The Bleeding Land (36 page)

‘Some wine?’ Sir Francis said when they were as alone as they could be among hundreds of armed and arming men. ‘My quarters are nearby.’

Mun shook his head. ‘I cannot stay.’ Sir Francis nodded,
understanding
. As always, Mun was struck by how much bigger, broader his father looked in his buff-coat. But Mun knew the ageing body beneath it: the pale skin, the frail legs from which the muscle had melted over the years. The shoulder that ached in damp weather and which must therefore be aching now, though none would know, and the knuckles that were swollen with pain.

He is too old for battle. The thought struck Mun like a hammer blow.

‘Are you up to it, my son?’ his father asked, his brows knitted with concern.

And yet he worries for me? ‘Yes, Father,’ he replied, ‘we will beat this rabble and march on to London where we’ll pull the rest of the rats out by their tails.’

Sir Francis nodded, but his smile was a ghost. ‘Then what is troubling you, Edmund?’

Mun considered swallowing what he had come to say. He could tell his father that everything was fine. They could share some wine and then he could head back to join his troop, leaving unsaid what needed saying.

‘It is Tom, isn’t it?’ Sir Francis said and even by the erratic light of camp fires Mun saw his father’s face turn ashen.

Mun nodded. ‘He is alive, Father.’ Sir Francis’s eyes flared but he held his tongue. Waiting.

Mun took a breath. ‘He fights with the rebels.’

His father flinched as though he’d been struck, his knees buckling, and Mun threw out an arm but his father refused it, somehow keeping his feet.

‘No, Mun. It is a lie. I will not hear lies! No lies.’

‘It is the truth, Father.’

‘How do you know this? Who told you?’

‘I have seen him. We have spoken.’

Sir Francis shook his head, as though to dislodge those terrible words from his ears and stamp them underfoot. He looked mired in disbelief and fury, unable to pull free, and
Mun
sensed that his father resented him then for keeping this secret. He will blame the son standing before him, he thought, for that is all he can do. So be it.

‘Tom was one of the rebels we captured at Wormleighton village. One of the men who broke out four nights ago.’

Sir Francis flinched again, glancing around to see who might be in earshot. Then he stepped in and clutched Mun’s arms, glowering. ‘Did you break him out?’ he hissed.

Mun said nothing.

His father was glaring at him, then he scrubbed his face as though waking from a nightmare. ‘Who else knows about this?’ he rasped. ‘Does Emmanuel know?’

‘Yes,’ Mun said, and his father drew back, aghast.

‘What could you have done, Father?’ Mun asked, shrugging. ‘You eat the King’s bread. Drink his wine. What about your reputation? Our name?’

‘Damn my reputation! He’s my son!’

Mun swept his helmet through the air between them in place of words he could not find. There were tears in his father’s eyes and so he looked away, watching a tall sergeant wielding his halberd threateningly at a knot of pikemen who were lingering by a freshly fed fire, passing round a pitcher of wine instead of being where they ought to have been.

When he looked back, his father’s eyes were still boring into him, bristling with questions.

‘Is he at Kineton with . . . the rest of them?’ Sir Francis’s voice suggested he had saddled his temper and was thinking now.

‘I am almost certain of it,’ Mun said. ‘He wants this fight, Father. He has changed. He is not the Tom we knew.’

Sir Francis nodded, pulling his short grey beard through his fist.

‘Death . . . war changes all men,’ he said.

‘He is full of rage. He craves revenge.’

‘Revenge against me?’ Sir Francis asked, nodding as though
prepared
for the answer. Yet Mun could not say it.

‘Not you, Father. Lord Denton and his son, Henry. He blames them for Martha’s death. Denton raped her. And there was more you don’t know.’

Sir Francis shook his head. ‘It seems there is much I do not know,’ he said.

A rampart of silence was thrown up between them and each seemed to be waiting for the other to breach it. Around them men yelled, horses whinnied and beasts of burden moaned.

‘And now for something which
you
do not know. Something I should have told you,’ his father said.

Mun’s blood froze in his veins. His mother and Bess broke the surface of his mind like the dead he had seen floating in the river at Powick Bridge.

‘Shear House is under siege,’ Sir Francis said. ‘Or at least it may be by now. The rebels have risen in Lancashire. Your mother wrote some weeks back informing me she had received an ultimatum from a captain serving under a Colonel Egerton.’ Now fury bloomed in Mun but he held it in check. ‘I wrote back telling her to yield the house. That there was nothing else to be done in our absence.’ Sir Francis shook his head. ‘But I do not know if the letter got through for I have received no reply.’

‘You kept this from me,’ Mun said. It was half question, half statement.

‘You could not ride back and break a siege, Edmund,’ his father said, the weight of so much on his shoulders. ‘Not even you could do that.’

Mun’s chest was a furnace of hate for the enemy. ‘Tomorrow, Father, we will beat the rebels,’ he snarled. ‘Then together we will ride home. The King will give us men. And if this Colonel Egerton is within a hundred yards of Shear House I swear I will kill him.’

Sir Francis visibly shuddered. He looked unwell. ‘But tomorrow . . .’ he said, ‘tomorrow we face Tom. And he is our enemy.’

‘There is still a chance he will come to his senses,’ Mun said, as though reaching for a ball that had already left the pistol’s barrel. ‘A chance that he will decide not to fight.’

Sir Francis seemed to consider this for a few moments. Then he smiled and it was a smile of such sadness that Mun felt his heart might rupture. ‘God be with you, my son,’ he said.

‘And with you, Father,’ Mun replied. He thrust out his hand and Sir Francis gripped it with both of his.

‘Be strong, Edmund,’ he said. Mun nodded, then turned and left his father standing there motionless. As the King’s men prepared for battle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sunday, 23rd October 1642, Edgehill

IT SEEMED TO
be taking an age for parliament’s army to set itself into battalia. Tom muttered a behest to God to let the killing start soon, for he knew God for what He truly was: a vengeful, spiteful Lord who revelled in mankind’s misery. At least the wait had given him time to appraise the terrain upon which the blood would be spilled. The Vale of the Red Horse, that was the name of the place, though Tom had caught no sight of the hill figure the ancients had cut into the earth, for which the place was named.

‘That’s some omen if you ask me,’ Weasel had said, digging something foul from his nose and smearing it on his breeches. ‘A red horse. A horse slathered in blood.’

‘Shut that superstitious mouth, Weasel!’ Will Trencher had growled, the Puritan in him offended by such talk. But Tom agreed with Weasel. A bloody horse had some strong augury about it on a day when thousands had gathered under their respective standards to kill each other.

He sat Achilles in the pale October sun, which had been rising behind the King’s men when they had first appeared on the long ridge known as Edgehill, their colours snapping in the
morning
breeze and the relentless beat of their drums descending to the plain. But then the Royalists had begun to move, a great tide spilling down to the vale, and it had taken them all morning, proving no easy task, especially for the Horse, due to the hill’s steepness. Now that enemy waited in bristling pike-divisions, bodies of musketeers and troops of wheeling cavalry, and Tom cast his eyes over them all, searching for a standard of a rampant gold griffin in a black field, for he knew that to be Lord Denton’s colour and if the spiteful God let Tom live through the slaughter, he would kill that black-hearted bastard and spit on his corpse.

But the enemy was still too far away for eyes to read standards and so Tom contented himself with studying the ground that separated the armies of King and Parliament. The plain was open, for the most part featureless, part hay meadow but mostly arable land which had been ploughed ready for the sowing of winter wheat. To his right and behind him, on the west of the field, was a swath of poor quality land, mostly gorse and brambles, which no doubt the folk of the parishes of Kineton, Oxhill and Radway used as rough grazing, though there were no animals there this day. Still, such ground would disrupt formations of men and horse as efficiently as cannon if the fighting crept westward. Far to the east, close to the Kineton–Banbury road, Tom had earlier made out some small, hedged fields which again could hamper movement, so it would be best for both sides if they came straight on and met on the open plain which, being almost featureless, offered advantage to neither army.

And yet that hill may serve them well, Tom thought. Like a tree climbed to escape a savage dog.

‘Not again!’ Will Trencher exclaimed, watching Nayler dismount. The man only just got his breeches down in time, squatting between the press of horses to empty his bowels in a foul gush of liquid.

‘I can’t bloody help it!’ the red-faced trooper exclaimed,
dabbing
his face with the orange scarf round his neck.

‘Well you could have buggered off and done it on their side of the field,’ Trencher said, rubbing the ears of a mare that was to Tom’s eyes even sorrier-looking than the one the Royalists had shot at Wormleighton village.

‘You’re forgetting, Will, that their side of the field will soon be
our
side of the field,’ Matthew Penn put in, gesturing towards the Royalist lines, ‘and I’d rather Nayler crapped where I can see it than I step in it later.’

‘A fair point I suppose,’ Trencher admitted grudgingly, removing his pot to scratch his bald head. ‘Could do with a piss myself.’

The air was clogged with the stench of dung and urine, sweat and damp wool. Tom twisted in his saddle and saw that everywhere men and horses were emptying their bowels. Some of the men were throwing up last night’s dinner or holding their bellies as though they were about to. Others were checking matchlocks and straps, disentangling powder flasks on bandoliers, kissing charms or the swords and guns they would soon kill with, and still others were standing or sitting their mounts with eyes closed, their mouths moving, as though communing with God or perhaps their loved ones far away. Ministers were threading through the ranks leading prayers, assuring men they were about to do God’s work, encouraging them that even if they died this day they would be granted eternal life hereafter. One, a big, broad-faced minister with a neat grey beard and fire in his eyes, strode boldly through the press of Sir William Balfour’s Regiment of Horse, spittle flying from his mouth and hanging in his beard as he proclaimed the righteousness of Parliament’s cause.

‘Is the King not accountable to God?’ he roared. ‘Is his duty not to protect and reward virtue? To honour true religion and punish wrongdoers?’

There were shouts of ‘Aye!’ and ‘Down with the King!’ But even more railed against the King’s damned advisers, Laud’s
bishops
and papists, rather than lay blame at His Majesty’s own feet.

‘Our enemies are possessed of demons!’ the minister bellowed. ‘They practise witchcraft! They talk of the Divine Right of Kings! Such talk is heresy!’ He caught Tom’s eye; Tom looked away but it was too late and next thing the big man was pushing between Achilles and Trencher’s horse like a thirsty man to a cup of ale. He grabbed Tom’s leg with meaty hands, craning his neck and turning those soul-raking eyes on Tom.

‘Young man, do you exist for the glory of God?’ Tom said nothing and the minister’s brow darkened like the sky before thunder. He tugged the orange sash that Tom had wrapped over his right shoulder and knotted at his left hip. ‘Boy! Is your first concern, above all else, to do God’s will?’

Tom thrust his foot forward, striking the minister’s chest, so that he staggered backwards, eyes bulging.

‘Get away from me,’ Tom snarled.

‘You devil!’ the minister roared. ‘How dare you!’

‘Touch me again and I’ll cut off your ears,’ Tom said, and some of the troopers around him growled and tongue-lashed him for his disrespect.

‘He means nothing by it, minister,’ Trencher said, ‘he’s just afraid, that’s all.
I’ll
have your blessing if I may?’

The big man glared at Tom and Tom glared back.

‘Do you exist for the glory of God?’ the minister asked Trencher, his face red as garnet as he tore his eyes from Tom and riveted them on the slab-faced man on the horse beside him.

‘I live and breathe for no other reason,’ Trencher replied dutifully, one eye glaring at Tom. But Tom was staring ahead, watching, waiting for a glimpse of a rampant griffin clawing against a black field. Looking for the man he hungered to kill.

‘You don’t like making friends, do you, Tom?’ Matthew Penn said, shaking his head which was encased in steel, the
three
bars of the face guard lifted so that it jutted into the air. His horse whinnied and it sounded like laughter.