Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles) (15 page)

Skellen took first watch on picket duty. He could not cover all possible approaches, but patrolling the bank, east and then west, would provide some security. In two hours, the sergeant would be replaced by one of his comrades. After Stryker had completed last watch, grey stems of light would be prising open the eastern horizon, and they would move on again.

The men under the willow set a small fire to warm their numbed hands and feet. They sat around its welcome glow and talked into the night. As the trees on the far bank first became tall silhouettes and eventually vanished into complete darkness, all that could be heard was the trickle and gurgle of the river, bubbling below the droning murmur of their own voices. The rich, familiar smell of burning wood filled the men’s nostrils making them nostalgic, so they spoke of past battles and lost loves. A number of small fish had been skewered on precisely wielded blades, and they sizzled over the embers as swords were rhythmically honed and musket barrels cleaned. The men checked their match cord and counted ammunition. Somewhere a scream echoed from deep in the darkness, causing
the soldiers to lift their heads in alarm until Stryker identified the shrill bark of a fox.

‘Vos,’ Burton said. Stryker rewarded him with a brief nod of acknowledgement.

As they tucked into the piping hot fish, the men slouched back on the damp ground, propping tired bodies on elbows and feeling a measure of contentment wash over them. Between mouthfuls, Captain Forrester rifled in the recesses of his doublet, eventually brandishing a small bottle.

‘Compliments of the good Mister Archer!’ he announced. He glanced at Stryker. ‘May I, sir?’

Stryker nodded. ‘But try not to get insensible, Forry.’

Forrester looked mortified. ‘I am not some jug-bitten copper-nose, Captain.’ He raised the bottle to his lips. ‘Begin thy health!’

‘What is it, sir?’ Burton asked as Forrester took a long draught.

‘Perry. Fermented from Archer’s pears.’ He grinned. ‘Strong stuff. If we’re lucky Paulet’ll go one better. He has deep pockets. Perhaps we’ll be treated to sack or hypocras. Now that’d be a rare delight these days.’

‘Paulet’s a staunch fellow, by all accounts,’ Burton remarked as he took the bottle.

‘Loyal as any, I’d say,’ Forrester said. ‘Even if Prince Rupert
has
got the wind up. Lineage stretching back to Lord knows when and they’ve always remained loyal to the crown. His father supported the old king, bless his immortal soul.’

The old king was James. Men like Stryker and Forrester, in their teens during the accession of James’s son Charles, barely remembered the previous monarch.

During the seventeen years since Charles took the crown they had spent their lives abroad, marching and fighting and killing, but even in the distant lands of Europe the looming discontent at home was known and discussed.

‘Not been lucky, has he?’ Forrester said.

‘Paulet?’

‘Charles. It’s turned sour as a mouldy lemon. I’m amazed he’s lasted as long as he has, if I’m honest.’

‘Why, sir?’ Burton asked politely.

Forrester settled into a more comfortable posture. ‘Now mark, learn and inwardly digest, stripling. Charles dissolved Parliament back in ’29. That’s more than a decade ruling like he was a bloody Plantagenet. Even King John had to sign Magna Carta.’

Burton nodded. ‘My father blames Laud and Strafford.’

‘As do many,’ Stryker said. He could not care a jot for Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford, but many in the new Royalist army regarded them as heroes.

‘Firebrands of Lucifer, my papa called them,’ Burton continued, causing eyebrows to rise. ‘Oh, he was a loyalist,’ he clarified hurriedly. ‘But he hated their excesses.’

‘It wasn’t just those venomous bastards, Andrew,’ Forrester said, scratching his belly. ‘The bloody Puritans were getting bumptious. Making a damned nuisance of themselves.’

King Charles, though publicly a fervent Protestant, was continually accused of harbouring Catholic sympathies. ‘Just last autumn, it was. Seems like a lifetime now. The Irish revolted and His Majesty dithered.’ Forrester said. ‘Refused to condemn the rising. Not straight away. Not until he took the measure of public opinion.’ Forrester stirred the fire with the toe of his boot. ‘And by the time he eventually acted, the rumours of his sympathies toward Rome were spreading like syphilis. Course, it didn’t help that good Queen Henrietta Maria’s a raging Catholic.’

Even Burton knew what had happened after that. The real turning point had been this very year, when King Charles finally grew tired of the perpetual discord. He resolved upon a course of forthright action, culminating in the attempted arrest of five key members of the House of Commons on a charge of treason. But Charles had not understood the strength of the House’s Puritan majority.

‘I remember my father telling us of the Commons’ refusal to present the five,’ Burton said. ‘And then we heard the apprentices were causing trouble. Inciting rebellion.’ He shook his head, still astounded by the events. ‘Next thing we hear, the king has fled London and armies are being assembled.’

And as the threat of war grew, men like Captain Stryker had been drawn back to England, commissioned into the new armies with promises of steady food and pay.

Stryker had needed the money, for sure, but his feelings for the country of his birth were conflicted. He would tell people that he left for the wars in Europe to make himself a name and a fortune, but in truth he had been running away. Escaping from an England where the past kept stabbing at him in his waking moments and, crueller still, invaded his dreams.

Stryker’s father had been a wool merchant, working in the verdant chalk-hilled South Downs, where Hampshire met West Sussex. He was not high-born, but by the time his only son came bawling into the world, he had achieved status within his rural community.

He was a large man, in personality too, and the young boy revelled in being the charismatic merchant’s son and heir. Stryker was prepared to take up his natural role in the family business, in the knowledge that his future was assured.

Everything changed after the merchant’s wife died, suddenly, on an August day. She’d been shooing hens from beneath her feet, then fell dead from a weak heart. Stryker remembered the stench of his father after he had staggered home night after night from the local tavern. He would reek and shout, rage and punch and vomit, then snore. At the same time the family fortune was being steadily drunk away, the once blooming business left to crumble.

One Christmas Day Stryker’s father was found bobbing beneath the ice of the millpond. There was no suspicion of foul play. The inevitable skinful had finished him off, a drunken sot tumbling down the slippery bank and to his death.

The teenage Stryker was left with nothing but a ramshackle house with some land attached, left fallow too long to be valuable, five chickens, a barrel of poor-quality ale and a small mountain of debt.

Stryker left. He sold the farm, ate the chickens, ignored the ale and turned his back on the debt. Packing only what he could carry, he walked to London and into a new life.

He had begun his new life as a thief. His quick wits and even quicker hands had lent themselves perfectly to the role of cutpurse. It had been enjoyable, exciting and often lucrative. But as the thrill waned and the need for bigger rewards gnawed away at him, he took ever greater risks. In the end, one man had been too much for him.

That man was Vincent Skaithlocke. He had ambled down the Strand one windy day without a care in the world, and the young Stryker had tracked him like a feral cat after a mouse, scenting riches in the portly man’s gold-laced buff-coat and ermine-trimmed doublet. But the dandyish clothes were deceptive. As Stryker moved, Skaithlocke twisted away with the grace of a dancer, tripping his assailant, pinning him on the muddy road with a vicelike arm and a razor-sharp dirk. Stryker understood too late that this was a professional fighter.

Stryker remembered the pathetic threats spouted by his younger self with a brazenness only a guttersnipe could muster. The fat man had grinned. Indeed, the soldier bellowed to the skies like a lowing bullock, amused and impressed in equal measure by the callow urchin’s bravado. And then Vincent Skaithlocke gave Stryker a shilling and asked him to join his company, bound for the Continent the following dawn.

The ship had taken him to foreign lands, foreign women and foreign wars. He had witnessed horrors beyond imagination as the powers of Europe tore each other apart, had revelled in the elation of victory and wallowed in the ignominy of defeat. But most importantly, he had discovered something of himself. Discovered that he was good in a fight – more than good – and
the life of soldiering that began as a means to avoid the hangman’s noose, fast became his career.

‘Remember Praise-God Sykes?’

‘Praise-God Sykes,’ Stryker said, his eye staring off into the distance. ‘I haven’t thought on him for a long long time.’

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Burton. ‘But who’s Praise-God Sykes?’

‘He was a corporal. A Puritan – and a vicious bastard who’d quote scripture at you while he beat you black and blue.’ Stryker shook his head at the memory. ‘Captain Forrester and I had the dubious pleasure of his company as junior officers.’

‘Junior officers in a company of mercenaries,’ Forrester added. ‘This bugger was in charge of our training. And by God did we fear him! Worked though, didn’t it?’ The bottle had reached Forrester again, and he drained it, letting out a hefty belch. ‘Look at the state of your commanding officer. I wouldn’t want to fight a bugger like him, would you? He’s fit as a fiddle.’

‘Unlike you,’ Stryker said, a sly smile showing bright across his face in the fire’s glow.

The alcohol had already given Forrester’s cheeks a rosy hue, but he reddened further at the remark. ‘It’s true I’ve been resting on my laurels of late, but you know how it is with us men of the theatre. An impressive physique adds presence on the stage.’

‘In his defence,’ Stryker said to Burton, ‘you watch him if we get into a scrap. He scares the wits out of me.’

Forrester dipped his head at the vote of confidence. ‘Yes, well, Sykes’s efforts weren’t completely wasted. Now can we talk of something else?’ He shot a wry glance at Burton. ‘Do you know, for instance, how Captain Stryker here became such an ugly brute?’

‘Careful, Forry,’ Stryker said in a sharply warning tone. ‘Don’t let the drink rule your tongue.’

But Stryker’s cautionary words were obviously too late, for Forrester had cast Burton a conspiratorial wink. ‘Imagine those dark locks and intense gaze without the scars. He was quite the rakehell. Then he was careless enough to have half his face blown
off.’ He took another piece of fish and chewed it exaggeratedly, prolonging the story. ‘He had a little help in that regard from a styptic little weasel named Eli Makepeace,’ he said when his mouth was clear, ‘who just happened to drug him senseless.’

Stryker sighed. Forrester was going to speak whether his commander liked it or not. ‘While another bastard, though not so little, placed me next to a powder keg and set a fuse.’

‘Ah yes,’ Forrester nodded in sudden memory, ‘a beast of a specimen. Malachi Bain, if I’m not mistaken. Never did a more sinful pair of punk-poxed weasels walk God’s earth.’

Stryker twisted round to see that Skellen had returned. He stood suddenly. ‘I’ll take next watch. Get some rest, all of you.’

‘He’s a sensitive sod sometimes,’ Forrester said quietly, as they watched their commander disappear into the night. ‘Perhaps I overstepped the mark a little.’ He glanced at the empty bottle in his hand. ‘Never could hold me drink.’

Some miles to the north and west another fire glowed, though the smoke from these flames billowed up through the brick stack of a chimney. A thin face stared into the heat, the orange glow intensifying his red locks and neat beard. The face had mocking eyes and a hooked nose, a thin jutting chin and small, sharp teeth: at once both handsome and feral. Eli Rushworth Augustus Makepeace was deep in thought.

‘Your throw,’ a voice broke into his reverie and Makepeace turned to his right. He and Bain had taken shelter for the night in a small tavern. The tapster had stared with suspicion when Makepeace had entered, and with fear upon seeing Bain, but he served them their ale promptly and provided reasonable victuals.

‘Eh?’

The man was stout, middle-aged and heavily pockmarked in the face. ‘I said it’s your throw, friend.’

‘So it is,’ Makepeace said, taking the dice. There were four players at the table. Makepeace and Bain had been joined by the fat man and a tall, reedy fellow named Climpet.

Makepeace shook the dice and sent them tumbling across the table’s wooden surface. ‘Fives again, gentlemen!’ he exclaimed happily, gathering up his winnings. ‘My lucky night!’

He collected the dice and passed them to Climpet as more coins were laid down. Climpet rolled.

‘Fuck it all!’ he shrieked in despair as the bone cubes rested with a 1 and a 3 on top.

‘A shame, sir,’ Makepeace said, reaching across to offer the dice to Bain.

Bain threw. Lost. Shrugged.

The fat fellow, Binkle, took his turn and was disappointed to see a 4 and a 6. ‘I need more funds, gentlemen. Will you wait? I shall go to my rooms and be back instantly.’

The others agreed, and Binkle disappeared in the direction of the tavern’s back staircase.

Climpet stood as well. ‘Piss.’

Makepeace watched him leave, before glancing at his sergeant. ‘You know, Bain, sometimes I wish I were more like you.’

Bain frowned, suspecting a veiled sarcasm in the captain’s words. ‘Come again, sir?’

‘Seriously, Sergeant. You see something you want and you take it. You do what is required.’

Bain swallowed the meat. ‘I’ve s-seen you kill to get something you wanted, sir.’

‘Quite so,’ Makepeace said impatiently, ‘but only after thought and conscience and scruples have all had a merry old discussion in my noggin. But you, on the other hand, are not troubled by such spectres, are you?’

‘No,’ Bain said, taking a mouthful of his ale.

Makepeace smiled ruefully. ‘I, on the other hand, tend to think too much. My brother was like you in many ways. He took what he wanted to. In fact he took what I wanted too. What should have been mine.’ He saw his sneering older brother Nehemiah, a tall, gap-toothed dolt who bullied him mercilessly. He saw Emily Moffat, the girl with long legs and
golden hair and bouncing breasts, and he saw her laugh at his advances, before dancing off into the forest to spread her thighs for his brother.