‘Again?’ Moll said anxiously. ‘You and me go to London in a coach, and father riding longside?’
‘One day,’ said Anne. ‘One day when the war is over and father can be with us properly again.’
Moll sighed, a small intense sigh; she was never gusty. ‘I would like it if father was with us now!’
‘So would I,’ said her mother, with a sudden surge of longing. To look up now, and see Thomas striding towards them across the cobbled market place ... ‘So would I, little lamb.’
But a letter was better than nothing. She had had a letter from him this morning, enclosed in a report to his father and the inevitable urgent demands for arms and supplies.
Thomas had written to her at once proudly and humbly, and somewhat in bewilderment. The news of his coming to take command in Bradford had spread all up Airedale and Wharfedale and over the moors to Halifax and Dewsbury; and from all the dale country of the West Riding, men were pouring in to his standard. Men raw from the sheep cote and the loom, who had never even served in the militia, armed with the usual clubs and pole-scythes. And he wished to God that he had William to help him train them, though Captain Hodgson was a tower of strength, as was Captain John Bright who had just joined him with some companies of his own raising. He wrote that there were daily skirmishes with Saville’s men from Leeds, but that he thought for the moment there would be no further full-scale attack on Bradford itself; the town had given them too good a drubbing last time. That was like Thomas, to give all the credit for the respite to tilt Bradford weavers.
She strung a last berry on the glowing strand, and began to tie it off.
Here in Selby, with Lord Fairfax at once greyly determined to hang on, and greyly depressed at the whole situation; with no money to pay his raw troops and in chronic difficulties over getting stores and armaments up through the Royalist-held south, there seemed for her something of prison closeness in the very air. It was sweet to get Thomas’s letter, even though he never said that he wished she were with him, only that he wished William was.
She began to think about William, wondering how things were with him, down there with Essex’s army in the south country; and was still thinking about him, when a nearing clatter of horses’ hooves made her look up — to see William himself with a little knot of horsemen behind him, coming at a hand canter into the market place.
In the first moment she simply did not believe it. You could not make people appear merely by thinking of them, as though it were a spell. It was somebody rather like him, that was all. But there was no mistaking that dark straight figure that had enough likeness of Thomas to twist her heart. ‘It is your Cousin William!’ she said to the child under her cloak. ‘You remember Cousin William? Come, my lamby!’ She slipped the holly necklace over Moll’s head, and sprang up, catching her by the hand; and gathering her own wide skirts ran to meet him across the deserted market place. A few months ago, Lady Fairfax would not have dreamed of doing a thing so unbefitting the Mistress of Nun Appleton, but she was forgetting many of the things that had once seemed important to the Mistress of Nun Appleton.
‘God save you, William.’ She was breathless with her running. ‘What brings you here?’
‘The news that Tom and my uncle might well stand in need of men.’ He was swinging down from his horse as the stable hands came running, and turned to gather in the other men dismounting behind him. ‘Anne, let me present to you my companions who have ridden north with me. Sir Thomas Norcliffe.’ A thickset man with a ruddy wind-burned face was bowing over her hand. ‘Sir Henry Fowlis’ — a slender one with eyes like a pretty girl. ‘Captain Mildmay’ — an engaging grin and sparrow legs. ‘Sergeant Major Forbes’ — a black Highlander wearing the stateliness of his race like a cloak. Later, they might become people to her; for the moment they were only types. ‘Gentlemen, this is Lady Fairfax of Nun Appleton; my Cousin Thomas’s Lady. Ah, and this demoiselle in the ruby necklace is Mistress Mary Fairfax.’
Then a few moments later, when the other men were moving towards the inn doorway, William hung back a little with his kinswoman, and asked, ‘Where is Tom, then?’ glancing about him as though he expected to see his cousin appear from some further recess of the stable yard at any moment.
‘Thomas is in Bradford, these seven days past,’ Anne said, and told him what had happened to bring that about. ‘He has been crying out for you,’ she ended. ‘Even in the letter I had from him this morning, he wrote that he would to God he had William to help him train his rag-tag army.’
‘Good old Tom,’ said his cousin with affection. He looked down at her, gravely questioning. ‘And you? What do you here, my Lady Kinswoman?’
‘I followed Thomas — ever since the King raised his standard. I could not lie at home and weave willow garlands for the baby’s grave while Thomas rode out over the hills to war.’
He touched her arm gently, a little clumsily. ‘I heard about the babe. I’m sorry, you know, Anne.’
The old pain sprang out at her, seeming for the moment to blot out the winter sunlight. Then she pressed it back from her, as she had learned to do. ‘Thank you, William. Have you been home to Steeton yet? Have you seen Frances and the babes?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet. I came straight to Selby. Maybe I shall be allowed twenty-four hours’ leave to ride home and see them before — as I hope — my uncle sends me to join Tom.’
Later that day, with his hoped-for twenty-four hours’ leave granted, Sir William Fairfax clattered away up the Cawood road on a horse belonging to the George and Dragon and towards evening of the next day he was back, riding a roan gelding out of his own stables, and leading the inn nag behind him, and was closeted for a while with Lord Fairfax in the long parlour. Anne, sitting opposite with her own door ajar, heard the mutter of their voices as the cold January dusk deepened about her. At last the door opened.
Anne had risen purposefully at the first sound of his hand on the door latch, and was beside him as he reached the head of the stairs. ‘William — William, wait. Are you riding for Bradford?’
He turned to her, surprised. ‘Yes, with the supply train going up tonight. Mildmay and the others ride with me, and an escort of Horse and Dragoons for the powder and ball. Have you a letter for Tom?’
‘No,’ Anne said, ‘no letter.’ She gripped her hands together. ‘Let me ride with you, William — and Moll and her nurse. Let us ride with you.’
His face tautened with surprise, before he protested quickly. ‘My dear Anne, this is not a pleasure jaunt; it would be too long and hard a ride for you, let alone for the bairn.’
Anne shook her head. She was prepared for the hardship herself, and prepared also, with a certain ruthlessness, to accept it for the bairn. ‘Thomas rode it, and I am stronger than Thomas. Moll will be no charge upon your soldiers; her nurse and I will carry her before us in turn.’
‘We shall ride without baggage —’
‘A saddle-bag is all that I have had in most of my journeyings for a long, long while.’
‘And we ride in an hour.’
‘The last time that I rode after the camp, I had only half that time to make ready,’ she countered fiercely. ‘And Thomas woke me from sleep to tell me so!’ She was amazed that he should make such trivial objections. She had been prepared for him to refuse bluntly; to say, ‘This will be a dangerous ride, and I’ll not be burdened with two women and a bairn,’ but not for all this talk of long hard rides and starting in an hour and no baggage, as though she were some Court Lady without understanding of what it meant to follow a man in war.
In the little strained silence, a knot of troopers clattered up the street below the window. Someone among them was singing:
‘Come you not from Newcastle,
come you not there away?
Oh met you not my true love,
riding on a bonnie bay?’
‘Anne,’ William Fairfax said bluntly, ‘will Tom want you in Bradford?’
And she realized that he had b
een trying to spare Thomas the embarrassment of an unwanted woman in his outpost, and Thomas’s wife possible pain. She put her hand on the slashed and buttoned sleeve of his buff coat: ‘That is my hazard, William, not yours.’
The old song died away in the deepening winter dusk.
‘Why should I not love my love?
Why should not my love love me?
Why should I not love my love,
As well as another bodie?’
‘Tom’s hazard, too,’ William said, with a kind of clumsy gentleness.
‘I — believe that Thomas will not find our coming so very much amiss,’ Anne said. Her voice was softly insistent. ‘You will let us ride with you, will you not?’
‘Yes,’ William said after a long moment. ‘Yes, you shall ride with us.’ He set his hand over hers as it rested on his sleeve, and added quickly, ‘A most happy journeying to you, Anne, my dear.’ Then he was away, clattering down the stairs, hitching at his sword belt as he went, while Anne turned back to her own chamber, to tell Moll, sitting beside the fire with her shoes off to warm her chilblainy toes, that they were going to be with father again as soon as ever the saddle-bags were packed.
They trotted out of Selby up the Gowthorp into the Leeds road, in the first full dark of the winter night. Anne and Christian rode with William and his companions in the van, the pack beasts with the slung kegs of ball and powder following, and the dragooners of the escort riding behind and before. William had taken his little kinswoman closely muffled in shawls on his own saddle bow, forestalling Anne’s protests by saying, much as Corporal Hill had done on the ride down from Tadcaster, ‘I’ll give her back to you quick enough if we run into any trouble.’
In a short distance they turned off into side lanes and open country, where there would be less danger of running into Newcastle’s men at every turn. They rode silently through the night; silently save for the creak of saddle leather and the muffled beat of horses’ hooves in the mud of deep rutted lanes or over grassland still spongy with the thaw.
Anne had no idea of their course; she knew only that they were heading westward, towards the hills and the high moors; and the thin wind from the fells was in their faces.
Dawn was not far off, when William brought the whole company to a halt beside a lonely farmhouse under the first shoulder of the moors; and a tousle-headed man came with a lantern and spoke to William by name.
‘I’ll give you twenty minutes and not one more,’ William said to Anne as she set her foot in the cupped hands that Sergeant Major Forbes held for her, and slid stiff and half frozen from the saddle. He gave Moll into her arms, then dropped from his own mount and turned instantly to the question of bating the horses with the shock-headed man.
Anne carried the child in and put her on the settle in the dark corner of the hearth, where the fire had not yet been woken from its night-time smooring. Moll sat perfectly still, looking about her. She was half frozen, shrivelled with the cold, yet she had made no sound, and she made none now. What an intense little oddity she was, her mother thought, rubbing the small chilblain-purpled hands in the warmth of the newly wakened fire, and smiled at her. ‘Soon, we shall be with father!’
‘When we see father,’ said Moll, grey-faced and bright-eyed on the settle, ‘I shall tell him how I rode all the way before Cousin William on his horse, leading all the troopers!’
The farm wife had brought oatmeal Bannock and a knuckle of braxy ham, and Christian fed the child and herself while Anne continued to crouch on the hearth and chafe the small frozen feet, watching with relief the colour and roundness begin to steal back into the little grey face. Finally, with almost all of the twenty minutes spent, she poured a cup of warm milk down her own throat, and was ready when the door opened and William appeared on the threshold, saying, ‘Time to be away.’
She thanked the woman, and put silver into her hand, and turned to follow him, leading Moll with her. It was not until she caught the gleam of firelight on the long barrel of the pistol he held, as she went past him into the darkness, that she realized what he had risked in giving her and the bairn this respite.
‘God keep you, Selathiel,’ she heard William say to the man. ‘You and your wife have been good friends to us tonight.’
And the man’s growled rejoinder, ‘God keep thee, Sir William, and God speed the Cause.’
The first grey light of the winter dawn was all about them as they clattered out of the farmyard. Mildmay and the rest were a couple of lengths ahead, riding hunched into their cloaks, and for the moment Anne and William were isolated among the troopers. He nodded, his eyes on the furthest lift of the fells. ‘The south country is a good country, when not rent by war, but it is too long since I have heard the peewits crying as they cry here in the north.’
‘William,’ she said presently, ‘will the war ever be over? At the outset, somehow we all expected that the first battle would finish it. Now, it seems that there is no reason — no reason save that there will be no whole men left in England — why it should ever end.’
‘God knows what may happen,’ William said; and his grimness shut down on him again. ‘Edgehill was not such a battle as one may read the future by — certainly not a future favourable to the Parliamentary Cause.’
‘What really happened at Edgehill? You were there. One hears such varying and crosswise accounts.’
William glanced at her, his straight mouth under the clipped imperial beard at its most uncompromising. ‘What happened was simple enough. Rupert charged our Horse, and most of them ran like redshanks. Not much cause for amazement, when you think what they were. One of our Cavalry Colonels — a man called Cromwell, maybe you’ve heard of him, he’s the life-spark of this new army that the Eastern Association Counties have been raising under Lord Manchester — has been shouting in Parliament’s ear ever since, that old decayed menservants cannot stand against gentlemen’s sons and men of honour. And it’s true.’ He was staring straight ahead now, between his horse’s ears. ‘It shouldn’t be; but it’s damnably true!’
‘Are there no gentlemen’s sons and men of honour then in the ranks of Parliament?’ Anne said, up in arms to defend her own. And added for good measure, ‘And may not a man be a brave soldier though he once brushed a master’s coat?’
William laughed, but his amusement was at her swift indignation, not at anything she had said. ‘Fierce My Lady Anne! Aye, we have our gentlemen’s sons in the ranks of Parliament, but not so many as gather to the King. And a man may well be a good and brave soldier though he once brushed a master’s cloak or guided a plough, but he isn’t likely to have been trained to think as clearly or as quickly, nor to command others, nor is he likely to have as good a horse! No Anne, the King’s Cavalry outmatches ours in quality. Noll Cromwell’s own men, of course, are the exception; ranting Anabaptists for the most part, and horse thieves to a man, but superb soldiers. They’re the salt and the fire of the Parliamentary Cavalry, only — there are as yet just eighty of them, and three officers. It is not enough to win a war.’
After a while he added, ‘There’s another advantage that the King’s Cavalry has over ours, and that is Prince Rupert. And God alone knows how that is to be remedied.’
‘What is he like, this Rupert of the Rhine? His name has almost the ring of legend.’
‘And there you have the thing in a hazel husk. Already his name has the ring of legend. Stories gather to him, and a kind of dark lustre. I have heard it said that he is a warlock, and that great white poodle that follows him even into the Council Chamber is his familiar. What is he like? A very big, very beautiful young man with a mouth like a girl-child’s and a spoilt girl-child’s at that. A brilliant Cavalry Commander save that he does not understand the value of discipline. But above all —’ his voice became deadly serious, ‘he is one who can gather to him men of his own temper, young and hot-headed, to whom death is a little thing and honour great. He can infect a whole regiment — a whole army with his own enthusiasm and his own inabili
ty to count the cost. If Parliament could find a like champion, there would be a surer hope for the future of England.’
It was not long after that that they came over the last great billow of the moors, and saw Bradford lying in its hollow below them. The grey stone walls of the intake fields came striding up to meet them; and below, the grey stone roofs of the little town that looked to have broken from its native hills like a rocky outcrop through the heather caught fish-scale smears of light from the breaking sky. And Anne set aside England’s future to wonder with a tightening under her heart, whether she had done right to come; whether Thomas would be angry — no, not angry, but embarrassed and exasperated by her coming. It would all be so much simpler if he loved her — or if she did not love him.
Upwards of two hours later, in the house of Master Sharpe the dry-salter and wool merchant, where they had lodged before, Anne had fed little Moll and seen her bestowed with a hot brick to her feet and a black currant posset inside her, in the truckle bed in the closet next to the big attic room with Thomas’s second pair of boots in the corner and his dark cloak flung across the chest, where she herself felt an interloper. In that big room, with the chill sleety rain spattering the crooked window, the smell of the piled woolsacks against the gable wall and the icy draughts eddying about the floor, she unpacked the few belongings that she had been able to bring with her. She stowed them beside Thomas’s even fewer, in the great oaken kist. She sat on the edge of the box bed for Christian to pull off her riding boots, and thrust her icy feet into the one pair of shoes that she had allowed herself; once pretty shoes with Provence roses of yellow silk, but they were growing shabby now. She combed and rebound her hair as best she could with only her girdle mirror to see by; she shook out her damp skirts — no good trying to brush off the mud until it was dry — and twitched with impatient fingers at her wide lawn collar; lace she had given up long ago, it was too fragile for this kind of life. Then, leaving Christian to yawn her way into bed beside the sleeping child, she turned to go downstairs. Her body ached for the comfort of the great goose feather bed; but she was too restless to lie down. Not yet, not until Thomas had come.