Wintercombe, page 2
part #1 of Wintercombe Series
Soldiers: the terror that had lurked beneath the calm surface of their lives for two years now, since war had come to Somerset. Moving to Wintercombe had saved Silence and her family from penury or worse, for the county had been controlled by the King’s supporters for over a year now, and the estates of all prominent Parliament men, George St. Barbe amongst them, had been confiscated with speed and efficiency, and their owners proclaimed traitor. The aged Sir Samuel, of course, being an ancient and highly respected member of the county community, had escaped any such retribution. With an aplomb that had disgusted his wife Dame Ursula, and secretly amused Silence, he had paid off both sides since the opening of hostilities, not caring, in his own words, a fig nor a spoon for King or Parliament so long as they left him in peace at Wintercombe to enjoy his declining years, to potter undisturbed in the sunshine or sup a tankard of beer or cider at the George.
And now a sudden seizure of the heart had put a term to Sir Samuel’s life, and the wolves had gathered. Silence knew why they had come, what she would say to them, what must be done to save Wintercombe from sequestration, and herself and all her family from being turned out to fend for themselves as they could. She felt very much alone, and frightened. Realising that the two girls were looking at her as if she held all their salvation in her hands, she gave herself a tiny shake, and called up to her stepdaughter, who was still hanging over the balustrade with her hair coiling round her shoulders like some unkempt prophetess of doom. ‘How many soldiers, Rachael?’
The girl waved an arm that was splashed with dark, milky stains; she had been helping in the dairy, Silence remembered. ‘How should I know?’ she said with irritation. ‘Hundreds of them — the courtyard’s full of horses.’ And she added, with a faintly spiteful note in her voice, ‘Well, are you coming, Mother, or shall I go ask Grandmother to see them?’
Since Sir Samuel’s widow was crippled, and had been virtually confined to her chamber for many years, this was hardly practical: moreover, to allow such a thing to happen would be another lost battle in the long, hard-fought struggle that Silence had waged with both her mother-in-law and her stepdaughter, since her marriage nine years previously. She made herself smile up at the difficult, moody, wilful, stubborn child who was Nat’s twin and yet his opposite, and said gently, ‘No need for that, Rachael. I shall come up now — and don’t you go rushing back, I want you to stay with me.’
‘More soldiers?’ said Tabitha angrily. ‘What do they want?’
‘I expect they want more money, now that your poor grandfather is dead,’ Silence told her reassuringly. ‘They’ll soon go away, I promise, they won’t be here any longer than any of the others were.’
But they’ll want more than money, she thought, as she climbed the steps up from the orchard to the arbour terrace, Rachael and Tabitha beside her. Now the house was visible, its rough, old stone grey-gold and glowing in the sun, the large windows of the Hall with their stained-glass coats of arms, the smaller panes to either side, all winking in the afternoon light. Silence drew a deep breath, her heart juddering with the realisation of the depth of her love for this place, and the strength of her fear that it might be taken away from them and given to rapacious strangers. Everything depended on her conduct with these unknown men now doubtless filling her Hall, eyeing the furniture and the tapestries, speculating on the wealth of this old and lovely house, the farm buildings, the barn newly filled with the fruits of harvest and hay-making, the fat milch cattle and plump, woolly sheep, the rich water-meadows along the Norton Brook, the barrels of cider made from the small sour apples in the orchard, the horses in the paddocks, the hazel coppices up behind the house, the cheeses new and green in the dairy…
They will want the house, she thought, and found that her mouth was dry when she tried to swallow. They will want the house, they will know that Sir Samuel is dead and that it should be George’s now, and because he’s in Waller’s army and Sam with him, they will want to take it away as they did with Sir John Horner’s house at Mells, and George’s at Chard, and strip it of everything to feed the King’s soldiers — and we will be destitute. Unless — unless I can persuade them otherwise.
Part of her, the part that had feared her father’s beatings and her husband’s unthinking and hurtful criticism, wanted to hide, to cower, to protest that she was not capable of such defiance, that she was only a weak and feeble woman, made of inferior flesh, Adam’s spare rib, a lesser being created purely for Man’s help and comfort. But as she gazed despairingly up at the mossy stone tiles and the ridiculous carved beasts that Sir Samuel’s father had placed incongruously on the mediaeval gables, the other Silence asserted herself with quiet, confident calm. She had an unassailable argument. She had her children around her, and surely not even the rapacious lechers that popular report held to be the usual run of King’s soldiers would be so heartless as to turn her and all her family out of doors, in defiance of the laws of God and man?
She walked with the two children across the terrace, past the arbour of cherry trees, the old stone sundial whose shadow showed, sharply, that the hour approached four of the clock, and up the next flight of steps to the knot garden. The south wing of the house, built in the same rough-dressed stone as the rest, lay in shadow to their left, almost hidden beneath the weight of the huge vine which sprang from the south-facing wall of the Hall, and had spread in perhaps fifty years over most of that side of Wintercombe. It had only once or twice ever given any grapes, and those small and mean, too sour to eat and too few to make wine; but Silence and the elderly gardener, Diggory Barnes, had nursed and pruned and worried over it, as over some sick infant who would surely soon recover. There was a saying at Wintercombe, however, which talked of ‘when the vine bears’ in the same way as other households spoke of falling moons or flying pigs.
On the last terrace, paved with stone and hummocked with sweet-scented thyme and marjoram and chamomile growing between the cracks, stood Eliza Davison, the chief maid, her plain horse face rigid with disapproval. ‘My lady, the place be all amok with soldiers, a-tramping about in the Hall with their slummocky boots, and Madlin Tilley’s been screaming and crying, ’tis a wonder you didn’t hear her, my lady, and all the maids be afeared they’ll be ravaged.’
Silence fought a sudden impulse to hysterical laughter. Eliza, who gave herself airs, was always struggling to eliminate the more incomprehensible elements of her dialect from her speech, and the results were sometimes unintentionally comical. She said soothingly to the maid, ‘I’ll deal with them, Eliza. Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll soon be gone. They’ve probably only come for money, just as they did when Sir Samuel was alive. Can you go and calm the other servants? They must be greatly in need of a steady influence at the moment.’
Gratified, Eliza bobbed a curtsey and vanished inside the house. Silence, aware of the unfamiliar sound of male voices within, took a deep breath, glanced encouragingly at both children, grasped Tabitha by the hand, and stepped into the cool dimness of the Hall.
The screens, dark carved oak hung with heavy, red curtains, hid her from the uninvited, unwelcome visitors, but their words came to her with clarity. ‘Sir Thomas has been waiting for the old bugger to die for months — there’ll be rich pickings here now, eh, Nick?’
‘There’s no plate,’ said the second voice, deeper, less rough-edged, but no less calculating or hard. ‘I wonder what they’ve done with that?’
‘I can imagine, right enough — but still, no harm in looking, eh? An amusing way to spend an afternoon, and the lads’ll be pleased, we’ve not had the chance of a little wanton destruction for months.’
Silence, standing in the dark passageway with the two girls close beside her, could feel their horror and fear. In her own breast was a cold, hard knot of emotion that she recognised, with some astonishment, as rage. She had not experienced such fury since the brief, bad days when she had last attempted, at the age of ten or so, to defy her father. Tabitha gasped, and she realised that she was clutching her hand too tight.
‘A great pity, to smash such a place,’ said the voice of the man addressed as Nick. ‘But needs must, where the Devil — or Sir Thomas — drives, and a quantity of plate would make any amount of pillage worth our while.’
‘I’m surprised you’re so squeamish. The man’s a proclaimed traitor, he and his son have been with the Roundheads from the beginning. We’ve picked his own lands at Chard bare — and now his father’s dead at last, this becomes his, and therefore ours. Do you fancy quartering here, eh?’
‘Better here than Bath, and besides, to my mind the women are prettier — and ripe for the taking. Did you see that bold, red-haired trollop gave us the wink as we rode in? No doubt of it, Johnny my lad, there’s good sport to be had here.’
‘I think you may be mistaken in that,’ said Silence, her voice holding her fury tight-leashed. Seemingly of their own accord, her feet had moved her out from behind the screens, the children pressed against her as if to shelter beneath the wings of her rage. She saw that there were, despite Eliza’s words, only two men in the high, old-fashioned room, standing before the fire, their faces turned towards her in surprise as she entered. She knew what they must see — a woman neither tall nor short, young nor old, dark nor fair, handsome nor ugly, fat nor thin, clad in sober mourning black, the habitual serenity of her expression belying the turmoil of anger and terror within. There would be no sport to be had with this woman, and it was written all too clearly on the face of the taller, fairer of the two young men confronting her. They were both dressed in the famous Taunton blue of the Bath garrison, overlaid by buff coat and sword-belt; and both, as they assessed her probable identity, doffed their plumed hats and swept her low, courtly and assuredly mocking bows.
‘Mistress St. Barbe, I assume?’ said the shorter, darker one: his was the voice that had so casually discussed the dishonouring of her maidservants. Silence stared at him coldly, seeing a brown face, brown hair, brown eyes, a countenance unserious and lively, seamed with paler lines where he had screwed his face against the sun, and rendered peculiarly devilish by a thin, dark sliver of moustache on his upper lip. He was the pattern of those brawling, swearing, wenching Cavaliers of legend, and in sudden panic she wondered if she could argue with him at all. It was the face of a man who saw what he wanted, and took it.
‘I am Lady St. Barbe,’ she said. ‘To what circumstances do we owe this unexpected visit, sirs?’ She did not like being courteous, since they so clearly would not be, but Sir Samuel had always treated the most rapacious grasper of funds for King or Parliament with an unfailingly polite manner that had never, to the discerning, concealed his contempt for men who must be wooed by fine talk and flattery.
‘To the death of Sir Samuel St. Barbe, your husband’s father,’ said the fair man. At first sight more handsome by far than his companion, she could see at closer quarters the broken veins under the skin of cheek and nose, that in a few years would become the betraying ruddiness of dissipation and debauch. His eyes were blue and bloodshot, and he did not look as if he had slept much the previous night. ‘We have come to offer you our most sincere condolences on his sad demise, Mistress St. Barbe.’
‘And whom have I the…honour of addressing?’
The bite in her voice was not lost on the darker man. The corners of his mouth turned up infuriatingly, and the rebellious ten-year-old buried deep within the calm and capable wife and mother longed to hit him with all her strength. ‘I am Captain Hellier, and this is Lieutenant Byam. Alas, madam, sad though was Sir Samuel’s death, we have not in fact come to offer our condolences.’
He paused, tantalisingly. Nauseated by their hypocrisy, Silence glanced at Tabitha and saw her eyes narrowed, assessing the two men. The unaccustomed severity of her expression gave her face a mean, pinched look quite unlike the sweet-natured, sensitive child whom her mother loved so much. Up until now, thanks to Sir Samuel’s wisdom, they had been spared the full horror of war, of unthinking destruction, pillage, murder, rape, the brutalising of soldiers and civilians. Silence, seeing her beloved Tabby’s changed countenance, knew with terrible foreboding that the children’s loss of illusion and security this day might be only the first step down a steep and horrifying slope.
Muffled footsteps and voices came from above: she looked up to the gallery, above the screens passage, and saw the bobbing caps and curious, frightened faces of a clutch of her maidservants, peering down. The brown man followed her eyes, and said with every appearance of concern and consideration, ‘Perhaps if we may talk somewhere more privily, madam?’
‘That will not be necessary,’ Silence told him firmly. She knew that she must win this battle, and if she did so in public, her authority over the servants, always a trifle uneasy, would be vastly enhanced. Bad enough to have her mother-in-law like an avenging Fury in her chamber, too sick to run the household but too obstinate and domineering to relinquish her grasp so tamely, without appearing weak and intimidated by a couple of soldiers. They were after all only a captain and a lieutenant: when her husband had last written, he had been raised to the colonelcy of his regiment.
‘As you will, madam,’ said Captain Hellier formally. He came closer, and she saw that he was a little taller than herself, by some three or four fingers. She was aware of Tabitha’s intense glare, and the white, set face of Rachael at her shoulder, and drew herself up. ‘Say what you must, Captain, and be gone — you and your men are frightening the children, and the maids.’ And me, she could with truth have added, but did not; she would not have admitted her terror to these men for all the gold at the King’s command.
‘I regret, madam, that I must do a great deal more than frighten your family. Sir Samuel St. Barbe is dead, died three weeks ago, am I correct? On Saturday, the fifth day of October, in the year 1644?’
‘At about five of the clock in the morning, of a seizure of the heart, if you require the finer details,’ said Silence, with heavy sarcasm. ‘And was buried in the church at Philip’s Norton two days later — you may go ask Master Willis, who is Vicar there, if you doubt me.’
‘I do not, Mistress St. Barbe. But it is my unfortunate duty to tell you that, since Sir Samuel’s tragic, though not alas untimely death, your husband George St. Barbe, Esquire —’
‘Sir George, if you please, sir — since you are so concerned to be correct. Sir Samuel was made a Baronet by King James, and my husband now inherits that title — so I am Lady St. Barbe.’
‘As he has also inherited this house. And I must tell you, Lady St. Barbe, that all his inheritance, as a proclaimed traitor, is forfeit to the King’s cause, the use and revenues thereof to be granted to Sir Thomas Bridges, His Majesty’s Governor of Bath, for the support of the garrison there.’
‘Is it, indeed?’ said Silence coolly. She could almost touch Rachael’s fury: the girl was rigid and crackling with it. She wanted to reach out, to give her stepdaughter some reassurance, but did not dare; all her energies must be concentrated on saving Wintercombe. ‘And so you have come to turn me out, a defenceless woman, and my five children, and my husband’s mother who has not walked these eight years, and is upwards of seventy years old, in the King’s name, and leave us with the clothes on our back and no roof over our head? Is that the King’s law, and the King’s justice? I have not fought for the Parliament, sir, and nor have these innocent children, nor my mother-in-law, Dame Ursula.’
‘Indeed you may not have done,’ said Captain Hellier. ‘But that, I regret, is not my concern. I have orders from my Colonel, Sir Thomas Bridges, to seize this house in the King’s name. No mention was made of the inhabitants of this place, madam, and other ladies in your position have in the past taken shelter with relatives or friends. In any case, you would no doubt not wish to stay while my men are quartered in the house.’
Silence could hear the maids on the gallery whispering in agitation amongst themselves. Pitching her low, clear voice to reach them, she said, ‘You are labouring under a serious misapprehension, Captain. You have no rights to this house, nor has your Colonel, nor the King, and I must ask you to leave at once.’
That, she saw with satisfaction, had taken the wind very nicely from his sails. The brown eyes, a light, autumnal colour, like Tabby’s chestnuts, widened slightly, then narrowed. ‘You are wrong, madam. I have the King’s warrant in my coat, signed with his own hand — he is even now in Bath, though on a brief visit only. I doubt you could reach the city in time to appeal to him, and still more that he would listen to your entreaties. He has no patience with traitors, Lady St. Barbe, nor with their importunate wives.’
So your gloves are off, my fine Captain, thought Silence. She found that she was almost enjoying this tantalising game, playing the man on the hook of his ignorance of the one vital fact which she had wilfully withheld until now, the information that would save Wintercombe.
‘There is no need for me to appeal to anyone, Captain. The law is on my side, not yours. You are mistaken in one essential particular.’ She took a deep breath, meeting those narrow eyes coldly, savouring her victory. ‘When Sir Samuel died, he left a will, as do most men at the end of their days. His lands were his to bestow as he wished, and he did not choose to leave them to his son, my husband. In his will it states plainly that Wintercombe and all the manor lands, and everything else besides of which he died possessed, goes to his wife Ursula, Lady St. Barbe, for her life, and after her death to his grandson Nathaniel, who is fourteen years old. So you see, Captain, my father-in-law has not left my poor husband a penny. This house belongs to Dame Ursula, and there is nothing whatsoever that you can do about it.’
The Hall was quite quiet, hushed, as Captain Hellier stared at her disbelievingly. Silence spared a quick glance for the two children, and saw Rachael exultant and Tabby’s wide, hazel eyes shining with delight and relief. Then, abruptly, a new combatant entered the fray.
‘That’s taken you all aback, hasn’t it, King’s Captain? But it’s quite true, I can assure you.’
