Wintercombe, page 1
part #1 of Wintercombe Series
Wintercombe
Pamela Belle
© Pamela Belle 1988
Pamela Belle has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1988 by The Bodley Head.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Historical Note
PART I
THE AUTUMN-COLOURED MAN
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART II
WINTER QUARTERS
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
PART III
SO EARLY IN THE SPRING
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
PART IV
A SUMMER’S DAY
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
For Chris and Maureen, with love and many thanks
for all the years of help and friendship
Historical Note
Like some of my earlier books, this story was originally inspired by a house, in this case the National Trust property Great Chalfield, in Wiltshire. Like Wintercombe, with which it has many features in common (including the listening-masks in the Hall, and the secret way across the roofspace), it suffered garrison and siege during the Civil War, though for the Parliament side. Unlike Wintercombe, however, the family inhabiting it was of little interest; and so I decided to use a novelist’s licence and place the house some miles away, in one of my favourite villages, and people it with a variety of characters, many of whom actually existed.
The village of Norton St. Philip is still very similar to its seventeenth-century appearance, and moreover has the benefit of an unusually comprehensive survey, carried out in 1638 for the Lord of the Manor. Using this and the Parish Registers, it has been possible to work out the details of almost every family, where they lived, and their approximate financial circumstances. Almost all the servants, and all the villagers, mentioned in the book are described as accurately as possible. The soldiers, too, with the exception of Nick Hellier, were real people. Lieutenant-Colonel Ridgeley had a reputation quite as evil as I have indicated, and his fate is suitably obscure.
In telling this fragment of the history of the St. Barbe family (a noted name in the West Country), I have enjoyed the assistance of many people. The staff of the Somerset County Record Office at Taunton kindly produced maps, books and documents on several occasions. Mrs. Pat Lawless, of Norton St. Philip, helped me with various aspects of village history. Dave Ryan, of Caliver Books and the King’s Army, supplied me with invaluable information about seventeenth-century weaponry, as well as numerous vital volumes, and the London Library once more came up trumps.
Finally, I am indebted to Steve, who has given me every encouragement, and much-needed assistance with items of high and low technology; and, as always, to my mother, who has read and checked every stage of the book, and offered her usual helpful suggestions. In consequence, I take full responsibility for what mistakes remain!
P.D.A.B.
JANUARY, 1988
Note: all the chapter headings in Parts I and II are taken from the Book of Proverbs: all those in Parts III and IV from the plays of William Shakespeare.
‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband’
(PROVERBS, 12:4)
PART I
THE AUTUMN-COLOURED MAN
(October – December, 1644)
Chapter One
‘A good man leaveth an inheritance for his children’s children’
(13:22)
It was unseasonably mild for late October, and the sun stole warm and welcome through her thick woollen bodice and skirts as she sat in the cosy niche in the lowest wall of the terraced, south-facing gardens. The voices of her children and her stepson, gathering early chestnuts in the orchard, came distantly, punctuated by delighted shrieks of discovery or, more frequently, of enraged argument. She did not concern herself: Nat, her stepson, could be trusted to arbitrate in all disputes between the three turbulent younger children. She closed her eyes, lapping up the sunlight with the same contented greed as her cat Pye, who sat in the niche beside her wearing, she suspected, a very similar look of luxurious bliss on her fat black face with its startlingly asymmetrical white nose and whiskers. She put out a hand and stroked the animal’s back. It was surprisingly hot, and shivered with a sensual pleasure reflected in the simultaneous rumbling purr. Pye was that rarity, a cat whose devotion was given to her lady as an individual rather than as a mere provider of food and comfort, although these were of course much appreciated.
Another loud outburst of childish rage erupted amongst the chestnuts. Silence, Lady St. Barbe, reflected for the hundredth time that day, as indeed she had done ever since becoming mistress of a large country household and, subsequently, mother to three healthy children in addition to the trio of young stepchildren, on the absolute incongruity of her name. But her father, a sternly religious London draper, had strict views on the female place in the world, and had named her younger sisters in similar spirit. However, since Prue was a giddy, careless child, the despair of her parents, Patience a hasty young woman who was always in too much of a hurry to take thought, and Silence an inveterate delighter in words, godly Isaac Woods’ hopes of rearing submissive meek ornaments to Puritan womanhood had been sadly disappointed.
The childhood of the three sisters, and their brother Joseph, had been a sad and sorry time, punctuated by frequent beatings, exhortations, prophecies of the awful fate that would surely befall them if they did not slavishly follow their father’s will, and hours spent in usually false penitence on their knees. It had drawn the four children into a secret world of insolence and laughter and mockery that her father had never suspected, and that her mother, who had died when Silence was fifteen, had tolerated and even fostered.
Yes, she had always feared and disliked her father, and all he represented; she had been bored by the interminable sermons, and secretly and sinfully despised his pompous, priggish friends. She had resented the urge that all of the Lord’s Elect, as they styled themselves, seemed to have, to control not only the deeds, but the minds and souls and thoughts of their wives and children. She had longed for escape, and had taken the first chance of marriage that offered; but found, at the age of nineteen, that she had merely exchanged one strict male mentor for another.
Her husband, George St. Barbe, a Somerset gentleman of middle age and undistinguished appearance, had been casting about for a young and biddable second wife to run his house near Chard: a godly girl, acceptable to his doting mother Dame Ursula, able to give his three young children the direction and guidance so lacking in their motherless lives, and to instil some order into a household that he was too busy, and too ignorant, to supervise.
He had encountered Silence’s father on one of his business trips to London, and had learned with interest that this honest, religious and wealthy man had a daughter of marriageable age. Meeting her, he had been struck at once with her decorous, seemly disposition, her neat and unassuming grace. She had had a most godly upbringing; she was young and submissive; she was not unpleasing to look at, with that serene face and modest figure; with two younger sisters and a brother, she had ample experience of looking after children and running a household, especially since her mother had been four years dead; and above all, her father was a rich man and would dower her well. Silence, too young and too frightened of her father to realise that life might hold any other possibilities, had agreed to marry this stout, confident man more than twice her age, knowing only that it brought status, security and, above all, freedom from her narrow, cold, constricted life above the draper’s shop in Paternoster Row.
It had. led her, instead, to the old-fashioned and inconvenient house at Chard, to a dozen surly, resentful servants whom she had not the slightest idea how to direct, to three unhappy and difficult stepchildren, and to a husband who, while at first quite kind and attentive, lacked any understanding of her feelings, her bewilderment and loneliness, her isolation amongst people who seemed to speak a different language, and a countryside almost threatening in its richness and abundance and strangeness after the cramp and dust and noise of London, where she had lived all her life.
She had not been bred to such a position: her father had been no more than a draper, albeit a very rich and respected one, and his parents humble Kent yeomen. And her mother’s father had begun by selling fish in Billingsgate. She could cook and sew and clean, no task had been thought too lowly for her during the dreary days of her childhood: she had scoured pots and polished furniture, cleaned hearths and mended Joseph’s torn hose and her father’s austere collars and cuffs. She was trained to be a competent housewife, able to drive a hard bargain at market and turn out a plain but respectable meal for her husband. She had speedily found that such skills, earned with so much la
Yet she had managed, just, to adapt. Her husband might treat her like a child, even as she bore his children with dutiful regularity, and lost only one out of four, still much regretted. The servants tried to ignore or deceive or cheat her, and as for the stepchildren, they were openly hostile. But she had remembered her fishwife grandmother’s adage, uttered at some despairing moment of her unhappy childhood, and never forgotten. ‘Make, do, mend, girl,’ old Granny Richards had said. ‘No regrets, no pity — just you pick up the pieces and start all over again.’ And Silence had made the house comfortable and welcoming for the husband she did not love, and set herself to manage the rambling, draughty old building and obstreperous servants; had learned to understand and appreciate the richness and warmth of their dialect, and had made significant progress with the three stepchildren. She had enjoyed no such felicity, of course, with Dame Ursula St. Barbe, who would resent any woman wed to her beloved son who was not his dead first wife, naturally in her eyes a paragon of piety and all the female virtues. But Dame Ursula had not lived at Chard, and at Chard, Silence had discovered that she could cope with the life into which she had so abruptly been thrust.
She sighed now, thinking of that earlier, hesitant self, so desperately striving after the perfection desired by her father and, later, her husband and his mother, and which she knew that she would never, ever reach. As a child, she had tried to rebel: her insubordination had been beaten out of her by the age of ten, with tears and prayers, apologies and many suppers of bread and water, but her spirit, outwardly docile, had never been broken, and neither had her sisters’. Their brother Joseph, however, was an irresolute young man, easily swayed, and his letters from London, full of family news and political affairs, were remarkable for their characteristic swings of emotion and opinion. Civil war had raged across the country for two years now, and still he could not decide whether or not to join Parliament’s army. It would be exactly like him, Silence thought wryly, to enlist just as the conflict ended, having dithered on the brink for years. But, unfortunately, the war showed no sign of ending yet.
It had raged for two years now; two years ago last week, in fact, since the first great battle had been fought at Kineton, when the King and his fierce and bloody German nephew Prince Rupert had fought the Earl of Essex to a standstill all through a cold autumn afternoon beneath a Warwickshire hillside, and the dying froze with the dead beneath the icy moon that night. Two years since her husband George, a stout man of integrity and principles, fifty years old, had taken his eldest son Sam, aged eighteen, and his servants and tenants and friends, and marched away with borrowed armour and rusty swords and patched buff coats to fight for the Parliament, leaving his young second wife and children in the care of his aged father, Sir Samuel St. Barbe, who lived at a house called Wintercombe, just outside the village of Philip’s Norton in Somerset, a few miles south of Bath. And for two years Silence had had nothing of her husband save for a few battered, infrequent letters in his characteristically literal and pompous style. Guiltily, she had thoroughly enjoyed the sudden and drastic change in her situation.
It had almost been perfect. Her husband’s house near Chard, in the south of the county, was small, shabby, old and cold and inconvenient. There was no incentive to improve it, to introduce modern comforts, since the St. Barbe family home, Wintercombe, would one day be his. Wintercombe had glorious gardens, laid out by George’s grandfather in a flush of enthusiasm after diplomatic visits to Italy and France. It was also old, but very beautiful, large enough to afford privacy, small enough to be easily managed. Sir Samuel, although nearly eighty, was a delightful man, erudite, wise in the ways of the world, full of sly jokes and sound common-sense; his second grandson Nat was a chip off the old block. Silence had revelled in his company, enjoyed his books, learned chess and tables and even, daringly, some card-games from him, listened to his rasped but still tuneful voice singing plaintive songs from his youth, when Queen Elizabeth had repelled the might of Spain and England had known its greatest glory.
But now that voice had gone. Sir Samuel St. Barbe had been three weeks in his grave in the golden church at Philip’s Norton, sincerely mourned by all, and none more so than by his son’s second wife. And as she sat here at the edge of the orchard, soaking up the last heat of the year, she was unhappily aware that everything had changed by his death, and that all at Wintercombe stood at the brink of an abyss into which one false move, one unfortunate event, might hurl them.
‘Mama?’
It was her eldest daughter Tabitha, who was eight. For once not sorry to be awakened from her thoughts, Silence opened her eyes, blinking into the light. The child stood before her, tall for her age and slender, her great mass of ungovernable golden-brown hair turned a glorious, sunlit yellow around her calm, pointed face. Her name, Silence had been told by Sir Samuel, meant ‘gazelle’, and for such a graceful, shy, unassuming child it was especially appropriate. She shared her mother’s sense of humour and the ridiculous, and Silence was aware, with a characteristic pang of guilt, that she favoured Tabitha, who was most like her, above either of her other children.
The little girl gave the sudden, vivid smile that was so attractive, and said, ‘May I sit with you?’
Pye opened a jaundiced eye, yawned delicately, and went back to sleep. Silence smiled. ‘Of course you can, but it’s getting late — look at the sun. You’ve all been here long enough, I think. How many chestnuts have you gathered?’
Tabitha’s hazel eyes, the image of her mother’s, flashed up at her. ‘Not very many. I think the squirrels have been eating them too. But there’ll be enough to roast on the fire tonight — look.’ She thrust a hand into the pocket of her apron, and withdrew a fistful of fat, gleaming chestnuts, shining rich and russet in the October sun, for her mother’s admiration. Then, replacing them, she sat in the warm stone niche and took Pye onto her lap, stroking away the cat’s indignation with small, gentle fingers. ‘Isn’t it lovely here! I wish it could be summer for ever, all warm and sunshiney and no winter.’
‘I think you’d have to travel to Italy or Spain to enjoy that sort of climate,’ Silence told her. ‘Would you really want to leave Wintercombe?’
‘No!’ said her eldest child, with quiet passion. ‘Never, never, never — it’s the most beautiful place in the world!’ She laid her cheek possessively against the warm, golden stone beside her, and closed her eyes blissfully.
Into the brief moment of quiet came a distant shout. Tabitha jerked upright, and grasped her mother’s sleeve. ‘Listen, is that Rachael?’
Her half-sister was fourteen years old, and twin to Nat, at present supervising the little ones in the orchard. The difficulties of the birth had left their mother, George St. Barbe’s first wife, dead, and Nat’s health permanently affected. According to Wintercombe legend, Rachael’s enraged wails at birth had been heard in Philip’s Norton half a mile away, and maturity had not mellowed her voice.
‘Mother — please come quick — Mother!’ With a scuttering of gravel, Rachael arrived with a bump against the yellow stone balustrade just above them, her black hair escaping in regrettable rats’ tails from her plain white cap. Silence rose, and surveyed her gasping stepdaughter with her usual serenity. ‘Whatever is it, Rachael?’
‘It’s soldiers — soldiers have come!’
Neither of the children could possibly have guessed the enormity of effort it took to maintain that look of calm, wide-eyed enquiry. But the years of her childhood, learning to keep her self, her individuality and liveliness beneath the subservient mask that so gratified her father, and thus escape his beatings, stood Silence well in such moments of crisis. Yet still, in the sudden and absolute quiet, she felt that they must surely hear, or see, the fierce battering of her heart against her ribs.
