Assuredly her Venice glasses had been wasted.
Gifford sat forward with a shrug and reached for the bottle. ‘Nay then, I’ll not have My Lord Newcastle spoil good wine! ‘Tis not every day of this merry war that one comes by such Muscatel as this. Fill up all round — Fairfax, you’re not drinking. Drink up, man, and fill again.’
Sir Thomas Fairfax looked up and shook his head. ‘It is truly excellent wine, however you came by it; but to speak truth I have small taste for it tonight.’
Sir Hugh Cholmley stifled a hiccup. ‘Can’t drink when’s out at elbows wi’ the world. Wine turns to vinegar in’s belly,’ he said. ‘Ought to know that by now, Gifford.’
‘I am sorry that I should be such poor company,’ Fairfax said after a moment. ‘I was thinking of Bradford and Leeds and the rest, and finding that my sympathies are with Judas Iscariot. I mislike the feeling that I have broken faith.’
There was a startled pause. It was as though he had shouted the words, flung them like a glove in their faces; and yet he had spoken them very quietly, almost apologetically, in that pleasant halting voice of his.
‘Why as to that, it’s a goo’ thing to keep faith when you can, but any man with a grain of sense in’s head knows it’s no goo’ digging’s toes in when the time comes for breaking it,’ Cholmley said thickly.
‘A comfortable philosophy, Sir Hugh,’ Tom Fairfax said.
Gifford raised his keen gaze from his own sword hand. ‘But even you will admit that in this case it was unavoidable, Sir Thomas?’
Lord Fairfax spoke for the first time, his dry tired voice cutting across the voices of the other men. ‘I, as Commander-in-Chief, must bear the weight of that guilt, if guilt there be, Tom. And of all of us here, surely you have the least need to speak of broken faith, since you have already made one attempt to get through to Bradford with troops and supplies.’
‘And failed,’ Fairfax said simply.
Cholmley was following his own swerving line of thought with a tipsy persistence. ‘No goo’ digging’s toes in when time comes for breaking it.’ He looked up with an odd slippery gleam in his face. ‘How much — Gennlemen, do you s’pose young Hotham’s faith is worth?’
For a full five seconds no one spoke or moved. Then, ‘As much as yours or mine, I trust, Sir Hugh,’ Lord Fairfax said coldly.
‘Aye, you trust so because he’s ‘n experienced ossifer — officer.’ Cholmley took a drink and set down the Venice calyx with a little clatter. ‘Worth’s weight in gold in this ramshackle army of ours. But he might be worth something to — other side, too...’
‘I think,’ Lord Fairfax said, ‘that you had better either say more clearly what you mean, or take back altogether what you have just said.’
Sir Hugh winked with some difficulty. ‘Could be up to anything, out there at Cawood. Nobody t’see what he’s up to ‘n say “Bad Boy!”’
‘The same applies to every commander on outpost duty.’
‘Aye so, but there’s a difference. Ever thought, My Lord, that old Hotham might not be besht — best pleased t’be still Governor of Hull, while Lord Fairfax commands all th’ Yorkshire forces?’
There was a moment’s complete and icily brittle silence, then Lord Fairfax said, ‘No, Sir Hugh, I had not, nor do I see the least reason to do so now.’
But the harassed look that he always wore these days seemed to Anne to deepen in his long face.
Into the somewhat explosive silence burst the drumming of hoof beats coming up the street, clattering in round the corner of the house to the stable yard.
Tom Fairfax’s chair screeched on the polished floor as he pushed it back and made to get up. Then relaxed into it again with a small hopeless shrug. ‘I think, Gentlemen, that in something under five minutes we shall have heard of the fall of Bradford.’
But Sir Thomas Fairfax, like Lord Newcastle, had underestimated that town.
In considerably under five minutes, Charles D’Oyley had come pounding up the stairs to announce that a rider had just come in from Bradford with urgent word for Lord Fairfax. In a minute more, a somewhat breathless young man, mired to the thighs with the slush of the thawing lanes, was standing before them, doffing his rough felt hat in salute to Lord Fairfax, while he introduced himself. ‘Peter Metcalf, My Lord, from Bradford.’
‘Have you come ahead of my own scouts to tell me that Bradford has fallen?’ Lord Fairfax said, turning from the table.
‘No, Sir.’ He was a stolid young man, snub-nosed and freckled, and grey with fatigue, but suddenly incandescent with pride. ‘To report Bradford still in our hands, Sir — or was when I came away.’
Anne had risen from the table and drawn aside, to the window. She heard the moment’s utter stillness in the room behind her, and then the leap of voices. She saw the broken reflections of the scene in the candle-lit panes, and through the dark transparency that was her own shadow on the glass, she saw the lovely central tower of the abbey soaring towards the stars.
The newcomer was making his report. ‘Three mornings since, we had word that Saville of Thornhill was marching upon us. We’d posted a couple of lads down t’Leeds road to bring us warning, and that gave us time to put up t’barricades and finish padding round t’kirk tower wi’ woolsacks, and put Harry Gill and Samuel Webster up there wi’ a good store of powder and shot and a couple of lads to load for them — they being the best marksmen in Bradford, My Lord; and all else to t’barricades wi’ whatever weapons we had.’
‘And what weapons did you have, friend?’ she heard Thomas ask gently.
And the blunt reply: ‘Clubs and scythe blades on poles, mostly. Tha’ can do a powerful deal of damage wi’ a scythe blade on a pole and the Lord of Battles in thy heart — but we’d a few firearms as well.’
‘And so?’ Lord Fairfax said.
‘We held ‘em until evening; and at evening, Captain Hodgson that was home sick to Halifax come over t’moors wi’ every man and grown lad in the town to our help, and we took the Papists between us and drove ‘em off.’
‘Just — like that,’ said Tom Fairfax.
‘Yes, Sir. But they’re not routed for good, t’isn’t to be expected, and Sir — we can’t hold ‘em when they come again. So ‘twas determined between us yester morning that one of us should bring you word, My Lord, and — beg you for God’s sake to send us help. And — here I stand, to pray you not to leave us forsaken to fall to the enemy after all.’
That time the silence was a painful one. Anne, with her hands gripped together and her gaze lifted to the crest of the abbey tower, was praying urgently, fiercely, ‘Let them go to help! Let them, dear God! I would if I was a man …’
The Lord Fairfax said slowly, ‘God knows it was not an easy decision, to draw back to the Ouse and abandon the clothing towns forsaken to the enemy; but it was the only course that could be followed. It is still the only course. The fate of your town is a great thing to you, Peter Metcalf, but it is a lesser thing than the fate of England.’
Anne heard a swift movement in the room behind her, the crash of a chair thrust back, and saw its broken reflection in the candle-lit panes. Instantly she swept round to face the room and the men in it, and found that Thomas was on his feet. Thomas dominating the little tense scene with a blazing vehemence. He turned on his father. ‘Sir, we cannot hold back now, and see this valiant little town fall as the others have done. Leeds and Wakefield fell easily, but after their noble defence, it will go hard with Bradford at Lord Newcastle’s hands. Give me leave — only give me leave, Sir, I don’t ask for orders, and I’ll have another thrust at getting through to them!’
‘Why should you succeed now when you failed three days since?’ his father demanded.
‘For one thing, the thaw has come since then, as Metcalf here says, and Newcastle’s men will be bogged down in their quarters —’
‘And having got through, what then? The town is completely untenable in the face of anything like a full-scale attack. God knoweth how hard pressed w
e are for men. It would be madness to hazard even a few companies in such a crack-brained venture as this!’
The other men were silent, even the drunken Cholmley, even the Bradford man, though his young grey face turned with almost pitiful eagerness to each speaker in turn. The whole room knew that this was a battle, not of wills but of judgement between the two Fairfaxes, between the level-headed caution of the older man and the élan of the younger one, with the fate of one small clothing town and possibly the whole Cause of Parliament in the north hanging on the issue.
Tom Fairfax set his hand on the back of his chair from which his sword hung on its crimson slings; and his knuckles paled to bare bone. ‘Sir, they have hazarded everything for us, these Bradford weavers, and shall we then risk nothing for them? Give me three companies of Foot and two troops of Horse, beside my own, and I’ll not lose them for you... If we leave Bradford to fall to My Lord Newcastle without lifting a hand to save her, we shall have betrayed God’s Cause, however closely we keep faith with the Parliament of England.’
‘Thank God!’ thought Anne at the window, shivering in the chill of the thaw that struck through the glass. ‘Oh, thank God for my Thomas.’
For a long moment father and son faced each other across the candle flames, and then Lord Fairfax bent his little pointed beard. ‘Very well, Tom, you have my leave. When do you propose to march?’
His son pulled out his big gold-cased watch from an inner pocket. ‘Six o’clock now. Two hours should be enough and that will give us twelve to be into the moors by daylight.’ He strode to the door and plucked it open, calling ‘Charles — Charles D’Oyley, rouse out Clayton and Taffler and Holms, and bid them have their men mustered for the march here in the market place two hours from now. I’ll be down to the horse lines myself immediately.’ Anne heard the string of incisive orders given without hesitation, for he never stammered in issuing his orders. In a few moments he turned back to the room, where the Bradford man, by now seated at the table, was being fed with the remains of the meal. Then, dropping into the broad tongue of the dales, ‘Tha’s had a long ride and tha’s fair weltered. Can’st ride back wi’ me, Peter Metcalf?’
The man looked up at him with a broad slow grin. ‘Happen tha’d need a collar and chain t’keep me here i’ Selby,’ he said.
Suddenly Fairfax laughed, and rounded on the others about the table, still laughing. ‘Gifford, for the first time this evening I’ve a taste for that wine of yours. We’ll have a parting toast — toast and stirrup cup in one: to the valiant town of Bradford!’
*
Towards sunset on Christmas Day, Sir Thomas Fairfax, with his weary troops behind him, came up towards the last lift of the high moor before Bradford. A night and day of forced marching in the gruelling conditions of the thaw lay behind them, and a brush with Royalist troops from Lord Newcastle’s headquarters at Wakefield that had cost them two men killed and several slightly wounded. Two full marches with scarcely a break between, for with the countryside alive with Royalist troops Fairfax had not dared to give them any respite. The men were marching almost blind, even the horses were weary; but they had made it. In a few minutes now, Bradford would be in sight.
Peter Metcalf, riding at Fairfax’s side, flung up his head and gave an earsplitting whistle, twice repeated. A sound clear and lonely and devoid of human meaning as the cry of a curlew, a sound belonging to the windswept solitudes about them. But as the last shrill echo died away, a man sprang up from the shelter of a dry stone wall less than a musket shot ahead of them. He waved his hat, then turned and ran. In a few moments he had dropped below the skyline.
‘We have our scouts, too, tha’ sees,’ said Peter Metcalf. He was swaying in the saddle, but he grinned. ‘None of my Lord Newcastle’s troops’ll catch Bradford unawares.’
‘If we had been Lord Newcastle’s troops, your scout would have gone but a short way with his warning, friend,’ said Fairfax.
‘If we had been Lord Newcastle’s troops, there’s none of us would ha’ seen him go,’ said Metcalf simply.
It was full sunset as they rode down from the moors into the little town. The outskirt streets were athrong with people, homespun soldiers carrying clubs and pole-scythes, their women and children and their dogs. And as the spent and weary troops came down the steep way from the moors, blood-stained, mud-stained, staring straight before them, a shout went up that seemed as though it must rock the tall church tower. ‘Tom’s here! Black Tom’s come! God be thanked. It’s Black Tom!’
At Goodman’s End the barriers had been drawn aside, and as he reined in there, his weary troopers checking their horses behind him, a small grizzled man with an eye of blue steel stepped forward hat in hand to Fairfax’s stirrup. ‘Captain Hodgson, Sir. In command here — and never a man more glad to hand over his command to a better!’
‘And never a man made more gallant use of his command while he held it, Captain Hodgson,’ Fairfax said. He stripped off his gauntlet and held out his hand to the other man who gripped and wrung it. ‘Where now?’
‘Up to the kirk, Sir; there’s many a strange use the House of God is put to in these days. It serves us as a strong point, and ‘twill serve to shelter your men until we can come by proper quarters for them in the town.’ He turned as he spoke, and with a quick glance up at Peter Metcalf, ‘Eh, well done, lad!’
Goodman’s End, the market place and the narrow cobbled gully of Kirkgate with the strong square tower of the kirk rising fortress-wise at the head of it were athrong with people, too long anxious to make much noise of their rejoicing and relief; but the word ran from mouth to mouth, as the weary companies trudged in. ‘Black Tom’s here! Thank God, here’s Fairfax! Here’s Black Tom!’ They surged forward about him and his troops as he drew rein before the kirkyard gate. A ragged boy standing no higher than White Surrey’s shoulder came darting to hold the great stallion for him; a woman thrust through the throng of men, with little gingerbread cakes hot from the oven in a napkin, crying, ‘Here, your Honour, they were for my man’s supper, but that was before we knew as tha had come to us!’ And a little girl, older than Moll but no bigger, came ducking between the legs of a huge golden bearded weaver, to reach up to him a yellow tasselled sprig of wintersweet pulled from some nearby garden.
He took one of the gingerbread cakes and bit into it; he stooped low for the sprig of wintersweet and tucked it into the shoulder buckle of his black breastplate, smiling at the child as though she had been his Little Moll. And all the while his deep humility — for he was a very humble man — was crying out within him, ‘Why all this for me? I’ve done nothing for them, nothing that any man wouldn’t do. Oh God, I’m such a shabby hero — I can’t even speak to them without stammering!’
‘Eh, my friends, we shall do well together!’ he managed. ‘We shall do well together!’
High overhead the ninety foot tower of the great kirk, with its valiant ridiculous armour of woolsacks, was flying the clouds of the stormy sunset from its crest like banners — like the shining banner of a victorious army. And above the many mingled voices of the crowd, rose the one great voice of a preacher — Bradford was rich in preachers — who had sprung on to the mountain block beside the kirkyard gate. ‘And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; and his name is called ‘The Word of God’. And the armies which were in Heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword …’
Chapter 6 - ‘Tha’s bonnie i’ t’firelight’
On the last day of the old year, Anne sat with Moll tucked beside her under her cloak, on a bench in the shelter of a very different tower. The grey embattled tower of St Peter’s at Bradford was a warrior, not a knight but a grizzled man-at-arms. The
great central tower of Selby Abbey was a queen with a crown of stars. Anne craned her head back to look up at it, seeing the gabled buttresses, the lovely lantern turrets with their leafy pinnacles fretting the skim-milk blue of the winter sky; saw, too, the bat-eared gargoyles that leered or scowled or grinned down from the lichened guttering, the leafy pinnacles for the good and the grinning gargoyles for the evil that warred in men’s souls; and away beyond them, rising from their midst, that great central tower that seemed not to have been built by hands.
Moll stirred under her cloak, a small insinuating stirring, and she became aware that it was a long time since she had added another holly berry to the necklace that she was stringing for her little daughter. She looked down into the small brown eager face, and smiled, holding up the jewelled string threaded on its strand of crimson silk. ‘Look, it is nearly long enough now,’ and picked another berry from the glowing pool of them in her lap, and ran her needle through it; then other, and another, counting aloud as she strung them. ‘Onetherum, twotherum, cockerum, quitherum, shitherum, shatherum, wineberry, wagtail, Den! That’s the way they count sheep in the south country where I come from.’
‘The South Country,’ said Moll, putting out a brown finger to set the bright berry necklace swinging. She had no very clear idea of what the words meant, but she found in them the magic of an incantation. ‘Mammy, is it very far?’
‘Far enough,’ said Anne, thinking, ‘In another world.’ For to her the south country was not only place, but time; and the time before she married Thomas seemed very far away.
‘Shall we go there, one day?’
‘You have been there once, already,’ Anne said, ‘but you were too little to remember. You went to see grandmother. You and I went all the way to London in a coach and father rode beside us. And grandmother gave you the silver spoon that you sup your bread and milk with.’