Chapter 3

The night was so long that Penitence kept taking out Rupert's time-piece and shaking it, believing it had stopped, until it did. She fell asleep and woke up to find she was clutching the time-piece to her chest. Prue was still standing at the window. 'Ladyship.'

Penitence went to stand beside her. The artillery had stopped, though sounds of musketry had become widespread. And the sky had changed, losing the deepest layer of black. 'Dawn.'

They went out into the expectant air of a July dawn, crossed the moat and went down to the gates. Firing was much closer now and they could see the occasional tiny stabs of light that went with it. The first scream they thought was an owl's until it lasted too long. There were others, shouts and splashings, travelling easily over the flatness from differing distances.

Cordite tinged the air which grew lighter until the landscape revealed itself as if dipped in milk; white at the bottom where the mist was thick and then in opaque gradations so that the top branches of willow and alder stuck up like flat scenery artistically arranged between a muslin haze. It was going to be a beautiful day.

The sharp kik-kik-kik of a water-rail in the reeds woke up the land birds in the Priory trees. A marsh harrier began quartering his hunting ground, waiting for the mist to clear.

With the birdsong came the ragged shouts of men, still some way off but unmistakably swearing in panic.

'Where are they?' It was like being marooned on a mountain top trying to penetrate cloud cover below them.

'Heading for Scaup rhine,' said Prue. They couldn't see the men, only the dislodgement of the haze made by their running. What they could see was the horsemen who chased them because eerily, almost ridiculously, the horsemen's hats were the only things visible. Ten or so hats, mostly brown, one black with a high feather, zigzagged through the marsh like hounds. Once a sabre rose up above the haze to gleam in the dawn sun before it flashed down. There was a scream.

Giggling even as she wept, Prue said: 'Which is which?'

'It doesn't matter.' It only mattered that the hidden foxes should escape those dreadful, millinery hounds. Even if it was Benedick under one of those hats, she still prayed that the men he was chasing got away.

The mist was clearing and the bank of the rhine was high so that they could see the running men as they topped the bank and fell down into the trench of fog on the other side. 'So many.' Twenty or so. They were too far away to distinguish faces, for which Penitence was always glad, but they could see the fear. They could tell that one didn't attempt the bank but ran along it, because the figure of a cavalryman bobbed in a horizontal direction on his invisible horse until his sabre swept in a beautiful movement along the line of his gallop. They saw him come trotting back.

The cavalrymen dismounted and ran to the top of the bank. This time they had pistols in their hands.

'Oh no,' said Prue, "tis too deep.' The men in the rhine would be dragged down by mud, trying to climb up, slipping, clawing. She began to jump up and down shouting, 'Leave un be.'

'They won't.' They were too far away to hear Prue's light voice anyway. Still Penitence joined her, waving her arms, yelling, because if it was useless, it was also against nature not to protest.

The cavalrymen used the men in the ditch for target practice. They made an elegant frieze along the bank, perfectly etched now in the sun that had burned away the mist, taking aim, once or twice pointing out an escaper to each other.

Penitence dragged Prue away as the shots began.

The two of them ventured back out of the gates when the firing was over. If the royal army had won the battle, two of the men in the ditch might be Benedick and MacGregor. Whoever had won the battle, there might be somebody still alive in the rhine.

But though the cavalrymen had gone, the Levels were busy and they didn't dare venture into them. Here and there knots of mounted men rode the causeways. Sometimes they dismounted to slash at clumps of reeds with their sabres. Every hut and haystack on the marshes was burning. Once, the two women saw a line of men roped around the neck being driven north along the Taunton causeway. At least they're taking prisoners. But who's taking who prisoner?

The morning wore on while they dithered and did nothing until it became afternoon. 'I can't bear it. I'm saddling the damn donkey. I'll ride over to Ostyn's. I've got to know.'

Together they went towards the farm, Prue protesting it was dangerous to go. Then she said: 'There's some'un behind us.'

They had come the old way to the farmyard rather than up the house drive; it was quicker. Behind them the deep ruts of the track disappeared round a bend dappled with cowpats and the shadow of leaves. As Penitence listened she heard a dislodged stone rattle away from a foot. 'Get into the trees.'

But lumbering round the bend with a body across his shoulders was Mudge. The body's dark hanging hair hid its face and funnelled blood down Mudge's jacket but Penitence knew who it was. She ran to him. 'Thank you, Mudge. Oh, Mudge, oh Mudge, thank you.'

She steadied her son's head as Mudge lowered his body on to the track. 'Is he all right?' She could see he wasn't. Around his forehead a piece of lace she recognized as the bottom of one of Dorinda's petticoats had dislodged and was allowing blood to seep out of a wound that had torn across the back of his head. His skin was yellow-white.

'He'll live.' Mudge straightened and put his hands to the small of his back. 'He's a tidy weight.'

'Where did you find him? Is Dorinda with you? Where's MacGregor?'

'Miracle 'twas.' Mudge addressed his sister. 'There's King's men all over but the man MacGregor'd got un in a dip on Yancy Hill. Miss Dorinda weren't pleased we had to go so far. "I told you further south, you ballocker," she says to her man as she kissed un and he smiled like, then he fainted. Broken ribs, I reckon.'

'Who won, Mudge?' On reflection it was a stupid question. If Monmouth had won MacGregor and Benedick could have stayed on the battlefield and waited for the ambulance carts instead of dragging themselves to a dip in the Polden hills.

The Devil,' Mudge told her. He kissed his sister. 'Can 'ee drag the boy from here? I'd better get back before the patrols get un other two. Miss Dorinda can't manage alone.'

'Be careful, Mudge. Thank you, Mudge.'

Penitence didn't even watch him go, and didn't allow Prue to, but called her to put Benedick's arm round her shoulders and help her get him to the house. He was completely unconscious and his weight was fearful; he'd grown. The toes of his boots dragged wavy lines in the dust of the track. Once across the other side of the moat, the women had to prop him on the bench inside the gatehouse tunnel while they rested.

They'd reached half-way across the courtyard when they heard hooves trotting up the drive. Prue began to pull towards the hall door, but Penitence pulled to the left. 'In here, in here.' The north wing door was nearest and stood open. Doubled up under their burden, they almost fell over the threshold and Penitence kicked the door shut behind her.

'Upstairs. Quickly. Quickly.' Whoever it was would try the hall first — the more impressive door and the first to be seen on entering the courtyard. She had her son's hands in hers now and was hauling him from above while Prue pushed from below.

Benedick's boots caught on every rise with a loud click but the sounds of hooves and voices in the courtyard covered it — whoever it was, there were a lot of them. The door to her bedroom was only a yard away now. The staircase was narrow but, thank God, well polished.

The men were in the house now. Even from here she could hear boots and spurs in the screen passage and somebody shouting in the name of the King.

'Go round,' she panted to Prue. 'Go round the hall way so they don't think you've come from here. Keep them there. Offer them ale.'

'Wreckers took that last week.' Prue let go Benedick's legs and squeezed past him up the stairs to the tortuous passage that eventually bent round to run between the hall and solar to the stairs.

'Offer them anything. I need a few minutes.'

They'll look under the bed,' Prue warned her.

Not behind it. 'Go, for God's sake. Before they come up.'

How she did it, she never knew. Later that day she was hobbling from lifting a weight half as much again as her own on to her bed, clambering through the panel, then pulling the body through after her. At the time she didn't notice pain. She had to do it anyhow, no time to consider the boy's wound. The elegant frieze of figures standing on the bank of a rhine taking aim at men floundering below kept moving through her mind. They'll shoot him. She tugged fiercely at her son, furious at him, ready to kill for him, until his legs scraped over the sill and they both fell backwards on to the floor of the secret room.

No time to see him comfortable. Even above the sound of her own panting she could hear boots coming along the corridor towards her bedroom and Penitence's voluble protests: 'Her Ladyship's sleeping.'

Penitence dived for the square of light that was the opening in the bedhead, got herself through, squirmed round and dragged the panel back. It clicked into place, she got off the bed, the bedroom door opened — all simultaneously.

She patted bits of her dress and herself into place, and the man who came through the door saw her do it. But that's all right. If I'd just woken up I'd do the same. It was an actress's response: yes, my character would do that. She knew she was going to have to act to the top of her bent for this man.

He was bleach-haired, thirty-odd, not bad-looking and he didn't believe anything; not that the earth went round the sun, not that the sun went round the earth, not in God, not in non- belief. From the moment Penitence set eyes on Nevis she knew he lived in a vacuum.

'Major Peter Nevis, mistress.' His eyes roamed the room before resting on her: 'Search it.'

So exactly did the last words match the tone of his greeting that she thought he was addressing them to her but, as he said them, two soldiers leaped forward and pushed her out of the way to kick open her clothes press, tear down paintings, overturn her mirror and shake out the contents of her scent bottles and powder boxes. While one ripped through the bed- hangings with his sword the other dived under the bed and came up with the chamber pot, shaking it over the floor and then, as if disappointed it was empty, throwing it against the wall, where it broke.

She remained calm. Would my character remain calm? It would have to; she was shaking too hard with relief at having got Benedick hidden to simulate anger. Anyway, the destruction was being perpetrated less as a search — who would hide in a scent bottle? — than to get her frightened. And this much she already knew: if she showed fear to Major Peter Nevis he'd want more.

She showed dignity instead. 'And why is this being done?'

'Guess.' He was tossing robes out of her clothes press with the end of his sword, idly, not looking at them. His eyes were directed at the bed.

'1 guess it is because you are a lout, sir.'

'Not a bad guess.' He sidled over to the bed and sat on it with his sword point-down to the floor between his knees and his hands crossed on its hilt. 'But my guess is you're hiding somebody, Mistress . ..?' He raised an interrogative eyebrow.

'Hughes.'

'Mistress Hughes. In fact I know you are. A man carrying another was seen coming up this rise from the marsh.'

Is that all? There was some abatement to her terror. 'Oh well,' she said with sarcasm, 'that proves it. He wouldn't have been going to the village, or the church, or the farm, he'd have been coming here. What an idiotic fellow you are.' Play the grand lady, the royalist, make him ashamed of suspecting her, her, of hiding a rebel.

'Yes,' said Major Nevis, 'he would. You see, Mistress Hughes, I have a wonderful instinct. The Arabs used to say I had a third ear. That may be because I cut off so many of theirs, of course, but I like to think it was because I hear the things people aren't saying.'

His left hand was feeling in the rumpled bedclothes. 'For instance, the first thing your abigail didn't say to me when she met us in the hall was that she had something to hide. Now you aren't telling me you are concealing someone.'

He had wonderful instinct right enough, but he wasn't sure. And I'm an actress. She could feel his mind probing her stance, looking for weakness and disconcerted at not finding any. Time to bring in the big guns. 'Fellow,' she said, 'you will regret this nonsense when I tell Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys of it.'

'Tell the King while you're about it, mistress.'

'I could,' she said, 'I know him too.'

He brought his hand out from the bedcovers and sniffed it. 'And explain to the King why there's fresh blood in your bed?'

Her toes curled with the effort not to show shock. She'd dragged Benedick to the bed, then climbed on it and hauled him so that his head and trunk rested across it while she got the panel open. That's when the blood went on the covers; after that she'd put a pillow over the two sills and sledged him through on it. He'd bled on the pillow as well, but by the mercy of God she'd just had time to put it between his head and the floor of the secret room.

'You humiliate me, Major, if you force me to explain what happens to women at certain times of the month.' She ought to blush but her face was bloodless. It might shame him.

It didn't. He nodded — more at an opponent scoring a hit than if he believed her. She braced herself. He was capable of having her stripped to make sure she was menstruating.

Slowly, like a-puppet's, his head began to turn to the left as if it was being drawn to consider the bedhead. He brought up his sword and casually began digging its point into bits of the carving and flicking it out again. Penitence stood frozen, unable to think, just watching as the swordpoint went into the eye of a hare, then flicked off the nose of a dachshund, stabbed Adam's navel, waiting for the inevitable when it pierced Eve's nipple.

There was an altercation at the door; somebody shouting, Nevis's lieutenant was shouting back. She heard the word 'wounded'. Pay attention to them, not Eve. The man had powers but perhaps she could will them towards something else. Not Eve. Not my son.

He was looking at her. 'I'm going to find him, Mistress Hughes. Wherever he is, I'm going to find him.'

And she believed him.

'Bring her down.' He stood up and went out of the door, and the soldiers took Penitence's arms and marched her after him.

In the courtyard a standard hung above the archway of the gatehouse tunnel painted with the Paschal Lamb. Beneath it, two horses were coming in, the wheels of the cart they pulled still sounding on the bridge. Sir Ostyn Edwards in the red and yellow uniform of the Devon and Somerset Militia was striding ahead of it, shaking his fist at Major Nevis: 'I ain't leaving the wounded waiting in that dang marsh no more. Fly-blown, poor 'andsomes. They needs good water and good women to nurse un.' He turned to Penitence: 'Ain't that so, Mistress Hughes? Good water and good women.'

She could have kissed him. 'Bring them in, Sir Ostyn.'

Mollified, the magistrate gestured to red-and-yellow-clad soldiers to start lifting down the men who lay in the cart and the one behind it, grumbling to Penitence and the world in general as he did so. '"Wait" he says. "There's rebels in that house," he says. "May be Monmouth," he says. "Wait 'til I go and ferret un out," he says.' He turned on Major Nevis, looking like a gaudy bantam cockerel. 'And I told you Mistress Hughes was a good friend to Prince Rupert hisself and as like to shelter Monmouth or his rebels as my arse.'

Major Nevis addressed his lieutenant: 'Nobody to go in the house until you've finished searching, Captain. After that nobody to go in the house without they're accompanied by you or Canto.'

'Yes, sir.' Nevis's lieutenant had long black hair, olive skin and an earring but he looked capable. Of anything, thought Penitence.

'I'll be back.' Major Nevis swung himself up into his saddle and rode out with his mounted troop behind him. He hadn't so much ignored Sir Ostyn as seemed unaware of his existence.

The magistrate shook his fist after him. 'I'll write to the King, iss fay. Just because we'm militia, don't mean you can treat us any old way.' He nudged Penitence and repeated, 'Just because we'm militia.'

But Penitence was watching the major doff his hat in a salute to the standard hanging from the gatehouse as he rode under it, or rather, she watched the hat. It was black and had a high feather. It had been predominant among the hats that had hunted down the men in the mist that morning.

'Good riddance to un.' Sir Ostyn wiped his top lip with a hand that shook, and Penitence knew it had taken courage even for a magistrate to stand up to Major Nevis.

'Who is he?'

'Colonel Kirk's second-in-command. One o' the Lambs.' At her incomprehension he jerked his head towards the standard embroidered with the Paschal Lamb. 'See them colours? Never thought I'd see men scared of a danged sheep but that un'd frighten its own side, never mind the enemy. Kirk and Nevis, just back from the garrison in Tangier. Ask me, they've learned nasty ways from they danged Tangerines. Very nasty. Still, the King do love un.' He turned to his wounded who were being helped off the carts. 'Well, Jem, there's a cut to be proud of. Missus would have complained if ut was an inch higher, I reckon.'

Nevis's second-in-command, a lieutenant with the unlikely name of Jones, interpreted his superior's orders meticulously; Prue was only allowed to enter the house under guard, Penitence wasn't allowed in at all, and the wounded lay on the cobbles of the courtyard in full sun all the afternoon. More and more injured were brought to the Priory gates as word spread that it had been designated the casualty post for the southern end of the Levels.

'You thank God it's royal troops mostly down yere,' Sir Ostyn told her. 'Up by Weston Zoyland they got all the injured rebels in the churchyard. Thousands, they do say.'

'How do they know which is which?' she asked furiously. Not all the militia were in uniform, having run straight from their fields and jobs to answer the call to arms. Blood mixed with mud rendered it impossible to tell the original colour of the cloth Penitence cut away from wounds that day. Army, militia, rebel, they were all suffering. She got up from her knees to face Lieutenant Jones: 'Will you let me go to my room for more bandages?'

He surprised her: 'Yes.' He chewed tobacco — a habit she hadn't come across before. When he smiled, as he did now, his teeth were tan-coloured. He spoke very little, probably so as not to betray a foreign accent, but he listened a lot. As she'd bent over a dying man to catch his last words, Lieutenant Jones was there, catching them too. Soothing a patient's head with a cold cloth, her arm was obstructed by Lieutenant Jones as he listened to the delirious babblings.

'Good.' She pushed past him to the north door, found he was going with her and changed direction to go in by the hall instead. The Tudor wing stairs might have blood on them.

She strode ahead, desperate. She begrudged nothing to the men she was nursing, except that her own son lay without help a few yards away. This was the first time she'd been permitted to enter her house since .. . she looked back over her shoulder and saw that it was evening sun lighting up the screen passage . .. since midday. Prue had been allowed in, but always under guard. Even had Prue known how to enter the secret room she was too closely watched to help Benedick. The girl looked as desperate as Penitence felt; on top of the worry for Benedick was the anxiety for Mudge, Dorinda and MacGregor out on the marshes. The activity around the Priory would warn them not to come close, but on the other hand where could they hide? Royal troops were scouring the Levels for fleeing rebels. Every so often some half-dead scarecrow was flung into the courtyard to be patched up by the doctors before being marched off to the prison carts.

If she had not lived through the Plague and seen what it did to the human body, Penitence would have been no use to the men who lay in rows across her courtyard. Prue had kept retching each time the surgeons uncovered an anemone- coloured bit of bowel or liver or revealed a piece of bone glistening white among the blood. Penitence, fighting sickness herself, had kept her busy fetching water from the pump.

Flies were attracted by the stench and heat. There was no shade. Time and again, Penitence appealed to Lieutenant Jones to let his soldiers take the men into the cool of the hall but he refused.

She was trying to bandage a stomach wound when some militia soldiers began dragging her patient away towards their cart. 'He's a Monmouth, Ladyship,' explained their sergeant, pointing to the white cockade pinned to the man's jacket.

'He's hurt.' she screamed. The sergeant - a local man, she knew his face from somewhere - was not unsympathetic. 'Better let me have un, Ladyship.' He cocked his head towards the mild woolly shape sewn on the standard over the archway. 'He's a rebel dog, but tid'n pretty to see dogs torn by Lambs. That old boy Nevis, he don't take prisoners.'

His subordinates didn't leave stones unturned either. As Penitence passed through her house she couldn't see a chair standing upright. Cupboard doors were off their hinges, every tapestry cut from its pole. All the portraits, even the two of Rupert, lay face-down in the hall.

But the greatest destruction was in her bedroom. Nevis had returned to it to inflict more. Her down quilt had been stabbed so that the place was snowed with feathers. Her needlework which had been stretched on a frame by the window was slashed across and across.

The devastation had a message. Nevis's instinct was telling him the room concealed something. It was also a display of sexual hatred; her shifts and under-petticoats had been hung from the tester rail of the bed and a hole gouged out from the front of each skirt at pelvic level. Most serious from her point of view was the door's smashed lock which stopped her from securing it.

Lieutenant Jones's dark eyes were on her face to see how she reacted. She almost forgot to - she could only think of the boy in his hiding-place. He could have bled to death or choked on vomit. He'd been in darkness without food or drink for over four hours.

It was an effort to keep her eyes away from the bedhead. It was an effort not to pick up a torn piece of wood from her tapestry stand and stab the leering pig to death. They'd hear if he screamed. It was her only reason for not doing it.

The bandages from her medicine chest were spilled on the floor. As she gathered them up she caught a glimpse of her face in a shard of her looking-glass. It was dirty. Now she came to think of it, she hadn't done anything to her appearance since she left the inn at Yeovil ... incredulously she counted back . .. only yesterday morning.

God damn them all. I'll he clean if the skies fall. 'Will you leave while I wash?' she asked.

She glimpsed his brown teeth as he spat. Deliberately, she went to her toilet cupboard and washed. She balanced the sliver of glass on her scored dressing-table, searched among the wreckage for her hairbrush, righted a stool and sat down to brush her hair.

'You want change your robe I don't mind.' Lieutenant Jones's voice insinuated down from somewhere above her head. He was behind her. She could feel the heat of his groin against the back of her neck.

Will it help Benedick if I do this? It's how I saved him once before. She calculated. Was there the remotest possibility that this man would allow her to tend to Benedick for services rendered? No. Her body wasn't sufficient incentive now for a man like this to betray his superiors for long. She studied the dark eyes reflected in the mirror and knew they had looked on excesses she couldn't even think of. Benedick was better off dying unconscious in his hole than in the hands of this man.

'Get away from me,' she said.

For a moment she rested her head in her hands, her fingers threading her hair. How had all this happened in a day? This was war, then, this thing arbitrated by other people, those poor men out there, her son dying in his hole, this sudden collapse of all structure, this lady of the manor transformed back to actress and then to calculating whore.

Hooves clattered in the courtyard and Jones moved over to the window to see, then jerked a thumb at her. 'Down. Now.' He was suddenly in a hurry.

She began gathering up ointment jars from the floor in the hope that he'd lose patience and go without her. He lost patience but drew his sword instead. 'Down.' Hastily, she swept jars and bandages into her apron and preceded the man down the stairs.

'Evacuate this place. Get these men down to the ambulance carts.' It was Major Nevis's voice. Some of his soldiers were already joining the militia doctors in carrying stretchers across the bridge.

Not until she saw him again did Penitence realize what fear Nevis had left in her. His figure on his horse was outlined against a glorious sunset - and turned it grey. She might cope with everyone else to bring herself and her son out of this situation intact — Sir Ostyn, bless him, the lustful Jones, even Monmouth if he found his way here — but Captain Nevis was beyond anything that she could manage. He had no bounds.

The men with him were of similar, though paler, stamp. Uniformed, they still gave the impression of irregulars: thinner, quicker, more wolfish than standing army soldiers.

Jones crossed the courtyard, stepping over the stretchers, and his commander bent down so that the man could whisper in his ear. Is it about me? The men surrounding Nevis's horse were fixing bayonets. The click of the knives fitting into the muzzle of muskets brought up the head of each man in the courtyard capable of lifting it.

With Jones leading the way Major Nevis, still mounted, followed to one of the wounded lying in the shade of one of Penitence's flower urns. Their men came behind, lifting their feet like cats to avoid the bodies stretched on the cobbles. She heard Jones say: 'He's one.'

It was the wounded man who'd been delirious and babbling while she cooled his forehead and Jones listened. She'd known even then that he was a rebel who'd been mistaken and brought in for a royalist soldier — he'd kept raving of 'King Monmouth' as she tried to hush him and hope that Jones didn't understand his thick Somersetshire.

She watched Nevis nod, saw the right elbows of two of his men crook as they brought up their muskets, then straighten. She saw the bayonets go into the body of the man at their feet, and still didn't believe what had happened. The steel went in so easily. There'd been just a twitch then, again so easily, the man was dead.

Penitence found herself running forward. What are you doing? He was alive.' Sir Ostyn was behind her, backing her up. You varlet, you villain. I protest, sir.'

'Do you?' asked Nevis. 'The man was a rebel. Perhaps a spy.'

'You dog, sir,' shouted a militia surgeon from the other side of the courtyard. 'He was entitled to trial.'

'Trial?' said Nevis. 'You want a trial?' He was looking towards the gatehouse. The setting sun was shining through its tunnel in an arch of orange light that made the eye blink. Black figures stood against it, one dumpy and still with a distorted collar round its neck and what looked like a lead snaking upwards from it.

Penitence couldn't make it out. But from the other side of the courtyard she heard Prue gasp: 'Barnzo. Barnzo, what they doing to ee?' She watched the girl run into the light and be pushed to the ground by one of the guarding figures.

Penitence turned to the man on the horse. 'It's Barnzo,' she said, as if he'd know.

Nevis's voice was negligent but it carried into the silence. 'Stands accused of obstructing His Majesty's soldiers when they were searching the village for rebels and of shouting epithets against the King. Ask the prisoner if he has anything to say, Harris.'

There were villagers on the other side of the moat. From his height Penitence recognized Jack Fuller, who was the tallest man in Athelzoy and Barnzo's father.

'He says Bur, bur, bur, sir,' called back Harris, and somebody laughed.

It was a trick of Major Nevis that as he talked he looked elsewhere than at the person he was addressing until his last sentence. He did it now, turning his head as if considering the upper windows that looked down at him from three sides. 'Anything to say in this man's defence, Mistress Hughes? Like who was being carried up this rise this morning and by whom?' Now he looked at her. 'And where he is now?'

He's trying to make me an accomplice. The sun through the tunnel turned the gatehouse entrance into a proscenium arch against which actors stood in perfect, black silhouette. It's a play. It isn't real. She said: 'He's a simpleton. You can't hang him. Please don't.' It wasn't the right line. Too feeble. It is a play. But it's real. Even if she could trade Benedick's life for Barnzo's, she had no right to trade Mudge's.

Nevis nodded to the silhouettes around Barnzo and Penitence shut her eyes. She heard the screams from Prue and the villagers.

When she opened her eyes again the silly round face of the Paschal Lamb looked down on a bundle that swung beneath its embroidered hooves. Beneath them both carts with wounded were trundling across the bridge and down the drive. On the other side of the moat the relief of villagers was kneeling, all except Jack Fuller who stood upright and still.

A shocked Ostyn Edwards lectured Nevis. 'No harm in that poor soul, 'twas sheer cruelty to hang un. I'm going to report you to the King.'

Nevis stretched. 'You're going to take the wounded to Taunton.'

Penitence said quickly: 'Don't leave me, Sir Ostyn.' The thought of being alone with Nevis terrified her.

'I won't, maid,' he said stoutly. 'I take my orders from the Duke of Somerset and from the Duke of Somerset only.'

'Captain Sir Ostyn Edwards?' said Nevis.

'I am, sir.'

'In charge of the Cary Valley troop of the Somerset Militia?'

'And proud of it, sir.' Sir Ostyn put his arm around Penitence.

'Ordered by Commander Feversham four days ago to destroy the bridge over the rhine at Chedzoy so as to deny it to the enemy and still deliberating on how to do it when the enemy crossed it yesterday?' Nevis's eyes regarded the sky.

'T'wasn't. . .' Penitence felt Sir Ostyn's stout arm slacken.

'Mistook a hollow tree trunk in a hedge for artillery and called on his men to retreat, as it turned out, into real enemy fire?'

Sir Ostyn's arm dropped away from Penitence's shoulders.

'Poured rapid fire into advancing enemy all night to discover when dawn broke that he'd peppered the sails of Somerton windmill?'

Sir Ostyn said nothing.

At last Nevis looked at him. 'Now fuck off to Taunton.'

Lieutenant Jones and some of the Lambs lined up to cheer a destroyed Sir Ostyn as he and his troop disappeared into the last of the sun underneath Barnzo's still-hanging body.

Penitence tried to remember where she'd put the Bridgwater merchant's pistol. She was going to be raped or killed, probably both. Her death would mean Benedick's. She had never felt so frightened but if she could remember where she'd put her pistol she'd go down fighting. She was as terrified for Prue as for herself and her son; the girl didn't deserve what was going to happen to her now. Nobody deserved what was going to happen ... In the kitchen chimney. That was it. She'd become irritated as it clanked against her knees while she'd helped Prue prepare soup during the long hours of waiting for Dorinda to come back.

Stay away. At the thought of Dorinda, Penitence felt tears come to her eyes. Keep safe. But I wish you were here. You and me together.

Leaning over the pot she'd felt the pistol hit her knees again and had put it on the sooty shelf inside the chimney. If Nevis's men hadn't thought to look in the chimney, it was still there.

She heard a whimper. Prue had been pushed into the middle of the courtyard in a circle of soldiers.

Penitence staggered as the shoulder of Nevis's horse nudged her forward. She looked up. Nevis's hands were on the pommel of his saddle. He was apparently riveted by the condition of his horse's right ear. 'There's two ways of doing this, Mistress Hughes.'

'I'm not hiding anybody,' she said, and knelt down. 'Please, sir, please, I'm not hiding anybody.' She had turned liquid with fear. There wasn't anything she wouldn't do if he would only not let happen what he was going to let happen.

'One way,' he said, 'is to give your abigail to my men until you tell me where and who you're hiding.' He smiled and turned his head so that he looked at her. 'Or I can set fire to the house.'

'Please,' she said, 'please.'

From somewhere came anger. An odd, almost unrelated anger, for the reduction decent people suffered at the hands of monsters like this man on the horse above her.

How dare he unman poor, amiable Sir Ostyn and his militia because they couldn't kill? They were crop-growers, children- raisers, they made things - they didn't have time to leam how to destroy efficiently. How dare he take away a harmless life like Bamzo's, how dare he threaten atrocity on Prue, on her. How dare he hate women.

'You bastard,' she said and ran for the kitchen.

She got to the chimney in time to see that the pisol wasn't there before they caught her and dragged her back to the courtyard. Her bolt had released the men to action and Prue, lost somewhere under a crowd of them, was screaming. Penitence screamed with her as she kicked and spat at the two men who held her back.

And stopped.

'That's not nice, lads. Don't do it,' said a voice that managed to carry and remain conversational at the same time. Somebody new had ridden, unheard, into the courtyard.

'I heard women screaming,' said the voice, chattily, 'and I said to the Brigadier: That must be old Nevis up there, let's call in. And he said: It looks a decentish place, why not spend the night there? He'll be here in a minute, by the way. Help the lady up, Muskett.'

Prue, clutching the torn basque of her dress to her breasts, was helped to her feet by a sturdy soldier in buff uniform. Nevis's men edged reluctantly back, wild animals driven back from a carcase by flame. They looked from the speaker on his horse to their major on his. The newcomer had the red and yellow flashes of the Somerset Militia on his collar and sleeves but he was no Sir Ostyn; there was a whip behind the sociability of his tone; besides, he held a pistol - carelessly and as if he didn't know he had it, but steadily - pointed in their direction.

Unnoticed in the shadows, a great peace descended on Penitence. The other soldier who'd come in with him held a flare which lit up his face; she was eighteen again and he looked as he'd looked in a Rookery alley, smiling on her attackers as if he loved them.

And I loved you. Then and ever since. So much. With incredulity and pain she couldn't remember why she'd wasted twenty years away from him. Oh, God, what do I look like? She so forgot the situation they were all in that she put up a hand to adjust her hair - and found two of Nevis's soldiers still trapping her arms in theirs.

They might be on the same side but these two limbs of the army weren't losing any love for each other. The Viscount of Severn and Thames was holding off a nasty situation with personality, two men and a pistol. It isn't over yet. Take care, my dear. She'd caught a glimpse of Nevis's face. He hates you.

At that moment Henry received reinforcements. A younger man on a handsome horse came trotting into the courtyard at the head of a cavalcade of officers: 'Is supper ready, Torrington? Where is this place? Who owns it? Ah, Nevis; the corpse told me it must be you.' Somebody was already taking down Barnzo's body.

She knew this man too, though not enough to recall the name — a theatregoer, had done something disgraceful. She was saved. More important, Benedick was saved — if she could manipulate the situation aright. To do that she had to contrive what she longed for anyway, to be alone with the Viscount of Severn and Thames.

Nevis was sullen: 'The owner's a hell-hag. She's hiding a rebel. I was just going to get her to say where.'

The name.

She took a deep breath and pitched her voice across the courtyard. 'Sir John Churchill.' This was James's second-in- command in the West.

He looked round and squinted in the attempt to place her. At his side the Viscount of Severn and Thames had become very still. She shook off the men who held her and walked forward into the light of the flare, trying to look like the actress she had once been and not the exhausted harpy she felt now.

'Peg Hughes, by God. What by all that's wonderful do you here?'

'This is my house, dear,' she drawled. 'The Prince bought it for me. And I have been trying to convince this deranged oaf that I am not entertaining Monmouth in it. Win a pair of gloves, my dear, and send him away.'

He was charmed to hear theatre slang. He had been stage- struck, she remembered now. Always at the theatre. He'd attacked an orange-girl one night and Otway had called him out for it. He was introducing her to his staff: 'Gentlemen, the dearest friend' — he winked — 'of our hero Prince Rupert, and finest actress of her generation. The stage's not been the same since she and Nelly left the boards.' He made her feel ninety, though he was about the same age. 'Your precious instinct led you astray here, Nevis. Peg, may I also present Colonel Oglethorpe of the cavalry? And Viscount Severn and Thames? You were interested in the theatre at one time, Torrington. You must remember Peg Hughes.'

There was a pause. 'I do indeed.'

Penitence looked up into the face of Henry King, and fainted.

She came to as he carried her up the stairs. Prue was lighting the way and the soldier Muskett was bringing up the rear. This is ridiculous. She was, she knew, near exhaustion but to become so weak when she looked at him as to faint ... nevertheless, the sheer luxury of being in his arms was something she wasn't going to forgo by insisting on walking. Everything had gone out of her but the physical remembrance of him. She put her cheek against his neck and felt his throat move. And you remember me too. The air about them thrummed.

'You've got fatter,' he said.

She grinned because she hadn't. She moved her head so that her skin brushed against the stubble of his chin. He was breathing hard, and not just from expending energy: 'Jesus Christ.'

Prue opened the door to the bedroom and a small snowstorm of feathers rose up in the draught.

'What the hell's all this?'

Lust subsided as the nightmare of the situation came back. He put her down. She said: 'Major Nevis was searching for the rebel.'

'What did he use, cannon fire?' He caught sight of the petticoats with their obscene holes still hanging from the tester rail. 'I'll kill him.'

'Henry, I need help.' She struggled for coherence. Muskett was standing in the doorway, Prue was lighting candles in the room. 'I want Prue to go downstairs and bring me some food and drink. I want Muskett to go with her; it's not safe for her to be left alone.'

Prue looked dreadful. A trickle of blood from her nose had dried on her top lip. She'd managed to tie her torn basque together enough for decency but it showed bruises on her shoulder. 'Are you all right, Prue?' Penitence asked. 'Did they hurt you?' Of course she's not all right. Of course they hurt her. The girl was suffering reaction; the candleholder in her hand was shaking but she was regarding the man who'd saved her from rape with something approaching worship.

Penitence lowered her voice so that Muskett shouldn't hear: 'And the bandages, Prue. I left them in the courtyard. But don't let anyone see you bring them.'

The girl nodded and left. With a glance at the Viscount, Muskett followed her.

As fast as she could Penitence began heaping on the bed the things she would need in the hidden room; light, covering, water ... 'Hold this please.' She passed the Viscount a bowl and ewer.

Slowly he set them down on a table. 'I gather from this that you lied, do I? You are hiding a rebel?'

'Not Monmouth,' she said. 'It's your son.'

She was in a hurry and desperate to recruit his help or she would never have told him like that. She'd had dreams in which she told him. Sometimes it was as retribution: This is the son you abandoned when you abandoned me. Sometimes with sorrowful bounty: See the son I have been nurturing for you. But if the son wasn't to be dead when he discovered he had one she must move fast. She didn't even look to see how he took the news, but tied everything except the ewer in a sheet. She just said: 'When I knock to be let out, press Eve's nipple', pressed it herself and started clambering through the hole, dragging the bundle after her.

She heard him say: Won't she mind?' as, once in the room, she turned, took the ewer of water off the bed and shut the panel.

The cluster of holes in the wall showed that candles were lit in the hall where she could hear the great table only used for feasts being dragged to the centre of the room. There must be so many officers to be given supper that the dining-room was too small for them. I hope they've brought their own food. She wondered if her taper would be bright enough to cast a beam through the gargoyle's orifices that could be seen in the hall. She had to risk it. She needed light.

Benedick lay where she'd dumped him; his breathing was irregular and he was very cold. The room smelled of urine and vomit. For a moment she dithered, undecided which of his needs to deal with first, then set to work.

After a while the panel slid back and the Viscount's long legs came over the sill followed by the rest of him. 'Muskett's guarding the door.' He looked around. 'God Almighty.'

'Shh,' she begged, though the noise from the hall below where army sutlers were setting the table would cover any exclamations coming from a gargoyle's mouth. 'Lift him up.' As she put a folded blanket on the floor to act as a mattress under the still-unconscious Benedick, she saw the three of them in a delayed nativity: Joseph, Mary and a large baby Jesus in this taper-lit stable. It was another irreplaceable moment she had no time to savour. 'Look at his head. How bad is it?'

She'd cut the boy's hair away from the wound showing a straight path of torn flesh.

He held the taper near the wound and peered. 'I think he was lucky. The bullet grazed his skull, probably cauterizing it as it went. But it gave him a hell of a thump. He'll not be compos mentis for a bit.'

'He swallowed some sips of soup,' she said. She took the rolled strips of cloth he'd brought and began bandaging, watching him studying Benedick's face. Her movements made the light from the taper flicker, distorting the boy's features. He'll see the resemblance. It was too marked not to be noted. She saw it all the time. 'Will he be all right?'

'Dark room, rest, liquid food.' He shrugged as he looked around. 'You seem to have thought of everything. Except what they'll do to the two of you if they find you sheltering a rebel. Have you thought of that?'

She didn't understand him. 'He's my son,' she said. 'Our son.'

The noise from the hall coming through the air-holes was getting louder as officers gathered to eat. They heard Churchill's voice calling for the Viscount of Severn and Thames: 'Where's Torrington? Still tending our hostess?'

'Fucking the bitch more like,' said somebody else. It was Nevis's voice. Penitence noted that, though Churchill had reprimanded the man for his treatment of her, he hadn't sent him away.

'I thought he was courting the Portlannon girl,' said somebody.

'No marriage contract says you can't fuck a beautiful actress.'

'Turns my stomach just to sit down with militia.' Nevis again. 'If we'd left it to them, the King would've lost his bloody throne.'

'Most, I grant you,' said Churchill's voice, 'but if it hadn't been for Torrington and his North Somerset men I'd have lost my life.'

By her side, the Viscount grunted. 'I must go. I'll leave Muskett on the door. You'll be safe enough.'

So he's going to get married. She watched him squirm through the panel. 'Henry.'

His face appeared in the square. 'Yes?'

'Is the rising all over? Has the King won?'

He nodded. 'It's all over.' His eyes went to the figure on the floor. 'Bar the killing.'

She sat staring at the square of light long after he'd gone away. He didn't even ask Benedick's name. If she thought about it she would weep. But she couldn't think about it; she was too damned tired.

Gently, she laid her son's head on its side on the pillow. He was warm and clean, at least; it was as much as she could do for now. She took up the taper and crawled through the hole with it. She put the panel back, blew out the light and fell asleep.

Hours later she woke up to the sound of horses and men moving in the courtyard below her window. There were low voices outside her door, then it opened. 'It's me.'

She knew it was. She brushed feathers out of her face and hair. He came and sat on the bed. 'We're being deployed to chase what's left of the rebels. Monmouth's been sighted heading for the New Forest. I'm ordered after him.'

You're not leaving me here with Nevis.'

'No. Nevis is to join the rest of the Lambs at Taunton.' As she sighed with relief, he said: 'Just who is it you've got in there?'

'Benedick,' she said. 'He's known as Benedick Hurd.' She thanked her God that he'd used the name by which he'd been christened rather than the Benedick Hughes which was how he'd been known at court. It was unlikely that anyone would identify the Major Hurd who had allied himself with Monmouth as Peg Hughes's son and Rupert's foster-son.

'For God's sake, Boots. Hurd's one of Monmouth's cavalry commanders. Half the country's hunting for him.'

She'd had no idea. Her son still seemed a child to her. 'What are we going to do? How can I get him away?'

'You're not - until he's conscious. Then we'll see.'

'You'll come back?'

'It looks as if I'll have to.' He slammed his fist on the mattress, and feathers fluttered around them. 'For Christ's sake, Boots, there was no need of all that cock and bull to present him as my son. I wouldn't have given you away.'

'But he is your son.' She heard her voice, ineffective and whispering, a snake's hiss, the echo of women down the ages foisting somebody else's child on to the innocent, trusting, helpless male.

And he said, the Viscount said, Henry King said: 'How could you possibly tell?'

She looked at the line of his head and shoulders against the glow from the window. Twenty years had taught him nothing. His distrust of her was so great that the attraction he felt for her must be regarded as an aberration. He'd spent all his years in Louis XIV's prison — and probably most of them since - fighting the memory of the whore he'd been ungentlemanly enough to fornicate with, yet unable to forget her.

I knew who you were the moment I saw you. How could you not know me? There was no act she could perform, no display of virtue that he would ever believe, because he wanted to believe her and the very wanting damned him in his own eyes and society's as a fool.

When he'd looked at Benedick he'd looked in a mirror that had reflected his own face made youthful again. But he must not believe his own eyes because he'd found the mother in a brothel. Therefore she'd been a whore. Therefore her child was anybody's.

She was suffocating; the misery of Newgate, the toil, the responsibility, the nights spent pacing the floor during measles, the croup, teething, all the fight to keep his son alive and he asked how she could possibly tell.

Anger lit twenty years of suppressed resentment and became a bonfire. 'You stupid b-bba-b—' It wouldn't say itself. She was hitting her cheeks so that the word would come out, she was drumming her heels, she clawed at him. 'You b- bbaa—'

'Bastard,' he said. 'For God's sake breathe.' He caught her hands to hold them away.

Their faces were close, the heat of each body reflecting back on to the other's. His body and hers. His breath on her mouth blowing the fury higher until it was transmuted into an intolerable passion.

'Oh Christ, Boots,' he said. And that was that.

How nice it was. How lovely men were, thick, inflexible branches sheathed in silk. She remembered from twenty years. The bedhead was creaking rhythmically, somebody was trying to get in. In ... 'They'll hear,' she said.

'Let 'em,' he said.

She couldn't bear for it to finish, she couldn't stop it finishing. Cartwheeling, vortexing, whirlpooling, panting, she came back to a ruined bedroom in an occupied house and a man who thought she was a whore. And I've just proved it. Respectable women weren't as abandoned as that. Poor respectable women.

As she watched him begin to dress, she was returned to the Rookery. 'Last time you apologized and never came back,' she said.

He was pulling on his boots. 'You remember.'

'Oh for God's sake. Of course I do.' Think what you like. Think anything. Only don't leave me again.

'It's only Monmouth this time, not Louis. I'll be back.' He arched over her, leaning on his hands so that he could look at her. 'I'll leave you Muskett. You can trust Muskett. But for Christ's sake be careful or you'll be hanging from your own gatehouse like that poor sod earlier.' He kissed her hard. 'And do something about this bloody bed. I'm covered in feathers.'

She snuggled into it as he went out, picking down off his shoulders. When she heard his step in the courtyard, she had to pull a sheet round her shoulders and rush to the window. He was still brushing feathers off his uniform. Churchill and some of the other officers were joshing him about her. He shrugged them off and waved his hat at her as he rode away with the others.

She stayed where she was, trying to glimpse him coming out of the gatehouse before he disappeared down the drive. The doxy bidding the night's soldier goodbye from her window. Nearly the oldest scene in the world. She didn't care.

A hoof stamped below her and she looked down. There was one horse left in the courtyard. Its rider came out from the doorway immediately below her window. Nevis. He swung into the saddle looking round at the house, an owner checking that everywhere was secure, as his horse clattered towards the tunnel gatehouse. She saw that the Paschal Lamb colours had been taken down.

Just before he entered the tunnel, he reined in and turned his horse round. Instantly she drew back. no.

Nevis smiled, took off his hat and waved it - exactly as the Viscount had done. Then he went.