She saw a flash of his teeth as he bent to pick up his three-bar pot. ‘Lady Mary’s resolve would be admirable,’ he said, straightening, ‘if it were not—’
‘Foolish? Futile?’ She spat the words like a challenge, daring him to agree.
But the captain shook his head, placing the helmet under his arm. ‘If it were not going to cost the lives of your garrison. And likely some of my own men too,’ he said.
This took Bess aback and she was not sure how to respond. Instead she looked around her. There were a handful of rebels at the wall, muskets pointing through the loopholes, but the bulk of Downing’s force was still fifty paces from the breach. She could see heads and shoulders sticking out from the trenches, faces moon-washed white, and other soldiers milling around gabions, the great wicker baskets filled with earth excavated from the trenches. A fire burned in the distance, crackling now and then, several shadowy figures huddled about it. Laughter and pipe smoke carried to her on the breeze. Somewhere, someone was singing a sad song of love found and lost and in that heartbeat she thought of Emmanuel.
‘You must know what will happen tomorrow, Miss Rivers,’ Captain Downing said, one hand resting on his sword’s hilt. Bess thought he looked different. Tired. Perhaps he was not made for sleeping under canvas night after freezing night. She looked past him again and this time could just make out the shape of the great demi-cannon sitting there, a fire-spitting beast in the darkness. Sleeping. For now.
‘I am not a soldier, Captain.’ She felt the cold trying to worm into her jaw bones and start them trembling.
He regarded her for a moment as though he suspected her of mocking him. ‘At first light we will bring our gun forward,’ he said, nodding back towards the hole in the wall, ‘and from there it will batter Shear House itself. Given time there will be nothing left but rubble. And that is the best you can hope for, if your . . . garrison . . .’ he said the word contemptuously, ‘should by some miracle hold.’ His eyes bored into hers, a little of the stars’ cold glow reflected in them. ‘What is more likely is that my men will sweep across your lawns in a rolling wave of steel and musketry, and your aged misguided Major of the House, Mister Radcliffe, will drown in a river of blood.’ He shook his head. ‘Blood that need not be spilled.’
Bess wanted to sneer at the man’s hyperbole, but there was something in those dark eyes that made her hold her tongue. Remorse? Pity? Whatever it was sent a shiver scuttling up her spine. Somewhere over to her right, near a copse of birch whose skeletal branches were silhouetted against night’s jewelled veil, a small herd of oxen lowed and snorted.
‘You are with child, Miss Rivers. A woman’s instinct must be to protect the life she is nurturing.’
‘And what would you know of a woman’s instinct, Captain?’ she asked, the fog of her breath rising between them.
‘My own child will be born any day now,’ he said, those words and his half smile disarming Bess and bringing to her mind an image of a pregnant woman somewhere, wishing her husband were with her instead of fighting in some God-awful war. ‘The King’s army is one hundred and forty miles away,’ he went on. ‘It is likely that they are already beaten and His Majesty’s cause lost. That Charles and his retinue are prisoners. Or else His Majesty has fled and is already halfway to France.’ The young man dipped his head respectfully. ‘I do not know your father, Miss Rivers, but I do not think Sir Francis would want his womenfolk fighting for him. Or his house destroyed. Does he even know what is happening here?’
‘My mother has written,’ Bess said, as though that were answer enough. In truth they had received no reply from Sir Francis, but she would not admit that to this recreant devil. ‘I am not a naive child, Captain. If the King were beaten we would know of it. And as for a mother’s duty, that is surely to bring up her child in the true faith and obedience to its sovereign lord. I will not have an act of cowardice his first example.’
His. Yes, it is a boy, she thought. I know it.
With this sudden assuredness that she carried a boy, the fog in her mind cleared and she knew beyond certainty what her answer to Captain Downing must be. There had been doubt. If not, why had she come to meet him? But now that doubt had dissipated like breath in the numbing air and she saw in her mind’s eye Emmanuel, Mun and Sir Francis on some far-away field, fighting for their king, doing their duty no matter the cost.
Captain Downing shook his head in a gesture that suggested this was a fight he was resigning himself to losing.
‘I beg you to reconsider,’ he implored, his helmet held like an offering, ‘to convince your mother to yield. For the sake of good men, yours and mine.’
Bess pulled her cloak even tighter, hoping he could not see her bones rattling with cold. And fear.
‘I am ashamed that you thought me less than my mother,’ she said. ‘That my courage and steadfastness were not equal to hers. But let me make this clear, Captain Downing. I shall put a musket to my own shoulder tomorrow. I shall fight you with a mother’s heart. A mother’s strength. And you will learn what duty is.’
He cocked his head, as though seeing her properly for the first time, then put on his helmet, pushing it down savagely in a gesture of intent that made Bess clench her teeth and want to step back out of his reach.
‘Get that gun moving!’ he bellowed into the dark, inhuman again with his head ensconced in cold steel.
And then the night exploded. Hooves thundered and pistols and carbines roared, tongues of fire licking the darkness, and suddenly Captain Downing flew at her, putting himself between her and the attackers, his arms thrust out behind him, corralling Bess so that she could not move.
Horses shrieked and men yelled and more firearms flared and now came the screams.
‘What in God’s name?’ Downing growled, though he did not step away from her as the riders slashed about them and some fired into the huddle of oxen who bellowed in pain and impotent fury. And then Bess saw her mother in back- and breastplate, red hair flying wildly in the half moon’s light, her white face all bone and shadow and fury. A rebel musketeer thrust his matchlock’s muzzle up at the rider next to Lady Mary and pulled the trigger, launching him from the saddle. Lady Mary hauled on the reins and her grey mare, Hecuba, reared at the musketeer, her hooves smashing his head open in a flood of black gore. Hecuba’s forelegs slammed down to the iron-hard earth and for a heartbeat Lady Mary looked over at them, the whites of her eyes glowing, then she howled and turned the mare and with a dozen others spurred off towards the big gun.
Captain Downing strode forward now, drawing his sword and yelling back to his men at the boundary wall to hold their positions in case of a full-scale sally from Shear House’s defenders. Horrified, Bess watched as soldiers clambered out of their trenches and formed into ranks, walls of musketeers facing different directions, blowing on their match-cords, muzzles pointing into the dark. But the attackers were already gone, the thunder of their hooves fading in the distance, and Captain Downing knew the attack was over before it had really begun. He turned and strode back towards her, eyes raging.
‘You knew about this?’ he yelled, his sword accusing her.
‘No,’ she said, hands pressed against her belly. ‘I swear.’
‘Damn it!’ he roared, scything his sword through the air and turning back round to assess the damage. From what Bess could make out, seven men and four of the six oxen lay dead. Several more of Downing’s troopers lay moaning and bleeding, their fellows gathered around them doing what they could. It looked as though only two of the attackers had been killed, men she could not identify, and her mother had got away safely. Her mother!
‘Keep the bitch as a hostage, Captain!’ a gaunt-faced soldier sneered, grabbing Bess’s arm with savage fingers, his stink filling her nose.
Captain Downing stepped up and backhanded the man across his face, sending him staggering, but he stood glaring at Bess still, yellow rat’s teeth bared.
‘Touch her again, Dix, and I’ll kill you,’ Downing spat
and Bess felt herself recoiling from his fury as he turned back to her. ‘Get back to your people, Miss Rivers,’ he said, struggling to throw a bridle over his wrath. ‘Get out of my sight!’
Bess was already moving, clambering up the rubble of the breach, no offer of help now, numb fingers scrabbling for a hold on the sharp shards and bricks, the weight of her unborn child trying to pull her down.
‘And tell Lady Mary that she can expect no quarter! Do you hear me? Tell her men to get on their knees and make their peace with God!’
She did not reply, stumbling and almost falling but keeping her feet which were now on Shear House’s lawns. Then she heard a whistle and glanced left to find Cawley waiting in the shadows, beckoning her on with a flurry of hand. And she was relieved to feel the weight of his big arm on her shoulder as he threw his own cloak around her and led her up the slope towards the defences and the house. And she hoped beyond hope that their menfolk would return, that her father would ride to their defence.
Because a river of blood was coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HE COULD NOT breathe. Something was clogging his mouth and throat and so he clawed at his own face and found the end of something and pulled. It kept coming and coming, spooling up from his gullet as though it would never end and then he realized what it was. Hair. Raven black, thick as a horse’s tail and twined in loose curls. He was choking on it. It was killing him. Then he saw her, tramping through snow away from him. She turned and looked, her face white as lace, and he tried to wave but could not move his arms. Were the bones broken? He yelled. No sound. She did not see him and then she turned and traipsed on and his heart ripped open because he knew he would never see her again. Martha.
Then terror struck him. He was being pulled and wrenched this way and that.
Dogs?
A pack of dogs had found him. Big mastiffs, whose coarse hair and fetid breath stank like death. They were tearing at his clothes, trying to get to his flesh, but he could not move to fight them off. They must have come all the way from Lathom green. From the bear post. Why him? They tugged and tore and he knew with dread certainty that they would, any moment, find his bare flesh and rip into it and begin to eat. He tried to summon her face again. If only he could make their eyes meet the dogs would leave him be. Somehow. But he could not conjure her, could not remember what she looked like. And then he realized it was not hair that was choking him. It was rope. Thick and coarse and suffocating him.
Darkness. The smell of blood and faeces. And earth. A shrill, broken laugh. Wraiths moving through the frozen gloom, flapping and croaking like carrion crows. Bending and crouching amongst the—
Corpses?
Seeking. Stealing. Cutting.
A man five feet away cried out for his mother. One of the wraiths twisted suddenly and sidled over. Tom saw a flash of blade, heard a wet gurgle and splutter and smelt fresh shit as the dying man’s bowels opened.
If they see I am alive they will kill me. If I am alive.
He was half aware of a deep sense of repugnance at having been stripped naked. He knew his feet were bare even, though he could not feel them. Like crows they had pecked him clean and moved on. They were all around, plundering the dead and the nearly dead, yanking rings from fingers or hacking the fingers off and stuffing them into knapsacks. They cawed and squabbled over purses and helmets, back- and breastplates and swords. They hauled buff-coats, boots, doublets and jerkins off stiffening men, leaving pale pathetic corpses in the mud that was hardening and hoary with frost. There was no pity, just greed, and Tom looked up at the stars, indifferent and eternal and infinite, and he had a sense that this was not how he was meant to die. But God was hateful.
I was shot. My shoulder?
He felt no pain. The freezing night had eaten into his very marrow. Numbing him.
He tried to move but could not. A corpse’s leg lay across his own, heavy as iron. Slowly, as though his own blood was thickening, clotting with ice in his veins, he turned his head. There, beneath a shock of silver hair, was a dead face, the expression frozen in eternal surprise.
‘Did you check that one?’ A woman’s voice, cold as frostbite.
‘I can’t remember. You do it,’ a man replied.
‘Lord preserve us, but it’s another gold one,’ the woman hissed. ‘Give me the knife. Quick before someone else sees it!’
Tom kept his eyes shut and wondered if he was still breathing. He tried to think of Martha but could not remember her face, so he recalled a scene from his childhood. Mun and his friends had not let Tom play with them, saying he was too small, and he had cried. But Bess had taken her savings, sixpence in all, and walked to Lathom market, there paying a carpenter to make a pair of stilts specially for Tom. Together they had gone up to Gerard’s Wood to find the other boys and when Mun saw Tom tottering along, his face a mask of concentration, he had laughed until his stomach ached.
I love you, Bess.
He wished she were with him now. She would fight for him.
He kept his mind’s eye fixed on her face as his arm jerked and twitched. And he begged for death’s embrace.
As they sawed off his finger.
‘Away, villain!’ Mun growled, pointing a pistol at a toothless crone who cursed him and shuffled off to find easier pickings. The looters were everywhere, shadows moving amongst the dead, and the sight of them would have made Mun sick if he were not already numbed to the horror of it all. Dead and dying littered the field, piled up three deep in places, and Hector would have been hard-pressed to find footing amongst them. So Mun had left the stallion tethered at the foot of the escarpment, telling him to go with no other until he returned, and Hector had nickered softly that he understood.
Some of the ruined men still clung stubbornly to life, their moans cloying the stench-thickened air in a hopeless lament. The night was bitterly cold and clear and by the stars’ light Mun searched, as he had done for the last two hours. He had seen hundreds of dead faces, not knowing for the most part which side they had belonged to in life. All were now united in death. A great army of the dead. He wandered aimlessly, stumbling over stiff limbs, all but oblivious to the plaintive cries of those who were not ready to die though they surely would.
But he had not found his father or Emmanuel. He had a vague idea where on the field he had seen Sir Edmund Verney and a small knot of foot and horse make their final, desperate stand beneath the Royal Standard, and what he found at that place was a scene of unimaginable awe: sixty or more corpses fallen thick as wheat before the scythe. Many were naked, already stripped and plundered by local folk who had, like carrion-feeders, flocked to the field of the slain. White flesh glowed in the cold, waning moon’s light and some of the dead stared at Mun accusingly or pointed at him with stiff arms and clawed hands. And if his father had fallen near this place, his fine cuirassier’s armour would have drawn looters like beggars to a bishop’s train.
‘Be gone or you’ll join the dead!’ he barked at another scavenger, this one a mere boy with pale hair and arms straining beneath a bundle of swords.
He had never felt so tired. Empty. Exhausted to his very soul, so that he suspected that if he were to sit down now amongst the dead he would simply become one of them.
Of course, there was a chance his father and Emmanuel were even now reunited with the rest of the King’s Horse, or else walking their tired mounts back south-east after their relentless pursuit of the enemy. But he did not think either of these was true. He knew his father well enough to be almost certain that Sir Francis would not have left the field to chase after a broken force, like an over-eager young blood caught up in the mad thrill of it all. Neither would Sir Francis have been unable to curb his horse, simply letting it run itself out rather than remain in the fray, as some men had surely done. No, his father had not sought this war, but with its coming would not place anything above the execution of his duty and the preservation of his honour. And though Mun had not seen him amongst those men he had watched tr
ying to force a way through to defend the King’s standard, he yet knew that Sir Francis had been there. And Emmanuel, whose fire outblazed his sense at times, would have been there too, staying by his lover’s father, loyal to the end.
Only when he was challenged by a small troop of rebel Horse did Mun give up the search. With nightfall a considerable portion of Essex’s army had remained on the field and now their fires blazed and crackled in a ragged line along the north-west, and in his stupor Mun had wandered too close.
‘Who are you?’ a trooper had called and Mun had heard swords rasp up scabbard throats and the clicks of pistols being cocked.
‘I am looking for my father,’ he had replied, barely looking up at the dark mass of mounted men. ‘And for my friend.’
‘You are the King’s man?’ the horseman asked.
‘As should you be,’ Mun said, knowing he still gripped his pistols though he could not feel them for his hands were useless, little more than numb, rigid claws.
‘Insolent bastard,’ one of the troopers growled.
‘Away with you, man,’ the first rebel said. ‘There has been enough killing today. Go back to the living and leave the dead to God.’ And with that Mun had turned back towards the Edgehill escarpment and the fires of his own side winking here and there on its heights, and tramped through the slain once more.
His heart stopped when he thought he saw Tom torn and bloody amongst mounds of horseflesh, some of the beasts still breathing and lifting their heads now and then. But the dead man was not Tom, and so he moved on, his whole body shuddering with cold.
The bitter night was at its deepest when he found some of his own troop huddled in cloaks against the cold. They sat beside a meagre fire they had made from broken pike staves, musket rests and whatever else they could find that would burn, and of his friends Mun saw O’Brien first. The big man was cradling a cup of ale to his chest as though there was heat in the thing, not cold liquid, and absent was the good-natured raillery that was the usual accompaniment to the fire’s crack and spit. Rowe and Downes were there too and Mun was glad to see that those three at least had survived the day.
The Bleeding Land Page 32