All day they travelled at that punishing pace. An old man and an old woman stopped at the side of the trail and said they would go no further. Attone left them with a bow and arrow to do what damage they could to the pursuers, and with a tiny sliver of sharpened bark to open their veins rather than be captured. None of them stopped to say goodbye. The safety of the People was greater than the farewells of individuals. Attone wanted to get the People away.

On the third day they reached a small hill deep inside the swamp and Attone gave the order that they could rest. There was nothing to eat except some dried flour which they mixed cold with the marshy water. Attone sent out scouts, empty-bellied, to go down the trail and see if they were followed. When they returned and said that the trails were safe he sent them out again. Only when the third party had come back on the fifth day did he say that the women could light fires and start to collect food and the men could go hunting.

‘What happens now?’ John asked one of the old women.

‘We live here,’ she said.

‘In the middle of a foul swamp?’

She gave him a look which told him as clearly as words that she despised his weakness. ‘In the middle of a foul swamp,’ she said.

Summer 1644, England

Alexander’s predictions seemed correct. Through the spring and early summer gossip, wild surmise and news filtered back to London, and finally to Lambeth, of small battles all around the country and then finally, in July, a dreadful battle at Marston Moor. Alexander wrote to Hester:

I cannot come out to see you, I am so busy with the demands of the ordnance. There has been a major battle in Yorkshire and it has gone the way of Parliament. I hear that Prince Rupert has met Cromwell himself, and it was Cromwell that triumphed. In haste … Alexander.

Hester waited for news for another few days and then one of her neighbours rapped on the door to say that she was going up to the House of Commons to see the king’s standards. ‘Forty-eight royal standards laid for all to see on the bar of the House,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Johnnie along with me. The boy should see it.’

Johnnie shook his head. ‘Is Prince Rupert’s standard taken?’ he asked.

‘You shall see it,’ the woman promised. ‘Stained with his own blood.’

Johnnie’s brown eyes grew bigger in his pale face. ‘I don’t want to see it,’ he said stubbornly, and then remembered his manners. ‘But thank you very much for inviting me, Mrs Goodall.’

She bridled for a moment. ‘I hope you’re not siding with the enemy?’ she said sharply. ‘The king has forced us to this battle and now he is defeated and good riddance to him.’