Simon Read online

  Contents

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  DEDICATION

  I: THE GOLDEN CITY OF MANOA

  II: THE LAST DAY’S FREEDOM

  III: A TOAST TO THE KING

  IV: HORSEMEN FROM THE WEST

  V: FIERY TOM

  VI: THE EMPTY HOARD

  VII: INTO BATTLE

  VIII: ‘MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND’

  IX: SENTENCE OF THE COURT MARTIAL

  X: THE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST

  XI: SUSANNA

  XII: TIDINGS OF OLD FRIENDS

  XIII: SPECIAL DUTY

  XIV: OF COCKS AND FIDDLES

  XV: THE ROYALIST OFFICER

  XVI ‘EMANUEL, GOD WITH US!’

  XVII: THE MAN ON CASTLE HILL

  XVIII: LOYALTIES

  XIX: ‘NO MAN SHALL HARBOUR THE ENEMY’

  XX: THE CALL HOME COMES FOR ISHMAEL

  XXI: AFTER MANY DAYS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book

  It had never seemed important during their boyhood that Simon Carey was for Parliament and his friend Amias Hannaford a royalist. But when Civil War breaks out, they find themselves fighting on different sides.

  Finally the day comes when the friends must put their friendship to the test.

  Author’s Note

  Most history books deal with the final campaign of the Civil War in a single paragraph, and the Battle of Torrington they seldom mention at all. In this story I have tried to show what that final campaign in the west was like, and to re-fight the battles fought over my own countryside. Most of the people I’ve written about really lived; Torrington Church really did blow up, with two hundred Royalist prisoners and their Parliamentary guard inside, and no one has ever known how it happened, though Chaplain Joshua Sprigg left it on record that the deed was done by ‘one Watts, a desperate villain’.

  FOR MY MOTHER

  with love

  I

  The Golden City of Manoa

  IN THE DEEP sunshiny window recess of Dr Odysseus Hannaford’s study, two boys sprawled side by side. One, the slighter and taller of the two, wore doublet and breeches of holly-leaf green that made the tawny hair rising in a defiant crest from his forehead seem red as flame by contrast; tawny eyes, a disdainful beak of a nose, a wide laughing mouth—this was Amias Hannaford, the doctor’s son. The other, clad in puritan’s grey, was his friend Simon Carey, a square dependable-looking boy with a shock of barley-pale hair, bleached silver at the ends by the sun of the past summer, which had burned his skin to berry brown.

  There was a bowl of apples on the polished sill between them, and they were both in a state of joyful thanksgiving. It was not that they actually wanted Mr Braund, their harassed schoolmaster, to have one of his bilious turns—they rather liked him, as a matter of fact, and certainly wished him no ill; but if he had to have one, then they were glad and grateful that he should have it on such a day as this. For ever since dawn the wind had been rising, and now it was blowing half a gale from the south-west. The long grass in the doctor’s garden lay over in silvery swathes before the gusts, and the tangle of lilac and guelder-rose at the garden end was a swaying lashing turmoil from which the brown and coral leaves came whirling down. It was a day of shining blue and russet, dancing to the wild music of the gale; a day to make the heart leap after adventure; and the two in the Doctor’s window gave thanks loudly for Mr Braund’s bilious spell that had set them free as the wild sou’wester for all that afternoon.

  Simon was almost as much at home as Amias in the deep window recess, for the village of Heronscombe, from which he rode in every morning on the odd-job pony, was too far off for him to go home again at noon; so he always had his dinner at the Doctor’s house, and in winter, when the lanes were turned to quagmires, he often slept there too, sometimes for several nights together. It was he who had removed the apples from the side chest, to stay the pangs of hunger while they waited for dinner.

  They took great care to eat fair, each taking an apple at the same moment, and every time they finished an apple, they unpicked what was left of the core and tried which of them could spit the pips farthest.

  ‘I can spit farther than you can,’ said Amias, with conscious superiority.

  ‘Well, you’ve got that hole where your front tooth came out,’ Simon pointed out reasonably. ‘That makes a difference, you know.’ He took careful aim at a large cobble in the path. ‘Got it! How about that?’

  ‘Wind behind it,’ said Amias, and reached for another apple.

  Simon let it pass. He never argued with Amias; and besides, he felt too contented to argue with anyone, sprawling there in the windy sunshine, with the whole afternoon an unexpected gift before him. So he took another apple—a golden apple, flecked with coral and crimson, and fragrant as a flower—and bit a large piece out of it, squinting happily at the juicy white hollow with tooth-marks round its edge.

  ‘I say! That was a good one.’ An exultant shout from Amias made him look up. ‘Right into the middle of that clump of marigolds! I’ll wager Sir Walter Raleigh couldn’t have spat farther than that!’

  Simon measured the distance with his eyes. ‘It’s a long way,’ he agreed. ‘But I expect Sir Walter could spit mighty far!’

  Sir Walter Raleigh was their most particular hero. Simon had learned to read from his ‘Discovery of Guiana’, in the great calf-bound copy of Hakluyt’s Voyages at home; and during the past summer holidays, when Amias was spending harvest-time with him, they had pored in the evenings over Sir Walter’s accounts of great rivers and wide plains, of golden cities which he had never quite found, and birds of white and crimson and carnation, that fluttered through the steaming forests.

  ‘Of course, Sir Walter mightn’t have got a front tooth out,’ Amias ruminated.

  The door behind them opened as Tomasine Blackmore came in to set the table, and instantly the October gale swooped in through the window with a shout. Golden leaves whirled in after it and all the room was in a hurly-burly. The cloth on the side chest took wings, upsetting a box of red-pepper lozenges and a pot full of earth in which Amias, who was of an inventive turn of mind, had lately planted an apple-core with a cherry stone embedded in the middle of it, hoping to grow a tree that would bear cherries as big as apples. A pile of the Doctor’s papers scattered to the four corners of the room, and the heavy curtains billowed out, flapping like the sails of a ship when she comes about. Then the door slammed shut with a crash that brought a shower of plaster down from the low raftered ceiling. Almost before they knew what had happened, the boys felt a hand twisted in the neck-band of each, and they were jerked backward into the room and set on their feet with a tooth-shaking thump.

  ‘I say—why—’ began Amias.

  ‘We’re sorry; we didn’t think it would do that,’ Simon said, looking up rather anxiously into Tomasine’s wrathful face as she slammed the window shut.

  ‘I dare say,’ said Tomasine, much put out. ‘Opening the window with the wind in this direction! Will ’ee look at thicky mess? Now ’ee can clear ’un up while I sets the table, or there’ll be no dinner for either of ’ee.’

  It was a threat which Tomasine was quite capable of carrying out, and they set to work in a great hurry, Amias gathering up the broken pot and sweeping the scattered earth into a pile, while Simon, still holding the remains of his apple in one hand, collected the red-pepper lozenges, blew the earth off them, and put them back in their box. While lying on his stomach under the drugchest, groping for the last one, he found something. ‘I say, Amias,’ he called, his voice slightly muffled by the cobwebs. ‘There’s some more of
your cherry-apple earth here, and a sort of thing with it that we must have dug up at the same time.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’ demanded Amias, who had just found the cherry-apple core under the table.

  But at that moment Dr Hannaford appeared in the doorway, stripping off his heavy riding-gloves as he came, and Simon pushed the Thing down the front of his doublet, and wriggled out backwards from under the chest in a hurry. Dr Hannaford stood with his legs planted well apart, and surveyed them out of very blue eyes under bushy badger-grey brows. ‘Ah!’ said Dr Hannaford in an amused rumble that seemed to come from the middle of his deep chest. ‘A little gardening, I presume, Amias? And Simon trying his hand at dispensing lozenges? I always thought that it was Amias who planned to be a doctor, while Simon grew things. Strange how easily one can be mistaken.’

  Both at once, they began to explain; but Dr Hannaford was peering at the box of lozenges in Simon’, hand. ‘I am sure that Grannie Halfyard will find the apple-juice a great improvement,’ he said, ‘but the cobweb is a mistake. Cobwebs for an open wound, not for a sore throat, no.’

  Simon hastily removed the cobweb; and a few moments later, Tomasine having brought in the broiled mutton and prunes and departed again, slamming the door, they gathered round the leather-topped table. The two boys stood behind their stools with bowed heads and folded hands while the Doctor said Grace, adding, as he had done ever since the troubles started, a plea that God might bless His most Gracious Majesty King Charles, and confound his enemies in Parliament. Simon always found that part of Grace rather confusing, because when his own father mentioned the King in family prayers each evening, it was to pray that he might be brought to his senses before he ruined England. So he was glad when Grace was over, and he could forget about it until next time.

  Simon liked having dinner with Dr Hannaford. He liked the low-ceiled room, which, although it was called the study, and served as living-parlour, was almost as full of pestles and mortars, instruments cases and pill-boards and pitch-pots as the surgery next door. The walls were lined with shelves in which books on herbs and surgery and astronomy rubbed shoulders with drug-jars of thick green glass or grey lambeth pottery, each with its name on it in gold: mercury and camomile, camphor and opium, making a kind of shadowy tapestry with stray sparks of light and colour in it, that Simon found oddly fascinating. The smell of the study was fascinating too: a mixture of drugs and herbs, the leather bindings of old books, a faint suggestion of mice, and the warm sweetness of apples; and Simon sniffed contentedly as he ate his dinner and listened to the Doctor reading extracts from the book which was open on the table beside him.

  It was Dr Hannaford’s custom to read at meals, for the simple reason that he had no leisure to read at any other time; and generally he read extracts aloud to the two boys. Today it was a new book, The Circulation of the Blood, by a Dr William Harvey of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and Simon did not find it very interesting; but Amias, who was passionately interested in how things worked, found it enthralling.

  It was not until dinner was nearly over that Simon remembered the Thing he had found under the chest. He took it out of his doublet and looked at it in the palm of his hand. It was a chrysalis of some sort, brown and shiny, and very large, with a queer little tail turned up over its back like the handle of a jug. Simon had never seen one quite like it before. He held it out to the Doctor, while Amias sprawled across the table for a closer view. ‘It was in the earth in the pot that got broken,’ he said. ‘What is it, do you think, sir?’

  ‘It’s a kind of grub thing,’ said Amias, and poked it. ‘With a hard skin,’ he added.

  Dr Hannaford brought out his square horn-rimmed spectacles. He had eyes like a hawk, but he had worn glasses in his youth to make him look learned, and they had become a habit. Balancing them on the end of his nose, he peered through them at the brown thing in Simon’s hand. Then he shook his head. ‘Save that it is some sort of chrysalis, I greatly fear that I cannot satisfy your thirst for knowledge. Had it been a morbid humour, now, or a spasmodic contraction of the thorax, I could have told you all about it; even a conjunction of Saturn with Mercury: but a chrysalis—no, my education has been neglected.’

  ‘You don’t know at all what sort?’ Simon was surprised and disappointed, because usually the Doctor knew the answer to any question you might ask him.

  ‘I have not the slightest idea,’ said Dr Hannaford, returning his spectacles to his pocket. ‘You had best ask Pentecost Fiddler, the next time you meet him. There are very few living creatures he does not know, at least to bow to, I should imagine.’

  Across the table the eyes of the two boys met, bright with sudden excitement. Here was the perfect adventure for this golden afternoon. They did not speak, for they seldom needed to put thier plans into words, each to the other, but from that moment the whole thing was settled. Pentecost Fiddler was something of a legend in those parts; he came and went as fitfully as an April wind, he and the battered fiddle that had given him his name; and wherever he appeared, at wake or wedding or country fair, he was welcomed for his playing, that could set the feet of an old man dancing and draw the heart out of a maid. From Hartland to South Molton, every man, woman and child was his friend when they chanced to meet him. But nobody ever went near him when he was at home; nobody ever went up the wooded valley below his cottage without crossing their fingers or turning their coats inside out. For Pentecost lived alone in a clearing of the woods beyond the Torridge, in a place where it was not good for a mortal man to live. Once, the cottage had been lived in by ordinary folk, but that was long ago. The fairy flowers grew in what had once been the garden—white foxgloves and vervain and elder—and everyone knew what that meant. From time out of mind the place had been called Solitude, and a place does not get such an odd, uncanny name for nothing; and since no man could live comfortably on Fairy Ground unless he was on very intimate terms with the rightful owners, it stood to reason that Pentecost was kin to Good Folk.

  Therefore, to visit Pentecost in his own fastness and ask him what sort of moth the brown chrysalis belonged to would be an adventure worthy of this heaven-sent half-holiday. They made no mention of their plans to anybody, because an adventure should never be made public beforehand. When dinner was over and the Doctor had gone back to his doctoring, they simply got a box to put the chrysalis in, lest it should find the inside of Simon’s doublet uncomfortably warm, and set out.

  They went down through the garden and out on to Castle Hill, Amias leading and Simon at his heels. Amias always led in all their doings, partly because he was eleven and Simon was only ten and three-quarters, partly because he was the kind who leads and has brilliant ideas, whereas Simon was the kind who follows loyally, and does his best to save the brilliant ideas from ending in disaster. The wind was roaring up from the south-west, churning the bracken into a wild golden sea, and lashing through the waist-high furze with a shrilling like the outgoing tide on a pebbly beach; and the boys flung themselves into it, running and shouting for the joy of the autumn gale. They charged over the edge of the hill, down the ridged sheep-tracks that zigzagged through the furze, travelling at breakneck speed, for long practice had made them sure-footed as mountain sheep; and arrived at last, breathless and laughing, on the river-bank just above Taddiport.

  Taddiport was a disreputable clump of cottages, and the Manor mill huddled under the sheer bluff of Castle Hill. It was joined to the town of Torrington high above by the steep straggle of Mill Street, which hung down so like a disgraceful tail that one almost expected it to wag when the town was pleased. More often than not when going that way the boys crossed Mill Street and continued down-stream, to ford the river by one of the many stickles; but today, for no particular reason, they elected to cross like Christians by the hump-backed bridge where the seeding willow-herb grew between the arches.

  On the farther bank they stopped to pass the time of day with a friend, a lean and lounging man with one watery blue eye, and a ferret in his pocke
t.

  ‘Mitching from school, my dears?’ inquired the one-eyed man, with sympathy.

  ‘No. Schoolmaster has the stomach ache, and we have a holiday,’ Amias told him; and they went on, past the chapel of the old leper hospice, and into the woods beyond, where the wind through the trees roared like a high sea and one had to shout to make oneself heard above it; and all the woods were full of flying sunshine and the shrivelled leaves whirling down the gale.

  ‘This is the Orenoque!’ Amias shouted presently, when, having worked their way down-river almost as far as Rotherne bridge, they reached the tiny half-choked stream that came down the valley of Solitude. ‘And if we follow it, it will bring us to the Golden City of Manoa that the Spaniards called Eldorado.’

  So the woods became the great and rich country of Guiana, and the muddy trickle running down to join the Torridge was a great silver river, winding through forests of huge trees among whose branches fluttered Sir Walter Raleigh’s birds of white and crimson and carnation. The two explorers pushed on in huge excitement, until they found themselves far up the winding valley; here they halted and looked at each other, suddenly a little scared.

  ‘Perhaps he’s not at home,’ said Simon, and then felt ashamed, because his voice sounded hopeful.

  ‘Of course we could turn our doublets inside out,’ suggested Amias. ‘We should be quite safe then. But perhaps he wouldn’t like it.’

  Simon shook his head. ‘It would be sort of untrusting to call on him like that,’ he agreed.

  So they went on with their doublets still right side out, which took quite a lot of courage. They had left the stream now, and were pushing up the wooded hillside, guided by nothing but the smell of adventure in their eager noses.

  A few steps more, and quite suddenly the woods fell back, and they were on the edge of the clearing they had come to look for. Solitude lay aside from the main valley, in a little hollow of the hills, sheltered from the wind which surged through the tree-tops all around; and the quietness of it, under the roof of roaring wind, gave the place an odd feeling of sanctuary. Elder trees ringed it round, dripping with dark berries beloved of thrush and blackbird; crab trees drooped branches of little russet apples almost to the long grass where the coral leaves of the bird-cherry lay thick. Seeding periwinkle and wild geranium told where once a tended flower-patch had been. The tangle was so thick that it was a few moments before the two boys, halting on the woodshore and looking about them, could pick out the tumbledown cottage on the far side. Then they both saw it at the same instant.