‘Ah,’ the fisherman beamed, ‘that’ll be the lord Manchester. He’s brought with him an army from Lincoln.’
Richard Weeks, it transpired, lived in the nearby village of Linton but spent a great deal of his time in a modest shack on the edge of the river on account of a nagging wife, five squawking daughters and half a dozen Scottish musketeers. ‘I swear they do drive me deaf, sir,’ he exclaimed as he showed Devlin Greer into the tumbledown pile of timber.
‘The soldiers?’ Greer said, taking the low stool offered by his host.
Weeks shook his head. ‘The bloody girls. I’d have married ’em off before now, ’cept they look too much like their mother. No bugger’ll have them.’
Greer laughed. ‘I can see this place would be a haven. A pleasant bolt-hole, if ever I saw one. But are you not a trifle near the armies? Do they not cause you bother?’
Weeks shook his head. ‘They come by, from time to time, but they leave me be, for they know I’m no bother to ’owt but the fish. Besides, I’m sheltering and feeding six o’ their surly fedaries, so I’m doing m’ bit.’
Greer leaned forwards, propping his elbows on his knees. ‘Forgive my rudeness, Master Weeks, but you appear to know plenty about the siege, so you do.’
Weeks pulled a grim face. ‘The Parliament has three armies camped outside the walls o’ York, sir. Every household has the honour of providing the men shelter. My lot are good enough lads, though Goody Weeks claims they’ve brought us lice.’
They’ll probably bring you the pox to-boot, thought Greer wryly. ‘And you say the city is surrounded?’
‘Now that Manchester’s rabble are here, sir, aye. The Cavaliers could get in and out till the new lot came, but now ’tis truly bottled up tight.’
Devlin Greer swore softly. Then a thought struck him. ‘The river flows south, yes?’
Weeks nodded. ‘Through York, then on to Selby.’
‘You have a boat?’
‘A small thing, aye. Few holes,’ he chuckled, ‘but nowt a bucket and some hard graft won’t cure.’
Greer drew his knife slowly. ‘Is it nearby, good Master Weeks?’
Richard Weeks said that it was, and Devlin Greer went to commit murder.
The boat was rot-eaten and mouldy, with a full inch of stinking bilge slopping around Devlin Greer’s feet as he perched on the edge of the single, rickety bench. But with York surrounded, he had no choice. The River Ouse was always powerful, but now, swollen by rain, it had a malicious streak that snagged the boat as it bobbed out into the deeper reaches, hurling it along with the current so that he barely needed to use the paddle. For the most part, he was content to let the Ouse do its work, concentrating instead on baling out the encroaching water.
Southward he was borne, ever vigilant for prying eyes on the banks, but he saw no one. The land reminded him of his war-torn homeland, and he found himself recalling the hours he had spent on the Boyne, knotting rope to high branches overhanging the crystal clear water so that he and his brothers could swing out, dropping into the chill depths on warm summer’s days. He had made love for the first time on those grassy banks, and he smiled as he remembered the lithe body of Molly Peirce and the slow hiss of a swan’s wings as it had flown close above them. Well, Molly was gone now, her family slain by the heretics. He felt his heart ache at the memory. The flames and the screams.
The uprising had been glorious in the beginning. A God-given revolt for the defence and liberty of the native Irish. The insurgency was not intended to harm the king, nor any of his subjects, except that matters had tumbled out of control, and Protestants had been massacred. It had never been meant to happen that way, but the die had been cast, Catholics had been slaughtered in reprisal, and before anyone knew different there was a full-scale war. Greer had become involved after Molly’s death. He had been with Rory O’More at Drogheda, and the victory had promised so much. But then England and Scotland had sent more troops to defend the Protestant settlers, and defeat had followed defeat. Ireland was in flames, its people destroyed by plague and famine. There were victories, of course, but not enough. And always there was death and destruction, and Devlin Greer had realized that the only way to save Ireland was to defeat the rebellion in England. Because, though the insurgency fought against King Charles, everyone knew he secretly sympathized with the plight of the Catholic majority. How could he not, when he was married to the staunchly Catholic Henrietta Maria? Indeed, it was said that, even now, he was making peace with the Confederates. But the English parliament was driven by Puritan zeal. Westminster – and London itself – was the very bedrock of everything that the native Irish despised, and if ever they secured victory in England, Ireland would be next.
Ahead of him, just beyond the river’s rising east bank, he saw a man seated on a large horse. The man wore a helmet with three bars attached to a visor, caging a face that was grim and hard, and his body was encased in armour. He was a cavalryman. Worse still, he wore the tawny scarf of the Parliament, which made him an English cavalryman. Running into a Scot would have been bad enough, Greer knew, but the English Roundheads posed the most danger. The English hated foreigners, but they hated Catholics more. As an Irishman, Greer was both. He grinned, offering a cheery, confident wave.
The cavalryman watched. He cocked his head to the side, examining the boat and its passenger in the way a cat might eye a mouse. With a squeeze of his thighs the horse turned, walking south, increasing its speed to keep pace with the boat. Greer stared up at the horseman, feeling as though he might vomit. He had been an intelligencer for many masters, both in Ireland and England, and knew his business well. Here he was a sitting duck to be pistol-pocked if the Roundhead so wished.
‘Where go you, friend?’ the horseman called suddenly.
Greer forced the rising bile back down his throat. ‘York,’ he called back, dry-mouthed. ‘That is to say, the Godly army now laying siege to York.’
‘Whence d’you hail?’ the horseman demanded. ‘You’ve an unusual voice.’
‘Wales, sir,’ Greer replied, thinking of the most exotic location he could muster. ‘Came to England seeking work.’
‘What kind?’
‘I am a cordwainer, sir.’ Greer’s bowels churned. ‘A good one.’
The Roundhead smiled behind his visor. ‘There are plenty o’ latchets need mending.’
‘That was my hope, sir,’ Greer called, twisting as the boat moved further ahead so that he sat athwart the bench. ‘Thousands of feet mean thousands of shoes.’
The horse slowed. ‘Good fortune, then!’ its rider called as the boat slipped further downstream. ‘But you’ll have to walk, my friend, for we have built a new bridge down at Poppleton! You’ll not get through!’
Devlin Greer shouted his thanks, waited for the boat to meander round the next bend, and vomited into the River Ouse.
Chapter 10
Liverpool, Lancashire, 10 June 1644
The rain had come again, barely ceasing for two full days. It came from the west, from the sea, and it was a cold, hard, relentless torrent that turned the besieging encampment to a muddy morass. Men waded between the tents, horses were so plastered in grime that one could no longer tell the shade of their pelts, and the mood of Prince Rupert’s itinerant city was sombre at best. In the trenches, the engineers and sappers had been forced to delay work on their zig-zagging gullies, for they were knee-deep in brown water that seemed impossible to drain, and so there was no chance of bringing the works close enough to the battlements to begin laying a mine. Yet still the heavy guns fired, spewing their fury from the Royalist batteries, from the Parliamentarian walls, and from the ships anchored on the coast, so that a stinking pall of smog writhed like the devil’s own cloud above the sodden hills. The rebel fire achieved little, for Rupert’s forces were out of range and his cannon emplacements well protected, but the Royalist gun captains had found their mark with aplomb. In the first frantic hours of bombardment they had sprayed the town rampart, picking at it in vari
ous places, always gauging any damage inflicted. With every passing salvo they took stock, exchanged notes, agreed upon the best places to concentrate their efforts, and gradually the vulnerable sections of wall became apparent, gradually the noose tightened. It was mid-morning when the first light could be seen through the high wall, patches of tiles and thatch showing through from the buildings beyond, and the gunners knew that their efforts were coming to fruition. They kept up the barrage, focussed on the cracks, even as Rupert’s infantry officers drew their men into battle order, and just before noon the wall caved in.
Perhaps it was the weight and frequency of the iron shot alone, or perhaps the timber-faced sods that buttressed the ancient wall had become too heavy with rainwater. What mattered was that a breach had been made, and the debris from that wide fissure had slithered like a great avalanche into the outer ditch, filling it almost to its brim, so that a bridge of rubble now presented itself. Then the rain stopped, the Royalists cheered divine intervention, and the prince ordered the escalade he had promised.
Stryker commanded almost a hundred men. They were drawn from reformado officers and conscripts and had been cobbled together to form a full company of foot. All three of his regular subordinates were officially part of the storming party, though he excused Hood and Barkworth on the pretence of mild fever so that they could remain behind to watch over Faith. Her presence, he privately admitted, was beginning to take a real toll on their collective ability to discharge their duties, and her situation would require resolution very soon: after Liverpool had fallen, he told himself as he splashed through the most advanced sap, snaking his way towards the town, the breach gaping above. Once the port was under Crown control, they would be able to take stock and consider how best to see her safely back to Sussex.
First there was the matter of the assault. His column stretched back beyond a sharp turn so that he could not see its tail, but he knew his motley band of musketeers were all there, for William Skellen picked up the rear, and even now he could hear the fearsome sergeant’s snarls. They did not disguise their approach, for Liverpool’s defenders would have seen them muster beneath Everton Heights, and the thrum of drums sounded back at the camp, a resonant, ominous call to war that drove his every step forward. Artillery pieces belched rage up on the rampart, flame coming first, then smoke, and the ear-splitting crack a moment later. Stryker flinched, as did his nervous charges, but still he waded on, his feet dry in good boots but rapidly numbing within the chill slop.
The storming party reached the extent of the sap, still sixty yards shy of the ditch. There they were joined by more attackers, the greencoats of Tillier’s regiment, jostling along two parallel trenches. Muskets crackled now. The Parliamentarians had watched them come, waited until they were within range, and decided to patter the mud with lead in the hope of dissuading the attackers from the final charge.
Stryker looked back, cupped hands to his mouth. ‘On my word!’ he called, voice carrying easily down the half-tunnel. ‘My word! Steady now, lads!’
‘Godspeed, sir.’
Stryker looked to his blind left flank, where a young officer in a finely slashed doublet of green and yellow waited for a reply. He nodded. ‘And you, Captain. I am sure you will fight well.’
The captain seemed to find fortitude in the words, for he set his jaw and stood a little straighter. He touched fingertips to a band of delicate lace knotted at his wrist. ‘I fight for a lady’s favour, sir.’
‘Then you’re a fool.’
The captain’s face fell. ‘She said she’d give me her hand if I proved my courage.’
‘And she’ll wish you do not return,’ Stryker said harshly. He immediately regretted the words, for the young man looked utterly crest-fallen. ‘I jest,’ he added. ‘She will think you brave, sirrah, of course. You will be verily dragged to her marriage bed.’
A smile flickered at the corners of the captain’s white-lipped mouth. ‘I do hope so, sir.’
Stryker watched as the officer drew a beautifully crafted pistol from his belt. ‘It’ll shoot high, like as not, so aim low.’
‘Low,’ the young captain echoed.
‘Aim for his head and you’ll hit the rampart. Aim for his stones and you’ll hit his throat.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘And remember,’ he said, pointing up at the figures taking up position on the battlements. ‘They are more scared than you. It is your job to prove they are right to be.’
Stryker did not need to give the order to attack, for one of the other parties had erupted from a trench perhaps thirty paces to the right of his position. They screamed, pouring out on to the open ground like a stream of demons, white-eyed and shrieking. The defending fire grew thick, the sporadic pot-shots of before suddenly building to a wave that was deafening in its concentration. Mud spattered in all directions, kicked up by boots and bullets, and swords glimmered in the feeble sunlight. Stryker bellowed for his men to attack, and then he was up on the cloying terrain, leaping ruts made by cannon balls and scrambling past debris. He screamed as every other man screamed, in the hope that it would frighten the enemy, and because it gave vent to his terror. A musket-ball whipped past his face, for he felt the kick of scythed air, and he ducked as he ran, crouching low like a tortoise in its shell. Around him men slipped in the filth, scrabbled as they tripped on their own scabbards, or wheeled sharply round, punched by bullets into waterlogged graves.
The ordnance fell silent, and he thanked God for that, because it meant that they were inside the range of the bigger guns, but then the breach vanished in racing cloud and the report of a smaller gun shook the ground beneath his feet. He threw himself into the mud; like as not, case shot had been deployed. He sprawled flat, his mouth and nose clogging with foul soil, and then he was twisting, lurching up as men fell all around him. Case shot – small bullets, or even scrap metal, loaded into a canister – was used at close range. The soldiers called it murdering shot, because the canister split open pouring its bounty in a wide arc that could enfilade a dense unit of men, and it had done its duty now, cutting a swathe of slaughter across the storming party’s advanced ranks, and some of them, the rawest recruits, had stopped, desperate to be anywhere but this hell-on-earth. Stryker hauled himself to his feet, aware that he must have seemed like a ghoul from beneath the soil, such was his mud-plastered appearance, drew his sword and screamed for the men to press on. Further along the line, out of the case shot’s murderous arc, Tillier’s greencoats were bearing down on the ditch, and they leapt on to the accidental bridge, scrambling over the rubble that had collapsed from the hurriedly patched wall. Stryker called for his unit to follow their example.
He ran again, joining the greencoats even as the musketry rattled above them. He heard Skellen’s familiar battle-cry somewhere nearby, then he was on the stones and the timber spars and the piles of soil that rose out of the ditch like vast ant hills, jumping from one rickety stepping-stone to the next, always fearing he might fall but dreading the enemy muskets more.
He reached the wall. A pistol ball bounced off his sword-hilt, eliciting a savage curse. One of the defenders ran at him, and he found himself chopping wildly at the man, their blades clanging, jarring all the way up from fingers to neck, but he was too strong and he pushed the man back so that he toppled rearward down the slope that had formed like a stone glacier on the inner face of the wall. Now the fight was engaged across the ruined section, from the ditch to the rampart and down into the town where the vanguard of greencoats had bravely striven, but the defenders were many, and they were joined by civilians and by hard-faced men whose leathery complexions spoke of lives lived at sea, and for the first time Stryker realized that Rupert might have underestimated his opponent. The garrison here was stronger than the one they encountered at Bolton; it was better equipped, better trained and more experienced. He moved along the rubble-strewn breach, cleaving at opponents and screaming for the men to keep up the fight, but all the while knowing that it
was already lost. Skellen had instinctively moved to his vulnerable left, and he nodded his thanks. The big man was black-eyed as he swept his halberd in crushing half-circles so that none would come too close. Most of the shots had been spent on both sides, and the fight was too furious for any man to stop and reload, so steel became king, and muskets smashed down, used now as bludgeoning clubs, and dirks were pulled to slice and gut when a man was close enough to smell his breath.
A rat-faced corporal stepped into Stryker’s way as he picked a path along the precarious crest. Stryker spat in his eyes. The man flinched by instinct and fell by steel. The greencoats were further ahead, just inside the line of the wall, slashing and stabbing their way down the glacis of caved rubble. Stryker made to follow them, but out of the corner of his eye he spotted a small-calibre gun, set on a platform on the inner face of the rampart to the side of the breach. Its crew had been lucky not to have been swept away in the initial rupture, but they had turned their perilous position to supreme advantage, for the gun was now trained on the ditch immediately below. This was the weapon that had delivered the round of screaming case shot, and he saw that its crew were frantically making the piece ready again, but this time they had swivelled it round to fire down on the inner slope to eviscerate the greencoats from behind.
He rammed his sword into its scabbard and climbed. The existing wall was jagged where the stone and soil had fallen away, leaving plenty of footholds by which he could haul himself up, and no man shouted alarm or shot at him from above or below. In less than a minute he was on the platform and his sword was naked again. There were three men tending the gun, packing charge and ball and wadding into the muzzle. They did not see him at first, so the man nearest him died, neck cut right through, and the second man turned in alarm to receive a kick to his stones that folded him double. Stryker smashed the heavy pommel of his sword down on the back of the gunner’s skull, feeling a wet crunch as the bone cracked and depressed, and then the third was spinning on his heels, searching desperately for a way off the platform. But he was trapped, for the stairs that had led to this high place had fallen away with the stony avalanche, and so the Roundhead could only heft the long wooden shaft that he gripped, a burning match coiled at its iron head. He swung it at Stryker, who ducked beneath the glowing tip and lurched forwards, driving his sword deep into the gunner’s midriff, ripping it up and out so that the man’s belly gaped like a slit snapsack, entrails spilling down his legs. The man wailed and dropped the staff, hurriedly gathering up his guts as though they were a tumbled basket of apples. Stryker picked up the staff; it was a linstock, the tool used to ignite a gun’s charge.
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