Simon
Page 15
‘Another ten days or so, the surgeon says.’
Barnaby nodded. ‘Well, I daresay I shall survive—oh, and while I think of it, I’ve got that sorrel of yours safely; and a more ill-tempered fidgety brute than he’s been ever since we brought him back, I never met!’
‘He’s never been parted from me since he was broken,’ Simon explained. ‘And when he was a colt, and I was away at school, he was at home in his own paddock, among people he knew as well as me.’
‘I don’t see that he need behave like a fine lady with the vapours, even so,’ said Barnaby. ‘Anyhow, he’ll be doing pack duty up to Tiverton tomorrow; that ought to bring down his airs and graces a bit.’
‘Tiverton?’ Simon said quickly.
‘Yes, didn’t you know? Fiery Tom is moving his headquarters back there. The men are dying like flies in those blazing swamps round Ottery, and its more than time we pulled out.’
Simon felt as if he had been weeks away from the Regiment, instead of only four days. It was queer, he thought, how quickly things moved when you were not there to move with them. They talked on for a while, and then he made up his mind.
‘Barnaby,’ he said, ‘Barnaby, listen—’
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘Did you happen to notice a red-headed Royalist among the garrison that night—in the hall when you broke in?’
‘The one who looked as though we all smelt?’ inquired Barnaby.
‘Yes, that would be him. What—happened to him?’
‘He marched off with the rest of the garrison after their Commanding Officer surrendered. They had the usual pass into Exeter.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Course I’m sure. I saw him go, with his nose akimbo.’
Sheer relief flooded over Simon, and suddenly, joyously, he laughed. ‘Yes, he would! He’d go just like that.’
Barnaby was looking at him with rather puzzled eyes. ‘Friend of yours?—It wouldn’t be your fellow unicorn, would it?’
Simon mumbled something incoherently.
‘Yes, but look here! When we broke in, you were—’ Barnaby checked, and then asked in a rush: ‘What’s the food like in this place?’
‘Pretty good; the charitably minded housewives of the town bring us all sorts of extras in covered baskets,’ Simon said quickly.
Presently Lieutenant Colebourne scrambled to his feet. ‘I must be marching. Get your head well soon, there’s a good lad.’
‘I will,’ Simon promised, and watched him swaggering away down the barn and out into the fading light of the winter afternoon. He felt light and clean with relief; later, the memory of that night at Okeham Paine would begin to hurt unbearably again, but for the moment, it was enough that Amias was all right, after all. Suddenly he was very hungry, and the greasy smell beginning to waft from the camp kitchen seemed to him glorious.
Upwards of a fortnight later Simon had news of another friend. It was the last night of his stay in hospital, and he was very thankful to be going back to his troop in the morning. Life had not been exactly dull, with the constant coming and going of army chaplains and surgeons, and the charitably minded of the town with covered baskets; the food had been rather more interesting than the food on active service, and the women of the camp had for the most part been kindly. Still, he was thankful to be getting out of it. It was the nights he hated; the long nights when men tossed and muttered in pain and the dawn seemed to have lost its way in the tangle of dragging hours. Anyhow, by this time tomorrow he would be back with the Regiment, back to the horse-lines and the familiar routine, and the trumpets sounding for watch-setting.
He stretched his stockinged feet luxuriously to the makeshift hearth, and looked about him at his companions. There were five of them gathered round the fire that night, all who were well enough to leave their beds, and they were a motley company, huddled close for warmth, with blankets drawn over their unfastened uniforms, like so many Redskin braves around their council fire. A cuirassier of Cromwell’s Horse, a man of true Ironside mould, such as Zeal-for-the-Lord had been, though as unlike him in body as might well be, being square and ruddy as the other was lean and dark. A grizzled Lieutenant of the Artillery Escort, with a hand badly mangled by the accidental explosion of a powder-keg. A long-faced pikeman with a merry eye, who had got into the New Model by way of the London train-bands. The fifth was a Royalist officer captured in an outpost skirmish and found to be suffering from neglected fever; a man older than the rest, except perhaps the Escort Lieutenant, with the face of a scholar rather than a fighting man, whose doublet showed gold-laced but very tattered beneath the brown folds of the blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
Usually the Royalist sick and wounded were housed in a smaller barn to themselves, but after the capture of Eggsford House on the eighteenth it had become too crowded, and the overflow had been put in here. They were accepted quite peaceably, for the fighting men of the two armies had very little real bitterness against each other; and Captain Weston sat quite naturally and comfortably with the men of the New Model, round their makeshift fire.
Looking round at them as they sat talking idly, Simon thought, ‘What a funny crew we are, to keep Christmas night in company,’ for it was Christmas night. Parliament had declared that 25 December should no longer be celebrated as a ‘Pagan Festival’ but be kept only as an ordinary Sabbath. But Christmas night, Simon thought, remained Christmas night, and no Parliament on earth could stop it—might as well try to stop the spring. There had never been wild Yule-tide merry-makings at Lovacott, but there had been cake and cider for the mummers, and the singing of old carols and the telling of old stories round the fire on which the Ashen Faggot was burning, and people had called out the Season’s Greetings to each other on the way home from church. And in the great hall at Lovacott, the kissing branch had hung like a crown of light from the rafters. Simon’s father had not really approved of the kissing branch, but he had suffered it to hang there every Christmas, because it had hung there in his father’s day, and his grandfather’s, and so on, back to Christmases before Agincourt was fought; sparkling and glowing in the light of its own candles, and making a link with all those other Careys who had gathered under it. Susanna Killigrew would like the Lovacott kissing branch, Simon decided suddenly; there was something inside her that was kin to the warmth and the joyousness of it.
The great barn was settling into its night-time aspect. The horn lanterns shed their uncertain light on the double row of pallets, where some of the men were already asleep, while others amused themselves with greasy cards, or tried to read their Bibles, or talked half under their breath. A low moaning wind had risen with the dusk, and came eddying in through the small high window and the ragged chimney-hole in the roof, driving the smoke down in occasional stinging clouds, setting the flames of the lanterns jumping, and filling the long building with swirling icy draughts. Sometimes two men laughed quietly over a shared joke, or the rattle of the forbidden dice sounded sharply in a dice-box; and all the time there was the heavy breathing of the man on the nearest pallet who had been filled with opium for the pain of a smashed leg, and was deep in a drugged sleep. A queer Christmas night, and Simon, sitting silent beside the fire, while his elders and betters discussed the new high-explosive shells which were beginning to be used, knew that he would remember it always when Christmas time came round again.
Outside, a sentry went by; Simon heard his footsteps on the beaten snow as he passed the barn door, and caught the air of an old Carol that he was whistling cheerfully out of tune. No, you couldn’t stop Christmas by an Act of Parliament.
As Joseph was a-walking,
He heard an angel sing;
This night there shall be born
On earth our Heavenly King.
The familiar words sang themselves over in Simon’s head:
He neither shall be born
In housen nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise,
But in an ox’s stall.
He found that he had taken up the air and was whistling it under his breath; and he broke off, half expecting that the cuirassier would berate him for the ungodly tune. But hardship or pain shared has a way of making folk tolerant one with another, and the cuirassier said nothing. It was the pikeman who spoke, breaking a silence which had fallen on them when the subject of explosive shells was talked out.
‘Cove sounds cheerful,’ said he, cocking an eye towards the doorway. ‘Of all the company a fellow can have on sentry-go, commend me to a good loud whistle, specially after dark. Psalm tune or pot-house ditty, it makes no odds, s’long as it’s loud enough.’
‘That may be, friend,’ said the cuirassier, ‘but if your ears are full of your own whistling, how are you going to hear your enemy?’
‘Why now, there’s drawbacks, I grant you.’ The pikeman grinned. ‘But it keeps yer courage up, now don’t it?’
‘Whistling in the dark.’ This time it was the Royalist who spoke. ‘There is a lot in it. It is in the silence that a man’s nerves start jumping; I have found that often enough, on outpost duty.’ He held out his hands to the fire, as though he was suddenly cold. ‘I believe most savage tribes sing before battle, or drum their spears on their shields—anything to make a noise; not to strike terror into the enemy, as is so often supposed, but to strengthen their own courage. It is a very comforting thing, noise of one’s own making.’
The Escort Lieutenant sat forward, his face thoughtful in the firelight, his sound hand curved about the bowl of his short clay pipe. ‘Maybe that is why it is our English custom to fight shouting; though oddly enough the Scots do not, as I know, for I served with Lord Levan in Sweden. They are brave fighters, the Scots, but I’ve ay noticed that men charge best when they’re yelling like demons.’
The talk meandered on, drawing farther and farther from the original subject under discussion, until, from whistling on sentry-go, it became an argument about those things which best kept up a man’s heart—or an army’s—in time of hardship or danger. The Escort Lieutenant was inclined to think that a strong personal trust in one’s leader was among the greatest of these, and talked of the retreat from Lostwithiel. ‘If it hadn’t been for the Old Man, we’d have lain down and died rather than struggle on,’ he said, much as the Infantry Lieutenant had done, that evening at Windsor. ‘There was only one of the Old Man, and upwards of five thousand of us, but somehow he forced his will on every man of us, individually—and he brought us through. He was something for us to hang on to, and we hung on.’
Meanwhile, the cuirassier and the pikeman were arguing keenly, the cuirassier declaring again and again that faith in the righteousness of his cause was the best thing any man could have for the strengthening of his arm in the hour of battle, while the pikeman staunchly maintained that the hope of loot was even better.
The Escort Lieutenant listened to them, puffing steadily at his pipe. ‘Mind you,’ he put in, with a cocked eyebrow, when the argument began to wax hot, ‘the hope of getting one’s own back isn’t far behind when it comes to supporting someone under difficulties. I’ve known a man dragged safely through the smallpox, when he’d been given up by the apothecary, simply by his determination to recover in order to be revenged on an old enemy who had stolen his Sabbath hat.’
A grin ran round the group; but the cuirassier said gravely: ‘Aye, a just vengeance is a powerful strengthener to a man’s arm.’
The Royalist leaned forward into the firelight which lit his thin scholarly face. ‘The lust for revenge may be all that, but it has an odd trick of destroying its owner in the end,’ he said. ‘I have seen it at work, not long since. It was not a pretty sight.’
The others looked at him expectantly; for the fire was warm and their pallets not inviting, and they were in the mood for any sort of anecdote. ‘And did it destroy its owner in the end?’ asked the Escort Lieutenant.
‘It may have done, by now,’ said Captain Weston. ‘It was in the late summer that I last saw the man I have in mind. I was serving under Prince Rupert in Bristol, when he came in to join the Army. He was a renegade from your ranks, by the way: a tall black-browed fellow who talked like an Old Testament prophet. He actually served in my Company for a while, and I got to know something of him; not that there was anything wonderful in that; the whole Army was in a fair way to knowing his story. That was the strange thing about him; he told his story to all and sundry, and yet he was not a babbler by nature. It was as though he wanted someone to hear it, and be afraid. It was a coldly calculated attempt to make someone suffer the torment of a rabbit with a stoat on its trail.’ He broke off for a few moments as though sorting the story out in his mind; and when he went on again, Simon, who had already a suspicion of the truth, found that he was listening to Zeal-for-the-Lord’s story of a false friend and a double hyacinth.
‘. . . He was caught by a patrol.’ The Royalist had almost come to the end of that part of the story which Simon knew. ‘He was tried by Court Martial for desertion, and sentenced to be flogged and degraded to the Pioneers. It seems that you are more tender with your deserters than we are. And from the Pioneers he escaped and went once more after his revenge. He reached his old home, and found that the man who had been his friend was gone. The new Lord of the Manor had come out to join Prince Rupert, and many of the tenantry had followed him, this man amongst them, not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. In the hope of finding his enemy and filled with a bitter sense of his wrongs—for remember, he felt his own revenge was so righteous that the sentence of the Court Martial seemed to him a mad injustice—he followed, and joined himself to us at Bristol. And as I have said, he told his story to all who would listen, so that it should come to his enemy’s ears and he should know what was loose on his trail.’ Captain Weston paused again. ‘How the story ended—if it has ended yet—I do not know. After Bristol fell, my Company was split up, and I did not see him again.’
‘Poor devil!’ said the Escort Lieutenant.
‘Aye, poor devil. If you had had the man under your eye, as I have done, you would have good cause to say so. He was bitter as gall against the Parliament Forces; but he hated the Army of the King. He took some pains not to show that; but I happen to be something of a student of men, and I saw plainly enough. And most of all, he hated himself, because in joining our ranks he had broken faith with the things he still believed to be right. He had paid away his self-respect, and though he clung all the more fiercely to his revenge in consequence, maybe it was dear at the price.’
‘You seem to have taken a most uncommon amount of interest in this unhappy wretch,’ said the cuirassier.
‘Did I not say that I am a student of men? I find the study absorbing.’
‘How did such a man come to be accepted into your ranks?’ asked the Escort Lieutenant. ‘Even to a less discerning eye than yours, he can’t have seemed a very promising recruit.’
The Royalist made a small, hopeless gesture with the hand which hung lax across his kness. ‘We need men,’ he said; and suddenly his face was bleak and haggard in the firelight.
‘If it come to be the fashion, slingin’ yer hook and going off to get yer own back on coves wot helped theirselves out of yer pockets,’ ruminated the pikeman, grinning at the Royalist, ‘I’ll wager there’d not be many of your coves this side o’ the Channel tonight; and yer’d be able to walk across to Spain on the boats making the trip.’
There was an awkward silence; for a few weeks since, Lord Goring had deserted his command and fled to Spain with every penny of Royalist funds that he could lay hands on. Between the men around the fire there was a kind of unspoken truce; they did not use the slighting nicknames of Cavaliers and Roundheads, they did not speak of King Charles as the Man of Blood, nor of Fairfax and Cromwell as accursed rebels; and they felt that the pikeman’s gibe was untimely.
‘I may have my own opinion concerning My Lord Goring’s conduct,’ said Captain Weston, after a moment. ‘But in my present rather unfortuna
te position you can scarcely expect me to discuss it.’
The pikeman, who was a friendly soul, grinned more broadly. ‘No offence meant, yer know.’
‘And none taken,’ said Captain Weston.
Someone put another turf on the fire, and the talk wandered in a more cheerful direction; but Simon took no part in it. He sat, elbow on knees and chin on fists, staring into the warm up-leap of flames, and thinking about his old Corporal. But if the older men noticed his moodiness, they thought maybe the lad was homesick—Christmas time, even when it had been abolished, was apt to turn the heart homeward.
XIII
Special Duty
AFTER A WET autumn the winter had turned bitterly cold, and from early December the West Country was deep in snow. It was weather for hugging the home fireside and leaving the roads to the north-east winds and the deepening drifts; but neither army went completely into winter quarters, as they had done each year before. This year, the end of the struggle was coming, and King’s men and Parliament’s men knew it, and faced each other warily, like two wrestlers watching each other’s first move. The New Model was encamped around Exeter and Tiverton; one part of the Royalist Army covered the country between Dart and Teign, while the other was strung from Okehampton to Tavistock, where the young Prince of Wales was quartered. North Devon had become a sort of Tom-Tiddler’s ground, where the patrols of both armies skirmished and foraged and made life generally difficult and dangerous for the folk of the countryside.
Soon after Christmas the scouts began to bring in news of preparations for a strong Royalist attempt to relieve Exeter: Cornish train-bands were daily expected at Tavistock, five hundred of the Barnstaple garrison and all the troops that could be spared from the siege of Plymouth were to join them, and the Prince of Wales, with his own Guards, was to lead the whole lot to Totnes, where a magazine was being made for them with stores brought by sea from Cornwall. After that would come the relief of Exeter, and the beleaguered garrison would sally out to join forces with their comrades.