The innkeeper of the George Inn at Midsommer
Common was boundlessly attentative to the three men, Daniel,
Robert, and Oliver. They shared one of his quieter rooms on a slow
and misty November night. The clan always held back a cask of
Genever for the George, and charged him not much more than their
Dutch cost for it. In return for this and for other favours from
the Wellenhay clan, the innkeeper provided the occasional room and
board, and grazed a few of the clan's horses in his field with the
saddles safely stashed in his stable.
The George was a meeting place of the country gentry and nobility. A place where plans were made and deals were sealed over good sipping Genever. The three men did not enter the public rooms of the inn, but took their meals in their upper room at the rough table with the window view down the River Cam. This table was also a place were plans were being made over good sipping Genever.
Daniel had bid farewell to Cleff and the crew, who were now on their way home to their Fens island villages. He had not gone with them because he was determined to accompany and guard his friend Robert all the way to Bridgwater, Somerset, to make sure he arrived safely with the small fortune that he had brought from Schiedam. Just as Daniel had been the 'factor' in Rotterdam for his clan's trade there, so had Robert been the factor for his family's trade there.
In the morning Oliver would ask a ride on any boat heading back towards Ely. He would offer to pay passage, but the offer would be refused. No one would charge passage to the Abbey's titheman, the man who decided the tolls for ships to tie up beside Abbey land. Over the meal of lamb's leg, peppered turnips and apple pie, Oliver encouraged the two Pistoleers to tell him all about the politics of the United Dutch Republic, and about the Dutch trading companies, the armies and the navy.
It was as if Oliver was in grammar school again, though he was pushing forty. His mind was filled with a new thirst to learn. His reading in Cambridge had once quenched this thirst, or rather, drowned it. These two vital men, however, had answers to questions, important questions, real questions that before today he had never thought to ask, and every answer spawned a new question.
"So, it sounds like you would rather live in the Dutch Republics than in England, so why do you come back?" Oliver eventually asked the two of them. They both answered, "Family," almost at the same time. "So do you think England would be a better place to live if it copied the Dutch Republics?"
"Yes, of course,” Robert was quick to answer. "In Holland all the talented, trained, and educated men are admired and the fruit earned from their ideas goes to them. Here in England the profits of such men go to men who by sheer accident of birth, are considered their betters. It means that the wealth of Holland is shared more equally amongst the folk."
"Absolutely not,” Daniel interrupted his friend. "Not if it means seventy years of war against the kingdoms of the rest of Europe. If we could snap our fingers and be where Holland is now, then I would agree with Robert. Unfortunately, our own aristocrats will maim and rape and ravage and kill to keep their inherited and undeserved honors. They have brutally put down peasant rebellions in the past, and they know well how to do it. First, they create a famine to starve us into desperation, and then they will watch us fight amongst ourselves for the scraps from their tables."
"But if the working folk don't rise against them,” Oliver said, "things will never change. We will always be controlled by our parasitic ruling class." He regretted using the technical word 'parasitic', because although Robert was college educated, Daniel was not.
"And you think it is so different in Holland?" Robert replied. "They have simply traded the aristocrat parasites for the banker parasites. In England you must pay rent to work the land of an aristocrat, while in Holland you must pay rent on the coins from bankers that you used to buy the land to work. It is the same. Today you spoke long to old Cleff. He is the wisest man I know and yet he can barely read. Did you not listen? What is given by God is for the common wealth of all, and the fruits belong to those who do the work. Today that is hardly more true in the republic of Holland than it is in the kingdom of England."
Oliver felt an all too familiar dark cloud shadowing his thoughts, and he sighed. For one short afternoon the dark cloud he had lived under for a decade had receded from his mind, but now it was creeping back. In desperation he asked them, "So how can we English free ourselves of aristocrats like the Heaths, without simply replacing them with bankers?"
It was Robert who answered. "The bankers gained Holland because of the cost of the seventy years of war against the Papist aristocrats. The leaders of the rebellion borrowed heavily to keep the rebellion going. Do you think that working folk, even Dutch folk, can afford pistols like those?" he asked, pointing to his long holsters that hung on a cloak hook. "The bankers supplied the rebellion with weapons, but always for a price. Now they hold a huge claim against Holland's future."
"So England must rid herself of her aristocrats without borrowing to do it,” Oliver was desperately trying to hold back his own personal dark cloud.
Robert snorted sarcastically. "If there are armies involved, then for sure the bankers will gain control, for they will loan money to both sides. In Holland the aristocrats borrowed heavily to hire mercenaries to put down the rebellion. That forced the rebels to borrow heavily to gain modern weapons. That forced the aristocrats to borrow to... well, you see the vicious circle. Eventually the Duke of Burgundy was so deeply in debt that his duchy collapsed and was taken over by the King of Spain. When it comes to armies, the only consistent winners are the bankers, while the only consistent losers are the women and children. Always the women and children."
"If the Puritans weren't trying so hard to replace the Catholics as the new ruling class,” Daniel told them, "then they wouldn't need armies. May the goddess save me from bible-thumping-over-educated Puritans." After the curse he continued quickly in hopes that these God-fearing men had not noticed the word goddess. "In my village, and in all the damp island villages of the Fens, we learned this lesson back before memory.
All we have is our damp islands and our ships. When armies threaten us we do not raise an army to match them. Instead we flee on our ships. Eventually the invaders realize that our damp islands have nothing that they want and they leave. We have been known to hurry their departure by arranging fatal accidents for their leaders. You don't need to raise costly armies just to get rid of a few bad leaders."
"You Frisians are a special case,” Robert replied, "both here and in Friesland. You purposefully build your villages on easily defendable islands so that you can leave your women in safety while you go off on your ships for months at a time. Your land is communal to the clan. Your men would rather own a ship than a manor house. Your women are trained in weapons."
"Which is how we met this morning,” Oliver interrupted. "At first I did not recognize Teesa as my daughter's friend. All I saw was a Fens maiden about to skewer a man with a fishing spear. I fired my pistol to stop everyone in their tracks. I have heard many stories of dry-landers having fatal accidents in the Fens, and many of those stories begin with some dry-lander taking liberties with a Fens maiden.
Unfortunately, neither did I recognize Heath until I was on the bank. Just think, if I hadn't been there, then by now that bastard Heath would be dead. No, I do not dare wish that, for that would have required that Teesa be ravaged by him. For her sake I would have stopped him no matter what. Umm, just out of interest, if Heath had ravaged Teesa, how would he have died?"
"Badly,” Daniel said quickly and then gave the question some thought. "But perhaps not this week or even this month. The clansmen would have patiently waited until they could cause him an accidental death, with witnesses to swear it was an accident. Perhaps his horse would have been startled by something and bucked him into one of the bottomless bogs."
"Are you related to Teesa?"
Daniel smiled while thinking about how to explain the complex relationships within his village to a dry-lander Puritan? "The ship is owned communally by my clan. We have two such ships and my elder brother captains the other. Teesa is his daughter, or at least I think she is his. In my village you can never be sure. Sometimes the village men sail away for months at a time. Sometimes they don't come back.
A man of my age is often supporting a woman on each side of the North Sea. Tit-for-tat, those same women will have more than one man supporting them. The children all know their mother, but few will know who their blood father really is. That is why our children are raised by the entire village. So yes, I may be related to Teesa. By blood I suppose I am her uncle, or her cousin. I am too young to be her blood father."
"And yet you did not punish Heath after what he tried to do to Teesa? If Cleff hadn't stopped the crew they would have at least given the bastard a good beating."
"Oliver, you ask a great many questions and yet you don't seem to listen to the answers,” Daniel criticized. "Heath's tongue was bitten almost through by Teesa, and his writing hand will still be numb from my shooting the pistol from his grip. To beat Heath further would win that day's battle, but risk losing the war. You are just like Robert. He would kill artillery men in hopes of winning a single battle, whereas I would kill the leaders of the army in hopes of winning the war."
Oliver suddenly felt like something was missing, something was absent. Like when you strain your back while digging, and it aches for days, and then one day you wake up and something is missing It always takes a while before you realize that what is missing is the backache. Then it came to him. The dark cloud was missing from his mind. It was not just hovering to the side ready to cloud his mind again. It was missing.
There was a rap at the door and then an alewench from the Inn's tap-room came in to side the dishes from their meal. She was a handsome young lass, and her bodice would have been showing a lot of cleavage, if she had any. Oliver stared at her face as she was bending over the table giving it a wipe, partially so that he would not be tempted to look down her bodice, and partially because she had a striking resemblance to the girl Teesa from today's incident with Heath. Or was that just his imagination because Teesa had just been in his thoughts.
"Glad you're back, Dan,” the girl said and then gave the man a peck on the cheek. He in turn grabbed her around the waist and sat her in his lap and gave her a good hug. "No Dan, I'm not a little girl anymore. It's not proper to do that in front of others. You will give them the idea that I am an easy woman." She wriggled out of his grasp and off his knee, but stayed close to him. "So, if you are back from Holland and here for the winter, then has any woman spoken for you yet? Are you going to spend the winter warm in a house, or with the single men in the longhouse?"
"That depends on which other men stay the winter. I have to do some business in London before the highways become quagmires. Umm, Britta love, does Edward Heath come to the George much?"
"Not usually, but this summer he had men working on a drainage ditch near to here. Has this something to do with Teesa? Some of the crew were telling me...."
"That is not for tavern gossip, love. Keep it to yourself. And be careful around Heath and his men. You took this job as a way of finding a good husband, remember, and against your mother's wishes. If Heath or any of his men are in the house, then you hide and let the others serve them. I don't want you anywhere near them."
In a careless but oh-so-graceful move, she twirled away from him, picked up the loaded tray and glided towards the door. "Jealous are you?" she said and gave Daniel a saucy wink and was gone. The door closed behind the girl, and the room suddenly seemed a dull place without her smile.
"She looks like trouble in skirts,” Robert muttered. "I pity her mother and the trials she must endure. What is she, seventeen?"
"Thereabouts,” Daniel replied. "Our village teens are a constant trial to all of us. The more we try to protect them, the worse they rebel. At least the lads can crew on the ships. This Inn is a Godsend for the lasses. The wife here is from our village and she hires our girls once they reach the point where they will leave home anyway to go a-roving on their own. Between the innkeeper and his wife, they keep them working and safe enough until they learn some city skills. This city is filled with horny students, yet somehow the wife keeps our lasses safe from them."
"Especially tough since your lasses are so comely,” Oliver admitted. "All the women from the Fens clans are comely, and not just the girls, but also their mothers, and even their grandmothers. They would be considered beauties anywhere in England. What about in the Netherlands?"
"In the north of the Netherlands the women, the folk, everyone looks much like our clan, and no wonder, for they share the same Frisian blood. In the south and in Holland, not so much. The south has a mix of many different folk from all over Europe, all over the world." Daniel checked to make sure that the table was dry. It was. "Robert, now that the table is clear we should plan our route for tomorrow. Spread out your map."
While Robert and Daniel planned their route to Somerset, Oliver inspected their long pistols and compared them to his own weapon. The very pistol that his grandfather had kept beneath the bar in The George Inn in Huntingdon. The barrels and the stocks were not dissimilar but the locks and triggers were completely different.
His grandfather's pistol was a matchlock. The trigger arm held a match cord and when you pulled the trigger the cord would drop into the powder flash pan. If the match cord was still lit and the powder hadn't blown out of the pan, then the flash from the pan would travel down along the vent into the barrel and ignite the powder loaded in it.
When he'd broken up the fight for Teesa by firing this pistol from his punt, he had been delayed while he used his flint and steel to light the match cord. In truth, he had given up in frustration at lighting the cord because it must have been damp. Since his purpose was just a warning shot, instead he had braced the pistol against the gunnels of the punt with his foot, with the barrel pointed towards the sun, put some fresh powder in the pan, and then had used his flint and steel to set off the flash.
As a weapon for use out in the open, in the damp fens it was pretty well useless. The only reason he carried it in his belt was as a sign of his authority as the Abbey titheman. He dreamed of someday buying a better pistol but with six children, coin was always hard to save.
One of these Dutch pistols would do him nicely. They were Dog-locks. A pivoting lid covered the powder in the flash pan to keep it in place and dry until it was needed. There was no rope fuse to light because ignition was by the spark of a flint. There was a piece of shaped flint held by a clamp called a dog. The dog arm was cocked against a spring and then held in place by the trigger.
When you pulled the trigger, the spring swung the dog and flint down along a bolt of steel which dropped sparks into the flash pan. The pistol load would thus fire almost immediately after you pulled the trigger, and better still, you could keep it loaded and ready to fire. When you needed to fire it, all you had to remember was to pivot the pan cover out of the way and cock the dog.
He had seen the English equivalent of them before, but these Dutch ones were better thought out and had a simpler mechanism, especially the spring. The advantage was not just the built-in flint and steel to replace the match cord, but the cover for the flash pan to keep the powder in place, and the damp out of it. The lock was the clockmakers' gift to modern times.
Slowly he moved between all of the weapons and compared them. The two carbines and the four pistols all had the same Dog-lock fling ignition. They could unscrew and remove a lock from one and fit it to any of the others. This was typical of Dutch attention to detail. Interchangeable parts. The pistols were not just abnormally long due to the barrel. To better balance the weight of the longer barrel in your hand, the length of the handle had been exaggerated.
The barrel of the carbine was not quite twice as long as the barrels of the pistols. The longer barrel gave it an extended aimed range, as did the rifling. Those twisting grooves down the inside of the barrel set the ball to spinning, and a spinning ball was less likely to go off course due to an imperfection in the rounding of the lead. He put the carbine up to his shoulder and it felt snug and solid there, though the shoulder stock seemed long and the trigger far away. After aiming it by looking along the top of the barrel, he realized that the long stock was to keep your eyes and face as far away from the powder flash as possible.
Rifling tugged at his mind, so he put the carbine down and picked up Daniel's two pistols. One was rifled and straight bored, while the other was not rifled and the barrel flared slightly at the end. He turned to Daniel with a quizzical look on his face, but did not have to ask the question.
"They are different for a reason,” was Daniel's answer to the look. "We load our right hand gun with a single ball, a killing round, and use it to take down our primary target from a safe distance beyond the reach of swords, lances, and long pikes. If you use a good ball, then the slight rifling gives the ball a longer true flight. It takes the same balls as the carbine.
We call our left hand gun our dragons, because they breathe fire. One of Rob's tactics. We load it with bird shot, or sand, or lye or anything else that will sting the eyes. We use it for covering shots, you know, so we can get away. We've filed a flare into each side of the muzzle to make the shot spread wider and blind a group rather than just one man. Doesn't matter if they are pikemen or swordsmen or musketeers, they are not so dangerous when they have both hands over their eyes." At Oliver's nod of understanding, Daniel turned back to the map spread out on the table.
Oliver lifted a stool and stacked it onto another, so that it was high enough to drape the long saddle holster down over both sides. Once both sides were hanging free from the stool, the stitching caused the sides to twist outwards. When hung in front of a saddle, the twist would allow a rider's leg to snug in behind the leather. Legs were therefore shielded from being hit by branches, or by weapons.
Each of the weapons had a loop of cord attached to the handle, and when you holstered the weapons, those loops hung down in a circle around the mouth of the holster. Thus when you grabbed the handle of your weapon, your hand went through the loose loop. When you lifted the weapon free of the holster, the cord fell down to circle your wrist. The loop of chord was a safe guard so that if you lost your grip on the handle, your weapon did not fall to the ground.
He was in wonder at the well-thought out simplicity of these weapons and the way they were carried, but it also made him shudder. Well-thought-out out simplicity designed for more efficient killing. Were these pistols a marvel of science, or the invention of the devil? He pulled at the axe, but did not unsheathe it. It was a tool more than a weapon and only noteworthy because the bottom of the blade curled to form a hook.
He fingered a line of small lacquered pipes that were held in leather loops along the top of the leathers, the part that would lie in front of the saddle.. "What are these?" he asked as he pulled one out and carefully twisted the lid that kept the pipe closed tight.
"They are pre-measured powder and shot. The ones with the black lids are for the dragon,” Robert replied. "To a mounted Pistoleer there is a constant danger of having your own gun blow up in your face because you overloaded it with powder. On horseback and in a hurry you can never get the amount of powder right, so instead we pre-select the shot and then pre-measure the powder into one of those pipes. By opening it and tapping the open end hard down onto the muzzle, the powder and then the shot fall down the barrel. Without those cylinders, loading a pistol while mounted would be clumsy and slow."
With all the weapons once again holstered, Oliver lifted the leathers off the stool and instead hung them around his neck. The same stitching that created the angle to shield the rider's legs, also allowed the sides to hang comfortably over each of his shoulders and down the sides of his chest. Because his neck was not the girth of a horse's back, the handles of the weapons did not sit up near his neck as he had first expected, but down nearer to his waist. When a Pistoleer was not mounted, hanging the holster over his own shoulders would protect a lot of his body from slashes while keeping the weapons close to hand. It was heavy though,-what with the weight of the leather and four weapons. Heavier than a saddle but not so cumbersome to carry.
By this time Daniel was putting on his boots and his cloak. Robert folded up the map and then stood to help Daniel on with his cloak. Seeing the two men shoulder to shoulder brought the difference in their heights to Oliver's notice. Daniel had said he was thirty, while Robert was Oliver's age, almost forty. Both were fit and sturdy men, but Daniel stood a full head higher.
"Are we going somewhere?" Oliver asked, wondering if he would be treated to some Cambridge-style mischief, the likes of which he hadn't known since he had attended college here. His question was left hanging in the room as Daniel grabbed his left-hand pistol, pushed it into his belt, and went through the door and was gone.
Robert turned to look at Oliver. "He has gone to offer our services as outriders to any coach traveling west. There is supposedly one leaving in the morning for Oxford via Bedford. That would serve us nicely and would serve the coachmen nicely, too. We have been warned that there are highwaymen in Bedfordshire."
Robert turned away and opened both sea chests. He removed a helmet and a set of breast and back plate armour from each chest and then repacked the rest of the contents into just one chest. Oliver picked up one of the breast plates. It was surprisingly light, and then he realized why. Instead of being made from cast iron, it was made from rolled steel.
"It is the cuirasses style chest armour that is standard issue to Dutch Pistoleers,” Robert told him, "and it costs four times as much as the iron equivalent. It's well worth the price, though."
"But musket balls pierce armour, especially armour as light weight as that."
"They can, but it would take a perfect shot. See how the steel is continuously curved as if to fit the body better? The true purpose of the curve is not for the fit, but to deflect a ball. The helmet is curved for the same reason."
Over the next hour the two men, one educated in Cambridge and the other in Oxford, spoke continuously about politics and Parliament, or rather the lack of Parliament as King Charles had not convened one in nine years. Oliver had once been sent to Parliament representing Huntingdon. For the last three hours and for the first time in a decade, he had been thinking of standing for Parliament again. Not from Huntingdon, of course, because the Heaths would veto that. This time perhaps from Cambridge. He would make inquiries tomorrow before returning to Ely. He was frustrated that Robert seemed to have little interest or knowledge of English politics, which was unusual for an Oxford educated gentleman, and he said so to him.
Roberts explanation of his lack of interest was brief, almost as if he were hiding something. "I read History at Oxford, not Law. I have spent most of the last dozen years away from England, not just in Holland which is close in distance and culture, but once as far as the Moroccos of the Berbers, which is far in distance and in culture. I suppose I should take more of an interest now that I am back in England. Are you a lawyer, Oliver?"
"I read Law at Cambridge but I was never called to the Bar although my father and my uncles were,” Oliver went silent for a moment. "Perhaps I should send a letter to Lincoln's Inn and ask them to start the paper work. What were you doing in Morocco?"
"Trade. Trade in saltpeter and sugar. I'd rather not talk about it."
Try as he would, Oliver could get nothing more out of Robert about Morocco, so he went back to asking about Holland, and the weapons used by the Dutch. "Daniel said that pistols replace crossbows, but not archers and bows. What replaces them?"
"Nothing yet,” Robert replied. "There is no weapon that is so easy to make, with such range, and with such a rapid rate of fire. In the time it takes me to reload my pistol, a good archer will have shot ten aimed arrows at me. Not only that, but arrows are silent, and you can arch them over walls, or use them to start fires in roofs. Arrows may be expensive, but they can be reused. Better still, the aristocracy refuse to serve as lowly archers in a battle, whereas every lad on every farm and in every market is eager to get his hands on a good bow."
"Yew bows, longbows?"
"Not so much anymore. It's not just that you need a strong man to draw one, but nowadays seasoned yew staves are in short supply. You can blame that on Queen Elizabeth and her father Henry. They stripped Europe of yew trees to arm every Englishman with a bow in case of a Spanish invasion. The Dutch bows look like toys when compared to the old longbows that you are speaking off."
"So, nothing yet to replace bows. That is interesting." Oliver thought, but it wasn't just interesting, it was vital. English peasant archers had slaughtered the French aristocracy on the battlefields of Agincourt. "So even big guns firing grape do not replace arrows?"
Robert shuddered. He had seen the results of using canon grape against infantry. That had been just last year when he had been riding as a skirmisher during the Siege of Breda. It was a sight he hoped to never ever see again. Even the professional soldiers in the battle had been deeply disturbed by the horrific carnage caused by the grape.
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THE PISTOLEER - HellBurner by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14