If only all armed conflict could be decided instead by scything a field of timothy grass. Then, she thought, every townsman could return to a whole roof and a waist full of game pie, their champions lying over the windrows of wild weeds and thistles on summer-mown earth, not in tormented death but in comfortable exhaustion. But men, being what they are, could never take the excise of battle without tearing apart the land, pulling the sky and its curtain of stars in afterwards.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything and then we’ll bury Thomas Morgan so that Thomas Carrier can live.”

CHAPTER 18

From Martha’s Diary: Begun Thursday, August 28th, 1673


These, then, are the words of Thomas Morgan Carrier, known as the Welshman, who places in my hands through faith and through trust the whole of his story; inscribed by my hand alone through his remembrances. Committed in secret from the eyes of men and the tongues of women and hidden from the knowledge of the teller himself, I will commence to make a true record of these happenings.


I were born in Carmarthenshire during the cruel winter of sixteen and twenty-six. My father while crossing a crook of the River Towy heard the Hag of Warning, Goorach uh Hribun, shriek out from down under the ice and snow, “My wife. Oh, my wife,” and by this he kenned that my mother, who labored even then to birth me, would die. Runted and puny, I had no name until I were past four months old and the ground could be dug up to bury my mother’s body. The earth where I first placed my feet to walk was savage hard and rocky with scarce enough topsoil to fill the hand. But Father was canny and carried inland from the shores of Llandach sea sand mixed with lime and dung. From this he grew barley and oats for his sons and daughters, and fodder for his cows. We bartered our sheep and milk cattle in the lowland fairs for corn and wool culled from the beasts of Tremain. And the Welsh cotton my sisters made of it could have floated a man in the Cardigan Bay, so tight was it woven. The old house, or hendre as it is even now called, was small but cunning-built. And a harp sat in the window, though none of us could play it but our mother, for it was said that a Welshman without a harp had no soul.

The winters through we huddled nightly over the smoking peat and daily whipped the cattle against a frozen sleep. But when spring came, my brother and I would run to the southern pastures and rest in the hafod, the summerhouse of loose rock and thatch. There we would stay until the frosts came again, chasing the wolves from the calves and chasing each other through the hills above Llangadok. I grew to a man swallowing the dust from my brother’s feet, for though I stood hands above him, I could never best him in a race. And so we lived our days until my brother died, his heart giving out at the end of a great race between Carmarthen and Kidwelly, a distance of ten miles and more. I was but fourteen, and into that graveyard furrow my keenness for life was also buried, dropping away like sunlight into a well.

I lived that winter through doing as my father willed until the March thaw, when he gave me a bundle of woolens to take to Swansea for tin. I walked two days and a night through fog and a tearing wind but didn’t so much as raise my collar against the rain, so low was I. There is a legend in Cymry, which is what the Welsh call their land, of a monster called the Afang which likes the taste of flesh better than cake. It lives in the bogs and lowlands, swallowing up man and cattle alike, and with the flesh, it devours the essence of its prey. So, too, it seemed to me, following down the River Truch to the sea, that to stay in my father’s house would be my soul’s end.

When the bale of woolens was boarded onto a merchant ship, I boarded with it, and paid for my passage with the woolens and with strokes of tar and sandstone upon the deck. The three-master was filled with coal and iron bound for Caernarvon and hugged the coast around St. David’s Head to New Port and Cardigan, banking the Irish Sea. I slept every night upon the deck because the beams below could not contain my height. But the biting cold up top was nothing compared to the stench of rotting wool over the pale and wormy seamen resting in the holds below. For a day and a night we spied an Irish galley with thirty oars and a square-rigged sail. It was a shallow-draughted pirating ship out of Dublin only seventy sea miles westward and would have overtaken us had a gale not sprung up.

We rounded Badesey Isle in a storm that howled like the dogs of Hell with waves that breached the topmost timbers. Men were blown from the decks and floated like corks in a monstrous vat of ale. On the third day the skies parted and I saw like a crouching giant the gray walls of the Castle Caernarvon.

I made my first night’s supper on the wharf, putting my back to unloading ships full of cargo: wheat and barley, woolens and hides, waiting to be shipped to England and beyond. There had never been the likes of this fortress, so I thought, with eight angled towers, thirty feet or higher, braced walls punched through with murder holes, gates, arrow loops, and spy corridors. To look upon it was to know the shame, and the pride, of being a Welshman—shame that an English fort sentineled our fairest port, pride that it had to be built so high and so stout to keep our great-grandsires from overrunning it again.

I made my bed in the shack of an old crippled seaman named Darius in a court off Newgate Street hard by the jail. For weeks I bent my back to loading off bales by the outer postern. I lifted those bales to my shoulders and walked like a mule up King’s Head Street to High Street, day upon day. Mornings as I walked to the wharf, I carried the old lame man on my back to the western wall of the castle. At the foot of Eagle Tower he would sit, there to beg the day through.

The soldiers posted in the tower would greet us by calling down, “Look, there is Darius with his Black Dog.” For idleness sake, they threw at us roots and stalks and once a bottle which cracked open my skull. Seeing the blood, Darius called up through his fist, “My Black Dog against any two of ye. A shillin’ a throw-down, ye damnable whores. Tonight on Market Green.”

By that evening I had lifted a quarter ton of iron and a hundredweight of wool from two ships and had walked six miles to a nearby town and back again. The king’s men had gathered between the market sheds and the smithy shop when I came walking onto the green, Darius on my back. I placed him on the ground and turned to face them. There were eight gray-coated soldiers, but seeing me up close, they quickly sent for a bigger man. The man they found was near as tall as me, with the bulk of unkind livelihood, but he was spindle-shanked and angled poorly for hand-to-hand. He spit into his hands and made a run for me, grinning, showing the whites of his eyes. There was some grunting and circling about and I would have put him gently to ground, but for the knee he put in my groin. I broke his arm before I brought him to his knees and pounded his skull with my fists. The rest of the men backed off a ways and soon moved, grumbling, on to their suppers. One man stayed, a hardened corporal, a Welshman named Jones, who paid Darius his wager and led us to Green Gate Street for a pie and ale.

Laughing, Jones watched us eat like the starving men we were, and he said in Welsh, “You’re a fierce dog, all right. Black Dog is a name the Englishers fear well. It’s the stalking spirit of Newgate Prison, a dungeon in London dug deep into the ground and full of horrors. No light, swarming with vermin and other creeping things, the condemned lying like swine on the ground, howling and roaring. And when the Black Dog comes on paws of madness and despair, sweet death is welcome.”

The corporal gave us more ale and recounted his memories of London. “It is the fairest of cities to those who have the mettle. It matters not whether you are Welsh, Cornish, or Scots. All are welcome. Even the damned Irish can find a motherly teat to feed their base and ugly natures. The city is like a great forge that takes in pig iron and puts out fine instruments of every kind, instruments of peace and war. It’s a fire-filled, loud, boastful place. Hammers beating in one yard. Pots clinking in another. And tumbling bodies of water turned by wheels, rushing through the heart of it. Church bells clamoring at all hours. Wagon wheels beating the coppered streets into an alchemist’s dream. Dogs and horses and men braying for dominance. The huzzas of soldiers out for a drink and a piss at all hours of the night.

“And the women, Great God in Heaven, man. The whores are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Not like these little kitchen morts here, girls who will lift their skirts for the smallest brass mirror. The doxies of London have great silken thighs and breasts to make a man cry for his ma. Even the Welsh milkmaids are game for a proper backwards toss. All a man needs is his infantry wage and voice enough to say, ‘After you, my dear.’ ”

Jones walked with us along Castle Ditch Street to our nightly hovel, Darius falling to sleep as I carried him, snoring wetly against my back. When we approached King’s Gate, Jones said, “Here I must leave you, Thomas. I have a mind to billet you into the fort so you can serve the king, and make me a handsome sum throwing to ground every last one of the Englisher bastards. But you are Welsh, as I am Welsh, and I would say to you as a friend—or as a father—might: walk, ride, or crawl from this place and get you to London. Live in this place and you’ll die a wharf rat like Darius here, or lose your nose from the French disease got off some dock whore. The king takes into his own bodyguards able men of great height and strength, which, by God, you are such a one. Make yourself known. I will give you a packet for a captain that I’ve served with in the trained bands. He is Welsh and will be glad for another countryman.”