Apples and Prayers (22 page)

Before we ate our own meal, our priest bade us bow our heads and pray. ‘
Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona
…' he began.

‘What's he say?' I heard Ben Red whisper to his mate Harvey, as father Lock made the blessing.

‘The food that we receive through Christ…idiot,' the tanner whispered back.

‘I wish he'd say it faster. I'm bloody starving already. Idiot yourself.' 

From across the barn, I caught him a sharp look with my eyes for defiling our prayers.

We began to feed ourselves in reasonable spirits, given our distance from home and our cramped conditions. 

When the first wisps of smoke drifted down from the roof, it was nothing but a faint odour, a few small puffs of musty grey, drifting down from the rafters. We thought nothing more of it than our own fire was, perhaps, smoking up the barn with a strong back draught.

‘Whoever set the fire tonight needs lessons from the kitchens,' Coppin jeered, leaning in beneath the trivet to shift the logs and make a better draught. Through their laughter, our company cast allegations about who'd set so smoky a fire.

‘It must've been the thatcher, Andrews. Who else could create so much smoke?' Tom Putt was quick to make jokes at the expense of others, but none of our party took offence. His companions, Brimley and Barum, sat alongside, encouraging his clever comments.

‘Not me,' the thatcher denied. ‘You'd best look elsewhere for your scapegoat, Putt.'

‘Then who?' said Putt, looking round the circle of faces, stroking at the shadow of his stubble. ‘The ploughman, Lucombes? Must've been him. All he knows of ashes are those he scatters on his fields. Or perhaps it was the Priest, with all he knows of
ashes to ashes and dust to dust
?'

The general response, the occasional laughter, warmed him to his theme. 

‘Or maybe it was the miller? What about it, Billy White? You're most times as white as those cinders.' 

In the firelight I saw Billy White raise his eyebrows and pout his lower lip, as if considering the proposition plausible. 

‘One thing's sure though,' said Putt, ‘it couldn't have been the farrier. Have you seen the blaze that Coleman makes each day in that forge? Makes the very fires of Hell seem nothing more than the dying puff of a candle.' 

We sat smirking at his jokes and, for a moment, our men seemed to forget that they were a long march from home, or that the rafters were slowly filling with smoke. But when a greater crackling of flames was heard in the thatch overhead, we all became alert, as one, to immediate danger.

‘Shit and Hell's fire!' cursed John Toucher, loud as a warning bell. ‘There's a bloody fire in the rafters!'

We turned our collective gaze to the roof, in time to see great flashes of red and orange shoot across the underside of the thatch.

For a moment, pandemonium. 

We were on our feet and running faster than a warren of frightened rabbits beneath the falcon's shadow. Fearing that we'd all choke on the smoke, or worse be burned alive by falling thatch and timbers, like witches or heretics at the stake, we picked ourselves up and scattered in a hurry, fleeing through the narrow doorway in a tangle of arms and legs, out into the cold and murky night. We stumbled and fell in mud in all the confusion.

The barns went up in terrible flames, faster than you might imagine possible. We gathered outside the buildings, gazing on, our faces illumined by the brutal glow. 

I turned around to account for all of our party, but couldn't tell if everyone was safely out. Alford was clinging to my side, crying and jabbering like a child. I slapped her, kindly, round the face. Immediately she stopped her wailing.

‘Screeching'll help no one, Alford!' I shouted at her and she looked at me with great hurt in her eyes, soon turning to shame, for she knew that her hysteria was nothing but a hindrance.

‘Forgive me, Morgan,' she sniffed. ‘I'm so afraid.' She paused to wipe her eyes. ‘Are we all out?' 

With this, she began to help me look for the rest of our company. 

‘Dufflin, Dufflin!' she called frantically and didn't rest until his arm was about her quaking shoulders.

Most of our men were already busying themselves with pails of water and great pieces of sacking, beating at the flames to try and halt their spread. 

But nothing they did halted their march and the barns were consumed with shocking speed. One minute they were there; the next, it seemed, they were gone.

We gathered ourselves together and made our way towards the safety of the Cornish camp. There, we counted our number. Everyone was present, bar two. Coppin the carpenter and Coleman, the smith. 

We searched and searched for them, carrying firebrands back to the barns, to see if they were lingering there. But nothing. 

We agreed to wait until morning for them to show, imagining that they'd become lost in the confusion as we'd fled the barns. Either that, or they'd already bolted to the Cornish camp for safety.

By morning, they still weren't with us and we steeled ourselves for the truth; surely, they must have been trapped in the great conflagration. They'd perished there, in that hideous bonfire.

Dufflin wept. We all wept. These, our first casualties. If there were two among us who least deserved to be so snatched away – for they were disliked by none among us – it was Coleman, devout and just and Coppin, our likeable carpenter. All he had wanted was to see his country restored to its balanced and organised ways, like one of his well ordered coppices. 

If the fire had been started by some accident, or misfortune of our own, these would have been bad enough losses. But, slowly, as we searched through the burnt remains, it became clear that the fire had been deliberately set, under cover of dark by Carew's men. The charred remains of Royal metalwork lying in the ashes of the rafters. 

This gentlemen, or so they called him, was altogether bent to overrun, spoil and destroy us and, so help us God, we pledged ourselves to defeat him in his aims, even if it now meant fighting to the death.

We marshalled ourselves from this routing and consoled ourselves with some small ceremony to mark the loss of our neighbors and friends, placing coins on their closed lids as we laid them in their humble graves.

Two days later, our march took us around the city, past Exeter Cross to the village of Clyst St. Mary. We walked to the beat of a drummer, who bore two large barrels slung over his shoulders, dressed in black from head to toe, a vast red cross upon his chest beneath a forked red beard that dangled low. His legs strode out beneath his flowing cape and the ground around him shook with every beat he made upon the drum skins. Two small boys walked beside him, rattling sticks across the hides of their smaller percussions.

A team of monks and clergymen, marched along with whistles and drums, the fingers of one hand busy at the air holes of their whistles, while their other hand counted time with drumsticks. They led a whole troop of players: men on the harp and citole; a young girl with a psaltery hitched around her neck; women on oboes and pipes and recorders. A peasant boy sat in a wheelbarrow, turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy, while his brother pushed him along. Someone blew a hollowed cow's horn. A girl in linens and leather walked beside them, twirling from her fingers two balls on strings with streamers at their ends, that swirled and described great arcing figures round her head.

I found myself walking beside a Cornish piper, his black bellows mirroring the flopping, wide-brimmed hat he wore on his head, his belt garlanded with foxtails and lucky rabbits' feet, his fingers moving swiftly on the chanter, as he puffed his cheeks and filled the air bag through the blowstick, squeezing the sac between his arm and ribs to make that unearthly drone. 

My God, the Protestants would know that we were coming. 

When we reached them, the commons of Clyst had built themselves earthworks and ramparts against us, but by evening we'd dug ourselves in again and made safe camp, out there along the river plain, defending the bridge on the Exeter Road, with cannons raised high on quoinings to better aim them. Our men entrenched the highways and threw up great bulwarks, laying tree trunks across the bridge to bar its passage. Woodbine was the principal architect, stacking beech and oak boles in a stockade. But he worked alone, his spirits low with the loss of his journeyman, Coppin.

The following day, Alford and I were at the cooking pit, preparing a pot of gathered roots and coney, caught among the hedgerows. Further round, among the Cornish men, a hog roast spat fat onto burning logs, its skin crisping in the smoke and heat. We were near to the end of our rations, while they were still in theirs.

A great to-do suddenly distracted us from our cookery; a riot of shouting and cries in the distance.

‘What in God's name?' said Alford, turning to me, suddenly fearful. 

We ran like hounds across the camp, gathering up our skirts as we went, to take our view of the action from behind the earthworks.

‘Slow down, Morgan,' she implored. She couldn't run any longer at speed with her swollen belly. I turned to wait for her and then walked briskly on, leaving her behind, as she clearly couldn't keep up.

Peering between the paling slats, I saw the conniving Carew, who'd ridden out again with his escort, to persuade our captains at the bridge to turn home. I watched him confer with our men. The captains stood each other off in the sunshine, as if they wanted neither to concede, nor take each other on. It looked from a distance like a battle of wits and insults. I'd seen my Lord play dice and draughts and tables back at the Barton, but this was more like a cautious game of chess… two ranks of soldiers standing each other off in the sunshine, with only the smallest movement here, or there, to fill the moments of waiting. 

After the Crediton fire, however, our hatred of Carew was untold. As if it was happening elsewhere, a shout suddenly went up and, to one side of him, across the field by the bridge, a soldier of our own, a defender of the ordnance on the crossing, began to run towards them. He held a charged musket high in his hand and made as if to shoot. Ahead of him, Carew turned at the commotion. The moment stilled. In confusion, we jostled forwards to see what would happen.

It was only the interference of a wiser soldier that stopped the first from dispatching Carew to Hell. He tripped him with a lariat of twisted rope. The report of the musket echoed uselessly in the treetops, sending crows and jackdaws upwards into the blue.

Carew turned again, noted the danger and, gesturing rudely to our lines, immediately retreated. You've never heard so much derision… men and women jeering, rattling the timbers, clacking their weapons. It sounded like a giant cart from Heaven, rattling over our enemies as they fled. Life is made of small victories and, this, our first, as well as recompense for recent deaths.

I returned to camp. 

Alford was standing in the smoke of the kitchen fire in her long kirtle dress, wiping at her eyes with a dishcloth that hung from her apron's belt. She held her hand to her back, pushing her bulging stomach forward, in some attempt to ease the aches of standing on her feet all day with all that weight to carry. I smiled at her, as if to apologise for running on without her and asked her how the stew was doing. She couldn't seem to manage a smile back and simply gestured to the fire pit, lifting the kettle lid to show me the braising casserole inside. 

I'd told her she shouldn't have come along with us and here was living proof, though I had to bite back on my tongue and withhold ‘I told you so'.

With Carew withdrawn, his tail between his legs, our talk soon turned to how we might end this affair the sooner. 

Some wished to march upon London, to stir the capital to our cause. Others preferred to stay at home and take control of the West Country. We had our fill of argument about the progress of our band, mostly over supper round the fire.

‘To march on London's suicide,' said Dufflin that evening. He'd become more frank since his master's death in the burning barns. ‘We've already lost two. How many more lives are we going to waste in this crusade?' 

Alford was at his side, spooning broth into his bowl. She looked tired and was silent. The hardships of camp had shot the youth from her face and I wished she'd listened to me back at home. 

I blew on the smoldering fire and the embers spat into life, licking round the bottom of the stew pot, where our meat bubbled and set our mouths watering. I dipped in a ladle and dished it out amongst the men. They ate it down hungrily, like animals tussling for space at the trough.

‘Better to control Exeter and Devon, than waste our time, our drive, our blood, in a march on London.' Harvey was shoveling in more than his fair share of supper as he spoke.

‘But there's little more than local levies between us and the King,' John Toucher said. ‘Supporters'll join us on the way. We'll be legion before we get there!' 

Sidney Strake, who was only with us by deception – he'd hidden under covers on a cart as it pulled out of Buckland – forcibly agreed with him in grunts and other feral noises, for he was no more use in debate than he would be in battle.

‘Oh, aye, John,' said Harvey. ‘Just like the people of Clyst have joined us…' 

Ben Red laughed at his friend's quickness. John Toucher bristled.

‘John. Don't you remember Blackheath, not fifty years past? So many good Cornishmen.' Billy White wiped the supper grease from his mouth with his rough sleeve.

‘But the way to London's unknown territory,' said Dufflin.

‘That may be,' said John, unyielding. ‘But even in London, the Catholics have risen. The city and day could soon be ours.'

‘The capital's in sympathy,' I agreed, eager to uphold John Toucher's quarter. Even if he was becoming further estranged from me with every passing moment in our camp, I wanted him to know I was still here for him.