Simon by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

just shows you!’ Barnaby said happily. ‘I’d as soon have suspected Corporal Relf.’
    Fletcher turned round on Simon. ‘You’ve not met Corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf yet, have you?—A pleasure in store!’
    ‘Don’t listen to him,’ cut in Barnaby. ‘The Corporal’s all right. And anyhow, he’s the cove who’ll be teaching you your job.’
    Discussing the matter of Lieutenant Anderson’s recorder with unholy interest, they finished undressing and crawled into their blankets; Cornet Fletcher blowing out the guttering tallow dip before he did so. ‘Good nights’ were exchanged, slightly muffled by the bed-clothes, and silence descended with the blue darkness into the cramped inn chamber.
    For a long time Simon lay awake, listening to the quiet breathing of the other two, and watching through the window the stars moving behind the dark head of the Garter tower. They were the same stars as those he saw through the little garret window at home; only at home they shone through the branches of the old warden pear tree that was a dome of snowy blossom in the spring. A sudden wave of homesickness flooded over him; the hard unfamiliar pallet, the breathing of the others in the alien darkness, the strangeness of everything, all brought back to him the desolation of his first night at Blundell’s. He remembered the long bare dormitory and the smell of damp and candlesmitch, the confused rise and fall of many breathing in the dark, the emptiness of his stomach because he had not yet found how to get his full share of supper, his aching longing for Lovacott. But then, Amias had been there, so near that if he flung out an arm, he could touch him; and he and Amias had shared their homesickness as they had shared everything else.
    He wondered where Amias was tonight. Quartered in some farm-house perhaps, or bivouacked under the stars . . . Serving with the Army of the King as he, Simon, was with the Army of Parliament. It seemed suddenly very odd, that if he reached out into the darkness, he would merely annoy Cornet Fletcher, because Amias would not be there.

VI
The Empty Hoard
    DURING THAT SPRING all Windsor was one great camp, humming with life and activity as more and more troops came in and were drafted into the re-formed regiments. All day and often half the night the cobbled streets rumbled to the arrival of the wagon-trains bringing stores and ammunition. For the first time an English army was being dressed in scarlet, and day by day the shifting crowds grew more colourful as the new uniforms arrived, and regiment after regiment appeared in good kersey breeches and red coats faced with blue or yellow or green according to their colonel’s fancy. In the Commons Fields below the Castle, as far as Datchet Mead and beyond, the remnant of Essex’s force, together with scattered regiments and new-joined men,were being nursed and hammered into an army; and the three men chiefly responsible, who seemed to be everywhere at once, needing neither food nor rest, were Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Philip Skippon, the Chief of Staff, and Lieutenant-General Cromwell, who officially commanded nothing but the 6th Regiment of Horse.
    Before long, these three became familiar figures to Simon, as they were to every man in the Army. The dark rather Don Quixote-seeming General, constantly appearing and disappearing between Windsor and Whitehall; grey-haired and stooping Sir Philip, a veteran of the Swedish Wars, known affectionately to his troops as Daddy Skippon or The Old Man; the thick-set ruddy Cavalry Colonel, with a laugh that seemed to shake the Castle Walls, a heavy farmer’s walk that gave the impression of a pound or so of good East Anglian soil caked on each boot, and a reputation for wrestling whole nights in prayer. At first they were only figures, but very soon he began to learn things about them that brought them to life.
    He learned how Fairfax had come by his scarred cheek at Marston Moor. ‘You