It was a clear evening with blackbirds singing from vantage points on stately trees and high barn roofs. He passed through the South Leicestershire hamlets, with their medieval churches, their elegant Tudor granges and halls owned by wealthy men who had taken over the church leases when the old monastic endowments were reformed. Sibbertoft, Husbands Bosworth, Shearsby and Peatling Magna… ridiculous British village names. Gideon had taken the westward road, because the eastern route through Market Harborough was clogged with conveys of guards and their dispirited, defeated prisoners. Children who should not have been allowed out stood on gates to watch his passing and to wave, thinking that today's procession of desperate fugitives and stern-faced pursuers was an exciting carnival. 'Who are you for, Mister?'
'I'm for freedom,' Gideon answered, deliberately puzzling the tousle-haired little scamps. He had fought for their future, though they neither knew it, nor cared.
He struggled to control the strange horse, which had been terrified in the fight and would not go easily under him. It was the tallest horse he had ever ridden, a beautiful creature that must have been the delight of its previous rider — some Royalist cavalryman who was now dead, in all probability. Maybe not even an English cavalier, but a Frenchman, or one of the King's Irish or German mercenaries. Now this horse was carrying one of the victorious New Modellers through the peaceful countryside, and neither of them much enjoyed the experience.
While the horse flicked its ears manically whenever he tried to soothe it, and pulled sideways across the roadway at every opportunity, Gideon kept his thoughts fixed on his dead father and his fears for his brother. He was utterly tired, mentally and physically, but he knew that he must keep awake. He had to find his regiment. He was bound to return to the colours. He could not allow himself to doze in the saddle; he dreaded the moment when exhaustion would claim him and force him to sleep.
Gideon's fear was the fear of remembered noise and terror: scenes of horror that he had barely taken in at the time, but which he knew from old experience would be etched in his memory. The battle of Naseby was now with him for ever; whenever he was particularly weak or weary, this day's work would come rampaging through his dreams.
Chapter Thirty-Three — Oxford: June 1645
Oxford always had violent noises at night. In the last month of her pregnancy, Juliana slept fitfully. When she realised there was knocking at the street door, she roused herself. Tipsy soldiers and ne'er-do-wells sometimes banged as they passed. Although it was intended to cause anxiety, the malefactors rarely kept it up but staggered on their way. Juliana longed to return to sleep, but she lay partly tensed for trouble.
When this noise became too insistent to ignore, she pulled a shawl around her shoulders. Stumbling and complaining, she blundered downstairs without lighting a candle. It was high summer and must be after midnight, judging by the dawn light which had already filtered through window curtains. The knocking continued. As she was about to unfasten the door onto St Aldate's, she became sufficiently alert to stop, laying her head against the wood and calling out, 'Who is it? Who goes there?'
'Juliana!'
She recognised Colonel Mcllwaine's voice. In a flurry, she hastened to draw the bolts and open up. Sleepily laughing, she began to apologise for keeping him standing out on the doorstep of his own house.
'Juliana.' She stopped talking when she saw his face. 'Juliana.' The figure she admitted was spectral and abrupt. Seizing her shoulders, the colonel dropped a kiss upon her forehead with a kind of fervent despair. 'Lock the door — lock it tight!'
He strode past, making his way to the kitchen where faint warmth still came from the embers of the fire. He flung his muddy cloak on a chair, his hat — in which was a wizened wreath of vegetation — upon the table. He sank down on a bench. He laid his head in his hands, then shuddered long and hard.
Juliana hovered in the doorway behind him, stricken.
She recognised a man in trouble when she saw one. Lumbering to the hearth, fastening the loose ribbons on her nightgown for decency, she knelt and raddled up the coals, reaching for a pan to heat hot water. At the noise of utensils, Mcllwaine raised his head. Always hook-shouldered and gaunt, his general appearance seemed unchanged, yet she noticed he was wearing his swordbelt but the hangers were empty. He had been waiting out of doors on foot; quickly she wondered where he had stabled his horse and what condition the beast was in.
'Let me find you food and drink.' She managed to keep her tone level. In response, the colonel breathed once rapidly, then he groaned. Juliana sat back on her heels and remained still. Moments passed, seeming long and extraordinary.
'Hot water to wash then,' she suggested gently.
'I want nothing… You are very kind.' Juliana read the worst into that heavy statement. This was a man in deep grief.
'You have come alone, sir?' Doggedly she began to prod for explanations: 'There have been rumours of fighting — but there are always rumours, usually wrong…' Only a slight lift of the colonel's chin, and maybe a shadow in his dark eyes, confirmed for her that battle had taken place. 'For the love of God, Owen, tell me what has happened.'
Then, because he was a professional soldier, Owen Mcllwaine straightened up. In terse, bitter language, he explained what befell the King's army at Naseby. Written in a letter, it would have been only a paragraph. Fairfax and Cromwell took little more, when they reported their triumph to their masters in Parliament; for the defeated there was even less to say. The unembroidered facts were bleak. They had lost the battle. The royal cause had lost all hope. Victory, in the widest possible sense, belonged to Parliament.
This crisis was dire, but Juliana's preoccupations were different from those of the despondent Irishman. Struggling with good manners, she tried to drag out of him what she needed to know: 'You escaped with your life and I am heartily glad… What can you tell me of Orlando, please?'
As if she had overstepped good taste, the colonel rounded on her: 'When we rode from the field, I did not see him. He is gone, Juley!'
'Gone? What do you mean? Did you see what happened to him?' The colonel raised his shoulders a little, in a weary shrug. 'So you did not see him?'
He did not search, she thought. He was distancing himself from Lovell. This was hers to deal with. She was a woman alone, with one child to care for and another about to be born any day -
Sensing rebuke, Mcllwaine flared, 'You must suppose him lost. There was a field of blood more than a mile long! Men dead and men not yet quite dead… Men who ought to be dead, but who refused to go to their God in timely fashion, groaning and twitching…'
'But if you did not see him,' Juliana insisted dully, 'there must be hope?'
Mcllwaine gave her a cold look. Even with her mind racing about what would happen to her, her young son Tom, the baby that would be born in two weeks, Juliana realised there was some great matter he was not yet telling her. A still, terrifying voice warned her in advance. 'Why is Nerissa not with you? Did you lose her in the confusion?'
'I lost her,' agreed Owen. His voice was terrible.
There was a tortured silence as the man found himself devoid of speech. Then, quite suddenly, words broke from him. Juliana would always afterwards remember that moment and how the coals collapsed down so the fire blazed up suddenly, just when he told her. For the rest of her life she would remember the sudden heat and the crackle of the flames. She had to control the urge to lean back away from the heat on her face. She could not ply poker and brush in the normal hearth routine. A spark fell on her nightgown but she brushed it off discreetly.