Women of Courage (147 page)

But later that evening, as they sat around one of the little companionable camp fires that dotted the hillside like a reflection of the silent stars above, Adam was not the only one to remember the rout it might have been.

“They ought to hang that Lord Grey,” said William Clegg bitterly, as he lit his pipe with a spill from the flames. “The only soldier he came anywhere near killing was me, because I got in his way when he was trying to run off!”

“The Duke will have to get rid of him now, depend upon it, boy.” Ivor Evans, the Welsh sergeant, sat with them now; after the day’s events he did not seem such a fierce stranger as before. “He’ll make him Superindendent of Supplies or Major-General of Ordnance or something like that, where he can’t do no harm on the battlefield.”

“I hope he does it quick, then,” said Tom. “There’s nothing worse than being led by a coward.”

The harsh words spoke for them all, for the flight of the cavalry had left them all in danger of being killed. But as he murmured his agreement Adam felt a stab of fear for himself also, as he remembered the rising wave of panic as they had all turned their backs on the enemy. Surely Tom had felt it too? Surely they all had?

“Still, ‘twas not all Grey’s fault,” said Roger Satchell quietly.

“Not all his fault? He should have stayed to face the enemy, as we did, and led us to the attack,” Tom insisted. “He had the command of us, didn’t he?”

“Indeed he did, Tom, and he played the knave today. God send the Duke of Monmouth the sense to keep him out of a position where he can do the same again.”

“Amen to that,” muttered several voices around the fire, led by Tom and Israel Fuller.

“Amen indeed.” said Roger Satchell calmly. “But all I would say in his defence, and that of good men like John Clapp, who rode with him, is this: not one in ten of the horses they rode had heard a musket fired in anger before, and a street full of shouting men is not the best place to train such an animal as that.”

There was a babble of angry voices, agreeing and disagreeing, over which Tom’s voice rose highest.

“But the men on the horses’ backs were surely riders enough to turn the beasts around again before they reached all the way back to Lyme!”

“Aye, there you have it, Master Satchell,” said sergeant Evans. “We must train both beasts and men in the next few days, if we are to rely on them at our sides in future.”

“‘Twas the Lord gave His people the victory,” rumbled the sepulchral voice of Israel Fuller from the darkness. It reminded Adam of a stained-glass picture he had once seen, of the prophet Elijah coming out of the wilderness. Yet somehow, it filled Adam with rage as he heard it, so that his hands began to shake. “He held His army in the palm of His hand, and blew away the chaff from the wheat, and put courage into the hands of His chosen people, that they were not dismayed.”

“And into the heart of Nathaniel Wade especially,” Adam burst out angrily. Then he halted, choking back the rest of what he wanted to say. He did not usually disagree openly with the preacher, but this time he could quite keep his annoyance out of his voice. For Israel’s words were simply not true, as he saw it. The preacher had turned his back with the rest of them, as had young Tom, for all his brave words now. If it had not been for Colonel Wade everyone here would surely have fled too, as Lord Grey had done. Yet they seemed to be denying it now — or was it only he who had felt that, he who had been the coward?

“Into the heart of Colonel Wade, and all of us,” answered Israel reprovingly.

Adam was silent, waiting for someone else to speak. Earlier that day he had been proud, to think that he had felt no more fear than the rest of them, and that they had conquered their fear together. But now it seemed different. He saw his friends’ heads nodding wisely at Israel’s words, accepting his judgement of what had happened. The Lord was on their side, for they were His holy army, predestined to victory. And so perhaps He had not wanted to share that victory with unworthy chaff like Lord Grey, posturing reprobates who looked more like one of the Tories and Papists they were fighting than a Protestant general. That was what Israel had meant, when he had said that the Lord had put courage into the hearts of all His chosen people. Those who had fled - Lord Grey, John Clapp - were not included in that brotherhood.

So what about himself? Adam knew he had felt no courage, but only a horrible screaming panic, in his own heart until their flight had been checked by Colonel Wade. He had tried to say that Colonel Wade had been the Lord’s instrument in preventing their flight - but that was heresy, as Israel knew, for it would mean only he, Wade, was among the Lord’s chosen, and the rest of them were faithless, vacillating chaff like Lord Grey. Adam knew it been so for himself, and his earlier pride was blown away by a chill, colder than a midwinter wind, that froze him with the renewed certainty of his own damnation. But surely - had it not been like that for the others? Or had it only seemed so, to him? He sat silent, and waited by the fire, the devil’s icy hands around his heart, hoping and dreading that one of his friends would admit that they too had been afraid, and would have run back to Lyme if they had not been stopped. Even one companion in Hell would be a comfort.

But no-one noticed his silence. His friends spoke only of the glory of their victory, and the easy triumphs the Lord would give them in the future.

15

“T
HE IDEA is absurd, Ann. ‘Tis far too dangerous.”

“But mother, it’s just as dangerous to be here now, in Colyton. You see how the militia behave. The whole country is dangerous.”

“Safest at home. Especially for young maids like you.”

“I’m not a young maid, mother. I’m a young woman, betrothed to be married. How can I stay safe at home when I could ride out to help Tom?”

“That’s a woman’s duty, Ann. You should know that.” Mary Carter sighed, and looked at her daughter bitterly. “Don’t you think I should like to go there too, to look after your father and know whether he’s come to any harm, to persuade him to come home, maybe? But I don’t, do I? I stay here, and worry, and look after you, and Simon, and the children. And now
you
want to leave me too!”

“It’s not that, mother - but I should be more use, helping to take the horses, than staying here at home with you. I can’t help father or Tom like that.”

“And do you think ‘twould help your father to know his daughter was traipsing round a countryside infested with militia, or dragging her skirts at the coat-tails of an army? A fine idea you have of what your father wants!”

“But he wants our horses! He sent young Paul to say so!” She looked desperately from her mother to Simon, who sat stern and pale beside them in his chair, his leg propped in front of him. “He says the army needs them more than anything else!”

“Then let a man take ‘em! The whole thing’s a man’s business, not ours!” Mary Carter tugged furiously at the wool she was carding, but could hold back her tears no longer. She dropped the wooden carders with a loud clatter, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

Ann’s voice was quiet and gentle and relentless. “But the men have all gone, mother. You know that.”

It was true. The men whom Adam and Roger Satchell had told Paul Abrahams to seek out had almost all gone already, melting away in the night to make their own way over the hills to Lyme. One or two had succumbed to what they saw as the inevitable and joined the militia. The only men left in the village were either too old to fight, or farmers who wished to be left out of the whole affair and who were as likely to steal the mounts to sell themselves as deliver them. So far only Nicolas Thompson, the surgeon, had volunteered to go with the boy. And Ann wanted to go. She looked to Simon for support.

“You know I can ride, Simon, better than either of the other two. We owe it to father to bring him all the help we can. Don’t you think I should go in your stead?”

Simon winced at the reference to his leg. Of all times, this was the moment when he should prove his manhood and take control in his father’s absence. But his elder sister had to taunt him with the contrast between her own strength and his physical weakness, as she had done all his life. He clenched his fists in frustration.

“‘Tis not a fit job for a maid.”

“Not even when the maid might bring two more horses to the army? It’s my duty, Simon. How do you think I should feel, if I were to stay at home, and hear that Tom or father had been killed, when a few more horses in the army might have saved them? How should you feel?”

“The army is in the hands of the Lord, Ann, not yours. He’ll give the victory to those who deserve it, whether they have your horses or no.”

“But the Lord won’t help us if we do nothing!” Ann stopped, trying to choke back the rage that her brother’s prim religious arguments always provoked in her. She needed to to persuade him this time, not antagonise him. “Anyway, it would be easier for me. No-one would suspect a woman.”

“They would if you had two horses. How would you go to explain that?” asked her mother.

“I’d say I was taking them back to a friend. I’d say we’d had them in our field to spare their grass and now I was taking them back.”

“It’d be better if they were loaded up like pack-beasts. Put some old cloth on and say you were delivering somewhere. At least they might believe that,” said Simon scornfully.

“Perhaps. Could you find some cloth for us?”

“You’re not going, Ann, and that’s an end to it. So there’s no sense talking further,” said her mother firmly. “Now sit quiet and help me with this wool. Oliver, put that carder down! You’ll cut yourself!”

“But ... “ Ann looked at her mother and saw the ugly pain on her broad face, and knew that further talk would only set her crying again, to no purpose. So for a while she sat quietly and helped her mother and Rachel with the carding, while Simon watched and Sarah and little Oliver played with a spinning wheel in the corner. Then the two young ones grew tired and Ann took them up to bed. But even as she helped them undress, and sang little Oliver’s favourite, comforting lullabies, she could not get the thought of the conversation out of her mind.

Paul Abrahams’ return to the village, with his story of the success at the Axe bridge, the projected attack on Bridport, and the army’s need for horses, had been the most important event of the past two days. It had brought hope after the arrival of the Devon militia on Saturday, and young William Salter’s stern sermon on the duties of loyalty and the dangers of rebellion, delivered in church earlier that Sunday morning. The sullen, unresponsive congregation had been composed almost entirely of women, children, and old men. The judgement of God would be revealed, they knew, not by the foolish words of the vicar, but by the fortunes of their menfolk in the Duke’s army. Their only real, fervent prayers were made, as they prayed together later in the privacy of their own homes, for their absent husbands, sons, and fathers.

Ann prayed as much as any, for her almost whole heart longed for the men of the village to win, for her father and Tom to come back safe. She knew that the part of her which wanted this was the good, the holy part, the Ann that the Lord wanted her to be, that He wanted to save. She knew it when she prayed, but somehow, every hour that she busied herself around the house, or walked the half-empty, waiting streets, her memory of Tom and her father began to fade. The voice of the tempter murmured in her mind, and the rebellion began to seem a dream, a distant game of chance that could be decided either way without hurt, if only she stayed quietly at home.

So she began to remember Robert. Once, in the street, she had heard a voice so like his she had been afraid to move, and stopped quite still where she stood, trembling, certain that if she turned she would see Robert in his blue military coat, with that strange puzzled smile on his thin, freckled face, those thin, gentle hands that had once held hers, and touched her cheek ... but when at last she did turn it was only a short, fat, mustachioed militia officer, swaggering officiously along; and she had blushed and hurried home with a dull breathless ache in her chest, close to the tears that she felt would betray everything.

But though at home she shook her head vigorously to clear it, and remembered Simon’s leg, and Robert’s cold, dismissive words in the moonlight, she knew that the longer she waited here, isolated from all news and action in this tense, empty, waiting town, the more often such thoughts would recur. She helped her mother about the house, but only in a dream, numbly, without speaking. Martha Goodchild thought she was grieving for Tom, and tried to interest her in the cottage in Rosemary Lane; but Ann’s reaction had been so sudden and violent that Martha had hurried home. She told her husband sadly that poor Ann was so distracted with worry about their son’s fate, that she could not bear to think about the cottage until Tom was safely returned.

Into this long night of worry Paul Abrahams had come like the first thrush of morning, to tell of the army’s need for horses, for Ann’s own horse, and for riders who could deliver them. Riders who were trustworthy, but who could also allay suspicion, as Paul himself had done, by appearing clearly unsuitable for military service. Nicolas Thompson, the old surgeon, had volunteered, telling Paul that he had wished, on Thursday night, that he had gone with the others at the beginning, but that now he thanked the Lord he had not, for he could do the cause a greater service by at once bringing them horses, and his own skills to mend their wounds.

So Ann had seen the chance of action for herself - action which would help her to forget the tempting dreams that obsessed her in idleness, and might really bring about the result wanted by the Lord; so she argued with herself. (And if she should see Robert in the process, surely it would only confirm her in her righteous scorn?)

But she had to use different arguments with her mother and Simon, and these - that she could ride well, knew the roads, and could never be taken for a soldier - had so far failed. She was determined to go, but she knew she could never saddle one horse and lead it and another out of the town without one of them knowing, and there could be no worse start to such a secret trip than her mother running through the streets after her, tugging at the reins and shouting that she should come back. So she sat quiet and waited, plotting what else she could say.