by Vicary, Tim
Afterwards she remembered thinking how ridiculously short the corporal's legs were now that he was dismounted, and wondering whether Kate would outrun him. Then there was a rough burning pain around her neck and shoulders, and she realised the butcher's hand was in the front of her dress, trying to rip open the bodice. But it would not tear, the seams were too strong. She saw Elspeth struggling on the ground, with her dress thrown up over her head, and the bony man kneeling on her arms as he fumbled with the flap of his britches. Then Ann wrenched one arm loose, and half-turned, almost free, before she bent forward with the pain of her other arm being forced up her back. A sword blade glinted dully in front of her nose.
"Don't fight no more, hussy, or I'll stick this right up inside yer! Hold still now!"
And then it was horrible and ridiculous at the same time. He held one arm behind her, and with his other hand slipped the sword under the front of her dress, between her legs, and moved it slowly upwards, so that it was entangled in the petticoat around her thighs. She wriggled, so he jerked her hard upright, and she felt the sword prick her groin.
"Hold still now I told you!"
And so, trembling with horror, she felt the blade work its way upwards until it was against her stomach, where it caught in the waistline. He tugged away from her and the cloth ripped; then he worked the sword further up until the point was between her breasts and then under her chin, so that she had to move her head up and sideways to avoid it. He tugged sharply, and she screamed as the point dug into her neck; then he let go of her arm, put the thick sleeve of his other hand behind the point of the sword, and wrenched the sword towards him. Ann stumbled and the bodice of the dress ripped open. He tore the sword clear through the skirts so that her dress and petticoat were ripped open all down the front.
She stepped away, and would have run, but the sword was at her throat.
"Don't go!" he said. There was a demoniac gleam of triumph in his eyes, and she could see a pulse throbbing urgently in his neck. He moved the swordpoint down from her neck, and flicked the dress sideways with it so that the point rested on her nipple.
"Now take it off," he said. "Slow, if you don't want this up yer." He dropped the sword further, and flicked the dress away from her hips. The sword's point tickled the hair between her legs.
"Please ... "
"Take it off. Slow." His voice was slurred, as though the pulse in his throat hindered him from speaking. She struggled clumsily out of the dress, careful to be slow. She heard a muffled scream, and behind him, to the left, she saw the naked hairy buttocks of the bony man pumping urgently between Elspeth's tense, childish thighs. Elspeth's head was still hidden by her skirts. Beside them, two of the dragoon's horses were grazing peacefully near the cart. There was no sign of Kate or the corporal. Ann pulled her second arm out of the dress, let it fall behind her, and stood trembling in the middle of the glade. naked except for her boots and socks, the dragoon's swordpoint in her pubic hair.
"Lie down. Go on, down on your back. Lift your knees. Spread 'em. Go on, more That's it. Right." He stuck the sword in the grass between her legs, so that she could not easily move without touching it. Then he began fumbling with the hooks and buttons on his britches.
"You're going to get it now, girl, I've had this lot for a long time. You got it coming to you now, by God!"
The grass itched strangely on her skin. She looked up and saw the head of one of the thunderclouds above the trees. God's thunderclouds. A cuckoo called in the wood. She looked between her legs and saw the man with his boots off, pulling his britches down to his knees. She could not believe this was happening to her. She pushed herself backwards, wriggled her legs around the sword, got up and ran away.
It was very easy. Even as she heard the man roar she was out of sight in the trees; in a minute she was out of sound as well. The wood was coppiced, with hundreds of tall saplings sprouting out of old stumps, each resplendent in its summer dress of fresh light green leaves, excellent cover. She ran hard, desperately changing direction to left and right, ignoring branches and brambles, until for a long time she had heard only the crash of her own feet on the old leaves. Then her legs began to shake and betray her, and she almost twisted her ankle and fell.
She stopped, clutching a tree, and listened. But there was only the sobbing gasp of her own breath, and the scream of a startled blackbird. Her skin was tingling and sore where it had been lashed by twigs. She listened harder, earnestly, thinking her ears were failing her. A pigeon cooed in the trees overhead, and there was the tiny peet! peet! of bluetits. Far away to her right, there was the sudden flurry of wings and the co-co-cock! of a startled pheasant. Then nothing - and through the silence the faint gurgling of a brook somewhere downhill ahead of her. Also a breathless, feeble whine, like a whipped puppy, that came again and again, obscuring everything, until she realised it was the sound of her own crying, and stopped it, panic-stricken in case it had been heard. But there were only the birds and the gurgle of the stream. She made her way towards it, trying to steady her trembling legs and quieten the rasping, painful breaths so that she could still listen to the safe silence of the wood.
The stream chuckled busily on its way in a tiny channel a foot wide at the bottom of a deep valley. Every few yards there was a small pool caused by a dam of old sticks and leaves, and she drank gratefully from one, pausing like a deer between each sip to listen. She washed away some of the blood from the cut on her neck and scratches on her arms and body, and realised she was naked. Only boots and short stockings. Ridiculous to be wearing nothing except boots and short stockings, yet she could never have run so fast without them. But where could she go, naked?
A horror of the future flooded in on her, and then vanished as a blackbird shrieked in alarm a short distance away. She blundered across the stream and up the far bank to a wide slope of four-foot-high ferns. She scrambled in amongst them, her back bent low, trying to break as few as possible, until she was in the thick fibrous heart of them, where she lay and panted and listened.
She lay there all afternoon, while the big flies hummed around her and settled on her sweat. Little stealthy crackles and rustles in the last year's growth of ferns set her heart racing with terror, until she saw a robin hop out from a place she had been sure had been hiding a man. Birds she did not mind, so long as there were no snakes.
Then the rain came, torrents of water rattling all around in the trees and undergrowth so that no-one could have heard a horse a yard away; and after her initial shrinking she lay back, naked as she was, letting the raindrops run off her arms and breasts and stomach and legs and mingle with her tears that she did not now have to keep silent, tears of fear and outrage and yet at the same time of relief and even jubilation, that the Lord had saved her from rape and was now baptising her with His blessed rain. She opened her mouth to let the water in, and sucked drops from her hair, and then rolled over onto her stomach so that her back could also be cleansed from the man's touch.
It rained for over an hour, and when it ended she was no longer afraid, but only profoundly grateful. She sat quietly, watching the steam rise from her body and the ferns around her. She could see part of a rainbow, and the glory of its colours and the tumult of the birdsong made her feel as though she were in church, a holier church than she had ever been in, where the beauty of holiness was quite unadorned and natural. She thought how pure and fresh the world looked, as though it were newly created, and she with it, like Eve alone in her garden.
For a while she sat so, at peace, watching the rays of the setting sun sparkle on the damp fern leaves, until the flies and gnats returned and made her itch, and she noticed her boots and stockings, and began to wonder where she could get more clothes. Yet she felt it no longer as a panic, but as an irritation, a tiresome need. She thought of trying to find her way back to the glade, to look for her clothes, and see if there were any sign of Kate and Elspeth; but that would be foolish — the three dragoons might still be there, and if they were not, their frie
nds might return the same way. She shuddered at the memory of the bony man's loins forcing themselves down upon Elspeth, again and again; she would have to find the two girls somehow, but she could not help them now, naked like this. Her best hope was to find a shepherd's hut or a farmhouse where she could borrow clothes first and ask for help.
She waited a little longer, until the sun had gone and the colours of the wood were all pale blues and greys, and she judged there was still enough light to see by, and yet enough dark to help her avoid being seen. Then she stood up calmly and walked down the slope, glorying in the rough caress of dripping fern leaves on her skin. It was a long slope, about a quarter of a mile or more, and at the bottom of it she stepped quite suddenly into a little lane where it forded the stream. To her left, the track continued through the bracken to another arm of the wood, which still echoed with the birds' evensong; to the right it turned a sharp corner and disappeared around a little cliff where the bank of the steep little valley ended.
She hesitated, uncertain which way to go. A bat flittered by overhead, and a horseman rode around the corner.
The horse snorted and bucked, and Ann screamed and ran back into the ferns. There was a clatter of other hooves, a whoop of 'View Hallooo!' and horses came crashing into the ferns after her. She tripped, fell, and stumbled to her feet, but a horse was up with her, the rider leaping from his saddle and grabbing her arm. She swung her free arm round wildly and caught him a hard clout across the face, jolting her shoulder and making him lose his grip; then she was away, but he caught her ankles and she fell face down in the bracken. She turned over, writhing and kicking to be free, and then something like a tree hit the side of her jaw and she knew nothing.
Words. Too many words. Different voices. What did they mean?
“... gipsy ... fine pair on 'er ... look at they scratches ... been doin' it with a wildcat, maybe ... runnin' around askin' for it ... fought like a wildcat though ... that’s how they likes it ... gift from God, though, bain't it? ... Quite enough words like that, sergeant ... only talking, sir ..."
She felt herself lifted and wrapped in something warm and scratchy. She struggled to fight it off but the effort was too great and everything faded. Then the words came again, further away at first: “just like them ... keep it all for theirselves ... what d'you 'it 'er for anyway? ... sergeant, take those men back to the road ... can't blame 'em, though, can you ... let me see her closer ... Ann!"
A bottle was forced against her lips and something trickled into her mouth, burning her throat and nose. She spluttered and opened her eyes.
"Ann! It is you, isn't it? My God, what have they done to you?"
"Robert?" Her voice sounded small and slurred and distant. She tried to put out an arm to touch him but the warm scratchy thing prevented it. It was still a dream, then.
"Have some more of this." The brandy scorched down her throat and sent sudden life through her veins. She sat up and saw him properly, on the hillside beside her. It was not a dream. The blanket fell away from her. He covered her carefully, glancing back over his shoulder to the men on the road.
"Did the rebels do this? Was it Monmouth's men?"
"Monmouth's men? No, I ... Ooooh!" The side of her mouth was aching and swollen where the man had hit her, making it hard to speak.
"I'll have the man whipped for that! Yet it is hard to prevent them in such a case - in God's name, where are your clothes?"
She felt his words almost as a reproach, because she had tempted his soldier.
"It was your men took them. Your men - soldiers of the King!"
"My men?" He did not disbelieve it. Slowly, slurring her words because of her throbbing jaw and swollen tongue, she told the story. She told it bitterly, spitting out the details of uniforms and names he asked for as though they were stones to hurt him with. Yet when at last she bent her head and cried at the humiliation of it all, the humiliation that returned because she had to tell it before a man, she let him hold her and comfort her without pushing him away. She could not help it; and even when her tears were over she let her head rest against his chest for a long, longed-for moment while the peace she had felt earlier returned to her. If only she could rest, sleep, forget it all.
"So." She pushed him away and sat up. "You must help me to find them, Robert, for the sake of those poor girls. If you can trust your men with them, that is."
"Never fear that. But are you strong enough, Ann, to show us the place and ride?"
"I can manage." But her small bruised smile seemed feeble when she stumbled even as she got to her feet. Her legs began to shake as they had done before. She felt cold suddenly and ashamed to be so naked and weak. She hugged the cloak tightly around her.
"You may ride before me on my horse. Don't be afraid of the men." Nonetheless she did fear and hate them as she walked the few yards through the ferns to the horses. Their muttered conversation stopped, and a dozen hungry eyes explored her. She feared them as she had never feared men before, and felt a new meaning to the story of the tree of knowledge.
There was nothing to see in the glade by the road. Even the cart had gone, though its tracks were still there. Robert set his troopers to search the coppice round about for the best part of an hour, but there was no sign of the girls; just a long ribbon of cloth on a bramble, and Ann's ripped dress thrown in amongst some trees.
Only later, when they had ridden halfway to Chard, did they overtake a cart which had turned down a side road at the sound of their coming. The old man driving it sat still as a tree trunk, as he had done that afternoon. But Ann recognised him in the moonlight. When she assured old Amias he would come to no harm, the bundle of sacks stuffed under the seat moved, and Elspeth crept out, still pale and dumb with shock. Ann dismounted and rode with her in the cart, but Elspeth neither wept nor spoke all the rest of the way, except to say that old Amias had hidden her in the trees while the dragoons had been chasing Ann and Kate, and that they had not seen Kate again.
21
SHE HAD not seen a man flogged before. It gave her no satisfaction. The cold, disbelieving way in which the colonel of dragoons had received the complaint; the humiliation of the identity parade in which every man had ogled her knowingly, and one of the three, the man she had thought of as like her kindly village butcher, was not there and could not be accounted for; and the prolonged, prurient questioning of the court martial, had so filled her with cold fury that she longed to get to the punishment; yet when she and Elspeth were finally led into the inn courtyard where the two men were stripped to the waist and tied to rings in the wall, she was too exhausted to feel anything.
She and Elspeth were the only women present, and gradually, as the flogging began, she realised that the same horrible prurience had returned. The officers and men were interested, not in the cruel whip slashing into the backs of their comrades, but in the effect of this sight on the two girls. It was as though each man was thinking he would have done the same, if he had known he would not be caught; and so the blame and real punishment were for the girls, for having dared to tempt them and then escape. Elspeth could not bear it, and turned away; but Ann bit her lip and watched every stroke, dry-eyed and pale and scared, until at last the bloody torsos were cut down, and staggered clumsily away, every unassisted step winning them glory in the eyes of their comrades.
"I trust you are satisfied, ladies?" The dragoon colonel's sneering bow rubbed salt into their wounds, and took in Elspeth's tears with covert pleasure.
"I shall be satisfied when Kate Grenfell has been found, and I am out of the care of his Papist Majesty's lawless troops!"
Ann had thought her words a triumph, but in fact even they had only added to her own frustration, for when she had asked Robert when she was to be sent home, like Elspeth, he had smiled in surprise.
“You surely cannot think it safe to travel the roads by yourself? Elspeth's mother lives in Chard, but yours is many miles away. And I have no soldiers to spare to escort you, even if you could bring yourself t
o trust them, which does not seem likely, after your words today."
"Then what am I to do?"
"In the first place, answer some questions."
"More questions? But Robert, I have spent all day answering questions!"
"About the misconduct of the dragoons, yes - but you must allow that we have been more than courteous in getting you prompt redress for that; now perhaps you can help us. We are after all here to put down a rebellion, and you are in the fortunate position of having spent some time with the rebel troops. Brigadier Lord Churchill has specially asked to speak with you this evening."
Ann stared at him, shocked and disbelieving. This masterful, supercilious Robert was new to her - or rather, it was a return to the Robert she had first met, before he had started professing love to her in a way that had seemed real, and that had coloured all her own feelings towards him with passion. Surely he had not forgotten? He could not have been playing so cold a game, that he was merely indifferent to her? But then he, too, was a man – he had been part of the conspiracy of this afternoon.
Her stare troubled him. A slight tinge of red came into his freckled cheeks, and he stood up suddenly and strode to the window to look out.
"Here he comes now. He must have seen us return." There was no disguising the relief in his voice. A moment later there was a knock at the door and he almost ran to open it.
"Good afternoon, sir. This is the young lady - Miss Ann Carter. Ann, allow me to present Brigadier John Churchill, the - er - commander of his Majesty's forces in the West."
It was ridiculously formal, yet how else was he to present her? Despite her anger, she grinned at Robert’s confusion, and saw her amusement mirrored in the faintly raised eyebrows of the Brigadier. He solemnly took off his hat to her in a sweeping bow, and smiled quizzically at her hasty curtsy.
John Churchill was a strikingly handsome man in his late twenties, of middle height, with sparkling brown eyes and a smooth, boyish, almost ladylike skin that reminded her irresistibly, in the first moments, of the Duke of Monmouth. The same polite, open manner, that made people feel instinctively that they could trust him.
