Simon Read Online Free Page B

and a sword in the other,’ argued Simon.
    Amias thought so too, but as the Covenanters were against the King, and Amias was a passionate Royalist, he could not very well admit it. So he changed the subject. ‘It would be just as good if Cornwall was a hostile country; then the Cornish might come reiving over the border, and we could have a siege. We’d leave loopholes in the windows, and fire through them—like this.’ He demonstrated, squinting along the barrel of an imaginary matchlock. ‘And your mother and the maids could load for us.’
    ‘Mouse too,’ put in Simon firmly. Mouse was his small sister, and he often found her rather a trial, but he was not going to have her left out of the fun, all the same.
    ‘All right, Mouse too. And we could climb up on the gatehouse roof and pour boiling lead on their heads—ssswsh!—like that.’
    ‘We could have all the things out of the armoury,’ added Simon.
    Like all farms and manor houses, Lovacott had to provide certain weapons and pieces of armour for the county Militia. In the small farms this might be only an ancient helmet—a morion—and perhaps a pike that first saw service in King Hal’s army. But Lovacott, beside John Carey’s own equipment as Lieutenant of the Torrington Company, provided three back-and-breasts andmorions, and a motley collection of pikes and matchlocks; and they were stored in a small room between the house and the stables, which was called the armoury in consequence. Only a few days before, Simon had helped his father and Diggory to overhaul those ancient and fascinating weapons, just as most people, up and down the country, were overhauling their weapons that summer. For the old trouble that had been twenty years a-brewing between King and Parliament was all too surely coming to a head at last. Simon knew that, of course, and the grimness of his father’s face as he tested the straps of a breast-plate had stuck in his mind, so that he remembered it again now, and the memory gave him a solemn feeling in the pit of his stomach.
    ‘Of course, if they got up here into the high orchard, we’d have to make a sortie, and drive them out,’ Amias was saying. ‘Otherwise they might be able to shoot down into the courtyard.’
    Simon did not answer. Between the branches of the apple trees the sky was turning clear and colourless as crystal. The shadows of the hawthorn wind-breaks had reached out, all across the fields, and the green of pasture and the gold of arrish were quenched with evening. Tomorrow, Diggory’s son Tom would begin ploughing Sanctuary, ready for the autumn sowing; but Simon would not be there to see it. A heron came lapping lazily home against the quiet sky, following the pass through the hills between Taw and Torridge, which herons had followed since the world began, thereby giving Heronscombe its name. Simon watched it out of sight, the solemn feeling deepening in his stomach; and he didn’t want to talk about fighting in the high orchard, or Lovacott being besieged, not any more.
    So when Amias began to work out a brilliant plan for blowing up the enemy with their own gunpowder, he gave him a violent push and said, ‘Yah! You’ve got gunpowder on the brain! What happened when you tried inventing that new kind, last year?’
    Amias shoved back. ‘’Twas proper fine gunpowder! The best gunpowder ever was—as sure as unicorns!’
    ‘Yiss! And it blew your eyebrows off and set fire to the study table, and I had to use all the stock-jar of dill-water to put it out—Yow! Get off my innards!’ for Amias had hurled himself upon him with a war-shout.
    They tumbled over and over like puppies in mock fight, until there was no more breath left in them, and then rolled apart, laughing and gasping, and lay quiet. Simon had forgotten the solemn feeling in his stomach.
    At that moment, round the corner of the farm buildings appeared the little bent figure of Diggory Honeychurch. Diggory lived in the gatehouse, with his