Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (2 page)

To the soldier at least, it was a smile of flesh-scorching beauty. He winked at her.

‘This wench is a harridan of Satan,’ the second priest spluttered. He was fresher-faced than his compatriot, tall and willowy.

The soldier tore his gaze from the girl to meet that of the new speaker, who, to his surprise, was also English. ‘She truly looks a frightening creature, sir.’

‘She is a witch!’ the first priest interjected with outraged indignation. ‘I have proof she worships Lucifer.’

A chorus of low mutterings came from the driver and the locals. They may not have been able to comprehend the discussion, but they all knew the name of the Devil well enough. The second priest sketched the sign of the cross over his chest.

‘
Proof
!’ the girl screeched from up on the cart. ‘And I got proof of no wrongdoing!’ Her hands were bound in front, but somehow she managed to angle them so that her long, thin fingers could fish for something from within the neckline of her bodice. When she withdrew them, they grasped a glinting disc of metal. ‘The king’s shilling! Payment for a night’s work,’ she jerked her chin at the taller priest, ‘with this young gentleman!’

‘She bewitched me!’ the second priest wailed, his tone shrill and desperate. ‘Befuddled my senses!’

The soldier’s lip upturned in an amused sneer. ‘Turn your head did she? She’s a rare beauty, I grant you.’

‘I—I—’ the willowy priest stammered, unable to find a suitable retort.

‘What are you, son?’ the soldier went on. ‘Sixteen years? Seventeen? I bet she befuddled you well.’

‘She is the Devil’s whore!’ the older priest bellowed.

The soldier shook his head. ‘She’s a whore, certainly, sir. But more angel than demon.’

‘
Blasphemy
!’ The priest almost spat the word. ‘You should have your neck stretched beside her!’

‘Perhaps,’ the soldier replied casually, ‘but at least I can sleep at night. You goddamned priests want her just as any other man, and hate yourselves when you’ve shot your bolt. You would see her hang to salve your vile consciences.’ The younger priest’s pale face immediately reddened, and he knew he had spoken true. He glanced up at the cart. ‘Beth! Get down here!’

Beth did as she was told. Wrists still bound, she swung her legs over the side of the vehicle and dropped down to the road with a squelch, pushing her way past the indignant men to stand beside her rescuer. She held up wrists that had been rubbed raw by the coarse bindings. He handed her one of the pistols, and she trained it on the group as, with his free hand, the soldier drew a small blade from his belt and cut her bonds.

He grinned as she pecked him on the cheek.

The locals began to mutter their dissent at her release, but they remained frozen to the mud, frightened by the pistols into bovine acquiescence.

The soldier pursed his lips and gave a short, high-pitched whistle. The undergrowth at the road’s edge immediately began to rustle and crack as branches, vines, bracken and grass were thrust aside and a bay mare trudged on to the rutted road.

‘Get on, Beth,’ the soldier ordered, taking back the pistol and backing slowly away from the group.

The younger of the priests simply stared mutely at the ground as the object of his lust clambered up into the waiting saddle, his thin lips working frantically in what looked like silent prayer.

The senior priest took a step forwards, dropping his voice to a low growl. ‘She seduced this God-fearing, Christian man, sir. Poisoned his mind with wicked desire. And she
will
swing for it.’

The soldier’s angular jaw quivered as he gritted his teeth. ‘Not today.’

The shot echoed about the trees as a fat halo of acrid smoke obscured the air around the soldier. He heard the priest scream and knew the ball had found its mark, but did not wait to see the result until he was safely in the saddle, Beth Lipscombe’s lithe arms snaked tightly about his waist.

Only when he had holstered the spent weapon and handed the remaining pistol to Beth did he look down at the men gathered around the cart. The priest was rolling in the sticky mud, a hand clutched at the tattered flesh of his backside.

‘Let that be a lesson to you, sir!’ he called down at the wounded, writhing man. ‘And be thankful I showed you the mercy you would not have shown this woman.’

The priest looked up at him, blood seeping through fingers held tight to his breeches, face creased with fury and pain. ‘I will find you, witch’s helper! I will hunt you down, so help me God! I may not have your name, but—’

‘No, sir, you will not!’ the soldier called. ‘For we will be long away from this cursed country by the time your arse heals! So you may have my name.’ He grasped the reins, slashing them against the bay’s broad neck, propelling them on in a surge of power and a spray of mud. He crowed his victory to the thick canopy above, glancing back only to shout his name. And they were gone.

CHAPTER 1

Near Bovey Tracey, Devon,
26
April
1643

Captain Innocent Stryker was in a foul mood. It might have been late afternoon, but it was still warm, too warm for a man in a woollen coat and breeches, and the Devon sky was smothered in a pelt of pregnant clouds that made the skin prickle with humidity. The steepness of the hill seemed to make his pumping chest burn and tightening calves ache. All these things made a march difficult, and, in turn, his mood darken. But worse still, Captain Innocent Stryker was running away. And that, more than any other trial, turned his temper as black and as explosive as gunpowder.

‘Maybe we could go back?’ a voice came from behind him.

Stryker rounded on the speaker, causing the long line of scarlet-coated soldiers to halt their march. ‘God’s blood, Ensign Chase! I’ll send you back down there alone if you say something so dull-witted again.’

Chase, the man charged with bearing the company standard – a large square of blood-red taffeta, with the cross of St George at the top corner and two white diamonds in the field – stared into his captain’s face. That face was narrow, weather-hardened and spoiled by a mass of swirling scar tissue in the place where his left eye should have been. He swallowed hard. ‘Sir.’

The tremble of shoulders caught Stryker’s lone grey eye. He turned to glare at a man who stood taller than any other in the company, a man whose mottled-toothed smirk immediately vanished. ‘And you’ll join him, Sergeant Skellen, do not think I jest.’

Skellen’s face, layered with dark stubble and criss-crossed with its own creases and scars, became a well-practised mask, blank and unreadable. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

Stryker turned away to stare back down the road. ‘Got out just in time,’ he muttered to no one in particular.

They had marched out of Bovey Tracey some three hours earlier, with word of an advancing Parliamentarian unit hastening every step. Stryker eyed the town’s thatches, tiny smudges of gold and russet from this distance, huddled at the foot of the tree-choked hill his men now climbed. With the uneasy truce in the south-west close to ending, Hopton, the Royalist general, had become increasingly nervous, and Stryker had been stationed here, at Dartmoor’s south-eastern fringe, to guard one of the few routes into the bleak wilderness. But now he had been driven to the hills like a deer in the face of hounds. He swore viciously.

‘Least they didn’t catch us sleeping,’ a new voice reached Stryker from further down the road.

Stryker peered along the line of soaring pike staves and shouldered muskets until he saw the speaker, a man whose hard face and battle-ravaged body belied the fact that he was only in his late teens. Stryker nodded acknowledgement to his second-in-command. ‘That is something I suppose, Lieutenant Burton. Still, I hate to turn tail.’

Burton smiled. ‘Strategic retreat is not cowardice, sir.’

Stryker glanced at him, single brow raised. ‘When did our roles reverse, Andrew?’

‘Sir?’

‘It was not so long ago that you were as green as cabbage,’ Stryker said, though without malice. ‘Now you offer me advice.’

Burton absently adjusted the leather sling that cradled his right arm. That arm had been shattered at the shoulder by a pistol ball the previous year and was now withered and next to useless. ‘Seen a deal of soldiering now, sir.’

That was true, Stryker reflected. Youthful innocence had been marched, slashed and shot from young Burton, so that the lieutenant was now an extremely proficient officer, and one of the few men Stryker trusted with his life. He was proud of Burton, strange though it was for him to admit.

‘We’ll rest here,’ he ordered suddenly. He looked at Skellen. ‘See to it, Sergeant.’

Burton moved to stand at his captain’s side as Skellen sent word down the line. The lieutenant kept his voice low. ‘What if they send men after us?’

Stryker pulled the buff-gloves from his fingers and scratched at the puckered skin that served as a macabre lid to his mutilated eye socket. ‘A force that size? They were to garrison Bovey Tracey. We’re of no concern.’ He took off his wide-brimmed hat, rapping it with his knuckles to send a cloud of dust into the breezeless air before tossing it on to the grass at the road’s verge. ‘Besides, if they send cavalry we will be caught. Would you march another hour and be tired when finally they’re at our backs?’

Burton shook his head. ‘I would rest now and fight them afresh.’

‘So we rest.’ Stryker unbuckled his sword, dropping it next to the hat, and sank to his haunches. ‘And hope the bastards don’t come.’

Burton removed his own hat and sat beside Stryker, running a hand across his forehead to shift thick tendrils of sweat-matted hair. ‘A good match, wouldn’t you say?’

Stryker followed Burton’s gaze to where Ensign Chase was attempting to prop the company colour against a broad tree trunk. ‘Match?’

‘The new coats, sir. Captain Fullwood has some experience in the dying trade, apparently. According to him, getting the right shade of red – or any colour for that matter – is the devil of a job.’

Stryker stared at Chase as the company’s most junior officer continued to struggle with the large standard. The regiment had been supplied with new coats after Cirencester had fallen to Prince Rupert earlier in the year. The Stroud Valley was a prolific centre of wool production, and many of the king’s regiments had taken the opportunity to replace their threadbare coats and breeches with the sudden availability of material.

‘They might have ended up in blue,’ Stryker replied eventually. ‘There was more blue than anything else.’

Burton sniffed his derision. ‘Well I for one am pleased Sir Edmund insisted upon red. Goes with the regimental colours, after all. Slightly darker hue than our flag, I grant you, but it’s not too far off.’ He glanced down at his own coat, a nondescript shade of brown, and fingered the sleeve of his limp right arm. ‘Perhaps I should have taken the opportunity to replace this old thing when I had the chance.’

Stryker shook his head. ‘The prince would not have been pleased.’ He might have been an infantry officer, but Stryker and a select group of comrades were often enlisted by the king’s nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, for special – often covert – tasks.

Burton chuckled. ‘Aye, I suppose he would not wish us parading around in nice, bright red. Still, the fact remains,’ he went on, his attention back on the rank and file, ‘they look a far more imposing body now.’

Stryker did not much care for coats or colours, and he allowed his thoughts to drift elsewhere. To old battles and fallen friends, to the most recent horrors he had witnessed on the killing field of Hopton Heath, and to the bitter siege he had barely survived before it. And then, inevitably, to the person whose presence had drawn him to the ill-fated little city of Lichfield. A woman with long, golden hair and sapphire eyes. Who could be dainty as a flower one moment and hard as steel the next. A woman who beguiled and infuriated Stryker in equal measure.

‘Is she still in Rome?’ Burton’s voice stabbed through his reverie.

Stryker looked up sharply, and the lieutenant’s face paled, his eyes immediately studying the ground. ‘Christ, Andrew, but you’re becoming as impertinent as Skellen.’

‘Beg pardon, sir, I overstepped,’ Burton muttered sheepishly.

‘Yes, you bloody did,’ Stryker replied, though he could feel the anger already begin to seep away. He sighed heavily. ‘Aye, she is still in Rome.’ The image of Lisette Gaillard leapt back into his mind’s eye, and for a second he allowed himself to luxuriate in the memory of her voice, her touch, her scent. But even as those fine thoughts swirled, they were intertwined with sadness. She had left England back in March, shortly after the bloody fight outside Stafford, a fight that saw the last great act of a master fire-worker, the death of an earl, and the restoration of Stryker’s reputation. For Lisette was Queen Henrietta Maria’s agent. Messenger, spy, assassin. Ever at the monarch’s beck and call. And that meant she could never be truly Stryker’s. He didn’t know if he loved her or loathed her. ‘So far as I goddamn know,’ he added bitterly.

Burton opened his mouth to speak, but another glance from Stryker’s forbidding grey eye made him think twice. Instead he watched Stryker unlace his sleeveless buff-coat and fish out a folded piece of paper. The captain opened the greasy square carefully, staring down at the hand-drawn features adorning its surface.