Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (32 page)

‘That is why we should move,’ Tom said, feeling all eyes on him. ‘And we should do it now.’ For he had suddenly been struck by a thought. What if The Scot meant to betray them? What if he was even now leading the King’s soldiers back towards their camp? After all the man had seemed eager enough to ride off and leave Haggett’s beleaguered troop.

‘You think he would betray me?’ Haggett asked, dragging the sweat-stained sleeve of his shirt across his face. His chest was exposed and Tom could see rose spots against the white skin. Thus attired, his buff-coat and armour lying in a neat pile near by, the colonel responsible for Parliament’s silver looked nothing more than a frail, dying man.

‘I would if I were him,’ Tom replied, holding the man’s eye. ‘For just think of what he might gain by delivering twenty thousand pounds in silver and coin unto the King.’

‘More than his fee for getting it to Essex where it’s needed to pay us, that’s for damned sure,’ one of Haggett’s men named James Bowyer said, spitting a wad of phlegm onto a beech’s trunk.

‘This is the fourth day,’ Tom said. ‘You think this silver would still be here attended by dying men if Essex knew its whereabouts?’ There were some sullen murmurs at that. ‘No, The
Scot is not in Thame. He’s dead or he’s on his way here with King’s men or His Majesty himself. But he is not in Thame.’

Either Colonel Haggett believed this or else he had not the strength to argue, for he nodded, shivering now, and flapped a feeble hand towards the carts which sat a little way off draped in thickets and gorse.

‘You two,’ Tom said to a pair of dozing troopers who seemed healthy enough, as yet untouched by whatever disease was ravaging the others, ‘ride to Thame and get word to Essex. Tell him that twenty thousand pounds is at risk of falling into the King’s hands if he does not come with all haste to secure it.’

They glanced at their colonel, but Haggett was consumed by his own malaise and did not look up, so they nodded to Tom and went to their horses.

In the distance a last percussive flurry signalled the end of the short but fierce fire fight. Tom turned to Haggett’s men, the nearest of whom were already stirring, some of them like corpses into which a cruel God had breathed one last bitter breath. ‘Get up!’ Tom yelled. ‘We’re moving. Leave nothing behind and move with care. Do not break any branches, and cover your tracks where you can. If you or your horse shits you will bring it with you.’ Then he strode over to the carts, taking Trencher, Penn and Dobson with him, for the draught animals needed to be hitched to the carts and he knew he would get it done faster than Haggett’s men would.

‘We should mount up and leave this bunch of cursed bastards to look after themselves,’ Dobson muttered, slipping a halter over a horse’s head whilst Trencher cleared the wheel spokes of foliage. ‘If you’re right and The Scot
has
turned lickspittle and declared for the King, we’ll not get far. He’ll smell this lot out like a whore-monger on the sniff for notch.’

Tom thought the big man was likely right, that even if they were careful they would yet leave enough of a trail for The Scot to follow, that so much silver was plenty of motivation to make a good search of it.

‘We’re not going anywhere, Dobson, except deeper into this wood,’ Tom said, then called a knot of Haggett’s men over, telling them to put their shoulders against the back of the carts to help get them moving. ‘It’ll be dark soon and no one will find us in the dark.’

‘Not without us having good warning,’ Trencher put in with a nod, satisfied that the two oxen before the rearmost cart were hitched and ready to do their jobs. ‘You’ll stay with us, Dobson, do your duty and serve your country.’

The big man mumbled some or other curse into the thicket of his beard, then clicked his tongue, leading his beasts off deeper into the woods, with Haggett’s men – those that were able – helping the carts as they could. But Tom knew Dobson was right, that if they were being hunted there was little chance of not being found, particularly by a troop of men who knew full well in which wood they were hiding, if not now the exact location. If Tom’s instinct about The Scot was right he would be better off riding into the dusk and leaving these ill-fated men like sheep for the wolves. There was nothing tying him to Haggett’s troop. Better to report back to Captain Crafte, who would surely by now have heard of their success in Oxford and the ruin of the King’s printing press. Crafte would also know about Tom’s failure to kill the
Mercurius Aulicus
editor John Birkenhead, but that was another issue.

And yet Tom would not leave this troop. It was no sense of duty to the cause, nor even for the sake of seeing the silver used to pay brave men what they were owed. It was something else. Something to do with the fear he saw in these men’s eyes, the hopelessness that had etched itself into the faces of the sick and dying and even those who were as yet hale. Now, as one of Haggett’s men led the animals up front and Tom pushed the cart from behind, he realized with no little surprise that he needed to protect these troopers for they might not be able to protect themselves. Disease and sickness had ravaged them, so that in place of courage was wretchedness. And it was on this
wretchedness that The Scot would prey, if Tom’s suspicions were confirmed.

Well, let him come, Tom thought, as the cart’s wheels and their own boots flattened bluebells and the smell of damp bog myrtle thickened the air, while they pushed deeper into the wood.

‘I am not afraid,’ he whispered, wondering how long they had before men came looking for them.
I am a killer
.

Twilight brought the churring of nightjars leaving their nests in the heather and molinia grass to take up residence on branches above the clearing in which Tom and his companions had chosen to make camp for the night. They had pushed west towards the last light of the day and after about a mile Penn had noticed an injured roe buck tucked well into a thicket of blackthorn. From its breathing it was clear the creature’s life was ebbing away and even when Tom was but three feet away it could hardly lift up its head.

Trooper Banks, one of Haggett’s men, had raised his carbine but Trencher had growled at the man did he want to bring Prince Rupert himself down on them. Then as Tom, Dobson and Penn held the beast still, Trencher took his big knife and cut its throat, afterwards dragging it out from under the thorn.

‘This lot will be happy for some fresh meat,’ Penn said, but Tom was more interested in where the roe buck had chosen to hide as death stalked it.

‘We’ll camp here,’ Tom said, and with that they had managed, all of them taking cuts and thorns, to push the carts through the mass of blackthorn and hazel into a small clearing beyond, through which a stream ambled. Colonel Haggett had not contested their choice. The man had used whatever strength he yet had to make the journey, albeit in the saddle like those others of his men who were too sick to walk or help with the carts.

Then Tom and Trencher had skinned the roe buck, finding two deep puncture holes in its flesh and terrible bruising.

‘Must have been one hell of a fight,’ Trencher had muttered, for these fresh scars were clearly caused in battle by another buck’s antler.

‘Makes you wonder what the other one looks like,’ Penn said as the raw, skinned flesh steamed in the crimson-washed gloaming.

‘A fallow will seek out an injured or sick deer and beat it to death,’ Tom said, ‘I’ve seen it often.’ And Trencher had raised an eyebrow at that, his eyes flicking towards the coughing, sweating men setting up camp around them, and not even Dobson had missed the allusion.

Whilst the spitted buck roasted and dripped, glistening above the cookfire, Tom led Trencher, Penn and Dobson out of the camp, Dobson complaining as they left that mouth-watering smell behind. They backtracked along their route into the woods, doing what they could to cover the convoy’s tracks, treading-in the more obvious hoof prints and pulling deadfall across the trail, until at last they could do no more in the waning light.

‘I’d find us without breaking stride,’ Trencher had said, dissatisfied.

‘Those arrogant dandy prats ain’t you, Trencher,’ Dobson had remarked into his beard. ‘Bastards can’t see past their royal fart-catching noses.’

When night proper fell Haggett was lying in his own filth, holding the right side of his abdomen and groaning. His second in command, a Corporal Laney, seemed all but paralysed by the fear that whatever disease was afflicting his fellows would do for him next. So Tom set the watches, placing four men in a perimeter around the camp, fifty paces out and all armed with two firelocks each so that they would be sure to make themselves heard if the enemy was upon them.

Then, as owls announced the night and the rich green canopy above them rustled in the breeze, Tom and his companions lay down under blankets and oiled skins, their heads on knapsacks, and waited.

Tom had taken the last watch, for if The Scot was coming he would come at the first flush of dawn when he could see and Haggett’s men would still be half asleep. He had barely slept, his ears sifting the many sounds of woodland at night, all of which were somehow raised to a higher degree so that one could even hear such as a mouse turning over a leaf. He had recalled his childhood and the summers spent in Gerard’s Wood, and that thread had led to the last time he had been there. When he had been freezing to death until his brother Mun had found him and taken him down into Shear House where, despite the fire burning in the parlour, his blood had run even colder, for he had learned of his father’s death. And of Emmanuel’s. Ever since that night he had steered his thoughts from them, from them all, because the wound was so deep and there was not a surgeon alive who could stitch it.

Now the scent of the woods and the silence had summoned thoughts of his old life. His old home. What had become of his family, of Bess and her new child, Francis, and of Tom’s mother? What had become of Mun? All this squirmed in Tom’s guts, gnawing away as he sat alone and bone-tired, listening to the night creatures and the moans of dying men.

But not so tired that he did not hear the echoing snap of twigs under foot.

He eased himself up from the old stump and took cover behind an ivy-covered ash, wincing at the clicks he made pulling his two pistols to the half cock. Chaffinches and robins were noisily greeting the day. In the distance a cock pheasant called out. Somewhere in the rich green above him pigeons were fighting, their wings beating madly, but he didn’t look up, his eyes instead scouring the misty woodland before him.

Another deer perhaps.

Or men with firelocks and cold steel.

Tom cursed himself for not having emptied his bladder before now. Sweat was rising on the skin between his shoulder
blades and his mouth was dry. His heart quickened and he felt the great organ thumping in his chest, the blood in his limbs beginning to tremble, raising the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered into the dawn.

The pistol butts felt good in his hands, though they were poor weapons compared with the pair he had lost on the field below Edgehill: those twenty-six-inch-long man-killers with their octagonal barrels, which had belonged to his father.

Two hundred paces away, beyond the lowest branches of a young oak that were being pushed up and down by the breeze, he glimpsed a flash of red – a tunic perhaps – but then it was gone. Immediately in front of his face two hoverflies held still, inspecting him, their humming loud in his ears, and Tom found he was holding his own breath as he looked past the little creatures for confirmation of what his eyes thought they had seen.

And yet he knew well enough. The Scot was back and he had come for the silver. A crack of twig behind him brought him round to see Trencher creeping towards him, hunched like an old jakes farmer, though no jakes farmer would be gripping a carbine in one hand and a wicked sharp hanger in the other.

Tom put a finger to his lips and shook his head, then nodded back towards the camp, and Trencher understood for he began to step backwards the way he had come, his eyes fixed on a point beyond Tom and the ivy-covered ash. Perhaps one of the other sentries had also seen the soldiers coming through the trees and had already warned the colonel and his men. But perhaps not, and Tom decided the risk of his being seen moving was worth it to inform the troop of the danger, to have them ready to fight if needs be, but preferably to have them stay as quiet as the dead. For this way they might avoid having to fight at all. And so like Trencher he crept back towards the waking men, now and then taking cover behind a trunk or crouching behind a thicket, listening mostly for movement or voices or any indication that either of them had been seen.

When they were at the camp’s perimeter he told Trencher to position himself in the thorn and keep watch, and then he slipped through the bramble where they had found the roe buck.

‘They are here,’ he hissed at the nearest men, one of whom was doing his morning necessary into a patch of bluebells. The yellow stream stopped mid flow and the man looked up into the woods, his pale, dirty face a sudden rictus of fear. Tom strode over to Colonel Haggett who was lying in his blankets staring up at the sky through the gaps in the canopy. ‘Colonel Haggett, sir,’ he growled, crouching beside the man and shaking his shoulder, ‘they are here. Cavaliers more than likely.’

Haggett frowned, his bloodshot eyes glaring at Tom accusingly, but then he seemed to come round and with a quivering hand threw off the damp wool and rose on unsteady legs. The stink of the man’s befouled breeches hit Tom’s nose.

‘Then we must surrender,’ Haggett said, the cracks in his lips oozing blood. ‘’Tis the only course.’

‘As yet they do not know we are here,’ Tom said, gesturing at Penn and Dobson to spread word through the troop that they were to prepare for a fight. In truth he did not know what he had seen through the trees. Whoever it was could be friendly. But he did not think so. ‘There is every chance they will go past. Or turn back,’ he said. ‘If we just keep our heads down.’

Colonel Haggett shook his head. ‘We cannot risk it. We must surrender and let them have the silver. That is what they have come for.’ Corporal Laney hurried up, doing up his helmet’s thongs as he came, his armour clanking so that Tom cursed under his breath.