Read Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles Online
Authors: Michael Arnold
Happy with the ear-string, he stared down at the crossbow in his lap. He had stayed in his room since retrieving it from the Little Mead, for the king, it was said, had gone to Oxford with his headstrong nephew. Rumours of a gathering Parliamentarian relief expedition were rife in the camp, spreading from Kingsholm to Over, down through Barton, Gaudy Green and Llanthony Priory like a bout of French Welcome in a swiving shop. The senior officers denied it, naturally, letting it be known that the enemy could never have raised enough men in such a short space of time, but Charles and Rupert had gone to the Royalist capital anyway, so Robbens was unconvinced. Either way, his regal target was not in Gloucester, so there seemed little point in showing his face unnecessarily.
The bow had been soaked by the downpour, of course, and that had given Robbens pause for concern, but the steel weapon did not suffer the same ill-effects of saturation as its wooden cousin might have. Now, dry, clean and gleaming, Robbens found that he spent a great deal of time simply stroking the beautifully crafted stock as he might a lover’s thigh. The etched stags on either side of the grip seemed to prance for him alone, as though the bow somehow knew what great work he would soon put it to. He traced one of the delicate grooves that represented an antler. ‘Soon, I promise.’
‘Look lively, you flea-bit pack o’ mongrels! He’ll be here before you knows it, so sort your damned shirts and fasten your coats!’
The shout had come from out on the road below his lodgings. Robbens carefully placed the miniature crossbow on his palliasse, covering it with a sheet, and padded to the window. He was on the first floor, and he thrust open the shutter and leaned out. Soldiers milled down below; something was afoot.
‘Ho, friend!’
The man he had hailed, a sturdily built corporal with ink-black stubble and narrow, suspicious eyes, peered up at him from beneath a filthy Monmouth cap.
‘What is happening?’ Robbens asked, adding a cough for authenticity.
The corporal backed away and scratched at the paunch of his belly, which strained against the pale blue material of his coat. ‘Gen’ral o’ Horse visits us,’ he said, adding, ‘for our sins.’
Robbens felt his throat tighten a touch. ‘General of Horse? You mean Prince Rupert?’
‘No, chum,’ the corporal replied, ‘I mean Gustavus Adolphus. Of course I means the Prince!’
‘He has returned from Oxford?’
‘Well, he’ll struggle to inspect the army if he hasn’t!’ the corporal boomed. His men laughed.
‘And the King?’
The corporal was already walking away, but he glanced up at the window one last time. ‘That’d be my guess, chum! Won’t have rid ’ere on his own, will he?’
Nikolas Robbens shouted his thanks and slid back inside. He had to breathe deeply to regain his composure. So they were back, he thought, walking to the bed and its fatal prize. Praise God, they were back.
Near Oxford, 28 August 1643
The capital city of King Charles shone like a gemstone in the grey dusk. Its citizens had lighted their candles and lamps for the creeping night, making every street and building glow, while the soldiers out on the band of rapidly progressing defensive works had lit a string of small fires, which marked Oxford’s new limits. It was a beacon among the surrounding hills, a guiding light for pilgrims and fugitives alike.
Two such fugitives eased their shattered mounts to a grunting halt on one of the hills above the metropolis. The beasts snorted and shivered, their flanks caulked in sweat and mud, as their riders patted their exhausted, twitching necks and begged for two more miles of effort. The horses seemed to understand, for they moved forwards, negotiating the edge of the escarpment, which would lead them down into Oxford.
Lisette Gaillard pulled gently at the pricked ear of her mare, its grey coat almost glowing in the gathering moonlight. ‘Nearly there. Nearly there.’
She had led Cecily Cade on a mad, terrible gallop through New Brentford the previous day. They had weaved in and out of carts and horses, oxen, children, dogs and soldiers. They had crouched in their saddles and hugged the horses’ huge necks, willing them on as the beasts bolted through the stunned crowd, clattered over the bridge that took them across the River Brent, and pushed on into Brentford End. Lisette had veered right, easing them off the London road and into the fields to the north. She knew the area, had marched through it with Stryker when the folk of rebel London had chased the king’s grand army from Turnham Green, Brentford and Hounslow, and she remembered the old farming tracks many of the infantry regiments had traversed when the high road had been turned to a morass by melting snow. They had pressed the horses hard, always fearing the sound of chasing hooves at their backs, but the blackcoats had not come. Erasmus Collings would not have abandoned the search, they knew. But there were many routes to take to Oxford, and perhaps, by the grace of God, his malevolent flock of ravens had chosen the wrong ones.
They moved down the hill, trees flanking them like Titans, and trotted in silence. The flickering orange city beckoned them home.
CHAPTER 21
Beside the East Gate, Gloucester, 29 August 1643
‘And that’s it? They just ran?’
‘No, Forry, they didn’t run,
I
did.’
It had been nearly five days since the attack outside the Cob and Saddle, and Stryker had had plenty of time, while he guarded sappers and kept a lookout for Skaithlocke’s vanished assassin, to ponder just how close he had come to dying on the wet path beside the courtyard. He had not seen Forrester since parting amid the tavern’s warm fug, for their respective companies had been posted to different parts of the siegeworks, but his friend had heard about the close call on the army rumour mill, and set to interrogating Stryker as soon as the pair greeted one another in the wicker-screened musket emplacements to which their sharpshooters had been assigned.
‘Details, old man,’ Forrester said dismissively. He gazed out over the breastwork at the sodden saps. ‘The men whisper of a large army marching out from London.’
Stryker followed his gaze. A metal-clad engineer slopped out from one of the trenches like an armoured monster rising from the underworld. A shot immediately rang out from the city, followed by a ripple of cheers as the whistling ball clanged against the man’s encased chest, knocking him on to his back. He writhed there for a few seconds, flailing like a flipped beetle on a vast dung pile, before two more similarly armoured creatures appeared like steel rabbits from their burrows, scuttling out to drag him clear, vanishing just as quickly. ‘The Parliament could not muster enough men to challenge us.’
Forrester blew out his red cheeks, adjusting his wide hat so that it sat at a suitably rakish angle. ‘Still, this is all rather sluggish, wouldn’t you say?’
They stared in silence at the ravaged land before them – a flood plain of shimmering pools and black filth. The whole area was waterlogged and had become a cloying, foot-numbing morass. It had been wet from the start; dry, flaky mud turning to thick glue as the sappers unleashed spring after spring in the excavation of their man-sized badger set. But it was the rain that had taken the worst toll. The downpour, now just a memory beneath clear blue skies, had filled the moat and trenches, saturated the earth and made the rivers swell. Men stank worse than usual, for their feet were beginning to rot inside shoes and socks they could not get dry, while the mining work had become a lesson in sheer toil. The work beneath the bullet-proof galleries crept on, but the moat was proving impossible to fill as water continued to seep up from below. In addition, the resources dedicated to them had been diverted to the subterranean attack. But that clandestine enterprise, the daring, ingenious mine that reached deep below the ground, sweeping beneath the moat and up to the gatehouse, had taken far longer to dig than even the most pessimistic of the Earl of Forth’s engineers could have imagined. The soaking tunnels were difficult to clear and collapsed all too often, trapping good men inside. They were being pulled out hours later as blue-lipped corpses.
‘They’ve brought in a crew of Welsh miners this very morning,’ Stryker said after a while. ‘I hear they’re experts in this kind of thing.’
‘I saw them,’ Forrester said.
‘It is expected they’ll lend speed to the whole affair.’
‘God willing,’ replied Forrester, ‘but the undeniable fact is it that our clever mining expedition, the main plank in our current strategy, is simply taking too long.’ He looked at Stryker, his face tense and serious. ‘If the Roundheads have managed to scrape an army together, I fear our spirits are not high enough to challenge them, despite our numbers.’
Stryker stared back at the East Gate, imagining the frenetic activity of the digging teams beneath its foundations. ‘Then let us hope our Welsh friends can prove their worth.’
‘But you’ve no idea who it was?’ Forrester asked, suddenly returning to the earlier topic.
‘The attack? Oh, I’ve ideas.’
‘Coat colours? Field words? What?’
‘None of that. They weren’t that foolish.’
‘So you do think it was premeditated,’ Forrester mused. ‘Not just a gaggle of copper-nosed routers out for sport?’
Stryker thought back. He had been drunk, and the details were blurred, but he remembered enough to keep his suspicions alive. ‘That’s just it. They hadn’t been drinking, not that I could tell, leastwise. And they were determined to kill me.’ He shook his head. ‘It was no chance robbery.’
Forrester screwed up his face in frustration. ‘And that’s all you have to go on?’
‘I managed to escape because their mounts were poor. Just palfreys. And they fought well enough, skilled in the saddle, like cavalry, but dressed like you or me.’
‘Infantrymen on horseback.’ Forrester was silent for a moment as he absorbed the information. A new light flickered across his eyes. ‘Dragooners!’ he exclaimed, swotting the wickerwork with a gloved backhand.
‘That is what I wondered,’ Stryker said. A flurry of musketry crackled up on the walls, and the pair ducked back behind the screen. Stryker met his friend’s gaze when the volley was spent. ‘Is Crow in camp?’
Forrester spread his palms, indicating that he did not know. ‘It is a very big army, old man.’
The musket squall had evidently been intended as a precursor to a larger action, for a bombardment by cannon began to shake the ground at their feet. Iron shot whistled away to batter the eastern trenches, fired from somewhere behind the walls.
‘But it is unlikely he’ll have spotted you amongst the throng,’ Forrester said, having to raise his voice above the artillery fire, ‘’specially if you haven’t seen him. He’s a mad-eyed loon in a yellow coat. With all due respect, Stryker, you’re just another filth-clothed plodder wading about this delightful quagmire like some sword-swinging mudlark.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ Stryker could see that the chances did seem slim, and he had to admit that Crow was not necessarily behind the attack. He had plenty of enemies, after all.
‘But we must keep our eyes peeled,’ Forrester added. The corner of his thin mouth twitched slightly. ‘Obviously just the one eye in your case, old man.’
Jesus College, Oxford, 29 August 1643
Lisette Gaillard and Cecily Cade sat in the antechamber for three hours before they were permitted entry. A stooped servant in a dark-blue tabard shuffled through a groaning door and mumbled for them to follow. They stood, stretched, and did as they were told. On the far side was another room, bigger and more lavishly appointed, with richly panelled walls and an ornately carved ceiling.
‘About time,’ Lisette grumbled. She was not given to waiting, let alone in musty old offices for mouldy old men, and it was a struggle to keep her temper in check.
The servant snorted softly into his white whiskers. ‘You must be patient in this place.’
‘So we have learned,’ Cecily said, cutting off a reply from her French companion that was destined to be acerbic.
Tetchy and tired, they had been in the Royalist capital for a night and a morning, and already the swarming city felt like a great weight about their necks. The king’s court had consolidated here after his failure to take London the previous November. Believing it the only city wholeheartedly loyal to his cause, Charles had reconvened his court and administrative machine in the sprawling university buildings, and had begun defensive outworks to ensure its safety. But with the court had come an army of clerks. Black-fingered scribes and watery-eyed paper-shufflers who were necessary to keep the cogs of administration turning, but who also guaranteed the place would be tightly bound by bureaucratic inertia. The women, so joyful as they had galloped into the capital’s outlying pickets, had run headlong into Oxford’s indolent chains almost immediately. They were escorted by a small troop of cavalry to a stable block on the outskirts of the city, and had been questioned during the night. And though they were eventually given lodgings and promised access to a more senior official, that meeting had not taken place until dawn. The man, a lawyer turned staff officer, had done nothing more than forward them on through another layer of bureaucracy, sending them to the ostentatious rooms in a corner of Jesus College to wait in line for yet another audience. At least now they were on the move, but the entire process was akin to wading through molasses.