War Game (2 page)

“Too true,” agreed the dying man. “Just happens Dave and I don’t happen to be a couple of your Eastern Association men. We’re low-grade cannon-fodder— what Noll Cromwell called ‘old decayed serving-men and tapsters’. We run away when things get too hot, but we bloody well come back again. And we died out there too—“ he pointed towards the water-meadow “—before there ever were any Ironsides in their pretty uniforms. This is 1643, remember, not ‘44 or ‘45.”

He could be right at that, thought Digby penitently. But more than that, there ought to be a use for such cheerful rogues because even in defeat there was a marked reluctance among members of both armies to behave shamefully. The dying man and his friend might become the nucleus of a special group prepared to disgrace themselves—a company of cowards. He might usefully raise the idea with Jim Ratcliffe before the next Mustering Committee meeting. Although he was a successful stockbroker, Jim’s enthusiasms for the realism and the Roundhead cause were unbounded.

As he emptied the last of the dye from the canister and reached for a fresh one a shadow fell across his hand.

“Keep it up, Henry—keep it up.” Bob Davenport’s broad American voice followed the shadow. “It’s going down great at the bridge, the people there are loving it. If we could bottle it I swear we could sell it for souvenirs… . Casualties ready to perform?”

“Any real casualties?” Digby’s private nightmare came to the surface.

“Just the usual cuts and bruises … plus one minor concussion. No fractures— nothing serious,” the American reassured him. “The boys are getting pretty good at looking after themselves.”

“Have you seen the Lord General?” asked the dying man.

“Not since he was hit. He’s just round the next bush.” Davenport looked over his shoulder. “Well, here they come. Do your stuff now.”

Digby screwed the dripper-top into the new canister of dye and fitted it into the recess he had scooped out in the bank between the roots of the willow. When he had checked that the red stain was spreading satisfactorily he camouflaged the plastic with the grass he had cut in readiness and climbed back up the bank to where Davenport stood beside the bodies. As the first of the spectators drew near he dropped on his knees beside the dying man, his hands clasped in prayer.

“Courage, good friends,” said Davenport in a loud voice. “We must needs look upon this dread day as the hand of the Lord raised mightily against us poor sinners, for it was only He that made us fly from the ungodly hosts.”

“Amen to that,” said Digby. “For those that He loveth He first chastiseth, even as the mighty Samson was brought low before the Philistines.”

“Ye shall be cast down in this wicked world that ye be raised up in the world everlasting,” agreed Davenport. “And doubt not that on the dreadful day of judgment the Lord shall know His own.”

“He that loseth his life in Thy service shall save it,” said Digby.

“Look! He’s all covered in blood, mum,” said a shrill treble voice in the crowd.

“Sssh!”

“Tomato sauce, more likely,” said another voice irreverently.

There was a titter of laughter, which the dying man cut off with a realistic groan. “Lord, Lord—Thy will be done,” he croaked.

“Amen,” intoned Davenport.

The bushes on the far side of the stream parted and the first of the Puritan Angels of Mercy appeared exactly on cue, a fine buxom girl bursting out of her tight black dress in unPuritan style.

“Water, water,” croaked the dying man.

Raising her skirts with one hand and grasping her leather water-bottle firmly in the other the Angel stepped bravely into the water.

“Thou comest as an angel of mercy, sister,” said Davenport. “This poor fellow hath need of thee.”

The Angel knelt beside the dying man and tenderly lifted his head as she tilted the bottle to his lips.

The crowd murmured appreciatively, cameras clicked, Digby smelt beer and the dying man winked solemnly at him.

Davenport launched himself into his standard five-minute sermon on the wickedness of the Royalists, the diabolical nature of their recent victory, its temporary nature and the inevitable outcome of their obstinate adherence to Popery, prelacy, superstition, heresy, profaneness and other abominations contrary to sound doctrine, godliness and the will of Parliament.

It was good stirring, authentic-sounding stuff and the American put it over with hellfire sincerity, thought Digby. Indeed, it knocked spots off all the modern political harangues he had heard, from National Front meetings to International Marxist rallies, at which each side had bayed for the other’s blood, but in dull twentieth-century language lacking the marvellous Old Testament vocabulary which had come naturally to seventeenth-century speakers.

Now the climax was coming—

“The Swine Brook runneth red this day with the blood of the servants of the Lord, shed by those men of Belial whose cause is the horridest arbitrariness that was ever exercised in this world.” Davenport pointed towards the stream. “It crieth out for vengeance, and be assured that the vengeance of the Lord of Hosts shall be terrible to behold—“

Digby rose unobtrusively from his knees (those who were not listening open-mouthed to the American were staring pop-eyed down the Angel’s cleavage) and made his way back to the stream’s edge to check the spread of the dye.

It was still dripping out nicely from the container, and also spreading—Digby looked down, suddenly perplexed. Where the stream had been stained rusty-brown downstream from the container, now it was also already coloured a vile unnatural pink
upstream
.

He stared to his left, into the dark tunnel of overhanging bushes. Some unauthorised joker was at work up there, spiking the water with a chemical of his own—possibly a toxic one. And that must be stopped quickly.

The look on his face as he turned back towards the crowd was caught by the dying man.

“What’s up, Henry?” he said, reviving himself miraculously.

“Somebody’s playing silly buggers,” hissed Digby angrily.

“Well, you can’t go now—the Preacher’s just getting to his blood-and-confusion bit. He’ll need you for that.”

“This won’t wait.” Digby pushed into the crowd.

The Preacher paused in mid-flow. Where—“ he caught himself just in time. Where goest thou, brother?” he called out.

Digby raised his hand vaguely. “Upon the Lord’s business, brother, upon the Lord’s business.”

He made his way through the crowd and out round the straggle of blackberry bushes and young hawthorns to the first gap in the thicket, where Jim Ratcliffe was stationed, carrying with him a gang of small boys who were concerned to discover what the Lord’s business entailed. But the gap was empty; without the distraction of the Preacher’s performance Jim had obviously spotted the tell-tale stain ahead of him.

Somewhat reassured he continued upstream. The next opening in the undergrowth was nearly a hundred yards on, by a gated farm bridge. That was the most likely place for—

“Mister! Mister!”

The treble yell came from behind him. One of the small boys waved frantically at him, and then pointed at Jim’s empty gap.

“’E’s in the water, mister!” yelled the boy.

Digby pounded back the way he had come. Inside the gap, between the high tangles of thorn and bramble, there was a yard of ground beyond which the stream widened into a dark little pool.

“ ‘E’s in the water,” the voice repeated, from behind him now.

Two slightly larger boys stood on the bank of the stream looking down. One of them squatted down abruptly to get a better view of what lay out of sight.

“Well, I still think ‘e’s shamming,” said the boy who had remained standing. “It’s what they do, like on the telly.”

Digby noticed a bright splash of red dye on the crushed grass beside the boy’s left foot.

“Get out of the way,” he commanded.

As the boys parted he saw that the pool was bright red.

He took two steps forward and looked down.

One thing Jim Ratcliffe certainly wasn’t doing was shamming.

HOW TO BE A GOOD LOSER

CROMWELLIAN GOLD HOARD
WORTH “MORE THAN £2m”

By a Staff Reporter

A SUBTLE
skein of historical mystery, interwoven with the red threads of piracy, civil war and sudden death, surrounds the discovery yesterday of a great treasure of gold, thought to be worth more than £2 million, at Standingham Castle in Wiltshire.

The discoverer—and the probable owner—of this vast fortune is Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, 26, who inherited the castle recently on the death of his uncle, Mr. Edgar Ratcliffe, 70, after a long illness.

The gold, nearly a ton of it in crudely-cast ingots, is now under guard awaiting the coroner’s inquest which must by law decide its ownership.

Meanwhile, Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, who is a Roundhead “officer” in the Double R Society, which re-enacts English Civil War battles and sieges in costume, has revealed how his special knowledge of the period helped him to discover what so many others, Oliver Cromwell among them, have sought down the centuries.

Yet the story that he has finally unravelled begins, it now seems likely, not at Standingham Castle at all, but far out in the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1630, with the disappearance of the Spanish treasure ship
Our Lady of the Immaculate Concepcion
.

Legend has it that this ship fell prey to one of the last of the Devon sea dogs in the Drake image, Captain Edward Parrott, of Hartland, whose own ship, the
Elizabeth of Bideford
, was lost that same summer on the North Devon rocks.

It was widely believed in the West Country, however, that Captain Parrott had earlier landed the gold secretly (since England was nominally at peace with Spain at the time), and then had put to sea again.

No confirmation of this rumour emerged until August, 1643, when during the Civil War a party of Parliamentary horsemen from North Devon led by Colonel Nathaniel Parrott, the Captain’s son, took refuge in Standingham Castle to escape capture by the Royalists.

Colonel Parrott and his men reinforced the defenders of the castle, which had been re-fortified by its owner, Sir Edmund Steyning, himself a fanatical supporter of the Parliamentary cause.

They brought it no luck, however. For after a Roundhead relief force had been defeated at the battle of Swine Brook Field, twelve miles away, the castle was stormed by the Royalists and the majority of its defenders massacred.

Both Colonel Parrott and Sir Edmund were among the dead, but it is known that the Royalist commander, Lord Monson, instituted a thorough—but fruitless— search of the castle directly afterwards. The historical assumption (though one not widely maintained until now) is that both the search, and indeed Lord Monson’s energetic prosecution of the siege, had been inspired by some knowledge of a treasure brought to the castle by the Roundhead horsemen.

The North Devon legend of Spanish gold now became firmly rooted in rural Wiltshire, strengthened by a second search, reputedly by Oliver Cromwell himself, in 1653. Since then there have been at least four other major treasure-hunting operations, the last in 1928 by the late Mr. Edgar Ratcliffe’s father.

This long record of failure, which led most historians to discount the whole story, has now been ended by Mr. Charles Ratcliffe’s brilliant historical detective investigation.

Standing beneath the crenellated outer ramparts yesterday, Mr. Ratcliffe, a youthful and colourful figure, said: “I have never believed the experts who said either that there never was any gold, or that Cromwell must have found it in 1653. As a boy I listened to all the old stories, and I believe that local traditions are worth far more than the half-baked facts in the history books.”

Mr. Ratcliffe, who is a postgraduate sociology student and runs a workers’ paper in his spare time, said that he had not searched haphazardly for the gold.

“First I studied all the known facts and compared them with the local tales,” he said. “Then I simply put myself into Colonel Nathaniel Parrott’s shoes.

“I took my final conclusion to a distinguished historian of the period, and he agreed with me. But I shall tell the full story of that at the coroner’s inquest to be held shortly.”

And he added intriguingly: “I can say that once I had worked out what really happened I didn’t have to search for the gold. I went straight to it.”

The only shadow on Mr. Ratcliffe’s good fortune is the recent death of his cousin, James Ratcliffe, in circumstances peculiarly relevant to—and strangely connected with—the Standingham treasure.

For Mr. James Ratcliffe was killed earlier this year during the re-enactment by the Double R Society (of which he was also a member) of that same battle of Swine Brook Field which preceded the storming of Standingham Castle.

The suspicious circumstances of his death are still being investigated by the Mid-Wessex Police Force, following the adjournment of the inquest in June.

The police have stressed that Mr. Charles Ratcliffe, who was also present on the fatal mock-battlefield, is not involved in their inquiries.

Our legal correspondent writes
: It will now be for an inquest jury convened by the local coroner to decide on the ownership of the Standingham gold. Broadly speaking, buried treasure comes under two categories: that which was deliberately abandoned with no intention of recovery (i.e. burial goods, like that found in the fabulous Sutton Hoo ship cenotaph), and that which was temporarily hidden by an owner intending to recover it (like the Romano-British coin and plate hoards) or otherwise lost accidentally. The latter category provides the classic examples of “treasure trove” in which, in default of finding a rightful owner, the established principle of English law is that the Crown is entitled to the treasure but grants “full market value” to the finder. This custom, designed to encourage finders to declare their discoveries, has aroused controversy in recent cases where there has been a marked discrepancy between what the Treasury and the British Museum consider “full market value” and what dealers on the open market are prepared to offer, since the finder has no redress in law.