Basing House

By Michael Hopkins

THIRD PLACE in May Competition

By the fifth day of the attack, even the bread tasted of brick.

Anne carried the pail with both hands along the gallery, stepping round glass, splintered frames, and a chair smashed for firewood.  The great house had always seemed too strong to fall.  Its walls were thick, its cellars deep, and all summer the men had said the Parliament men might batter, starve, and curse, but Basing House would stand for the King.

Now the cannon did not stop.

Each shot shook lime from the ceiling.  Smoke drifted where no hearth was lit.  Somewhere below, a woman was praying aloud, not for triumph now, but for mercy.  Anne had heard that change in the voices before she saw it in their faces.

At the nursery door she set down the pail and looked through the crack.  Mistress’s two boys sat under the table, still in their nightshirts though it was near noon, the elder with his arm round the younger as if he were the parent and not eight years old.  On the bed lay the little velvet coat set out for Sunday, grey with dust.  She had pressed that coat herself, three Sundays ago, when pressing things still seemed to matter.

Behind her, boots pounded on the stair.  A man cried that the Roundheads were in the courtyard.  Another shouted for powder.  Then, lower and sharper, came the order Anne had never thought to hear: “Hide what you can.”

She stood with her hand on the latch, listening to the house learn the truth at last.  Not that it was beaten.  Only that it could be taken.

Anne lifted the pail again and went in smiling, because the boys were watching, and servants do not weep before children.

Judges’ Comments; I found this story about the siege of Basing House very evocative. I loved the opening line – “By the fifth day of the attack, even the bread tasted of dust.” This story captured for me what it must have felt like to be trapped in Basing House under constant bombardment from Cromwell’s guns and knowing that the end is in sight.