only a littered courtyard, full of men and captured cannonry. He could
not guess where the most valiant of cock-throstles found anchor for his
feet; and, to settle the question, he went out. The song greeted him
with fine rapture as he set foot across the doorway; and in the middle
of the yard he saw the trunk of a big, upstanding walnut-tree.
Three-quarters of the branches had been shot away, but one big limb
remained. At the top of the highest branch a slim, full-throated
gentleman was singing to his mate.
"Good Royalist!" said Kit. "Go singing while your branch is left you."
His mood was so tense and alert, his sympathy with the throstle so
eager, that he started when a laugh sounded at his elbow. "I knew last
night a soldier came to Lathom. He is a poet, too, it seems."
The wild, red dawn--sign of the rainiest summer known in England for
fifty years--showed him Lady Derby. The lines were gone from her face,
her eyes were soft and trustful, as a maid's eyes are; it did not seem
possible that she had withstood a year of siege.
"I was just thanking God," she explained, "that picked men come my way
so often. There are so many Rigbys in this world, and minorities need
all their strength."
She was so soft of voice, so full of the fragrance which a woman here
and there gives out to hearten roughened men, that Kit began to walk in
fairyland. So had Captain Chisenhall walked long since, Rawstorn and the
other officers, the private soldiery, because the Lady of Lathom was
strong, courageous, and secure.
"How have you kept heart so long?" asked Kit, his boy's heedless pity
roused afresh.
"And you, sir--how have you kept heart so long?" she laughed.
"Oh, I was astride a horse, plying a sword or what not. It was all
easy-going; but for you here----"
"For me there was the bigger venture. You have only one right hand for
the spear. I have control of scores. My dear soldiery are pleased to
love me--I know not why--and power is sweet. You will believe, sir, that
all this is pastime to me."
Yet her voice broke. Tired folk know tired folk when they are climbing
the same hill of sadness; and Kit touched her on the arm. "Rough
pastime, I should call it," he said, "and you a woman."
She gathered her courage again. Laughter played about her charitable,
wide mouth.
"You're in love, Mr. Metcalf--finely in love, I think, with some chit of
a girl who may or may not deserve it. There was a reverence in your
voice when you spoke of women."
Kit's face was red with confession of his guilt. "There's none else for
me," he said.
"Ah, then, I'm disappointed. This zeal last night--it was not for the
King, after all. It was because some woman tempted you to do great
deeds for her own pretty sake.'
"We've been King's men at Nappa since time began," said Kit stubbornly.
"My father has sounded a trumpet from Yoredale down to Oxford. All
England knows us stalwart for the King."
Lady Derby allowed herself a moment's happiness. Here was a man who had
no shams, no glance forward or behind to see where his loyalty would
take him. There was nothing mercantile about him, and, in these muddled
times, that was so much to be thankful for.
"Believe me," she said very gently, "I know your breed. Believe me,
too, when I say that I am older than you--some of the keen, blue
dawn-lights lost to me, but other beauties staying on--and I ask you,
when you meet your wide-eyed maid again, to put it to the question."
"I've done that already."
Again laughter crept round Lady Derby's mouth. "I meant a deeper
question, sir. Ask her whether she had rather wed you and live at ease,
or see you die because the King commands."
"She would choose death for me--I should not love her else."
"One does not know. There are men and women who have that view of life.
They are few. Put it to the question. Now I must go indoors, sir, to
see that breakfast is readying for these good men of mine. Pluck is a
fine gift, but it needs ample rations."
Kit watched her go. He was amazed by her many-sidedness. One moment
tranquil, fresh from her dawn-prayers; the next a woman of the world,
giving him motherly advice; and then the busy housewife, attentive to
the needs of hungry men. Like Strafford, whose head was in the losing,
she was in all things thorough.
He went up to the ramparts by and by. The sentry, recognising him as
one who had shared the sortie over-night, saluted with a pleasant grin.
Kit, as he looked down on the trenches, the many tokens of a siege that
was no child's play, thought again of Lady Derby, her incredible, suave
courage. Then he fell to thinking of Joan, yonder in the North. She,
too, was firm for the cause; it was absurd to suggest doubt of that.
Whether she cared for him or no, she would be glad to see him die in the
King's service.
He was in the middle of a high dream--all made up of gallop, and a death
wound, and Joan weeping pleasant tears above his prostrate body--when
there came a sharp, smoky uproar from the trenches, and a bullet plucked
his hat away.
"Comes of rearing your head against the sky," said the sentry
impassively; "but then they're no marksmen, these whelps of Rigby's."
Another bullet went wide of Kit, a third whistled past his left cheek;
so that he yielded to common sense at last, and stooped under shelter of
the parapet. The besiegers then brought other artillery to bear. A
harsh, resonant voice came down-wind to them:
"Hear the news, you dandies of Lady Derby's! Sir Thomas Fairfax has
routed your men at Selby. Cromwell is busy in the east. Three of our
armies have surrounded your Duke of Newcastle in York. Is that enough
for my lady to breakfast on, or would you have further news?"
The sentry--old, taciturn, and accustomed through long months to this
warfare of the tongue--bided his time. He knew the habits of these
spokesmen of Rigby's. When no answer came from the ramparts, further
taunts and foul abuse swept upward from below. Still there was no
reply, till the man, in a fierce rage of his own making, got up and
showed head and shoulders above the trench. The sentry fired, without
haste.
"One less," he growled. "It's queer to see a man go round and round
like a spinning top before he tumbles out of sight."
"Was his news true?" asked Kit, dismayed by the tidings.
"Ah, that's to prove. Liars speak truth now and then. Stands to reason
they must break into truth, just time and time, by chance."
Kit left the rampart presently, and found a hungry company of men at
breakfast.
"Why so grave, Mr. Metcalf?" laughed Lady Derby, who was serving
porridge from a great bowl of earthenware. "You are hungry, doubtless.
There's nothing else brings such gravity as yours to a man's face."
"I was thinking of last night's sortie," said Kit.
"So that hunger, too, grows on you as on my other gentlemen? But,
indeed, we propose to rest to-day. Even we have had enough, I think."
He told them the news shouted from the trenches. Rough-riding, zeal, and
youth had given him a persuasiveness of his own. "The news may be true
or false," he said, looking down at them from his full height; "but,
either way, it will put heart into the enemy. By your leave, we must
harass them."
He had his way, and, knowing it, sat down to a breakfast that astonished
all onlookers.
"I find many kinds of admiration for you, sir," drawled Captain
Chisenhall, "but especially, I think, for your gift of feeding that fine
bulk of yours."
"I'm just like my own homeland in Yoredale," assented Kit; "it needs
feeding if strong crops are to follow."
That night they made three sorties on the trenches, five on the next,
and for a week they kept the pace. A few of the garrison were killed,
more were wounded, but speed and fury made up for loss of numbers, and
Colonel Rigby sent a messenger galloping to Manchester for help in need.
The besiegers, he explained, were so harassed that they were dropping in
the trenches, not from gun-fire, but from lack of sleep.
The sentries on the walls had no chance nowadays to pick off orators who
rose from cover of the trenches to shout ill tidings at them. From
their vantage-ground on the ramparts they could hear, instead, the oaths
and uproar of a disaffected soldiery who voiced their grievances.
On the seventh morning, an hour before noon, a man came into Lathom, wet
from the moat, as Kit had been on his arrival here. He told them that
Prince Rupert, the Earl of Derby with him, had crossed the Cheshire
border, marching to the relief of Lathom.
"So," said Captain Chisenhall, "we'll give them one last sortie before
the frolic ends."
Lady Derby smiled pleasantly. "That is your work, gentlemen. Mine is
to get to my knees, to thank God that my husband is so near to me."
When they sortied that night, they found empty trenches. The moonlight
showed them only the disorder--a disorder unsavoury to the
nostrils--that attended a forsaken camp. One man they found with a
broken leg, who had been left in the rear of a sharp retreat. He had
been bullied by Rigby, it appeared, and the rancour bit deeper than the
trouble of his broken limb. He told them that Rigby, and what were left
of his three thousand, had pushed down to Bolton, and he expressed a
hope--not pious--that all the Cavaliers in England would light a bonfire
round him there.
When they gathered for the return to Lathom, the futility about them of
hunters who have found no red fox to chase, Kit saluted Captain
Chisenhall. "My regards to Lady Derby," he explained; "tell her I'm no
longer needed here at Lathom. Tell her that kin calls to kin, and where
Rupert is, the Metcalfs are. I go to warn them that Rigby lies in
Bolton."
"Good," said Chisenhall. "Rigby has lied in most parts of the country.
Go hunt the weasel, you young hot-head."
When they returned, Lady Derby asked where Kit Metcalf was, and they
told her. "Gentlemen," she said, with that odd, infectious laugh of
hers, "I have no favourites, but, if I had, it is Kit Metcalf I would
choose to bring Prince Rupert here. There's the light of youth about
him."
"There is," said Chisenhall. "I lost it years ago, and nothing else in
life makes up for it--except a sortie."
*CHAPTER XIV.*
*A STANLEY FOR THE KING.*
Christopher Metcalf had learned the way of hazard, the need to say
little and hear all. As he rode from Lathom House through the summer's
dawn, the land was full of blandishment. Last night's heavy rain had
brought keen scents to birth--of primrose and leafage in the lanes, of
wallflowers in the homestead gardens that he passed. Scents tempt a man
to retrospect, and he wondered how it was faring with Joan--remembered
the nearness of her and the fragrance, as they roamed the Yoredale hills
together in other springs.
He put blandishment aside. There was no before or after for him--simply
the plain road ahead. Wherever he found a countryman to greet, he drew
rein and passed the time of day, and got into talk with him. Before he
had covered six miles, he learned that Rigby, with the three thousand
men withdrawn from the siege of Lathom, had in fact retreated behind the
walls of Bolton, and that the town was strongly fortified. A mile
further on his horse cast a shoe, and, while he waited at the door of a
wayside smithy, he joined a company of gossips seated on the bench
outside.
"Thanks be, the Lady o' Lathom is safe," said a grey old shepherd.
"A rare game-bird, she," assented the jolly yeoman on his left.
"Ay. She's plucked a few fine feathers from Rigby. Rigby? I mind the
time when he was skulking in and out--trying to find wastrel men who'd
pay him to prove black was white in court. And now he calls himself a
Captain."
"Well, he's as he was made, and of small account at that," said the
yeoman. "The man I blame is Colonel Shuttleworth. One o' the gentry,
he, and likeable. There's no good comes, say I, when the gentry forget
their duty to their King. They go to kirk each Sabbath, and pray for
the King's health--well, they mean it, or they don't mean it, and
there's no middle way."
Kit felt at home. These men were of the country stock he knew by heart.
"Friends," he said, "I'm a stranger here in Lancashire. Who is Colonel
Shuttleworth?"
"Oh, just a backslider!" The yeoman's face was cheery by long habit,
even when he condemned a man. "He's sent fifteen hundred men to help
Rigby garrison the town of Bolton. The likes of him to help the likes
of Rigby--it makes us fancy the times are upside down."
Kit Metcalf, when his horse was shod, rode forward swiftly. A league
this side of Bolton, where the track climbed steep between banks of ling
and bilberry, he saw a man striding a white horse. Man and horse were
so big that they blotted out a good part of the sky-line; so he knew
that there was a kinsman waiting for him.
"Yoi-hoi!" yelled Kit. "A Mecca for the King."
The horseman shielded his eyes against the sun as he watched the
up-coming rider. Then a laugh that Kit remembered floated down-wind to
him.
"Why, Michael, what are you doing here?" he asked, as he drew near.
"To be frank, I was yawning just before you came. I've been waiting
since daybreak for some messenger from Lathom. And at the end of it you
come, white brother of the Metcalf flock--you, who have the luck at
every turn."
"I had luck this time--fifteen sorties since I saw you last. Michael,
you should have been there with us. We brought their mortar in----"
"Good," drawled Michael. "You had the luck. For my part, I've been
sitting on a horse as thirsty as myself for more hours than I remember.
Let's get down to camp and a brew of ale there."
"And afterwards we sortied--sortied till we drove them into hiding, like
rabbits. The Lady of Lathom welcomed us home each night, her eyes on
fire."
"No doubt, brother. The tale will warm me by and by. Meanwhile I don't
care a stiver what fire shone in my lady's eyes--blue, or grey, or
black. Give me honest ale, of the true nut-brown colour."
"You're a wastrel, Michael," laughed the younger brother, glad to pass
badinage again with one of his own folk.
"I am, my lad, and know it. There's luck in being a wastrel--folk
expect nothing from a man. He goes free, while such as you--babe Kit, if
you guessed how prisoned up you are! They look for sorties, gallops
against odds, moonshine of all sorts every day you live. You've a
nickname already in Oxford. They name you the White Knight."
"Oh, be done with banter," snapped Christopher. "There's little
knighthood about me. Let's get down to camp and see the colour of that
ale of yours."
When they came to the heathery, rising land wide of Bolton, and the
sentry had passed them forward, Kit found himself face to face with
Prince Rupert once again.
"The White Knight brings news," Michael explained in his off-handed way.
"Pleasant news?" the Prince asked. "Is Rigby dead, or the siege
raised?"
"By your leave," said Kit, "the siege is raised. Rigby has gone to
Bolton-le-Moors, to hide there. He has what are left of his three
thousand men, and fifteen hundred others. The town is strong."
"Good, sir!" Fire--deep, glowing fire--showed in Rupert's eyes. "Lady
Derby is a kinswoman of mine; and if Rigby is in Bolton, I know where to
find the fox she loathes."
A big, tired figure of a man pushed his way through the soldiery. "I
heard someone speak of Lady Derby?" he said.
Prince Rupert touched him on the shoulder. "_I_ did, friend," he said,
with a quiet laugh. "There's none so touchy as a husband who chances to
be his wife's lover, too. My Lord Derby, this is Mr. Metcalf, known
otherwise as the White Knight. He brings news that Rigby the fox has
slunk into Bolton. Best put our hounds in and drive him out of cover."
"Give me the assault," said Lord Derby drily.
"I cannot. Your name glamours Lancashire. I will not have you risk all
in driving a red fox into the open."
Derby yielded to the discipline engrained in him, but with a bad grace.
The Prince, himself eager for the assault, but ashamed to take a
leadership which on grounds of prudence he had refused the other, asked
for volunteers. When these were gathered, the whole force marched on
Bolton and halted within five hundred yards of the stout walls. Then
the assaulting party came forward at the double.
"Not you, Mr. Metcalf," said Rupert, detaining Christopher as he ran
forward to join in any lively venture. "We cannot spare you."
What followed was a nightmare to the lookers-on. They saw the volunteers
reach the wall and clamber up--saw a fierce hand-to-hand struggle on the
wall-top, and the assault repulsed. And then they saw the victors on
the rampart kill the wounded in cold blood.
Some pity, bred of bygone Stuart generations, stirred Rupert. Wrath and
tears were so mingled that his voice was harsh. "I give you freedom,
Derby, to lead the next attack."
Without pause or word of thanks, Lord Derby got his own company
together.
"We fight for my wife, who holds Lathom well," he said to his men.
Then they ran to the attack. Kit, looking on, was astonished to see
that Prince Rupert, who had talked of prudence where lives of great men
were concerned, was running with the privates of Lord Derby's company.
So he, too, ran.
The fight on the wall was bitter, but the King's men prevailed. Over
the bodies of their friends, massacred against all rules of war, they
leaped into the town. The first man Lord Derby met was a groom, lately
in his service at Lathom, who had gone over to the enemy. The man
struck a blow at him with the clubbed end of a musket, and Derby parried
it, and gave the rogue a better death than he deserved--at the sword's
point.
They pressed forward. Once they were hemmed in--six of them--after a
fierce rally of the garrison had swept the Royalists aside. One of the
six was Prince Rupert; and Kit Metcalf felt the old Yoredale loyalty
stir in his veins--a wildness and a strength. He raised a deep-bellied
cry of "A Mecca for the King!" cut down the thick-set private who was
aiming a blow sideways at Rupert's head, and then went mad with the lust
of slaying. Never afterwards could he recall that wonderful, swift
lunacy. Memory took up the tale again at the moment when their comrades
rallied to their help and thrust back the garrison.
Three of the six were left--the Prince, and Kit, and a debonair,
grey-eyed gentleman whose love-locks were ruddied by a scalp-wound. The
three went forward with the rest; and, after all was done, they met
again in the market-square.
"You, my White Knight?" said the Prince, touching Kit on the arm. "Are
you touched? No more than the gash across your cheek? I'm glad of that.
Captain Roger Nowell here tells me that I should be lying toes up to the
sky if your pike had not been handled nicely. For my part, I saw
nothing but Roundhead faces leering at me through a crimson mist."
The instinctive, boyish romance came back to Christopher. He had always
been a hero-worshipper, and turned now to the grey-eyed gentleman, who
was bandaging his head with a strip torn from his frilled shirt. "You
are of the Nowells of Reed Hall?" he asked.
"I am, sir--a queer, hot-headed lot, but I'm one of them."
"My nurse reared me on tales of what your folk did in days gone by. And
at Lathom they told me of your sorties. Sir, they thought you dead in
your last effort to break through the lines, to bring relief in. They
will be glad."
The Prince and Nowell glanced at each other with a quick smile of
sympathy. Here, in the reek and havoc of the street, was a
simple-minded gentleman, fresh as dawn on the hills that bred him--a man
proved many times by battle, yet with a starry reverence for ancient
deeds and ancient faith.
"May your nurse rest well where she lies," said Roger Nowell, the
laughter in his grey eyes still. "In spite of a headache that throbs
like a blacksmith's anvil, I salute her. She reared a man-child. As for
those at Lathom, I share their gladness, I admit. A bandaged head is
better than none at all."
Then all was bustle and uproar once again. Men came bringing captured
colours to the Prince; and in the middle of it Lord Derby found them.
"Welcome, Derby," said the Prince, "though, for the first time since I
knew you, you wear the favours of both parties."
"Be pleased to jest," laughed the other. "For my part, I know my wife
will soon be seeing me at Lathom."
"But, indeed, you wear both favours--rebel blood on your clothes, and a
warmer crimson running from your thigh."
Derby stooped to readjust the bandage. Sickness of body was nothing.
Long battle for the King who did not trust him was forgotten, as a
service rendered freely, not asking for return. "It is permitted, these
bleak days, that a man ask grace to love his wife and hurry to her
side?"
"Get home to Lathom, but not just yet. I have a gift for that brave
wife of yours."
Through the uproar came other zealots, bringing captured colours in,
until seven-and-twenty were gathered in the market-square.
"These speak for the strength of the attack on Lathom," said Rupert, his
voice lifted for all men to hear. "Take them to Lady Derby as a token
of my high regard. Tell her that it is easy for men to charge at speed
and win their battles, but hard for women to sit behind crumbling walls
and hold the siege. If I were my Lord Derby, I should be proud of such
a wife."
"Your Highness would," assented Derby with sharp, humorous simplicity.
"I have husbanded her, and know her mettle."
Again the ebb and flow of the battle scarcely ended swept across their
talk. A hot-headed band of Cavaliers was bringing fifteen prisoners
through at the double.
The captain of the Royalist band, drunk with the wine of victory,
laughed stridently. "To the ramparts with them. Give them short shrift
on the walls! Measure for measure, say I, and curse these psalm-singing
butchers."
Through the laughter of the troop came Rupert's voice, harsh and
resonant. "Who are these, Captain Sturgis?"
Sturgis saluted. He had heard that voice more than once in the thickest
of the onset, while Rupert was winning his spurs as a leader of light
cavalry. The wine of victory left him. "A few crop-headed folk, your
Highness," he said lamely. "We proposed to make them a warning to other
butchers of Cromwell's following."
"Captain Sturgis, I am sorry. We have shared many fights, and yesterday
you were a gentleman of the King's."
There was silence in the market-place; and presently Sturgis saluted
Rupert with extreme precision. "To-morrow, by your leave, I shall
report myself. I shall spend a sleepless night."
Rupert laughed pleasantly. "There's no need to waste a night's sleep,
Sturgis. It was a madness, and it has left you, that is all."
Then all again was uproar as men pressed up and down the street, some
with prisoners, others hurrying to slake their thirst at a convenient
tavern.
"Where's Rigby?" asked Lord Derby suddenly "I have a long account to
settle with him."
A jolly yeoman caught the question as he went by. "Gone away, like the
fox on a hunting morn. I had a thrust at him myself just now, but
missed him; and he leaped the ramparts where we broke it at the
coming-in."
"So!" growled Derby. "The fox will give us sport another day."
"My lord," said the Prince, his voice grave and full of courtesy, "I
give you twenty-seven standards, captured from Rigby's forces. I give
you a hundred of my men as a guard of honour. Eat and drink, and then
get forward to Lathom, where your wife awaits you. Let the red fox
skulk until a more convenient date."
"And you?"
"I stay on here for a while. It seems to be my business these days to
batter walls down, and to stay on afterwards to build them up again.
This town is worth defending for the King. Tell Lady Derby that my
march to the relief of York will go by way of Lathom, if I may claim her
hospitality."
Kit Metcalf found himself among the hundred chosen to accompany Lord
Derby; and he was glad, for in Oxford--with its deep, unconquerable love
of attaching mystic glamour to a person or a cause--the Lady of Lathom
had grown to be a toast drunk silently, as if she were above and beyond
the noise of praise.
That evening, as the sundown reddened over Lathom House--the sultry,
rain-packed heat aglow on broken battlements--they came through the camp
deserted lately by Colonel Rigby. A sentry challenged them; and Lord
Derby laughed as any boy might do.
"A Stanley for the King! Have I been away so long, Thornthwaite, that
you do not know your lord?"
The master, as usual, had the keener vision. In the clear light he had
recognised the sentry as one old in service to his household. They
passed through; and in the courtyard Lady Derby was standing near the
captured mortar, talking of ways and means with one of her captains.