Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (24 page)

‘The boys will be glad to see you back,’ Rowe said, rubbing Hector’s muzzle like an old friend.

‘And how’s our good friend Captain Boone?’ O’Brien asked.

‘Still alive. Still a bastard,’ Downes said.

‘Now now, Trooper Downes,’ Corporal Bard said, appearing from nowhere and nodding in greeting to Mun and O’Brien. The guard of his three-bar pot was pushed up, exposing his skull-like face. ‘Good to have you two back with us,’ he said. ‘Do I take it there are no more rebels in Lancashire? Rumour is you and your farm lads have been hunting ’em down like the bloody plague.’ His eyes ran the length of the column behind Mun but it was impossible to know what the man was thinking.

‘There are still plenty of Parliament men up there, Corporal,’ Mun said, ‘but I heard that Captain Boone has been heartsick ever since I left.’ He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t think of him suffering like that and so here I am.’

Bard hawked, turned his head and spat a wad of tobacco
and phlegm into the mud. ‘And you happened across a bloody great gun on your merry way,’ he said. ‘A bloody great cannon no less.’

Again Mun shrugged, glancing at O’Brien, who smiled. ‘It was just sitting there by the road, Corporal,’ Mun said. ‘Seemed a shame to ride on by and leave it to the enemy. We thought His Highness might find use for it.’

‘The cannon is mine, Corporal,’ Lord Lidford said, walking his Cleveland Bay up, so that Mun noticed Bard taking in the fine horse with its large, white-star-marked head and well-muscled withers, before he fully appreciated the man upon it.

‘And who might you be?’ Bard asked, the respect he would usually have afforded a man in full cuirassier’s armour blunted by the man’s apparent lack of a sword.

‘Insolence everywhere I turn,’ Lord Lidford announced despairingly and Bard looked up at Mun for an explanation that Mun did not have the time or patience for.

‘I must speak with the Prince,’ Mun said, peering through the torch-lit night towards the siegeworks before the Cathedral Close.

‘Aye, I expect you must, Sir Edmund,’ Bard said, as though the title still tasted curious on his tongue, ‘but I warn you His Highness has cursed you more than once since Oxford. You were supposed to join us at Windsor once you had broken the rebels attacking your house.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘Perhaps you forgot,’ he suggested, scratching one hollow cheek upon which the bristles were thick and grey. ‘Besides which, he’s been in a foul mood since we got ’ere.’ He thumbed back towards the rebel defences which Mun now saw were surrounded by a moat. ‘Getting that lot out will be harder than getting a quart of ale out of Walton,’ he said, which made the point well for Humphrey Walton was a known niggard though he always seemed flush with coin for whores and gambling.

‘I suspect my cannon might cheer him,’ Mun said.

‘Aye, it might,’ Bard admitted, glancing again at Lord Lidford
and the young man at his shoulder and cocking his chin in their direction, wanting an explanation. But Mun did not want to get into it and so he ignored the corporal. Bard shrugged. ‘Downes, Rowe,’ he barked, ‘now that I’ve found you why don’t you make yourselves useful for once in your miserable lives? Get Sir Edmund’s troopers’ horses picketed and find this lot billets and ale.’

‘Why don’t we find them each a woman, a warm bed and a suckling pig while we’re about it?’ Downes dared, earning himself a look from Bard that promised cold horrors.

‘Let’s not go spoiling them,’ Bard replied, ‘they ain’t bloody heroes. And I’m no military genius but I reckon that there cannon would be a great deal more use if they had brought shot for it.’

‘Don’t ask for much, does he?’ O’Brien grumbled.

‘You haven’t changed a bit, Corporal Bard,’ Mun said, dismounting, impressed that even in the dark with the cannon being taken off by the artillery sergeant and his men, Bard had known from the way the cart rode that it could not have contained shot.

‘I’m older, Sir Edmund,’ Bard said, ‘but I blame that on the damn rebels.’

‘We’re all older,’ Mun said.

‘Praise the ripe field not the green corn,’ O’Brien said, as Rowe took Hector by the bridle and Downes took O’Brien’s mare and the horses blew and nickered excitedly for they knew they would soon be fed.

‘Lead on, Corporal,’ Mun said.

‘Aye, off we go then,’ Bard said, turning back towards the looming cathedral as Mun and O’Brien, Lord Lidford and his son Jonathan followed through the siege lines that smelt of wet wool and tobacco smoke, the latrine pit and, more faintly, the sharp metallic and earthy scent of burnt black powder.

To find the Prince.

BESS HAD NEVER
seen London before. She had heard enough about it – too much if truth be told – from Mun who had visited the capital several times and then from Tom who had been full of it all after his time there with his father and brother before the war. They had told her that London was a great monster, spreading out beyond the confines of the medieval city, stretching from Stepney in the east to Westminster to the west. They had told her that London was home to four hundred thousand souls, though she had not been able to conceive of so many people and had listened to their stories with a quiet detachment, as though they talked of a foreign country which she, in all likelihood, might never see with her own eyes.

‘The streets flow like rivers,’ Mun had said, ‘and like a river in which it is impossible to touch the same water from one heartbeat to the next, there flows an endless tide of faces which once seen are never caught sight of again.’

‘All the country is stuffed into London,’ her father had said once on returning from the place, ‘so that soon England will only be London and the whole country left waste.’

And yet none of their talk had prepared her for it. Because it was not the same place any more. She had been struck by its size, its vastness, but where were the multitudes thronging the
streets which her brothers had spoken of? She had been awed by the palatial buildings of the Strand and made dizzy by the grand classical piazza of Covent Garden, its space so at odds with the random and haphazard arrangement of London’s winding streets, alleyways and courtyards. She had been horrified by the atrocious housing of the poor labourers and apprentices and desperate migrants who massed in London like flies on a corpse, their appalling and unsanitary living conditions like nothing Bess had ever seen or imagined.

Yet London was but a shadow of itself. Even Bess, who did not know the city, could feel that. If London had been an open hand before the war, now it was a closed fist, scalded by the conflict, withdrawing from it like flesh from the flame. Absent was the feverishness she had expected to see but should have known she would not, for with the King and his court removed to Oxford, London’s apprentices off fighting, other men having been conscripted, and those folk that remained burdened by Parliament’s new taxes, parts of the city had a stillness about them. The great law courts, the chancery, and the King’s Bench at Westminster had seemed all but abandoned and now, as they crossed the bridge into Southwark, Bess could tell that Dane sensed it too, that there was a cloud over the city as thick as any you might see on a cold day when the coal fires belched their smoke into the sky. Dane’s eyes had lingered on the boarded-up shop fronts and the lifeless trading and livery companies which would normally have buzzed with craftsmen and manufacturers.

‘It is a pity you and the boy should see London like this,’ Dane said now, careful to step around a pile of fresh dung as they led their mounts southward down Long Southwark. ‘This damned war has ripped out the city’s heart and soul.’

And yet to look at Joe Bess would have thought he was gazing upon St Peter’s gates. The young man had never before been north of Preston or south of Wigan, so that he had turned dumbstruck the moment they came into the city. Was
dumbstruck still, and they had been in London two days.

‘I’ll wager one can’t even find a comely whore any more with so many Puritans wagging a finger around Westminster,’ Dane said.

‘Then you can blame the rebels for your loss,’ Bess muttered as soon as an old white-haired brewer had trundled out of earshot on his cart.

‘I blame both parties,’ Dane replied, letting go the bridle to sweep his unkempt dark hair back off his forehead, tying it with a thong as his little Welsh Cob walked dutifully behind.

Without the lank hair to obscure his face, his cheekbones and strong dark eyebrows announced themselves, and Bess considered that some women might think him handsome, at least until they knew the man for a boor and a drunkard.

‘Royalist and Parliamentarian garrisons have spread like a pox over the country,’ he said. ‘Every town along the Thames from here to Oxford is choked with them and London suffers for it.’ They had been approached by so many starving, wild-eyed beggars that Dane now walked out in front just ahead of Bess, his hand never far from his sword. Joseph guarded the rear, though his blunderbuss and Dane’s pistols were well hidden amongst the blankets carried in sacks upon the dun mare’s back. ‘The normal trade routes are tightly controlled or blocked completely,’ Dane said, ‘and London is hungry. But Parliament is hungrier. It milks the city’s merchants as much as – perhaps more than – did the King.’ He grimaced then and Bess caught a glimpse of the other Dane, the man who had slaughtered those clubmen with terrifying ease. The killer. ‘Parliament’s war chest fills and men’s bellies do not.’

They stopped at the junction of St Olave’s Street to let a troop of dragoons trot past, their horses’ hooves clipping and scuffing off the cobbles, and Bess could not help but study the riders’ faces, struck by the notion, absurd as she knew it was, that one of them might be Tom.

Then Dane glanced at her and she looked away, afraid
that he might in that brief moment have read the hope in her eyes.

He had.

‘It will not be so easy, Bess,’ he said.

‘What will not be easy?’ She felt the blood come to her cheeks.

He shrugged, dropping the issue, then clicked with his tongue to lead his horse off again. ‘It’s not just the fighting men that will feel this pinch,’ he said, to Bess’s relief. ‘With Parliament’s navy blockading Newcastle the coal is not getting through, so come next winter London will freeze. And nor will the brewers and the glass-makers, the potters and the smiths earn their crust with no coal to burn.’

‘And yet I suppose some of Parliament’s taxes will be spent here on clothing and equipment for their armies?’ Bess suggested. ‘Some of the shoe-makers and felt-makers will be up to their necks in orders.’

‘True enough,’ Dane admitted. ‘But still. You do not know London. If you did it would bring a tear to your eye to see it in this condition.’

‘Have you been here many times?’

He nodded. ‘On your grandfather’s business.’

Bess was not ready to ask what kind of business that was, for Dane was talking courteously and that made a pleasant change. Besides which, whatever business her grandfather had the man involved with, it was unlikely to be delivering candles to St Paul’s Cathedral or alms to London’s poor. Better to leave that conversation for another time.

‘For a man who has displayed no allegiance in the conflict, who would rather sink his head in wine than serve his king, you surprise me,’ Bess said. ‘You are less ignorant of the world than you would have folk believe.’

‘Folk believe what they want,’ he said. ‘Or what they are told. As for myself, I have no wish to die for either my king or my parliament. Each wants to rip out the other’s throat and I will not get between them, for when it is over and one of them
has its
victory
…’ he almost spat that word, ‘there will be a mountain of corpses, Miss Rivers. My intention is to be not amongst them.’ He reached inside his tunic, drew out a flask and pulled the stopper, then took a long draught and winced as though whatever it contained was sour. ‘I want good wine, good company, and now and then a spirited wench to share my bed. Until such time as I may once again enjoy those simple pleasures, I must attend you on your wild-goose chase.’ He thumbed back towards Joseph, who fortunately could not hear their conversation for the rumble of cartwheels and the clatter of hooves. ‘I must play the nursemaid to you both to earn my pay.’

Bess flinched at the offence, angry at herself for having thought he might be capable of civility. ‘You are rude, sir,’ she said, glaring at him, wanting to tell him how poor and pale a version of a man he was compared with her Emmanuel who had been brave and honourable. ‘You are rude and I wonder that my grandfather should have anything to do with you.’ She looked ahead, seething inside yet knowing she needed the man. That much had been made clear already. ‘The moment we find my brother you may slope off to seek whatever debauchery pleases you. I shall tell my grandfather that you earned your coin.’

‘I will tell him myself when I deliver you back to him,’ Dane said. And Bess bristled at his impertinence but bit her tongue rather than bite back. Even that young rebel Captain Downing who had besieged Shear House had been as a gentleman compared with this rogue. For all his faults the rebel had been a man of honour. But Downing was dead, too, just like Emmanuel. He had fought bravely and given his life for his cause, and a selfish and ignoble thought occurred to Bess then: that if Emmanuel had been a little less honourable, a little less brave, he might still be alive and they might be married. And little Francis might have a father.