A scratching came at the door, and Mary’s soft flurried voice upraised outside it. ‘Tom — oh Tom love, I know you’re in there. Bring Anne down to supper now, for there’s little enough, and if you keep it waiting what there is will spoil.’
*
The sky was brimming with the first light of a fine Whit Sunday morning, as the motley force of Tom Fairfax’s gathering, formed already in battle order, and every man with a white kerchief about his arm, came down from the high ground into the shallow rolling dale country north of Wakefield. The Foot marched in two detachments, one commanded by Major-General Gifford, the other by William; the Horse, guarding their flanks, by Sir Henry Fowlis. Tom Fairfax, in over all command, rode in the van, his staff about him, and rode warily, unusually warily.
The scouts sent ahead had fallen back reporting that the Royalists were aware of their coming, and every hedge about the town strongly held. If there were indeed only eight or nine hundred men in Wakefield, they should not be able to hold the outer hedges very strongly. It was no more than that at first; the unlikeliness that the outer defences would be held so strongly as it seemed they were; if the whole defence numbered no more than eight or nine hundred men. But it nagged at his mind, and alerted his sense of danger.
The morning mists were rising, and Fairfax saw the light on pikehead and musket barrel, the dark ranks massed behind every hedge, the silken flutter of standards over all. Somewhere a horse neighed as though in defiance, and White Surrey flung up his head and answered, crying, ‘Ha Ha!’ against the trumpets; and suddenly Fairfax’s all but formless sense of blunder crystallized into certainty.
‘Fowlis,’ he said, quietly, to the quiet man riding beside him. ‘Do you know, I fancy that the scouts have somewhat underestimated the size of the Wakefield garrison.’
The complete understatement was spoken almost conversationally, but Sir Henry Fowlis, glancing aside into his Commander’s face, saw it very grim, the mouth tense and faintly smiling, the eyes a little narrowed in the shadow of the lobster tail helmet. ‘I also,’ he said in the same tone, and then, ‘What now? It’s too late to draw off; we should have the whole Royalist pack on our flanks and rear.’
There was a moment’s pause, filled with the creak of saddle lather, the jinkety-jink of harness and accoutrements, and the soft rolling thunder of hooves coming down behind. Then Fairfax said, ‘Much too late. The only thing to do, my dear Fowlis, is to go on, and to go on damned quickly!’ Even as he spoke, he turned in the saddle, to assure himself that the Horse were as he needed them for instant use; and brought Charles D’Oyley to his side with a swift gesture of the hand. He had no time to write his orders down, but both William and Gifford knew his galloper and would act on a word-of-mouth order sent through him. ‘Charles, get back to Sir William Fairfax, then to General Gifford, and bid them have their men ready for an assault on the northern barricades as soon as they receive the order.’ And as his eager galloper wheeled his horse to obey, turned again to his Cavalry Commander. ‘Fowlis, bring up your men into one body, and bid your trumpeter to sound me the Charge. We must sweep clear these hedges and drive the enemy back into the town.’
At the time it seemed to him that they swept down like a wave upon those outer defences, swept the defenders from behind hedge and haystack and whirled them away like flotsam on a stormy sea, and flung them back into the town. But later looking back, he remembered the shock of charge and counter-charge, the rattle of musketry and the fire-fly dance of the matchlock flames, the trampling struggle for every hedge and ditch and sheepcote wall. He remembered the reek of burned powder and blood and sweating horses, and his young cornet’s horse still charging with the rest of them, riderless, while Corporal Hill caught up the black lion’s-head standard almost before it fell from the boy’s dead hand.
He remembered also, when the outer defences had been cleared and the last defenders driven back into the town, sending back by his flushed and bright-eyed galloper the grimly awaited word that the General would be obliged if Sir William Fairfax and Major-General Gifford would now assault the Wrengate and Norgate barricades.
At the barricades, when the Foot came in, drums rolling, all hell broke loose. The fighting over the fields had been open and scattered, but here in the mouths of the streets it was forced in upon itself into a dense packed roaring turmoil life a river boiling in a sudden narrow gorge. No space nor time for shooting; only the bloody, fundamental business of hand-to-hand fighting, and the men surging to and fro across the piled logs of the barriers fought with clubbed muskets and shortened pikes. At Wrengate they had fired the barricades; the flames sprang up red in the morning light — unexpectedly red, as fire always is in the daytime — casting its fierce and uncertain glare on the yelling, distorted faces of attack and defence alike, while the smoke thickened, hanging in a dun cloud above the fighters. Fairfax, sitting White Surrey at the head of Wrengate, with the flame-lit street opening like the mouth of hell before him, judged that the barricades would go at any moment now, and sent his staff galloping right and left, for his own troop, for Colonel Alured’s, for Captain Bright’s ...
Just an hour after the assault on the barricades began, the Wrengate barrier went down. The glowing pile of tree trunks crumpled and collapsed, and a great yell rose from attack and defence alike, as the flames shot up in a wavering sheet, and a comet-tail of sparks flew skyward, before the fire sank and was beaten out under the rush of feet.
For an instant, Fairfax saw little things. He saw William with his eyebrows burned off; he saw a drummer spring on to the glowing wreck and plunge down on the further side shouting to his comrades to follow; he saw a summer-dry stalk of wallflower growing on a cottage roof suddenly become a flower of flame. Then, for the second time that day, he said to the trumpeter beside him, ‘Sound me the Charge.’ And as the brazen crowing of the trumpets rose above the turmoil, he jabbed his spurred heel into White Surrey’s flank. The great stallion sprang forward, the squadron sweeping after, and on a great wave of cheering the forces of Parliament poured through into Wrengate.
They were half-way down it when a flying squadron of the Royalist Cavalry reserves came crashing in upon them from a side street. The charge took them on the flank, cutting them in two, while from far ahead a redoubled tumult told of another desperate attack upon the van. Wrengate was a seething maelstrom, a red maelstrom of men and horses; and in the midst of it, Sir Thomas Fairfax, standing in his stirrups saw Lord Goring himself, his bold dissolute face alight with triumph as he snatched off his feathered beaver hat and flourished it in great swooping circles above his head.
But Lord Goring’s triumph was premature. Within minutes, the whole northern half of Wakefield was one reeling, roaring mêlée; and in the midst of the turmoil, General Sir Thomas Fairfax, always too prone to get personally involved, was fighting like any of his scattered troopers. But it was the example of one man on a great white horse, fighting in their midst with the wild uncaring courage of a berserker, that held the Parliament men together, nerving them against overwhelming odds until — God might know how, they did not — it was Lord Goring’s Horse that broke and scattered.
Later, while the Parliamentary Foot surged down upon the market place, while the Horse were already pouring through the lanes and alleys after flying Royalists, General Sir Thomas Fairfax found himself alone and unnoticed on the west side of the market square, with the best part of a regiment of Royalist Foot between him and his own troops, having collected somewhere along the way two Royalist officers, his sworn prisoners. He wished vaguely that these things did not happen to him. He had a feeling that they did not happen to other Generals in battle. ‘Gentlemen,’ said General Sir Thomas Fairfax, breathing quickly, and feeling the warm familiar balance of his long pistol against his palm. ‘Shall we go this way?’ and urged them into a narrow lane that seemed to offer some prospect of getting back to his own men.
It led him, as the chances of war would have it, straight into a party of Royalists coming
full tilt down it to the aid of their comrades in the market place. Fairfax looked at his prisoners, and they at him, and an instant of shared reckless laughter touched them. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Fairfax, ‘it seems that our ways part here.’
The younger of his prisoners made him a small courtly bow. ‘It seems so. Our acquaintanceship has been a short one, Sir Thomas, but it is sheer joy to me to have made it.’
Neither gave any sign to the approaching Royalist troops as Fairfax set his horse at a low place in the dry-stone wall that ran along one side of the lane. ‘Up! Come up, boy!’ He felt the snorting stallion gather himself under him. ‘Up, lad!’ And they were up and over like a bird, into a back garden with shirts hanging on the line and only a low sweetbriar hedge before them ...
When Sir Thomas Fairfax rejoined his men, the thing was virtually over. When the count was taken towards evening, Fairfax found that of the garrison of three thousand men (the scouts had indeed been mistaken) almost half had fallen to Parliament, either killed or prisoner.
That day’s work made Fairfax’s name for him beyond the borders of his own county; and still he did not know how it had happened. Colonel Cromwell in his Lincolnshire mud hammered with fist on one knee and swore that his own men could have done little better, which from Colonel Cromwell was praise that had no equal. And the Two Houses, though they did little more about the money and nothing about Lord Fairfax’s continued urgent demands for Colonel Cromwell, sent Thomas a flowerily worded expression of their appreciation.
‘And ingrate that I am,’ he confided to Anne with a flash of rueful amusement, his foot already in the stirrup to ride over to his old H.Q. at Bradford, ‘I should have found deeper pleasure in it if I could have eaten it or fired it from a gun!’
Standing with the stirrup cup in her hand, Anne did her best to laugh with him but there was little laughter in her that morning, because it had seemed to her that Moll was flushed and certainly she was cross; and probably it was nothing at all, and she must not tell Thomas; not now when he had to ride away. But everything in her was crying out in cold fear, ‘Not again! Dear God, not again! Not Little Moll, too!’
Chapter 9 - Camp Follower
By nightfall, Moll’s small dark head was very hot indeed; she wept when being put to bed by Christian, which was a thing quite unlike her, and her nose was running. The apothecary came; a meagre little man in a greasy skull cap, surrounded by an aura of drugs and stale tobacco, stated the little lass’s malady to be nothing but a childish fever, and forecast that the spots would be out in three days.
Moll, thoroughly upset by the whole affair, and not liking the smell of his bony, drug-stained hands, bit him when he tried to make her open her mouth for a parting look down her throat; and he departed, deeply aggrieved. And Anne, shaking with relief, did her best to impress on Moll the enormity of her conduct. ‘If you were not a sick little girl, I should whip you for biting that poor man!’
To which Moll, still weeping, replied with unanswerable logic, ‘Nasty ole finger! If Moll wasn’t a sick little girl he wouldn’t have been here, and Moll wouldn’t have bitted him!’
The spots duly appeared in three days, and the fever took its course without the least sign of complications; and Moll came downstairs again, completely recovered but still rather spoilt, and allowed to be in the big sunny parlour with her mother and Aunt Mary, instead of with Christian and fat Euphemia and Aunt Mary’s bairns in the nursery quarters. The two things which made Moll prefer the parlour to the nursery were the absence of Aunt Mary’s bairns, for she had never played with any other child except Elizabeth, and the presence of the carved cabinet which stood there, and with which, because she had been ill, she was allowed to play. The cabinet had been brought from far away by a travelling Fairfax, and had a lady carved on it, and a tree with apples in rows, and a slender little unicorn with his head in the lady’s lap. Moll liked the gentle unicorn best of all the things in the cabinet, though the cabinet was full of little drawers and compartments and there was something in every one. Most of the contents were strewn around her now, as she sat on her heels in a tumble of blue skirts in the pool of sunshine before the cabinet. At least they seemed strewn to adult and un-understanding eyes, but in actual fact they were arranged with infinite and loving care.
Mary Arthington sat at the table, struggling with her household accounts, and sighing over the rising prices of everything; and Anne on the low cushioned window seat, stitched at the skirt of a summer gown that had lately been her sister-in-law’s. Her old stuff gown was much too thick for June, and lacking all chance of getting at the many gowns she had stored away in orris root at Denton and Nun Appleton, she had been prepared to scour Leeds for something, even striped dimity such as the servant girls wore, with which to fashion herself another. It was a strain to live without baggage, there was no denying it, saddle-bags held so little; her Venice glasses had gone long since; she couldn’t even remember now at which of her halts she had abandoned them. Mary had cast up her hands at the idea of striped dimity, and poured scorn on the possibility of getting anything better this side of Royalist held York, which was not helpful; and had finally produced a scarce worn gown of her own. ‘Orange-tawny was never my colour, but it should suit you not so badly, because of your eyes. If you do not feel it too soon for bright colours, that is.’
Anne had looked at her in surprise for a moment. It was not that she had forgotten the baby, simply that the formalities of life, including the wearing of decent black for the dead, had gone the way of her Venice glasses. Then she had thanked Mary for her kindness, said that she did not feel it too early; and set to work with Christian’s help to make the needful alterations; for she and her sister-in-law were of rather different sizes and completely different shapes. However, the thing was nearly done now. She spread the glowing folds across her knee, seeing how the sunlight ran on the soft damask. Presently she heard a horse canter up the street, and stop at the door; and a few minutes later William stood on the threshold of the parlour. William in buff and steel with the dust of the June lanes thick on his riding boots, bringing the war and the sound of the guns with him into the sunny room.
‘William!’ and ‘Cousin William!’ The two women rose in a flurry of skirts to greet him as he pulled off his beaver hat and came forward.
‘Anne — Cousin Mary — your devoted servant. What, Moll, no spots? I expected to find you spotted like a cowslip!’
‘This is a happy surprise!’ Mary said. ‘What do you here in Leeds? And how is Tom? And have you come to supper? Ah, but of course you have. You shall have a potted neat’s tongue that I have been saving —’
‘Tom thrives like a war horse, but I fear that I have not come to supper,’ William said, his hand already in the pocket under the skirt of his buff coat. ‘Indeed I can stay but a few minutes. I am on my way up to the North Riding — more recruiting — and since my way lies through Leeds, I am come in passing to pay my duty to my two kinswomen; and also —’ he withdrew his hand from his pocket, and held out a packet addressed in a familiar and beloved hand — ‘to bring Anne a letter.’
Anne, as she looked up at him in taking the little packet, thought what nice eyes he had, despite the rigid inflexibility of his mouth. ‘Thank you, William,’ she said, and then to the world at large, ‘I beg you excuse me —’ and turned back into the sunlit window, her fingers already breaking the seal.
The letter was very short. Thomas’s letters were seldom long; no more than a few lines, asking for news of Moll, whose spots had been made known to him once her mother knew that they were nothing worse; telling her of a new band of musketeers who had come in to him from over the Lancashire border, and that he had promoted Corporal Will Hill, in whom he knew she felt an interest, to cornet, since he had carried out the duties of a cornet so valiantly at Wakefield, and had within him the stuff of a good officer. But at the end, inconsequently, one sentence seemed to reach out to her like the physical touch of Thomas’s hand. ‘Dear, I would that you w
ere with me.’ And something in the writing, an odd jaggedness, told her that Thomas had been in pain when he wrote it. Thomas sick of the old malady, in pain and wanting her. ‘Dear, I would that you were with me.’
She looked up, questioningly, at William; and he came with his wine glass in his hand, and stood looking down at her. ‘William, how was Thomas when you left him?’
‘As — well as usual, I believe,’ William said, his eyes steady on her face. But she noticed the tiny hesitation, and her suspicions were confirmed.
‘I suppose he told you not to tell me.’
‘There is nothing to tell, Anne.’ He drank, bowing towards her. ‘If you should be sending a reply, there’s a supply wagon going up to Bradford tomorrow, and the corporal of the escort will doubtless take it for you. A most welcome stirrup cup, Mary; and now I must be on my way.’
When he had taken his leave Anne turned back to the window, the letter, with its oddly jagged writing still in her hands. She was vaguely aware of Mary’s soft distressed inquiries as to whether there was bad news, but paid no heed. ‘Dear, I would that you were with me.’ She knew that it was involuntary, a cry for help made without knowing that one has made it. She knew that with his mind, Thomas did not wish that she was with him; the reasons that had caused him to order her in from Bradford to the new headquarters at Leeds still held good. And that in itself told her the depth of his need, in the dark inner places far below the level of mind and judgement.
She looked round at Moll, who had returned to her absorbed play. The child was not yet strong enough to be carried off across the moors, and anyway, she knew that to take Moll back to Bradford now would be a wicked thing to do, both for Moll’s own sake and for what her presence would add to Thomas’s already over heavy burden. For herself, she was content to disobey Thomas’s mind and judgement for the sake of that other part of Thomas that wanted her to come to him. And yet — to leave her baby, her only one, here in the uncertain conditions of a war-racked countryside ... ‘Dear, I would that you were with me.’
The Rider of the White Horse Page 11