by Maria McCann
Price straightened up. ‘Beg pardon, comrades.’ Reaching for the pike as one of them handed it him, he straight let it fall a second time, and himself on top of it.
The man who had given back the pike crouched over him. ‘Soldier?’
Price did not stir. The man looked helplessly at me. I pulled our fallen comrade up onto his knees and found him wet with blood-streaked shit.
‘You’d best take him to the surgeon’s tent,’ said the other. I raised Price to his feet but found myself taking his whole weight, for he was as if dead.
‘He’s big,’ I said, but none offered to help me so I heaved him over my shoulder and brought my uncleanly burden through the ranks as best I could, laying him on the rutted grass outside the tent entrance. There were no hurdles. The surgeon’s mate, a little, sweaty fellow I had not seen at Winchester, came up and asked what the injury might be; I explained it was rather a case of flux than shot. He told me that practically every man in the tent had some sickness of the kind.
‘Had we tents for the healthy, we’d not need them for the sick,’ I complained. The man looked at me, as if to say he wished for tents as much as I did, and could do as little to procure them.
‘Don’t bring any more,’ he said, ‘unless it’s wounds.’
‘What if it’s vomiting and flux?’
‘Lay them on their sides.’
‘They’ll get trodden on,’ I protested.
‘Then don’t tread on them.’ He laughed. I was at first enraged, but then saw that he was half crazy having neither space nor physic for so many sick and the assault proper still to come.
Price, at least, I had got out of the action. As I left I saw another man stagger in, spewing down the front of his buff-coat, and wondered if he would be ordered back to the ranks. I returned to my place, sinking in the field up to my knees and more than once groping on all-fours to wrench my boots out of the sucking mud. As I went I looked again at the battery for Ferris, but could see none like him. From where I stood it was hard to tell one man from another, and the great guns were all in a fume. I wiped my hands on my red jacket. It was caked in filth and I recalled my wedding coat, Peter fastening the mother-of-pearl buttons and calling me a prince. Suddenly hungry to look on the coat again, I rummaged for it in my snapsack. It was gone. Most likely it had been stolen at Winchester and the buttons cut off. So it was that I lost my last remembrance of a happier time, of which there was now not a thread left.
When I got back there was another standing in line with me, holding Price’s abandoned pike. At first I did not know Philip through his mask of mud and smuts.
‘I thought you were muskets?’ I asked, taking up my own weapon. I did not want his company.
‘Blew up. Last night.’
‘But you’re not hurt.’
‘Hugh had it at the time. He’s lost a hand.’
I marvelled at the ill chance of this world, that saved Philip and maimed Hugh. To the lucky man I said, ‘But you can’t just come to us!’
This he ignored. There was a bursting sound as the cannon went off again, and Philip shouted, ‘Like Winchester.’
‘How so?’
‘Made a hole wide enough for thirty to enter abreast. In a day, that was.’
‘Then I’d say this is different.’
‘We’ll get in, never fear.’ He smiled at me. ‘They’ll hang, draw and quarter the priests.’
I did not care to answer. Rain came down heavily; Philip turned up his cheeks to the sky and let the downpour rinse away the mud. He had a sweet young face full of kindness, God help any prisoner or defenceless woman who trusted in it. Ferris, in contrast, must look a devil by now, his wound red and smarting from the smoke. I remembered the story about his drowning in blood at Bristol.
‘There’s your mate,’ said Philip, pointing.
My heart leapt: I strained to follow his finger, but saw only Nathan.
‘Well, well!’ Philip raised an eyebrow. ‘He’s coming your way.’
In that moment I felt I could humble myself as Ferris had asked, and waved to the boy, but he failed to notice me. Nathan was unhelmeted, his delicate features tensed as if he were distracted by some fear. His wet hair showed almost black against his neck and forehead.
‘Pretty little piece, isn’t he?’ asked Philip. ‘You know what they say about him?’
At last the lad saw me. His eyes narrowed, then he turned his head to one side and moved away from us.
‘Mind this,’ I ordered Philip, and put my pike into his free hand.
He gave an oily wink.
‘Nathan! Nathan!’ I shouldered my way through the ranks towards his red coat, which was a recent issue and still bright enough to stand out. When I finally laid hand on his shoulder he twisted away, his face pouting and pulling like that of a young child.
‘Be easy, man, I want only—’
‘He’s on the guns, Rupert.’
‘I know. He’s not the one I want.’
‘I haven’t seen him,’ he went on without listening, ‘since you sat with us last night.’
‘Hear me, Nathan! I am come to talk to you, to say I am sorry for – for the hasty words I spoke. Be so good as to forgive them.’
Cough as I might, my voice would not act the lie for me, but clanged hard and flat. I could abase myself when alone with Ferris, yet in the company of the boy himself, his twisting and whining stirred me up again. Softening my tone as much as I could, I added, ‘Ferris said he would bear you my apology.’
‘Aye,’ he muttered. ‘Many thanks, I must be gone—’
‘Nathan!’ I placed a hand on my heart. ‘Did not Ferris tell you?’
‘I swear, I’ve not seen him.’ Nathan pulled away from me. ‘Let me go now, don’t hurt me.’
‘I am suing for pardon, why should I hurt you?’
The words which I had meant for gentle came spiked with exasperation at his stupidity. I took him by the shoulders to compel attention.
‘Please, Jacob! Let me go!’
‘By Christ, Nathan—’ I stopped.
A wail escaped him. Too late, he clapped both hands to his mouth.
Rage beat up from my belly. Gritting my teeth to hold it in, I put the question as if to a child: ‘Who said my name was Jacob?’
The goose had not the wit to run but stood shaking, hands dropped now and limp as gloves.
‘It was Fat Tommy.’ I shook him. ‘Wasn’t it?’
A couple of men near us stepped closer; I turned to them. ‘Private quarrel, friends; you see I do no more than put a question.’
‘He’s a murderer! He’s going to kill me!’ shrieked the little fool.
I loosed his shoulders, spreading my hands to show myself unarmed, and laughed to the onlookers. ‘He’s a boy, gentlemen, though you might not think it seeing him thus afflicted with the mother.’ I appealed to them whether they had seen me do the lad any harm, whether he showed a bloody lip or a bruise anywhere. They looked at Ferris’s sprig, at his trembling mouth and his tears just starting, and laughed along with me.
‘Pray witness our talk, gentlemen. Now, Nathan,’ I took hold of him once more, as the cat takes back the mouse, ‘look at me.’ I knew he would not be able to do so; he tried, but winced away.
‘Look at me,’ and I tightened my grip on his arms until it was sure to give pain. When he raised his face to mine I slackened the hold – not too much – and softly went on, ‘It was Fat Tommy. You see I know already.’
Nathan sniffed back phlegm and tears. ‘What will you do to him?’
‘Nothing. What else did he tell you?’
He again looked away, down to the ground, black lashes standing out against the bluish skin beneath his eyes. I ached to strangle him.
‘Has he frighted you with some tale about me?’
Nathan shook his head. When next he forced himself to meet my gaze I saw the ghost of Chris Walshe, pleading and terrified. There was no doubt in my mind that he knew, and it must follow that Ferris knew also.
I let go of his arms. ‘Tommy is a wicked liar,’ I said for the benefit of the men still listening. ‘In proof of which, go your way in peace.’
He ran off, and I stayed a minute gaining command of myself. I could hear Tommy’s gloating voice lingering on Walshe’s wounds and on the last agony of Mervyn Roche, Nathan adding his squeaks the while: He pulled a knife on me! He’ll have us all poisoned! until between them they had killed every last kindness in Ferris. I had much to repay these two. I would wait my chance during the assault, when my friend would be none the wiser.
The rain had slackened. I tramped and elbowed my way back to Philip who, being unequal to the two pikes, had stuck them upright into the mud.
He grinned at me. ‘No breach as yet.’
I grinned back. ‘What were you telling me about that lad? The pretty little piece.’
‘It’s not what I say, it’s what they all say. He’s more girl than boy.’
‘Are you saying that I use him as a girl?’ I kept smiling, and at the same time pushed him over backwards.
‘No!’ he shouted from the ground. ‘Not you.’ He scrambled up quickly, and I let him; I could easily knock him back again.
‘Who then?’ I demanded.
His face grew sly. ‘Don’t know as any names were mentioned.’
‘Who says this?’
‘Can’t remember who told me. Rumour’s a wicked thing.’
‘Your days as a pikeman are over,’ I said. ‘Go and be something else, or you won’t get through the siege.’ A couple of good kicks and he was face down in the ooze. He rose spitting, the ground sucking at him as he staggered away from me.
‘Ask your dear friend Mistress Lilly.’ It was sprayed from scarlet lips in a beard of mud. I lunged at him and he dodged between two men and ran.
They hanged men who were caught together. When I was eight I hid behind my father as they roped up a fellow, grinning and misshapen, perhaps an idiot; the word sodomite came to me from the crowd but no other man was with him. He waited, raised above the people, his hands bound behind his back, while the executioners readied the other prisoner: a witch, bonnetless and with bloody patches on her scalp. One held her upright on the stool while the other fitted the noose. Her head fell forward onto her chest, giving him some difficulty, but he at last fumbled the rope into place. I saw the man in front of me scratch his arse and move forward, blocking my view. Then the people about us gasped, and laughed. My father swung round and lifted me. I saw the two of them thrash against the air. The woman’s eyes were crossed and her tongue lolled from her mouth; this it was that made the people laugh. My father lowered me and led me away. I looked back before we turned the corner and saw them dangling black against the sky like the crows our gardener nailed to the trees at home.
‘What’s a sodomite?’ I asked.
‘One who mocks God and Nature.’ His lips closed tight.
‘What will become of them?’ I meant the corpses.
‘You know your Scripture,’ Father answered me. ‘They shall be cast into the pit.’
I did know. It meant burning, the worst pain there was. In Hell, though dead, you were as if alive, and you felt everything.
The rain came on again. The heat of my rage once abated, a leaden cold weighed on me. If I died of the flux, then farewell to Caro, Zeb, Izzy, Ferris. I ought to be more afraid of God, I knew it even then, but all my fears ran on what I had heard. That meant damnation: the soul insensible of grace and sin alike, following blindly its own rutted track to Hell. Instead of considering my eternal salvation, I picked at my filthy fear as a hungry man picks a fowl’s carcass. Ferris and Nathan, it was true, was false. I would have given ten years of my life for Isaiah’s advice. One thing I did at last recall: he had said that a man’s character should be weighed along with his counsel. Philip had no character to speak of. Thus I resolved to consider it, but too late: the poison blade once entered, the venom was eating deep within. I stood in icy rain and up to my knees in mud, my garments chafing whenever I moved an inch, and neither felt nor saw anything of the field before me.
What I did see were pictures, each held before my eyes an instant and then replaced by another: the brightness in Nathan’s face as he laid his arm about Ferris’s shoulders, my friend’s smile as he told Nathan to keep praying for him. Again I saw them push at one another, like boys that roll on the grass, fighting in play; again I heard that laughter which had shut me out.
And then came the last pictures, the terrible ones. I felt these coming and tried to hold out against them, against the pawing and the licking and the – the rest of it. Ferris and Nathan were all over me, they were in my mouth, they closed over my head as the pond had closed over Walshe.
For perhaps an hour I stood scarce knowing where I was or what I did. The Voice visited me once without warning, and jeered, They play their game beneath your nose.
There is not opportunity, I answered silently, and in saying it at once saw where the opportunities lay. The Voice was already gone, leaving me in a pitiful state, and not only for what it had revealed.
There was in this – intelligence – something that was not like my father. Though he had warned me when I was a boy of the weakness and corruption of the flesh, yet his talk was mainly of clean living, of the sweet perfume of chastity, pleasing to God in a man as in a maid. Never had I heard him, even in impressing upon me the force of temptation, dwell lasciviously upon the sins of any person, no, not a sinner in the Bible, much less upon the shame of one known to me. He was a man of chaste and godly conversation, too wise to sully or heat a young man by a minute recitation of vice.
I bethought me of other things the Voice had said of late, and grew still more anguished when I recalled its promptings in the wood. Had it not fired me, at a moment when my blood was already up, with a furious thirst for mastery? It was not righteousness, and as I forced myself on the woman I loved, tearing her, the Voice had uttered no word of reproach.
Show him what becomes of a boy—
At this last memory I grew cold as the lad himself, though the sweat burst out all over for sheer terror. The thing was horribly of a piece. I knew now whose Voice spoke in my head and heart; who it was that hunted me for one of His.
The sky grew dusk and still the bombardment went on. Ferris might be shot or half dead of the flux for all I knew. Standing fire meant exposure to flying shards which cut into men more cruelly than any sword: it was one of these jagged pieces which had laid open his cheek at Winchester. From time to time gunners were brought past on hurdles, and then I was filled with agony lest I should spy him among those, pulped or gutted, for whom death could not come fast enough.
I walked in a daze to one of the fires where two men were saying the walls would heal themselves in the night, Basing being protected by charms and the power of Satan. A third rebuked them, saying such superstitious trash was not fit to be uttered save by the priests within. ‘We will have them, my lads,’ said he, ‘never fear.’
The ration was handed out – bread, butter and beef – and, having eaten it alone, I pulled my coat round me and lay down where someone had spread straw over the mud. Though my muscles lacked strength, being constantly stiff and chilled, I was now grown half used to wet clothes and to sleeping in boots. These last were more use than latchets, which in the boggy ground could be sucked clean off your feet.
There was a bang, then screams; looking round I saw a man hold up the bleeding stumps of his fingers in the firelight, while a second nearby had his hands clasped to his face. Another gun blown apart. Comrades gathered round the one whose face was covered, trying to prise his hands away and gritting their teeth in distress, while the man with no fingers seemed more surprised than pained. I guessed he would not feel it awhile, and then would come the torment. Philip, having passed Hugh the weapon which took off his hand, had left him. I hoped Hugh’s other friends might prove more loving.
The man who had spoken of superstitious trash sat down next to me, his ration
on his lap. I watched him chew doggedly on the beef and cheat, licking his fingers so as not to lose so much as a skin of grease. He was a greybeard and had the look of one that had served before. I marvelled that a man who had survived one war would wish to fight another.
The old soldier smiled to see me bedded on the straw. ‘Not long now, friend, before you can lie between sheets.’
‘I have forgotten what they feel like,’ I answered. ‘Tell me, will the artillery go on much longer?’
‘They’ll be leaving off soon.’
At that I pulled myself into a sitting position. ‘Some say we’ll be in there tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps. I wager we’ll see splits in the wall at least. And once the thing’s well opened up – no quarter!’ He punched the palm of his hand and frowned. ‘Mind you, I could wish us not so weakened with the flux.’
‘All this lying out in the rain.’
He nodded. ‘The Scots do better. They have tents for their men.’
‘Truly?’ I had not thought that savage folk would take such care.
‘Truly. This damnable weather is enough to turn a man Cavalier,’ he went on.
‘How, turn Cavalier?’
‘For a leaguer-lady to bed down with. Devil take the lust, what I crave is the warmth!’ He laughed. The last thing I wanted to recall was my lying down with a woman, but I laughed too.
The guns quietened. Lights showed in the windows of Basing-House and I wondered what the Papists saw when they looked upon us, crawling wet and muddy over the earth. A young lad came and put some logs on the fire. I was mighty grateful, for my hands were dead meat. Rising, I fanned up a blaze with my coat, and in doing so saw Ferris cross on the other side of the flames.
‘Ferris, man, stay!’
He stopped and turned. I ran up to him at once but faltered when I saw his look.
‘What ails you, Ferris? Is your face worse?’
‘I told you to treat Nat kindly,’ he said.
‘I begged his pardon!’
‘Indeed. His arms are all bruises.’
