A Falling Star, page 45
part #3 of Wintercombe Series
‘I think it’s as well that you don’t — I doubt any excuse would sound convincing,’ Phoebe told him roundly. ‘And if you’re so eager to fight for Monmouth, why are you here now, and not marching off with them through the night?’
Alex looked up at her, and his eyes were not friendly. ‘You know why not.’
‘And so you have the worst of both worlds,’ his sister said, with some disgust. ‘You risk your inheritance, and worse, you risk your life, for the sake of a momentary whim, and yet you take no part in the glory — instead, you’re left for dead in a muddy ditch, for Louise to rescue you! If anything, she’s the hero.’
‘I put in no claims for heroism,’ Alex said, and his long mouth twisted suddenly in self-mockery. ‘I never have done, Phoebe. You know, none better, that I am hardly an admirable character.’
‘Well, at least you have the grace to admit it,’ Phoebe said. ‘And I’d rather have my only brother an honest rogue than a hypocrite, any day.’ She paused, knowing that she should not mention Charles, who throughout that long, weary, nerve-racking day had lost no chance to proclaim his loyalty to the King and his utter contempt for all rebels, most especially his cousins Bram Loveridge and Ben Wickham. Instead, she said quietly, ‘Lukas was very anxious for you — and for Louise. He was so glad to see her, and to know that you were safe.’
‘And I expect that he is now sound asleep in bed?’
‘Along with the rest of the household. It has not been the best of days — we were able to watch some of the battle, on the ridge around White Cross, but we could discern very little of what was happening. And there was no news until Louise returned — we had no idea of how widespread or how fierce the fighting was.’ A ghost of his own self-deprecating smile curved her lips. ‘We were all quite distracted with terror.’
‘Well, I expect some of you were,’ Alex said. He braced his fingers against the arms of the chair, and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Phoebe — I must go, or I shall fall asleep where I sit, and that would be most inconvenient, for you as well as for me. I promise you, I shall be quite restored to my usual self, come the morning.’
‘That’s what I most feared,’ Phoebe said drily. ‘And, before you ask me, yes, I shall be exceeding discreet.’ She smiled rather bleakly. ‘Goodnight, brother — have a sound rest, and sweet dreams!’
She listened to his footsteps, uncharacteristically slow and uncertain, on the stone steps that wound up inside the stair turret leading to the large, light, beautiful chamber occupying all of the east wing, above her own. The distant door closed softly, and she could hear no more: the ceiling between them was vaulted stone, and sound did not travel down from above, a fact for which she had been thankful ever since her brother’s return to Wintercombe.
The rain battered the windows with renewed frenzy. She shivered, closed her own door, and began, with her usual ungainly care, to undress. The bed was comfortable, the fire still warm: outside the night was wet, and dark, and inhospitable to marching rebel soldiers. She blew out her bedside candle and snuggled down under the blankets, listening to the wind and weather. Bram and Ben were somewhere out there, but she would not feel much sympathy for their plight, for they had, after all, brought it upon their own heads by following Monmouth’s bright and falling star.
But despite her resolutely practical thoughts, a bitter tendril of pity, and regret, and sadness crept unbidden into her heart, and lodged unwelcome. For no one who had any grasp of reality, and who possessed the ability to take a detached view, could fail to see that unless a miracle, the unbelievable, the impossible happened, Monmouth and his rebel, rabble army were doomed.
*
They began to straggle into Frome at eight in the morning, after a march that had taken on the quality of a nightmare. The rain had not ceased, but grown heavier, if anything, and the foot had waded through mud to their knees in places. It had taken nearly nine hours to travel perhaps six or seven miles. The town, prosperous and full of Dissenters, cheered the rebels who had given so much for the Protestant cause and their beloved Duke: and the exhausted men, both horse and foot, were given a hero’s welcome, dry beds, and hot food.
It was astonishing how quickly such apparently defeated soldiers, once they had been given a chance to rebuild their strength, could recover their spirits. Monmouth, well aware of his men’s needs, announced that, as this was Sunday, they could rest themselves and their horses here, at least until the following day. And that evening, the inns and houses and tenements where they had been quartered, on the bounty of the good people of Frome, echoed with debate and description and argument as Norton Fight was waged again, with a variety of aids and an excess of exaggeration. Listening to them, their hosts might have been forgiven for thinking that the skirmish had ended in a crushing victory for Monmouth’s men.
But the Protestant Duke did not share his troops’ sudden surge in morale. On the day after their arrival in Frome, he received the unhappy news that the Duke of Argyll, who had launched rebellion in Scotland just before his own, had ignominiously failed. There was no indication of any other rising in his support, and still no sign at all of Captain Adlam’s five hundred horse. All day, while the men rested and dried their garments and cleaned their weapons in every nook and cranny that the town could offer, Monmouth’s council of war debated their future strategy amidst furious argument.
At first, a strike eastwards, into Wiltshire, seemed the most attractive. There, at last, they would surely encounter those elusive five hundred horsemen; and the men of Warminster were said to be eager to join him. To this end, outposts had been placed on the eastern side of the town, towards Roddenbury, and the horse, who were less weary than their footsore comrades, sent to occupy them.
But all this activity had chiefly been set in motion by the more vigorous and determined of Monmouth’s officers. Their leader himself sat at the head of his council table and bemoaned his fate: the lack of support, the failure of Argyll’s invasion, the weather, the disloyalty of those in the regular army who had failed to change sides…everything and everyone was to blame, in fact, save himself. His complaints found a ready audience in Colonel Venner, who had once been a captain in Cromwell’s horse, and who had come with Monmouth from exile in Amsterdam. The Colonel’s initial enthusiasm had evaporated very rapidly as the paucity of gentry support and the diminishing prospects of success alike became clear, and he had counselled caution at every crisis until Nat Wade, in particular, had conceived a virulent dislike for his faint-heartedness. Now, listening to Venner applauding Monmouth’s appalling suggestion that they all run back to Holland, leaving their loyal army to shift for themselves, Wade could barely contain his disgust. Rather to his surprise, he discovered that the effete Lord Grey, whose nominal command of the cavalry had been notable only for its stunning incompetence, was also repelled by such spineless counsel. Forcefully, Grey, Monmouth’s closest friend, pointed out that to desert their followers, who had risked everything for the Protestant cause, was the action of a base and despicable coward, and that if the Duke and his officers fled, they would deservedly forfeit the love and devotion of the people, and Monmouth’s name would never be trusted again.
To the relief of Wade and Holmes, and the dismay of Venner, their vacillating leader was eventually persuaded to take the nobler course. They would not abandon the men of the West Country who had served them so loyally. Instead, they would march the next day to Warminster, where an advance party had already bespoken quarters and warned the bakers to prepare extra bread.
Venner, who had had more than enough of this ramshackle army and its unhappy leader, so painfully unlike his hero Oliver Cromwell, took the opportunity to slip away, and Holmes’s major, Parsons, went with him. To cover the defection, it was given out that the two men had returned to Holland to buy arms for an Irish revolt, but since it was now common knowledge amongst the army that their money had almost run out, very few believed it. The prevailing comment amongst the rebel ranks was, good riddance.
It had been planned to march to Warminster on the Tuesday, but at the last minute, Monmouth’s mind was changed by two pieces of news. Feversham and the Royal army were moving south from Bradford to intercept any strike he might make to the east. And then a plausible Quaker, Tom Plaice, arrived with a convincing tale of thousands of clubmen, natives of the Somerset marshes, ready to rise up as they had forty years ago in time of civil war, and smite the Papist enemy with their rustic weapons. It was, like Captain Adlam’s promised and illusory five hundred horse, another straw in the wind, but Monmouth clutched at it frantically. He could not go east, as he had planned: why not turn in the opposite direction and aim for the country where his support seemed still to be strongest? There, with his loyal people at his back, he could turn and rend the Royal army at last.
Rested, refreshed, their bellies full, the rebel army marched out of Frome singing, that Tuesday morning: and if their stalwart voices disguised an emptiness, a hopelessness lying in their future, they hid it well. Besides, the sun was shining, after so many days of grey lowering skies and torrential rain, and the warmth, the birdsong, and the rich wet smell of the fertile earth and lush green vegetation all around them put heart into their voices and their step.
*
Behind the rebel army, the people of Philip’s Norton, amazed and horrified by the battle that had taken place under their windows, began with typically practical stoicism to restore order to their village. The dead — of whom there were many fewer, on either side, than rumour had stated — were buried in a large common grave under the field where some of them had fallen, and Parson Pigott, his quavering old voice barely audible in the quiet, said a prayer over them. Most of the wounded had been removed by their comrades, but there were a few, both Royalist and rebel, fished out of hedgerows or from outbuildings, who had been left behind, and they were tended by kind-hearted village women. The debris of battle — weapons, bullets, cannon walls, barricades, clothing, abandoned baggage — was collected with enthusiasm by anyone who could walk, and many cottages now possessed some treasured souvenir of the day when the Protestant Duke had defied the might of the King’s army on their own doorstep, and won.
The tales spread round the village, much embroidered and exaggerated in the telling, but retaining still an essential core of truth that would, with each generation, become embalmed in tradition. The man who had held open the gate for the rebels, and was shot for his pains; the old grammer whose tiny tenement was ransacked by rebels seeking supplies, but who sat firmly on the bread crock in which she had hidden her hoarded coin; Mistress Coombe, the miller’s wife, who had thought herself safe from the battle raging on the hillside above her, until a cannon ball landed with a splat in the yard, as she was feeding the hens, causing a panic of poultry, but no actual harm. Colonel Holmes, wounded in the arm, was stated to have walked back to the George and hacked off the ragged remains of his limb with the cook’s cleaver, thus occasioning several dark remarks about the precise ingredients of the pies subsequently served up to Master Prescott’s guests. And the sudden, unexplained solvency of two members of the notoriously impoverished Grindland family was interpreted, with much whispering and winking, as the result of their fortunate capture, on the morning after the fight, of a wandering and unattended sumpter mule, said to be laden with coin. Being Grindlands, they naturally did not use their windfall to make the lives of their struggling families any easier, or to set themselves up in a trade which would keep them from being a burden on the parish. Instead, the only real beneficiary of the luck of the ‘sumptuous muleteers’, as some wit dubbed them, was Harry Prescott at the George, and his counterpart at the Fleur-de-Lys, the rather less reputable establishment on the other side of the marketplace.
All these tales, some more fanciful than others, came to Wintercombe on its low hill outside the village, brought by the servants and their friends and kin. Now that the danger was gone, fear had vanished, and an eager, gossipy excitement had taken its place. Maids who had trembled with each cannon shot in the servants’ hall on that rainy Saturday now exchanged tall tales whenever they were out of earshot of the chief housemaid, Abigail, made sentimental comments on Monmouth’s good looks and dashing gallantry, and hoped, in whispers, that he would soon topple the long-faced Papist King from his throne.
Louise had wanted to wait up for Alex, the night of the battle, but her weary body had betrayed her, and she was forced at last to admit defeat and retire to bed. She was woken by Christian at dawn, as usual, and was vastly relieved to be told that Sir Alexander had apparently returned very late last night, and was still asleep in his chamber.
‘Since he spent all day in the George, I’m not surprised,’ said Louise. She took a deep breath as Christian pulled the laces of her stays tighter, and watched the consequent improvement of her figure, displayed in the mirror, with satisfaction. Fortunately, her injured shoulder was now almost completely recovered, and could withstand such constriction. Alex had seen her dirty and dishevelled and soaking, and had wanted her even so: how much more desirable was she now, with her lean body enhanced by graceful curves, and the slithery cool silk of her best, peacock-blue gown adding its own allure.
She surveyed her finished reflection with delight, and a glow of anticipation began deep within her, lending a flush to her face and making her eyes brilliant. This was how he would see her later, the exotic elegance, the low-cut mantua, her skin clean and scented and ready for his touch, and all her skill and charms and accomplishments to enslave his senses, and her own.
‘The fur tippet, madam, or the double lace?’ Christian asked. She debated, and glanced out at the still unpromising sky. ‘The fur — I do not think that it will be very warm today.’
It was not. Fires burned in the hearths of Wintercombe, from necessity. Outside, the torrential rain of the previous day and night had given way to a gloomy and dispiriting drizzle. Alex did not appear to break his fast and Lukas drooped fretfully. ‘Where can Papa be? I thought he was home!’
‘He is,’ Phoebe said, from the end of the table. ‘But he probably decided to sleep late, after yesterday.’
‘Why?’ the child persisted. ‘He wasn’t in the fighting!’
‘Of course he wasn’t,’ Phoebe said calmly, without a glance at Charles, eating silently at her right hand. ‘But when I saw him last night, he was very tired.’
‘Drunk, you mean,’ Charles muttered under his breath. He pushed his chair back, and stood up. ‘Well, since he hasn’t deigned to appear, there is some urgent business I must deal with. I shall be in the library for the next hour or so.’
Although it was a Sunday, Phoebe bore Lukas off to her chamber, where her books and papers were kept, and Louise was left alone with Amy. For too long, Charles’s sister plied her with questions, until her slender patience had all but expired. Eventually, Amy retired, defeated, to sit with her mother, and Louise, at last, took refuge in the winter parlour, overlooking the damp garden, where she could have the peace and leisure to think, until it was time to go to church.
No one, it seemed, doubted the story she had told late yesterday afternoon, on her return, muddy and soaked, to Wintercombe. The inclement weather meant that her bedraggled appearance was entirely to be expected, and indeed everyone had been most sympathetic, insisting that she change her clothes, indulge in the rare and blessed luxury of a hot bath in her chamber, and ward off the threat of chills and colds with a succession of warming and delicious possets. No one had expressed surprise that Alex was still in the village, at the George, and no one seemed in the least suspicious.
So far, so good. Of course, if Alex was still suffering from the aftereffects of that blow on the head, then it might not be so easy to continue to allay suspicions. But if Charles chose to assume that he had returned home last night drunk, and was still sleeping it off, so much the better. And, with luck, Alex would be quite recovered by tonight.
With a slow, reminiscent, cat-like smile, she curled up in the window seat, and tried to lose her undisciplined, lascivious thoughts in the pages of Amy’s latest French romance.
*
Charles St Barbe stared down at the sheaf of papers, all dealing with the lease, the transfer and orders for repair of the house in Abbey Green in Bath. He had never really wanted the place, it was a pathetic substitute for the glories of Wintercombe, and yet now that his family’s move there had been delayed yet again, he felt increasing impatience and frustration. The tenant had proved obstreperous and had been persuaded to leave without further ado only after the payment of a substantial sum. Charles, who had been given a free hand with the arrangements, had not told Alex about that, nor about the mounting cost of the repairs which were proving necessary, nor of the increasingly wild extravagance of his mother’s suggestions. He pressed a hand to his brow, and tried to marshal his figures again. Under the terms of his uncle’s will, he and Amy alike received goods and land worth about four hundred pounds a year, and his mother was provided with a pension. It sounded like a great deal, but to decorate and furnish the Bath house from nothing would eat a large hole in those sums, and to do it in the style which Bab desired would take all they had, and more. It was impossible…impossible.
He thought with irritation of his mother, her fluttering eyelashes and imploring looks as she twittered on about how splendid gold leaf would look on the panelling in the parlour, and how nothing would do for the hangings but watered silk, in, naturally, the most expensive colour known to the dyer. And his mind progressed, trailing a track of venom, to the baleful figure of his cousin Alex. If he had not returned…if only he had died in exile…then Charles would have inherited Wintercombe and all the abundant wealth that surrounded it, and, with the new King a Catholic, preferment, perhaps even a place at Court would have been his, and a glittering marriage for his sweet and lovely sister.
The dream was too vivid, too real, too wonderful to be borne. He got to his feet and paced urgently round the table. Money…it all came down to money. Unfairly, his uncle had given him enough on which to live in moderate ease, but nowhere near sufficient to fuel his sense of his own worth and position. His paltry inheritance would not buy more land, and without land, an estate of his own, he was of no account. And the blocks of houses and tenements in Bath and Bristol, the scattered parcels of tenanted farmland and the interests in the Bristol shipyards and his Uncle Orchard’s business, could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as an estate.
