Rewards and Fairies

Simon’s angry face changed to a sheepish grin. He waggled his immense hands, but Puck stood off and laughed mercilessly.

‘But let me tell you, Mus’ Robin,’ he pleaded.

‘I’ve heard the tale. Tell the children here. Look, Dan! Look, Una!’ – Puck’s straight brown finger levelled like an arrow. ‘There’s the only man that ever tried to poison Sir Francis Drake!’

‘Oh, Mus’ Robin! Tidn’t fair. You’ve the ‘vantage of us all in your upbringin’s by hundreds o’ years. ‘Stands to nature you know all the tales against every one.’

He turned his soft eyes so helplessly on Una that she cried, ‘Stop ragging him, Puck! You know he didn’t really.’

‘I do. But why are you so sure, little maid?’

‘Because – because he doesn’t look like it,’ said Una stoutly.

‘I thank you,’ said Simon to Una. ‘I – I was always trustable like with children if you let me alone, you double handful o’ mischief!’ He pretended to heave up his axe on Puck; and then his shyness overtook him afresh.

‘Where did you know Sir Francis Drake?’ said Dan, not relishing being called a child.

‘At Rye Port, to be sure,’ said Simon, and seeing Dan’s bewilderment, repeated it.

‘Yes, but look here,’ said Dan. ‘Drake he was a Devon man. The song says so.’

‘“And ruled the Devon seas,"’ Una went on. ‘That’s what I was thinking – if you don’t mind.’

Simon Cheyneys seemed to mind very much indeed, for he swelled in silence while Puck laughed.

‘Hutt!’ he burst out at last, ‘I’ve heard that talk too. If you listen to them West Country folk, you’ll listen to a pack o’ lies. I believe Frankie was born somewhere out west among the Shires, but his father had to run for it when Frankie was a baby, because the neighbours was wishful to kill him, d’ye see? He run to Chatham, old Parson Drake did, an’ Frankie was brought up in a old hulks of a ship moored in the Medway river, same as it might ha’ been the Rother. Brought up at sea, you might say, before he could walk on land – nigh Chatham in Kent. And ain’t Kent back-door to Sussex? And don’t that make Frankie Sussex? O’ course it do. Devon man! Bah! Those West Country boats they’re always fishin’ in other folks’ water.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Dan. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No call to be sorry. You’ve been misled. I met Frankie at Rye Port when my Uncle, that was the shipbuilder there, pushed me off his wharf-edge on to Frankie’s ship. Frankie had put in from Chatham with his rudder splutted, and a man’s arm – Moon’s that ’ud be – broken at the tiller. "Take this boy aboard an’ drown him,” says my Uncle, “and I’ll mend your rudder-piece for love."’

‘What did your Uncle want you drowned for?’ said Una.

‘That was only his fashion of say-so, same as Mus’ Robin. I’d a foolishness in my head that ships could be builded out of iron. Yes – iron ships! I’d made me a liddle toy one of iron plates beat out thin – and she floated a wonder! But my Uncle, bein’ a burgess of Rye, and a shipbuilder, he ’prenticed me to Frankie in the fetchin’ trade, to cure this foolishness.’

‘What was the fetchin’ trade?’ Dan interrupted.

‘Fetchin’ poor Flemishers and Dutchmen out o’ the Low Countries into England. The King o’ Spain, d’ye see, he was burnin’ ’em in those parts, for to make ’em Papishers, so Frankie he fetched ’em away to our parts, and a risky trade it was. His master wouldn’t never touch it while he lived, but he left his ship to Frankie when he died, and Frankie turned her into this fetchin’ trade. Outrageous cruel hard work – on besom black nights bulting back and forth off they Dutch roads with shoals on all sides, and having to hark out for the frish-frish-frish-like of a Spanish galliwopses’ oars creepin’ up on ye. Frankie ’ud have the tiller and Moon he’d peer forth at the bows, our lantern under his skirts, till the boat we was lookin’ for ’ud blurt up out o’ the dark, and we’d lay hold and haul aboard whoever ’twas – man, woman, or babe, – an’ round we’d go again, the wind bewling like a kite in our riggin’s, and they’d drop into the hold and praise God for happy deliverance till they was all sick.

‘I had nigh a year at it, an’ we must have fetched off – oh, a hundred pore folk, I reckon. Outrageous bold, too, Frankie growed to be. Outrageous cunning he was. Once we was as near as nothing nipped by a tall ship off Tergo Sands in a snowstorm. She had the wind of us, and spooned straight before it, shooting all bow guns. Frankie fled inshore smack for the beach, till he was atop of the first breakers. Then he hove his anchor out, which nigh tore our bows off, but it twitched us round end-for-end into the wind, d’ye see, an’ we clawed off them sands like a drunk man rubbin’ along a tavern bench. When we could see, the Spanisher was laid flat along in the breakers with the snows whitening on his wet belly. He thought he could go where Frankie went.’

‘What happened to the crew?’ said Una.

‘We didn’t stop,’ Simon answered. ‘There was a very liddle new baby in our hold, and the mother, she wanted to get to some dry bed middlin’ quick. We runned into Dover, and said nothing.’

‘Was Sir Francis Drake very much pleased?’

‘Heart alive, maid, he’d no head to his name in those days. He was just a outrageous, valiant, crop-haired, tutt-mouthed boy roarin’ up an’ down the narrer seas, with his beard not yet quilled out. He made a laughing-stock of everything all day, and he’d hold our lives in the bight of his arm all the besom-black night among they Dutch sands; and we’d ha’ jumped overside to behove him any one time, all of us.’

‘Then why did you try to poison him?’ Una asked wickedly, and Simon hung his head like a shy child.

‘Oh, that was when he set me to make a pudden, for because our cook was hurted. I done my uttermost, but she all fetched adrift like in the bag, an’ the more I biled the bits of her, the less she favoured any fashion o’ pudden. Moon he chawed and chammed his piece, and Frankie chawed and chammed his’n, and – no words to it – he took me by the ear an’ walked me out over the bow-end, an’ him an’ Moon hove the pudden at me on the bowsprit gub by gub, something cruel hard!’ Simon rubbed his hairy cheek.

‘“Nex’ time you bring me anything,” says Frankie, “you bring me cannon-shot an’ I’ll know what I’m getting.” But as for poisoning – ‘ He stopped, the children laughed so.

‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Una. ‘Oh, Simon, we do like you!’

‘I was always likeable with children.’ His smile crinkled up through the hair round his eyes. ‘Simple Simon they used to call me through our yard gates.’

‘Did Sir Francis mock you?’ Dan asked.

‘Ah, no. He was gentle-born. Laugh he did – he was always laughing – but not so as to hurt a feather. An’ I loved ’en. I loved ’en before England knew ’en, or Queen Bess she broke his heart.’

‘But he hadn’t really done anything when you knew him, had he?’ Una insisted. ‘Armadas and those things, I mean.’

Simon pointed to the scars and scrapes left by Cattiwow’s great log. ‘You tell me that that good ship’s timber never done nothing against winds and weathers since her upspringing, and I’ll confess ye that young Frankie never done nothing neither. Nothing? He adventured and suffered and made shift on they Dutch sands as much in any one month as ever he had occasion for to do in a half-year on the high seas afterwards. An’ what was his tools? A coaster boat – a liddle box o’ walty plankin’ an’ some few fathom feeble rope held together an’ made able by him sole. He drawed our spirits up in our bodies same as a chimney-towel draws a fire. ‘Twas in him, and it comed out all times and shapes.’

‘I wonder did he ever ’magine what he was going to be? Tell himself stories about it?’ said Dan with a flush.

‘I expect so. We mostly do – even when we’re grown. But bein’ Frankie, he took good care to find out beforehand what his fortune might be. Had I rightly ought to tell ’em this piece?’ Simon turned to Puck, who nodded.

‘My mother, she was just a fair woman, but my Aunt, her sister, she had gifts by inheritance laid up in her,’ Simon began.

‘Oh, that’ll never do,’ cried Puck, for the children stared blankly. ‘Do you remember what Robin promised to the Widow Whitgift so long as her blood and get lasted?’[5 - See ‘Dymchurch Flit’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘Yes. There was always to be one of them that could see farther through a millstone than most,’ Dan answered promptly.

‘Well, Simon’s Aunt’s mother,’ said Puck slowly, ‘married the Widow’s blind son on the Marsh, and Simon’s Aunt was the one chosen to see farthest through millstones. Do you understand?’

‘That was what I was gettin’ at,’ said Simon, ‘but you’re so desperate quick. My Aunt she knew what was coming to people. My Uncle being a burgess of Rye, he counted all such things odious, and my Aunt she couldn’t be got to practise her gifts hardly at all, because it hurted her head for a week afterwards; but when Frankie heard she had ’em, he was all for nothing till she foretold on him – till she looked in his hand to tell his fortune, d’ye see? One time we was at Rye she come aboard with my other shirt and some apples, and he fair beazled the life out of her about it.

‘“Oh, you’ll be twice wed, and die childless,” she says, and pushes his hand away.

‘“That’s the woman’s part,” he says. “What’ll come to me – to me?” an’ he thrusts it back under her nose.

‘“Gold – gold, past belief or counting,” she says. “Let go ’o me, lad.”

‘“Sink the gold!” he says. “What’ll I do, mother?” He coaxed her like no woman could well withstand. I’ve seen him with ’em – even when they were sea-sick.

‘“If you will have it,” she says at last, “you shall have it. You’ll do a many things, and eating and drinking with a dead man beyond the world’s end will be the least of them. For you’ll open a road from the East unto the West, and back again, and you’ll bury your heart with your best friend by that road-side, and the road you open none shall shut so long as you’re let lie quiet in your grave."[6 - The old lady’s prophecy is in a fair way to come true, for when the Panama Canal is finished, one end of it will open into the very bay where Sir Francis Drake was buried. Then ships will be taken through the Canal, and the road round Cape Horn which Sir Francis opened will be abandoned.]

‘“And if I’m not?” he says.

‘“Why then,” she says, “Sim’s iron ships will be sailing on dry land. Now ha’ done with this foolishness. Where’s Sim’s shirt?”

‘He couldn’t fetch no more out of her, and when we come up from the cabin, he stood mazed like by the tiller, playing with a apple.

‘“My Sorrow!” says my Aunt; “d’ye see that? The great world lying in his hand, liddle and round like a apple.”