‘And Broom had his skin flensed,’ Gardner replied, quick as a pistol shot. ‘And then his neck was wrung like a quarrelsome bloody hen. No fear, boy, I’d rather stay unpricked and short-necked, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘But they would not see you, Seek Wisdom,’ Stryker pushed again. ‘Broom was on the road, but you would move in the shadows.’
Gardner’s head shook firmly. ‘I said no, boy, and that’ll be an end to it. Besides, I am too old to traipse off into Cornwall. I was a sprightly lad once,’ he chuckled ruefully, ‘but time is the ultimate traitor.’
There was an uncomfortable silence as a frustrated Stryker paced away, slumping down on a lichen-bright log a short distance along the riverbank. He watched the water meander past, aware of the company’s hopeless isolation.
‘But do you have a man willing to run the badger’s gauntlet?’ Gardner’s voice interrupted his thoughts after a while.
He looked across at the wizened hermit. ‘No, but I would have no difficulty finding such a man.’
Gardner’s eye twitched in his conspiratorial wink. ‘I said I would not take your message myself, boy. I never said I would not help another.’
Peter Tavy, Dartmoor, 5 May 1643
Forrester had ordered the dead buried quickly, eager to have the matter dealt with before the red kites could swoop to feast. They were interred in a lonely corner of the village churchyard. The local vicar had attended the ceremony, joined by a smattering of curious locals, and all had watched in solemn silence as soil was shovelled on to the eighteen waxen bodies. They had been enemies in life, only to share a grave in death.
Neither Forrester nor Payne had welcomed the delay, but such matters were entirely appropriate after so lethal a fight, and they had encouraged the men to take refreshment from the river and food from any local folk kind enough to offer.
‘What’ll become of me?’ the defeated Parliamentarian commander uttered meekly after the grim funeral. Lieutenant Reginald Jays had spent the night locked with his remaining dozen men in one of the rickety outbuildings of the Peter Tavy Inn. He had only been given the chance of sunlight for the burials, and that had been under the kestrel gaze of a squad of Forrester’s musketeers.
‘All depends how willingly you answer my questions,’ Forrester replied, strolling away from the burial site with the grey-coated officer on one flank and Payne on the other.
‘I’ll endeavour to do my best, sir.’
Forrester stopped. ‘Good. Well firstly, I should like to know why in hades’ name you did not encircle the inn.’
Jays lifted a gloved hand to smooth his tiny moustache. ‘I don’t follow, sir.’
‘And therein lays my question. Why did you blunder straight into our front, where we could easily make a stand?’ He was pleased, of course, not to have faced a more able foe, but men had died for the man’s incompetence, and that fact irked him.
Jays flushed, swallowed thickly, inspected his hose. ‘I—I cannot—’
Anthony Payne, looming over both officers, cleared his throat thunderously. ‘How old are you, Mister Jays?’
Lieutenant Jays peered up at Payne as a rabbit might stare at an eagle. ‘Near fifteen, sir.’
Payne looked at Forrester. ‘Seek no further for explanation, sir. It was no deliberate tactic.’
Jays was crestfallen. ‘It is my first command.’
‘Christ on His Cross,’ Forrester hissed angrily. ‘They send boys against us.’ He fixed the lieutenant with a caustic glare. ‘Which regiment?’
‘Merrick’s,’ Jays replied, sounding more like a rebuked child than a leader of men.
‘You’ve cost me dear, Mister Jays.’
Jays managed to meet the Royalist’s eyes. ‘But, sir, did you not win?’
Despite the prevailing sourness of his mood, Forrester felt his face crack in reluctant smile. ‘Impertinent whelp,’ he said, though without conviction. ‘You are now my prisoner, sir. As are your twelve disciples, and that causes me a problem, for I have neither the time nor vigour to waste on your keeping.’
‘You’ll free us?’ Jays asked hopefully.
Payne snorted his amusement.
Forrester shook his head. ‘I’ll do no such thing, Lieutenant. You’ll stay with me until you’re able to secure funds.’
‘Funds, sir?’
Forrester plucked the wide-brimmed hat from his head and fingered the bullet hole in its crown. ‘You owe me a new hat.’ He placed the damaged item back on his head, wincing as the hair moved around his scalped pate. He thanked God the musket-ball had not been a fraction lower.
‘Where do we march, Captain?’ Lieutenant Jays ventured.
‘West to Launceston,’ Forrester replied. There was no need to explain Payne’s imminent departure north to Stratton. ‘Where you will be clapped in irons, I do not doubt.’ He noticed Jays’s bottom lip quiver slightly. ‘But you are a gentleman, so have no fear.’
‘You’ll likely be offered the king’s commission,’ Anthony Payne put in.
Forrester nodded. ‘We need ever more men, Lieutenant Jays. Your best chance of liberty is to switch allegiance.’
Jays was taken aback. ‘But my honour, sir—’
Forrester dismissed the protest with a wave of his hand. ‘There is no honour in war, young man. The quicker you learn that, the longer you’ll live. But enough of this. You’ll come back to Launceston as my prisoner, and there you will be dealt with accordingly. Your presence will necessarily hinder our progress, so I would warn you that any trouble from you or your men will not be tolerated.’
With that, Forrester looked pointedly from Jays to Payne. The Parliamentarian stared up at the colossal Cornishman with dumbstruck awe. ‘Good,’ Forrester added, satisfied that his intimation had been understood.
‘Best get moving,’ Anthony Payne muttered. ‘Dusk soon.’
‘Right enough,’ Forrester agreed. ‘Let us cover a mile or two before dark, eh?’
Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor, 5 May 1643
Twilight saw the now established routine play out. Stryker’s pikemen – pots, breastplates, and pikes stacked in the avenue – set about taking their familiar positions all around the higher parts of the tor. Some stood on the vast stacks at the very summit, others on the obelisks fringing the crest, and many on the smaller granite heaps further down the slopes. They were the lookouts, the men who would raise the alarm if an enemy advance was spotted. Down on the lowest climbs, and, to the south-east, around the breastworks made by the tumbledown village, Stryker’s musketeers stood in wait, staring out into the grey ether, occasionally blowing on cords of match to keep the crucial embers alive.
Yet, on the plain to the west of the tor there was new activity. Five men snaked, single file and silent, through the network of bushes and stone that pocked the area at the foot of the hill. Four of them were soldiers, boots thudding and weapons clinking in the deathly silence, but they were led by a cadaverous figure with the hair and beard of a pagan druid, the clothes of a beggar, and the name of a Puritan.
Seek Wisdom and Fear the Lord Gardner had promised to show Stryker the secret of his ability to approach the tor unseen, for it would prove, he claimed, the way a message might be carried to the Royalist high command. Stryker had been incredulous, but he, Skellen, Burton, and Barkworth had followed the former priest into the darkness nevertheless.
After several minutes picking their way slowly over the perfidious terrain, Gardner came to a halt at a dense thicket of bracken. He glared, wide-eyed, at the four men in turn, raising a spindly finger to his lips to urge a complete hush. Thus satisfied, he eased his way into the undergrowth, parting the bracken at his waist. The rustle of foliage seemed unnaturally loud in the still night, and every man winced as he followed the path cut by the Welshman.
Stryker was last through the bracken, coming to a standstill at the thicket’s epicentre. To his surprise the ground here was cluttered with flat, pale stones. They were set in a wide circle, and he realized that t
his was no accident of nature. ‘What is this?’
Gardner’s blue eyes twinkled in the wan moonlight. ‘An ancient place,’ he whispered softly. ‘A secret of the old Britons, the ones the cursed English chased all the way into Wales and Scotland, and across the Tamar, of course.’
Burton was staring down at the stone circle. ‘Some kind of tomb?’
Gardner clicked his fingers. ‘You have it, boy. They call it a cist in these parts. But this is more than a tomb, I can assure you.’ With that, the hermit paced to the cist’s heart and dropped to a crouch, digging fingertips beneath a stone that was larger than the rest. In a flash he had prized the flat tablet of granite away from the earth, revealing a gaping patch of blackness. ‘Much more.’
Sergeant Skellen moved to take a look. ‘Well I’ll be a Tom O’Bedlam.’ He looked back at Stryker. ‘A tunnel.’
‘Goes off west,’ Gardner elaborated, pointing to the woodland that concealed Wild’s large barn. ‘Its twin hides in those trees. I’ll lead your man through.’
Stryker moved to take a look for himself. The mouth of the tunnel was less than a man’s pace across. ‘It’s narrow.’
Gardner nodded. ‘See now why I said your man would have to be a littl’un?’ The Welshman had been adamant that whoever was chosen would have to be slight of frame. Stryker had been bewildered by the request, but had acquiesced all the same. ‘On land your brawn keeps you alive. Down there it’ll see you dead.’ Gardner glanced up at Skellen. ‘Imagine old spider-limbs crawlin’ down there, boy.’
‘P’raps not, eh?’ Skellen grunted.
‘I am to go,’ Barkworth’s voice, ordinarily a virtual whisper, croaked from the edge of the cist. ‘I am the smallest,’ he looked at Skellen, ‘and the bravest. Besides, I cannot stay on this fucking tor any longer.’
Gardner beckoned him to the centre of the stone circle. ‘I’ll take you as far as the woods, then you are on your own. It’ll be risky once you’re out in the open, boy, for the badger’s eyes are everywhere, but if you move with guile you might just make it beyond the hills.’
‘Shall we?’ Barkworth said quickly, perhaps before he could think too deeply upon the matter. He moved around the cist, shaking the hand of each of his comrades, before returning to the tunnel’s entrance and following the hermit to his knees. ‘Launceston, then.’
Stryker stared down at him through the gloom, even as Gardner vanished from view. ‘Aye. Head due west, but beware of Tavistock. We cannot know which side holds it.’
‘I’ll have a care, sir.’
‘All’s well, then. Pick up the road west of Tavistock. It will take you all the way home. Find Colonel Mowbray. Get some men out here with all haste.’
Barkworth began to slide into the tunnel. ‘And if Mowbray refuses?’
‘Then fetch Captain Forrester.’
Simeon Barkworth flashed a final, sharp-toothed grin, and was gone.
CHAPTER 13
The Barn Near Gardner’s Tor, Dartmoor, 6 May 1643
Witch-finder Osmyn Hogg slurped steaming pottage from his wooden spoon. Some of it dripped on to his cloak, congealing in a mealy blob, and he hurriedly rubbed at it with a sleeve.
‘Here, sir,’ José Ventura leapt up from his place at the little fire outside the building’s double doors. ‘I have cloth.’
Hogg waved the Spaniard away. ‘No matter, José. Sit.’
Ventura did as he was told, returning to his cross-legged position on the rotten log, but his face spoke of confusion. Hogg was not surprised, for Ventura had seen him fly into a rage for less than spilt pottage, but today he did not mind. Did not care for such trivialities. ‘I am sanguine, señor. Sit and finish your breakfast.’
Indeed, today Osmyn Hogg was in a positively buoyant mood.
The hanging had gone almost to plan. Not perfectly, he had to admit, for part of him had expected Stryker to be handed over as soon as Broom’s body ceased its thrashing, but some vestige of loyalty from his men was to be expected, he supposed. One thing that was not in doubt, however, was the imminent delivery of the fiend into Wild’s – and, by turns, Hogg’s – hands. Soldiers were rough men, hard and inured to fear, but, in Hogg’s experience, they were often remarkably Godly creatures. As if a life of fighting and killing, of plundering and whoring, made such men more sensitive than most to their lot in the afterlife. These were the kind of men who would not wish to harbour a witch.
It had been Hogg, of course, who had suggested Stryker as a potential collaborator to Otilwell Broom. The man had bled that night, screamed as Ventura and his needle had sought a witch’s mark Hogg knew would never be found, and, eventually, he had talked. He had admitted of his involvement with the men on the little tor. Had blurted information about their strength, their provisions, their strategy. He had even muttered something about a girl being trapped up there with the malignants. Stryker’s bitch, no doubt. And, simply to get the pain to stop, Broom had signed a piece of blood-spattered vellum that declared his compact with Lucifer. When Hogg had initially put his quill to the confession, Stryker’s was the only name he had thought to scratch, but Ventura had suggested they include the girl, and Colonel Wild had mentioned that a dwarflike beast marched with the king’s men. Both, Hogg had decided, would be worth adding to the pot, if only to bring a note of authenticity to the charge.
It was a shame, Osmyn Hogg inwardly accepted, that Broom should have to die in such a manner. Judging by the man’s hair and clothes, he had doubtless been a Godless rakehell, but he was no witch. The death, as with Hogg’s every thought since that fateful meal in Okehampton, came down to one thing only. One person.
‘Stryker.’
José Ventura glanced up from his piping bowl. ‘Señor?’
Hogg shook his head as though it were full of wasps. ‘Nothing.’ It had been a surprise even to him that he had uttered the word out loud. Such was the power the knave’s very name had over him, he supposed. He took another tentative sip of pottage, pushed the beads of barley about his mouth with his tongue, and swallowed slowly. ‘I said Stryker.’
Ventura looked at him, fleshy jowls tremulous as he nodded. ‘What of him, señor?’
‘He is an evil man, José.’
Ventura nodded again. ‘I know this, señor. You tell me of his cavort with witches.’
Hogg closed his eyes, throwing his mind back a decade to an unassuming little place called Podelwitz. ‘One witch in particular.’
Ventura sniffed derisively. ‘Germany full of such wenches.’
‘This one was English, José. She followed the armies as did we.’
‘You were priest then?’
‘I was,’ confirmed Hogg. ‘And I know what you must think. A whore, and nothing more. But she was so much more. A consummate seductress. Luring men to sin with her wiles.’ And what wiles, he thought, guiltily. He remembered catching her with the young novice, Jerome. Remembered walking into the lad’s chamber to see him thrusting and grunting at her naked, glistening behind. Remembered that he had grown instantly hard, unable to tear his gaze from her exquisite buttocks. And she had looked back at him then, glancing over her slender shoulder with the most coquettish of smiles, and shot him a wink that told him she could read his very mind.
Hogg swallowed thickly, though there was no pottage in his mouth. ‘She brought one of my novices to sin. To ruin in the eyes of God. Would have done the same to me had I not been strong in faith.’
Ventura peered at Hogg for a short time, expression contemplative. ‘He give you your limp?’
Hogg subconsciously put a hand to his hip, rubbing the area that still ached after all these years. Stryker, the witch-helping, faithless obstructer of justice, had shot him in the rump without so much as a second thought. The memory, the hatred, the need for vengeance rankled within the witch-finder even now. ‘Aye,’ was all he managed to say.
‘We will get him,’ José Ventura said matter-of-factly. ‘We will get him and he will swing.’
‘I pray so,’ Hogg s
aid, and that was all too true. He had prayed for Stryker’s demise every night for eleven years. And now, on this bleak plain in a far-flung corner of England, justice would finally be done.
Inside the barn Colonel Gabriel Wild spoke soothing words to his big stallion. The troop’s horses had been stabled in here since the prisoner’s execution, and, though the place was now empty for them, the stench of old blood had clearly unsettled the flighty beasts.
Christ, he thought, but there had been a lot of blood. Broom had squealed like a stuck boar, the blubbery Spaniard had grinned like a hideous ghoul, Hogg had kept a face of stone, and the floor and walls had been stained crimson. But at least Broom had talked. He had signed Hogg’s damned confession, pleasing the witch-hunter, and, more importantly, he had confirmed that morale in Stryker’s camp was at a low ebb.
‘We’ll go in soon,’ Wild said.
Welch, the dragoon captain sent by Collings, was seeing to his own mount nearby. He left the beast and went to stand at Wild’s flank. ‘Sir?’
Wild stared at the pinch-faced dragoon. ‘I said we will attack soon, Captain.’
Welch frowned. ‘Mister Hogg believes they will surrender of their own accord.’
‘Then Mister Hogg is a fool,’ Wild sneered. ‘He believes they’ll stroll down that bloody slope like reproached children.’ He chuckled at the thought. ‘But he forgets that I have faced Stryker before. He is a swash-and-buckler out of the classic mould, as are the men at his command. Mark me well, Captain, there will be a fight before this is done.’
‘Then—’ Welch began, but his words trailed off to nothing.
‘Then what? Speak plain, sir.’
‘Then why did you allow him to hang the prisoner, sir?’
Wild considered the question for a moment. ‘Because the prisoner signed a confession stating that he is a witch, and that puts him under Hogg’s justice.’
Hunter's Rage: Book 3 of The Civil War Chronicles Page 24