Alice in Love and War (2 page)

As if he guessed her wish, he smiled and said, “Corporal Robin Hillier, of Sir John Agnew’s Regiment of Foot.”

She found her courage. “You’re not from around here?”

“No. From Oxford.”

Oxford: where the king now kept state, since Parliament had forced him out of London. Alice had only the vaguest idea of where Oxford was, or how far away, though she knew it was to the north. Most places were north of Tavistock.

“We’ve been on the road five months,” he said. “Makes you long for home comforts.”

Alice did not know what to say to this. She was almost relieved when her aunt reappeared and said, “Alice! Sarah! Be about your work!” Her sharp gaze would have taken everything in.

The sergeant called for a tub of hot water “and a maid to pour it over me!” Sarah gasped and giggled, but Mary Newcombe assigned this task to Jenefer, who was forty and had – so she muttered on her way to fetch the tub – “seen it all before, and it’s nothing much”. Alice was set to tearing up rags for bandages. It seemed that some of the soldiers had been wounded at Lostwithiel and the wounds required dressing.

“You’ll be more use to me than Sarah,” Mary Newcombe admitted grudgingly. “Come out to the barn and help.”

They took cloths, clean water in a leather bucket, and a pot of salve that Alice had made from one of her father’s recipes. The hens were all in the yard, clucking and grumbling at being evicted from the barn. Their place had been taken by a crowd of men, most of them eating and drinking, a few lying exhausted on straw bales.

The first man they dealt with had a sword cut in his upper arm. When her aunt removed the bandages Alice saw that the wound was oozing foul-smelling pus, the flesh around it red and swollen.

“You need a surgeon,” Mary Newcombe said, and the man looked at her in terror. “There are surgeons with the regiment?”

He nodded, his teeth knocking together as she swabbed the wound, smeared on salve, and got Alice to help her re-bandage it.

“I’ll tell your sergeant. It must be seen to, soon.”

Afterwards she said to Alice, “He will die, no matter what. It’s infected.”

With brusque hands she set about attending to the next one. Alice went to help a red-haired lad, greenish-pale under his freckles. He had a thigh wound, still bleeding after four days. She washed it gently, trying not to hurt him, but she saw that he was frightened by the fresh gush of blood that ensued.

“It will stop,” she reassured him. “And this salve will ease the pain and help healing.” She laid a piece of lint on the wound and bandaged it carefully.

“Thank you, mistress,” he said when she was finished. He was a mere boy, no more than eighteen. She hoped she was right, that his wound would heal.

When they were done, Mary Newcombe burned the soiled bandages and they both washed themselves in clean water from the well. Alice looked down the hillside and saw large movements of soldiers, horses and wagons all around. It seemed that the entire army was settling in the village and the surrounding farms.

“How long will they stay?” she asked her aunt, thinking of Robin Hillier and his warm gaze.

“Why ask me? The sooner they go the better. They’ll be all over the village, making whores of folks’ maids and daughters, drinking a month’s brewing in a day.” She looked keenly at Alice. “You keep away from them! I know you and your sluttish ways.”

You know nothing about me, thought Alice. Nor care. She remembered how she had tried, at first, to please this woman who so clearly did not want her. Alice had come from a loving home, a place where she was never beaten, but praised and cared for; where there were streets full of friends, neighbours, customers. Here there was nothing: no life, no love. And now her aunt called her a slut because she had grown into a woman and her uncle had laid hands on her. As often before, she thought, Why did my father send me here, to a brother he hadn’t seen for years?

She knew the answer, of course: it was that or the orphanage and a life of servitude. He’d put his trust in his brother.

When Alice and her aunt returned to the yard they found Robin Hillier there, alone except for the guard dog, Watch, who lolled against him, allowing the man to pull his ears and fondle his muzzle. Robin had shed his stained blue coat and wore fresh linen. The shirt hung loose on his lean frame.

He stepped forward with an easy grace and acknowledged them. Alice dared not catch his eye with her aunt there. He smelt of her aunt’s wash-ball of best lavender soap, and she recognized the shirt, from a darn on the sleeve, as one of her uncle’s.

Mary Newcombe also recognized it. “I see you have found my linen chest,” she remarked.

“Indeed. And we are most grateful. Your generosity, mistress, prospers the cause of his sacred majesty.”

Was he mocking her aunt, Alice wondered? If he was, Mary Newcombe did not see it. She appeared quite disarmed.

“That one has better manners than his sergeant,” she said as they went indoors. She told the sergeant about the badly wounded soldier. “If your surgeon is in the village, the man must be taken down there.”

While they were discussing this, Alice slipped outside. There was always work to do on the farm – and many places to be busy yet away from her aunt’s eye.

The barn was a good place to hide, and there was often the excuse of eggs to be searched for. But the barn had now been taken over by soldiers. Instead she chose the dairy, deliberately passing Robin Hillier without a glance as she walked across the yard.

The dairy was a favourite haunt of hers: cool, fresh and orderly, with a faint pleasant sour-milk smell. There were stone sinks and tables and pewter dishes all scrubbed clean; linen aprons hanging on a hook; butter shapers with the Tor Farm mark on them; curds tied in a linen cloth and hung up for the whey to drip into a bowl; bunches of parsley and chervil. This morning there had also been a great round yellow cheese. That was gone – taken by Jenefer to feed the soldiers.

She busied herself chopping herbs for the curd cheese. It was not long before Robin Hillier’s figure darkened the doorway. She glanced up, nervous now, even though she had hoped for this.

He looked about in approval. “Your uncle has a fine house and farm.”

“He keeps sheep, mostly,” said Alice. “They run free on the moor.”

“He’ll be taking some to market soon.”

“Yes.”

They were talking of nothing, and both knew it. Her hands trembled; she struggled to chop the herbs finely.

“Has he children?”

“Two sons. One dead, last year, fighting for the king.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. He died in a noble cause.”

“The other is with the Parliament army. They had always fought each other, even as boys. There is no love in this house.” She blushed and looked down as she said the word “love”.

“And how came
you
here? An orphan?”

“Yes. My mother died when I was five; I scarcely remember her. My father did not marry again. He brought me up himself, with the help of neighbours, and I was always with him in his shop.”

“His shop?”

“He was an apothecary. We lived in Bideford. It’s a big port – do you know it?”

“No.” He leant back against the table, settled himself to listen. “Tell me.”

So she told him about Bideford, with its quay where ships unloaded cargoes from all over the world: tobacco, wine, spices. She told him about the long bridge – “twenty-four spans” – across the River Torridge. “Our shop was at the top of one of the drangs—”

“Drangs?” He was teasing her, and she laughed.

“Alleyways. They lead up from the quay into the town. My father was always busy. We’d get sailors as well as townsfolk. And sailors’ wives…”

She thought of the sailors’ wives, those women, often desperate, wanting remedies for whispered “women’s troubles”. She’d been too young then to understand what some of these troubles might be. But of course no woman wanted a new baby at the breast when her husband came home after a voyage of a year or more.

“I became my father’s assistant. Helped him make medicines, keep records and accounts.”

His eyes widened. “You can write?”

“Yes, indeed.”

He questioned her more, and seemed to listen to her answers; and she found herself telling him how much she had loved her father, her grief at his death, the coldness of her reception at her uncle’s farm, how her aunt resented her. “My uncle was not so bad, at first. But he’s a weak man.” She could not tell this young man about her uncle’s advances; that would be too shaming. Instead she asked, “And you?”

“I am lucky. My parents are both still living and have always been indulgent.” He smiled, and Alice felt that she too would want to indulge him.

He told her his father had a farm in a hamlet near Oxford; he himself was twenty-one, the youngest of three sons. He had worked there with his family, but had been glad enough, when the chance came, to join up and serve the king. His eyes lit with enthusiasm when he spoke of the king, and he described with shock and anger how the rebels were in contempt of both king and church, stealing silver plate from a bishop’s tomb near Exeter, riding their horses into the nave. “And in Lostwithiel church,” he said, “they made play of christening a horse in the font, calling it Charles in mockery of his sacred majesty. They are rough fellows, many of them, apprentice boys from London; and their leaders psalm-singing hypocrites. But we humbled them at Lostwithiel.”

Alice, who until then had thought little about it, felt herself drawn to the campaign, to him, to his loyalty to the king.

“Oh, I envy you!” she exclaimed. “To have such a cause! I long to leave this place.”

“But you’ll leave in time. You’ll marry, won’t you?” And he moved closer. “You must be spoken for, a pretty girl like you?”

A pretty girl? She shook her head in denial that she was promised to anyone, and considered these words with hope but some mistrust. Her aunt had told her frequently that she had no beauty, no pleasing ways. But there was no man hereabouts whom she wished to please. It was true that Sim Braund, from Upper Farm, had called her pretty when she encountered him at Tavistock sheep fair. But he had been drunk, with hands that had constantly to be slapped away. She flinched at the memory. He disgusted her. She knew well what he was after.

This one made it sound true. And marry? Oh, if only one such as he—

“Alice? Where are you?” Her aunt’s voice came from the kitchen doorway.

“Stay here!” Alice whispered, and put out a hand, almost touched him. “I’ll go out to her.”

But he seized her hand, making her shiver with excitement and alarm. “Alice—”

“Alice!”
came from the yard, loud and irritable.

“She must not see me with you!” She broke away and ran out, breathless. “I’m here, Aunt. I was chopping herbs for the curd cheese.”

Mary Newcombe was no fool. She looked suspicious and glanced towards the dairy, but at that moment her husband came tired and hungry into the yard, and her attention was turned to him and the forthcoming supper as well as food for the men in the barn.

Later, Alice was kept busy hurrying back and forth between barn and kitchen with Jenefer, taking meat and beer out to the soldiers. (“For if we don’t, they’ll seize what they want themselves, and make havoc,” said her aunt.) Mary Newcombe and Sarah waited on the officers indoors. There was no time for Alice to talk to Robin Hillier, though once he brushed his hand against hers as she passed by. The sergeant, however, was grappling with Sarah as openly as with his meat; she made only token resistance.

Jenefer, crossing the yard with Alice, said, “If he gets that foolish slut with child the missus’ll throw her out.”

That night, Alice could not sleep. The room was full: Sarah, Jenefer and herself all sharing it with her uncle and aunt, all breathing with different sighs and rhythms. Alice had been given a mattress near the foot of her aunt and uncle’s bed, and was disturbed not only by these sounds and by wariness of her uncle – though she was sure he’d try nothing here, and he soon fell to snoring – but by thoughts of Robin Hillier and where in the house he might be lodged. In her mind she went over and over their encounter in the dairy, and imagined what might have happened if her aunt had not called for her; and what might happen tomorrow. She longed to be loved. She imagined kissing him, lying down with him, and was shocked at her own thoughts about a man she had only just met.

There was no chance of leaving the room during the night, for Jenefer’s mattress was laid across the doorway. Before daylight Jenefer went downstairs to start the kitchen fire. Mary Newcombe followed, after prodding Sarah and Alice to encourage them to get up. Sarah groaned and pulled the blanket over her head, but Alice rose promptly and went out. In what had been her own room, the bed curtains were drawn and she heard snoring. The sergeant, she guessed. She shuddered at the thought of him there, in her bed.

The stair room was an annexe screened only by a curtain. Alice started when she heard Robin’s voice from behind it. “Alice?” The curtain was twitched aside, and he was there, kneeling up in his shirt on the bed she’d made yesterday. “Alice!”

He caught her hand, pulling her down to sit beside him. His hair was tousled, his shirt untied and open at the neck. She smelt the bed warmth coming from him, and trembled.

“I must go! My aunt—”

“Where can we meet? Away from your aunt.”

Alice knew that either Mary Newcombe or Sarah might appear at any moment. And now, to her alarm, she heard a sigh and movement close at hand in the shadowy room, and realized that at least one other soldier was lodged there.

“Let me go, for shame!” she whispered.

He released her, but persisted. “Where, Alice?”

“Up on the tor. The high rocks, at the top. I don’t know when.”

Two

As
she went about her morning’s work, fetching water from the well, looking for eggs, scouring the plates, Alice thought about what she had proposed. Had she demeaned herself? Would Robin think she was like Sarah? She asked herself, over and over, whether she should go. But the desire to spend more time with him was so strong that she knew she would.