“Monmouth’s army is on the move,” she said. “It is now three thousand strong. The Devon militia to the west and the Somersetshire militia to the east are converging on Axminster to prevent their advance.”
I dropped my face into little Mary’s curly red hair. If it were not for her and her brother, I would have left for Axminster right then. I was sure this waiting was far worse than being at the vanguard of any fighting, no matter how brutal. But still we must wait, knowing now that a confrontation between the two armies was imminent. Still we must wait, dreading the worst.
Florence had promised she would come back as soon as she had further news, but when nearly a week had crawled by, I felt so certain something must have happened, I could wait no longer. I set out to ride to Ashton Court. A pale sun was struggling to break through the mist and as I rode through the deer park, a stag with enormous antlers appeared from out of nowhere and crossed the path in front of me, like a strange, majestic spirit.
I did not reach the mansion, but met Florence riding toward me, her cloak draped elegantly over her horse’s hindquarters. As she reined in and we faced each other on our mounts, I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.
“How did you know?” she said. “I was on my way to tell you.”
I clutched the pommel of the saddle to stop myself from slipping off.
“Oh Eleanor, dear, do not be alarmed.” With a jingle of the bridle Florence leaned across to rest her hand on mine. “It is with relief that I cry, and more than a little trepidation, but not for sorrow.”
The herd of red deer over toward the ancient oak woods stopped watching us and resumed their grazing. “It is over, so quickly? Monmouth is defeated?”
“No,” she said, tightening the reins to hold her horse steady. “He is not. But it is over for our men. We have just had it from the messenger. Monmouth’s rebels sent cannon and musketeers to line the routes of entry into Axminster, and in the face of such determination the militia were forced to retreat. The army marched on to Chard. The militia met them again there but were routed, abandoning their weapons and uniforms by the roadside.” She laughed even as she cried. “It was a shamefully disorderly and humiliating defeat, and my brother will be so displeased. It means the way is left open to Taunton and then for Monmouth to try for a tilt at Bristol, but at least our men can come home to us and leave it to the royal dragoons.”
I could not share her relief. “But Florence, where are the dragoons?”
“They are on their way. The King’s commander in chief also, to inspect the city defenses.”
I turned to the left, where the mist was clearing now, revealing spectacular views across the city. “And if they do not hold? If Bristol should be taken?”
Bristol was too close. Much too close.
I DID NOT HEAR the hooves of Richard’s horse clatter into the yard, though I had been listening out for the sound all day, so quietly did he come back to me. He walked into the great hall as the light was failing, his riding boots caked in mud, his cloak splattered with it. Even the glinting sword buckled at his side was tarnished. There were several days’ growth of dark stubble on his face, his skin was gray with weariness and his eyes looked bruised. The instant I saw him, I checked myself from running to greet him and throwing myself into his arms, from giving him the welcome I could see he did not want, did not believe he deserved. I went and took his hand and kissed it. “My love, thank God that you are safe.”
“They have proclaimed the Duke of Monmouth king,” he said emptily, as if it mattered to him very much. “He received a rapturous welcome in Taunton and the declaration was made in the presence of a corporation brought by sword point.”
“Surely they cannot do that?”
“They just did. They have hailed him the new King James.”
I saw that he found defeat almost impossible to accept. He had wanted to return to me with tales of valor, to come out on the winning side this time. And though he would never have admitted it, I knew he was afraid of what might happen if he did not.
“The rebel infantry are only five miles from Bristol,” he said. “The Duke of Beaufort has said he would see the city burned, would burn it himself rather than let it fall to traitors. A vessel in the quay, a merchantman, has already taken fire. There is nothing we can do to stop them.”
“The King’s forces will stop them. They will.” I led him to the settle, pressed him to sit. Seeing that his boots were wet, I knelt by his feet and pulled them off. I went to the buffet and poured a cup of wine for him, brought the flagon over and set it on the table by the fire. He took the cup in shaking hands and drank it dry.
I knelt by him again, rested my arm on his leg and reached up to stroke his hair. “Richard, please don’t take this so hard. You did your best. You had charge of a band of ill-trained and inexperienced part-time troops, not a proper fighting unit at all.” I did not add that matters were made so much worse because they were led by gentlemen officers with no military experience. “There is much sympathy for the rebels. It is no wonder there were desertions.”
He picked up the flagon and tried to pour it, spilled wine on himself and the floor. I put my hand over his to steady it, poured for him.
“Tell me this, Nell,” he said. “Can you honestly say that in your heart you were not hoping for this, that some of your loyalty at least does not lie with the rebels? That, at the last, your Puritan blood does not run thicker than your love for me?”
“How can you ask . . . ?”
“Your loyalty to Tickenham’s men, then? To Bess’s Ned and Thomas.”
“I cannot help hoping they will come home safe, for her sake,” I said after a moment. “Is that so very wrong of me?”
BESS HAD GIVEN UP on her reading and writing lessons and forgotten most of what I had taught her, but not before she had passed on the rudiments to Ned, and to Thomas, apparently. Bess said her brother had picked it up quicker than she could teach him, worked most of it out for himself. She came to me now with a letter from Ned, which he had sent with a carrier, and which she wanted me to read for her.
I hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Just because Mr. Glanville was with the militia does not make you one of them, now does it? You are your father’s daughter, and you know as well as I do that he would have been marching at Monmouth’s shoulder.”
I gave her a look, unfolded the letter and read aloud the message from her husband. “We have met with the King’s Life Guards, bonny Bess, a hundred of them, at Keynsham. There have been injuries but do not fear, Tom and I have not taken even a scratch, such able cavalrymen we have become, but the troops of the rebel horse are scattered and Monmouth has been forced to give up his designs on Bristol. I cannot say where we are to march to now but it will not be in your direction, praise God. I pray that we are not overtaken by the King’s troops and I pray that we have good weather.
“We are all so ill-shod and exhausted from toiling through deep mud under heavy rain, not that I am not well used to mud and to rain, nor mind the toil. Tom sends his wishes and I send you all my love and kisses, bonny Bessie. I hope Sam is tending the horses well for me. Keep him safe. Pray for us all.”
Richard had come silently into the hall; he wore the expression of a man who has caught his wife in the act of cuckolding him. I refused to let him make me feel guilty for having read Ned’s letter to Bess. I refolded it, unhurried, and handed it back to her.
Richard turned and walked away toward the parlor.
“It is people I care about, not causes,” I said, going after him and reaching for his arm. “Can you not understand that?”
He poured himself some wine. “It is which people you care about the most that I don’t quite understand.”
“I care about you,” I said almost despairingly. Why could he not believe that? Why was he so unsure of my love for him? Why, when I loved him so very much, was it not enough? What did he need from me that he did not already have?
Damn this rebellio
n, I thought. Damn Monmouth. Damn the King.
I removed the wineglass from his hand, moved closer to him, so our bodies were touching. I slid my hand down between them, felt his desire.
“You want me?” I asked him.
“I always want you.”
“Come with me, then,” I said softly. “And let me show you just how much I care about you.”
It was enough to bring a smile back to his beautiful mouth. “There is an offer I’ll not refuse.”
WE LEARNED FROM JOHN SMYTHE that Monmouth’s musketeers and scythe men had finally met with a full frontal attack by the royal army of four thousand men in the hilly country just outside Philipsnorton. It was a fierce bombardment that lasted for six hours and in which over a hundred perished. Fatal injuries had included skulls being cleaved in half, scattering blood and brain, guts torn out with bayonets, and cannon fire ripping clean through a man’s body from front to back.
But Ned had written to Bess again from Bridgewater to assure her that he and Thomas were unharmed. They had spent a miserable night on the wet moors en route from Wells, where they’d quartered in the cathedral and taken lead from the roof to make bullets while they awaited a promised horde of thousands of club men, armed with flails and bludgeons. These reinforcements had, in the end, numbered less than two hundred.
“It does not look good for them now, does it?” Bess said, clutching Ned’s letter to her.
It looked far worse when John Smythe came to report that the reprisals had already begun, that royal dragoons and horse guards had been ransacking rebel properties and had begun hanging prisoners at Pensford. When we learned that the royal army had set up an encampment outside Westonzoyland on Sedgemoor, with all roads and bridges secured, I sent Bess home to wait with Sam and her mother.
RICHARD RODE INTO BRISTOL FOR NEWS. The first account to be had of the battle was fragmentary and scant. But because the end came on Sedgemoor, a land so like Tickenham land, because the strategic points were rhynes and bridges and flat, muddy, mist-shrouded water meadows, I could picture it all too clearly.
Monmouth had moved his troops out of Bridgewater late in the evening of the fifth of July. The plan had been for the rebel infantry to launch a surprise attack at night, destroying the King’s forces. In the summer fog they had marched in a silent column round Chedzoy, to form in line and advance across the deep Bussex Rhyne toward the red tents of the royal encampment. But the King’s forces were alerted by a stray musket shot and set up a volley of cannon fire that went on across the rhyne all through the night.
The rebels didn’t stand a chance. The horse guards came over the Lower Plungeon River with their sabers and attacked Monmouth’s men to the right, and the Oxford Blues came over the Upper Plungeon on Monmouth’s left flank. By dawn the rebel army was beginning to crumble. They were pursued across the moor and cut down by horsemen on all sides, slaughtered in cornfields and ditches. It was more massacre than battle. Over a thousand were dead and three hundred taken prisoner. Monmouth himself was found asleep in a drain, dressed in the clothes of a peasant. Only the star of the Order of the Garter gave away his identity.
There was no way of knowing yet if Ned and Thomas were amongst those wounded or captured, no way of knowing even whether they were alive or dead. We just had to wait until they and the other Tickenham men came home.
Or until they did not.
Bess did not sleep for waiting. She kept a rushlight burning at the window of her little cottage all night to guide Ned and Thomas if they should be making their weary way home, and for much of the time she sat beside the light, keeping watch for them. It was almost a superstition, I think. If she kept the light burning they could not have perished. If she let the light go out, if she turned her back on the window, she was abandoning them, abandoning hope.
She kept up her vigil even when we heard that five hundred rebels, many of them wounded, had been rounded up on Sedgemoor and herded into the parish church at Westonzoyland. She waited even when we knew that many had been hanged outside the church in chains, and when more still were hanged without trial in Bridgewater and Taunton.
She carried on waiting for Ned and Thomas to return even when the local constables were ordered to report on all those who had been absent from home during the time of the rebellion, when she knew that mancatchers were offered five shillings for every rebel they handed over. When neighbor was pitched against neighbor in a way that even we who had been born into civil war would hardly have imagined possible.
Richard found me standing at the chamber window, looking out over the empty moonlit causeway, thinking of Bess doing the same. “If you care about her and this family at all,” he said, coming to stand beside me, “the best you can hope for is that Ned and Thomas Knight, John Hort and the rest of them all died a hero’s death in battle and never return.”
“How can you say that?” I rounded on him. “How can you be so heartless?”
I saw him struggle to control himself. “If they come back here they will endanger the lives of their families, or whoever harbors them under their roof or so much as offers them a crust of bread. You should not need to be reminded that jails all across the West Country are crammed with those suspected of sympathizing with the rebellion, as well as with the men who were known to have been in the infantry. You know as well as I that hundreds are being exhorted to confess, under pretense of pardon, and then being condemned to death without trial.”
“I have known these men all my life. Ned has a son, a wife. Don’t you care . . .”
He took me by my shoulders and pulled me round to face him. “I am not heartless, Nell. Do not say that I am heartless. Just tell me this. What does Bess plan to do if her prayers and best hopes are fulfilled and Ned and Thomas do come home? How does she plan to hide them and keep them from the constables and the mancatchers?”
“I have not asked her.”
He looked deep into my eyes. “Give me your word that if she tries to bring them here, you will not take them in.”
When I did not reply, his grip tightened on my shoulders until it hurt, until I could feel his nails digging into my flesh. “Bailiffs are seizing the property of sympathizers as forfeiture to the crown. I thought you loved this house, this land. Do you want to have it taken from you? Destroyed?”
“Of course not.”
“I do not want to see you reduced to living in want and in fear,” he said quietly. “I do not want to see you hungry and cold and sick and unhappy. I do not want you to die of a broken heart in a filthy charity hospital.”
I took hold of both his hands, held them tight. His face was so careworn that it tore at my heart. “That is not going to happen,” I said. “Do you hear me?”
He looked at me in silence, as if he had not heard me at all. “Your word, Nell. Give it to me.”
I gave one small, imperceptible nod, doubting that I should ever be put to the test. With each day that passed, it seemed less likely that we would be faced with the problem of what to do with Tickenham’s rebels if they should come home.
Autumn
1685
It was nearly five weeks after the battle on Sedgemoor when I was woken in the middle of the night by Bess, standing at the side of the bed with a candle, oblivious to the hot wax that was about to spill all over her hand. “It’s Thomas,” she cried, with quiet urgency. “You have to help me.”
Richard stirred, rolled over onto his stomach. He put out his arm as if to try to find me and his eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake. With a guilty glance at his peaceful sleeping face, I slipped quickly from the warmth of our bed, letting the hangings ripple shut behind me. I grabbed Bess’s arm and pulled her with me out of the chamber, closing the door softly after us.
She was shaking, her face blotched from crying. “He is badly wounded.” She was struggling, in her distress, to keep her voice to a whisper. “He was shot in his side and I think his arm is broken. Ned is . . .” She broke down and sobbed.
I put my arms a
round her heaving shoulders. “Bess, are you sure?”
“Tom was with him,” she rasped. “He saw the bayonet go right through . . . Ned’s chest. He still has the blood all over his shirt.” She made an effort to calm herself. “Tom will die too, if we don’t help him.”
“Where is he?”
“Below stairs. The hall. My father said we should bring Tom here. He said you would know what to do, how to treat the wounds. I’ve told my father to wait outside. To keep a lookout.”
“Good,” I said, with a glance back at the chamber door, wishing a sentry could be posted there too, in case Richard should wake, to keep him from knowing how I was deceiving him.
Bess had propped her brother on the settle, but he was so weak and sick that he had slumped over, his eyes closed and his breathing fitful. His clothes were ragged and filthy. He had grown a thick beard and mustache, and the rest of his face was so ingrained with dirt as to render him almost unrecognizable.
Bess ran to him, crouched down on the floor beside him and stroked his mud-caked hair. She held the candle for me while I moved him as gently as I could to examine the injury.
“Someone has removed the missile and debris and tried to bandage him,” I said. “They must have been too afraid to let him stay.”
The cloths needed changing; they were bloody and stinking and had stuck to his skin. He barely winced as I eased them away, though the pain must have been great. The wound underneath showed no sign of healing, was suppurating, still gaping and ragged and oozing fresh blood and yellow pus. I turned away and covered my mouth, trying not to retch. The pale bone of his rib was almost visible through the mess. He was so thin that the rest of his ribs were scarcely better covered.
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