Simon (27 page)

Horsemen were streaming away across the bridge and into the woods beyond; on either side the quick-silver water was churned and darkened as the desperate riders for whom there was no room on the bridge, set their mounts to swim the river.

Barnaby’s voice rose above the tumult, shouting to his troopers. ‘Follow me, lads—the bridge is no use to us.’ And he wheeled aside from the main pursuit, down the sloping river bank.

‘Fifty yards farther down!’ Simon yelled, ‘A stickle. No need to swim for it!’

‘Right! Here goes!’

Other troops, glimpsing the broken brightness of the shallows, were following, as Simon, holding the Standard high in one hand, steadied Scarlet down to the water. ‘Easy does it—steady, boy—now!’ A smother of spray, a flash of sheeted silver boiling all around, full of the thrust and plunge of other horses, the icy water flung up in drenching showers; and then with a wild slipping and scrambling of hooves and a shout of ‘Up, boy! Up!’ they had gained the farther bank.

As they did so, above the shouting and plunging there burst an appalling roar that seemed to leap down upon them from the town, a crash that flung backward and forth between the hills, making the solid ground tremble. Simon wrenched round as he rode, to stare behind him, and saw a livid glare spreading above Torrington, and the roofs of the houses along Castle Hill etched black against it. Other men were pointing and shouting, horses flinging this way and that in a shuddering panic.

‘In Heaven’s name, what was that?’ Simon shouted, with an instant’s jagged vision in his mind of a moorland bridge exploding into red ruin, and men and horses flung from it, to lie broken and huddled in the water.

And out of the crowding shadows ahead, Barnaby’s voice answered him. ‘Powder store gone up, by the sound of it!’

Ahead of them, Cromwell’s trumpets were calling up his scattered squadrons. They rounded the last cottages of Taddiport, and the muddy lane was beneath their hooves once more. The reddening glare in the sky above Torrington was left behind, and hunters and hunted swept on westward.

IN THE GREY
dawn, a dozen or more miles from Torrington, Cromwell called off the pursuit, and ordered his squadrons back on their tracks. And a few hours later the weary troops were bivouacking in the river-meadows below the old inn at Woodford, where the Holsworthy road crossed the upper reaches of the Torridge. The green valley-floor between hanging oak woods had become as busy as a market-place, with tired horses being rubbed down and made comfortable, camp-fires sending up jay’s feathers of smoke into the wintry sky, and all the ordered coming and going of a bivouack. The frost of last night had gone, and there was a smell of coming rain in the air; and so presently, when a meal had been eaten and stray wounds bound up, there would be the business of finding quarters for close on four hundred men among the house and outbuildings of the inn and the few farms and cottages nearby; for Cromwell, in mercy on his weary squadrons, had decided against returning to Torrington that day.

Now, with several officers behind him, he was making the rounds of the temporary horse-lines; speaking a brusque but kindly word to a trooper here and there, inquiring into a wound, bending to examine the hock of a horse that had gone lame, all with the personal interest in horse and man that he had had when he was the leader of a troop and had not lost now that he was second in command of an army.

Simon, watering Scarlet at the stream, and talking to him softly the while, looked up to see Cromwell standing beside him. He drew himself to attention, trying at the same time to keep one eye on the horse, lest he drank more than was good for him, and found the square man regarding him with interest. He had never spoken to the Lieutenant-General before, nor, so far as he
knew, had he been noticed by him; so he was surprised when Cromwell said, ‘Back to the Colours again, I see.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Not going to miss the fun, eh?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But you have reopened that wound a bit.’

Simon had certainly had a bang on the head during the fighting for the barricades, but he had thought no more of it, and now, putting up his hand, he was surprised to feel the crumbly dryness of caked blood on his temple.

‘Not good,’ said Cromwell. ‘And you scarce returned from—sick leave.’ There was the least possible pause before the last two words, and Simon saw that the Lieutenant-General’s bright hazel eyes were dancing like a boy’s in his blunt ruddy face.

They grinned at each other like a pair of cheerful conspirators, and Simon felt, as people generally did when they were with Old Noll, his tremendous power of drawing men into fellowship with him.

‘I forget your name,’ Cromwell said.

‘Carey, sir.’

‘You’re a local man, aren’t you? What a fool question! Of course you are.’

‘I come from four or five miles beyond Torrington, sir.’

General Cromwell nodded. ‘But no doubt you are reasonably familiar with the roads this side of the town.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Get a meal and give your horse an hour’s rest; then report to me at the inn yonder. My Galloper is wounded, and I shall have dispatches for carrying back to the Lord-General.’ And he tramped off to poke his blunt nose into the food being prepared for his men at the upper end of the meadow.

‘I seem fated to bear-lead this disgusting troop by myself while you go gadding!’ Lieutenant Colebourne said resignedly, a few minutes later, when Simon reported to him what had happened. ‘Why couldn’t you have told him you hailed from Coventry or Clerkenwell, and then maybe he’d have picked on someone else.’

An hour later, as near as he could judge, Simon made his way
up to the inn. The Troop Standards had been formally housed in the room over the thatched porch, and were slanting out through the open window; and glancing up at them after he had looped Scarlet’s reins over the hitching-post, Simon thought what a brave show they made in the faint sunshine, crimson and emerald and deepest blue, stirring a little as the breeze caught them. Then he turned his attention to the trooper on duty before the door, and explained that he had orders to wait on General Cromwell.

The man passed him on to another, and after tramping down a few worn steps and a sloping and uneven passage beyond, Simon found himself in the taproom of the inn. A low-ceiled room, with deep-set windows, and walls lined with the usual casks and demijohns and rows of many coloured bottles reflecting back in jewelled sparks the light of a fire that blazed on the open hearth. There was a strong smell of cider, and the air was blue with wreathing tobacco smoke through which Simon saw the figures of several dusty and weary officers. The Lieutenant-General was seated sideways on a settle by the fire, with a table before him. He was writing fast, with an inn pen which squeaked abominably, while with his free hand he supported the bowl of a long clay pipe, at which he puffed steadily.

Reaching the end of the page, he signed it and drew a final slashing line which spluttered ink all across the signature, sanded and folded the sheet, and held it out to Simon who was standing in readiness before him. ‘I want this in Sir Thomas Fairfax’s hands as soon as may be.’

‘Sir,’ said Simon, stowing the dispatch in the breast of his buff coat.

‘But don’t kill your horse for the sake of getting it there ten minutes earlier.’ And he lounged up from the settle to kick the blazing logs together with a booted foot, as Simon saluted and turned to the door.

Outside once more, he unhitched Scarlet and, mounting, set out for Torrington, six or seven miles distant. Scarlet was very tired, despite his short rest, but he rallied valiantly to Simon’s voice and hand, and changed his pace to an easy canter as they left the inn with its bivouacked troops behind them.

The first thing Simon noticed when he reached the near end
of South Street was a litter of broken glass crunching under-foot. He was leading Scarlet by that time; he never rode up Mill Street even with a fresh horse, and looking round, he saw that scarcely a pane of glass or horn was left clinging to a windowpane in all the length of the street, while the frames themselves were driven askew, and slates, chimney-pots and great lumps of thatch littered the cobbles. Suddenly he remembered the roar and the livid glare in the sky, which Barnaby had said was a powder store going up; and something seemed to turn over inside him. The powder store. Zeal and Podbury! Were they safely out of it, or had they gone heavenward with that rending glare? There was no time to find out now.

Simon called to one of the many passing soldiers. ‘Where shall I find Sir Thomas Fairfax?’

‘At the Black Horse, sir. Turn to the left at the Market.’

‘Thanks. I know the place.’ Simon walked on, turning up into the square. Here was a chaos of blown-out windows and stripped roofs, even worse than in South Street. Here also was a great coming and going of troops, wagons rolling in and horses being urged through the crowd. But scarcely any of the towns-people were to be seen, for though the good folk of Torrington had always been for Parliament, they had seen enough of armies in the past four years to distrust all of them, and they were keeping within doors.

Simon delivered up his dispatch to Fairfax in an upper room of the inn which he had taken over for his headquarters, and was ordered to join himself for the present to the General’s Troop, which was quartered with the Third in some farm buildings on the north of the town. His nearest way lay through the churchyard, which had always been a thoroughfare from one part of the town to the other, and when he reached the head of the Square, and turned in between two old shops that seemed oddly crumbled and askew, he felt for an instant as though he had walked into some hideous dream. His eyes had been ready for the quiet of leaning headstones, ancient lime trees among whose bare topmost branches the rooks would be at their building, the grey well-remembered church with its friendly little leaded spire . . . But the rooks had flown from trees that were no more than blasted
stumps stretching here and there a broken limb to the clouding sky, or lying uprooted across the hummocked turf. The old houses that had ringed the place were broken back, empty-windowed, roofless, with here and there a great breach in a tottering wall. And the church? The church was a fire-blackened and desolate shell, piled with rubble, among which soldiers were searching, under the orders of a sergeant.

Simon had brought Scarlet to a standstill, without knowing that he did so, and stood staring at the scene of desolation with a dull sense of shock lying cold and heavy in his stomach. Why the church? Why, in heaven’s name, the church? His head was a trifle woolly from the bang he had received on it, and it was a few moments before he realized that he had never known where Zeal’s powder store was. It must have been here, here in the church.

Leading Scarlet behind him, he made his way up what had once been a path, stepping over the fallen rubble to the place where the sergeant stood. ‘What has happened here?’ he asked, feeling as he did so how foolish the question sounded.

The sergeant turned on him a harassed face, and said wearily, ‘Can’t you see, sir?’

‘I can see there’s been an explosion; but what caused it?’

‘Couldn’t say, sir. Somebody or something must have touched off the powder.’

‘Oh yes, the powder,’ Simon said dully. ‘It was stored here?’

‘Aye, in the base of the bell-tower; but we didn’t know that when we put the prisoners there.’

‘Prisoners?’

‘Close on two hundred.’ The sergeant’s voice was grim. ‘And a dozen or more of Fortescue’s Regiment on guard. Didn’t you know, sir?’

‘No, I didn’t. Were many of them killed?’

‘We’ve dug out a few wounded,’ the Sergeant said, meaningly.

There was a long silence. Simon was staring down at a fragment of stone beside his foot. There were feathers chiselled on it, as though it came from a carved angel’s wing, or a bird’s.

‘Oh,’ he said at last, and turned away. He walked on, with his arm through Scarlet’s bridle, and the weary horse
clip-clopping after him, into Calf Street, and down one of the narrow ways leading to the Commons.

Captain-Lieutenant Meredith was down at the horse-lines when Simon found and reported to him; and presently, after Scarlet had been handed over to the care of a trooper, the two made their way back together to the big farm kitchen where several of the Regimental officers were gathered. They were standing round the fire, warming chilled hands in a few off-duty minutes; and they made room for the newcomer to get near the warmth.

‘Carey! Where have you sprung from?’ Cornet Fletcher greeted him.

Simon turned a shoulder and edged in to the blaze, carefully ignoring Denzil Wainwright, who was lounging in the chimney corner and just as carefully ignoring him. ‘Woodford,’ he said, ‘if that conveys anything to you. Old Noll sent me back with dispatches for the Lord-General—his Galloper being out of action.’

Several voices demanded news of the chase; and he told them that Cromwell had called it off before Holsworthy, and that to the best of his knowledge the Royalist Horse were heading back over the border into Cornwall.

‘I wonder how many of them will manage it,’ said Meredith. ‘Not that it makes much odds. The King’s Army in the West is done.’

Simon took off his steel cap, which was chafing the place where the old scar had reopened, and reaching up, put it on the broad mantel. ‘What happened after we left?’

Several people told him: while Fairfax’s troops were gaining the Square, Lord Hopton had brought up his reserves of Horse for one last charge against the attackers on the north, but by that time his Foot had been in full retreat, and without their support the charge had failed. Defeat had become a rout, and despite all his efforts to rally them, the whole Royalist Army had gone streaming away over the Commons and down Castle Hill, so that while Cromwell was driving the Horse down through Taddiport, the Foot had been already running like red-shanks. By dawn it had all been over.

‘What happened to Lord Hopton?’ asked Simon.