Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  “Yes, your Majesty.” Ann told him the story, skipping over the details of the attempted rape as best she could. The more religious men in the room - Wade, Colonel Venner, and the pale, one-armed Colonel Holmes - looked most concerned at this, frowning and asking her briefly for the names of the dragoon regiment and the punishment meted out. Monmouth and Grey, on the other hand, were alive to the more romantic part of the tale, of how she had been kept prisoner and the details of her escape. She tried to play down Robert’s role in it, but this, apart from the escape itself, interested Monmouth most. Her blush when he asked which of the royal officers she liked the most especially delighted him. The care vanished from his face, and before she could answer he turned to Grey with a gay, knowing smile .

  “I’ve hit the mark there, eh, Ford! I fancy this young Master Pole has been trying to persuade the young lady to enlist with him! Has he not, Mistress Ann?”

  Ann blushed more, conscious of the stern, disapproving eyes of the other men upon them. “No, sir. He was kind to me, that was all. There was nothing improper about it.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything improper; though, indeed, one could do with a little lapse from propriety on our side, sometimes. But I think perhaps this Captain Pole’s kindness evoked ... more than just a sense of gratitude on your part, at least? Is he handsome?”

  “Not especially, no.”

  “Tall? As tall as me, or Ford here?” He indicated Lord Grey.

  “Not so tall. A little shorter than you, perhaps.”

  “Neither handsome nor tall. Then what is it about him? Can he sing well? Has he a pleasant voice?”

  “He speaks well, sir. And ... I haven’t heard him sing.” It was a lie, but she was afraid of the censure of the older men, of the stories that might get back to her father. Monmouth himself she did not mind. His questions were impertinent, but the engaging way in which he put them made them seem part of a conspiracy of fun, as though love were an innocent game for anyone to engage in. Monmouth and his friend Grey seemed quite different from their serious, stern followers; they belonged to the world of Churchill and Feversham, Marianne and Robert, so that it did not seem wrong to speak to them of him. Of the people in the room, she felt that only she, Monmouth and Grey understood that world.

  “You forget, James, that she did escape and come over to us. There must be some greater attraction on our side, to have drawn such a beauty hither.” Lord Grey bowed to her, a small, ironic smile on his face.

  “I hadn’t forgotten, Ford ; it’s just that it seemed too much to hope for. Why did you come back, mademoiselle?”

  “I came back to be with my father, and my betrothed.” Monmouth and Grey exchanged a triumphant smile. “And because I saw our army winning, and it seemed more important to me than anything else, so that I wanted to be part of it, and help it, if I could.”

  Those words were for herself, and for everyone in the room. This light talk of a romance with Robert was making things unreal. It was not a light matter for her, nor was her decision to return. Yet Monmouth seemed slower to respond to her words than the others. He sighed before he spoke, as though he were reluctant to become serious again.

  “So it is important, at the moment. So important that I wish to forget it, sometimes. But tell me, Mistress Ann, there is something else of moment which I must know, which would help my army immensely.” He hesitated, as though reluctant to commit himself, and examined a ring on his finger as though there was some message there. “When you were with these officers, what ... impression did you get of their loyalty?”

  “Their loyalty, sir?”

  “I mean, some of them must have spoken sympathetically of our cause, for they are not all Papists, and many were my friends. Did they … how many of them gave you the impression they might come over to join us?”

  Ann stared at him, surprised, not knowing what to say. Her silence told him what he feared. She saw the colour drain from his face, and the anxious smile with which he had asked the question fade into a hopeless haunted look of despair. Her answer, when it came, was superfluous.

  “None of them, sir.”

  “None? But you say you spoke to Churchill, and Weston, and Lambe - did none of them have a good word for us? Did they perhaps look uneasy? Stay silent when the others laughed, something like that?”

  “No, sir. They all seemed very confident, and spoke most devilishly of us. I asked why they supported a Papist King, and Colonel Lambe laughed at me and said it was the rule of law, and the soldiers should all be hanged, and you ... beheaded.”

  She had said too much. For an awful moment she actually thought he was going to cry. The handsome, boyish face crumpled like a child’s that has been slapped for something it did not do, and he closed his eyes and covered them with his thin, delicate fingertips. Then he got up suddenly and went to the window, staring out with his hands clasped tightly together under his chin, one finger unconsciously feeling his neck. His voice, when he spoke, was high and querulous, addressed to everyone and no-one, utterly changed from the confident, teasing urbanity of a few moments before.

  “Promises, broken promises everywhere! Will there ever be anything else but broken promises? You heard them swear, Ford - you saw the letters! And now this is what it comes to - they laugh at us from safety while we sit in this dreary little town and wait for squire Althorp and his hundred and fifty horse from Wiltshire, who are also promised and also do not come. How can I win a battle against Feversham without more horse? I could not attack yesterday - I cannot even leave these hills without being cut down! And there is no rising in London, which was promised, and Argyll is beaten in Scotland, and my uncle the King in London gives his own promises, that he will pay £5,000 for my head, so that I hardly dare go outside this inn for fear someone will shoot me, while for anyone else who wants to leave ... “

  “James!” Lord Grey’s angry voice shocked him into silence, and he glanced at Ann, remembering she was there. “All is not lost yet, and need not be, if we keep our heads.”

  Monmouth stared back at his friend, and shivered slightly. “That, dear Ford, is what we are most likely to lose.” But the grim joke seemed to revive him, and he looked at Ann more steadily. “I am afraid your news is less good than I had had hoped, Mistress Carter, though I am grateful for it nonetheless. But now I must ask you to leave us. We have important business to discuss.”

  He held out his hand to her. She took it, curtsied, and stepped back. He looked at her oddly, and she wondered whether she ought to have kissed it, but it was too late now. As she went out, Colonel Wade followed her into the corridor. He took her arm before she could leave.

  “Perhaps I could have a word with you too, my dear, before you go back to your father?” He ushered her into a quiet corner, and they sat down at a table, his young, firm hand holding hers gently in his. His calm eyes studied her carefully from under thoughtful, dark eyebrows.

  “You are a brave girl, Ann. Colonel Holmes tells me you helped surgeon Thompson with the wounded. That’s not a pretty sight.”

  “It is a terrible sight. But someone must do it.”

  “Indeed they must. Not all girls could manage it, even so. I think you want our cause to win very much, don’t you, my dear?”

  “It must win. It’s God’s cause. If we lose ...”

  “If we lose it will be God’s judgement on us. But our punishment on earth will be meted out by King James, who is not likely to show any more mercy than his master in Hell. As you see, our King James - Monmouth - is a little afraid of that punishment already.”

  “Yes ... “ Surely this man was not going to turn against Monmouth as well? She could not bear it. “But perhaps he is tired?”

  “A King should never be tired, Ann. Or at least, he should not show it. Certainly he should never show fear, or irresolution, when the lives of eight thousand men depend on him. But as you see, all men are mortal, even kings, and ours has not yet been King for so long.”

  He paused, and looked at her car
efully again. She felt she was being measured, to see how much she could be trusted. But she did not feel demeaned; somehow, the care with which he looked at her made her value herself more.

  “What I want to say to you, Ann, is this. You will do our cause no service if you tell your father or anyone else of some of things our King said to you just now - of his fears, the broken promises, and the reward offered by his uncle. He should not have said them in front of you and you would be serving the Devil if you told anyone what he said, or how he said it. For if an army is to win, Ann, it must believe in what it is fighting for, and in the man who is leading it. So if you were to go out now and tell anyone that the man who is leading this army is worried and afraid, and does not know what to do next, you would be helping to destroy our last chance of victory. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I shan’t speak of it, at all.” Ann looked back at the young Colonel gratefully, drawing strength, as her father had done, from the sense of calm determination that filled everything he did. “But there is one thing I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If Monmouth is like that, and those things that he said are true, why aren’t you afraid?”

  Wade smiled, and she saw in him something of that reckless, cavalier confidence that she had hoped for in Monmouth, and which, allied to the sturdy puritan virtues beneath, might still win them this war as it had won their grandfathers the last.

  “I am afraid all the time, my dear, though it doesn’t do to show it. But then, I’m a lot more afraid of the flames of Hell than anything King James can do.”

  37

  “WE’D BE making ready for our wedding now, if it wasn’t for that bastard.”

  Tom looked moodily down across the fields and rooftops towards the main street of Frome, where the tiny distant figure of Monmouth rode his white horse through a cheering crowd of soldiers and citizens. They saw him wave back, graciously enough, and then he disappeared behind the leaves of a rowan tree which grew on the hillside where they were standing. Ann picked a moon daisy, and twirled its stem idly between her fingers as they strolled on in the warm evening.

  “‘Tis just because he’s not a bastard that we’ve come, isn’t it? Because he’s the King’s legitimate son? Because King Charles married Lucy Water before he married the Queen. So he’s the rightful heir to the throne!”

  “Well, I don’t believe it any more. If so, why did his father deny it? There’s more to being King than wearing fine clothes and waving at folks. Any bastard can do that - ‘tis like being a whore, that’s all!”

  Ann sighed. It was easy enough following Colonel Wade’s advice with her father, or William Clegg, or John Spragg; though they were tired, they had won a victory, as they thought, and their spirits were still high; and now, after a second day of rest in Frome, they were ready and eager to march on again towards London. But there was a dreadful bitterness in Tom which she had not seen before, and which frightened her more than anything Monmouth had said. At least Monmouth could hide his fears in public, but if Tom went on talking like this the despair would spread, and then surely all the men from Colyton would be killed, because they had lost the belief for which they fought.

  She longed to reach Tom, for their sake rather than his own, and give him back that bluff, angry courage he had had at the beginning.

  “He comes from a different world to us, Tom, that’s why he wears fine clothes and such. But he was brave enough in the fight at Philip’s Norton, wasn’t he? John Spragg told me he was right up in the front of everyone on that white horse, where anyone might have shot him.”

  “Oh yes, he was fine enough there at the beginning, like a proper cock on a dunghill, ‘e was. But why didn’t ‘e let us come off the hill, and drive the Papists back to the Devil where they belong?”

  Tom slashed savagely at the grass in the hedgerow behind them with a stick he had found, cutting down some foxgloves and pink campion. Ann picked them up carefully, to add to the little posy she was collecting to take back to the sick men in surgeon Thompson’s care.

  “Perhaps … I heard Colonel Wade say that it was because we had not enough horse, and so ‘twas better tactics, I think he called it, to stand till they attacked us.”

  “Tactics? To stand in a line and be shot at? And all because he gives command of the horse to that bloody coward Grey, who could hardly fight a fox if it didn’t run away from him! Oh Ann, don’t you see? ‘Tis blind deceit to call ourselves God’s army when we’re led by men like these! The Lord will forsake us!” He slashed wildly at the grass again, and then sent the stick spinning away into the woods beside the path, startling a blackbird into indignant flight. “We should never have made him King. It was a sin.”

  Ann stood very still, stroking the posy of flowers gently across her face, feeling the calm of the woods around them.

  “So would you rather we had stayed at home then, and done nothing?”

  As he looked at her, wonderingly, the wide eyes scared and serious, she saw the familiar boy she had grown up with, the boy who had protected her and whom she had helped with his schoolwork when it puzzled him. But the boy was in a man’s body now, and there was something dark and afraid in his eyes; something which she had occasionally glimpsed in Colyton, but which had grown. He was at once the familiar Tom she had always known and also a stranger, alone with his fear. She pitied him for the fear, and yet it frightened her.

  He watched her carefully while he answered, as though she had changed for him as well.

  “It was right to come when we did, Ann, you know that. But ...”

  “But what, Tom?”

  “But if we hadn’t come, we might be married now. We should be settled into that little cottage and ...”

  She shook her head. “How could you have stayed, Tom, when all the others went?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean, if Monmouth hadn’t come. If he’d come later, or somewhere else. Just think, Ann, we had all our life in front of us, and now ... I may be killed tomorrow because that fool leads us the wrong way, and we’ll never know any of it.”

  She bit her lip as the religious answer came pat to her tongue. It was so obvious, she remembered how her father had used it at the time. ‘He who sets up store for himself in this world shall have nothing, but he who sacrifices his desires to God shall have eternal joy in Heaven.’ But it was a measure of the change in Tom that he, with his everlasting doglike following after Israel Fuller, had not realised it for himself. If Israel could not restore his courage through religion, surely she could not.

  She looked up, and saw the passion in his dark fearful eyes, before he looked away in shame. And she saw what she must do. She trembled, like a bride holding her posy at the altar, and reached out one hand for his.

  “We are together now, Tom, at least.”

  His big hand tensed as she touched it. Even so much contact between them was strange. She stroked the hairs on the back of his hand gently and looked up into his face, seeing his heavy lips part in doubt. She thought how strange it was that someone so strong could be paralysed by fear, and wished she could set him free. She threw the posy onto the path and took each of his hands in hers, leaning back and smiling up at him.

  “See, I am here, Tom. Now. Do we have to wait for the future?”

  He scowled, as though he could not quite believe what was happening, but he did not push her away.

  “Kiss me, Tom. We may not have another chance.”

  He looked around suddenly, as though he thought they were being watched, but there was no-one, only the birds beginning their evensong among the leaves. He swallowed, then bent forward suddenly and put his lips to hers.

  It was a wet, clumsy kiss, and his sudden rough embrace drew her to him so tightly that her head was bent back sharply over her shoulders; but she gave herself completely, moulding her lips to his, running her hands through the back of his hair, feeling her body almost lifted from the ground in the strength of his grip.

  At last h
e let her go. She stumbled back, holding on to his arms, and saw the look of shock and wonder on his face. Yet he dared not speak; a half-smile flickered on his lips, and then his arms stiffened and the darkness returned to his eyes.

  “Shall we go to the wood, Tom? Someone might see us here.”

  He was as still as though he were in a dream, so that for a moment she wondered if he had heard her at all. Then the darkness in his eyes changed to hope and the tension in his arm relaxed so that she could lead him off the path and in amongst the trees.

  As they walked together, hand in hand, ducking their way under the low sprays of light hazel leaves, it was like the days when they had been children and played house in the copse by the river at Colyton. It had always been she who had had the ideas and taken the lead, he who had had the strength and the physical courage. Now she meant to give him back his courage. Yet as they walked on, she felt her own courage failing her. It was too cold-blooded, to walk into a wood like this, to couple with a man she did not love, even if she was betrothed to him. It felt like a sin, but why? Surely God would not disapprove?

  She stopped, at a place where a tree had fallen and made a little glade of grass and ferns.

  No, this wouldn’t be a sin against God, she realised. It would be a sin against Robert!

  “No ... “ she began, but Tom spoke too.

  “No-one can see us here,” he said, and then he was kissing her again, and her resistance was crushed in his huge, clumsy embrace. But she found she did not want to resist; the strength which she had awakened excited her so that she responded eagerly to the kiss, her hands pressed flat against the hard muscles of his back. The very feel of his back was a surprise to her, for they had hardly touched each other at all during the past year of their courting; now suddenly all caution was gone, and neither could touch enough. She felt his hands clutch her bottom, and clumsily pull up the back of her skirt. She kissed his neck in delight at the crude violence of it. Her own hands pressed his buttocks and legs hard against her, and her mouth sought his lips for another hot, urgent kiss. Then he groaned, and pushed her down on her back in the grass, pulling her skirt up around her waist.