Authors: Giles Kristian
THE SCREAM RIPPED
free of her throat, for two heartbeats flooding the dark chamber with the stark, raw energy of unbearable pain. And yet she
was
bearing it and she clamped her teeth together like a beast’s, biting back the shrieks, refusing to yield.
‘I can see yer chylt!’ Joyce Cawley exclaimed, looking up with wide eyes, her hands glistening with blood. ‘I can see yer li’le babby, Mistress Elizabeth, so keep pushing, d’year?’
Bess might have nodded as the face between her legs hardened and the two women gripping her sweat-slathered arms either side of the birthing stool exchanged a worried glance. ‘D’year me, Elizabeth?’ Joyce Cawley said sternly, ‘push now, wi’ the Lord’s own strength!’
Bess growled a response, closed her eyes and pushed.
It had begun two evenings ago. Her womb had started to squeeze, the sudden pain doubling her as she walked among the wounded, filling their bowls with pottage. The first spasm had abated as quickly as it had begun and yet she knew her child was coming. Isaac, who was with her, had known it too, had in his time seen enough women begin the labour pains to know it when he saw it, and so had helped her upstairs. And then, just as they opened the door to her bedchamber, Bess’s
waters
had broken in a great gush and Isaac had hurried off to fetch Lady Mary.
Women came, curtains were drawn and caudles were drunk. The chamber door’s keyhole was stopped up, straw was strewn across the floor and candles were lit. The stabbing, squeezing pains in her womb had repeated in bouts which, like waves nearest the shore, became more frequent: floods of pain that washed over her, then retreated leaving her stunned and exhausted. But then these waves had slowed, almost stopping completely, and Bess had feared the worst. That her child had died.
‘Trust i’ God and i’ nature,’ Mistress Cawley had said, as much to Lady Mary who stood ashen-faced, mopping her daughter’s brow, as to Bess. And they had been glad to have a midwife with Mistress Cawley’s experience there. Lucky, too. ‘By mi wark, yo’r strength, and God’s mercy and providence theaw’ll be delivered o’ this li’le one,’ the farmer’s wife had stated like a challenge to the fates themselves and to the frightened aspects of the other women in the room. And sure enough the excruciating shortening of her womb, like the drawstring on a purse being yanked tight, began again, and if the pain truly was women’s punishment for Eve’s sins then God was vengeful indeed.
The world roared and the whole chamber shook and masonry crashed to the forecourt amidst terrified screams. For beyond the birthing chamber walls, another battle raged.
‘God preserve us all!’ Hester exclaimed, squeezing Bess’s arm so that Bess felt fingernails dig into her flesh. She guessed the girl was about her own age, though she had never met her before now.
‘Ha’ the devils nowe decency at all?’ Winifred, a miller’s wife with a kindly face, exclaimed, putting a cup of hot wine and egg yolk caudle to Bess’s lips. But the smell of saffron and ginger turned Bess’s stomach now and she averted her face from the syrupy gruel and Winifred took it away.
‘Go, Mother,’ she snarled through her teeth, bracing against the pain and suddenly overwhelmed by a desperate need to bear downwards into her pelvis. ‘Go.’
Her mother’s grip tightened on her shoulders. ‘I’m not leaving you,’ she said, leaning over and planting a kiss on Bess’s sweat-sheened brow. ‘Major Radcliffe is there. He will know what to do.’
Bess felt a surge of relief. She was afraid. Afraid that God would take her baby. Afraid that He would take her, for she was weakening now, had been for hours though she had not allowed herself to admit it. But the pain was too much. It had gone on too long and she was tired. So tired.
‘I want some good, deep breaths, Mistress Elizabeth,’ Joyce Cawley said. ‘We dunno’ ned this going on lunger than neds be,’ and Bess glanced down to see the midwife’s bloody hands enter her again.
Outside, beyond the dark confines of the birthing chamber, muskets cracked, their reports savage in the late autumn dusk. Men yelled and clamoured, their words mostly unintelligible amongst the chaos. But Bess did make out one soldier’s chilling cry that the rebels were getting set to fire that devil of a gun again.
‘Go, Mother!’ she growled again. ‘They need you.’
‘Breathe loike I told thee!’ Joyce Cawley snapped, not looking up this time.
Bess could not hold the next scream in. It burst savagely out of her as she pushed with every fibre of her being, willing . . . demanding the baby to help them both. To be out of her. Somewhere, at once far away and yet horribly close, in some dark place, life and death wrestled over her soul and she thought she must lose her mind.
And when she next came back to the candle-lit chamber, her sight sweat-glazed as she looked at the pale faces around her, her mother was gone.
* * *
When at last the baby came, Bess’s screams had not been the only ones rending the night. The rebels’ demi-cannon had roared four more times, slamming iron balls against Shear House and sending lethal shards of stone flying. Captain Downing had led a charge, too, but somehow Major Radcliffe and his garrison had beaten off the attack, sending Parliament’s men back to the boundary wall to lick their wounds and regroup. But Radcliffe had lost eleven men in the desperate defence: seven dead and four too wounded to fight on, and now shrieks of pain flew along Shear House’s dark corridors like vengeful demons seeking out new souls to torment.
‘How long do we have?’ Bess asked, the words little more than exhaled breaths across her dry, cracked lips. She felt dangerously weak, as though she were not fully there at all but rather that her soul was half out of her body. On its way somewhere else. But the baby at her breast was alive. Her baby! Her boy.
And so she would live too. No matter what, death would not have her, and she forced some caudle down, hoping the warm drink would renew her strength.
‘I don’t know. Not long,’ her mother replied, sitting on Bess’s bed, staring at the swaddled babe suckling at his mother’s breast. For Bess’s instincts had been right and she had given birth to a healthy, chubby-limbed boy. He had squawked with impotent, red-faced rage while Joyce cut the cord and sponged the mess from him and Lady Mary stood in the flame-gilded dark with her hands over her mouth and tears in her eyes.
‘He wants to get eawt there and feight the devils,’ the midwife had said appreciatively, looking exhausted herself after the lengthy ordeal.
Bess put her nose against the baby’s blood-crusted head and inhaled, breathing in his urgent, vigorous life. ‘I’ll be ready, Mother,’ she said. ‘I just need a moment’s rest.’
‘Don’t talk, my love. Save your strength,’ her mother replied, smiling weakly.
The sanctity of the birthing chamber had been defiled and Bess was vaguely aware of men standing at the windows, boots crunching broken glass, muskets on stands pointing down onto the lawns. Lady Mary was wearing back- and breastplate over a thick tunic of green felt, and a sword hung from a baldrick across her shoulder. A firelock pistol and pikeman’s brimmed helmet sat beside the basin and pitcher on the dark oak chest of drawers, and Bess knew the end was near. Her mother’s foolhardy but inspiring sortie four nights ago had hurt the Parliament force. They had killed seven, including Captain Downing’s chief gunner, but more importantly they had killed four of the enemy’s oxen and wounded another, so that Downing had had to harness his own men to the gun to drag it up to the wall and this had taken time. But to their credit they had done it and now the demi-cannon was thundering again, this time its shot hammering the walls of the house itself. They will come in the morning, her mind warned. At first light.
‘I wish Father was here. I wish they were all here,’ Bess said and suddenly felt tears streaming down her face. They fell onto the baby’s skin but she did not wipe them off.
‘I wish it too,’ Lady Mary said. When Bess had watched her mother ride Hecuba into the rebels’ camp, her red hair flying, teeth like a predator’s, she had seemed invincible. She had been a warrior queen from classical legend, an Amazon bringing death to her enemies. Now, though, she looked tired and frail and her arms and armour struck Bess as faintly ridiculous.
‘They would have come if they had known,’ Bess said. It was more question than statement.
‘Of course they would have come,’ Lady Mary said. Which raised the question neither Bess nor her mother gave voice to. What had become of them?
‘Something must have happened to Coppe,’ her mother went on, ‘so that your father never received the letter,’ and to her
shame
Bess hoped that was so, for otherwise it might mean something had happened to Sir Francis.
Lady Mary took the little pink knot of the baby’s left hand between her finger and thumb. Her eyes had sunk into dark pools and there was dirt across her forehead, oil from her helmet perhaps. ‘What will you name him?’
Bess watched her baby suckle, willing it to gorge on her, to be strong. ‘I will wait for Emmanuel,’ she said. ‘We will decide together.’
Her mother nodded, then tucked a tress of Bess’s hair back behind her left ear. ‘Get some rest now,’ she said, standing. ‘Winifred will take the boy when he is full and you must try to sleep.’
Bess closed her eyes as her mother left the room, then she opened them again. And watched her baby boy.
And in the morning, the rebels came.
‘Long live King Charles!’ one of the men at her window yelled down into the cauldron of musketry and mayhem that had been lawns and flower beds but was now trenches, earthworks and gabions. Bess jolted, pushing herself up against the headboard, instinctively horrified that there were men in her bedchamber.
‘My baby!’ she yelled.
The other man turned, pulling the peaked
montero
cap from his bald head. ‘Forgive the intrusion, mistress, and the smook, but Major Radcliffe haz men at mooest o’ the second-floor windows. Sez he that howds the high ground howds the advantage. So ’ere we are.’ His cheeks flushed red. ‘My wife is seeing to yer li’le one.’ He smiled. ‘He’s a bonny babby.’
‘Winifred is your wife?’ Bess asked, taking a cup off the bedside table. Her hand was trembling.
‘Aye, she has a way with weans,’ he said proudly, ‘so dunno’ thee worry. They’ll be sum pleck safe.’ Bess nodded and put the cup to her mouth. Cold beer sluiced down her dry throat. She felt it hit her stomach. It was almost inconceivable that there
should
be soldiers in the room where just hours previously she was giving birth. But this only showed how desperate their situation had become.
‘’Ere they coom again,’ the other, younger man said whilst blowing on the end of his match.
‘’Scuse me, Miss Rivers,’ the first man said, replacing his cap and turning back to the window. A volley of musket balls clattered against the bricks and the younger musketeer grunted, dropping his matchlock, and staggered back from the window, blood gushing through the fingers of the hand clutching his throat.
Bess struggled out of her bed, onto weak legs, getting to the young man as he dropped to his knees, his wide eyes begging her for help as his lifeblood soaked his tunic and spattered on the bare boards.
‘Back in from the window, Mistress Elizabeth!’ the other man said. ‘There’s nowt thi can do for the lad. He’s kilt.’
She went to the chest of drawers and fetched a linen, folding it over her stomach. ‘I can try to stop the bleeding,’ she said, kneeling by the young man who was now lying on his back, his face deathly white against the bloody mess of his neck. Gingerly, Bess pulled his hands away and saw that his throat had been ripped out. The ball had shredded flesh and cartilage and torn through the back of his neck and even as she pressed the linen to the ruin, watching the white bloom red as it soaked up the gore, Bess knew the other man was right. Nothing could save the young man.
‘Lord, please take this man into your embrace,’ she whispered, as the stink of his open bowels hit her nose and she realized that he was dead.
She stood again, her head spinning, legs threatening to buckle, and she felt sick though she knew she would not be. Perhaps what she had been through had steeled her, prepared her for such horrors.
‘What is your name?’ she asked the soldier. He opened his
priming
pan and pulled the trigger and the musket roared.
‘Ellis,’ he said, wreathed in the smoke which was drifting back into the room. ‘Alexander Ellis.’
‘Well do not turn round, Alexander Ellis,’ she said, pulling on woollen skirts and a simple bodice that laced up the front, the pain between her legs excruciating. But the musketry outside was constant now, which meant the rebels were closing in on the house. Bess sat on her bed to pull on her riding boots, pain-sweat greasing her brow, then fetched an open-fronted robe from a hook on the wall and flung it around her shoulders. Then she went and stood beside Ellis and looked out, trying not to cough as the acrid smoke caught in the back of her throat.
‘My God,’ she said.
Fifty or so rebel musketeers had formed a skirmish line which was creeping closer to the trenches and gabions behind which Radcliffe’s men desperately loaded and fired with seemingly little effect. But what was even more terrifying was a company of the enemy who were concentrating their fire on one defensive position at a time. They were arranged in four ranks of eight, each rank firing in turn then reloading as the next line of men threaded through them to present and fire their own muskets.
‘Aye, and it’s warkin’, too,’ Ellis said grimly, filling the pan with black powder. ‘We’ve got nowt to stand against tat.’ He closed the pan and blew on it to do away with any loose powder, then put the butt on the floor and poured more powder down the muzzle.
Bess saw that the rebel musket block had already swept the defenders from the trench at the south-east corner, leaving bodies in its wake. Now this killing wave threatened to overwhelm another defensive position in front of the forecourt consisting of two earth-filled gabions. The eight garrison men behind this bulwark dared not step out of cover to fire their own weapons and were relying on others to stop the rebel block. But the other defenders had the skirmishers to worry about.