Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (14 page)

‘We’re going to a hostelry to find a whore,’ Tom said.

Tom sensed Penn’s head snap round and even Trencher’s eyes were round as shillings at that, for like the others Trencher was in the dark regarding the finer points of Captain Crafte’s plan.

‘You mutton-mongers!’ Dobson blurted. ‘You get to bang Cupid’s kettledrums while we’re working? How is that fair?’

‘Just stay out of trouble,’ Tom said, ‘and meet us at sunset.’

‘Aye, well, you two enjoy your notch,’ Dobson growled as Tom and Penn turned to make their way back north up Alfred Street. ‘And save some for the rest of us!’

The Spotted Cow had not been easy to find. Tom and Penn had followed several winding lanes then a dark, narrow alley on whose dank walls someone had scrawled, long ago by the looks of the faded white paint,
Hell’s Passage
. But rather than leading to Hell it had led to a grubby, noisome hostelry which was thronged with patrons despite the stench, which told Tom that either the ale was good or the whores were.

When at last he had been able to gain the landlord’s attention,
Tom had asked for two cups of beer and a whore named Hester. A plump, red-faced, scowling man, the landlord had nodded purposefully, thrown two drunks off a table in a dark dingy corner (because they weren’t buying flesh) and told Tom he would have to wait because the girl was busy upstairs. And so they had waited, ears full of the incessant burble of the congregation, eyes on their mugs or a pretty girl but otherwise oblivious to the soldiers and students, idlers and drunks, as though they were regulars of the Cow. And now Tom watched a wild-haired, wide-hipped girl descend the stairs opposite, lacing up her stays with nimble ease as she came, and he knew from Captain Crafte’s description that it was Hester. Evidently the whore had been well informed too by the landlord’s boy, for she came directly up to their table and looked both men up and down.

‘Which one of you two handsome gentlemen wants his quim first?’ she asked. ‘Or are you the sort that’ll share a dish?’

Feeling Penn grinning beside him Tom asked the girl if she had any cards. ‘I’m fond of Ruff and Trump,’ he said.

‘I prefer Laugh and Lie Down,’ Hester replied, completing the pre-arranged protocol, and Tom nodded and leant forward. ‘I’m here to see The Scot.’

Hester straightened the front of her full skirts, fingers brushing at a drying stain on the woollen cloth.

‘I know where I might find him,’ she said, lifting Tom’s cup and taking a draught. She dragged a bare arm across plump, wet lips. ‘Do you gentlemen want some company whilst you wait? I can get you two of the other girls.’ She smiled, handing the beer back to Tom. ‘They ain’t got what I’ve got but they’re good girls and clean.’

‘We have all we need,’ Tom said, taking the cup, and Hester nodded, turned and threaded her way through the throng towards the door. And one hour and three cups of beer later they met The Scot.

Captain Crafte had said nothing of The Scot other than that
he would supply the black powder and then be the one to see them safely away from Oxford when the job was done. But Tom did not need Crafte to tell him that the man now sitting opposite him was every inch a soldier. Though he was not a big man, his face was hard and unforgiving, reminding Tom of the effigy of some long-dead knight sculpted into a sarcophagus lid. But for the eyes. The eyes were big and alive and blazed with the zeal of a man who has lived amidst death.

‘They get younger,’ The Scot said. ‘They’ll be sending bairns and bantlings to do men’s jobs next.’

‘You know why we’re here?’ Tom asked.

‘Nae, laddie,’ The Scot said, raising his cup to his lips and downing a wash of ale. ‘I neither know nor care what they’ve got you sticking your neck in the noose for, but I’ve done what was agreed.’

‘Then you must have risked your own neck,’ Tom said. ‘With respect you risk it now by sitting here with us, for I’d wager you were at Kineton Fight and cannot have killed every man who saw your face.’

The Scot’s eyes widened still further as though his mind recalled the events. ‘Aye, I was there and at Brentford too, under Philip, Lord Wharton.’ Tom saw Penn wince and glance about to see if anyone had reacted. It seemed that no one had. ‘And I’ve made enemies in Germany and the Lowlands and even in Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, in my own damn parish,’ The Scot went on, not caring who heard. ‘But I’ve friends, too, laddie, and some of them are in this stinking hole now and would kill any man who so much as offended my eye.’

Tom found himself liking the soldier, admiring his cold indifference to danger even though it could get them all hanged for spies.

‘Where is it?’ Tom asked.

The Scot jerked his chin at Penn. ‘This one got no tongue?’ he asked, turning those callous eyes on Tom’s friend.

‘I’m just here for the beer and the laced mutton,’ Penn said,
holding the man’s eye long enough to hint at a belligerence that defied his affable grin.

‘Spoken like a true stonemason,’ The Scot said with a satisfied nod, then looked back to Tom, leaning closer now. ‘You’ll find it stashed with a farrier at the north end of Grope Lane. The man’s a simpleton and won’t give you any trouble. I’ll be waiting at the footbridge that crosses the Cherwell north-east of the city. I’ll wait as long as I can but I’ll be gone before first light, with or without you.’

‘We’ll be there,’ Tom said. The Scot nodded, finished his ale and slammed the cup down, then stood from the table and left without another word.

‘So what now?’ Penn asked, his eye drawn to Hester who stood at the foot of the stairs hoiking up her full breasts so that the white flesh bulged clear of her low-cut bodice. ‘Seems we’ve got some time to kill waiting for dark.’

‘Even if we had the silver,’ Tom began, nodding at Penn’s right shoulder made thick and bulky by the linen wrapped round the arm beneath the shirt and doublet, ‘a crump-backed labourer like you paying for a wench like that would raise eyebrows, even in a flea-pit such as this.’

Penn looked crestfallen, a condition exacerbated by the emptiness of his beer cup.

‘What are your orders then, general?’ he asked, head tilted, one eye still watching Hester.

‘Now, Matthew, we find out where John Birkenhead drinks,’ Tom replied straight-faced, ‘for a Fellow of All Souls and editor of the King’s newsbook does not drink here.’

‘
YOU WOULDN
’
T KNOW
there was a war on,’ Joe said, watching a line of women working in the field beside them, faces obscured by broad-hats, the hems of their skirts and their white hands caked in mud. They were setting seeds in neat rows and none even deigned to glance up at the riders making their way south along a road churned by hooves and wheel-rutted. ‘Mind, they’re late to be planting peas. S’pose the war might account for that,’ Joe suggested. ‘Perhaps they had meant to leave it fallow. But now, what with the way things are …’

Bess had thought the same thing, had been surprised not to see more evidence of the great struggle, more debris from the conflict that had stripped her own family of so much. She had watched men and women spreading manure across the fallow fields and ewes suckling their young. She had seen livestock being herded from home pasturage to the communal pens and women tending fruit trees and she had resented it all. For how could the world go on as normal when somewhere, perhaps in many places throughout the kingdom, men were killing other men? Brothers, fathers and sons were being butchered, their carcasses left as carrion, unburied, without the meagre comfort of a prayer said over them.

‘You think they should be cowering indoors?’ Dane put in,
uncharacteristically joining a conversation. ‘Do you resent them for trying to survive?’ Bess felt a pang of guilt clench in her chest at that, felt annoyed with Dane for putting it there.

‘I think they are lucky if this cursed war has not touched them,’ Bess said. ‘And if it has, I pity them, whichever side they are on.’

Dane looked back towards the bent-over women. ‘The first army that marches past this field come the harvest will leave nothing behind but the worms and maybe not even them. Those folk know it but they’ll still break their backs now. The world is sliding into chaos and they plant peas.’ He shrugged. ‘I admire them for their hope if nothing else.’

‘I pray this war will be over before the harvest,’ Joe said.

‘And you believe your prayers will make any difference?’ Dane asked, looking straight ahead.

‘Yes, Mr Dane,’ Joe said, sitting tall and rigid.

‘Then you are a fool, lad. Even if you promised me a thousand hands clasped in prayer, I’d sooner take two hands on two good firelocks.’ Even the way the man rode, casually swaying from side to side on his sorry-looking horse, annoyed Bess.

‘You do not believe in prayer, Mr Dane?’ she asked.

‘I do not, my lady,’ he said, deliberately baiting her by not calling her Bess as she had told him to. ‘To my ear, praying is too much like begging.’

‘Praying is nothing like begging,’ Bess snapped, annoyed with herself for reacting to the man’s nonsense.

‘Whatever you ask in My name, this I will do,’ Dane said, ‘that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.’ He leant over in the saddle, hawked and spat a gobbet onto the mud track.

‘Book of John?’ Bess asked, surprised to hear the man quote from the Scriptures. Even Joe had raised an eyebrow though he did not turn his head from the road before them.

Dane nodded. ‘I’d wager a barrel of good wine that my mother could recite the whole damn lot of it.’

‘Do not let the Puritans hear you talk of gambling, drinking and the book of God’s True Law in the same breath,’ Joe advised, still not looking at him.

‘I do not think Mr Dane spends much time in the company of godly men, Joe,’ Bess said.

Dane did not contradict her, nor did he give some frivolous reply, and from his absent air she saw that his thoughts were elsewhere.

‘Line after line she knew by rote,’ he said. ‘My father would have her deliver whole parables to guests at our table.’ He grimaced. ‘I was a bantling with ears stuffed full of damned prayers.’

Bess did not know what to say to that and neither did Joe have anything to add, and so they continued into the grey day, the empty sky blending into the colourless earth like an ashen veil. It was a windless day and Bess watched a lone bird of prey coursing low over the fields, gliding and twisting, unhurried yet resolute. Her stomach ached with loss. It seemed like forever since she and Joe had left Shear House and she wondered how little Francis was. Was his wet-nurse feeding him enough? She imagined her mother’s fury, or worse still sadness, and supposed she might have sent someone out to find her, end her folly and bring her back to Shear House.

The hen harrier was covering the ground in sharp sweeps and turns as it came towards them, its wings forming a V so that she noticed their tips were black, as though they had been dipped in the ink pot that still sat on her father’s writing table at home. Then suddenly the bird rose and twisted over them, making no sound at all in the still, moist air, and was gone, lost in the grey.

Where are you, Thomas?
her mind whispered.
Where are you?

It was raining now: a lashing deluge that had seemed to come from nowhere and soaked them to the bone even as they threw
capes around themselves and rode slump-shouldered as though by making themselves smaller they might escape the worst. They had meant to ride further, perhaps making another five miles before dusk and thieves or treacherous footing made it too dangerous to be on the road, but the rain made such an imitation of twilight that when Dane suggested they stop at the next village neither Bess nor Joe had protested.

‘It will be good to get by a fire,’ Joe said, clenching and unclenching cold hands on the reins.

Bess agreed wholeheartedly, though did not say as much. She had been shivering for the last three miles but had resolved to clamp her teeth shut and say nothing rather than be seen as the weak one. She
was
the weakest. She knew that, of course: weakest not only by virtue of her sex but also because hers had been a life of privilege and she was unused to hardship. She could change none of that. But not to reveal her weakness by showing that she could not endure what the men could endure, nor, God forbid, to engender their pity – that much was yet within her control and it would take more than a week of being saddle-sore, cold and tired to erode her purpose. Had she not watched her mother, attired for war in Mun’s old back-and-breast, ride out on her grey mare Hecuba and bleed the villains besieging Shear House? Had Lady Mary not stood with Major Radcliffe’s musketeers when all had seemed lost and the rebels were closing in?

If Mother has such steel in her spine then perhaps I do too
, she dared to ponder.

‘What village is that?’ Joe said, breaking the spell of her thoughts and nodding through the gloom. ‘Stone? Some other place?’

‘Matters not, so long as neither side of this damned quarrel has soldiers billeted there,’ Dane called above the seething rain, water cascading from the rim of his broad-hat. ‘We have her ladyship’s money,’ he said with a sour glance at Bess, ‘and they …’ he dipped his head towards the cluster of thatched
houses ahead, ‘they have food, fire, ale and … agreeable company.’