Simon (8 page)

They were a motley crew, some in rags, some in scarlet coats stiff with newness; some gaunt and toughened with long campaigning; many still ruddy from the plough or pale from the counting-house desk, for the new Model Army was as yet only an army in the making.

Stopping to ask his way from a small wizened man whose scarlet coat was faced with shrieking yellow, Simon rode on until the high curtain-wall and ancient towers of the Castle began to peer over the gables and down into the thronged streets, and he came to one of the gateways. There was no ditch on this side of the Castle, for it had long since been filled in, and crowding hovels grew right to the curtain-wall as toadstools crowd against a tree-trunk, and a lane simply turned between two houses and
led straight in through Henry VIII’s gate. Simon followed the lane, and reining up, appealed to the sentry on duty. ‘I want to see the colonel.’

‘Which colonel?’ demanded the sentry.

‘Any colonel of Horse.’

‘Sergeant!’ shouted the sentry.

The sergeant appeared from the guard-room, and looked at Simon hard.

‘Cove here wants a colonel of Horse—any colonel of Horse,’ said the sentry.

‘What for, sir?’ demanded the sergeant, doubtfully.

‘I want to join the Army,’ said Simon.

A young officer in the usual scarlet coat, who chanced to be passing, swung round at the sound of his voice, and letting out a yelp of surprise, came striding to join the group. ‘You!’ he cried. ‘Well, of all the—’

Simon looked at him blankly for an instant, and then suddenly the gay freckled face under the jaunty feathered hat seemed to alter, and he remembered it as he had seen it last, grey and haggard and stained with blood. It was the man he had pulled from under the hooves of a Royalist horse at Little Torrington!

‘You!’ echoed Simon, and bent down from the saddle to wring his hand. ‘How’s your neck?’

‘Sound as a bell, and right as a blazing trivet! You’re a good surgeon.’ The young officer’s eyes were dancing up at him, his huge mouth curling almost into his ears. ‘You’ve come to join us?’

‘Yes.’ Simon nodded. ‘Where and how do I find a colonel?’

‘Oh, to hell with colonels! It’s the General for you, my lad—and he’s down here today too. come along and we’ll catch him before he starts back again. All right, sergeant, a friend of mine; I’ll see to this.’

With a breathless sense of being caught up and hurried along by a wave against which it was useless to fight—not that he had the least desire to fight—Simon abandoned himself to whatever might happen next, and dismounting, obediently led Scarlet back into the main street.

‘I say, this is luck! A timely meeting!’ his companion was saying. ‘My name’s Barnaby Colebourne. What’s yours?’

‘Simon Carey,’ said Simon, slightly dazed. ‘
Who
did you say we were going to see?’

‘The Lord-General, Sir Thomas Fairfax.
You
know.’

Yes, but surely we don’t need to bother
him
!’ Simon protested, as they shouldered back into the shifting crowds of Thames Street.

Barnaby Colebourne explained rapidly and at the top of his voice, as he pushed forward across the street. ‘We do if you’re going to join my Regiment. Fairfax’s Horse, we are, and so the General is our Colonel, if you see what I mean.’

Simon saw, rather hazily, and was just opening his mouth for another question, when they arrived before the courtyard arch of a great inn, over which hung a brilliantly coloured sign showing the blue-and-gold insignia of the Garter.

‘Here we are,’ said Barnaby Colebourne, and with Simon and Scarlet at his heels, turned in through the dark tunnel of the archway. They emerged in a cobbled courtyard where two horses were being walked up and down before the house door; and after handing Scarlet over to the care of an hostler, Simon followed his new friend into a shadowy hall where several soldiers were standing about, and up a broad flight of stairs, past the doleful-looking sentry on duty at its foot.

‘Of course we could have gone to Major Disbrow,’ said Barnaby casually. ‘Most of the Colonel’s duties fall on him really, but the Lord-General is more likely to listen to reason.’

There was another man on duty before a door at the end of the long upstairs gallery, and a young officer of the Staff, a Galloper, kicking his heels by the window. Barnaby spoke to him, and he disappeared into the next room, and after a few moments came back and left the door open for them.

They went in and the door shut behind them, and Simon found himself in a panelled room where a low fire was smoking badly on the hearth. A man writing at a table in the middle of the room glanced up for an instant at their entrance, and then went on writing; while another man in the dark clothes of a secretary sat by him, ready to take the finished paper.

After the noisy streets, it seemed very quiet here, with no sound save the faint, harsh scratching of the quill pen over the paper; and Simon had plenty of time to take stock of the writer, who he supposed must be General Sir Thomas Fairfax. The Commander-in-Chief was dark; that was the first thing one noticed about him: dark as a gipsy, and gaunt as a scarecrow under the gay scarlet of his uniform coat, with black unruly hair hanging about his cheeks and neck. With nothing of his down-bent face visible save the frowning black brows and great beaked nose, he had a most forbidding aspect; and seeing his gloves and riding-whip beside him on the table, and remembering the horses being walked up and down in the courtyard, Simon began, first to feel that they had not chosen a very good moment to bother him, and then to wish fervently that they had not come to bother him at all, but gone to Major Disbrow, whoever he might be, instead.

The great man finished his writing and laid down the pen, sanded the sheet and handed it to the man beside him, saying in a slow very pleasant voice, ‘Three copies, John—no, four. Colonel Pride had better have one.’ Then he turned his attention to the pair waiting before him. Now that he was looking up, his dark face no longer seemed forbidding, for the eyes did much to redeem its harshness. Also, Simon saw to his surprise that he was quite young—not more than two or three and thirty. The scar of an old wound showed livid on cheek and temple, and he put up one hand for an instant to cover it, as though he was still very conscious of the disfigurement; then let his hand fall back to the table.

‘Yes, Colebourne? You wished to see me?’

Barnaby stepped forward, doffing his hat in salute. ‘Yes, sir. This is Simon Carey, a friend of mine, and he wants to join the Regiment; so I brought him along to you, sir.’

The General turned his head in the quick alert way he had, and studied Simon in silence for a few moments. Then he nodded, as though satisfied with what he saw. ‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, sir.’

‘You have seen no fighting before, I take it?’

‘Only as an onlooker, sir,’ said Simon.

Barnaby made a quick movement forward, and Fairfax turned to him. ‘Yes, Colebourne?’

‘He’s the guide who got us safely through to Barnstaple, after Lostwithiel, sir.’

Fairfax studied Simon again. ‘That was a good night’s work,’ he said slowly. (Indeed, all through the interview Simon found the slowness of the General’s speech an odd contrast to the quickness of his looks and movements.)

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I haven’t got a cornet, yet, sir; beg pardon, sir,’ said Barnaby, insinuatingly.

‘What about Cornet Wainwright?’

‘He—’ Barnaby hesitated, and then plunged on. ‘I know he thinks he has a right to the post, but seniority isn’t everything, and—do you think he’s quite the man for the job?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Frankly, no, sir.’

The General’s left brow shot up, and he leaned forward, arms folded on the table. ‘Tell me why,’ he suggested.

‘Well, sir, he’s too touchy about his dignity, for one thing, and he’s got a sarcastic way with him that doesn’t go down well.’

‘He has the makings of a good officer, none the less.’

‘But not for the Second Troop, sir.’ Barnaby was speaking quickly, and very much in earnest. ‘My men are mostly old Ironsides, and a good many of them are Anabaptists and so on, too, and that doesn’t make them any easier to handle. They’re the salt of the earth, sir, but they’re a pretty hard lot, and if Cornet Wainwright started his airs and graces on them, they’d—they’d be more inclined to spank him than salute him!’

The General’s dark face kindled suddenly into a smile that made him seem for an instant like an eager boy; then it was gone, and only a trace of it lingered in his eyes. ‘That sounds like indiscipline, Captain-Lieutenant Colebourne.’

‘No, sir; human nature,’ said Barnaby with a grin.

‘And you think Carey, here, would have a better chance of success with these ravening wolves of yours?’

‘Yes, sir—and Colonel Ireton would speak for him, I’m sure. So would Richard Cromwell.’

‘You have met him only once before?’ mused Fairfax. ‘Ah well, the circumstances of the meeting being what they were, that might be enough. We won’t trouble Colonel Ireton or Captain Cromwell.’ Turning back to Simon, he began to question him closely: of course he could ride? Had he ever used pistols? . . . Simon’s answers to these and sundry other questions evidently satisfied him, for finally he pushed back his chair and got up, saying, ‘Very well, Colebourne. I bow to your judgement. John Rushworth, see to it. You have the details correctly?’

The grey-haired secretary glanced at a slip of paper on which he had been writing and read out, ‘Simon Carey, to be commissioned as Cornet of the 2nd Troop, Fairfax’s Horse.’

Fairfax nodded, then turned to Simon again. ‘You will receive your Commission from the Committee of Both Kingdoms in the course of a day or two. In the meanwhile, get your equipment and report to Major Disbrow.’

Simon drew himself up even straighter than he had been standing before and said rather breathlessly, ‘Thank you, sir! I—I’ll do my level best to be worthy of it.’

‘I know that.’ Fairfax picked up his gloves and moved toward the fire. ‘I wish you a good evening, Colebourne. Good evening, Carey.’

A few moments later they were outside the door again, and clattering downstairs.

‘A friendly soul, the Lord-General,’ said Barnaby with satisfaction, as they crossed the courtyard where the horses were still being walked up and down before the door. ‘Never too busy to talk to small fry man-to-man and listen to what one has to say. Now for the Quartermaster; I’m off duty, so I’ll come too. We’ll leave your horse here and pick him up later on the way back to Quarters. Oh, but wait a moment—’

They had just emerged into the street, when he stopped in his tracks and turned to point upward. ‘Look up there.’

Simon followed the line of his pointing finger, and saw a mass of drooping Colours that hung motionless in the quiet air, brilliantly, glowing blue and gold and white in the fading light of the February afternoon, from the open oriel window above
him. ‘Those are our Regimental Standards,’ Barnaby was explaining. ‘The big ones on the left are the Colours of Fairfax’s Foot, and the smaller ones on lances are the Standards of Fairfax’s Horse; one for each Company and Troop, you see. That’s ours, second from the left, and the black leopard above is Sir Thomas’s personal Standard. They are always housed where everyone can see them, partly to show where Regimental Headquarters is, and partly because—well, because they belong to each one of us, and so we all have the right to see them, not only in action and on parade, but all the time.’

Simon stood gazing up at the motionless Standards, especially at the second from the left, the Standard of his own Troop, which one day he would carry into action. His heart beat high with resolve to be worthy of his trust; visions of honour and chivalry and the Glory of Arms rose within him, and pride in the cause for which he would soon be fighting . . . Then he woke to the fact that Barnaby was shouting in his ear that he was blocking up the way; and suddenly he flushed crimson, and turned to follow his new friend up the street.

Several hours later, Simon was sitting up in his shirt in the pallet bed which had been made up for him on the floor of Lieutenant Colebourne’s chamber. The White Hart was not a fine large inn such as the Garter next door, and with the sixteen officers of Fairfax’s Horse quartered there, space was limited; and there was another pallet in the small room, as well as the narrow truckle-bed on the edge of which Barnaby himself was seated, still half-clad, and tenderly polishing a pair of truly wonderful boots. They were of yellowish leather, very soft, and with turn-down tops so enormous that Simon wondered very much how it was possible to walk in them at all.

Simon was dog-tired, and the hours since his interview with Fairfax seemed like a crowded dream. In company with Barnaby Colebourne he had gone to report to Major Disbrow, a lean brown little fighting man with an eye of blue steel. The two senior troops or companies of each regiment had no captain, but were under the direct command of the colonel and major, and in them the work of the captains mostly fell to the lieutenants, who
were superior beings to other lieutenants in consequence. This, being the 2nd, was Major Disbrow’s Troop, and Barnaby was its Captain-Lieutenant. Those were two of the few positive facts that Simon had discovered that evening, and he clung to them as to a spar in a sea of chaos. Leaving Major Disbrow, they had repaired to the Quartermaster’s Office farther up the town, and to various magazines and depots to draw his equipment and see about his uniform. The scarlet coat faced with blue which was the uniform of both Fairfax’s Regiments had had to be altered slightly, and would not be ready until next day. But his sleeveless buff coat (second-hand and somewhat worn and weather-stained) and his heavy spurred boots and steel cap were now stacked with Barnaby’s in the corner; and from the back of the one chair which the room possessed hung his new sword in its crimson slings. He had been half-minded, before he left home, to take Balan with him, as Amias had taken Balin; but he had realized that though it was a rapier of the old sort, with a cutting edge as well as a point for thrusting, it would not be a good weapon for fighting on horseback, and he would do better to wait until he reached Windsor. Now he had his heavy Cavalry blade, the real thing, and he sat and hugged his knees, feasting his eyes on it, while Barnaby polished and re-polished those preposterous boots.