Mun was surprised and flattered that the Prince had remembered Hector’s name. ‘He is ready, Your Highness. As am I.’
‘We’re all keen to whip the rebel curs,’ a portly, red-nosed trooper named Lawrence said, stifling a great belch that threatened to explode his face. ‘We shall squash them. Like lice between your finger and thumb.’
‘Well said, that man,’ the Prince said, looking from him to the other men in the troop who were standing tall in his presence. He surveyed the big Irishman O’Brien and young Vincent Rowe, Corporal Bard, Richard Downes and the others, and he appeared to like what he saw.
‘I have come to tell you all that you will have the place of honour in the field, I shall see to that.’ Some of the men cheered and some raised their cups and pitchers towards the Prince, who received their gestures gracefully. Then with a swirl of his scarlet cloak he moved on to the next fire and the men around it, reminding Mun of a boy who is too excited to stand still for any length of time.
‘If Bard asks after me, I’ll be back before dawn,’ Mun said to O’Brien, taking up his helmet and rubbing it on a dry part of his tunic.
‘Where are you off to?’ the Irishman asked.
‘To see my father,’ Mun said.
‘Ah, well, give His Majesty the King my best when you see him, won’t you,’ O’Brien said, a grin splitting his red beard. ‘Tell him to be kind to Ireland, too, there’s a good lad.’
‘Anything for you, Clancy,’ Mun said, leaving a wake of bawdy laughter and a scowling Irishman.
‘Who told you?’ the Irishman called after him.
‘Your ma has sewn it into your tunic!’ Mun called behind him, and the laughter boomed in the night.
The regiments of the King’s army had been scattered across one hundred square miles of countryside between Kineton and Banbury, but Mun knew he would find his father near the King himself, who was at the home of Sir William Chancie at Edgecote. When, after an hour’s unhurried ride, he got there, he found the King’s camp a maelstrom of soldiers and horses and the many chaotic components of the artillery train. Mun had the sense that the air itself was trembling, like a great banner in a stiff wind, such was the excitement for the coming battle. Soldiers of the King’s Lifeguard, the Prince of Wales’s Regiment and Sir Richard Byron’s Brigade of Foot were striking camp and preparing to march, for this was the beating heart of the Royalist cause and the news of Essex’s proximity – and thus of a fight to be had – was spreading from this point, like trails of black powder whooshing in all directions.
It took a while, given the chaos, but eventually Mun found Sir Francis talking with Sir Edmund Verney, Knight Marshal to King Charles. The two men had come from a war council with the King himself and Mun knew that Prince Rupert would be furious to know that there had been such a meeting to which he had evidently not been invited. But then Mun knew that the upper echelons of the King’s officers had begun to form factions for and against the Prince. Mostly against if the rumours were to be believed.
His father smiled broadly at the sight of Mun. ‘My son Edmund,’ he announced proudly, ‘who serves with the Prince’s Horse.’
Sir Edmund Verney eyed Mun and nodded appreciatively, as though in Mun he saw what a son should be, and Mun cursed inwardly at his timing for he remembered that Verney’s eldest son, Sir Ralph Verney, had also turned his back on his father and sided with Parliament.
‘Your prince must be busy teaching his officers the Swedish tactics he has so faithfully studied,’ Verney said with evident sarcasm, snatching the broad-brimmed hat from his head and running a hand through his long hair, ‘for we had not the pleasure of His Highness’s company just now.’
Mun felt his hackles rise at the suggestion that the Prince had deliberately slighted the other generals. But then, perhaps he had.
‘Sir Edmund will have the honour of bearing the Royal Standard as we sweep the rebels from the field,’ Sir Francis said, reading Mun’s face and changing the subject.
‘Then you will not be left wanting for excitement, Sir Edmund,’ Mun said, trying to smile. ‘The rebels will be thick as flies around your party. May God be with you, sir,’ he said and meant it. For it took a brave man to wave the King’s standard at fifteen thousand enemies.
‘And with you, Edmund,’ Verney replied. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen. Sir Francis, I’m sure your boy did not trudge through the mire to wish me luck.’ One-handed he placed the hat back on his head. ‘For God and King Charles,’ he said.
‘For God and King Charles,’ Mun and Sir Francis repeated in unison, then Verney headed off into the whirling chaos of the King’s army.
‘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!’ t
he 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.
‘I don’t need friends like him,’ Tom replied, as the minister moved on to harangue other men. ‘I’ve got you, Matthew, and Will and Weasel. And that’s too many.’ Tom was only half joking. It was clear that the others were drawn to him for some reason he could not fathom, not that he put much thought into it. But ever since they had broken out of the Royalists’ gaol they had barely left him alone. It was as though they looked to him for leadership. ‘I cannot seem to shake you off,’ Tom said.
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