by Maria McCann
There was a door opposite: I went through it and found myself in a short corridor which was eerily empty, though ringing with the sounds of the most ferocious combat on all sides. At the far end there was a flight of stairs leading up. I went up to the foot of the steps; it was evident by the noise and the trembling of the ceiling that there was fierce fighting above, and the Marquess’s men by no means vanquished even yet. I knew I should mount, and wanted more than anything to stay where I was.
As I hesitated, there was a clang of metal and two men came rolling and slithering down, gasping as the stairtreads battered face and back. One’s head was caked in mud and blood, and he had lost his helmet, but I could see by his garb that he was one of ours. The other, big and thickset, seemed a manservant, and getting the better of it. They had both lost their weapons and had fallen to grappling one another, but though they were roughly of a height our soldier was much slighter in build and Paulet’s man, having got on top of him, commenced banging his skull against the stairs.
I came up behind the big fellow, clutching my knife, and got astride his legs, then seized his hair from behind, dragging his head back. He tilted his face towards me and I drove the knife under his ear, pulling it through the flesh to the other side of his throat so that my hand ached. There was a smell of iron. He fell forwards onto the one beneath, who turned his head aside, mouth closed against the warmth spilling onto him. A snorting, bubbling sound came from the Papist, but he continued to struggle, trying to throw me off. I held on tight and put the knife in him again, in the back; he cried out something that might have been ‘Mercy’ but we were long past that. His war ended in a drumming of the feet.
The smaller one pushed his dead opponent’s face away from his own. I knelt back, dragging the body aside, and let the Parliament man sit up to wipe the fresh blood from his chaps onto a sleeve. A part of the mud came with it, and I started. There was something – the lips—
‘God requite you!’ he wheezed. His eyes were clenched shut, tears seeping from under gummy lids. I strained to place the broken, breathless voice. Then, as I stared at the slime plastered over hair and face, the eyes unsealed and showed themselves flower blue.
Nathan.
It was hard to breathe for the lurching of my heart; the throat’s drag on the blade still stiffened my arm; my thighs remembered the dying man’s struggle against their embrace.
Tears and blood ran off Nathan’s chin. He rocked back and forth in an attempt to rise, but was too beaten to pull himself up.
‘Rupert, God bless you!’ He held out a palsied hand to me. ‘Brother, saviour.’ The jewel eyes turned full on mine, not with the crafty glance of the night before but with a look of adoration. That look coming after the girl’s death staggered me, drove me back. I knew it for what it was, a momentary outpouring of his love for his own life, yet despite myself the surge in my flesh began to ebb. I stood baffled, hand on my sword. A group of our soldiers burst into the corridor at the far end.
‘Jesus fights on your side all right,’ I said, frighted at the cracked sound of my own voice. ‘Where’s your weapon?’
‘At the top of the steps. I’ll fetch it.’
I helped the boy to his feet, then ran away from him towards the new arrivals who were trying all the doors to see if any Papists lurked within. There was banging and screaming from above. I burst into a room on the right: a bedchamber, empty and cold. Even against that grim and cloudy sky the windows shone bright, with three medallions in fine scarlet glass let into the leads. I let out a great bellowing sob, and taking up a stool from the bedside, I hurled it straight through the middle design, the finest. Glass fell to the floor like drops of blood.
A cry went up from outside and I ran to the broken pane. People below glared up at me. Glittering scraps lay on the stones, and among them the stool, still in one piece. I stepped back into the room. The shards put me in mind of Sir Bastard’s goblet; I took up one of them and read scratched upon it, Loyaute. Snatching up a linen cap that lay on the bed, I carefully wrapped the glass, and laid it in my bosom. As I did so a scarlet blot formed on the linen, and I understood for the first time that the liquid stinging my eyes was not sweat: my shaking fingers found a split across my forehead to make me a pair with Ferris. Someone had dealt me a cut right under the edge of the helmet without my feeling it. A rising roar warned me that the corridor was filling up again, and I pushed out into a rush of men heading back towards the courtyard.
The idolaters, flushed from every corner of the place, were being herded outside. They staggered, some howling with burnt flesh from powder and shot, others with broken heads or limbs. The soldiers showed them no mercy. I saw one man, blinded, rest against the wall and one of the New Model break his nose with a musket butt to teach him more speed. Even those who were not much hurt wept openly as they were forced along, guessing what tenderness would be shown them. Our men, too, bore marks of hard fighting. I was somewhat ashamed to have had an easy time of it, and so I made a show of goading the captives on their way.
Soldiers bustled about in the cold, stripping or tying folk according to the will of the officers. I wandered from group to group and heard men say there would be nigh on three hundred prisoners, though I could not see anything like so many.
‘Will they be killed?’ I asked the man who had charge of the four priests.
‘Not here. They’ll be sent to London.’
I knew what that meant: they were to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The guard told me that several Papist priests were already dead in the assault. ‘They had better fortune than these,’ he added, and I thought there was pity in him. He went on, ‘There’s every degree of prisoner. Did you see the old rat? Naked under the blanket?’
I nodded, remembering the frail legs I had seen earlier.
‘Inigo Jones,’ said the guard, but I could not tell who Inigo Jones might be.
Ferris waved to me across a group of men, beckoning me over.
‘Look here,’ he said without greeting. He knelt and raised the head of an enemy officer who had been shot in the chest and whose strange, comical face looked to be laughing. The eyes, bold and mocking, outstared anything men could do to him. Ferris thumbed them shut.
‘They call him Major Robinson,’ he said. ‘I knew him as Robbins the actor.’
‘You knew him?’
‘I saw him once on the stage.’ My friend lowered Robbins’s head onto the wet stones. ‘They say Colonel Harrison shot him.’
‘I have never seen a play,’ I said.
‘Do you know what he said as he did it? Cursed be he that does the Lord’s work negligently. You and he are of a mind.’
‘If I was ever of his mind, Ferris, I am not so now.’
My friend raised exhausted eyes to mine.
‘I have killed but few,’ I said, ‘and one of them, I think you would be glad of.’
‘If it was you or him, then yes. I’d not let a man put a sword through me neither.’
I wondered should I tell him just then about Nathan, but decided to wait, for had the boy been dispatched by another, there would be no proof. We regarded one another in silence. From behind him came the strange sound of prisoners muttering to themselves in Latin.
Ferris said, ‘Forgive me. You are not Harrison.’
‘Tell me,’ I answered before I could stop myself, ‘I beg of you. What has Fat Tommy—’
A whoop went up from the men: a gentleman, in a richly embroidered shirt but nothing else, was dragged from the house and was brought before Cromwell himself.
‘Paulet,’ said Ferris. We strained closer to see and hear. The man was shaking so that only his captors kept him from falling, but he tried to stare down every soldier there present. Hugh Peter, newly arrived from London and standing at Cromwell’s side, asked if the Marquess did not now think his cause must be hopeless? And the other, holding himself more upright now he was come through the first shock of that crowd, but still trembling in his linen, answered that had the King no
more ground in England than Basing-House, he would venture it as he had done and maintain it to the uttermost. I thought he looked a very hardnecked old sinner. Orders were given to take him to London, to the Tower, and to keep his sons away from him so that they might be raised in a pure religion.
‘He was in the bread-oven telling his beads!’ shouted one of the soldiers who had brought him out. There was a general laugh as the Romanist was marched away.
‘They still put faith in their idols, even when it’s all up,’ said a man in front of us.
I heard Ferris mutter, ‘Would you have him utterly comfortless?’ so I asked him what comfort there could be in false religion.
He answered me impatiently, ‘That’s the very question he’d fain put to us.’
I soon came to understand my error in smashing the windows, for we had fought for more than just prisoners. There were garrison supplies, and treasures fit for a Solomon, which this reprobate had bought in France, Italy and other corrupt places, and hoarded here where thieves break in and moth and rust do spoil.
The plunder began even before the assault was over, and once the prisoners were secured the entire army gave themselves up to it. Men ran through the rooms snatching up any gold or jewels they could lay hand on, stripping off their filthy linen and putting on good clean stuff found in the chests; many a friend fell out with his friend over a bag of money not shared or later stolen while he slept off the wine filched from the cellars. Costly perfumes were poured over lousy shirts; in the stores and kitchens men crammed their sacks and boots with dried fruit, cheeses, anything within snatching distance that no other fellow had got to first.
We had been ordered not to wantonly spoil anything, for it would be sold to pay and feed us, but where food and gold were concerned the men preferred helping themselves, as being the surer way. Even Ferris grabbed what he could, and I saw him lay hand on a purse and two shirts, one of which he straightway gave to me. In my sack I had three bottles of wine, a necklace set with rubies which I had found thrust under a pillow, and two fine silver candlesticks. All this was picked up in the chambers and apartments, after which we made our way to the barn and brought away as much food and drink as we could carry. On the way we passed some of the hotter sort slashing at Romanist pictures or statues, which were to be broken and not sold, but most soldiers were starved for comfort rather than set on destruction, and their most sacred mission was to fill their bellies.
We found rows of sweet wax candles, like ghostly rushes, in the idolaters’ chapel and took them to one of the chambers where there was a fire. To the troops it was morning, noon and night rolled into one. Our candles once lit, we sat in a blaze of light, other men soon joining us with provisions of their own. There was a deal of victual captured from the great barn and we had the wine, some hams, cheeses, salt beef, sausages and pies in the room with us. Someone was cooking eggs in a helmet over the fire. All were merry: each had a sack stuffed with plunder and a bellyful of drink.
Russ was nowhere to be seen. No more was Nathan, and I wondered if I had spared him only to afford another the pleasure of the kill.
‘Have you seen any of – the rest?’ I asked, not liking to say ‘our friends’ lest he challenge the words.
‘None.’ Ferris was flushed. He threw back his head and swilled the wine, eyes shining. ‘Here, give me your knife.’ The clumsy way in which he cut the ham put me in mind of Mervyn Roche. We gorged the meat without bread, washing it down with wine. Ferris pulled a bolster from the bed, where men were already asleep before midday, and laid it on the floor so that we could sprawl there in comfort.
There was singing, of the bawdiest kind. Someone had set to music a filthy thing I had never heard before:
An Elder’s maid near Temple Bar
Ah what a Queen was she
Did take an ugly mastiff cur
Where Christians used to be…
Not even coarse-minded Peter at Beaurepair would have sung that. Ferris seemed hardly to notice it, by which I saw how far gone he was in weariness and drink.
‘We are in for trouble if an officer hears,’ I said to him under cover of the final verses which the men roared out fit to split the ceiling. ‘ “An Elder’s maid”, that is not only lewd but against our own side, surely!’
‘Picked up from the Cavaliers,’ he murmured. ‘This is not a time for psalms. Cromwell has turned the place over to pillage. That means drink, and drink brings all the rest.’
‘Why does he allow it? Because Paulet was a Papist?’
‘And put us to the trouble of a storm. Besides, the soldiers are owed this for Winchester, for good conduct.’
‘Men must have something.’
He nodded. ‘The women of the house have cause to thank Cromwell. He hangs any that rapes.’
I blushed at that word, and even more when he said, ‘I will say one thing for you, Rupert: concerning pillage you are innocence itself.’
The wine spoke up before I could stop it: ‘Is there nothing else you can say for me?’
Such pleading was in the words that his look softened at once. ‘Much. You have strength in you for anything.’ Then his face hardened again; he frowned. ‘But you are altogether too fierce.’
I had known it. His mind was poisoned. ‘What has Tommy told you?’
‘Tommy? Nothing.’
‘I beg of you, Ferris, don’t lie to me! I know he—’
Ferris held up his hand to interrupt. ‘When have you seen me sit and blacken another’s name?’
‘But they tell you things?’
‘You should rather ask do I give ear to them. Our quarrels, Rupert, are between us two.’
‘You gave ear to Nathan.’
‘That was my quarrel. I had already begged—’ He broke off and I saw that he was backing away from a dispute with me. ‘Nathan is a boy, tender, gently raised. He should be home with his mother and sisters.’
‘We talked of this before,’ I said.
‘Let us try it again. You are a man, why crush him in your fist?’
‘He comes between me and you. I have no other friend.’
Though I waited for him to say, ‘You must make yourself friends,’ he took another pull on the wine, then handed over the bottle saying, ‘Give me some cheese.’
I watched him eat. The room was hot with the fire, with men’s bodies and with flaring candles; there was a shine on his brow and the sides of his nose. I ached to tell him how I could have made my teeth meet in Nathan, but had saved him instead.
‘I could gladly drink myself to death,’ Ferris said, closing his eyes.
I started. ‘Is this a time to be sad?’
‘O yes.’ His laugh was harsh.
‘But you are come through the siege,’ I said, ‘and in one piece.’
‘I were better cut in two.’
‘Are you afraid for Nathan?’
‘More afraid than you know.’ He opened his eyes and turned them on me. ‘He may be safe and well. Let us not kill him yet.’
‘With all my heart.’ I offered him the wine again; he drank off the rest of the bottle and asked me to fetch another. There was one opened and left untouched by the fireside, and I gave it him. None protested. Though the odd man whispered or swore here and there, the roaring stage was past. Several had been sick, their heads hanging out of the chamber window. Not all of them were got so far, and the unlucky ones had been roundly cursed by their mates. A fug of wine and vomit hung on the air as the fire burnt down and the revellers sank into sleep.
When I ceased staring round the room I saw Ferris looking at me very hard.
‘You have watched in the field every day,’ he said.
Unsure what to answer, I held my tongue.
‘Nat told me,’ he added.
‘Nathan?’ Now I suspected Ferris of trying to reconcile us through lies. ‘He told you of my doings? Why?’
‘I asked him.’
We regarded one another. A silence grew between us, and did not frighten me; I
looked him in the eyes longer than I had ever done with any man, save Izzy.
‘What a thing is wine,’ he murmured.
The next minute there was a shout; two of the men, grown quarrelsome, were begun pushing at one another, jabbing their sleeping neighbours into the bargain. Since they would not lie quiet, those of us who could still stand pushed them out into the corridor and turned the key on their threats and oaths.
When we lay down again Ferris arranged himself for sleep, injured cheek upwards. I at first settled beside him, but my hips, which had pained me so sorely till now, were no better for the warmth, so I went to the bed and found one side of it empty. It seemed that after months of longing for a mattress, most of the men had been too drunk to get onto it. Still wearing my boots, I stretched out next to a man called Bax sprawled on the other side, and was asleep before I could strip or get under the covers. Some time later I woke to find Ferris crept in between me and Bax.
Around noon our rest was broken up by a hammering at the door: hucksters and merchants come for anything worth having. Basing was to be flayed, then picked to the bones. What we could not eat from the garrison was sold off to the local folk; the pictures, together with missals, rosaries and wicked sculptures, were packed upon carts for public burning, to show our contempt for a religion that was half superstition and half Mammon. Whatever the soldiers could not pocket up fell prey to dealers: carpets, hangings, plate, linen, beds and other furniture, clothing, slipware and glass. There was enough to furnish two palaces, and crows aplenty come to fat themselves on the carcass. The very flesh of the building was devoured, for Cromwell bade the country people help themselves to brick and stone. Paulet having razed their own homes, this was a thing they were mighty willing to do.