As Meat Loves Salt (25 page)

Opposite to me I saw a great fair-headed fellow all plumes, and while he was engaged with another of ours I put my entire might into driving the sword into his neck. So did we fell him between us. Many times was I heartily glad of my helmet. One of theirs tried to lop off my hand — all he could reach — and left me with a bloody cut across the knuckles, which I saw but felt not. Sweat ran into my eyes. The place rang with clashes and screams; slowly we moved forwards, slowly the enemy gave ground. As they dropped, more would present themselves, and I saw there must be an army of them hidden in the inner fastnesses of the house, where we would have to smoke them out.

It was scarce a time for looking about me, but even a glance showed that Basing far excelled its fabled greatness, and made our old house, which I had thought so rich, a dungheap in comparison. The great hall by torchlight was now a gilded slaughterhouse, with pictures everywhere, filthy idolatries in paint and in stone. I glanced up in blinking the warm water from my eyes and saw wood carved fine as lace. Velvet and gold tissue ran with gore or were caught on pikes and torn from the walls: men were blown up and fell in gobbets through jewelled windows. I saw one soldier ram a sword down another's throat, and heard the scream grow shrill and then choke off as the blade was

driven home. Above them, high on the far wall, a marble Christ pale in death looked down from the cross upon His people.

All this time I continued pushing blindly forward, for there was nothing else to be done, cutting at a man here, being shouldered by another there. A burning in my thigh told me that I had been stabbed; though badly frighted and harassed by pain, I was unable to examine any of my wounds for fear of catching worse. Drill, which I had thought such war-like preparation, had been a country dance to this.

Paulet's men being at last unable to stem the flow, our soldiers rushed the stairs, swords out. I let myself be borne up with them, and found another fight going on before some chamber doors. Servants and gentlemen of the household barred the way, but being utterly unequal to so many adversaries they were spitted against the door and kicked aside. We shouldered the panels until the bolts burst off. There was a wailing from the inside, and I knew we had found the women of the household. They huddled together like rabbits in corn: I did not want to touch them. I looked round quickly for Philip and saw him not. I little doubted to see the females violently abused before my eyes, but the men dragged them out and down the stairs. Some, resisting, were kicked from the top step to the bottom and their screams were fit to tear flesh. An old woman's leg was shattered by the fall, and I saw her near the bottom of the steps, trying to crawl between men's feet as they gouged one another.

More men, come up with me by this time, broke open the door of another apartment and found therein an old man in strange priestly garments and a young woman, both on their knees before an idol in manifest defiance of God's commandments. The woman was ill dressed for prayer, in a pale green dress the colour of milk infused with mint, gleaming like metal in the candlelight and cut so low that she might almost have suckled a child without disarranging it; and in this wise she had knelt before God. I saw a beauty in her, in the black gypsy eyes and hair of bronze, but also that arrogance of carriage which has been the downfall of many in these times, and so it was hers.

One of our lads made to take captive the man, and seeing him reach towards a chest, thought it best not to wait to see what was

within, and fired first. There was a great scream from the wench as she saw the old man wounded and clutching at his shoulder; she jumped up and commenced railing, calling us 'Roundheads' and 'traitors'.

A soldier straightway gave her his sword across the head. She gasped, and clapped her hand to the wound; and then he ran her through. I heard the crunch of the blade, saw it disappear into her, and yet she remained standing, looking into his face, and reached down softly, as if to adjust some portion of her dress, until her fingers circled the steel. He at once wrenched it out, slitting her hand, upon which she held the bleeding palm up to her face and her lips worked as if she would cry. There was red coming down her neck from under her hair, and I saw a blotch spreading through the greenish, milky cloth over her belly. Suddenly blood streamed out from under her skirts. The old man shrieked like a dog that is scalded. The soldier whose work it was glared upon the girl as if he could have torn her in pieces for outright detestation. She looked at me, seeming to appeal for help, then softly folded downwards until she laid her cheek on the carpet. I watched her lips draw back and her shoulders rise and fall. The back of the gown was beginning to stain.

The man turned to the rest of us. 'And so will the proud and vainglorious be utterly pulled down and vanquished!' His voice trembled with passion; indeed, his whole body shook as if he had encountered with Satan himself. I nodded, feeling nothing but intense cold within me.

'Tie the old one,' he ordered.

I could see nothing to tie him with. Another man prodded with his sword at the girl's silk girdle, now clotted with blood. Her hair brushed my hand as I pulled at the fastening. At last it was off and I began tying the prisoner. Then the first soldier, still not finished, knelt and stripped her of every garment until she was naked under the old man's eyes.

I finished binding the priest. Speechless and wracked with dry heaves, he was left for the time being to contemplate the corpse. The woman's destroyer, having tied her dress round his neck by the sleeves so that it hung from his back like a cloak, went out 'to hunt up more

wolves', the others following. I leant against the wall, fingering my wounded thigh and sweating, until I could stand straight. When I left the old man's gaze followed me to the door.

There were many passageways, many chambers leading off each. Men surged back and forth, pushing prisoners before them, slashing the images in their great carven frames, shattering the statues. I saw one soldier with strings of bloody pearls about his neck. Others bore off plate and cloth, or tore jewels from women's ears. They tripped over the dead and dying, slipped on their blood and vomit, trampled their intestines. The air was foul beyond anything. I beat off a man who hacked at me, until he thought better of it and went to find someone smaller.

Directly beside me was another door. Opening it, I found myself in an empty bedchamber with a key, which I turned, on the inside of the lock. The urge to piss again came violently upon me, so I stood next the window, looking out of it as I relieved myself against the wall. The scene outside blurred and I understood by this that tears were rising in my eyes, but knew it in a blank, insensible fashion, like an idiot that cannot say why he laughs or weeps.

The window gave onto the courtyard, which was evidently under our control. Below me stood four priests, roped together; in another corner huddled the flock of women, now stripped to their shifts. I could not see the one with the broken leg. Their dresses were heaped upon a cart, and men were bringing other garments out of the house to add to the pile. A feeble daylight made it possible to pick out the colours of the pillaged clothing, but it was still bitterly cold. On the ground lay some old sick creature in a blanket, his naked legs like string.

There was a door opposite: I went through it and found myself in a short corridor which was eerily empty, though ringing with the sounds of the most ferocious combat on all sides. At the far end there was a flight of stairs leading up. I went up to the foot of the steps; it was evident by the noise and the trembling of the ceiling that there was fierce fighting above, and the Marquess's men by no means vanquished even yet. I knew I should mount, and wanted more than anything to stay where I was.

As I hesitated, there was a
clang
of metal and two men came rolling and slithering down, gasping as the stairtreads battered face and back. One's head was caked in mud and blood, and he had lost his helmet, but I could see by his garb that he was one of ours. The other, big and thickset, seemed a manservant, and getting the better of it. They had both lost their weapons and had fallen to grappling one another, but though they were roughly of a height our soldier was much slighter in build and Paulet's man, having got on top of him, commenced banging his skull against the stairs.

I came up behind the big fellow, clutching my knife, and got astride his legs, then seized his hair from behind, dragging his head back. He tilted his face towards me and I drove the knife under his ear, pulling it through the flesh to the other side of his throat so that my hand ached. There was a smell of iron. He fell forwards onto the one beneath, who turned his head aside, mouth closed against the warmth spilling onto him. A snorting, bubbling sound came from the Papist, but he continued to struggle, trying to throw me off. I held on tight and put the knife in him again, in the back; he cried out something that might have been 'Mercy' but we were long past that. His war ended in a drumming of the feet.

The smaller one pushed his dead opponent's face away from his own. I knelt back, dragging the body aside, and let the Parliament man sit up to wipe the fresh blood from his chaps onto a sleeve. A part of the mud came with it, and I started. There was something - the lips—

'God requite you!' he wheezed. His eyes were clenched shut, tears seeping from under gummy lids. I strained to place the broken, breathless voice. Then, as I stared at the slime plastered over hair and face, the eyes unsealed and showed themselves flower blue.

Nathan.

It was hard to breathe for the lurching of my heart; the throat's drag on the blade still stiffened my arm; my thighs remembered the dying man's struggle against their embrace.

Tears and blood ran off Nathan's chin. He rocked back and forth in an attempt to rise, but was too beaten to pull himself up.

'Rupert, God bless you!'He held out a palsied hand to me. 'Broth-

er, saviour.' The jewel eyes turned full on mine, not with the crafty glance of the night before but with a look of adoration. That look coming after the girl's death staggered me, drove me back. I knew it for what it was, a momentary outpouring of his love for his own life, yet despite myself the surge in my flesh began to ebb. I stood baffled, hand on my sword. A group of our soldiers burst into the corridor at the far end.

'Jesus fights on your side all right,' I said, frighted at the cracked sound of my own voice. 'Where's your weapon?'

'At the top of the steps. I'll fetch it.'

I helped the boy to his feet, then ran away from him towards the new arrivals who were trying all the doors to see if any Papists lurked within. There was banging and screaming from above. I burst into a room on the right: a bedchamber, empty and cold. Even against that grim and cloudy sky the windows shone bright, with three medallions in fine scarlet glass let into the leads. I let out a great bellowing sob, and taking up a stool from the bedside, I hurled it straight through the middle design, the finest. Glass fell to the floor like drops of blood.

A cry went up from outside and I ran to the broken pane. People below glared up at me. Glittering scraps lay on the stones, and among them the stool, still in one piece. I stepped back into the room. The shards put me in mind of Sir Bastard's goblet; I took up one of them and read scratched upon it,
Loyaute.
Snatching up a linen cap that lay on the bed, I carefully wrapped the glass, and laid it in my bosom. As I did so a scarlet blot formed on the linen, and I understood for the first time that the liquid stinging my eyes was not sweat: my shaking fingers found a split across my forehead to make me a pair with Ferris. Someone had dealt me a cut right under the edge of the helmet without my feeling it. A rising roar warned me that the corridor was filling up again, and I pushed out into a rush of men heading back towards the courtyard.

The idolaters, flushed from every corner of the place, were being herded outside. They staggered, some howling with burnt flesh from powder and shot, others with broken heads or limbs. The soldiers showed them no mercy. I saw one man, blinded, rest against the wall

and one of the New Model break his nose with a musket butt to teach him more speed. Even those who were not much hurt wept openly as they were forced along, guessing what tenderness would be shown them. Our men, too, bore marks of hard fighting. I was somewhat ashamed to have had an easy time of it, and so I made a show of goading the captives on their way.

Soldiers bustled about in the cold, stripping or tying folk according to the will of the officers. I wandered from group to group and heard men say there would be nigh on three hundred prisoners, though I could not see anything like so many.

'Will they, be killed?' I asked the man who had charge of the four priests.

'Not here. They'll be sent to London.'

I knew what that meant: they were to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The guard told me that several Papist priests were already dead in the assault. 'They had better fortune than these,' he added, and I thought there was pity in him. He went on, 'There's every degree of prisoner. Did you see the old rat? Naked under the blanket?'

I nodded, remembering the frail legs I had seen earlier.

'Inigo Jones,' said the guard, but I could not tell who Inigo Jones might be.

Ferris waved to me across a group of men, beckoning me over.

'Look here,' he said without greeting. He knelt and raised the head of an enemy officer who had been shot in the chest and whose strange, comical face looked to be laughing. The eyes, bold and mocking, outstared anything men could do to him. Ferris thumbed them shut.