Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [479]
He understood now. They meant to kill him. In a few moments, he realised, they would come closer. He stood up to run.
In doing so, he saved his life. For only as he stood could the trooper see in the pale light that it was a child. The trooper shouted, only one of the four muskets was discharged and that was aimed high.
Samuel heard the shot as he ran and wondered if he were dead.
It was Margaret who saw him when he was two thirds of the way down the High Street. He was moving slowly, a picture of dejection and terror. For some reason he had moved from the shadows at the side of the street into the middle, beside the water channel. His little round face was staring hopelessly towards the gate.
At the other end of the street behind him, the advance guard of the Royalist force had just appeared.
She called to him.
Across the gate in front of her a line of Roundhead troopers was forming, nearly blocking her view. Samuel did not seem to have heard her.
“Let me through.”
The troopers with their back to her maintained a solid wall. She looked for an officer. Ludlow was at the belfry.
“Let me pass.”
She began to manhandle them. They cursed her. She could see the Royalists preparing to charge.
“Samuel!”
This time he heard her. He stared at the gate, but hesitated, looking from Royalists to Roundheads and back again. It was as though, in his shock, the child had become suddenly listless.
The muskets were pointing down the street in his direction. It seemed clear to Samuel that all the soldiers meant to kill him, and he could no longer tell the difference between them.
Miserably he gazed from one to the other. The water channel was just below him.
“Jump into the water!” she cried.
He heard her and understood. He glanced again at the troops advancing down the street; they were breaking into a run. The freezing water below looked uninviting. He did not move. He was going to die, he thought.
She screamed at him. Why did he still hesitate?
And still nothing happened. The musketeers were taking aim at the Royalists.
How she broke through them she would never know. She heard curses, was vaguely aware that a musket had clattered to the ground and that she had trodden on a man’s back. Then she was running, frantically, nearly falling, and at last, just as the first shots rang out, throwing herself at the child and falling with him into the icy water.
Samuel Shockley remembered little of the rest of that night.
He did not remember that as soon as the troops had passed, Margaret had clambered out of the water channel and then struck him once, with the palm of her big hand, not in anger but because, at that instant, she could find no other way to give expression to her relief. He vaguely remembered being carried round to St Ann’s Gate, but he slept through the battle of the belfry.
Apart from some early and spirited charges by Edmund Ludlow, the battle was really a siege, while the several hundred Royalists surrounded the high belfry tower and waited. Since the light would show the enemy how pitifully few his forces really were, Ludlow quietly withdrew through the southern gate of the close just before dawn, and then went up Harnham Hill to watch events.
An hour after dawn, Samuel did awake. And so it was that through the upstairs window of the little house where they were sheltering, he saw the Royalists commandeer the cart of a passing collier and use his load of charcoal to burn down the belfry’s studded door.
The battle of the belfry was over.
But it was later that morning, when the little cart containing Samuel and his sister arrived back at the farmhouse that Margaret Shockley’s battle began. For she was met by a long-faced Jacob and Mary Godfrey at the door.
“I did what I could,” Jacob explained, “but there were two dozen of them.”
The house was in a shambles.