The child’s strained and piteous face melted suddenly, lit into a watery delight, and she bent her head over the treasure in her palm. ‘It has a lady on it — with wings,’ she said at last, indistinctly, round the hole where her tooth had been.
Anne, seeking to keep her interested, bent towards her. ‘It has a head on the other side. Colonel Cromwell said the head of a Roman king. Turn it over and look.’
Moll turned the coin with infinite care, and looked. ‘He has got leaves round his head instead of a crown,’ she said. ‘And it’s cut off in the middle of his neck. Poor king.’
A sudden sense of chill came to Anne, as though a little cold wind had blown down through the broken window, and she leaned nearer to look again at the coin in her little daughter’s hand. She had not seen it — not thought of it — in that way before. A king’s head, cut off at the neck ... The figures on the coins she knew ended at the waist or under the breast, which was such a different thing. She wished suddenly that she had not given the coin to Moll. Too late now to take it back; it would upset the child again, and beside, to take it back would be to admit — Admit — Moll’s eyes were raised to hers, puzzled and gravely questioning. ‘It is — only because there was no room on the coin for the rest of the king,’ she said with a little laugh that shook in the middle. ‘They didn’t cut it off the real king.’
And then Christian came back with the milk.
In the world outside, Sir John Meldrum and his division were advancing against the King’s Fort, while from the west jetty General Gifford was surging down upon the Royalist forts on the Humber. The first advance of the Hull men was carrying all before them, until, the enemy reserves coming up, their rush was checked and turned. They were being driven back, back and back. They were rallying under the walls of the town and sweeping forward again into a new assault...
But to the man and the two women in the dark crowded surgery, there was only a distant surf of sound that ebbed and flowed as a surf ebbs and flows. And for the exhausted child there was not even that, for with the strain of her ordeal over, and the warm milk inside her, she was asleep, the gold coin still clasped in her hand, in the warm corner of the hearth. Christian had drifted out to the street doorway, with that queer instinct to stand in doorways that comes upon people in times of stress and crisis. She had cleared the litter of the morning meal from the table; for the woman who, so he told them, ‘did’ for the surgeon and his boy, had not of course arrived, and the black bottle now stood in stark solitude within reach of the surgeon’s hand. He eyed it once or twice, and Anne knew that he wanted to return to it, but that his own peculiar form of good manners held him from doing so while she and the child were there; and she respected him for that.
She drifted to the shelves across the room, and read the names on the backs of the books there; books on herbs, on surgery, on astrology, all equally valuable to the healer’s art, and all the while, between her and whatever she looked at, she saw the little gold coin that was clasped in Moll’s sleeping hand.
Surgeon Openshaw’s voice growled very quietly behind her. ‘There’s many an old coin shows its king’s head cut off at the neck. It can scarcely influence Fate, that Colonel Cromwell gives one such to child for her aching tooth.’
She swung round to face him. How had he known the thing that was in her mind? His eyes, under the shaggy jut of brow, were on her face; small eyes, very blue, very far-seeing. ‘Of course not,’ she said a little too vehemently. ‘Our quarrel is not with the King — only with his policy.’
The deep-cut furrows of his face contracted a little, as though in some inner amusement. ‘And so the King himself is safe, and has but to yield his policy?’
She was silent, and after a pause, he went on: ‘But the King and his policy are one. Can you think of him yielding up the keys of his conscience to make a bargain, on matters that are to him sacred? Or rather, can you think that he would regard any such bargain as binding — he, the Lord’s Anointed?’
She went on looking at him, her eyes dilating a little. ‘So you think that his death is sure,’ she said at last, almost in a whisper.
‘If the victory is to Parliament. Because Charles Stuart is Charles Stuart, I think that his death is sure, for he carries it within himself as the seed carries the flower.’ Surgeon Openshaw leaned forward, his hands spread on the arms of his chair. ‘I also think that his death will be the worst day’s work for England that ever was wrought by English hands.’
There was a long silence, filled with the distant surf-sound of battle. Then Anne protested against something in herself as much as against his words. ‘But that is nonsense! All that is nonsense! The King is safe as ever he was; and if —’ It was defiance now, a rather wild bravado — ‘If he were not — other kings have died before —’
A fresh crackle of musket fire rippled across the marshes and lipped over the wall of Hull and sprayed down into the tense quiet of the little crowded room beside the Charterhouse.
‘Seldom quite as this one is like to die,’ said the surgeon. ‘For this one’s death there will be a new feeling in England; no, a very old one — and not only among Royalists, but rising up out of the dark places far below any question of Royalist or Parliamentarian. A new — or a very old fear.’
‘Fear? Of what?’
‘A sense of sacrilege.’
‘The King is not divine,’ Anne said quickly.
‘In the deep enough, dark places, near enough to the beginning of all things, kings and priests and gods are the same.’
Anne flung at him. ‘Almost you sound like a follower of Charles Stuart yourself, Mr Openshaw!’
The surgeon looked at her for a long moment, and she had the impression that his eyes drew back into a cavernous depth under his brows. ‘I have loved few men in my time,’ he said at last, and the voice in his chest rumbled like a distant storm. ‘One of them was Sir Walter Ralegh. I was a boy of fourteen when the Fleet sailed against Cadiz — apprenticed to a ship’s surgeon. I’d seen the Admiral from afar, as a black beetle sees God, pacing his quarter-deck as proud and as shining as Lucifer himself; but that morning he spoke to me in passing — a few words — set his hand on my shoulder. And come the evening he cursed me with words I’d never even heard before (and I’d heard a few) as he lay on the cockpit table while I helped my surgeon to probe the splinters out of his thigh. I doubt he remembered my existence the moment after. But I, I was fourteen. I gave him a boy’s heart. The next time I saw Sir Walter, I stood in the crowd in Old Palace Yard to see his head fall. That was in James’s time, when the Crown no longer had any use for its great men. That’s how much love I have for the Stuart breed. Ne’er the less, I’d not see this new England that men dream of, haunted by a bleeding head.’
They looked at each other in a long silence, and as they looked, all at once the air in the room throbbed to the boom of half-mile distant gun fire. Anne was kneeling beside Little Moll almost before she realized it. She waited, her flesh crawling on her bones for the crash of the landing ball. It did not come. But again the air in the room trembled to the boom of gun fire, caught up and re-echoed and prolonged into a drumming roll of sound. And still no crash and crump of bombardment in the town. Anne’s eyes, questioning, sought the old surgeon’s, and found them crackling with blue fire; he was sitting lunged forward in the chair, his head up. ‘By God! I believe they’ve got the enemy’s guns and turned them on their own kind!’
And then, with a roar that seemed to split earth and heaven asunder, the guns of Charterhouse joined the bell-mouthed chorus. The solid mass of sound crashed down upon the dim room as a wave crashes on the shore, making the whole room rock; a book slid sideways on the shelves; more broken glass fell from the window. Anne had her arms round Moll as the child woke with a gasp of terror. ‘It is all right, it is all right, little lamb; nothing to be afraid of. They are good guns. They are our guns!’
‘Ships’ guns!’ said Surgeon Openshaw, furiously upright in his chair, his face blazi
ng with an excitement that was part memory. ‘My God, I believe they’ve done it! Oh if I hadn’t the gout! Hell and the Furies take this foot of mine!’
Presently the gun fire died away, and there began to be a great shouting in the streets. Anne heard a wave of cheering; and then Christian, who had sallied into the street came flying back, crying, ‘My Lady, My Lady, they say t’King’s men are in full retreat! Happen t’siege is over!’
The siege of Hull was over and it was time to be away. ‘Ye’ll have no trouble in the streets, I reckon. All Hull will be on the wall’s wi’ their thumbs to their noses,’ Surgeon Openshaw said when she paid him his fee; and as she collected Moll and turned towards the door, he turned him again to his black bottle.
And they were outside in the alleyway. Anne heard the wild shining song of a missel thrush from the Charterhouse gardens. Storm cock singing against the guns. The strange half spiritual fear of the past hour fell away like her shadow behind her; it had been the strain of the place and time, no more. It was close on noon, she realized, hurrying a still shaky Moll back towards the Governor’s Palace; three hours since the fighting started; and now a great throbbing lightness of heart was rolling through Kingston-upon-Hull. Wave on wave of cheering swept from edge to edge of the wide marsh skies, and across the town the guns roared again from west-jetty fort as though in final triumph. Anne wondered whether any echo of the distant cannonade had reached Thomas across the river in his Lincolnshire wolds, and if so, whether there would be anything in the far off boom and mutter to tell him what it meant. For her ears the triumph and the victory; but for the Royalists? For Sir Charles Cavendish drawing off his Horse for the long retreat into York? Why should she think of Sir Charles Cavendish now? She was remembering the look in his strong grotesque face turned upon her as he sat his red mare beside the coach. ‘Think of us as gently as may be, remembering that we also draw sword in a Cause that seems to us worth dying for.’
Anne, hurrying up Silver Street with the sunlight scudding before her, had a sudden sense of enlarged frontiers. She was realizing that her ability to see men as friends or enemies with no possible mingling of the two was gone from her; and she let it go. A sense of enrichment came to her. She did not understand it, but nevertheless, she knew, in a moment of clear seeing, that it marked some change in her that could not be annulled any more than her body could go back over the physical changes of its maturing, or a flower, once opened, could return to the bud.
But Thomas, far to the south, knew nothing of her suddenly winged mood. For him there was only the spent and leaden greyness that came upon him always after battle. That morning, he and Colonel Cromwell fighting their first full scale action together had forced open the gap through which Leslie and the Scots were to march south; and the taste of the massacre among the narrow lanes about Winceby that had ended the Royalist rout, lingered sickly in his mouth. And hearing the boom and rumble of his father’s guns in the north, he wondered with harsh anxiety as to the meaning of the cannonade.
Chapter 19 - Martinmas Wind
Beside heavy losses in men, the Royalists had lost most of their guns, including the two great culverin known as the Queen’s pocket pistols; and there was no course left to them but to call off the siege of Hull. Lord Newcastle withdrew on York, pillaging Beverley and driving off all the cattle he met on the way. A few days later, Lord Manchester and the Eastern Association Army retook Lincoln, and at the end of the month Tom Fairfax returned with his Cavalry to Hull and went into winter quarters.
All over the north it seemed that this year the war was going to follow the old accustomed pattern of warfare; a summer’s campaign and a winter’s respite. All over the north, a hush settled as the nights grew longer and the weather worse, and with his men safely quartered in Hull and the surrounding villages, Tom seized the opportunity of giving leave; and even, about the middle of November, took a few days off himself to visit Nun Appleton, Anne with him.
At Nun Appleton the first blue-green tapers of the snow-drops were poking through the earth under the south wall where the Provence roses grew. It was one of God’s smaller and sweeter mercies, Anne thought, that He sent next year’s snowdrops breaking through the ground before the winter was even begun, a promise, while the cold Martinmas wind was stripping the last brown-edged leaves from the thorny twig-tangle of the rose bushes, that one day spring would come again. Thomas, just come out to join her after a day spent going round the estate with Portidge his steward, stooped to disentangle a long strong many-thorned shoot. ‘That’s a brier shoot unless I’ve forgotten all I ever knew of roses. I must tell old Crabstock to keep his eyes better open.’
‘When the war is over,’ Fairfax said, letting the severed brier shoot fall on the path, ‘if God grants us a time when the war is over, we will have more roses. We will make the rose garden bigger, and get some other roses from Persia. The Persian strain in roses is what the Arab strain is in a horse.’
But she had the feeling that only half his mind was on what he said; that he wanted to say something else to her. As they began to move back towards the house, he said, ‘What have you been doing with yourself all this day?’
‘There has been plenty to do about the house,’ Anne said. And that was true, for the Provence roses were not the only things to have grown brier shoots or their equivalent, in this year and more that Nun Appleton had been shut up with only a few old servants to live in one corner of it. ‘Among other things, I have been going through my clothes. You can have no notion of the pleasure that it is to handle Watchet satin and citron damask again, and setting out one or two gowns to take back with me to Hull.’
He said suddenly, ‘Nan, pack your gowns for London instead of Hull.’
‘London?’ she said, startled, and stopped in her tracks.
Thomas halted also, and turned to her, his hand lightly under her elbow. ‘Hackney, at all events. I want you to do something for me. I want you to take Little Moll and go to your mother for a while.’
How cold the wind blew; a dark wind whirling the leaves into the air. ‘Why, Thomas? Why are you sending me away?’
‘The war is going to follow a different pattern from now on. We should not be able to be together as we have been, and I shall fight it with an easier heart knowing you and the bairn are safely away.’
Anne put her hand on his sleeve, feeling the softness of the dark velvet, and the braced nervous strength beneath, and looked up into his face. ‘Thomas, don’t send us away. If you do not want — if you cannot have us with you any more, I will bring Moll, and we’ll stay here. This is our home.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re worn out. You need the complete break with all this. I had so much sooner know that you were at Hackney with your mother ... Please, Nan.’
‘William has let Frances stay alone at Steeton all this while, with four bairns now that the twins are come,’ she said almost childishly.
‘I know. But William is William, and I am I.’ Thomas put his arms round her lightly, linking his hands behind her back, and drew her closer. ‘Dear, believe me, it is not that I love you any the less in my limping way than Will loves Frances in his.’
She believed that, and there was a little whimpering of joy in her, mingled with her sudden wretchedness, but for now the wretchedness was uppermost.
‘It is only for a while, Nan,’ he was saying, ‘only for a while.’ But she knew that he was only trying to comfort her as he might have tried to comfort Little Moll. She knew that it was not “only for a while”, that while the war lasted, he would not call her north again; and when the war was over — if ever the war was over — it would be too late. Too late for what? She did not know; but she shivered in the thin dark wind, in the circle of his arms.
‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘The wind is getting up. Come away in to the fire, love.’
‘Martinmas Wind,’ said Anne, not moving, her head up and her throat aching. The words of an old song were singing through her mind, tearing her heart out of her
breast.
‘Martinmas Wind when wilt though blow,
And the cold rain down rain?
The small leaves gan fall from off the tree,
And I to my love do call in vain.’
‘There is one person who will take joy in our journey,’ she said, ‘and that is Moll. She has talked of going to the South Country, all this year, as though it were El Dorado or Hy Brazil. Only —’ she gave a little sorry laugh — ‘it was to have been her and me in the coach, and you riding White Surrey alongside, when the war was over.’
He kept his arm round her, as they turned together towards the terrace steps. There were pigeons on the terrace, and they exploded upwards on clapping indignant wings, from before their feet. But this November evening there was no sunset to set fire to their wings.
And so, on another evening, more than a fortnight later, Lord Fairfax’s coach, made over to Anne on indefinite loan, rumbled and jolted into the outskirts of the little village of Hackney, a mile or so outside London. Christian sat rigidly upright in it, round-eyed and wary at the splendours and the dangers of foreign travel. Little Moll slept against her mother. Her joy and excitement at the prospect of this magical and superbly adventurous voyage to the South Country, even without father, had been luminous to see; but the nine days’ coach journey had been too much for her excitement, and now, in the moment of arrival, she had fallen asleep. Anne, one arm about the child, sat forward, looking eagerly from the window, looking for things that she remembered and things that she had forgotten.
The coach rumbled to a stop, and the coachman dismounted from his perch and came round, the rain dripping from his hat brim, to ask for further directions; and she told him. ‘Beyond the church. You will see the gate on the right, in a brick wall.’ He disappeared, and the coach lurched on again, round the churchyard beneath the elms, and through the gate of which she had spoken, to draw up at last before the house of warm rose-red brick that was the first settled home Anne had ever known.
The Rider of the White Horse Page 23
