‘I wish to God I was not,’ the boy said huskily. ‘He charged alone when his men were driven back — it was the only way to bring them on. I saw them carry him in afterward, he — he was cut to pieces. He died in a few hours.’ He broke off, and became engrossed in his hat again; then swallowed loudly, and began to feel inside his buff coat. He pulled out a sealed packet, and something that gleamed faintly in the shadows. ‘I have a letter for her from Sir John Meldrum, and — this.’
Anne was not conscious of taking the things, but she found that she was holding the letter, and a woman’s bracelet; a slender gold band set with seed pearls, that she had seen on Frances’s wrist often enough in the old days. ‘Thank you,’ she said dully. ‘I will take them to her.’ She pulled herself together. ‘You will be hungry. I will tell them to bring you something.’
She gave the order to the servant woman who she found hovering outside. Then she went up the stairs slowly, very slowly, her hand with the letter and bracelet hidden in the folds of her gown; and turned to the door of the bedchamber. She had had some idea of calling Frances out to her own room and telling her, then breaking it to Thomas afterwards. But Frances, who had risen and was standing in the window, still holding the lute, saw her face and cried out, ‘Anne — what is it?’ And then before she could answer, in a little clear soft voice that Anne thought she would not forget as long as she lived. ‘Oh my God, it is William ... Dead!’
Anne hurried to her, afraid that she might fall. ‘He was killed before Montgomerie Castle — leading his men. Sir John Meldrum sends you this.’
Frances did not fall. She dropped the lute, and it fell with a sharp splintering crash that tore jagged holes in the stillness of the room. ‘Give it — to me,’ she said, and took the letter and the bracelet, fingering the gold. ‘It’s warm. It was warm when I gave it to him, and it’s still warm, but not — with William’s warmth.’ She broke open the letter quite calmly, and began to read. But after a few seconds she looked up. ‘Five days ago — and I never knew. It is odd that part of you can die — without your knowing it.’ She was staring straight before her, her eyes wide and still, as though she looked into the face of Medusa, the broken lute at her feet.
Anne had caught her hands, the one with the bracelet in it, the other with the letter; but she did not look at her, nor at Thomas; she had not the right. She looked through the window into the garden hearing, against the busy sounds of York, the thin regretful sweetness of a robin’s song. All that was over for William, the wind and the tiptoe fragility of the autumn crocuses and the heart-breaking sweetness of a robin singing in a walnut tree.
Frances withdrew her hands. ‘I will go to my own room,’ she said. ‘I pray you excuse me —’ and walked to the door. Anne hesitated, looking from her to Thomas, torn between which of them in that moment to abandon. She had started after Frances, then she checked. Thomas lay staring up at the bed canopy as a carved stone knight stares up into the carved stone canopy of his tomb. He looked ghastly, like a dead man; iron grey to the lips — only his right hand, instead of being folded neatly with his left on his breast, was flung out on the coverlid, clenched on the embroidered velvet until the knuckles shone with the starkness of bare bone. He said, his lips scarcely moving, ‘Go to Frances,’ and then, as she still hesitated, repeated the order in a quiet, terrible voice. ‘Anne, go to Frances!’
And Anne went. She reached the door at the end of the corridor and opened it only the moment after it had shut. Thank God there was no key, or she had a feeling that it would have been turned against her. It was the room that had been Thomas’s when he was a boy; and William had shared it often. His initials were on the broad window sill, carved with a new knife ... Frances was standing in the window now, her hands clutched on the letter and the slim circle of gold, against her breast.
Anne put her arms round her and felt her shaking from head to foot, but as unresponsive as a column of stone.
‘Frances,’ she said, trying to recall her from wherever she was before it was too late. ‘Frances dear, you must lie down — think of the bairns —’
‘Yes,’ Frances said. ‘The bairns. I must finish packing to go home to them tomorrow.’
‘No, no! You cannot go home yet, you must stay with us until —’ (Until what? She did not know.) ‘We’ll send for the bairns, and you shall have them round you.’ God knew where they would put them, with the house full of soldiers, but they would put them somewhere. She felt so helpless. Nothing she could do but hold the other woman close, striving to break through that terrible icy barrier and reach her.
Frances shook her head. ‘I must go home tomorrow, home to Steeton... Is the — messenger still here?’
‘Yes’ Anne said, startled. ‘Being fed below stairs. Do you wish to see him? Love, can you bear it? Are you strong enough?’
‘I must write an answer to Sir John Meldrum, for him to take back, that is all.’
The hot protests flew up to Anne’s mouth, but were never spoken. ‘Can you?’ she said quietly.
‘Oh yes; I even know what I shall say — I shall say all the proper things, Anne — that words fail me to express my gratitude to Sir John for his great kindness. That I grieve not that my husband died in the Cause, but only that he died so soon he could not serve it further.’ She began to laugh, wildly, horribly. ‘Is not that a fine high-sounding sentiment? And Sir John will consider it most suitable and right-minded — and never know that he and the Cause and the Committee of Both Kingdoms might all fly to Hell for all I care, before they took my William from me!’
The letter was written, a proud, hard letter, which was later considered the very model of what such a letter should be. The packing was finished; for Frances held unswervingly to her intention of going home; and Anne, thinking how it would be with herself if it were Thomas — if Thomas had died before Helmsley Castle, judged it best to let her go. And on the next day, Frances went home.
In all that time, Thomas made no sign, spoke no word of William’s death — William who had been to him far nearer than most brothers. And there was something in him, looking out of his eyes, which forbade Anne to speak of it. It was as though he would not allow himself to feel, let alone show, any grief while Frances was in the house, lest his agony should communicate itself to her and make her own one iota the harder to bear.
In the hours after Frances left, he continued to hold that perilous calm, raising a barrier of hard reserve, beyond which Anne felt herself shut out, even while she fed and tended him and did her best to make him comfortable for the night.
When he was settled, Anne herself, worn out with her long journey, with strain and anxiety and grief, crept away to the adjoining closet, supperless because she had no heart to eat. She slipped off her gown and shoes, but nothing else, lest Thomas should need her in the night, and stood beside her bed, trying to summon up the energy to go down on her tired knees and pray; staring at the blue heart of the candle flame while two tears trickled down her over-large nose. She was crying without knowing that she did so, for sorrow and weariness, and utter loneliness, because Thomas, kind and courteous as ever, had shut her out. She crawled into bed at last with her prayers unsaid; and crying still, and still not knowing it, fell asleep like a tired child.
An hour later she was broad awake and staring at the tiny crocus flames of the watchlight, with a vivid impression that someone had called her. Normally she would have assumed that Thomas wanted her, and tumbled out to go to him almost before she was awake; but something, maybe the sense of being shut out from him with which she had fallen asleep, held her in check an instant, listening for another call, the sound of restless movement, some stirring in the next room. No sound came, no call again; indeed she thought she could hear the faint rhythm of his sleeping breath — unless it was only the hushing of her own blood in her ears. She had been dreaming, that was all. And yet the impression of being called remained with her, the sense of a cry for help, an urgent need reaching out to her through the night.
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br /> She flung back the coverlid and slipped silently from the truckle bed. The door between closet and bedchamber stood just ajar, and she opened it a little, and slipped through.
The room was white with moonlight, that lay like a silver shawl cast across the foot of the bed. Thomas hated to sleep with a watchlight beside his bed, just as, even in the coldest weather, he hated to sleep with the bed curtains drawn. The head of the bed was a cavern of dark, filled with only the faintest back-wash of reflected moonlight; and in the cavern his face showed as no more than a pale blur; but she knew from his breathing that he was awake after all, and from something beyond seeing, something in the quality of his stillness, that he knew she was there in the doorway.
‘Nan,’ he said after a long-drawn moment. ‘What is it?’
‘I —’ she began. She was going to say, ‘I thought I heard you call,’ but she knew that he had not called, not with the voice of his body. ‘I have broken my fingernail — and I have lost my little scissors from my girdle — I thought I might have left them here.’ A childish, fumbling implausible excuse, but all that her tired mind would furnish her. ‘I — hoped I should not wake you.’
‘I was not asleep.’
‘The moonlight is so bright — so bright —’ Anne said breathlessly, and turned to the window below which the silver rushing of the moon and the wind rioted together in the gar-den. ‘Almost like Midsummer moonshine.’
‘No,’ said the careful, strained voice behind her. ‘It is too coldly silver for that. Here in the north, Midsummer moonshine never holds such absolute sway over the night. There is always a whispering of warmer colour — always something of the after-glow or something of the dawn.’ She heard him draw a sharp breath, and let it go again with a rather desperate control. ‘William and I lay out on the moors above Denton many and many a summer night, when we were boys, and watched the northern sky echoing with daylight as the sea echoes in a shell, all the short night through.’ Another long, long silence filled with the silver turmoil of the wind in the old walnut tree; and then he said, almost wonderingly, and as though listening to his own words, ‘William and I ... William and I were shoulder-to-shoulder men before ever we were breeched; and now he’s cold in his grave, and —’ Suddenly it was a call to her, a call of desperate and agonized urgency. ‘Nan, Nan, it’s hard to believe he won’t ever come whistling “Greensleeves” through the door again —’
She was at the bedside before the last word was gasped away. She slipped to her knees on the low stool that stood beside it; and reached out to set her hand on his thin dark one that lay palm upward with a curious emptiness on the coverlid. It was caught and crushed with a strength that she had not thought he yet possessed, and which she did not think he was himself aware of; the clutch of a man clinging to something to save himself from drowning, and his voice, when it came again, was a harsh whisper. ‘What did Frances say? Odd that you can lose part of yourself and not know it ...’
If he had been well and strong, she knew that he would never have let her into the private places of his grief for William; he was a man whose reserves went too deep for that. But he was very weak, he had used up all the strength he had in maintaining the rigid control that he had held since the news came. Now he broke, and Anne, who had felt herself to have failed him in not being with him in those first days of his wound, when his life hung in the balance, thanked God that she was with him now, knowing that this was his greatest need of her; a greater need than he had ever had before, or would ever have again.
This was William’s gift to her; and even as she understood that, the moment was gone. You could not hold a winged thing; you could not even perfectly remember it afterwards, for that, too, was a kind of holding; but she knew that she would remember always that because of William’s death, Thomas had once in his life turned to her wholly and completely, and had let her in ...
Chapter 24 - The Snowdrops Have Their Sweetness
In Queen Street, stretching from Drury Lane to Lincoln’s Inn, the soft mizzle rain came and went, trailing pale scarves of oblivion through the dusk that was already swallowing up Saint Pancras Fields; and the fine red brick house fronts were dimming to damson colour, as candlelight sprang up in window after window.
In the small sitting-room behind one of those lighted windows, a fire of sea coal and carefully hoarded fircones burned on the hearth, the resiny scent of the burning cones mingling with the thin sweetness of the snowdrops in a cup of Venice glass on the table. Snowdrop time again. And Little Moll, with Bathsheba in a new gown of green taffetas propped beside her, and Dandelion curled at her feet, sat stitching at a fat cornflower bud in the border of the sampler that was still so far from being finished, though she had started it on her sixth birthday, and now she was rising seven; one stitch, and then a long pause, head cocked at a listening angle of joyous but grave anticipation, eyes star-bright in the small brown face. Anne also had been working with her needle, but with even less success than Moll; and the stiff linen with its formal knots of flower and berry lay where she had flung it aside. Now she stood looking down into the fire, one foot, with its jewelled shoe-rose sparkling, on the raised hearth stone; and the firelight warming her brown skin and hair and setting crocus-coloured lights in the huge brilliant eyes that were her beauty, and losing and finding itself among the lustrous spreading folds of her gown — the first new gown she had had in three years — an unpuritanical gown of honey-pale satin trimmed at the breast and sleeves with knots of crimson ribbon, got for this occasion; for Thomas’s coming.
She was listening, too, like Little Moll, listening to the buzz and growl and murmur of voices that rose faintly through the floor beneath her feet, trying to distinguish Thomas’s voice among the others ... .
She had scarcely seen him yet, and it seemed such a long time since she had seen him last — all the long dark months since, scarcely out of his bed, he had ordered her south again before winter made the roads impassable. She had waited so long, and she was waiting still, staring into the red hollows of the fire as though she saw the events of those past months moving there. She had gone back to her mother’s house, but only for a few weeks. Then, admitting to herself for the first time that Thomas would not be calling her north again while the war lasted, she had taken this house in Queen Street, fortunate to find one furnished even to the soap-bubble of Venice glass in which the snowdrops stood, found the minimum of servants, and while Thomas himself with his shoulder not yet fully healed was besieging Pomfret, transplanted herself and Moll, Christian, and Dandelion from Hackney.
And meanwhile, things had been happening in England; Cromwell’s plans beginning to bear fruit.
On the twenty-third of November, while she had been still on the road south, Parliament had made over the whole state of the forces to the Committee of Both Kingdoms with orders to make an army. And two days later, during a debate on the competence of the existing Parliamentary Generals, Cromwell had risen and stated his case against Lord Manchester, mercilessly laying before the House the loss of Newbury and all that well-meaning nobleman’s other delays and hesitations and failures, accusing him of being one who sought peace by negotiation rather than victory, and who was now only playing at war. From then on, swords had been out between the Independents demanding an all out effort in the war and some freedom in religion thereafter, the extreme Presbyterians, and the great nobles like Essex and Manchester. On December the ninth, Cromwell had again addressed the House, abandoning his attack on Manchester personally, for broader issues. ‘It is now the time to speak, or for ever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less than to save a nation out of a bleeding, nay almost dying condition, which the long continuance of the war hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy, vigorous and effectual prosecution of the war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us and hate the name of Parliament. For what do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning of the Parliament? Even this, that the members of both Houses
have got great places and commands, and the sword into their hands; and what by interest in Parliament, what by power in the army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur and not permit the war speedily to end, lest their own power end with it. I am far from reflecting on any. I know the worth of those Commanders, members of both Houses, who are yet in power; but if I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive, if the army be not put into another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.’ Thus, ran the news letters, Major General Oliver Cromwell, before the House. Anne could almost hear him, see the strong ungainly figure, feel him sway them to this purpose. Two days later, the Self-Denying Ordinance was passed, ruling that while the war lasted no member of either House should hold Military Command. And it had been Cromwell’s doing. What did that strange man feel about his handiwork? It had been the only way to cut away the dead wood, and he had taken it, though it was to cut himself away with the rest.
On January the tenth, old Archbishop Laud, so long a prisoner in the Tower, was beheaded on a bill of Attainder, an act of mere blind revenge, without justice, need or sense, against which Essex had protested gallantly to the Lords, ‘Is this the Liberty which we promised to maintain with our blood?’
And ten days after that, the House of Commons had voted General Sir Thomas Fairfax to Command of the New Model Army which was yet to be raised. ‘God knoweth why the choice should fall upon me,’ he had written to Anne, giving her the news, ‘save that I am no Member of Parliament and am therefore free of the Self-Denying Ordinance, and that I have some skill in making men work together, and think that no antagonisms will be roused by me. But for whatsoever reason, the choice is unto me, and I will serve truly and faithfully, for life or death, and to the best of what ability I have, in the command to which I am called.’
The Rider of the White Horse Page 29
