Simon (21 page)

‘Our friend Hodge would seem to find his thoughts deeply interesting,’ said Denzil Wainwright’s voice at his shoulder, and he looked up with a start, to see his tormentor beside him. ‘Pleasant thoughts?’ inquired Cornet Wainwright tenderly.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Simon, with elaborate politeness.

‘Were they of cows, may one inquire—or possibly turnips?’

Simon said nothing. He was aware of a small crowd gathering around them to look on with interest.

‘Or could it be your worthy mother?’

Simon was staring into his beer-mug as though he had not heard. But his left hand, hidden under the table, was clenching and unclenching convulsively.

Denzil gave him a light poke. ‘I’m talking to you.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Simon between shut teeth. ‘I thought it was a blue-bottle buzzing.’

‘Rude,’ sighed Denzil. ‘Also crude.’ He lounged against the table. ‘This is your part of the world, isn’t it, Hodge?’

Simon did not look up. ‘Farther north, Torrington way,’ he said briefly.

‘Ah, a case of “so near and yet so far”, eh?’

‘Not really. I’m going home tomorrow—on sick leave.’

There was an instant’s surprised pause; and then, in a clear amused voice, raised a little for the whole room to hear, Denzil said, ‘You’re not such a fool as you look, Hodge.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It must have taken quite a lot of—shall we say intelligence?—yes, intelligence, to get sick leave out of that scratch on your head. I take it that when once you get back among the ancestral pigs and pastures, we shall not be counting you among our numbers again?’

Simon stopped staring into his beer-mug and got up deliberately. ‘Look here, drop it, can’t you?’ he said, breathing quickly through widened nostrils; and the onlookers saw that he had gone very white.

‘Drop what?—Oh, don’t come trampling over me, you oaf!’

‘
Drop it!
’ Simon said again, his voice shaking with passion.

And Denzil, hearing the tremor, and mistaking its cause, laughed.

At the sound of that laugh, a scarlet flame seemed to leap up in Simon, fanning out so that he saw Denzil’s dark amused face through the fiery redness. He drove his fist into it, with the full weight of his body behind the blow, and saw it suddenly surprised and with a bloody mouth. There was a fierce joy in him, and he never heard the crash of splintering wood as a chair went over and was kicked aside; he never felt the blows that were landing true on his own face. All he knew was the savage exultation of battle as his own blows went home, every blow the avenging of an insult too long borne.

Presently the red flame began to sink and he found that he was leaning against the table and drawing his breath in whistling gasps, the centre of a crowd of staring faces.

‘Phew!’ Cornet Fletcher was saying admiringly. ‘I never knew Carey had a temper like that!’

One of his eyes was rapidly closing, but out of the other he saw an overturned chair and a litter of pots and dishes that had been swept from the table; and beyond, Denzil Wainwright sagging against the wall in the midst of another group. Denzil’s face seemed the most appalling mess, and Simon looked vaguely from it to his own broken knuckles, and back again. Chaplain Joshua Sprigg was saying something about lewd brawling and ungodly behaviour, but Simon was not listening; without the red flame, he felt suddenly cold and very tired. The crowd parted to let someone through, and he saw that it was David Morrison.

The old surgeon took him by the shoulders and turned him to the light of a branch of candles. ‘Ach, these hot-headed bairns that canna’ thole a fancied smutch on their honour!’ said he, severely, shaking his head. ‘No harm done, save a black eye; but ye may thank your Maker that ye have na’ reopened that wound, ma laddie.’ And he patted Simon’s shoulder approvingly as he turned away.

‘Major Disbrow’s going to hear about this!’ said Denzil, as he dabbed at his bleeding mouth. ‘You went for me like a devil, Carey!’

Barnaby Colebourne, who was standing at his Cornet’s side, swung round on him in cold contempt. ‘Don’t be a fool, Wainwright. You’ve been asking for trouble all this past year, and now you’ve got what you were asking for. And I shouldn’t do any reporting, if I were you; too many of us can tell the truth about this evening’s performance.’

There was a murmur of agreement; and Ralf Marjory, the senior captain present, who had been ostentatiously staring out of the window into the night, with his back turned to the whole proceedings, looked round for the first time. ‘I suggest Cornet Wainwright puts his face to rights, and then turns in,’ he said, but it was an order, not a suggestion.

‘Sir,’ said Denzil, pulling himself together with an obvious effort, and stalking rather groggily from the room. But in the doorway he turned and looked at Simon, a long, dark look. ‘I swear I’ll even the account with you for this!’ he said, and lurched out into the gallery.

So next morning Simon rode northward, beside one of Major Watson’s scouts. They were an ordinary-looking couple, with nothing about them to catch the notice of any Royalist they might encounter; farmers or well-to-do tradesmen, to judge by their comfortable homespun garments; though to be sure the face of Simon’s companion, under the brim of his beaver, seemed somewhat leery for a farmer. As a matter of fact, he had been first a lawyer’s clerk and then a fairground thimble-rigger before he joined the New Model.

Simon had pulled his slouch hat far down to cover the general state of his face, as well as the ill-healed scar on his temple, for a beefsteak applied last night to his eye had not had much effect; and he rode lazily, with his free hand thrust deep into the pocket of his russet riding-coat, in manner very different from the way he had learned to ride as an officer of Fairfax’s Horse. His saddle felt unfamiliar after the hard Cavalry saddle he had grown used to, and he missed the light kiss of his sword against his left thigh. It had become so much a part of himself, his sword, and he had had to leave it behind, since a farmer going about his lawful business would be most unlikely to carry such a thing. But
pistols were another matter; anyone going on a journey in these hazardous days might carry pistols, and Simon’s were safe in their holsters at his saddle bow.

He had spent a rather worried night, for he realized that last evening’s affair had not been quite in keeping with sick leave. But save that Barnaby had remarked in a slightly puzzled tone, ‘I must say that for an invalid, you have an uncommon punishing left,’ there had been no awkward developments, and as they turned into the familiar road, his heart lifted because he was going home, just as it used to lift when he rode that way on the first day of the school holidays.

It was not a pleasant journey, with the roads churned to quagmire and every stream coming down in green spate from the melting snows of Exmoor, and some miles short of South Molton they were thankful to turn aside for the night at a dirty hedgetavern. Here they found two troopers of Grenville’s, who seemed to have mislaid the rest of their regiment, though they assured the newcomers that they were not deserters. They all spent a very merry evening together, and Simon, watching Mr Podbury drinking rum with his feet on the table after cheating the younger of the Royalists out of one and ninepence at the dice, remembered with interest a rumour which had run through the Army a while before, that the scouts had demanded a rise of pay to recompense them for the danger to their immortal souls.

Simon slept in the stable with Scarlet that night, partly because the straw seemed less flea-ridden than the tavern beds, and partly because he did not trust Grenville’s troopers where a horse was concerned. But nothing happened, and in the morning he and the scout took the road again.

Some miles short of Torrington they parted, after making certain careful arrangements. The scout held straight on towards the town, while Simon turned off into the maze of lanes and bridle-tracks that he knew like the lines of his own palm; and in the first fading of the winter day, he swung into the dearly familiar track that led home.

Horse and rider were both tired, but Scarlet pricked his ears and started forward to the sudden glorious memory of the home stable, and Simon lifted his head and gazed about him hungrily.
The muddied snow still lay drifted along the hedge-bottom, but already the withies were flushed with rising sap. Salutation was down to winter wheat, and as Scarlet’s hoof-beats disturbed them, a flock of green plover rose from the bare plough-land, their pied wings pulsing and flickering against the dun woods beyond. Then the track rounded the spinney where the white owl lived, and Simon reined back an instant by the gate and looked across the home paddock to the warm and welcoming huddle of the house and outbuildings. Always, in the old days, he had paused like this when he arrived back from school, for his first glimpse of home. But this time surely there was something different about the steep lift of the orchard beyond; a bareness about the crest where the old cider trees had always stood against the sky.

However, he had no time to notice what the difference was; scarcely time to notice that it was there at all; for at that instant Tom appeared from among the farm buildings, carrying a huge forkful of hay. He halted at sight of the rider in the lane, and then dropped the fork and shot back towards the house. ‘Missis!’ Simon could hear him roaring. ‘Maister Simon’s back! ’Tis Maister Simon, my dear souls!’

‘We’re home, Scarlet!’ Simon said, drawing a hand down the horse’s neck, and urging him on up the lane, the difference in the orchard quite forgotten. ‘We’re home again, old lad.’

Late that night three very contented people were still sitting round the fire in the parlour, where the firelight was reflected dancingly in the sheeny depth of the panelling, and the wintry darkness was shut out by drawn curtains of faded damask that seemed to fold the little room in warmth and shelter as though they had been wings folded close around it.

All the excitement of home-coming, the joyful astonishment and the breathless questions and answers, the supper with Mrs Carey’s storeroom raided in honour of the occasion, were over. There had been so much to say, so many things to tell, after almost a year of being apart; but for the moment they had talked themselves out, and now they were sitting quiet, with the dogs dozing at their feet.

Then Mouse, who was sitting on her heels before the fire, with
one of Jillot’s latest puppies asleep in her lap, looked up at Simon, and sighed. ‘I wish you were in uniform,’ she said. ‘We heard that the soldiers of the New Model Army all wear scarlet—I should like to see you in scarlet, with your sword.’

‘Why, a scarlet coat, or a buff one for that matter, would be likely to land one in trouble, in these parts nowadays.’

Mouse’s eyes suddenly grew round and solemn. ‘Oh, Simon, is it safe for you here? I hadn’t thought—’

‘Safe as houses,’ Simon reassured her. ‘Should I have been sent home on sick leave if it wasn’t safe, you goose? The village won’t talk, and if we should get Royalists round the place, how are they to know I didn’t cut my head open falling off a haystack?’

‘On to the edge of a scythe,’ added his sister, with a sudden glint of laughter in her eyes that had been so startled the moment before. ‘Yes, I see.’

‘This Mistress Killigrew who tended you when you were wounded,’ said his mother, looking up from the ancient damask cloth she was mending, ‘what is she like?’

Simon considered. ‘She’s a good woman,’ he said at last. ‘But not comfortable. Now,
you
are comfortable as well as good, Mother; it makes a lot of difference.’

Mrs Carey smiled at him fondly. ‘At all events, she seems to have been very kind to you. I shall write and thank her, when there’s any likelihood of a letter getting through again.’

‘Umm,’ said Simon, and smiled back at her. He leaned down to put some more wood on the fire; then paused, looking at the lichened log in his hand. ‘Hullo, have we had a tree blown down?’

There was a little silence, then Mrs Carey said, ‘Not blown, my dear—cut. A party of Lord Goring’s troopers passed this way in the early winter.’

Simon felt a small chill shock, and the sense of Sanctuary faded a little from the firelit room, and he heard the strident call of a hunting owl in the bitter darkness outside. ‘Have they cut down much of the orchard? The Old Warden?’

‘No, only the cider trees at the top. They were ordered on before they had time to start on the rest.’

‘And the Spinney close at hand, with enough dead wood in
it to cook for an army after the autumn gales,’ said Mouse, in a small grim voice, playing with the puppy’s ears so hard that it woke and whimpered. ‘Well, the green wood made them very poor fires; that’s one consolation. Even now we can only burn what was left a bit at a time, when the fire is hot.’

‘Have you had much trouble, these past months?’ Simon asked.

Mrs Carey was beginning another darn. ‘Not really. A few sheep stolen, and the granary fired by deserters—but we managed to put that out—and the apple trees. There are scars; but I doubt if you’ll find many houses quite unscathed that lie in the path of the war.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Simon said slowly. He looked at the log in his hand, with its delicate tracery of grey-green lichen; thinking of the autumn cider-making, and the beauty of white blossom in the springtime, that would not come again. It seemed so wanton, so stupid. He put the log gently on the fire, and watched it flower for the last time into petals of saffron flame that scented all the room with aromatic sweetness.

ON THE SURFACE,
the next few weeks were very peaceful ones for Simon. There was plenty of work for him on the demesne, with the lambing season in full swing, and the farm men away at the war, and old Diggory, who had been laid up with the rheumatics most of the winter, still in bed. And he worked hard, beside Tom, and came in tired at nights, with a deep quiet tiredness, and slept in his chair after supper, with weary legs stretched to the fire.

But he never for an instant felt that he had come home. He was no more than a passage-hawk: here under orders, to carry out a certain task; and it was as though Lovacott, grown wise with centuries of being lived in and loved, knew it, and did not try to claim him. Presently, when the war was over, he could come home, knowing that he had earned his heritage; and Lovacott would take him back. But that was not yet.