Work Text:
The only sound in the room was the scratching of the pen across the paper.
I had now not above a hundred Horse with me, we went to the Ship, where under the Security of her Ordinance we got all our Men and Horse aboard; and crossing Humber, we arriv'd at Hull, our Men faint and tired.
Thomas laid down the pen and looked out of the window. The garden below was part hidden in the October mizzle, but he could see the petals still clinging to one of the Provence roses. This damp autumn weather seeped deeply into his body, starting the old wounds into yet harder aching and further restricting the movement of his fingers, so that he now found writing an increasingly hard task.
To this day he could recall Moll's still white face as she hung in the trooper's arms. As the three riders dwindled down the driftway he had wondered when, or if, he would see Anne and Moll again. Would that forced ride have proved too much for such a young child; was there a chance Royalist patrol or scout that might discover her and take her and her nurse into custody too. Late that evening there had been the painfully polite conversation with his father; that he had left the child to be taken to a farm for the night and that, as they knew, his wife was still in the custody of the Duke of Newcastle. The relief of Moll's safe arrival the next day had eased his mind somewhat and, during daylight hours, he had been able to turn his thoughts fully towards the matters of the war. Night-times, even knowing from the scouts' reports that Anne was well, had been harder. He had loved Moll, small, dark, quiet, Moll, since she had first been shown to him swaddled in the family linen. His love for Anne had taken longer in the growing.
Young Thomas had not wanted marriage. Young Thomas had wanted the freedom to travel Europe and, indeed, had hoped to offer his sword in service in the Swedish army in Germany. Once his family had refused permission, he had returned to Yorkshire to learn the business of the estates. His father and, more forcefully, his grandfather, had put forward the benefits of marriage and, having cast around, had settled on further alliance between the Fairfax and Vere families. So to London he had been sent. Although he had, perhaps, been a little disingenuous to have written to his father "I have studied to do my best in effecting the business I came up about" the remainder, "whether my lady Vere disliked me, the conditions, or us both, I cannot tell ; but she put me off with an unwillingness to marry her daughter in a time of such perplexity as she pretends to be in.", had been true. He had not, indeed, been sure whether it was Lady Vere or her daughter who was unwilling; he had known Anne initially as a strong-willed child, and it seemed she had grown to be a strong-minded woman and he, of course, had been always halting of speech, and inclined to illness even when he had served under her father.
Ah, Nan. Nan, with her fierce concern for those for whom she felt responsible, the way she flung herself with determination into any task. She had said it was his illness so soon after their marriage that had first awoken her love for him. He had been ashamed to be struck down so soon and, in this shame, had overlooked and misunderstood her reaction as, indeed, he had done so much in those early years. It was after the death of baby Elizabeth, watching Anne's distracted, silent, withdrawal and grieving, that he had felt chilled at the thought that he must leave her and realised how much closer they had become, and how much he cared that she should be well.
The subsequent trials of the Yorkshire campaign had drawn them yet closer, each in their way. Bradford, Tadcaster, Leeds, Selby, Wakefield, Hull; each place had left its mark on each of them, individually and together. Had indeed, over those long months, drawn them together more, each coming to appreciate and understand more of the other and being able to lean on each others strengths in time of need.
When he sent her to London to her mother's he had known only that the course of the war would be different. He had not expected to see much of her, except when he too had to go to London. It had been a joy that she had been able to travel to be with him at Tiverton that cold, muddy autumn and winter. He remembered the valiant carriage of her head as she disembarked from the coach, their formal greetings to each other in front of the headquarters staff while their eyes had met and they had, so swiftly, known how it was with each other. He remembered too, with a smile that, had anyone been looking, would have been seen to reach his eyes, writing from Tiverton to his father at the end of 1645, "This season is so ill for travelling, as my wife cannot yet conveniently take her journey up to London; and the rather because my quarters all this time are so settled as there is no trouble to her or me in her stay." No trouble indeed; as in the Yorkshire campaign, her quick intelligence and interest in those around her had meant that the care shown her by his staff had been as much due to her as to their loyalty to him as their commander.
She had been with him too, for bitter-sweet siege of Oxford that had ended the first war, standing with him in requiring that order be maintained and that there should be no looting after the garrison had marched out . The bitter aftertaste of the victory had been longer in his mouth then and that, too, she understood. For both it was the effects on the ordinary lives touched by the actions that had lingered longest in their memories.
Anne. Nan. The spaces of Nun Appleton so echoingly empty without her presence.
Thomas turned again to the manuscript. All this he could not put into it, it was a record, first, of the business of the two years of the Yorkshire campaign and, if he were granted the time, of the later years, to be set down for the family against the tattling tongues already twisting deeds and words. He had specified that he would, when his time came, "bee buryed neare unto the body of my most honoured and deare wife in the Parish Church of Bilbrough in such a manner as may be convenient and decent rather then pompous".