Apples and Prayers (27 page)

I turned from him, numb, as on a winter's morning collecting milk, slowly traipsing back to my tent. It felt as if my feet were locked in stocks, for this was the longest and loneliest walk of my life and yet the shortest distance. When I lay down on my bundle, I could still feel John's touch on my hand. Could still make him out, just, through the slit in the fabric that made the tent's entrance. He was kneeling by the fire, gathering up the scattered pot and spoons. I had one thing, at least, to be pleased of. He had called me, at last, by my name.

The next morning my Lady returned to Buckland. 

She left the camp very early, before any of us had risen, escorted by some Cornish guards from Arundell's camp. I never saw her leave. Her last act of kindness had been in tending to Alford in her need. 

‘We tried, Morgan,' she had said. The last thing she ever said to me. 

It is said that butterflies are the souls of stillborns, or unbaptised children who've died. That morning, after the mean and sad funerals of our dear friends and after my Lady's departure, I saw a pair of Brimstones on the grass beside the Exe. As I watched them, surely one was Alford's lost child, I thought. And the other? The other was her own soul, or the soul of youthful Dufflin, or even that of Sidney Strake, our childlike man who didn't even know that he was dying. 

‘Holy Mary, Mother of Christ, I beseech you: no more butterflies. No more ghosts. Let this be an end of it.'

The stifling days of summer's end made me restless, the Dog Star rising with the sun and worrying my heels. Dog days indeed. 

In camp one cur for certain bit a soldier on the leg, who then went sick for days and, mad with fever, slew one of his own Cornishmen, before a billhook from the guard ended his own misery. Madness had broken loose. All strays in the field were then dosed with treatment to cure the poison that was brewing in their blood. We prayed to God that follies of this nature would stop.

Like the people inside the city, we too could do nothing more than sit and wait the blockade out. 

Alford's death plunged me into melancholy. All I had to fix upon was the detail of my daily chores in Buckland. My head was filled with idle dreams of the work I should have been doing at home: gathering summer flowers from the garden, distilling them into salves and lotions… eye-bright flowers to brighten eyes; elderflower to drive off insects; vervain, the Holy cure-all; lavender in thunder tea to ease a tension headache in the brain. Out in the fields we should have been bringing home the late hay, gathering seeds, coppicing hazel for broom handles, gathering honey. 

Instead, we were huddled in sad and angry motley round the city, waiting for our deliverance. Too many of our number were already dead. I hadn't talked with John Toucher, or so much as looked at him since he last touched my hand. 

Others were sick. The bloody flux. I nursed them through their nights of vomiting and shitting. Andrews, Voun and Rawlings. Once their guts had turned to liquid, they were little use for anything, ranting in their night sweats and fever about gaolers and hangmen and devilish torture. 

Bonds and friendships were breaking. Putt, Barum, Brimley. Their trefoil seemed de-flowered. My Lord and his sons were rarely among us, called to talk most days with the leaders of our campaign, camped at other sites around the walls. Our captains had promised a speedy affair. We had been fools to listen to them.

In my idleness I watched the distant villeins in their fields across the plains beyond Exeter, bringing in their hay. It made me even more homesick for Buckland, for my Lady. I watched them rake it, turn it, toss it, pull it into wind-rows. I watched them build their wooden cocks for drying. Not that they could get it to the city. I dreamed of the many times I'd carted hay back to the barn for stacking. You had to do it properly, or mold would ruin the crop. Worse, some yeomen stacked it so poorly, it built up heat inside the mound and razed the barn in fire. But we had had enough of burning barns. What I wouldn't have given for a day's work scything, or bringing in hay for the dairy cattle, in place of that tedious waiting in our loathsome camp.

And how I wished to be milking those cows of mine. I prayed each day to feel again the coolness of the dairy, with its cold, soothing flagstones. I could have been with Alford, churning rich July butter from the milking cows, fattened on clover and wildflowers.
Come butter come. Come butter come,
we'd sing
. St. Peter stands at Heaven's gate, Waiting for a buttered cake, So come, butter, come.
 

But there was no butter. Neither here nor in the city. 

How I grew sick of the thin meat stew around those fires at night. I could barely keep it down in my stomach, even though it was I who cooked it. How I longed for a supper at the Barton, a salet of greenery – sunflower, nasturtium, buttercup – or bowls of ripened strawberries and currants, loganberries and cherries, candied roses, tasty apple breads.

And then it was suddenly over. Just like that… one morning. All bids to undermine the walls, discovered. All sallies to the postern gate, to secretly gain access to the castle, defeated. All ladders raised against the wall, turned over. 

These were our last disappointments. As the city itself was on the verge of ceding, a messenger rode in to our camp and handed over the letter. 

Advancing on us, Russell had struck a victory. Our siege had come to an end.

 

Haymaking is over and the corn harvest proceeding, ripe ears of corn brought in before they shed, or blett. When God yields up his bounty to the farmer, his duty is to receive it with speed and thanks. What harvesting needs most is men, hired hands, yet men today are few in these villages. There's little work underway in Buckland and in Sampford, surely. The corn must be rotting on the stalks. This is no season of thanksgiving. 

A reaper walks. A harvest, of sorts, is already gathered in.

It's the foreman's duty to hire field hands, to bargain terms and oversee their labour. This would have been John Toucher's task. But John Toucher is gone, either slain on the field, or fled down country lanes to who-knows-where. I don't know which, although I pray the latter. I know this is, most likely, a hopeless prayer. What does it matter now anyway, for any of us? Tomorrow we die and, those who are still living, I'll never see again. I have tried to tell this story as it was lived, in good faith, untainted by the sadness of this our prison cell. Dying is of little consequence now. 

For all my years, I've carried sacks of bread and cheese out to the harvesters, carting out costrels of cider to the fields to quench their thirst. The August sun makes parching work, more so than other labour on the soil. The men are drilled to reap well with their sickles and not to scatter kernels from the ears. Nothing should be wasted. They gather it in and bind it in sheaves, pack it firm in stooks and load them carefully on the carts, before they lay down piles in the barn, stacked in order so nothing slides or falls. There it stands until the winter threshing. Once the harvest's in, the poor of the village, the beggars and vagrants, glean the fields for spillage, to boost their meagre diets. I've taken scraps and small beer out to these too. And when the job is done, a single stook stays standing at the gate and none may start their gleaning til that final stook is cleared. 

Tonight, of all our Buckland party, I myself stand like that final stook; derelict, alone, waiting to be gathered in to Heaven. Even now, the scavengers are fast upon the fields of our faith, fighting over spoils. Soon they'll drive their livestock on the land of our beliefs, to finish off the gleaners' work and spoil the lot with their blasphemous dung. All I have's the memory of harvest; these recollections of corn stooks and custom and orchards.

It's those, of all, I think I most hate leaving. Orchards, the heart of our land, where apples grow and customs root and cider flows like manna. Old English apples, ready when the fruits turn bright, the pips within dark brown. Thomas Rivers taught me all he knew. ‘Test the fruit for readiness, Morgan. Lift and twist, lift and twist. The ripest first and leave some more to season. Store them cool and keep them fresh. Nor mid-season fruit with late-pickers…'

‘So much to learn,' I used to say.

‘So much to learn indeed,' he'd echo. ‘Always something happening in the orchard, Morgan. Sawing limbs and mending tools. Planting, pruning, laying mulch. Scything grass, like cleaning the hearth, a never-ending chore...'

He taught me to bring in the bees come summer, to water the roots, to plan the crop. It was I who hired October's hands. I who mended ladders, collected in the tools and tidied up after. 

‘Prune in winter for next year's fruiting wood. Growing apples takes a year, Morgan. No escaping that.'

As best I could, I passed this on, to those who joined to clear the orchard's branches. The scent in the air of August afternoons is overwhelming. There's nothing like it – perfect, pungent fruit.

And then there's the art of picking. ‘If it shears from the spur and comes from the stalk intact, it's ready. Otherwise leave it,' I told them, so the ripest only would be picked. ‘If it comes of its own accord, it's ready.' Like all things. All things except maybe sieges. And when they're ready, they're flushed with colour, mottled and striped, or pitted like the hammered surface of metal. Or yet with a milky overcoat of scarfskin. Round or tall, smooth or ribbed. And there, at the end, the apple's all-seeing eye, all that remains of the flower once the fruit has formed. 

Whatever Rivers meant for me in all his teaching is so much wastage now, like the thinnings from the trees themselves. Our grafting and pruning is over. Fighting and politicking thins the people, as nature thins the fruit by wind and drought. So, what remains of that forgotten apple flower? And what of that first ever crop… 

…we are all helping gather in windfalls, rummaging through the grass and tumps beneath the trees, stinging our hands on nettles and briars. There's always a source of fallen fruit, though riddled by wasps that trouble you with their stings as you gather the fruit into baskets. We're all there: my sisters, Caroline and Victoria, helping the elders on their ladders, while we small children gather fallen fruit… my three brothers, Wat, Ellis and Pip, me and all the other village boys and girls, young and blithe, so the orchard itself is as good as filled with the promise of Buckland's youth. And there beside me's the boy, John Toucher. Tall and shy. Untroubled as yet. My friend, above all. We prattle and giggle and wonder great things as we hunt for the big ones down there in the leaf mold. He spies something deep down in the long grass, where the dew still clings and the spiders hide. His little fingers dart between the spikes of grass and the rich moist scent of earth rushes up to meet our noses. He slowly picks the apple from the ground – the biggest one I've ever seen, all russeted with scuffs of dust – and buffs it to a shine upon his tunic, smiling like an angel. He turns to me and offers it. ‘For you, Morgan,' he says and I take it, his hand alighting on my wrist… and then he's suddenly off, as fast as he can, his face flushed red, shy and embarrassed at touching my hand, his heart going fast, fast, fast, as he leaps through the grass, between the trees, the elders all turning to ask ‘Where's that boy to?' and out of the orchard, onto the lane, down to the woods where he hides out for hours, within a twisted oak so none can find him. I search and search while all the adults are resting, but cannot unearth him. And I cry childish tears, for the harvest's now a hollow affair…

Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth of August, the feast of Saint Bartholomew and our day of execution. This is my final oath and testament. 

Soon we'll be dispatched in the city square. Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the giver and sustainer of life. Blessed be God in all the Holy Saints. Blessed be the Holy name of Jesus, within whose mercy I place my soul. In dying we are born to life eternal.

I am the last of our Buckland party, imprisoned here with Cornishmen I've known for just a month or more, although it feels a lifetime now. And yet I know few of their names. All my friends and kinsmen have preceded me into the arms of Christ. My faith hangs before me like a golden ball shining in the heart of Heaven. 

God be in my head and understanding.

The journey from camp beneath the city walls to this, my last night's resting place – a dank and stinking oubliette, this prison cell but nine square feet for twenty people, guarded by dishonourable men – is vague and incomplete. 

That final day, the messenger arrived around the northern circuit of the wall. He fell from his horse to the dirt.

‘It happened in the bloody meadow,' he panted. ‘Below the bridge. Ankle-deep in gore.' 

His arms and legs were mired in grime, his hands and forehead smeared with blood. The envoy was frantic, confused and needed calming down before we understood him. Between his shallow breaths, the story of the killing tumbled out: some three hundred Cornishmen, slaughtered in the pasture. Their bodies now lay in the sun, cooking beneath the cauldrons of their helmets and armour, or lying in a pile of shields and weapons. It wouldn't be long before the crows came down.

The details spilled from him like worms. Further massacres abroad. Clyst St. Mary burned. Our people fled, killed by the sword and the lance, or burned and drowned as they vaulted the river. Some thousand dead and many prisoners. Further killings on the heath. A massacre of prisoners, their cries for clemency ignored. Nor age nor womanhood respected. Everybody slain. Nine hundred more butchered there in the luckless fields. Those who did escape, vanished with their injuries down country lanes. 

The news of carnage and loss of life disturbed our fragile hearts. We saw our future fall away like grain through out-stretched hands. We couldn't remain.

Within the hour, Arundell lifted the siege. 

The roads and byways to the west were open and we made to go in that direction. I believe the watchmen on the walls were unaware, or must have been asleep. We left silently under cover of dusk, striking camp and finding lanes for home. Some went south to Plymouth. Others took the byways north to Bristol. For the most part, we withdrew to the west, with our few belongings and armaments.