Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (7 page)

‘We came together as two armies,’ Mowbray answered promptly, placing the hat back on to his head with a light tap of his fingertips, ‘and we shall depart as two armies.’

Kuyt’s pale brow rose, forehead rippling beneath his thick blond curls. ‘We are to divide, sir?’

Mowbray nodded at the Dutchman. ‘Aye. The Western Army marches south and west with Prince Maurice.’

Kuyt exchanged a wary glance with Sergeant Major Goodayle, and the latter spoke, his deep tones incredulous. ‘They’re allowing the Cornish to leave? We heard some units had already departed, but not the entire force.’ Goodayle stretched his broad shoulders and rubbed a meaty hand across his chin. The stubble scraped loudly. ‘My God, but they’re our hardiest scrappers by far.’

Mowbray spread his palms. ‘And they would rather scrap in their own towns than in some far-away place. Moreover, Trevanion is killed; Slanning grievous wounded.’

Lieutenant Colonel Baxter blew out his thinly bearded cheeks. ‘That after Grenville fell at Lansdown.’

‘They haven’t the stomach for it any more,’ Mowbray went on. ‘His Majesty has two choices. He may let them march back through Devon, reasserting his dominance in that region, or he may force them to remain with the Oxford Army.’

‘And have them desert in their droves every night,’ Baxter agreed, removing his hat to expose thinning iron-grey hair and fanning his face with the brim, ‘till they’ve melted away to dregs.’

Stryker cleared his throat. ‘What of the rest, then, sir?’

Mowbray fixed him with a steady stare. ‘The Oxford Army – of which we are now a part – will march upon Gloucester.’

Stryker felt his heart pound harder against his ribs as he recalled Bristol’s dark streets lit by hellish, tremulous flame. ‘Another storming?’

‘Perhaps, Captain. Though the losses here seem to have set many a mind against another such course.’

‘A siege, then?’ Stryker asked, realizing he had been holding his breath. He let the air ease out through his nostrils as his pulse began to calm.

‘Starve the buggers out,’ Forrester added with relish.

Mowbray offered his clipped shrug. ‘It is not yet known. The Council was called to determine two things. Firstly, whether this grand alliance would part or march on to the next design.’

‘And second?’ Forrester prompted impatiently.

‘What that design,’ Stryker interjected, ‘should be.’

Mowbray let his intelligent eyes drift to his second captain. ‘You have it. The first decision was made with little fuss, as I have already recounted.’

‘And the second was not such a smooth voyage.’

The colonel’s pinched face cracked in a rueful smile. ‘Well put, Mister Stryker. The King’s chorus sings not in harmony but in grievous discord. One faction pushes for the subjugation of the Severn Valley, Gloucester being the final obstacle to that design.’ He glanced about at the black-tinged walls and lead-pocked buildings. ‘Rupert took this place in no time, and it is stout compared with Gloucester, by all accounts. I hear their garrison numbers no more than that of Cirencester, and we stormed that in half a day. But many others argue for a direct march upon London. They see Gloucester as a distraction.’

‘I can see their point of view, Sir Edmund,’ Goodayle boomed. ‘Before the spring, the rebels held sway across most of the west. Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire.’ He counted each region on a thick finger. ‘They garrisoned Bristol, and sent the Severn Valley’s riches direct to Parliament’s coffers in London. But now what do they have? Stratton took care of Lord Stamford’s army, and Roundway destroyed Waller. The Roundheads are finished here.’

‘He’s right, sir,’ Stryker agreed, casting his mind back to that bloody hill overlooking Devizes where Sir William Waller’s forces had been utterly smashed by the famed Royalist cavalry. The last major Parliamentarian field army had been crushed without hope of recovery, placing the momentum firmly with the Cavaliers. ‘Gloucester is no longer the northernmost tip of a vast rebel heartland. It is a lone island in a sea controlled by the King. Why waste our time in its taking?’

‘Because with Gloucester we have control of the River Severn,’ Mowbray replied, ‘allowing us to supply Shrewsbury and Worcester from the port of Bristol. And because,’ he added with a half-smile, ‘it is populous and wealthy.’

Forrester snorted in amusement. ‘Tax the buggers till coins pop out their backsides.’

Mowbray nodded. ‘Precisely. So we must take the city, mop up the region, then look east.’

‘To London,’ Sergeant Major Goodayle growled.

London, 3 August 1643

‘You have heard of the Peace Party?’ Christopher Quigg asked as he and Lisette Gaillard strode northwards along Fish Street. They had rendezvoused on London Bridge, hoping the crossing, tightly packed as it was with homes and businesses, would be teeming with the comings and goings of the day. Sure enough, the bridge had provided ample cover for their clandestine meeting, and quickly they were on their way into the city.

‘
Naturellement
,’ Lisette replied, unable to prevent the derision that coloured her tone.

He frowned. ‘You dislike a faction who would shift against the Parliament in their own town? I imagined you’d be their greatest advocate.’

Lisette looked up at Quigg. ‘I dislike a faction who would sue for peace, in any form. The rebellion must be crushed, not negotiated with.’ She saw the puzzlement in his expression. ‘You think me a hard woman, yes? You do not know me, monsieur. You have not seen what I have seen.’

Quigg shrugged. ‘And what have you seen?’

‘
In
,’ she rasped suddenly, hearing stentorian tones coming from beyond the street corner, some twenty paces up ahead. She snatched a handful of Quigg’s doublet and dragged him through the nearest open doorway.

‘What in God’s name is that stink?’ Quigg blurted angrily, unhappy at the manner with which the woman had manhandled him, and repelled by the vile air that greeted them.

Lisette touched a finger to her lips, indicating the roadway with a jerk of her chin. Immediately the voice she had heard rang out again, louder this time, and Quigg’s bulging eyes widened with terror. Now the fool understood, she thought, for he could tell a sergeant’s bellow as well as the next man.

The squad marched by. It was a small unit, perhaps a dozen men in the distinctive egg-yolk-coloured coats of the capital’s Yellow Regiment. At their head was indeed a man who probably held a sergeant’s rank, for his gloved hand gripped the shaft of a well-maintained halberd. Lisette held her breath, almost gagging from the stench that had pervaded her nose and throat. She peered back into the gloom of the building, realizing by the stink that they were in a tallow chandlery. At the rear of the workshop she could see the startled face of a man who had been hefting a stack of candles from one bench to another. He stared at them with a mixture of confusion and fear. She pushed the hem of her long cloak aside to expose the hilt of a dirk that protruded from her boot. The man sank back into the shadows.

She looked up to see Quigg’s pocked cheeks rapidly flush. He was evidently struggling with the noxious smell too. But the patrol had no interest in the building or its occupants, and quickly their thudding progress fell to a whisper as they turned down a side alley and away. Lisette let the acrid air seep from her nostrils, releasing her white-knuckled grip on Quigg so that he might rush out into the open.

Lisette followed in his gasping wake, calling a word of thanks over her shoulder. She had no idea whether the chandler’s disappearance was an act of mercy or fear, but the effect was the same, and she thanked the Holy Mother for his silence.

‘Now?’ she asked as she reached Quigg’s side.

Quigg pointed to the street corner from whence the patrol had come. ‘Turn right there, on to Little East Cheap. It is a short way after that.’

‘Then let us make haste.’

‘We were speaking of the Peace Party,’ Quigg said as they rounded the corner. ‘You may not like them, madame, but they are the key to this scheme of yours, mark me well.’

‘They are up in arms?’

Quigg scratched at his crooked nose. ‘Not yet. It is mostly the womenfolk, truth be told, but the resentment festers, nonetheless.’ He brandished his empty gums in the semblance of a smile. ‘The pot bubbles, so to speak. A touch more heat and we could have a proper uprising on our hands.’ Without warning, he took Lisette’s elbow, steering her down a narrow alley that seemed to taper with each step. At a point where it was nearly impossible for them both to walk along the passageway shoulder to shoulder, he abruptly stopped by a low, studded door. ‘And here,’ he said, rattling the stout timbers with a distinctive knock that she guessed was some kind of code, ‘we shall meet the man who will bring our pot to the boil.’

The door groaned loudly as it swung inwards, and Quigg bent beneath the wizened lintel. Lisette followed more slowly. Inside, a pair of fat candles flickered in placings on the wall, but they did not offer a great deal of illumination. There was also a window, open to encourage some semblance of a breeze, but it was high and small, and the result was a stiflingly muggy interior.

Lisette loitered near the threshold as a woman closed the door at their backs, increasing the gloom all the more. But by now her eyes were becoming more accustomed to their new surroundings, and she studied the woman closely. She was about forty years old, with mousy hair swept away from her high forehead and carefully captured beneath a coif. That garment, like the long apron that covered the rest of her bony frame, was stained with smudges of black. The woman acknowledged Lisette with a nervous nod.

‘This,’ Quigg announced, ‘is Goodwife Greetham.’

‘God save you, Goody,’ Lisette said.

‘And I,’ came a voice from deeper into the room, ‘am Henry Greetham.’

Lisette and Quigg turned to see the speaker. He was tall; perhaps, she thought, similar in height to Stryker, but of a far leaner build. His face was cadaverously hollow, with cheeks like craters dug beneath deep-set eyes and jutting cheekbones. His jaw was heavy with stubble, darkening the skin around a narrow mouth.

A smiling Quigg approached him, making to grasp the man’s hand, but Greetham shook his head with a wry smile, lifting palms vertical as though he pushed open an invisible door. They were black as jet, shimmering like the surface of a deep pool in the guttering light. ‘A hazard of my trade, I am sorry to say.’

Quigg turned to Lisette, grinning toothlessly in triumph. ‘Printer’s ink.’

‘I can see that,’ Lisette replied testily, though Quigg’s speed at arranging this meeting had been impressive.

They moved further into the room, and Lisette was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of the place. She caught her breath and waited a moment to steady herself.

Greetham seemed to read the discomfort on her face, for he grimaced. ‘The paper and ink make for a most rich odour, do they not? But you are most welcome.’ He beckoned to them, and they followed him into an antechamber at the rear of the dwelling, Mistress Greetham busily tidying the little house in their wake.

At the doorway to the rearmost room was a young lad of about ten. He, like his parents, had blackened fingernails and deeply stained clothes. He was red-haired, thickly freckled and as skinny as his father.

Greetham patted the boy’s head, striding past him into the room. ‘My son, David. He is my apprentice. One day my successor. It takes skill and diligence to work her, but he learns daily.’

Lisette frowned. ‘Her?’

Greetham let them move into the antechamber, where the smell of ink was that much riper, and moved aside to provide a good view of the interior. ‘
Her
,’ he said grandly, sweeping his arm back as though he were introducing a play at one of London’s (albeit now defunct) theatres.

Lisette looked beyond Greetham. There it was, the reason she had made this journey.

‘You wanted a printing press,’ Quigg boasted, ‘and I found you one.’

She ignored him, her attention instead focussed upon this thing that was so alien to her eyes. It was a machine. A vast skeleton of ink-stained wood and iron that squatted in the room’s centre, ugly and dominating, a huge screw rising from its very core like the ominous dorsal fin of some biblical sea creature. That screw was suspended between two broad wooden pillars, rising vertically from their fixings in the floor and connected by leather straps to the ceiling.

‘This here is my pride and my joy,’ Henry Greetham declared, moving to place a hand upon one of the press’s stout uprights. ‘My pet. My baby.’ He moved across to one of the stone walls and snatched a long apron from a hook. The garment might have been white once, Lisette supposed, but it was now as black as his stained paws. He deftly fastened it around his neck and waist, and returned to pat the machine fondly, as though it were a beloved dog.

‘You are an experienced newsmonger, sir?’ Lisette prompted.

‘Learned the trade in Holland, mademoiselle.’ He looked lovingly upon the press once more. ‘Brought her back to these shores piece by piece. Assembled her in this very room, for she would not have fit down our alley, let alone through the door.’ He beamed. ‘But she was worth it.’ He clapped his hands together smartly, startling his guests. ‘Is she not a thing of rare beauty?’