Adam's horse laid back its ears, the whites of its eyes rolling as it tossed its head. He leaned forward and laid a hand on the high arched neck, whispering into its ear.
Beside him the young ensign, whose name he didn't even know, tightened his grip on the standard and took a great shuddering breath. From their left came a wild cry as the Royalist horse, led by Prince Rupert himself, leapt forward at the gallop. With whoops and shrieks they descended on the parliamentary cavalry with the impact of a blacksmith’s hammer.
‘Do 'ee see what I sees, sir?’ The sergeant had come up beside him.
Adam nodded, his face grim. Part of the parliamentary line had turned on itself. There was betrayal in the ranks. The entire right flank of the line broke and fled, taking the closest infantry regiments with it.
‘God 'ave mercy on us,’ Adam heard the old veteran mutter as the royalist cavalry on the other flank careened down the slope of Edgehill in emulation of Rupert. Adam's troop of horse from the Warwick garrison had been placed under the command of Sir William Balfour, an experienced and wily old soldier. As Wilmot's charge began, Balfour gave the order to move his troops at a quick trot out of the range of the hallooing hordes.
Behind the cover of hedges, Balfour gave the order for his troops to move up the hill toward the king’s guns that belched fire and death on to the field below.
‘What's happening, sir?’ The ensign leaned forward, his face was now flushed with excitement.
‘Balfour intends to silence the guns.’ Adam replied, seeing the sense behind the old soldier's orders.
‘Us? Take the guns?’ Beneath the brim of his slightly too large helmet, the boy blanched and fell back from Adam to take his place in the line.
On the slope of the hill, still concealed by the hedges, Balfour drew his troops up to charge. At the point when the king's infantry had begun their advance under cover of the artillery, he gave the order to charge.
The bugles’ blasts reverberated through the cold, clear air. Adam dug his heels into the sides of his horse, which responded by throwing back its back its head and leaping forward. The slender lines behind him responded and as a body they took the hedges and galloped toward the line of the king's guns and the centre of the king's infantry.
Rapidly discharging his pistols into a couple of unfortunate gunners, Adam drew his sword, his mind now totally centred on the task at hand. Overwhelmed by the unexpected press of man and horse, the king's guns fell silent and for the first time the parliamentary infantry moved forward to face a wavering, but stubborn, line of pikes and muskets.
It may have been four years since Adam had last seen battle, but the acrid smoke, the shrieks of the injured and dying, the rattle of muskets and the clash of steel on steel came back as if it were only yesterday. The politics that had brought these thousands of men to this quiet corner of Warwickshire ceased to matter. The struggle for mere survival overcame all normal senses.
‘We’ve got the better of ‘em,’ the sergeant yelled above the noise. ‘Hold yer ground, lads.’
‘Wait,’ someone cried. ‘That’s enemy horse heading our way.’
‘Fall back.’ The clarion call sounded across the field.
Adam lifted his head and cursed his commanders. They were so close to victory but the gloom of the autumn evening was drawing in and the royalist horse had begun to return to the field, blown and exhausted and hardly a threat.
There would be no victor, nor vanquished this day.
He looked around for the standard. The boy had fought well and maintained his grip on the rallying point. Now he saw him barely twenty yards away, engaged in a fierce dispute for possession of the colours. Adam turned his weary horse toward the boy’s aid but it was too late. The sharp report from a pistol sent the young ensign jerking backward. He slid slowly from the saddle, the colours toppling sideways into the possession of a triumphant royalist.
The loss of the colours should have mattered but it didn’t. Around Adam the fighting was ebbing as the soldiers of both sides fell back to their original positions. Adam slid from his saddle and knelt beside the boy, taking him in his arms.
Small bubbles of blood flecked the boy’s lips. ‘So cold, sir.’
Adam knew that the boy did not refer to the weather. ‘It’ll be a bitter night.’
‘Did we win?’
‘Yes.’ Adam lied. ‘You fought well.’
‘Will you tell Jenny that?’
‘Aye. I'll tell Jenny.’
The boy closed his eyes. ‘So tired.’
‘Sleep then.’ Adam said softly and held the slight body until he sensed that life had fled. ‘God forgive me, lad,’ he whispered. ‘I don't even know your name.’
With difficulty, he hitched the boy's body up over his saddle and leading both horses, made his way down the hill towards their original position to count the cost of the day and make plans for the following one.
As the first streaks of light illuminated the cold, grey, colourless morning, the wounded came. The echo of horses’ hooves and the creak of wagon wheels sent Perdita hurrying downstairs. As she stepped outside, her breath frosted in the cold air and she shivered, thinking of the battle that had been fought the previous day and the wounded men who lay on the hard, frosted ground.
In the forecourt, a troop of horse, or what was left of a troop of horse, sat their weary mounts as their commander, a tall man on a bay horse, leaned down talking to Ludovic. Even in the grey light she could see from his build that it was not Simon and she slowed her steps.
As she approached him, the man raised his head, his fingers going to the brim of his heavy, iron helmet. She stopped, her breath catching. Adam Coulter.
She wanted to run to him, satisfy herself that he wasn’t hurt, but even in the circumstances any undue haste could be construed as unseemly. Instead she raised her chin and walked purposefully across to him.
‘Adam Coulter? What brings you here?
The answer was obvious and his red-rimmed eyes narrowed. ‘I’ve wounded with me and I can take them no further.’
Perdita moved her gaze to the tired, dispirited faces behind him. Dreading what she might see, she turned to the wagons, recoiling momentarily from the stench of blood and worse and the piteous cries.
Adam swung himself down from his horse, wincing as he straightened his back.
Perdita caught the grimace of pain. ‘Are you hurt?’
He shook his head. Beneath the shadow of the helm’s brim, he looked exhausted, his face unshaven and grimy. ‘Thank you for your concern, Mistress Gray, but no I’m not hurt. Just stiff. My men need rest and tending.’
‘Take the wounded into the barn.’ Perdita addressed an older man with a greying beard who seemed to carry some authority. She turned to Ludovic. ‘See that there is food and drink for the men. I’ll see to the wounded.’
She supervised the unloading of the wagons, hurrying ahead as the able-bodied men carried their injured companions into the grey stone solidity of the barn.
‘We heard the sounds of the battle. Where was it?’ Perdita threw the question to Adam as he helped one of the more lightly injured soldiers off his horse.
‘Kineton village. A place they call Edgehill.’
Perdita drew in a quick, sharp breath. ‘But that’s barely ten miles from here. Who won?’
Adam shrugged. ‘Both sides claim victory,’ he said. ‘The truth is neither.’
‘How can that be?’
‘When both sides lack the heart to finish what was begun, they can both claim victory, Mistress Gray.’
Bess emerged from the house carrying the basket of bandages and medical supplies they had assembled. She drew up short when she recognised Adam.
‘Why did you have to bring them here? You’re the enemy. You’re not welcome at this house.’
Adam shot her a cold glance. ‘This is war now, Mistress Clifford, and enemy or not, I have injured men. I knew Mistress Gray has some healing skills. Needs must.’
‘Are y
ou going to help, Bess?’ Perdita asked.
Bess raised her chin. ‘I’m a good Christian,’ she said. ‘Besides I ruined my hands preparing bandages yesterday so we may as well put them to use.’
‘Then come with me.’ Perdita laid an arm across the younger woman’s shoulders guiding her toward the barn where upward of twenty men had been laid out on the hay. Some still groaned and cried out but most lay still and silent.
A man with a reeking stomach wound was carried past her. She took a step back her hand flying to her mouth.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Perdita, I’m sorry but I can’t help you. I think I’m going to be sick.’
Perdita retrieved the basket before Bess dropped it.
‘You don’t have to, Bess. Bring some food and drink, blankets and more bandages. Indeed, the contents of the stillroom.’
Bess turned and fled. Perdita walked the lines of injured making a rough assessment of who was in most urgent need of care. The injuries ranged from sword slashes to the horrific and there were some, such as the man with the stomach wound, for whom a speedy death was all that could be prayed for. It was indeed no sight for the fainthearted and her own stomach churned. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this. The bloody, broken, stinking bodies were far removed from the day-to-day hurts of the farm workers or kitchen hands she was more used to tending.
She knelt beside a young man with a musket ball in his leg, helpless to know how to tackle such an injury.
‘Let me, mistress.’
Ludovic appeared at her elbow. He laid a satchel down and took out a leather roll. He undid the lace and laid it out, revealing a set of bright, freshly honed knives and surgical instruments. Perdita picked up one of the knives, turning it over in her hand, and looked up at the man’s broad impassive face.
‘Ludovic these are surgeon’s knives. How did you come by them?’
Ludovic shrugged. ‘I was a surgeon's mate. The surgeon died of fever so I became the surgeon. The knives are mine. I feared this day would come so I have prepared.’
He set to work on the boy, with speed and appreciably more skill than any surgeon Perdita knew.
She passed him instruments as he asked for them with what seemed to Perdita no more than a flick of the wrist, he held up the musket ball. The patient gave a groan and fainted.
‘Where are you from, Ludovic?’ she asked as he stitched the wound
He did not look up from his work. ‘My mother was Polish and my father Hungarian,’ he said at last.
‘You’ve not always been a servant, have you?’
‘I’ve been a soldier and a sailor,’ he answered. ‘Your kinsman bought my freedom.’
Perdita knew that Geoffrey Clifford had travelled extensively in his youth and had returned to England with Ludovic as his manservant. There were stories that Clifford had purchased Ludovic in a slave market in Constantinople, but he had been part of the Clifford household for so long that no one thought to ask him about his origins.
‘So, it was not just my uncle’s story? You really were a slave?’
He paused and looked up at her, his expression bland. ‘A galley slave, yes. The Turks took me in battle. I spent six years in the galleys until your uncle came across me in a slave market and gave me my freedom.’
‘You were free and yet you chose to remain with him?’
His eyes never wavered but the hand holding the knife momentarily stilled.
‘When you’ve been a slave, you know the value of choice.’ He looked up at her. ‘I think perhaps you of all people understand that, Mistress Gray.’
Perdita sat back on her heels.
When you’ve been a slave…
She’d never thought of it in those terms. Yet that is what she had been, bound to a man forty years her senior. When she had woken one morning and found him dead in the bed beside her, she had rejoiced.
As evening fell, Perdita sat with a dying man, his hand in hers. They had done what they could to repair the fatal slash to his belly, but he would be dead by midnight and his death would be a relief.
‘Pray with me, mistress,’ he whispered.
Perdita prayed and read to him from the Bible, straining her eyes in the poor light of the lantern.
‘You are my hope and my salvation…’ The familiar words mouthed by the dying man were surprisingly comforting.
She read until her voice cracked and the hand she held no longer sustained life. The man’s eyes were wide open, staring with a look of peace as if he had indeed seen his hope and his salvation.
She closed his eyes and as she knelt over the dead man, tears spilling through her fingers, she felt a hand on her shoulder.
‘You can’t weep for them all, Perdita.’
She stood up, wiping her eyes on her grimy and blood-streaked cuff.
‘How many, Adam?’
He shook his head. ‘Probably thousands. Englishmen killing Englishmen.’
She looked into his tired, strained face. He hadn’t left the barn once during the long day, choosing to stay with his men, keeping the dying company, talking with the lightly wounded. Now she could see he was at the end of his own resources.
He crouched down beside her and held out his hand. She took the slender love token of plaited hair curled in his fingers.
‘He was only seventeen,’ Adam answered her unspoken question. ‘Tobias Clarke, son of the apothecary in Stratford they tell me. This was a parting gift from his sweetheart. I think he said her name was Jenny.’
Her fingers tightened on the circle of fair hair and she looked up at him, remembering the bright, cheerful lad who had served her in his father’s shop. These were people she knew. It was one thing to mourn this man she had never known in life, but Toby She wondered if Jenny had been the pretty fair haired daughter of the innkeeper at the White Swan. She had seen the two of them, heads bent together in the intimacy of young love.
‘Poor Jenny. Did she think it would make him immune from death?’ she said, more to herself than the man beside her.
Adam raked his fingers through his hair. ‘What do I say to his parents, Perdita? That he fought valiantly for the cause he so passionately believed in and he died defending his colours? That his death was swift and he felt no pain and that he is with God, rejoicing in the company of the saints?’
Perdita studied his face, the planes and shadows stark in the lantern light, hearing the bitterness in his tone.
‘You don’t believe in God, do you?’
His face stilled. ‘I …’ He blew out a breath. ‘I do not think God believes in me.’
She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Come back to the house. You need food and rest.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you here, Perdita. But I couldn’t leave them to die like animals in ditches or on that field, and I knew that some would never make it back to Warwick.’
She shook her head. ‘This is how it will be unless the differences between king and parliament are resolved, isn’t it?’
He rose to his feet with a grunt. Holding out his hand, he helped her stand. His strong fingers closed on hers, and lingered for a moment longer than propriety required. She shook her stiff limbs and together they walked back to the house.
At the foot of the stairs, Adam inclined his head. ‘Goodnight, Mistress Gray. We will be gone in the morning. Thank you for the care of my men.’
‘I did my Christian duty. Goodnight,’
She watched him as he followed Ludovic up the stairs as if it required every nerve of his body to stay upright. He did not look back, and in the morning he had gone.
Simon, his arm in a neat blue sling, came a few days later. There were shadows in his eyes that had not been there only weeks previously when he had taken his men to join Lord Northampton. Now he had seen battle and viewed the darkness of men’s souls. Simon would never be quite the same man again.
Joan and Bess tactfully withdrew and left them in the gathering gloom before the fire in the great parlour. Perdita
drew up a stool and leant her head against Simon's knee, thinking that this was how it should always have been, had it not been for a stubborn King or a man called Adam Coulter. She wondered where he had gone after he had left Preswood. Back to Warwick, she supposed.
Simon rested his hand lightly on her head, drawing her thoughts back to the present.
‘You’ve not told me, how did you hurt your arm?’ She asked the question Bess had posed on seeing her brother.
Simon had skilfully evaded an answer and now he gave a self-deprecating laugh. ‘For you, sweetest, only the truth. My cursed horse caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and I went down in the first charge. My noble wound is, I fear, no more than a badly sprained wrist.’
‘Thank God it was not your neck.’
‘Indeed,’ he agreed. The silence that followed, broken only by the crackling logs, seemed to stretch for an eternity until the intimacy of the fire and the good Rhennish that Ludovic had produced loosened Simon's tongue and he leaned back in his chair.
‘I had no thought that men could die so many dreadful deaths, Perdita.’
Oh, Simon, dear good man, Perdita thought. She could see him sitting in the grass on the slopes of Edgehill, nursing his wrist while before him men and horses died.
‘But you saw it too,’ he continued. ‘I hear Coulter came here after the battle with his wounded.’
‘He did. I think it might in some ways be more merciful to die swiftly on the field than to die the lingering and horrible deaths I saw.’
‘What became of the dead and wounded?’
‘The three soldiers who died in the night were buried in the churchyard, their deaths recorded simply in the church records as Killed in the Kineton fight. Some were local men so they were returned to their families, the others still too sick to move we distributed among the village for care,’ Perdita said.
Simon nodded. ‘We must see that our people are compensated for their board and lodging,’ he said.
‘But they are parliament men.’
‘They are men. It doesn’t matter what colours they fight under.’
And Then Mine Enemy Page 5