Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles (37 page)

‘I will take my chances, Captain.’

He shook his head. ‘No, miss, you will not.’

Her pale face lifted in a tight smile. ‘I know how a man’s mind turns, Captain. I have seen the way you look at me.’

She approached him then, slowly, silently. Stryker held her gaze, and saw that the green eyes were unblinking, huge, and intense. Her fragile hands rose into view, thin fingertips fumbling at the lace that fastened the plunging neckline of her saffron bodice.

‘Cecily,’ was all Stryker could say, his voice low and thick. He knew the protest was pathetic, even reluctant, but no other words would come. Still he stared, still her dextrous hands worked, and then the string was free, the ends hanging slack, and Stryker felt himself stir as she grasped the detached halves and eased them apart. Gradually the uppermost parts of her breasts were exposed to the midnight air, pure white and swelling gently with her measured breath. Stryker stared at them, and at the dark cleft between, imagining what else would soon be free. It was not a hot night, but he felt sweat prickle at his neck.

‘We will trade,’ Cecily whispered. ‘You will give me a horse and free passage. And I will give you—’ Gently, she began to pull the bodice down further, revealing more and more flesh.

Stryker knew he should tear his gaze away, but, in that silent moment, he found that he did not want to. She was truly something to behold. A vision of pure, breathtaking, heart-jolting beauty in this place of loneliness and death.

And then he thought of Lisette.

‘Cecily,’ he said finally, some clarity falteringly restored. ‘Miss Cade. This is insane.’

Cecily moved closer, so that there was less than an arm’s length between them. ‘What have you to lose, sir?’

‘No,’ Stryker said with a resolve that startled even him. He took her wrists in his hands and drew them away from her  chest. ‘This is wrong. I have a woman.’ He took the ends of the lace and refastened the bodice. ‘And you are in my care, Miss Cade.’

Suddenly Cecily’s eyes seemed to dim. The temptress was gone, chased away by the frightened girl. ‘But—’ she stammered, ‘but I thought—’

Stryker smiled as he finished tying. ‘You are a rare beauty, Miss Cade, and I confess that I am a weak enough man. But my affections are elsewhere.’

‘But I am desperate, sir,’ Cecily pleaded, hands grasping his to her sternum. ‘I have important—’

‘What?’ Stryker snapped. ‘Important what?’

She shook her head in mute defeat.

Stryker sighed. ‘Then you will stay with the company.’

‘Now I understand,’ a man’s voice echoed suddenly about the low chamber.

Stryker had to turn to see the newcomer, but he recognized the voice well enough. ‘Andrew,’ he said, pulling his hands from Cecily’s grasp.

Lieutenant Andrew Burton was a young man. Yes, he was a veteran of many a fight, battle-hewn and tough as rawhide, but he was still just a stripling in Stryker’s paternal eye. Still the nervous boy packed off to war not even a year since by a proud father and clucking mother. Yet now, here, in this dingy recess on an isolated Devonshire hill, his face bore all the marks of a man who had lived ten lifetimes. It was a mask of sorrow, etched and furrowed by deep despair. ‘I sensed it.’

‘Hold,’ Stryker began, raising palms as if trying to calm a skittish colt. ‘You have it wrong.’

Burton’s gaze, harder than Stryker had ever seen it, flicked from his captain to Cecily and back again. ‘You encouraged me.’ He seemed to swallow hard suddenly, as if bile had spewed into his throat. ‘When all the while you knew she would not—’

Abruptly the stunned lieutenant turned away, stooping to leave the cave as if the air within was poisoned.

‘Wait, Andrew,’ Stryker tried again, following Burton out into the night. ‘It is not—’

Burton twisted back, thrusting a finger forcefully into his captain’s chest. ‘Damn you, sir.’ And then he was walking again, striding away down the grey-walled avenue towards the south-east edge of the crest. Stryker followed, keeping pace but maintaining the distance, not wishing to confront his subordinate until they were beyond the range of prying eyes and ears.

‘Lieutenant,’ Stryker near growled when Burton had come to a standstill at an outcrop of shoulder-height rock part way down the slope. ‘Have a care.’

Burton rounded on him, hissing angrily, ‘Do not bring rank to bear here, sir. It demeans us both. I am young, but I am not stupid.’

Stryker was taken aback by the savagery in the younger man’s tone. He lifted placating hands. ‘Mark me well, Andrew. She is not all she seems.’

But it was as though he had addressed one of the boulders, for Burton’s expression did not flinch or soften. ‘Damn you, Captain,’ he muttered in the lowest of voices, a look of utter hatred in his eyes. ‘God damn you.’

‘I did nothing,’ Stryker protested forlornly. ‘Mark me well, Andrew, she is hiding something. She meant to seduce me in order that I should allow her to leave.’

But even as he uttered the words Stryker knew how ridiculous they sounded, and it was no surprise to see Burton’s look of bitter incredulity. ‘You have Lisette, sir.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘How many more women do you want?’

Stryker had had enough of his junior officer’s attitude and gritted his teeth, stepping close so that Burton would see the dangerous glint of quicksilver in his eye. ‘Rein in your manners, Lieutenant.’

But Burton simply gave a rueful sneer. ‘A pox on your threats, sir.’ To Stryker’s amazement, he spat on the ground between them. ‘And a pox on your false words, and on your greed and on your lust and on your goddamned treachery.’

‘But—’

Burton turned away then, swift and abrupt, breaking through Stryker’s sentence and stalking into the darkness. Stryker wanted to follow, to chase his protégé through the granite gauntlet of the tor’s steep face and shake some sense into him. But he knew it would do no good. The younger man was in an incandescent rage, a fire burning so bright in his jealous heart that no amount of discussion would dowse it. And Stryker did not wish to give Burton the opportunity to turn the matter physical, for that could lead nowhere good. Instead he slumped back against the nearest stone and watched him go.

CHAPTER 15

The Barn Near Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor,
8
May
1643

Colonel Gabriel Wild strode out from the shit-carpeted building just as the falconets resumed their barrage. It was a new dawn, one that would finally see Stryker prised from his hill like a flea trapped between thumb and forefinger. Wild filled his lungs with the bracing air, revelling in the faint smell of sulphur it carried from the powder smoke, hawked up a gritty clump of saliva and despatched it on to the earth some yards away. He dug filthy fingertips into his bleary eyes, rubbed clear the last dregs of tiredness, and shook his head to untangle the long hair that had become so knotted during a fitful night’s sleep.

‘Spare me the rhetoric, Mister Hogg,’ Wild growled as he noticed the witch-finder hobble into his field of vision. ‘Your efforts have come to nothing. They will never surrender Stryker or his wench.’

The enormous Spaniard, José Ventura, waddled up behind Hogg, a sweaty sheen already glimmering across his blubbery face. He swept a tendril of oily hair from his forehead. ‘His men must be greater devils than he.’

Wild smirked. ‘Undoubtedly. Though I’m hardly shocked that they protect the girl. I would.’

Ventura looked aghast. ‘But she is a witch, Co-lo-nel.’

‘A witch with a young face and a snout-fair pair of tits, from what I could make out.’

Hogg held up his walking cane when his assistant made to argue. ‘I would still see him hang.’

Wild looked at the witch-finder, his face becoming serious. ‘Oh, the captain will die, sir, have no fear.’ He bent down to pull the folded bucket-top boots up to his groin. ‘Though I shall cut off his stones before he so much as sees a noose.’ He straightened, scratched an itch at his stubbly chin and fastened the string at the top of his shirt. ‘If he does not bleed out, then he’s yours to dangle.’

Hogg nodded reluctant agreement. ‘The man is a God-forgotten follower of Satan, Colonel. Señor Ventura and I have made it our life’s work to seek out and destroy such men. Stryker is the worst of them. He
must
hang. And I must do it.’

‘You have my word,’ Wild said, clicking his fingers at a nearby trooper. ‘But I get the girl.’

‘So be it,’ Hogg agreed.

The rapidity of the reply surprised Wild, and he raised an eyebrow. ‘You do not want her neck stretched?’

Hogg bit the inside of his lip. ‘I would see her hang, of course, Colonel. But she is irrelevant when compared with Stryker.’

The trooper had scuttled up to Wild with a sack full of kit, and he was busily laying out the colonel’s gloves, gauntlet, and armour. Wild watched him carefully, braced to give the man a swift kick should he drop an item in the mud, but when he spoke it was to Hogg. ‘Stryker means that much to you?’

‘He does.’ He paused as the twin cannon blasts shattered the morning. ‘God tells me that he, above all others, must be sent to hell.’

‘Then you’re in luck, sir, for I would attack this very morn.’

‘Not luck,’ Ventura muttered.

Wild glanced at him. ‘As you like, señor.’

‘You attack?’ Hogg asked. ‘It will succeed this time?’

Wild nodded confidently. ‘We have cannon now, so they cannot man the lower slope, which, in turn, means we can send in our men without fear of those bloody muskets.’ He shrugged. ‘At least until our advance is well underway. Without the falconets that one-eyed Pope-swiver would place his musketeers down on the flat, and we wouldn’t get close. But if the gunners keep up steady fire till the last moment, forcing Stryker on to the highest ground, we’ll get a storming party to the slopes before he can respond. And once we can get enough men on that damned tor, we will overwhelm them.’

‘But last time—’ Hogg began.

‘Last time,’ Wild retorted sharply, ‘we had only short-arm fire. Their muskets had the greater range. I had hoped that a night assault would hinder them, but they set the gorse alight and turned night to day.’

‘What different?’ José Ventura said belligerently.

Wild gritted his teeth, angered by the fat man’s insolent tone. ‘What is different, señor, is that this time we have dragoons. And though they are an inadequate bastard breed of foot and horse, they have decent muskets.’

The trooper had taken a large garment of buff leather from the cloth sack. He held it up for Wild to put on, and the colonel eased his arms into the sleeves, revelling in the feel and smell of his beloved coat. It smelled of war, of victory.

‘It means,’ Wild added, ‘that this time when my men are climbing the slopes and Stryker’s whoresons poke up their heads and start shooting, we can shoot back.’ He let his aide fasten the ties of the buff-coat, noticing Ventura’s inquisitive stare. ‘What?’

Ventura’s black eyes shot up. ‘Why do you not wear armour?’

‘I do,’ Wild replied, nodding at the breastplate that lay at his feet.

Ventura shook his head, chins quivering in unison. ‘I see men covered,’ he said, running a hand from head to toe, ‘like this.’

‘Heavy cavalry, señor. Cuirassiers.’ Wild thumped a fist against his leather-bound chest. ‘But I am a harquebusier. The buff-coat may not protect me from pike thrusts or guns, but it offers robust protection against sword cuts. It is lighter than the full-body casing you’ve seen worn by the cuirassiers.
Ergo
, it gives me a good deal more manoeuvrability. Allows me to hunt even the most fleet-footed quarry.’ He tapped the breastplate with his toe. ‘And when worn with the simple plate, I am well protected from bullets too.’

The aide continued to fasten pieces of clothing and equipment on to Wild’s body, and he tingled with the usual feeling of strength, of invincibility. ‘We will batter the vipers from their nest,’ he said, tugging his gloves over his fingers. One of the falconets boomed out on the plain, quickly followed by its sister to the south. He smiled as the echo faded. ‘By Christ, we will batter them.’

Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor,
8
May
1643

‘It’s them dragooners we saw,’ Sergeant William Skellen grunted as he squinted at the approaching force. ‘Wondered when he’d get ’em on to us.’

From the western fringe of the tor’s summit the Royalists watched the column of horsemen break from the tree line around the barn. They moved in good order, cantering in double file towards the waiting defenders. But these were not the destrier-mounted men of Wild’s elite force. These men trotted to battle on smaller, poorer-looking beasts. They wore no plate, but coats of brown wool, breeches of grey, and simple montero caps. And most strikingly of all, the advancing horsemen brought with them the long-barrelled weapons of infantrymen.

‘Aye,’ agreed Stryker. ‘He was giving Hogg a chance to scare us out.’

‘Balls-up, that was.’

Stryker glanced across at his tall sergeant, who was crouched at his side behind a hefty boulder. ‘And I’m grateful.’

Skellen sniffed derisively. ‘If I ’ad a groat for every time some bugger called you a devil, I’d be harvestin’ me own sotweed in the Chezzypeake, sir.’