by Vicary, Tim
Then again the shock of the enemy's volley lashed through them like a blast of wind through corn, and more men collapsed around him. Adam knew that they had to fire together like that themselves to win, and they were not doing it. He rammed the bullet down hard again with his scourer, lifted the musket into its rest, and fired blindly across the rhine into the smoke and darkness.
43
"IF ONLY the dawn would come! Can't we go now? 'Twill be light when we get there!"
"It would not! 'Tis hardly three yet; and what use would we be if we got lost in the dark, or stumbled into the royal camp? 'Tis much better to stay here, watch and pray. Oh my great Lord, show forth your strength now!"
The crackle of the distant musket fire was followed by the flat thunderclap of cannon, and Nicolas Thompson's voice shook with a sudden rush of earnest emotion. "Those be our guns, Ann, I'm sure of it. And they've a good gunner, too, to serve them. May the blessed Lord guide his eye tonight!"
The group peering over the battlements of St Mary's church tower had grown to a small crowd. At times Ann felt herself hemmed in and pressed against the wall as though she might fall, but she did not think about that. All her attention was concentrated on that area to the south-east, beneath the tall silhouette of Weston Zoyland church, where for over an hour now the darkness had been split by the crackle of musket fire and the bigger white flashes that they saw a second before they heard the flat bang of the field-guns.
In the darkness between the flashes, Ann prayed too, as they all did. At first she earnestly reminded the Lord of her father's goodness and courage, and that of all the men of Monmouth's army, who had so selflessly resisted temptation to serve Him. Later, as the battle went on and she saw there would be no easy victory, she remembered her father's decision to spurn the King’s pardon at Pedwell, and the brutal words of Colonel Weston began to haunt her mind.
It was then that she made her final, most solemn and desperate promise: "Give them victory now, Lord, spare my father and give them victory now, and I will do what I know you want and what is truly right, and renounce Robert for ever. And if one must be killed, let it be Robert, not my father!" Her lips trembled as she said the words, though no-one else could hear them; for it was a real promise, made without any hidden tricks or reserves in the secret corners and drawers of her mind; and she knew she would keep it.
When she opened her eyes and looked again into the darkness below the distant church, there was a change indeed, so that she thought her prayer had been answered. Her heart pounded afresh and she grew first hot with triumph and then cold as she saw what it meant.
More guns were firing now; not just the four from the north, on Monmouth's side, but two and then three and four from the south-east, firing the opposite way. At first someone said it must be Monmouth's troops who had captured the enemy's guns and turned them around; but as the barrage increased there could be no doubt. The two groups of guns were firing directly towards each other. Between them, Ann realised, the two lines of musketeers and pikemen must be standing, their ranks ripped again and again by the thunder of the shot that fired louder and louder as the night went on.
Ann stopped praying. She thought perhaps she would never pray again. She only stood and gripped the parapet, staring at the eastern sky for the first sign of the dawn that would show her the final truth. As the gunfire from the King's side increased, her heart froze slowly into a certainty as cold as the grey stone beneath her hands.
44
ADAM ONLY noticed it was dawn when he stopped firing, obeying the sergeant's orders to save the last of the powder for the cavalry. One by one the others stopped also, making a little pocket of eerie silence in the midst of the firestorm. The steady volleys still swept into them from across the ditch, and a sparse intermittent musket-fire still crackled from far away on their left, where Colonel Holmes stood encouraging his men, waving his sword in his one good arm.
But the real horror was the flat, ear-numbing boom! of the field-guns on both sides, which swept whole files of men into bloody, unrecognisable pulp with their cruel chain-shot every four or five minutes. There was only one gun firing directly against their regiment; Adam felt each man around him tense as he unconsciously counted the last few seconds before each shot, and then relax as the force of the blast hit him, and he found himself still alive. Life had become reduced to these short, five-minute intervals, with a horrible devil's lottery at the end of each.
Now that he was not firing Adam was able to look about him. At first he wondered that the pale dawn light should give colour to the trampled grass and blood, and yet leave the faces of the men around him grey and black as they had been in the night; and then he saw that the black was the black of burnt powder and the grey the grey of exhaustion. John Spragg smiled at him grimly, too tired any more for panic.
"'Tis not a pretty sight, Adam, is it?"
He nodded to their left, where the ranks of royal horsemen stood, just out of musket-shot, waiting the moment to charge. They must have crossed the rhine further up, Adam though - our horsemen should have done it, if these could. Now they are going to do to us what we should have done to them.
There was jostling and movement as the Colyton men formed a square to give the musketeers the best protection from the pikemen, and then another awful pause, broken suddenly by the flat boom! of the field gun and the horrible screams of a man who staggered out of the ranks with a great hole pumping blood out of his shoulder where his arm had been blown off, while a headless corpse slumped to the ground where a man had been standing.
Adam watched numbly as the man who had lost his arm ran until his strength gave out, and then collapsed twitching by a patch of tall yellow buttercups which had somehow escaped the mowers. I cannot stand here any longer, he thought. I can fight, but I cannot stand here to be shot at. Oh Lord let them come soon, please, if they are coming! But still the cavalry did not attack, and Adam felt the sweat breaking out on his face and in the palms of his hands as the minutes passed to the next cannon-shot.
Then there was one of those lonely quiet moments that come in the midst of battle, and they all heard quite clearly William Clegg's voice as he muttered softly to himself: "Oh Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken us?" He had spoken quite softly, for himself, and yet he had spoken for all of them, and Adam never knew whether there had been an order to retreat, or whether they had all just turned at once and started walking quietly away from the rhine.
It was then that the cavalry charged. Adam did not hear it at first. In the boom of the guns, he only felt a jostling around him, half the men standing still and the others pushing past to run, and he looked left and saw the long line of horsemen in blue coats sweeping inexorably down on them. One moment it was pretty, a line of tiny abstract figures, and the next it was a great mass of waving swords and yelling helmeted faces above the horses’ wild staring eyes, great flaring nostrils, and the huge steelshod hooves that reared over his head as he fired, and then smashed down towards him as inescapably as his own death.
45
THE NIGHT was the best and the worst of it. The best, because sometimes - very rarely but sometimes nonetheless - he could fall into a calm, dreamless sleep for three or four hours. That was the best that could ever happen. More often - perhaps six or seven times in the last month - he managed to lie quite quietly when he could not sleep, and watch the stars slowly cross from one bar to another of the high cell window. At these times a sort of tranquillity seeped into his mind from the starlight and grey moonlit stone, like a promise that one day he would have suffered enough, and be given the words to pray again.
One night he even felt that he had prayed, if one could pray without words. That feeling was so good that it stayed with him all through the clamour and hunger and stench of the next two days, when seven more men were found and herded into Dorchester jail, and two men died, and Ann came to visit him.
But the good nights were rare. The usual ones were a ghastly attenuation of the day, in which the no
ise of more than a hundred men's fear and irritation and boredom continued long after everyone was too tired to bear it. There was always someone who could contain his emotions no longer, and hurled all his resentment and frustration at the others, so that they in their turn could not bear it, and so the cauldron of despair was kept simmering. It was enough, sometimes, for a man to snore, or splash another's face as he used the latrine bucket, or throw something at a shape he thought was a rat, for a whole corner of the cell to erupt into an angry, fractious argument that left all of them more exhausted and on edge than before.
If it did fall quiet, more often than not the guards would sense it, and hammer on the great door to frighten and wake them up. Or they would call out some man's name from outside the window, telling him they had his wife or daughter, and what they had done or were going to do with her. Once they had done it there and then, so that the man could hear the women’s screams; and later in the night he had got up and run straight at the wall, smashing his head hard against the great projecting stone in the corner, so that he had cracked his skull and taken two long days and nights to die, threshing and moaning in great fits in a corner.
Then there were the other, less dramatic deaths, where people lay all night shivering until their fever burnt them up. Like the proud Miss Blake, the schoolteacher from Taunton, who had been herded into the filthy cell with the men, for want of other accommodation, and had babbled all night in her final hours of how her maids of Taunton had been sold to the Queen, though Adam did not understand it then, and indeed had little sympathy for her after what had happened to Ann. The shrunken body of the old lady had been lugged outside next morning, one stiff cold arm banging awkwardly against the door as it stuck out from her side. John Spragg had wept then.
Adam would have thought they were in Hell already, if it had not been for the hope. And yet the hope made everything worse, so that he began to think that that came from the Devil too.
The hopes were very small and modest in their demands, and yet enormous in their meaning for each man. Adam hoped only that Mary and the children would be left alone, and would stay away and not come to see him. He did not think he would be able to bear that. As for the trials, he hoped only that they would come soon, so that there could be an end to it. He did not hope for anything from the trials, as some men did, for he expected only death.
Some men, like John Spragg, hoped for the mercy of transportation to the West Indies, but Adam could see no advantage in that; it would only continue their present torments, with no chance of being able to escape or return, or forget. Several men even said they would plead not guilty, hoping they would escape with a fine or a whipping only, and at times John talked of a pardon, but Adam saw no chance of that either.
Instead, he sometimes hoped the most modest and enormous hope of all - a secret which he dared tell no-one for fear they would ridicule it or call it a blasphemy. For though he knew he had not the faith for Heaven, he thought that perhaps after death he might be judged to have suffered enough already for Hell, and that his soul might go instead to a third place, different from both, which he had pictured secretly to himself as being nothing - nothing at all but a place where men could sleep endlessly without dreams or thoughts, without waking or memory. When he thought of this he longed for the King's judge - Judge Jeffreys - to come, so the cruel, dreary imprisonment could come to an end at last.
Once or twice he had been tempted, in the rare quiet nights, to simply turn his face to the wall and let life go as some men seemed to do. But though he had tried he had not had the trick of it, for he had woken up an hour later as usual, and the second time John Spragg had suspected something, and would not let him alone.
He thought back over the time since the battle. It was nearly a month now since the wounded and the prisoners had been dragged into Weston Zoyland church, half unconscious from the battering they had had from the horses' hooves and the soldiers who had caught them. Their bruised bodies had been stripped half naked by the greedy, vengeful royal soldiers, and some men, lying on the cool stone floor under the great carved wooden angels of the roof, had had no clothes at all. Most had been wounded in some way. Four men had died in that church before they had left, and dozens more had been summarily strung up on the trees outside the church, some in chains, or hacked down in the ditches and cornfields towards Chedzoy where they had been hiding.
At the time it had seemed dreadful, but now Adam thought those men had been the lucky ones. He remembered stumbling the long, weary miles into Bridgewater, all the time being mocked and bullied by Colonel Kirke's brutal soldiery, and watching them steal and rape in every village they came to. Death would have spared him that.
Occasionally the soldiers caught some men who had escaped from the battlefield, hiding in a barn or a ditch or an attic; and often they would beat and torture them to get them to betray others of their friends. There were many men in the prison now who had to be helped to eat because of their maimed and festering hands that the soldiers had burned to the bone.
Always these memories brought him back to his worries about Ann. When he had not seen her in Bridgewater he had felt sure she had been captured, and treated as scores of other women had been in the town; only when there had been no sign either of Nicolas Thompson, or the wounded left in their charge, had he begun to hope. But now that they were beaten, the country seemed full of soldiers and militia, so that her chances of having escaped seemed impossible.
The thought of what might have happened to Ann tortured him even more than his fears for Mary and his other children, for they at least were at home. He sometimes wished he had sent her with Tom, despite everything; however cruel and bitter the boy had become, he could not have harmed her more than the devils the King had set loose in in the countryside - the men Colonel Kirke laughingly called his 'Lambs', because of the Paschal lamb on their coats that so ironically covered the wolves inside.
Then one day Ann simply walked into the jail at Dorchester.
Adam would never forget that moment, when she stood there suddenly in the cell doorway, straight and tall in the faded brown dress she had worn since Philip's Norton. She peered anxiously around the filthy, overcrowded room, a look of confused shock and pity clouding her face. But her face looked older. Adam suddenly felt he was looking at a young woman rather than the girl he had raised, and that he himself had somehow become a child or an old man. He was ashamed, and wanted to hide behind someone before he was seen. But the thought came too late; she was crossing the room towards him, the other prisoners moving respectfully aside and staring at her with a desperate hope that perhaps she might have come for them.
Behind her came Tom, his broad back shielding her from the jailor's leer. But there was no room in Adam's mind for anger at Tom, beside the glorious pain of seeing his daughter there, alive and unharmed and well and touching him.
"Father! Have I found you, at last! You are truly alive? Oh, thank God for that!" She hugged him, and he patted her back gently, almost voluptuously, not knowing what to to do. Then he pushed her away, ashamed of the filth and fleas of his clothes, and the sores on his shackled legs. He held out his hand to Tom, determined to forgive, and the boy took it awkwardly, staring at him as though he could not believe what he saw. But for the moment Adam had eyes only for his daughter.
"It is you, Ann? It is really you? They have not harmed you?" The words came clumsily; his throat seemed blocked when he tried to speak.
"Not me, no, father - they never caught us. But you – your poor legs!"
He glanced at the sores made by the shackles on his ankles, and smiled at the concern in her voice. "That doesn't matter, now. There's far worse than that here. But how did you come here? Have you been home? You must have, to bring Tom."
"I've been home this past week. We heard most of the prisoners were here, so we came to look for you. We'd have gone on to Ilchester next."
"And your mother and the others?"
"As well as you could hope, father. T
here have been soldiers in Colyton but they did not trouble us. But mother was afraid to come with the children."
"Very proper too. But she is well - the girls are well? Little Oliver?"
"They are all quite well, father, I promise. And they'll be the better for hearing you're alive."
Ann smiled at him, yet her eyes were sparkling with tears. As she smiled, a woman jostled her roughly from behind as she made her way to another man. There were perhaps a dozen visitors in the cell that day, so that there was hardly room to move, and the noise was so great that at times they had to shout to be heard.
"I shan't be alive much longer, girl. The King's judge is coming, you know. But 'tis good to know you're safe."
Ann's face changed at his words. "No, father, they can't! They won't kill you! They can't kill all these people!"
"'Twas rebellion, girl. What else can they do? Only leave us to rot in prison, or transport us, which is worse."
"'Tis never worse than death, Adam! A man can live beyond the waters even if his family's left behind. You tell him, girl!" John Spragg burst in eagerly, from where he stood by the wall a few feet away.