Marston Moor (18 page)

Up on the sconce, men cringed, turning their bodies in profile as if they braced against a howling gale. Most of the bullets flew harmlessly high or smacked into the rampart to rattle its timber facings, but some thumped into the space just above the lip of the fort, tearing noisily into the wickerwork, which shook and splintered. Forrester crouched beside the large cannon, its barrel still warm. A leaden ball whined as it careened past his right ear, another showered slivers of wood from one of the gun carriage spokes. He gestured for the gun crew to retire, for they had no time to make the iron killer ready for a follow-up shot.

Another volley rippled up from below. Forrester rolled along the base of the wicker screen to take up position at the joint where the horn met the main rampart. He noticed that the screen was badly holed in several places and beginning to disintegrate, leaking shot so that the first screams of pain rent the night. Moonlight, smudgy as it was, lanced through to dapple his coat. Somewhere behind, a mattross – one of the gunnery assistants – was down and shrieking, kneecap shattered by a ball that would have flattened into a disc as it smashed through the joint, pulverizing bone and tissue until the limb was tattered and forever useless. Forrester nodded to a pair of men who did not have loaded weapons, and they slunk forward to drag the wretched fellow to the rear. An appointment with the chirurgeon’s ravenous saw awaited him.

He risked a peek over the screen. The Covenanters were swarming forwards now, slogging through the mire behind a big banner that swirled high above a bulb-eyed ensign. A smattering of Scots carried round bucklers, others the huge claymores favoured by the men of the Highlands; almost to a man they were swathed in dense folds of plaid. The slopes of the two horns that formed the corners of this side of the sconce were almost sheer, far too difficult to scale in the wet, and so the attackers funnelled into the space between, aiming for the broad, straight face that formed the southernmost side of the square. They leapt into the ditch, waded through its saturated bed, and began to scrabble up the earthwork. Some had ladders, and these were tipped against the escarpment for the bravest souls to climb into the fray.

Forrester drew his pistol and eased the hammer to half cock. He felt the muscles in his face tighten as his bowels turned to water, and forced a grim smile for the others to see. ‘Front rank!’ For a dreadful moment he thought his charges might not obey, but to his exquisite relief they began to move, the first group shuffling up to the screen, flinching as more shots rattled against it. But those shots were sporadic now, for the attackers were too close to risk a pause for the reloading of muskets, and the lull was precisely what he had been waiting for. ‘Hold! Hold, damn your eyes! Let ’em come close!’

A bullet punched a wide fissure in the entwined willow switches beside his head. He leaned in, pressing an eye up against the newly cleaved loophole. The first of the Scots were very close now, almost at the crest. But their ladders were not long enough and they stalled, scrabbling for purchase on the slick timber slats that formed the final few feet.

‘Blow on your coals!’ Forrester snarled. He looked back at the second rank. ‘You too, you laggardly bastards!’ He counted silently to five, swallowed hard, and filled his lungs. ‘
Fire
!’

The foremost musketeers rose as one, black muzzles swinging up and over the screen. The long-arms discharged together, a great roar rippling right the way across the palisade, clothing it in white, sulphurous smoke. Forrester still stared through his spy-hole, long enough to catch glimpses of men snatched back by the thick wave of lead, tossed like rubbish into the ditch. Then he was screaming at the first group to retire, for the rear rank to come up, and before the Scots could reach the tattered wickerwork his charges were bringing the next volley to bear.

The world exploded for a second time, more smoke gusted out and over the slope, and then the whitecoats of the Marquis of Newcastle and the redcoats of Sir Edmund Mowbray were standing together, muskets turned about, butt ends brandished like clubs. Forrester had his pistol primed and cocked, and he stood too, leaning into the creaking trellis and squeezing the trigger as his men hacked and battered at the heads of the few Scots who had somehow survived the leaden barrage. A third volley ripped the night, and at first Forrester thought it had come from the enemy, but he saw the smoke billow out from the gun battery on the horn that formed the spike at the opposite end of the sconce’s southern face. The men had lined that platform, aiming along the face of the rampart, and their fire raked across the Scots’ flank. In seconds the rampart was clear, purged of the enemy, scattered blue bonnets the only thing left on the slope. Forrester squinted into the gloom, only to see the beaming face of one Elias Croak. He felt instantly ashamed, for he had presumed the young officer had fled in terror.

Down below, the ditch was filled with dead and wounded men who writhed like a pool full of eels; they were trampled as the next wave came upon them.

‘Pikes!’ Forrester bellowed. ‘Pikes!’

The pikemen came up, their musket-wielding comrades sliding back to the safety of the enclosure so that they might begin the laborious process of reloading their weapons. Scouring sticks plunged into barrels, scraping the clogging soot clear, while priming powder was carefully tipped into the pan of each musket. They needed wadding too, so that they might shoot down the slope without the ball falling out, and they hurriedly carried out each and every task as the seconds slipped by.

Forrester knew it was all taking too long. He reloaded his pistol and moved to the edge of the screen. The Scots were shoving and kicking their way across the ditch and hauling themselves up the slope using swords and dirks like climbers’ picks. He glanced along his line of pikemen, gave the order for the spears to be presented, and the steel-tipped shafts went up and over, jabbing down to stab and topple the attackers. But there were too many Scots this time, and though several were thrown back to earth, some dodged the pikes while others grabbed hold of the long stems of ash and pulled, dragging the defenders over the rampart and down into the killing field. There were more ladders this time, passed up from the rear to slam on to the rampart, and the Scottish horde suddenly found their climb made easy.

‘Fall back!’ Forrester called. He could see that most of his musketeers were ready now, but it was far too late to staunch the blue tide as it surged up and over the edge, smashing through the wicker as though the interlaced switches were so many brittle twigs. The Royalist defenders formed up in the centre of the enclosure, pikes providing a shield, muskets beginning to offer sporadic fire. The Scots kept coming, more and more, scrambling into the inner sanctum and firing their weapons. When they were spent, they reversed them to be used as clubs, while their officers brandished swords for the kill.

There was nothing left to do but fight. Forrester levelled his pistol and drew his own sword. More musketry rattled all around, immersing the sconce in bitter cloud. Forrester raised his blade high, hoping his men could see, snarled an unintelligible challenge, and charged.

At first he saw nothing, but then two bulging eyes above a russet beard leered from the acrid fog. He shot the man square in the face, features wiped clean in an instant, the trunk never emerging from the smoke. He moved on, swatted another man with his sword and ducked below a scything halberd. He was vaguely aware that others had joined him in the melee, bellowing their defiance as they fanned out to protect the redoubt. He saw bodies strewn here and there, and though they were half devoured by the mist, it seemed most flashed white and red in his peripheral vision, glimpses that told him the fight was not going well.

Then he was crouching, scrambling over terrain churned to sludge, barrelling headlong into a buckler and bouncing hard off its iron boss so that he landed with his rump planted in the cold filth. He rolled, slid wildly as he regained his footing, and swung his blade as the opponent came on. The sword glanced harmlessly off the shield rim, so he jumped backwards out of range of the inevitable follow-up thrust. The tip sliced air just inches from his nose, clanged off his sword-hilt as he frantically raised the weapon to block, and then he was falling again, battered off balance by a man possessed of impressive strength. The next blow would have cleaved him in two had not a thin rapier appeared a palm’s width from his face. The slender steel snapped as it parried, but it was enough, and Forrester was able to scramble clear to see Captain Elias Croak toss his sword-hilt away and shoot their shared enemy in the chest with a pistol. He gave a madman’s grin, spattered as he was in blood, and howled at the moon, then he was gone, plunging into the fray.

Forrester panted like an exhausted dog as he rose to his feet. They were overwhelmed, defeated in all quarters, and he screamed the order to retreat. Perhaps a few would make it to the safety of Micklegate Bar. All around him the fight raged. A musket coughed somewhere to the rear, the air pulsing at his left side as the ball flew into the attackers. It snatched one of the Scottish officers clean off his feet. And the attackers stalled. They hesitated, faces deflating as they stared, wide-eyed at the Royalist lines. Then they began to judder backwards. More shots came from behind him, picking away some of the retiring Scots as they faltered. And the Royalists were cheering.

Forrester turned. The whitecoats seemed to have multiplied exponentially. Dozens of them ran to the battle, emerging like ghosts from the tumbling smoke, grimacing like so many gargoyles as they screamed their victory, and Forrester joined them, cutting down a stunned Covenanter and looking for the next. He felt the battle-rage surge through his veins, intoxicating him, and he heard himself crow with the exhilaration he would later regret but could not hope to staunch.

The runner had made it back to York. The reinforcements had come from Micklegate Bar, and in the cacophony of battle, Forrester could hear the low thrum of hooves, and he knew then that they would win. The marquis had sent horse as well as foot, and the Scots would not face such odds with no horse or pike of their own. And then they were breaking, running, cohesion dissolved, the heads capped in blue were turning away, bolting pell-mell down the slope and into the cannon-pocked wilderness that separated besiegers and besieged. Forrester bent double, planting his hands on his knees, and gulped the caustic air into his lungs. Then he laughed, in bitter, mad relief. It was over.

PART 2

EXTREME NECESSITY

Chapter 8

Near Liverpool, Lancashire, 7 June 1644

The Royalist army moved westwards, bullied always by wind and rain. Talk was ever of York, of the fevered reports that spoke of an alliance of three vast armies, now fused into one. Men whispered of the inevitable collision with the feared Scots Covenanters in battle – a brew many of them had sipped in the Bishops’ Wars of the late 1630s, and one they would never willingly imbibe again – and of the need to relieve the Earl of Newcastle’s stubborn force that had been holed up in the capital of the north since April. But despite the talk and the bravado and the anxiety, they trudged in the opposite direction, Prince Rupert’s gaze remaining firmly fixed upon the conquest of the north-west.

The raising of troops had been Rupert’s priority in the days since the sacking of Bolton. With the arrival of the Northern Horse and efforts to recruit, equip and train as many Cheshire and Lancashire Royalists as possible, the army that marched out of Wigan, winding south via St Helens and Prescot, boasted some seven thousand infantrymen and more than six thousand horse. A drawn-out column of artillery, ammunition, stolen livestock, victuals and baggage formed the tail, shadowed, as ever, by as many camp followers as there were soldiers.

Stryker and his party were in the rear. They had been invited to join Sir Richard Crane and his Lifeguard at the very front, and it had taken some smooth diplomacy for the offer to be rejected without giving offence, but Stryker would not leave his baggage wagon and its secret cargo. Thus, they were forced to keep pace with the lurching vehicle driven by Simeon Barkworth, who swore viciously with each water-filled divot and rut. Stryker was pleased to ride, though the mud was fetlock deep, and even Vos seemed happy to brave the pelting showers. Hood and Skellen rode too, though the latter grumbled for much of the journey, his Monmouth cap stretched down as far over his ears as possible.

The going was slow but steady, the road a morass, but the drums and trumpets thundered and squawked so that the men kept rhythm as best they could. Packhorses whinnied as their hooves slid and slewed, soldiers – grudgingly suborned into driving cattle – spat threats and swung sticks at their lumbering herds, and all the while the north-west coast of England emerged out of the blurry deluge, inch by inch, mile by mile. First, the glistening expanse of a great river gradually resolved in the distance like a colossal gilt serpent, cutting a curve in the terrain to the south. It was the Mersey, and they had forced a crossing of the same river back at Stockport, a few days before their fateful arrival at the Geneva of the North. It had been wide enough there, its thrashing currents impossible to ford, yet this was something entirely different. The Mersey formed an estuary as it rushed out into the tumultuous waters of the Irish Sea, and here it was a titan, broad and glittering and mighty. The scouts up on a hill near a marsh-strangled village called Huyton reported it to be close to three miles wide at one point, and a new vein of fretfulness rippled up and down the meandering column as men wondered how they might possibly get across. So Prince Rupert himself galloped his great black destrier up and down the nervous army, bellowing for calm and for level heads, assuring the filth-spattered troops that there would be no perilous crossing this time. For it was on the east bank of the estuary that they would find the enemy stronghold, and the Royalist conquerors would hem Liverpool’s garrison between the vast waterway and their heavy artillery, and crush the rebels like hazelnuts in a vice. Sure enough, after a morning spent climbing into the undulating terrain that fringed the town, the walls of the region’s principal port seemed to blossom like grey petals, emerging from the bitter miasma as the storm waned to a fine drizzle. The army, tired and saturated, tramped into the fields to the east of their prize, even as the guns on Liverpool’s crenellated rampart coughed their first warnings, the flat cracks echoing back and forth between the mountains and the sea.