‘More than likely. And I have not the slightest doubt that I shall agree with you about the thatch . . . So be it then; I’ll come and act as reinforcement for the routing of Diggory in the morning, but you will probably have to give me an arm.’
‘Thank you, sir. That is good of you.’ Simon hesitated, looking down at him. ‘It’s really better?’
‘It is,’ said John Carey. ‘Go and look to your disreputable friend.’
Simon was satisfied. He was the one person in the world whom his father honoured with the absolute truth on such occasions, and he knew it.
Podbury had begun on his third pasty and was deep in a great leather-jack of cider. Joram was sitting bolt upright in a corner, with his back turned on the interloper and disapproval in every line of him from his feathery topknot to the last long hair at the end of his tail; but Jillot, a shameless beggar, sat at Podbury’s feet, quivering nose upraised and mournful eyes fixed on what remained of the pasty.
‘That,’ drawled Amias from the window seat, ‘makes two of them. Different methods, but—’ He broke off to watch a piece of pasty disappear down Jillot’s throat, ‘’zackly the same result.’
‘Nay, now, young sir, you’d not grudge a trifle to a man as has fought for his country?’ said Podbury, pained, but with his mouth full.
Amias’s only reply was a sniff.
‘Here you are,’ said Simon, giving the money into the ready hand which came out for it. ‘It’s maybe less than you hoped for, but ’tis all I’ve got.’
Podbury examined the coins, nodded, spat regretfully and put them in his pouch. ‘Ah well, it might be worse. No need to fret yourself about it.’
‘I wasn’t,’ said Simon, with the ghost of a grin.
Amias lounged up from the seat, stretching. ‘It’s too fine an evening to waste indoors. Come on, Simon, let’s go and be lazy in the high orchard until supper-time.’
‘Just coming.’ Simon turned back for an instant to the old scout. ‘Good luck and fair winds, Podbury. I hope you’ll never be hanged.’
‘Thank ’ee, sir; much obleeged, I’m sure!’ said Podbury, beaming.
They left him still eating, with Jillot cuddled on his feet, the centre of a half-admiring, half-disapproving group made up of Phoebe and the maids. Joram came with them. A few minutes later, with the dog between them, they were sprawling at their ease in the high orchard, where the new young cider trees, planted to replace those cut down by Grenville’s troopers, were putting out the first hesitant blossom of their lives.
‘I do not,’ said Amias, peering down between the young trees at the quiet huddle of house and outbuildings below, ‘no, I do not find myself drawn to your old comrade.’
Simon grunted, his nose in the long cool orchard grass. ‘Anyhow, he told me what I’ve wanted to know for four years.’
‘About the magazine going up, you mean, and that fellow Watts?’
‘M’m.’
Amias screwed round. ‘Why were you so interested in him—the other man? Who was he?’
‘My old Corporal,’ Simon said.
‘Your—but what on earth was he doing there? What was Podbury doing there, for that matter? Look here, what is all this about?’
Simon did not answer at once, then, very quietly, his eyes on the shadow of a blossoming apple spray among the grass, he told Amias the whole story. It was not breaking faith with Zeal to tell Amias, as it would have been to send in that report to the Army authorities. He was very sure of that.
‘Poor devil,’ said Amias softly, when the story was done. ‘Poor crazy valiant devil.’
‘He was the best Corporal a man ever had,’ Simon said.
Neither of them spoke again until, a little later, they caught the glint of a red seaman’s bonnet jigging down the wagon-way.
‘There goes friend Podbury,’ Amias said. ‘Odd, to think he was the spy we ransacked Lovacott for, and you working with him all the while. I’m glad I didn’t know that—about you, I mean—at the time.’ He turned on his elbow to look at Simon as the full truth dawned on him. ‘If I had known, I should have had to take you. You’d probably have been hanged,’ he said deliberately, and then he asked, ‘Simon, if it had been like that, would you have hated me?’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘It would have been just the fortune of war. I should have known that it was the only thing you could do.’
The sudden tenseness went out of Amias. ‘Anyhow, I didn’t know; and I hope Podbury gets a ship to suit him—no work and lots of loot.’ They watched the speck of scarlet out of sight, before he spoke again; ‘By the way, I fell in with Pentecost Fiddler yesterday. He was talking about going back to sea.’
‘Pentecost going back to sea—after all these years? He can’t have meant it.’
‘He did, though. He said that now dancing is counted sinful, there’s no place for a fiddler ashore, but he reckoned no Parliament could stop sailormen needing a fiddler aboard ship, so he was off where he was wanted, and I don’t blame him. England’s a dreary place, under the Commonwealth.’
‘Yes, but look here,’ Simon began, and broke off to get his argument straight in his own mind. ‘You’re a surgeon, leastwise you will be soon. You know how you deal with a man who’s sick; you knock off all the things he likes doing, and make him eat plain food, and bleed him and give him black draughts; and maybe he doesn’t like you while the treatment lasts. But he’s all the better for it afterwards.’
‘Aye, but is there going to be an “afterwards”?’ Amias countered.
‘Surely. This isn’t—natural, somehow, not for England. One day we shall have a King again.’
‘So even you admit that the Commonwealth isn’t all honey?’
‘Maybe,’ Simon said. ‘There are a lot of good things about it, though. More justice, for one thing, than ever there was under King Charles, and we’re getting back our old place among the nations, the place that men like Sir Walter Raleigh won for us, and our last two Kings threw away.’ It was odd, he thought suddenly, when they were boys, and the trouble between King and Parliament yet a-brewing, they had not been able to talk about it to each other; the subject had been like a sore place that is better not poked at. But now they no longer had to avoid it, they could argue and disagree if they wanted to, and it did not matter.
‘Well, I still don’t think much of your brave new England without a King,’ Amias was saying, ‘even if we do have another King, one day. What about the old one?’
‘It wasn’t meant to be like that,’ Simon said quickly. ‘We went to war to make the King see reason, to make him understand that ordinary folk must be free to worship in their own way, and—and things like that; never to get rid of him. Something went wrong at the end.’
‘Something went wrong, sure enough, and the King died for it.’ Amias was plucking up grass stems with a sharp snapping sound. ‘You know, I’m glad your General Fairfax stood out against the rest, and wouldn’t sign the King’s death-warrant.’
‘He’s the sort of man who’d go to the stake for what he thought was right.’
‘And so he’s sitting in his native Yorkshire mud, I suppose, ruling a few cottages, and a trout stream while the men who signed rule England.’
Simon laughed. ‘You sound as indignant as though he had been your commander, not mine.’
‘I liked your General Fairfax,’ Amias said thoughtfully. ‘That night when you and I were brought up before him . . . I’d sooner serve under him than any man I’ve ever come across—except Lord Hopton.’ Abruptly, he flopped flat on his stomach, pillowing his head comfortably on his arms, and no more was heard for a while.
Joram’s soft ears pricked, and he opened one eye as two girls came out through the garden close into the near corner of the paddock, where the old mare Rizpah was grazing with a foal beside her. Amias raised his head to watch them coaxing the little bright-eyed, feather-tailed creature, while its mother looked anxiously on. ‘I’ll wager that’s the last of the long-biding apples,’ he said.
>
‘Candy sugar,’ Simon said, with the glimmer of a smile. ‘They keep the long-biders for Scarlet.’
Amias was watching the smaller of the two, who had turned, the foal’s muzzle in the hollow of her hand, to look up at the other with an air of rather shy triumph. ‘You know, I’d never have believed that whey-faced little oddity I used to catch sight of at Okeham Paine could have grown into such a happy maid.’
‘Mistress Killigrew doesn’t approve of happiness, so she never had much chance until she came to us,’ Simon said.
‘How did you win her mother over into letting her come visiting up here?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Mother and Mistress Killigrew had been writing to each other for years about still-room management, and Mouse made a splendid impression when she visited them last year. Mouse can always be relied on to rise to an occasion; but you know that. And then Father and I both having fought for Parliament was a help, of course; and I think she felt that Father having lost a leg in the Cause somehow vouched for the principles of the family as a whole, though I can’t myself quite follow that line of reasoning.’
‘You aren’t Mistress Killigrew,’ said Amias. ‘How was he getting on when you went upstairs just now?’
‘Father? On the mend again. He says he’ll be all right by the morning, and he always seems to know.’
Amias nodded. ‘You’ll be able to enlist his aid in this desperate business of the linhay roof, then.’
‘I’ve already enlisted it. I have his solemn promise to come and help me rout Diggory in the morning,’ said Simon, his fingers very gentle in the soft hollows behind Joram’s fluttering ecstatic ears. ‘Game as a pebble, the Old Man,’ he added, in a tone of proud and affectionate disrespect.
The two girls had gone in again; the light was fading, and away over the western hills the sky was flushing pink behind quiet cloud-bars that were as faintly coloured as a dove’s breast.
‘Going to be another fine day tomorrow for the thatchers,’ Simon said contentedly, after a long pause.
‘I hate to dash your hopes, but it’s going to rain.’
‘You’re mazed! Look at that pink sky!’
‘I am looking. I don’t care if it’s scarlet with green spots; my shoulder aches, and that means a change of weather, as sure as unicorns.’
‘I can’t compete. My head doesn’t act as a weather-vane,’ Simon said, and laughed. ‘What a walking hospital we are! By the way, how is the shoulder?’
‘Pretty good, on the whole. I’ve had to learn to use a sword left-handed; but what’s the odds? They do say a left-handed swordsman is the most deadly, anyway.’ Abruptly he turned on Simon with one of his sudden bursts of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve brought a new rapier back with me from London; no, of course I couldn’t afford it, I sold most of my clothes; but wait till you see it! A French blade, the very latest thing; triangular, you see, supple as a withy wand and deadly as an asp. You fight with the point only. Oh, but I’ll show you when we get a chance.’
‘And what do you suppose a respectable country leach wants with a blade like that?’ Simon demanded lazily.
‘Even a country leach might run into adventure.’ Amias’s eyes had begun to dance. ‘My dear Simon, don’t be so lacking in ideas. “Amias Hannaford, the Duelling Doctor.” You take exception to the cock of a man’s eyebrow, or the way he ties his collar-strings, call him out, drill him through the brisket, and then plug the hole. It might be very good for trade.’
‘Zany!’ said Simon, and waited for more.
But instead they heard Mouse calling from the wicket gate. ‘Simon! Amias! where are you? It’s almost supper time.’
Amias cupped his hands and called back, ‘Up here in the cider orchard,’ and an instant later, as the two girls came out through the gate, rose to his feet and went strolling down to meet them. Simon hung back a few minutes, for the pleasure of seeing them coming up between the blossoming fruit trees; Mouse with her dark skirts caught up to show the gay murrey-striped petticoat beneath, Susanna with a knot of periwinkle tucked into the wide square collar of her grey puritan gown. Then he strode down after Amias, and the four of them came together just where the young apple trees of the high orchard met the ancient leaning ones of the lower slopes.
Susanna went at once to Simon, and Mouse to Amias, for that had become the established order. But Mouse’s first words were for her brother, and they were hotly indignant. ‘Simon, I don’t think it was at all nice of you to tell that poor old soldier that you couldn’t afford to give him anything but a mutton pasty, especially when he was an old comrade of yours! We shouldn’t have known anything about it, Susanna and I, if we hadn’t chanced to come out from the still-room just as he was leaving.’
‘And he told you I wouldn’t give him anything but a mutton pasty?’
‘Oh, he wasn’t complaining, you know, but I think he was a little hurt. Susanna and I gave him sixpence each, which was all we had, and he was touchingly grateful!’
‘I’m sure he was,’ said Simon.
But Amias subsided into the low branches of a quince tree, with a crow of laughter.
Mouse turned on him with raised brows. ‘It appears that we amuse you,’ she said.
‘No, oh no.’ Amias hiccoughed. ‘Only—I gave him a crown, and Simon bestowed his life’s savings on him. A deserving object. Oh, bless my soul.’
‘Well!’ began Mouse indignantly; and then she too dissolved into laughter, and Simon joined in, until, catching sight of Susanna’s pointed face, grave and puzzled and a little shocked, he managed to stop himself.
‘I’m sorry about your sixpence, Susanna,’ he said.
‘Oh, I don’t mind about the sixpence,’ Susanna told him. ‘But—but would you say we had been encouraging that man in the Path of Wickedness?’
‘Bless you, Podbury don’t need no encouraging,’ Amias cut in, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes, as he disentangled himself from the quince tree.
‘I wouldn’t say any such thing,’ Simon said. ‘And I’m sure he’ll find your sixpence very useful.’ He felt the corners of his mouth twitching, and tried desperately to straighten them, lest he should hurt Susanna’s feelings.
She looked at him gravely. ‘I don’t always quite understand about things being funny,’ she said, rather wistfully. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I am trying to learn.’
Simon reached out and touched her hand. ‘Sukey, I’m rather a dull sort of fellow. I like you as you are,’ he said, and then felt that he had not chosen his words very well.
But Susanna found nothing amiss. She did not speak. She simply went on looking at Simon.
There was some magic about the lower orchard that evening, that seemed to hold them there, though it was really time to go in to supper. Dusk was creeping through the long grass, but it had not yet risen high enough to dim the delicate radiance of the blossom starring the old knotted branches of pear and apple, quince and damson and cheery trees, and the faint cool fragrance of the apple bloom was all about them, seeming to float on the quiet twilight air. Then a little wind came soughing up the valley, bringing the scent of rabbits to flutter Joram’s nose, and scattering a flurry of petals like an elfin snow-storm on to the grass.
‘Supper,’ said Mouse sensibly, and held out a hand to Susanna, as they turned back towards the wicket gate, with Joram dodging about in front of them. Simon and Amias dropped behind, each with a hand on the other’s shoulder, as they strolled through into the garden close.
It was almost a year since Simon had returned from his soldiering, but this evening, as he entered his mother’s garden, he had all at once a vivid sense of homecoming. He remembered how, in those weeks before the battle of Torrington, he had felt that he did not belong here, but was only a passage-hawk and had not yet earned his right to come home. Now, quite suddenly, it was as though Lovacott had opened its innermost door to him; the door of some secret sanctuary that he had not known existed before, swept and garnished, with a fire burning in the hearth, t
o welcome him home.
‘Look,’ Mouse called back over her shoulder, ‘the jonquils mother got from Spalding are flowering beautifully this spring!’
The jonquils grew close under the parlour window, and inside the candles had been lit already, and the room was as golden as the jonquil petals. Glancing in, as they passed, Simon saw Balan hanging in its familiar place above the mantel; but now, the single blade, in its worn sheath that had been made for two, did not look lonely, any more.
‘I think,’ Amias was saying, beside him, ‘that next time I come, I shall bring Balin back. I shan’t be using it again; it’s too long and heavy for the new style of sword-play, and it seems a shame to break up a case of rapiers. It will still be mine, of course, but we’ll house it in its old place, along with your Balan; they belong together, after all.’
I should like to thank the people—especially Miss Margaret Bourdillon and Colonel Crookenden, CBE, DSO—who helped me to find out the many things I needed to know for the making of this book.
About the Author
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in 1920 in West Clanden, Surrey.
With over 40 books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally considered one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Her first novel, The Queen Elizabeth Story was published in 1950. In 1959 her book The Lantern Bearers won the Carnegie Medal. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and in 1978 her book, Song for a Dark Queen was commended for the Other Award.
In 1975, Rosemary was awarded the OBE for services to Children’s Literature and the CBE in 1992. Unfortunately Rosemary passed away in July 1992 and will be much missed by her many fans.
Also by Rosemary Sutcliff
Beowulf: Dragonslayer
The Armourer’s House
The Capricorn Braclet
The High Deeds of Finn MacCool
The Hound of Ulster
The Sword and the Circle
The Light Beyond the Forest