Marston Moor (21 page)

‘Good,’ Eythin said. ‘Praise God.’

‘I suspect,’ Newcastle broke in, halting in the middle of the hall, and lowering the nosegay reluctantly, ‘you ponder as to my visit, Captain.’

‘The question had crossed my mind, my lord, aye.’

Newcastle offered a white-toothed smile of easy warmth. ‘I would see you, sir, to award you this.’
 
He nodded at Eythin, who produced a ball of silk and handed it to him. Newcastle unfurled it, revealing two strips of material – one blue, one red – sewn together in the shape of a cross. He held it out. ‘The enemy pamphleteers dub it a popish sign, but it is nothing of the sort. A matter of honour, only.’

‘I have seen them worn by others, my lord,’ Forrester said, taking the cross. ‘On the right sleeve.’

‘Its bearer has shown great valour in my service.’

He paused as a commotion struck up at the corner of the hall. A man was screaming. Two women struggled to fasten a tourniquet above his knee. Almost at once the noise faded. So too did the patient.

The marquis seemed to shudder. ‘A hard fight was had, yes?’

‘Aye, my lord, exceeding hard,’
 
Forrester said. ‘The Scots make able soldiers.’
 
He considered the truth of the statement, comparing the men in blue bonnets to the raw Londoners of Waller’s new army he had encountered at Basing House the previous autumn. The difference was stark and frightening. ‘More than able.’

The marquis looked at Lord Eythin. ‘Do they not, Jamie? If only all your countrymen marched for their rightful king, eh?’

‘Quite so, my lord,’ Eythin said sourly.

The marquis patted Eythin’s shoulder. ‘I chide you, sir, but it is not only the Scottish foe who endangers this fair city. Yorkshire rebels under Fairfax, East Anglian rebels under Manchester. Yorkshire is a crab bucket, my friends. Each army snapping at the other to feast on the carcass. Sad times, indeed.’ He suddenly seemed to notice Elias Croak, and shed his sullen reverie with a brilliant smile. ‘Captain! One of my own men! You are commended, sir. And your wounds heal?’

‘They do, my lord,’ Croak croaked, ‘that they do.’

The marquis handed the young officer another one of the silken crosses. ‘For recognition of your valour, sirrah.’

The chirurgeon, a rotund man in a hideously stained apron, bustled past, bowing as he went. ‘My apologies, my lords. I must administer this poultice. ’Tis for the blood flow.’

‘Does not William Harvey write of the blood,’ Forrester asked, ‘that it moves about the body in circuit? Pushed by exertion of the heart.’

The chirurgeon halted, twisted back, his face exasperated. ‘Harvey?’ He almost spat the word. ‘I employ his treatise to wipe my arse, sir, if you’ll forgive the base reply, for that is its proper use. Galen is our tutor in this. Galen, good sir, tells us that blood passes by means of invisible spores.’

‘I stand corrected, sir,’ Forrester said.

‘You are aware,’ the marquis cut in, ‘our other sconces were taken?’

‘A dire day,’ Forrester answered. ‘They are but a spitting distance from our hearths.’

‘All the more reason to celebrate the Mount’s salvation,’ responded Lord Eythin.

He was seconded by the marquis: ‘Quite so. It is our only protection in the south. The enemy creeps, insidious and ruthless. They have built a battery opposite the Walmgate. On a hill. Dismantled a windmill for it, would you believe? A breach is already made in Clifford’s Tower.’

‘And the Walmgate barbican suffers terribly,’ Eythin added morosely. ‘The Northern Association has taken the suburbs thereabouts.’

William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, swallowed hard. ‘The siege is too close, pressed with too much vigour. I need Rupert’s help.’

‘He will not come,’ Eythin scoffed. ‘He will look to his own skin.’

‘I will write to him, nonetheless, though God only knows if such word may get through.’ He lifted the nosegay as he continued to walk. ‘If they breach our wall, then all will be lost.’

Liverpool, Lancashire, 8 June 1644

The herald rode out from the Royalist lines just after dawn. The sky was purple, suffusing steadily with blazing orange in the east, and it lit the rider’s spurs so that they winked as if passing some clandestine message to the king’s nephew, who stood and watched from up on the ridge. The herald had been sent to parley with Colonel Moore, the rebel governor, and order his immediate surrender. Now he approached one of the gates set into the earthen rampart, and every member of the Royalist army waited with baited breath as his mount high-stepped through the barren no-man’s-land.

Stryker was with Rupert, Crane and a dozen other senior officers. He had spent an uneasy night down in the copse, wondering whether the girl’s worries possessed firmer foundation than he’d thought. But as the stars began to fade and the night softened to a hoary grey, he had let Vos take him up to the ridge so that he might see the terms delivered with his own eye. Now he watched in grim silence.

Down in the valley, the herald sat on his horse, as proud as a peacock, resplendent in silk and satin, a wide hat adorned with colourful feathers, a blooming scarf swathing his torso, the jewels in the hilt of his sword twinkling as the sun lit up the sea beyond. He waved to the Parliamentarian sentries as he approached the town, glancing back briefly, acutely aware that all eyes were trained upon him.

A puff of smoke cascaded over the palisade near the gate, followed in a heartbeat by the crack of the shot. Before the echo died in the hills, the herald’s horse was down. It was a chestnut thoroughbred, huge and powerful, draped in a silver-threaded saddle cloth, with white streaks slashing both flanks. A magnificent beast, costly and superbly trained, yet all that was wiped away by the single musket-ball of a Roundhead marksman. The beast thrashed as it hit the mud, turning a half-circle on its side as its hooves ploughed great furrows in the earth, its braided tail smacking wetly in the sticky soil, the scarlet ribbon, so expertly interwoven, coming loose to wriggle like a giant worm. The herald was bellowing, trapped beneath the screaming animal, his beautiful slashed doublet daubed in grime, while up on the rampart came the sound of cheering.

‘By Christ,’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine said softly. ‘By Christ.’

All else was silent on the ridge, as if time itself had frozen. Stryker watched, dumbstruck, as the herald finally freed his pinned leg from the stirrup and somehow squirmed clear, taking a kick or two from the wounded horse as he rolled out of range. The defenders looking down upon him jeered, they capered along the wall as though a fiddler played a jaunty reel, and waved the rebel flags that were set at intervals along the rampart. With a final shriek the horse expired, juddering violently and falling utterly still. Its master ran, all dignity punctured as he skidded and stumbled through the quagmire, clutching his ribs.

‘By Christ,’ the prince muttered again. He blinked rapidly, swallowed hard, and spun on his heels, glaring at the slack-jawed faces of his subordinates. ‘By Jesu!’ he bellowed, thumping a gloved fist into the palm of the other. ‘The knave! The bastardly gullion!’ He thrust out an arm, jabbing the air in the direction of Liverpool with an accusatory finger. ‘This is a paltry parcel of traitors and cowards! I tell you, gentlemen, that we will dine under their roofs in short order! It is nothing but a nest of crows that a party of boys might take!’

Huzzahs rang out, though Stryker wondered how many of the voices were inflected with trepidation, for they all knew what was to come.

Just then a cry went up from the men near the top of the slope, and everyone twisted round towards the lookouts on the beacon. Activity had been spotted to the south. Stryker clambered into Vos’s saddle and galloped with the rest to the ridge’s summit. They reined in, a great line of warriors squinting southward, hands shielding their eyes against the sun. In the distance was the road that ran all the way back to Bolton, and on that mired thoroughfare, as far as the eye could see, came a cavalcade of soldiers, horses and oxen, of wagons big and small, of coopers, smiths and men paid pretty sums for their knowledge of black powder. It was the Royalist artillery train, lumbering a day behind the rest, and at the very rear, hauled by doughty ponies and escorted by musketeers and dragoons, came the unmistakable forms of the big guns, trundling like captured beasts on their great carriages.

Prince Rupert emerged from Stryker’s blind left side, standing in his stirrups as his black stallion turned a tight circle. The king’s nephew, so young yet so formidable, drew his sword. It sang its metallic tune. The prince made the stallion skitter sideways with a deft touch, steered him about so that he faced the port below, and levelled the blade, peering down its length as if he could shoot bolts of lightning on to the rebel stronghold from its tip. ‘Break them,’ he said, quietly at first, but then louder. ‘Break through their walls and push them out. We will drown the treacherous curs in the Mersey.’ He looked up, skewering a group of officers in his raptor’s gaze. ‘Prepare the heavy guns immediately.’

The Royalist army worked like bees at a hive. Prince Rupert resolved against a crossing of the protective river inlet, for Colonel Moore had astutely set trenches, mounts and guns at all the approaches to that south-eastern sector. Equally, the castle on the southernmost portion of the wall was extremely well fortified. Therefore it was to the north-east that the prince turned his furious gaze, from the point where the river spur petered out, all the way round to the main bank of the Mersey. Across this arc of land the first trenches were to be carved from the cloying mud. Often a besieging army would establish lines of circumvallation, a complete circle of fortified trenches running all the way around the place they wished to reduce, but here that option was negated both by the river and by Rupert’s impatience. He wanted to bring Colonel Moore’s garrison to heel, and that meant punching a hole right through Liverpool’s wall and injecting infantry to do the rest. So in the certain knowledge that he could not entirely cut off the town, his army laid down their muskets and exchanged them for shovels. They dug in shifts, scooping away the sodden soil with buckets, bottoming out the waterlogged gutters with timber and lining the inner face with stakes, and on a plateau below Everton Heights they threw up three gun batteries, from where they might bombard the port’s fortifications.

Stryker found himself overseeing the construction of one of the batteries. Fortunately, though the ground remained soft and sapping, the rain held off, and his surly team worked hard to erect the earthen banks. Men found branches thin enough to be woven into large baskets, and soon these baskets, known as gabions, were filled with spoil from the works and then lined like sentries in defence of the half-dozen siege-guns that were gradually hauled into position.

Teams of horses pulled the pieces, braying in exertion as they were whipped raw by their masters. The heaviest guns were demi-cannon, huge hulks of black iron set upon creaking carriages of oak and elm, and though their wheels were shod in iron, sharp strakes adding grip, they slid and stuck so that the crews had to manhandle them on to the wooden platform set upon the battery. But the task, for all its difficulty, was achieved in good time, with a small powder magazine set close by, alongside the supply of iron round-shot that would be hurled at the enemy positions.

‘They lie around like dogs, sir!’ exclaimed the lieutenant-colonel who came to take command of Stryker’s completed battery around noon. He was a fat man – broad as a mortar and almost as short – with cheeks speckled black by powder burns and jowls that quivered when he spoke, and he waddled on to the timber platform as if Prince Rupert himself owed him fealty.

Stryker, mounted on Vos below the biggest cannon muzzle, was lighting his pipe, and he nodded courteously as the irate man peered down at him through the gap between two gabions. ‘They have earned a rest, Colonel Wheatley.’

Wheatley shook his head, the saggy skin of his face swinging like a pendulum. ‘They are artillery crew, are they not?’ He vanished briefly, evidently inspecting the men who sat around the inside of the battery, their aching backs slumped against the baskets as they quenched their thirst on flagons of good beer that Stryker had ordered up. He returned, red-faced and spluttering. ‘Are they not, sir? Crew, sprawled about in my presence! It will not do, sir! No, sir, it will not! I’ll have ’em in chains, you mark my words!’

‘No, sir,’ Stryker said, puffing on the pipe and staring up through the smoke. Behind him the battlements of Liverpool opened up, but their aim so far had given him no cause for concern.

Wheatley balked. ‘No, sir?’

‘They are local labourers, brought here under duress. They have worked well to give you your battery, sir.’