For a while, Tom Fairfax remained at the window, bowed together over the pain under his hand. Then he returned to the table and sat down and drew towards him another sheet of Mary’s paper and set himself to write one more letter. A private letter to his father. Only a few lines. ‘Sir, I send back to H.Q. young Hotham, who I think not suited to the kind of warfare that we see here from day to day ... Your Lordship would I think be well advised to keep him somewhat under eye. If I do him injustice, may God forgive me; I do not entirely trust his loyalty.’
When that was done, he again summoned Charles D’Oyley.
‘Charles, Captain Hotham is returning to H.Q. tomorrow.’
‘Permanently, Sir?’
‘Permanently. He will be riding back with you and the escort. And Charles, this also is for my father, to be given to him — without advertisement.’
D’Oyley took the packet as he had done the others, and the eyes of the two men met steadily and with comprehension. ‘Understood, Sir.’ He turned to the door, hesitated, and then looked back. ‘Can I be of any help — now, Sir?’
‘No no. I’m well enough. Good night, Charles.’
‘Good night, Sir.’
When his galloper had departed, General Sir Thomas Fairfax dragged himself out of his chair by the arms as though he were an old man, picked up his sword, snuffed out the guttering candles, and crawled rather than walked from the closet and up the shallow stairs to the chamber that he was sharing with William.
William was already there, writing on his own account — that would be to Frances — at the clothes chest. He took one look at his cousin and superior officer, and sprang up. ‘Good Lord, man, you look like something picked off the barricades! Is it the old trouble?’
Fairfax found his cousin’s arm round him, and sank down on the edge of the bed, letting his sword slide with a clatter to his feet. ‘Yes, it has — been grumbling for days.’
‘I’ll go and rout out Morrison.’
‘No!’ Fairfax said, getting the words out with difficulty, through shut teeth and rigid lips. ‘No, Will. He’s got — his work cut out already with — the wounded. I’ll b-be all right by morning.’ He looked up into his cousin’s anxious face, his own trickling with sweat as a fresh agony took him. ‘Only for God’s sweet sake, keep — Mary away from me.’
He knew what it would be like if Mary came into this, and even through the dulling fog of pain his spirit cringed at the prospect; the prospect of being clucked over by Mary.
‘So be it,’ William was saying. ‘Good Cousin Mary stays away if I have to lie across the door all night.’ William was helping him off with his heavy boots, his buff coat; helping him strip down to his shirt, putting him into bed with the peculiar gentleness that large men usually reserve for small children. Vaguely, through the buzzing haze of pain that made a barrier between him and the world, he heard William’s voice speaking at the door to Swaine, his orderly. From somewhere they had produced a hot brick, and boiling water. He was aware of the blessed agony of scalding heat superimposed on the older torment. William’s face and the orderly’s bent over him. Good old Swaine like a worried sheepdog. And then only William’s face; and all about them the night-time stillness of the house.
‘I have found the laudanum in your gear,’ William said. ‘How much?’
Fairfax shook his head. ‘None. There might be a turn-out in the night, and — I must keep a clear head,’ he essayed with a gasp of laughter. ‘Can’t — have the troops saying, B-Black Tom was foxed!’
‘Very well,’ William said after a moment. ‘Is there aught else that I can do?’
‘Nothing. You’re a gentle nurse, Will.’
The attack, though sharp, was a mercifully short one, and by noon next day General Sir Thomas Fairfax, his dark haggard face already turning dingy yellow with the jaundice which always followed, had crawled back to duty.
At first sight, Leeds was an undoubted gain for Parliament, Wakefield, now untenable, was abandoned by the Royalists, and Newcastle drew back his whole force to York, with two big cannon and a rumbling baggage train of forty-five wagons, and the country was open again between Selby and the west. Nevertheless, Lord Fairfax in Selby, grimly clinging to his communications with Hull, was uncomfortably hard pressed. The promised twenty-five thousand pounds had not come through, and day by day the supply situation, with the Royalists in full power between him and the south, grew more desperate.
There was a lull in the fighting through February and March, while Tom, the yellow fading from his swarthy face, rode constantly between Leeds and Bradford, gathering and training his troops in both places and chafing at the otherwise inactivity. And Anne, who had chosen to remain in Bradford with Mistress Sharpe rather than go to her sister-in-law in Leeds, watched for his coming as a girl watches, took her turn with the other women at tending the wounded, and listened for news.
News drifted up over the moors where the young lambs were crying. The little Queen had reached Burlington, home-ward bound from Holland, and Lord Newcastle had gone to receive her and escort her into York. Lord Fairfax had sent William to her with the plea that she would allow the forces of her country’s Parliament to escort her; but not altogether surprisingly, Henrietta Maria had refused the plea, and accepted Lord Newcastle’s escort instead. She was in York, holding her pretty, artificial Courts there as though she were at Richmond or Whitehall, wearing her bright, brittle ununderstanding courage as though it were a rose.
It was news that seemed to Anne to come from another world; a world that was bright and small and vivid as though reflected in a silver cup. Up here was the real world, here among the high moors where the wind swept through last year’s heather and the helpings of oatmeal porridge grew smaller; among men in sodden buff and dark steel, who were beginning to be an army.
And then, at the end of the month, the lull blew up into black treachery. The traitor was not young Hotham, who had taken himself off to serve with Cromwell and was already making the Lovely Company too hot for him, but that very Sir Hugh Cholmley who had first cast suspicion on him. Sir Hugh Cholmley, apparently feeling that the time for breaking faith had come, went to the Queen in York, and delivered up to her Scarborough Castle. That was bad, but what happened after was hideously worse; for three days later the elder Hotham shut Hull to the forces of Parliament. Kingston-upon-Hull, the greatest stronghold in the north, and their chief — almost their only — means of supply from the outer world.
Selby was now quite untenable, and the only course remaining to Lord Fairfax was to abandon the town, abandon the line of the Ouse, and withdraw the whole Yorkshire army up to Leeds.
And so once again Anne had her marching orders. Once again there was the hurried packing, once again the long cold ride over the moors to the doubtful refuge of the new army headquarters at Leeds. And this time there rode with her a dread sharper and more sickening than any that had ridden with her before; for Thomas, with a pitifully small body of Horse and Foot, was covering the withdrawal of the main army with the desperate expedient of a mock attack on Tadcaster.
Chapter 8 - Wakefield
Two days later, from the foot of Mary Arthington’s garden which gave on to Briggate, Anne saw what was left of that small force ride into Leeds.
An hour or so before, she had watched, from the same vantage point, Lord Fairfax march in with the main body of troops, weary from a twenty-five mile march, but clearly without having suffered any molest on the way. It was different with this company — this pitiful, little company of horsemen with no sign of any supporting Foot. Surely, surely they must have had some Foot with them at the outset? She saw mired and all but foundering horses, and men with grey faces who seemed to keep in the saddle more by blind instinct than any conscious will of their own. And so many of them were wounded. She saw Sir Henry Fowlis swaying as he rode, with a dark stain spreading through the shoulder of his buff coat. Her wildly seeking gaze caught the kingfisher gleam of a blue scarf across black armour, a great white horse
mired to the shoulder with thick Yorkshire mud, a gaunt and scarecrow rider who had lost his helmet and rode bareheaded in the blustering spring rain, with a face set like grey stone. And she drew a sob of relief. Thomas was alive. For the rest, she would hear what had happened later.
She did hear later; so much later that it was almost next morning, when Thomas came at last to lie beside her in the wide guest bed; heard it told in quick harsh sentences out of the dark, by a man too weary to sleep, and too sick at heart. The mock attack on Tadcaster had gone well; so well that Newcastle, thinking he had the whole army with him and intended an attack on York, had hurriedly dispatched a body of Horse under Lord Goring, to get between him and the city, thereby leaving the lower road to Leeds clear for Lord Fairfax.
That first part of the story was easy telling. The last part was sheer pointless wasteful tragedy; the long march back with Lord Goring unpleasantly close on his heels with twenty troops of Horse to his three; the devil that had apparently entered into his men when they came down to Potterton Beck, so that, thirsty and mutinous, and believing the Royalists further behind than they were, they had broken ranks and gone into the cottages for a drink. He and Fowlis had fought to get them out and mustered again, sending the sergeants in after them like terriers after a fox — he remembered taking his riding whip into cottage after cottage himself — and so another force of Newcastle’s men had come down on them from the north, and between the two, cut to bits, the country levies had broken and fled. It had been all that he and Fowlis with a ball in his shoulder, could do to get the Horse away.
‘I had to abandon those poor devils, or lose the Horse as well. All those poor devils. Some of them were our own Nun Appleton lads, too.’
Anne thought she heard him choke in the darkness, and found herself beating against the hopeless barrier that divides soul from soul, isolating each into its own loneliness. There was nothing that she could say, nothing that would comfort him. No good to tell him he had done the only thing that he could do. He knew that, better than she could know it, and was not consoled. She fell back on the last resort of physical contact; her hand found his, his sword hand, and was accepted, so that they lay hand-in-hand like a pair of children.
Spring limped by, and day by day, for soldiers and towns-folk alike, the grip of want grew sharper. The bleak moorland towns had always depended for their food on the rich corn and cattle country of York Vale, the green and golden Ainstey, where now Lord Newcastle’s Army again ranged to and fro. All the corn and cattle was for York, now; and daily it grew harder to restrain the Leeds and Bradford troops from killing the sheep and feasting on mountain mutton. To kill the sheep would be to kill the future — if there was a future — though there was no market for skins in the evil present, nor for the woven kerseys and worsteds, and the looms fell almost silent.
A lean, gaunt spring, when the east wind swept up from the Vale of York from which no food came, when the bracken was late in, and the pasture forgot to wake from its winter sleep so that even the sheep went hungry; and Lord Fairfax sent letter after urgent letter to Parliament, begging that Colonel Cromwell should be sent to him with reinforcements and supplies from Lincolnshire, that he might be enabled to take the field again with some hope of success. The appeals were refused, and Lord Fairfax said to his son, in the sad dry voice that always annoyed Anne, ‘Seemingly it is God’s will — certainly it is Parliament’s — that we stand alone and die alone. Well, at least we can hold My Lord Newcastle in play awhile, that he does not take his Papist Army south to swell the King’s forces ... Sometimes, do you know, Tom, I think I know the very smell of Thermopilae.’
Through the days after the flank march to Leeds, some of the men scattered at Potterton Beck came trickling in, but most of those not killed had been rounded up and taken prisoner, marched off to York and herded into the ancient Merchant Venturers’ Hall, and told that if no exchange was paid for them they might lie there and rot. And the knowledge of their fate lay very heavy on the man in whose command they had been lost, adding almost unbearably to the burdens already crushing down on his thin braced shoulders, as he came and went from Leeds to Halifax, Halifax to Bradford, and back again on the high moors.
On a still May evening with the lilac in flower, he came back to Leeds after a longer absence than usual, and Anne, in the linen room where she was helping his sister Mary to sort out sheets of hundred-rose-pattern linen, cool to the touch, warm scented with the clove-stuck oranges in the corner of the great oak chests, did not hear him come until, emerging into the upstairs hall with an armful of linen in need of mending, she found him coming up the stairs.
She greeted him with a little winged ‘Thomas!’ softly spoken because she did not wish his sister to hear, and dumping the linen precariously on the broad carved baluster rail — whence it presently fell down and engulfed Oglethorp the steward, somewhat to his surprise — swept her wide skirts down the hall to meet him. ‘Thomas! You’re back!’
He returned the small glad commonplace with his usual grave gentleness. ‘Nan, I am back.’
Then she was beside him in the doorway of the guest-room. ‘Don’t send for Swaine, Thomas. Let me be your orderly this evening.’
She had acted as his orderly before this, quickly and efficiently. But now, taking the sword from his hand she made no move to put it down. She stood before him, holding it against her breast much as Moll held the disreputable Bathsheba in times of stress. ‘Thomas,’ she said, ‘some women came to me, three days since —’
He looked up from the knot of the blue scarf, with which his fingers were busy. ‘Well, Nan?’
‘They — Thomas, they came to beg —’
He cut in on her, his voice grating a little. ‘They came to beg for their men in the Merchant Venturers’ Hall in York. They came to you because you, also, are a woman, to beg that you would plead with me to do something to gain their release.’
‘So they came to you, too,’ Anne said.
‘Every woman I pass in the street comes running to my stirrup, crying out to me, “Do something! Don’t you understand? They’re our brothers and our husbands and our sons! You must know of something you can do — You’re the Rider of the White Horse!” Oh my God!’ His face was that of a man very near to the limit of what he could bear; but Anne knew that she could not turn back now.
‘Thomas, what are you going to do?’
Fairfax slipped off the long silken sash and laid it on the bed, a river of kingfisher blue striping the golden coverlid, the peacocks and clove gilliflowers. ‘I have no prisoners to offer in exchange. What would you have me do, Nan?’
Anne caught her breath, her hands tightening on the hard coldness of the scabbard against her body. ‘Get some!’ she said recklessly.
He looked at her very straightly, his hands already on the buckles of his cuirass. ‘You would. I am attacking Wakefield two days from now,’ he said, quite simply. ‘It may be that, with God’s help, when the day is over I shall have some prisoners with which to bargain.’
‘You would do that,’ Anne said after a silent moment. ‘Attack Wakefield, only to gain prisoners?’
‘No, not for that alone ... The Cause we fight for is greater than the lives of a few captives, even those that are our own Nun Appleton lads. We cannot go on like this indefinitely, caged up here — stalemate. Newcastle’s men have the advantage of us in every way if the thing is to drag on. Their supplies and munitions coining in steadily, the productive country open to them while we hold the barren moors. We must force the issue somehow, start the thing moving again …’
‘And so you will attack Wakefield,’ Anne said, kneeling to help him with his boots. She looked up at him as he sat on the edge of the bed. ‘What are your chances, Thomas?’
‘The scouts report eight or nine hundred defenders,’ Fair-fax said. ‘Against them I can muster from the various garrisons upward of a thousand foot, half a dozen troops of Horse and three of dragooners.’
It sounded a lot, against
eight or nine hundred, but Lord Vere’s daughter knew the enormous advantage of men behind barricades over men in the open, and she was silent.
He answered her silence as though it had been spoken words. ‘Nevertheless, I think the odds are better than they seem.’
‘Why do you think it?’
‘Because, in this instance, we are better men, better disciplined.’
‘Even after the Potterton Beck?’ she said ruthlessly.
‘God knows what entered into them at Potterton Beck. It entered into them in retreat, when men are always most vulnerable. Potterton Beck will not happen again,’ Fairfax said with quiet conviction, and she saw how stern his mouth was.
She did not know what made her say it; maybe it was the instinct to probe to the bottom of something. ‘William did not think we had the better men, better disciplined. He was telling me of Colonel Cromwell’s views, the day I rode up from Selby under his escort.’
‘Edgehill is half a year gone by. It will not be Prince Rupert and his firebrands at the Wakefield barricades, but George Goring, possibly sober, possibly drunk; nor will it be My Lord Essex’s first mangy pack that I shall lead against him in two days’ time! Colonel Cromwell is not alone in his views, nor altogether alone in the quality of the men he leads; I also have my men — a few — who “make some conscience of what they do”. I also could speak of my plain russet-coated Captains — Hodgson’s one of them — who know what they fight for and love what they know.’
‘You love your men, don’t you,’ Anne said.
‘Yes,’ Fairfax answered; no more. But all that was behind the quiet monosyllable rang like trumpets in the quiet room.
The Rider of the White Horse Page 10