Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  “Thank ‘ee, Nicholas,” said Adam gruffly, trying to cover his emotions. “I’ll settle up for this in the morning. I’m sorry to get ‘ee out of bed like this.”

  “‘Tis a burden of my calling,” said the old surgeon sadly. “Folk are seldom so sick by day as they are by night.”

  “Surgeon Nicholas!” Simon’s voice came faint but determined from the litter; and then hesitated suddenly as he was about to speak. “I ... will it be straight again, do you think? Will I be able to walk?”

  Nicolas Thompson fixed him with a long, sombre stare. “I can’t promise to make it as straight as the good Lord and your mother did, my son; but if you can promise me to rest it proper, and not try walking on it or taking the splints off before I say, ‘twill come pretty near. You’m young enough, and ‘twas a cleanish break. He’ll mend.”

  He turned away suddenly to John Clapp, who was rubbing the back of his head cautiously. “It looks as though these devils ‘ee met have been trying to reshape another piece of God’s handiwork. Take your hands away - let’s have a look, John.”

  Ann smiled as the strong bony hands took John Clapp’s head and examined it, gently, firmly brushing aside the big man’s resistance as though he were a little child. Ever since she was a child surgeon Thompson had fascinated her. She loved to watch him, on the rare occasions he had come to see someone in her family, and was seldom disgusted or horrified as other people were; and so more than once it had been she, rather than her mother, who had helped him with whoever was sick. The surgeon had come to notice this, and often had a smile for the intent, serious little girl at his patient’s bedside. He gave her simple tasks to do, and sometimes tried to explain the purpose of his treatments.

  She handed him a bowl to wash away some of the clotted blood, and he examined the base of John Clapp’s skull carefully for a moment. Then he clapped the red-faced mercer on the shoulder, satisfied.

  “A sound enough roof, it seems, for all the lack of thatch!”

  John Clapp scowled; he had been nearly bald for some years, but refused to wear a wig, despite the pressure of custom, preferring to keep his wide black hat on his head indoors as well as out. The surgeon’s own hair hung down to his shoulders, long and thin and wispy.

  “A few headaches, I should think, no more. If ‘ee have any fainting fits, come back and tell me, boy.”

  “I’ll not faint,” muttered Clapp, more than ever annoyed at being called ‘boy’. “Come on, Adam, let’s get this lad of yours back home.”

  At home, they carried Simon upstairs and laid him in his bed, and Mary mixed the draught which the surgeon had prescribed to help him rest. Then Ann stayed quietly with him until his eyes closed at last, his pale strained face relaxed, and his breathing became quiet and regular. She preferred to sit with Simon, for she knew she would not be able to sleep just yet, and she did not feel like talking with her parents. She needed somewhere to be alone, to sort out her own thoughts about the night’s events.

  She had seen Robert’s other side now, the one Simon had told her of, and which had been so hard for her to imagine. Again and again she relived the scene in her mind; the cold, stony face disowning recognition, the bitter parting words. “‘Twould be better to leave your women within doors, when ye go about your godless midnight plotting.” She had tried to find a hint of gentleness in them, a suggestion that Robert had been worried for her safety, but his tone had been too harsh for that. He had not wanted her there, to see the cruel, stern character he had among men.

  At first she thought she hated him for it. He had been there deliberately, looking out for them, armed and ready to fight. And for all his apparent surprise, he must have known it could easily be her family he stopped, or at least people like them, dissenters from their own village. Because of him Simon’s leg had been broken, John Clapp knocked from his horse, and Tom nearly run through with a sword. She shuddered at the thought of it, and of the grey muzzle of his friend’s pistol, pointed coldly at her breast.

  She tried to find some excuse for him, some bridge to the Robert she had believed in. Perhaps he had been forced to be there, and did not like what he was doing? At least he had told his friend to put up his pistol, and had not drawn his own; and he had examined her brother gently and carefully before her father had pushed him away, as though he had really feared Simon might be dead.

  It was not enough. However she tried to excuse him she always came back to the cruel words, the final contemptuous flick of his head as he had turned his horse, to gallop away up the hill. It had felt as though her father and Simon were beggars, with no right to crawl upon the earth; and she worse than that, for being a woman. Even if it was only an act, a mask put on to hide his feelings, it was a mask that fitted too well, as well as any other he had worn with her before. It was an act that was part of his own character.

  Despite all this she could not get Robert out of her mind, could not help making excuses when there were none, could not help loving him even for his cruelty. His harsh anger when he had confronted Tom reminded her of his absurd jealousy a few days before; his coldness reminded her of the warmth of his protestations of love; his pride made her pity him for his shyness. It was absurd; she looked at the drained face of her brother, and knew it should give her strength to reject Robert forever and love Tom, as she should; but she could not think of Tom at all. So she sat and wept silently, her thoughts more confused than ever, until she was sure Simon would not wake, and she got up quietly to leave.

  As she tiptoed to the door, the tallow light in her hand throwing great leaping shadows across the room, she saw little Oliver’s great wide eyes staring at her from his bed in the corner. She thought he had been asleep when they carried Simon in, and she had not heard him wake. She stopped, and looked down at him.

  “Not asleep yet, Roly?” she murmured. “‘Tis nearly morning.”

  Oliver shook his head, his dark eyes gazing up at her in mute question. She saw how tense he was, as though he was full of a question he dared not ask. She crouched down, her head near his.

  “What is it, Oliver? Tell me.”

  “Is he ... is Simon dead?” The words came so softly, it was as though she had felt rather than heard them.

  “Dead? No, of course not. He’s only sleeping.” The little body relaxed slightly, but she saw he still didn’t quite believe her.

  “Then why you crying?”

  “Only ... because he’s hurt, that’s all. Look, I’ll show you.” She put the light down on a table, and lifted him out of his bed. He was a heavy boy now, nearly two and a half years old, but she still thought of him as a baby sometimes. He clung round her neck gratefully, looking down at his gently breathing brother.

  “Will he die?” he whispered in her ear.

  “No, he won’t. ‘Tis only his leg. The surgeon’s dressed it and given him something to help him sleep.” She smiled at him, grateful for someone else to take care of. “Come on now, Roly, back to bed.”

  “He be better soon, won’t he? Surgeon make him better in the morning,” he said as she tucked him in.

  “That’s right, Roly. He’ll be better soon.”

  “Will he wake up and cry if it hurts him?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But you’re here, anyway, aren’t you? So if he wakes up or starts making a noise, you can come and call me or mother, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I can. I call you.”

  “Good. But if he’s asleep, he’s all right. So all you need to do is lie here quietly and listen. Can you do that for me?”

  The little head nodded eagerly. “And I’ll pray for him, too, shall I? God will help him.”

  “Yes, you do that. Goodnight, Roly.”

  “Goodnight, Ann.”

  She went out onto the stairs. As she came down she could hear the murmur of voices from the great kitchen below, and found her mother and father deep in conversation across the table. They looked up as she came in.

  “How is he, Ann?”

  “Sleeping.
I’ve left Oliver to care for him.” She sat down next to her father, then realised suddenly that they had fallen silent. “Do I disturb you?”

  “Of course not, girl. I was just telling your mother what happened tonight, that’s all.”

  Her mother moved her head impatiently. “Oh Adam, for the Lord’s sake, don’t try to spare the maid’s feelings by telling lies! If you’m going off to get killed fighting the King, she’ll find out soon enough! Or do you know already, and am I the only one forgotten?” She turned sharply to Ann, her normally happy eyes red and strained, her cheery round face ugly with pain.

  “Know what?” Ann asked, though she knew the answer as soon as she spoke.

  “Your father says there’s to be a rising for the Duke of Monmouth, and he’s going to join the army. To leave us all and get killed!”

  “You don’t know I’ll be killed, Mary.” Adam’s voice was sad and patient, trying to be kind and firm at once. Yet beneath the control, Ann could hear a distant plea for help, for understanding and comfort for himself, as well as that he was trying to give his wife. “There may not even be a battle at all, if enough of us go. ‘Twill be a godly revolution, over in a month, and then I’ll be back to you, with God’s blessing on us all.”

  “Overthrow the King in a month? Your father’s war lasted five long years - you know that, Adam. And how many men were crippled, or never came back at all? What about your brother Roger? Did he come back?”

  Adam stiffened. He had told no-one why Roger had gone to war, not even Mary: that was a secret between Roger and himself. And so it would stay. It was a secret too shameful to be told.

  “If the Good Lord has taken one of our family already, perhaps He won’t need another. But whatever happens, Mary, don’t you see that’s why I must go? If Roger went for nothing, just because someone asked him, should I hold back from a great cause like this, which every man of sense can see is just?”

  “Every man will not see it. Nor did Roger have a wife and family to care for.” Just poor Ruth, Adam thought, but she had wept long enough, before she had met John Spragg.

  “And what has happened to our family already, just by staying at home? By God, if this were not a holy cause I should have to take up arms anyway, just to avenge what has happened to Simon!”

  Mary Carter shuddered. “Don’t swear about such a thing. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, Adam, not to you.”

  “I know it, my love. I’m sorry.” Adam bowed his head for a moment in his hands, and when he took them away Ann thought she saw beads of sweat glistening on his seamed forehead. “Believe me, Mary, I don’t want to go. There’s nothing I want less in my whole life than this. I thought, when I was at the meeting this evening, that I would not go, that I would let the others go and fight for me, that life and family were more important than God. But if you had seen those men tonight ...!”

  Words failed him; he looked at Ann to see if she understood what he meant. “And do you know, Mary, do you know who was ready to go instead of me, if I had not gone? Simon! You have not heard him talk as I have! He would have gone instead of me, if I had let him - my own son! So should I sit at home now, while he lies up there with his leg ruined before my own eyes, and do nothing? What sort of a father would I be if I did that?”

  “A wise one,” said Mary slowly. “One that does not let his son’s judgement outrun his own.”

  “Then I shall be a fool,” said Adam, looking wearily at his wife across the table. “I have done my best to be a wise father all my life, and I have kept you and Ann free from sin and want as a man should, and loved you too, and hoped that that was enough. But there are some things ... Mary, this is in the hands of God, but I tell you, if the Duke of Monmouth comes and I don’t go to join his army, it will be through fear only, and not wisdom or even love of you. For it is God’s cause, however much of a sinner I am, and the Lord knows ... He knows how much I am afraid.”

  He buried his face in his hands again, while the two women sat still, the red tallow light flickering on their faces. Ann had never seen her father like this; and yet his pain seemed to her in some way like her own. She reached out a hand, gently, to his shoulder, and held it there, while her mother watched, unmoving, isolated in her sorrow.

  Adam took his hands away from his face, and patted his daughter’s hand gratefully. When he spoke his voice was his own again.

  “I’m sorry. You see what a poor soldier I shall be. Let us pray the Lord gives me courage, when the Duke comes.”

  He ventured a smile, but Mary’s face stayed bitter and stiff, refusing him the comfort he craved. She got up, and walked woodenly to the stairs.

  “Let us rather pray he does not come at all.”

  8

  THE NEXT day Adam was out most of the morning, collecting and packing cloth for a journey to Exeter, and the family settled to an uneasy, shattered peace. The surgeon came, and Ann and her mother united in finding useful ways in which the girls and little Oliver could care for Simon, whose leg was hurting him abominably. After the surgeon came Tom, who spent a while talking and praying upstairs. When he came down to the kitchen Ann at first avoided him, pretending to be busy with the cooking; but he stayed, amusing little Oliver by letting him help to fashion some crutches for his brother, and trying to talk to her, without success. She did not want to speak to anyone, and the comfort she got from his solid, friendly presence troubled her; but nonetheless comfort it was, and when he had gone she felt a sudden contrary flutter of remorse for the way she had treated him, and went round to the shoemaker’s shop.

  He was working at a bench by the window when she came in, surrounded on all sides by shoes and boots and knives and augers and needles of different shapes and sizes, and everywhere the rich smell of leather. He looked up in surprise as she came in. As usual she thought how small everything looked beside him.

  “Well now. I thought you didn’t want to talk to me today.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom, truly I am. I didn’t want to talk to anyone this morning, somehow. It’s just that I was upset about Simon. And then also you were so near being killed, and I a widow without ever being married. And I was ashamed, for being frightened.”

  “You didn’t look frightened, at the time. If that devil hadn’t had so many friends, and them a-horseback, ‘twouldn’t have been I you’d have needed to fear for!” Tom’s big hands gripped the boot he was mending, so that the sole creaked and bent, as he relived the fight in his mind. “That young dandy-cock with his sword, Robert Pole - by our Lord, he did anger me! If I do meet he again I shall take his little sword, break it across my knee, and stuff it up his arse!”

  He flushed and then laughed, a great rueful grin creasing his strong, handsome face. “I’m sorry, Ann, I shouldn’t use such words. But if there is one thing I hate it’s such a man as that, who comes down here from the great city to disport himself in fine clothes and wicked scents and perfumes! Such men do think of nothing but false religion and their own riches. Did Simon tell ‘ee what Robert Pole and his army friends did t’other night, breaking into Throckmorton’s house over to Farway and frightening his poor wife in childbed, like the very soldiers of Herod killing the firstborn? ‘Tis a very Satan incarnate!”

  Tom stabbed his auger savagely into the wood of his bench, his face suffused with anger; and then, as he watched it quiver there in the wood, a whisper of doubt seemed to cross his mind, and he looked up at her more quietly.

  “But wasn’t it he that stopped you on the road last Wednesday and tried to molest ye? Young Simon told me something of that, too.” Under his dark brows, Tom’s eyes watched her warily for the answer to the suspicion he dared not speak.

  “Yes, that was him. But he didn’t molest me though. ‘Twas only talk.” And mostly Simon’s talk, too, she thought bitterly. How still Tom had become! “I don’t think he’d dare do more, now he knows who I’m betrothed to!”

  Tom relaxed a little, his hands playing with the auger. “He’d better not. Did you tell him that, then?�
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  “I ... tell him? When?” It was a cunning question, shrewd, like a wrestling trick she had seen him use, when he relaxed his grip and with a little trip sent his opponent stumbling forward with the force of his own efforts.

  “When? How should I know? When you’ve met him. Anytime.”

  “Tom, I’ve not met him at all, but Wednesday, and last night with you.” Her voice sounded strangely slow to her, as though time was not passing as quickly as usual. She suddenly felt how bare her face was; it must be so easy to lie if you could hide your face behind a mask, as Robert had said some fashionable ladies did in London.

  “That’s just as well then. For I should find him one day, and tear him limb from limb, if I thought otherwise!” Nor would he leave her untouched - he meant that too, though he did not say it. But her gamble had won; he had no reason to disbelieve her, only his own suspicion.

  “I told him that. I said he should leave honest girls alone, and that I had a young man to marry. And now that he’s seen you, I don’t think he’ll be back.”

  For a moment he sat there, quite still, considering; she reached out and put her hand on his arm, awkwardly, and prayed that her fingers might not tremble. Then he smiled, relieved, and smothered her own hand in his.

  “If that be the truth of it, then I am glad. ‘Tis only that - forgive me for saying it - I had thought sometimes, when you were strange to me, that you were tempted by such things as fine clothes, and music, and dancing, and these heathenish tales as we do hear from travelling men of the life of rich folk in the country and in great cities. I did fear for your soul, Ann.”

  Her soul. For a second she shivered, and felt the colour drain from her face, as the blood drained from her fingers in the sudden crushing earnest strength of his grip. Was not her soul in peril from Robert, as she feared her body was from Tom? But no, that was all settled now - she had made a peace for her soul with God. He understood. And anyway, what she was doing now, trying to love Tom again, was what He wanted, what was really right.