As soon as she could, she left the main road with its traffic and roadblocks for the hill tracks. She was becoming tired and desperate. She kept mishearing birdcalls as a child crying – it was Ruperta, it was Tongs. She kicked the donkey and rode on, blinded by the lowering sunlight as she came into it out of trees, knowing that if she faced it she must sooner or later come down into the Cary valley from which she could find her way home.
All the cottages and huts she passed were shuttered. No smoke came from their stacks, no hens scratched in the empty runs. When she saw horsemen in the distance she took the donkey into some trees and hid until they’d passed.
The ground began to slope consistently downwards and the donkey stumbled. Penitence got off and walked with it, realizing that her eyes were becoming stretched with staring to keep the track in view. By the time she’d got down to the Levels they had gone into sepia with the banks of the rhines reflected as smudges in water still touched by gold and old rose. At long last, and far away, she glimpsed Athelzoy’s church tower, its weathervane caught gold by the last ray of sun, and sobbed with relief.
She found a path that would take her home, though slowly – its apparent aimless meandering avoiding the quagmires that lay in wait under the thin crust superimposed by a dry summer. It was just possible to make out the dip it made through the grasses, but she went ahead carefully. If the donkey got mired she’d never get him out.
There was a crackle as of somebody lighting dry twigs, no, letting off fireworks a long way away. It died down, started again, became brisk; a busy, innocent sound – until she realized it was musket fire. It came from directly north but if there were twinkling lights in that direction they were difficult to distinguish from stars.
What was eerie was that the noisier it became to the north, the quieter went the marsh around her. Usually a night walk was full of the carping of frogs, the booming of bitterns and the rustle of reptilian traffic through the rushes. Now everything had stopped.
The path shimmied gently under her feet and she heard a whine, then a crump. Somewhere north a cannon had fired. There were more explosions, until the tremor coming up through the soles of her feet became a continual palsy. She’d heard artillery before – she’d been present when the Fleet gave Rupert a twenty-one-gun salute, and had thought then that the scream of the shell represented the terror of those it was about to fall on, just as the keek of the hunting owl imitated the squeak of the mouse before the talons ripped it open.
Flashes lit up part of the northern sky now – flame roaring out of cannons’ mouths.
The long-promised battle between Monmouth and his uncle’s army had begun.
Stop it. Stop it. You’re too near my children. Damn you, go and fight somewhere else.
What puzzled her was a thin pencil of light that made a path over some willows ahead of her. It came from the direction she was aiming for. Not musket nor cannon fire, a steady beam. The Priory should be over there. It was the Priory.
What are they doing?
The three windows of the hall that should have been in decent obscurity shone out to make a triptych, a Christmas welcome, a beacon, an invitation cast over the moor: come and fight here, rape me.
Dorinda. I’ll kill her.
Something was very wrong. To be on the safe side she led the donkey along the old track to the house, the one that led to the Ridges’ farm. The farmhouse was shut up, hurdles that had once penned pigs lay on their side in the yard – in the gloom she tripped over one and grazed her ankle. From what she could see there was no other damage but the silence of a place that had always been busy with fowls and a rootling pig unnerved her and she began to run, dragging the donkey with her.
The bridge over the moat was floodlit by the hall windows and it wasn’t nice to be exposed as she crossed it, the donkey’s hooves making a loud, hollow reverberation. She kept her eyes away from the shapes of the yew chessmen on the north lawn in case one of them moved.
The light gave the courtyard normality. Mounting block, tubs of flowers, the lichened stone lions crouching against the steps, all reassuring. But no dogs came to greet her. No maids appeared at the windows to bob the mistress hello, no groom walked bandy-legged through the stableyard arch to take her horse… donkey. She let go its bridle and left it by the trough, taking the pistol from its saddle-bag.
The front door swung open when she touched it and then creaked to behind her so that she had to feel her way along the screen passage until her eyes were accustomed to the dark. Heat came out of the kitchen and there was a glow from its fire reflecting on copper pots.
The girls are dead. The household was keeping vigil upstairs in the hall. The lights from the windows were candles round their catafalques. Sobbing with dread and fatigue she threw herself at the stairs and pounded up them.
All the light in the hall came from three candelabra standing on the sills of its windows, the rest was in shadow. The noise of her ascent still hung in the air and covered some other quick and furtive movement. Penitence set her back against the nearest wall and brought up the pistol while she listened. It wouldn’t hold still but wavered up and down.
There was no sound now except the distant battle’s. Straining, her eyes travelled from piece to piece, the black mouth of the fireplace and the portraits of Rupert against the lighter walls. Bless him, he wouldn’t cower in his own house. ‘Come out,’ she called, making herself angry. ‘I know you’re there.’ Her voice echoed; she wished she’d kept quiet.
Something emerged out of the fireplace and walked towards her, brushing itself down and speaking in the creamy, comforting diphthongs of the Somerset accent. ‘You never did then,’ said Prue Ridge.
For all her assumed nonchalance, the girl was shaking and so was Penitence. They clutched at each other’s hands. ‘What’s happened? Where are the girls and Mistress Dorinda?’
Mistress Dorinda, it appeared, had instructed Johannes and Boller to take the two children, Annie, the Reverend Boreman and Mistress Palmer out of the danger zone a week before to stay with the Cartwrights at Crewkerne. Boller had brought back a note to say they’d arrived safely, had gone off the next day to fetch supplies from Taunton – and hadn’t come back. Staff from the village had run to their homes to secrete their stock in the marshes, out of the way of army scavengers.
It took time to learn these things, mainly because Penitence relaxed when she knew the little girls were safe and didn’t catch all that Prue said. Then again, Prue thought Penitence knew more than she did. ‘Miss Dorinda and Mudge gone looking for un.’
Who? Who had they gone looking for? Where? When? Why?
‘This minute gone.’ Prue didn’t know the name of the person searched for: ‘She couldn’t rest still. ’Twas her man seemingly.’
What man? Who had been so important as to lure her friend and this girl’s brother out into the marsh when they heard the noise of gunfire?
The bombardment had increased and the crackle of musket fire sounded as if the marshes were burning. She went to the windows; the flickering in the northern sky was like lightning that didn’t go away. She began to blow out candles, but Prue stopped her: ‘I was to keep they alight so’s if they missed un he’d find the place.’
‘“Her man”… MacGregor? You can’t mean MacGregor?’ Oh God, MacGregor had been in the Netherlands; he couldn’t have been so silly as to join Monmouth’s invasion.
Prue shrugged. But, yes, the man referred to was in the battle. She slapped the side of her head, her face clearing, then started to undo her shoe. It’s been too much for her. But Prue was producing a letter that had been tucked under her foot. ‘She said show ut you when you came.’
It wasn’t from Dorinda to her, it was a letter from MacGregor to Dorinda, the one they’d quarrelled over when Barnzo brought it across the marshes from Taunton. At the top it said: ‘On the island of Texel’.
It was very short, dated 14 May, nearly a month and a half ago. ‘Dear Wife’, it began:
The
lad is determined on it: I would have told all to his unknowing father trusting him to be as inclined as ourselves to wish his son’s retreat from this business of Monmouth but my lord Henry King has left the Netherlands. All the caution the boy will use is to call himself by the name of Hurd. Stay by his mother at the Priory as I shall stay by the lad when we get to England to direct him in need. We are committed to the venture now. Pray the Lord He smiles on the duke’s endeavour so that you and I be reunited in life before we are in heaven. But as He wills. Yr loving husband, Donal MacGregor.
For a second her mind drew back as if full understanding would scald it. The duke was the Duke of Monmouth. Did he mean Henry King was the unknowing father? Because if he did…
‘There, there, my ’andsome. Don’t take on so.’ Prue Ridge was holding her on to a stool with one hand and waving a smouldering taper under her nose with the other.
‘M-my-s-ss-son,’ said Penitence, ‘I have a s-sson.’
‘That’s what ’twas then,’ nodded Prue. ‘Would un be a Benedick? Iss fay, she mentioned a Benedick. Would MacGregor be his pappy?’
Penitence shook her head. Her lips had gone so stiff she had difficulty enunciating. ‘He’s D-Dorinda’s husband. They were very f-ffond of Benedick.’ My son, my son. She began to get up but Prue stopped her. ‘Where be going?’
‘My son. He came with Mon-monmouth. He’s out there.’
‘Iss and a thousand others with un. You’ll never find un.’
‘Neither will Dorinda.’
‘Mebbe not,’ Prue said, truthfully, ‘but she made a… a rendezvous, she called it. Mudge’d told her to tell her man if he ever got lost on the moor to make for the west side of the Poldens and turn south. That’s where they gone, I reckon.’
Penitence’s knuckles pressed against her cheeks. She was trying to comprehend the chaos of a battle but could only see the dear body of her child amongst those throbbing lights and knew there must be a thousand impediments to her son finding his way to the Priory – death, for one. ‘It’s hopeless.’
Prue shook her head: ‘There’s Mudge with her.’
Penitence seized on the girl’s faith because there was no other counter to despair. She built on the flimsy optimism: ‘And Dorinda’s been sensible.’ For if you were lost on the moor you could always see the Poldens – not very high hills by normal standards, but on this flat terrain they stood out like a mountain range – and if you made for the western side of the Poldens and turned south you would be unlucky not to see the light from the Priory hall windows eventually.
She stood up. To keep busy might, just, keep her sane. ‘We’ll get bandages ready,’ she said, ‘and food. And tell me everything.’
She tried to concentrate to keep her mind away from the battle; even so she kept losing the thread. Eventually, however, chronology and events and personalities became linked into some sort of coherence.
Three weeks before, practically the entire population of Athelzoy and the marsh villages had crossed the ten-mile causeway to Taunton to look on this son of Charles II who had come to challenge his Papist uncle and raise the Protestant rebellion standard in the market square.
It had been difficult to glimpse him, Prue said, so great was the crowd that had come in from all over the countryside. Dressed in purple with a silver star on his breast, he was besieged by people trying to kiss his hand and shouting ‘A Monmouth! A Monmouth! The Protestant religion!’ Prue had listened to his ‘Declaration’ read aloud by cryers. There had been some interesting bits, as when the duke accused King James of having burned down London and murdered King Charles. But it was very long and when Prue asked one of the men standing by what it meant, he said: ‘We come to fight Papists,’ which it was a pity the Declaration hadn’t said in the first place.
Then twenty-seven girls from the town school – ‘little Rachel Yeo was there,’ Prue said, proudly – had made a pretty procession and presented the duke with a flag they had sewn themselves.
Men had come from all over the county to enlist. So many, said Prue, that she thought the whole world must be for Monmouth. ‘Five or six thousand foot and a thousand horse, people do say.’
But the next Sunday Sir Ostyn Edwards, JP, had ridden over to tell the Athelzoy congregation that it mustn’t aid the duke with men or food. ‘…and if us did we’d be traitors to our lawful king. None of the gentry were joining him, Magistrate Edwards said, and we mu’n’t neither. But after he’d gone comes Master Hughes to the village cross and says the good old cause of God and religion as had lain dead is risen again. And who cared what the gentry did anyhow.’
Martin Hughes. Benedick and Martin Hughes. How strange that two such dissimilar relatives should be on the same side; the fanatical old man from conviction; but what could have tempted the young one to Monmouth? Romance, of course. And love of a fight. She heard Dudley’s voice saying that Benedick wanted to join an army, any army.
Her son would almost welcome that the cause was lost as long as he fought for it; he would see himself as another Rupert. Oh, Benedick, why didn’t you tell me?
She went to the window and held on to the sill, feeling it vibrate with the percussion of the guns. I’ve been here before. A long time ago she had stood at a window, just as helpless. Then, as now, it was to Dorinda that she’d had to entrust her son’s safety. I thought it was I who’d changed while she stayed the same. But all I did was become rich. I haven’t been paying attention. It was Dorinda who’d paid attention to the people who mattered where she had let them go, too busy – as Dorinda had said – to find out what they were feeling.
MacGregor’s letter to Dorinda had argued a depth to their marriage that Penitence had never guessed at. Never tried to. It was Dorinda who had kept in closer touch with Benedick, through MacGregor’s frequent visits to the radical exiles in Holland, than she had. Dorinda had known it was in her son’s mind to sail with Monmouth, and tried to change it.
A moth singed by one of the candle flames fluttered on to the back of Penitence’s hand and she stared at it. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to do with this moth. It rolled off her hand to the floor and she turned away.
Together they tore up an old sheet for bandages and prepared soup. Prue was full of her own and Mudge’s cleverness in having concealed so much of the harvest from ‘they old wreckers’, as she called army requisitioners. Her complaint was against James’s men, who had occupied the area when the duke had marched off towards Bristol and done little to endear themselves by demanding, then forcibly taking, supplies. The duke’s quartermasters, on the other hand, hadn’t had to requisition food; it had been brought to them in cartloads, flocks, herds – a gift from the common people of Somerset to their Protestant saviour.
She had thought she knew what her village thought and did, but she suspected Prue’s narrative of concealing that many of its men had joined Monmouth, or certainly sympathized with him. I didn’t pay attention.
The candles in the windows were low and they fetched others to replace them. They burned without flickering in the heavy air but there was a tremor to the flame. The noise of bombardment was getting louder and it seemed to Penitence that she could distinguish out of it the racket of drums and trumpets.
‘How far away is it, do you think?’
Prue joined her. ‘Five mile. Six. I reckon ’tis round about Chedzoy.’ For the first time her self-possession gave way. ‘If you get killed, Barnabas Turvey, don’t you come crying to me.’
‘Barnabas?’
‘Chedzoy chapel,’ wailed Prue, ‘and a girt fool. Couldn’t wait for Monmouth to get to Taunton, oh no. Has to leave his tidy little loom in Chedzoy and tramp all the way to Chard to enlist.’
‘Nice lad?’ Penitence put an arm around the girl’s shoulders.
‘I seen worse,’ sobbed Prue. ‘What for do they do ut, Leddyship? Eh? Answer me that.’
‘I don’t know.’ Young men, perhaps Benedick, perhaps Barnabas, had their limbs blown apart. Wheatfields were
trampled and soaked in blood. All the good, growing things mangled because somebody thought their religion better than somebody else’s. I did once. And then she had met Her Ladyship, and come to know Dorinda and the Cock and Pie, and found that, basically, it didn’t matter what you believed as long as you didn’t hurt people and you let the corn grow. Stop it. Stop it.
It was impossible to stay still. She went out and led the donkey round to the farmyard, fed and stabled him. She walked down the driveway to the gates, her eyes checking but not registering the dark rows of young chestnuts which would one day line its avenue.
She stood, keeping her eyes away from the flashes so that her sight could distinguish between the blacks and not-so-blacks of the near moorland, trying to hear local sound beneath the barrage. The moon was coming up; she could see the outline of the Poldens against the sky. Make for them. Come home and be safe.
She couldn’t bear to watch any more. She turned round and went slowly back to the house.
Chapter 3
The night was so long that Penitence kept taking out Rupert’s time-piece and shaking it, believing it had stopped, until it did. She fell asleep and woke up to find she was clutching the time-piece to her chest. Prue was still standing at the window. ‘Ladyship.’
Penitence went to stand beside her. The artillery had stopped, though sounds of musketry had become widespread. And the sky had changed, losing the deepest layer of black. ‘Dawn.’
They went out into the expectant air of a July dawn, crossed the moat and went down to the gates. Firing was much closer now and they could see the occasional tiny stabs of light that went with it. The first scream they thought was an owl’s until it lasted too long. There were others, shouts and splashings, travelling easily over the flatness from differing distances.
Cordite tinged the air which grew lighter until the landscape revealed itself as if dipped in milk; white at the bottom where the mist was thick and then in opaque gradations so that the top branches of willow and alder stuck up like flat scenery artistically arranged between a muslin haze. It was going to be a beautiful day.
The Vizard Mask Page 55