‘They got wind of our coming, and they was drawn up all ready for us on Adderton Moor, guns and all — yon great brutes that they call the Queen’s pocket pistols,’ the man said, resting his head against the door post. ‘We nearly did for ‘em, all t’same. Three times they charged us, and we flung ‘em back, and held ‘em all t’day; chased ‘em back to their guns, we did. But they broke us in t’end. There’s hundreds of us dead, and God-a-many taken prisoner ... Na Na, I dunno what happened; I only know they broke us —’
‘What of Sir Thomas Fairfax?’ Anne said, vaguely surprised at the levelness of her own voice.
‘Nay, Sir Thomas had t’Right Wing, and we was wi’ t’Left, under old Lord and General Gifford. Lost touch wi’ t’Right, early on.’ He lurched unsteadily to his feet, and stood, swaying, looking at them with bloodshot eyes. ‘I mun be away after t’others …’
It was upward of an hour later, when a hurried knock came at the street door, and a few moments later a message was brought in to her. For an instant her heart leapt, then as she took the folded paper she saw with a sick chill of disappointment that the hurried superscription was not in Thomas’s hand, but his father’s. She opened it out and cast a hurried glance over the couple of lines within, then raised her eyes to find-those of the other woman fixed upon her. ‘Lord Fairfax sends me word that he intends trying to get through to Leeds tonight, with such of his troops as are yet in a fit state to march; and bids me go up to him at the church, and be ready to leave within the hour. That is all.’
They looked at each other in the light of the candles that burned without a flicker in the still air; both knowing what that meant for Bradford, left with no fighting men save their wounded. Then Anne turned, gathering her wide winged skirts, and ran, out from the candlelit room into the dark street, heedless of Mistress Sharpe’s voice calling after her.
Several lanterns clustered about the church, where such glass as was still unbroken glowed in shadowy jewel colours upon the dusk; and there the crowd was thickest, and made up, for the most part, of wounded weary soldiers.
Anne scudded through the gate into the crowded kirkyard and on into the kirk. A group of officers stood deep in urgent converse before the chancel steps, and seeing Lord Fairfax there, Anne swept towards them. They moved apart, a little surprised at her coming even in their weariness, to let her through; and her father-in-law broke off in what he was saying to Major General Gifford and Captain Bright, his long face growing yet more harassed as he saw her coining. ‘Anne, I said in an hour. There was no need for this haste.’
Anne was panting a little with her speed; she let her gathered skirts fall and stood before him in the heart of the lantern light, fiercely and imperiously bright in her orange-tawny gown as though one of the spread-winged angels had stepped down from her hammer beam to confront him; a small stocky accusing angel, demanding, ‘Where is Thomas?’
The tired men in buff and steel stood back from her, looking on with respect; and Lord Fairfax, his mind very full of more urgent matters, found himself answering her question — with harassed kindliness, certainly, but answering none the less — as though she and not he were the Commander-in-Chief of the Yorkshire Army. ‘I sent the order to the Right Wing to withdraw, and had hoped that they would have come in by now. But since we had by then become separated from the Right, it is possible that he never received my order.’
‘And what then?’ Anne demanded.
He spread his hands. ‘God knows ... My dear, you will understand that I have other matters to attend to. I said in an hour — and it was in an hour that I meant.’
Anne faced him, her eyes dilating until the bright irises all but disappeared in the great black pupils, her brows frowning above the strong mannish nose. ‘Ah yes, I know that I should not have come; it is ill mannered and ill convenient; unwomanly — or maybe too womanly — but I may be allowed to feel some interest in the matter — I should like to know if I am a widow —’
Lord Fairfax made a quick move towards her. ‘Anne, be quiet! You are overwrought. Go back now, and get ready to ride. An hour’s time.’
Anne ignored him. For a moment she seemed to be listening. But she was not listening, she was receiving into herself one of those odd convictions that come at times out of nowhere, having nothing to do with reason, but not to be denied. She was not conscious of taking any decision, for it seemed that it was taken for her, Thomas would be coming back and she must wait for him.
‘My Lord, I shall not be riding with you.’
He frowned, a desperately harassed man, the last shreds of whose patience was being frayed out unbearably, and bent close to her, saying in an undertone, ‘Don’t be childish, Anne; and don’t make an exhibition of yourself. Go back now, and make ready to ride; you cannot know what it may be like when the Papists enter Bradford.’
She gave him back look for look, suddenly smiling a little, and her smile silenced him. ‘I know the Papist Army’s reputation, My Lord ... I will embarrass you no longer by my presence here, but — nor will I leave Bradford with you. I shall wait here for Thomas.’
He scrutinized her a moment longer, then gave a small weary bow. ‘Very well, my dear. I must accept your decision and bid you good night, and God keep you.’
From wherever it had come, Anne’s sudden absolute certainty of Fairfax’s return was justified before the night was out.
Not knowing what was happening on the Centre and Left Wing, he had held his men steady behind their hedges against repeated charges and under galling gun fire, until the order to retreat reached him, by which time the victorious enemy were between him and his fleeing comrades. He had therefore marched his men in good order down the lane to the village of Gomersal, under the fringes of the moor, and thence to Halifax. And a little before dawn on the first day of July, a few hours after his father had marched out, got back into Bradford again with several companies of Foot and a couple of troops of Horse, and took over command of the town defences from Captain Hodgson who, like Anne, had elected to remain.
Anne did not see his return, but she saw, most movingly, something of its effect.
When she came again up Ivegate, heedless of the sudden thunder rain spattering about her, from that strange interview with Lord Fairfax in the church, it was to see lanterns hovering outside the doorway of the inn, and wounded men still being helped or carried inside. And scarcely thinking what she did, she passed Mistress Sharpe’s door and, with gown gathered high and hair wet with the summer rain, turned in at the one beneath the great swinging sign, and said to Davey Morrison, whom she found within, ‘Let me help. I was no hindrance to you at Tadcaster.’
The old Scot took a long look at her, and said, ‘And you in your bonnie gown? Aye then, come away in and help,’ and stood away from the door. In the long tap room of the Unicorn, the furniture had been thrust back, and wounded men were bedded down in borrowed blankets all over the sanded floor; the blue reek of tobacco smoke hung about the place, wreathing in the light of a couple of lanterns that hung from the rafters. One of the inevitable Bradford preachers in black gown and rumpled Geneva bands was standing in the midst of the place with the Bible in his hands, and several women were at work among the wounded. Anne saw a slut in a once-scarlet petticoat squatting with her man’s head in her lap and a black bottle in her hand which she held to his mouth or her own with complete impartiality.
It was unbearably hot, for the shutters had been drawn across the windows — most of Bradford would be shuttered tonight, as householders barricaded their lower stories against tomorrow’s fighting — and no freshness had come with the rain. But no shutters could keep out, a while later, the weary tramp of marching feet passing up Ivegate and away into the distance; nor the knowledge of what it meant. Men turned in their blankets to look at each other without a word; Anne and the Scots surgeon caught and held each other’s gaze for an instant above the body of the wounded man between them; the drab in the scarlet petticoat laughed shrilly and finished the bottle. On e
ach of them was the knowledge that now nothing stood between them and Lord Newcastle’s Papist Army.
The night seemed to drag more slowly after that. It was only a short summer night; a night when from the fells across Airedale one could see the light linger in the north, the afterglow reaching out to touch fingers with the first paling of the dawn. But in Bradford, to Anne, her hair hanging limp about her forehead, her hands foul with blood, it seemed longer than any January darkness that she had ever known.
It was still night, no streak of light yet showing through the chinks in the shutters, when out of the heavy stillness a sound arose; feet coining and going over the cobbles, a horse’s hooves, and the jink of a bridle bit, a distant order. She never knew quite how it happened; she was working at the far end of the stifling room, trying to ease the pain of a boy with a shoulder smashed by a musket ball, and she never saw anyone come to the door, never heard the news break into the midst; but suddenly it was running from one to another of the blanket-wrapped figures on the floor. ‘Black Tom has come in! Here, Jud, did you say Black Tom —? Black Tom! He’s got back to us! Eh lad, Black Tom’s in command again!’
She felt the sense of increase, of new heart surging through the wounded, with the knowledge that the dark quiet man with the stammer had returned to them and they were not deserted. The boy looked up at her, from the cup she was holding for him, his face streaked with sweat, snail-trails of sweat shining in the lantern light, but there was a wide blue look of hope and, yes, contentment, in his eyes. ‘Eh well, ah don’t know!’ he said. ‘Him and his old white horse! We’ll be well enough, now we’ve got our Black Tom wi’ us again.’
Anne looked down at him; he was such a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen, maybe, who should have been getting in the hay of some up-dale farm and whistling at his work, and now he was most likely going to die; or if he lived, it would be with a twisted lump for a shoulder and a useless right arm. She smiled at him. ‘We will be well enough, now,’ she said.
Chapter 11 - The Truce
The grey summer dawn came up with rain in the wind, and showed to the anxious eyes gazing out from behind the Bradford defences, the jewelled flicker of Lord Newcastle’s personal standard flying from the ancient tower of Bowling Hall, and the Royalists already busy behind rough breastworks of brushwood, mounting the guns that the straining teams had brought up overnight from yesterday’s battlefield. From the mouth of Goodman’s End where parties of Bradford’s defenders were already toiling at their barricades while others brought down the kegs of powder, Sir Thomas Fairfax, making the rounds of his own defences, watched the ordered ant-swarming of little black figures about one of the Queen’s pocket pistols on the slope of the nearest hill, from which the thirty-two horse team was only now being led away. In the morning air the crack of the driver’s whip came to him quite clearly. ‘They’ve no need to raise batteries,’ said Captain Hodgson standing close beside him and staring with narrowed eyes in the same direction. ‘Not wi’ the hills rising within musket shot of the town all t’way round.’
His gaze still on the toiling gunners at the edge of the hayfield, Fairfax said, ‘Since we have only musketry wherewith to answer them, it is as well that at least they are within range.’
At about ten o’clock in the morning the big guns opened up with a roar, answered by the rattling volleys of musketry from the defenders; so that all the hollow in which Bradford lay was filled with rolling thunder, and the acrid white smoke of burned powder trailed across the steep hill fields where the hay lay a-making. At noon, judging that the softening up process should have taken effect, Lord Newcastle launched a general attack on the barricades; an attack which was met with unexpected strength and, after a hot struggle, hurled back, leaving its dead like sea-wrack washed by the tide against the breastworks. More softening up needed. The bombardment began again; and so it went on, all that long summer’s day, while the guns tore their ragged wounds in the stubborn little town, and men crouched behind low garden walls and barricades of tree trunks and piled woolsacks, pouring in their volleys in reply. And all the long summer’s day Sir Thomas Fairfax gave a startling imitation of a man able to be in three places at once; at the church where he had his strong-point and headquarters, beside the solitary sharp-shooters in loft windows, among the men at the hard pressed barricades.
Towards evening, with the shooting light already beginning to fade, one of the sharp-shooters high in the smoke filled bell chamber of St Peter’s square embattled tower, heard a step come up beside him and caught out of the tail of his eye the flash of kingfisher blue across dark steel, and glancing round as he handed his discharged musket to his loader and took the freshly charged one in its place, found Black Tom at his side. The marksman was a withered little man with a wedge-shaped face, whom Anne would have remembered kneeling below the jewelled splinters of the church window at Tadcaster, the muzzle of his musket resting on the sill, and chanting triumphant verses from the more vainglorious of the Psalms with every shot that went home. Now he knelt in the deep embrasure of the bell tower windows, the beechen stock cradled between cheek and shoulder, sighting with narrow-eyed intent along the brown muzzle that nosed out between the piled woolsacks, his face fantastically barred with silver as the wet fading light of the summer evening shone upward upon it between the open bell louvres.
Fairfax moved forward into the deep embrasure, the loader, busy with wad and rammer, shifting a little without looking up, to give him space, and looked out and down. He saw the crazy gambeson of woolsacks slung about the face of the tower, and the men who manned the breastworks of the kirkyard wall, and small and grotesquely foreshortened by the height; he saw the jagged holes in the cottages at Baker End and along Kirkgate. He saw the northern of the two batteries that Lord Newcastle had mounted against them, up there at the head of the long hayfield where the cultivated land ran out into the heather, and felt that he was looking directly into the glaring eyes of the guns. There was a flicker of movement from the battery, a sudden white vomit of smoke from one of the great thirty-six pounders, followed, some two seconds later, by a deep booming roar that beat against the bell tower like a breaking wave; and then the crash of the ball landing somewhere in the town below them. For some time past the Royalists had been concentrating their fire upon the strong point of the ancient church, but that was a miss, and a grunt of derisive laughter greeted it. A deep murmuration of sound like a distant swarm of bees stole down from the high shadows above them and, glancing up through the wreathing fog of musket smoke, Fairfax realized that it came from the bells hanging at rest, black mouths gaping downward, among the great beams and the spider’s web of ropes and wheels overhead.
‘They been like that, a-humming and a-buzzing to their-selves all day,’ said the marksman. ‘Queer things, bells: I’ve heard tell as they’ll kill a man if they don’t like him.’ And so saying, bent his head and blew up the end of his slow-match to a bright spark, flicked back the cover of his priming pan, and applied the tiny flame. The crack of the musket in that enclosed place had a ringing sharpness that stabbed at the eardrums; and again, as his deafness cleared, Fairfax heard a humming and a thrumming, a singing higher than the first had been, with a kind of deadly sweetness in it, eddying down from the bells among the great beams overhead.
‘Yon’s Jericho,’ said the other sharp-shooter, a Bradford man. ‘Always answers to the musket, does Jericho.’
‘Eleven,’ counted the first man with satisfaction. ‘Then Elisha said Shoot. And he shot. And he said, The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance, and the arrow of deliverance from Syria.’ Then with an abrupt descent from exaltation to the accents of every day, ‘Like to ma-ake it a round dozen afore t’light goes.’ And handed his second musket to his waiting loader, taking back the first.
‘For thou shalt smite the Syrians in Aphek till thou have consumed them.’ Fairfax finished the verse and stepped back from the embrasure.
Another musket cracked at the far side of the chamber, sharp as a
whip crack above the deep baying of the guns; and again Jericho answered with that high sweet thrumming. Fairfax had already turned to the ladder head, when there was a rending crash and the whole tower seemed to leap and shudder. Mortar dust and chips of stone flew inward, and instinctively every man crouched down. ‘If it hadn’t a’been for t’owd woolsacks, they’d ha’ breached us, that time,’ someone said, as the dust cleared a little.
‘Woolsacks? Eh lad, take a look down there,’ said the Biblically-minded marksman, and spat out mortar dust.
The woolsacks no longer padded the face of the ancient tower; the last shot, by one of those crazily far-fetched chances of war, had cut the master rope that held them in position, and the whole lot had gone slithering down into the kirkyard seventy feet below.
‘The bastards! The lucky, bloody bastards!’ Someone was cursing, fluently and with sustained concentration, wiping the blood out of his eyes, even as they heard the distant wave of cheering rise from the Royalist camp; and feet were already clattering on the ladder as men from the church below came pounding up to see how things were in the tower after the direct hit.
‘Tha’s scaithed?’ someone said.
‘Nobbut a scratch.’
‘How long is t’owd tower like to last now she’s lost her corsets?’
Fairfax, his hair and brows and the dark steel of his cuirass powdered white, stood with a hand against the stone wall, looking down through the embrasure from which the bell louvres had been partly torn away. ‘There will be darkness enough in an hour to cover the work of lacing her corsets again.’ He turned to the little marksman, with a smile kindling his dusty face. ‘Get me that twelfth Syrian before the light goes, friend.’
The bell chamber and all in it seemed to pull itself together again, shake the mortar dust out of its hair, and settle again to the business in hand. Jericho sang once more to the crack of the musket, and the little marksman’s withered face broke into a grin. ‘Happy to oblige, Sir, ah’m sure.’