Simon (14 page)

‘If you said that you repented of your conduct, and no longer felt any desire for revenge now that you had had time to think, can’t you see that that would help to make a good impression?’ Simon demanded at last. But he knew what the answer would be.

‘The words of the liar are abomination in the sight of the Lord,’ said Corporal Relf. ‘I repent of nothing, who am an avenging sword in the hand of the Almighty, for the smiting of the evil-doer!’

‘No, I didn’t think you did,’ Simon said miserably, staring at the sodden floor. Then he looked up. ‘I must be going now, Zeal. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Aye, in the morning, sir.’

Suddenly they gripped hands; and then Simon went out into the soft June dusk, and the sentry re-secured the loop-holed door behind him.

Next morning, in the long dining-room of the Manor House, Corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf was tried by Regimental Court Martial for the crime of desertion in time of war. Ever afterwards, Simon remembered the scene: the grave faces of the
captains seated in order of seniority down the long, leather-covered table, with Major Disbrow, in his place as President of the Court, at the head; the few lieutenants and cornets who were present, standing, like himself, bareheaded behind their betters; the prisoner, decently scarlet-coated once more, standing between his guards like a disdainful prophet. And from the panelled walls, portraits of women in farthingales and men in silk and steel looked down on the unfamiliar scene.

The disposition had been read, and Major Disbrow had begun to interrogate the prisoner. In answer to a quick fire of questions, Corporal Relf told his story once more, his replies as quick and clipped as the questions. Evidently he was keeping a strong hold on himself. Witnesses were called: the officer of the patrol who had brought him in; Simon himself, to testify to the prisoner’s character and previous conduct. He heard his own voice: ‘A most reliable man—strong sense of duty—great provocation—couldn’t wish for a better Corporal.’ He was doing his best for Corporal Relf, fighting for him to the last steps of Cæsar’s throne; but he could not alter facts, and the facts were deadly.

And now the time had come for the Court to be cleared. Prisoner, witnesses and onlookers passed out into the hall, and the door closed behind them; and when they returned, Simon knew, it would be to hear Corporal Relf condemned and sentenced. Behind the closed door, now, Major Disbrow would be turning to the junior captain present, asking ‘Guilty or innocent, Captain Mostyn?’

And there was only one answer to that question. ‘Guilty.’

‘Guilty.’ Simon seemed to hear the word falling inexorably as the strokes of a clock striking for an execution. Suddenly the crowded hall began to press inward, stifling him until he could hardly breathe. It was as though he, and not Zeal, was the prisoner. Close beside him the house door stood open to the summer day, and scarcely realizing what he was doing, he turned and made for the open air, and having reached it, stood leaning against the house wall, breathing quickly as though he had been running.

‘Captain Marjory?’

‘Guilty.’

This time he really did hear it. He looked up with a start, narrowing his eyes in the sunlight, and saw what he had not noticed from inside the makeshift court-room; that one of the mullioned windows was a little open. And he was standing almost directly under it. He supposed he ought to move away, but he did not: he remained where he was, flattened against the wall and listening with strained intensity to the murmur of voices beyond the window.

Ralf Marjory was the senior captain, his verdict the last to be given, and they were discussing the sentence now; and Simon seemed to hear above the voices of the Court, the words of one of the Articles of War, read to the assembled Companies every pay day. ‘No man shall depart a mile out of the camp without licence, under pain of death.’ That sentence was rare, in the Ironside Regiments, he knew, for among them disgrace was held a worse punishment than death, and a deserter was usually flogged and turned adrift as a renegade. And yet, there
had
been disorders among the newer regiments since they left Windsor, and Cromwell’s ‘Lovely Company’ must be all the more above reproach in consequence. Simon knew by now the value of example.

The Court Martial was having difficulty in reaching a decision, and the argument dragged on. A plot of heliotrope grew under the window, murmurous with bees, and their droning seemed to make a fine web of sound through which Simon heard voice answering voice. There was a surprising amount of sympathy, especially among the younger captains, for a man who had been wronged, and deserted to avenge the wrong. The Ironsides were not of a forgiving nature; and Simon found his hopes rising a little as he listened. For what seemed a long while, Corporal Relf’s fate hung in the balance. Then Captain Mostyn’s voice sounded, raising a new difficulty. ‘If we turn him adrift, he’ll go straight off after this revenge of his.’

‘Is yon any concern of ours?’ It was Ralf Marjory who spoke. Simon knew his voice by the Yorkshire burr.

‘I think it is the concern of this Court to decide whether or not to let murder loose against one of God’s creatures.’

‘Hang him, then; it’s all one to me.’

‘You cannot hang a man because you don’t know what to do with him,’ snapped Captain Bennet. ‘That is rank injustice, and injustice stinks in the nostrils of the Almighty.’

Major Disbrow’s voice, in cool contrast to the heated tones that had begun to rise around the table, now put in the President’s word. ‘Gentlemen, there is a third possible course.’

There followed an instant of absolute silence. Only the bees zoomed among the mauve spikes of the heliotrope. Then the cool voice went on. ‘I suggest that the more usual sentence be given, with this difference: that instead of being turned off as a renegade, the prisoner be degraded from the rank of Corporal and transferred from the Regiment he has disgraced, to the Pioneers.’

Another moment of silence, while this sunk in. The Pioneers, save for a few brilliant officers, were the scum of the New Model. Many of them were foreign mercenaries who would fight for anyone who paid them; and to them too fell all the most unpleasant jobs in the Army. It was not at all uncommon for men from prouder regiments to be transferred to them as a punishment, for which reason they were strongly guarded against escape. It meant almost as much disgrace as being turned off altogether, but on the other hand, it did give to a man so disgraced the chance to redeem himself by good service.

Simon scarcely breathed during the discussion of details which followed. He could not see the show of hands when the vote was taken, and Major Disbrow’s coolly spoken ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ told him nothing, save that the Court’s deliberations were over. He could only hope, desperately, sickeningly, as he turned back to the crowded hall. The inner door was already opening, and he was just in time to file back with the rest into the court-room, and take up his place among the other cornets, before Corporal Relf was brought back, marching between his guards, with head up and eyes staring woodenly in front of him as though he were on parade.

He came to a halt; and Major Disbrow rose to pronounce sentence.

‘Prisoner, this Court Martial finds you guilty of the heinous crime of desertion in time of war, and sentences you to receive
one hundred lashes at the pikes, in the presence of your old Regiment. It further decrees that after your sentence has been carried out, you shall be transferred from the aforesaid Regiment, to serve henceforth as a private in the Pioneers.’

Even as relief flooded over Simon, he saw Zeal-for-the-Lord go very white, and then flush crimson. He never knew what his old Corporal had really expected, but assuredly it was not this. He took one forward step, against the grasp of his guards, and the hold he had kept upon himself up to now broke and was swept away.

‘Unjust! Unjust!’ he cried. ‘Woe to them that decree unrighteous decrees!’

‘The decree of this Court Martial is not only just, but uncommonly merciful.’ Major Disbrow’s voice cut across his railing like a whip-lash. ‘May I remind you that you are a tried and condemned deserter?’

‘Was I not justified in my deserting? I who am an instrument of Vengeance in the hand of the Lord, against one that is marked for the Burning Pit?’ The guards each held an arm of him now, but he tore himself free, and the torrent of his words poured on. ‘What saith the Good Book concerning Vengeance? “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot”—’

Again Major Disbrow’s voice cut across his. ‘I also can quote from the Good Book. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Take him away, guards.’

The guards had a good grip on him this time; they were two to one, and if he was a powerful man, so were they. His arms were twisted behind him, and he was half thrown as they wrenched him round; but even after the door had crashed shut behind him, the men in the dining-room heard his voice, rising to a great sobbing cry: ‘Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for—’

Another door crashed, and the raving voice was stilled.

Three hours later, before the whole Regiment drawn up in a hollow square to witness it, the sentence was carried out. The sun had gone in, and a little chill wind stirred the silken folds of the Standards, as Corporal Relf was marched past his old troop, to the triangle of pikes where the farrier sergeants stood ready to carry out the sentence, with Major Disbrow and the surgeon
beside them. Simon, standing rigidly in his place, saw the red coat with its proud blue facings dragged over Zeal-for-the-Lord’s head, in the small terrible ceremony by which a man was degraded from his rank. He saw the tall figure stripped to the waist, and lashed to the triangle; saw the first farrier step forward with the terrible cat-o’-nine tails in his hand.

Simon had seen men flogged before, and hated the sight, but it had never before been a man of his own troop, and it had not sickened him as it did now. He shut his eyes and clenched his teeth; and in his self-made shell of darkness he heard the hiss and shock of every stroke, that seemed to fall on something quick and flinching within himself. But he heard no cry, until at last old David Morrison stepped forward with upraised hand to stop the punishment, eleven strokes before the end; and he opened his eyes to see the unconscious figure taken down from the triangle. It looked more like a puppet than a living man, a limp puppet from which the sawdust had drained away. But sawdust is not crimson.

A few minutes later, Zeal-for-the-Lord had been carried off to have his back dressed with brine, and Simon marched his men away, and having done so, went down in a hurry to the ditch beyond the regimental horse-lines. There, his shame hidden by the thick-growing willow-herb and fools-parsley, he was very sick indeed.

Zeal-for-the-Lord never served in the Pioneers. He went out through the field-hospital window in the early hours of the following morning, with his back like raw meat, and took to the wild. This time no patrol rounded him up.

Two days later, when the Army broke camp and marched south, no one saw the man who stood among the oak woods crowning a nearby hill, to watch them go. A tall wild figure with eyes of dark flame in a face the colour of cold ash, who stood motionless as the oak trunks around him, gazing down along the valley road until the last dust of the rearguard had settled on to the whitened hedgerows, and the distant lilt of fifes and drums was gone into the hum of bees among the clover bloom. Then he shook savage fists after them, and with a strange broken cry, turned and plunged away into the green woodland shadows, startling the pigeons as he went.

THE BATTLE OF
Naseby had lost the Midlands to the King; and while he clung uncertainly with his broken troops to the Welsh Border, Fairfax marched the New Model south to deal with General Lord Goring, who was still besieging Taunton. The Royalist General, getting word of his advance, raised the siege and took up new positions along the valleys of the Yeo and the Parrot, and through the first hot days of July the two Generals manœuvred like chess-players looking for an opening. But that was a game at which My Lord Goring was no match for Fairfax and Cromwell. And on the morning of 10 July the New Model was across the Yeo and had come up with the main Royalist Army, half a mile or so from the little market town of Langport, astride the road to Bridgwater and the West.

It was a close heavy day, with thunder in the air, and the thick veiled sunshine that often comes before a storm. Simon, heading for the rearguard with a message from the Commander-in-Chief for Colonel Hammond, who had taken over command of the Foot while Daddy Skippon was laid low, wiped his forehead below the burning rim of his steel cap, and saw the heat dancing like a midge-cloud over the low green country. The troops were deploying for action. Horse moving up to the Van. Foot massing in the Rear. On the slightly rising ground in the centre, as Simon rode by, the great thirty-pounder culverin were already massed, and the eight-horse gun teams being led off, and a moment later he had to rein aside as the light guns—the drakes and sakers—went by with a shout and the crack of a whiplash; little deadly guns, each with two horses harnessed to the limbers of the grey gun-carriages, and their crew clinging on behind. After them went an ammunition wagon, lurching over the boggy ground, the heavy draft-horses straining into their collars, the driver
leaning forward to encourage them, as perhaps he had done not long since, when he and his team were hauling timber or carting hay on some quiet farm of the Blackmoor Vale.

When, his message safely delivered, Simon re-passed one of the batteries a few minutes later, the limbers had been cast off and the horses led aside, powder and ball were in place behind each gun, and the crews standing ready for action. He edged Scarlet between a dyke and an ammunition wagon returning empty, skirted the flank of the massing Cavalry, and reached the place where Fairfax sat his black charger with his staff around him.

‘Message delivered, sir,’ he reported; and being given leave to rejoin his own Troop, wheeled his mount, looking for his Troop Standard among the many that hung limp in the heavy air above the squadrons. He found it without much trouble and edged Scarlet into place among the sliding horses that were being got into line.