Women of Courage (137 page)

Robert rose to his feet, still looking straight at her. His voice was flat, hard. “And perhaps ‘twould be better to leave your women within doors, when next you go about your godless midnight plotting.”

He glanced briefly at Adam, then mounted his horse. And suddenly they were gone, four horses bounding away up the slope, their tails swishing behind them.

Ann did not move. She did not know how long she stood there, but she watched the horses ride all the way up the hill and disappear over the ridge. She saw Tom run over to John Clapp, who was just beginning to sit up and rub his head in confusion. The big man stumbled to his feet unsteadily, rubbing a huge lump he could feel just above his neck. Ann saw Adam bend down again over Simon. She heard their words, faintly, from a long way off.

“How is it, my boy? Are you awake again now?”

“Yes. ‘Tis better now they’ve gone. But it ... hurts bad, father!” He tried to move, and fell back groaning with the pain.

“Lie still. We’ll get ‘ee home. John, are you all right?”

“I’ll live.”

John Clapp staggered cautiously towards them. “How’s the boy?”

Adam told him. “But I don’t see how we’re to get him home. He can’t walk or ride.”

“Get a cart,” suggested Martha. “Tom, you run on home and call Jacob Sanders. He ... “

“Not a cart, no.” Adam interrupted her, his voice decisive. “He’d never stand the jolting, Martha. Tom, help me break some of they saplings down from the hedge. If you can strap two or three of they together he can lie on it for a litter. Ann, stay with Simon. Ann?”

Ann moved, slowly, and then knelt down. “Yes, father.” She put her hand on Simon’s forehead and shivered as she felt the sweat.

Adam and Tom broke saplings for a litter while Martha and John Clapp rounded up the frightened horses. Then they lifted Simon carefully onto the litter, and the two men carried it along the lane, the women and horses following behind.

They began the journey in silence, and then sang psalms for a while to cheer themselves. After which Tom spoke longingly of the rising that would sweep the ungodly from the earth, while Adam listened grimly, and Ann thought alternately of the bone sticking out of her brother’s leg, and of Robert’s face in the moonlight, stony as a statue on a tomb.

7

T
HEY REACHED Colyton in the middle of the night. The tramp of their tired feet and their horses’ hooves echoed loudly in the dark, empty streets. Adam and John put Simon down carefully on the cobbles, and hammered urgently on the door of a house near the church. For a long time no-one answered, and then at last a tall, haggard, melancholy man came to the door in a long white nightgown and night-cap, like the ghost of an old heron, and held up a candle to look at them.

The surgeon, Nicolas Thompson, was a slow-moving man much given to tobacco and lugubrious humour, but he stirred a little when he saw why they had come. He led them in, saw Simon Carter laid on the great oak table in his kitchen, and called his wife to wake and bring him warm water and candles. The wife, a short, wrinkled bustling little body, the antithesis of her husband, hurried downstairs, and Ann helped her heat the water. Then she watched, fascinated, as Surgeon Thompson’s long knobbly fingers cut away the trousers from around the leg. He gently washed and probed the wound until she could see the bone move inside the great bruised and discoloured mass of flesh. Martha Goodchild had to go outside for a moment to be sick, but Ann stayed, holding her brother’s hand and wiping the sweat from his forehead. For a few moments he gripped her hand so tightly that she almost cried out herself, but then he relaxed, breathing deeply, and she turned to see what the surgeon had done.

To her surprise she saw a slight smile of satisfaction in the stubble of Nicolas Thompson’s long face. She looked at Simon’s leg, and saw with relief that the thigh was no longer bent, but straight under the swelling.

“That’s a mite better, young Simon. We’ll strap ‘ee up like Peg-leg Peter now, and get ‘ee home to bed. Then if you do what I say for a month or so, you’ll have a leg just as tough and ugly as ‘twas before.”

The surgeon and Tom carefully cut a couple of splints from a stock he kept for such emergencies, and strapped them firmly to the leg, after which they wrapped a cold, moistened cloth around it to reduce the swelling. Nicolas Thompson had his own litter, too, more comfortable than the rough bed of saplings the patient had arrived on. Simon winced as he was lifted on to it, and made a brave attempt to smile, which only served to emphasise how pale his face was.

“Thank ‘ee, Nicholas,” said Adam gruffly, trying to cover his emotions. “I’ll settle up for this in the morning. I’m sorry to get ‘ee out of bed like this.”

“‘Tis a burden of my calling,” said the old surgeon sadly. “Folk are seldom so sick by day as they are by night.”

“Surgeon Nicholas!” Simon’s voice came faint but determined from the litter; and then hesitated suddenly as he was about to speak. “I ... will it be straight again, do you think? Will I be able to walk?”

Nicolas Thompson fixed him with a long, sombre stare. “I can’t promise to make it as straight as the good Lord and your mother did, my son; but if you can promise me to rest it proper, and not try walking on it or taking the splints off before I say, ‘twill come pretty near. You’m young enough, and ‘twas a cleanish break. He’ll mend.”

He turned away suddenly to John Clapp, who was rubbing the back of his head cautiously. “It looks as though these devils ‘ee met have been trying to reshape another piece of God’s handiwork. Take your hands away - let’s have a look, John.”

Ann smiled as the strong bony hands took John Clapp’s head and examined it, gently, firmly brushing aside the big man’s resistance as though he were a little child. Ever since she was a child surgeon Thompson had fascinated her. She loved to watch him, on the rare occasions he had come to see someone in her family, and was seldom disgusted or horrified as other people were; and so more than once it had been she, rather than her mother, who had helped him with whoever was sick. The surgeon had come to notice this, and often had a smile for the intent, serious little girl at his patient’s bedside. He gave her simple tasks to do, and sometimes tried to explain the purpose of his treatments.

She handed him a bowl to wash away some of the clotted blood, and he examined the base of John Clapp’s skull carefully for a moment. Then he clapped the red-faced mercer on the shoulder, satisfied.

“A sound enough roof, it seems, for all the lack of thatch!”

John Clapp scowled; he had been nearly bald for some years, but refused to wear a wig, despite the pressure of custom, preferring to keep his wide black hat on his head indoors as well as out. The surgeon’s own hair hung down to his shoulders, long and thin and wispy.

“A few headaches, I should think, no more. If ‘ee have any fainting fits, come back and tell me, boy.”

“I’ll not faint,” muttered Clapp, more than ever annoyed at being called ‘boy’. “Come on, Adam, let’s get this lad of yours back home.”

At home, they carried Simon upstairs and laid him in his bed, and Mary mixed the draught which the surgeon had prescribed to help him rest. Then Ann stayed quietly with him until his eyes closed at last, his pale strained face relaxed, and his breathing became quiet and regular. She preferred to sit with Simon, for she knew she would not be able to sleep just yet, and she did not feel like talking with her parents. She needed somewhere to be alone, to sort out her own thoughts about the night’s events.

She had seen Robert’s other side now, the one Simon had told her of, and which had been so hard for her to imagine. Again and again she relived the scene in her mind; the cold, stony face disowning recognition, the bitter parting words.
“‘Twould be better to leave your women within doors, when ye go about your godless midnight plotting.”
She had tried to find a hint of gentleness in them, a suggestion that Robert had been worried for her safety, but his tone had been too harsh for that. He had not wanted her there, to see the cruel, stern character he had among men.

At first she thought she hated him for it. He had been there deliberately, looking out for them, armed and ready to fight. And for all his apparent surprise, he must have known it could easily be her family he stopped, or at least people like them, dissenters from their own village. Because of him Simon’s leg had been broken, John Clapp knocked from his horse, and Tom nearly run through with a sword. She shuddered at the thought of it, and of the grey muzzle of his friend’s pistol, pointed coldly at her breast.

She tried to find some excuse for him, some bridge to the Robert she had believed in. Perhaps he had been forced to be there, and did not like what he was doing? At least he had told his friend to put up his pistol, and had not drawn his own; and he had examined her brother gently and carefully before her father had pushed him away, as though he had really feared Simon might be dead.

It was not enough. However she tried to excuse him she always came back to the cruel words, the final contemptuous flick of his head as he had turned his horse, to gallop away up the hill. It had felt as though her father and Simon were beggars, with no right to crawl upon the earth; and she worse than that, for being a woman. Even if it was only an act, a mask put on to hide his feelings, it was a mask that fitted too well, as well as any other he had worn with her before. It was an act that was part of his own character.

Despite all this she could not get Robert out of her mind, could not help making excuses when there were none, could not help loving him even for his cruelty. His harsh anger when he had confronted Tom reminded her of his absurd jealousy a few days before; his coldness reminded her of the warmth of his protestations of love; his pride made her pity him for his shyness. It was absurd; she looked at the drained face of her brother, and knew it should give her strength to reject Robert forever and love Tom, as she should; but she could not think of Tom at all. So she sat and wept silently, her thoughts more confused than ever, until she was sure Simon would not wake, and she got up quietly to leave.

As she tiptoed to the door, the tallow light in her hand throwing great leaping shadows across the room, she saw little Oliver’s great wide eyes staring at her from his bed in the corner. She thought he had been asleep when they carried Simon in, and she had not heard him wake. She stopped, and looked down at him.

“Not asleep yet, Roly?” she murmured. “‘Tis nearly morning.”

Oliver shook his head, his dark eyes gazing up at her in mute question. She saw how tense he was, as though he was full of a question he dared not ask. She crouched down, her head near his.

“What is it, Oliver? Tell me.”

“Is he ... is Simon dead?” The words came so softly, it was as though she had felt rather than heard them.

“Dead? No, of course not. He’s only sleeping.” The little body relaxed slightly, but she saw he still didn’t quite believe her.

“Then why you crying?”

“Only ... because he’s hurt, that’s all. Look, I’ll show you.” She put the light down on a table, and lifted him out of his bed. He was a heavy boy now, nearly two and a half years old, but she still thought of him as a baby sometimes. He clung round her neck gratefully, looking down at his gently breathing brother.

“Will he die?” he whispered in her ear.

“No, he won’t. ‘Tis only his leg. The surgeon’s dressed it and given him something to help him sleep.” She smiled at him, grateful for someone else to take care of. “Come on now, Roly, back to bed.”

“He be better soon, won’t he? Surgeon make him better in the morning,” he said as she tucked him in.

“That’s right, Roly. He’ll be better soon.”

“Will he wake up and cry if it hurts him?”

“No, I don’t think so. But you’re here, anyway, aren’t you? So if he wakes up or starts making a noise, you can come and call me or mother, can’t you?”

“Yes, I can. I call you.”

“Good. But if he’s asleep, he’s all right. So all you need to do is lie here quietly and listen. Can you do that for me?”

The little head nodded eagerly. “And I’ll pray for him, too, shall I? God will help him.”

“Yes, you do that. Goodnight, Roly.”

“Goodnight, Ann.”

She went out onto the stairs. As she came down she could hear the murmur of voices from the great kitchen below, and found her mother and father deep in conversation across the table. They looked up as she came in.

“How is he, Ann?”

“Sleeping. I’ve left Oliver to care for him.” She sat down next to her father, then realised suddenly that they had fallen silent. “Do I disturb you?”

“Of course not, girl. I was just telling your mother what happened tonight, that’s all.”

Her mother moved her head impatiently. “Oh Adam, for the Lord’s sake, don’t try to spare the maid’s feelings by telling lies! If you’m going off to get killed fighting the King, she’ll find out soon enough! Or do you know already, and am I the only one forgotten?” She turned sharply to Ann, her normally happy eyes red and strained, her cheery round face ugly with pain.

“Know what?” Ann asked, though she knew the answer as soon as she spoke.

“Your father says there’s to be a rising for the Duke of Monmouth, and he’s going to join the army. To leave us all and get killed!”

“You don’t know I’ll be killed, Mary.” Adam’s voice was sad and patient, trying to be kind and firm at once. Yet beneath the control, Ann could hear a distant plea for help, for understanding and comfort for himself, as well as that he was trying to give his wife. “There may not even be a battle at all, if enough of us go. ‘Twill be a godly revolution, over in a month, and then I’ll be back to you, with God’s blessing on us all.”

“Overthrow the King in a month? Your father’s war lasted five long years - you know that, Adam. And how many men were crippled, or never came back at all? What about your brother Roger? Did he come back?”

Adam stiffened. He had told no-one why Roger had gone to war, not even Mary: that was a secret between Roger and himself. And so it would stay. It was a secret too shameful to be told.