Page 19 of Feathers in the Wind
She closed his eyes and as she knelt over the dead man, tears spilling through her fingers, she felt a hand on her shoulder.
‘You can’t weep for them all, Perdita.’
She stood up, wiping her eyes on her grimy and blood-streaked cuff.
‘How many, Adam?’
He shook his head. ‘Probably thousands. Englishmen killing Englishmen.’
She looked into his tired, strained face. He hadn’t left the barn once during the long day, choosing to stay with his men, keeping the dying company, talking with the lightly wounded. Now she could see he was at the end of his own resources.
He crouched down beside her and held out his hand. She took the slender love token of plaited hair curled in his fingers.
‘He was only seventeen,’ Adam answered her unspoken question. ‘Tobias Clarke, son of the apothecary in Stratford they tell me. This was a parting gift from his sweetheart. I think he said her name was Jenny.’
Her fingers tightened on the circle of fair hair and she looked up at him, remembering the bright, cheerful lad who had served her in his father’s shop. These were people she knew. It was one thing to mourn this man she had never known in life, but Toby She wondered if Jenny had been the pretty fair haired daughter of the innkeeper at the White Swan. She had seen the two of them, heads bent together in the intimacy of young love.
‘Poor Jenny. Did she think it would make him immune from death?’ she said, more to herself than the man beside her.
Adam raked his fingers through his hair. ‘What do I say to his parents, Perdita? That he fought valiantly for the cause he so passionately believed in and he died defending his colours? That his death was swift and he felt no pain and that he is with God, rejoicing in the company of the saints?’
Perdita studied his face, the planes and shadows stark in the lantern light, hearing the bitterness in his tone.
‘You don’t believe in God, do you?’
His face stilled. ‘I …’ He blew out a breath. ‘I do not think God believes in me.’
She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Come back to the house. You need food and rest.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you here, Perdita. But I couldn’t leave them to die like animals in ditches or on that field, and I knew that some would never make it back to Warwick.’
She shook her head. ‘This is how it will be unless the differences between king and parliament are resolved, isn’t it?’
He rose to his feet with a grunt. Holding out his hand, he helped her stand. His strong fingers closed on hers, and lingered for a moment longer than propriety required. She shook her stiff limbs and together they walked back to the house.
At the foot of the stairs, Adam inclined his head. ‘Goodnight, Mistress Gray. We will be gone in the morning. Thank you for the care of my men.’
‘I did my Christian duty. Goodnight,’
She watched him as he followed Ludovic up the stairs as if it required every nerve of his body to stay upright. He did not look back, and in the morning he had gone.
* * *
Simon,his arm in a neat blue sling, came a few days later. There were shadows in his eyes that had not been there only weeks previously when he had taken his men to join Lord Northampton. Now he had seen battle and viewed the darkness of men’s souls. Simon would never be quite the same man again.
Joan and Bess tactfully withdrew and left them in the gathering gloom before the fire in the great parlour. Perdita drew up a stool and leant her head against Simon's knee, thinking that this was how it should always have been, had it not been for a stubborn King or a man called Adam Coulter. She wondered where he had gone after he had left Preswood. Back to Warwick, she supposed.
Simon rested his hand lightly on her head, drawing her thoughts back to the present.
‘You’ve not told me, how did you hurt your arm?’ She asked the question Bess had posed on seeing her brother.
Simon had skilfully evaded an answer and now he gave a self-deprecating laugh. ‘For you, sweetest, only the truth. My cursed horse caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and I went down in the first charge. My noble wound is, I fear, no more than a badly sprained wrist.’
‘Thank God it was not your neck.’
‘Indeed,’ he agreed. The silence that followed, broken only by the crackling logs, seemed to stretch for an eternity until the intimacy of the fire and the good Rhennish that Ludovic had produced loosened Simon's tongue and he leaned back in his chair.
‘I had no thought that men could die so many dreadful deaths, Perdita.’
