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  a short story by John Ivor

  Brilliant swordsman and heroic in stature, young Jeremy has only one weakness as he faces his greatest challenge. He is a coward.

  © Darling Newspaper Press

  All rights reserved.

  The law doth punish man or woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common,

  But lets the greater felon loose

  That steals the common from the goose.

  (ANON, 1764)

 

  THERE was a time, a desperate time, when I cursed the gentle mists of my native Oxfordshire and regretted its picturesque vales and folds. Among the fruitful brown and green a deceptive dip will conceal the approach of riders. In truth, though, I would never have noted the danger, because my whole concentration lay in hacking at old Tom Bidwell with my sword.

  He stepped back laughing, grey beard flecked with sweat and his weepy eyes aglow with pride. “Feint and thrust, Jeremy, you got it sweet. Yes! Left, left, left, make me go left, young sprat. If ye can, if ye can!”

  Giving no quarter I lunged and slashed. My skill with foil, sabre and cutlas caused me to believe I had truly reached manhood. At 21 in the heart of England that spring day of 1834, not far from Banbury Cross, my acquired talent helped ease the uncertainty of youth but did little to bolster real courage.

  “Tom,” I confessed when he called a rest. “If ever it came to a real fight . . . I mean, well I just couldn’t. I mean, really stick somebody. Even in war.”

  He growled softly, squinting along the edge of his cavalry blade to make sure no nicks had appeared during our strenuous bout. “Your Da use t’say same, but blood and gore come natural to farmboys.”

  Light as a wand in his broad fist, the sabre rattled into its faded leather scabbard. I likened the scabbard’s colour to his weather-brown face where gulleys and crags stretched like battlefields past, and where the hideous crater of his left cheek sprouted stubble like a snow-laden dale.

  My father’s war-friend now carried the fat of peaceful years as he danced near the pig-sty, incongruously dainty in his farm boots and his fencing doublet that were spattered with mud and manure.

  Again the bold laugh and the bared fangs. “Ye’re good, me sprat. Well ready for the Frenchies.”

  But secretly I knew I was a coward and my secret had long vexed me even as my sword arm grew stronger and swifter. “Never ask me to slice somebody’s head.”

  “Seen um younger than thee, lad. Cut man in two, 'tis in the stroke. War teaches best at your age.”

  “Peace teaches too,” I told him. “It makes good farmers.”

  “It don’t make hate. You got all else, but you’s needing the hate.”

  “To run a farm?”

  The old soldier spat against a post, drew his sabre in a flash and stabbed his own spittle. “I’se learnt thee everything, Jeremy, but hate can’t be taught.”

  “I’ve no wish to acquire it.”

  “The one thing ye’re lacking. We’ve run your Da’s farm together and I’ve watched you learn and I’ve seen you flow easy to swordplay. Ye’re tall, son. Ye’re sturdy, well-limbed, and willing, aye. But a winner needs hate. Put cold hate behind thy cold steel and I’d wager no man against you.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  “Except me!” he roared. “Defend thyself, Master Hanwell. Hate, hate, hate!”

  As Tom pranced at me, I hopped smartly and flicked the instinctive parry he had drilled in me. The rasp and clank of our blades echoed from the ivy-swathed walls of the farmhouse and across those moist meadows from whence unknown destiny was hastening for both of us.

  THE five horsemen were trampling through our wheat before I saw them and alerted Tom. “It’s Uncle Naaman and his brood. Here to make trouble.”

  He sheathed his sword. “Squire Naaman’s not a rowdy man. Too much cowardice that one.”

  I wondered if Tom ever suspected my own, but this was not a time for reflection, because my uncle and his three bully sons were in the yard acting like they owned it.

  “I wonders who be scarecrow?” murmured Tom, for beyond my loutish cousins the fifth horseman was a stranger in black townie clothes: tophat and tails and his polished shoes clumsy in stirrups. He sat his mount uneasily, scrawny elbows and knees sticking out, and a grimace stretching pallid skin over long cheekbones.

  The five formed a half circle about us. “Good day, nephew,” said Naaman, ignoring Tom.

  My uncle always acted the king, but his only crown was a bald scalp splotched by large, white birth-marks, like a leper. Hairless and hatless, he sat straight-backed in a war saddle, with high arches for shielding the stomach and kidneys, although this horseman had never ridden to battle. He wore an old-fashioned neck stock and a purple riding jacket with tails. I had never seen him smile.

  His three sons, my cousins, snickered and nudged one another, while the black-garbed scarecrow behind them bent to fumble in a saddlebag.

  From his jacket, Uncle Naaman produced a small buff envelope which he offered down to me. “The London coach brought it up to Banbury. I claimed it along with my own mail.”

  Aware of my cousins smirking, I studied the black-inked official marks and, in my mother’s hand, my own name.

  “Thank you, Uncle.”

  “I shall wait while you open it.”

  We both knew my father did the writing in his clear copper-plate, that my mother had never before addressed an envelope from distant Swan River in Australia’s western wilderness.

  Sometimes she might add a few lines in her clumsy, ill-formed hand, but it was my father, Gideon, who always wrote the main news from the end of the world. The colony of Swan River was Britain’s first free settlement in the Great Southland.

  “It’s the new America,” my father had declared one day, pointing at the shiny map he brought back from London and nailed to a kitchen post. “And we’re going. But you, Jeremy, shall stay and help Tom until we send for you. By then we’ll have a much better farm waiting in Australia. The land’s so cheap at Swan River, a good farmer will make his fortune in a year.”

  I knew it could never be that fast making profit from a farm, but Tom had shared Da’s euphoria. “A survivor, your dad. He’ll do it, then we two sell up an’ follow.”

  Uncle grunted. “Bads news?”

  This brought amused snorts from my cousins, half heard through my stunned haze of anguish. I managed a croak. “Dead. He’s dead.”

  Thrusting the letter at Tom, I slumped to a hay bale, legs suddenly useless, mind in turmoil, refusing to accept. But there was no denying my mother’s chill message: “Be brav Jer. Da kilt by natifs. Get here quik.”

  I felt Tom squeeze my shoulder in silent sympathy, and watched Uncle’s open palm reach down. “Give it here.” He snatched the letter from Tom and glared at the inkstrokes. Would he notice, as I had, how smudged they were, as if the blotting-sand had absorbed a tear or two?

  “She wants you there quickly, Jeremiah. She needs you.” That was all he said, and the blunt words held no pity.

  The sons of Naaman exchanged knowing winks and chuckles while he beckoned to the sticklike townie.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “My solicitor from Banbury. He has some papers.”

  On cue, the stringy lawyer held up some stiff documents, heeled his hack two steps forward and handed them down to me, not saying a word. To Naaman he grunted, “There you are, sir. That’s official now.”

  My cousin Fletch, the oldest, sneered at me the way he had since I was four. Cedric and Fat Hector were smirking to each other.

  “What are these for?” Still in shock, I fumbled with the ribbon that held the papers, then remembered my manners. “Won’t you come indoors, Uncle?”

  I stood to
lead the way but Uncle barked: “I have delivered formal notice and my solicitor has witnessed it. That’s all we came for, Jeremiah. Your father mortgaged this farm to me in order to raise funds for his Swan River folly. Now I am taking it.”

  I gaped. “Da never meant you to have it.”

  “Everything is legal, I saw to that. Now I need vacant possession, without delay.”

  “But I can’t just walk off. We’ve got crops near harvest, and the livestock . . .”

  “Two weeks.” The voice of doom. “You’ll have that long to sort things out, but I need these fields for flax. Big contract. This farm will grow sails for the Royal Navy.”

  “Hold on.” Tom’s protest was slow, flat and solid. “It be just two months to harvest.”

  Naaman snarled as to a dog. “Can’t be helped.”

  “Pure daft, squire. To plough 'im under, just for flax like.”

  Naaman paid him no heed. “Jeremiah, you should have taken my advice and leased these fields to me a year ago.” And there it was, Uncle’s very first grin. It fascinated. Here was jubilation, the beard fissuring to reveal his ragged teeth. “Always a gamble is farming.”

  “True,