Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (5 page)

She blew out her cheeks, clearing her thoughts. ‘What are you saying, Quigg?’

‘The people fear for their very lives, madame,’ he replied in hushed tones, ‘for they see the King’s gaze turning back to London. The war is lost, they say. The rebellion will be smote once and for all, Parliament dissolved again, but this time for good. The people are terrified, and every day comes news of more lives lost. The women want their husbands and sons back. The merchants want peace in which to trade. They want an end to it.’

A sudden thought struck Lisette Gaillard. ‘Pamphleteers.’

Quigg stared, eyes bulging. ‘Mademoiselle?’

‘Pamphleteers, Quigg,’ she replied urgently, stepping closer. ‘Printers. Do we have any in our pay?’

Quigg considered the question, spat the plum stone on to the muddy road, and nodded slowly. ‘One or two I could name.’

‘Do not name them, for God’s sake,’ Lisette hissed earnestly. ‘Pick the best. Take me to him.’ For the first time in months, she felt hope surge within her, for she had had an idea. An idea that would finally bring this miserable mission the success she so craved. She almost laughed aloud, because in the heart of this most rebellious city, she was going to start a rebellion of her own.

Hartcliffe, near Bristol, 1 August 1643

‘Stryker’s boys here!’ bellowed the tubby man, red coat straining about his ample gut. He pointed at the nearest of a chain of ramshackle houses. ‘On this row.’

‘All of us, sir?’ a musketeer asked incredulously, earning a venomous scowl for his trouble.

‘
All
, you cheeky beggar!’ Quartermaster Richard Kinshott snarled. He leaned back, craning his oak trunk of a neck to inspect the tumbledown homes. ‘Reckon you’ll get—’ He was thoughtful for a moment, scratching the wiry tuft of russet hair that served as a beard in his near chinless face. ‘Half a dozen in this’n.’ He snatched a stump of chalk from behind a hairy ear and scratched six vertical lines on the door. He repeated the action with the next house, and the next, until a woman came bustling angrily from within one of his targets.

‘Six?’ She spat the word. ‘Six soldiers in my home, sir?’ The portly quartermaster ignored her, and she grasped at the tail of his coat, furious.

Kinshott rounded on her. ‘Have a care, Goody, or you shall have a dozen ’neath your roof !’

The woman was mortified. ‘You cannot—’

‘Cannot?’ Kinshott mocked, placing hands on broad hips. ‘Well my apologies, your ladyship, but I can do as I damn well please. To your pots, for you have extra mouths to feed this eve.’

Anger turned to worry as the woman’s weathered face seemed to age visibly. She fiddled nervously with her coif as her gaze drifted across the red-coated horde that had descended upon her village. ‘But, sir—’

Kinshott cut her off with a raised palm, his watery, dark-green eyes drifting beyond her shoulder to settle on the open doorway of her home. ‘Your boy’s a strapping lad, ain’t he?’ He brandished a malicious grin as the silhouette of a young man slunk rearward into the gloom. ‘How many years? Sixteen? Slot straight into a pike block, I’d wager.’

‘Thirteen years only, sir,’ the woman replied defiantly. She stepped back, positioning herself between the quartermaster and her home. ‘A boy. Just a boy.’ She forced a smile. ‘I will make pottage, sir.’

Kinshott beamed again. ‘That’s the spirit. For good King Charles and his fighting lads!’

‘Ho, Dick!’

The quartermaster spun on his heel. ‘
Sir
, to you, Stryker.’

Captain Innocent Stryker lifted his hat in deference. ‘Quartermaster Kinshott, sir. Well met. Do you have me a choice billet?’

‘I do, sir, I do,’ Kinshott declared proudly. ‘The finest I could find.’

A tall man came to stand at Stryker’s flank. ‘Couldn’t swing a bleedin’ dwarf in there.’

‘Mind your tongue, Skellen, you gangling clodpate,’ Kinshott bawled. ‘The King arrives in Bristol, so the likes o’ you must make way.’

‘Aye, mind your tongue,’ Stryker agreed.

Skellen cast a glance back over his shoulder, winking at the company’s shortest man, Simeon Barkworth.

‘Permission to see if we might swing a lanky sergeant in there, sir,’ Barkworth croaked. He might have been tiny, but he was one of the best fighters under Stryker’s command. Former bodyguard to the Earl of Chesterfield and member of the feared Scots Brigade before that, Barkworth had enlisted with Stryker’s company after the Battle of Hopton Heath, and he had already shown himself to be an able man. But his fiery pride and powder-keg temper had proven a dangerous combination on many an occasion in recent months, and Sergeant Skellen took unholy relish in goading the little man.

‘Denied. Enough of this.’ Stryker looked back at the quartermaster. ‘Thank you, Dick. It will serve nicely.’

Kinshott nodded and, with a final, mischievous smirk at the crestfallen woman, bustled away to secure more quarters for the men of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot.

Stryker turned to the woman, who stepped back involuntarily under his Cyclops gaze. He was accustomed to the reaction. ‘Goodwife, we thank you for your hospitality.’ He offered a low bow. ‘My men are rough-hewn, but they require only food and shelter. We carry no fever, and will pay you all respect. Upon my honour.’

She swallowed hard, peering up at Stryker. ‘Honour, sir? Soldiers have no honour.’ Her mouth hardened. ‘They are a plague on us.’

‘My word, madam.’

The hostile gaze left him and raked across the men who gathered along the road. ‘And I suppose you’ll tell me you keep no women of the . . . lewd sort?’

Stryker smiled as kindly as he could. ‘No, Goodwife, I will not. We have many. But they are yet in Devon, with the tail of our baggage train. You have my word that your home and family will be safe.’ He set his jaw. ‘But we
shall
rest here, that is decided.’

The hue and cry went up almost as soon as Stryker had taken his seat. Even as the sweet relief of rest surged up and down his weary legs, he was compelled to rise again.

He had selected the defiant goodwife’s home for his own quarters, letting her bustle around the small ground-level room as he and five of his most senior men unslung baldrics and bandoliers. Skellen was there, with his second sergeant, Moses Heel, and Simeon Barkworth. Ensign Chase, the company’s standard bearer and most junior officer, had joined them, speaking in hushed tones with the newest recruit, Lieutenant Thomas Hood. Stryker was glad the pair were beginning to forge the beginnings of comradeship, for he had been remiss in his dealings with Hood since the young man joined them. He had needed a new second in command to replace Burton, and complained continuously to Colonel Mowbray upon the subject, but when one had been forthcoming, his reaction surprised even himself. It was as if Hood’s appearance had triggered the grief Stryker had carried since Burton’s death, and he found it barely tolerable to so much as meet Hood’s eye, let alone fulfil the excitable officer’s enquiries about Edgehill, Hopton Heath and Stratton.

Stryker had been staring at the large cauldron rocking gently above the soot-shrouded hearth when the door rattled, a heavy fist belting it from the roadside. It was a struggle to tear his gaze away from the dancing steam, but the beating became more insistent.

‘What is it?’ Stryker snapped, as Skellen moved swiftly to open the door.

On the road, shifting his weight from one foot to the next in agitation, was Harry Trowbridge, one of Stryker’s best musketeers. ‘Enemy, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘Out on the tree line to the east, sir.’

Stryker followed Trowbridge’s outstretched arm, his lone eye settling quickly on the place, perhaps a hundred paces beyond the last of Hartcliffe’s modest buildings, where a large group of his men were beginning to gather. The road through the village ran away to the east, and his men seemed to be peering into the cluttered foliage hugging its wooded northern verge. ‘How many?’

‘Hard to say, sir. Score?’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘They’s in green.’

All at once the crackle of musketry reached Stryker’s ears, and he pushed past the anxious redcoat and out to the road. He followed the sound, bounding along the cracked mud of the village’s main thoroughfare, passing a couple of the regiment’s wagons and several frightened-looking locals. Skellen and a dozen of his men were at his heels, all squinting to assess the burgeoning engagement, though they could discern little beyond the pall of smoke that thickened with every shot loosed. There was no breeze at all, and the gritty gouts from each weapon simply roiled around their masters like stinking haloes.

Eventually Stryker was able to make out a few of his redcoats around the periphery of the acrid cloud. Some stood, others knelt, but all were focussed on the opposite side of the road, where large trees provided cover for this unknown and unwelcome force. They were firing, reloading and firing again. All the while bright tongues of orange licked the air from amongst the trees, illuminating the enemy hiding places for the briefest of moments.

The first soldiers Stryker encountered were his pikemen. He had twenty-five of them in the company, nearly a quarter of the fighting force, but at this moment they were an irrelevance. The skirmish was chaotic in its rhythm, with men firing their weapons as and when the long-arms could be brought to bear, but still the lead flew with a consistency that made his pikemen sheer away like a flock of sheep in the face of a rabid dog. They were impotent in this scene, unable to reach an enemy obscured by trees, and unwilling to charge into the hail of bullets.

He turned, his gaze falling on Sergeant Heel. ‘Get them formed up!’

Heel, the bullock-shouldered Devon man who had traded Bible and plough for sword and halberd, spun on his toes to engage the pikemen. ‘Form up, you lazy bastards!’

The men began to shift, jockeying for position within four short lines, morion pots adjusted, tucks swept clear of shuffling legs. In seconds they had formed a small square, the block of man and spear that made them appear as a gigantic, malevolent hedgehog.

‘But do not advance till you have my word, Moses,’ Stryker added, as he plunged into the smoke. ‘You hear me?’

‘Right enough, sir,’ Heel bellowed at his back.

Stryker had marched across countless battlefields, breathed deeply of the sulphurous air that such places produced, and stormed more burning, smoke-veiled towns than he cared remember, but, even after so many years, those evil humours of war still blistered his eye and throat. He screwed up his face, straining to make sense of the obscured fight amid the yellowish, roiling fog, until, as if dropped there from on high, Skellen appeared before him.

‘Will, get them into some order.’

Skellen knuckled the upturned fringe of his Monmouth cap. ‘Right, you tardy-gaited bravos!’ he snarled, transformed by action into some demon in this unholy mist. ‘On me, and make it lively!’

‘Stand your ground!’ Stryker bellowed, as his men began to step back from the more advanced positions on the road. He craned his neck left and right as Skellen continued to bellow orders, fretfully scanning the ground in the grim expectation of discovering red-coated bodies. To his relief, he saw none, but that would not remain the case if the situation went unaltered for much longer.

‘All yours, sir!’

Stryker had to twist his entire head to see the speaker, as the voice had come from his blind left side, but saw that Skellen had arranged the musketeers into two broad ranks.

Stryker moved to the end of the line, wincing involuntarily as the air pulsed beside his face. Somewhere behind, he heard a thump as a musket-ball met a doorpost. ‘First rank only!’ he roared. ‘First rank, I say!’ He drew his broadsword, held it aloft so that all might see the ornate Toledo steel and know it was him, and swept it downwards in a scything arc. ‘
Fire
!’

The world seemed to crack in half. The noise was ear-shredding, reverberating about Stryker’s chest like the beat of a thousand drums, and he had to take a step back to steady himself. But it had been exactly what was required. A single, thunderous volley at close range. All at once a gust of fresh air swept down from the village, funnelled first between houses and then between ancient trunks. It dispersed the powder smoke as though it had never been there. The view was abruptly, starkly clear. Green-coated bodies moved amongst the trees, sure enough, but Stryker could see that they were falling back in the face of an organized onslaught that had evidently been unexpected.

‘Hold your fire!’ he snarled at the remaining ranks. He turned to the waiting pike block. ‘Sergeant Heel! Get them into those bloody trees!’

But even as he saw the great, tapering, razor-tipped shafts of ash fall to chest-height so that they might charge the green men beyond the roadside, Stryker knew that his pikes were not needed. The cacophonous volley, coupled with the terrifying image of the advancing pike block, had worked its magic. Less than a minute had passed since the muskets had rent the air, yet already there was no return fire from within the tangled branches. Indeed, the rebels showed only their backs.

The ambushers scattered like sparrows before a buzzard. Their dark green coats melded superbly with the lush summer woodland, but their movements could be seen well enough, as so many blurs against lichen, branch and trunk. Stryker watched as the enemy soldiers plunged deeper into the foliage, scrambling to save their skins like a herd of hunted deer, but he called for his own men to hold their position. It was tempting to race after the fleeing rebels, to put them to the sword as they had been put to flight, but he did not know what was beyond the wood. Perhaps these men were not a terrified and isolated unit, but the bait in a bold Roundhead trap. He doubted it, but that did not mean he was interested in finding out. Some of his men strode between the gnarled trunks, fanning out into the shadowy world to ensure there were no remaining threats within musket range of the road, and Stryker let them wander, but most he ordered to stay back.