The great coach lumbered down into the Leeds road, creaking and groaning and lurching through the ruts; the troopers and corporal of the escort riding before and behind, Lieutenant Gasgoine at the left hand and Sir Charles at the right, and the soft July dust rising cloudwise in their wake. The last woman to ride in that coach, Anne supposed, must have been the Queen on her way down from York to join her husband.
Presently the road rounded a steep shoulder where the moors came marching down to it for one last time as though in farewell, and ahead they caught their first glimpse of the dim blue flatness of the Ainstey. And there, at a word from Sir Charles, the coach and its escort rumbled and clattered to a halt. Anne looked out as Sir Charles brought the red mare, dancing a little, close beside the window. ‘Lady Fairfax, it is time that I take my leave of you and return to my own duties.’ Then with a glance at the young officer who had come round from the other side of the coach, while the corporal took his place there, ‘You will be perfectly safe with Lieutenant Gasgoine.’
‘I am very sure of it, Sir Charles,’ Anne said.
The wind from the high moors fluttered the curled osprey feathers in his hat; nothing else moved about him, least of all his eyes on her face. ‘Think of us as gently as may be, Lady Fairfax, remembering that we also draw our swords in a Cause that seems to us worth dying for.’
Anne put up her hand to him, feeling it lightly caught in his strong fingers as he stripped off his riding glove to take it. ‘At least I shall always think gently and with most deep gratitude of My Lord Newcastle’s General of Horse.’
‘And I with as deep admiration, of a very brave lady, and no mean swordswoman,’ said Sir Charles Cavendish. It was the nearest that he had ever come to speaking of that scene on the terrace and the fantastic matter of the White Lady.
He bent his head, and she felt the light brush of his lips across her knuckles. Then he released her hand, and reined his horse back a little, touching Lieutenant Gasgoine briefly on the shoulder. ‘Take over, Robin.’
‘Sir,’ said Lieutenant Gasgoine, his sword flashing up in salute, his face as he looked at the older man telling Anne something of the affection in which Lord Newcastle’s Horse held their Commander. She had thought of Sir Charles on horseback as a man among men; she took that back now, realizing that in all essentials, in the things that made a man, Sir Charles was in any case a man among men. Looking for that one last moment into his face, she saw its ugliness as strength, as the scars of battle and the scars of victory. She saw a man without bitterness when most men would have been bitter, and finely tempered by his own cruel adversity as a Toledo rapier blade. Yet in remembering Sir Charles Cavendish afterwards, his quality that came first to her mind was a warmth that in a woman would be charm.
At noon they stopped to bate the horses at a hedge tavern under the moors, and Anne was shown into a little stuffy parlour and fed on cold beef and a bowl of cherries by the inn-keeper’s wife, while the escort regaled themselves on bread and cheese and beer on the strip of rough grass before the door. She heard their idle laughter through the thick panes of the window while she listened to the eager chatter of the inn wife who was filled with excited curiosity. ‘Is it true what they say, My Lady?’ the woman’s eyes were round, her withered face avid for sensation, ‘that Lord Newcastle gave orders for Bradford to be sacked and the soldiers to have free rein, but a woman all in white appeared to him t’very night before ‘twas to happen, wringing her hands and crying to him for mercy on the town?’
‘So says My Lord Newcastle,’ Anne said.
That night they reached Wetherby and Anne was lodged at the inn; next day passed as the first had done, and at night she found shelter in the old Manor House in York; very strange that seemed. The third night she passed in a private house, where the squire, a friend of Lord Fairfax’s, told her hawking stories until she could have thrown the branched silver candle-sticks at his head, while the Lieutenant looked on with bright-eyed amusement that annoyed her almost as much, until he, too, began to yawn.
It was a full four-day journey, but at last towards evening on the fourth day, they clattered through Beverley; the air that came in at the coach window began to have a salty freshness in it. And presently, leaning far out, Anne saw across the flatness of the Humber marshes, the strong walls and flanking towers of Kingston-upon-Hull.
Once there had been houses and cottages, the over-spread of the town, sprawling below the walls, but they had been cleared back now lest they give cover to an enemy. They rumbled across the moat, and lurched and clattered to a stop before the Beverley Gate with its vast double bastions and flanking towers. And Anne, looking up at the battlements against the wide marsh sky, remembered afresh that this was the strongest fortress town in all Yorkshire — and it was once again in Parliament’s hands. Then she turned her eager gaze to the gateway, where a stir of movement caught her eye.
Lieutenant Gasgoine had sent one of the escort ahead with word of their coming, and the great gates of Hull stood wide, and she saw Thomas coming out to her from the gloom of the gatehouse. A knot of officers were behind him; but it was only Thomas that she saw, with his sword arm in a blue silken sling.
Her hands were struggling with the heavy catch of the coach door, dragging it open before Lieutenant Gasgoine could swing down from his horse to do it for her, and she stood poised in the doorway, while he pulled down the steps. She longed to fling herself into Thomas’s arms, waiting for no steps, but mindful of his sling, mindful also of the many eyes upon her, she waited for the steps; one long moment. Then as he came striding to help her down, her hand was caught in his, and still she stood an instant, looking down at him, seeing the unutterable relief in his poor strained, weary face, before she stepped down to him, to the cobbles of the barbican that rocked a little under her feet with the four days’ rocking of the coach.
‘Nan,’ he said. ‘My most dear Nan.’
‘Thomas, you’re wounded.’
‘Only a ball through the wrist.’
‘Moll? Is Little Moll safe?’
‘Quite safe, and waiting for you.’
Anne drew a quivering sigh of unutterable relief, as, still holding her hand in his, he turned to the Lieutenant of the escort.
She had dreamed perhaps, after all that had happened since they parted, of a rather different kind of reunion, but she realized that to have that, she must have another man; and, alas, she had never wanted any other man. Thomas was physically incapable of kissing her before the escort and his officers. He could only show her his gladness in her with that one quietly spoken ‘My most dear Nan’, and the way that he kept her hand in his sound one as though he were afraid to let it go.
Thomas was thanking Lieutenant Gasgoine for his care of her. ‘Will you not ride in, at least to bate the horses and refresh your men? Lady Fairfax’s escort need fear nothing in. Hull.’
Young Gasgoine replied with a quick, eager smile. ‘It is not for any fear. Believe me, Sir, there is no man in all the King’s armies fool enough to doubt the honour of Sir Thomas Fairfax. It is that our orders are to return immediately and we hope to reach Beverley again before dark.’ He turned to Anne. ‘Lady Fairfax, I take my leave.’
‘And with it, take my thanks for your kindness towards me,’ Anne said and gave him her free hand.
At last it was over; the great coach had been got round with much shouting and trampling, and the escort turned about; and the whole cavalcade had clattered out over the drawbridge and away down the Beverley road, the white summer’s dust rising behind them and blotting them from her sight; and she was walking with her hand in Thomas’s through the dark gate arch where faces peered out at her from the guard-rooms, and into the narrow streets of Kingston-upon-Hull.
Anne, sweeping her draggled tawny skirts through the filthy dust of the Hull streets in the first tumbled light of the sunset, found herself having something of a royal progress. Word had gone round that Sir Thomas’s Lady who had been a captive in Royalist hands had been
returned to him in Lord Newcastle’s own coach; and the good people of the town, especially the women, came tumbling out of doors to stare at the plain little woman in the tattered gown walking with Black Tom and his officers about her; to throng round her and greet her and wish her well. One of Black Tom’s own troopers, safely anonymous at the back of the crowd, called out to her, ‘Eh lass, didst a’make Bowling Hall too hot to hold thee?’ And an old woman, with a pair of very blue eyes in a face that was wrinkled and sweet like the very best kind of long-biding apple, came hurrying from her door to bring her a posy of the little dark-eyed pinks that the country people called ‘sops-in-wine’.
They had not far to go. Soon they were in Silver Street, and from Silver Street they turned in through the archway to the courtyard of the Governor’s Palace, and someone swung to the heavy gates behind them, shutting out Silver Street and the friendly populace; and Thomas’s officers had melted away, and she and Thomas were alone with the magpie black and white of the house rising many windowed about them. ‘Through here,’ Thomas said, releasing her hand to thrust open a small deep-set door in the wall; and drew her through into the peace and privacy of a narrow walled garden where the dusk was rising like cool water around the feet of an old Whiteheart cherry tree, and the stocks in the border were in full scent.
She was in Thomas’s arms, in both of Thomas’s arms, for he had slipped his wounded hand from its sling the better to hold her; and he was straining her close in a silent passion of relief, so close that the buckle of his buff coat hurt her.
‘Nan! Oh my dear Nan,’ he said at last, holding her off a little to look questioningly into her face. ‘Have they used you well?’
‘Very well,’ Anne said. ‘My body has lived silken-soft these past days, Thomas. I have been half out of my mind, but that was not their doing.’ In the first moments of their coming together again, her world had held only Thomas, but now it was opening a little, just enough to make room for one other person. ‘Where is Little Moll?’
‘Somewhere about the house — in bed maybe, by now — with a ginger kitten that has been added unto her.’
‘Ah, I have heard already of that ginger kitten; Sir Charles Cavendish told me how you had to send her to a farm. May God be kind to them there ...’
‘So!’ Thomas said, startled. ‘It seems that the Royalist scouts do their work well.’ He drew her close again, but gently now. ‘Doubtless Moll will be here in her night shift before long, if she can escape from Christian, and if you do not first go up to her, but it is sweet to have these first few moments of you untouched by any other hand. I have been so bitterly afraid for you, Nan.’
In a while, turning to other things, he said, ‘Presently you must play scout also, and tell me all that you know of the fall of Bradford. Nan, have you heard aught of this wild tale of a White Lady that appeared to My Lord Newcastle, and saved the town from sacking?’
‘Yes, I have heard,’ Anne said. ‘Who has not? It is all over Yorkshire by now,’ and burst into a storm of tears on her husband’s breast, with no more clear idea than Little Moll had had of why she was crying.
Chapter 17 - The Huntingdonshire Squire
In the withdrawing-room of the Governor’s Palace at Hull, Anne stood gazing into the fire. The late September evening had turned chilly with a brittle hint of frost, and the fire burned clear, with a snapping crackle that spoke of winter. It was a mixed fire of sea coal and wood, and the wood had come from the shipyard down by the river — short ends of old ships’ timbers that burned with little spitting salty blue and green flames, very different from the gentle fragrant peat fires of Bradford.
Anne reached behind her and took a sprig of rosemary from a silver bowl on the table, and tossed it into the glowing hollow under the coals. It dried, crisped, became a sprig tipped with gold like the gilded rosemary carried before a bride to her wedding; and an aromatic sweetness stole out into the room. Apart from being pleasant, it was wise to burn a little rosemary now and then about the house, with the siege already three weeks old — good against infection.
Her gaze on the golden sprig as it crumbled away, Anne’s thoughts went back over those three weeks, and the weeks that had gone before them. At the end of July, Thomas’s father had been appointed Governor of Kingston-upon-Hull, in a letter from the two Houses, promising their utmost support. Promises, always promises ... But long before that, scattered Parliamentary soldiers had begun to come in, swelling the ranks of the ragged little army until by early September they mustered fifteen hundred Foot, and seven troops of Horse for Thomas to wield into some kind of overgrown. Cavalry regiment. And so My Lord Newcastle, having overrun the whole of Yorkshire and crossed the Trent to do the same for Lincolnshire, had been recalled by the news that Black Tom, far from being safely shut up in Hull, was traversing the country again, rounding up another army, and had even menaced Stamford Bridge at the very gates of York. After that, Anne supposed, there was really no choice left to My Lord Newcastle but to lay siege to Hull in an attempt to burn out the Fairfaxes and the last core of Yorkshire’s resistance, once and for all.
So the siege had begun, if siege it could truly be called, for though the Royalist troops drew a great bow about the north-west of the town, the south and eastern sides were guarded by the Hull and the Humber and the Parliament warships and merchant vessels anchored there. Thomas had raised an earthwork covering the bank of the Hull close beside the Charterhouse, and mounted on it brass culverin from the Parliament ship Lion.
Her wandering mind returned to the firelit room, and the spring of rosemary crumbling into fine white ash. And she heard the mutter of voices going on and on overhead in the little panelled parlour. Voices that sometimes rose a little, sometimes fell, earnest and urgent, once or twice breaking into laughter. She heard the scrape of a chair violently thrust back, and hoped that they would not wake Moll, sleeping in the closet next door, with the ginger kitten — now christened Dandelior, as the most golden and at the same time catly name she could think of — tucked under her chin. Evidently someone had risen from the chair for she heard the thud of footsteps overhead, five steps up, five steps down; feet that trampled like a farmer’s with a pound or so of good loam caked on each boot. Not Thomas’s step or his father’s, and not, she thought, Lord Willoughby’s, who was a slow man and soft footed. Only one of the men in the upstairs parlour could walk with that furious energy and purpose in his tramping step; and that was Colonel Cromwell. Colonel Cromwell who, with Lord Willoughby (in theory, she supposed, it was the other way round, but one could not feel it like that), had crossed the Humber that day for the council with the Fairfaxes, that had begun as soon as supper was over and had gone on ever since.
Anne, her interest alight, had watched him through supper, while she played hostess for her father-in-law; this East Anglian Cavalry Colonel who held such revolutionary views on the making and handling of armies. A big uncouth man, bluntly heavy of face, harsh of voice and none too clean of person. The merest homespun country squire, he seemed; and then something that one of the other men said, or that he himself said, some word, some turn of the conversation, would fire the spark, and the swift living flame would flash out like a sword from its sheath, only to be sheathed again almost before one had caught the brightness of it. Then one began to understand, to see the Cavalry Commander whose name was already a legend throughout the armies of King and Parliament alike, the man, not bred to soldiering, but inspired as he believed by God, who could win battles that twenty years of Low Countries training would not have won.
Upstairs in the panelled parlour, Colonel Cromwell swung round from his pacing upon the three men who sat watching him about the table, crashing one great fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘Promises — promises — promises! Forever it is promises! For the lack of any support save promises, I have been fighting a rearguard action all this summer.’ His brilliant gaze thrust at Lord Fairfax almost as though in accusation. ‘You, too! We have seen the fruits of earlier victories s
lipping away from us ... Lacking support from the south, we may not even, until now, come to the support of each other. The Lord God knoweth how long you have been urging the House that I be sent to you; The Lord God knoweth how long I have been straining at the leash to come. Together we could have cleared the Papist Army out of Yorkshire, and turned together to do as much for the counties of the Eastern Association. But no; we are two separate armies, and it is decreed in the stars, seemingly, that we may not come together!’ He bent forward, his great hands spread-fingered on the table, his full, troubled gaze thrusting from one to the other. ‘If we do not have a care, separate armies will lose us this war and the Grace of God for England!’
Lord Willoughby sighed a little, as one who is weary of living with a westerly gale. ‘Strong words, my friend.’
‘Strong? Aye, but not too strong! How can we find any overall design or purpose to carry us forward, when My Lord of Essex, our Commander-in-Chief, had in truth no command over any army save his own? Charles Stuart at least knows the value of a master plan ... See now, the King has three armies, but under his own command. He fixes his headquarters with one army at Oxford. The second, under My Lord Newcastle, advances from the north; the third under Hopton and Prince Maurice from the west; both crushing our resistance as they come. They converge on the Thames below London, cutting off all seaborne communications, while the King himself advances from Oxford to deal with Lord Essex. It’s a simple, clear-cut plan of campaign — probably Prince Rupert’s — and it’s a magnificent plan!’
The Rider of the White Horse Page 20