Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (60 page)

Stryker’s engine seized on one side, and he could see that they were not simply stuck this time. They had been sucked into the mire. The wheels on the opposite flank were spinning madly in the air as the men pushing the contraption wrestled to get it squared and moving. But the garrison men were firing now, loosing a shower of lead from up on the rampart, and the bullets were clipping the wooden screen, zinging off the wheels and pecking the mud all around.

‘Get movin’! Get movin’, you lazy bastards!’ someone shouted.

‘Heave!’ another called.

Stryker pushed his way back to look down at the toiling men who worked to combat the swamp-borne inertia, and immediately realized that they were not going to win the fight. He leaped off the back, planting his feet with a splash between the long handles. The grimacing soldiers who manned them looked like teams of galley slaves, sweat-stained and straining.

Stryker moved out from the safety of the engine to stare up at the walls. Massie’s musketeers lined the bushel-plugged palisade, jeering and firing by turns. He swore as a musket-ball clipped his shoulder. It had glanced off a soggy spar, losing its murderous rage, but the blow served to make him duck low, and he found himself staring at one of the wheels. He watched in stunned despair as the long spindles slowed, the wheels digging a deep rut in the watery earth. Desperately he sought solace in the other two engines, but he could see that they were both floundering like ships in a storm, neither so much as budging in the gluey terrain. And he was turning, shouting at the men to abandon the engine and retreat, for the wheels were simply sinking with every shove the teams at the back gave. It was a lost cause.

The South Gate, Gloucester, 3 September 1643

The men on the walls cheered, raising muskets high and crowing to the pregnant black clouds. Their women and children cheered too, waving any garment they could find that carried a flash of orange or tawny in jubilant mockery of the pathetic engines.

Edward Massie watched the scene with something akin to disbelief. He had almost wanted the engines to reach the ditch, if only to see what the intriguing contraptions were capable of, and now that they languished like scuttled galleons out in the southern marsh, the engineer in him felt somehow deprived.

‘A sign,’ Vincent Skaithlocke rumbled at his right hand. The huge colonel had borrowed his perspective glass, and cradled it to his face with hands that made it seem like a child’s play thing. ‘A sign of God’s will, if ever I saw one.’

‘It was too wet,’ Massie said, ever the pragmatist. ‘We’d have been in trouble if they’d used them in the dry.’

‘But they could not wait,’ Skaithlocke said. ‘They are frightened, Governor. They must know Essex closes with them by the hour. It was a desperate move.’ He lowered the glass with a broad grin. ‘God is with us.’

‘I pray you are right, Colonel,’ Massie replied, turning away.

‘Wait.’

Massie looked back. ‘Wait? What is it?’

The glass was back at Skaithlocke’s eye. He had it trained upon the nearest of the impotent machines. ‘Stryker.’

Massie frowned. ‘Surely not.’

Skaithlocke handed the leather tube to the governor with an expression that was so ashen it was startling. ‘Not many could be mistaken for him, sir.’

Massie scanned the glistening mud, tracing a path from saps to shattered buildings, to upended gabions, piles of trench tools and beyond one of the many burial pits that now dotted the surrounding land, until his view was filled by the dark shape of the siege engine. At its flank, frantically ushering red-coated soldiers back in the direction of the priory, was a tall man dressed in black, with a dark feathered hat. He was mostly obscured by the brim, but enough could be discerned to see that a patch of pale scar tissue blighted one half of his face. Indeed, he seemed to have only one eye.

Massie sighed, blowing cold air through his nostrils. ‘Stryker.’ He thrust the perspective glass into his belt. ‘A great shame. He played us for fools.’

‘A shame?’ Skaithlocke replied, and it sounded as though a petard had erupted inside his throat. ‘The villain. The fucking, double-dealing, pope-coddling villain.’ He turned away from the governor, looking to descend to ground level.

Massie watched the corpulent soldier go, his great slab of flesh juddering like a bowl of whale blubber where it hung across his breeches. ‘A shame,’ he called after the strangely furious mercenary. ‘Nothing more. After all, what has his betrayal cost us? We are undefeated. Unbowed before all the King’s might.’

To his surprise, Skaithlocke marched away with a face that was twisted and crimson with rage.

Near Gaudy Green, Gloucester, 3 September 1643

‘Majesty.’

‘Wh-wh-what?’ King Charles stammered. Perched on a fine roan gelding, he was furious since witnessing his lumbering siege engines meet their ignominious end. ‘What is it?’

The horseman, who had thundered up to the royal party from the east with his breathless report, gently urged his mount to walk through the midst of the group. They moved aside for him, stunned by what they had just seen into unnatural deference. ‘My lord Wilmot continues to skirmish with Essex, Your Majesty.’

‘Good,’ the king retorted waspishly, expecting nothing less. He turned back to the sad forms of his heavy machines, slumped and slanted in the mud, Goliaths with no Davids to be seen.

‘But he reports that he has been unable to prevent His Excellency’s march westwards.’

That grasped the monarch’s attention, and his head snapped round, brown eyes like discs. ‘Where is he?’

‘Chipping Norton in the main, Your Majesty,’ the messenger replied, brushing grass mulch from his sleeves.

The king tugged at his little beard. ‘In the main? What is that s-s-supposed t-to mean?’

‘His vanguard overreaches, somewhat. They have gone as far as Oddington.’

A huge warrior in full breast- and backplates, a broad, feathered hat and buff-coat laced with silver crashed his way through the group. The silk and satin entourage parted like the Red Sea for his black-nostrilled destrier, averting their gaze from the challenging rider and his bullish glower. ‘They’re spreading themselves too thin, Uncle,’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine barked, showing that he had caught the last part of the exchange. ‘Let me join Wilmot. We may destroy Essex’s force in detail before he even reaches Stow. Let me crush them, Your Majesty.’

‘V-very well, Rupert. Take the rest of the horse and put the hateful rogues to the swo-swor—’

‘Sword, Uncle,’ Rupert snapped, his flaring temper governing his tact. Immediately he realized his mistake, and turned his charger around, kicking the coke-black flanks before any more damage was done.

But the king seemed not to notice. He simply stared out at the abandoned engines again, crestfallen and deflated, a small figure on a large horse, overshadowed by Gloucester’s towering defences. ‘Falkland?’ he said in a weak voice.

Lord Falkland, the grim secretary of state, was staring, slack-jawed at the floundered engines. He could not bring himself to look at his sovereign. ‘Majesty?’

‘Come with me, F-Falkland,’ Charles said, shaking his reins deftly. ‘I am eager to seek an exp—an explanation for this.’

Outside Matson House, Gloucester, 3 September 1643

Cecily Cade had waited.

She had sat in a large, rectangular reception room the previous afternoon and stared at the walls. She had peered out of the window, examined the high beams and even resorted to counting the scuff marks on the polished floorboards, rubbed raw by the riding boots worn by the king’s visitors.

But he had not come till late. King Charles, as the courtier had told her, had spent the day inspecting his troops, blessing their endeavours and encouraging their officers. She had hoped the regal progress would not take long, but the city was big, the camps vast and the terrain difficult, and that made the whole affair an arduous and time-consuming duty. In the end the royal entourage had returned, but the hour had been late, and Cecily had been conveyed to a small antechamber at the rear of the building in which the bustling staff had arranged for her to stay. They had been kindly enough, she had to admit, despite their innate air of stuffy superiority, and she had rested her head on the most comfortable pillow she had felt in all her life. By the time King Charles was home, Cecily Cade was enjoying the deepest sleep she had had since that fateful day on a deserted Dartmoor road, when her father had been murdered and her life turned upside down.

In the morning, woken by birdsong and the sound of children shouting, Cecily had risen with renewed hope. The children, she was told, were the princes of the realm; Charles and James. If they were present, then surely he would be too. She had paused only to splash water on her face and straighten the creases on her filthy shirt, before going to seek an audience. Only to discover that King Charles had already departed. He had gone, it was said, to view the final assault on the city. The besiegers had some specially designed siege engines, throwbacks to the time of Richard the Lionheart or the Black Prince, and Charles had been eager to witness their long-awaited deployment.

That, she told the salmon-suited courtiers, was quite enough. After all the privations, the torture and the threats, running for her life one minute and hiding like some frightened rabbit the next. She was done with waiting.

Cecily Cade marched out of the leafy grounds and turned on to the deeply rutted road running past the great house. Cavalrymen and foot soldiers shared the thoroughfare with thundering messengers, carriages plain and ornate, and carts carrying pay chests, baggage, ammunition and powder, and she could instantly see by weight of traffic which direction would lead her to Gloucester.

One of the Matson staff came running from the house in her wake. ‘Miss Cade! Miss Cade!’

She turned, and recognized the man who had first admitted her to the Royalist headquarters. ‘What is it?’

‘The King is aware you await him.’

‘Then why does he ignore me?’ she said angrily.

‘Because the taking of Gloucester is his sole concern, Miss Cade. His every thought is bent on it.’

‘Then I shall speak to him as he tends to his siege, sir.’

The courtier looked up and down the road with a look of sourness. ‘It is dangerous, Miss Cade. There are armed men everywhere.’

‘Then give me a horse,’ she said simply.

He grimaced, as though the request caused him physical pain. ‘I cannot, Miss Cade. You know I cannot. The royal mounts are not mine to give.’

He reached for her wrist, but she shrugged him off roughly. ‘Then I will walk, and your worries be damned, sir. Where has he gone?’

After a second’s hesitation, the man sighed. ‘Gaudy Green, Miss Cade. North of here.’ He offered a smile of resignation. ‘I have a horse you may borrow.’

On Bristol Road, Gloucester, 3 September 1643

The road through Gloucester’s southern suburbs had once been a furiously pumping artery for trade and commerce. Now the shops and houses were all gone, burned and smashed and shot to ruin. But the road remained. It conveyed soldiers to and from the trenches, linked the Earl of Forth’s command centre at his fortified leaguer beside Llanthony Priory with the king’s court at Matson House, and divided the batteries of Severn Street and Gaudy Green. For such a barren landscape, Bristol Road teemed with life, and it was here that a man who wished to go unnoticed had come to view the advance of the Royalist behemoths. Except they had failed. Miserably and laughably. Yet another lesson in abject humiliation that Gloucester had heaped upon King Charles.

Nikolas Robbens trudged with his back to the city. He stared at his boots as he walked, his mind in seething turmoil. The ridiculous abandonment of the siege engines had been an amusing distraction, but one that did nothing to alleviate his black mood. The king had barely ventured from Matson House since his return from Oxford. Robbens had waited and watched, walked the roads and moved between camps, always with his snapsack slung across his shoulder, its cloth-wrapped secret within. He had prayed to see the monarch, to get close to him, but the most powerful man in all England seemed to have hidden himself away. Then yesterday, a breakthrough. The chirurgeon who had been assigned to examine him at one of the casualty clearing stations up at Kingsholm had mentioned that His Majesty had ridden through the area reviewing the troops. Robbens had been furious to miss him, compelled as he was to have his phoney cough reviewed, but at least, he consoled himself, the king had finally ventured out of his lair.

The chirurgeon had given the man he knew as Hatton another two days’ leave of duty for recuperative purposes, and Nikolas Robbens had gone back to the hunt. But still nothing. He had come out this morning, wandered down from Kingsholm, in the hope that the elusive king would make an appearance at Llanthony Priory to watch the engines advance, but Robbens had seen neither hide nor hair of him. Now, as the afternoon wore on, he would traipse back around the insolent city to his billet, hoping all the while that the heavy clouds did not compound his misery.

It was with outright astonishment, then, that he caught his first glimpse of a small man trotting atop an exquisitely groomed roan. He had a narrow, pale face, with an auburn beard and slim eyebrows. His hair was a shade darker than his whiskers, and fell to shoulders encased in burnished armour. He wore a sleeveless buff-coat beneath the breastplate, and it seemed to glimmer in defiance of the glum day, laced as it was with brightest gold. The rider’s arms, free of the hide layer, shone even more brilliantly, for the coat the man wore was of emerald green, adorned with tight swirls of yet more gold. Across his torso, from left shoulder to right hip, ran a blue scarf that matched the feather in the man’s large hat.