Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 8

CHAPTER IV.

By this time dawn had begun to grow in the sky behind us. I handed over the prisoners to Wilkins and Carey, and gave Wyld and Masters leave to return with them to Farnham: 'for,' said I, 'they seem the weariest, and Shackell and Small Owens will serve well enough for escort by daylight.'

Wilkins stared. 'You are not telling me,' said he, that you intend going forward with that silly wine, and you in such plight!'

'There's my orders, to begin with,' said I; 'and--bless the man!--you don't suppose, after this night's work, I mean to miss the fun of it, now that the luck is turned and is running. As for the wine, Lord Crawford will get but three firkins for his hogshead; but if his rascals choose to play highwaymen upon a peaceful convoy, that is _his_ look-out. And as for my plight, I shall present myself with these bandages and ask him what manner of troops he commands, that do violence upon a trumpet honourably sent to him and on his own pet.i.tion.'

And this (to shorten my tale) I did. With Shackell and Small Owens I herded my two pack-horses along the road to Alton, and arrived at the earl's outposts without mishap and within half an hour past daybreak.

There I sounded my trumpet, and was led without ado to his lords.h.i.+p's headquarters.

I found him seated with his secretary and with a grave, handsome man, Colonel John Bolle, that commanded his regiment of infantry, and was killed next day defending Alton Church (I have heard), in the very pulpit. This Colonel Bolle bowed to me very courteously, but the earl (as one could tell at first sight) was sulky: belike by deprivation of his favourite drink. Or perhaps the ale he took in lieu of it--he had a tankard at his elbow--had soured on his stomach.

'Hey?' he began, frowning, as he broke the seal of my letter.

'Are all General Waller's troopers in this condition? Or does he think it manners to send me a trumpeter in such trim?'

'My lord,' said I, 'your wine and my poor self have come by a roundabout road, and on the way have been tapped of a trifle.'

'By whom, sir?'

'By certain of your men, my lord.'

'I'll hang 'em for it, then.'

'I thank you, my lord; but for that you must treat with General Waller.' And I told him the tale, or so much of it as I thought was good for him.

At the close he eyed me awhile angrily, with his brows drawn down.

'You are an impudent knave, sir, to stand and tell me this to my face. Look ye here, Bolle'--he swung round upon the colonel, who had put forth a hand as though to arrest this unseemly abuse. 'How do I know that this dog has not tampered with the wine? By G.o.d!' he broke out as a servant entered with a stoup of it, 'I'll not drink it--I'll not drink a drop of it--until this fellow has first tasted it, here, in our presence.'

I believe that I went white: but 'twas with rage. 'Give me a gla.s.s of it,' I answered; and, as the servant filled and handed to me, 'The wine, my lord, came on your own pet.i.tion and at your own risk, as I must remind you. Nevertheless, I will drink--to your long life, and better manners.' I drank, set down the gla.s.s, and asked, after a pause, 'May I go, my lord?'

'You may go to the devil!'

I hesitated. 'There was, as I remember, some little mention of an ox--'

'You may tell your master to come and fetch it,' he growled.

Well, my master did fetch it, and with speed. That same night he a.s.sembled five thousand men without beat of drum in the park at Farnham, and at seven o'clock we marched off towards Basing. On the way to Crondall, we of the horse halted for an hour to let the foot regiments catch up with us, and all together headed down upon Alton.

In this way, at nine in the morning, we came down upon the west of the town, while the earl kept watch on the roads to the eastwards; and charged at once.

I say that the earl kept watch; but in truth he had put this duty upon his captains, while he still fuddled himself with our general's sack. He and his horse never gave fight, but galloped before us on the road to Winchester; along which, after close on an hour's chase, our trumpets recalled us as our infantry forced the doors of Alton Church, and cut up Colonel Bolle's regiment that still resisted there. The Earl of Crawford left a good half of his wine behind, and two days later our general, who had sent for me, showed me this letter--

'To Sir W. Waller.

'Sir,--I hope your gaining of Alton cost you dear. It was your lot to drink of your own sack, which I never intended to have left for you. I pray you favour me so much as to send me your own chirurgeon, and upon my honour I will send you a person suitable to his exchange.--Sir, your servant,

'Crawford.'

From this happy success it was my fortune, that same afternoon, to lead our troop back to Farnham. Coming on the way to the entrance of a lane on our right, I avoided the high-road for the by-path.

It twisted downhill to the river, crossed it, and by-and-by in a dip of the farther slope, brought me in sight of a round cottage of two stories. No smoke arose from it, though the twilight was drawing in upon a frost that searched our bones as we rode. No inhabitant showed a face. But I waved a hand in pa.s.sing, and I am mistaken if a hand did not respond from the upper story--by drawing a shutter close.

RED VELVET.

[August, 1644. The Story is told by Ralph Medhope, Captain of the Twenty-second (or Gray-coat) Troop of Horse in the Parliament Army, then serving in Cornwall.]

We were eight men in the picket. My cornet, Ned Penkevill, rode beside me; our trumpeter, Israel Hutson, a pace or two behind; with five troopers following. I could tell you their names, but there is no need, for I alone of the eight come into the story. The rest rode to their death that night, and met it in the dawn, like men.

We rode northward and inland along the downs high over the left bank of the Fowey River; with good turf and heather underfoot, and with the moon behind our right shoulders. She was the harvest moon, now in her last quarter, and from her alt.i.tude I guessed it, by west country time, to be well past four of the morning or within an hour of daybreak. But because she hung bright up here, we p.r.i.c.ked forward warily, using every pit and hollow. We had left our breast-pieces, back-pieces, and gorgets behind us, with Penkevill's standard, for the main troop to carry; and rode in plain gray jerkins--bareheaded too, since on mounting the rise above the valley-fog we had done off our morions (for fear of the moonlight) and hidden them in a furze-brake, where belike next summer the heather-bees found and made hives of them.

Fog, rolling up from the sea--seven or eight miles away--filled all the valley below us: and this fog was the reason of our riding.

For the valley formed the neck of a trap in which the King held our general with two thousand five hundred horse, six thousand infantry, and I know not how many guns. His own artillery lined the heights under which we rode--that is, to left or east of the river; he had pushed across a couple of batteries to the opposite hills, and between them easily commanded the valley. It was just the ease of it that made him careless and gave us our chance. He had withdrawn the better part of his horse to the coast, to make a display against our scattered base; and our general, aware of this, was even meditating an a.s.sault on the heights when the sudden fog changed his plans and he resolved to march his horse, under cover of it, straight through the trap. The risk, to be sure, was nearly desperate; since, for aught he knew, the King was marching back his troops under the same cover, and to be caught in that narrow valley (which was plashy, moreover, and in places flooded) would mean the total loss of his cavalry. Yet he had spoken cheerfully when I took leave of him and rode off with my seven men--our business being to watch along the enemy's lines for any movement, to sound a warning if necessary, and, if surprised or caught, so to behave as to lead suspicion away from the movement of the main body.

The enemy kept loose watch up here. We could see his camp-fires dotted on the ridge between us and the dark woods of Boconnock, where the owls hooted; but either we were lucky or his outposts had been carelessly set. Clearly no alarm had reached these encampments.

But Heaven knew what might be happening, or preparing to happen, in the valley. There at any moment the report of a single musket might tell us that all was lost.

Penkevill--a good lad--insisted that all was well. Our men had been due to start at two o'clock, and all delay allowed for, by this time they should be past the gut of the valley, where an opposing force would certainly choose to post itself.

My answer to this was that, even allowing it, we must wait for the sound of fighting at Respryn Bridge, farther up the vale, or at one of the two fords a little below it. For there, and there only, could our men cross the river, as they must to hit off any line of escape through Liscard and into Devon. The bridge we knew to be held by a guard, and almost to a certainty the fords, though swollen by recent rains, would be watched also. It was a part of the plan to surprise and force these crossings, and no question but that--unless their guard had been strengthened--they could be forced. But as certainly the guard, however weak, would make at least some show of fight; so certainly, indeed, that the sound of firing here was to announce success and be our signal to rejoin the main body.

Now from this bridge of Respryn a highway climbs from the valley and runs due east across the downs; that is to say, straight athwart the track we were holding; and our orders were on no account to cross this highway, but to halt at some little distance on the near side of it, place ourselves in cover, and so await the signal. For the enemy held it--we could spy a couple of their camp-fires on the rise where it crosses Five Barrow Hill, with a third somewhat nearer, by the cross lanes called Grey Mare--and it would a.s.suredly be patrolled.

If in attempting to cross it we fell foul of the patrol, the alarm might draw their troops down towards the bridge; and again, if we crossed it without mishap, we should be no better placed and might easily overshoot our mark, for somewhere alongside this road our general would direct his retreat, over the heather and short turf that stretched for miles ahead and for a mile or more on either hand--fair open country and for cavalry the best in the world.

Accordingly we found cover in a belt of fir-trees overlooking the valley, and for a while possessed our souls in patience. We were early, having come without mishap or challenge, and to expect a like speed of two thousand five hundred men--riding in thick fog through water-meadows, with ditches to be crossed and gates to be found and pa.s.sed--was in the last degree unreasonable. Nevertheless, dawn could not be far off, and as the minutes dragged by, my spirits sank and my thoughts ran on a score of possible disasters.

By-and-by the sky began to pale. We heard a small troop of hors.e.m.e.n coming down the road at a walk--a patrol perhaps, or perhaps they were riding down to relieve the guard by the bridge. We listened and made out their number to be twenty or thereabouts. The wind had s.h.i.+fted--another good reason for keeping on our side of the road--and blew from them to us; but our horses were well trained. The troop drew level with our hiding; we could hear the jingling of their bits, and with that came our signal. A couple of pistol shots rang out; they made every man of us start in his saddle, and they were followed by a volley.

In my surprise I had dug spur and pushed out beyond our clump of firs, almost before it struck me that the sound came not from the valley but from ahead of us, across the road and some way up the slope. My first motion had been to charge the troopers in the roadway, to drive them (or at least to check them) from helping at the bridge; and I had done more wisely by holding to it, even upon second thought, for they had wheeled towards the sound and so gave their backs to us. While they stood thus we might have charged through them, and all had been well.

As it was, they offered us this chance for a moment only; and then, striking spur, scrambled up the bank on the far side of the road and headed across the turf at a gallop. We looked, and slowly we understood. For half a mile away, up the rise of the downs, a broad dark shadow was moving; and we had scarcely discerned it before, in the pale of the dawn, small points of light wavered and broke upon morions, gorgets, cuira.s.ses. That moving shadow was our own main body, climbing the hill at a gentle trot.

A few picketers hung on their rear. It was these, of course, that had given the alarm: and by-and-by the trumpets taking it up on Five Barrow Hill, a body of four hundred horse came over the rise at a gallop and bore down obliquely on the ma.s.s--very confidently at first: but at closer quarters it lost heart and started off to hara.s.s the right flank of the solid ma.s.s, that paid it little attention and held on its way without swerving.

Before this we had put our horses in motion, to overtake the patrol (as I will call it) and break through to join our comrades. But here it was that our delay proved fatal. For turning at the sound of our gallop, and belike judging us to be the advance-guard of a second large body of horse, the leader of the patrol wheeled his men about, halted them for a moment, and so charged them straight down upon us.

In numbers they were more than two to one, with the advantage of the slope, and albeit we fought fiercely for a minute, they broke us and drove us back headlong on the road. Nor did they stop here, but, having us on the run, headed us right down the road to the bridge.

Here, at the bridge-head, finding it unguarded, I managed to wheel about and beat off a couple of pursuers: and Israel Hutson and one of the troopers joining me, we three blocked the pa.s.sage and could not be dislodged. For the bridge was extremely narrow; so narrow, indeed, that in either parapet the builders had provided an embrasure here and there, for the foot-traveller to step aside if he should meet a pa.s.sing wagon.

The cavaliers, confronted by this remnant of us, and still perhaps believing that we counted on support, drew off some thirty yards, and were plainly in two minds whether to attack us again or to drop the business and ride back towards the trumpet-calls now sounding confusedly along the crest of the downs; when, to their and our worse dismay, was heard a pounding of hoofs on the road behind us, and over the bridge at our backs came riding a rabble of mounted men with a woman at their head--a woman dressed all in scarlet with a black flapping hat and a scarlet feather. What manner of woman she was I had no time to guess. But she rode with uplifted arm, grasping a pistol and waving the others forward; and her followers--who in no way resembled soldiers--poured after her, shouting, clearly bent on our destruction.

I had managed to recharge my two pistols; and now, thrusting one into my belt and grasping the other, with my sword dangling handy on a wrist-knot, I dismounted and slipped into the nearest embrasure, there to sell my life as dearly as might be. As I did so I heard, above the pounding of hoofs, five or six shots fired, and saw Hutson fling up his arms in the act of dismounting, fall his length across the roadway, and lie still under the feet of my own terrified horse.

The trooper made a plunge forward as if to hurl himself through the patrol; and they, no doubt, disposed of him. I never saw him again.

For me, I faced upon the new a.s.sailants, as the spitting of bullets on the parapet directed me, and found little time to wonder what manner of people these were who so plainly intended to murder me.

Some rode on cart-horses; one or two flourished pitchforks; and if ever a man had a sense of taking his leave of life in a nightmare it was I during that next minute. It seemed that a dozen were on me.

I cannot remember letting off my second pistol; but for some time, with my back to the angle of the embrasure, I held my own with almost astonis.h.i.+ng ease, and might have held it for many minutes--my opponents being more savage than skilful--had not one of them barbarously hurled his pitchfork at me as a man throws a spear.