Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [510]
It was reasonable to guess, therefore, that he would have taken the main north western road.
“I’ll horsewhip him,” he swore.
But as he came up to him now, and saw his small face set with determination and the ludicrous sword bumping at his side, Jonathan Shockley suddenly felt a wave of affection for his son. As he took the pony’s bridle he said kindly:
“Come, Adam, you’ll fight in a better cause, another day.”
And so it was that from that day, though he wept with rage the next spring when news came of the final defeat of the prince at Culloden, Adam Shockley lived with a new hope and determination in his heart.
The Stuart cause might be lost, but he would still be a soldier.
After the Forty-five, as the rising came to be known, Jonathan Shockley no longer passed his hand over the glass. But at dinner, if he chanced to see his son, he would call to the company:
“Take care, gentlemen. Here comes a damned dangerous Jacobite.”
1753
He stood before his parents and smiled.
“You are sure you want to be a soldier?”
He nodded. He was certain.
His father was sitting on a tall-backed chair; his mother standing beside it with her hand resting on her husband’s shoulder. They were a good-looking couple, both greying now, his father the more robust of the two. He thought he saw a little twitch at the corner of his mother’s mouth and he noticed that, once or twice, she had blinked her eyes rather rapidly. There was a frown of concern on Jonathan’s broad face.
He was sorry to disappoint them but he could not help it.
He knew very well what his mother would have liked. Elizabeth Shockley had always hoped her son would be a clergyman. True, many church benefices were poorly paid and some parish curates nearly starved. But her family still had some influence that might have got him preferment. Many a rector or prebendary lived like a gentleman, and at Sarum, at least, the dean lived like a lord.
All the great men of her own youth had been clergymen. Sarum had been full of distinguished figures – Izaac Walton, the writer’s son, who had improved the cathedral library; Dean Clarke, the great mathematician; Bishop Sherlock, friend of the queen and denouncer of the Deists. She had always dreamed of seeing her only son a great man like one of these.
But there had always been one problem, as his headmaster Mr Hele had explained:
“The boy is a credit to you, madam, but he will never be a scholar. I think you must forget the church.”
Adam had not been sent to Winchester or Eton after the choristers’ school, but to a modest local establishment run by one of Jonathan’s friends.
He was not stupid, but like an animal whose body is not yet coordinated, his brain often seemed to move clumsily and at times, to his shame, a kind of fog seemed to descend upon its operations. The year before, when in order to bring the English calendar in line with that of continental Europe, the date had been moved by eleven days, he could not shake off the feeling, shared by many of the illiterate folk, that the eleven days had been lost. And when he heard his father laughing at a little group of labourers in the street who were crying, “Give us back our eleven days,” he began to defend them.
“They were on the calendar but they’ve been taken away.”
“Of course,” his father replied, “but that doesn’t make the sun rise and set any less does it?”
“No but . . .” Blushing, he felt the fog descending upon him before breaking off, embarrassed by the look of wonder on his father’s face. It had taken him another two days to sort the business out clearly in his mind, to his own satisfaction.
He was slow, and did not pick up received ideas as well as the cleverer boys, but the conclusions he slowly and clumsily reached were at least his own.
As for Jonathan, he had simply hoped that his son might do something to mend the family fortunes.
But he wanted to be a soldier. One day he would be a great commander like his hero Marlborough. For years, ever since the rising of ’45, he had dreamed