Black Tom's Red Army

by Nicholas Carter

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  But the rabbit-scuts weren’t about to let Porthcurn throw his weight about. Instead of dispersing to their homes the entire town seemed to have turned out to escort the carriage in to the guildhall.

  The governor, an eager-to-please, round faced gentleman with little in the way of military bearing, had begged and pleaded with Porthcurn not to excite the town any further.

  He had steered the furious Cavalier away from the gate escorted them through the packed streets toward the Guildhall. They paused every now and again, watched the dust-draped coach rattle and roll into the narrow, overhanging streets beyond Southgate.

  “I assure you sir, I had no choice. The men are mutinous, the townsfolk discontented. They are terrified your troops will carry plague here,” Sir Thomas Bridges explained, wringing his hands as Porthcurn fumed and glared.

  “You leave an officer of the King standing beside the gate like a lousy brush salesman,” he accused under his breath. “And then blame your disorders on a few jabbering fishwives?” Porthcurn spluttered. “His Highness Prince…”

  “But Prince Rupert isn’t here, I am,” Bridges countered. “They would have shot me down, the moment I made to open the gates to your men. They weren’t sure about the coach either, fallen officers or no!”

  “Shall I have the coffins opened so your people can see the corpses for themselves?” Sir Thomas’s pale blue eyes widened in horror.

  “Don’t be preposterous! I am the governor sir, appointed by the King’s warrant, and I would thank you to remember that and your place! There are matters here beyond the neat dispositions of the battlefield!”

  Porthcurn’s temper cooled a couple of degrees. Aye, he could see that, looking at the staring, jeering and whispering citizens. They outnumbered the small garrison hundreds to one.

  “We will need quarters for the merchant and his people. And the Roundhead and his dragoons will need close watching.”

  “We had been told Parliament had refused to exchange prisoners after Naseby,” Sir Thomas inquired.

  “They have. But the ruling does not apparently stretch to the dead, or the grievously wounded.” Sir Thomas nodded, looked back over his shoulder as the nervous convoy approached the Guildhall.

  “The merchant and his people can remain here the night. As for the Rebels, I suggest we escort them to the Bridewell.” Porthcurn nodded.

  Sparrow might act the poltroon but he had been keen enough studying the fortifications, let alone his vapouring reinforcements. Poor ignorant farm boys from the Welsh valleys, keen enough to serve the King. Back on their home turf. Not so eager once they had been shipped across the Bristol Channel.

  “Aye. I’ll bring Sparrow in, the rest will follow him. He’s more concerned with his long lost sweetheart than plotting your overthrow sir,” Porthcurn advised.

  Sir Thomas didn’t look convinced. But he had his small troop of horse standing by, alongside the under-strength trained band that formed the backbone of Bath’s garrison.

  Porthcurn watched the carriage trundle past, the merchant, the preacher and the bawling women ensconced within.

  Sparrow was walking his horse, the dragoons closed in tight bringing up the rear.

  The townsfolk did not seem to have twigged that half the scowling horsemen were enemy troops. Probably for the best, it had been a long day and Porthcurn didn’t need the additional aggravation. He took off his hat, rubbed his brow. By God he needed his bed.

  Sparrow looked equally exhausted. And not likely to argue over their sleeping arrangements.

  “Fall your men in behind my escort Sparrow. The Governor has quarters for us, you and yours up the road.”

  He’d been to Bath before now. Did the bastards mean to lock them in the guildhall?

  The Roundhead captain cast a sideways glance at the lopsided palace, bright light spilling from the grand arched windows. Blinking like an owl in the torchlight, he was too exhausted to argue with their accommodation arrangements. He’d be happy lying out with the corpses on the coach, if truth be told.

  “Whatever you say Colonel,” he nodded. Porthcurn sighed with relief.

  “You need your sleep captain. After all, you’re getting married tomorrow,” he grinned.

  “My last night of freedom, in the Bridewell,” Sparrow chuckled.

  “Well at least it’ll keep you out of mischief.”

  By the Guildhall, Bath, July 6, 1645

  “Well I’ll tell you one thing Sparrow. You tell a good tale.” Porthcurn manhandled his jaw, unable to quite make up his mind whether the Roundhead captain had given him God’s own truth (as he had loudly maintained throughout) or been spinning him a yarn. “And you pack a decent punch, for an Englishman.”

  The mood had mellowed somewhat, now the tinkers, tailors and whores who had followed them had been packed off to their own quarters. Candles had guttered in cathedrals of molten wax and the guardhouse cat had sidled in unnoticed.

  Porthcurn and Sparrow were stretched out on the benches either side of the jailer’s plate and bottle-strewn table. They had cast off their boots, reeking feet cooling in the chill night air.

  It was midnight and gone now. The shouting, jeering, catcalls and whistles had died down - all they could hear was the muffled snoring of the troops next door along and mice scuttling in the wainscotting. Muffet, Butcher, Francy Snow had been arguing about anything and everything, their amused overseers sharing pots of beer and platters of cheese.

  The governor, apparently anxious to make what amends he could with his pox and possibly plague-ridden guests, had sent in a leg of cold mutton, plates of pease pudding and a jug of sack for the officers.

  And good bloody riddance.

  Porthcurn and Sparrow had tucked in with gusto, reducing the joint to a bare bone which they had tossed to the turnkey’s drooling mastiff.

  They supped in silence, listening to the soft tramp of the guards in the hallway. They had left the doors ajar, Muffet and Butcher in one cell, Francy Snow’s squad in another and Porthcurn’s men in two more. Half a dozen of Bath’s most notorious neer-do-wells had been evacuated to the cell on the end of the passage.

  “I’ll tell you another thing,” Porthcurn slurred. “Hopton would have had nothing to do with it, even if you’re giving me half-truths.”

  Sparrow shook his head, eyes closed to slits as he let the sack warm his belly.

  “I’d not said he did. This was a private enterprise. Clavincale and Cruickshank running their own private trade, taking a few dozen here, a few dozen there. Who was going to ask any questions about a few missing Roundheads?”

  Porthcurn shook his head at Sparrow’s outrageous anabasis about the West Country. Captured on Roundway, marched off west, sold to a grinning Spanish condottiere for service in Flanders?

  And it had gone downhill from there.

  They had survived and escaped by sea. Returned a few months later in the same Parliamentary man-o-war which had fished them from the channel. Their unauthorised mission to punish the squint-eyed pirate and his wretched crew, burning their rat’s nest base to blood-clotted cinders.

  There wasn’t much left of Penmethock, by the time they had finished with it. Aye, and not many villagers either.

  Sparrow hadn’t spared a single detail. The cocksure colonel’s indulgent smile had slipped, Porthcurn shaking his head as Sparrow recited each volley of shot, every dagger in the dark.

  But he had seen the end result, the snowy fields pooled and splashed with blood. Frozen corpses, aye men women and children and all. Just like Sparrow said.

  “You threw us off the track right enough. We thought at first you’d make for Plymouth.”

  Sparrow shook his head.

  “We kept to the high road, I told you, Sir Gilbert suggested we masquerade as Royalist reinforcements. Seemed like a plan, at the time,” Sparrow said ruefully.

  “Aye, well you would have been shot as spies, right enough, for that alone.” Sparrow grimaced.


  “Ah come on colonel, wasn’t the first time that trick had been used and it won’t be the last.”

  Porthcurn conceded that.

  “Aye well. We almost had you, outside Poole.”

  “Aye. What a bloody march that was.”

  Porthcurn nodded. “I’ve not seen the like, before or since,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “And that damned boat, lifting you off like that,” he held up his hand, finger to thumb. “We were this close.”

  Sparrow yawned like a culverin, narcotically comfortable in the guardroom gloom.

  “The Anne and Joyce, she was called,“ he shook his head. “And here I am, back in Bath. Where I started out, with Morrison’s bloody militia,” he mused.

  Porthcurn remembered the day. Waller’s ambuscade scattered. A sudden descent on the puny fort thrown up by the ford.

  Five minutes and the Roundhead recruits had legged it over the mill race and run for the hills. Waller’s main army deployed on the heights in great black and tan blocks, daring them to do their worst.

  “Aye, we’ve marched half way round the country and ended up back where we started. Well, where you started. I fought up through Cornwall, with Hopton. Stratton. You should have been at Stratton Sparrow, you think Lansdown was bad enough. By God, we must have been overmatched, two, three, four to one. And we still bowled ‘em off that damned ridge. Rabbit holes everywhere,” he remembered with a shake of his head.

  Sparrow drained his cup, lifted his leg to fart. Porthcurn grimaced.

  “Naseby was bigger. I can’t remember how it started - marching around all night and the next thing we knew your boys were hareing up that slope like madmen in May.” He stared into the guttering candle set on the table between them.

  “Their block lined us up, came straight at us. I had my halberd, managed to knock this feller’s pike to one side,“ he mimed the blow with the empty cup. “I caught him a glancing blow, under his helmet rim, right in his throat,“ Sparrow recalled. “Cut him like a round of cheese, blood everywhere.”

  Porthcurn eyed the brooding dragoon, his features flaring red and black and gold in the candlelight.

  “Look what you’ve done, he said. What d’you go and do that for?” Sparrow’s voice not much more than a croak. He glanced at Porthcurn. “He bled out in about a minute, maybe two, his face closer to me than this cup. I couldn’t push him away and he couldn’t fall down because of the crush in behind. I breathed his last breath.” Sparrow lapsed into silence.

  The Cornishman had killed and maimed his fair share of enemy soldiers, but Sparrow’s valediction bore a distinctly chill ring of truth.

  “I had no argument with him, nor he with me,” Sparrow sighed. “What was he, an earl, a duke, a Prince of the blood? No.”

  “We don’t need to be nobility, to serve our rightful King,” Porthcurn countered.

  “And we don‘t need you bloody English down telling us what to do and where to do it either.”

  Sparrow chuckled. “Last time I checked it was you Cornish boys up here telling us what to do.”

  Porthcurn nodded, thinking to himself for a moment.

  “What I can’t understand Sparrow,” he said eventually, “Is why you’re fighting at all. I mean, you’re a daft sort, worrying your head about the feller lined up against you in the middle of a bloody battle. Where would we be if we all charged round saying sorry to every body we left behind?” He sat up, warming to his theme.

  “And you don’t strike me as the praying and ranting kind, like some I’ve come across. Strikes me you and I, well, we’d be good enough neighbours, as long as you didn’t tell me my business, which it strikes me is what your mob have been trying their best to do to their rightful King,” Porthcurn raised his cup, tipped the dregs into his mouth.

  Sparrow raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, maybe that’s where we part company. Because it strikes me,” he said with emphasis, “that if your King had used a bit of common sense he could have come to the table and settled all this years ago. A bit of give and take, like you and me here, and all the rest of it, it’s so much bloody hot air.”

  “The king doesn’t have to bow and scrape to some jumped up MP Sparrow, nor you or me or any other bugger. He’s the King and that’s that. I mean,” he slurred, gesturing with his cup at the thoughtful captain, “say you win the West, say you win the war. What in hell’s name are you going to do with the king then? Set him up like some kind of puppet? Doodling his name on every new law your Puritan candle wasters come up with?”

  Sparrow and his close confederates had debated the point around many a camp fire.

  Gillingfeather had said exile, hinted at worse if Charles continued to resist the inevitable. But nobody had ever taken him seriously. Not until that Spring when they had given the bastard Sparrow’s own company.

  “Things have changed Colonel. Let me tell you,” Sparrow lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Back in Windsor when they rolled all Parliament’s armies into one New Modelled. There are tapsters and wheelwrights in charge of regiments now. Night watchmen in charge of brigades. Okey - our Colonel of dragoons - was a drayman. A bloody drayman. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Aye, the lunatics have taken over the asylum,” Porthcurn snorted.

  “No, it’s more than that. There’s some regiments made up of fellers from the Eastern Association and some of those Northern boys, they have their own soldiers’ committees. Sit about and debate their next order. There’s some, those sea-green fellers, that reckon they’ll finish the war with the vote. The vote,” Sparrow repeated in case Porthcurn hadn’t heard.

  “Balls to that. You’re forgetting half your commanders are all landed gentry same as our lot. They’ll not sign up to that sort of bollocks.”

  Sparrow wasn’t so sure.

  “I saw the army, outside Leicester when your garrison had buggered off. Fifteen, twenty thousand of us, all in red. They didn’t touch ’em as they marched out, never lifted as much of a penny of plunder. Because Black Tom Fairfax and Cromwell, they’re in charge. Properly in charge, d’you know what I mean? Not like before, with Essex and Waller, God bless him. The whole weight of the Commons, the country, the church, choirs of bloody angels. All behind them.”

  Porthcurn frowned.

  “Not the whole country Sparrow. Parts of it, aye, I’ll grant you parts of it.”

  But Porthcurn hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen the army Black Tom and Cromwell and Rainsborough and Okey and Hardress Waller and the rest had brought into being and marched to the field. And held them together when the Royalist attack had been about to tip them all off that ridge.

  This was an army like no other. Like no other he had been in nor fought against.

  An army to be proud of and to be part of. Deep down in your bones.

  “I’ll tell you what…”

  He turned to Porthcurn, but the defiant Cavalier had slipped to one side, his cup spilling from his fingers.

  Dead to the world.

  *************************

  Sir Gilbert Morrison hadn’t enjoyed his usual well-earned rest. Tossing and turning in his poor quarters in the guildhall, running and re-running every scheme and riddle he could think of. He’d burnt all his candles down to the dish, trying to make sense of it all.

  Bella, his little treasure, his golden hope. Dragged back to Bath like a punchdrunk boxer, squinting and peering about like a lost soul in purgatory.

  By God he’d been too soft on her, allowed her far too much rein since her poor splinter of a mother had died when she and Jamie were infants.

  Mary Keziah, God bless her, had taken the girl under her wing, looked after her as if Bella was young Callum’s long-lost sister.

  She’d spent her wedding eve combing and cutting Bella’s hair, dabbing her bruises, fussing over her poor bruised arm.

  Chattering away twenty to the dozen as if by blathering on she’d stop the radically opinionated Bella from getting a word in edgewise.r />
  As if she wouldn’t have to stop and think what they had done to her mistress.

  Mary Keziah had looked up, eyes flashing as if she was sending him signals to do this or do that or say this or say that.

  What did she think he was, an Egyptian sorcerer? Did she think he could read her thoughts?

  Keep your mouth shut, he’d worked that much out. Don’t stare so.

  “There,” Mary Keziah declared, straightening up with her borrowed scissors in one hand and a brush in the other.

  “Good as new!”

  She flashed him another look.

  “Oh aye, good as new, good as new, well done Mary, you’re a miracle worker. Mr Telling, haven’t I always said, our Mary’s a miracle worker. Worth her weight.”

  Telling regarded Bella’s bumptious father, alternately studying the bottom of his wine glass or babbling on regardless.

  “She looks angelic, wouldn’t you say Mr Telling? Like a young novice, about to, er, go..”

  “Into a nunnery, is that what you’ve in mind for me?” Bella inquired.

  “Nunnery? You? Not a bit of it. A nunnery Mr Telling, what would you say to that?”

  The brooding bugger might say quite a lot to that, come to think of it. Sir Gilbert determined to get a hold on himself, stood back and regarded his wayward daughter.

  Mary Keziah had shorn her hair, left not much more than an inch all over. Bella looked horribly vulnerable, as if the very candles could glow right through her. But it was an improvement on last eve that was for sure. Mary had fished her out a new gown from somewhere, a deep and fairly sombre red.

  Made her look very pale. But it was a sight better than the awful brown sack she’d been delivered in.

  What had Telling been thinking of? He studied the big chaplain, hands wringing over his tightly-buttoned doublet.

  Hugo’s elder brother but Sir Gilbert couldn’t discern any resemblance between them.

  Poor Hugo. Bella had always had a soft spot for the lad. Although she hadn’t been able to supply too many details about their wedding.