Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles) (35 page)

Captain William Bennett was no longer listening to his commanding officer, for a musket-ball had passed through his windpipe. It burst from the side of his neck in a great fountain of gore.

‘Fall back on my order!’ Quarles bellowed, as Bennett’s body sank to its knees.

C
aptain Roger Tainton sat in the former bedchamber that currently served as his quarters staring at the contents of a small wooden box.

He had been given the strongbox during the night. God’s hand was clearly involved, for it had been pure chance that Tainton’s men were on picket duty at that time. Roused from his sleep, the captain had been told of the capture of a Frenchwoman down at the river. Trooper Bowery had explained that the patrol needed to have her incarcerated quickly, for they were charged with sailing on towards Kingston-upon-Thames, and Wynn’s was the nearest viable option. Tainton had agreed. And then Bowery had passed him the strongbox, which had been tied to the suspected spy by a length of twine.

The lock had not given a fraction until Tainton had taken a pistol and blasted the lid from its hinges. Now, as the battle raged outside, he found himself transfixed by what he had found inside.

Tainton lined up the objects on a small, polished table. There was a yellowing piece of parchment, folded several times into a tight square; a small brooch, edged in gold, with the ivory silhouette of a woman at its centre; and a posy ring, just a small, gold band, adorned with nothing more than a faint inscription.

Tainton picked the ring up between thumb and forefinger, turning it so that he could read the words across its inner surface.
‘None shall prevent the Lord’s intent,’ he whispered. ‘Amen to that,’ he breathed.

Setting the ring down, the cavalryman’s eyes moved to the item he had saved until last.

‘Why do I always ’ave to d-do the donkey work?’ Sergeant Malachi Bain said unhappily as he hefted Sir Randolph Moxcroft on to a broad shoulder.

Makepeace nonchalantly smoothed down the front of his exquisite purple doublet and flicked specks of mud from the matching breeches. He had enjoyed his brief stay in Sir Richard Wynn’s house and had raided the building’s cavernous chests to furnish himself with new, beautiful clothes. ‘Because, Malachi, you’re the donkey,’ he replied, the wide ruff, thick with frills, bobbing at his throat as he spoke.

‘We’re hardly enamoured of this arrangement, either,’ Moxcroft snapped, wincing as Bain’s muscular shoulder dug painfully into his midriff.

Makepeace glanced up at him. ‘My apologies, Sir Randolph, but the current situation necessitates a swift and, I’m afraid, uncomfortable solution.’

As soon as the gunfire started, Makepeace’s instinct had told him that to linger on the front line was tantamount to suicide. But even he had not anticipated the Royalist attack coming so soon.

Makepeace and Bain had run from the cellars. They ordered the hatch shut and barred, and, while Makepeace was locating their cart and saddling the horses, Bain went to fetch the spy.

‘There are fucking thousands of them,’ Makepeace breathlessly explained to Moxcroft as they emerged from the rear of the house. ‘Wynn’s will fall. Then the town itself. And then God only knows.’

‘So one should escape?’ Moxcroft asked, his confident demeanour shaken by the gunfire and by the panic on Makepeace’s face.

Makepeace watched as Bain dropped the spy, rather unceremoniously, into the wagon. ‘Quarles told us there’s a bridge further east, between Brentford End and the new town. We’ll cross the river there.’

‘But they’ll ride us down, Captain.’

Makepeace shook his head as he helped Bain bolt the vehicle’s rear flap shut. ‘If we stay this side of the Brent, yes. But the bridge is well defended. Once we’re across, we’ll have some time before the king’s men break through.’

‘What of Stryker?’ Moxcroft said. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Tainton’s problem now.’

Bain growled as he joined Makepeace at the front of the cart. ‘That Puritan arse’ole won’t deal with ’im p-properly.’

Makepeace flicked his wrists sharply so the reins slapped at the horses’ spines, urging them into motion. But even as the cart surged forward, his mind was wandering, for he knew the sergeant was right. Tainton would undoubtedly be up to his neck in the fighting. And, when the rebels finally relinquished their hold on Sir Richard Wynn’s house, would the cavalryman have time to gather his prisoners? There was a good chance that Stryker’s company might yet go free.

‘L-let me go back,’ Bain said. ‘I can’t leave ’ere knowin’ he’s still alive. And that froggy b-bitch of his. She nearly stuck a blade in you once.’

‘I had not forgotten, Malachi,’ Makepeace snapped. He thought of Lisette Gaillard. The French whore had tried to murder him in the days following his maiming of Stryker. The provosts had stopped her, but the memory of her burning fury still frightened him. He made a decision. ‘As you wish, Malachi.’

Bain turned to him. ‘Eh?’

‘Go back there. Rid the world of their interminable presence.’

Sergeant Bain grinned, wafts of foul breath drifting from behind rotten teeth. He leapt down from the wagon with impressive agility for such a big man.

‘When it’s done,’ Makepeace called after him, ‘meet us at the bridge.’

‘Sir!’ Bain shouted over his shoulder.

‘And Malachi?’

Bain turned reluctantly.

Makepeace smiled. ‘You might want to have some fun with the girl.’

Out in the grounds at the front of Sir Richard Wynn’s house eight units of infantry sent as vanguard by the Earl of Forth vastly outnumbered Quarles’s red-coated defenders, but the butchers and dyers of London were veterans of Edgehill and not an easy nut to crack.

The Parliamentarians were arrayed in their companies, pikemen forming bristling blocks at the regiment’s centre, musket companies taking up the flanks. They would make a stand here, in front of the house, straddling the road.

Quarles was with one of the musket companies on the right flank. ‘When the first of them come through the gap, feed the heathens fire and lead!’ He was gratified to receive a cheer for that. ‘When all arms are spent, fall back ten paces! Pikes to cover!’

It was a simple enough plan. They would fire their muskets into the ranks of the enemy and retreat, by increments, toward Brentford End and safety. It was true that the numbers were daunting, near four thousand Royalists bore down upon them, but it remained for those attackers to funnel, one company at a time, on to the road, for the enclosed fields were impenetrable. It was then, when they were at their weakest, that Quarles would hammer them. It was a difficult, bloody way to retreat, but to break cover and make a run for it would invite the Royalist cavalry to mow them down. That time might yet come, but he would be damned if he’d give the king’s men an easy time in achieving it.

The first ranks of the enemy passed beyond the hedgerows, the head of a great snake winding its way toward London.
Quarles recognized their colours immediately. ‘Salusbury’s chaps!’ he bellowed so that as many of his men could hear as possible. ‘Heard they cut and run at Kineton Fight! They’ll run again, mark my words, boys! You must make ’em run!’ He drew his sword, holding it aloft momentarily, before sweeping down his arm in a silver arc. ‘Fire!’

The ruby was a thing of beauty. A perfect, shimmering sphere casting shafts of soft red light across the room in all directions to dance playfully along the walls.

Tainton held it in front of him, wondering at how it had come to be in the girl’s possession. She had stolen it, no doubt. But where had she found such a precious thing?

He gathered up the objects, depositing them in a small leather bag that he hung about his neck. He knew nothing about the ruby, except that it must be worth a great deal. If he could take it to London, the rebel cause would be aided by the money it would fetch.

The crackle of musketry was constant now. Tainton paced quickly through the house and out into the courtyard. There he found chaos, for the wounded were being carried back to the house for treatment, while aides scurried to and fro with orders.

Tainton caught one such man by the sleeve. ‘What news?’

The aide shrugged him off, fear overcoming respect for the chain of command. ‘Ordered retreat, sir. Back to the bridge. We’re to keep fighting, though. Stall the buggers for as long as we can.’

Tainton understood. They were no chicken-hearts, the soldiers of Denzil Holles’s Regiment of Foot. They had fought hard against the seemingly irresistible tide of Rupert’s cavalry at Edgehill, and had held steadfast against his three regiments for the last hour, but while heavy cannon and dense hedgerows could limit a cavalry charge, it would not withstand infantry for long. Holles’s men, brave as
they undoubtedly were, would soon be swept away if they continued to resist.

Tainton found his own troop regrouping at the stables to the rear of the house. They had been involved in intermittent but bitter skirmishes with the Cavalier horsemen since the initial attack had been rebuffed by Quarles’s cannon. They would be thankful to leave this place. A trooper appeared, carrying his commander’s polished metal armour in a large hessian sack. Tainton beckoned to him, and the man scuttled over, hefting the jangling sack. ‘God’s teeth, man! That is not a bag of cutlery!’

Tainton’s eye caught a glimmer of silver in the distance, like the crest of a giant wave. As he stared out at the tall hedgerow beyond the house, he realized that the silver wave was the massed shafts of Salusbury’s dense pike battaile, dipping into the roiling cannon smoke, ramming home against the thinner ranks at Quarles’s command.

‘They’ve made it through the hedge,’ he said.

Tainton waited until the gleaming Milanese armour was fastened to a sturdy but comfortable tension and then met his subordinate’s eye. ‘Fetch my horse, Bowery.’

Bowery sprinted away towards the stables. Men were killing and screaming, weeping and bleeding and dying in the fields hugging the flanks of the road. Tainton watched as a young lad, one of Salusbury’s drummers, was flung back, spitted on the end of a pike. Blood flowed freely from his mouth while urine dripped from his hose and down his boots.

A musket-ball splintered the brickwork somewhere behind Tainton. Shots at this range might not be accurate, but his experience of fighting Stryker’s sharpshooters had taught him not to assume too much. He hurriedly put on his helmet.

Ducking behind the nearby colonnades, he slipped into the familiar pre-action ritual, strapping on gauntlet and cross-belts, checking his carbine’s firing mechanism and sliding the long sword in and out of its scabbard a number of times to ensure
that it would not stick when the time came. All the while he watched the battle, counting men and gauging strategy. The men of Holles’s Regiment of Foot were offering staunch resistance, but their fire was becoming increasingly sporadic as more and more of the enemy made it through the gap between the hedges and into the open ground in front of Wynn’s house. It was not a rout yet, for Holles’s lads were retiring in good order, but the regiment of London apprentices were simply too few, and more of them fell back towards the house with every passing moment.

More smoke-wreathed pikes came into view on the far side of the hedge. Tainton took a few paces away from the building so that the structure did not obstruct his view, and counted two more companies behind the first few. This was a very large force. More, perhaps, than the entire Parliamentarian army between here and the capital could handle.

He had seen enough. His horse was ready now, and he leapt into the saddle, turning to the remainder of his troop. ‘We’ll not abandon them, lads! By God we will not!’

The Parliamentarian defenders kept their fire rapid and their courage strong until the last of the vast Royalist vanguard squeezed through the gap between the hedge-rows and fanned out in the clearing to face the remains of Holles’s regiment.

Lieutenant Colonel James Quarles was still on the right flank of his beleaguered force. He bellowed orders at the ranks of musketeers who fired, reloaded, fired, reloaded and fired in a professional rhythm that made him proud. To his left a pair of men fell together, a ball ripping through the first’s forehead and out the back of his skull, before punching through the face of the man behind.

‘Enough,’ Quarles whispered. His men were being battered by the greatest of hammers and their duty was done.

‘Beg pardon, sir?’ a nearby lieutenant called.

‘I said, enough,’ Quarles said, louder now. ‘We cannot hold our shape any longer. Not against this many muskets.’ He glanced across the thinning line of redcoats and filled his lungs. ‘Retreat! Retreat! To the bridge!’

Despite the dank, oppressive air of Sir Richard Wynn’s cellar, Sergeant Malachi Bain was in hog’s heaven.

‘M-miss me?’ he said as he reached floor level, a trio of wary musketeers at his back. The soldiers had been guarding the cellar, and were on the verge of abandoning their posts at hearing the commotion outside, when Bain had reappeared.

Bain stepped forward confidently, muskets levelled behind him, poised to blow holes in the prisoners’ chests. Clutching the big halberd he had liberated from Quarles’s stores, he lowered the shaft so that the blade hovered in line with Stryker’s throat.

‘Back so soon?’ Stryker said calmly. He glanced up at the open hatch. ‘And there I was thinking you’d turned your tail as well as your coat.’

Bain sneered. ‘I ain’t runnin’ away. Not yet, leastwise.’ The big man glanced at the others. ‘D-do you know,’ he said, nodding towards Stryker, ‘I take c-credit for that? I always figured him for an ugly bastard, that’s for certain, but me and the captain made it sure. Didn’t we, Mister Stryker?’

Stryker stepped forward. ‘Yes. You held me down. You watched while your master lit a fuse and you laughed as the powder took half my face.’

‘And now I’ve come to finish what I started all them years ago.’ Bain shook his head confidently. ‘M-Makepeace and the spy are on their way f-from here even n-now. I’ll see to you and meet ’im at the b-bridge.’

Forrester stepped forward. ‘But we are not yours to kill, Sergeant. Tainton is our gaoler.’