Two men – one large, one small – burst from behind those doors. The smaller, dressed like a musketeer, though missing his weapon, hurled a huge metal pottinger at Stryker as a fountain of obscenities poured from his black-gummed mouth. The pottinger clipped Stryker’s temple. It was heavy, knocking off his hat and sending him reeling to the side and careening into a low table to collapse among a clanging pile of pewter chargers, which spun away in all directions. Skellen went for the assailant as Stryker regained his balance, only to see the larger of the two men, bearded and grimacing above a long, blood-stained apron, bearing down, a hefty cleaver in hand. The blow came fast and heavy, a huge swat delivered with the full weight of the man, whose eyes were distended with rage. Stryker threw himself to the side, letting the brutal lump of rectangular steel scythe harmlessly past, and smashed the guard of his sword into the man’s face. The beard was immediately wet with blood from ruined lips and teeth, but the big man did not retreat. Stryker shot him in the knee, stepping back to let his victim crumple with an incongruously puppy-like keening. Skellen was with him as he snatched up his hat and strode through the doorway. He supposed the soldier was already dead.
‘Bloody butcher,’ the sergeant muttered as they reached a broad staircase, musket fire ringing louder above them now.
‘Aye, a butcher and a soldier together,’ Stryker said. ‘If the common folk fight beside Rigby’s men, we’ll have no choice. The order was to spare none caught under arms.’ The thought made his heart ache. If the townsfolk had decided to stand with the garrison, then they would die with them too.
They took the stairs three at a time. The upper landing was almost completely dark and the air was clogged with acrid powder smoke. They moved along the creaking floorboards, more carefully now, voices wafting to them from beyond the panelled wall to the right. If Stryker’s bearings were not thrown by the chaos, then the chamber beyond would face on to the street. He jammed his spent pistol into his belt, tugging its twin free and cocking it in one movement.
‘Fire!’ a disembodied voice bawled, and the building seemed to vibrate with a fresh volley. Screams carried to them from down on the street.
They felt their way along the passage until they found a break in the panels. An iron ring, cold and rough, betrayed the siting of a door. They exchanged a glance, checking firearms as Stryker said, ‘No matter what we find, they cannot hold the high ground.’
Skellen nodded, grunting something grim below his breath, and lined his redoubtable boot up with the door’s lock. A swarm of floating embers made him stop. At the far end of the corridor there was another staircase, and emerging at the top were at least a score of tiny, dancing flames. Skellen turned, Stryker too, and they stared as faces materialized from the gloom. The lights were the tips of burning matches, fixed and poised in muskets. The faces were those of soldiers. They hesitated when they saw the two men.
Stryker took a risk. ‘King’s men.’
The lead musketeer, a burly sergeant with a single, jutting tooth, quickly took in Stryker’s red ribbon and expensive sword. He nodded curtly. ‘Broughton’s, sir.’
‘To me, then, and be smart about it.’
They met outside the door. Stryker and Skellen stepped aside as the sergeant barked orders and several musket stocks turned the polished panels to kindling. And then they were inside.
More smoke greeted them. It was the swirling, choking cloud produced by many muskets discharged in an enclosed space. He pushed through the gritty pall, squinting hard through his stinging eye. A flash of a torso ghosted across his path. He fired his piece without thinking. It was blinding in the chamber, deafening. The men of Broughton’s regiment poured their leaden fury into the bank of yellowish white, shrieks renting the stifling air in reply. A window smashed as someone tumbled through to the ground below. Stryker plunged into the miasma, lashed with the handle of his pistol at a man’s chin, and stabbed deep into the belly of another with his sword. Figures moved on all sides, some wearing Colonel Broughton’s ochre coat, others garments of black, brown, green, and he feared that these were not the fighters enlisted by Alexander Rigby, but were clubmen, or worse. Now the shots ebbed, for there was no time to reload, and the sickening thuds of musket butts against flesh and bone began to play out.
Another crescendo announced the obliteration of a second window, and this time the damp spatter of rain came in on the breeze. Out went the noxious mist, sucked into the ether in so sudden a gust that the Royalists found themselves in confounded silence for a long moment. All around them there were bodies. One of their own was down, curled like a giant foetus as blood oozed from his cudgelled skull, but the rest were unscathed. Of the Roundheads there was only debris. Lead-pocked and battered bodies, scattered like old sacks all around what Stryker now saw was a floor rich in exotic pelts, now ruined by unspeakable stains and the black scorches of dropped match. He wiped his blade on a discarded hat and returned it to its scabbard, stepping over a corpse to come up against the sill of one of the shattered windows. He looked down at the road. It was almost empty. He leaned a short way forwards, craning out so that he could peer right the way down towards the church. Bolton’s defenders still resisted, to judge by the gunfire that crackled from thereabouts, but they were hemmed in now, trapped in a single enclave of a town conquered. Screams seemed to come from every house and street, and Stryker pushed back into the room, knowing that the real vengeance had begun.
People were pleading away to his blind left side, whimpering like scolded pups, and he turned to find the source. There were half a dozen prisoners, all kneeling, faces dipped, palms raised beneath the points of looming swords. He started towards them, made to speak, but the first blade killed the words on his lips as swiftly as it killed its victim. He heard himself protest as the rest of the captives were slaughtered where they knelt, but no one else heard him.
The toothless sergeant had given the order. He perceived Stryker with a surprised expression. ‘Any found under arms, sir.’
And that was right. Stryker looked around the room, dumbstruck, as the stench of smoke was gradually replaced by the metallic hint of the shambles. None of the dead were Rigby’s, he realized. Not one. ‘Jesu,’ he said quietly, as Broughton’s musketeers filed briskly out.
‘They spare none,’ Skellen said.
They were walking up Churchgate, a road that in happier times played host to Bolton’s vibrant market but which was now turned to a ruin of destruction and human misery. Shots still echoed in the houses, on rooftops and around the church, where the last rebels were determined to make a stand, but the battle was won. Already, Stryker expected, the unfortunate officer from Tyldesley’s regiment had been cut from his noose, never to know the import of his death, and already the tide of retribution had turned the Puritan town into a vision of the hell their preachers so delighted in describing. There were bodies strewn all about, doors put through, belongings thrown from windows to be ransacked by crowing Cavaliers in the persistent drizzle that saturated but never cooled the skin.
‘Any who fight are forfeit,’ Stryker said as he reloaded his pistols. If anything, a town was more dangerous after its storming, for the sack made a man shift for himself and his plunder.
Skellen sniffed. ‘You know that won’t be true, sir.’ Stryker looked up, and the sergeant swallowed hard. ‘Forgive me, sir.’
‘No matter.’ In truth, Stryker agreed. Among the corpses littering the cobbles were women, and he had glimpsed the silver hair of the elderly amongst the dead. Perhaps they had been the folk flinging tiles from the roofs. He quickened his pace. ‘We have our orders. They should not have denied the Prince.’
‘They should not have hanged that fuckin’ officer, sir,’ Skellen said bitterly. ‘Beg pardon. That’s the cause. Now they’ll pay dear.’
‘The town is our prize. It has ever been thus. They do not slay the innocent in England.’ Stryker had seen such things many times. If a besieged town or city refused to surrender, the possessions of its inh
abitants would be forfeit when finally an assault broke through. It was an unwritten understanding that besieging armies, often forced to dwell behind filthy, disease-ravaged siege-lines for weeks, were due more than their pay after surviving the murderous gauntlet of an escalade. The reward for those privations lay in plunder and, in turn, served as a warning to the next place thinking to trust in its defences. In the conflict engulfing the Low Countries, that plunder had been tainted by wholesale massacres conducted in revenge. But such hatred had been engendered by reason of religion, which had meant, mercifully, that the darkest acts of a city storming had not been visited upon this new civil war.
‘Until now,’ the sergeant grunted.
Stryker stopped in his tracks, following Skellen’s gaze. Slumped in the doorway of a smouldering shop was a woman in a torn dress, her auburn hair flowing free where her coif had been ripped away. Her face was black with soot, tears carving pale gullies down her cheeks. Cradled in her arms was a small girl, hanging limp and lifeless, blue eyes staring sightlessly at the grey sky. The two men exchanged a long, silent glance. Eventually Stryker stepped close to his old friend, deliberately crowding him. ‘Have a care, Will. Do not be rash.’
Skellen was a hard man; a man raised in the dockside tenements and taverns around Gosport, where sailors, pirates and smugglers converged and schemed and whored and killed. But his real education, like that of his one-eyed officer, had been gained on the Continent, fighting in the cruel fields of Germany. Those formative years had inured him to so much and yet left in him a residue of deep pain, a cavernous rage, plumbed so infrequently it was easy to forget. Now, though, it was there, brightening the black core of his pupils like a distant torch. ‘Rash, sir? Is it not a time for rashness?’
Skellen was gripping his sword, and Stryker noticed that his gnarled knuckles were bleached white.
‘You are right,’ Stryker admitted. ‘It’s as you said. This is different than before.’ He glanced back at the dead girl. ‘Greed does not drive them, but hatred.’ Skellen’s face tightened, and Stryker placed a hand on the taller man’s elbow. ‘But you will be the one to regret the day, should you meddle.’
Skellen’s cheek quivered. ‘Meddle?’ He pointed at the girl and her weeping mother. ‘This is slaughter, sir, plain and simple.’
‘Search the dead,’ Stryker said. ‘Take what you will, and do not be foolish.’
‘And you, sir?’
‘I will find our billets.’ Stryker moved away. ‘Do not be foolish, Sergeant, or you will answer to me.’
Skellen nodded. ‘Aye, Major.’
Stryker spent the next hour seeking the quartermaster to James Stanley, the Earl of Derby. The earl was the leading Royalist in the county, and, as host to Prince Rupert’s army, it was his dubious honour to arrange quarters for the victorious troops. Of course, most would not require a place to sleep for hours, even days, so distracted would they be with the search for plunder, but Stryker had no yearning to immerse himself in the indiscriminate savagery. Both he and Skellen would be better off away from it.
When finally he discovered the quartermaster, he was directed to The Swan, a tavern on the corner of Churchgate and Bradshawgate, near the market cross, where most of the prince’s staff were being placed. It was a strange thing indeed, to be classed as a staff officer after so long as a leader of men, but fate and a storm-carved sea had conspired to twist his fortunes during the bitter winter months. He had survived hardship and danger, impressed the grandees of the Royalist cause, gained the rank of sergeant-major, but lost his command. Now he and his group of mercenaries, the last of his company, were little more than Prince Rupert’s hired swash-and-buckler men, fighters who drew steel on the whim of their Bohemian lord. Stryker had never felt more incongruous in a world to which he was otherwise so well suited.
He paced westwards along Churchgate, loosening his grip on neither pistol nor sword. There were fewer horsemen now, and he guessed they had left the town to their counterparts on foot, carrying the hunt for Bolton’s fugitives into the surrounding fields and forests. The dead would be discovered in streams, under bridges and on the moors for weeks to come. There were bodies strewn here and there. Some were barely recognizable, mangled by hooves; the blood from their slash wounds seemed to have dyed every single cobble. There were women wandering listlessly in the street, stripped to their smocks and prodded at sword point by braying men who demanded plate and coin. The screams of children were smothered only by the sharp cracks of firearms. Stryker stepped round a party of grinning greencoats, presumably men from Tillier’s regiment, as they dragged a hapless individual out through a doorway. He was a stick-thin, bookish-looking fellow, with red-tipped nose and thinning pate, who yowled as he was kicked to the ground. The greencoats stood around him like baying wolves as he hurriedly blurted out where valuables might be found. Whatever he said did not save his life.
Stryker was relieved when eventually his gaze fell upon The Swan; a large, slate-roofed affair of black timber and grubby whitewash. It had survived the fighting, and now enjoyed a heavy guard at its double-doored entrance. He was just about to make himself known to the sentries when his eye was drawn to a band of soldiers crowded around a young lad slumped in a pile of horse shit that still steamed. The boy, probably in his late teens, clutched his midriff, and Stryker, moving closer, realized that he was fighting a losing battle to keep his guts within his body. The boy was weeping as he groaned, calling for his mother, each cry eliciting a gust of laughter from the watching mob. One of the soldiers, a tall, thin-faced man with a prominent brow, a hunched back and severely hooked nose, stepped into the circle. From within the folds of a heavy, black-pelted cloak, he produced a pistol, which he discharged directly into the wounded boy’s heart. The gut-sliced lad fell back, sighing up at the rain, but still his chest rose and fell in shallow pulses.
The shooter – an officer to judge by his fur cloak – turned like an actor playing to his adoring audience. ‘Bless me, comrades! Yonder lies one of the strongest Roundheads that ever I did meet, for my pistol hath discharged at his heart and would not enter!’ He paused, relishing the cat-calls of his men, before producing a second pistol. Spinning back with an acrobatic whirl that belied his crooked shoulders, he shot his victim again, bowing as the men cheered. ‘But I think I sent him to the devil, with a vengeance, with the other.’
The boy was indeed dead. Stryker looked on as the fur-trimmed hunchback led a dozen of his crowing adherents into the home from which the disembowelled boy had been hauled.
The acid tang of vomit was ripe on Faith Helly’s tongue. She swallowed it, stifling the urge to retch as it burned her throat. She feared she was suffocating. It was cool inside the clay dome, for the oven had lain dormant for the better part of two days, but the ash dust upon which she was curled had stirred into furious life when first Faith crawled inside, elbows and head disturbing more black plumes from the walls, and now it seemed there was no air left to breathe, her lungs becoming ever more clogged with each shallow gulp. She clamped her mouth as tightly shut as she could, leaving only the tiniest fissure between her lips through which she drew the foul vapour, feeling it rasp between gritted teeth. Her back ached and the joints in her hands were stretched to breaking point as she pulled her knees hard to her chest. She squinted in the darkness as her sight grew accustomed to the gloom, and angled her head so that she could see out through the mouth of the oven to the kitchen beyond. The larder on the far side of the room was firmly shut, and she stared hard at its doors, praying Master Sydall could sense her presence and feel shame in it.
She held her breath as laughter rang out from somewhere in the house. A man’s voice chimed, recounting a ribald jest that had others guffawing and Faith aghast. She knew the words, but had never been in the company of men who used them with such flagrant contempt for decency. Soldiers. Her stomach churned, and she squeezed her thighs tight lest she soil herself for fear.
The men entered the chamber casually, as if their day�
��s work was done, and even from Faith’s poor vantage she could see their stained clothes and darkly spattered faces. It was all she could do to bury the scream that formed like a knot behind her ribs. They were laughing still, the soldiers. Perching on tables and ransacking cupboards, upending pots and rummaging through shelves, a flock of blood-drenched magpies seeking baubles for their greed. One man, a thick, russet moustache draping his upper lip and a horrific-looking three-bladed pole propped on his shoulder, found the cheese cratch and began stuffing tough scraps into his mouth. The others harangued him, wanting their share, but he snarled like a dog and the pack shrank gingerly away. In turn, the man with the pole-arm offered a deferential bow as another sidled in.
This newcomer, evidently the leader, was tall but strangely formed. His small head sat atop shoulders that seemed to be excessively round and slung in an unnaturally low position, as if his neck were too long. It put her in mind of a gigantic bird, his cloak – black as night and thickened at the collar by a luxurious black pelt – forming a strange plumage, the sharp features of his face and tiny jet pebbles of his eyes only adding to the avian appearance. Her father had often warned her of the dangers of witchcraft, that though its creeping, insidious talons dug unnoticed into every facet of society, every so often the minions of Lucifer became too strong to conceal their true nature and would crawl into the light for righteous men to see. It took the wisdom and guile of witch-hunters to weed out such men, drawing them to the light as a physic draws poison from an adder’s bite, but her father had maintained that, on occasion, a creature of wickedness would walk in plain sight, too cruel and perverted to disguise. She shuddered as she watched him enter the room, dark eyes never resting, as if he weighed and measured the contents of each and every cupboard, somehow able to penetrate even the stoutest door. When eventually his gaze rested upon the shadowed corner where she knew Master Sydall and his family were huddled, it felt as though her heart would burst through her chest like a cannon shot.
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