They reached the beach in less than an hour. Tainton tossed a tupenny coin to the lad guarding their boat, and added another when he had located a second vessel, and they began unloading the hoard, wading out to the boats that now bobbed in the shallows. Cordell and Fassett did the majority of the work, supervised by Tainton, whose hand never left his side, while Squires positioned himself a little way up the sand, standing with folded arms and a grim expression between the boats and any curious fishermen. They divided the treasure in half to spread the weight, then clambered aboard, Tainton with Cordell, Fassett with Squires. And then they were away, another penny thrown to the boy so that he would push them off. Tainton twisted to wave at the men aboard the Silver Swan while Clay Cordell worked the oars. When he turned back, he caught a flicker of movement up on the rising land above the coast. His eyes were not as good as they once were, but still he could make out the shapes of more than a dozen men on the grassy hill. They stood in a line, very deliberately gazing down at the bay, at Tainton’s boats. He could not see their faces, nor the detail of their clothes, but one of them, smaller than the rest, was tiny, the size of a child, and another seemed to have long hair that was as golden as the ornate salvers piled at Tainton’s feet.
‘Is it?’ Clay Cordell said as he heaved against the waves. He too gaped at the figures. ‘The froggy bitch?’
Tainton shielded his eyes with his hands ‘I believe it is, Mister Cordell. Somehow they have escaped.’
‘Fuck,’ Cordell said, splashing them both with water.
Tainton’s heart thundered like the drums at Brentford Fight. His revenge would not come, and it made him want to weep and vomit both at once. All this time, all these months, he had thought of the moment when he would give Lisette Gaillard a lingering death of exquisite, horrific agony. And now somehow, inexplicably, she was free.
‘Balthazar must have lost his nerve,’ he said eventually. It was the only explanation.
‘Just as well we’ve got ourselves away, then.’
And Roger Tainton’s pulse began to slow, because the choleric-looking mercenary was right. How and why Stryker’s band of Cavaliers had managed to extricate themselves from Star Castle, he could not fathom. And the escape of Lisette Gaillard was particularly vexing. But, he realized with the most perfect, uplifting rush of relief, it mattered not a jot. He had the gold. He had defeated Stryker, defeated the French whore, and would be a hero of the rebellion. He wept now, but out of joy instead of sorrow, and he thanked King Jesus at the top of his lungs, waved up at his enemies, and began to laugh.
Near Overton, Hampshire, 14 October 1643
Forrester’s initial elation at his escape had been cruelly punctured by the knowledge that Dewhurst had been plucked clean away by a pistol ball. But that sorrow was compounded further when, around noon the previous day, he had looked back to see three horsemen on the horizon. They had closed the gap, gradually but inexorably, and Forrester had known that he would not make it to Basing House before nightfall. As evening descended, he had veered off the most direct course to Basing, plunging into the enclosed fields and coppiced forests to the north. The trio of hunters had followed, and, before the light faded completely, he had been able to make out the white hair and beard of Wagner Kovac, and he had understood that his shot had simply unhorsed the Croatian. Kovac was no longer riding his big bay, but the grey of another of his troopers, and Forrester had realized that Dewhurst’s shot had been the killer. Kovac, unharmed, had merely lost his mount to Forrester’s bullet.
Now, while this second day wore old, somewhere in this forest of silver birch, Wagner Kovac and his two remaining troopers were prowling; silent, watchful and hungry for blood. After hours of slinking from one tangled thicket to the next, Forrester had decided to go to ground. He would make a stand, once and for all.
He had scanned the terrain and picked a place where the soil had been ruined by a coney warren and where men had once asserted their ancient grazing rights by digging shallow ditches that were now furred with moss and capsized by tree roots. And now he waited.
Forrester blew on his cord of slow-burning hemp. His mouth felt terribly parched. He ran his tongue around his gums, biting the inside of his cheek gently to force some saliva to come. He had supped from the last stream he had crossed, but already the heady mixture of exhilaration and weariness was beginning to take its toll, and his sticky lips scraped on his teeth. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, yawned and stretched, keeping to his feet but leaning back on a thin, peeling trunk. When he opened them he saw the horseman, a charcoal silhouette some sixty paces into the watery mist, made unmistakable by the outline of lobster pot, sword and mount. This was it, Forrester knew.
‘Come then, sirs, for I grow weary of this game!’ he bellowed, his voice echoing amongst the trees. As if responding directly to his challenge, two more figures resolved from the gentle miasma. Forrester offered a deep bow as their collective attention fixed upon him, fishing in the side of his boot for a couple of musket-balls as he did so. ‘Then we shall have our reckoning at last!’
He popped the leaden spheres into his mouth and blew on his coals again, sidling backwards to where his musket rested, muzzle up, against a gnarled stem. The spot he had chosen was a small half-moon of a clearing carpeted in the yellow of fallen leaves. The curved side was thick with silver trunks around whicch clustered thorny brambles and decaying bracken, while the straight front was open, the trees more sparse. It was from this side that the horsemen came now, breaking into a gallop that sounded more like an entire cavalry charge in the eerie stillness.
Forrester shouldered the musket. It was primed, and at this distance he did not bother to fix the match in place. He exposed the pan, dipped the burning tip into the powder, and the world exploded. He fell back immediately as much to clear his own field of vision as to remove himself from danger, and was horrified to see three troopers racing towards him. He had missed. He dropped back further to where his snapsack and bandolier rested, and flicked the stopper off one of the powder boxes. He already had the next bullet wedged against his lower gum, and he spat it down the muzzle after the charge had been decanted. They were close now, too close, at the very edge of the clearing, leaves and mud flinging up in clods to blur their fetlocks, and he knew they would be upon him before he could prime the shot.
The horse screamed. It brayed and snorted and tried to rear but was unable to find its footing, and instead it juddered forwards on to its fore-knees, its long head ploughing a deep furrow in the forest floor, its rider flung violently out of the saddle. Kovac and the other trooper stayed mounted, but they slewed about to view the commotion made by their comrade and his injured horse. Forrester did not look up. He frantically reloaded the musket, thanking God over and over for inspiring the conies to infest this part of the forest.
Kovac was snarling, furious at having been gulled into charging across a warren. His orders finally rose above the agonized calls of the felled trooper and the pathetic thrashings of his horse. The white-whiskered Croat wrenched his sword free, circled it above his head so that the sound of slicing air carried all the way to his cornered quarry, and set off again, slower this time, the remaining trooper in his wake. They made it across the pocked earth without further trouble, but Forrester had retreated to the very rear of the open ground, tossing the bandolier and snapsack ahead of him, over a stretch of slightly raised terrain that scarred the leafy turf and into the first trees of the clearing’s curved edge. Oberon was beyond those trees, waiting for his master’s return. The horsemen were near, but not near enough to stop him shooting, and he took aim, fixing the match in the serpent this time. He picked the nearest, easing back the trigger and vanishing in his own smoke once again.
This time Forrester heard the scream and the crash as ball met man and man met earth. He squinted through the smoke to witness a riderless horse turning frightened circles in its attempt to flee, and knew the shot had flown true. He could not hope to reload the weapon before the t
hird hunter reached his position, and he gritted his teeth, waiting for the vengeful killer to burst through the acrid cloud. But more screams came, more cacophonous grinding of metal and flesh, more savage oaths, this time mingled with the whip-cracks of splintering branches.
The third rider had not recognized the stretch of raised earth for the ditch it was, and had galloped straight across it. It was only shallow, no more than three feet at its deepest point, but a heavily laden horse dashing pell-mell over its branch-latticed and leaf-concealed surface would find itself in immediate difficulty. Now Forrester could reload, and he took a knee, blowing gently on the match, taking another powder charge from the collar and fishing primer from the sack. The smoke was lifting into the higher branches, and he began to see the horse. It was Kovac’s, and it writhed and twitched, legs splayed out and upwards from the ditch, front half wedged into the lip of earth on Forrester’s side. The fall had demolished its front limbs so that it collapsed forwards and flung its master clear. Then Forrester saw Kovac. The mercenary seemed dazed as he pushed himself to his feet. His helmet had been dislodged in the fall, and he staggered a touch as he tried to reach Forrester’s position, ice-blue eyes blinking rapidly, before spinning on his heels and making for the horse.
Forrester took the priming flask and braced it between his knees, blew again on the match, then slid the scouring stick from its place on the underside of the barrel and jammed it down the muzzle, scraping it up and down the smoking tube half a dozen times. It was a delay he could not afford, but a musket was like a chimney; it clogged with soot every time it was fired. Two shots had been loosed already, and the third would be compromised unless he cleared its path. He scoured the barrel quickly, tossing the stick away rather than replacing it in its slot, and upended the next charge, but a quick glance at the pan told him the touch-hole was also soot-caked. The shot would be nothing more than a flash in the pan. He swore viciously, stooped to fish the sharp pricker from his snapsack, and used it to dig out the debris from the touch-hole. He blew the blackened flakes free, but the ball in his mouth skittered past his dry lips to roll amongst the leaves.
‘Damn it all to hell!’ he hissed, snatching the flask from between his knees and pouring a measure into the pan before tossing the vessel away. He hurriedly scanned the leaf mulch for the missing ball.
‘You’re mine now, Cavalier!’
Forrester stopped dead in his tracks. He looked up to see Wagner Kovac, pistol raised in the Croat’s grip. ‘I say,’ he called back, knowing he could not find the bullet in time, ‘I don’t suppose we can discuss this?’ He saw Kovac grin maliciously. ‘No, I didn’t think so.’
‘I admire your trick,’ Kovac said, jerking his head back at the carnage of the shallow ditch.
‘Glad you appreciate my hard work,’ Forrester replied. He was holding the musket horizontally at waist height, and eased his free hand along the warm barrel so that it was beside the muzzle. ‘Took me a good hour to collect all those leaves.’
‘You have killed two of my men, Captain Forrester.’
‘Sergeant Dewhurst must take half the credit, in truth.’
‘And he is dead.’
‘So we’re even.’
Kovac laughed. It was a dry, mirthless sound. ‘No, we are not. You owe me a death.’ He cocked the pistol. ‘You have given me much trouble, Captain Forrester. Too much.’
Forrester dived forwards, tilting the musket up so that the pricker slipped from his fingers and slid all the way down the barrel. He fired without looking, and heard the sharper report of Kovac’s pistol compete with his own shot. Wherever the pistol ball went, it did not find Forrester, but Kovac’s deep bellow echoed about the birch phalanxes like the howl of a wolf. Forrester stood quickly, turning to plunge through the trees. He glanced back briefly to see Kovac staggering lopsidedly, face a deep crimson hue, a stream of foreign oaths spewing from his mouth. His hands were clamped over his thigh, the pricker glinting as it jutted from his flesh like a metal thorn.
Lancelot Forrester took a long, lingering breath and bowed deeply. ‘I will raise a glass to your health at Basing, Captain Kovac!’ He went to find Oberon.
Off Carn Near, Tresco, 14 October 1643
Titus Gibbons, master of the Stag, stood on the gun-deck of his small warship with hands firmly on hips. He peered along his crooked nose at the newly boarding passengers who scrambled up the hull on rope ladders that dangled into the skiffs below. ‘And did fortune favour your mad dash?’
Captain Stryker, first on to the lower deck, craned his head to look up at the figure above. ‘It did not,’ he answered breathlessly. ‘They were gone.’
Gibbons frowned in thought. ‘The gold?’
‘They have it.’
‘S’blood!’
Stryker stooped to help the others up, though when it was Lisette’s turn she refused his hand. He looked quickly back at Gibbons. ‘We followed their wheel tracks all the way to their vessel, but they were casting off.’
‘Where?’ Gibbons asked. His two dogs, Sir Francis and Sir Walter, bounded past him and down to the lower deck, weaving in and out of the new bodies, sniffing each green-coated figure and yapping to one another enthusiastically.
‘Old Grimsby,’ Stryker said, patting the head of the brindle mastiff. ‘They have a ship in the bay.’
Gibbons tugged sharply at the hem of his green and silver doublet, the weak light sliding along the sparkling thread. ‘Then we shall give chase.’
Everyone was on deck by now, milling at Stryker’s back. There was an air of relief about the party, and yet the mood was sombre too. Everyone had known Cecily Cade, protected her on the bleak and bloody plains of Dartmoor, and they shared a collective duty to retrieve the fortune she had so desperately wished to donate to the king’s cause. Now Cecily was dead, her inheritance bound for Parliamentarian coffers, and Stryker’s company had been obliterated in the process. Stryker spoke for them, feeling the catastrophe more profoundly than any. ‘Did you not hear, Titus? They were casting off some hours ago. They will be well away.’
Titus Gibbons looked out at the darkening horizon. Brooding clouds were gathering above the waves. ‘The weather will soon be inclement, Stryker. Difficult to handle,’ he glanced at Lisette and winked at Stryker, ‘like the very best mistresses. And I am pleased to say that a small wound received by one of my beloved ship’s masts has been neatly rectified, thanks to Captain Balthazar’s assistance.’
Stryker shook his head in exasperation. He had the sudden urge to sleep. ‘He’ll have a hired crew.’
‘Aye,’ Gibbons allowed, ‘but I have the very best. Besides, the Stag is built for speed. What does he have?’
‘A big thing. Bigger than this. Three sails, rigged squarely.’
‘A pinnace, I should imagine,’ said Gibbons. He spun about, bellowing orders at his startled crew. Immediately they sprang into action, scuttling into the shrouds and hauling up the anchor.
‘Titus?’ Stryker called after him.
Gibbons looked back only once, his face taut and enthused. ‘We can catch him, Stryker,’ he said, slapping his thigh excitedly. The cliff-edge face opened into a grin of predatory delight. ‘Upon my honour, we can catch the bastard!’
CHAPTER 14
The English Channel, 15 October 1643
The small hours of the morning were anxious ones for Roger Tainton. Satan’s minions would, he knew for certain, be shifting against him, desperate for God’s plans to be foiled. He lifted his cup, slumping back in the chair that had been placed in the little cabin, and drank deeply of the small beer that the ship’s captain had provided. It was not particularly refreshing, but he had tasted worse. The others – Fassett, Cordell and Squires – were drinking vinegary wine, cross-legged on the floor in the cabin’s corner, tossing dice and growling as they won and lost the few little coins for which they played.
Tainton swallowed hard as the ship pitched sharply to one side. The Devil was working. The winds were capricious out in th
e darkness, changing direction without warning, whipping with a vengefulness that had the Silver Swan’s masts creaking and groaning against the snapping shrouds. He prayed they would be safe, that the pinnace would make it through the squall, that the crew knew what they were about.
‘A toast!’
Tainton looked down at the speaker. ‘I do not imbibe strong drink, Mister Fassett, as well you know.’
Sterne Fassett smirked. ‘We’ll drink, you pray.’ He raised his wooden cup, the dark liquid sloshing at the rim as the ship swung to centre again. ‘To our success.’
Tainton pulled a sour expression. ‘Success?’
‘Still simmering over that one-eyed bugger?’ Fassett asked, tilting back his head to swig heartily at the wine.
‘I had planned to kill them,’ Tainton said softly.
‘But we have what they came to find, haven’t we?’ Fassett countered. ‘You’ve won!’
‘And we shall receive our remuneration,’ Clay Cordell offered.
Tainton glanced at Cordell now. ‘I am intrigued. You are an educated fellow, are you not?’
A tiny suggestion of colour came into the pallid man’s cheeks. ‘I was a clerk, sir.’
‘Then you have fallen far,’ Tainton said. ‘Now you have nothing to live for but gold. Is reward all you desire?’
Cordell’s shoulders bunched involuntarily like the hackles of a dog, but at a narrow-eyed stare from Fassett he licked thin lips and took a drink. ‘As desires go,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, ‘it’s a snout-fair one, I’d say.’
‘Do you not want your slice, Mister Tainton?’ Sterne Fassett said.
‘I will have expenses recompensed.’
‘That’s it?’ Fassett’s surprise was evident.
Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 22