Simon (34 page)

‘Nice Nourishing Broth,’ said Simon softly.

The smile deepened in his father’s eyes. ‘Exactly. If your mother’s Nice Nourishing Broth could grow me a new leg, I should be a centipede by now.’

He shifted a little, searching for an easier position, and Simon leaned forward to slip a hand under his braced shoulder and help him. ‘Speaking from a purely selfish point of view, I should intensely dislike to have a centipede for a father,’ he remarked. Then, as the other relaxed and lay still again, ‘We’ve got company downstairs. An old comrade of mine, just landed at Bideford and come up “to allow me for to assist him”. They’re feeding him in the kitchen now.’

Mr Carey showed no surprise. Derelict soldiers were everywhere, left behind by the war like driftwood when the tide goes out. He asked, ‘One of your troopers? What are you going to do about him?’

‘
Not
one of my troopers,’ Simon said emphatically. ‘And I’m going to give him some money—more than I can afford—and bid him a very good day.’

His father’s brows lifted for a moment in cool inquiry, and Simon shook his head quickly. ‘No, he doesn’t want work. Steady employment and Benjamin Podbury don’t mix very well. He’s been a lawyer’s clerk, and a fairground thimble-rigger; he was one of our scouts when I ran up against him, and the only evening I ever passed in his company, he spent in cheating a trooper of Grenville’s out of one and ninepence with loaded dice. He tells me he is now an honest seaman, so I should think that if he hasn’t yet turned pirate he’ll do it on his next voyage.’

‘What remarkably odd company you seem to have kept in your soldiering days,’ said Mr Carey with amusement. ‘If this specimen is as plausible as your account of him would suggest, it appears to me that you had best pay him off before your mother finds him and gives him everything we possess.’

Simon got up, grinning. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He half turned to the door, then back again. ‘Job Passmore’s coming up tomorrow to start re-thatching the cow byres. Look, sir, when you’re feeling up to it, will you come and inspect the linhay? Diggory says it ought to be re-thatched too, and he can’t abear to have the place looking such a proper mucksey-pie; but the thatch seems to me sound enough to last another year—and anyhow we honestly can’t afford to have it done now, so soon after the new plough oxen.’

‘You told him that?’

‘Ye—es, but he only muttered darkly.’

‘Diggory, alas! still lives in the spacious days before the war,’ said his father. ‘It’s hard for old men and old dogs to alter their ideas.’

‘That’s why I think he’d take it better from you, than from me—if you agree with me about the thatch, when you’ve had a look at it that is.’

‘More than likely. And I have not the slightest doubt that I shall agree with you about the thatch . . . So be it then; I’ll come and act as reinforcement for the routing of Diggory in the morning, but you will probably have to give me an arm.’

‘Thank you, sir. That is good of you.’ Simon hesitated, looking down at him. ‘It’s really better?’

‘It is,’ said John Carey. ‘Go and look to your disreputable friend.’

Simon was satisfied. He was the one person in the world whom his father honoured with the absolute truth on such occasions, and he knew it.

Podbury had begun on his third pasty and was deep in a great leather-jack of cider. Joram was sitting bolt upright in a corner, with his back turned on the interloper and disapproval in every line of him from his feathery topknot to the last long hair at the end of his tail; but Jillot, a shameless beggar, sat at Podbury’s feet, quivering nose upraised and mournful eyes fixed on what remained of the pasty.

‘That,’ drawled Amias from the window seat, ‘makes two of them. Different methods, but—’ He broke off to watch a piece of pasty disappear down Jillot’s throat, ‘’zackly the same result.’

‘Nay, now, young sir, you’d not grudge a trifle to a man as has fought for his country?’ said Podbury, pained, but with his mouth full.

Amias’s only reply was a sniff.

‘Here you are,’ said Simon, giving the money into the ready hand which came out for it. ‘It’s maybe less than you hoped for, but ’tis all I’ve got.’

Podbury examined the coins, nodded, spat regretfully and put them in his pouch. ‘Ah well, it might be worse. No need to fret yourself about it.’

‘I wasn’t,’ said Simon, with the ghost of a grin.

Amias lounged up from the seat, stretching. ‘It’s too fine an evening to waste indoors. Come on, Simon, let’s go and be lazy in the high orchard until supper-time.’

‘Just coming.’ Simon turned back for an instant to the old scout. ‘Good luck and fair winds, Podbury. I hope you’ll never be hanged.’

‘Thank ’ee, sir; much obleeged, I’m sure!’ said Podbury, beaming.

They left him still eating, with Jillot cuddled on his feet, the
centre of a half-admiring, half-disapproving group made up of Phoebe and the maids. Joram came with them. A few minutes later, with the dog between them, they were sprawling at their ease in the high orchard, where the new young cider trees, planted to replace those cut down by Grenville’s troopers, were putting out the first hesitant blossom of their lives.

‘I do not,’ said Amias, peering down between the young trees at the quiet huddle of house and outbuildings below, ‘no, I do
not
find myself drawn to your old comrade.’

Simon grunted, his nose in the long cool orchard grass. ‘Anyhow, he told me what I’ve wanted to know for four years.’

‘About the magazine going up, you mean, and that fellow Watts?’

‘M’m.’

Amias screwed round. ‘Why were you so interested in him—the other man? Who was he?’

‘My old Corporal,’ Simon said.

‘Your—but what on earth was he doing there? What was Podbury doing there, for that matter? Look here, what
is
all this about?’

Simon did not answer at once, then, very quietly, his eyes on the shadow of a blossoming apple spray among the grass, he told Amias the whole story. It was not breaking faith with Zeal to tell Amias, as it would have been to send in that report to the Army authorities. He was very sure of that.

‘Poor devil,’ said Amias softly, when the story was done. ‘Poor crazy valiant devil.’

‘He was the best Corporal a man ever had,’ Simon said.

Neither of them spoke again until, a little later, they caught the glint of a red seaman’s bonnet jigging down the wagon-way.

‘There goes friend Podbury,’ Amias said. ‘Odd, to think he was the spy we ransacked Lovacott for, and you working with him all the while. I’m glad I didn’t know that—about you, I mean—at the time.’ He turned on his elbow to look at Simon as the full truth dawned on him. ‘If I had known, I should have had to take you. You’d probably have been hanged,’ he said deliberately, and then he asked, ‘Simon, if it had been like that, would you have hated me?’

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘It would have been just the fortune of war. I should have known that it was the only thing you could do.’

The sudden tenseness went out of Amias. ‘Anyhow, I didn’t know; and I hope Podbury gets a ship to suit him—no work and lots of loot.’ They watched the speck of scarlet out of sight, before he spoke again; ‘By the way, I fell in with Pentecost Fiddler yesterday.
He
was talking about going back to sea.’

‘Pentecost going back to sea—after all these years? He can’t have meant it.’

‘He did, though. He said that now dancing is counted sinful, there’s no place for a fiddler ashore, but he reckoned no Parliament could stop sailormen needing a fiddler aboard ship, so he was off where he was wanted, and I don’t blame him. England’s a dreary place, under the Commonwealth.’

‘Yes, but look here,’ Simon began, and broke off to get his argument straight in his own mind. ‘You’re a surgeon, leastwise you will be soon. You know how you deal with a man who’s sick; you knock off all the things he likes doing, and make him eat plain food, and bleed him and give him black draughts; and maybe he doesn’t like you while the treatment lasts. But he’s all the better for it afterwards.’

‘Aye, but is there going to be an “afterwards”?’ Amias countered.

‘Surely. This isn’t—natural, somehow, not for England. One day we shall have a King again.’

‘So even you admit that the Commonwealth isn’t all honey?’

‘Maybe,’ Simon said. ‘There are a lot of good things about it, though. More justice, for one thing, than ever there was under King Charles, and we’re getting back our old place among the nations, the place that men like Sir Walter Raleigh won for us, and our last two Kings threw away.’ It was odd, he thought suddenly, when they were boys, and the trouble between King and Parliament yet a-brewing, they had not been able to talk about it to each other; the subject had been like a sore place that is better not poked at. But now they no longer had to avoid it, they could argue and disagree if they wanted to, and it did not matter.

‘Well, I still don’t think much of your brave new England
without a King,’ Amias was saying, ‘even if we do have another King, one day. What about the old one?’

‘It wasn’t meant to be like that,’ Simon said quickly. ‘We went to war to make the King see reason, to make him understand that ordinary folk must be free to worship in their own way, and—and things like that; never to get rid of him. Something went wrong at the end.’

‘Something went wrong, sure enough, and the King died for it.’ Amias was plucking up grass stems with a sharp snapping sound. ‘You know, I’m glad your General Fairfax stood out against the rest, and wouldn’t sign the King’s death-warrant.’

‘He’s the sort of man who’d go to the stake for what he thought was right.’

‘And so he’s sitting in his native Yorkshire mud, I suppose, ruling a few cottages, and a trout stream while the men who signed rule England.’

Simon laughed. ‘You sound as indignant as though he had been your commander, not mine.’

‘I liked your General Fairfax,’ Amias said thoughtfully. ‘That night when you and I were brought up before him . . . I’d sooner serve under him than any man I’ve ever come across—except Lord Hopton.’ Abruptly, he flopped flat on his stomach, pillowing his head comfortably on his arms, and no more was heard for a while.

Joram’s soft ears pricked, and he opened one eye as two girls came out through the garden close into the near corner of the paddock, where the old mare Rizpah was grazing with a foal beside her. Amias raised his head to watch them coaxing the little bright-eyed, feather-tailed creature, while its mother looked anxiously on. ‘I’ll wager that’s the last of the long-biding apples,’ he said.

‘Candy sugar,’ Simon said, with the glimmer of a smile. ‘They keep the long-biders for Scarlet.’

Amias was watching the smaller of the two, who had turned, the foal’s muzzle in the hollow of her hand, to look up at the other with an air of rather shy triumph. ‘You know, I’d never have believed that whey-faced little oddity I used to catch sight of at Okeham Paine could have grown into such a happy maid.’

‘Mistress Killigrew doesn’t approve of happiness, so she never had much chance until she came to us,’ Simon said.

‘How did you win her mother over into letting her come visiting up here?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Mother and Mistress Killigrew had been writing to each other for years about still-room management, and Mouse made a splendid impression when she visited them last year. Mouse can always be relied on to rise to an occasion; but you know that. And then Father and I both having fought for Parliament was a help, of course; and I think she felt that Father having lost a leg in the Cause somehow vouched for the principles of the family as a whole, though I can’t myself quite follow that line of reasoning.’

‘You aren’t Mistress Killigrew,’ said Amias. ‘How was he getting on when you went upstairs just now?’

‘Father? On the mend again. He says he’ll be all right by the morning, and he always seems to know.’

Amias nodded. ‘You’ll be able to enlist his aid in this desperate business of the linhay roof, then.’

‘I’ve already enlisted it. I have his solemn promise to come and help me rout Diggory in the morning,’ said Simon, his fingers very gentle in the soft hollows behind Joram’s fluttering ecstatic ears. ‘Game as a pebble, the Old Man,’ he added, in a tone of proud and affectionate disrespect.

The two girls had gone in again; the light was fading, and away over the western hills the sky was flushing pink behind quiet cloud-bars that were as faintly coloured as a dove’s breast.

‘Going to be another fine day tomorrow for the thatchers,’ Simon said contentedly, after a long pause.

‘I hate to dash your hopes, but it’s going to rain.’

‘You’re mazed! Look at that pink sky!’

‘I am looking. I don’t care if it’s scarlet with green spots; my shoulder aches, and that means a change of weather, as sure as unicorns.’

‘I can’t compete. My head doesn’t act as a weather-vane,’ Simon said, and laughed. ‘What a walking hospital we are! By the way, how
is
the shoulder?’

‘Pretty good, on the whole. I’ve had to learn to use a sword
left-handed; but what’s the odds? They do say a left-handed swordsman is the most deadly, anyway.’ Abruptly he turned on Simon with one of his sudden bursts of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve brought a new rapier back with me from London; no, of course I couldn’t afford it, I sold most of my clothes; but wait till you
see
it! A French blade, the very latest thing; triangular, you see, supple as a withy wand and deadly as an asp. You fight with the point only. Oh, but I’ll show you when we get a chance.’

‘And what do you suppose a respectable country leach wants with a blade like that?’ Simon demanded lazily.

‘Even a country leach might run into adventure.’ Amias’s eyes had begun to dance. ‘My dear Simon, don’t be so lacking in ideas. “Amias Hannaford, the Duelling Doctor.” You take exception to the cock of a man’s eyebrow, or the way he ties his collar-strings, call him out, drill him through the brisket, and then plug the hole. It might be very good for trade.’

‘Zany!’ said Simon, and waited for more.

But instead they heard Mouse calling from the wicket gate. ‘Simon! Amias! where are you? It’s almost supper time.’