"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.
"The rest was but the natural sequel. The foot, seeing our confusion, broke. They were rallied again; broke again; and again were rallied; but all too late. The enemy was up, and with that damned ditch between us there was no getting to close quarters with them. Had Grey ridden round, and sought to turn their flank, things might have been--O God!--they would have been entirely different. I did suggest it. But for my pains Grey threatened to pistol me if I presumed to instruct him in his duty. I would to Heaven I had pistolled him where he stood."
Walters, at gaze in the doorway, listened to the bitter tirade. Wilding, on the settle, sat silent a moment, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, his eyes set and grim as Trenchard's own. Then he mastered himself, and waved a hand towards the table where stood food and wine.
"Eat and drink, Nick," he said, "and we'll discuss what's to be done."
"It'll need little discussing," was Nick's savage answer as he rose and went to pour himself a cup of wine. "There's but one course open to us --instant flight. I am for Minehead to join Hewling's horse, which went there yesterday for guns. We might seize a ship somewhere on the coast, and thus get out of this infernal country of mine."
They discussed the matter in spite of Trenchard's having said that there was nothing to discuss, and in the end Wilding agreed to go with him. What choice had he? But first he must go to Bridgwater to reassure his wife.