The fight on the wall was bitter, but the King's men prevailed. Over the bodies of their friends, massacred against all rules of war, they leaped into the town. The first man Lord Derby met was a groom, lately in his service at Lathom, who had gone over to the enemy. The man struck a blow at him with the clubbed end of a musket, and Derby parried it, and gave the rogue a better death than he deserved—at the sword's point.
They pressed forward. Once they were hemmed in—six of them—after a fierce rally of the garrison had swept the Royalists aside. One of the six was Prince Rupert; and Kit Metcalf felt the old Yoredale loyalty stir in his veins—a wildness and a strength. He raised a deep-bellied cry of "A Mecca for the King!" cut down the thick-set private who was aiming a blow sideways at Rupert's head, and then went mad with the lust of slaying. Never afterwards could he recall that wonderful, swift lunacy. Memory took up the tale again at the moment when their comrades rallied to their help and thrust back the garrison.
Three of the six were left—the Prince, and Kit, and a debonair, grey-eyed gentleman whose love-locks were ruddied by a scalp-wound. The three went forward with the rest; and, after all was done, they met again in the market-square.
"You, my White Knight?" said the Prince, touching Kit on the arm. "Are you touched? No more than the gash across your cheek? I'm glad of that. Captain Roger Nowell here tells me that I should be lying toes up to the sky if your pike had not been handled nicely. For my part, I saw nothing but Roundhead faces leering at me through a crimson mist."
The instinctive, boyish romance came back to Christopher. He had always been a hero-worshipper, and turned now to the grey-eyed gentleman, who was bandaging his head with a strip torn from his frilled shirt. "You are of the Nowells of Reed Hall?" he asked.
"I am, sir—a queer, hot-headed lot, but I'm one of them."
"My nurse reared me on tales of what your folk did in days gone by. And at Lathom they told me of your sorties. Sir, they thought you dead in your last effort to break through the lines, to bring relief in. They will be glad."
The Prince and Nowell glanced at each other with a quick smile of sympathy. Here, in the reek and havoc of the street, was a simple-minded gentleman, fresh as dawn on the hills that bred him—a man proved many times by battle, yet with a starry reverence for ancient deeds and ancient faith.
"May your nurse rest well where she lies," said Roger Nowell, the laughter in his grey eyes still. "In spite of a headache that throbs like a blacksmith's anvil, I salute her. She reared a man-child. As for those at Lathom, I share their gladness, I admit. A bandaged head is better than none at all."
Then all was bustle and uproar once again. Men came bringing captured colours to the Prince; and in the middle of it Lord Derby found them.