Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (11 page)

‘My lord, if you had seen the strumpet I was forced to share my bed with last night you would have downed a cask of the first water just to get over the shock.’ Stifling a belch he glanced at Bess and Joe, then looked back to Lord Heylyn, suspicion thinning his eyes as he removed his hat and raked dark hair off his face.

‘Your father would be ashamed,’ Bess’s grandfather said, though he had only just finished a jug of malmsey himself.

Dane squinted at the sky. ‘At this hour my father would have still been in his cups with a whore on each knee, my lord, as well you know,’ he replied through a scowl, hitching back his cloak, so that Bess could see two pistols tucked in a belt and a brutal-looking sword scabbarded at his left hip. The sword was nothing special but Bess knew enough about weapons to know that the firelocks were of good quality, easily the most expensive items about his person, and that included the cob.

‘I have a job for you, Dane,’ the earl had said, pulling his own thick cloak tight around himself, his grey-flecked hair ruffling in the chill wind. ‘You still owe me, for all you seem to squander every penny that comes your way. This is my granddaughter Elizabeth,’ he said, gesturing to Bess, ‘and she means to find her brother, my grandson, who is currently enlisted with Essex’s rebels.’

The dark points that were Dane’s eyes grew at that, though Bess could not tell which bit of what her grandfather had said interested him more – the fact that she was his granddaughter, or that his grandson was a traitor.

‘You are to accompany my granddaughter, however long it takes, and make sure that no harm comes to her. You will have money enough to last, so long as you don’t piss it all away.’

‘And the boy?’ Dane said, at which a flush spread across Joe’s face.

Lord Heylyn shrugged. ‘He is no concern of mine. Keep my granddaughter from harm. Whatever it takes,’ he said, the word
whatever
the ballast of the command.

Dane had seemed indifferent to the task being asked of him, preoccupied instead with the misery of his self-inflicted condition. On top of this he struck Bess as disrespectful, inattentive and slovenly, which made the prospect of travelling in his company not in the least bit appealing. Still, she had Joe, who if anything seemed to like Dane even less than she. Furthermore – and this made her heart sing, threw light upon the world and vanquished a great shadow – she had succeeded in prevailing on her grandfather to help. Somehow she had done that. She would find Tom and Tom would be pardoned. Then they would weave the broken threads of her family back together and make the picture whole again. No, not whole. Never so. But it would be a new beginning.

Thus had they provisioned and set off south from Kingsley that very day with the aim of travelling the ten or so miles to Winsford before dark. Part of Bess wished she had brought her own mare, Chryseis, but she had feared that such a fine-looking horse would bring her unwanted attention and so she had taken a bay called Millicent, who was usually ridden by servants running errands in the village or Ormskirk. Lord Heylyn had provided them with a good-tempered dun mare to help carry provender for man and beast as well as spare furs and waterproofed canvases should they for some reason find themselves sleeping underneath the stars. Dane, Bess noticed, now wore a buff-coat, though made sure it was covered by his bad-weather cloak and a ratty old bear skin which he wore across his shoulders, so that on his short-legged cob he looked more like some grizzled, itinerant pedlar than someone in whose hands you would place your safety.

For the most part the man kept his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself and this was fine by Bess, fine by Joe too, she suspected from the young musketeer’s silence. He was sulking, she knew, presumably because he felt his position as her protector usurped, and Bess had given up another prayer, an utterance steeped in frustration, that they might find Tom
soon, before such gloomy company made of their venture some sort of purgation.

And yet Alexander Dane’s stony-faced silence irked her, too, for how could the man have no questions? How could anyone show such scant interest in her purpose or in the charge commanded of him?

They overnighted in a hostelry in Winsford, the men sharing a room adjoining Bess’s, and set off next morning at dawn along the River Weaver’s eastern bank, the rising April sun on their left cheeks making white blooms of each breath. Bess had spent the first mile wondering if Dane would exhibit a more affable temperament now that he should have at least recovered from his indulgences of two nights before. But by the third mile it was quite clear to her that the man was simply a boor and even that acceptance was a knife in her heart, because it made her think of Emmanuel, good, joyful Emmanuel, and how lucky she had been to love him and be loved by him.

‘
I STILL DON
’
T
see why we couldn’t have ridden the first forty-five miles and walked the last ten,’ Weasel griped, sharply tugging the halter of the ass he was leading, as though it were the animal’s fault that they were footsore and comfortless. ‘Might as well have bloody enlisted with the musketeers.’

‘I’d give you a week before you forgot about the match between your fingers, stuck your hand in the black powder and blew yourself to Kingdom Come,’ Trencher said, sweeping his cap from his head and mopping his slick brow with it.

‘I don’t know what you’re moaning about, you little runt,’ Dobson said to Weasel. ‘Try pushing this damn thing half a mile and then let’s see what you’ve got to say about it.’

Tom suspected it was time someone else took a turn pushing the handcart but said nothing, enjoying seeing the big man’s pride take him further with it than he ought to have gone. It was dusk and they had been on the road since dawn, so that Tom knew they would have to lie up for the night before long.

‘When we get to that oak tree yonder, I’ll take the cart,’ Guillaume Scarron said, his English thick with French, ‘and after me Tristan will take it.’

‘He’s all right for another mile yet, Scarron,’ Tom said, lifting
his chin towards Dobson who muttered something foul under his breath.

‘Well, this bloody beast stinks like a dead dog left out in the rain,’ Weasel said, ‘and I’ve been downwind of it ever since Stokenchurch.’ Each man had a knapsack slung across his back in which he carried spare clothing, money, flint, steel and charcloth, a wooden bowl and spoon, a leather bottle and some other essentials for the journey, but the ass was saddled with more knapsacks containing food, blankets and dry tinder. The animal also carried five skins full of small beer, two large mattocks and a pickaxe.

‘I doubt the beast likes your stink any more than you like his,’ Penn put in, ‘yet you don’t hear him complaining.’

Just then the ass flared its nostrils, opened its mouth and brayed, startling a pair of pigeons that clapped into the darkening sky and raising laughter from the small band of stonemasons on the road to Oxford. Except, only three of the men were real masons: Guillaume Scarron the master stonemason, and his two companions – one a squat, square-headed carver of marble named de Gombaud, and the other Scarron’s apprentice, a dark-haired, fine-featured young man named Tristan. All three were Frenchmen and like many of their profession they spent their lives travelling across England from one great house-building project to the next. But the war had put paid to many such building ambitions and now the three men, originally from the village of Brimont five miles to the north of Reims, found themselves in the employ of one Captain Crafte of Parliament’s army and earning more, Tom guessed, for not shaping stone than they would working on some cathedral or lord’s hall.

‘No horses, no firelocks or swords or any of a soldier’s accoutrements,’ Crafte had told Tom and his small band of volunteers, ‘for you must appear to all the world no different from any company of roaming masons and labourers, though you may of course bear what crude weapons are common to such fellows.’

‘No weapons?’ Trencher had blurted, turning to Tom, his eyes bulging incredulously.

‘We’ll not get into Oxford looking like this, Will,’ Penn had said, rapping his knuckles against his breastplate.

‘We’ll never make it to Oxford at all without bloody steel and shot,’ Weasel had said through a grimace.

‘Once inside the city you will be supplied with arms. Thomas has received the necessary instructions,’ Crafte had said, and all eyes had turned to Tom then.

‘We’re to keep our mouths shut in company.’ Tom had laid the greater weight of his gaze on Weasel. ‘The masons we’ll be travelling with are French and—’

‘French!’ A yawp from Trencher. ‘Why don’t we invite the Pope along while we’re at it?’

Tom had ignored this. ‘By keeping our mouths shut and letting our companions make any necessary introductions, we shouldn’t arouse suspicion.’

‘The last thing we want is your being recruited into a company of the King’s musketeers,’ Crafte had explained humourlessly. ‘Being French should spare you that particular indignity.’

‘I think I’d rather be taken for a Cavalier than a Frenchman,’ Dobson had muttered, raising his brows at Trencher.

‘It’s not too late to change your minds,’ Tom had said, glancing at each of them in turn and not caring much either way, for he would go to Oxford whatever their decision, alone if it came to it.

Trencher had folded stout arms over his barrel chest. ‘Oh yes, and stay here locked up till you’ve either clobbered the Cavaliers’ newsbook or been strung up by your ballocks?’ he suggested. ‘No thank you, Thomas. And more to the point, if we’ve got snail-gobblers running around the country someone needs to keep an eye on them.’ Then he had looked back to Captain Crafte and held out a meaty palm. ‘Where’s my damned mallet?’

Next day, Tom, Trencher, Penn, Weasel and Dobson had
been introduced to Guillaume Scarron and his men. Captain Crafte had found the masons at a sandstone quarry in Godstone village some thirty-something miles to the south-east. The Frenchmen had been living in a draughty, timber-framed, bracken-roofed lodge built into the semi-circular, scarred wall of tawny stone, and the main reason Crafte had chosen them for the mission – other than their being French – was that they had appeared the least drunken of a very drunken company. It was not hard to imagine the scene that must have greeted Crafte, for Tom had seen such a travelling band working on Emmanuel’s house in Shevington. That ruin had belonged to Cockersand Abbey, before King Henry had changed all that, and Tom had not disagreed with his father’s assertion that the masons labouring in Emmanuel’s employ might be reckoned the lewdest and worst-conditioned fellows that one could expect to meet.

‘They will drink more in one day than three days’ wages will come to,’ Sir Francis had warned Emmanuel, ‘and you must all but take up your crop to rouse them from their drunken stupor.’

And now Tom and the others were to imitate such men so as not to provoke suspicion amongst any that they should meet on the road to Oxford and on entering the city.

‘At least it’s not raining,’ Penn said cheerily, slapping Dobson’s back, so that a cloud of yellow stone dust puffed up from his tunic. ‘I’ve got no drill and no corporals yapping in my ears and that’s good enough for me.’ In the meadows either side of the worn track, sheep bleated, dogs barked and shepherds whistled. Clusters of men and women were still out in the fallow fields spreading manure and others were strung out in lines, bent over, dibbing peas and beans by the last of the light.

‘If you don’t mind looking like a crump-backed bloody shabbaroon,’ Trencher remarked, taking a swig from his leather flask. For Crafte’s ruse was more elaborate than simply having Tom and his companions dress in dishevelled, dust-ingrained
breeches and doublets. Like all the stonemasons Tom had seen, the three Frenchmen were lopsided in appearance, Scarron most of all, the muscles of their mallet arms being overdeveloped from years of hard use. So Crafte had made them wrap swaths of linen round their upper right arms and shoulders beneath their shirts to create the masons’ disproportional bulk. Scarron and de Gombaud wore tough leather gloves, but the rest had bound their hands in grubby linen rags or thin leather strips and all had rubbed stone dust into beards, faces and hair, so that Tom thought the only apparent characteristic they did not share with the real masons – one which afflicted Scarron more than the other two, he noticed – was the cough that announced itself all too often, caused by years of breathing the airborne gritty powder of the quarry.

Dobson let go the cart’s handles and the thing thumped down, rattling the assortment of mauls, gavelocks, kevels, and chisels within the canvas knapsacks stowed in the cart bed. Scarron cursed at the tools’ treatment, but though he was a big man he was not a killer like Dobson and had the sense to know it.

‘Done my bit and more.’ Dobson pushed big hands into the small of his back, looking up to the sky as though waiting for the Divine to reward him. Instead, a murder of rooks and crows swept above them eastwards in a dark riotous cloud, heading for their roosts. The sun had gone and the sky was grey blue and streaked with cloud the colour of cooked salmon flesh.