Women of Courage (151 page)

So Adam relented, and went with them, though he still seethed inwardly. He wondered that no-one seemed to notice when he felt so strongly; was it like this, too, when he was afraid?

There was a crowd of men outside the White Hart, for Monmouth had made it his headquarters; but the Duke himself did not seem to be there. Instead Lord Grey came out, laughing, with several well-dressed, perfumed cavaliers of similar fashion. Tom cursed, and deliberately told Ann the story of Grey’s flight at Bridport, in a voice quite strong enough for most of those around to hear.

“And yet we’m still to have the sodomite for our leader of horse, for all that, because he’s a Lord and do look pretty,” he ended, so loud and scornful that Ann felt sure Grey must have heard it; and indeed he glanced at them coldly as he strode into the crowd. But he passed without speaking. Grey was a foppish, weak-looking man with big eyes and delicate hands that played for a moment with the ringlets of his wig. Ann noticed how the strong perfume that he and his friends wore drifted after him, contrasting strongly with the stale sweaty smell of most of the men around her.

“He doesn’t look much like a champion of the good old cause,” she said mischievously. “I wonder when he was last inside a conventicle?”

“Never!” said Tom vehemently. “Such men’ll betray us, if the Duke don’t rid himself of ‘em. They see him as a King, and theirselves as his courtiers, keeping his godly followers away from him. ‘Tis like Israel says, the Duke should listen to us and the preachers, not fancy cavaliers like that one.”

“Remember the Duke’s a fancy cavalier himself, boy,” said John Spragg quietly. “He’s been in no more conventicles than Lord Grey.”

“But the man’s a soldier of God for all that,” said Tom. “With the Lord’s blessing he’ll learn to lose his vanity and bring back that godliness to the nation that Israel says we had under the Protector.”

“Won’t Monmouth want to be King, first? Surely
he
doesn’t talk of a Commonwealth, a religious republic, now?”

Before it had happened, Ann had had her opinions, but never believed the rebellion would really come at all; and now that it had come, it was too overwhelming to be sure where it would lead. But Tom was certain.

“It doesn’t matter what he wants, now. ‘Tis like Israel says - we’re an army of common, godly people. ‘Tis us that fights - the leaders must do what we say.”

Adam frowned. “That’s not what matters, Tom. ‘Tis the leaders that matter. Monmouth don’t want to be Protector. He’ll be King.” He smiled at Tom’s innocence as he thought of the contrast between the Cromwell his father had spoken of, the heavy, blunt-featured farmer he had once seen a woodcut of in a book, and the Duke of Monmouth. Monmouth was a prince, King Charles’s illegitimate son, an aristocrat like Lord Grey; not a man who could share power and work with others, nor yet one who could bully and dominate others by the sheer force of his personality.

He was a man who would be King because people loved him, and would follow him for love - he was that, or nothing. “If he can lead us to win a few battles, and get rid of his Papist uncle, that’s all you can expect from him. We’ll have to put up with a few Lord Greys, just the same.”

“‘Tis a pity, though, Adam, bain’t it?” said John Spragg thoughtfully. “When there’s dozens could lead us better. Noll Cromwell was no fop like Grey, nor was Lord Fairfax neither, from what they say. And the country thrived just as well without a king, as I recall.”

“Cromwell was no more’n a king without a crown,” said Adam. “This Protestant Duke’ll do us well enough, if he’s soberly advised, as he will be, if he lets us crown him.”

“We don’t need no more kings, Mr Carter!” burst out Tom vehemently. “Look around you! Do these people look like courtiers, who want to change one king for another? Or follow fops like that fool Grey, or Robert Pole? These are the people who held Taunton against King Charles in my grandfather’s time - people who want to go to the meeting house and pray like us in our own way, without any vicars or bishops or kings to come between us and God! Look at them - Ann, don’t you see?”

Ann looked across the square, where all the doors and windows were decorated with bolts of cloth or flowers or branches of green trees, like a festival. Nearly all the men, even the preachers, had some flower or sprig of green in their hats, for this was the badge of the army. The atmosphere was serious, yet joyful at the same time, as though everyone felt they had been set free; yet from what she had heard of the time of Cromwell’s republic, before she had been born, it had not been a time of great joy or freedom except in religion. Tom’s words about Robert made her think of London, the tempting, thrilling London Robert had described to her, and she wondered if the army would go there, and if it would be as exciting as Robert had painted it. Certainly there must be evils there; but for all Tom’s boastful enthusiasm she did not want a country ruled by men as narrow and dogmatic as him and Israel Fuller. Was that what these men wanted; these men around her, with the keen, purposeful joy in their faces, and the cheerful sprigs of green in their hats?

“I’m for a Protestant King,” she said, and smiled at her father, ignoring the jealous, bitter disapproval on Tom’s stern handsome face.

19

T
HERE WERE no orders for the army to move next day, and Adam was determined to use part of the time to ensure that Ann went home, or at the very least, did not follow the army out of Taunton. But in the morning he could do nothing, for it was spent in continued practice drill in the army camp outside the town.

The Colyton men had now cut down the basic musket drill to two minutes between each volley, at which Sergeant Evans seemed almost pleased, though he would not admit it; and they watched with tolerant scorn the fumbling efforts of the newly-formed regiment of Taunton men, Colonel Bassett’s Blues, who took a good ninety seconds longer. Even when they did fire, most of the Taunton men’s shots skimmed the bark and leaves off saplings in the hedge two or three feet above the haycock targets.

“Reckon they be trying to knock the old blackbirds out of their nests,” chuckled William Clegg good-humouredly.

“They’ll learn, in time,” answered Adam. “We were as bad as that a week ago.”

“So long as they listen to their sergeant, instead of falling asleep on the job,” snapped the sharp, sing-song voice of their beloved tormentor. Sergeant Evans looked pointedly at Adam and winked at the others. The sergeant had a long memory, and Adam had not yet been allowed to forget that first day when he had been too tired and deafened by the endless noise to know when to stop. But although the Welshman was stern he was not vindictive, and as the Colyton men saw how they had improved, they were coming to trust his judgement as much as they feared his tongue.

“What’s this? Are you musket men taking your ease again?” broke in Roger Satchell, striding over from where he had been exercising the pikemen. He glanced at the haycocks and laughed. “I see you even bring your sheets to work!” For that morning Sergeant Evans had somehow procured two bedsheets from some unsuspecting housewife, and had strung them up on a line just above and behind the haycock targets, so that they could easily see if bullets had missed and gone too high.

“I did have hopes of taking them back as good as they came,” the sergeant replied. “But we’ve still got a few hayseeds here who think we’re out to shoot pigeons!”

“Not too many though.” Roger Satchell looked approvingly at the twenty-odd holes produced by a dozen volleys. “I think if you’d tried that a week ago, the poor housewife would have had nothing left but rags. But we need to learn to work together. Sergeant, fall your men in over there, if you please!”

For the rest of the morning they practised the complex drill of manouvering with the pikemen, forming squares and lines and columns, each designed to enable the infantrymen to use their two main weapons to the maximum advantage to protect each other, destroy the enemy on foot and remain impregnable to their horse.

So far on the march they had had little time for this sort of drill, for most of their time had been spent in learning to handle either musket or pike satisfactorily, without thinking about how they could use them to help their neighbours. But they all remembered the near-disaster at Bridport, when musketeers had jostled pikemen against the wall, and they had all nearly been run down by their own panic-stricken horse: and the sergeant and Roger Satchell could remind them of several times on their fumbling triumph on the way to Taunton, when they would have been dangerously open to attack, had they been faced by an enemy more determined than the terrified, conscience-stricken militia.

So they saw the point of the exercises easily enough, and worked hard and willingly until the sun stood high overhead, and the sweat was pouring off even the sergeant’s face. (“Though I reckon his throat ought to sweat most,” muttered William Clegg. “For that’s where all his work’s done!”)

In the afternoon Colonel Wade’s Red Regiment was itself strengthened by recruits, a company of musketeers from Taunton, and some pikemen, mostly armed with scythe-blades mounted on poles. Roger Satchell and Sergeant Evans were assigned to help train them, alongside their own officers, to bring them as quickly as possible up to the standard of the rest of the regiment, so the others found themselves free to rest or go into town if they chose.

Adam had spent half the night wondering what he should do about Ann. He was at once worried by her presence with the army, and deeply grateful for it. Grateful, because in the last two days she had helped him to forget his own fears and see the adventurous, triumphant, confident side of everything; worried, because soon they would go into battle, and he did not want his daughter to see her father hurt or frightened. He did not want any of his family to see that.

He had also seen her with Tom in the last few days, far more than he had done before. Always, before, he had seen them as children in his own or Tom’s parents’ house, and the respect Tom had shown him had been natural and obvious. Now, perhaps because they were betrothed, perhaps because Tom stood with his father-in-law in the ranks and shielded him with his great pike, the respect seemed to have gone. In the evenings, around the camp fires, Adam had found that Tom stood near Ann, walked with her, as though he owned her; and he, her father, could not get near. It did not seem right that a father should be jealous of the husband he had urged his daughter to accept; but Adam did not like it, and he fancied, from looks he had seen on her face, that Ann did not always like it either; especially when Tom boasted, as he had taken to doing, about what he had done to the militia at Bridport, or would do to them in the future.

For all these reasons Adam had decided that it was his duty to send Ann home, whatever her or Tom’s reasons for her staying. He had thought long last night about how he should do it, and smiled to himself a little at the answer. There were times when a man’s strength could become his weakness. He put on a suitably stern face as he approached his prospective son-in-law.

“Tom, I am afraid I have bad news for you. I have been wrestling with my conscience most earnestly in the night, and I am convinced it is wrong for Ann to be here.”

“‘Tis no proper place for a woman, I sees that.” Tom’s voice was slow, troubled. He had liked having Ann with them the last few days; it had given him great confidence, to know that she could see him marching proudly with the other pikemen - always the tallest and strongest of the foot-soldiers - and that she was there in the evening to listen admiringly to his stories of the fighting. He felt she admired him here more than she had done at home; and he had seen more than a few men cast envying glances his way as they walked through the town last night. But now he felt guilty and resentful, afraid that her father had noticed some of this. If only they had been married, before the revolution had begun!

“‘Tis not a proper place for a woman at all, Tom,” Adam went on. “Only the armies of the ungodly are followed by women, and the Lord is not like to look kindly on our cause if we do ape their ways.”

“She does no harm, though. I heard Surgeon Nicolas say how she were a great help to him with those two as were wounded yesterday.” A sullen, resentful look, like that of a scolded boy, passed across the big young man’s face.

“Such sights are not fit for her to see. War is man’s work, you know that.” Adam sighed, and put his hand on the boy’s broad shoulder. “I know it is hard for you. ‘Tis only natural for her to admire you when you do your duty to the Lord, and for a lusty young lad like you to want to be with his sweetheart as much as he can, but ... “

“Oh no, Mr Carter, ‘tis not that.” Tom hesitated, almost blushing, but Adam let him stammmer on. “That which you’re speaking of now, ‘tis only vanity, and ... and the lusts of the flesh. ‘Tis not for that I seem glad that Ann’s here, ‘tis only ...”

“‘Twould be natural if you did, Tom, I know that.” Adam’s voice expressed understanding, but he did not want Tom to think of his daughter like that, at all.

“No ... no, Mr Carter, ‘tis not that, truly. ‘Tis just that it seems safer just now for her to be with us, than to be travelling cross-country with the militia about. And there’s even been militia in Colyton, she says.”

“That’s my worry, too, Tom. The thought of a young woman wandering alone in the countryside at this time is something that no father - or husband - would want. But I cannot safeguard her while we’re on the march either, if she’s to ride behind in that old cart with the surgeon. You know, Tom, not every man in this army is as pure a follower of the Lord as you. ‘Tis a sin, boy, a sin for her to be here. And as her father, I hold myself responsible ... “

“But where else can she be?” Again Tom wished that he and Ann were married, that more of the power of decision were his. Beside Adam Carter now, he felt little more than a clumsy, overgrown boy.

“Well now, ‘tis that I’ve been cudgelling my brains to find out. And since she cannot go home and she cannot go with us, it seems best that she stay in Taunton when we leave. Though not with old mother Trumble, if it can be helped.” The house where Ann and surgeon Nicolas were lodging, and caring for the few wounded men that they had so far had to deal with, made Adam’s stomach heave with disgust. It was small and dirty and smelly, with scraps of old food and insects in every corner. “But there’s a better place, if they’ll have her. Roger Satchell told me of it, and gave me a letter to take. The Ladies’ Academy.”