Apples and Prayers (24 page)

Woodbine built us a row of rough shelves, on which we stored our kegs and jars. He carried out his task with speed and skill, but silently, in sullen mood. Since losing his journeyman Coppin in the fire, his usual balanced humours had turned to melancholy. 

Outside our new threshold, Dufflin drove in iron hooks, for hanging kettles over the fire. We set a rough circle of logs around the fire pit, by way of benches. The field was almost home for us by nightfall.

From that day on, our number grew daily, with many wives and serving men of those gentlemen who'd already marched with us, now also joining our ranks. Outside the city, large numbers of traveling artisans and labourers came to our cause. With them, however, came criminals; common thieves and fugitives who joined the fight for what they sought to gain, but whose attendance so demeaned our purpose. With them came beggars, the maimed and disfigured, hobbling on crutches, or wheeling here and there on makeshift carts and trolleys that served them for legs. What they had to offer us in our piety, I couldn't say, but we took them in from charity, or simply to swell our forces and show the city dwellers inside our burgeoning strength. Whatever our company's make-up, we numbered in the thousands and all of us dreamed of soon returning home in victory, dressed in finery and bearing riches.

Around the camp were many tents for sleeping, but also many trades to keep us going. We were really now a town upon the move and needed all things that a settlement might provide. Swords, chain mail and teardrop shields stood arrayed on wooden shelves outside the armoury tents. Longbows and crossbows were laid across the racks. Behind them lances, billhooks, caltrops, halberds, stood pointing to the sky in dense thickets. There were racks of helmets in polished steel. Round ones like bonnets for the top of the head, with chain mail curtains hanging to the shoulders. Ones that looked like cooking kettles with slits for the eyes. Still others had breathing holes around the fringe, like some strange colander, with straps for the nose and drop-down metal flanges to cover the mouth and the throat. I picked up a pair of metal gloves – a hand like any other hand, with moving fingers and flexible joints, but so inhuman in its shining steel. On the way back to my kitchen tent, I passed a wooden block with three long-handled axes embedded in it. Their heads glittered, their handles cast long shadows. In an idle moment, I tried to lift one, but its keen edge was sunk so far in the grain, I couldn't shift it. The thought of such a blow, the strength of the man who had hefted such a weapon, made me shudder.

The fletcher was also always busy at the doorway to his tent, where his table stood. The children would bring him constant supplies of wands and feathers. He'd sit there, hour on hour, gluing feathers to the arrow shafts and tipping them with steel from the forges, where Dufflin found himself usefully employed. The cordier also seemed perpetually busy, twisting the yards of hempen rope that were needed for animals, haulage and building our engines of siege. Only with our industry would the city fall to us and we set ourselves to the mission with passion.

Further to the long, drawn-out matter of laying siege, our captains aimed their cannons at the gates and set to breaking pipes and conduits to and from the city. The lead they took was used for making shot. We seldom saw Dufflin at that time. He was always employed at the Cornish forges, smelting metal and casting gunshots. Alford bothered herself at his absence and couldn't settle.

And yet, we didn't have enough heavy armaments to do substantial damage. In scattered cliques the fighting men awaited their chance to engage with the defenders, in some skirmish or attack. Each day they prepared themselves in their armour and breast-plates, or gathered patiently for their mounted captains to give them orders, with broad swords drawn, with longbows drawn and lances ready. Yet often the order to arms resulted in no attack – for the practice of siege relies upon patience of mind and not upon mere muscle and brawn – and the men would return to their barrack tents, restless and disgruntled. It was, as such, a challenge to keep up morale in our ranks, let alone capture a castled city set upon a hill, surrounded by deep ditches and strong walls. 

Even in those early July days, the disciplines of camp life were too much for some men to abide. To relieve themselves, men played at dice and quoits, or entertained themselves at makeshift taverns of logs and trestles around the many camp fires. Here stood huge barrels of ale and cider, served up by women to earn themselves their keep. Musicians played on fiddles, pipes, on bagpipes, mandolins and drums, while dancers turned circles late into the night. Often there were drawn-out spates of drunkenness, the cider relieving the tedium of siege, but causing brawls and broils and injury. Ben Red and Tan Harvey were among the worst, with their habits of drinking that turned them away from their faith, always soused and mixing with the whores. These shameless women tagged along and plagued our men, preying on their weaknesses and boredoms, infecting their minds and their bodies with longings and with sores that I prescribed they rub with healing heartsease.

But ill-discipline was rifer than syphilis. Ben Red's belligerent, offensive answers flew, whenever asked to serve in some small action, or to take his turn at the watch. ‘Leave me alone you shite-arse, can't you?' and for his insolence was locked in stocks, or beaten with horse whips and withies.

‘Useless wretch. I can't imagine why you joined us,' a captain said as they dragged him off to the lock-up one time.

‘To disappear within the crowd and earn myself some peace from digging graves!' he hollered back, rattling his arms as they chained him to the stocks. ‘Or for women and glory. I forget which.' How he had come to care so little for himself, or our endeavour, was a mystery to me.

Other quarrels also simmered, sometimes bubbling into fights. Lucombes, Reynolds and John Toucher became thick in friendship, but when their talk turned to Billy Down, or Billy White, these three new friends would claim that good was bad, or day was night, they were so aggrieved against the shepherd and the miller. Tom Potter, Northcott, Rawlings and Andrews were also likewise ranged against the miller and shepherd. It became nigh-on impossible for my Lord to shape a fighting group who'd cooperate together. All of which was nothing in face of John's ongoing rancour with Harvey. Such arguments served our cause no benefit at all, but added to the strains already besieging us. Those inside the walls we had surrounded, but those of us outside them were beleaguered from within our own ranks.

To keep our spirits raised, our priests ministered to us from the makeshift chapels of their tents, in daily services before the crowd. In lighter mood, there was a fool from some Cornish Lord's entourage and troupes of children chasing him for entertainment, getting under our feet with spinning tops and hoops, when they might usefully have found a task, say, fetching wood, or setting traps for birds. Our campground therefore swayed between carnival and solemnity, one moment sworn upon our self-confessed commission and then, the next, engaged in acts of vanity and folly.

We had become cathedral, barracks, town, farm and hospital all at once. For that curative work, the surgeon's table stood ready laid with tools, for dealing with daily injuries and the graver scars of battle. The surgeon was from the Cornish camp, a man called Tidicombe. He was really an apprentice barber, used to cutting hair and pulling teeth, but here he worked on any injury. A big fat man, with a rounder face, he wore a black skull cap with flaps pulled down over his ears, presumably to muffle his patients' cries. Beneath his black jacket he wore a white smock that was mostly smeared in blood. Owning nothing more than a makeshift bench, he'd draped it with an animal hide and spread his instruments out in easy reach. Metal forceps, hooks and cutters, clamps for stopping blood. A saw and hammer. A purgative syringe. Small metal shears for snipping hair away. I prayed I wouldn't see those implements used but, from time to time, heard a man's cries, or smelt the acrid singe from some cauterized wound.

My own makeshift kitchen was nothing like I knew at the Barton, but it served me well enough, to cook tureens of broth and herbal pottage smoked above prodigious fires. Each day our men fetched coney from the woods and there was a ready supply of woodpigeon and small birds for roasting, or adding to the stewing pot. We kept a pen of quails beside the tent and a rough-hewn sty of stakes and staves to house a pair of pigs. The great fat boar lay on his bed of straw, striped with shadow and sunlight. Beside him, goats dozed or fossicked for morsels on the ground, their pendent ears dragging in the dust.

The hedgerows provided us with small additions: elder buds, bracken fronds, summer mushrooms, wood sorrel and small, sour crab apples. Fishermen brought us creatures from the river, carp and bream, or sometimes even trout. We gutted, skinned and baked them in the open. The smells attracted cats, dogs and scavenging rats, which seemed to appear as if on order. My God, if they weren't so filthy, we'd have eaten those as well. The whole camp was overrun with vermin and other beasts upsetting tables and stew pots here and there: wandering sheep and cows brought in for milk and meat; horses for the Lords and captains of cavalry, all of which needed great mounds of hay for feeding. Their dung became scattered throughout, making the thoroughfares stink to the very pits with the ordure of animals and our own latrines. Sickness was rife: puking, diarrhea, summer sweats. The weather was extremely hot and we were grateful when the rain clouds came, uplifting showers cleaning down the stench.

So, though it most times stank, we guarded our camp judiciously and placed our watchmen viewing every quarter. No one could enter or leave the city without first passing by our guard. Yet with its own cannon and defences, it became clear soon enough that the city wouldn't yield to our attrition, nor fall to us by use of force alone. We'd need to turn to tactics of starvation, to dissension from within, to win our cause. 

For water, the city had streams and springs of its own. But we could stop the transport of foodstuff and starve them into submission. Our men were therefore set to firing small shot from the high ground to the north, deterring the traders and merchants who hoped to cart their produce in to town. Within days the supply lines were broken, keeping all their markets lean of victuals. The snipers also turned their musket bores and arrows on the town's defenders, from the high windows of garrets outside the city walls. But when many inside had been killed in this way, the citizens set fire to our garrets and cheated our gunners out of their sniping posts. 

And so it ran for weeks.

Some time into those weeks, I found myself attendant on my Lord as he discussed tactics with our captains. I waited outside the tent where he and the Cornish Lords had gathered. Lord Russell, that stern, brutal, practised soldier, would soon be arriving at Exeter, they said, to quell us in our determination. Well, we would show him.

‘Russell advances on Honiton, short of money and men,' said the rich voice I now knew as Arundell's. ‘He holds no Royal Army, save for conscripted militias and mercenaries. Our numbers swell daily, while his, his are on the wane. He can't even be sure of the allegiance of those who stay with him. Lord Grey's troops are diverted to Oxfordshire. Something more to do with a rising of priests there. The whole county's in turmoil. While Russell idles, the Devil makes work for Grey's hands in the hanging of good priests…'

‘Exeter mercenaries or not, we still far outnumber him.' There was no mistaking the voice for anyone's but my Lord's. Talk had wafted out of the city that Protestant merchants were funding the battle against us.

‘Hasn't the King also sent detachments to Russel in Honiton?' asked another.

‘Aye,' said Arundell. ‘De Wilton brings the German foot this way. Some seven hundred. And one hundred and fifty Italian arquebusiers.'

Their talk went quiet and I let my gaze drift above the canvas of the tents, up into the clearness of the sky. I saw it suddenly filled with a rain of Italian fletches landing to the guttural cries of the Franks. We'd all heard, by now, that such mercenaries didn't content themselves with the fight alone, but murdered, plundered, burned and raped, filling the world with disorder more pernicious than our protest could ever be accused of raising.

‘Even if he brings them,' my Lord said, regaining my attention from unpleasant daydreams, ‘they can neither relieve the city, nor stop us with so few.'

‘Supplies to the city are falling short,' Arundell agreed. ‘They've barely got enough to survive two days.' His opinion was gladly received.

‘Of all dangers, famine's the worst for them,' someone else approved. I thought of my own grumbling stomach, of Alford's need for feeding two. ‘They're baking bread from animal feed,' the voice went on. ‘No meat, save from horses. They won't bear it much longer.'

I prayed that he and Arundell were right. Two days was about as much as anyone, they or we, could take.

Later that day, as a result of that meeting, a group of Buckland men were charged to sabotage the city walls. My Lord gave them their orders from the purlieu of his tent. We gathered there to hear, eager for some action to stir us from the boredom of siege and waiting. Alford was wearing her ankle length dress of brown kersey, a cloth wrapped round her head to guard her hair against the smut of camp. Beside her, along with his boyish grin, Dufflin wore a borrowed Cornish helmet, its metal nose guard dividing his face in two. His fist was clutched around the pole of a wooden pikestaff, a good two feet taller than himself. John Toucher had also taken to wearing a soldier's helmet. I'd watched him tie the leather straps beneath his chin, the helmet sitting high on his broad brow like an ill-fitting acorn cup. His eyes burned out of the eye slits, like two great knots of wood in a planed plank. It frightened me to only see his eyes and no expression there; more animal than human being. I couldn't recognise that impassive stare at all.