Simon

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Prince Maurice had occupied Barnstaple, and the Militia and train-bands in the town had been disbanded. Simon’s father had come home in a cold rage against Colonel James Chudleigh. There had been a wonderful pie of mazard cherries for supper, Simon remembered—his mother was famous for her mazard pies—and the door had opened and they had looked up, and there he was standing in the doorway. He had come in and taken his place at table, but he hadn’t been able to eat the mazard pie. They hadn’t dared speak to him about what had happened; they hadn’t dared try to comfort him, and the next morning he had ridden off to join Essex’s army in the Home Counties. They had not seen him since, though they had word from time to time. Barnstaple was back in Parliamentary hands this last month and more, but that was not likely to bring him home, for he was serving in the north, now, with Lord Leven’s army, to which he had somehow become joined after Marston Moor.

  And Simon himself? He had obeyed his father’s order and continued his schooling as best he could. So had Amias. But they had not ridden the Tiverton road together, nor shared the same school bench, nor spoken when they passed. Then last April Prince Maurice had wanted men, all the men he could raise, for an attack on Lyme. The news had reached Tiverton on a market day; and Amias had gone to answer the call. He had not run away in the night, that was not Amias’s way; he had simply walked out, during the midday break. He had turned in the gateway, his tawny eyes dancing, and waved to the crowded playground. ‘I’m through with inky schoolboys! I’m off to join the Prince.’ And he had disappeared into the market-day crowds before anyone realized what he was about. Save that he had sent to claim Balin from his father (Simon knew that from Tomasine, who was still his friend if they chanced to meet), he had not been heard of again.

  Abruptly, Simon turned and went into the smithy, where the smith, with Scarlet’s hoof between his leather-aproned knees, was putting the finishing touches to the new shoe. He glanced up as Simon entered, then returned to his task, while Scarlet slobbered at the back of his neck. ‘There, me beauty,’ he said, a few moments later, parting his knees so that the round hoof came down with a ringing crash on to the cobbles. “Proper fine horse, young maister. And ye’d never think a’was newly broken. Stands so still as a Christian, to be shod! That’ll be sixpence, but if so be as you bain’t got it on you, any time you’re passing will do.’

  ‘I’ve got it somewhere.’ Simon felt inside the breast of his jerkin, while Scarlet advanced a hopeful nose, with soft lips nuzzling. ‘No, you zany, it’s not sugar.’

  ‘Will Mr Carey be coming back, now Barnstaple be held for Parliament again?’ asked the smith.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. He seems to be with Lord Leven’s troops for good and all.’ Simon produced the sixpence, and paid it over into the grimy palm outheld to receive it.

  ‘My niece be wed to a Barnstaple man serving under Colonel Lutterel as led the revolt and turned the Cavaliers out. Proper fine show ’twas, so they do tell me.’

  ‘Proper!’ agreed Simon.

  ‘Don’t seem like the war’s going to be over yet awhile, for all that.’

  ‘If ’tisn’t over by the New Year, I’m off to join the Army,’ Simon said, and turned to free Scarlet from the ring in the wall to which he had been secured. His hand was already on the headstall, when above the murmur of the forge fire there rose a distant uproar, a confused splurge of shouting and the drumming of horses’ hooves, followed by a sharp crack like a breaking twig. Dropping his hand from the headstall, Simon strode back to the doorway. A soft scurry of rain blew in his face as he rounded the corner of the smithy wall, making him blink, and when his sight cleared, the first of a knot of horsemen had appeared over the hill-crest to his left, and were riding hell for leather towards the village, with the unmistakable look of men pursued. The peace of the scene was shattered as by a blow, children rushed squealing for their own doors, the rootling pig departed at a canter. Somewhere behind the riders sounded again that sharp crack like a breaking twig. Then the first wave of buff-and-steel-clad horsemen had pulled out of the lane and were heading for the church, fanning out over the hummocky grass so that the horses on the nearer flank swept by within a few yards of where Simon stood.

  ‘My days! What be ’appening?’ shouted the smith, appearing round the corner of the smithy to join him.

  ‘Running fight, seemingly,’ Simon shouted back. The horses swept on, wild-eyed, with labouring blood-streaked flanks, their riders crouching low and tense in their saddles, in a smother of flying mud and streaming manes and drumming hooves. ‘Looks as if they’re going to make a stand in the churchyard.’

  Wave after wave of desperate horsemen were drumming up the lane and across the fields, and in the distance, topping the rise, Simon could see the forefront of the pursuit. As the last knot of fleeing riders swept past the smithy, the report of a horse-pistol cracked through the tumult, and one of them jerked in his saddle, swayed, and crashed down on to the churned grass, while his horse plunged on riderless.

  ‘’Ware there! He’ll be ridden down!’ Simon sprang forward into the path of the following horsemen. An upreared head with wild eyes and rolling mane blotted out the sky, and the thunder of hooves stunned and deafened him as he dragged the fallen man clear; and next instant the first wave of the pursuit torrented past.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ he shouted to the smith, and between them they lifted the fugitive and carrying him inside, laid him down in a clear space beside the anvil. Scarlet was snorting and trembling, but Simon had no time to console him just then.

  ‘Be ’un a Parlyment man?’ demanded the smith, in a doubtful bellow, above the noise of the hunt as it thundered by to hurl itself against the desperate defenders of the churchyard.

  Simon had dropped on one knee beside the man, and was unfastening the worn buff coat to expose the bullet-wound in the base of his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think so.’ It had not occurred to him to wonder whether the man was friend or foe, he had simply seen that he was in danger of being ridden down, and acted accordingly. Certainly the hair which curled wildly back from his forehead was long, and the square linen collar turned down over his buff coat was edged with point lace, but Simon had seen hair as long and lace as fine on a Parliamentary officer before now. Moreover, he thought that in the fleeting glimpse he had caught of the pursuing Standard, he had recognized the arms of Sir Francis Storrington, a Royalist of Royalists.

  It was a shallow wound, though bleeding freely, and the man, who to judge by the lump on his temple had been knocked out in his fall rather than by the bullet, was already beginning to stir. Simon dragged back the stained shirt and looked up at the smith. ‘The ball’s not still there, is it?’

  The smith bent forward to look, then shook his head. ‘’Tis no more’n a gash; best tie ’un up—if so be as you think ’un be a Parlyemnt man.’

  The fugitive’s eyes opened suddenly, with a dull bewilderment in them, and with a savage exclamation he tried to struggle up.

  Simon pressed him back. ‘Stay still, till I bind up your hurt; you’re bleeding like a stuck pig.’

  ‘What I asks is,’ said the smith doggedly, ‘be you a Parlyment man, or be you not?’

  The wounded man squinted at him for a moment, then, as the question sank in, said faintly but with extreme clearness, ‘You babbling splay-footed lunatic, of course I’m a Parliament man,’ and shut his eyes again. But an instant later, as his head began to clear, he made another attempt to rise. ‘What’s happened? I must go after the rest—I—’

  ‘You’ve been shot,’ Simon told him, tearing his own rather grimy kerchief into strips. ‘And you fell just outside here. You’ll be all right when I’ve tied you up.’

  The other gave a little groan of weary rememberance rather than pain, and rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. Simon saw now that he was young, not more than two or three and twenty, with a round, freckled face and snub nose. ‘For the Lord’s sake be quick! What’s happened to the rest of the Cavalry?�
��

  ‘They are making a stand round the church, out yonder. If you don’t stop squirming about, how can I tie up this gash?’

  ‘Oh, perdition to that! What’s happening out there?’ The young man had strained up on to one elbow and was staring round at the doorway.

  Simon glanced up at the smith, and jerked his head in the same direction. The smith ambled over to it, and disappeared, and a few moments later he was back, grinning. ‘Fine old to-do,’ he reported. ‘They’m shooting from the church tower now. Looks like they’m holding their own, what’s more.’

  The young man relaxed at his words and lay down once more, and Simon was able to get on with his task. As he strained the first strip tight, his patient flinched sharply, and then apologized. ‘Sorry. I’m about at the end of my tether. We all are. It’s a long way from Lostwithiel.’

  ‘Lostwithiel?’

  ‘Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know; but you will soon enough. We got drubbed at Lostwithiel.’

  The smith bent forward to peer at him. ‘What happened, then?’ he demanded. ‘Do ’ee tell us what happened, my dear soul.’

  ‘Goring and Grenville made a sudden drive across our rear and—trapped us,’ said the young man, muzzily. ‘Essex got away—I believe he got away—but the Infantry couldn’t, and poor old Daddy Skippon was left to hand over the whole lot.’ He gave a dreary laugh. ‘We only got out because My Lord Goring was drunk, so mazy drunk he couldn’t stop us.’

  Amid the tumult of battle outside, the sudden hush in the smithy was like a bubble of utter silence, broken only by Scarlet’s scared fidgeting. ‘Then—do you mean the war is over—we’re beat?’ Simon demanded.

  ‘No! Not by a long shot! The Royalists are bound to give our Foot a pass—a safe conduct back to Plymouth or Portsmouth when they’ve disarmed them. They can’t feed five thousand prisoners, and even that brute Grenville can’t hang so many—there wouldn’t be trees enough in Cornwall to go round. Daddy Skippon will bring his troops home somehow; and the whole of the Horse got away—leastwise, unless the rest have fared no better than we have. We ran into a blazing regiment of the King’s men up on the moor ’bout six miles from here, and we were too done to beat them off . . . Go and see what’s happening outside.’

  Simon knotted off the makeshift bandage and, getting up, crossed to the doorway and made his way round to the corner of the smithy, from which he could get a clear view of the church. He had been longer than he knew, tending the hurt of the man behind him, and the running fight had become a grim and desperate struggle for the churchyard. The King’s men seemed everywhere, pressing in from all sides against the churchyard wall, behind which the defenders, some afoot, some still on horseback, were battling stubbornly for the makeshift breastwork. Some of the horses had been tethered among the dark yew trees close in to the church, and stood quiet, too spent to resent the uproar all around them. From the bell-slits in the tower an occasional crack and a puff of blue smoke, whipped away by the September wind, told where a marksman was at work; but on both sides the shooting was dying down, mainly, Simon guessed, from lack of powder and ball; and it seemed that the fight was going to be finished hand-to-hand with the sword.

  All this he shouted back as well as he was able to the wounded man; and a short while later he caught his breath in a gasp of excitement, as, without any warning, the fight began to break up once more. He could not see what had happened, but suddenly the Royalists round the gate swayed back. They rallied, pressing fiercely in once more, and once more gave ground. A hoarse cheer went up from the churchyard, and the defenders hurled themselves against the weakened place in the attack. The grey light glinted on many leaping blades; and Simon found himself yelling, he didn’t know what—and beside him, someone else was yelling too. He glanced round and saw the young officer clinging to the rough stone wall, and rocking on his feet. ‘Done it! Done it, by the Lord Harry!’

  In other places now, all round the churchyard, the Royalists were being forced back; and the men of Essex’s Horse were swinging into the saddle once more. For a few wild minutes of charge and counter-charge, victory seemed to hang in the balance; then another yell burst from Simon’s companion. ‘They’re running! Praise be! They’re finished!’

  It was quite true. Hurled back by a grim, exultant wave from the churchyard, the King’s troops were falling back upon each other, streaming away in confusion; and after them poured the men of Essex’s army, cheering as they spurred their weary horses.

  The time that followed seemed to Simon a wild dream of men and mud and horses, and a score of separate skirmishes wheeling and whirling through the village and across the fields; and a turmoil that grew fainter and fainter in the distance, until it was gone. He found that his companion was wringing him violently by the hand, and then sitting down suddenly on a convenient baulk of timber, and sliding quietly from it to the ground in a dead faint.

  By the time Simon, with the smith’s help, had contrived to bring him round again, the whole thing was over and the Parliamentary troops beginning to gather once more round the church. Like gnats in the first sunshine after a storm, the villagers were appearing from their cottages, and the young officer staggered to his feet and demanded his steel cap, which still lay where it had fallen, against the smithy wall. Simon brought it, and he clapped it on with a flourish, and set out to rejoin his comrades, without more ado. ‘Though I do say I’m a bit weakly,’ he said cheerfully, zigzagging like a snipe in the general direction of the church.

  Simon grabbed him from the edge of a headlong fall, and put a steadying arm round him. ‘Well, you’ve had a good crack on the head,’ he said, ‘and you’ll get another if you go falling over your feet like that.’ Together they crossed the open ground, where men and horses lay crumpled on the hummocky turf or among the Good-bye Summer in little ruined gardens.

  ‘Up there, towards the door—that’s Colonel Ireton,’ directed the other, as they reached the church, and Simon obeyed.

  There were a good many wounded already in the churchyard, and others being brought in by their comrades, and nobody took any particular notice of them as they made their way up the rough path. A knot of officers were standing in the west door of the church, talking earnestly together, and Simon’s fugitive staggered clear of his arm and joined them. A ruddy hawk-nosed man swung round to him, exclaiming, ‘Colebourne! I imagined you were dead.’

  ‘No, sir. Reporting back for duty,’ grinned the other, doffing his steel cap in salute.

  Colonel Ireton nodded, and turned away to give some order to a grizzled corporal, while the young officer sat down thankfully on a tombstone, and called to a passing trooper, ‘Jenks, have you seen anything of my horse?’

  ‘Tethered round the north side of the church, sir,’ said Trooper Jenks; and then, his eye falling on Simon: ‘Hi, you! Come and give a hand here.’

  It was falling dusk by now, and with the food and clean rags which the Colonel had ordered to be brought from the cottages, some of the villagers were bringing up lanterns to light the tending of the wounded, who had mostly been gathered in the church. The lights came jiggiting up between the tombstones and the dark yew trees, turning the scarlet yew berries to strung jewels, making the soft rain shine as it fell, and filling the church, when they reached it, with a golden radiance that seemed more fitted to a festival than to the grim business in hand. Simon worked hard, that evening, among the wounded of both armies, while outside the church, and at the Sanctuary door and the windows, the troopers stood with drawn swords, in grim readiness for an attack. But no attack came. Evidently Sir Francis Storrington’s men had had enough for one night. The food had been issued and eaten, and most of the wounds tended, and presently, as Simon knelt in the porch, steadying someone’s forearm while somebody else got the bullet out, he realized that the hawk-nosed officer was standing by, in earnest talk with a younger man.

  ‘If we can reach Barnstaple, we can get rations and fresh horses, or at least bait these, Richard.’

&n
bsp; The other shrugged. ‘And get away over Exmoor afterwards. Yes, but how in the Lord’s name are we to get to Barnstaple?’

  Colonel Ireton swung round to the knot of villagers who yet hung about the church door. ‘Is there any man here able and willing to act as our guide to Barnstaple?’

  There was no answer, and after a few moments he spoke again. ‘It is needful that we should reach Barnstaple before down. Do any of you know the way, or know anyone who does?’

  A long silence, and then someone suggested, helpfully, ‘’Twould be easy enough, maister, but the road goes through Torrington, and Torrington be in the Cavaliers’ hands, do ’ee see?’

  ‘I know that, you fool!’ Colonel Ireton’s voice was biting. ‘It is precisely because Torrington is in enemy hands, that I need a guide for the cross-country journey.’

  Another silence. The village people seldom travelled more than a few miles from their own homes; Torrington was their market town, and Barnstaple quite beyond their ken. Then Simon, having finished his task, rose slowly. He knew the Barnstaple road, since he had travelled it several times when his father was in the garrison, and when the direct road from Heronscombe was closed by spring floods; and with Amias in the old days he had explored every mile of the country round Torrington. He said, ‘I’ll take you. We can fetch a half-circle round Torrington, and join the ridge road farther on.’

  Colonel Ireton looked him up and down in the lantern-light. ‘You are sure of the way? We cannot afford to be led into a bog.’

  ‘I know the way well, sir,’ Simon said. He saw that the soldier was searching his face to make sure that he was trust-worthy, and he returned the look, levelly. ‘I’ll not lead you into a bog—or a trap.’ By way of giving some proof of good faith, he added, ‘My father served in the Barnstaple garrison until the capitulation. He’s with Lord Leven and the Covenanters now.’