Wintercombe, page 29
part #1 of Wintercombe Series
With one swift movement, she slipped inside, leaving it almost closed, as it had been before. This was the outer room, where the servant slept, on the neat truckle-bed in the corner. Chairs, a settee, a little table against the window which was piled high with papers, met her urgent glance. No sign of a spy-glass — and no sign of her most recent fear, someone else in the room. She ran to the further door, lifted the latch, and stepped into Ridgeley’s sanctum.
It was as arrogantly and sordidly untidy as himself. Clothes, armour, papers, lay in heaps in the corners, and there was a sour smell of sweat, tobacco smoke, dirt and stale wine. The table was even more hidden by papers than Harris’s, and the bed, its curtains half-closed, displayed a tumbled pile of sheets. Rachael’s avid eyes swept over the squalor, the almost dead fire, empty bottles and overturned cups, spilt wine, plates of mould-furred food, confirming everything she had suspected about the uncouth Colonel. So intent was she on finding the spy-glass that her gaze passed right across it before she realised. There it was! On the windowsill, next to those books — could that awful man really read? — and still in its leather bag. She stretched across the table and very carefully lifted it off. It was surprisingly heavy: she held it grasped tightly in triumph for a moment, and then thrust it into the pockets of her apron.
As she turned to go, her eye was caught by the long, flat wooden case on the windowsill by the books. She had always been told by her grandmother that curiosity was one of the greatest of her manifold sins, but had, being Rachael, never taken any notice. Whatever could be in that case? It was filmed with a fine layer of dust — for obvious reasons, the maids never ventured into Ridgeley’s domain — so it was obviously not well-used. Very carefully, so as not to leave betraying fingermarks, she undid the simple metal catch and pushed up the lid.
Two pistols lay within, on a bed of crimson velvet. Rachael had a limited acquaintance with firearms, but one look was enough to tell her that these were beautifully made, and exceedingly expensive. Less than half the size of the cumbersome horse-pistols that all the officers carried in holsters at their saddle-bows, the rounded, slender butts, inlaid with silver, were in a warm reddish wood that looked like walnut. Fascinated by their alluring, deadly beauty, Rachael stared down at them, struggling with temptation. The spy-glass would be missed, at once. But to take one of these, not an everyday weapon, in a box that so evidently had not been touched for weeks…
By the time he finds out, thought Rachael exultantly, I’ll have it so well hidden he’ll never suspect me — or anyone else in the house. She laid the spy-glass, not without a twinge of regret, back on the sill, and picked up one of the little pistols. It fitted perfectly into her hand, beautifully balanced. Also in the case were a little leather bag full of shot, a tiny wooden ram, another bag which proved to contain paper cartridges, each holding sufficient powder for one loading, a powder flask, and the metal spanner with which to wind the pistol up. Her hand hovered over them, hesitated, and swooped. In sudden haste she tumbled everything into the wide pocket of her apron, leaving only the one weapon forlornly alone upon its velvet, the impression of its fellow beside it. Then she shut the case with trembling hands, and glanced around the chamber. It lay still in the same sordid chaos as before. The spy-glass seemed untouched, and there were no tell-tale smudges on the pistol case. Her mission accomplished, all she had to do now was to escape.
She sped back to the outer chamber, her heart banging so loud inside her bodice that the rest of the house must surely be able to hear it. Nat’s words about planning came back to her: she glanced at the truckle-bed, wondering if she could hide beneath it should Harris return. But outside in the passage there was no sound. Rachael listened intently, hardly breathing, alert for any noise from the stairs or the nursery. Then, hearing nothing, she took a deep rasping breath, opened the door and dived through it.
No one awaited her frantic, guilty gaze. She was safe: she had done it, unseen and unsuspected! Fighting the wild desire to throw back her head and screech her triumph, she closed the door to within two or three inches of the frame, and then turned to walk back to her own chamber, the pistol banging against her thighs with every stride.
She was Home, as in the games of tag they played in the garden in kinder weather. Home, and safe from pursuit. She shut the door firmly and sat on the bed beside the neglected Bible, hugging herself with glee. That would show them! And Nat’s face when she told him! She laughed to think of it, and then reality struck her. She could not tell him. He would disapprove. He might even make her take it back (her heart quailed at the thought), or, worse, tell her to confess all to their stepmother. And then Ridgeley would find out.
No, this was her secret, and hers alone. She did not know what she would do with it, where she would hide it. Hester made her bed, tidied and cleaned her chamber daily: it would not be safe there. Then she thought of the summer-house, the Home of their games. It was built at the edge of the higher terrace, but there was a lower storey, used chiefly to store apples, and reached from the higher one. And in one corner of that dusty, neglected little room, there was a small, loose stone that Sam had found on some long ago visit to Wintercombe, when he had been ten or eleven. He had hollowed out a cavity underneath, big enough for his secret treasures, and Rachael, trailing adoringly after her big brother, had once come upon him unexpectedly and discovered his secret. Now Sam was grown, and a soldier, but she remembered it very well. That was the perfect place to hide her spoils: and if by some dire mischance they were discovered, there would be no clue to give away the thief’s identity.
Only one other problem remained: to take the pistol there without rousing suspicion. To wander outside in this rain was foolhardy, to say the least, and would only draw attention to herself. No, it would have to be concealed in her chamber until the weather improved and she could find some excuse to stroll in the garden.
Hester might make the bed, but she never moved it: a big, heavy, oaken four-poster, it lay against the wall. Rachael took out the pistol, holding it once more in her hand to feel the sweet balance of it, the curl of her fingers around the cool smooth butt. She peered at the silver decoration, which seemed to depict some kind of military scene amid swirls and swags of engraved foliage, and traced the graceful curves with one fingertip. It seemed strange, that something so beautiful could bring death.
I can kill Ridgeley with this, Rachael thought suddenly, with a mixture of horror and wonder. I can put the ball and the cartridge in it, as Sam showed us before he went to war when he had his new pistols, and I can ram the shot home, and wind it up, and raise it and aim it at his horrible, ugly face, and — bang!
She pressed the trigger, but it was slack and unresisting. The lock mechanism was similar to that on Sam’s weapons, needing to be wound, or spanned, with the key she had taken care to steal along with the rest. She remembered her elder brother telling her and Nat, with his usual effervescent enthusiasm, that this was the type of most modern pistols, matchlocks being impossible to manage on horseback, and firelocks often unreliable. Wheellocks like this were expensive, but simple to load and fire: they could be wound in readiness, and left for a while until needed. Not too long, though, Sam had said: they could wind down again and then they would fail to fire.
She laid it down on the bed with the little heavy bag of shot, the cartridges, the powder flask and the ram. If she could remember how to load it all in the right order, as Sam had shown her, she would have a lethal weapon at her command.
It frightened her, but it was also, somehow, wildly exhilarating. She was no longer the difficult child, but a lady with the power of life, or death.
She found a piece of cloth in her clothes-press, left over from the making of her blue gown. She wrapped the pistol and its accessories in the soft azure wool, tied a knot in the bundle, and crouched down by the side of the bed. Underneath, behind the green perpetuana counterpane that hung to the floor, was a dark and dusty cavern in which, had she been younger, she might have been wont to hide when the world grew too oppressive. She pushed the package beneath the bed, as far back as her arm would stretch, and scrambled to her feet, dusting herself off. She doubted if the escapade had taken more than five minutes from start to finish, and now she must behave as if nothing had happened.
A betraying smirk on her lips, Rachael sat down on the bed and tried with indifferent success to apply herself to learning the first chapter of the Book of Proverbs.
Chapter Eleven
‘Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly’
(6:15)
The days slid by, and March appeared, like the lamb sweet and smiling. In Silence’s garden, the snowdrops and crocuses stood in massed ranks of green-frilled white and brilliant yellow, shy and lovely in unaccustomed sunshine. Diggory’s robin, a cheerful bright-eyed little bird who always followed him as he dug, and who had so far managed somehow to evade the murderous instincts of Pye, began building a nest with his mate on one of the stone beasts guarding the top terrace. Silence, concerned, thought that they would be lucky to rear a brood, unless Pye’s interests were speedily engaged by her inevitable litter of kittens. Since the cat had already gone calling for a mate in her usual brazen fashion, it would not be long before the arrival of four or five delightful bundles of fluff, to nestle in the old kittening basket by the fire in her chamber.
Spring was here, there seemed no doubt of it. In the pots crammed on every one of her windowsills, the bulbs she had planted in the autumn were bursting with life and fragrance: hyacinths, hoop petticoat daffodils, narcissi, the fragile purple and yellow flowers of crocus. In a fortnight or so, given further warmth, the display would be matched in the garden. Here, she could forget for a while the troubles that beset her: the continuing shortage of food, the behaviour of Bessie, who was almost certainly sharing Byam’s bed on a regular basis, the grumbles of Darby, whose threatened departure would be utterly disastrous; and the increasingly destructive behaviour of the soldiers, following Ridgeley’s example. Despite their busy days spent foraging or working on the defences, they still seemed to have the energy to get drunk every night. Wintercombe’s supply of cider had run out weeks ago, though they still brewed beer every fortnight, and so extra supplies were brought in from the villages to quench the men’s insatiable thirst. There had been a fair amount of damage, windows broken, tapestries ripped, wood burned, pewter squashed, melted in the fire or severely dented. At least there was nothing of real value for them to pilfer — George had taken all the precious metal off to be melted down for the Parliament, and she had hidden the silver-gilt salt and sundry smaller valuables in the study hearth. But she spent weary hours listing the destruction and loss with Clevinger, in the hope that somehow, some day, reparation would be made. No use applying to Ridgeley, who had scored tables and panelling with his knife, and amused himself at drunken suppers by throwing it at the hangings and pictures in the dining parlour. Nor, she suspected, would Sir Thomas Bridges be any more sympathetic — and a herd of wild horses could not have dragged her into the Governor’s presence again.
She was on her own, save for Captain Hellier. It was still difficult for her to address him as ‘Nick’ — the brief syllable seemed to falter on her tongue. And it was also exceeding strange to hear her own name spoken, in his deep, rather hard-edged voice, for the first time since Sir Samuel’s death. All her life, she had wished she were called Anne, or Bess, or Moll, any ordinary name instead of Silence, that made her a laughing-stock amongst those who derided Puritans. And yet now, when he used it without any mockery or disbelief, as if she were just a common-or-garden Nan or Dorothy, she could begin, hesitantly, to delight in its strangeness, the difference that marked her out amongst all other women. If there was another in the whole land called Silence, he had said, he did not know of it.
He lent her a book of poems by a man called Donne, with rough boisterous rhymes and rhythms, and an urgent love of life that leapt from the page. She remembered, later, that this man had died the Dean of St. Paul’s, just before her marriage, famous for the beauty and godliness of his sermons, even if he did approve of bishops. And at Tabby’s insistence, she instructed Turber and Clevinger to carry the virginals up from the study, and install them lovingly in the little clothes closet, twin of Mally’s, that led off her chamber. The instrument had only just fitted inside the stairs: the larger pieces of furniture, such as the bed, must originally have been brought up in pieces and reassembled.
During the day, Silence hardly saw any of the soldiers. As the weather improved, they were kept extremely busy, working on the defences about the house. The rebuilding of the wall bordering the courtyard had been easy enough, although a severe shortage of suitable stone meant that it was no more than breast high. Silence, surveying its progress from her oriel, had to acknowledge that it was not at all detrimental to the house; indeed, it could be said to have enhanced it. The pigeons, ejected, still flew obstinately back to their old towers every evening, and were as stubbornly repelled by the soldiers on watch there. They sat glumly on the wall and the tower roofs and in the yew walk, and their despondent cooing proved so infuriating that pigeon pie began to appear with increasing regularity on the dinner table.
It was in the orchard that the real damage was being done. She had not been able to bring herself to go down there for a long time. Nat reported to her regularly, not concealing his satisfaction at being proved right. Progress was slow, water a constant problem, tempers short and morale low. Apparently the soldiers would go to almost any lengths to avoid trench duty, and there were frequent punishments, beatings and floggings. Predictably, desertion was becoming more regular. Nick had told her that they had lost three men this week. ‘More trouble than it’s worth, Ridgeley is saying now,’ he had added, with a very shrewd glance at her and at Nat, sitting at the table apparently oblivious of all but his Latin. ‘There’s some talk of building a rampart on your lowest terrace, instead.’
There had been a small, tense pause. Nat’s head did not move, but Silence knew that he was listening intently. Rachael, sewing opposite him, was more open in her interest, and had fixed Hellier with a malevolent stare. In the little southern closet, the faint hesitant tinkle of the virginals could be heard, as Tabby practised her latest piece.
‘They couldn’t do that!’ Rachael cried hotly, into the quiet. ‘Not the terrace — they couldn’t!’
‘They can do anything they want,’ said Silence wearily. ‘They have the power, the will, and the ruthlessness. We have nothing at all.’
A strange look appeared on the girl’s face, a rather smug expression, as if she knew something that her stepmother did not. She opened her mouth, closed it, and applied herself with ostentatious industry to her stitches. Nick glanced at her, and Nat, and then turned back to Silence, sitting opposite him by the hearth. He said, very softly, ‘I think Ridgeley is realising how he’s been gulled — and for that matter, so am I.’
‘Gulled? Whatever do you mean?’
‘I am sure you know, my gracious Silence. Nat was very keen for the ditches to be dug at the bottom of the orchard, was he not? But the obvious place to fortify is the lowest terrace. You could knock down the balustrade, build a wooden fence with shot holes — oh, yes, by far the best way.’
‘But not one I’d volunteer, even to you,’ had said Silence. She found that she was trembling with anger and fear. ‘I know all is fair in war. But I love my garden dearly — do you think I’d hand it to your soldiers on a platter, to be destroyed at their leisure?’
‘No, I don’t. And I salute you for trying your best to keep it safe. I would do exactly the same, in your position.’
‘But as you’re not in my position, you’re going to tell Ridgeley where he can fortify more profitably?’
‘No,’ he had said quietly. ‘No, I will not. Though the future of this garrison may depend upon it, I will not.’
‘More fool you, then,’ said Nat, lifting his head from his book, his eyes gleaming with amusement. ‘And let’s hope Ridgeley is too stupid to think it out for himself.’
So far, it seemed that he was — or too stubborn to admit that his original plan had been wrong. The northern side was finished, and a wooden palisade had been thrown up along the hedge running down from the barton, bordering the orchard, and a shallow ditch dug outside it. But the earth rampart alongside the fish-ponds still was not finished, and the widening of the channel between them, although ostensibly completed, would not in Nat’s view have stopped a rabbit.
Silence stood now at her window, looking down over her garden, through the decimated apple trees, trying to see what was being done. Nat must have a much closer vantage point, or be so accepted by the soldiers that they let him watch their work. Today was dull but dry, quite warm for the season, and the fifth of March. Out in the fields around the village, the people of Norton would be taking advantage of the calm weather to plough their arable land, and to sow their crops with what grain the soldiers had left them. Those with cattle — and almost every household, except the poorest, had at least one cow — would be anxiously supervising calving, or turning their beasts off the hay meadows to allow the grass to grow. After the dead wet cold months of winter, the farming year was leaping into busy new life.
All through those drear past months, save when the snow and rain rendered any movement outside the house foolhardy if not actually impossible, she had visited the old and sick and poor of the village, bringing comfort and cordials and small gifts of charity, and had listened to their woes. Some, of course, had been self-inflicted: the man who complained of poverty who had spent all his money on drink, another so lazy and feckless that his crop had failed and his cow was dead of neglect. But over and over she had heard the litany of misery and repression: the people whose small, hoarded stores had been ransacked again and again, who had been abused as traitorous rebels for concealing what they did not have, whose wives had been ogled and daughters molested. The richer families, the Flowers and Perrys, the Pearces and young Ned Apprice and Mistress Baylie in her farm over near Farleigh, at risk from two garrisons, could survive the depredations of the soldiers. The lesser ones could not.
