She had halted to get her breath in the momentary shelter of a peat stack, when she heard someone calling her name behind her. ‘Anne! Nan!’ Away below her she saw a tall figure climbing towards her through the dusk with the long springing stride of a man born and bred to the hills. She stood quite passively against the peat stack, knowing that it was Thomas, and waiting for his coining, and watching him come. She had not been running from Thomas, not even from the still house; it was only that she had wanted the storm.
He came up with her in a little, breathing fast, his black hair blowing wet about his face, the breast and shoulders of his old buff jerkin dark with the rain. She was vaguely aware that he had been carrying a rolled up cloak, that he was wrapping it about her with the rough masterfulness of anxiety. ‘Nan, Nan, what are you thinking of? You are drenched!’
She looked down vaguely at the dark folds of the cloak. ‘I shall take no harm — no more harm than a mountain pony. My father always used to say I was as strong as a mountain pony. I could not breathe in the house, that is all.’
‘Oh Nan, what am I to do? How can I go and leave you like this?’
It was a cry of harsh and urgent anxiety, and Anne looked up quickly into his haggard face. ‘Go? Leave me?’
He took her by the arms below her shoulders, his dark eyes holding hers. ‘Nan, my father is less of a soldier even than I am, for all that he has been set to command the Yorkshire forces, and has a right to all the aid that I can give him. There are clubmen gathering to him in Bradford from all over the dales, and they must be given some kind of training before Glamham comes out from York against the cloth towns. He has sent for me, and I ride for Bradford tomorrow.’
Anne stood looking at him in the windy dusk, and as she looked, an odd thing happened. It seemed to her as though the wind dropped, and in the sudden hush all the wild unrest in her gathered itself into a clear purpose, into the response to a call to action. She felt as though she had just woken from a fevered dream, to find reality again. She was aware of her own wetness, of the weight upon her shoulders of the cloak that Thomas had wrapped about her. These things were for reality. She was aware of a great tenderness for Thomas, who was sickly and had to be careful what he ate, and was riding out to the bleak business of war.
‘You’ll not be leaving me, Thomas,’ she heard her own voice saying. ‘I must ride with you tomorrow.’
She could not clearly read his face for the windy dusk, but his voice when it came after a moment’s blank pause, stuttered a little, gentle and incredulous. ‘My dear, it is not possible!’
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
‘You — Nan you don’t — you cannot know what it is to follow such an army on campaign.’
‘Cannot I?’ She spoke swiftly, urgently, driven by her own desperate need. ‘Have you forgotten how I was bred? Thomas, remember the first time ever you saw me or I you, when I was ten years old. I was sitting in the crutch of an apple tree, and all the orchard was full of the rumble of the guns before Boi le Duc. I haven’t been bred in a sheltered garden like Frances or your sisters, but in war-torn Brabant orchards within sound of the guns. Oh, I know we followed the camp in comfort — something of comfort — my mother and my sisters and I; I know this will be a harsher life. I am prepared for that, and I will be no burden upon you — no more than the other women. Or is this to be the first army that ever went to war without its draggle-tail of camp followers? If so, it will go hard with the wounded, Thomas — Thomas my dear.’
Fairfax’s arms were round her, holding her close in the shelter of the peat stack while the soft rain and the wind swept by. He should have been hurrying her home by this time, but neither thought of that; there was too much at stake, for both of them. ‘Nan, I believe that you would be no burden upon me, but you are not strong enough, not yet — so soon after the bairn.’
She stood straight and unyielding in his arms; yet feeling the strength of him within his slight body as something — an oak tree — to lean her whole weight upon. Her body did not relax to him, but something within her, worn out and bruised and not used to leaning, leaned on him none the less, and found peace in it. She did not know that she had closed her eyes, until she opened them again and saw his poor anxious face close above her in the dusk. ‘I have buried the bairn,’ she said. And then, ‘If you will take me with you, I shall do well enough. I know my own body and my own mind, I swear that I shall do well enough, Thomas.’
He said, ‘What of Little Moll?’
And with a new insight, she saw in him the fear that she had turned against the elder child. ‘Moll must come, too,’ she said. ‘Christian will look after her — after both of us — we must all be together.’
Fairfax turned her a little as though to catch the last sodden light of the west on her face. ‘So be it, then,’ he said at last. ‘So be it, Nan, we shall all be together.’
Chapter 4 - Tadcaster Bridge
Little Moll lay curled in one corner of the huge soft inn bed, with Bathsheba, more grimy and crumpled than ever, in the curve of her arm. Everybody — all the wide world — thought that she was already asleep; but Moll was not asleep, she was very wide awake indeed. She could see the fire casting fluttering golden warmth up the curtain at the foot of the bed, and reaching out to touch, but only just, the figures of her mother and Christian sitting by the window. The night outside the window looked blue — a lovely deep and luminous blue like the velvet of her mother’s best mantle that they had left behind like so much else at home, packed in the big dower chest with orris root to keep the moths away. She could see a crooked chimney stack across the street, black against that wonderful moth-wing blue. It looked like an old crooked witch. If she had been alone in the strange room, Moll would have been afraid of that witch-chimney stack; but she knew that even if it could pass Christian, it could not pass her mother. There had been a time when her mother had not made her feel safe, but had gone away to an immense distance, and become only the outside of her mother. That had been when Elizabeth died and went back to God. And then one wild night her mother had come to her just after she was in bed, and told her that father was riding out to fight a war tomorrow, and that they were going with him; and her hair had been wet as though she had been out in the storm: but she had been looking out of her own eyes again and Moll had not been afraid any more.
Lying in the big bed pretending to be asleep, Moll felt very wise. She knew a lot of things that people did not think she knew. She knew that there was going to be more fighting in the morning, and that father was coming any moment, out of the winter night, tall and splendid in his black breastplate, riding White Surrey with his troopers behind him; because he was always there when there was fighting, to keep Moll safe. That was why her mother was sitting by the window instead of by the fire where it was warm and nice, to watch for father. That, and to keep the witch away ...
Primrose-coloured candlelight seeped out into the snow directly below Anne’s window, from the inn parlour where Lord Fairfax and several of his officers were in conference. She could hear the low grumble of their voices coming up through the floor. Distantly she heard a shouted order from the breastworks across the bridge, near at hand the crunch of boots in the snow as somebody went by, whistling softly:
‘We be soldiers three.
Pardonez-Moi, je vous en prie,
Lately come from the Low Countrie
With never a penny of money.’
It was all a familiar pattern from her childhood, and growing doubly familiar now.
Two months had gone by since she rode out from Denton with Thomas and his raw Wharfedale levies, over the moors to Bradford. Edgehill had been fought and drawn, and the King, turned back at Turnham Green by the London Trained Bands when almost within sight of the city, had fixed his headquarters at Oxford, where the army gathering to the Royal standard grew greater day by day. Here in the north it seemed that there was to be no question of winter quarters. She remembered the fighting at Bradford, Sir Thomas Glamh
am driven back by Thomas Fairfax in command of his father’s Horse; the swift weary moorland marches from one to another of the little grey clothing towns where it seemed that there was always a wind blowing; the damp inn beds and the drums beating to quarters; the few days’ rest and civilization that she had spent with Thomas’s sweet infuriating sister Mary in Leeds, and which seemed, looking back on it, completely unreal. And now the changing patterns of war had brought Lord Fairfax and his little army down again into the Ainstey in a desperate attempt to hold the line of the Wharfe and so prevent the Royalists in York overrunning the counties to the south. A little more than a week ago he had fixed his headquarters here at Tadcaster on the high road to York, detaching Thomas with three hundred Foot and a troop of Horse to hold the other bridge across the Wharfe at Wetherby.
She would have gone with Thomas, but he had refused to have her on outpost duty, and so for her the week had passed at Tadcaster, and passed slowly, while news came in that the Earl of Newcastle, now stepped into Cumberland’s place as the King’s General in the north, was marching to the aid of the Yorkshire Royalists. For some while past he had been collecting a large force among his own tenants and the tenants of his friends and followers; all was grist that came to Lord Newcastle’s mill, they said, even Catholics and recusants who were forbidden to bear arms. ‘A Papist Army, Lord Newcastle’s Papist Army.’ Captain Hotham had met them at the ford of the Tees, with a troop of Horse, one troop against eight thousand men. Anne had seen him ride into Tadcaster afterwards with the tattered handful of troopers left to him, while My Lord Newcastle continued his march to York. After that they had known, of course, that it could be only a matter of days before he attacked the line of the Wharfe. Lord Fairfax had called in his levies ready for the attack, but they made such a pitifully small force, when they were gathered; and today, with the Royalists already out from York, he had sent messengers galloping to recall Thomas from Wetherby. Thomas had now been appointed General of Horse, but the new rank, it seemed to Anne, was the only full sized thing in this pitiful, ridiculous army of eight hundred stubborn Wharfedale farmers and Bradford weavers, without enough powder or shot, without enough of anything except courage, who tomorrow would be facing all that Lord Newcastle could fling against them.
Far off, her straining ears caught the muffled and formless sound of horses’ hooves on a snowy road. She straightened a little in her chair, losing the sound, then catching it again more clearly. Horses, many horses, on the Wetherby road.
Christian had heard it, too; she was sitting forward, listening. Her eyes met her Mistress’s and both women smiled without knowing that they did so. ‘It is Sir Thomas,’ Anne said, keeping her voice at half breath so as not to rouse the sleeping child in the great bed.
Christian said, ‘I’ll be feeling a deal safer wi’ Sir Thomas here.’
It had been the same among the little clothing towns, his wife remembered, always that sense of added confidence and higher heart that came with the slight dark man on the white stallion, no matter how few rode behind him. She rose, shaking out her dark skirts and, leaving the other woman by the window, turned to go down. She paused for a moment by the bed to bend over Moll. She was asleep, really asleep now, Anne knew, because when she was only pretending, as she had been doing earlier, her lashes that lay feathery on her brown cheeks always fluttered. Then she left the room, closing the door softly behind her, and went down the wide stairway.
At the turn of the stairs she paused. Below her a fire burned in the low long common-room of the inn, and candles had been set on the mantel beam, and several of Lord Fairfax’s junior officers had gathered before it. Among them John Lister, just returned from his barricades, squatted holding chilled red hands to the flames, while the snow on the shoulders of his buff coat melted into damp darkness. What a child he looked, thought Lady Fairfax, aged twenty-three, his fair hair ruffled and rising in a cock’s comb from the back of his head, his thin eager face flushed like that of a boy who has been playing snowballs, so that it was hard to realize that he was a man with a wife worrying for him at home and a little son just as old as Elizabeth had been. They had all heard the horses’ hooves now; it was in the listening cock of their heads and the sudden meeting of their eyes. ‘It’s them all right,’ someone said. ‘Black Tom’s here.’
And as though in echo, a voice outside in the stable yard called jubilantly, ‘Eh lad, here they come. Black Tom’s come in!’
There was a swinging burst of lantern light across the window, a sense of quickening and stirring and activity. Captain Lister sprang to his feet as Anne came down the remaining steps. The smother of hoof beats was very near now, as she turned to a window which looked out into the stable yard. Nearer, nearer yet. She saw a dark mass of horsemen in the street beyond the archway; a small knot broke off from them and swung aside, clattering over the snowy cobbles into the stable yard of the Falcon, while the rest went on. A soldier came running with a lantern as they reined up, and by the golden light as the man held it high, Anne saw for a moment the picture that her little daughter had been seeing as she fell asleep; the tall slight figure, upright and potent as a flame on the huge white stallion. Fairfax’s cloak fell back from his shoulder as he swung down from the saddle, and she caught the glint of black armour in the lantern light, and the kingfisher flash of the blue scarf across his breastplate.
Then he was tramping in over the threshold, with Charles D’Oyley his galloper behind him. He doffed his wet beaver hat with the draggled plume and flung it with his whip on to a settle beside the door, shaking his shoulders, with a quick ‘I greet you, Gentlemen’ to the men who had sprung to their feet about the fire.
Anne was beside him in the same instant. She took the wet heavy cloak from him and his mailed gauntlets as he slipped them off. He gave her no greeting but a swift courteous smile.
‘Wait for me here, Charles,’ he said, and turned to the door of the inn parlour, plucked it open, and went in. ‘Reporting back for duty, Sir,’ she heard him say. ‘The Foot will be in within the hour.’ And then the door crashed shut behind him.
She greeted Charles D’Oyley, whom by now she knew well, and, gathering up her husband’s wet cloak and hat and gauntlets, went to the fire with them. The men there made swift way for her; ale jacks and bread and cheese were swept from the settle seat, and a chair was pulled forward. ‘Won’t you sit here, Lady Fairfax?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll not sit, but I will have the chair, Captain Lister,’ and flung the wet riding cloak across it as he turned it round for her and drew it to the blaze, hung the feathered hat on the corner and knelt to set the gauntlets palm upward on the hearth. But she had hardly finished when the parlour door opened again, and Fairfax was back, looking for his cloak and hat, and she knew that her task had been for nothing. She had hoped that they might lie where they were for a time to dry, while maybe Thomas snatched a meal, and even lingered for a few minutes of warmth and rest after the hard wintry ride; but she realized with a sigh that she should have known him better. She could not forbear one protest, all the same. ‘Could you not spare the time to eat something now, quickly?’ She longed to say, ‘You must be so tired. Thomas, you don’t look well; you’ve grown thinner than ever, this week,’ but she had enough wisdom to leave it unsaid.
He shook his head. ‘I must go down to look at the breast-works. Maybe I’ll be back later ... Give me a cup of wine quickly, Anne, and I’ll be away.’
She flew to the table, caught up a full cup already standing there, and brought it to him. He took it from her and drank, quick and deep, and gave it back into her hand. ‘I may not see you again before the drums begin to beat. God keep you, Nan; you and the bairn.’ Then to John Lister, who was reaching for his own comb-cap, ‘Nay lad, you’ve done your stint for the moment, by the look of things; bide and eat your supper. Charles, come you with me.’ And he was gone.
Anne stood for a moment looking after him, the wine cup still in her hand; then turned to the young men abou
t the fire. ‘Whose cup have I taken?’
‘Mine, Lady Fairfax.’ Captain Lister moved forward and took it from her. His eyes met hers with a kind of serious laughter. ‘My grandfather used to tell me how he served under Sir Walter Ralegh at Fayal. He told me so often that I grew to think the story somewhat overrated. But if I live long enough, I doubt not that I shall have told it as often to my own little lad, how Sir Thomas Fairfax drank my wine on the night before Tadcaster Fight.’
They smiled at each other, not knowing that John Lister would not see his little lad again; that something under twenty hours of life were left to him, and at the end of that time he would die between Lady Fairfax’s hands.
*
Anne was overseeing her daughter’s breakfast of bread and milk in the grey of the next morning when she heard the rattaplan of drums. She had been listening for that sound ever since the first pallor of daybreak touched the sky, and her heart jumped unevenly as her gaze flew to meet Christian’s across the child’s head. ‘Listen, they are beating to arms.’ She rose and went quickly to the window. The panes were misted over, and she flung the lattice back and leaned out into the bitter chill of the winter morning. Below her the little town was thrumming with an ordered turmoil, bright with the glint of colours carried by and loud with the tramp of marching feet. Men were tumbling out of their quarters and heading for the bridge where others were already fallen in in formation. A trumpet sang from the horse lines, above the urgent rolling of the drums; a troop of Horse went by at a canter. Anne saw the black lion’s head of Thomas’s personal standard in their midst, and under it caught a passing glimpse of a man in blackened armour on a great white horse.
She felt a small determined hand tugging at her skirt, and next instant Moll was scrambling on to the broad sill beside her. Christian followed hard behind, to pluck her back into the room, but Anne said, ‘No, let her be,’ without looking round. She twisted a hand in the back folds of her small daughter’s skirt to prevent her from falling head foremost into the hurrying street, and told her with the fierce intolerant pride that was part of her own upbringing, ‘Look, Moll, there is father, down yonder toward the bridge, under the standard. That is something for you to remember when you are old, that you saw father ride out to fight God’s battle for England’s freedom!’