Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (10 page)

‘That depends on who your master is,’ Mun answered.

Boxe’s brows knitted together. ‘Truth be told, I haven’t a bloody clue,’ he said, ‘save to say he told me to tell you that you have met more than once, and that you have a mutual friend.’

‘That’s it?’ Mun asked. Hector snorted and Mun understood the stallion’s derision.

Boxe nodded. ‘If you would be so kind as to follow me, Sir Edmund, I will take you to my master.’

‘What’s in your cart?’ Mun asked.

Boxe frowned. ‘Provender for man and beast. Some powder and shot. Nothing too exciting. Your Major Radcliffe at Shear House said we would never find you out here. Said that you would find us. So my master had us bring the cart to lure you out. He reckoned it would make us look a tastier morsel.’

‘Had you been rebels the cart would have made no difference. I would have killed you anyway,’ Mun said, patting Hector’s wet neck. ‘Have your master bring a barrel of ale when he comes to meet me. You do have ale?’

‘We do,’ Boxe admitted, almost smiling.

‘I will be waiting with my men at the wood’s edge,’ Mun said, then turned Hector and walked back through the mustering
gloom, the blood in his veins slowing and turning cold again now. Because the men they had tracked were not rebels and there would be no butchery that night.

‘Prince Rupert is taking the fight to the enemy,’ the man said with a sniff, dragging a sopping sleeve across his hook nose. They sat on blankets beneath a crude canvas shelter rigged between four birch trees and Mun regarded the man opposite him. He looked utterly miserable and Mun saw that he was shivering though trying to hide it. ‘Whilst the peace talks continue, Rupert strikes into the enemy heartland, determined through his vigour and martial zeal to win political advantage on the battlefield.’ Those hawk’s eyes bored into Mun’s. ‘He fights whilst you and your men roam the moor like common brigands.’

‘And yet I hear the rebels call
him
Prince Robber,’ Mun said, raising a cup of ale to his lips and sipping the bitter draught, savouring the taste of it on his tongue. ‘The ones I meet tend not to live long enough to insult me.’

‘So I have heard,’ Hook Nose admitted with an expression that held neither admiration nor condemnation. All around them Mun’s men were busy making what shelters they could, ground sheets and bad-weather gear strung up to keep off the worst of the rain. They talked in low voices, moaning about rust on helmets, back-and-breasts and sword scabbards. They complained about the lack of hot food, decent beer and the want of women, so that Mun thought for all that they looked like a horde of murderous thieves, they sounded just like any other soldiers.

‘My men were nervous, I don’t mind telling you,’ the man went on, shifting out of the way of a torrent of water that was pouring off the canvas onto the muddy ground by his left leg. ‘They feared you would simply attack without warning or first allowing us to offer our surrender.’

‘I would have done if not for this damned weather pissing
on our powder,’ Mun said, choosing not to mention that there had been other doubts, or at least some unexplained feeling, which had stopped him falling on the column as he had on so many others.

Prince Rupert’s man sneezed three times, his face gripped in a strange rictus as he anticipated a fourth explosion, which never came. Mun had recognized him straight away, unlike when last they had met. That had been at Oxford and the man had been in Rupert’s company the night the Prince had given Mun leave to ride north home to Shear House which was then under siege. But Mun had seen him once before that, on the road to Lathom. Lord Denton’s son Henry and some others had dragged Minister George Green from his house, accusing him of being a secret but practising Catholic. Mun, Tom and their father had tried to stop Denton, but they had failed and Green had been hanged. And worse. And the shivering man before him, this agent of the Crown, had been at the heart of it all, had played his part conducting an exemplary campaign against Catholics and those suspected of spreading papism. Likely he had been at George Green’s hanging. On a colder day than this.

‘This God-forsaken winter will be the death of me,’ the spy said, flexing slender fingers as though he feared he might lose the use of his hands. Just to look at this man, Mun knew he would not trust him. That the Prince’s agent was a friend of the Dentons made Mun all but despise him. Their persecution of Minister Green and the horror of seeing him hanged, coupled with Lord Denton’s cruel use of Martha when she had sought his mercy for her father, had driven the girl to suicide. This in turn had led Tom to turn his back on his family and his king in the pursuit of revenge.

‘The Prince and six thousand men took Cirencester in four hours,’ the man went on, ‘and marched back to his uncle with one thousand prisoners as well as much-needed arms and provisions.’

‘That was well done,’ Mun acknowledged with a nod. ‘Cirencester gains the King a stronghold between Oxford and his rich recruiting grounds in the north-west and Wales.’

‘And allows us to growl at Bristol and Gloucester,’ the man added, glancing at O’Brien and Cole who were trying and failing, it seemed, to get a fire going near by.

‘Where is the Prince now?’ Mun asked.

‘When I left, His Highness was rampaging through Hampshire. But now I expect he is striking terror into our enemies in the Midlands.’

‘The Midlands? So not all of the King’s regiments are bottled up in Oxford waiting for spring.’

‘Rupert rides to Yorkshire to meet with Her Royal Majesty who is returned from the Continent with men and weapons,’ Hook Nose said. ‘On his way north he means to carve himself a corridor, thus ensuring the convoy a safe return journey with its precious load.’

‘The weapons?’ Mun deliberately goaded.

‘The Queen,’ the agent snapped waspishly, as though, the weather being foul as it was, he did not need Mun compounding his considerable irritation.

‘I still don’t know your name,’ Mun said.

The miserable man drew his narrow, sloping shoulders even closer together, if that were possible, and Mun felt his own contempt for him bristle across his back like a dog’s hackles. Any friend of the Dentons was no friend of Mun’s. Despite being near neighbours the two families had never got along; Lord Denton’s son Henry had been Mun and Tom’s enemy since they were all boys running wild. That made this man a bastard by association if nothing else.

But there was plenty else, Mun suspected.

‘My name is unimportant, Sir Edmund.’ A full-blown shiver ran from the top of his head to his toes. ‘We both serve God and our king, and that is enough.’ He smiled then and it seemed almost genuine. ‘Even though our methods … our roles in this
play, if you will … are very different. In fact, you might say I am one of those whose talents remain hidden from the crowd. The scenery changes and the players play on.’ He lifted his cloak and with two fingers fished inside his doublet’s sleeve, pulling out a handkerchief. ‘I change the scenery, Sir Edmund. I leave the spilling of blood to others.’

It was clear that that last was aimed at Mun and he accepted the bait. ‘I am spilling no blood sitting here with you,’ he said, ‘so what is it that you want with me?’

‘Indeed, let us come directly to the point. The Prince wants you to do something for him. He needs a man he can trust.’

‘The Prince barely knows me,’ Mun said, ‘and I fail to believe he would choose me for any task.’

‘The task is of a sensitive nature. We need the right sort of men.’

Mun glanced around, feeling a smile find its way onto his lips. ‘Men that look like cut-throats and villains?’

‘Just such.’ The agent secreted the handkerchief back up his sleeve. ‘Your men’s wild aspect is what makes them perfect for the purpose.’ He looked over to where O’Brien and Cole had at last managed to nurture a flame into life, the feathered kindling beginning to catch. O’Brien, looking like a half-drowned troll, growled a satisfied curse. ‘The Prince wanted to ask your friend Osmyn Hooker first but the man was nowhere to be found.’

‘Hooker is no friend of mine,’ Mun said.

The face before him looked surprised. ‘Is that so? And yet the man won you back your estate.’

‘I’d sooner trust a mastiff with my meat pie,’ Mun said.

‘And there’s another man who comes highly recommended. A fierce-looking fellow. Captain Stryker.’

‘I’ve heard of him,’ Mun said.

‘I dare say, but Stryker is already engaged on the Crown’s business. So here we are.’

‘I am also busy serving the Crown, as you can see,’ Mun
said, sweeping an arm across his wolfpack’s makeshift den. ‘I kill rebels.’

‘You were supposed to ride south and join us at Windsor weeks ago. Once Shear House was safe you had your orders to return to your regiment, not skulk around the moors like a rogue hound.’

‘The war goes on here,’ Mun said.

‘I could have you up on a charge for desertion, God knows—’

‘Be careful, friend,’ Mun said, returning the man’s intense stare. ‘You are far from your comforts and I do not take kindly to threats from men without name or rank. For all I know you could be the keeper of the Prince’s chamber pot.’ The man’s lip curled at that insult but he held his tongue. ‘Until I know that my family and estates are safe from rebels I will continue to … hunt.’

The man turned his face and looked out at the gathering dusk. The rain was slowing but the fog was thickening and the air was turning even colder.

‘Your brother Thomas is a traitor, is he not? An impulsive young man as I recall.’ Mun bristled, clenching his teeth so as not to take this bait. ‘I have heard a rumour, and I am certain it is just a rumour, that Thomas Rivers, second son of Sir Francis Rivers who died bravely trying to save the King’s standard, was one of those prisoners that escaped from our camp at Meriden.’ He frowned. ‘You recall? Someone blew up that powder cache and in the confusion the rebels were sprung from their gaol.’

‘I remember,’ Mun said, holding the man’s eye.

‘A terrible business,’ the spy said, glaring at him. ‘The perpetrators were never found and the Prince took the whole thing very badly, considered it a monstrous insult that the miscreants thought they could carry out their brazen act under his very nose and get away with it.’

‘They did get away with it,’ Mun said, aware of his own heartbeat, hoping that his eyes gave away nothing. For with the help of the mercenary Osmyn Hooker, Mun and Emmanuel
had broken the five rebel prisoners out of their gaol that night. They had made traitors of themselves and risked everything. Because one of those rebels had been Tom, and Nehemiah Boone, Mun’s captain – another bastard in Mun’s book – would have seen Tom hanged the next day and taken altogether too much pleasure in it.

‘Indeed,’ Rupert’s man said. ‘I have been considering hiring Mr Hooker to find out who was responsible. He is a very resourceful fellow. When one can find him.’ He knows, Mun thought. Or at least he suspects. ‘Can you imagine what would happen to the men if they were found? Especially if, as is suspected, they are King’s men.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You recall what we did to the traitor Blake, the Prince’s personal secretary?’

‘I watched him hang,’ Mun said. ‘He deserved it.’

Hook Nose’s eyes flicked from left to right, taking in every aspect of Mun’s face, like maggots trying to wriggle deeper inside flesh. ‘Enough of rebels and traitors,’ he said. ‘Let us get back to the issue of
your
duty. Furthermore, if duty is not in itself enough to lure you away from this desolate, freezing land, if that fruit is yet too tart, let me sprinkle some sugar in the pie. If you perform the service that we require of you, your reward will be not ungenerous. I am sure Mr Hooker’s services cost you dear, even though I had agreed with him to settle that account.’ He tilted his head then, gauging Mun’s reaction to that.

That bastard Hooker
, Mun thought, for with the rebels beaten the mercenary had indeed duped him into draining his family’s silver reserves, just as Mun had suspected at the time. ‘
You
paid Hooker?’ Mun asked.

The agent nodded. ‘You only got Hooker and his men because of me. It was my doing.’ He wafted long white fingers through the numbing air. ‘But that is not important now.’

Mun’s head was spinning. He felt nauseated by the thought that this man had been manipulating events all along. Perhaps
Hook Nose had had it from Osmyn Hooker’s own lips that it had been Mun who had broken the rebel prisoners out at Meriden, but here was someone who would only use that leverage when he needed it.

Could he even have fashioned the rope that had hanged George Green? Surely not, Mun thought. And yet somehow this man, whose name he did not even know, had manoeuvred him into a position of weakness, something the rebels had been unable to do since Mun had broken the siege of Shear House and begun to hunt them across the moors, forests and valleys of Lancashire.

Mun looked at his men now as they came out of their shelters to add fuel to, and gather by, O’Brien’s fire, the rain having all but stopped. They were good men. Mun knew that they would follow him.

Then he looked back at the man before him, who looked nothing much but was as dangerous as a blade in the dark.

‘What is it that you need me to do?’ he said.

Bess did not like Alexander Dane. The man was arrogant. Or else plain rude. He had arrived at her grandfather the earl’s house just after midday and with a pallor that only accentuated the dark circles burrowed beneath his eyes. His breeches, shirt, doublet and cloak had about them all the neatness of having been slept in and his whole appearance slurred of a night drenched in ale.

‘By God, man, you’re still at your altitudes!’ Lord Heylyn had remarked as Dane dismounted from a sorry-looking Welsh cob, snagging his foot in the stirrup and all but falling on his face. He muttered a curse at his horse, which lifted its head and snorted as if to say it had heard it all before, then he bent, placing his hands on his knee, and Bess thought he would vomit. Instead, he spat into the mud, dragged a gloved hand across his mouth and stood up nearly straight, his broad-hat in a worse condition even than Joe’s.