Marston Moor (51 page)

Barkworth’s horse bolted. It reared first, thrashing wildly, and Stryker was forced to duck lest his skull be cracked like an egg, but then the riderless creature gave in to its fear and lunged forth, punching a way through the thick mass of Parliament cavalrymen. The passage opened for just a moment, the blink of an eye, but Stryker took the chance with both hands. Vos had seen the gap too, lunging through as Stryker hammered at the intercepting blades that scythed into their path.

‘
Highness
!’ Stryker bellowed. ‘
Highness
!’

By the time he let out his breath, he was in clear space. Vos, wounded and heavily panting, had drilled right the way through to the far side of the melee, and Stryker whispered his thanks to Simeon Barkworth. He risked a glance behind. The Royalists had been utterly routed. Many riderless horses skittered around the outskirts of the swirling fight, while a large part of Rupert’s cavalry were extricating themselves from the killing field, fighting their way out to gallop pell-mell back in the direction of York. In the darkness, he could see a that handful of horsemen had followed him west. Some were rebels, for he could see the white field signs fastened to their lobster-tailed pots, but three he recognized. He hauled on Vos’s reins, turning the sorrel stallion in a wide arc to face his pursuers. Because one was the willowy visage of Sergeant Skellen and another was young Thomas Hood, and his heart leapt to see them alive. But it was the third man that really made him pause: he was tall and lean, billowing scarf ostentatiously knotted at his waist, and his head was encased in an unusual
Zischägge
helm. Running at his mount’s hooves, barking wildly, was a large, white dog.

‘Good Christ, I had never thought to see the like,’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine blurted as he reined in. They had outrun the chasing pack, and now they gathered perhaps five hundred yards to the west of where the brief, bloody fight had taken place. Already they could see that the killing ground had shifted. Those Royalist horsemen who had managed to break clear of the broiling clash had been pursued by a large body of Eastern Association horse to be hunted all the way to the gates of York. The rest of General Cromwell’s victorious wing was now reforming in perfect order and wheeling about to observe the infantry conflagration burning along the line of the ditch in the centre of the moor. Rupert watched them, his handsome face utterly forlorn. ‘My own troopers beat. What sorcery have they conjured here?’

Stryker thought it best not to note that discipline, bravery and religious zeal was a more potent brew than any witch’s broth. Instead he eyed the chasing pack that was closing in quickly. ‘What now, Highness?’

Rupert was weeping. He sniffed hard as he cleared his throat. ‘To the fight. We’ll die here, my friends, for I’ll not live in a land where mine own regiment is routed by the likes of Oliver Cromwell and a parcel of Scotch lancers.’

Stryker shook his head. ‘You must endure, Highness.’ He slammed home his blade. ‘You are our champion.’

Skellen, face almost completely masked in congealed blood, wiped his sword on his horse’s neck and propped it on his shoulder. ‘Wi’out you, General, we’re done for. The lads fight in your name.’

The prince shook his head. ‘They fight in the name of the King.’

‘He is in the right of it, Highness,’ Stryker said. ‘You are their talisman. You must survive this.’ He looked back towards the chimneys of Tockwith. Around the village, he remembered, there were fields of thick crops. ‘There. Into the beanstalks, I beg you. Hide away, Highness. Do not let the enemy make sport of your capture. It will damage your uncle’s cause most terribly.’

Rupert wiped away tears with his sleeve. ‘All is lost.’

‘The flank is lost,’ Stryker argued, more brusquely than he would ordinarily have risked. ‘Not the battle. Not the war. But you cannot fight your way back to our lines. Your person is too conspicuous.’ The five enemy riders, four Parliament men and one Scots lancer, were close now, and he watched as Skellen and Hood spurred out to cut them off. ‘Go, Highness.’

Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the most formidable warrior in the land, was suddenly, shockingly the boy Stryker had once known, lost and frightened. His face was pale, gaunt and strained in the half-light. His fine clothes were tattered, smeared in dark stains and nicked by blades. His thin mouth flapped open like a net.

‘For Christ’s sake, Highness, go!’ Stryker cried. Rupert blinked.

There was no time left. Stryker kicked Vos hard, felt the animal flinch beneath him, and knew the strength was fast ebbing from his old comrade, but now was not the time for such concerns. Skellen had already killed one of the Parliament men with a well-timed thrust, and Hood was engaged with another. Stryker did not bother with his sword, drawing his flintlocks instead, and kept them low, concealed behind Vos’s neck until the last moment. The riders came at him from either side, aiming to slice him like pincers. He let them come as close as his nervous heart would allow, then levelled the pistols. To his rushing relief, neither misfired in the damp, and one of the rebels was snatched clean off his saddle. The other was clipped in the shoulder; it was not a killing blow, but was enough to send him wide with an agonized grimace. He went to assist Hood, but a shrill yowl made him wrench violently round. He expected to see the prince in trouble, but what he saw was a dog impaled on a long lance. The Scots rider was looming above Boye, Rupert’s beloved poodle, grinning as he walked his mount past the skewered creature. The Scot laughed as he dismounted to collect his prize, for the death of Boye would be a tantalizing morsel upon which the rebel printing presses would feast. For a moment Stryker thought to butcher the man, but he barely had the strength to fight dangerous foes, let alone a man hefting a dead dog into a saddle, so he chose to go to his prince.

But Prince Rupert of the Rhine had already gone. Stryker caught a glimpse of a shimmering helm at the shadowy edge of Tockwith’s bean fields, and then, like a wind-blown candle, it vanished.

Edward Montagu, Second Earl of Manchester, had been swept away in the rout, and now his group were one small part of the detritus of a battle lost. Always they scanned the land to the north, terrified that the next arrival would be a harbinger of Goring’s victorious horsemen.

They reached a crossroad a mile to the south where a neatly arrayed body of horsemen had drawn up. They were incongruous amongst the rabble of Manchester’s party.

‘I gather men, my lord,’ the commanding officer replied when questioned by the earl.

Manchester stared hard at the officer, half expecting a Royalist ruse. ‘To what end?’

The corners of the officer’s mouth turned down in bewilderment. ‘To fight, lord.’

Now Manchester was certain of trickery, and he signalled for his bodyguards to be ready. ‘The battle is lost.’

‘I had thought as much,’ the officer replied, ‘but I received a rider from General Cromwell.’

‘Cromwell?’ Manchester shook his head. ‘He is wounded.’

‘He returned. His wing has destroyed the malignants on that side. Even now they prepare to assist our foot.’

Manchester’s heart was beginning to quicken. His mouth was dry. ‘Our foot is beaten,’ he persisted, pointing back at the road and the shattered Allied infantry. ‘Do you not see these thousands, man?’

‘Many are beaten, but not all, my lord. Your own foot, under Crawford, do hold their place on the left, while Lindsay’s brigade fight with great valour on the right. That is what General Cromwell’s message conveyed. He orders every man back to the field forthwith.’

‘Then we return,’ the Earl of Manchester said. ‘I will take my banner back to the moor.’

One of his advisers urged his horse closer. ‘My lord Manchester, I must advise against such a course. It can lead only to ruin.’

‘To flee will lead only to humiliation,’ Manchester said firmly. ‘Did you not hear this man? The day is not lost. Not yet, leastwise.’ He cast his gaze across the assembled men, then back at those trailing along the road. ‘Do not desert our cause, fellows! God is with us! Follow me!’

Chapter 22

Lieutenant Hood joined Stryker and Skellen as they rode back into the heart of Marston Moor. They were forced to pass between blocks of enemy cavalry, but Skellen had taken a blue bonnet from a wounded Scot, while the officers snatched scraps of paper from some of the myriad corpses littering the field and inserted them into their hats. The victorious rebel horse were not interested in three stragglers bearing the correct field sign when a larger prize called to them.

Hood took off his hat, pushing sweat-matted hair from his eyes as he looked nervously behind. ‘They do not give chase.’

Stryker mused: ‘They mean to fall upon our exposed flank.’ The Royalist foot brigades clustered in the very centre of the moor, their stands of pike swaying like miniature forests as they moved. It was almost dark now, but such was the ferocity of musket fire that banks of flame flared all the way along the disputed ditch, highlighting patches of the battle. What Stryker saw was a bitterly contested brawl. The nearest enemy infantry battaile had crossed to the north side of the ditch, battering their way into the Royalist position inch by bloody inch, but the rest of the rebel front was severely lopsided. The other battailes remained on the south side, their Royalist counterparts pushing right up to the hedgerow fringing the trench. He could see pike blocks judder forwards across the shallow frontier, fall to a swift, thrusting engagement, and retire for their units of shot to light up the smoky gloom. Scores of drummers rumbled a constant beat: it was a sound like thunder not heard since Noah’s time. With it mixed the yells of thousands of men clashed in hideous discord.

What was clear, however, was the congestion throughout the centre of the moor. All three of Rupert’s carefully plotted battle lines had effectively converged after the first hectic moments when the front line had been shattered and the second had come to its aid, and now they were bunched into one mass, contesting the part of Marston Moor around which all else pivoted.

‘We must warn the foot,’ Hood said as he steered his mount past a drake, its wheels splintered, muzzle buried in the mud. ‘They have no support.’

‘Did not Goring win over there?’ Skellen growled, indicating the area to the east where the modest homes of Long Marston would be. ‘Where’s the bastard got to?’

Stryker squinted at the chaos. There were horsemen in that maelstrom, but there were not enough of them to constitute the full Royalist left-wing horse. Where were they? A knot formed at the pit of his stomach, and he pointed up at the ridge line, a black mass against the slate southern sky. ‘Filling saddle bags, like as not.’

‘Shite on a shovel,’ Skellen intoned. ‘Not again.’

Hood spat on the slick turf as his horse trampled a broken halberd into the gory mire. ‘Forgive me, sir, but have our Cavaliers learnt nothing?’

Stryker shrugged. It was the ill-gotten reputation of the Royalist horse that allowed Parliamentarian pamphleteers to refer to Rupert as the Duke of Plunderland. Once again it seemed the prince’s riders were more interested in treasure than glory, and this time they had left their infantry out on a precarious limb.

Skellen took a bottle from his bags. ‘A pox on those arseholes.’ He lifted the vessel in a toast. ‘To fallen fedaries. Them with more honour in their elbows than Goring’s fuckin’ magpies.’

Stryker took the bottle and drank. It was small beer, watery and tepid, but it was like elixir on his parched throat. ‘To Simeon Barkworth. A better man there never was.’

‘Jack Sprat,’ Skellen intoned. Stryker thought he saw tears in the big man’s eyes.

Hood drank too. And then they rode to the fight.

Over on the rightmost flank of the Allied front line, Sir Charles Lucas galloped to glory. His brave Cavaliers had wheeled, consolidated, and charged for a third time. Crawford-Lindsay’s Scots, he knew, would not withstand another attack. They were shaken enough by the rout of the bulk of their front line, but to endure two heavy charges on one flank while taking thick musketry on another was tantamount to suicide. No one could fight on two fronts, and Lucas would prove it.

‘Cheer!’ he bellowed into the rushing air. ‘Cheer, you devils! Let them hear you!’

His blade, the Milanese beauty, whipped a silver circle above his blackened helm, and he felt elation in his veins. A dead horse, its rider mangled beneath, seemed to rear from the turf, and he braced, but his mount flew clean over it, as if it sprouted angels’ wings. Then they were close, achingly close, and the pikes were down, presented in a wall of needles that now showed gaps where none had been before. This time the obstinate Scots would break.