But for once, Lord Fairfax, perhaps roused to a faint antagonism by this high wind of a man blowing out of a new world that he did not understand, took the hopeful view. He plucked his pipe from between his teeth and laid it on the table, his sad level gaze never leaving the Cavalry Colonel’s face. ‘It is a magnificent plan, supposing that you are right, and the King has such a plan at all; but — would you say that it was working out? Hopton started well enough, but now it seems that his western levies are refusing to cross their own county borders. And in any case, with Plymouth and Dartmouth still held for Parliament and Gloucester covering the Severn Valley, I’m thinking that Lord Hopton dare not press on with this great convergent march on London.’
And Lord Willoughby rallied to the same banner, saying with a little courteous bow of head and shoulders, that took in his host and his host’s silent son across the candle flames, ‘And nor, thanks to your most valiant selves, can My Lord Newcastle be said to be sweeping south at any very great speed.’
Colonel Cromwell swung to and fro a little on his braced arms and outspread hands, towering over the men at the table; the upward light of the candles beating under the strong bones of his face and accentuating the iron moulding of the mouth, the brilliance of the broading, slightly prominent eyes. ‘The Lord has been good to his people, giving us His Mercy, respite under the shadow of His wings... Nevertheless, the fact remains that Charles has a plan of campaign and we have none. Sometimes I think the only man in the two Houses who knows where he is going is Pym, and he’s dying. Na, na, my friends, sooner or later — and if ‘tis later, then it may well be too late — we must have a unified command, at the head of a new kind of Army.’ Abruptly he straightened from the table with a gesture as though to fling the thing off like a cloak. ‘Eh well, but ‘tis not to teach the two Houses their business that we crossed Humber today.’ He turned to Tom Fairfax, who had sat unmoving throughout, his eyes levelled in silence on the other man’s face. ‘So then; it is settled that you bring the Cavalry out tomorrow, and cross with me into Lincolnshire.’
Black Tom bent his black head in agreement. ‘It is. I feel d-damnable about getting out at this juncture, but ...’ He left the sentence unfinished, pushed back his chair and rose. The thing was over, no point in talking any more.
Anne heard other chairs scrape overhead, other footsteps across the floor. She heard the rattle of the door latch and Thomas’s voice as he called up his galloper with a string of orders. Then the withdrawing-room door opened, and the four men came in. Anne greeted them, then drew away into the background. Thomas followed her, and she seated herself where the shadows crowded, and looked up at him, mutely waiting for him to tell her what it was that he had to tell her. ‘Nan, I am going back with Colonel Cromwell tomorrow, taking our Cavalry with me. Horse are no use in a siege, and the poor brutes are dying every day for lack of food and water. Better to get them out.’
She had thought that it might be that. She had known that if it were that, he would not be taking her with him. For her and Little Moll the trooping days were over, and they were to be left to the more womanly business of being besieged in Hull.
‘I will get your spare shirts packed tonight,’ Anne said, in a voice that felt tight in the back of her throat.
Thomas touched her bare shoulder where it rose from the fine cambric of her collar; then turned back to the group about the fire.
Anne drew towards her the piece of damask table linen she had been mending earlier. But her eyes wandered between every stitch to the group in the firelight. She was hearing the interwoven pattern of their voices without, for the moment, any clear idea of what they said; watching them, or rather watching two of them, for beside Colonel Cromwell and black Tom Fairfax, the two older men seemed somehow dim and without significance, as though they belonged to the past, whereas Thomas and Cromwell were of the red-hot present moment, maybe of the future. It was not simply a matter of generations; Cromwell was nearer in age to the two older men than he was to Black Tom; it was a matter of two worlds. Watching those two as they stood with their shoulders to the mantel and the flare and brightness of the fire behind them, Anne found herself seeing the likenesses and unlikenesses between them as she had seen the likenesses and unlikenesses of Tom and William, on a long ago February night at Nun Appleton. She saw one man, big and ungainly, with a great wen under his lower lip; a man with an iron face, every deep-gouged line and furrow telling of an unconquerable fixity of purpose, only the brilliant, brooding eyes betraying the dreamer behind the man of action. She saw one man, dark and thin and fine drawn, with braced nervous energy to replace the other’s elemental force. Dark silk to the other’s russet homespun, damascened steel to the other’s grey iron; but in both, something of the same fire, the same quality that wins battles and the love of men; the same dreams to die for. Those two together, she thought, those two together might well bend history.
‘A unified command at the head of a new kind of army ...’ Colonel Cromwell was saying, clearly returning to a conversation that had begun elsewhere. ‘And by God’s Grace we will have such an army, for by God’s wrath we shall not win this war without it!’
She found that she had risen; drawn by the man’s fire as a moth to a candle flame, she abandoned the mending, and moved in from the shadows to sit on the cushioned bench beside Lord Fairfax. She was thinking suddenly of the things that William had said of this man and his inspired unorthodoxy, the ugly comparison that he had drawn between the King’s forces and their own. ‘This new kind of army,’ she heard her own voice saying. ‘I have heard of your opinions that old decayed serving men and tapsters cannot stand up against gentlemen’s sons, and that therefore we must have better. What then would you oppose to the King’s young chivalry, Colonel Cromwell?’
He swung round on her, gathering her into the circle clearly with no thought that a woman had joined their councils. And in that she glimpsed something of his power over others; that to him all men, all women, high and low, fool and wise, were living souls.
‘Not a like chivalry,’ he said. ‘That is of the old world; for us, in the very nature of things, it is a new world, and a harsher than the old one.’ Suddenly he raised his head and the rather prominent grey eyes were filled with a light that was not of the fire or the candles. ‘A harsh world, but the wind of God blows through it ... I would — I will take gentlemen’s sons when I can get them; I will take merchants and foundry clerks as lads from the plough; but all the best of their kind, as I choose my heavy fen horses, and all such men as make some conscience of what they do; and instil into them by the love of God and the strength of their righteous purpose such a fighting spirit as shall stand against and outmatch a thousand years of inherited chivalry!’
Something made Anne turn her gaze from the man’s strong moody face, transfigured by the radiance of his vision, to look at Thomas standing beside him. Thomas had been staring into the fire, but in the same instant he raised his eyes with the same light in them as burned in Cromwell’s, and she saw his thin dark face transfigured also. It was as though the big man standing before the fire had called it up again out of his depth to fill his whole being. On all of them, Anne thought, even on the two older men with their puzzled and tired and wary faces, he had had something of that kindling effect — unless it was only the firelight in their eyes. But Thomas had the look of a man with his head up into a wind, and the light of some wide and shining promise reflected in his face like the light of a windy sky.
She found that the talk had become general again, and they were discussing the treaty with the Scots that had occupied Parliament all that summer. The negotiations were finished at last, and the solemn League and Covenant between the two kingdoms had been drawn up so short a time before that news of it had only come in to Hull with Willoughby and Cromwell that evening. ‘And now the next move is to open up communications, make a lane through the Royalist Midlands for Leslie and his Scots to march south when the time comes,’ Colonel Cromwell said, and tu
rned and flung a heavy arm across Tom Fairfax’s shoulders. ‘Like enough that will be for thee and me to do, lad, now that we ride the same road.’
And Black Tom, who had never met Colonel Cromwell until this evening, and who normally had a sensitive man’s dislike of haphazard physical contact, let it lie there, and turned his head to the other man with a long unsmiling look that seemed to share something with him almost as he might have shared it with William.
Later, when the time came to part for the night, the strange Cavalry Colonel came and took both of Anne’s hands in his, saying, ‘Sir Thomas tells me ye’ve a little lass that’s been with him and you throughout this year’s campaigning.’
‘Yes, Little Moll,’ Anne said. ‘Abed and I hope asleep, upstairs. A hardened soldier now; but she has the toothache, poor bairn.’
‘I’ve four lasses at home — eh, but they’re big lasses now,’ Cromwell said. ‘I’ve two lads out with the army. Three lads there were once ... But God’s will be done.’ The shadow of a great grief passed over his face, a grief that had not faded in the years since Robert, the first born, the best beloved, and died at school and all but broken his father’s heart. And then the warmth shone out again. ‘Toothache, you say? Will it have to be drawn? Eh, poor child.’
‘I am afraid so,’ Anne said. ‘It is not good to draw too many of a child’s milk teeth, but she is in so much pain.’
He released her hands and began delving in the breast of his greasy buff coat, and growing very red about it. ‘I shall not see your little lass, I shall be away too early in the morning, and her father with me, but give her this. I’ve carried it since I was a young lad; ‘tis the head of a Roman king, I think. Put it under her pillow for me, for her poor little tooth when ‘tis drawn, and pray God bless her.’
And he put into Anne’s hands a very old coin that gleamed dimly golden in the candlelight. Looking at it closely she made out a head crowned with laurel leaves. ‘You’re a very kind man,’ she said, warmed by the warmth of the small act. ‘An unexpected present is such a joy to Moll, and all things small and strange. It will recompense her for all her sorrow and suffering,’ and she turned from him with a smile to bid goodnight to Lord Willoughby of the well shaved double chins and steady, bothered blue eyes.
When Thomas had taken both their guests to escort them to the chambers that had been made ready for them, Anne and her father-in-law were left alone for a few moments before the hearth where the fire was dying. Lord Fairfax kicked the dulling embers into a last red glow, and again it seemed to Anne that a faint scent of rosemary stole into the room. ‘I think,’ said Lord Fairfax, staring into the sudden flame-flare that reddened all the room, ‘that this evening we have been talking with potentially the greatest man in England.’ And then, after a moment, ‘I’m feeling rather — old, my dear.’
Chapter 18 - The Omen
Little Moll’s toothache abated without the offending tooth having to be drawn, and so the age-eaten golden coin lay half forgotten in Anne’s purse, while the autumn drew on.
The autumn crocuses in the Governor’s garden grew battered in the autumn gales and died into the grass, and the siege of Hull went on. The Royalists built the King’s Fort half a mile from the north walls; Lord Fairfax replied by adding two more ships’ culverin to the Charterhouse battery. Lord Newcastle mounted guns on Humber bank and trained them upon the western walls; Lord Fairfax retorted with a great new fort and half-moon work on the west jetty. On the night of October the third, it being spring tides, volunteers cut the river banks, so that the country round was flooded at high water and the Royalist camp was washed out and Lord Newcastle’s men had nowhere to sit down; and the Hull Garrison viewed the glimmering sheet of water with a deep and unholy sense of satisfaction. That was a move to Parliament. And two days later, Lord Manchester sent them reinforcements, five hundred Foot under Sir John Meldrum, a red-haired, hard-mouthed Scot with a record of foreign mercenary soldiering behind him that would fill a good sized book, if it did not burn out the pages.
Sir John Meldrum came straight from service with Cromwell, and beside five hundred men for Hull, brought Lady Fairfax a letter from her husband.
It was almost entirely concerned with Colonel Cromwell and Colonel Cromwell’s troops — men drawn chiefly from the ranks of the yeoman farmers, freeholders and their sons, the backbone of East Anglia, and all with that fighting quality of which they had spoken (did she remember?) by the Governor’s fire in Hull. And now, Thomas wrote, he and Colonel Cromwell and Lord Willoughby with three thousand Horse between them, were met with Lord Manchester and the East Association Army in the wolds a mile from Bolingbroke — the task before them, to clear Lincolnshire of Royalists, protect it against Lord Newcastle’s raids, and prevent a threatened line of forts from the Trent to the sea. He sent his love to her and to Little Moll, excusing the shortness of his letter by the fact that he had been in the saddle all day and must be in it again in five hours’ time, and so remained, her affectionate husband, Thomas Fairfax. As unsatisfactory as Thomas’s letters always were, and as dear.
A week later, while the Royalist Commander at Bolingbroke was collecting forces from the surrounding garrisons to march against Lord Manchester, My Lord Newcastle launched a great assault on Hull, one division attacking the Charterhouse batteries, while the other, under a young kinsman of the Robert Strickland who had raised Strickland’s Foot for the King on that far off spring day in York, came against the west jetty fort; both, after an hour or so of desperate fighting, to be beaten off with heavy losses. ‘Young Strickland’s dead,’ Lord Fairfax told Anne next day, when he came back to snatch a hunch of bread and cheese. ‘It is always the flower of the young men that go, on either side.’ And he pulled on his boots and went back to the siege of Hull.
Late on the evening of the next day, Anne sat before the fire in her own chamber, trying to read, while her thoughts constantly wandered to the world outside, where preparations were going forward for the desperate full-scale sally against the enemy’s works that had been ordered for the morrow.
She had left the door a crack open because with the wind in this quarter the fire smoked if it was shut. Probably the chimney was choked with old jackdaws’ nests — and presently something made her look towards it; and as she looked, it began to open further. From where she sat, the door hid whoever — whatever was coming in, and there was an odd suggestion of stealth in the slowness with which it moved. Anne sat rigid, telling herself that it was only the wind.
But it was not the wind. Round the edge of door, light as an eddying feather and dignified as a full grown tiger, stalked Dandelion, followed by Moll in her night shift and clutching Bathsheba to her breast, her face streaked with tears.
‘My tooth hurts,’ said Moll, still standing in the doorway. ‘I woke up and it hurts and hurts!’
It occurred to Anne that life was untidy. It did too many things at the same time and got them mixed. It staked the fate of a great seaport town on one desperate throw of the dice, and at the same time it gave a little girl toothache. She slid down on to her heels on the hearth. ‘The same tooth? Come, show me.’ The child came into her arms quietly, with none of the rush, none of the turmoil of grief with which Elizabeth would have come, and her mother felt the little body alive as a bird’s in her clasp, but unyielding, not really sharing its grief. Moll would always be like that, Anne thought; she would share her joys; she would never be able to share her griefs. ‘Show me,’ she said again, trying to turn her face to the candlelight. Then, as Moll clung to her, head butting into the hollow of her mother’s neck, ‘I can’t make it better if you’ll not show me.’
Little Moll manfully swallowed a sob, and opened her mouth, and Anne peered in, feeling with a forefinger. ‘This one?’ Yes, it was the same tooth again; the child’s gum was hot. It would have to be drawn after all, Anne thought, frowning. But the first thing was to stop the pain if that might be. She picked the child up and dumped her in the chair from which she herself had ri
sen, then went to the small lacquered cabinet beside the bed, in which she had stowed the few salves and remedies that she always carried with her. She took out the oil of cloves, and let a few drops fall on to the wisp of sheep’s wool that she had taken also; then with the child’s moaning breaths in her ears, hesitated with her hand on the little dark laudanum bottle which she kept to ease Thomas when he had an attack of the old trouble. Finally she withdrew the stopper and let one drop of the poppy syrup fall on to the clove-drenched wool. She returned to the chair before the fire, where Moll sat motionless and staring straight before her with dark tragic eyes. Anne knelt down once more and took the rigid little figure into the curve of her arm, bade her open her mouth again, and packed the aching tooth with the wisp of charged, wool. ‘Soon stop hurting now,’ she said; and then, whispering into the top of the dark tangled ahead, ‘Would you like to get into mammy’s bed?’
But Moll it seemed distrusted all beds at the moment. She shook her head. ‘No, tooth hurted in bed.’
‘Bad old tooth,’ Anne said. ‘Poor baby, poor Little Moll,’ and gathered her into her lap, rocking her gently to and fro, her cheek pressed against the child’s hot one. No good trying to make her lie down until the pain had eased and she grew sleepy.
‘Tell a story,’ Moll said after a few moments, driving her nose into her mother’s neck.
She had thought that would come; but the high wind and her sense of tomorrow’s desperate venture seemed to have driven ill the stories she had ever known out of her head. ‘I think you are too sleepy for a story,’ she said.
‘Not too sleepy!’ The child’s voice was edged with indignation through its drowsiness. ‘Tell story!’
Anne’s gaze wandering in search of inspiration, found the book that had fallen from her lap. It had fallen open at the title page and the firelight flickered across the thick black lettering.