Cromwell himself was so overcome by the relief of tension he laughed uncontrollably as if he was drunk. He had saved a disaster. It was his most perfect victory, a masterpiece of tactics, both in planning and execution. By seven o'clock in the morning it was all over. The English had lost only an estimated forty men, the Scots three thousand dead, with ten thousand more rounded up and taken prisoner. The New Model could not cope with such numbers. The wounded would be released, but half of the prisoners were taken to Durham in a terrible eight-day march, then held in revolting conditions. Between three and four thousand died of hunger and mistreatment, the rest being transported as slaves to New England.
As the English cavalry pursued fugitives, they paused to sing the 117th psalm: not a long delay, for it has only two verses. English booty included Leslie's entire baggage train, all of the Scottish artillery, armour and colours. Retreating to Stirling, Leslie had lost over half his army and although the war was not yet won, Cromwell would control Edinburgh and Leith. Edinburgh city surrendered at once and was occupied by Lambert; its strong castle followed by the end of the year.
When news of this victory reached London, the Rump Parliament ordered that a Dunbar medal should be struck for both officers and men. It was the first military medal celebrating a battle ever issued to British armed forces.
Captain Gideon Jukes fought in the savage melee at the centre. Hopping on his pony after he returned from reconnaissance, he joined himself to Okey's dragoons for old times' sake. They piled into the Scots' infantry from the shoreward end. At some point, he felt as if he had been punched hard; a bullet had gone into his body from the front, on the left side, though somehow bypassing his heart. Strangely exhilarated, he kept going. He took a sword thrust in his right thigh. He began losing blood from that. Unable to keep on his horse any longer, he reined in and slid off, landing on his right side so his pelvis moved, his ribs crunched and his shoulder came out of its socket, the same one he had dislocated four years before in the West Country.
In disappointment and surprise, Gideon tried to curl up for protection as the battle raged over and around him. He had no way to avoid being fatally trampled; he felt worse fear than ever in his life. He could do nothing for himself. Only when his loyal pony came and stood over him with its head down sadly, was he sheltered. He had not yet lost consciousness. In a dreamlike state, he experienced waves of blackness and devastating pain. He thought he saw visions. He wished it could be over.
Then he was kicked in the head — by man or horse he never knew — which solved that problem. The noise of guns and men shouting faded to a remote blur. The buffets his body was taking seemed no worse than being shaken by a companion in the night, who had heard a cat make suspicious noises on the roof. Believing himself in his own bed, Gideon Jukes smiled briefly before he sank back dangerously into sleep and knew nothing for a long time.
Chapter Sixty-Six — Moorfields: 1650
Priss Fotheringham's scheme, as conceived in Newgate Prison, was that Alice Smith would be given a new virginity by the tame quack 'doctor', Hercules Pawlett. Daintily renamed as 'Mistress Pernelle', she would then join the Dutch 'girls' — some of whom were stretching that youthful definition beyond incredulity. To be foreign was to be exotic. One fraudulently passed herself off as Dutch even though she came from Clerkenwell. They worked at an old trade, in what was about to become London's most legendary brothel.
Mistress Pernelle had other ideas for herself. All along, the waif had understood more of what Priss was planning than she showed. In her life on the streets she had seen enough bawds to recognise exactly what Priss Fotheringham was, and to be wary. Although she herself had had connections with men from time to time, swindling was forced on her by desperation, either financially or because of an all-too-human need for comfort. A regular life of fornication was not for her. She feared the consequences. She had seen whores sink, in only a few months, through prettiness to coarseness then further into the vile ravages of syphilis, which rotted off their faces. She had known many who died, some of them going mad on the streets first.
The former Alice Smith did recognise the false promise of this life. A girl with a sweet visage, who managed to keep herself clean and nice just long enough to secure a rich patron, could live off her trade — in her own apartment with a lute and a French clock, if she was extremely well thought of — at least until the patron spent all his income on sack and gambling, or got himself married and retired to estates in the country, or simply found a newer mistress with a gayer laugh, a tighter commodity and perter breasts. Or until he died. Few of these women achieved a tolerable old age. There were, and there would be, mistresses of kings, long-term ones too, who died in abject poverty.
There was a different route to prosperity. A smart businesswoman, who kept out of debt to bawds and pimps, might begin as a whore but one day establish her own brothel, sit all day in a parlour beneath racks of delft plates, wearing a good gown, and retire from lying down with men herself. An organised bawd like this might make her fortune through her girls, at least until some man spent it for her. Some, and Priss Fotheringham was one, really enjoyed such entrepreneurship, which brought money and fame — though generally not enough money and sometimes the wrong kind of fame. It also carried a constant risk of fines and imprisonment.
In 1650, the Six Windmills was becoming known and had embarked on what would be a long period of secure notoriety. The place hummed with excitement. Priss was creaking with the pox, which could never quite be cured even by mercury, but in those days she remained full of energy and managed her girls in a grubby style that the shameless men who trekked out to Moorfields deemed to be a fine welcome. When they called her 'Mother' Fotheringham, it sounded as if she were some homely body who might offer tureens of nourishing soup and prayers before bedtime — although once her establishment became known as the Half-Crown Chuck Office, all suggestion of gentility was dropped. Anyone who knew that name knew into what moist and mysterious cavities the money was thrown.
Only men with a healthy disposable income, perhaps acquired illegally, could afford to throw away half a crown. Half-crowns — two shillings and sixpence — came in all shapes and sizes since the war started. Two-and-six would buy you a bedstead, a stack of bees, a hammer, a yard of kersey or a barrel of oysters, pretty well fresh. Half a crown was the going rate to place a high-class advertisement in a news sheet, or to buy a reading from the astrologer William Lilly.
At the Six Windmills, half a crown was what had to be tossed between the spread legs of Priss Fotheringham when she stood on her head with her feet wide apart, showing her bare belly and breech. The whooping culleyrumpers then chucked their coins into her vagina until the cavity was filled. It was reckoned there was space for sixteen standard half-crowns, which would pay a whole year's wages for a live-in household maid. French dollars or Spanish pistolles were an acceptable alternative if the customers were foreign. The sought-for coins were the various 'official' issues of the Tower Mint in London that was controlled by Parliament or from the now-defunct Royalist Mints of Shrewsbury and Oxford. Through having to assess more dubious offerings, Priss had become curiously expert in the irregular coins issued by besieged garrisons during the civil war — the triangles and rectangles showing castles and fortified gateways that had come into general circulation after being cut from donated tankards, trenchers, salts, bowls and apostle spoons in Beeston, near Chester, Scarborough and Colchester, the diamonds with jewelled crowns from the great Royalist cavalry station at Newark, the octagons from Pontefract. Since Cromwell's return from Ireland, she was familiar with coinage from Kilkenny, Inchquin, Cork; the Youghal copper farthing; the blacksmith's half-crown that was crudely executed yet bore an ambitious equestrian portrait of the King; the round coins issued by the Marquis of Ormond, with crowns, harps and beaded rims. Priss accepted them all if the metal in them was good, though for reasons of personal comfort, she preferred that diamonds and other parallelograms with sharp corners were not thrown at her privities in the Half-Crown Chuck.