Black Tom's Red Army

by Nicholas Carter

“By whom?” Telling asked, giving the grinning sergeant a suspicious look.

  “Master Eagleton conceives we must have some consideration for her care, it being our fault she was caught up in the rout.”

  Telling could see the logic of that, at least. The disgraceful rampage through the Royalist baggage area didn’t sit well with their loudly proclaimed crusade.

  “I am surprised and delighted Master Eagleton has found the time to make inquiries after my sister-in-law’s welfare.”

  Sparrow grinned.

  “And her whereabouts,” he added, in case the shifty eyed chaplain hadn’t taken the point.

  “Recovering as best she may, in a farmhouse nearer the field,” Telling replied with the vaguest of shrugs down the Northampton road.

  “Farmhouse?”

  “Farmhouse, aye.” He wasn’t going to elaborate on her whereabouts then. Sparrow tried to catch the chaplain’s eyes, but they were everywhere and nowhere.

  “And no word of her husband, your brother,” Sparrow inquired. Telling bristled.

  “I have not seen or heard from my brother for a year or more. I don’t imagine corresponding with me is high on his list of priorities at this moment,” he said without a breath of humour.

  “Indeed. Will Miss Morrison...”

  “Mistress Telling. She and my brother were married more than a year ago,” Edward said curtly. Sparrow blocked the horrific detail from his consciousness.

  “Will Mistress Telling, will she recover?”

  Telling pursed his fleshy lips. Sparrow could have caught him one there and then but striking a clergyman was a hanging offence in this man’s army.

  God knows just about everything else was.

  “She has quite possibly fractured her forearm. We were concerned she had also broken her jaw, but it is merely bruised. She has lost a couple of teeth. Severe bruising about her abdomen,” his voice cracked a little. Sparrow caught his wandering eye for a moment, perfectly tuned to his thoughts.

  Sparrow imagined him taking particular care around her abdomen. But it was unfair to judge the preacher man – Sparrow knew full well he would have been exactly the same given the opportunity. He’d had enough opportunities in the past.

  “Your interest in my sister-in-law’s welfare is…”

  “I have known Miss…I have known Bella,” he corrected, “since childhood. I worked for her father.”

  “Sir Gilbert.”

  “Indeed. I wonder how we can resolve her care, both of us facing pressing duty with the army,” Sparrow inquired archly. Telling considered this.

  “I will continue to supervise her care from headquarters. She is not yet fit to travel.” Sparrow had no particular grounds to object to that. He could hardly have her brought to army headquarters, rigged up in some kitchen garden in Harborough.

  “I imagine we’re marching for Leicester on the morrow. I would appreciate being informed of her condition and whereabouts. So I can pass on full details to Master Eagleton. He was most anxious to take ownership of her care.”

  Telling raised his chin a notch.

  “And I suppose, a letter for Tell…for her husband, informing him of his wife’s whereabouts, in, where did you say?”

  “A farmhouse, safe enough for now.”

  Sparrow frowned. Short of drawing his sword, he wasn‘t going to get a whole lot more from the brute. Maybe Eagleton would find the necessary powers of persuasion back at headquarters?

  “I will see to it. Good morning to you sir.” Telling fixed his hat, turned and strode off after Hugh Peters and the rest of them, already half way down the street.

  Sparrow bristled with impatience. But he couldn’t think of any further role in the squalid affair.

  Bella had married the snot-nosed brat, wherever in hell he’d got to. And now she had the brat’s self-righteous brother to watch over her. Sparrow didn’t trust that swivel-eyed hypocrite either.

  But he couldn’t chase around every farm between here and Naseby looking for her. He had a pass from Eagleton at headquarters, but not a warrant to launch a personal manhunt around Northamptonshire.

  He recovered his reins and swung himself up into the saddle, completely at a loss what to do next.

  *************************

  A dozen miles back, they were still clearing the battlefield. And the trampled pathways leading away from the abandoned Royalist positions.

  “Here’s another one!” A bored cavalryman called over his shoulder, rolling one of the anonymous bodies away from the wall.

  The dead man’s ripe shirt was soaked through with blood, no wonder the villagers had left him. Nasty looking wound at the back of his neck, sword cut at a high angle.

  The trooper could see gleaming white backbone in the congealed blood. He grimaced, wiped his hands on the front of the dead man’s shirt. His doublet, breeches and hose were long gone, as was his belt, baldric and any purse he might have carried.

  Longish hair, but all that proved was he wasn’t some foul-mouthed London apprentice. His beard was matted with blood, dust and grit scored into wax-work features.

  Another trooper appeared, leaning out of the saddle to look down at the body. They had found him in the kitchen gardens behind Marston Thrussel’s main street.

  One of the dozen or so who had made it that far. The bodies were still logjammed in the main street all the way up to the church. They had not gotten any further, caught like rabbits in a sack by the Roundhead pursuit.

  “One of theirs?”

  “Hard to tell without his coat, but we didn’t lose no bugger chasing ‘em in here, so yes. Didn’t see him when we came round their flank.”

  “He could have worked his way down that alley yonder,” the mounted man suggested.

  The first man straightened, staring down at the corpse. Didn’t look much like the fire-breathing cavaliers they had read so much about in the newsbooks.

  The second trooper gestured across the field to his sergeant, escorting one of the Royalist prisoners around the squalid graveyard.

  A couple of dozen of their comrades had been cornered in the dead end street, cut off and hacked down. Survivors clubbed to their knees as they tried to run. Another half dozen had made it out into the meadow beyond before being hemmed in by the Roundhead horsemen.

  The sergeant strode over, peered at the dead man. The Royalist cornet looked ready to drop, a dirty bandage tied around his head, grimy features streaked with tears. Too big for his boots and shaky on his feet.

  “Recognise him?”

  “No. Can’t say I do,” the prisoner said wearily.

  “Your regiment?”

  “How should I know?”

  The sergeant turned, waved at the villagers waiting nervously by the cottages. The bastards had been there first, stripped the Royalist dead to their drawers. Almost impossible to identify any of them now.

  “Bring the cart over, there’s another one here,” he called, wiping his gauntlet across his forehead. Hot work, burying the dead.

  Hugo Telling, waxy, cold and broken, was way beyond caring.

  By Leicester and elsewhere, June 18, 1645

  The world had been turned upside down. Aye, and inside out. The endlessly debated summer strategy, so long in preparation, had unravelled within hours.

  Prince Rupert needed no lengthy explanations as to who would stand blame for the disaster. For the loss of the king’s marching army.

  Their only success that threadbare summer, the storming of Leicester. Challenged to do his worst by the defiant garrison Rupert had done just that - unleashing the horror of the storm on the cosy Roundhead stronghold.

  The Midlands had been given a small taste of the medicine administered on the continent. Pitiless slaughter, ravishment, pestilence.

  Rupert would have wagered that Parliament had lost as many men defending Leicester as they had at Naseby fight. The bloody highwater mark of the King’s summer campaign.

  The defenders - a mixed bag judging by the mobs of scowli
ng prisoners they had taken - had made Rupert pay in blood for every wall, every gate, every blind alley.

  Maybe that’s why the victorious Royalists had extracted such a weregild from the defenders and the dumbstruck inhabitants. The Scots regiment which had marched in to stiffen the garrison had paid particularly heavily for their determined resistance.

  Bare weeks later the Royalists had marched out on the one-way street which led them to Naseby. The townsfolk maintained the thatch was still smouldering when the fugitives, vagabonds and lost horsemen returned bare hours later.

  The King and his retainers had stayed long enough to brief the Governor and ridden on, leaving the surviving townsfolk with the clothes they stood in and not much more.

  It was enough to make the King’s most optimistic counsellor tear his hair in frustration.

  They were already at one another’s throats, conniving with the few friends and allies they had left.

  And all the blame for those errors and harebrained escapades which had marked the summer campaign had been lain unfairly and squarely at Rupert’s door.

  He had insisted the Royalists confront the New Noddle before it had found its feet, insisted they charge uphill against almost double their own strength, insisted the most effective element of the King’s army spent most of the battle miles away circling the defiant Roundhead baggage train.

  Rupert, in a towering temper, heard and saw all. Noted the way the king had chosen to overlook his presence as if he was some snot-nosed ensign desperate to impress.

  Digby and Ashburnham had the king’s ear now and weren’t about to let Rupert bleat his excuses anywhere near his majesty.

  Instead, he brooded in his headquarters, boots spread by the hearth, a glass of sack gripped in his elegantly tapered artist’s fingers.

  His brother Maurice and his friend De Gomme were sharing another bottle at the small table, their eyes already sliding sideways with sheer exhaustion, papers and a rough map of the disastrous battle spattered with spilled wine.

  Twenty miles they had ridden, enough to open a small breathing space between themselves and the crowing rebel horse. Now, a couple of hours to grab some sleep while they could.

  Rupert’s secretary had spent an hour and more detailing the disaster, in case the Prince had failed to register the calamity which had overtaken them.

  “…Sir James Baskerville dead. Ensign Potts taken. Thirty troopers slain outright and at least three score missing. As to your highness’s foot, the tale makes grim reading. All the colours lost. All senior…” Rupert held up his hand, wearied by the deadly roll call.

  His secretary paused over his notes, his spectacles pinched to the end of his nose.

  “Enough. My lifeguard scattered if not slaughtered. Would we could report the same for the foot.”

  In truth Prince Rupert’s bluecoats had been massacred. Their fierce resistance had cost them as it had cost the Scots in Leicester. Getting on for five thousand of their fellows had taken quarter. The Bluecoats had been cut down to the last dozen.

  The King’s marching army, carefully collected from a score of hard-pressed garrisons, lost at a stroke.

  Marston Moor had cost them the north, Naseby the centre.

  It was only in the far west Charles had any hope of fielding another army fit to take on the New Model.

  But Charles wouldn’t listen and they were still heading north west.

  To where? To what? To whom?

  Better to negotiate now, while they still held something. If the King maintained his stubborn refusal to see reason, he risked losing all. Exile, ruin, the wandering shade of the courts of Europe.

  But he hadn’t dare broach the subject with his uncle. Not while Digby and the rest had his elbow and ear. Filling his Majesty’s head with fantasies.

  “On a more positive note,” Rupert’s secretary continued carefully, “We have to hand letters from a dozen and more officers seeking permission to transfer into your highness’s regiment of horse.”

  The usual crop of chancers, drooling for the opportunity to show off their martial abilities in the Prince’s lifeguard. Hopeless liabilities for the most part.

  Rupert closed his eyes, picturing the eager young faces. By Christ’s bones he had seen enough of them come and go these last three years. He flicked his hand, the reflected fire chasing shadows around his glass.

  “Agreed. Sign their commissions.”

  Beggars couldn’t be choosers. Aye, and they would all be begging before the year was out.

  “I fear your highness’s regiment of foot will prove rather more difficult to replace.”

  The understatement of the war, Rupert thought.

  “There will be time enough for that, once we are in the West. Recruiting here,” he shook his head, “we will lose three quarters before we have completed our march.”

  West? They were still in the Midlands. Hurrying like tinkers across Roundhead territory.

  Had His Majesty lost his bearings as well as his will to fight to the end of all?

  The secretary drew another line through his hastily scrawled agenda.

  “A letter from Thomas Winter, lieutenant with the Newark horse.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “Reporting the loss of his father, Sir George Winter. Colonel of horse.”

  Rupert took another mouthful of sack, rolled the liquid about his mouth.

  “I know the fellow. Dead you say?”

  “No sire, he fell from his horse during the flight…the withdrawl,” the secretary corrected smoothly. He selected a second note, scanned the long list of names.

  “He is among the prisoners notified by his excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax.”

  Fairfax.

  Rupert sighed. A man of honour, assuredly. One of the finest soldiers he had ever fought.

  And blessed by the Gods of war, to judge by his punishing progress across his uncle’s broken-backed kingdom. He had glimpsed him from a distance, upright and proud in his darkly rusted armour, an unusual lobster pot helmet with crosswise bars across the face as well as the usual nasal bars.

  His very own doppleganger in a rich red suit.

  “And his son seeks permission to take command of his father’s regiment?”

  “No my lord. A transfer to the lifeguard.”

  Rupert’s sworn companions. Chosen men.

  “Add his name to my regiment of horse,” Rupert instructed.

  “Young Winter is quite specific. He asks to be given Captain Telling’s command, following his unfortunate fall during the rout of His Majesty’s...”

  Rupert opened his eyes, glanced up at the secretary.

  “Telling? He was with the baggage. We left him behind.”

  The conniving rogue. Bearing tittletat and tales to the Queen, to Digby, Goring and all the rest of the God-damned crew. Rupert’s mind leapt.

  “Fall? Is he dead, wounded, which?”

  “Dead, according to young Winter. Says he saw him fall during the flight…the pursuit. At the village called Marston Thrussel. The lane proved to be a dead end…”

  Rupert had heard some of the bloody details. Another regiment ruined. A hundred and more horse lost or taken.

  “Captain Telling dead? Is this confirmed? His name wasn’t on the list.”

  “We had no word of his fall, until this from young Winter. He volunteers himself for your lifeguard in his place.”

  Rupert was fully awake in a moment. Telling dead? If this were so, he might have taken his imagined secrets to the grave. But he had never acted alone – the flirtgill girl had been involved from the start. Just as much, or perhaps as little, as the absent captain himself.

  Telling had been toting the strumpet around with his saddlebags since the siege of Gloucester. He had damn near ridden them down in the woods outside the besieged town while he rode out to meet Mary. Duchess of Richmond. Wife of one of his few friends at court. Not that it was anybody’s business but his own.

  He had nothing to hide. He would ha
ve killed to protect her honour. They had merely arranged to speak in private after dark. Who could have found fault with that?

  But by some mischance they had managed to select one of the busiest spots in all Gloucestershire judging by the midnight tumults he had been caught up in. He groaned at the memory. Compromising her honour and his own and for what?

  A childish crush?

  The absent captain and the turncoat’s daughter had been busy about complex trysts of their own, and had apparently witnessed Rupert’s clumsy encounter.

  What the queen would have given for some evidence of his dalliance. It would have destroyed his close friendship with the Duke of Richmond. Besmirched his spotless reputation.

  He could not afford to have her name or his dragged through the Gloucestershire mud by rapscallions like Telling.

  The captain and his bewitching sweetheart had fluttered about his lantern like velveteen moths ever since. Carrying tales to the Queen, to Digby as well he shouldn’t wonder.

  Telling had never mentioned the incident, nor given any hint or clue as to his motive or intent. But Rupert didn’t trust him or the girl.

  Rupert remembered the strumpet’s rumbustuous rogue of a father, that blathering turncoat, what was his name, Morrison?

  He had woven more webs than a tower full of spiders and had attempted to embroil the Prince in his sorry shenanigans on more than one occasion.

  The answer? To send them on some fool’s errand to Scotland? No, Rupert had kept the plotters close by, where he could keep an eye on them.

  Rupert had appointed Telling to his own lifeguard. Kept him on the shortest leash.

  The Queen had gotten to the girl before he could think of a use for her. She had appointed Miss Morrison to Mary’s personal retinue to watch over Rupert’s beloved and totally untouchable companion.

  For once Queen Henrietta Maria’s stratagems had proved as clumsy as a drunk with a cudgel, advertising her intentions with none of her usual low cunning. He had sent word to Mary to be well aware of her new lady in waiting’s true purpose and intentions.

  He had barely spoken with the Duchess of Richmond since, so there had been little for the lovestruck spies to report back on.