Simon
Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
Contents
VIII
: ‘
MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND
’
IX
:
SENTENCE OF THE COURT MARTIAL
XIX
: ‘
NO MAN SHALL HARBOUR THE ENEMY
’
XX
:
THE CALL HOME COMES FOR ISHMAEL
It had never seemed important during their boyhood that Simon Carey was for Parliament and his friend Amias Hannaford a royalist. But when Civil War breaks out, they find themselves fighting on different sides.
Finally the day comes when the friends must put their friendship to the test.
Most history books deal with the final campaign of the Civil War in a single paragraph, and the Battle of Torrington they seldom mention at all. In this story I have tried to show what that final campaign in the west was like, and to re-fight the battles fought over my own countryside. Most of the people I’ve written about really lived; Torrington Church really did blow up, with two hundred Royalist prisoners and their Parliamentary guard inside, and no one has ever known how it happened, though Chaplain Joshua Sprigg left it on record that the deed was done by ‘one Watts, a desperate villain’.
FOR MY MOTHER
with love
The Golden City of Manoa
IN THE DEEP
sunshiny window recess of Dr Odysseus Hannaford’s study, two boys sprawled side by side. One, the slighter and taller of the two, wore doublet and breeches of holly-leaf green that made the tawny hair rising in a defiant crest from his forehead seem red as flame by contrast; tawny eyes, a disdainful beak of a nose, a wide laughing mouth—this was Amias Hannaford, the doctor’s son. The other, clad in puritan’s grey, was his friend Simon Carey, a square dependable-looking boy with a shock of barley-pale hair, bleached silver at the ends by the sun of the past summer, which had burned his skin to berry brown.
There was a bowl of apples on the polished sill between them, and they were both in a state of joyful thanksgiving. It was not
that they actually wanted Mr Braund, their harassed schoolmaster, to have one of his bilious turns—they rather liked him, as a matter of fact, and certainly wished him no ill; but if he had to have one, then they were glad and grateful that he should have it on such a day as this. For ever since dawn the wind had been rising, and now it was blowing half a gale from the south-west. The long grass in the doctor’s garden lay over in silvery swathes before the gusts, and the tangle of lilac and guelder-rose at the garden end was a swaying lashing turmoil from which the brown and coral leaves came whirling down. It was a day of shining blue and russet, dancing to the wild music of the gale; a day to make the heart leap after adventure; and the two in the Doctor’s window gave thanks loudly for Mr Braund’s bilious spell that had set them free as the wild sou’wester for all that afternoon.
Simon was almost as much at home as Amias in the deep window recess, for the village of Heronscombe, from which he rode in every morning on the odd-job pony, was too far off for him to go home again at noon; so he always had his dinner at the Doctor’s house, and in winter, when the lanes were turned to quagmires, he often slept there too, sometimes for several nights together. It was he who had removed the apples from the side chest, to stay the pangs of hunger while they waited for dinner.
They took great care to eat fair, each taking an apple at the same moment, and every time they finished an apple, they unpicked what was left of the core and tried which of them could spit the pips farthest.
‘I can spit farther than you can,’ said Amias, with conscious superiority.
‘Well, you’ve got that hole where your front tooth came out,’ Simon pointed out reasonably. ‘That makes a difference, you know.’ He took careful aim at a large cobble in the path. ‘Got it! How about
that
?’
‘Wind behind it,’ said Amias, and reached for another apple.
Simon let it pass. He never argued with Amias; and besides, he felt too contented to argue with anyone, sprawling there in the windy sunshine, with the whole afternoon an unexpected gift
before him. So he took another apple—a golden apple, flecked with coral and crimson, and fragrant as a flower—and bit a large piece out of it, squinting happily at the juicy white hollow with tooth-marks round its edge.
‘I say!
That
was a good one.’ An exultant shout from Amias made him look up. ‘Right into the middle of that clump of marigolds! I’ll wager Sir Walter Raleigh couldn’t have spat farther than that!’
Simon measured the distance with his eyes. ‘It’s a long way,’ he agreed. ‘But I expect Sir Walter could spit mighty far!’
Sir Walter Raleigh was their most particular hero. Simon had learned to read from his ‘Discovery of Guiana’, in the great calf-bound copy of Hakluyt’s
Voyages
at home; and during the past summer holidays, when Amias was spending harvest-time with him, they had pored in the evenings over Sir Walter’s accounts of great rivers and wide plains, of golden cities which he had never quite found, and birds of white and crimson and carnation, that fluttered through the steaming forests.
‘Of course, Sir Walter mightn’t have got a front tooth out,’ Amias ruminated.
The door behind them opened as Tomasine Blackmore came in to set the table, and instantly the October gale swooped in through the window with a shout. Golden leaves whirled in after it and all the room was in a hurly-burly. The cloth on the side chest took wings, upsetting a box of red-pepper lozenges and a pot full of earth in which Amias, who was of an inventive turn of mind, had lately planted an apple-core with a cherry stone embedded in the middle of it, hoping to grow a tree that would bear cherries as big as apples. A pile of the Doctor’s papers scattered to the four corners of the room, and the heavy curtains billowed out, flapping like the sails of a ship when she comes about. Then the door slammed shut with a crash that brought a shower of plaster down from the low raftered ceiling. Almost before they knew what had happened, the boys felt a hand twisted in the neck-band of each, and they were jerked backward into the room and set on their feet with a tooth-shaking thump.
‘I say—why—’ began Amias.
‘We’re sorry; we didn’t think it would do that,’ Simon said,
looking up rather anxiously into Tomasine’s wrathful face as she slammed the window shut.
‘I dare say,’ said Tomasine, much put out. ‘Opening the window with the wind in this direction! Will ’ee look at thicky mess? Now ’ee can clear ’un up while I sets the table, or there’ll be no dinner for either of ’ee.’
It was a threat which Tomasine was quite capable of carrying out, and they set to work in a great hurry, Amias gathering up the broken pot and sweeping the scattered earth into a pile, while Simon, still holding the remains of his apple in one hand, collected the red-pepper lozenges, blew the earth off them, and put them back in their box. While lying on his stomach under the drugchest, groping for the last one, he found something. ‘I say, Amias,’ he called, his voice slightly muffled by the cobwebs. ‘There’s some more of your cherry-apple earth here, and a sort of
thing
with it that we must have dug up at the same time.’
‘What kind of thing?’ demanded Amias, who had just found the cherry-apple core under the table.
But at that moment Dr Hannaford appeared in the doorway, stripping off his heavy riding-gloves as he came, and Simon pushed the Thing down the front of his doublet, and wriggled out backwards from under the chest in a hurry. Dr Hannaford stood with his legs planted well apart, and surveyed them out of very blue eyes under bushy badger-grey brows. ‘Ah!’ said Dr Hannaford in an amused rumble that seemed to come from the middle of his deep chest. ‘A little gardening, I presume, Amias? And Simon trying his hand at dispensing lozenges? I always thought that it was Amias who planned to be a doctor, while Simon grew things. Strange how easily one can be mistaken.’
Both at once, they began to explain; but Dr Hannaford was peering at the box of lozenges in Simon’, hand. ‘I am sure that Grannie Halfyard will find the apple-juice a great improvement,’ he said, ‘but the cobweb is a mistake. Cobwebs for an open wound, not for a sore throat, no.’
Simon hastily removed the cobweb; and a few moments later, Tomasine having brought in the broiled mutton and prunes and departed again, slamming the door, they gathered round the
leather-topped table. The two boys stood behind their stools with bowed heads and folded hands while the Doctor said Grace, adding, as he had done ever since the troubles started, a plea that God might bless His most Gracious Majesty King Charles, and confound his enemies in Parliament. Simon always found that part of Grace rather confusing, because when his own father mentioned the King in family prayers each evening, it was to pray that he might be brought to his senses before he ruined England. So he was glad when Grace was over, and he could forget about it until next time.
Simon liked having dinner with Dr Hannaford. He liked the low-ceiled room, which, although it was called the study, and served as living-parlour, was almost as full of pestles and mortars, instruments cases and pill-boards and pitch-pots as the surgery next door. The walls were lined with shelves in which books on herbs and surgery and astronomy rubbed shoulders with drug-jars of thick green glass or grey lambeth pottery, each with its name on it in gold: mercury and camomile, camphor and opium, making a kind of shadowy tapestry with stray sparks of light and colour in it, that Simon found oddly fascinating. The smell of the study was fascinating too: a mixture of drugs and herbs, the leather bindings of old books, a faint suggestion of mice, and the warm sweetness of apples; and Simon sniffed contentedly as he ate his dinner and listened to the Doctor reading extracts from the book which was open on the table beside him.