Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (54 page)

‘We could, sir,’ the elder of the pair replied nervously.

‘Just so,’ Massie acknowledged. ‘Get up on the hills. If you hear further news of his advance, light two great fires for me to see. Understood?’

‘Understood, Governor,’ the messenger said. ‘But how will you know ’tis us?’

That was a good question and it made Massie pause. Only a few nights earlier a Royalist force had lit fires on Wainlode Hill, even going so far as to feign a loud skirmish in order to gull the city into thinking they clashed with a Parliamentarian army. Massie had dismissed the escapade as a devious ruse to make him throw open the gates, and time had proven him correct. How would this be any different? ‘Light them at opposite ends of the hill, one twenty or so paces lower than the other.’

The messengers nodded and he dismissed them immediately, walking briskly back to the table. ‘Just so,’ he muttered quietly, forcing himself to remain businesslike in the duties that required his attention, despite the heartening news. The Parliament were finally on their way to save him, and yet, as he looked down at the paper with its numbers that told of dwindling powder, he could not help but worry. It would be a close-run thing, that much was certain.

Near Gaudy Green, Gloucester, 29 August 1643

Colonel Artemas Crow hated Gloucester. He hated it because it stood for everything that was wrong with the world. The new craze of social upheaval, of peasant disobedience, and of a Parliament that would not kneel to its rightful sovereign. Worst of all, it climbed from the sodden mud to scream defiance at the once all-conquering Royalist army, brandishing its ramshackle walls like some badge of honour, as though the mere existence of the cannon-frayed patchwork proved the fallibility of the king’s cause. Crow had seen the Cavaliers forge a victorious path through the Roundhead ranks on so many bloody fields, taking territory, sacking towns and striking fear into the hearts of those arrogant enough to take up arms against Charles Stuart. He had jeered at the barefooted chain of prisoners who had been forced to march from Cirencester to Oxford in the snow to beg the king for forgiveness, and he had cheered at the news of the Cornish victory at Stratton. And yet it had all stopped. Juddered to a bloody, muddy, humiliating halt. At Gloucester.

‘I would pay good money never to lay eyes on those crumbling walls again so long as I live,’ he said as he pulled off his long boots. He propped his feet on the footstool in front, inspecting the stinking black hose that covered his feet with a wrinkle of his bulbous nose. ‘Good money.’

The man standing before him was tall and thick-set, with a bushy beard of wiry black hair. An old scar made a horizontal cleft in his right cheek, dividing it into upper and lower halves. ‘I still think we should storm the walls,’ he said in a gruff tone that put Crow in mind of a growling mastiff. ‘Lay ladders across the ditch to the north, where the rampart is lowest, and throw men at it. We have enough. The city would fall in an hour.’

Crow folded his arms. ‘And then what, Major Triggs?’

Triggs scratched his beard thoughtfully. ‘Then put the whole place to sword and fire, sir. Kill the men, rape the women, burn the houses.’

Crow laughed. ‘And that is precisely what the King fears. We have gained a poor reputation with the common people, Major. A reputation for rape and pillage, as though we were an army of damned Norsemen. His Majesty would rather like to change that perception.’

‘Then he will not take Gloucester,’ Triggs said bluntly. He went to a battered little table where a stinking tallow candle flickered and spat against the closing darkness. He took it, pacing round the room to light three more for his colonel’s comfort. ‘I hear Essex marches even now.’

‘Conjecture,’ Crow said.

‘Where there’s smoke, Colonel, there is flame. We need to breach the walls quickly before the Roundheads reach us.’

Crow teased an errant hair from his bushy eyebrow, examining it between thumb and forefinger. ‘Essex will not come. And if he dares, we will turn on him and crush his feeble army like ants beneath our boots.’ He swept his hands over the spiked white tufts that grew in irregular clumps from his pate, and laced them behind his head. ‘They could muster no more than two thousand foot and the same in horse. Pitiful.’

A wave of raucous laughter washed through from the next room, and Crow rolled his eyes in annoyance. This was one of the privations that made him sympathetic to Triggs’ wish to wipe Gloucester clean off the map. There were simply not enough billets for the officers around the city, so, while the king made merry in his court down at Matson House, the rest of his men were left to find what shelter they could. The inns were crammed full; the storehouses, stables and barns were turned to quarters; every single house outside the walls was bursting with lice-ridden soldiery.

Crow might have been a full colonel, yet a little room in this pestilential hovel was all he had been able to find. It was scandalous, not least because the other three chambers in the rundown home had already been commandeered by grubby gangs of half-drunk pikemen. He had tried to turf out the surly mob upon his arrival, only to find that their officers had been forced to share with them. It was a disgrace to common decency, and another reason, if any more were needed, why Gloucester was simply the most wretched place in the whole of England.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how fares Dowdeswell?’

‘The wound heals as well as can be expected, sir.’

‘No fever?’

Triggs shook his head. ‘None. But the blow was solid, took a good chunk out of his forearm. It’ll be a long time before he can wield a sword properly.’

They waited while more shouts reverberated through the thin walls.

‘But he’ll live?’

‘He’ll live, sir.’ Triggs could not hold his colonel’s baby-blue gaze, and looked quickly at the floor. ‘We failed you.’

‘You did. But I am not surprised.’ Crow moved his hands to his lap, straightening in his chair as the need to admonish the major grew. He had already bawled at Triggs, screamed in red-faced anger when the news reached him, but he could not help but labour the point yet again. ‘I warned you, did I not? Told you to have a care with him. He’s a real devil.’

‘Give me another chance, sir,’ Triggs muttered, crestfallen.

‘I cannot risk it,’ Crow replied as he brought his temper under control. ‘I told you before that I could not risk a direct attack on Captain Stryker, for he is Rupert’s creature.’

‘But the—’

‘The attempt the other night was under cover of darkness, and he was drunk. I heard his name mentioned at Council and sought his unit out.’ It had been a terrible shock to discover that Stryker was still alive. God only knew what had become of James Buck, but Crow had a reasonable idea his agent would not be returning. He had gone to a deal of trouble to locate the billets to which Mowbray’s regiment had been assigned, and yet more difficulty in ascertaining which taverns the officers frequented. But his men had spotted the one-eyed fiend eventually. ‘That was your one chance, Major. You let him slip away.’

‘Sir, I—’

Colonel Artemas Crow held up a broad palm for silence. ‘Enough.’ He closed his eyes and immediately saw Stryker’s arrogant face. Christ, but it felt as though the hatred flowed in his veins instead of blood. ‘Edberg, Buck and now you, Major. You have all failed me. The ugly peacock yet struts. Now leave me in peace, Major Triggs. I will deal with him myself.’

CHAPTER 22

The East Gate, Gloucester, 1 September 1643

The hole had been made in the old dungeon at the foot of the gate.

‘Sally party, to me!’

Four blue-coated soldiers gripped their muskets in white-knuckled fists and pressed themselves up against the walls on either side of the newly made sallyport. They looked like night creatures, their faces darkened by dust and soot and their eyes glowing like hot coals in the gloomy dawn, and they stared hard at the near toothless sergeant as though in a trance.

‘Have a care, you men,’ the sergeant growled again, the lone incisor in his upper jaw jutting out between dry lips like a dirty fang. He kept his voice low, for, though they were on the inner face of the wall, it was no longer a secret that a company of human moles was busily tunnelling beneath their feet. ‘No one gets killed lest I asks it of yer.’ That elicited a few sheepish grins. ‘Now where’s that bugger got to?’

The bugger in question was a young man with straw-coloured moustache and close-cropped hair named John Barnwood. ‘I’m here, Sergeant,’ he hissed.

‘You got what you’re meant to’ve got?’

Barnwood’s heart rattled like an antick in a cage, but he managed to affect a look of calm detachment. He had a small cloth sack in one hand and a length of smouldering cord in the other. He shook the sack. ‘Three grenadoes and one match.’

The sergeant hawked up a wad of green and yellow phlegm, which he spat in a foamy ball at his feet. ‘Then let’s get this fuckin’ thing over with.’ He jerked a mucky finger at Barnwood’s chest. ‘You stay with me. I’ve orders to keep you alive, right?’

Barnwood was not about to argue. ‘Right.’

The four bluecoats arranged themselves in single file and a ladder was passed up along their right-hand side. It was an awkward manoeuvre, for they had first to prop smouldering match-cords between their teeth and shift their muskets to their free left hands, but eventually they were ready. The lead man ducked through the hole and out on to the narrow lip of earth that ran between the outer face of the gate and the watery ditch, the rest following silently, with Barnwood and the sergeant in pursuit. Barnwood immediately grimaced, for the air stank. The ditch had been dug for defence but was quickly used for the city’s refuse and, for the soldiers on the rampart, a convenient latrine. Moreover, it had filled with springwater and then rainwater, and the result was a stagnant moat that seemed to singe the hairs in Barnwood’s nostrils.

He forced himself to keep the contents of his stomach down, biting back at the rising bile, for he did not wish his nausea to be misconstrued by Stamford’s men as fear. This was, after all, his first raid, and he would damn well make a good fist of it.

‘Go go go!’ the gruff sergeant growled, shoving him between the shoulders.

Barnwood looked down to see the four bluecoats sliding sideways down the slippery glacis. They hurriedly laid the ladder across the stewing gully and scrambled across, the desperately weak-looking wooden poles, lashed together with twine, creaking as they bowed under the weight. Barnwood followed, noticing the wooden faggots and loose rubble dumped into the morass by Royalist engineers as he heard the raid’s grunting commander breathing heavily at his back. He was frightened now, terrified, and with every inch of the putrid ditch he crossed, he expected to hear the scream of orders and din of musketry. But nothing came. He went on, dancing as nimbly as he could over to the far bank and into the Royalist works, the sack jangling at his hip with every rung traversed.

Edward Massie looked on from the fire-step on the east wall adjacent to the endangered gatehouse. He did not need his perspective glass for this work, for the action was immediately below his position, and, though the morning was overshadowed by a new host of grey clouds, he could see the operation unfold as though he were there himself.

‘Is it worth the powder?’ Thomas Pury asked at his side. The dour Puritan leader, along with Skaithlocke and several other officers, had scaled the wall to follow the garrison’s first real attack in days.

Massie did not look round, leaning instead on the crumbling stone palisade in front. ‘We cannot sit here and wait.’

‘The enemy mines are not progressing as we’d feared,’ Pury said as he adjusted his coat buttons. ‘They have not yet filled the moat.’

‘The surface petards, yes,’ Massie agreed. ‘They seem to be hampered by the springs, for the moat swallows their debris like quicksand. But underground?’ He sucked at his teeth as he considered the report by some of the men in his countermines. They had claimed that they could hear the Cavalier digging crews through the walls of the muddy subterranean shafts. ‘I believe they grope closer to our foundations every day, Thomas. They may already have cleared the moat. That is what this expedition has been tasked with discovering.’

‘And if they find the mining work continues,’ Vincent Skaithlocke said with grim relish, ‘then we have a grenade expert from the Town Regiment to give the bastards pause for thought.’

Pury gnawed the flesh at the side of his narrow thumb. ‘And nothing more of Essex?’

‘No word,’ said Massie sombrely. ‘We only know that he comes hither. Therefore we must distract and delay the malignants for as long as we can, even at the cost of our precious powder.’

The group fell silent as their half-dozen raiders cleared the ladder, the blue-coated quartet tarrying briefly to fix matches to their muskets’ serpents. Then they were moving on through the nearest saps. They had been long abandoned, having striven too close to the walls, their occupiers picked at by Massie’s rebels, but the dark grooves might still hide hidden sentries and the watching group collectively held its breath.

John Barnwood peered down into the deep sap as he scurried past. It had been dug by brave men, he thought, for its proximity to the walls ensured it was within easy reach of the city’s sharpshooters. A broken spade stuck out at an angle from the foot of the trench, while bits of wicker and wood were strewn along its length. He wondered whether one of Gloucester’s cannon had put paid to the excavation here.