The Pigeon Pie | Page 6

that day, and rejoice in a new war? How can
you wonder her heart should sink at sounds of joy which have so often
ended in tears?"
Walter twisted about and muttered, but he could not resist his sister's
earnest face and tearful eyes, and said something about not making so
much noise in the house.
"There's my own dear brother," said Rose. "And you won't tease
Deborah?"
"That is too much, Rose. It is all the sport I have, to see the faces she
makes when I plague her about Diggory. Besides, it serves her right for
having such a temper."
"She has not a good temper, poor thing!" said Rose; "but if you would
only think how true and honest she is, how hard she toils, and how ill
she fares, and yet how steadily she holds to us, you would surely not
plague and torment her."
Rose was interrupted by a great outcry, and in rushed Deborah,
screaming out, "Lack-a-day! Mistress Rose! O Master Walter! what
will become of us? The fight is lost, the King fled, and a whole
regiment of red-coats burning and plundering the whole country. Our
throats will be cut, every one of them!"
"You'll have a chance of being a mark for all the musketeers in the
Parliament army," said Walter, who even then could not miss a piece of
mischief.
"Joking now, Master Walter!" cried Deborah, very much shocked.
"That is what I call downright sinful. I hope you'll be made a mark of
yourself, that I do."
The children were running off to tell their mother, when Rose stopped
them, and desired to know how Deborah had heard the tidings. It was

from two little children from the village who had come to bring a
present of some pigeons to my lady. Rose went herself to examine the
children, but she could only learn that a packman had come into the
village and brought the report that the King had been defeated, and had
fled from the field. They knew no more, and Walter pronouncing it to
be all a cock-and-bull story of some rascally prick-eared pedlar,
declared he would go down to the village and enquire into the rights of
it.
These were the saddest times of English history, when the wrong cause
had been permitted for a time to triumph, and the true and rightful side
was persecuted; and among those who endured affliction for the sake of
their Church and their King, none suffered more, or more patiently,
than Lady Woodley, or, as she was called in the old English fashion,
Dame Mary Woodley, of Forest Lea.
When first the war broke out she was living happily in her pleasant
home with her husband and children; but when King Charles raised his
standard at Nottingham, all this comfort and happiness had to be given
up. Sir Walter Woodley joined the royal army, and it soon became
unsafe for his wife and children to remain at home, so that they were
forced to go about with him, and suffer all the hardships of the sieges
and battles. Lady Woodley was never strong, and her health was very
much hurt by all she went through; she was almost always unwell, and
if Rose, though then quite a child, had not shown care and sense
beyond her years for the little ones, it would be hard to say what would
have become of them.
Yet all she endured while dragging about her little babies through the
country, with bad or insufficient food, uncomfortable lodgings, pain,
weariness and anxiety, would have been as nothing but for the heavy
sorrows that came upon her also. First she lost her only brother,
Edmund Mowbray, and in the battle of Naseby her husband was killed;
besides which there were the sorrows of the whole nation in seeing the
King sold, insulted, misused, and finally slain, by his own subjects.
After Sir Walter's death, Lady Woodley went home with her five
younger children to her father's house at Forest Lea; for her husband's
estate, Edmund's own inheritance, had been seized and sequestrated by
the rebels. She was the heiress of Forest Lea since the loss of her
brother, but the old Mr. Mowbray, her father, had given almost all his

wealth for the royal cause, and had been oppressed by the exactions of
the rebels, so that he had nothing to leave his daughter but the desolate
old house and a few bare acres of land. For the shelter, however, Lady
Woodley was very thankful; and there she lived with her children and a
faithful servant, Deborah, whose family had always served the
Mowbrays, and who would not desert their daughter now.
The neighbours in the village loved, and were sorry for, their lady, and
used to