Simon (16 page)

One of these small manor houses was Okeham Paine, a low-set grey house, at the curve of a shallow valley, down which its garden and demesne sloped to a cluster of cottages and a bridge. Because of its position, commanding the road to Exeter, the place had been fortified and garrisoned by Royalist Foot, and because of its position, it was needful that the troops of Parliament should occupy it as soon as might be.

The attack was ordered, and in the pitch darkness of the mid-December night, the attacking force set out from Broad Clyst. It was made up of two dragoon companies, a troop of Waller’s Horse, an officer and two privates of the Pioneers in charge of the powder-keg for blowing up the main door, and Disbrow’s Troop of the General’s Own. None too many for the job, but men were short, for fever, bred in the Ottery Marshes, was rife in the Army, and there were no men to be spared for the taking of one small fortress.

It had been snowing off and on for days past, and the thick fall muffled their hoof-beats, so that the column moved in eerie silence, save for the occasional jingle of a bridle-rein. It was very dark, with a loaded sky that seemed to press upon the tree-tops, and a
chill, moaning wind blew the snow-scurries in their faces as they rode. Like a cavalcade of ghosts they passed, by lanes and bridle-paths and over untracked open land, following the scouts who had covered the ground in advance; and like a cavalcade of ghosts they came at last down through a belt of hanging oakwoods, to the verge of open land above Okeham Paine. Here, where the snowy pasture glimmered white between the trees ahead, they dismounted. The troopers, like the dragoons, linked their mounts together by slipping each bridle over the head of the next horse, every tenth bridle being taken by a man who was to remain behind. Then, as a whispered order passed along the lines from the senior dragoon captain, who was in command, they started forward again on foot, still following the scouts, down the woodshore.

It was snowing hard again; all the better, for the drifting flurries would help to conceal their advance, while the moaning wind covered any chance sound. The dragoons, usually armed with matchlocks, as befitted Mounted Foot, carried flintlock cavalry pistols tonight, that no glimmer of a slow-match should betray them in the darkness; and the jingling spurs had been stripped from the heels of the troopers for the same reason.

At the lower end of the wood, where the oaks gave place to birch and hazel, the whole party halted. There were no whispered orders now, for they had their orders in advance; and in utter silence they divided, Waller’s and one company of dragoons melting off to the right, Disbrow’s and the other to the left, towards the place where a long hawthorn windbreak led down towards the home paddocks. After a short distance a stream sunk between deep banks came looping almost to the roots of the windbreak. The dragoons dropped down one by one, and disappeared along the stream side, any movement in the snowy darkness hidden by the willow and alder scrub. Disbrow’s stole on, the advance-guard scouting ahead, the rest following after a space, in single file, with the Pioneers and their powder keg bringing up the rear. Simon only knew when they reached the first guard-point by a faint scuffle and a grunt far ahead that might well have been made by a rooting badger; and a little farther on he saw the dark shapes of the sentries, lying where they had been
dragged aside from the way. To judge by the number of them, the watch had been doubled.

The windbreak grew thin here, where newly-planted thorn saplings gave poor cover, and it was a case of crawling from now on. On the edge of the home paddock they came upon another sentry post, and here the guard were on the alert, and there was a scuffle and the beginning of a cry followed by the crack of a musket-stock on somebody’s head; then a long prickling silence in which the men, crouching in the black gloom of the paddock trees, waited with straining ears for any sound of an alarm. None came. Evidently the sentry’s quickly silenced cry had been blanketed by the falling snow, or, if it had been heard, had been taken for the cry of some night bird. The attackers crept on.

They encountered no further sentry-posts, and in a few minutes more they were in their places along the eastern verge of the garden. A long wait followed. Crouching under a yew hedge, Simon was filled with a tingling expectancy. There was shelter from the wind here, and behind and on every side of him he fancied he could catch the faint breathing of hidden men. Away in front of him the whitened lawn dipped and rose to the dark bulk of the house itself. The windows had been barricaded against assault, but here and there a spangle of yellow light shining through a loophole told where men were wakeful and standing to arms. A little scurry of snow fell from the yew branches on to Simon’s shoulder, and the chill of the ground on which he crouched seemed to strike upward, a sodden creeping cold, through all his body. But still the waiting-time crawled. Surely, surely the other companies must be in place by now! They had farther to go, but they could not have run into any trouble, for there had been no outcry, no sound of shots.

Simon did not dare to shift from one chilled knee to the other, lest the movement should bring down a heavier fall from the yew branch, and so catch the notice of the sentries who must be on duty at the house. The snow had stopped, he realized, and the loophole lights shone clear.

Then a faint glow sprang up for an instant in the darkness of the bushes opposite, carefully screened from the house. Walley’s
Troop was in position, and signalling the fact by the smuggler’s method of a shielded lantern. From the far end of Disbrow’s sector, Simon knew, the same glow would be signalling across the corner of the kitchen garden, to the remaining company of dragoons.

So far, everything had gone without a hitch. The next move was for the dragoons behind the house; and almost at once, they made it. There was the sudden, sharp challenge of a sentry, followed by a pistol-shot, and then a whole volley; and a swelling uproar as if hell had broken loose in the kitchen garden. The dragoons were staging an attack in force, to draw the enemy’s fire. In the house and outbuildings drums were beating the alarm; and the golden spangles of the loopholes darkened one by one. Under his yew hedge, Simon drew himself together like a runner before the start of a race, waiting—waiting, while the defenders had their attention fully taken up by the mock attack in the rear. Then the voice of the dragoon Captain, raised in a staccato yell, gave the word of command, and like a dark wave the hidden men broke from cover, cheering as they did so. From all sides of the garden the attack swarmed in. Simon was up and running for the house, his long pistol in his hand. He was half-way across the lawn when fire spurted from the darkened loop-holes, and the rattle of musketry rose above the uproar on the far side of the house and the drums beating to quarters. He flung himself down like the rest, but in the pitch dark, firing was wild and most unlikely to do much harm, and an instant later he was up and racing forward again. The ranks grew thicker as the circle narrowed; one section was heading for the stables and outbuildings, another swerving left round the house to make common cause with the dragoons in the kitchen garden. Simon and his Troop, following Lieutenant Colebourne, held straight on to make a direct assault against the front of the house; and with them went the Pioneers who were to blast in the door.

Next instant, as it seemed to Simon, the darkness exploded into a fitful red glare in which the flashes of discharged weapons were myriad points of flame. There was shooting enough now on both sides. The rooms beyond the barricaded windows were in darkness, that the light might not silhouette the men at the
loop-holes; and they had flung down firebrands among the attackers to make them a possible target; but these quickly fizzled out in the snow, save a few which the dragoons had caught up and were using to fire the barricades, ripping out the blazing wood as it scorched and twisted. Again and again Fairfax’s troops were driven back, again and again they rallied and pressed forward once more. The fight was swirling like an angry flood through stable yard and outbuildings; and crouched against the stout main door, out of the line of fire, three dark shapes made hasty but careful preparations with powder and fuse. Inside the house the Royalists stood to their posts, the marksmen firing steadily while their comrades loaded for them; but this was to be a hand-to-hand fight in the long run, and as the shutters and barricades went down, window after window became the centre of its own fierce struggle, where battling figures reeled to and fro with clubbed muskets; and the fitful red light flashed on leaping sword blades.

In the midst of one such
mêlée
, Simon was slowly but surely forcing his way inward. He had emptied both pistols, and was fighting now with his sword, his men pressing at his heels. It was a cut-and-thrust affair of random blows, like a fight in a dream, and in the course of it he had lost his steel cap, but would not have noticed it if he had lost everything except his sword; for suddenly the press against him was slackening, the defenders of the window were giving way! And with a yell he and his men poured across the shattered sill.

‘First in! By the Lord Harry!’ His voice was drowned by the roar of an explosion, and he knew that the main door had gone.

It was a small room in which they found themselves, and the light of a burning shutter showed them a door in the opposite wall. Shouting in triumph, they hurled themselves against it. More and more men were crashing in behind them, as they burst it open and stormed through into a yellow radiance of candles that almost blinded them.

They were in the main hall of the house, lit by candles guttering wildly in sconces against the damaged walls; the place was reeking with the fumes of burned powder, which hung like swirling fog in
the air, and a desperate struggle was going on for the splintered doorway. A great staircase curved out of the murky shadows, and half-way up it stood a woman in a dark gown, a tall woman, standing with arms spread as though to make a barrier, and looking down with no shred of fear on the wild scene below her. Simon saw all this in a confused flash, before a band of the defenders came charging down upon him, led by a slight figure whose wild red hair shone like flame in the guttering candlelight.

The two bands came together in a reeling clump of men and clubbed muskets and leaping steel; and as the two leaders sprang to meet at the foot of the stairs, and their blades rang against each other, Simon saw that the red-haired man was Amias.

Amias recognized him in the same instant, and laughed. ‘Well met, brother sober-sides!’ His eyes were full of the old dancing fire, and his blade—it was Balin, Simon knew instinctively—never wavered out of line. Simon said nothing. He pressed grimly forward, full of a queer cold feeling of unreality. This could not be really happening! It was something so horrible, so much against the nature of decent things, that it simply was not possible. But it
was
possible!—It was happening!

There, at the foot of the wide staircase, Simon and Amias fought, forgetful of the struggling figures all around them; seeing nothing but each other’s eyes filled with deadly purpose above their leaping blades; while the woman on the stairs, standing coldly remote from the turmoil below her, looked down upon them.

The whole affair lasted only a few moments, then the resistance about the door broke suddenly, and the dragoons came flooding in. The
mêlée
in the hall was forced towards the stairs, and Simon, springing back from a lunge that had ripped his sleeve, glimpsed for a split second the menacing outline of an up-swung musket-stock above his head. It came whistling down, and he staggered sideways, not realizing that he had been hit. There was a wild sea-roaring in his ears, and something hot trickled down his forehead and cheek; for an instant he saw Amias’s face, with a look on it that he did not understand. He saw it very clearly, but as though from a long way off, and then the floor tilted under him and he plunged downward into a great darkness.

A GREAT WHILE
later, as it seemed, Simon began to float up through the darkness, rather as one might float up through murky water towards the light and air above. Indeed, it was so like that, that he had a vague idea he had been swimming with Amias in the pool below the oak woods at home, and had somehow got stuck at the bottom. He kicked out strongly to come to the surface, but the nearing light beat on his head like a hammer, and he must have swallowed a lot of the muddy river water to make him feel so sick. . . .

Some sort of frightful upheaval took place inside him, and somebody said, ‘There, he’ll be better after that.’ And the dark waters closed over him once more.

But he did not sink as deeply as before, and it was not so long before he began to come up again. This time there was a kind of wavering leaf of light far ahead and, little by little, a blurred halo began to spread round it, a golden glow, very
comforting, like the glow of candle-light in a window when one has been out a long time in the darkness and the cold. And suddenly Simon knew that that was exactly what it was; a candle, or two candles, he was not sure which, for sometimes there was only one flame, and sometimes two, with a possible third. It seemed to waver about, growing sometimes very large and blurred, sometimes very small and sharp. Then, as his sight began to clear, he saw that it was only one candle, and that it was held aloft in the hand of a woman who was regarding him fixedly by its light. A tall woman in a grey gown, with her hair showing smoothly dark under the edge of her white Puritan coif. He seemed to remember that he had seen her somewhere, a long while ago, but where?

Next instant a small clear picture sprang out of the darkness in his head, and he saw her standing in the curve of a wide staircase, looking down with a kind of rigid calm on the fighting men below her. Memory of at any rate part of the night’s work flooded back to him, and with a choking cry he tried to struggle to his elbow. The world tilted and swam, and the hammer in his head nearly deafened him, and next instant the woman was beside him, with her free hand in the middle of his chest, pushing him firmly back on to soft pillows. ‘Lie still,’ she commanded. ‘God has seen fit to preserve your life, and will you undo His work?’