Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (64 page)

Stryker placed a hand on the smooth pommel of his sword. ‘Colonel Crow.’

Crow spat. ‘I heard tell it was you took the bolt, Captain Stryker. Had prayed hard that it was your brave leap into the murderer’s sights that saved the King. Had dreamed all night of the sweet image of your cold, dead face. Wanted to come and piss on your corpse.’ He placed a hand on his chest in mock grief. ‘The disappointment is palpable.’

‘You sent James Buck to kill me,’ Stryker said.

Crow dipped his big head. ‘I did.’

Stryker smiled. ‘I killed him first.’

Crow eased his pliable mount into a walk, bringing him alongside the three on foot. ‘You are a devil, sir.’

‘And those men at the inn?’ Stryker asked, ignoring the insult.

Crow twitched his brow in a manner that left no doubt. ‘You are a difficult foe to vanquish, Captain. Rather akin to a dose o’ the pox.’ He dropped a hand from his reins and slipped it down to his saddle holster. In a heartbeat, a pistol was in his hand. ‘Still, there is nothing that won’t die, given the right medicine.’

Stryker lunged at the dragoon, pushing away the hand that held the pistol and taking a handful of the colonel’s coat. He dragged him from the saddle, slamming him down on his back.

‘How dare you?’ Crow shrieked. ‘How dare you, sir?’

‘You were going to shoot me,’ Stryker hissed, as Forrester stooped to rip the firearm from Crow’s flailing fist.

‘Unhand me, sir!’ Crow cried. ‘You would kill a senior officer? A colonel?’

‘No, Artemas,’ Stryker said. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

He hit Crow hard in the face. The white-haired officer’s head snapped back, his eyes rolled and blood cascaded from his nose. Stryker released him and stood. ‘Let us be on our way.’

They left the yellow-coated officer lying in the mud. He screamed obscenities at them, swore that Stryker would pay, but they did not look back.

‘You should have killed him,
mon amour
,’ Lisette said.

‘Probably,’ Stryker replied as she threaded her arm through his. ‘But I’ll be in enough trouble for that punch. I don’t think I can stomach a trial for murder.’ That was true, he thought, though the reality was that he had seen enough blood spilled at Gloucester to last him a lifetime. He would not shed any more this night.

She shook her head in bewilderment. Forrester laughed. Up on the hills, two huge fires sprang into sudden roaring life to illuminate the dark crest for all to see. On Gloucester’s tumbledown walls, voices rang out in a great cheer.

‘They’re here,’ Forrester said. ‘Essex has come.’

Stryker nodded, but for once he did not care. He walked with his woman and his friend into the night.

EPILOGUE

Gloucester, 5 September 1643

The fires on Wainlodes Hill blazed all night.

Gloucester’s weary populace could barely believe their eyes as the flames licked the sky. Indeed, most thought it another Cavalier trick, the briers set to coax open the city’s gates. So they did not move from their positions on the rampart, and the gates remained firmly shut. And still the fires blazed.

The morning brought more surprise. The folk packing the walls looked on in disbelief as a vast flotilla of small craft sailed down the river. They had been moored against the bank of the Severn beside the Earl of Forth’s headquarters at Llanthony Priory, used occasionally to transport supplies or wounded soldiers in and out of camp. But now, strangely, spectacularly, they were leaving as one, released like a flock of swans to race southwards in their scores.

Governor Edward Massie watched from the high rampart in as much amazement as everyone else. He rubbed his sore eyes as a train of wagons and oxen was corralled in the priory’s tangled orchards, each stacked to the brim with men and baggage, ammunition, powder and barrels of food. They formed up in a line, cajoled by drivers with whips and soldiers with muskets, and soon began to trundle away from the city they had striven so hard to bring to heel.

Thomas Pury, the dour alderman and Gloucester’s civilian power broker, stood beside Massie. ‘What are they about?’

Massie was unsure. He studied the priory again. Soldiers, rows and rows of them, were marching out through the gates and down Severn Street. The artillery redoubt had already gone, he noticed now; the big cannon hauled away under cover of darkness. ‘They’re leaving.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Pury muttered.

Massie looked at him. ‘I can scarce believe my own words, Master Pury, and yet here I am saying them. They’re evacuating Llanthony.’ He leaned back a touch to shout along the rampart. ‘Ho there! What news of the saps?’

When word came back that the musketeers to the east had abandoned their trenches, his heart began to pound. When men called up that they could not longer hear the vibrations of the Royalist mine at the East Gate, his eyes began to prickle. Because the Royalist army was retreating. Marvellously, miraculously, they were marching away.

‘Thank you Lord,’ Edward Massie whispered. He had done it. He had won.

But one man did not clamour for space on the wall. His attention was instead fixed upon a small cloth sack into which he stuffed clothes and provisions. He moved quickly, with a fleet silence that belied his massive frame, muttering constantly through lips that were taut with fury, whispering vows of the most heinous kind.

Vincent Skaithlocke was preparing to leave. He had heard the news of the Royalist retreat, for the jubilant shouts rang loud and triumphal in every street and home, and that could only mean that a relief force had finally come. He straightened, pulled the string of his bag tight, and slung it across the dusty floor to nestle in the room’s corner. Gloucester had been saved, but what did he care? How could he possibly give Massie and his obsequious rabble a moment’s consideration when all he had worked for had disintegrated? The city was full of the news. An attempt had been made on the king’s life. But that attempt, the rumour-mongers claimed, had failed, the assassin slain in the attempt. Skaithlocke imagined Robbens’ quarrel flying forth, pictured the leering face of Charles Stuart as the bodkin sailed impotently by. But Robbens did not miss. He never missed. Someone had intervened.

‘Stryker,’ Skaithlocke said, instinctively guessing.

He moved to the window of his chamber and stooped to peer out at the unsettled sky. He would wait for Essex. The earl would soon arrive and Gloucester’s gates would be flung open, and then, with no companion save the simple thought of retribution, Vincent Skaithlocke would ride away. Because he had a new purpose in life. Revenge.

The dark clouds finally made good their threat as evening drew in.

As column after grumbling column of pikemen, musketeers, dragoons, gunners and harquebusiers trudged sullenly away from their hard-dug saps, heading south for the rendezvous at the king’s headquarters at Matson House, the heavens opened in a torrential downpour that seemed to heap scorn upon the army’s misery. They slopped through huge puddles and sucking ruts, growled oaths when they were set to pushing floundering carts out of the rain-sodden mire, and privately cursed the officers who had led them to this disgrace.

And disgrace it was, for they all knew they had failed. The grand swarm of king’s men who had so brazenly crowed at the feeble walls had been held at bay by less than fifteen hundred men and a smattering of common families with delusions of grandeur. Essex, it was announced, was less than a day’s march to the east. He would be coming for them imminently, with a force far larger than anyone could possibly have imagined, and the siege would be lifted. What mattered now was that the vast Royalist army move out of their stinking trenches and regroup to face the approaching earl, and thus the earthworks would have to be sacrificed for the greater good. At least, it was said, they had not been smashed in pitched battle. But all secretly knew that they were an army if not defeated, then certainly defied.

Captain Innocent Stryker marched at the head of his men as the rain pelted them in thick, diagonal sheets. He had his head down, his hat angled to shield his face, and simply watched his boots as they ploughed furrows behind the thousands of others. He felt the disappointment in leaving Gloucester without breaching its walls, but, for his part, his distress was tempered by the knowledge that the men, women and children of the rebel stronghold had not been subjected to the inevitable sack that he had witnessed so often before. He looked back briefly above the heads of his soaking men, squinting through the forest of pike staves that bobbed at his back. Gloucester rose out of the boggy terrain like a battered but unbowed warrior. He touched a finger to the water-beaded brim of his hat in private salute.

‘Where we gonna get a ship from, sir?’ Sergeant William Skellen’s sardonic voice droned at his left ear.

Stryker looked up at the man who had felled Cecily Cade’s killer. ‘Been speaking to Captain Forrester, have you?’

Skellen shook his head. ‘Miss Lisette, sir.’

‘How is she?’

‘Just fine, sir. Ridin’ in the wagons at the rear. Suggested we put some men back there to protect her.’

‘And?’

‘And she was quite rude to me, sir,’ Skellen sniffed.

Stryker laughed. ‘I am not in the least surprised, Mister Skellen.’

‘The ship, sir?’ Skellen prompted.

Stryker’s thoughts turned to a wind-battered island in the Atlantic Ocean. It was where he knew he must go; for Cecily’s memory, and for Lisette’s love. ‘We’ll find one, Sergeant,’ he said simply.

Tresco was his future, that much was certain. But what future now lay ahead for the Royalist cause, he wondered? They had been humbled here, humiliated, and though they were far from beaten, it was all too easy to imagine the name of Gloucester ringing like triumphant church bells in every rebel town and city across the land. A reputation for success could so quickly roll and build that Edward Massie’s famed defiance might prove more costly to the king’s war effort than any defeat in open battle. A creeping dread spread through him at the thought.

‘Sotweed, sir?’ Skellen asked, producing a plug of tobacco from a pouch in his snapsack.

Stryker clapped his sergeant on the back and put the war out of his mind as the rain lashed down. ‘Thank you, Mister Skellen. Don’t mind if I do.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the hard work and encouragement of a number of people, it would not have been possible to write this book. I would like to thank my editor, Kate Parkin, who has yet again steered me through the process, and my agent, Rupert Heath, whose belief in the series was the first step on the road to seeing my rough scribblings become real books.

Much gratitude to the team at John Murray and Hodder. Caro Westmore, Hilary Hammond, Lyndsey Ng and Ben Gutcher in particular.

Many thanks to Malcolm Watkins of Heritage Matters, whose invaluable comments have, as ever, been crucial in tightening the historical accuracy of the manuscript. Reimagining such a complex event as this, however, inevitably comes down to the author’s own interpretation of the available evidence, and all remaining mistakes are my own.

Lastly, much love and thanks to my wife Rebecca, and kids, Joshua and Maisie, without whom none of it would be possible, or half as fun.

HISTORICAL NOTE

By the late summer of 1643 the Royalist cause had reached its high tide. Major victories in the north and (as described in
Hunter’s Rage
) west had been followed by the storming of Bristol – England’s second city at the time – and the pressure was beginning to tell. The Parliamentarians were in deep crisis – politically as well as militarily – and it appeared as though the Great Rebellion was about to be crushed.

But within weeks of Bristol’s bloody fall, the king’s chance at victory had been squandered. The reason widely cited for this dramatic turning of the tide is the Royalists’ failure to take Gloucester. With the momentum firmly in his favour, King Charles, it is (and was at the time) argued, should have marched upon London. The impact of the decision to stay and ‘mop up’ the last Roundhead stronghold in the region cannot be overstated. The delays at Gloucester not only damaged his army’s morale, but gave his enemies the time and encouragement to regroup. The heroics of the city’s citizens, not to mention their inspirational leader, Edward Massie, became something of an example for beleaguered Parliamentarians everywhere. Moreover, the Royalist army’s failure to take Gloucester, and its subsequent failure to defeat Essex in battle at Newbury, had the twin effect of galvanizing the rebellion – from the grass roots right the way up to the political elite – and splitting the king’s ever fractious court into a fatal spiral of recrimination and acrimony. People often think of the first English Civil War as being a relatively inevitable victory for a Parliament that was more united, organized and determined than its Royalist counterparts. This was not even remotely true until after September 1643. The siege of Gloucester changed everything.

As for the day-to-day events of the siege, I have tried to stay as true to contemporary accounts as possible, and, therefore, I believe
Assassin’s Reign
retells much of the story as it actually happened. The Royalist army was indeed vast, led officially by the ageing Earl of Forth from his camp at Llanthony Priory, though Prince Rupert seems to have been an ever-present voice at the king’s makeshift court at Matson House. As I have tried to show, the besieging force was camped right around the city, and must have made for a truly intimidating sight for those on the inside, though they concentrated much of their efforts on attacking the south of the city where the ground was higher and drier.