz Mailey before she left the Tower.”

Unusually, it was an up-time edition, not a down-time replica. Up-time editions were getting very pricey. It must have been one of Ms. Mailey’s own books that she’d brought with her to England.

Vicky held it up so Darryl could read the title on the spine.

The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714,
by some guy named Christopher Hill.

There was a time when Darryl would have wondered why the Schoolmarm From Hell would have given one of her precious books to a twenty-one year old English girl betrothed to one Darryl McCarthy, a once-respectable West Virginia hillbilly.

But no longer. He knew the answer.

“God help us all,” Darryl said.

The Mason residence

Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia

January 20, 1635

“Relax, Arnold,” said Mike McCarthy, Jr. “We’re just here to wish the kid happy birthday.”

Arnold Mason’s concentration was mostly on Mike McCarthy Senior, however. Who, for his part, smiled and held up the gift-wrapped package in his hands.

“It’s not a bomb, Arnold. You can inspect it if you want.”

Mason made a little snorting sound. “I never thought you were
that
nuts, Mike.” The gate to the front yard was already open, so Mason just made a little sweeping gesture. “Come on in.”

* * *

Central Germany in mid-January had been cold even in the universe Grantville had come from, with average temperatures hovering around the freezing point—just about where they’d been for Grantville itself. In the seventeenth century, right in the middle of the Little Ice Age, the average temperatures were well below freezing.

It was an unusually warm day, this particular twentieth of January, but still not warm enough that anyone wanted to spend much time outside. So the birthday party was being held indoors.

The noise level was impressive. Six-year-old children are not much given to sedate and quiet conversations at any time, much less at an officially sanctioned party. And the Mason house seemed to be full of them.

Mike McCarthy Senior was a little surprised. The Cromwell children hadn’t been in Grantville for more than a couple of months or so. He wouldn’t have thought they’d have made this many friends so quickly.

Something of his surprise showed in his face. His son smiled crookedly. “You haven’t had school-age kids in a long time, Dad. Grantville’s changed a lot, that way. Used to be a town of old farts, now it’s full of kids—and the schoolteachers make a point of encouraging the kids to socialize.”

A woman’s voice spoke behind them. “It’s a deliberate policy, which we instituted right after the Ring of Fire once we saw how many immigrants we were getting.”

The McCarthys turned and saw Vickie Mason, holding a big birthday cake in her hands. They hadn’t noticed her coming up.

“That’s right,” said Mike Junior. “You work in the school system, don’t you?”

“I’m the secretary to the superintendent of schools.” She peered at the package in Mike Senior’s hand. “Is that for the birthday boy?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Do I need to have trained dogs sniff at it? If it’s food, will I need to have it tasted first?”

McCarthy scowled at her. “Damn it, Vickie—”

“Don’t you ‘dammit’ me, Mike McCarthy. I’ve seen you at the Thuringen Gardens—and at least two bars back up-time—on St. Patrick’s Day. Hell, any day you have too much to drink. I’ll give you this much, you’ve got a pretty decent singing voice. Even if that Irish brogue you put on when you sing
A Nation Once Again
is thick enough to cut with a knife.”