Women of Courage (169 page)

“Kiss me, Tom. We may not have another chance.”

He looked around suddenly, as though he thought they were being watched, but there was no-one, only the birds beginning their evensong among the leaves. He swallowed, then bent forward suddenly and put his lips to hers.

It was a wet, clumsy kiss, and his sudden rough embrace drew her to him so tightly that her head was bent back sharply over her shoulders; but she gave herself completely, moulding her lips to his, running her hands through the back of his hair, feeling her body almost lifted from the ground in the strength of his grip.

At last he let her go. She stumbled back, holding on to his arms, and saw the look of shock and wonder on his face. Yet he dared not speak; a half-smile flickered on his lips, and then his arms stiffened and the darkness returned to his eyes.

“Shall we go to the wood, Tom? Someone might see us here.”

He was as still as though he were in a dream, so that for a moment she wondered if he had heard her at all. Then the darkness in his eyes changed to hope and the tension in his arm relaxed so that she could lead him off the path and in amongst the trees.

As they walked together, hand in hand, ducking their way under the low sprays of light hazel leaves, it was like the days when they had been children and played house in the copse by the river at Colyton. It had always been she who had had the ideas and taken the lead, he who had had the strength and the physical courage. Now she meant to give him back his courage. Yet as they walked on, she felt her own courage failing her. It was too cold-blooded, to walk into a wood like this, to couple with a man she did not love, even if she was betrothed to him. It felt like a sin, but why? Surely God would not disapprove?

She stopped, at a place where a tree had fallen and made a little glade of grass and ferns.

No, this wouldn’t be a sin against God, she realised. It would be a sin against Robert!

“No ... “ she began, but Tom spoke too.

“No-one can see us here,” he said, and then he was kissing her again, and her resistance was crushed in his huge, clumsy embrace. But she found she did not want to resist; the strength which she had awakened excited her so that she responded eagerly to the kiss, her hands pressed flat against the hard muscles of his back. The very feel of his back was a surprise to her, for they had hardly touched each other at all during the past year of their courting; now suddenly all caution was gone, and neither could touch enough. She felt his hands clutch her bottom, and clumsily pull up the back of her skirt. She kissed his neck in delight at the crude violence of it. Her own hands pressed his buttocks and legs hard against her, and her mouth sought his lips for another hot, urgent kiss. Then he groaned, and pushed her down on her back in the grass, pulling her skirt up around her waist.

“Wait, Tom! Let me … “ she fumbled with the ribbons at the back of her bodice, suddenly wanting to be out of her dress completely, to give him exactly what she had denied the dragoon, but the ribbons on her dress were too tightly tied and Tom misunderstood. He forced her dress up higher, so that for a moment a fold of the brown cloth came over her head and she had to fight to push it down so she could breathe. She felt him fumbling with his own clothes and the scratch of his belt buckle on her thigh as he pulled his breeches down. He looked at her, his face flushed and urgent, and she thought he would kiss her first and lifted her face to be kissed.

“Yes, Tom, yes!” she said, glorying in the strength she had released, but he was too preoccupied to kiss her. His arm and knee forced her legs up and apart and then she felt a sudden hot tearing pain between her legs, again and again as he thrust himself in and out, his breath coming in great hot gasps through the lips pressed against her neck. She cried out with the pain and tried to arch her back and force him off, but his great weight pressed her down, her arms and legs pushed helplessly aside. He rammed himself hard up into her and shuddered and she cried out again as his back arched and he drew in breath in a huge, moaning gasp. Then he slumped down on top of her and she lay limp, crushed under his bulk, staring up at the pattern of the leaves against the sky, her hands clutching the cloth of the shirt on his back as she drew breath and felt the first long sob well up inside her.

After a while he stirred, and lifted his head to look at her. His face was flushed and heavy, but not cruel. He bent to kiss her, but she turned her head away, feeling the tears trickle off her nose. He kissed her anyway and sat up, heaving at his trousers. She let her bare legs flop uselessly to the ground and pushed some of the skirt down between her legs where the pain was.

He turned to look at her and she hunched away from him on her side, weeping, her arm over her face. He dragged at her skirt.

“Come on, pull it down. Someone might come.”

“Let them! I don’t care!”

“But what are you crying for. It was you who wanted it!”

“Not like this.” She took her arm away from her face and glared at him in fury. He looked a little irritated, but under that, proud – pleased with himself!

“You hurt me!”

“It always hurts for women, first time. That’s why you’re bleeding - look.” He pulled her skirt up again. She flinched, then sat up and stared at the wet blood on her thighs.

“You’d better clean yourself up.” He got up, walked over to the fallen tree, and sat down on it quietly with his back to her.

“You ...!” But she was too shocked to think of a word. She stared at his back for nearly a minute, watching the picture slowly blur as the tears returned. She shook them away and tore up handfuls of grass to wipe her legs. Then she made a pad of leaves to stop the rest of the bleeding, wincing as she touched herself. She did it hurriedly, suddenly afraid that someone might come, and take Tom’s side as the soldiers in Chard had taken the dragoons’. There was blood on the hem of her skirt; she rubbed it frantically with mud to hide it. No-one must know about this. But what would happen if the bleeding did not stop? Who could she go to for help?

“Are you clean?” He turned and looked at her when she did not answer. She stared back at him, not moving. This is the end of childhood, she thought. She had led him into the wood as she had always led him, when they were children. Now she was a woman, and she had lost control. He stared at her like a stranger, and she did not know what to do.

A pheasant called in the wood, and the distant church clock of Frome chimed the half-hour.

“We’d better get back,” he said. “There’s muster at nine o’clock.”

She followed him out of the glade and back to the path. Twice he held back branches for her, but they did not touch. She had stopped crying, and tried to hold her head up high, to salvage something from the mess; but his eyes, like his body, avoided hers, and the look of pride in his face began to darken to guilt. He did not speak to her, and as they came nearer the town, she looked down at the ground, absorbed in her own sense of shame and failure. When at last they had to part, in the crowded street, it was too late for words, and she hurried back to her room, hoping that the blood would not stain its way through her dress.

38

J
OHN SPRAGG had hammered the dent out of Adam’s helmet, and the padding of the bandage made it fit better, so that it did not shift and rub his scalp on the march as it had before. At first Adam had been surprised by the weight of his musket and rest, and thought someone had filled the barrel with shot for a joke; but after a few hours on the march he had got used to it, although his legs still trembled and threatened to betray him when he stumbled in a rut.

But anything was better than that horrible jolting on a cart through the wet darkness on the way to Frome. He felt sorry for those poor wounded men whom Ann and Nicolas Thompson had loaded onto the carts this morning. They would be lucky if their wounds were not opened and their bones put out of joint again by the end of the day. Adam rejoiced to be back on the march again, with the solid reassurance of his friends all around him, the familiar steady tramp of their feet, and the larks singing above the hazy dust-cloud kicked up by the thousands of men and horses in front and behind.

Occasionally a psalm broke out, led by the rich baritone of Sergeant Evans; and earlier in the day they heard bits of a sermon preached by the chaplain of the army, given at the top of his voice on the text from Deuteronomy chapter 20:
‘The Lord your God is He that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you’
. The pauses and crescendoes of his sermon had been punctuated by deep ‘Amens’ from Adam and the others.

It had not perhaps been one of the best sermons he had heard, Adam thought reflectively; for since they were marching away from the enemy the preacher had had to avoid the earlier part of the text
‘Ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies’
. So he had not quite worked up that air of fiery conviction which Israel Fuller used to have in the secret meetings in the woods near Axminster. But then it must be hard to preach on the march, when you were constantly having to avoid the ruts, or step in the hedgerow out of the way of horsemen taking messages up and down the line, and still keep the thread of your argument and your voice loud enough to carry over the noise of marching feet and creaking leather, and the violent coughs and sneezes of the men plagued with the hay fever. William Clegg had it worst; today, with the warm sun and all-enveloping dust, his eyes and nose were streaming, so that when they had paused at midday he had looked as exhausted as if he had walked twenty miles instead of ten. Adam caught himself hoping he would not have to stand near Clegg in the battle line, and offered up a short prayer instead that he would be cured of the affliction on the day of battle so that he could fight his best for the cause, though he doubted, as ever, whether his prayers would be heard.

Adam wondered when the next battle would be. There had been murmurs of dismay from several men, not only Tom, when they had found themselves marching west out of Frome that morning, instead of east to Warminster, as they had expected. Last night John Clapp had come over from the cavalry, with the news that small detachments had already been sent east to find lodgings and look for arms and recruits on the road to Warminster, Longleat and London. Roger Satchell and Sergeant Evans had agreed in warning them all to march ready for battle, for Lord Feversham would surely not let them out into the plains of Wiltshire without a fight.

Instead, here they were marching briskly back to Shepton Mallet, with not a royal soldier in sight. Roger Satchell had tried to cheer them by suggesting it had all been a trick to send Lord Feversham the wrong way, at which one or two had laughed. But what was the point of giving the enemy the slip, John Spragg had asked, if by doing so you let him get between you and London? Roger had scratched his head, and said he did not know, but perhaps they were marching to join up with some more recruits. No-one thought that particularly likely, since they had already been this way before. Perhaps, William Clegg said, it was due to the kindness of their leader in not wanting to make his men start out the day with the sun in their eyes; but if so, they should then have made camp at midday, or turned round, instead of tramping on all afternoon into the west.

Despite this confusion, Adam was so glad of his recovered strength and the simple blessing of sunshine instead of rain, that he did not care too much about where they marched. For the moment he could leave the major decisions of the campaign to their leaders and to God. He felt that most of his closest friends - John Spragg and William Clegg especially - thought the same. When it was time for battle they would see that their muskets were clean, their powder dry, and their aim sure - the rest was in the hands of the Lord.

For surely this was God’s chosen army, Adam thought, whether he himself was one of the Elect or not. His one duty in all of this was to be like his friends; if he did not flinch when the time came, then no-one would know the depths of fear and doubt in his soul. No-one would be able to tell his children that their father had not been one of His chosen Elect, but one condemned to endless darkness and purgatory.

So far at least he had not betrayed himself. He remembered with a kind of wonder how there had never actually been a moment when he could say he was afraid at Philip’s Norton, not even when the dragoon’s musket had been levelled at him and he had shouted to him to shoot. There had been no time, really, for fear; there had been all the hurry of forming up outside the walls and going through the musket drill, and they had marched forward in a kind of trance, so that the action had been all over before he had had time to feel anything. If only the next battle came soon, before he lost his trust in his leaders and the Lord, and began to doubt …

He looked ahead at the tall figure of Tom, marching with his big pike over his shoulder. Why did he feel so sour about the lad? Had he been mistaken in his choice of son-in-law? Tom’s religion should have given him strength, as it had done at first; Adam remembered how fierce and determined the boy had been at Lyme and Bridport and Chard, how wretched he himself had felt beside him. There had been no question of his courage at Philip’s Norton either - had it not been for Tom he might have been dead. But this everlasting doubt about Monmouth’s right to be King, and his ability to lead, was poisoning the boy’s mind, and worse, spreading doubt and fear amongst the rest of them. Doubt, not of their own righteousness in the sight of the Lord, but of Monmouth’s.

There was something else, too. Last night, when he had asked Tom about Ann, the boy had flushed, muttered something inaudible, then said that he had not seen her. At the time, Adam had put it down to shyness, but this morning John Spragg had said he had seen the two of them walking back into town together, looking as though they had quarrelled.

A quarrel might be no bad thing, perhaps, if it had been about Tom’s doubts of Monmouth; for Tom needed someone to put some faith into him, and since she had returned Ann seemed more fiercely determined than any that they should win.