Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  “You know I can ride, Simon, better than either of the other two. We owe it to father to bring him all the help we can. Don’t you think I should go in your stead?”

  Simon winced at the reference to his leg. Of all times, this was the moment when he should prove his manhood and take control in his father’s absence. But his elder sister had to taunt him with the contrast between her own strength and his physical weakness, as she had done all his life. He clenched his fists in frustration.

  “‘Tis not a fit job for a maid.”

  “Not even when the maid might bring two more horses to the army? It’s my duty, Simon. How do you think I should feel, if I were to stay at home, and hear that Tom or father had been killed, when a few more horses in the army might have saved them? How should you feel?”

  “The army is in the hands of the Lord, Ann, not yours. He’ll give the victory to those who deserve it, whether they have your horses or no.”

  “But the Lord won’t help us if we do nothing!” Ann stopped, trying to choke back the rage that her brother’s prim religious arguments always provoked in her. She needed to to persuade him this time, not antagonise him. “Anyway, it would be easier for me. No-one would suspect a woman.”

  “They would if you had two horses. How would you go to explain that?” asked her mother.

  “I’d say I was taking them back to a friend. I’d say we’d had them in our field to spare their grass and now I was taking them back.”

  “It’d be better if they were loaded up like pack-beasts. Put some old cloth on and say you were delivering somewhere. At least they might believe that,” said Simon scornfully.

  “Perhaps. Could you find some cloth for us?”

  “You’re not going, Ann, and that’s an end to it. So there’s no sense talking further,” said her mother firmly. “Now sit quiet and help me with this wool. Oliver, put that carder down! You’ll cut yourself!”

  “But ... “ Ann looked at her mother and saw the ugly pain on her broad face, and knew that further talk would only set her crying again, to no purpose. So for a while she sat quietly and helped her mother and Rachel with the carding, while Simon watched and Sarah and little Oliver played with a spinning wheel in the corner. Then the two young ones grew tired and Ann took them up to bed. But even as she helped them undress, and sang little Oliver’s favourite, comforting lullabies, she could not get the thought of the conversation out of her mind.

  Paul Abrahams’ return to the village, with his story of the success at the Axe bridge, the projected attack on Bridport, and the army’s need for horses, had been the most important event of the past two days. It had brought hope after the arrival of the Devon militia on Saturday, and young William Salter’s stern sermon on the duties of loyalty and the dangers of rebellion, delivered in church earlier that Sunday morning. The sullen, unresponsive congregation had been composed almost entirely of women, children, and old men. The judgement of God would be revealed, they knew, not by the foolish words of the vicar, but by the fortunes of their menfolk in the Duke’s army. Their only real, fervent prayers were made, as they prayed together later in the privacy of their own homes, for their absent husbands, sons, and fathers.

  Ann prayed as much as any, for her almost whole heart longed for the men of the village to win, for her father and Tom to come back safe. She knew that the part of her which wanted this was the good, the holy part, the Ann that the Lord wanted her to be, that He wanted to save. She knew it when she prayed, but somehow, every hour that she busied herself around the house, or walked the half-empty, waiting streets, her memory of Tom and her father began to fade. The voice of the tempter murmured in her mind, and the rebellion began to seem a dream, a distant game of chance that could be decided either way without hurt, if only she stayed quietly at home.

  So she began to remember Robert. Once, in the street, she had heard a voice so like his she had been afraid to move, and stopped quite still where she stood, trembling, certain that if she turned she would see Robert in his blue military coat, with that strange puzzled smile on his thin, freckled face, those thin, gentle hands that had once held hers, and touched her cheek ... but when at last she did turn it was only a short, fat, mustachioed militia officer, swaggering officiously along; and she had blushed and hurried home with a dull breathless ache in her chest, close to the tears that she felt would betray everything.

  But though at home she shook her head vigorously to clear it, and remembered Simon’s leg, and Robert’s cold, dismissive words in the moonlight, she knew that the longer she waited here, isolated from all news and action in this tense, empty, waiting town, the more often such thoughts would recur. She helped her mother about the house, but only in a dream, numbly, without speaking. Martha Goodchild thought she was grieving for Tom, and tried to interest her in the cottage in Rosemary Lane; but Ann’s reaction had been so sudden and violent that Martha had hurried home. She told her husband sadly that poor Ann was so distracted with worry about their son’s fate, that she could not bear to think about the cottage until Tom was safely returned.

  Into this long night of worry Paul Abrahams had come like the first thrush of morning, to tell of the army’s need for horses, for Ann’s own horse, and for riders who could deliver them. Riders who were trustworthy, but who could also allay suspicion, as Paul himself had done, by appearing clearly unsuitable for military service. Nicolas Thompson, the old surgeon, had volunteered, telling Paul that he had wished, on Thursday night, that he had gone with the others at the beginning, but that now he thanked the Lord he had not, for he could do the cause a greater service by at once bringing them horses, and his own skills to mend their wounds.

  So Ann had seen the chance of action for herself - action which would help her to forget the tempting dreams that obsessed her in idleness, and might really bring about the result wanted by the Lord; so she argued with herself. (And if she should see Robert in the process, surely it would only confirm her in her righteous scorn?)

  But she had to use different arguments with her mother and Simon, and these - that she could ride well, knew the roads, and could never be taken for a soldier - had so far failed. She was determined to go, but she knew she could never saddle one horse and lead it and another out of the town without one of them knowing, and there could be no worse start to such a secret trip than her mother running through the streets after her, tugging at the reins and shouting that she should come back. So she sat quiet and waited, plotting what else she could say.

  She thought the argument would begin again in the evening, after Sarah and little Oliver had gone to bed. Ann and Rachel were sitting at the great table carding wool, while Mary span by the window in the last of the evening light, and Simon read his Bible in his father’s chair. Now they had fallen silent, and the click of the carders and steady hum of the spinning wheel made a peaceful music with the evening chorus of birds outside, as they had on a thousand such evenings before, when there had been no thought of war.

  Ann glanced covertly at Simon, where he sat with his fingers drumming softly on the arm of the chair, and wondered what thoughts were going on behind the bitter, gloomy face, and sometimes closed eyes. She knew Simon would have taken the horses himself if he could, whatever their mother said; the problem for him now, she thought sharply, was whether it was more of a sin to keep the horses at home or to let his sister take them.

  She looked down, weighing her words carefully, and was about to begin again when Simon’s head turned to listen to a loud, drunken song coming down the street outside, and the unsteady, clumsy tramp of heavy boots on cobbles.

  “We’ll hang the traitors on a tree

  Where they can swing for all to see

  With a hey! and a ho! and a hey nonny no!

  And damn the Duke of Monmouth!”

  The street door slammed back on its hinges, and the two militia troopers staggered in, their arms around each others’ shoulders, bellowing out their song as loud as they could. They stared about themselves, ins
olently, and then lurched to the table. Mary, Simon, and the two girls looked up at them in shock.

  “Hello, traitors!” said one, picking up some carded wool. “What be doing? Cardin’ wool to make a coat for your daddy? Better make a rope, dears — that’s all ‘e’ll be needing after tomorrow!” The two of them burst into uproarious laughter, and one of them sat down and put his arm around Rachel, giving her a beery kiss on the cheek as she shrank away from him.

  “Don’t! Go away!”

  “Leave the girl alone!” Mary Carter glared at him, raising one of her carders to strike. The man cringed in mock terror.

  “Oh, don’t hit us, dear, we’m just playing! But ‘tis a beautiful brace o’ maids you got yer, just like my own going to be. Ripe for pluckin’!” He leered at Rachel again, making her blush.

  “Then if you’ve got daughters of your own you’ll know not to touch mine!” said Mary furiously. “Just because you’re billeted in this house it doesn’t mean you have any right to behave differently from at home!”

  “Oh yes it do, missus,” said the other, a short, stocky man with a paunch and a bent nose. “You see, we bain’t traitors, and you be. That do make all the difference. Your husband’s going to hang, see, if we don’t kill him first, when we goes to fight tomorrow. So you’m different.”

  He collapsed suddenly in the second armchair, and beamed drunkenly at Simon. “How be doing, ol’ Peg-leg? Why don’t ‘ee pray the Lord to make it better, so that ‘ee could go and join your daddy and t’other traitors, eh? He could mend it for ‘ee, if ‘ee prayed hard enough!”

  “‘Tis not for you to blaspheme!” burst out Simon furiously. “The Lord will have his revenge on you soon enough!”

  “‘E can’t pray, Daniel, now can ‘e? How can ‘e pray when ‘e can’t get down on ‘is knees?” The two men laughed again, and the second man got up from the table. “Come on now, Peg-leg Peter, get out of that chair. We’m masters of this house now and I needs ‘un.” He shook the edge of the chair roughly.

  “Leave him alone! You’ll hurt his leg!” Ann got up angrily.

  “I’ll break his bloody leg for him, mistress, if he don’t get up,” said the man coolly. “Now get on out of it. boy.”

  “Wait, let me help him. Rachel, fetch the crutches.” Ann moved the stool gently from under her brother’s leg, and caught him under one arm, while her mother lifted by the other. They got him slowly to his feet, and he grabbed the crutches awkwardly.

  “Good.” The man slumped heavily into the chair. “Now fetch me my baccy, boy, and my pipes. They’m over there in that bag by the door.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Rachel.

  “No! You stay where you are. I wants holy Joe here to get it for me, to see if the Lord gives him strength to take up his leg and hop.”

  The militiamen laughed again, and Simon stared at them without moving. “Thou shalt not take the name of thy God in vain,” he muttered.

  “Thou shalt not rebel against thy King, neither! Go on, boy, quick, or I’ll have ‘ee on the floor.” The man kicked at the foot of one of the crutches, and it slid to one side so that Simon would have fallen if his mother had not caught him.

  “Go on, Simon. You’ll only make it worse. I’ll be near you if you fall,” she said. Simon hesitated, then turned and hobbled clumsily to the door, wincing as he banged his leg on a bench. He slung the bag over his neck to bring it back. The two men laughed as they watched him.

  “That’s better, boy. Now get ‘ee upstairs to bed. Us don’t want no more kids nor Bible-preaching yer. And tell your sisters to give us a kiss before they goes, too.”

  “No! Ann, Rachel, don’t do it!” Mary Carter sounded scandalised.

  “I didn’t ask ‘ee, missus,” explained the second man patiently. “Us don’t want our faces rubbed off against yourn, do us? No more than you want young Jonathan here to fall down again, do ‘ee?” He aimed another kick at Simon’s crutch.

  The kisses, and the gropes that went with them, were much as could be expected. Afterwards, when the family had helped Simon laboriously upstairs like a wounded bird, leaving the two men smoking and laughing triumphantly in the kitchen, he turned to his mother, his voice low and bitter.

  “You see how safe we are at home too, mother, with such devils as these here! Would it be any worse for Ann to take the horses and risk doing some good, than to stay here and be treated thus? I know I should go, if I could!”

  Mary Carter shook her head uncertainly. “I don’t know what to think, Simon. To be treated so in my own house! Why did your father have to leave us?”

  “He went to serve the Lord, mother. ‘Twas the only thing he could do.” Simon’s whisper was so loud, they all listened for a minute, afraid they had been overheard, but the rumble of talk and laughter downstairs did not stop.

  “They say they’re going tomorrow, mother, perhaps they won’t be back for a day or so. I can slip out with Paul as soon as they’ve gone, and stay with Aunt Jane when I get to Lyme. I’ll be just as safe there as here.”

  “And you’d promise to stay with your Aunt Jane when you got there?”

  “Yes, mother. The militia won’t come there.”

  Mary Carter shook her head angrily. “I don’t know, my dear, I really don’t. Let me think it over some more. Maybe ‘twill seem different in the morning.”

  But as her mother wearily got ready for bed, in the room she had to share with her daughters now, Ann knew what she would decide, and felt an exultant, desperate hope flutter in her heart as she waited for the morning.

  16

  SO IT was that, early the next morning, as the militia were marching noisily out of the market place towards Colyford and the main road for Lyme, three riders were to be seen making their way quietly out of Colyton in a different direction. Each was riding one horse and leading another beside on a long rein. The road to Lyme was being used by the militia, and it would have been foolish to be seen near Shute, so they rode north-east at first, into the maze of tracks and sunken lanes that wander here and there among the rolling hills and woodlands, and could have led them to Honiton or Ottery, had they wanted. But Ann and young Paul knew these lanes well from their visits to Israel Fuller’s secret meeting places, and gradually they edged their way north, until they crossed the Honiton-Bridport road, and then west, working their round to Lyme in a wide circle that would take them north of Axminster.

  They rode silently in single file for the most part, each concentrating on the horses. Paul rode first, a slight, shockheaded figure, dwarfed by the great chestnut hunter of Roger Satchell’s on which he perched, and leading a bay that was little smaller. Then came Ann, sitting side-saddle on her chestnut pony, and leading the pack-horse that her father sometimes rode; and finally the gawky, angular figure of the surgeon, like a bony scarecrow astride his black stallion, softly cursing the phlegmatic grey pony beside him every time it stretched its stubborn head for some juicy grass in the hedgerow.

  All morning they saw no-one, except a group of haymakers in a field, and a girl driving a few cows, and midday found them creeping awkwardly down a steep slope towards the river Yarty, which they were to cross at Beckford Bridge. The horses were slipping and checking awkwardly on the stones and mud in the lanes, and it was all they could do to control them, so that at first they did not watch the bridge as carefully as they might have done. Suddenly Ann, who was having to drag her father’s horse to make it move at all, felt her leg graze the flank of the bay Paul was leading in front.

  “Stop! There be soldiers!” he hissed in a loud whisper. “Tell surgeon!”

  From where she was Ann could not see over the hedge, but when the surgeon’s horses had stopped she could hear the sound of voices, barely fifty yards away. She eased her pony forward so that she could see through the gate. A group of about twenty footsoldiers and a horseman in a blue coat had come down the road from the north. They had stopped for a moment at the bridge, but as she watched they crossed it, and followed the horseman sout
h along the other side of the river towards Axminster.

  “Militia!” muttered young Paul. “And that be the way we were going too. What’s to do now?”

  “Let them get ahead, I suppose,” said Ann. “Don’t you think so, Mr Thompson?”

  “Indeed, my dear. The Lord has saved us this once, at least, it would seem. If we had arrived a few minutes earlier we should have had some explaining to do, I fancy. As it is, perhaps it is a sign that we should broach the contents of these saddlebags.” He eased his thin, bony figure off his horse with a croak of relief.

  “Don’t you fear there may be more coming, Master Nicolas?” asked Ann anxiously as the old surgeon settled himself in a sunny spot in the gateway. “They could come down this lane after us.”

  “So long as they do not force us to ride back up it, I do not greatly care. Come and join me, young lady, in some of my missus’s excellent bread and cheese which she has provided against just such a moment as this.”

  Ann smiled, and slid gratefully out of her saddle. All her life, the bony old surgeon had given her confidence. He made the most of the good in any situation, and dealt with the bad calmly, quickly, as though it did not matter and would soon be gone. Now, as usual, food was more important to him than worry.

  So they tethered the horses and rested. And certainly the rest was welcome, for it had been a hard morning riding one horse and leading another through the narrow lanes, past endless banks of lush grass which the animals longed to graze. Now at least they had their wish.

  “Where do you think they was headed, Master Nicolas?” asked young Paul, his words finding their way obscurely past the great mouthful of bread he was chewing.

  “Looks like Axminster, don’t it? ‘Twould be as good a place as any for them to gather, if they was going to strike at Lyme.” The surgeon swigged a long draught of cider from his flask, sighed deeply, and belched so that the Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his scrawny throat. “That is, if the good Duke don’t come out and have a crack at ‘em first.” He leant his head back against a tree and closed his eyes.