As Meat Loves Salt

‘Money on your first coming in. Keep tight hold, you won’t see that much again.’

I was handed a red coat, two shirts, breeches, and hose; also a leather snapsack and a cap with dried blood on it, as if peeled from the head of a corpse.

‘I can’t get this coat on,’ I said, holding it up.

The man shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do there. One yard of cloth, that’s the regulation.’

‘Suppose you gave him two, and we got a tailor to run them together,’ suggested Ferris.

The fellow was willing enough. I thanked him from my heart and Ferris took up the coats, saying he knew a man would undertake the work for a shilling.

As we walked across the camp I felt the food warming me and longed for more. To take my mind off it, I asked Ferris what would happen the next day.

‘We will see to your coat…and you’ll be drilled in the pike,’ he added.

‘You are surely not a pikeman!’ I said, without thinking.

He stopped and gave me a hard look. ‘I have outlived many pikemen.’

‘I did not mean—’ but my voice faltered, for I had meant it. There was a pike over the fireplace of the great hall at Beaurepair, and all the men had lifted it at one time or another. Ferris was of too slender a make to carry such a weapon. It might be, I thought, that he had some little thing to do, far from the van of the fighting. But carrying a pike was better than lying a corpse by the roadside, and for this I owed him thanks. I smiled on him and he at once returned the smile.

‘If you would know,’ he said, ‘I was a musketeer. But a man that knew me in London thought I might be more use elsewhere.’

‘Where – why?’

‘I am not bad at the mathematics, and some of his best were just then dead. So now I help with artillery,’ he said as we seated ourselves at a fire. ‘Really it is for the cavalry to do, but what with fever and shot – well, they need men who can count without their fingers,’ his mouth twisted at his own grim jest, ‘fire straight, and dodge whatever comes back. When the enemy are in range, so are we.’ He held my eyes and I felt myself rebuked.

‘I know nothing of war,’ I said.

‘Would that I could say the same. It is a bestial occupation.’

‘Yet it is said the men of this army are rather godly than beastly. Is it not the other side that plunders? Do they not call Rupert, Duke of Plunderland?’

Ferris grinned. ‘Is that why you took his name? Aye, there are those who sing psalms in battle, and our commanders take pains to hold in the plunderers, but not for love of the vanquished. They see rather that armies need friends, and that soldiers once run wild are insensible of authority. Especially if they chance on Popish wine.’ He threw a stick into the flames. ‘A man may sing psalms, you know, yet cut the defeated in shreds with as little mercy as—’ he paused for a comparison, and ended by shrugging.

Warmed by the fire, I stripped myself and tried the new shirt and breeches, Ferris watching me in silence. The shirt was coarse but almost clean; both it and the breeches were big enough. These last had pockets, a new thing for me. My old garments I put in the snapsack, but when I took off my shoes, the fine hose that Peter and my brothers had given me were worn to rags. Not without regret, I put them on the fire.

‘Ferris, you said, “especially Popish wine.” Is it so strong?’

He grinned. ‘Any wine a soldier finds is Popish. That salves conscience.’

I gazed at him. ‘Do you say there are no goodly soldiers? That all are wolves?’

‘Soldiers are but men. There are many both brave and merciful—’ Ferris paused to wave in greeting as a figure skirted the fire. ‘As for the other side, they are more than even with us—’

He broke off and called eagerly to the new arrival. ‘Welcome my lad, and did you get any?’

I looked up and saw a boy almost as tall as myself, all legs and arms. His face shone with pleasure and even in the poor light I was struck by the gem-like brilliance of his blue eyes, the kind which often go with yellow hair. This boy’s hair, however, was so dark a brown as to be almost black, and I thought I recognised the lad who had waved earlier from the fireside.

‘This is Nathan,’ said Ferris. ‘A good comrade and not beastly.’

‘Who called me beastly?’ asked the boy. ‘See, Ferris,’ and without awaiting a reply he pulled a cloth from under his coat and proceeded to unwrap two chunks of roast meat, the fat gleaming in the reddish light. ‘There’s bread too.’

‘You are a marvel,’ Ferris told him. Turning to me he added, ‘The meat’s mostly boiled.’

‘I guess this was picked up at Devizes,’ the boy said.

Ferris grinned at him. ‘Plunder, eh? Is there enough for Prince Rupert here?’

‘Prince—?’ He giggled, regarding me curiously, then said, ‘I think we have not met before?’

‘I joined up today.’

Nathan seated himself on the other side of Ferris and began slicing the beef with a dagger, trying to make three portions out of two. To my surprise he showed no sullenness at this unexpected reduction in rations. ‘Is your name really Rupert?’

I nodded.

‘You’re from these parts?’

‘Right again.’

‘I wager you’ll be pikes. They always put big fellows on pikes,’ and he commenced telling me the weight of a pikeman’s armour. He had altogether too much to say, and his voice grated on me.

Ferris, watching my face, said to Nathan, ‘He’d bear the armour well enough, if there were any.’

‘Surely,’ the boy agreed. He passed the meat to Ferris and began cutting bread.

‘Even I could carry what they issue now,’ Ferris continued with a glance at me. ‘But most men don’t want it. A buffcoat – that’s the thing.’

‘Would you wish to be a pikeman?’ Nathan asked him.

‘I wager Rupert thinks me unfit for any kind of soldier.’

‘O, no,’ I said, ‘I only—’

‘And he is right,’ Ferris went on. ‘The recruiting officers are told to find the tallest, strongest men, and what do they turn up? Seven years older than Nat, and not as tall.’

He passed me some beef and Nathan held out a piece of bread. I tasted my share and relished its very toughness as making it last longer. Ferris crammed roast flesh into his own mouth and closed his eyes, sighing as he bit into it. I watched Nathan layer his bread and meat, holding them delicately in long hands that hardly seemed fitted for soldiering.

Looking back at Ferris I found him staring at me. He said, ‘For all that you think, I can put down any man my own size—’

‘Nay, taller,’ said Nathan.

‘—and I wager that’s as much as you can do.’

Nathan coughed. A morsel of bread shot out of his mouth, brilliant in the firelight, and I saw that he was laughing.

‘Nat, you’ll choke one of these days,’ Ferris warned.