God Is an Englishman (15 page)

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Their bivouac was under a small spread of Spanish chestnuts on what was probably the most westerly fold of the Pennines. The map called it a forest, the Forest of Bowland, but there were few trees hereabouts, apart from the clump that crowned the spur of a slope rising behind them to a height of about two hundred feet and sown with boulders all the way to the summit.

To the west, far beyond the winding waggon track they had fol lowed from Preston, lay the sea, and the air up here had a whiff of salt that blended pleasantly with the summer scents of parched fern, rock moss, peat, and flowering gorse.

Away in the distance one or two farms lay huddled in rocky gullies, little blobs of greyish white against a gold and olive background, but the dust-road was empty of traffic, for one macadamised road followed the coast to wards Lancaster, and the other, several miles to the east, ran due north from Clitheroe. As fugitives they had chosen the older, pack-horse route that lay half-way between.

The enormity of what he had done might have worried him if he had thought about it, but he continued to hold it off, busying his mind with the routine chores of a trek across a sparsely populated wilder ness, and was now engaged in trapping a rabbit for it was time, to his way of thinking, that she had a hot meal and he preferred to avoid farms and inns.

There was water to drink from the dozens of moorland streams they had crossed, and once, to her delight, he had cornered a cow in the angle of a drystone wall and taken a pannikin of milk from her. For shelter they had his tiny bivouac tent, now given over to her and Twitch, while he slept within call, wrapped in the cloak that covered her by day. Interested glances had been directed at them as they passed through villages and one small town but nobody had challenged them and this was not really surprising. A man and woman riding pillion, with a dog at their heels, was commonplace, and curiosity, such as it was, was confined to the basket-trunk balanced on his pommel and the fact that Henrietta was wrapped in a boatcloak, notwithstanding the continuing spell of dry weather.

Perhaps, thought Adam, people took her for an invalid and left it at that. Now, he supposed, there was no other course but to deliver her into Aunt Charlotte’s GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 72

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keeping and await developments, although what might result from this madcap ride he could not imagine. At best, he thought, an undignified wrangle with her father. At worst, a court case, with himself in the dock on a charge of enticing a minor away from her legal guardians. He didn’t know and didn’t much care.

His respect for conventions had been blunted by years of rough living, and he preferred to follow his soldier’s nose until presented with a direct challenge. It was a long time before he was able to adjust to Western civilisation. Henrietta Rawlinson was the first of many to recognise and exploit the fact.

He had taken her along, he told himself, from motives of curiosity and compassion after the Lea Green stationmaster had informed him that trains were unlikely to run either way for forty-eight hours. The same man told him something of what had occurred in Seddon Moss the previous night. The town, he said, enjoying this unlooked-for chance to broadcast calamitous news, was still in a turmoil.

Four rioters had been killed and any number arrested. Police had converged on the area from Liverpool and Manchester, and there had been outbreaks of looting during which two constables had been injured. When Adam asked if he could hire a trap or dogcart to drive as far as Garston, he was told this was out of the question. Every posting horse in the district had been commandeered by the Yeomanry, who had been put on an alert in anticipation of further outbreaks in Warrington and elsewhere.

“A police inspector told me it were like forty-two all over again,” he said, importantly, as though it wasn’t everybody in whom police inspectors confided,

“but tha’d be too young to recall that, sir.” Adam said he was, gave him a shilling, and returned to the gorse thicket where he had hidden Henrietta.

He was not surprised when she told him she would prefer to walk down the line to Liverpool than return home. He was adjusting to her obstinacy but had made his own decision regarding her when he learned that Mrs. Worrell’s sister was not expecting her. They did not even discuss her future until they were in open country again, and frying bacon over a fire he kindled under a hazel bank.

He said, “If I hand you over to my aunt Charlotte will you promise to abide by her decision?”

“What’s your aunt Charlotte like?” she asked, guardedly, and he said he could not give her an up-to-date answer, not having seen her for years, but recalled that she had a reputation for observing the proprieties and wore corsets that made an embrace with her a painful experience. She laughed at that but said it wasn’t enough to go upon. When had he last seen Aunt Charlotte?

“When I was fifteen. Her sister Agatha kept house for the Colonel in those GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 73

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days, and Charlotte, the eldest of the Swanns, ran a Dame’s school. She’ll probably give you a thrashing, me the rough edge of her tongue, and return you to Seddon Moss as soon as you’ve had a bath and a hot meal,” he added.

“And your father?”

“Ah, the Colonel,” he said, and she noticed the lines of his face softened, “he’d never lift anything but his hat to a woman. He’ll spoil you worse than your father has,” and he looked at her intently where she sat out of range of the smoke, fondling the spaniel’s ears. “He’d have a reason to do that, I imagine.”

“What reason?”

“You’re approximately the size, build, and colouring of my mother. I know that because he has a portrait of her made when she was a year or so older than you.

I remembered it the moment I saw you peep out of that shepherd’s hut. She was French and she died when I was six.”

“How did your father come to marry a French lady, Adam?”

“He met her in France, in a little town called Perpignan, when he came over the Pyrenees with the Old Duke. Romantic it might have been but not wise. She never adapted to England.”

Her eyes opened wide, as he noticed they usually did whenever he mentioned soldiers. “You mean your father actually
knew
the Duke of Wellington?

You aren’t teasing?”

“Well, I won’t swear to him knowing him,” Adam said, smiling, “because he wasn’t a colonel then. He was a cornet in the Sixteenth—the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, and helped chase the French all the way from Lisbon.”

“Then he must be terribly old, Adam.”

“Why? It’s not all that long ago. His first action was Busaco, in 1810, and he was only twenty at the time.”

“Then he’s sixty-eight.”

“Your mental arithmetic is better than your geography. Have some more bacon.”

She accepted a brittle rasher, nibbling it as though it was a tooth some biscuit.

Presently she said, without looking at him, “Adam, may I ask you something?”

“Ask away.”

“What made you stop being a soldier?”

“I was bored with it.”

“How could a soldier ever get bored?”

“Nine-tenths of soldiering is dull. The rest is terrifying.”

“I’m sure you weren’t scared.”

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“Indeed I was, many times. Scared and…” he broke off and stood up, scooping a handful of soil from the bank and using it to damp the fire.

“This has no bearing on what is to happen to you,” he said, gruffly. “That’s what we should be discussing.”

“We don’t have to,” she said, “for there’s nothing to discuss. I’m coming with you, and I’ll do whatever your aunt thinks best. What were you going to say?” He had been tempted to tell her something of the well at Cawnpore but thought better of it. Instead he said, lightly, “I had a fancy to become my own master and make money, like Sam Rawlinson,” but she replied, sulkily, “I do wish you’d stop treating me like a child, Adam! I’m not a child, and you don’t think I am really.”

“You behave like one most of the time.”

“For wanting my independence and being ready to fight for it? Isn’t that just what you’re doing? Isn’t that why you’re here instead of India?” He looked disconcerted for a moment and then smiled. He had, she decided, a very nice smile. He looked years younger when he used it.

“That’s a fair point,” he admitted and then, in what she had al ready learned to think of as his boot-and-saddle manner, “We can make five miles before sundown and had best do it. As long as we’re this close to the main line we’ll meet people and one of them might be your father.”

From then on he said little, but the silence, and the increasing distance they put between themselves and Seddon Moss, oiled their relation ship, so that soon it seemed to him they had been travelling com panions a long time, a hardbitten man of thirty-one, a hoyden of eighteen, an over-burdened horse, and a dog moving slowly across the parched landscape between the Pennines and the sea. It was when they reached the site of their first overnight camp that he saw a change in her, noticing that she was subdued and perhaps secretly scared by the finality of her flight.

He pitched the tent and lit a fire between stones, setting his billycan to boil on a tripod of sticks for tea brewed from a packet he car ried in his saddlebags. She had come to look upon his saddlebags as a transportable bran tub, of the kind seen at chapel bazaars where one could expect to find all manner of things. So far she had seen him handle a piece of cold mutton wrapped in oiled paper, a needle and thread he had used to sew up the trailing hem of her green dress, a homemade but very effective tinder box, all kinds of homespun items that she supposed campaigners stowed in their kit. She was im pressed by his dexterity, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 75

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of the kind she associated with Mrs. Worrell at work in her kitchen. Nothing seemed to fuss or harass him. He lifted her down, pitched the tent, unsaddled and haltered the mare, lit the fire, and set about cooking their rations as though this gipsy life was the way everybody travelled. It was only when he told her to crawl into the tent that she asked, “But where will you sleep?”

“Under the hedge. Where else?”

“But supposing it rains?”

He looked at the sky. “It won’t rain.”

That was the way of him. He was a superior being, knowing every thing and fearing nothing, cool, deft, self-sufficient, gathering to him self the apparatus of survival as he went along. He was handsome, too, in a dark and rather forbidding way, with strong features sur prisingly innocent of whiskers, heavy, arching brows, and a skin tanned the colour of tobacco. She liked the easy way he moved his big, loose-jointed limbs and his quick smile, even though it had the patronage of all male smiles, implying that the sharpest woman in the world was half an idiot.

It was curious, she thought, that she did not resent this, as she had in other men.

But then he was a soldier thoroughly accustomed to fending for himself and judging anyone who could not a milksop or sluggard. She had always admired sol diers, not only because they looked fierce and resplendent in their scarlet uniforms and tall busbys, but because they were so far re moved from all other men in her experience, foxy-faced merchants like the Goldthorpes, brutes like her father’s overseer, pallid, round-shouldered clerks in mill and counting-house, and slow-moving artisans like McEwan, gardener at the Lodge. Soldiers were clearly men who could impose their will on anyone, who could and did mould circumstances to their pleasure and like Adam they were al most invariably big, handsome creatures who could whisk a girl off her feet and march across country carrying her like a prize. Lying there under the taut canvas of his little tent she wondered what it would be like to have him behave in this way towards her, and the fancy, improbable as it was, made her shiver with fear and delight, for nothing remotely like this had ever happened to her, despite the licence she had enjoyed under Sam’s roof. There had been half-a-dozen swift embraces under the mistletoe at Christmas parties, and the occasion when Sarah Hebditch’s blond brother, Edward, had held her more closely than was
de rigeur
during a waltz at the Assembly Rooms. She had liked that at the time and had even fancied herself half in love with Edward, but now she realised it must have been non sense, because Edward Hebditch was less than half a man com pared with Adam Swann, who could sleep soundly in a hedge and order the rain clouds out of the sky.

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This feeling of reverence, that was something entirely new to her, began to enlarge itself during the second day’s ride. Physical con tact with him, as she sat perched on her bunched petticoats, one arm about his waist, the other hooked in his belt, produced a glow that had nothing to do with the clammy heat generated by the folds of the cloak. It seemed to pulse through her from her toes to the roots of her hair, compensating for the almost unbearable ache in her buttocks caused by her cramped position on the rump of the mare. He must have been aware of her discomfort, however, for he pitched camp long before sundown, telling her to watch the fire while he and Twitch went over the hill to try for a rabbit, and presently he returned carrying one by the ears and she watched him skin and joint it at twice the speed of the kitchenmaids at home. She said, as he put it into the billycan, seasoning the stew with herbs from a packet produced from the lucky dip of a saddlebag, “You don’t need money and houses and servants. You could manage wherever you happened to be, Adam,” and he said, carelessly, “Any fool could live off this kind of country in summer. Besides, there’s no competition. It’s very different when you have to share a route with ten thousand other thieves.”