Alice in Love and War (22 page)

The embers of last night’s fire still glowed. She lit a candle from it, and opened the door to the parlour. He was awake. She saw the gleam of his eyes in the candlelight.

“Good morning.” She set the candle down. “How do you feel?”

“Grateful. To you, and these good people, and to God.”

“Your voice is stronger.”

He grimaced. “But the pain keeps me awake. You are up early.”

“I don’t want to sleep. I have nightmares.” And before he could ask her why and perhaps provoke her into a grief-stricken response, she said, “There is more broth in the kitchen. I’ll fetch you some.”

“Mistress Alice – wait! Could you open the shutters? I’ve not seen daylight since I was brought in here.”

Alice hesitated. “A sickroom should be warm and dark…” But she knew that the main reason Hannah had closed up the room was because she had thought this was to be a death chamber.

She crossed the room and drew back the shutters. The window faced east, overlooking the road where the baggage train had been attacked. The glass panes were small and greenish-coloured and distorted the view, but they let in the growing daylight.

When she brought the broth, he got her to help him sit up; and he wanted to feed himself, so she poured the broth into a tankard that he could hold in his right hand.

“Are you right-handed?” she asked.

“Yes. For which I thank God. I fear I may always have pain in the left shoulder.”

“What is your trade?”

“I’m a carpenter. Or was about to be, before this war. Tell me, have you heard anything of how the fight went?”

“I believe it was a victory for your side.” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. The news clearly pleased and heartened him, and that offended her still more.

He saw this, and said, puzzled, “I see that my side is not yours? But I thought Master Barford was for Parliament.”

“I am not one of Master Barford’s family.”

“No. Your voice…”

He gave her the empty tankard and she set it down. Sunlight was now streaming into the room; she could feel it on her face. When she turned back to him she saw that he was looking at her intently.

“I was not mistaken,” he said. “We
have
met before. You are the girl from the house we raided near Oxford. Weston House, was it?”

“Weston Hall,” said Alice. She knew him now. The officious young captain – so upright and proud he’d looked then! And she remembered how she had pushed between him and Lady Weston and demanded that he keep his men in order. She felt a flush rise in her face.

“I recognized your voice first,” he said. “That West Country burr.” A smile twitched his lips and he imitated her reading:
“‘The Lord is my shepherd…’”

Alice, embarrassed, was seized with a desire to laugh. And then she thought of Nia only a few hours buried, and herself here with their enemy, and the shock of it all overwhelmed her and she began to sob.

He looked instantly contrite. “Please forgive me,” he said. “I meant no mockery of you.”

She wiped her eyes, gulping. “It’s not you. My friends – my friends were…” But she could not bring herself to tell him.

“Please forgive me,” he repeated.

“There is no need.”

He sighed, suddenly weary, and leaned back, white-faced, on the pillows. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how you come to be here, so far from Oxford.”

Alice rose and began gathering up the crockery to take out to the kitchen. “You’re tired,” she said. “I’ll tell you another time.”

The fact was, she was not at all eager to tell him. At the moment, he probably imagined her to be Lady Weston’s innocent young maidservant. If he knew the truth he would despise her, as Master Barford did, and she would lose his respect.

Twenty-one

Alice
took over from Hannah the task of changing the soldier’s bandages each afternoon. She also made him tisanes from herbs that she gathered in the Barfords’ small garden. The wounds were healing well, with no sign of infection; his appetite had improved; and he became concerned about washing and changing his linen.

“In my pack,” he said, reaching awkwardly towards it, “there’s a shirt, cleaner than this one.”

She found it; and at his request she helped him to wash, comb his tangled hair, and put on the clean, crumpled shirt.

He smiled. “Thank you.”

“You look better.”

He looked more as she remembered him from Weston Hall, except that now he was bearded with a growth of untrimmed fair hair. His eyes, which had been dull, were blue and had recovered their brightness. She felt pleased – with herself for her care; and with him for responding so well to it.

There was no longer any need for her to watch over him continuously, so she would leave him with a tankard of beer within reach, and a small pile of his belongings – books, pamphlets and letters – on the bed beside him, and go and help Hannah or play with Elen. Often when she came back she found him reading his Bible. Sometimes he asked her for news.

In those first few days after the battle the village was full of news and speculation: what people had seen, what they’d heard or witnessed in Clipston or Naseby or Marston Trussell. Those who had connections to the army reported that a great Parliamentarian victory had been gained: the king’s entire army of foot was destroyed, his cavalry dispersed, hundreds killed and nearly five thousand men taken prisoner. Ammunition and cannon had been captured, and all the contents of the Royalist baggage train. It was even rumoured that a box containing the king’s private correspondence had been found on one of the wagons. People who had been out soon after the battle talked of seeing bodies – heaps of them – on the field near Naseby, along the road to Sibbertoft, around the baggage train, and on across country towards Harborough.

“All along by Hellcombe they lay,” Master Barford reported. “They were in retreat, those Cavaliers, but they fought every step of the way. Wadborough Hill’s where the bodies lay thickest; where they made their last stand.”

Alice looked out towards Wadborough, only a few miles away to the north-east. So that was where it had ended, that last great fight she’d been so terrifyingly caught up in.

“What of the king?” Hannah asked. “And the princes?”

“Fled. No doubt they’ll re-form. But if you ask me, Cromwell’s the man of the future.”

Master Barford, as blacksmith, was well placed to gather news. He would come in for his supper and relay it first to his wife; and then, since Jeremiah Banks was now recovered enough to talk, he would spend time with him in the evening. Alice heard, from behind the closed door, their voices rising and falling, and occasional bursts of laughter.

“They’ll be talking horses, if I know my man,” said Hannah. “Horses and horse management, and equipment.”

Alice thought the blacksmith’s conversation would tire her patient, and was perversely annoyed, when she went in to check on him before retiring to bed, to find him cheerful and invigorated.

The next day, when she brought him one of her herbal drinks, she asked him about his own part in the fighting, and he told her what he remembered. He described how, on that morning, he had seen the front line of the king’s army ranged along the ridge opposite – a sight of beauty, gallantry and terror: the colours rippling, the sunlight glinting on armour and weapons, the forest of pikes; how he had watched Prince Rupert’s cavalry begin to move: a trot, a canter, a gallop, a charge; how he and his comrades had raced into position to be ready to fire. He spoke of the difficult, uneven terrain, the furze bushes and rabbit holes, the confusion of battle. In the general melee he had been wounded in the shoulder, but ignored it and fought on till the Royalist foot began to surrender. Then he joined in the pursuit of the Cavaliers as they fled north. Near Sibbertoft he had been thrown from his horse by a pistol shot in the thigh.

He was innocent of the attack on the baggage train, Alice realized. Indeed, he seemed unaware that it had taken place.

“My friends found me later, close to death, and lifted me onto my horse and brought me here.” He took a sip of the drink she had given him and pulled a face. “What’s this?”

“Nettle tea. Drink it!” she said sternly, with a smile. She had found nettles growing near by and knew the tea would strengthen him and restore the blood. But in truth he seemed to have a strength of his own that needed little help.

She saw letters lying on the bed, and asked him about his family.

“I have a mother and two sisters,” he said. “My home is in Hertford.”

He showed her where the town was in his pocketbook of maps, and she leaned with him over the small, densely printed pages. The maps, with their tracery of roads and pictured hills, fascinated her, and she longed to study them more, to see all the places she had travelled through, to see Wales.

“Do your sisters live at home?” she asked.

“Priscilla does. My elder sister, Phoebe, is married and has her own home at Ware. But her husband is a soldier, in the king’s army—”

“The king’s?” Alice was surprised.

“Yes. I believe he was at Naseby fight, though I did not encounter him – and I’m glad of that, for I like him well, though this war has torn our two households apart. He could have been taken prisoner, or even killed. I shall be relieved when I can get news of him. And I must write to my mother and Priscilla.” He looked at her. “She’s about your age, Priscilla. Eighteen?”

“I’m seventeen.” And nothing like your sister, Alice thought. She imagined Priscilla Banks, innocent and well protected, her fair head bent over a prayer book.

“And you?” she asked. “What age are you? Are you an apprentice?” She knew that some of the Parliamentarian regiments were full of London apprentices, unruly and violent, who brought terror to the countryside. This young man was not of that sort.

But he said, “Yes, I was apprenticed to a carpenter in Willesden, and was near the end of my term, when I enlisted for Parliament. I’m twenty-three, and should have been working as a journeyman by now had it not been for this war. I never thought it would go on for so long, nor grow so bitter.”

Alice admitted, “I don’t know what it’s all about.”

He laughed, shortly. “It’s about our arrogant, devious king, and his Catholic wife; about the will of Parliament, of the people, and their right to be heard. It’s about God’s purpose—” He stopped. “I’m sorry. Tell me about you. You sit with me, and read, and listen to me talking about myself, but you still haven’t told me how you came to be here.”

Alice took a breath. “I came with the king’s army,” she said. “Following the baggage train.” She spoke defiantly, watching his face, challenging him – and caught the slight, shocked widening of his eyes.

He was silent for so long that she thought he would not speak to her again; but he recovered himself, and said, “Then … you left the service of Lady Weston?”

“I was never in her service. I stayed at Weston Hall over the winter, when the soldiers were in their winter quarters. I was already with the army.”

She found that her heart was beating fast. Why should I care? she thought. What does it matter what he thinks of me?

“Last year,” she continued, “I ran away from home with a soldier. I thought he loved me, that we’d be married; but – oh, you know the old story, the one in all the ballads – he already had a wife.”

He stared and was silent again. Then he sighed, whether in sympathy or despair at her wickedness she could not tell. “He abandoned you?”

“Yes. But my friends in the train – the wives of Welsh pikemen – did not. I stayed with them, and we came here, to this battleground…” She had begun to tremble. “Captain Banks, do you know what your righteous, hymn-singing, God-fearing comrades did to the women in the baggage train?”

He said faintly, as if he did not want to hear, “What did they do?” And when she told him, he groaned and pulled back as if he had been struck. “Your friends…?”

“All dead. But I escaped. And I saved Elen.” She left him and went out to the kitchen, and lifted the baby from her basket and carried her into the parlour.

Now he was astonished and confused. “You have a child!”

“She’s not mine. Her mother – my friend – was murdered. I came to this house to find a wet nurse.”

“Mistress Barford. Of course… But what will you do now? Will you stay in this village?”

“Oh, no.” She would not stay here, where her friends had died, and where she would probably always be known as the Cavaliers’ whore. “I’ll go back to Weston Hall. I believe they will give me work as a maidservant.”

“And the baby?”

“I’ll take her with me.”

“You can’t travel so far alone, with a baby!”

“We must trust in God to care for us.”

Twenty-two

The
next time she saw him he was standing up. His teeth were clenched, and the bandage on his thigh, below the rolled-up edge of his breeches, was stained with fresh blood. He limped forward – and grabbed at the windowsill for support.

“What are you doing?”

She rushed to his side, put an arm about his waist and tried to lead him back towards the bed. It was the first time she had seen him on his feet since their encounter at Weston Hall. He was of middle height, strongly built, with a determined vigour about him that had probably saved his life.

“No!” he exclaimed. “I won’t lie down there again.” But he rested his arm on her shoulder and allowed himself to be lowered onto the stool, where he sat scowling with impatience. “I want to move,” he said. “I want to look out – to open the window.”

“You have made the wound bleed again.” She frowned, wishing she had more knowledge. “Perhaps it should have been stitched. I must ask Hannah—”

“Not now!” He caught her arm. “Open the window – please? Let me see where I am.”

“I suppose it can do no harm.” She crossed the room and pushed open the window.

Warm summer air flowed in, and a scent of hay, wonderfully fragrant after the foul air of the sickroom. The view was of rough pasture and distant wooded hills. Over to the right was the road where the baggage wagons had halted. She saw, with relief, that the few remaining wagons had been removed. But somewhere near by must be the burial pit.