The Rafael Sabatini Megapack. Rafael Sabatini
had been his fault—however indirectly—that Feversham had been forewarned. “But how lost?” he cried a moment later.
“Ask Grey,” snapped Trenchard. “Ask his craven, numskulled lordship. He had as good a hand in losing it as any. Oh, it was all most infernally mishandled, as has been everything in this ill-starred rising. Grey sent back Godfrey, the guide, and attempted in the dark to find his own way across the rhine. He missed the ford. What else could the fool have hoped? And when he was discovered and Dunbarton’s guns began to play on us—hell and fire! we ran as if Sedgemoor had been a race-course.
“The rest was but the natural sequel. The foot, seeing our confusion, broke. They were rallied again; broke again; and again were rallied; but all too late. The enemy was up, and with that damned ditch between us there was no getting to close quarters with them. Had Grey ridden round, and sought to turn their flank, things might have been—O God!—they would have been entirely different. I did suggest it. But for my pains Grey threatened to pistol me if I presumed to instruct him in his duty. I would to Heaven I had pistolled him where he stood.”
Walters, at gaze in the doorway, listened to the bitter tirade. Wilding, on the settle, sat silent a moment, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, his eyes set and grim as Trenchard’s own. Then he mastered himself, and waved a hand towards the table where stood food and wine.
“Eat and drink, Nick,” he said, “and we’ll discuss what’s to be done.”
“It’ll need little discussing,” was Nick’s savage answer as he rose and went to pour himself a cup of wine. “There’s but one course open to us —instant flight. I am for Minehead to join Hewling’s horse, which went there yesterday for guns. We might seize a ship somewhere on the coast, and thus get out of this infernal country of mine.”
They discussed the matter in spite of Trenchard’s having said that there was nothing to discuss, and in the end Wilding agreed to go with him. What choice had he? But first he must go to Bridgwater to reassure his wife.
“To Bridgwater?” blazed Trenchard, in a passion at the folly of the suggestion. “You’re clearly mad! All the King’s forces will be there in an hour or two.”
“No matter,” said Wilding, “I must go. I am dead already, as it happens.” And he related his singular adventure in Feversham’s camp last night.
Trenchard heard him in amazement. If any suspicion crossed his mind that his friend’s love affairs had had anything to do with rousing Feversham prematurely, he showed no sign of it. But he shook his head at Wilding’s insistence that he must first go to Lupton House.
“Shalt send a message, Anthony. Walters will find some one to bear it. But you must not go yourself.”
In the end Mr. Trenchard prevailed upon him to adopt this course, however reluctant he might be. Thereafter they proceeded to make their preparations. There were still a couple of nags in the stables, in spite of the visitation of the militia, and Walters was able to find fresh clothes for Mr. Trenchard above-stairs.
A half-hour later they were ready to set out on this forlorn hope of escape; the horses were at the door, and Mr. Wilding was in the act of drawing on the fresh pair of boots which Walters had fetched him. Suddenly he paused, his foot in the leg of his right boot, and sat bemused a moment.
Trenchard, watching him, waxed impatient. “What ails you now?” he croaked.
Without answering him, Wilding turned to Walters. “Where are the boots I wore last night?” he asked, and his voice was sharp—oddly sharp, considering how trivial the matter of his speech.
“In the kitchen,” answered Walters.
“Fetch me them.” And he kicked off again the boot he had half drawn on.
“But they are all befouled with mud, sir.”
“Clean them, Walters; clean them and let me have them.”
Still Walters hesitated, pointing out that the boots he had brought his master were newer and sounder. Wilding interrupted him impatiently. “Do as I bid you, Walters.” And the old man, understanding nothing, went off on the errand.
“A pox on your boots!” swore Trenchard. “What does this mean?”
Wilding seemed suddenly to have undergone a transformation. His gloom had fallen from him. He looked up at his old friend and, smiling, answered him. “It means, Nick, that whilst these excellent boots that Walters would have me wear might be well enough for a ride to the coast such as you propose, they are not at all suited to the journey I intend to make.”
“Maybe,” said Nick with a sniff, “you’re intending to journey to Tower Hill?”
“In that direction,” answered Mr. Wilding suavely.
“I am for London, Nick. And you shall come with me.”
“God save us! Do you keep a fool’s egg under that nest of hair?”
Wilding explained, and by the time Walters returned with the boots Trenchard was walking up and down the room in an odd agitation. “Odds my life, Tony!” he cried at last. “I believe it is the best thing.”
“The only thing, Nick.”
“And since all is lost, why…” Trenchard blew out his cheeks and smacked fist into palm. “I am with you,” said he.
CHAPTER XXIV
JUSTICE
It has fallen to my lot in the course of this veridical chronicle of Mr. Anthony Wilding’s connection with the Rebellion in the West, and of his wedding and post-nuptial winning of Ruth Westmacott, to relate certain matters of incident and personality that may be accounted strange. But the strangest yet remains to be related. For in spite of all that had passed between Sir Rowland Blake and the Westmacotts on that memorable night of Sunday to Monday, on which the battle of Sedgemoor was lost and won, towards the end of that same month of July we find him not only back at Lupton House, but once again the avowed suitor of Mr. Wilding’s widow. For effrontery this is a matter of which it is to be doubted whether history furnishes a parallel. Indeed, until the circumstances are sifted it seems wild and incredible. So let us consider these.
On the morrow of Sedgemoor, the town of Bridgwater became invested—infested were no whit too strong a word—by the King’s forces under Feversham and the odious Kirke, and there began a reign of terror for the town. The prisons were choked with attainted and suspected rebels. From Bridgwater to Weston Zoyland the road was become an avenue of gallows, each bearing its repulsive gemmace-laden burden; for the King’s commands were unequivocal, and hanging was the order of the day.
It is not my desire at this stage to surfeit you with the horrors that were perpetrated during that hideous week of July, when no man’s life was safe from the royal butchers. The awful campaign of Jeifreys and his four associates was yet to follow, but it is doubtful if it could compare in ruthlessness with that of Feversham and Kirke. At least, when Jeifreys came, men were given a trial—or what looked like it—and there remained them a chance, however slender, of acquittal, as many lived to prove thereafter. With Feversham there was no such chance. And it was of this circumstance that Sir Rowland Blake took the fullest and the cowardliest advantage.
There can be no doubt that Sir Rowland was a villain. It might be urged for him that he was a creature of circumstance, and that had circumstances been other it is possible he had been a credit to his name. But he was weak in character, and out of that weakness he had developed a Herculean strength in villainy. Failure had dogged him in everything he undertook. Broken at the gaming-tables, hounded out of town by creditors, he was in desperate straits to repair his fortunes and, as we have seen, he was not nice in his endeavours to achieve that end.
Ruth Westmacott’s fair inheritance had seemed an easy thing to conquer, and to its conquest he had applied himself to suffer defeat as he had suffered it in all things else. But Sir Rowland did not yet acknowledge himself beaten, and the Bridgwater reign of terror dealt him a fresh hand—a hand of trumps. With this