The Great Siege

8

They cantered out of town, the heavy horses needing whipping over the hard streets, the boys trembling with pain at the jolting. They crossed a wild range of rocky hills and put many miles between them and the town, finding cover in woodland before Stanley pulled up.

‘Tell me,’ he said as they sat on the sweating horse. ‘How the devil did you become vagabonds? Nicholas Ingoldsby is a proud-sounding name for a beggar. I thought such kind had simple peasant names as Jack by the Hedge, or Bedlam Bill.’

Nicholas slipped off the horse’s rump.

‘Hey!’

Nicholas looked up. ‘My father is dead.’

Stanley stared at him, and then dismounted more slowly. He had feared this, the moment he saw it was the young Ingoldsby tied at the cart’s end.

‘When?’

‘The day after you left our house. Crake came — that Justice there. With armed men. There was a struggle and my father was killed by the kick of a rearing horse. I was responsible.’

‘You?’

Nicholas could not speak.

Blackbeard rode into the glade nearby. He seemed to have heard every word from far off.

‘You gave command for the horse to kick out, did you?’ he growled.

Nicholas glared up at him.

‘Well then. You were not responsible.’ He dismounted, jerking his head at Hodge to do likewise. ‘It was in the hands of God.’

‘He speaks the truth,’ said Stanley more gently. ‘Do not punish yourself. As for your father, though I am damnably sorry for it — he is in a better place. Bitter loss though it is to the Order.’

Suddenly, to his shame, tears were coursing down Nicholas’s grimy cheeks.

‘He was the bravest of knights,’ said Stanley, and laid his hand on the boy’s shaking shoulder.

Nicholas felt a wretched weakling, weeping before them. But the fairhaired knight murmured, ‘It takes a man of heart to weep, and a man of wit to know a matter worthy of weeping. I’ve seen a man weep over losing at dice — which was not so worthy. You are your father’s son.’

He glanced around the glade. ‘We wait here till nightfall. Get some sleep. We ride all night.’

‘Cuts first,’ said Blackbeard. ‘Get in the stream over there.’

Hodge and Nicholas found the stream at the edge of the wood, shallow with leafmould, but knelt beside it and washed as best they could. After only one night they already had the sour staleness of prison on their skins — besides weeks of vagabondage. Their single cuts were deep and tender even to a splash of cold water. Thirty such cuts and they would surely have bled to death.

They came back freezing cold, pulling their ragged shirts on.

‘Not yet,’ said Blackbeard.

He pulled a battered flask from his leather pannier and turned them around.

‘I don’t need to warn you this will hurt.’

Whatever he poured from the flask went down their cuts like flame. Nicholas’s ears sang with the pain of it. But they made no noise. A chaffinch sang happily overhead. The sky was blue and clean. The only evil in the world was the evil of men.

The knights gave them their bread and cheese and their blankets and they lay down gingerly on their sides. Blackbeard made them sleep on their backs.

‘It’ll seal the wound quicker.’

Voice already thickening with sleep, Nicholas asked, ‘What was in that flask?’

Blackbeard spoke through a mouthful of bread. ‘Finest French brandy and a good pinch of gunpowder.’

‘Gunpowder?’

Blackbeard grinned. ‘Gunpowder has more uses than blowing heads off Turks.’

When Nicholas awoke it was dark. Hodge still snored beneath his blanket, exhausted by all this travel in foreign parts.

A fire burned low in a shallow pit, and Stanley was turning two leverets on a spit. Blackbeard was quickly skinning a third, and then the mother hare. She was paunched and gutted, her legs and head cut off and skin pulled free and all buried in half a minute.

Stanley questioned Nicholas quietly. Where was his father buried? What was the cause of Crake’s enmity? He could answer neither question, except to say that Crake was a Puritan. But there was more to it than that.

Where were his sisters?

Nicholas told him, and Stanley brooded.

‘This will weigh on you. The responsibility of it. But they will be cared for well enough. One day, in time, you will return.’

‘I mean to.’

‘And where do you and your man make for meanwhile? Are there uncles, cousins?’

‘There are,’ said Nicholas, ‘but none will want to take in the children of a traitor.’

‘Your father was no traitor, and such would be hard to prove before a court.’

Nicholas shrugged. ‘I’d not burden any distant kin, nonetheless. We make for Bristol.’

‘Bristol?’

Nicholas looked at him steadily. ‘To take ship for Malta.’

Slow, uncomforting smiles spread over Smith and Stanley’s faces.

‘Malta?’

‘Malta of the Knights,’ said Nicholas.

‘Well.’ Smith tore off a large chunk from the hare’s thigh and chewed it slowly, savouring this childish fantasy as much as the sweet spring meat.

‘Malta, you say. And how exactly do you propose, you and your steadfast manservant here, to pay for your passage to Malta? Do you imagine Bristol shipmen have charitable hearts? And once at Malta — I presume you’re not going there to grow pomegranates, but to wage noble war upon the Turk — how do you propose to arm yourself? Do you have any idea of how much armour costs? A sword? Or perhaps you’re taking your catapult — the terror of all the sparrows in Shropshire?’

Stanley coughed sharply. It wasn’t right to mock the boy overmuch. He had lost a father, his family estate, given up his sisters, taken to the road — and they themselves had some part in it. Young Ingoldsby had nothing left, but still this boyish dream. It was not so contemptible, though ludicrous.

But Nicholas needed no defending, and his voice was steady.

‘We go to Malta with your aid or without. Your sneers cannot hurt me. The death of my father before my eyes, the lash of a whip, winter’s hunger, dishonour, these can hurt me. But not your sneers and mockeries. Hodge is no longer my manservant, since I have no money to pay him. But he is my companion still, and goes where I go.’

He tugged free a shoulder of the roast hare, glistening with dark meat, and ate. The boy had self-possession, no question.

‘You might help us on our voyage, but you cannot hinder us.’

Even Smith looked at the boy’s set expression with a faint, grudging respect.

‘Besides,’ said Nicholas swallowing, ‘here we will never be safe. This country is cursed for me.’

‘Never curse your country, lad,’ said John Smith. ‘You might as well curse your mother that gave you birth and suck.’

Stanley stoked up the fire. ‘Times are evil in all Christendom. In Holland they have slaughtered Huguenots by the thousand, and in France. In England they begin to persecute Catholics. The Body of Christ is divided and cut in pieces once again.’

‘All the more reason to flee such troubles for Malta,’ said Nicholas.

Smith snapped a thin bone and sucked at the marrow. ‘We might as well lead you into an abattoir, boy. Into a firestorm, the mouth of a volcano.’

‘Are there no women and children on Malta too?’

‘Aye. That stubborn and mulish peasantry will never leave their barren rock of an island, not if all the Legions of Hell were sailing on them.’

‘Well, if women and children are preparing themselves to face your firestorm and your terrible Turk, so can we.’

Stanley and Smith were silent. The boy was speaking some skewed sense, damn him.

Meanwhile the boy sounded ever more like a man.

‘Do not mistake me. You came to my father’s house, and I do not mean to … to turn that into a weapon against you. Yet you will agree that your coming to my father’s house was the origin of my misfortunes.’

‘We owe you nothing,’ growled Smith.

‘No. Nor do I mean to blackmail you. My father would roar me out of the house for such a thing.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I can hear him roar now. Nevertheless, the start of our troubles was your coming. So could it be that now we are meant to go with you? What else has providence got for me? Beatings and beggary. What would my father wish from you?’

That was a sharp question. Like father, like son.

Nicholas kept them wriggling, like playing two trout at once.

‘I am the only son of your brother knight, Sir Francis Ingoldsby. Is that how you requite him?’

Damn the boy.

Stanley looked at Smith. ‘We have truly failed on this journey of ours into England.’

Smith grunted agreement. ‘Which we were supposed to conduct with as little hubbub as possible.’

To Nicholas, Stanley resumed, ‘We will find you some better protection before we go. Some position in an old Catholic household, perhaps? One of my own, in Derbyshire-’

The boy’s voice rose in anger now and Hodge stirred.

‘In the bitter winter I protected my sisters, I found them shelter. We have wandered the length and breadth of the shire, Hodge and I, under snow for a blanket. We have slept in barns and pigsties and bartons not fit for beasts. Yet I am no Prodigal Son, with father to run home to.’

‘You have proved yourselves tough and cunning, I grant you.’

‘We had no choice in the matter. Neither I nor Hodge have father nor mother nor inheritance. If you will not go with me to Malta, yet I will find my way, through every hardship. It is my fate. You came to our house, and my father died. Yet it was me you came for, though you did not know it.’

The fire crackled in the still night. A fox barked. The boy spoke with conviction and a sublime simplicity.

At last Stanley stirred. ‘I do not agree with your interpretation, boy. But-’

Smith said brusquely, ‘Have you shot a fowling piece?’

‘Of course. And I can bring down a woodcock.’

‘How is your swordsmanship?’

‘Not so much. But I will learn.’

‘It takes years.’

‘Well then, I will learn in a month. The Turk is coming soon.’

Now Smith and Stanley exchanged a different smile. The boy was unstoppable. The son of Sir Francis Ingoldsby, Knight Grand Cross.

‘Malta?’ said Hodge. ‘Where in the back-of-beyond the Forest of Clun is Malta?’ He looked around, all three faces smiling now. ‘You mean we’re going to Wales?’

The moon was high when they rode out of the glade onto the frosty road, the night cold and clear. The sound of their hooves would carry, dogs would bark as they passed by.

‘We need to move fast,’ said Stanley. ‘The whole country will be looking for two men and two boys on stolen plough horses.’

‘Two boys?’ pondered Smith. ‘What day is today?’

‘Near Lady Day. The twentieth in March, I think.’

‘’Tis a Monday. Washday.’ He turned in his saddle. ‘You are shivering, lads. But we will find you new garments, if some addled housewife has left her linens on a hedgerow overnight.’

Within a few miles they saw such linens cast over a holly hedge, gleaming in the moonlight. Smith made his choice, and hung a small purse of silver pennies from the gatepost in payment.

He tossed the clothes to the boys. They were stiff with frost.

Nicholas and Hodge stared down. Kirtle, pinafore and white lace-fringed mob cap for each.

‘That’s right,’ said Smith. ‘You’re going to Bristol as girls, never mind what Saint Paul says against men dressing up as maids.’

‘And your names shall be …’

‘Nancy,’ suggested Smith.

‘And Matilda,’ said Stanley.

For some reason, this was so amusing that the two knights had to stifle their laughter on their sleeves.

‘We also need a whore,’ said Smith at last.

The boys looked startled.

Smith grinned and offered no explanation.

It was a party of five who arrived unmolested at Bristol docks a week after. Mr Edward Melcombe, man of law; his brother Simon. His wife, a somewhat raddled-looking older woman called Margaret, whom he had picked up only recently in a dubious alley in Ludlow. And their two daughters, Nancy and Matilda, regrettably ill-favoured maids, both being of strapping build and with a distinct foreshadowing of beard about the jawline.