Apples and Prayers (26 page)

Meanwhile, Sidney Strake lay feverish in the camp, where Peter Lock was tending to him. For days, he'd been nursed, his wounds aching and bleeding profusely, until they'd been cleansed with vinegar and cauterised by the Cornish surgeon, Tidicombe. When that round-bellied barber applied the irons to his scrawny patient, Strake had screamed to Heaven and passed out. 

When he came to, his wounds were horribly infected and filled with yellow pus, the boil of which was lanced and the liquid drawn forth. But the infection had quickly spread through his body and corrupted his blood and his bile. Tidicombe came to our camp again and tried to bleed him. He opened his wrap of tools, took out a simple lancet and snicked a vein on poor Strake's arm. The sick man's thin blood barely dribbled out, his humours were so weak and wounded. In the end, the bleeding itself served no purpose at all. Strake simply lay on a lumpy pile of straw, just a few breaths from death, with the camp's rats for his ultimate bedfellows, waiting for his final rites and unction.

‘Some bread,' the priest demanded and was handed a stale crust from the trestle table beside our fire. He prayed the sacred words and lifted the crumbs to Strake's lips. 

The dying man whispered something feeble in return. ‘I'll be rising soon, mother,' he blathered, as though he were waking from some sleep on any other morning, at home, a child in arms again.

The priest consoled him. ‘Eat the bread, my son,' he said. ‘Feed your soul upon its final journey.' 

He made the sign of the cross above the dying man's body. He made the recitation of the Holy Eucharist and Strake passed away into a better place, secure in the arms of God.

In her own murky patch, where we were attending to the delivery of the stillborn, Alford turned from bad to worse. 

She wasn't able to walk to that private spot where we needed to tend to her out of view and, so, we dragged her booted feet through the mud and grass, her arms slung around our shoulders. Her cries battered my ears with more vigour than all the cries I'd heard from men in fights and skirmishes beyond. She smelled of fear and fetid blood, flowing from her in a steady trickle and then in great thick clots. I could taste her anguish in my own throat, like a hot iron rod burning at the back of my tongue.

When we had her where she had some privacy, she crouched herself above a wooden pail and poured out her soul, her dead child's blood, pushed it out between her legs, with screams and curses that were enough to rent the very fabric of Heaven.

‘My God, you have forsaken me!' she wailed and I wept and wept some more to hear it. ‘Don't you leave me! You stay with me, Morgan!' 

‘I'm here! I'm here,' I reassured. ‘And staying, Alford,' I said uselessly. 

She clutched hold of my hand and strained and screamed and yelled bloody murder and damnation, so I thought she was going to tear through my skin and crush my bones she was squeezing so tight. From time to time she'd go quiet and still and, for all the world, it seemed that there was nothing more wrong here than a sick child resting herself in a glade. Her skin would go soft and warm to the touch and her eyelids closed. Then the cramps would set in again and wrack her body as though she were the victim of demons, tearing at her flesh with spikes and hot iron tongs. She became terribly cold in those moments, but still the sweat poured from her in cataracts. I mopped at her brow with a cloth and, with that closeness, gazed into her eyes. But Alford was far away, convulsed in pain and who knows what she saw before her as she stared up at my face? I just hope she saw a friend in that time of sorrow. 

The only consolation I could see myself, was Dufflin's absence. He wasn't there to see the worst of her anguish, but was away on some shift of guard-watch below the city walls, or else gathering in rabbits and birds for that day's eating. It wouldn't be long however, I thought, before he returned.

We didn't see the full delivery of the baby, for Alford herself died before that came about. 

Suddenly, she went proper calm and said my name, so help me I could almost believe all was well with her again. Then she smiled at me with her once-youthful look, her pretty brown eyes open wide and, in that moment, I saw her as I'd seen her in my waking dream: carefree over the cobbles, fetching in the eggs, or twirling in the summer sun with a trug of fresh herbs on her arm. 

A truly horrible noise shattered the sweet picture and she convulsed one final time, slumping heavily from off the bucket, into the arms of God. I had failed her in her need of a guiding angel.

We laid sweet Alford's body on the ground beneath the trees behind my Lord and Lady's tent, with a cover over her bloodied legs and some meadow grasses round her head, to pretty the awful picture. 

Soon after, Dufflin returned from his watch, with John Toucher and Lucombes beside. Each of them carried a brace of rabbits for the cooking pot, strapped into their belts. Unlike the rest of us, they were in high spirits from their hunt.

‘Morgan,' Dufflin called to me, when he came into camp and saw me alone at the fire. ‘Where is everyone? Have they all gone to sleep? Look at these rabbits for the stew pot.'

‘Aye, woman,' said John Toucher. ‘Our cause goes well and the watch returns hungry! If we can't dine on Protestants, we'll have some rabbit stew!' 

The three of them roared and threw their catch down onto the camp table. Around us, the dejected figures of our party emerged from their tents.

‘Ahh, the dead rise!' laughed Dufflin. No one returned his laughter.

‘Come on,' said John. ‘Won't you share in our news and our meat?' They cast enquiring eyes around us. Dufflin called his wife.

‘Alford? Alford. Come here and share the story of our watch, if no one else is going to listen. Alford.' He waited on the silence and called again. ‘Where are you? Come out. You should've seen the faces on those guards as we crept up on them. They went flying when we shot across the walls. They must've jumped and fallen the full height of the battlements, hey John?'

‘Aye and snapped their bones in doing,' he replied. Again the three men filled with laughter, but we stood silently.

‘Come on,' said Lucombes. ‘It was funny.'

‘Dufflin,' I said. He ignored me.

‘Alford!' he said again, finally raising his voice in annoyance. ‘Where is she, Morgan? Why no reply? Don't tell me she's gone off with a new husband already?'

I couldn't answer him, my throat was shrinking ever narrower. I couldn't breathe.

‘For Heaven's sake woman, why so sombre? Have you burned dinner again?' 

I strode up to John and shouted at him forcefully. 

‘What?' he replied, grabbing at me. ‘A woman can bawl out a man now, for nothing more than laughing? Is that a new law of Council too?'

There is a time when birds stop singing, when winds cease blowing, when the river itself seems to stop in its flow and all the world stands still. Animals, birds, people, all the elements, brought to motionless silence. And in that pause, an angel walks across us. The angel of truth. And what was once vague and imprecise, is suddenly made clear to us, as though our eyes have been freshly opened. This was one of those moments.

‘What's wrong, Morgan?' Dufflin asked, a catch in his voice. ‘Is something wrong with Alford, Morgan? Is it the child? Where is she? What's happened?' 

Still I found myself unable to say. He must have then noticed the fresh blood on my apron and realized it had not come from rabbits, or a joint of meat for the stewpot, for those had not yet been delivered. I saw the scales fall from his eyes. He knew. 

‘Where is she?' he shouted at me, placing both his fists around my arms below the shoulder and shaking me, as if to wake me from a dream. ‘Tell me!'

I looked at him and he could see the tears behind my eyes.

‘Alford!' he called and ran towards our tent, throwing open the entrance flap. ‘Alford!' he barked again, tracking across our circle to grip me by the shoulders once more. 

‘Dufflin, my son,' Father Lock finally spoke. ‘Come with me…'

‘Go with you? Where?'

‘Just come with me,' the priest said.

John Toucher placed his hand on my shoulder. I dropped my head. I couldn't look at him. The tears then came and my frame trembled.

‘Lord have mercy on us,' he said and took hold of Dufflin's arm to follow the priest.

We waited there around the smoking campfire, while Father Lock led Dufflin and John Toucher to the glade behind my Lord and Lady's tents. My Lady came to stand beside me and, in a gesture of sympathy, gave up her superior position for a moment: she put her arm around my shoulder and mothered me while I wept. We stood there for some time considering the loss. Then Dufflin's moans rose above the general noise of camp. I shook to think of his grief and breathed deeply to calm myself, counting. Time was passing very slowly as I watched the thin threads of smoke weave their way up into the great tapestry of the sky beyond. I cannot say how many minutes passed.

And then the priest was running back towards us, his customary, unruffled guard let fly in flailing arms and ragged breath.

‘He's fled!' he shouted. ‘With his dagger in one hand and a firearm in the other. Towards the city wall. Holy Mother.' 

‘What?' my Lady said. ‘To do what?'

‘Where's John Toucher?' I said.

‘He saw her body lying there,' said the priest, ‘dead beneath the cloth. There was nothing could have stopped him, my Lady. We tried to hold him back. He knocked John Toucher clean to the floor and was gone, faster than a hare on coursing day.'

‘God protect him!' my Lady prayed. Behind the priest, John Toucher himself then stumbled into view, shaking his head and rubbing his brow.

‘Straight to the floor,' he said. ‘One punch.' I don't know what was worse to him, the circumstance, or Dufflin's sudden vigour. For a moment we stood across the turf from each other, watching each other's congested face.

‘Well, let's after him,' said Lucombes. ‘No good standing here. John? Weapons. Let's go find him. Which way did he head?'

‘Straight towards the walls,' replied the priest. ‘He'll be there in minutes if you don't hurry.'

Lucombes rallied and the men there gathered up whatever pike, or axe, lay near to hand from the racks of weapons. As briskly as they'd arrived, they were now gone.

The exact manner of Dufflin's death can only be ascribed to the madness of a suicide. Although he assailed the city single-handed and, in so doing, tempted death at the hands of its defenders, it's absolutely sure that his only wish in those moments
was
to die. In that forlorn moment, when he'd seen Alford's unresponsive body and pictured the death of his child, it must have seemed that Death was his fate too.

By the time our men had reached him in pursuit, Dufflin lay dead on the scrubby ground outside the northern gate. His body lay peppered with musket shot, his face was blown away. 

When, at last, it was safe to retrieve his corpse, John Toucher carried him back into camp on his back, like a boar, or deer upon a hunter's shoulder. If Alford and her child's deaths were like the vile black cape around his bony shoulders, then Dufflin's death was like the Reaper's hood. 

Darkness had marched unforgivingly into our camp, his finger pointing casually at us all.

The funeral mass for these departed souls followed the next day. 

‘
Accipite et manducate ex hoc omnes: Hoc est enim corpus meum. Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes: Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei
…' 

I knelt to take the wafer from the priest onto my tongue, but couldn't keep it in my mouth, let alone swallow it. It wasn't only that it tasted rank. It did. Nor that my mind was rebelling against the Holy Mass. Rather, that it seemed my soul was in revolt at Alford's death. I couldn't accept it. I still cannot. 

I turned away from the hurried funeral service and wretched violently, bringing black bile into my throat. It stung me with bitterness and regret. I'd lost my girl in spiteful calamity and turned my back on Communion with our Lord. I couldn't take the Host into my own body. I could hear the priest's words ringing, but all I could see in my head was sweet Alford's face, the moment before she died – one moment calm and peaceful in the midst of the battle that shook her, the next convulsing and suddenly bloated, with blood in her eyes as she slumped to one side with a rattle and wheeze. 

Father Lock's words should have been consolation to me. Instead they were hollow. Empty vessels breaking on dry ground. It was exactly then that I knew my struggle was ended. With sweet Alford and her near-formed child committed to the earth, with the burial of Dufflin, with Sidney Strake interred, barely more than a child in mind himself, I knew it was all sealed and over. Coleman and Coppin had preceded them. Saint Mark's Eve had begun to be proved true.

‘To these, Lord,' I heard the Father saying, ‘and to all who rest in Christ, we beg You to grant of Your goodness a place of comfort, light, and peace.
Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen
.'

‘May they rest in peace,' my Lady echoed and she too prayed ‘Amen.'

We turned and walked away from their hurried, undignified graves.

As we walked back to our miserable tents, I wandered aimlessly, knocking into the cooking pot on its tripod above the cold fire, spilling congealed contents onto the ground and scattering the cooking spoons. I bent down to lift them up and, as I scrabbled in the dirt, felt another hand alight upon my wrist. Large, firm and familiar, I'd not felt a gentle touch from John's hand for many weeks now. As I looked up, I saw too that he was grieving for his fellows.

‘I'll pick them up for you, Morgan,' he said. ‘Go rest yourself for Heaven's sake. You need it more than most.' 

He smiled awkwardly and lifted my arm, so that I had to stand. I felt something rising in my breast, which he too sensed and pressed his thumb against my lips. ‘Quieten it, Morgan,' he whispered and shook his head.