Women of Courage (174 page)

“Right? You want me to be killed, then?”

“No, father, of course not!” She stared at him and then turned away, horrified by the bitterness in his voice. But he followed her around the cart, to where she stared unseeingly at the pale rose of sunlight on the distant clouds.

“I’m sorry, Ann, forgive me. That was a foolish thing to say. Forgive me, please.”

“I forgive you, father. But why do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you, girl. What do you mean? Who was talking of that?”

“I can see it in your eyes when you look at me. It’s because of what I did with Tom, isn’t it? Is that ... that why you want to die?”

She felt sick, as though she had been kicked in the stomach. Perhaps it was not bravery at all that had made her father choose as he had done, but shame - the unbearable shame of having to return home with a daughter like her. If that was true, she ...

“I don’t want to die, Ann, my dear. I don’t intend to die, if I can help it. If the Lord wills, and we stick together as we did at Philip’s Norton, we shall have the victory and stay alive.”

“But if you took the pardon you would be sure to live.”

“If I took the pardon ... as you say, Ann.” Adam shook his head wearily, staring out through the fading light across the fields to where the great blue and white banner floated lazily in the evening breeze.
Fear Nothing But God.
“It is ... it is just that it is a matter for a man’s own conscience, you see, and I ... I could not take this pardon and go home for the reasons that Israel gives - or that young bastard Tom! I could not live with that.”

He shook his head again and breathed in deeply, savouring the smell of the air that he might not smell so many more times.

“So it is not because of me.”

“No, Ann, it is not because of you.” Nonetheless he did not smile when he looked at her. “But I am at least glad of the pardon for your sake, for now you can make your way home with some of those who will go, and take some of these poor wounded with you.”

“No, father.”

“Yes, Ann. I will not be questioned on this. The army is no place for a girl, as we have seen only too clearly; and it is likely to get worse when we fight, as we surely will soon.”

“Then I should be here to help with the wounded!”

“You will
not
be here! You will go with some of those who leave!”

“Who shall I go with then? Tom?”

He opened his mouth and then paused, shaken.

“Tell me, father, which traitor shall I go with? Which coward would you trust to look after your daughter? If it is dangerous here, it will be worse with them!”

He was silent, and looked down away from her towards the church where John Spragg had gone. “It is easy to call someone a coward, Ann, if you do not have to make his choice.” Then he saw a sudden commotion from near Monmouth’s tent, and a familiar sturdy figure appeared, striding towards them ahead of a group of others. Adam sighed.

“You shall go with your godfather, John Spragg.”

Ann watched John Spragg as he strode up the hill towards them. She wondered how a man could look so confident and purposeful when he had just decided to desert his friends and betray the cause he had been fighting for. Then she noticed something strange in the group behind him. A man - a short burly man - stumbled, and would have fallen if another - Roger Satchell it was - had not grabbed his arm and dragged him roughly to his feet. As he did so Ann saw that the short man was Thomas Dyer who had brought them the proclamation, and he had stumbled because his thick blacksmith’s arms were bound firmly behind his back. Roger Satchell pushed him roughly forwards, and Ann saw Colonel Wade striding firmly forward on the other side of him.

John Spragg strode up to them sternly, and gave Adam a brief smile as he watched the others following.

“Our new friend seems to be out of luck, Adam. I took ‘un to the very men who could best get the word of his gospel spread throughout the camp, but it seems Colonel Wade’s not converted. Nor King Monmouth neither.”

Adam gaped at his friend. “Then ... God forgive me for doubting you, John! But I made sure you meant to go with the serpent, and help him!”

“That’s how ‘twas meant to look, Adam, or he wouldn’t have come with me. And I’m afraid if I’d told him the plain truth, there are those amongst us who would have taken his side rather than mine.”

“There are that.” They turned to watch as the group came up, and Roger Satchell thrust the stumbling blacksmith forward into the circle around the fire. The earnest discussion died as men turned to stare.

“It seems we have a Judas in our midst, friends!” Roger Satchell glared fiercely round the circle, then pointed angrily to Thomas Dyer. “A fat traitor who has come to spread doubt and fear amongst us, all in the service of our enemy, the papist Duke of York.” He held up the proclamation contemptuously. “And he has shown you this!”

Ann searched amongst the watching faces to see what Tom and Israel Fuller would make of it, but she could only find Tom, whose face was sullen and guarded.

Roger Satchell continued. “Well, friends, I don’t know what you make of it, but I for one am glad. For I came from Colyton, as I think you all did, to fight the Devil and all his tricks, that we might have the honest religion of God back amongst us again. And when the Devil comes amongst us with tricks like this, we can see all the plainer who it is we have to fight!” He pointed scornfully at the surly Dyer, and dropped his voice to make his next point. “We can see, too, friends, just how much we’ve scared our enemy. For do you think he’d have offered such a glozing lie, such a fair-seeming promise as this, if he weren’t already afraid for his very life?”

“‘Tis no lie!” burst out Dyer. “‘Tis plain truth. I seen ‘em ...”

“Shut your mouth, Judas! Or I’ll save the hangman his trouble!” Colonel Wade pointed a pistol roughly at the man’s head. Roger Satchell sighed, and turned back to the rest. “Even if ‘tis true, ‘tis only the Devil being kind now, to be more cruel later, like a man putting down ground bait to draw in the fish. But if any man here be faint-hearted or fool enough to go - let him! ‘
He that hath no stomach for the fight, let him depart
, ‘ as it says in the good Book. For this is God’s army, and we only want God’s soldiers in it. But don’t let him come along after, and pretend to be any friend of mine!”

He turned away angrily, and again Ann searched the faces for their response. Most looked solemn, and several were guarded and sullen, as Tom’s had been. She wondered where Israel Fuller was, and when she looked for Tom, she found that he was no longer there, either. As the meeting broke up, several of those with the more guarded faces made their way quietly out of the light of the fire into the gathering shadows.

Those who left the fire must have spread the news that Thomas Dyer had brought, for when the roll was called in the morning, it was found that nearly a thousand men had disappeared from the army in the night. But Ann was still there, and for the moment there was no more talk of her leaving.

41

“M
Y GRANDFATHER used to say they were the souls of babies who had died before being baptised.”

Ann shivered as another bat flittered past, so close that she fancied she almost saw its huge ears and tiny, pig-like snout, like those on the gargoyles on the church tower below them.

“I doubt that - there’s too many of ‘em,” surgeon Thompson grunted calmly in reply. “Anyhow, I never saw one do a person harm, for all folk hates ‘em.”

“So long as they don’t get in my hair - I’d hate that.” She drew her hood tightly around her, and then shrieked as the surgeon gripped her shoulder hard in his thin, bony hand.

“There! Did you hear it? A shot, I’m sure ‘twas!” He pointed urgently out into the darkness with his other hand.

Ann stared where he pointed, her heart pounding as she tried to pick out some flash, some sign of movement in the dark countryside below. But she could see nothing - not even the church towers of Westonzoyland and Chedzoy, which the surgeon had pointed out to her so eagerly in the last of the twilight, when they had known the attack would come.

“No! I didn’t hear nothing. But then I had my hood over my ears because of the bat.”

“Sssssh!”

But if there had been one shot there was bound to be another. They both waited, eyes and ears strained to the utmost, for what seemed an age, until Ann was sure that the Great Bear had moved several inches across the sky, and despite her anxiety her attention began to wander again. She stifled a yawn and shuffled her cold feet to keep them warm.

They had been on the tower of St Mary’s church in Bridgewater for nearly three hours now, ever since the first files of the army had begun their silent, stealthy march out of Bridgewater and up the road towards Chedzoy. No drums, no trumpets, no singing; hardly even any orders; just the silent, steady tramp of four thousand foot soldiers and a thousand horse - many with muffled hooves - marching in a long, slow snake out of the east gate of the town. They had no matches lit - all their muskets were firelocks. Their banners were folded and lowered. But it seemed incredible to Ann that so many armed men could possibly hope to march three or four miles down the roads and across the moor at night, as they proposed to do, and surprise the enemy without being seen. Surely, even if they met no guards, the steady tramp of so many feet would be heard, or a horse neigh, or ... had Nicolas Thompson heard a shot? If he had, surely Lord Feversham’s troops would have heard it too?

But there was no sign of movement, no sound, from the village of Westonzoyland to the south-east; nothing, in fact, but the occasional hoot of an owl, or a laugh or muttered conversation from some late-goer in the streets of the town below, up like themselves perhaps, watching, waiting ...

At least the attack was a move forward. Their arrival in the little, busy town of Bridgewater yesterday had been in marked contrast to the joyful celebrations Adam and the others remembered from when they had come before. The citizens had accepted them, stoically enough, but only in a mood of grim determination to make the best of a bad job. Ann had seen many gloomy faces among the shopkeepers as they had barricaded the bridge and dragged some of the guns into the cross, the castle and the south gate, as though preparing to stand a siege. A deputation had gone to Monmouth begging him not to expose the townsfolk to ruin, and reminding him how little time - only eleven days - it had taken Lord Fairfax to capture the town when the royalist army had tried to stand siege in it in 1645. Monmouth had looked stern, and said they should be of stronger heart, for the Lord was with them this time, as He had once been with Lord Fairfax. But the deputation had insisted, saying that they could get no food to support such a large army over a siege; and Monmouth had withdrawn into a council of war with Wade and Grey and Holmes and the others, while the orders to continue fortifying the town had ceased.

Ann remembered how the early part of the day had seemed like a holiday; a strange, earnest sort of holiday in which every man found himself with free time on his hands to enjoy himself, and a sense, too, that whatever enjoyment he chose should be worthy of the time, for it might easily be the last holiday he ever had. There had been something of the same feeling in Frome, even in Wells - Ann remembered with a shudder how each of those had gone sour. Yet this Saturday, at least, the devils of riot and destruction seemed to have been exorcised - cast out perhaps with those who had left at Pedwell - and the mood for the most part had been one of earnest, determined sobriety.

Not that the ale-houses had been empty - she had even seen her father, with William Clegg, Sergeant Evans and John Spragg, sitting outside one - but there had been no mood of drunken riot or despair, as there might have been. The ale-houses and streets had echoed rather with cheerful psalms, and good stories of famous fights in the civil war that some of the older men had seen. Everywhere there was an atmosphere of good-humoured banter between man and man, that at once calmed the latent, horrible fears deep in everyone’s mind, and also let them be shared without ever being mentioned.

The knowledge of the King’s offer of pardon had spread throughout the army, and it was as though that knowledge had been a watershed, beyond which things could only get better. Everyone knew that those around him had chosen to stay rather than take the broad and easy path home; and the harder the choice had been for themselves, the more they respected it in others, and felt themselves proud to be amongst men whose courage they so valued.

And so each man drew strength from his neighbour, and the whole army acquired a quiet, determined trust in itself which was very different from the brash conquering euphoria with which it had first marched into Bridgewater a fortnight ago, but was perhaps more likely to last them through the days ahead.

The town was full of women, so that Ann for once did not feel conspicuous. She even found herself a little resentful, hoping that people would notice the stains of travel and blood on her brown riding dress that she had tried so hard to wash out, and realise that she too was part of the army, a surgeon’s nurse, and not some mere wife or sweetheart that had come in with food and tears and tales of home to wear her man’s spirit down. There were no women from Lyme or Colyton or Axminster, because Lord Albemarle’s militia held the roads of Devon and Dorset; but there were a few from Taunton and many from the little villages round about Bridgewater, who had followed the foraging parties in.

In the same way many men had taken the chance to go home for the day, some passing their wives en route. But just as the women who came to town did little to wear down the calm determination of their men to see it through, so nearly all the men who visited home came back; those who had been going for good had already gone.

There had been a skirmish outside the town in the afternoon. Ann remembered the excited cheers and groans from the walls as they had watched a troop of their own horse clash with some royal dragoons who had come too close to the town. The dragoons had escaped, but few of the watchers had been dispirited - it had been enough to see them run.