“Sh, sir! He's asleep in the library. You'll wake him, you'll wake him!”
But Trenchard never paused. He crossed the hall at a bound, and flung wide the library door. “Anthony!” he shouted. “Anthony!” And in the background Walters cursed him for a fool. Wilding leapt to his feet, awake and startled.
“Wha... Nick!”
“Oons!” roared Nick. “You're choicely found. I came to send to Bridgwater for you. We must away at once, man.”
“How—away? I thought you were in the fight, Nick.”
“And don't I look as if I had been?”
“But then...
“The fight is fought and lost; there's an end to the garboil. Monmouth is in full flight with what's left him of his horse. When I quitted the field, he was riding hard for Polden Hill.” He dropped into a chair, his accents grim and despairing, his eyes haggard.
“Lost?” gasped Wilding, and his conscience pricked him for a moment, remembering how much it had been his fault—however indirectly—that Feversham had been forewarned. “But how lost?” he cried a moment later.
“Ask Grey,” snapped Trenchard. “Ask his craven, numskulled lordship. He had as good a hand in losing it as any. Oh, it was all most infernally mishandled, as has been everything in this ill-starred rising. Grey sent back Godfrey, the guide, and attempted in the dark to find his own way across the rhine. He missed the ford. What else could the fool have hoped? And when he was discovered and Dunbarton's guns began to play on us—hell and fire! we ran as if Sedgemoor had been a race-course.