Friends, though divided: A Tale of the Civil War

by G. A. Henty

"That is enough, then," Harry said. "The alarm is given. Now let us be off." They leaped from the window, and they were soon making their way across the country. They had not been gone a hundred yards before they heard a great shouting, and knew that their departure had been discovered. They had not walked far that day and now pressed forward north. They had filled their pockets with the remains of their supper, and after walking all night, left the road, and climbing into a haystack at a short distance, ate their breakfast and were soon fast asleep.

It was late in the afternoon before they awoke. Then they walked on until, after darkness fell, they entered a small village. Here they went into a shop to buy bread. The woman looked at them earnestly.

"I do not know whether it concerns you," she said, "but I will warn you that this morning a mounted man from Fairford came by warning all to seize a tall countryman with a young fellow and a woman with him, for that she was no other than King Charles."

"Thanks, my good woman," Jacob said. "Thanks for your warning. I do not say that I am he you name, but whether or no, the king shall hear some day of your good-will."

Traveling on again, they made thirty miles that night, and again slept in a wood. The next evening, when they entered a village to buy food, the man in the shop, after looking at them, suddenly seized Jacob, and shouted loudly for help. Harry stretched him on the ground with a heavy blow of the stout cudgel he carried. The man's shouts, however, had called up some of his neighbors, and these ran up as they issued from the shop, and tried to seize them. The friends, however, struck out lustily with their sticks, Jacob carrying one concealed beneath his dress. In two or three minutes they had fought their way clear, and ran at full speed through the village, pursued by a shouting crowd of rustics.

"Now," Harry said, "we can return for our gypsy dresses, and then make for the east coast. We have put the king's enemies off the scent. I trust that when we may get across the water we may hear that he is in safety."

They made a long detour, traveling only at night, Harry entering alone after dusk the villages where it was necessary to buy food. When they regained the wood where they had left their disguises they dressed themselves again as gypsies, called for the donkey, and then journeyed across England by easy stages to Colchester, where they succeeded in taking passage in a lugger bound for Hamburg. They arrived there in safety, and found to their great joy the news had arrived that the king had landed in France.

He had, they afterward found, failed to obtain a ship at Bridport, where when he arrived he here found a large number of soldiers about to cross to Jersey. He returned to Trent House, and a ship at Southampton was then engaged. But this was afterward taken up for the carriage of troops. A week later a ship lying at Shoreham was hired to carry a nobleman and his servant to France, and King Charles, with his friends, made his way thither in safety. The captain of the ship at once recognized the king, but remained true to his promise, and landed him at Fécamp in Normandy.

Six weeks had elapsed since the battle of Worcester, and during that time the king's hiding-places had been known to no less than forty-five persons, all of whom proved faithful to the trust, and it was owing to their prudence and caution as well as to their loyalty that the king escaped, in spite of the reward offered and the hot search kept up everywhere for him.

Harry had now to settle upon his plans for the future. There was no hope whatever of an early restoration. He had no thought of hanging about the king whose ways and dissolute associates revolted him. It was open to him to take service, as so many of his companions had done, in one or other of the Continental armies, but Harry had had more than enough of fighting. He determined then to cross the ocean to the plantations of Virginia, where many loyal gentlemen had established themselves. The moneys which Colonel Furness had during the last four years regularly sent across to a banker at the Hague, for his use, were lying untouched, and these constituted a sum amply sufficient for establishing himself there. Before starting, however, he determined that if possible he would take a wife with him. In all his wanderings he had never seen any one he liked so much as his old playmate, Lucy Rippinghall. It was nearly four years since he had seen her, and she must now be twenty-one. Herbert, he knew by his father's letters, had left the army at the end of the first civil war, and was carrying on his father's business, the wool-stapler having been killed at Marston Moor. Harry wrote to the colonel, telling him of his intention to go to Virginia and settle there until either Cromwell's death, and the dying out of old animosities, or the restoration of the king permitted him to return to England, and also that he was writing to ask Lucy Rippinghall to accompany him as his wife. He told his father that he was well aware that he would not have regarded such a match as suitable had he been living at home with him at Furness Hall, but that any inequality of birth would matter no whit in the plantations of Virginia, and that such a match would greatly promote his happiness there. By the same mail he wrote to Herbert Rippinghall.