Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (59 page)

‘Excellent,’ Essex said happily. He looked around at the faces of aides and senior officers. ‘Good work, gentlemen. We will make camp here.’

‘Young Middleton has done a rare job, Your Grace,’ Major General Philip Skippon said as he leaned across his horse to stroke its twitching ear. ‘Outnumbered, but stood firm. If we make it to Gloucester in one piece, we’ll have much to thank him for.’

Essex nodded agreement. ‘He has done great work this day.’ He looked at the breathless aide. ‘See that he is recalled now that we are safely on this side of the river. Tell him we’ll set pickets to protect us from Wilmot. His men may rest.’

‘What awaits us on the morrow, Your Grace?’ Skippon asked as the aide raced away.

‘The morrow is Sunday, General, and we shall not swerve from our devotions, whether we are hounded by Wilmot or Satan himself.’ He paused for the chorus of huzzahs to wane. ‘I should like an open air service, if the weather permits.’

‘That’ll stir the blood,’ Skippon said.

‘Indeed it will. And then on to Chipping Norton. It is twenty miles short of the Cotswold escarpment, so I should like to rest there the night. We shall need all our strength if we are to press westward through the hills in good time.’ He looked around the group, raising his voice. ‘Never fear, gentlemen. We shall relieve Gloucester yet.’

Llanthony Priory, Gloucester, 2 September 1643

All Stryker could do was stare.

The business for which he had been so abruptly ripped from Lisette’s arms was to be the king’s final throw of the dice. For days – weeks – under the sultry sun and the torrential rain, a crew of local artisans had slaved amid the workshops of the priory, assigned to give life to the sketches of Doctor William Chillingworth. Stryker had remembered Mowbray speaking of the strange mechanisms, but nothing more had come of it, and, in truth, he had all but forgotten the idea as he had slogged in the sopping trenches out to the east.

But now, it seemed, the mad plan had come to fruition, for the men of Stryker’s red-coated company had been ordered to one of the priory’s forecourts. There they had encircled three wooden contraptions that looked for all the world like gigantic lizards. They were effectively wheeled pontoons of rough-hewn timber, set upon huge axles, with retractable bridges attached towards the front by dozens of thick ropes.

‘The blind will protect you,’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine announced as the incredulous musketeers looked on. The king’s tall nephew had apparently taken it upon himself to end the siege quickly now that Parliament had a formidable army on the move, and his first act was to begin the mobilization of Chillingworth’s timber monsters. He had hand-picked the troops that would storm the walls, borne on the beasts’ long backs, and Mowbray’s unit was the first on his list. The sharp-faced general, Boye panting noisily at his knee, went to one of the engines and patted the screen of stripped planks that rose to the height of two men above the front axle. ‘The men stand behind it so that they are protected during the approach. The wood is thick enough to repel bullets and small shot. You’ll see there are holes through which you may return fire when closing with the enemy.’

‘What happens when we reach the moat, General?’ a plate-eyed Lieutenant Hood asked, as he stared enthralled at the alien engines.

‘You will pull these ropes,’ Rupert said, reaching out to grasp the thick cord that connected the hinged drawbridge to the front of the vehicle like a great, lolling tongue. ‘The drawbridge will rise. Then you will drive – pushed by the men behind – directly into the moat.’ Rupert waited for the smattering of horrified gasps to die down. ‘The ropes are released, the bridge falls on to their walls, and you charge up to glory.’

‘Miss Gaillard’s back, then,’ Lancelot Forrester said as he came to stand beside Stryker.

‘She is.’

‘Well, I presume?’ Forrester asked in a matter-of-fact voice. Doubtless he had spoken with Skellen and been regaled with the details of how the captain had taken the Frenchwoman in his arms when first she had appeared like an apparition amid the devastation of Barton Street.

‘Yes, Forry, thank you.’

Forrester lowered his voice so as not to irritate the irascible prince, who was busily explaining the more intricate workings of the drawbridge to Lieutenant Hood and a group of redcoats. ‘I heard she came into camp with another young lass.’

Stryker looked pointedly at his friend, who now casually examined his fingernails. Clearly he was not as disinterested as he made out, for he had made enquiries of his own. ‘Cecily Cade, aye.’

Forrester whistled softly. ‘Managed to extricate her from the crop-heads on her own, eh? Very impressive.’

‘Indeed,’ Stryker said, trying not to take the bait.

‘Bet she’s none too happy with you, old man.’

Stryker rounded on him. ‘Have a care, Captain Fo—’

‘Captain Stryker!’ Prince Rupert’s voice cracked loud and crisp across the forecourt.

Stryker shot Forrester a caustic glare and turned to the general. ‘Sir.’

‘Brief the men,’ Rupert ordered. ‘Familiarize yourselves with the engines now, so that you all know how to deploy them when the time comes. You attack in the morning.’

CHAPTER 24

The Cathedral, Gloucester, 3 September 1643

It was Sunday, yet there would be no day of rest. Not even a sermon.

Indeed, as the whispering congregation were ushered out of the shot-scarred church, they could only pause to pray for themselves, whisper lonely entreaties to the God that had kept them out of the clutches of the enemy for so long, and against such odds. There was no time for anything else, for soldiers had come, marching down the nave with powder-darkened faces and tattered blue coats to cut short the preacher before he could launch into his righteous tirade. They were carrying orders for every able-bodied parishioner to proceed directly to the East Gate.

Perhaps in days gone by, at the beginning of the siege when nothing was certain, they might have chosen to ignore the young governor with his narrow, ashen face and sorrowful gaze, putting such a summons down to youthful impertinence. But they had grown to respect him with each daring raid, each new earthwork and each countermine. He had believed in the city’s will to survive, and they had begun to believe in him. Now, if Edward Massie needed help, they would happily leave the crimson-cheeked clergyman to bawl at the high beams.

The men and women hurried through the rubble-strewn streets, inured to the craters left by exploding mortar shells, blind to the decapitated chimney stacks and hardened to the sight of the gaping holes punched by round shot into rooftops and walls. They had lost people – friends and kin – but somehow the horrors of life within the beleaguered walls had become commonplace. What mattered was that they held out. After all, they had heard the news of Essex’s advance. They did not know where he was, but they believed he was coming for them. A few more days. Just a few more days.

It appeared the Royalists scurrying about their miserable ant-hills in the section of trenches beyond the eastern wall had constructed a new, formidable battery from which they might launch a new bombardment of the gate. If that was the case, Massie had surmised, then perhaps their cursed mine beneath the moat had finally reached its target, the new artillery redoubt being part of a strategy of softening the defenders’ spirits before the charges were ignited down in the sopping depths. A second line of defence, therefore, needed to be constructed, and it was to this task that the hardy citizens of Gloucester were quickly set.

‘I want a strong breastwork here,’ Governor Edward Massie called as whole families assembled for the morning’s work. He pointed a skinny white finger at the ground where he stood, tracing an invisible line from one side of the road to the other. ‘It must run all the way across Eastgate Street, lest the enemy break through the gate. We’ll have a trench in front, deep as we can make it, and we’ll place cannon at the flanks.’

Soldiers of various descriptions – Stamford’s blues, the men of the Town Regiment, the smattering of dragoons that had been trapped behind the walls, and Backhouse’s cavalrymen – began directing citizens to the day’s toil, handing out spades and picks, and moving carts and sledges into position for the removal of debris. Further along the east wall, cannon fire boomed out from the new gun port. Overnight, Massie’s secret plan to place a saker opposite the Royalist gallery had come to fruition, and, though its iron shot did not penetrate the thick wooden slats, the pounding to which the men filling the moat were subjected had served to slow their progress significantly. Down at the fresh works, the townsfolk cheered its every shot.

They had laboured with soil and stone for more than an hour, digging and hefting and scouring and sweating, when a great, despairing cry rose up from the south. As one, the citizens in the workforce stopped in their tracks to peer through the warren of battered houses at the great edifice of the South Gate. From the bastion and the walls on either side, men were frantically waving, calling a shrill alarm that made the folk at ground level stare in wild-eyed panic at one another. Massie was already running from the fresh breastwork, trailed by his entourage at a brisk jog that did nothing to salve the panic of his garrison.

Men and women were following suit, clambering up the earth glacis to the rampart running from the East Gate to the South Gate, and risking having their heads picked off by sharpshooters in the saps below in order to get a look at the sight that had caused such consternation.

A great murmur rippled along the walls as hundreds of pairs of eyes settled upon a piece of desolate land to the south. It was the sound of dismay; a city gripped by sudden collective fear. Because out in the bleak wastes, as though conjured from the bowels of hell itself, three monsters crawled.

Near Llanthony Priory, Gloucester 3 September 1643

Stryker checked his musket for a third time. It was primed and ready, the charge kept safe beneath the pan cover, the match perfectly poised to ignite the fine grains when called upon. What a strange life it was, he thought silently as the engine lurched into juddering motion. He had gone back to his room at Barton, lain with Lisette for a few more precious hours. But then it had been time to return to the front, and he had left her, naked on his palliasse, only to be crammed on to the back of a timber machine and told to succeed where so many other Royalist schemes had failed.

Now he found himself towards the rear of one of Chillingworth’s great leviathans, braced between two ranks of men as they wobbled and jerked their way across the landscape. The engines were heavy and cumbersome, so the doctor had designed large handles that jutted from the back of the wheeled pontoons so that teams of men could push them as though they were vast barrows.

‘I feel like a bloody Greek,’ Captain Lancelot Forrester complained at Stryker’s side. He was similarly armed, his bandolier loaded with extra powder flasks so that he rattled like a wind chime, his forearm wrapped in a length of spare match.

Stryker peered beyond his friend and over the vehicle’s open flank. The terrain was slick and cloying, the engine’s huge cartwheels already beginning to slip. ‘Except this horse isn’t getting into Troy.’

‘You do not think this will work?’ Forrester asked cautiously.

‘I think we rush into this attack because the King fears a relief force appearing on the hills. We are ill-prepared.’

‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,’ Forrester muttered. ‘That’s
King Henry the Fourth
, part two. And never more worthy a quote, I am sorry to say.’

‘Don’t be like that, sir,’ an excited Lieutenant Hood said. He had been enthused by the sight of the mechanical beasts, eager to board and be part of the first unit to cross Gloucester’s wall. He grinned when Forrester rolled his eyes. ‘We drive straight into the ditch, sir.’

‘I’m quite aware of that, Tom,’ Forrester said witheringly.

‘Straight into it!’ Hood went on, unaware of the weary disdain his ebullience engendered. ‘And the engine’s body – where we now stand – will become the bridge across the moat. Then we merely drop the drawbridge on to their rampart, and run up it.’

‘And simply leap like a shoal of salmon into poor Gloucester town,’ Forrester said, ‘where the evil Massie and his horned minions will lay down their arms to us.’

‘I pray so, sir, yes,’ Hood replied, still apparently oblivious to the captain’s sarcastic tone.

A flurry of shots came from the city. They were mostly wayward, flying high and wide, and too weak to do any damage at this range, but still the men ducked behind the timber screen. The musketeers at the front thrust their long-arms through holes cut into the log shield and played at the walls, if only to let the garrison know that the fight’s leaden traffic would not all be one way.

On they rumbled, thrown shoulder to shoulder with each jolt as the wheels plummeted in and out of the deep ruts. At one point the engine slewed to the left, and the packed musketeers peered out to see that the wheels had become stuck on that side. Stryker ordered a handful to exit the rear of the vehicle and lend their muscle to the effort, and amid much snarling and cursing, the wheels jerked free.

But worse was to come, for it quickly became apparent that the wheels, though still in motion, were digging deeper and deeper tracks as they went. They were sinking. The ground, firm as iron at the start of the siege, was little more than slurry, and the unfathomably huge engines were simply too heavy to make it as far as the walls.