The aide, a bespectacled fellow with a spotty chin and fingers that were brittle and blue, bobbed again. ‘Which, sir?’
‘All of them,’ Rawdon said. ‘Earth, rubble, whatever can be found. The gates too. No weak points, you understand me?’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘And a new half-moon on the outside of Garrison Gate. Let them fight their way to our door this time.’
‘Colonel Rawdon!’ a voice, slightly nasal and pitched high, carried to them across the gardens from the east. ‘Rawdon!’
The party looked as one towards the small gateway leading from the direction of the Old House. Rawdon bowed, the rest followed suit. ‘My lord.’
Sir John Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, swept down from the higher ground, the hem of his cloak brushing the path’s small stones to leave a wake like ripples behind a boat. ‘Rawdon! My confessor has been humiliated!’
‘Humiliated?’
Paulet’s cheeks were a deep crimson, and Stryker wondered whether it was a result of chilly air or hot temper. ‘My priest, Colonel. A gaggle of your heretical musketeers did kick up a muddy puddle at him this dawn.’
‘A puddle, my lord?’
Paulet clenched and unclenched his fists. ‘Kicked it, besmirching his robes in the most disrespectful manner! I shall not have Protestant blackguards behaving so ill within these walls, Rawdon, by God Himself, I shall not!’
Stryker saw his chance to slip away as governor followed marquess back up the slope, duty-bound as he was to assuage Paulet’s prickly honour. He stayed with the group until they were in the Old House, then shook the hands of the others before making for the Great Hall. He had not been down to its cellars, but he had heard that they were cavernous and well protected from any shot flung over the walls, and they made a sensible choice for the temporary infirmary.
‘Give me a moment to explain, old man. Does the Bard not say—’
‘Do not dissemble, Forry, I have no mood for it. She was not in the damned infirmary, so where is she?’
Stryker had found his friend up on the fortified rooftops that formed the south wall of the New House. He was peering down at the deep ditch and the staked earthen rampart beyond. Forrester’s initial grin had melted as he had looked into his fellow captain’s eye, the colour draining from his cheeks. It had been enough for Stryker to know that he had been lied to.
‘Very well,’ Forrester said on the back of a deep sigh, leaning his elbow on the crenellated edge of the roof. ‘She did not wish you to know of her mission.’
‘Mission?’
‘She delivers a message from the marquess.’
‘To whom?’
‘Lord Hopton.’
‘What message?’ asked Stryker, his eye narrowing.
‘What do you think?’ Forrester retorted defiantly. He looked up at the clouds, which were pregnant and threatening in vast banks across the hills. ‘Dearest Lord Hopton, it is with great regret that I report of the impending destruction of Basing Castle, the slaughter of its inhabitants, and the utter ruination of the righteous cause of King Charles Stuart in the fine county of Hampshire. Yours in imminent defeat, Sir John Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, or words to that effect.’
Stryker turned to stare outwards, to the fields and parkland that hemmed the estate on its south side. ‘That scheming bloody stoat.’
‘If you refer to the marquess,’ Forrester interjected, ‘have a care, for he has ears everywhere, I’m certain. Besides, you’d be wrong, in part at least. It is his note, but it was given unto Lisette’s hand by the marchioness. She evidently does not trust in her husband’s people.’ He laughed without mirth. ‘A shrewd decision, would you not agree, given the non-appearance of our much vaunted escort?’
Stryker did not, in that moment, care one jot for the escort. His mind whirled with Lisette’s vanishing, with her deceit. ‘Why did she not tell me?’
Forrester smiled kindly. ‘Because she knew you would resist, and because you had a mountain of troubles on your heart already.’
‘And because of what happened.’
‘On Scilly?’ Forrester would not meet his gaze. ‘That too. She suspects the two of you cannot operate to the best of your abilities when each knows the other’s work. I was only made privy so that someone in your confidence knew what became of her. She did not want you suspecting Tainton’s blade in this.’
‘How did she get out?’ said Stryker.
Forrester glanced back beyond the high turrets to the broad rise of Cowdrey’s Down. ‘Waller’s cordon was not so tight. And one so resourceful as Lisette? I imagine it was no strain. She went during the bombardment, before they took the Grange.’
‘Then let us hope she made it through,’ Stryker muttered, looking south and imagining her corpse swinging from one of the oaks that smudged the distant horizon. If she was captured with the marquess’s letter, then it would be the worse for her.
Forrester nodded. ‘For all our sakes, old man. For all our sakes.’
Amesbury, Wiltshire, 9 November 1643
‘Waller launches an assay against Basing Castle.’
The speaker was Sir Ralph Hopton, Baron of Stratton. He was dressed in his usual sober attire, his hat slanted down to one side to obscure the scars across his temple and ear, and he sat in the corner of a taphouse on the Winchester Road. The newly-made lord was pressed into the join between two flinty walls as if he expected an assassin’s bullet at any moment. His hands, as ever, were gloved, and in them, made milky orange by the glow of a sputtering tallow candle, was a sheet of vellum. He licked his lips, reading silently, then looked up. ‘The Lord Marquess speaks of a veritable horde at his gates. Foot, horse and heavy ordnance. He desires my assistance forthwith.’
‘He has desired your succour for days, my lord,’ one of the assembled officers muttered, a little more loudly than was appropriate.
Hopton’s eyes were not as keen as they once had been, but they were yet able to pierce the gloom when an insolent subordinate required chastisement, and he slammed a fist down on the table. ‘Have a care, Sergeant-Major Allerton! Wish you a post commanding our latrine diggers?’
The officer, obscured by the shadows at the rear of the room, cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘No, my lord, no. I did not mean to speak out of turn. Meant no offence.’
Hopton nodded. He would not accept such destructive chatter, but that did not mean he was completely blinkered to the feelings of his men. This new army’s task was to clear Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire of the Parliamentarian menace and then swing left, pushing north into London, to smash the rebellion right in its belly. The first part of Hopton’s strategy had been as straightforward as he might have hoped, the majority of the territories falling swiftly to his threat, but now, as Hampshire was almost in his grip, Waller had come to stop him. Matters required more consideration than had been originally thought.
‘I have awaited more men, more ammunition, more supplies,’ he said, his voice measured and stern. ‘I would not risk a repeat of Newbury Fight by wading headlong into a mire from which I cannot extricate myself. But we now have enough about us to pursue the enemy, ’tis true. Sir William has pushed his pieces across the board; now I may make my move.’
Another man stepped from a shadow. ‘You will relieve Basing, my lord?’
‘I shall,’ Hopton confirmed, receiving a chorus of excited whispers in response. ‘We may march in a day or so, should the rain ease. I will write at once to His Majesty, requesting further reinforcements. I believe we have a good body of men in Reading who might be spared.’ He glanced to his left, where a clerk busily scribbled notes on scraps of parchment in a spidery hand. ‘Dispatch riders to all divisions. We shall muster at Kingsclere.’
‘My lord,’ the clerk said, not looking up from his quill.
Hopton set down the sheet, flattening it with his palms. ‘To your work, then, gentlemen.’
When the assembly had dispersed, he sat back, tugged at the fingers of his gloves, and called out t
o an aide. The door opened once more, and in strode a diminutive figure in a long cloak. ‘Thank you for your bravery in this, madam.’
The woman scraped the hood from her head, revealing long, golden hair and a pale face. ‘Duty done, my lord.’
‘What is your name? You are not from these parts.’ Hopton smiled. ‘Nor, I suspect, are you the common apple seller you claimed to be when my outriders first found you.’
She returned the smile. ‘My name, Lord Hopton, is Lisette Gaillard.’
Basing House, Hampshire, 9 November 1643
Roger Tainton had been worried. He had used Perkin Yates’s skeleton key to slip his way into the musty, dank bowels of the Old House. He had waited, listening to the muffled crackle of muskets, the earth-shaking din of heavy artillery and the shouts of men, women and children, all witnessing the fall of the place they had come to regard as home. Except it had not fallen. Waller’s attack, so successful in its early throes, had, it seemed, been thrown back, and the guns had lost their voices, the strained cries from out in the courtyard had fizzled to nothing, and then all was quiet. And now Tainton found himself locked inside this self-imposed prison.
He had felt the gold. He could barely see anything at all, but beneath the sheet had been the wagon, and there, crammed tight, had been the treasure. Even in the darkness, he had checked it, probing hands snaking over the ranks of cool plate, across the various bejewelled baubles and over the solid forms of chests that he knew were brimming with coin. He had expected Stryker to keep the trove in one place, for only a fool would trust the marquess not to skim the cream for himself, but it was still an exquisite feeling to have his instincts proved right. Yet he had not been able to fling open the double doors to the tune of Kovac’s Teutonic tones echoing around the Old House amid a great Parliamentarian victory. He had not been able to hitch his compatriot’s horse to the wagon and drag it out of the estate while Waller’s victorious men rampaged in search of blood and loot and women. None of that had come to pass, and he had been left hoping and praying for a miracle.
Two days, he estimated, had passed since the end of the assault, though it was difficult to tell. Only the constant, tortuous drip of water down one of the slimy chalk walls gave him company as he sparingly gnawed his way through the snapsack-load of provisions. More worrying had been water, for the flask he had brought only contained enough for a couple of days, but the rain had kept the slick walls well irrigated, and he had found he could syphon enough to survive. At his lowest moments, when his mind played tricks and his ears echoed with hollow voices whispering promises that this place would be his tomb, he wondered at the audacity it had taken to steal the gold from under Royalist noses. Mocked himself for the very hope that he might relieve Stryker of his great prize a second time by hiding here, locked away, awaiting a rescue that had not materialized. But the mission, from conception to the coast, from stormy seas to the search of Scilly’s windswept islands and all the way back to the mainland, had been fraught with risk and danger and cost. Diving into this clammy hole on the chance that General Waller could reduce the Marquess of Winchester’s estate to rubble was just one more risk upon many. One more leap of faith. And that was the crux of it. Tainton still had, albeit in an oblique way, possession of the treasure, and his faith was undaunted and undeterred. Tainton had come too far for the King of Kings to abandon him now. So he prayed, sitting in the darkness, gnawing on salt pork, sipping gritty water from the excavated chalk, and waiting for Sir William Waller to arrive.
CHAPTER 26
Basing House, Hampshire, 12 November 1643
The Parliamentarian army returned just before noon. It was Sunday, and Stryker’s men had joined the soldiers commanded by Rawdon, Peake and Johnson in the fan-shaped entrance-yard outside the Old House for a sermon delivered by a dark-browed preacher who seemed intent on describing hell’s torments in gratuitous detail. The men had formed up in ranks behind their colours, flanked by sergeants and officers, as a strong breeze buffeted them, and they had dutifully kept their silence as their mortal souls were harangued. In the panelled luxury of the New House, a similar but very distinct service was undertaken as Basing’s Catholic contingent reflected upon their own salvation, Sir John Paulet’s priests – the men with perhaps most to lose were they ever to be taken by the rebels – performing their tasks as God’s anointed conduits.
It was as both sides of the religious divide filed out into the daylight to become one again that the men on the precariously damaged towers of the Great Gatehouse began to ring their bells. The rooftops and walls, turrets and bastions were quickly lined with folk all staring northwards, searching the skyline as unit after unit of infantry, cavalry and dragoons swarmed over Cowdrey’s Down, along the River Loddon, and into Basing village.
Paulet himself was amongst his people, beseeching God for strength and calling orders that, though superfluous given Rawdon’s fastidious preparations, served to bolster the morale of the frightened population. The marchioness was there, too, skirts whirling as she swept through the nervous crowds with words of encouragement and fortitude. They looked to the sky, prayed for rain, but, though the sun was entirely cloaked in a murky grey miasma, no merciful droplets fell.
k
Sir William Waller rode his horse along the crest of Cowdrey’s Down, letting it follow the camber so that, when he was twenty yards off the summit, he drew up and dismounted. He could feel the earth tremble at his feet. All around, to the east, west and south, dense blocks of infantry were on the move. From up here, a little way along from where his ordnance were already being unhitched from their teams of horses, he could see the brigades shift in and out of formation as they found their places within the trio of divisions that would encircle the house. It was strange being back here, in almost the exact spot from which he had witnessed the crumbling of the first attack, and yet now, on this windswept Sabbath, with the words of morning sermons still fresh in their ears, his men would right the wrongs of five days ago. There was no option but to persist in the enterprise; Waller had a reputation to rebuild. He had been Parliament’s shining light in the early days, its dynamic alternative to the lethargic caution of the Earl of Essex. But Roundway Down had changed all that: Waller was no longer the rebellion’s star, his brilliance eclipsed by the man he despised most in the world. He badly needed a victory, and quickly, for Hopton’s new army was said to be on the move somewhere to the west.
‘Beef, Sir William?’ an aide was saying. Waller heard the words, but was not truly listening. Instead he laughed. ‘Sir William? Would you like beef or chicken?’
Waller looked at the aide. ‘I am sorry, Harold. A thought took my mind elsewhere.’
The aide looked nonplussed. ‘General?’
‘It is no secret that I do not share friendship with His Excellency.’
The aide’s eyelid fluttered gently. ‘No, General, it is not.’
‘And nor is my friendship with Lord Hopton a matter of concealment.’
‘No, sir, nor is it.’
Waller laughed again. ‘Does the irony not amuse you? I must defeat Hopton in order to regain my position at Westminster, a position begrudged by Lord Essex.’ He shook his head at the wonder of it. ‘I must thrash my friend to confound my enemy.’
The aide nodded sagely. ‘But you must reduce Basing Castle before you may engage your friend in battle.’
‘Aye,’ Waller said. It was not strictly true, for he could abandon Basing altogether and march directly upon Hopton, but his troops were raw, untried, and their only experience of warfare thus far had been the inept failure to hold the Grange, followed by days and days of rain-sodden inertia. Mutiny, he suspected, was not far from their minds, and he needed a resounding victory at Basing to bolster their resolve. ‘We will break the malignants this time, Harold. Are the siege items dispersed amongst the brigades?’
‘The supplies you requested from the capital have been sown like seeds, Sir William. Each of the three divisions possesses ladders to s
pan ditches and scale walls; they have petards aplenty and certain units were given grenadoes. The reserve dragooners have also arrived.’ He held out a hand, palm flattened to the grey skies. ‘We are ready for the escalade, Sir William, so long as the weather holds.’
They watched from the escarpment for another hour as Waller’s cavalry deployed around the ruin of the Grange. They drew close to the long line of walls hemming New House and Old House, staying just out of musket range, and began hurling abuse at the defenders lining the works. If the threats served to dampen Royalist spirits, then God would surely forgive.
A man in civilian clothing, golden hair sprouting beneath a felt hat, came up from the direction of the ordnance, sweating atop a piebald pony that seemed to struggle with both the gradient and his vast weight. His jowls and midriff wobbled alarmingly as he reined in a dozen yards from Waller, sliding ungracefully out of the saddle, and waddled the last paces to his general. He bowed low. ‘Sir William.’
Waller touched a finger to his hat. ‘Larsson. What news?’
‘The big gatehouse, Sir William?’ Larsson asked in heavily accented English as he swept back an arm to point down at the fortress.
‘You are my chief gun captain, Mister Larsson,’ Waller replied, raking his gaze over the enemy earthworks and mentally gauging its weak points. ‘I did not bring you all the way from Stockholm to ignore your advice. What say you?’
Larsson rubbed his fleshy chin. Blue eyes, deep-set within puffy sockets, swivelled round to regard the Royalist target. ‘Took its lashes well the last time, did it not?’ He shrugged. ‘Still it stands.’
Waller nodded. ‘My thoughts, indeed. And it’ll be empty now, if Lord Paulet has a grain of sense.’
‘So?’
‘So the marquess and his Romish court will be in the New House, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Waller said. ‘Concentrate your fire there.’
Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 40