Authors: Michael Arnold
Stryker realized his blade was still exposed, and he sheathed it quickly. ‘Highness, I—’
‘Jesu, Stryker, but you’ll not duel here. No, sir, you will not!’
‘I beg forgiveness, Highness,’ Stryker managed to say. His mouth was bone dry as he stared up at the general. Prince Rupert of the Rhine was still only in his early twenties, yet he had been in almost constant military service for more than a decade, and every man knew he was not one to be trifled with. ‘He slaughtered a family.’
The prince did not flinch. ‘Many terrible acts befall a town under sack, Major.’
‘He raped the women.’ He looked to Crane, but the blue eyes gleamed hard in the shade of his hat. ‘Murdered children.’
Rupert’s eyes swivelled to pinion Kendrick. ‘Well?’
‘He lies, Highness.’
If Kendrick was a vulture, hunched and glowering, then Prince Rupert had the noble ferocity of a hawk, and his unflinching gaze seemed to twinkle as he spoke words dripping with danger. ‘This is Sergeant-Major Stryker, Captain Kendrick. A man of senior rank and dignity.’
Kendrick was not to be cowed, though the smirk had faded. ‘He is Sergeant-Major with no command, Highness. A reformado.’ He twisted his narrow face, as if the word itself brought putrefaction to his tongue. ‘I bring sixty-three men to your army.’
‘He is a particular associate of mine,’ Rupert replied, ‘and I can assure you, regiment or no, Stryker brings plenty to my army. Have a care with your accusations, Captain.’ The eyes shifted, lancing Stryker. ‘Major?’
‘Highness.’
‘This,’ the prince said, nodding at the Vulture, ‘is Captain John Kendrick. Also an associate of mine, and a very great leader of men. I need both of you. Have a care with your own accusations.’
Stryker gritted his teeth. ‘Highness.’
‘The fact remains,’ Kendrick said, ‘that he challenged me to armed combat.’ He swept his brutish gauntlet across the hushed crowd. ‘Witnesses aplenty. Honour must be served, Highness, do you not agree?’
Prince Rupert of the Rhine paused for a second, pursing his lips in thought. ‘Very well, gentlemen,’ he said eventually. ‘Fight your damnable duel.’ He patted the hilt of the sword that hung at his hip. ‘My own blade awaits the victor. We are agreed?’ He waited as the two men first glanced at one another, then back at him, their mouths firmly shut. Rupert flicked his reins. His black stallion shook its head as it turned away, nostrils flaring as it whinnied. ‘I thought not,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Back to quarters Captain, Major. I mean to march on Liverpool, and I would have you both with me!’
Chapter 5
York, 3 June 1644
The Parliamentarian Army of the Eastern Association arrived on the outskirts of York as rain lashed the ancient city. It was halfway through the afternoon, but angry clouds had transformed the sky to a blanket of black, and out of the tempest, illuminated by jagged spears of lightning, marched the great warlike column that represented the third arm of Roundhead power in the north.
Lancelot Forrester stood on the fire-step of the shallow trench, well ensconced within his deep hood, rain sluicing in maddened rivulets off the oiled cloth swathing his shoulders. Around him his men were collecting the valuable tools of trench work – shovels, picks, dog carts – and preparing to abandon the flooded sap for the fortress looming at their backs. They chatted as they worked, cheerful in spite of numbed hands and feet, because blazing hearths awaited. But it was more than that, Forrester knew. He felt it too: a yearning to be inside the walls as this new threat surged up from the south. He would lead his men back to their saps, he felt sure. Creep out to dig deeper, strive further, set new pickets, place new marksmen. For now, though, they were best to get out of the way until they knew where precisely the Earl of Manchester’s fresh forces would be allocated.
‘If they’ve any sense, they will push around to the north,’ Forrester muttered to no one in particular. ‘Take up the final unguarded section.’
‘The last stopper in our confounded bottle.’
Forrester glanced to his right, icy droplets skittering off the edge of his hood. ‘Quite.’
Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner was himself cowled, though his long, white beard extended beyond the reach of the hood so that raindrops gathered like dew on the wiry bristles. He shook his head. ‘How many?’
‘Six thousand foot, so says Master Killigrew.’
Gardner screwed up his craggy face. ‘Killigrew spews more dung than a donkey’s arse.’
Forrester grunted his amusement, though the sound was lost in a sudden clap of thunder. ‘He is an intelligencer, Father, and that is the intelligence he imparts.’
‘Horse?’
‘They’re detached. Ravaging the county this very moment, I shouldn’t wonder. Three thousand, as I understand it.’
‘What happened to the Oxford Army?’ Gardner’s voice was strong with the accent of the Welsh mountains. ‘Don’t like the rain do they, boy?’
‘Perhaps,’ Forrester mused, searching the storm-hazed horizon for regimental colours. ‘Though I rather suspect the defeat at Cheriton has put the King on edge. He would rather lose York than Oxford.’
‘If he loses York, he loses the north.’ The old man hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it into the swelling quagmire at his feet. ‘If he loses the north, then we’re all buggered.’
Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner was the de facto preacher to Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot. It was a curious arrangement, for the man, who might have seen anything from sixty winters to ninety, was a Puritan. Or, at least, he had been in earlier days. Father Gardner, as they tended to address him, had been found by Stryker’s company during their flight from a troop of enemy cavalry the previous summer. He had been living alone on Dartmoor; a cantankerous, foul-mouthed hermit, who appeared unable to maintain his sanity from one moment to the next. But the madness, it became clear, was a screen for an active and sharp mind, and Gardner had proved himself invaluable in the escape of Stryker’s embattled force. His shrewd advice had resulted in Stryker’s request for Gardner to counsel his rough, jaded men. It was an unlikely appointment, given the obvious scarcity of those with Puritan leanings amongst the Royalist faction, but Stryker had wanted it, and Mowbray had not demurred. The irony, of course, was that Stryker’s company had lasted a matter of months before its obliteration, leaving Seek Wisdom with no home in an army generally hostile to his particular beliefs. But then the regimental preacher had died, his heart giving out one snow-sprinkled day in January, and somehow old Seek Wisdom had taken over his duties. He had been forced to tone down his austere rhetoric, naturally, and carry out some of the ceremonial tasks required by the High Church, but Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner was a survivor, and he had done what was necessary. Now the short, wiry priest gave a cackle that was pitched high and nasal. ‘If I’d have known how poorly your bastard army would conduct this war, I’d have joined the other side.’
Forrester looked down upon him with a baleful expression. ‘You have time yet, Father.’
‘I may agree with the dissenters, Lancelot, but I do not like ’em.’ Gardner rocked back suddenly, tilting his head up at the violent sky. ‘Do not like ’em, Lord, do I?’
‘Oh?’ Forrester prompted when the priest had finished staring at the roiling abyss.
‘Gaggle o’ dour old goats.’ Gardner spat again. ‘The Godly, as we call ourselves’ – he shot Forrester an impish wink – ‘are imbued with the fear of the Almighty, but such divine blessing does not always inspire us to nurture a love of His creatures.’
Forrester smiled. ‘The man claiming spiritual infallibility for himself tends rather to think the worst of the man who claims nothing.’
‘Ha!’ Gardner crowed, staring heavenwards again. ‘He has it, Lord! The dear captain is not as stupid as we thought!’ He fixed Forrester with a lucid stare. ‘The Godly, dear Lancelot, know that all life is predestined and unchangeable, that the baubles of Rome and Canterbury are nothing more than idolatry, that all wisdom may be discovered in Scripture and that the Papacy dances hand in hand with the great whore that sitteth upon many waters. But that does not mean we have to be arseholes.’
Both men laughed at that, and Forrester helped Gardner along the bottom of the sticky gully. ‘Let us find some warmth, eh? And some vittels.’
Gardner glanced pointedly at the pewter buttons of Forrester’s cloak, straining taut against his ample midriff. ‘Think you only of your belly, boy?’
‘It is not the courageous man who wins the day, Father, but the well-fed.’
‘Greed is a sin, dear Lancelot.’
‘So is nagging like a bloody fishwife.’
Gardner slipped, slid like a fawn on a frozen lake, and was only saved from planting all fours in the mud by Forrester’s firm grasp at his skinny wrist. He let Forrester haul him up the side of the trench to ground level. ‘I’m right, though, you can admit that much.’
‘Right?’ Forrester said, rearranging his baldric after the scrambled climb. Musketry began to ripple out from the walls above them. Newcastle’s sharpshooters had evidently decided to harass the oncoming column of infantry. The range was too great and their powder would be damp, but sometimes men needed to show an enemy that they were willing to fight.
‘About the war,’ Gardner said when there was a lull in the sporadic shooting. ‘This time last year we were all dancing a jig round our fires and chanting
hang up the Roundheads
. We were winning, boy. Now it’s all falling apart.’
‘The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.’
Gardner twisted his mouth in distaste. ‘Do not quote Cicero at me, boy.’
‘It is Shakespeare, Father,’ Forrester said, exasperated. ‘Henry the Sixth, Part Three, act two, scene two.’
‘Blasphemy,’ Gardner retorted.
‘They were trodden on,’ Forrester persisted: ‘the rebels, I mean.’
‘Not hard enough, boy.’
‘Precisely.’ Forrester led the way back to the gates of the Walmgate barbican, their boots splashing as they went. ‘They fought for their very lives, Father, for the existence of their cause. At Gloucester, at Newbury, at Cheriton.’ He looked back, nodding towards the Earl of Manchester’s huge force as it trudged along the shadowy skyline to join with two more armies in defiance of the king. ‘Now look. The worm has turned, well and truly.’
‘Except it is not a worm, boy,’ Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner replied in barely more than whisper. ‘It is a viper.’
Near Standish, Lancashire, 3 June 1644
The camp had been pitched where fields dipped to a shallow valley fringed by woodland. A brook babbled through the centre of the temporary settlement, providing a latrine for both man and beast as well as a rich source of clear, crisp water that would slake even the most arid thirst, so long as a man thought to trudge upstream to dunk his flask. The heavy horses of the Lifeguard whickered as the light faded, their muzzles foamed green with torn grass. The sounds of men singing drifted on the light breeze, accompanied by a tuneful fiddle that seemed to exult in the retreat of yet another day’s rain, while foraging parties groped the countryside in every direction, stretching out like tentacles to gather food and supplies from disgruntled but cowed folk who wished to play no part in the games of kings and parliaments.
Stryker pulled on his boots and left his tent. He paced across the small encampment, weaving in and out of awnings clustered around flickering fires freshly kindled against the onset of dusk. Pots hanging above the flames sent delicious vapours into the dank air, and he breathed in appreciatively. He paused at the stream, arching his back, heard the satisfying report of a cracking spine, and leapt the chattering shallows in a single bound. Somewhere men jeered, and he saw a large, black-eared hare race in a panicked blur through a gauntlet of baying folk and grasping hands. The startled creature eventually made it to the open ground on the camp’s periphery, and bolted up the slope towards the beckoning shadows of wind-stooped trees.
Somewhere a dog barked, one of the flea-bitten mongrels that could always be found scuttling in the wake of armies. It was abruptly silenced, a yelp and whine its pathetic retort. Meanwhile, up above, the splayed wings of a red kite turned lazily, the bird of prey circling silently, biding its time. Stryker watched it, a black silhouette against the grey sky, and thought of the vultures he had seen in Spain.
‘How now, Sergeant-Major?’ Sir Richard Crane strode out of the half-light towards him.
‘Colonel.’