Free Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall by Vengeance Thwarted Page B

time,” his father murmured. “I knew it in my heart when I saw you alone but God gave me His service to finish and I found peace. Daniel is with Him. Whether it was with a musket bullet or a fever he is with the Lord. Come, let us sit down. You must eat, Nat. You look thin and gaunt.” He gently disengaged himself and turned to the hearth where he took up the bellows and revived the fire and set on the trivet a covered pan standing ready.
    “Where is Jenny?” Nat asked.
    “We have no servant now. When our debts are paid to the workmen who have repaired the windows here and in the church and other restorations about the place, Jenny may come back to us.”
    “You answer him about Jenny and he has not answered my questions.” His mother was standing stiff with disbelief. “He eats nothing till he has told us all.”
    They sat down at the scrubbed kitchen table and Nat, looking mainly at his father but with anxious darting looks at his mother, struggled to unfold the tale. Where should he start? At the doubts that had overwhelmed him of the rightness of the war? At his own disgust and Daniel’s horror at the training to use a pike? No that was a detail, a distraction.
    “I was ill with a fever,” he began. “Daniel sought food and water for me.”
    “The Scots took him?” his mother burst in. “Do they kill their captives now?”
    “Peace, Anne,” said his father. “Let him tell the tale.”
    Nat told it then in a rush, the bare, horrific facts. Daniel was caught as a thief and falsely accused of firing a stack, tried and hung before Nat knew anything of it.
    His father did then bow his head over his hands and weep but his mother leapt up howling. She tore at her hair, she scraped her nails down her cheeks, then came round the table as if she would strangle Nat with her bare hands. He pushed away his chair and backed to the window. His father tried to hold her arms from behind but she broke away, spat into Nat’s face and rushed from the room and pounded up the stairs.
    “Oh Father, have I sent her mad? Why did she ever let Daniel go for a soldier?”
    His father shook his head. “It nearly broke her heart seeing you two march away with the troop and she has fretted herself out of her mind in your absence.”
    “But why, then, why?”
    They could hear her trampling overhead.
    “She always feared you two would grow up as feeble in spirit as I. That was what she used to say. ‘They are nineteen now. They must be tried and tested as men. Nat is for ever at his books and Daniel is so sweet-natured he will let all men trample over him. They must be stiffened to face life.’ Those were her words and when the King’s standard was carried through the village and Daniel was so excited she said this was the chance. We had been raided by those Puritan devils as she called them and there was little food in the house. How were we to feed your healthy young appetites, I asked myself, and I didn’t oppose her as I should have done. She was bursting with pride that her Daniel would be a great warrior and come back heaped with honours for his valour.”
    “I remember that too well. Oh Father I will tell you it all, every moment from when we left home, but God knows I would rather I had died than come back without my brother.”
    His father raised his hand. “Hush! She is quiet. She may do herself harm.”
    Nathaniel followed him upstairs and they could hear a low moaning coming from the chamber where the brothers had slept in one bed from boyhood.
    She was lying on the bed, on the side where Daniel always slept and covering with tears and kisses the leather bound book in which he had written the alphabet and the few words he had learnt to spell.
    Nat and his father crept away before she could hear them.
    Downstairs they sat at the table and his father extracted the piece of boiled beef from the pan and insisted on cutting slice after slice for Nat. Once he had taken a mouthful he ate compulsively, having scarcely