Lark (Sally Watson Family Tree Series)

by Sally Watson

  And then there was a furtive sound at the broken wall behind him, and he whirled, one hand ready to pluck out his dagger if it should be necessary.

  A small girl stood surveying him with interest. Tangled hair hung over her grubby little face so that her eyes peered out from behind a black mat, and her rags were colorful but dirty. One finger went to her mouth when James turned, but she didn’t budge from where she stood planted at the hole in the wall.

  James stared back. It seemed to him presently that there was something faintly aggressive about the way she stood, putting him in mind of a puppy standing guard over a bone. He cocked his head on one side and smiled down at her. “Hullo,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  James’s smile was altogether irresistible. It was white and wide, causing deep dents along his lean cheeks, and his eyes crinkled with it. This little girl—like Lark before her—was smitten with instant devotion. She wriggled ecstatically, shuffled her feet, and smiled back. “Glenna,” she told him, and then remembered herself and scowled behind her hair.

  “Well, Glenna,” James said confidingly, “you’re a very nice person, I can tell. I’m James.”

  Glenna, clearly making an effort not to melt, nodded with dignity, and then looked around pointedly. “What will you be doing in here, look?” she asked him hoarsely.

  James looked down at the small dirty face, wondering at the challenge and hostility there. Then light dawned. “Is this your special place to play?” he asked her, and she nodded, unyielding.

  “I see.” He squatted down on his heels and smiled again. “Well, you need not worry about me, Glenna. I shan’t disturb it. Do you mind if I just look around a little?”

  Glenna was clearly in two minds about this. “There’s yourself is a foreigner,” she pointed out doubtfully.

  “But I’m a very nice foreigner,” James told her, and smiled again to prove it. “And I promise, word of honor, that I won’t say one word about this place to even one single townsman.”

  Glenna tilted her matted head and stared shrewdly from behind her fringe. “Is it yourself is wanting it a secret, too?” she demanded.

  Slightly taken aback, James blinked and then nodded. The child went on surveying him for an instant. Then she gave a gap-toothed but engaging grin and held out a dirty hand. “It’s us’s secret place, look you,” she said. “But you can see too.”

  Together they wandered around at random, James staring rather hopelessly at the not very helpful trees and the smooth high wall. Then he became aware that Glenna was carefully avoiding a certain rhododendron bush next to the wall. He tested this by turning his steps that way, and Glenna at once pulled him in another. James stopped and looked at her quizzically.

  “What’s the matter, Glenna?” he asked kindly.

  Glenna avoided his eyes and shuffled one bare ankle against the other. Then she peered up at him again, clearly in the throes of some terribly difficult decision. Finally she heaved a great sigh, smiled, and beckoned. “Us has another secret, look you,” she confided, and dived behind the sprawling rhododendron bush. James followed, his eyes gleaming. There had been a small earthslide here, it seemed, for one of the bottom blocks of the wall had slid downward and out just enough to leave a narrow tunnel. The stones above it had locked against each other, so that there was no danger of the wall collapsing.

  Glenna squatted down and began scooping away some of the mud from the recent rain. Presently she flashed a gamin grin at James, lay down, and wriggled through. “Us goes out this way, look,” she chirped back through the hole to James. “Come on. It’s big enough, indeed.”

  James stooped and peered through. It seemed big enough. “Not just yet, Glenna,” he called softly. “Come back now, so I can talk to you.”

  In a minute her mud-covered face appeared again, and she slithered out. “Why not?” she demanded.

  “Not now,” explained James gravely. “Perhaps another time. Is this a secret tunnel, Glenna? Who is ‘us’?”

  “Me and Owen,” explained Glenna. “And now you. Will you go visit Wales? Indeed, and Wales is fine. Us is Welsh, look see. Will you go soon?”

  “Quite soon,” said James. “That is, if you keep it a secret.” Glenna tossed her tangled mop to indicate that if anyone could keep a secret, she could. James believed her. “We can both keep secrets,” he told her in a very flattering adult-to-adult way, as they headed back to the garden entrance. “Shall we shake hands on it?”

  Glenna glowed, and grasped his hand in her grubby one. And such was her warmth and charm under the dirt that James bestowed a kiss upon her cheek when they parted with vows of eternal friendship.

  Very much cheered, he set about making one or two important purchases, for his plan was now developed enough to make it seem a trifle less dangerous. He arrived back at the inn with some fifty feet of strong rope concealed under his cloak, and a little later Lark received a long note under her door, with most elaborate instructions written on it.

  At about midnight that night, Doll was comfortably asleep, but several other people were not.

  Colonel Jeremiah Talbot, just arrived back in Shrewsbury, was asking God with some severity why He had chosen to inflict a crazed niece on His servant just at this moment, and how on earth Elizabeth had got here at all.

  Will-of-God, who had been unable to answer this question and had received a strong tongue-lashing in consequence, was awake too, smarting in spirit, and disliking Elizabeth more than ever for being the cause of it all. He had definitely decided that he did not wish to marry her, even if she recovered her wits.

  Captain Dove was wondering when the expected armies were going to arrive, and if they were really going to come past Shrewsbury after all. It was also occurring to him that perhaps he should have asked that young Horatio Thornywhatsis more about himself and why he was not in the Parliament army.

  Lark, half asleep with one ear pressed firmly against the door, heard James scratch it lightly on his way up to the attic, and at once became wide awake. She tiptoed shoelessly to the casement and waited for a rope to come slithering down from the window above. When it did, she tied her bag (containing shoes, caps, collars, stockings, and cloak stuffed on top) firmly to the end. Then she pushed and squeezed the bulge of it through the narrowness of the space between window and frame, and watched it moving slowly upward, bouncing a little against the side of the inn.

  Presently the rope came back down, this time accompanied by another one, with knots in it a foot or so apart. Lark went to work very efficiently. It did not occur to her to be nervous about anything except waking Doll, and she certainly did not dream that James, above, was shaking like a leaf and beginning to want to forget the whole thing. She would surely fall and be battered to bits on the cobblestones below! How could he have considered letting her . . .

  James leaned out to call to her, and found it was too late. Lark had tied the end of one rope around her waist, had the end of the knotted one firmly in her hands, and was in the process of squeezing her small self through the ridiculously narrow gap.

  James groaned, prayed, and took himself in hand. He began pulling gently but firmly upwards on the rope tied around Lark, keeping it just taut. If she should lose her grip on the other, her life would depend on this one. By the time Lark had scrambled in at the attic window, grinning and in high spirits, James had beads of perspiration along his upper lip, and had to sit down for a moment. Once he got Lark out of this particular mess, he was going to see to it personally that she should never again be exposed to any danger as long as she lived!

  He would have been extremely aggravated had he known that Lark had just decided to share all danger and adventure with him for the rest of their lives.

  But there was no time for contemplation. They still had to get out of the inn, not to mention the town. Now James discovered what it was like to escape in silence from a house in which nearly every board seemed to creak. (Lark, by now, had begun to feel that this was a way of life.) They inched their
way, holding their breath as they passed near Doll’s room.

  And then, after eternities and a dozen scares, they were unbolting the door and slipping out into the street, which seemed quite bright after the dark of the inn.

  “Whew!” breathed James, wishing he could have bolted the door again from inside. Since he couldn’t, he wasted no time on it, but led off at an extremely brisk pace toward the section of town with the deserted garden.

  Twice they had to flatten themselves in doorways as Roundhead soldiers passed. Once James thought he was lost, and had to stop and think, and then go back a way. But at last he found the entrance to the garden, and then the tunnel under the wall.

  Lark eyed the size of the hole thoughtfully. “I’ll go first,” she suggested. “And then you come with your hands in front of you, so if you get stuck, I can pull.”

  James recognized the sense of this. They knelt down and pushed their cloaks through the gap, and then their bundles, and then Lark. She burrowed under with very little trouble, and James followed with great difficulty. Lark had to brace her feet against the wall and pull on his arms, while James scrabbled with his feet and wondered how it would feel to drown in mud. But finally he scraped through, leaving a bit of shirt and skin behind him.

  They sat up and looked at each other in the faint light of the half moon. They were both slimy with mud from head to toe—but they were out of Shrewsbury. They hugged each other, laughing with relief. Then they remembered that the Roundhead garrison was extremely likely to have sentries around the walls on these tense nights, and that it would be a great pity to be caught again after all this.

  They stood up, picked up their things, and began the business of leaving Shrewsbury as far behind as possible before dawn.

  14

  The Skirmish

  When the sky paled, James found a hiding place: a small clearing on a wooded hill, where the ground had been dried by the sun. They wrapped their cloaks around them, using bag and pack for pillows, and lay down for some sleep.

  Lark dozed off immediately, happy and secure. But James did not. Now that he had got past the immediate problem of rescuing Lark, the other problem of his duty rose again, just as unanswerable as ever.

  He lay staring up at the gray sky, now streaked with lemon and apricot. There really did not seem to be any right action. The ground beneath him got harder and lumpier by the minute as he went around and around the old track. He was a Royalist, and so his loyalty should be to King Charles, who ought to be king of both England and Scotland. But the Scots were invading England! And they were Covenanters, more Puritan even than Cromwell, so that if Charles were not at their head, James would feel it his duty to fight against them. But Charles was at their head.

  James groaned, turned over on his stomach, buried his face in the crook of his arm, and tried another tack. What could he do at this point? He couldn’t abandon Lark even if he were sure he ought to be fighting with the king. And he couldn’t leave her with anyone because he didn’t have any other friends in the area—even if she would stay. And he couldn’t get her to his parents in Devon and hope to be back again in time to help, even if he knew what to do. He couldn’t even just ignore the whole thing and devote himself to Lark, because he would know in his heart that he was avoiding the issue, and this would cause him to dislike himself. Like Lark, James couldn’t bear to be a coward.

  He groaned again, unable to think of any other possibilities. Perhaps he ought to try to sleep. After all, he had been awake much of the previous night, too. But by now the birds were making a perfectly outrageous racket, shouting and twittering and yelping at the dawn as if they had never seen one before. James muttered uncomplimentary things into his bent arm, sighed, resigned himself to staying awake, and immediately fell asleep.

  When Lark awoke, the sun was halfway up the sky and James was still sleeping. She decided not to wake him, because he was probably tired after being so heroic and clever, so she lay contentedly still. A slab of bright sunlight crept upward from her feet, and birds sang from the woods which grew down one side of the hill and in the valley below, crowding so close together at the bottom that she could not even glimpse the ground between. Lark hoped there might be a stream down there. She and James were both covered comically with dried mud, and it was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

  James awoke when the slab of sunlight reached his eyes, and looked up to see Lark’s face, looking rosy and contented and infinitely trustful. His dilemma—not in the least solved by having been slept on, pounced on him again, and he was seized with a kind of paralysis and guilt. He just grunted disagreeably in answer to Lark’s chirp of greeting, sat up, rested his arms and chin on top of his knees, and began brooding darkly.

  Lark sat up too, and looked at James anxiously. Clearly he was not himself, but she was not sure whether his pain was of the physical or the mental variety. And somehow his attitude discouraged her from asking. She thought it over for a minute. No doubt husbands had such moods now and then—even though she had never seen James in one before—and it was the duty of a wife to help, and perhaps this would be good practice. If she were very sweet and cheerful . . .

  “Isn’t it a lovely day, James?” she remarked brightly. “I love the smell of warm grass and trees, don’t you? And I think you were so clever to get us away so perfectly! I wonder what Doll and Will-of-God are doing now?”

  James didn’t appear to hear her, and Lark began to wonder if she had done something to offend him. “Uh—Is it a secret what we’re going to do next?” she asked meekly.

  James made a muffled sound which might indicate either deep distress or anger. Lark began to progress from worry to indignation. If she had done anything as horrible as all that, the least he could do was tell her what it was. And if there were something terrible to worry about, why shouldn’t he share it? Didn’t he trust her any more? “I’m hungry!” she announced a trifle crossly.

  James pulled himself out of his paralysis for a moment, dug into his pack, and produced some bread and cheese. It was not of the very best quality, as he had begun to wonder how long his money would last. Lark noticed this and guessed at the reason. Perhaps this was his trouble?

  “I’ve still got my money,” she told him, feeling into the bottom of her bag for it. “It’s two shillings, fivepence, half penny. Here, take it. I ought to pay my share, you know.”

  James looked at her, but seemed not to have his mind entirely on the subject. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Thank you, Lark. I think you should carry it, though. We shouldn’t have all our money in one place. Have you got a pocket or anything?” And without waiting for her answer, he lapsed again into gloom.

  Lark, by now definitely piqued, silently fastened the little purse to her waist just under the brown skirt. She made a point of showing an immodest amount of petticoat, hoping at least to shock James into some sort of reaction; but he didn’t even seem to see her. She lapsed into gloom herself. A lark spiraled skyward from the meadow on the other side of the hill, singing joyously, but she was in no mood to sing back to it. She tried to pick some of the mud off her dress, but the outer layer had already cracked off during the night, and the rest had soaked right into the material, and hardened.

  Presently she stood up. “You can stay here all day if you like,” she announced stiffly, “but I’m going down the hill and see if I can find a stream to wash in. Perhaps you’ll be human again when I get back.” And she started down the hill.

  James roused himself instantly at this. He turned his head, fixed her with a masterful stare, and pointed back at the tree. “You stay right there!” he commanded quietly.

  Lark looked at him with some astonishment. “Yes, James,” she said, and obeyed him with a new and very great respect in her heart. It was one thing for her to decide not to manage him any more, and quite another for him to put his own foot down so firmly. She loved him, she decided, more than ever.

  James, feeling slightly foolish over it all, looked at her ruefully and tried to
decide whether to try to explain things, but he never had a chance to make up his mind. For at that moment the sound of a small but energetic battle erupted near the foot of the hill.

  James completely forgot his moral dilemma. Through the trees he could see clearly enough that a small number of Royalists were fighting against about twice as many Roundhead soldiers, and nothing else mattered for the moment. “You stay right there!” he barked at Lark, and rushed down the hill and into battle—precisely as she had feared he would.

  She promptly disobeyed him. Did he think for one moment that she would just sit there while he got killed? Not likely! Although her heart was positively flapping with fright, she crept cautiously down the hill in James’s footsteps, promising herself only that she would stay a safe distance away because it would upset James and perhaps distract him if he were to see her. But her idea of a safe distance was hardly further than the nearest tree, where she armed herself with a stout stick and a stone the size of her fist, and lurked anxiously. If James should need help, she would do what she could—though she was not at all sure how much help she could be.

  James was already in the fight, his eyes glittering. Here, at least, was a clear-cut issue. The Roundheads were attacking English Royalists, not Scots, and they badly outnumbered them. Right in front of James a Royalist was trying to cope with two Roundheads at once. James attacked the nearest with fierce joy, his dagger now in his left hand, and his right curled lovingly around the sword which he had already acquired from a now unconscious Roundhead before Lark got there.

  It was his first real fight, but he had no sense of fear. He was seized with the superhuman skill and strength that often comes to people who are fighting for what they believe to be a righteous cause. He disarmed the second soldier in seconds, and allowed his blade to continue in a thrust straight for the heart. And then, in the last split second, he deflected his blade and ran the man through the shoulder instead. He hadn’t intended to. But it seemed that even stronger than rage was his instinct not to kill if disabling would do as well. James, considerably astonished at himself, paused for an instant to make sure that the man would not hold a sword for some time to come. Then, with a shrug, he looked for a new Roundhead to conquer.