Pistoleer: Edgehill

by Smith, Skye

  Since Teesa liked to ride by 'thinking' her horses along, rather than using exaggerated signals like other people, it had taken him a while to learn how to control Femke. Eventually he realized that by preparing his own body for the action he expected of Femke, she knew what to do. The subtle change in his own balance and position and grip in preparation for an increase of speed, would be noticed by Femke and she would oblige by stepping up her pace. If not, then you could always use the reins ... one handed of course, but what fun was that compared to playing mind reading games with a horse.

  There was one bit of training that Femke did not have, and why would a mare named 'Peace'" know it. Daniel had to train her to the sound of his pistol. Though it cost him most of a powder horn, he did this training as they traveled endlessly south by south-west to pass halfway between the parliamentary stronghold of London and the royalist stronghold of Oxford. Once she more or less ignored gunfire, he taught her how to charge and turn. A pistoleer's caracole charge ended in a quick stop and a tight right angle turn, a half a moment of stillness while the pistol was fired, the completion of the U turn, and then a leap to a run now that the pistol was emptied.

  It wasn't until he was almost to Wells that he realized that Femke must have been the trick pony Teesa had been training for showing off her riding skills. He found this out one day when for some reason he said "Up" and the mare, despite his weight, rose up on her hind legs and held the pose for a moment. Femke knew word commands. That made sense for when Teesa was doing her stand-hands-free-on-the-saddle trick, her horse had to obey word commands.

  He tried out other verbal commands such as 'walk' and 'trot' and 'left' but to no avail, and then he realized that 'up' in English was similar in sound to the Frisian equivalent 'op'. Of course Teesa would use Frisian words so the mare would not be confused in English crowds. He tried 'valka' and she walked; 'renni' and she ran; 'riucht' and she turned right, and 'luf' turned her left. The cunning lass had put a lot of time and effort into training Femke, and she would be furious that he had taken her. His pot had just risen from half full to overflowing.

  The old town of Wells was a madhouse of men, horses, carts and supplies. He had arrived just as the Earl of Bedford had learned that the Earl of Hertford's royalist forces had fortified Sherborne, a castle town south of Wells near Yeovil. No one at headquarters seemed to have heard of a Captain Blake, but he did find out that Colonel John Horner and his cousin Alex Popham were with Colonel Strode in Shepton Mallet. He also learned that the evil Colonel Lunsford had withdrawn from Wells with the Earl of Hertford and Colonel Hopton.

  The most disturbing news was from a stable lad who mentioned that the royalist general, the Earl of Hertford, was the brother-in-law of the parliamentarian's captain-general the Earl of Essex. Every time he heard things about how related the leaders of both sides were it made his blood run cold. In the Netherlands the continuous wars had torn families apart, and had brothers and cousins killing brothers and cousins. Was this now to happen in England?

  It seemed that on either side one had to be a Lord to be given a rank higher than a Colonel. To be a parliamentary Colonel meant you were a sitting MP, whereas a king's Colonel meant you had been knighted. Or so it seemed. He was a bit dubious about the army he saw being staged for the march towards Sherborne. There were a lot of them, thousands of them, but they all looked more like lads on a lark than soldiers. On the bloody brutal battlefields of the Netherlands none of them would last an hour.

  Daniel was quick to quit Wells and hurry the six miles east to Shepton Mallet. The town had been under siege just the week before and it looked it. Crops were trampled or eaten, there were no animals other than the army horses, and there was no woman under thirty, certainly no attractive women. When he finally found Strode, he had a shock, for he did not recognize the man. It was not the rebellious William Strode with the farm near to Plymouth, but a different man completely, William Strode of Shepton Mallet. A year ago he had helped to rescue the Strode of Plymouth from Ralph Hopton and he had assumed that this Strode, who also needed rescuing from Hopton, was the same man. He was wrong.

  After saying his apologies to this new Colonel Strode, and explaining the confusion, he then found out that a Captain Blake had never been to this town, but that Alex Popham had been. Supposedly Blake had been riding with Popham. Unfortunately no one knew the current whereabouts of Popham other than he was out there scouting the countryside somewhere between Wells and Sherborne. Daniel left Shepton by a steep trail to the north that took him up to the ridge of the surrounding Mendlip hills. Once to the top he could use his spectacle looker to spy out the land and watch for columns of mounted men.

  He followed the ridge to the south east and perhaps three miles further along he came to an ancient hill fort on a south facing knoll above a string of small villages in the valleys below. He didn't bother crossing the grassed over earthen defensive rings to gain the center of the fort because by riding along the southern edge he had a better view. Through his spectacle lenses the villages below looked dour, likely due to the grey stone that they used for building. It made him shiver to think of how cold the houses would be in the winter, and wondered if the folk were as grey as their buildings. He decided to roll out his bedroll within the fort's rings so that in the morning he could use this knoll to take his bearings before setting out.

  Any thought that he may spend a lonely night up there on the knoll were short lived, for the locals of the surrounding villages had already set up a camp within the defensive rings. Or at least the women and children of the villages had set up camp. With them were their animals, even ducks and chickens. At first they were fearful of the arrival of the well armed pistoleer, but Daniel assured them that he was simply looking for a lost friend who may have been injured around Shepton Mallet.

  Eventually an old woman believed his story enough to ask him for a description of his friend. That was easy. "He is a short man, not much above five feet, with dark hair and about forty years of age. He would have had saddle holsters like mine, and chest armour like mine. His name is Robert Blake. One of the Blakes of Bridgwater."

  The description did not remind any of these frightened folk of any man they had seen, but it did end in him being invited to share their meal of French bean and barley stew. The French of course, meant that there were chewy chunks of horse meat in it. No sense in wasting good meat even if it had died in battle.

  Like most folk around Shepton, these folk were against the king. Not that they were for parliament, mind you. Most of the stories they told him were about losing animals and crops to the king's army, who refused to pay for what they took and claimed it was their right under the king's Commission of Array. Between the stories, Daniel pieced together the big picture of what had happened around Shepton Mallet over the past weeks.

  The William Strode of Shepton was the wealthiest wool and cloth merchant in town and so had been made the Lord Lieutenant of the local militia. Daniel had been wrong in thinking that Ralph Hopton was from Cornwall for he was actually from a wealthy Somerset family and was now the MP for Wells. Apparently Strode and Hopton were old rivals and hated each other. The trouble began when the Earl of Hertford put his royalist headquarters in Wells. He sent his officers out all around to read the Commission and thereby demand men and animals for the service of the king. If men and animals were not volunteered, they were pressed into service and dragged back to Wells.

  When Hopton came to Shepton Mallet to read the Commission, he was interrupted by Strode with his sons and some local men. A fight began between the two leaders, which ended in a standoff, so Hopton retreated from the town and made camp outside it so he could prey on the surrounding area. Meanwhile Strode called out his militia. When Hopton came back into Shepton the next morning he was met by a mass of men who had walked in from the surrounding area.

  "They liked Strode so much?" Daniel asked the young cooper's wife who had told him most of this. She had a two year old in her lap and a newborn on her
breast. His words caused everyone sitting on the grass around him to fall over laughing.

  "We hate the stingy bugger, but at least he was trying to stop the king from taking our men and animals. The day our men walked into Shepton was the first night we slept up here."

  "So then what?" Daniel asked.

  "Hopton returned to Wells, beating or killing any man who would not join him in the service of the king. Meanwhile the locals were still streaming into Shepton. A few days later there was a bit of a battle between Wells and Shepton halfway betwixt at the village of Croscombe, heaven help those villagers. Over the next week the king's men began leaving Wells, and the Dorchester militia marched north to help Shepton."

  Another young mum spoke up. "I heard that the Dorchester militia were ambushed and lost twenty men to one cavalry charge. How dreadful. All those young widows. I do hope there will be peace soon. All the Somerset militias have been called to Wells to join with our local militia, so the king's men have must have given up any idea of holding Wells. We didn't see any columns of men and carts marching from Wells towards Wraxhall to use the ancient road south, so the king's men must have gone by way of Glastonbury."

  "Twenty men dead from Dorchester, you say?" Daniel asked, suddenly worried for his friend, "Are you sure they were all from Dorchester?"

  "Oh aye,” said a better dressed woman, a town women. "They brought news to Shepton about how in Dorchester they had beheaded a Catholic Priest and had used his head in a football match." Everyone grinned at the morbid story.

  Daniel's heart sank at the sound of the snickers. The violence was spreading, and the stories of unfair violence, whether true or not, would put vengeance into the minds of peaceful folk. He had seen all of this before, along the borders of the Netherlands. The folk there had become so hardened by the endless violence that their personal values had become twisted and deadly vengeance had become the law, even for petty crimes.

  As evening drew closer he took one last look out from high on the knoll before he lost the light. There seemed to be activity at Wells which he assumed would be the first of Bedford's army to move south towards the new royalist stronghold at Sherborne. They seemed to be making for the village of Wraxall, probably so they could march south along the absolutely straight road that passed through that village.

  Early the next morning Daniel joined some of the old women around the first cooking fire for left over French bean stew and then left the women's camp and the safety of this ancient earthenwork ring. He wondered how many times their ancestors had sought safety up on this knoll. Probably every time an army crossed this land, so countless times, and still the ring served the folk. It caused him to say a prayer of thanks to the ancients who had first created it.

  From the edge of the hill through his looker he could see that no longer could he stay up high in the Mendlip hills, not if he were heading south. The land stretching south from the Mendlip Hills rolled with valleys and hillocks, and while he still had the view of it all he planned out a route that would take him from hillock to hillock so he would at least have some view of each new valley and hamlet on his way. A voice made him take his looker from his eye and reach for his dragon, for he had heard no one approach.

  "This man yer lookin' fer,” the better dressed woman from last night said, "was he with the men from Dorchester. The ones who were attacked?"

  "I don't think so,” Daniel replied after taking a deep breath to calm his heart. "He is from Bridgewater so he would have been coming to help Shepton Mallet from the other direction."

  "But the lads from Dorchester were on their way to cut off the retreat of the king's men from Wells, so they were not using the ancient road through Wraxall." She pointed down into the valley where an absolutely straight road ran south. "They were on the Glastonbury Road that goes through the village of Street. They were attacked just before they reached Cockrod road which runs along Walton Hill towards Bridgwater. What I was told was that they were ambushed at Marshall's Elm farm by cavalry swooping down the hill. Your friend could have easily joined them there from Bridgwater."

  This woman was not from one of the villages below the knoll, but from Shepton, so her news was more reliable. It decided his day. He would not ride south towards Sherborne, but southwest to the village of Street to see if any of the locals were caring for injured men, and then press on to Bridgwater to see if Blake had since made it home again. That gave him another problem. To get to Street he would have to cross the path of the Earl of Bedford's army which would by now be breaking camp to continue their march south to Sherborne. He decided it was safer to double back towards Shepton Mallet and cross to the north of the army, rather than across their path.

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  The Pistoleer - Edgehill by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14

  Chapter 14 - Blake found at Yeovil, Dorset, September 1642

  Only two of Blake's brothers were at the family home in Bridgwater. The other brothers were away doing the same thing as Daniel and searching for Robert. He accepted the offer of a good sleep and good food from them, but left early in the morning to go back to the area around Street and continue his search. If he couldn't find Blake, perhaps he could find one of his brothers.

  For two days he searched the villages and farms around Street, but to no avail. The folk were frightened and even when he found some that were brave enough not to run away without speaking to him, he could never know if they were telling him the truth. Blake was almost a local, so of course they would protect him from being taken by the king's men. Why should they trust Daniel? They didn't. It was so frustrating. If Blake were wounded he could be in any house, any barn, any shed or even in a copse of wood. If the locals wouldn't speak to him, or wouldn't be honest with him, then what chance did he have of finding him?

  "Almost none,” he told Femke. "Come on love. I give up. Lets press on to Sherborne and see what is happening." The mare seemed to understand him and turned around and headed down this farm road towards the main road. Something had better happen soon. It had just turned September and his clan should have been under sail to Bermuda by now. Where the hell is Blake?

  He had been told that the Earl of Bedford had surrounded and sealed off Sherborne and Sherborne Castle, so when he came to a crossroad with arrows one way to Yeovil and the other to Sherborne he decided to go towards Sherborne. Once within a few miles of Sherborne he took a cattle trail up the side of a low ridge so he could have a look around. Once he reached the top of the ridge he realized that there was a higher ridge behind it that was blocking his view of Sherborne, so he motioned Femke to climb that ridge as well.

  The trail to the higher ridge was much steeper so he traversed the slope to a nearby gully hoping there would be a better trail following its contours. There was another trail, a much better trail, so Femke was quite happy to follow it. At least she was happy for about a hundred yards and then she began to hesitate her steps. Her ears were pricked up and she was sniffing the air with each breath. That was enough of a warning for Daniel. He motioned her off the trail and behind some broom bushes and listened.

  A moment later he heard the sound of horseshoes sliding loose stones ahead of them down the trail. A group of riders were coming towards him from up the gulley. Damn, was he well enough hidden? Could he be seen from above? He dismounted and drew Femke between two bushes. They would be parliament's men, of course. Sherborne was sealed off so of course they would be friendly. Of course, he hoped. Just in case he checked the flash pans of each of his pistols. The two of his dragon, the one of his killing pistol, and the one of the wheellock hidden in his bedroll. He decided to add more flash power to the pans of his dragon ... just in case.

  By this time there were horses walking by abreast of him, but none of the riders were speaking so he had no clue to their identity. With one hand he reached out to Femke to stroke her nose to keep her quiet. She was nervous and curious at the smell of the nearby horses, and she was shaking her head. He kept stroking he
r, while silently hoping that she realized that the strangers would be gone by in a moment.

  "Don't move,” came a calm voice from behind him. "This dragon will cut you in two if you move." Then in a louder voice. "I have him covered. There is only one."

  The horses on the trail stopped moving and there was a creak of horse leathers as men dismounted. The bushes parted and men came through with aimed pistols cocked and ready. The closest one to him put the safety on and then pushed his pistol under his belt so he could disarm Daniel. He immediately said, "Jesus Christ, take a look at this dragon." Daniel moaned. His double barreled dragon was worth a fortune and looked it. Would he ever get it back?

  "Let me see that,” a voice said from the trail. "Son of a bitch. Bring him out of the bushes. If he ain't Daniel Vanderus, I'll blow his head off with Danny's gun."

  Daniel recognized the voice and pushed the broom branches out of his way so he could reach the man. "Rob, where the hell have you been?" It was Blake. He had found Robert Blake. Or rather, Robert Blake had found him. The other men relaxed when they saw the two men hugging in the middle of the dusty trail. "Your brothers are out looking for you. I am out looking for you. Why don't you send word. Don't you know that you were reported missing in the London rags."

  "My brothers found me, and now so have you. Forgive me if the mail is not what it was. Every post road in the south is being blocked by one side or the other. Now go and get your horse. I have something urgent to report to the general in Yeovil."

  "I thought you had Sherborne under siege."

  "We lifted it. We didn't have the artillery to take the castle so the army has withdrawn to Yeovil. Get your horse, I will explain as we ride."

  Daniel gave two quiet whistles and Femke came to him through the bushes. By this time the rest of the squad were mounted again, and they all laughed at the bony pony coming through the broom.