Simon (31 page)

Fairfax seated himself without a word at the paper-scattered table, and looked long and searchingly at the three before him. There was a suggestion of triumph in Denzil Wainwright’s bearing that did not seem altogether to please him, and he turned his attention to the prisoners. They were a disreputable pair, haggard with exhaustion, both wet through and mired to the eyebrows, their clothes torn and stained; one with his arm in a sling and the sleeve of his doublet hanging empty, the other with dried blood clotted on his temple. But they stood before him with their heads up, and met his gaze eye to eye, as though they felt no need to be ashamed of themselves. The General was a good judge of men.

Then Amias, who had been fiddling with his sword-belt while they waited below stairs, slipped the buckle free. ‘I regret that owing to my right arm being out of action, I am unable to proffer you my sword in the correct manner,’ he said, and bowing with a gesture as proud as that with which his old hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, might have yielded up his sword to a captor, laid Balin on the table before General Fairfax.

The General put out a hand and touched the hilt in token of acceptance. There was an instant of silence, while still he scanned the faces of the three before him. Then, with a quiet courtesy and not at all as though he were speaking to a prisoner, he asked of Amias his name, rank and regiment.

‘Amias Hannaford, Ensign of Major General Molesworth’s Regiment of Foot.’

‘Thank you, Ensign Hannaford. Are you responsible for setting off the powder stored in the church yonder?’

‘No, sir.’

Fairfax turned to Denzil Wainwright. ‘What grounds are there for making this charge against the prisoner?’

A great weariness was growing on Simon. As in a dream, he saw Denzil produce Trooper Pennithorn like a fairground conjuror producing a rabbit out of a hat. As in a dream, he heard the trooper’s story again. ‘Smelled sort of singed, he did; of burned powder like, and I thought ’twas a bit queer.’

The General glanced an instant at Amias, at the rent and blackened cloth of his doublet, on the side on which the sleeve hung empty. ‘If you thought it was so queer, why did you let him go?’

‘He had the watchword, sir.’

‘Seeing it had been used for a battle-cry, probably half the Royalist Army had it by that time,’ said the General drily. ‘Very good, you may go now,’ and as the crestfallen trooper drew back, he turned again to Denzil. ‘Have you anything to add to that?’

Denzil produced from the breast of his buff coat the length of oiled bed-cord, and laid it before the General. ‘This, sir. It was in the inner pocket of the prisoner’s doublet when I found him. It could be fuse, sir.’

‘It could scarcely be the fuse that blew up the church.’

‘No, sir, but it could have been the piece from which the fuse was cut, if you see what I mean, sir.’

‘I see what you mean. Personally I would rather use a powder trail than anything as slow as this would be.’ Fairfax laid down the cord, and addressed himself to Amias. ‘I do not need to ask you what you were doing when you encountered Trooper Pennithorn.’

‘No, sir. Getting away.’

‘What did you mean by your very peculiar remarks to him?’

‘I did not mean anything in particular. I’d heard the explosion, and guessed it was our magazine going up. I didn’t know about our men being prisoned there—and I was glad that at least there was something of our war supplies that wouldn’t fall into the hands of the King’s enemies.’

‘Good,’ nodded Fairfax. ‘How did you come to have these obvious marks of an explosion on you?’

‘Somebody’s musket blew up,’ Amias said, and his voice was bitter. ‘It must have been a very old musket, ill-cared for, I suppose. The King’s Army, you doubtless know, has been running very short of such things for a long while past.’

General Fairfax leaned forward to touch the length of cord, his bright dark eyes fixed on the other’s face. ‘This is bed-cord, oiled to serve as emergency slow-match. But you are not a musketeer, and so you had no need of slow-match. How did you come to have this in your pocket?’

A small twisted smile curved Amias’s mouth. ‘I used it to mend the cords of my Company’s Colours. They were shot through during the assault. That cord was the first thing that came to hand to mend them, when there was a lull. Later on, when I cut the Colours from their pike for—bringing away, I suppose I stuffed the cord into my pocket without thinking.’

‘You had the Colours with you, then, when you encountered the trooper yonder?’

‘Naturally, sir. I should scarcely be leaving without them.’

‘No,’ said Fairfax, consideringly. ‘No, I imagine not. What did you do with them afterwards?’

‘I hid them.’

‘Where?’

‘I regret, sir, I have forgotten.’

Fairfax nodded. ‘You realize that you have given me no proof of all this? If you could remember where you had hidden the Colours, and they proved to have the cords shot through, it would at least bear out part of your story.’

‘I regret, sir, I think it—most unlikely that I shall remember.’

‘So do I,’ agreed General Fairfax. Then he raised his voice quickly. ‘Orderly, a chair for the prisoner.’

For Amias had suddenly begun to sway on his feet, and his eyes looked blind in the candlelight. A chair was brought, and he crumpled slowly into it, and sat there with drooping head. ‘I beg your—excuse, sir—a little weak,’ he mumbled.

The General left him to recover himself, and turned his attention to Simon’s share in the business. ‘Cornet Wainwright, I should like now to hear your grounds for the charge you have made against Cornet Carey, and also, as a matter of general interest, how you came to hunt him down.’

Still in his dreamy state, Simon heard Denzil’s voice, a little flurried now. ‘Well, sir, when we first heard Trooper Pennithorn’s story, Carey looked—odd—as though he guessed who the man was. Then at about seven o’clock this evening, as I was passing through the Square, I saw him clearly in the light of a lantern, talking very urgently to the local doctor, who has been helping tend the wounded.’

Simon heard the story in snatches, with foggy blanks between. ‘Thought he looked as if he was up to something, so I followed him . . . doubled back while he was in the Doctor’s house, and got a few men together . . . We picked up his trail when he left the garden with the Doctor . . . lost him twice in the woods, but . . .’

Presently he found that the recital was over, and Fairfax had turned on him a very bleak face. ‘Cornet Carey, there is no point in my asking you whether or not you are guilty of the charge, since you have been taken in the act.’

Simon struggled desperately to clear his foggy wits. ‘No, sir.’

‘You know the Articles of War.’

‘“No man shall harbour the enemy, under penalty of death”,’ said Simon, steadily.

‘Have you anything to say to me in your own defence?’

‘No, sir,’ said Simon again.

Amias suddenly raised his head. ‘He always got me out of scrapes in the old days, and it became a habit.’

‘A dangerous habit, seemingly,’ said Fairfax; but all at once there was the hint of a smile in his eyes. ‘I take it that you two are friends of long standing?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said both together.

General Fairfax made an abrupt movement in his chair, and reached for the embroidered bell-pull beside the hearth. ‘This matter of the magazine will of course have to be gone into in the normal way. Personally, Ensign Hannaford, I am inclined to accept your story; but it is for the Court of Inquiry to decide, and in the meantime you will understand that I must give orders for your close confinement. As for you, Cornet Carey—’

But the sentence was never finished, for at that moment the door opened to let in an orderly sergeant with an urgent message.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ said the orderly sergeant, saluting.

‘Yes, Sergeant?’

‘One of the wounded as was dug out of the church last night has come to hisself, sir. Says he knows how it come to be blowed up, sir.’

‘
Does
he?’ said General Fairfax. ‘Very good, Sergeant; I’ll be along shortly.’

‘Beg pardon, sir, the Doctor says he can’t last many minutes.’

FAIRFAX GOT UP,
reaching for his sword, which hung from the chair back. ‘It seems that this may alter the complexion of certain matters we have been discussing,’ he said, as he belted it on. ‘Cornet Carey, you had better come with me, since your friend, whom it chiefly concerns, is in no state to do so,’ and he turned to the door, asking of the sergeant as he passed out to the stairhead, ‘Where is the man?’

‘Only in the long parlour, below stairs, sir.’

Close behind the General, and with the strange dreaminess coming between him and his own feet, so that he had to walk carefully, Simon went downstairs and turned into the long inner room, where the furniture had been pushed aside, and wounded men were bedded down in duffle blankets all over the sanded floor. A horn lantern hung from the rafters and under it, his Bible held so that the light fell on the pages, stood Chaplain Joshua Sprigg, his black gown and Geneva bands sadly rumpled, for he had been working among the wounded since the previous night. He was reading aloud as they entered, his voice filling the crowded room.

‘“I have smitten you with blasting and mildew. I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt. Your young men have I slain with the sword, and have taken away your horses, and I have made the stink of your camp to come up unto your nostrils. Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.”’

Not a yard off, quite undisturbed by his thunderings, Mother Trimble sat on her immense haunches, tenderly spooning broth into a wounded Royalist. Friend or foe meant little to Mother Trimble, if he were but hurt or sick.

At the far end of the room, Dr Hannaford was bending over one of the blanket-muffled figures, which lay very still.

Behind Fairfax Simon made his way towards him, and found himself looking down at Zeal-for-the-Lord. Zeal-for-the-Lord, not much marked by the explosion, but most cruelly changed by the months before it that had turned his hair from black to white. Meeting him only in the dark, for the light of the shielded lantern had never reached his face, Simon had not realized the change in him, and it was a few moments before he knew him. Then the dreaminess that had seemed to clog his brain burst like a pricked bubble, and everything became very real again, with clear hard edges. He saw that General Fairfax had not recognized the man at all; there was no particular reason why he should. In the same instant he saw the appeal—no, it was a command—in the eyes of his old Corporal, fixed on his, and he did not betray him.

‘You’re almost too late,’ the Doctor muttered.

Fairfax bent over the still figure, saying quietly, ‘You know what caused the explosion in the powder magazine?’

Zeal did not answer at once. It seemed as though his clear command to Simon had taken all the life that was left in him. ‘We made a clatter getting down from—the bell-tower. The Guard—came in on us,’ he said at last, in a harsh whisper, so faint that it was hard to catch his words. ‘Slow-matches alight, and there—must have been—loose powder.’

The dry whisper trailed into silence; and for a few moments Sir Thomas Fairfax stood looking down at the dying man, with the look of someone trying to lay hold of a half memory. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

A shadowy smile fluttered for an instant on the other’s cracked mouth. ‘Ishmael Watts.’

‘Watts,’ said the chaplain, who had closed his Bible and joined the group. ‘And a desperate villain, sir, by the look of things.’

‘We do not know that,’ said Fairfax. Then, very slowly and clearly, ‘What were you doing, above the magazine?’

No answer.

Joshua Sprigg, convinced that he had to deal with a villain, and bent on bringing him to repentance, far more than on finding out the cause of the explosion, had dropped on his knees beside him. ‘Sinner!’ he thundered. ‘Through you, two hundred souls have gone untimely to their Maker!’

‘A heavy harvest from—a small sowing.’

‘Sowing? What sowing do you speak of?’

Zeal’s lips were scarcely moving. ‘Thirty pounds, all in silver,’ he said. ‘And a white—just thirty pounds.’

‘O vile and wretched man—’ began Joshua Sprigg.

Dr Hannaford looked round with the beginning of an angry protest; but Zeal-for-the-Lord was beyond any reviling now. He turned his face to Simon’s, and it was peaceful as the boy had seen it only once before, on that spring day beside the river, when he had talked of his little holding and the breeding of flamed and feathered tulips. He stretched himself out with a long quiet sigh, as though he were very weary. And Simon knew that, in this world, it was all over for his old Corporal.

‘Poor devil,’ said Dr Hannaford; and got up, dusting the sand from his knees.

‘A most hideous mishap,’ said Fairfax.

The chaplain turned to him in surprise. ‘You believe that cock-and-bull story, Sir Thomas?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the General. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ll notice he refused to say what he was doing in the magazine, at all?’

‘In the bell-tower above it, rather. He may have been hiding for some cause. Does it matter, now?’

‘Would any sane man hide over a powder-store? For my part, I believe him to have been some rogue left behind by the Man of Wrath, Hopton, to destroy the magazine. The thirty pounds were obviously his fee for doing it.’

‘Joshua, Joshua, men risk their lives for many things, but would you or I, or any sane man face almost certain death for a fee that we should not have the spending of? There is some mystery about all this, that we shall not find the answer to.’

Simon said nothing. That was the one last thing he could do for Zeal, to obey him, and say nothing. The old Ironside had paid his debt, and the fact that it had all been in vain could not alter that. He had made peace with his own hard unbending conscience in his own way, and it was not for Simon to meddle.

Fairfax had turned to leave the room, and Simon, once more following him, missed the anxious question in Dr Hannaford’s
eyes, and blundered against the doorpost as he passed, because he was not seeing very clearly. For the first time since he was nine years old, when his dog died, he was crying; crying for an unknown man called Ishmael Watts, who had once been Corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf, of the General’s Horse, and erstwhile of Cromwell’s ‘Lovely Company’.