The fort grows higher, even as the hopes of a new peace settlement mount. She is happy. And yet, every time she reaches the new top of the fortifications, and sinks her feet into the freshly turned earth, she scans the ranks of labourers. Hoping. But Will is never there.
CHAPTER TWELVE
November 1642
‘NED CHALLONER. NED CHALLONER.’
Ned thinks he hears his name. It is a cold dawn he wakes into, and he shivers. Taffy, lying close next to him, snores with extraordinary vigour. Holy Joe is curled into the Welshman’s side, sharing the one cloak the three have left between them. Ned has somehow wriggled free in the night. Must be your stink, Taf, he thinks, without rancour. He remembers – how could he forget? – another cold dawn.
Ned wakes with the soldier’s lament in his belly, in his goose-pimpled flesh and in his heart. Fucking hungry, fucking cold and fucking miserable. Who’d be a soldier? But he listens to his mates’ guttural breathing and it softens his morning rage. Their snoring is a loud and rattling affirmation of life.
‘Ned Challoner, Ned Challoner.’ It comes in a high-pitched singsong. Ned raises himself onto an elbow, and looks across the huddles of sleeping men. A boy, an irritatingly chirpy-looking boy, picks through the bodies. ‘Ned Challoner.’
‘Boy!’ hisses Ned.
‘You him?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Who’s asking?
‘Who is . . . Plague take you, boy. I am Ned Challoner. What do you want?’
‘I’ve a message. From a man says he’s your father.’
‘Aye.’ Ned’s pulse quickens. He sits upright, wiping the sleep from his eyes. ‘And what does he say?’
‘He’s here.’
‘Here!’ Ned, absurdly, looks around his sleeping fellows, as if his father will loom up next to them.
The boy jerks his head.
‘Not here!’ he says with scorn. ‘Come, I’ll take you.’
Ned nudges Taffy, who stirs from his sleep with a growl.
‘Sores on your member, Ned. I was somewhere lovely.’
‘Tight and wet, Taf?’
‘You know me, boy.’
‘Listen. My father’s here. I’m going to see him.’
‘Rich, your old man? Bring us back something, man.’
Ned smiles, and Taffy closes his eyes again, settling back somewhere lovely.
The boy leads Ned through the sleeping soldiers, towards the river and the road that meanders alongside it and heads into the City. Beyond the sleeping soldiers, there are units of men moving through the darkness. The trained bands on the move, coming up from London overnight to join Essex and his men, Ned guesses. Reinforcements, God be praised.
Then he smells something. Bread, by God. Freshly baked, warm. The smell makes him almost giddy with desire. There are other smells too, drifting over the dew-soaked grass. Meat pies, he thinks, and sausages. I’m still asleep. Imagining it. Must be.
A cart trundles past, with a linkboy running alongside it. Ned can just see the outline of baskets, piled high with loaves.
‘What’s all this, boy?’ he says, as they wait to cross the road. He fights the urge to jump face down and mouth open into a breadbasket.
‘The city’s alive with the coming battle. Bakers up all night, goodwives cooking by candlelight. Half the city’s turned up to bring you food, or stand with you. I’ve come to fight.’
Ned looks sideways at the boy, who barely reaches his waist. He says nothing.
‘Now,’ says the boy, and they dodge between two carts. ‘Here somewhere,’ says the boy, peering through the crowds in the gloom. ‘By this tree, he said.’
‘Ned?’ A tremulous voice from the darkness.
‘Father.’
Lord, Lord, thank you, thinks Ned, as his father’s familiar bulk becomes obvious in the half-light.
‘Oh, my boy,’ says Challoner. ‘Your hair! And you so thin.’
Ned has forgotten how he must have changed. The surgeon shaved off all his hair when he came in from the cold at Edgehill, the better to pick the maggots out of his scalp wound. He rubs at the bristles, sheepishly. He knows he is thinner, too. The clothes, such as he has left, hang off him.
The small boy holds out his hand, and his father makes to drop some coins in the outstretched palm.
‘Wait. Father, have you any food, and an extra coin?’
His father points to a basket at his feet. Ned rummages. Bread. Pies. A chicken! Cheese. He steadies himself, quelling the desire to stuff himself. He fights for control. The bread is still warm. He breaks it in half, grabs a pie, and a couple of smaller cooked birds.
‘For my pals,’ he says to his father.
‘Of course.’
He wraps the food in cloth, and hands the parcel to the boy.
‘Take these back to where you found me. The snoring man. Wake him with these and tell him the birds are poxed and his mother pissed in the bread. Do it quietly, or he’ll have to share.’
Pocketing the extra money, and holding the cloth parcel, the boy dodges back across the road.
Ned turns back to his father.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘We had no news of you since Edgehill, and we were afraid you were victims of Prince Rupert’s rout at Brentford. I came to find you.’
‘And here I am.’
‘And here you are.’
Ned realizes that his father is crying. He shivers, from cold touched with embarrassment.
‘Sorry, Ned, I forgot. I brought this. In case.’ Challoner pushes a cloak into his hands, and Ned puts it on. It is heavy, warm cloth, lined with soft lambs wool. He wraps it round himself.
‘How did you know I’d need it?’
‘I was a soldier too, boy, remember. Now, food. And there’s ale here. Or wine, if you’d rather.’
‘Ale,’ says Ned.
They sit on the damp ground and, with the cloak heavy on his shoulders, Ned stops shivering at last.
‘When we heard some of Holles’ men were near the walls and the king’s troops on their heels, Hen and Cook took to the kitchen.’
‘Hen in the kitchen?’
He senses his father’s smile in the gloom.
‘All night. She said she could not sit idly by. You can tell her pies from Cook’s, I fear.’
He puts one fat pie and one shrunken, misshapen thing in Ned’s hands. Ned is curiously moved by the funny little one. But he puts it down, and cracks open the pastry case of Cook’s pie. Still just warm, the steam rises in the cold air. It smells of meat and ale and carrots. It smells of the kitchen at home, and Cook’s apron. Ned takes a moment to savour it, to enjoy the anticipation, the saliva rushing into his mouth. He bites into the meat at last. This is the greatest pleasure of my life, he thinks. Nothing will taste as fine as this again. Nothing.
His mouth full, he says: ‘Tell Hen I ate hers, will you, Father, and it was delicious.’
Richard Challoner chuckles.
‘We got your letter, after Edgehill,’ he says, while Ned eats on. ‘We knew already that you were well. Oliver Chettle came to tell us – he’d heard tales of you wandering into the camp, naked in the morning.’
Ned just nods. He’s tearing the leg off the chicken now. Cook has basted its skin with honey as it turned on the spit. She knows that’s how he likes it best. He licks the heavenly mixture of honey and skin from his fingers, and thinks he might faint with the joy of it. Gluttony is a sin, he thinks, even as he rips a strip of meat from the bird’s breast.
‘He’s doing well, Chettle. Rising fast. Advising the Committee of Safety on legal revenue-raising to fight this war. None of it legal, in my book…’ Challoner tails off. ‘I will not talk politics, Ned. I promise it. Mind, I promised it on the way here, and I’ve broken it already.’
Ned waves a gnawed bone at his father, as he drinks deep from the ale. The warm pie, the cloak and the hoppy hug of the ale are combining to make him almost deliriously happy. The pleasure of small things. I would not have und
erstood that, had I not become a soldier, he thinks. His father had always understood the pleasure of small things, he realizes suddenly, and he looks across at the old man with renewed affection.
‘Hen is well, but anxious,’ says Challoner. ‘If I find you, I’m to give you a hundred kisses. Consider them bestowed.’
Ned, his mouth full to the brim with a ripe cheese, grins, and clasps a hand to his breast.
‘And Sam. Poor lad is eating his heart out to join you. Sends his love through gritted teeth.’
‘Don’t let him,’ says Ned, spitting crumbs.
‘I shall not. Is it bad?’
Ned nods. ‘I was at Brentford yesterday.’
‘Jesus wept. We heard of it, last night. Bad news travels on wings.’
Ned looks up at his father. ‘Did you, in the Low Countries, know the thing they call the panic fear?’
‘I saw it myself, once.’ His father’s eyes look beyond him, seeing past horrors.
They are silent, and Ned lets the food settle. A warmth spreads through his body. He wriggles his toes, glad to be whole and alive. He feels the shame moments later, alongside the gladness. The unbearable burden of surviving your friends.
‘They told us, Father, when we trained. Stand together, and you’ll make it. Break ranks, and you’re done. A row of pikes can take a horse. A lone man with a pike? He is just a dead man running with a big stick.’
‘Aye. But it’s one thing to be told it, and another to stand fast,’ Challoner says. ‘All it takes is one or two.’
Ned nods, remembering.
It was misty, cold. Fear fluttered up, down damp skin. Numb hands gripped slender ash pikes. He stood shoulder to shoulder with his brothers, with more crouching in front and standing close behind. He could feel Holy Joe’s breath hot on his neck, and the nervous yammering of Turnip’s leg as it hit the back of his thigh, repeatedly. Inky Pete behind him on the other side sang a psalm to himself. He half-sang, half-whispered, so quiet Ned couldn’t tell which psalm it was. He smiled to himself, briefly, thinking of Pete’s relentless psalm singing. Like the oaths falling from a Cavalier.
His smile faded as quickly as it appeared. He was boxed in. Chalk to the left of him, Taffy to the right. So close that, glancing sideways, he could see the puckered ridges of Chalk’s pimples. On the other side, Taf’s face was immobile, but his mouth was pursed so tightly his lips had disappeared. The Welshman caught Ned’s glance and winked. They all stood together, physically bunched and mentally entwined by training and loyalty and the strong desire not to be the one who cracked, who let the others down. Ned understood, then, the courage that is borne of fear; the fear of failing, of seeming a coward in the eyes of men you respect. He was still detached enough, rational enough, to enjoy the irony as if at a distance from it: that bravery is just fear worn in public view.
Tight in, together, they waited. Hands clenched and unclenched on pikes. Their breath and the heat from their bodies punched through the cold air in clouds. Like a dragon, bristling with pikes, they shuffled and breathed, waiting, listening.
Ned’s stomach churned. He heard someone retching, and muffled curses. There’s no room to vomit among the pikemen without hitting a brother. The sour smell mingled with the stench of frightened men. I have smelled fear, Ned thought, and it smells of shit and puke. On the wings of the five-deep pike unit, the musket men nervously checked their gear, anxious fingers jumping from barrel to match.
The mist was the worst of it. At Edgehill, Ned had known the battle blindness, as the haze of smoke hanging thickly over the battlefield destroyed all visibility. But battle had already been joined. The enemy was in front, a pike’s push away.
This blind, silent waiting was worse. The pike unit twitched at rustling leaves, shuddered at cracking twigs. The scouts’ shouts, which sent them running to their gear and into formation, the orders of the office, all had abated, leaving this deep and unsettling quiet.
Then came the rumbling of horses’ hooves. From somewhere else came the excited yapping of a dog, like a hound on a scent. Packed in with his brothers, part of them, Ned could feel the chain sag before it broke. The few veterans spoke up. Taf to the side of him growled, ‘Hold fast. Fast, you whoresons.’
A high-pitched gabbling came from behind Ned’s left shoulder: ‘Jesus Lord. Jesus Lord. Jesus Lord. Watch us, Lord.’
‘Shut your mouth.’ This came grumbled from somewhere behind Ned. His helmet was hot and heavy, and the sweat ran down to catch the chill November air, cold on his cheeks.
‘Jesus. Oh my Lord.’
‘He can’t hear you, boy.’
‘Them fucking Cavaliers can, though.’
A laugh, and the unit stood firmer. Ned held his pike so tight he imagined his fingers freezing in that position, claw-like.
Inky Pete’s psalm tumbled out, fast and louder: ‘“For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.”’
‘The ungodly shall perish. They shall perish,’ Ned muttered under his breath, and still the rumbling grew, and Ned could feel the tremor of it beneath his feet. He forced himself to listen to his brain, even as his legs twitched with the urge to run.
Stand, you fool. Cavalry can’t break pike. Cavalry can’t break pike. Can’t break pike.
The end of his pike was jammed against his left shoe, its point angled up at horse’s head height. He tried to imagine the point driving through a nag’s neck, catching it on the soft underside.
He could sense his brothers caught in the same battle between brain and legs. Fear gripped the pikemen, vice-tight.
Stand fast, for Christ’s sake. Fast.
Suddenly the horses broke through the mist ahead of them, nostrils flaring and hooves tearing up the turf. They came with a noise like thunder and the crack of pistol shot. A shrill screaming and, in a blink-space, the formation behind Ned collapsed. He heard Taf’s urgent, fierce swearing and he found himself running, running. The fear was a demon clinging to his soul. He tried to run from it, but who can run from his own soul? The demon obliterated thought, loosened bowels, gripped his stomach and galloped on his racing heart. He let go of his pike and didn’t stop to watch its fall.
Ned ran, tripping over mud, his feet scrabbling for purchase. Men were cut down either side of him, their blood raining on him and running into his eyes with his sweat, so that he could barely see. There was no reasoning left to him, no prayer; just the zigzag flight of a cornered fox. The fierce thrumming of hooves behind him pushed it on, that dumb animal trapped inside Ned’s familiar, crazed body. At last, the ground gave under his feet, and he threw himself into the river. The icy water knocked the air from his lungs, punching his terrified frame into a new state of shock.
He wrestled his heavy coverlet, icy hands pulling at the straps. He turned, sensing something behind him, and looked straight into the eyes of a man on horseback, a man whose sword was drawn and pointing at Ned’s throat. Ned waited, beyond even fear, at the last. Flooded with a calm emptiness. Cowed. The mute creature gazed at the Cavalier through Ned’s wide eyes.
And the man cocked his head and turned away, pulling his sword back from the death stroke.
Ned’s knees buckled, and the icy water reached his waist. Then suddenly, Taf’s face loomed in front of him, shouting at him. Words Ned seemed to take minutes, hours to understand.
‘Can’t swim, Ned. Help me, Ned.’
The current pulled at his legs and he launched himself into the river as Taf grabbed onto him, clawing at his back.
Behind them the horsemen were coming, scything down the fleeing soldiers. The water was already swirling red as Ned and Taffy fell forward into the choppy waves. Taffy was panicking, pulling them both down. The shock of the cold pulled Ned back to the fore, pushing the scared beast back into its corner of his mind.
Ned struggled across the water, fighting the current and his thrashing comrade. As he pulled himself up on the far bank, only then did he master the demon. But with his returning
self came a rushing shame. For what man can lose himself to the beast and not be tainted?
Squatting here next to his father, tummy full and wrapped in the warm cloak, the horror is receding. He plays the scene in his head, but it already feels like a tale told by someone else. He remembers how the urge to live bade him drop his friend in the icy river; how close he came to biting Taffy’s arms as they wrapped round his neck, pulling tighter and tighter.
His father is looking at him with compassion, the face he has always worn for his children’s grazed knees and bruised limbs. Ned fights the urge to cry like a boy.
‘I looked back across the river, and it was just one great mass of bodies. You could walk across their backs. On the other side, there was Prince Rupert. I knew it was him – I could see his dog prancing at his horse’s legs. The mark of Satan, that imp. No dog, but evil, dog-shaped.’
‘A bad day.’ Challoner shakes his head. ‘It’s done him no good, His Majesty. There was a peace delegation with him at Reading. And then reports came back of how Rupert’s men sacked Brentford. Brutal, it was – the way they learned it in the European wars. Englishmen sacking an English town, even while the king talks of peace. So now the king’s seen as too devious to trust with talk of peace, and his men are feared as demons poised to sack London.’
‘Small wonder that most of the city seems to be here, in support of Lord Essex.’ In the grey light, Ned can see the crowds of people; the carts and the militiamen; women and children; boys armed with kitchen knives and old men brandishing staves.
‘We’re better off in a crowd. Standing fast,’ says Ned.
‘Not always, boy. Not always.’
Ned looks down at the grass and picks a fat blade. As a boy he would have pulled it taut between two thumbs and blown on it, imagining it a war trumpet. Not so long ago, in fact.
He finds the words he’s looking for. ‘Father, I haven’t seen Chalk. Not since Brentford.’
His father sucks in his breath.
‘No hope?’
Ned shakes his head.
‘Lord, I shall have to write to his parents. When this battle is done, Ned, should you like to join the cavalry? I’ll settle enough on you now.’
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