Women of Courage (143 page)

“I’m sure it is, Ruth,” she said, touching her hand in sympathy. “Just think, men from all over the West Country will be going - there’ll be thousands of them. They’ll be sure to win.”

“That’s what they said last time, when Roger went,” said Ruth quietly. “But I never saw him again.”

For a while there was silence, and Ann looked cautiously at her mother, wondering if the pinched look on the round, red face was one of sympathy or pain. She knew her father’s brother Roger would have married Ruth, if he had not been killed in a war long ago; and she remembered her mother saying once how Ruth had wept, at Adam’s wedding, for the lover she had lost.

“Oh, they are such fools!” Mary Carter shook her head violently, as though she might cry, and then went on in a voice grey and desolate as rain. “They are nothing but fools, to think they solve anything by war! Whatever has come of it before, but tears, and broken bodies, and cripples to be cared for by the hearth? My Adam has been a good husband to me; kind, gentle, honest - like your John, Ruth - and yet sometimes, I think he has longed for war ever since Roger went away and was killed - has thought of nothing else. Well, now he has his chance; much good may it do him!”

She stood up, brushing her eyes with her hands, and looked about for something to do.

“Isn’t father coming back, mummy? Is he killed?” Little Oliver stood desolate in the middle of the room, crying.

“No, no, of course not! Come here, my love - don’t fret now!” She picked him up protectively and held him on her knee, soothing him and rocking him against her breast. Sarah wandered over anxiously, sucking her thumb, and held onto her mother’s sleeve.

“I don’t think father wanted to go, mother,” Ann began timidly. “I think ... “

“It was to protect us all that he went!” Simon’s sharp voice burst on them, high and indignant. “To protect his family from the Papists and unbelievers! ‘Tis a man’s duty to fight for his family, mother!”

“Then he should have fought for you before, when he was young.” Mary shook her head in despair as she cuddled her children and gazed at her eldest son, white-faced and intense by the window in his father’s chair. “Now what are we to do, with him gone and you with that leg, and no-one to earn our daily bread? We’ll have to scrimp by on what little we’ve saved, and pray for an early end to all this foolishness.”

“‘Tis wrong to call it foolishness, Mary,” said Martha Goodchild stubbornly. “It be a righteous cause, blessed in the sight of the Lord. They have given us provocation ...”

“And what if they have? ‘Tis no more provocation than for a dozen years past!” interrupted Ruth furiously. “And good men die in a righteous cause, too! I don’t think I could bear to lose John, as well as Roger ...”

“We will bear what we have to, my dear,” said Martha stubbornly. “That is all we can do, other than pray. Their fate is in the hands of the Lord now.”

“So it is, Martha, so it is,” sighed Mary Carter, still rocking little Oliver on her knee, and with her arm round Sarah. “Let us pray the cause be good, as you say. Though it do hardly seem like godly work to me, to send such good kind men out on the road with muskets in their hands ...”

As she bowed her head with the others in prayer, Ann thought for once neither of Tom nor Robert nor her bargain with the Lord, but of the slight upright figure of her father, marching with the rest down the dusty roads to Lyme, with his old musket on his shoulder and the dark ghosts of fear hiding behind his eyes.

12

“A
ND AGAIN! Smartly now this time! Wait for the order, wait for it! Musketeers, rest your muskets!”

For the hundredth time that day Adam slid his musket forward into the cup of the rest, and felt the ripple around him as the whole company did the same. There was a clatter and a curse as John Spragg mistimed it, and musket and rest fell feebly to the ground.

“Cock your muskets! Guard your muskets! Present! Wait for it now, wait for the order ... “ Adam squinted along the barrel at the row of hay-cocks standing on the grass twenty-five yards in front of him. He depressed the barrel deliberately so as to fire into the hay and not over it, as the sergeant said most recruits did.

“Fire!” There was a ragged series of ear-splitting roars all along the line, and the hay vanished in clouds of smoke that the wind blew back into their eyes and nostrils.

“... aaaarms!” Hurriedly he drew back the musket, obeying the order ‘Recover your arms’ which he could never hear. “Half-cock your muskets! Clean your pans! Handle your primers! Prime! Smarter than that - come on, there! The enemy are coming!”

If they really were coming, Adam thought, there’d be no time to look up, not with all this fiddling about to do. But he was glad of it; if only he could absorb himself totally in this routine, he would become like a machine, able to fight without thinking of what he was doing, or of what might happen to him. If it could be like that in battle, he might manage it.

Carefully he filled the pan with just the right amount of powder, and let the primer fall back to his side. “Shut your pans! Blow off your loose corns!” He blew, between his teeth, through lips already black with powder, from a mouth stuffed with half-a-dozen lead bullets. The bullets made his mouth wet with saliva, and he spat as much as he blew. “Cast about to charge! Handle your charges! Open them with your teeth! Charge with powder! Draw forth your scourer! Come on, soldier, quicker than that! Up to the height of your eye!”

Adam growled in his throat, in impotent rage at this squat Welshman whose tongue had suddenly become the bane of his life. “Charge with bullet!” He took a shiny wet bullet from his mouth, dropped it into the barrel, put the large end of the scourer after it, and stood waiting for the next order. “Ram down powder and ball! Withdraw your scourers! Poise your muskets! Shoulder your muskets! Come on, now, quickly, you at the end! Rest your muskets ... “

And so back to the beginning of the circle, and the next booming volley, in something under three minutes, a time which the sergeant said was terrible, but which was still a vast improvement on their performance yesterday. On and on they went, in the hot June sunshine, while the pikemen under Roger Satchell’s instruction marched, wheeled, and thrust in the field to the left of them. Adam’s arms ached, and sweat and spittle ran in trickling smears through the black powder on his neck and chin. After each boom his ears sang like a million larks, so that the harsh sergeant’s voice came from further and further away ...

Suddenly, he found himself alone of all the line with his musket loaded and ready in its rest. The others stood casually, gazing at him in exhausted amusement.

“Come on, man, wake up! I said ‘rest’ not ‘rest your muskets’ this time. Time to lie down and have a bite to eat. That’s better, lads, anyway. Give me another few days and I’ll have you frightening King James’s soldiers as well as me. Dismiss!”

They turned and trailed wearily across the grass, making for the shady places by the hedge, where some women from Lyme had set up a trestle table with large cheeses and bread. It seemed a hundred years since yesterday, when John Clapp had left them outside the Town Hall to join the cavalry, leading Roger Satchell’s horse behind him. The rest of them, shouldering their new equipment, had marched up out of Lyme to the West Hill, where they had met the young Colonel Wade again, and their new Welsh sergeant, Ivor Evans. The rest of the day they had spent lining the sides of the hedges over the deep sunken lanes that led into the town, alternately guarding the approaches and learning the endless intricate musket and pike drill. Throughout the day a constant stream of recruits had poured into Lyme, and formed into companies like their own.

Then in the evening they had marched back into the town for the grand parade, when they had first seen the great blue and white striped standard Monmouth had brought, with the proud motto
‘Fear Nothing But God’
blazoned across it. Even Adam’s heart had lifted as the flag rose above them, with the whole town cheering, drums beating, cannon firing from the ships in the sea, and the tramp of the great army through the town. After that they had marched out again to their present positions, where they had stood watches throughout the night, covering all the positions from which the enemy might approach.

Already there had been rumours of another skirmish, which crackled through the army like fire through dry grass: a cavalry skirmish in Bridport, with enemy horsemen killed. How many - two, five, ten - nobody knew, nor whether they were militia or regular soldiers; but all the excitement had meant that there had been little sleep in the fields, tired though they were. Instead there was much earnest, eager talk, psalm-singing, and anxious calling of the password throughout the night. Then, early in the morning, it had been back to the endless, deafening, mind-numbing musket drill again.

Adam helped himself to bread, cheese and water from the supply table, and slumped down by the hedge to tear at it greedily. His mouth left black marks in the bread, and he washed the powder off his lips as best he could.

He smiled at John Spragg, whose round, cheerful face was as black as his own. “Tastes better’n bullets, don’t it, John?”

“It surely does. It don’t get your mouth so wet, neither.”

William Clegg stretched his thin legs carefully, as though he thought they might break, and rubbed his ear. “I don’t think I shall hear anything ever again. Do ‘ee think ‘tis so loud as that in battles, John?”

“Louder, I reckon. ‘Twould be best to plug thy ears, afore it starts.”

“Then you wouldn’t hear the sergeant, neither, like me,” said Adam ruefully, gratified by the laughter they all shared at the memory of his mistake.

“I could do with a little less of his voice, anyway,” said Paul Abrahams, the youngest of the group. He glanced over to where the little sergeant was joking with some of the women, and spat expressively into the grass.

“Oh no, son, don’t think that.” John Spragg shook his head wisely. “The man knows his trade, and that’s going to matter to us in a day or so. If we can shoot and reload faster than our enemies, we shall have the victory.”

“It is for the good Lord to give us the victory, not mortal men,” growled Israel Fuller through his black beard, from where he sat by his pike. “We may go through this play of training, but it will be the hand of the Lord that will give us the victory, because of the justice of our cause.”

“Amen to that, friend Israel,” said Roger Satchell, who had come over to join them after leading the pike-drill. His lean face contemplated the preacher gravely. “But don’t you think ‘tis our duty now to transform ourselves into a fit instrument for the Lord’s hand, that through us He may smite more surely and swiftly when the time comes?”

“Assuredly, friend Roger. But it is a foolish vanity to think that it is only the matter of pike and musket drill that will fit us to be such an instrument; for the forces of Babylon will be equally skilled in such black arts as we. It is our duty to keep our minds and bodies pure and attentive to His Holy Word, that His army may conquer the enemy by the force of the Spirit alone.”

Israel’s dark, fierce eyes gazed around at them sternly, and Tom and several others gave a firm ‘Amen’.

“There’s little danger of our forgetting that, though, friend Israel,” said John Spragg easily. “Surely there must be the greatest gathering of true Protestants in these fields that you have ever seen, with a preacher every twenty yards or so?”

There was a general laugh at this, for indeed the wide black hats and Geneva bands of preachers were everywhere amongst the knots of men in the fields around them, and from beyond the hedge at the end of the field they could hear the lusty chanting of a psalm. Despite his own fears and doubts, there had been moments throughout the day when Adam’s mind had thrilled at the thought of being part of an army that was a huge religious instrument, gathering itself to strike into the ungodly heart of Papist England.

But Israel Fuller was not satisfied. “That’s an easy thought, John, and one that may well lead us into byways of sin unawares. Have you not thought of the danger of these women and young maids of Lyme, that do bring us food and drink? Did they not also wander freely through the camp last night, among countless scores of men from other villages? Such a practice is to put needless temptation in the way of those who may not be best able to resist it. I should think, friend Roger, that we should raise this matter with our leaders; for I doubt, from what I have so far seen of them, whether they be the best sort of men to think of sufficiently guarding against such a danger.”

A frown of irritation crossed Roger Satchell’s brow. He looked down and paused before he answered.

“I’ll mention the matter, friend Israel. But I think perhaps it would carry more weight coming from yourself, and other preachers, than from me. For now ... “

But they never heard what he meant to say next, for there was a sudden slap of hooves and jingle of harness as John Clapp rode up behind him and dismounted, the look on his round red face serious and urgent.

“Found ‘ee at last, friends. Roger, have ‘ee heard the news?”

“News? No, what now?”

“One good thing, one bad. The good thing first. We are to march this evening, to punish the enemy in Bridport. Here are your orders from Colonel Venner, in charge of the foot.”

There was a stir of excitement in the group. Adam shivered in the sunlight, and clenched his fist angrily on the grass. He must not be afraid now; he must not let them see it.

“And the bad news?”

“Thomas Dare of Taunton has been killed.”

“Killed? Where? How?”

“In Lyme this afternoon, by the Scotsman Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, in a quarrel over a horse which Dare brought in.”

“You can’t mean it.” Roger Satchell’s voice was hushed, like a whisper from the grave. Thomas Dare was his friend, the man who had sent him the letter from Holland. Fletcher of Saltoun was an experienced soldier, the man all expected to be the general of horse.

“Never more so, I’m afraid. Fletcher wanted the horse for himself, and Dare wouldn’t give it him, so they came to high words, and before anyone knew what was afoot Fletcher out with his pistol and shot him dead. Some say Dare used his whip, but I never saw it.”