Simon (9 page)

They had collected Scarlet from the Garter stables and brought him here to the White Hart. Then there had been supper in a long room that seemed over-full of loud voices, long legs and tobacco smoke. He had a confused memory of a dark-eyed resentful looking youth a year or two older than himself, who he had gathered was Cornet Wainwright; and of a long ropey Yorkshireman with a merry eye, who Barnaby had whispered to him was Ralf Marjory, one of Cromwell’s old Ironside captains. All the rest had been just faces, grim or merry, ruddy or pale or brown. Simon hoped that one day, perhaps tomorrow, he would get them sorted out. But meanwhile he was thankful the day was over.

Barnaby gave the left boot a final loving pat, and held the pair out at arm’s length. ‘What d’you think of
that
for a pair of fashionable boots?’ he demanded.

Simon gave up gazing at his sword, and turned his attention to
the fashionable boots. ‘Umm, they’re very fine,’ he said at last. ‘How do you walk in them?’

‘Why, it took a bit of practice, I’ll admit,’ said Barnaby airily. ‘But I’ve got the knack of it now. Wait a moment, and I’ll show you.’ And he began, with many grimaces, to pull on his treasures. It took him some while to do so, but he managed it at last, and rising, began to walk up and down the cramped room with what was meant to be a careless swagger, but was actually a pigeon-toed waddle; for the turn-down tops of his boots were so wide that he could only get along with his legs almost as wide apart as though he was on horseback.

The sight was almost too much for Simon. He let out a stifled sound between a snort and a hiccup, and then recovered himself. ‘They—they’re splendid boots.’

‘Yes, I think they’re pretty good. Don’t believe there’s another pair like them in the Army,’ said Barnaby, squinting sideways at his legs.

‘I—I shouldn’t think there would be,’ agreed Simon.

‘Ah, well, even in the Army one can observe the decencies, you know. It’s different with the Ironsides, of course: they mostly pride themselves on dressing like a cross between a parson and a horse-thief.’

‘Most of the officers of—of ours are old Ironsides, aren’t they?’ said Simon.

The other nodded, and sat down on the bed. ‘The senior ones, anyhow. More than half of the men too.’ He reached for the boot-jack and began to rid himself of his boots. ‘The rest of us are Fairfax’s men. Of course, between us, we’re the cream of the Army.’

Simon sat silent for a few moments, watching him wrestling with his left boot. Then he said, ‘You know, it was a tremendous piece of luck, my running into you like this.’

‘’Twas so,’ agreed Barnaby, beginning on the other boot. ‘You’d not have been in Fairfax’s Horse tonight, if you hadn’t. And—well, we
are
the cream of the Army. We’re worthy of the General, and no one can say fairer than that.’

‘What is he really like, the General?’ asked Simon.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well—he seems queer somehow: that quiet slow way he has of speaking, when everything he
does
seems so quick; as if you were watching one man and listening to another,’ fumbled Simon.

‘Oh, there’s nothing mysterious about that. The moment he slackens the bearing-rein, he starts stammering.’

‘Stammering?’

‘Like a July cuckoo,’ said Barnaby, setting his boots tenderly in the corner.

Simon thought this over for a few moments; then he said, ‘Yes, but what is he like?’

‘Oh goodness!’ the other said helplessly. ‘How in the name of—’

The door opened and a young man, evidently the owner of the third bed, came in. Barnaby appealed to him. ‘Fletcher, what’s the Lord-General like? Carey wants to know.’

‘Fiery Tom? Oh, he’s all right,’ said the new-comer, yawning. ‘Lord, but I’m tired till my bones ache.’

‘Why “Fiery Tom”?’ asked Simon, made stubbornly persistent by his tiredness.

‘Wait till you see him in action, then you’ll know.’ Cornet Fletcher turned to drag off his coat, but was checked by a shout from Barnaby.

‘Hi! Don’t go trampling over my best boots, you blear-eyed hippopotamus!’

‘With all due respect, sir,’ said Cornet Fletcher, continuing to take off his coat, ‘curse your best boots! One can’t move an inch in this dog-hole without falling over them!’

‘If you don’t like my boots,’ said Barnaby reasonably, ‘go and share with Bennet and Anderson.’

‘Bennet’s such a hell-fire red-hot militant Anabaptist. No stable-mate for a peaceable fellow like me.’

‘There’s that, of course.’

‘And Anderson plays the recorder under the blankets.’

‘
What
? Old Sober-sides? Gammon!’ Boots and the General were instantly forgotten.

‘Found him at it, when I went to rouse him out about that sick horse the other night.’

‘It just shows you!’ Barnaby said happily. ‘I’d as soon have suspected Corporal Relf.’

Fletcher turned round on Simon. ‘You’ve not met Corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf yet, have you?—A pleasure in store!’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ cut in Barnaby. ‘The Corporal’s all right. And anyhow, he’s the cove who’ll be teaching you your job.’

Discussing the matter of Lieutenant Anderson’s recorder with unholy interest, they finished undressing and crawled into their blankets; Cornet Fletcher blowing out the guttering tallow dip before he did so. ‘Good nights’ were exchanged, slightly muffled by the bed-clothes, and silence descended with the blue darkness into the cramped inn chamber.

For a long time Simon lay awake, listening to the quiet breathing of the other two, and watching through the window the stars moving behind the dark head of the Garter tower. They were the same stars as those he saw through the little garret window at home; only at home they shone through the branches of the old warden pear tree that was a dome of snowy blossom in the spring. A sudden wave of homesickness flooded over him; the hard unfamiliar pallet, the breathing of the others in the alien darkness, the strangeness of everything, all brought back to him the desolation of his first night at Blundell’s. He remembered the long bare dormitory and the smell of damp and candlesmitch, the confused rise and fall of many breathing in the dark, the emptiness of his stomach because he had not yet found how to get his full share of supper, his aching longing for Lovacott. But then, Amias had been there, so near that if he flung out an arm, he could touch him; and he and Amias had shared their homesickness as they had shared everything else.

He wondered where Amias was tonight. Quartered in some farm-house perhaps, or bivouacked under the stars . . . Serving with the Army of the King as he, Simon, was with the Army of Parliament. It seemed suddenly very odd, that if he reached out into the darkness, he would merely annoy Cornet Fletcher, because Amias would not be there.

DURING THAT SPRING
all Windsor was one great camp, humming with life and activity as more and more troops came in and were drafted into the re-formed regiments. All day and often half the night the cobbled streets rumbled to the arrival of the wagon-trains bringing stores and ammunition. For the first time an English army was being dressed in scarlet, and day by day the shifting crowds grew more colourful as the new uniforms arrived, and regiment after regiment appeared in good kersey breeches and red coats faced with blue or yellow or green according to their colonel’s fancy. In the Commons Fields below the Castle, as far as Datchet Mead and beyond, the remnant of Essex’s force, together with scattered regiments and new-joined men,
were being nursed and hammered into an army; and the three men chiefly responsible, who seemed to be everywhere at once, needing neither food nor rest, were Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Philip Skippon, the Chief of Staff, and Lieutenant-General Cromwell, who officially commanded nothing but the 6th Regiment of Horse.

Before long, these three became familiar figures to Simon, as they were to every man in the Army. The dark rather Don Quixote-seeming General, constantly appearing and disappearing between Windsor and Whitehall; grey-haired and stooping Sir Philip, a veteran of the Swedish Wars, known affectionately to his troops as Daddy Skippon or The Old Man; the thick-set ruddy Cavalry Colonel, with a laugh that seemed to shake the Castle Walls, a heavy farmer’s walk that gave the impression of a pound or so of good East Anglian soil caked on each boot, and a reputation for wrestling whole nights in prayer. At first they were only figures, but very soon he began to learn things about them that brought them to life.

He learned how Fairfax had come by his scarred cheek at Marston Moor. ‘You see the trouble with our revered Lord-General,’ Barnaby told him, ‘is that the moment he goes into action, he loses his helmet. It just flies straight off his old cock-loft like the lid off a pot when it boils over, and he goes stark staring mad. You wouldn’t think it, to look at him, would you? No; well, it makes him a simply tremendous man to follow in a charge. He was leading a squadron of four hundred of us that day, and he lost his helmet as usual; and one of Prince Rupert’s guards took a swipe at him, and there he was, with blood streaming down his face, as crazy as a March hare, still riding straight for the main body of Rupert’s left wing, and yelling to us to follow—so we followed.’

He learned how Daddy Skippon had brought back the tattered remnant of Essex’s Foot from Lostwithiel. An Infantry lieutenant, with a grim face old beyond his years, told him that story as they leaned over a gate together one off-duty evening, watching for the distant flicker of a roe-deer’s passing among the glades of the Little Park. ‘We were given our pass back to Portsmouth, and a lot of good that did us. We were starving and most of us were
wounded, and the country folk were mostly for the King, all along the south coast. Leastwise, they were for the winning side; they harried us like wolves on our flanks, and we couldn’t defend ourselves because we were disarmed. When any of our lads fell out, they killed them and left their bodies in the nearest ditch; and all the time it rained. Faith! How it rained! That meant fever, of course, especially for the wounded. If we’d had any other commander, I think we’d have lain down and died, rather than struggle on; but Daddy Skippon got us through somehow. Oh, it’s no good asking how, for I don’t know; he was our pillar of cloud by day and flame by night; he made us too afraid of him to give in; he comforted and encouraged us like a mother with a sick child, and he got us through—most of us, that is—to Portsmouth at last, under our own Colours, and with our drums beating.’

Of Cromwell, he heard many stories from many people (for already Old Noll was a legend in the Army), but chiefly from Corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf, who had served under him from the days of that first little troop which Cromwell had called his ‘Lovely Company’ and which had grown into a double regiment and borne the proud nickname of Ironsides. Corporal Relf was a long lean man, with a harsh voice, a hollow cheek, and a brilliant eye; the word of the Old Testament was constantly in his mouth, and his right hand seemed empty when his sword was not in it. He was the type of man who had made Cromwell’s Ironsides what they were, ranting heretics and red-hot Anabaptists, many of them, but men who ‘knew what they were fighting for, and loved what they knew. Now the Ironsides had been split up to form the stiffening of the two Senior Cavalry Regiments in this new Model Army; and Corporal Relf of Disbrow’s Troop was, as Barnaby had said, teaching Simon his job.

Simon, his Commission having duly arrived, was an eager pupil and learned quickly, he and Scarlet together. They learned to manœuvre with other horses and riders, and to know the trumpet-calls by which, from now on, they would live and take their orders. Scarlet was broken in to the noise of trumpets and kettle-drums, and trained to stand steady under gun-fire. Simon
mastered the correct handling of the Troop Standard and the use of the heavy Cavalry sword. Little by little, he learned to handle his section of the Troop; and this was made as easy as might be for him by his Corporal and his men, who looked on him kindly, and in his early and uncertain days dragged him through many a manœuvre in which, without their goodwill, he would have come to grief. And added to all this there were the ordinary routine duties of each day: ‘Stables’, ‘Rounds’, kit inspection, guard-mounting and the like.

At first life seemed strange and overful, but very soon the bewildering whirl of the days began to settle into a pattern; and in the pattern were many happy things that he would remember all his life. Sunday morning, and the drum-head service, with the Keep of Windsor Castle rising above the spring-flushed willows, and an ecstasy of lark-song soaring above the deep voice of the Army at its prayers. A squadron at the canter, and the quick music of trumpet and kettle-drum that made the horses all but dance. The comradeship of his men, and the slightly different comradeship of his brother officers.

They were an oddly assorted company, the officers of Fairfax’s Horse: men of every type, from Barnaby Colebourne of the stylish boots to Captain Bennet who preached hell-fire and a God of Wrath, with his drawn sword in his hand, from Pastor Hugh Peter’s makeshift pulpit on Sundays. But on the whole, they were friendly souls; and the only one of them with whom Simon could not get on at all was Cornet Denzil Wainwright, who was hurt in his dignity at being posted to the Third Troop, while the coveted cornetcy of the Second went to a raw West Countryman. Denzil, a townsman himself, considered Simon a bumpkin, and was at pains to let him and everybody else see that he did. He never missed a chance of showing up the mistakes which Simon, new to life in a Horse Regiment, frequently made; holding him up to sly malicious ridicule before the others; even, once or twice, before his men, which was an unforgivable thing to do. It was a process he had described to a friend as ‘a little harmless boar-baiting’, but for his victim it was not pleasant.

One morning about a month after Simon joined the Army, Denzil Wainwright was particularly objectionable on the way
down to take early stables; flaunting his town airs and graces, pointedly calling him Hodge, and talking about cows in a way that made Simon, who was proud of the Lovacott herd, long to blacken his supercilious face for him. He took it all calmly enough, knowing that the pleasure of getting a rise out of him before the other cornets was exactly what Denzil wanted; but he was still fuming inwardly an hour later when he led his section out on patrol.