Take Courage

by Phyllis Bentley

  It was the sound of drums which waked us. The thunderous beat went on and on while I rose and prepared oatmeal porridge and we ate it; when at last the drumming ceased there came a great clamour, screams and shouts and cries, from down over Bradford. I was so uneasy I made Thomas rise and dress, though he was scarcely fit for it, and I bolted the doors and put out the fire and drew everything away from the windows, so that the house might look as though it were empty, and I made the children sit very quiet by the hearth and I read them the story of Samuel out of the Bible. While I was just reading how the Lord called Samuel for the third time, I saw my Sam’s jaw drop and his eyes grow very round, and I knew he had seen a scarlet coat down the lane, and within myself I trembled, and I prayed God to give me strength to bear this calamity and save my children.

  Sure enough in a few moments there was a sudden rush of feet across our yard, and a confused shouting, and then a shaking of our door and a great banging on it. The timbers quivered beneath the blows but did not yield. Then a scarlet coat came to the window and shouted at me. I turned my head towards him very slowly and calmly, as if I had no fear of him, and pretended not to understand what he was saying, but his face then grew crimson and grimacing with anger, and he lifted the butt of his musket and swung it through the window quarry, so that it broke and fell to the ground crackling and tinkling.

  “Oppen t’door or it’ll be t’worse for you!” he shouted, sticking his angry face through the opening.

  “We’ll burn door down if tha doesn’t!” shouted one of those at the door.

  “Nay, shoot bolts off; that’ll be t’gainest way,” advised another.

  “I am alone here with my children—we have done you no harm,” I cried.

  “Oppen t’door and no harm’ll happen you,” said the man at the window grimly.

  I hesitated. At my silence they showered blows from their musket butts on the door, striking all in unison; the timbers still did not yield, but a nail sprang from one of the bolts.

  “I will open, I will open!” I cried, terrified, and I ran across to the door. With trembling fingers I shot back the bolts; half a dozen redcoats at once rushed into the house, almost knocking me over as they passed.

  “Get out o’ t’road, missis, and nowt’ll happen thee,” shouted the man who had broken the window, who seemed to be their Corporal. “Now, lads, oats and meal first, remember!”

  A shout of derision greeted this. “There’s better things here nor fodder,” said one, snatching down the candlesticks from the mantel.

  “General’s order is oats and meal,” insisted the Corporal obstinately. “See if there’s any sacks upstairs to put ’em in—he’s a clothier, so I reckon there will be.”

  One soldier went up the stairs two at a time, and a cry came down to us.

  “Sam! Sam!” I cried in an agony, running to the foot of the stairs.

  “And who’s Sam?” said the Corporal roughly, holding me back with an arm across my breast.

  “My little son—younger than this one,” I explained, pointing to Thomas.

  The Corporal still seemed disinclined to believe me, but the soldier just then appeared, holding Sam by the ear so tightly that the child’s eyes watered with the pain.

  “Let him go!” I cried in a passion. “You’re hurting him—he’s only a child.”

  “So this is Sam. He was sitting with his mother here a two-three minutes ago,” said the Corporal suspiciously. “What didst go up there for, lovey, eh?” he demanded, bending his knees to bring his face to the level of the child’s.

  “I only went to fetch my brother’s cloak,” said Sam crossly. “He’s sick and feels cold.”

  That this was a lie I knew from Thomas’s face, and I guessed Sam was hiding something beneath the cloak which he clasped in his arms.

  “He was sick all yesterday,” I murmured.

  “Well, let it go,” said the Corporal ill-humouredly, and he jerked Sam away from the soldier by his arm and sent him spinning. “Sit thee down there, missis,” he said to me, pointing to a buffet by the hearth, “and keep thy children close and hold thy tongue, or it’ll be worse for thee.”

  So I sat there, and kept my children close, and held my tongue, and watched the soldiers sack my house.

  At first I suffered a fresh anguish with everything on which they laid their hands, but I had had a surfeit of grief of late, and soon could suffer no more, but fell into a kind of stupor in which I merely watched with a dull interest to see what they would take. First, throwing back the lid of the ark so roughly that one of the hinges broke, they heaped the meal into a sack, and then they tore down our cheeses and our hams. Through the window I saw them driving off the cows and the sheep, and chasing the hens and geese; such a lowing and bleating, such a squawking and hissing, you never heard. When they had cleared the eatables, they turned to our finest and most easily carried goods; the only two gold pieces of John’s which had not gone to the cause were found by the Corporal, who chinked them joyously and put them in his pouch. Then the pewter went, and every trencher we had in the house, and every candlestick; and the spits and the ladles, and the kettles and pans. The soldiers ran upstairs, and came down carrying our blankets and coverlets rolled up in bundles, and my apparel and John’s and some of the Fairfaxs’ which they had left, and the children’s, and a piece or two of unsold cloth which lay in the loom chamber. The two men who had these bore them on their shoulders in the proper fashion, so that I knew they had been cloth-workers, and this, with their Yorkshire voices, was very bitter to me, for it seemed as if they were our own folk betraying us. They came from York, I supposed; there were many cloth-workers in York, and folk there were mostly Royalists, because of the Minster clergy and the gentry. Some of the other soldiers laughed at these two for choosing such cumbersome wares, but they took the chaff easily, knowing well the cloth’s value.

  More soldiers continually poured in on us, for those that passed by, seeing the stream of goods going down the lane on men’s backs, turned in to The Breck hopefully.

  By this time those already in the house had found, alas, our casks of home-brewed ale and tapped them, and so they grew drunk and quarrelsome, and resented badly the advent of the newcomers. A soldier coming down with one of our feather mattresses spread out flat over his head, not being able to see in front of him ran into one just entering; a loud fierce quarrel ensued, they came to blows, and trampled all over the mattress. One of them wore spurs, the cover tore and the feathers flew out. Their fellow-soldiers had to separate them; when the first rolled up the bed and went off, leaving a trail of feathers behind him. Those who came late now began to be vexed because there was nothing left for them; they pushed the others aside from the ale-barrel, and tried to snatch their booty, whereupon the first-comers shouted loud reproaches—the din was so great we felt quite stunned. One went tramping angrily upstairs, and then the noise of his boots stopped, so that I wondered what he had found to thieve, and when he came down I cried out, for it was our cradle he bore under one arm. I could not bear that my children’s cradle, which was full of tender memories, should be tossed about in the hands of a Royalist trooper; I sprang up and seized it and tried to drag it from him, but he put his free hand on my breast and pushed me aside. A drunken soldier who stood swaying by reproved him:

  “Leave cradle,” he said in his thick drunk speech, shaking his finger at him: “Lady needsh cradle.”

  The other gave a loud coarse laugh. “Aye, that’s plain to be seen,” said he. “But when she needs it she can come and buy it.” And off he went with old Mr. Thorpe’s finely carved gift under his arm.

  Some who stood by, thinking there was more to be found upstairs, staggered up again, and finding nothing, began to break up the beds for fuel. The sound of great blows, and heavy thuds, and splintering wood came down to us.

  “If only they leave the looms!” I prayed, and, perhaps because the looms were very heavy, or perhaps because some were men used to looms who liked not to break the t
ools of their trade, they spared them.

  After a while there was nothing movable left in the house; even the books had been carried off, though amid expressions of disgust that there was nothing better left, all thumbed and dirtied by the soldiers’ rough hands. The din began to die away a little when two soldiers, newcomers, half drunk, came stumbling in. Without a glance at us they staggered rapidly all over the house, meeting again at the foot of the stairs.

  “Nowt left here,” said one disgustedly.

  “Let’s take table,” suggested the other.

  The first soldier looked at our long oaken table dubiously.

  “Think we could move it?” he said, scratching his head.

  “We can nobbut try,” said the other.

  Staggering each to an end they seized the table. It was a very solid heavy piece, made in Queen Elizabeth’s days for the wedding of old Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe, and they could not lift it; they dragged it inch by inch towards the door, so that both table and floor grated and shuddered. In the porch, praise be, it stuck; they tried to turn it sideways, but being partly drunk and not very clever, they mixed their commands to each other and somehow got it upended, so that Sam laughed and even I could scarce forbear a smile. One had clambered beneath and was butting at the top with his head, when there came some sort of a trumpet call and a drum, evidently summoning them back to their lines, for they dropped their hands from the table and peered over at each other, startled.

  “Come away!” cried the one outside, and he pulled at his coat and hitched up his musket and ran off, though somewhat unsteadily. The one within gave a last look round, then staggered towards me.

  “Up wi’ thee, missis!” he cried thickly, and snatched at my arm and jerked me up, and pulled out the buffet on which I was sitting. He ran to the door with it and tried to put it through our table, but caught the legs in a manner which was truly somewhat comical, and then remembered the back door and disentangled the buffet and ran out through the kitchen with it. We heard his uneven footsteps, and his shouts to his companion, dying away down the lane.

  And so at last they were all gone. At first we could not believe it, and stood cowering together, pressed back against the wall by the hearth; but when the silence continued, Sam darted off and peeped into the kitchen, and shook his head and mouthed at us to say it was empty. A distant drum brought him back like an arrow to my hand, but soon he was off again, and the stillness confirmed his report that there were no Royalists anywhere in the house. We crept out, and I looked about to see what was left to us.

  Very little, indeed. The looms, the table, the empty meal ark and the big cupboard, which was also broken and empty, were all I could find. The floors were spattered with feathers and trodden meal, and scraps of paper from our books and John’s accounts, and sticky runnels of ale and milk, and here and there a splintered piece of wood. It seemed that Thomas had unknowingly clutched our Bible from which I was reading to them, firmly beneath his arm, for he now discovered it there, but otherwise there was nothing; there was not a morsel of food, not a spoonful of drink, not a stick of fuel, not a cushion or a chair, not a pair of stockings or a cloak, left in the house.

  “Sam, what hid you beneath your cloak?” I said, remembering.

  Sam, blushing and hanging his head, drew out Sir Thomas Fairfax’s boots.

  Then I laughed and cried together, and knelt down and drew my little sons into my arms, and we mingled our tears, and kissed, and put cheek to cheek, and so eased our hearts of their heavy burden and regained some courage.

  After a time I smoothed back the boys’ hair, and wiped their faces with my skirt, and stood up, and tried to bethink myself how to get food for them.

  First we tried to move the table from the door, but we could not shift it—the boys had not the strength, and I was afraid to strain myself. So we left it there, and perhaps it was better so, for the door was torn from one of its hinges and leaning sideways, and the table served to block the doorway. I set Sam to get water, and Thomas to clean the floor—there was no broom left to us, but I made him gather some leafy twigs and sweep as well as he could with those. And then Sam came in and said he had ventured a small way down the lane, and had found quite a heap of meal by the hedgerow—some soldier had emptied out the meal to put something of greater value in the sack, he thought. So we all went out to this blessed heap, and the boys scooped up the meal with their fingers and I held out my skirt to hold it, and we carried it back to the house with great gladness. I set Thomas to gather twigs, and Sam to chop some larger wood, and by a good chance I found an old pan with a hole in it below in the cellar, and so we made shift to get ourselves a fire and some supper, and to cheer the children I made merry over it.

  And so the time passed, and it came night, and we heaped ourselves close together on the floor, and the children slept. But for my part I lay long awake, turning over and over in my mind where John and David were, and how I was to nourish my children.

  The next day we heard the drums again, and the women’s screams, as strong as yesterday but not as frequent. We kept close in the house and lived on water and some handfuls of oatmeal; but I knew this could not go on, and spent the hours tormenting myself as to how and where I could obtain succour. Twice Royalists came to our door, but seeing the barrenness within went away again without troubling us, save for the fright, which indeed was pain enough.

  Then, early next morning, we had another visitor. I was stooping over a little fire we had made in the kitchen, blowing on it to help the green wood to a glow, when I heard footsteps by the front, and an exclamation. My heart jumped; the moments while the steps rounded the house and came in at the back were some of the longest I remember. Then the door was pushed timidly open, and Lister’s freckled face peered in. It was criss-crossed with long red scratches.

  “Are there any malignants here?” he whispered.

  “No,” I said. “It is safe. Come in.” I stared at him, amazed, over my shoulder as he crept in, and my slow mind came round to ask why I was so greatly amazed, and then I knew, and I stood up from the fire holding my hands apart from my dress because they were dirty, and I cried harshly: “Lister, where is David?”

  He hung his head and cracked his scratched knuckles, and looked aside, and I screamed at him:

  “Where is David? Where is David?”

  “I’ve seen Mester John—he’s safe at Colne over in Lancashire,” croaked Lister. “The Lord hath delivered him from his cruel enemies. He gave me this gold for you.”

  I took the gold pieces from his hand and threw them down, and I stepped close up to him—I daresay my cheek was pale and my eyes glittering, for he backed away from me looking affrighted—and I seized him by the arms and shook him, and I panted:

  “Where is David? Is he dead? Is David dead? Lister! Tell me instantly!”

  “No, no, he’s not dead,” said Lister crossly. “The young man liveth.”

  “He’s at Colne with John, then?” I cried joyously.

  “No, he’s not at Colne.” Lister hung his head again, and finally got out in a piteous tone, his voice dying away from shame as he spoke: “He’s a prisoner.”

  “A prisoner? And you come here and tell me that? He threw away his safety to save you, and you deserted him? Shame on you for a coward, Joseph Lister!” I cried, and my voice rang through the house, fierce and loud with anger.

  “Under favour, Mistress, I did not desert him,” muttered Lister.

  “God grant me patience!” I burst out. “Will you tell me what has happened to my brother, or must I strike you?”

  “I did not desert him, I but hid in a holly bush,” repeated Lister obstinately. “In a secret place shall He hide me. A man on horseback espied us and came riding fast towards us with his sword in his hand—I will bring a sword upon you, saith the Lord—I must tell you we were four by that time; we met with two troopers who had left their horses in the town, and hoped to get away on foot, after we had waded the beck, that is. Mistress.”

&nb
sp; “Lister,” I commanded, driving my nails into my palms to keep from raging at him: “Tell me this tale orderly, from its beginning. What did you after I left the two of you in Kirkgate? Leave your texts, and speak plain.”

  “I led him to the far bridge,” explained Lister in a tone of grievance: “It was in my mind to get up towards Clayton and then turn Haworth way and go to Colne.”

  “Why to Colne?” said I. I looked about for some place to sit, for I saw the story would be long, but the soldiers had left us nothing, so I wiped my hands on my apron and leaned against the hearth side.

  “Because I reckoned I should find Mester John i’ Colne,” replied Lister, sullenly. “You had begged him to go to Lancashire, so I reckoned he would go there—more fool he,” he added, muttering. “The woman’s heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands. There was a foot company at the bridge, yet I think they did not see us, so we ran on the right hand of them, and then we waded over the water, and hearing a party of horse come down the lane towards the town, we laid us down in the side of the corn, and again they did not see us. The Lord hid us from their eyes. Then we went along in the shade of the hedge, and then, thinking we were past the danger of the leaguer, we took to the highway. And here we met with the two men that were troopers, and they and we walked on together, and hoped we had escaped all danger. And then all on a sudden this malignant on horseback espied us and came riding towards us with a drawn sword in his hand, and we, like lost sheep without a shepherd, kept together and thought to save ourselves by running. Had we scattered from one another, he had got but one of us.”

  “Master David was on horseback, I think?” I cried. “He could have ridden away and left you, and escaped?”

  “Aye, he could,” admitted Lister. His nostrils twitched, and suddenly his pretended complacence fell from him, and he wept. “Aye, he could have left us and saved hisself, poor lad,” he wailed. “But he never thought of it. You know well, Mistress, that David would never think of it. We all got into a field, and the Royalist crossed the field and came to us, and I being running by the hedge side, espied a thick holly tree, and I crept into it and pulled the boughs about me, and presently I heard David crying out to the horseman for—”