Take Courage

by Phyllis Bentley

  There came a long thunderous knocking at the door.

  At once I was ashamed of my weakness. I sprang up in a flurry and picked up the book and dried my eyes and smoothed my skirts and went to the door’, and flung it open, smiling cheerfully.

  A Royalist officer stood there, a tall broad man with a scarlet coat and a sword, holding his horse’s bridle in one hand. His feathered hat was stuck somewhat carelessly on his flowing curls, and as I stared at him in horror I guessed why it was so, for his left sleeve was turned back and he wore a bandage soaked in blood on his forearm, from beneath which blood was trickling down his wrist and dropping off the. ends of his fingers.

  “Will you bandage my arm for me, Mrs. Thorpe?” he said.

  “No—no,” I stammered, hardly knowing what I said in my fright. “Oh, no. There is a Royalist house across there,” I went on feverishly, pointing towards Holroyd Hall: “It is but a step up the lane. They will give you every attention there, sir. If you would go there?”

  “Penninah Clarkson would not have turned a wounded man from her door,” said the Royalist.

  I trembled. Then I whispered:

  “Francis!”

  “Captain Ferrand, at your service,” said Francis, laughing.

  “Francis!” I whispered again. “Francis!”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in, Pen?” said Francis in his light easy tones. “That confounded chirurgeon hasn’t tied me up properly—if I go to the Hall like this my mother will faint in every room of the house.” As I still stood staring at him, with my hands to my heart, he went on teasingly: “Surely John’s not such a crop-eared Roundhead he’ll turn his own cousin from the door.” He gave me a shrewd look, laughed again and said: “I see John’s not here. So we needn’t wait for his permission.” He threw his bridle over the hitching-post, and came into the house and closed the door.

  “No! No!” I said, stepping back from him. “No!”

  “Why, Pen,” said Francis, losing his smile: “You don’t mean your heart has really hardened with the years?”

  At this, I shook my head softly. My heart was not hard towards him at all. And after all, I thought, what harm could there be in admitting him to The Breck? He would be gone in half an hour. It was the merest humanity to tie up his arm.

  “I will bandage your wound,” I told him quietly. “Come this way.”

  “Your grave and lovely voice, Pen,” said Francis. “That at least is the same.”

  “Am I myself much changed, then?” I asked him, though I chided myself for the vanity of the question.

  “You are as beautiful as ever,” said Francis, considering me thoughtfully: “But in a different way. You have—children, I suppose?”

  I told him: two sons.

  Francis nodded. “Aye, so I have been told,” he said. His face was sober for a moment, then he laughed again, and said, throwing wide his arms: “And what do you think of me? Have I changed in these last nine years, eh?”

  I looked at him, smiling, and said: “Yes, you have changed.”

  He was no longer a slight wayward lad, but a man, tall and strong, with the marks of nine years’ soldiering in his face. His hair had darkened, but was still a strong rich gold, very thick and wavy, as it used to be; his eyes were still the same lively merry grey. But his smooth warm cheek had tanned, and the moustache and beard he wore gave him a very manly and soldierly appearance. He wore his full-skirted scarlet coat and his sword and the pistols at his waist and his thigh-long boots with an air, for Francis would not have been Francis without some swagger; but his clothes and his weapons were not new or foppish, they had seen good service, and he was very plainly long at home with them. I judged he was now a gallant and resourceful officer, a little over-daring perhaps, but fitted to be a captain and in charge of enterprises, having learned by experience all the necessary stratagems and cares of war.

  “Yes, you have changed,” I repeated, smiling.

  By this time we had reached the kitchen. The moment Francis appeared in the doorway the two maids screamed, and, dropping one a towel, the other a dish, fell back against the wall.

  “There is no need for fear—this is Mr. Thorpe’s cousin, Captain Ferrand from the Hall,” I told them, and gave orders for hot water and linen, so that I might bandage the wound.

  “I shan’t eat you, my dears,” said Francis, rolling his eyes at them and laughing heartily; they smiled timidly in reply and set him a chair.

  To my inexperienced eyes the wound looked deep, though clean; it seemed a piece of metal from the burst cannon had penetrated the flesh and had to be extracted. Francis made light of it, simply cursing the chirurgeon who had dressed it ill, and rejoicing that it was not in his sword arm.

  “I have had many worse,” he said, laughing at my concern, and he rolled up his sleeve further, and showed me the puckered weal of a long deep scar. His arm was still as white as when he was a boy, though it was a man’s arm now, strong and sinewy, and lightly covered on the wrist with golden hair. He had received that old wound, he said, in the leaguer outside some town or other in the Low Countries, whose name I do not remember; and from that he fell into talk of his adventures in those wars, so that the two maids listened open-mouthed. When I had washed the wound once, I bade them empty the bowl and bring fresh water; by now they were so eager to serve Francis that they both ran off to the beck together. Francis looked up at me and said in a low caressing tone:

  “Pen, we have done this before, you and I.”

  I said: “Yes,” quietly, but my heart was not quiet, for I remembered very well how I had bathed his hurts that Sunday long ago when he had fought with John, and how when I had done he had turned to me and put his arms round my waist, and how I had cradled his head on my breast and loved him. I remembered, too, many other sweet passages of my youth: Tabby and Thunder, and Francis’s first kiss, and the poetry writ behind the wager for a cockfight. In spite of myself I felt my breath quicken, and the colour rise in my cheeks.

  “Thy hands are still the softest in England, Pen,” murmured Francis, watching me.

  “And in the Low Countries?” I asked him in a false voice, trying to joke.

  “And in the Low Countries,” said Francis, laughing.

  He told me how to place and tighten the bandage, and when I was clumsy, for my fingers trembled, offered to do it himself with his teeth. I thought this a joke, but it seemed it was not; many a man had stopped a fatal flow of blood, said Francis, by a strip of his shirt and his own teeth. He laughed and showed his strong white teeth as he spoke.

  I looked up from tying the bandage to see that Thomas and Sam had come in, and were standing by the kitchen door holding hands, their little heads, one dark, one sandy, very close together as they gaped at Francis, frightened and wide-eyed.

  “Boys, this is your father’s cousin, Captain Francis Ferrand,” I said. “Make your greetings to him.”

  As mothers so often do, I increased their lack of ease by smoothing their hair and settling their doublets, wishing them to look their best. And as children so often do, they showed up ill before a stranger; they jerked their heads and mumbled, hardly able to take their eyes long enough from Francis to make a proper bow. Francis, who had got to his feet, watched them shrewdly, then returned their greetings with his usual grace.

  “I am glad to meet my young cousins,” he said.

  I gave them a piece of oatcake in their cold little hands and bade them go out and play again. I ought not to have done this, I ought to have kept my children close beside me; but I saw they feared Francis, and I thought too that though Francis’s words to them were kind enough, there was some slight mockery in the way he said them. He had moved away back into the house, and I perforce followed him. He threw himself down in John’s chair by the hearth, picked up the book I had left at its side, muttered: “Sermons!” with a jesting grimace, and threw it down again.

  “Are you not going to offer me some ale, Mrs. Thorpe?” he teased. “My cousin’s hospitality see
ms a trifle churlish.”

  “Your mother will be eager to see you, Francis,” I told him.

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  He might have gone then, for his face was sober, but one of the maids, blushing, came in with a brimming tankard and offered it to him with a curtsey, while the other stood giggling at the door. No woman could withstand Francis long, I thought, half smiling and half vexed. (I should have applied that rule more strictly, if I had been wise.) When they had gone Francis sat looking very fixedly at me with the tankard in his hand, not offering to drink from it; I stood by the table and bore his gaze in silence for some time, not choosing to sit with him or talk, lest he should be encouraged to stay with me. But at last I could bear his gaze, so ardent and so tender, no longer, it stirred too much confusion in my breast. I cast about for some harmless thing to say, and observed:

  “Do you doubt The Breck ale, Francis?”

  “I am waiting for you to pledge me,” said Francis.

  “You must excuse me—I am not drinking,” I said, confused.

  “Drink to me only with thine eyes,

  And I will pledge with mine,

  Or leave a kiss within the cup

  And I’ll not ask for wine,”

  sang Francis softly.

  “Francis!” I exclaimed harshly. “Enough of this nonsense.” I walked away towards the window and stood looking out at the whirling snow. “You are our enemy now, and should not stay in this house. If John were here I believe he would put you in custody.”

  “Would he indeed?” cried Francis hotly, following me to the window. “He would if he could, no doubt. But two can play at that game. To speak soberly, Pen,” he said, leaning against the window-sill so that he faced me: “What kind of a man is John grown these days?”

  “He is a great friend of Sir Thomas Fairfax,” I said, exaggerating a little out of loyalty to my husband.

  “Well, that tells much,” said Francis, hitching his sword-belt round so he could loll at ease. “Tom is a melancholy ass, but a good soldier. He deserved a better fate than to marry his Presbyterian general’s daughter. And what kind of a husband is John, eh?”

  “The best in the world,” I told him staunchly.

  “Then why were you weeping when I came in, eh, Pen?” said Francis.

  “Because John is away,” I said quickly. But the tears rose in my eyes again, and my throat felt choked. It was so sweet, so almost unbearably sweet, to have someone’s attention fixed on me after all these years, someone who called me Pen, who noticed when I wept, who told me I was beautiful. I turned my head away so as not to betray my discomposure, but, as if he read my thoughts, Francis went on in a tender caressing tone:

  “You are more beautiful now than when I came in, Pen. You had the cold and dusty look of a woman who has not been made love to for many years. Now you are alive and glowing.”

  “Come, Francis!” I said, forcing a laugh. “What nonsense!” I looked at him to show by my cheerful air the foolishness of his supposition, but his eyes were so near, and said so many things which I did not wish him to think I read in them, that I looked away again quickly.

  There was a silence. Francis hummed a little, softly, then took my left hand, spread it on his own, and closed his right hand over my fingers. At his touch my heart turned over within me; I could neither move nor speak.

  “So John is the best husband in the world,” said Francis. “And those two are your children.”

  “Yes,” I said, making an effort to rally: “Sam and Thomas. Thomas is the elder.”

  “Penninah,” breathed Francis, leaning forward to put his lips close to my ear: “You and I could have done better than that.”

  “Do not disparage my children, Francis Ferrand!” I cried. But my voice was too shrill, for in my heart I knew his meaning. Thomas and Sam were my children I had carried in my womb, I loved them as my heart’s blood, I would give my life to protect them, but they had not the grace, the dash, the bright glory of life which Francis’s every movement revealed so abundantly. I struggled not to think what a child of mine and Francis’s would have been, but the sweetness of the thought almost overpowered me. I snatched my hand from his and drew back. “Drink your ale and go,” I told him hoarsely.

  “Not till you have kissed the cup,” said Francis, teasing.

  “Nonsense,” I said; but I did not speak with decision. I was distracted by perplexity whether to do as he asked, regarding it as a foolish custom merely, or whether to do it would be to yield too much to him.

  “Or me,” concluded Francis. “Kiss me, Pen.” His voice was suddenly no longer light and merry; he rose and came towards me purposefully.

  “No, no!” I cried, stepping back from him. “I am John’s wife, Francis.”

  His strong arms were about me, holding me close to him. I struggled to unloose them, I beat my fists against his shoulders. “I am John’s wife,” I repeated.

  “What do I care?” said Francis, kissing me roughly. “Thou art mine, Pen. Thou wert always mine, till John took thee from me.”

  “John did not take me from you,” I gasped. “It was your own——” I could not bring myself to say: your selfishness. “You are on the wrong side, Francis,” I wept instead.

  “I must be true to the cause I serve,” said Francis. “I have been one of His Majesty’s own guards. How could I leave him?”

  “Thine is not a cause, Francis,” I said. “It is a tyranny.”

  “Thou shouldst have married me, then, and kept me from it,” said Francis, his voice suddenly breaking with emotion. “What a young fool I was, what a fool, to let thee go! Thy voice has rung in my head, Pen, all these nine long years. Thy lovely voice. Thy lovely face. Pen, my dear heart, my sweet love. Dost thou still love me?”

  I whispered, trembling: “Francis!” He bent back my head and kissed my lips, my eyes, my throat, with savage ardour. My hands found his warm golden head, his strong hard shoulders. He murmured in my ear, caressing me, and urged me. I seemed to die in his arms, there was no strength left in me; it was a sin, a grievous sin; a sin before God and man; but I yielded to him.

  I will not pretend, or lie to myself. I have repented my sin in bitter shame, in utter humiliation and abasement of spirit; I have paid for it in burning anguish and in long years of torment, in grievous trouble brought on those I loved. But I will not lie, even in my own memory. I yielded to Francis, and it was the sweetest moment of my life.

  3

  BRADFORD GIVES QUARTER

  On saturday john came home.

  It was at the dead of night; I was abed, but not asleep. Neither was I fully awake; I lay in a kind of stupor, from which since Francis left me I had been unable to rouse myself. Too many contrary emotions battling in my heart, like great winds arrested by each other’s force, produced a tense and fearful immobility. Sometimes one gained in strength over the rest, and then my whole soul swayed sickeningly in its direction. There was a wonder whether I, Penninah Clarkson, my father’s daughter, had in truth broken my marriage vows and been unfaithful to my husband. Could it be true? I gazed at my act in horror and could not credit it. There was a dreadful shame that I had done this thing to John while he was serving a high cause in which we both believed; there was a guilt which pierced me like a spear whenever I looked at my innocent children. There was a wild grief that Francis had gone, for he must return, he said, to his company that night, and he had ridden away to where I could not reach him. There was also—God forgive me!—a secret shameful sweetness. I called on myself to repent, to confess my sin before God and admit its shame, but I knew my repentance was not whole and honest, because I could not wish my sin unsinned. My soul wished it, that it might throw off its deathly sickness, but my body rebelled, feeling glad and satisfied. So, the battleground of these conflicting passions, I moved about the house in a daze, or sat by the hearth idle, my hands drooping listlessly in my lap. The nights seemed endless, yet I rose from them unrefreshed.

  As I lay there, the
n, neither asleep nor awake, staring wide-eyed at the darkness, I heard a rattle of little stones against my windows. At first it meant nothing to me, but when it came again my heart cried: “Francis!” and I sprang up and made a light, and threw on a cloak and hurried down and unbarred the door. It was John who stood there; and so I found myself thrown abruptly into the moment I had been dreading, the moment when I had to face my husband.

  But I had not to meet his eyes or take his kiss, as I had feared, for he walked straight past me to the table, and threw down his hat and cloak. I followed, fear at my heart; for he seemed so frowning and sober that for a wretched moment I thought he knew my fault. But his frown was not for me; he was preoccupied with larger matters.