Simon (6 page)

Simon’s mother turned back into the house, looking very much as usual. ‘Simon, have you had your supper?’ she asked.

Simon shook his head. He had forgotten about supper.

‘Oh, my dear, you must be so hungry—come and have it this moment. Mouse, sweeting, don’t cry like that; it will only make you sick—it always does.’ She turned on the scared maids with little shooing gestures. ‘Run along, Meg; run along now, Polly. Have you no sewing nor spinning waiting to be done?’

War might come; the skies might fall; but Simon’s mother would see to it that her husband had clean shirts, her family were fed, and her maids not idle.

SIMON LEANED AGAINST
the rough stone wall of the smithy, and gazed idly across the hummocky field-corner round which the lane curved like a horseshoe, to the church and straggling cottages of Little Torrington. He had ridden over to see Matthew Weeks about a litter of pigs, and had hoped to be home again by dusk; but only a mile on the homeward way Scarlet had cast a shoe, and he had had to turn back to have it seen to. It was a nuisance, but it couldn’t be helped, so he waited patiently.

The village had a very peaceful look in the early autumn quiet of 1644, so that it was hard to believe that England had been at war within herself for more than two years. Edgehill and Newbury were battles of the past, as well as a score of lesser fights. Parliament had triumphed at Marston Moor two months ago, and the Earl of Essex, overrunning the south, had driven Sir Ralph Hopton, the Royalist General, back into Cornwall. Leaders were rising out of the chaos, their names becoming household words; Prince Rupert and his brother Maurice, Hopton and Astley, for the King; and for Parliament, Fairfax and Waller, and a certain East Anglian squire, Oliver Cromwell, who had ideas of his own about raising armies. The whole country was in a turmoil, and yet always, between the marching armies, the ordinary life of ordinary folk went on: wool was woven and tin mined, the harvest gathered in, and the fields ploughed for the autumn sowing, people married or died or were born, and Sunday dinners were cooked.

In Little Torrington, children were playing between the cottages, and there were Michaelmas daisies and a golden tide of Good-bye Summer in the little gardens. Two women stood in their doorways, discussing somebody’s shameless behaviour, and
their voices came to Simon clearly across the field corner. A lean pig rooted contentedly among the yellow cabbage-leaves in a garbage pile, and on the brown hillside beyond the church a man was ploughing, with a wheeling crying cloud of gulls behind him.

Leaning there, with the quick ring of the smith’s hammer in his ears, and his eyes on the distant plough team, Simon found himself thinking idly back over those two years. During the first few months, his father had been one of the Barnstaple Garrison, serving under Colonel Chudleigh, who had built the fort at Bideford—for North Devon too had had their leader at the outset; and James Chudleigh had led his men out to victory again and again, until his name began to have a ring to it that was almost magic. Simon had seen him once riding by, a young man laughing into the high March wind, and understood why his men followed him as a guiding flame. Then had come the day when the garrisons of the three towns had marched out to head off Hopton’s advance from Launceston (for Cornwall had risen staunch for the King as Devon had done for Parliament). They had been defeated, and news of the disaster, filtering back into Devon, had brought with it the almost unbelievable tidings that James Chudleigh, taken captive by the King’s men, had turned his coat for the sake of freedom and a Colonelcy in the Royalist Army! The bright flame had been only a jack-o’-lantern, after all; and when it flickered out, some of the heart seemed to go from the men who had followed it. A few weeks later, after Bideford and Torrington had fallen, Barnstaple had yielded without a fight, leaving Plymouth to stand alone for Parliament in the West Country.

Prince Maurice had occupied Barnstaple, and the Militia and train-bands in the town had been disbanded. Simon’s father had come home in a cold rage against Colonel James Chudleigh. There had been a wonderful pie of mazard cherries for supper, Simon remembered—his mother was famous for her mazard pies—and the door had opened and they had looked up, and there he was standing in the doorway. He had come in and taken his place at table, but he hadn’t been able to eat the mazard pie. They hadn’t dared speak to him about what had happened; they hadn’t dared try to comfort him, and the next morning he had ridden
off to join Essex’s army in the Home Counties. They had not seen him since, though they had word from time to time. Barnstaple was back in Parliamentary hands this last month and more, but that was not likely to bring him home, for he was serving in the north, now, with Lord Leven’s army, to which he had somehow become joined after Marston Moor.

And Simon himself? He had obeyed his father’s order and continued his schooling as best he could. So had Amias. But they had not ridden the Tiverton road together, nor shared the same school bench, nor spoken when they passed. Then last April Prince Maurice had wanted men, all the men he could raise, for an attack on Lyme. The news had reached Tiverton on a market day; and Amias had gone to answer the call. He had not run away in the night, that was not Amias’s way; he had simply walked out, during the midday break. He had turned in the gateway, his tawny eyes dancing, and waved to the crowded playground. ‘I’m through with inky schoolboys! I’m off to join the Prince.’ And he had disappeared into the market-day crowds before anyone realized what he was about. Save that he had sent to claim Balin from his father (Simon knew that from Tomasine, who was still his friend if they chanced to meet), he had not been heard of again.

Abruptly, Simon turned and went into the smithy, where the smith, with Scarlet’s hoof between his leather-aproned knees, was putting the finishing touches to the new shoe. He glanced up as Simon entered, then returned to his task, while Scarlet slobbered at the back of his neck. ‘There, me beauty,’ he said, a few moments later, parting his knees so that the round hoof came down with a ringing crash on to the cobbles. “Proper fine horse, young maister. And ye’d never think a’was newly broken. Stands so still as a Christian, to be shod! That’ll be sixpence, but if so be as you bain’t got it on you, any time you’re passing will do.’

‘I’ve got it somewhere.’ Simon felt inside the breast of his jerkin, while Scarlet advanced a hopeful nose, with soft lips nuzzling. ‘No, you zany, it’s not sugar.’

‘Will Mr Carey be coming back, now Barnstaple be held for Parliament again?’ asked the smith.

‘I shouldn’t think so. He seems to be with Lord Leven’s troops for good and all.’ Simon produced the sixpence, and paid it over into the grimy palm outheld to receive it.

‘My niece be wed to a Barnstaple man serving under Colonel Lutterel as led the revolt and turned the Cavaliers out. Proper fine show ’twas, so they do tell me.’

‘Proper!’ agreed Simon.

‘Don’t seem like the war’s going to be over yet awhile, for all that.’

‘If ’tisn’t over by the New Year, I’m off to join the Army,’ Simon said, and turned to free Scarlet from the ring in the wall to which he had been secured. His hand was already on the headstall, when above the murmur of the forge fire there rose a distant uproar, a confused splurge of shouting and the drumming of horses’ hooves, followed by a sharp crack like a breaking twig. Dropping his hand from the headstall, Simon strode back to the doorway. A soft scurry of rain blew in his face as he rounded the corner of the smithy wall, making him blink, and when his sight cleared, the first of a knot of horsemen had appeared over the hill-crest to his left, and were riding hell for leather towards the village, with the unmistakable look of men pursued. The peace of the scene was shattered as by a blow, children rushed squealing for their own doors, the rootling pig departed at a canter. Somewhere behind the riders sounded again that sharp crack like a breaking twig. Then the first wave of buff-and-steel-clad horsemen had pulled out of the lane and were heading for the church, fanning out over the hummocky grass so that the horses on the nearer flank swept by within a few yards of where Simon stood.

‘My days! What be ’appening?’ shouted the smith, appearing round the corner of the smithy to join him.

‘Running fight, seemingly,’ Simon shouted back. The horses swept on, wild-eyed, with labouring blood-streaked flanks, their riders crouching low and tense in their saddles, in a smother of flying mud and streaming manes and drumming hooves. ‘Looks as if they’re going to make a stand in the churchyard.’

Wave after wave of desperate horsemen were drumming up the lane and across the fields, and in the distance, topping the rise,
Simon could see the forefront of the pursuit. As the last knot of fleeing riders swept past the smithy, the report of a horse-pistol cracked through the tumult, and one of them jerked in his saddle, swayed, and crashed down on to the churned grass, while his horse plunged on riderless.

‘’Ware there! He’ll be ridden down!’ Simon sprang forward into the path of the following horsemen. An upreared head with wild eyes and rolling mane blotted out the sky, and the thunder of hooves stunned and deafened him as he dragged the fallen man clear; and next instant the first wave of the pursuit torrented past.

‘Give me a hand,’ he shouted to the smith, and between them they lifted the fugitive and carrying him inside, laid him down in a clear space beside the anvil. Scarlet was snorting and trembling, but Simon had no time to console him just then.

‘Be ’un a Parlyment man?’ demanded the smith, in a doubtful bellow, above the noise of the hunt as it thundered by to hurl itself against the desperate defenders of the churchyard.

Simon had dropped on one knee beside the man, and was unfastening the worn buff coat to expose the bullet-wound in the base of his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think so.’ It had not occurred to him to wonder whether the man was friend or foe, he had simply seen that he was in danger of being ridden down, and acted accordingly. Certainly the hair which curled wildly back from his forehead was long, and the square linen collar turned down over his buff coat was edged with point lace, but Simon had seen hair as long and lace as fine on a Parliamentary officer before now. Moreover, he thought that in the fleeting glimpse he had caught of the pursuing Standard, he had recognized the arms of Sir Francis Storrington, a Royalist of Royalists.

It was a shallow wound, though bleeding freely, and the man, who to judge by the lump on his temple had been knocked out in his fall rather than by the bullet, was already beginning to stir. Simon dragged back the stained shirt and looked up at the smith. ‘The ball’s not still there, is it?’

The smith bent forward to look, then shook his head. ‘’Tis
no more’n a gash; best tie ’un up—if so be as you think ’un be a Parlyemnt man.’

The fugitive’s eyes opened suddenly, with a dull bewilderment in them, and with a savage exclamation he tried to struggle up.

Simon pressed him back. ‘Stay still, till I bind up your hurt; you’re bleeding like a stuck pig.’

‘What I asks is,’ said the smith doggedly, ‘be you a Parlyment man, or be you not?’

The wounded man squinted at him for a moment, then, as the question sank in, said faintly but with extreme clearness, ‘You babbling splay-footed lunatic, of course I’m a Parliament man,’ and shut his eyes again. But an instant later, as his head began to clear, he made another attempt to rise. ‘What’s happened? I must go after the rest—I—’

‘You’ve been shot,’ Simon told him, tearing his own rather grimy kerchief into strips. ‘And you fell just outside here. You’ll be all right when I’ve tied you up.’

The other gave a little groan of weary rememberance rather than pain, and rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. Simon saw now that he was young, not more than two or three and twenty, with a round, freckled face and snub nose. ‘For the Lord’s sake be quick! What’s happened to the rest of the Cavalry?’

‘They are making a stand round the church, out yonder. If you don’t stop squirming about, how
can
I tie up this gash?’

‘Oh, perdition to that! What’s happening out there?’ The young man had strained up on to one elbow and was staring round at the doorway.

Simon glanced up at the smith, and jerked his head in the same direction. The smith ambled over to it, and disappeared, and a few moments later he was back, grinning. ‘Fine old to-do,’ he reported. ‘They’m shooting from the church tower now. Looks like they’m holding their own, what’s more.’

The young man relaxed at his words and lay down once more, and Simon was able to get on with his task. As he strained the first strip tight, his patient flinched sharply, and then apologized. ‘Sorry. I’m about at the end of my tether. We all are. It’s a long way from Lostwithiel.’

‘Lostwithiel?’

‘Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know; but you will soon enough. We got drubbed at Lostwithiel.’

The smith bent forward to peer at him. ‘What happened, then?’ he demanded. ‘Do ’ee tell us what happened, my dear soul.’

‘Goring and Grenville made a sudden drive across our rear and—trapped us,’ said the young man, muzzily. ‘Essex got away—I believe he got away—but the Infantry couldn’t, and poor old Daddy Skippon was left to hand over the whole lot.’ He gave a dreary laugh. ‘We only got out because My Lord Goring was drunk, so mazy drunk he couldn’t stop us.’

Amid the tumult of battle outside, the sudden hush in the smithy was like a bubble of utter silence, broken only by Scarlet’s scared fidgeting. ‘Then—do you mean the war is over—we’re beat?’ Simon demanded.

‘No! Not by a long shot! The Royalists are bound to give our Foot a pass—a safe conduct back to Plymouth or Portsmouth when they’ve disarmed them. They can’t feed five thousand prisoners, and even that brute Grenville can’t hang so many—there wouldn’t be trees enough in Cornwall to go round. Daddy Skippon will bring his troops home somehow; and the whole of the Horse got away—leastwise, unless the rest have fared no better than we have. We ran into a blazing regiment of the King’s men up on the moor ’bout six miles from here, and we were too done to beat them off . . . Go and see what’s happening outside.’