Simon (10 page)

It was still very early as the party of horsemen came out into open country; the sun was not yet up, and the mist lying low in the water-meadows, but all the sky was full of sunshine, and the young leaves of the poplars caught the first light like flakes of gold tangled among the bare twigs. A most lovely morning in a most lovely part of England, and the beauty of it turned Simon’s heart back to his own countryside, so different from this one of lush meadows and stately park-land trees—a countryside of little rounded hills and steep coombs; oakwoods that grew bent all one way by the west wind; sunk lanes where the foxgloves crested the high banks in summer, and little bleak fields hedged round with beech and thorn for a windbreak.

The sun began to rise, and at its coming the mist rose too, drawn upward by the warmth, so that for a while Simon and his men rode through a dim white world where tree and cottage and haystack seemed like phantoms, and even Corporal Relf, riding beside him, was dimmed by a veil of moisture. Then slowly the mist grew thinner; threads of blue appeared overhead, and stray glints of gold shot through the greyness, turning it to opal. A lark leapt up singing into the morning sky, and suddenly the mist was gone, only the mist-drops strung on every twig and grass-blade and silvering the manes of the horses sparkled with rainbow fires in the new sunshine.

The little company rode on, fetching a wide circle that took in several villages, where no one paid much heed to them, for these constant passings and re-passings of the Cavalry patrols had become familiar in the past few weeks. And some while after noon, coming to a pleasant river-side tavern, Simon called a halt to bait the horses and refresh his men. A stout man in a white apron bustled to the door as the troopers swung down from their
saddles, and Simon called to him. ‘Bread and cheese, Landlord, and beer—lots of it—for me and my men.’

‘Bread and cheese it is, General,’ said the landlord cheerfully. ‘And the best beer in Berkshire,’ and he disappeared to attend to the matter.

The horses were picketed, and their nose-bags buckled on, and the troopers crowded into the dark tap-room, leaving two of their number to lounge before the door and keep an eye on their mounts. Simon wandered over to the window at the far end of the room, and stood looking out. The casement was open, and the scent of early wallflowers came in to him, and the murmur of a weir from somewhere beyond the willows at the foot of the garden. He swung round to find Corporal Relf at his shoulder, also looking out. ‘I’m going into the garden,’ he said. ‘Bring me out some bread and cheese when it comes, Corporal, and send Perks and Wagstaff out their share.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Simon flung a leg over the low sill and climbed out, carefully avoiding the wallflowers that grew beneath the window. There were new leaves everywhere, brilliant in the sunshine as tiny jets of emerald flame, and the untidy garden was a riot of daffodils and anemones; evidently someone here loved flowers like his mother, Simon thought, though unlike his mother, they did not care for weeding. He wandered down the sloping path into the realm of cabbages and currant bushes, drawn by the murmur of the weir; and parting the hazy willows, stepped down on to the river-bank. It was a backwater of the Thames, not the main stream, and the voice of the weir, whose foam-tumble curved across it a few yards farther up, was not loud and earth-shaking as that of an open river weir would be, but a soft wet thunder that was very pleasant to hear. Below where he stood, the water ran dark and smooth, and the curds of foam floated by, mingling with the flashing criss-cross web of gold that was the sunlight on the water. Simon was watching them, his shoulder propped against the bole of an ancient pollard willow, when steps sounded on the bank behind him, and Corporal Relf appeared with a large platter and a leather ale-jack.

‘Food, sir.’

‘Thanks, Corporal.’ Simon took them from him. ‘Ah, the best beer in Berkshire. This is a good place. Worth remembering another time.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Corporal Relf, and even as he spoke his head whipped up, and he was watching something away down-stream. ‘Kingfisher,’ he said softly.

Simon was just in time to see the flash of living blue as it disappeared into the willows. ‘That’s the first kingfisher I’ve seen for months,’ he said. And for the first time he realized that Corporal Relf was a countryman like himself, with a countryman’s eye for things to which the townsman is blind; and suddenly there was a bond between them. ‘There’s plenty of bread and cheese for both of us, and we can get some more beer afterwards. Sit down, Corporal.’

‘Sir?’ said Corporal Relf.

‘Sit down, Corporal Relf. I’m going to.’ Simon suited the action to the word, and after a moment’s hesitation, Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf folded up his long legs and did the same.

In a few moments they were settled very comfortably with the bread and cheese and black-jack between them.

‘Are you a farmer?’ Simon asked, after they had sat eating in silence for a short while.

‘I had a small-holding, Spalding way—I and my brother.’

‘Ye—es?’ said Simon hopefully. After Denzil Wainwright, he wanted desperately to talk countryman’s talk with a brother countryman; and as his Corporal showed no signs of carrying on the conversation, he added ‘Tell me? . . .’

‘There’s not much to tell; ’twasn’t a big plot, nor yet a rich one, but our father held it afore us, and his father afore him, and so on, way back I dunno how many generations. Maybe you know how ’tis with a plot of land—how it gets to be wove into a man’s heartstrings, when it has bred him and his forebears.’

‘Umm,’ said Simon. ‘I know.’

‘What says the Good Book about every man sitting under his own vine and his own fig tree?—Not that the place was ever our own; we held it from Squire; father and son holding it from father and son.’

‘Mixed farming?’ asked Simon.

‘No, bulb farming. Spalding be a great bulb district. That pheasant-eye there—’ He nodded in the direction of a starry clump that had evidently strayed from the garden behind them and was growing in the long riverside grass. ‘We used to grow a-many like that; tulips too, and daffy-down-dillies; all for the bulbs, you see. Folks mostly thinks of bulbs coming from the Low Countries, and so they did in the first place—a good many of ’em, anyways—but nowadays, when your mother buys jonquil bulbs for her garden, ’tis as like as not they come from Spalding.’

Having got started on the subject of his heart, he talked on for a while, about the little holding in the Fens that seemed to be the one thing in the world he really loved. About the business of bulb farming, the care needed in their storing, the difficulty of breeding certain flowers true to type; until it seemed to Simon that the man beside him was no longer Corporal Relf, the warrior-prophet of hell-fire that he had come to know, but a new friend, a peaceable man who grew things, and found joy in the flaming and feathering of a tulip petal.

‘I suppose your brother is carrying on the holding until the war is over and you can go back to join him?’ Simon asked presently.

There was no answer. And when he looked round the new Corporal Relf was gone, and the old one back again, with his dark face set like a stone. ‘No, sir,’ said Corporal Relf, in a grating voice. ‘Henceforth, I am Ishmael. There is neither vineyard nor fig tree for me.’

In the appalled silence which followed his words, Simon heard very clearly above the murmur of the weir a distant splurge of laughter from the tavern behind them. ‘I say, I—I’m sorry,’ he blurted out at last. ‘I wouldn’t have said that if—’

Corporal Relf went on staring at the white flowers of the pheasant-eye beside his booted foot. ‘Nay now, there’s no call for that, sir,’ he said harshly. ‘Word-of-mouth don’t make the matter no worse.’

Simon never afterwards knew quite how or why his Corporal came to be telling him the whole unhappy story, unless it was because of the kingfisher. He only knew that the other had laid
down the stub of his bread and cheese, and was talking, quickly and bitterly. ‘’Twas this way: we did pretty well with the bulbs, my brother and I—better nor ever our forebears did. We even managed to save a bit, and none of our forebears ever managed to do that. And we saved to the end that, if need be, we might one day buy the holding. Old Squire had no son nor any near kin to follow him, and well we knew that when his time came to be gathered to his fathers, we should see the Manor go to strangers, and maybe the holding ours no longer. For that end, we lived lean, and went without all else, wife and children included; all that could come later, we thought, when the holding was safe. We got all of thirty pounds together at last, saving and scraping, adding a bit each market-day, and hid it in the hole in the house-place wall. ’Twas a good hiding-place, and we used it for other things beside the money; we’d been at work for years breeding a double white hyacinth, and at last we had succeeded, and we hid the bulb there too, ready for planting time. But man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward, saith Job in his wisdom. ’Twas just after that the war broke, and Cromwell was gathering his men against Charles Stuart, that Man of Blood, and I joined him, that I also might smite the Amalekites. I hadn’t been gone but a few weeks when word reached me that my brother was dead. Died of a marsh fever, he did; and when I got back to see to things, and went to the hoard in the wall—’twas empty. Neither silver piece nor hyacinth bulb was there.’

‘Oh, what evil fortune!’ said Simon, after another silence. ‘What happened, Zeal-for-the-Lord?’

‘I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and planted in them of all kinds of fruits—and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun,’ quoted Zeal-for-the-Lord moodily. ‘What happened? Why, I went back to the Troop, and within a month old Squire died, and the Manor went to some gay young sprig as sold off up’ards of half the farms and holdings. Some of the farmers bought in their land. I couldn’t.’

‘But—would the thirty pounds have done it?’ suggested Simon.

‘No; but ’twould have been enough for a start, and I could
have paid the rest later. The white hyacinth would have brought in a goodish bit once ’twas on the market. New Squire weren’t unreasonable.’

‘There was no one you could have borrowed from?’

‘If there had been, I’d have swallowed my pride, and borrowed,’ said the Corporal. ‘I loved the land well enough for that. But we aren’t a rich folk with money to lend, we Fen farmers. James Gibberdyke, my neighbour, he’d have lent it me if he’d had it. A bit on the feckless side, James were, and had even less than more. But the staunches’ friend any man could be wishful to have in time of distress. “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity,” saith the Good Book, and that was James all over, and a deal closer to me than my own brother: for Aaron and me never had much in common, save the holding. Yet there was some as looked down on James for a ne’er-do-well, not knowing him as I do.’ He drew his long legs under him and got up. ‘And now, sir, ’tis about time you gave orders for the march.’

So Simon knew that the odd intimacy of the past half-hour was over. He got up obediently, finished the beer, and went back to the tavern with his Corporal marching at his heels.

ON A SUMMER
morning some months later, two armies faced each other across a wide upland valley, a mile or so north-east of Naseby. The light west wind stirred and fretted the Colours of the opposing regiments, but save for the wind, it was very quiet; and as the waiting minutes lengthened, Simon, sitting his eager Scarlet in the ranks of the New Model, found himself thinking back over the events that had brought him there.

‘Six weeks ago, when Cromwell and a body of Horse had already been sent to keep the King shut up in Oxford, the New Model had marched west under orders from the Committee to relieve Taunton. Horse, Foot and Train, they had marched out under the grey Castle ramparts, with the camp-followers riding in the commissariat wagons or tagging along behind (for the New Model, like other armies of their day and long afterwards, were followed on Campaign by wives and sweethearts without whom it would have gone hard with the sick and wounded). There had been trouble about the rearguard before they were two days out: Fairfax’s Foot had objected to taking their turn of rear-guard duty; they were the General’s Own; why should they march in the rear with their mouths full of the dust of lesser regiments? They had chosen a spokesman and put their case to the General. Fairfax’s reply was typical of him; he was sorry that his Regiment found themselves too grand for rearguard duty, but he himself did not; and he had dismounted and marched with them. There had been no more trouble with the rearguard after that; but plenty of another kind.

They had scarcely reached Taunton when they were recalled and ordered to besiege Oxford, from which the King had already escaped, slipping past Cromwell and heading north to join
Montrose on the Border. Cromwell had been sent off again, this time to see to the defence of Ely; the Army had grumbled and grown restive; the siege had dragged on, while the King and Montrose prepared to crush Lord Leven’s force between them: and Simon, knowing that his father was in that threatened Army, had fretted more than most. But the orders of the Committee were not for questioning. Finally, when Charles, halting in his march, had sacked Leicester, and all the Eastern counties were in danger, Fiery Tom had taken matters into his own hands. He had called a council of war, raised the siege of Oxford and marched north, and sent orders to Cromwell to return at once and take command of the Horse.

That had been several days ago; and yesterday Cromwell had rejoined the main Army at Kislingbury, just as they were breaking camp in a chill mizzle-rain. Simon had seen him ride in with his six hundred troopers, red-eyed and mired to the combs of their helmets with hard riding, their horses leg-weary under them; and word had run like stubble-fire through the camp. ‘Noll’s back! Old Noll’s come in!’ The Foot had taken up the cry from the Horse, and the whole Army had cheered themselves hoarse as the weary company rode in, cheered until the voice of their cheering had seemed to beat against the sodden skies, bringing the rain down faster than ever.