Simon (33 page)

It was more than a year since the bitter January morning when the King had stepped out from the window of his banqueting hall on to the waiting scaffold; more than four since the battle of Torrington; but the two friends had seen very little of each other in all that time.

Simon had remained with his Regiment after the fall of Oxford,
and when the King from his “honourable confinement” had contrived to stir up the war again, he was at the storming of Maidstone, and was promoted Lieutenant; but he held his new rank only a few months. Then Parliament had decided that it was hopeless to treat with Charles any longer, since he obviously did not understand treaties, and would go on making trouble as long as he lived. For the welfare of England, the King must die. Cromwell and most of the Army leaders were of the same mind, but not Sir Thomas Fairfax. Simon’s General had gone to war because he loved justice and freedom, and felt it to be his duty. But the execution of the King, he said, was not his duty; it was not justice but only expediency, and he would have nothing to do with it. He refused to sign Charles’s death-warrant, knowing that the refusal would cost him his Army Command; and when he gave up his commission, many of his officers did the same, amongst them, Simon.

So Simon had returned to take over the Mastery of Lovacott, for that was what it amounted to. His father had finally returned home late in the summer that ended the war, and with old Diggory to help him, had contrived to keep the farm and the Manor going, without quite enough men or quite enough money, as so many farmers and landowners were doing in the lean years after the war. But it had been gruelling work for a rather sick man lacking a leg; and when Simon came home, he had thankfully given the reins of government into the young man’s hands. They were still “the Maister” and “the Young Maister”; John Carey was there for Simon to turn to for advice, for counsel, out of his experience of land and men and cattle that Simon had not yet had time to gain; but none the less, it was Simon now to whom the farmhands came for orders, and who decided what crop should be sown in Sanctuary, whether a villager’s pigsty really needed rebuilding, and when a new team of plough oxen should be bought.

For Amias, the story had been quieter. He had been unpleasantly ill after the battle of Torrington, and by the time his wound was healed and he was fit for service again, the war was over. So he had become apprenticed to his father, as both of them had always intended. When the King’s Standards were raised once
more, he had answered the call, but the rebellion had flickered out almost before it touched the West Country, and Amias had gone back to his father’s surgery. By the time Simon had returned to Lovacott, Amias was away in London, taking instruction at St Bartholomew’s Hospital; and only a few days since, he had come home to finish his apprenticeship and settle down, as he said, into a staid and respectable country surgeon. Not that he showed the least signs of becoming either staid or respectable at the moment, mooning contentedly through the hazel-scrub, with his red hair wildly on end and his ancient green doublet split at one shoulder from a misadventure with a sharp alder root.

The lower spinney was hazed with green, and full of the wing-flitter of nesting birds; primroses and wind-flowers held up small clean faces among the fern and brambles, and away over open country the curlews were crying. Amias sniffed the springtime smell of wet moss and green things growing, flinging up his head like a colt into the light west wind. ‘Listen to the curlews! I’ve not heard a curlew calling for a whole year; and, by heaven, I have been hungry for that bubbly call of theirs!’

They had come out from the woodshore, as he spoke, on to the steep grass verge of the lane, and suddenly he checked. ‘Hullo, who have we here?’ For a solitary wayfarer had appeared at that moment, loping along from the direction of the village. He wore loose-fitting faded clothes with a smack of the sea about them, and on his head a red seaman’s bonnet. Simon did not know any seamen, yet there was something familiar about this one.

‘What on earth is a sailor doing, so far from the beaten track?’ Amias said.

But Simon was not listening. ‘Good Lord! It’s Podbury!’ he exclaimed, and dropped into the lane, calling, ‘Podbury! Hi!’

‘Long-lost relation?’ inquired Amias, following; but got no answer.

The seaman quickened his pace at sight of Simon, and came up with a broad smile splitting his rogue’s countenance in two. ‘Why, if ’tisn’t Cornet Carey! I been asking for you in the village. ’Tisn’t so easy to find your place from this side.’

Simon said in bewilderment, ‘I thought you were killed when the powder store went up, four years back.’

‘Not me, sir; just come from Bideford, I have, and afore that from Jamestown in the New World. I’m a honest seaman now, ye sees.’

‘Yes, I can see that. What happened in the church? What really set off the powder? How did you escape?’

‘Nay now, sir, ’tis all ancient history by this time.’

‘Maybe,’ said Simon. ‘But the man who was with you in hiding was a friend of mine. He died of his wounds, without being able to tell us much, and I want to know that ancient history.’

‘You’ll be meaning Ishmael Watts?’ inquired Podbury.

‘Yes.’

‘Now I’ll tell you what, sir’—in the tone of one trying to oblige a friend—‘I’ll tell you all I knows, honest and above board; but I didn’t come here for that. I comes here because I says to meself, “Benjamin Podbury, here you are, just landed on your native soil, and here’s Cornet Carey as would be pained to think as you’d gone your way, with no soles to your shoes, so to speak, and never come a-nigh him for to allow him to assist you. And ’oo are you to pain Cornet Carey, as is a old comrade of yours?” So here I am, and—’

‘Is it work you want?’ Simon interrupted.

‘Work? Lor’ no, sir. I did think to turn thimble-rigger again, but fairs and suchlike is out of favour now, it seems, and consequently don’t pay like they used; so I’m on my way to Plymouth to pick up another ship; but I thinks to meself that for the sake of days gone by, and comrades in arms, and so on, you might feel disposed to help a deserving object on me way.’

‘I’ll give you what I can. In these days we none of us have much to spare.’

‘Bless you, sir, I know that. I’m a reasonable man, and not one to hold it again a comrade that his pockets ain’t so well lined as I could wish,’ Podbury assured him kindly. ‘You throw a square meal in with it, and there’ll be no ill-feeling, I do assure you. And speaking of square meals, s’pose we goes and gets
this one now, and I’ll tell you what you wants to know as we goes along.’

Simon realized that they had been standing stock-still in the middle of the lane all this time, while Amias and Joram looked on, and a little red heifer, with her head thrust through the hedge, peered down at them with soft long-lashed eyes.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Down the wagon-lane yonder.’

‘Well, now,’ said Podbury, as, with Amias strolling a few paces behind, they turned into the narrow track. ‘Ask away, sir.’

‘I want to know what happened from the time Watts hid you above the powder store.’

‘Well now, for a while nothing happened, and precious cold quarters ’twas up there too, and me bruised and basted all over and scarce able to move, and never daring to groan or sneeze for fear of being overheard, and the hard-tack going green and not too much of it. (Not as I means to complain, mind you, sir; real grateful I was to that cove, even if he did look a sight too like the prophet Isaiah for my taste.) Then things must o’ got too hot for him, and he nips in past the guard in a snow-flurry one night with a sack of biscuit and “Benjamin”, says he, “don’t neither of us stir out of this place again till you’re fit to run the gauntlet or the New Model arrives”, he says. And there we was.’

‘What then?’ demanded Simon.

‘I’m a-telling you, ain’t I? There we was, three days, maybe, till we decided to make a dash for it after the next nightfall. I was pretty well mended by that time, as right as a cove could be in such a doghole, on mouldy biscuit. But about dusk we hears a great to-do in the town, drums beating to action quarters and such like; then a lot of coves comes into the foot of the tower and starts taking out some of the powder, and presently we hears the rattle of musketry. “’Tis Fairfax at the gates,” says Watts. “Now let us forth and smite the Amalekites,” says he, and then we finds as some fool has took away the ladder! We couldn’t pull it up after us, ye sees, ’cos that would have been sure to make some suspicious-minded cove get ideas in his head. Well, ’twas a long drop from the ringing-chamber, and no knowing how we might land in the dark, and I were still a bit weakly; so we decided
to wait a bit, afore risking a pair of broken necks, hoping as the church’d fall into the hands of our own men, by and by. The fighting comes nearer, and presently ’tis all around us, and then it seems to pass on a bit, and we hears a mortal lot of men being herded into the church like as they might be prisoners; but with only a li’l slit window to squint through, and the thick walls and all, we can’t make out no details, nor whose hands the church is in, nor nothing, which aren’t a comfortable thing, seeing as how we’re sitting on dunno how many kegs of gunpowder like a hen on addled eggs.

‘“I’m getting out o’ this,” I says. “I’d sooner break me neck than be blowed to flinders.” Watts says to me not to be a fool, and makes a grab at me in the dark, but I leaves me coat in his hands and drops down through the hole where the ladder should ’a been, like a pea into a thimble. As ill luck will have it, I lands all a-sprawl, with enough noise to rouse old Davy Jones hisself; and next instant the li’l door in the churchyard flies open, and a whole lot of nosy rogues comes busting in,
with
their slow-matches well alight too, and then Ishmael Watts lands on top of me, hollering, “Get out, you fools! ’ware powder!” But whether they never takes it in, or what . . . Howsomever, I wriggles clear and finds meself near the door, so I ducks under a cove’s arm, and runs for it; (wonderful how easy a cove forgets his bruises in a emergency!). And afore I’d run twenty yards the whole place goes up behind me like a catherine wheel. I comes to, after a bit, and I’d had a fair sickener of this spying lay, and I says to meself, “Benjamin Podbury, with your record, you ain’t going to be none too popular with those in authority, and the sooner you slings your hook out of here the better”, so I slings it.’

They had almost reached the house by now, and Podbury looked about him with an approving eye. ‘’Tis a’most enough to make a cove turn respectable,’ he said. ‘You said Ishmael Watts was killed? I allus thought he must have been. Well, he were a gloomy sort; didn’t seem to get much pleasure out o’ life.’

Simon, who had listened in silence to this recital, felt a hot rush of anger. ‘At least he saved yours, and lost his own thereby,’ he said furiously, as they turned in through the farm buildings.

‘Ah, so he did,’ agreed Podbury. ‘I’d have been hanged, but for Ishmael, and
I
gets a deal of pleasure out o’ life.’ And he sniffed loudly at the savoury smell that was floating out from the kitchen.

Simon handed him over to Phoebe and left him deep in mutton pasty, with Amias a-sprawl in the deep window-seat looking on with a kind of distasteful interest; while he went upstairs and got out the money with which he had meant to buy a new saddle. He knew quite well that Podbury was not a deserving object, but it was not for Podbury’s sake that he would do without the saddle: it was for Zeal’s. It was a kind of thank-offering, because he knew now for a certainty that although the whole black business had indeed sprung from that long-ago betrayal and Zeal’s wild questing after revenge, yet it was Podbury’s blunder and not any fault of Zeal’s that had brought the last hideous tragedy on the church and its prisoners. Zeal-for-the-Lord had kept the Faith in his own way, and Simon tipped the jingling coins into the palm of his hand.

He did not go downstairs again at once, but strolled in to see his father, who was having a bad day. In four years, Simon’s father had learned to do without his left leg quite well. On good days he hobbled about the farmstead and demesne, generally with Jillot, who was growing old, at his heel; the same rather stern, quiet figure that he had always been, quite unchanged save for his long crutch and for certain lines about his mouth that had not been there when he rode out to join the forces of Parliament. He would never ride again, but he took an expert’s interest in Simon’s horses, and would spend hours leaning on a gate to watch Simon and Tom breaking a colt, with cold light grey eyes that took in every point and detail, every least success or failure, and sometimes made Tom feel that his fingers were all thumbs, though they never seemed to worry Simon. But the four-years-past explosion had played havoc with the nerves and muscles of his maimed side, and from time to time there would be a bad day, or several, when the old wounds throbbed almost unbearably and every movement twinged to the quick, and there was nothing for John Carey to do but lie still and wait until the pain died down again. He was doing that now, lying very long and flat under
the tumbled blankets and staring out of the window to the blue beyond; but he turned his head when Simon came in. ‘Ah, Simon, how is the Jewel Water?’

‘We’ll have to plant willows down there in the autumn to bind up the bank,’ Simon told him. ‘But it’s all right for the present;
and
so it should be: Amias and I have been working on it the whole day, and Joram of course. Joram is convinced he’s a water spaniel.’ He sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. If one sat down carefully, it was all right, but if one sat down with a jolt, it hurt. His father had never said so, but Simon knew. He knew rather a lot about his father by that time. ‘How is it? Any easier?’

‘Unpleasant, but less unpleasant than an hour or two ago. I’ll be a sound man again in the morning. In fact, I’d make a push for it and come down to supper, but that it would worry your mother.’

They smiled at each other in perfect understanding. Simon’s mother might remain unruffled when a rick caught fire or Civil War broke out, but where Simon’s father was concerned she was a hen with one chicken. She took the greatest care not to let him know it, but there was one infallible sign which always told her family when she was anxious.