Devil's Charge (2011)

by Arnold, Michael

  Stryker’s single eye narrowed. ‘I thought you said you’d run out.’

  ‘Of the plebeian muck the two of you tend to prefer, yes. This, however, I was keeping back for a special occasion.’ He took his pipe from another pocket stitched into the lining of his coat. ‘I think one’s final night in the land of the living is special enough, don’t you?’ He turned towards the door, squinting to see the figures at the far end of the room. ‘You there, kind sir!’

  One of the pair of sentries stared back. ‘Problem?’

  Forrester brandished his most charming smile. ‘Not the least of it, my good man! I merely wish to garner your assistance.’

  The guard took two or three tentative paces towards Forrester.

  ‘Oh?’

  Forrester held up his clay pipe. ‘Would you spare a light for a condemned man?’

  The sentry nodded, set down his long-arm and took the flickering candle from its stand. He held out the flame to the prisoners, though his companion was careful to keep his own musket trained squarely on Forrester’s chest. Skellen scrambled quickly to his feet and went to where the aromatic leaf was being packed in the clay bowl, eager not to miss his turn with the pipe.

  Back at the palliasse near the hearth, Stryker and Lisette stayed huddled closely, neither wishing to break the embrace.

  Lisette leaned up to speak into Stryker’s ear. ‘I saw your face,’ she said softly, her breath warm against his skin.

  ‘My face?’

  ‘When that bastard touched me.’

  Stryker thought back to Gell’s appearance in the Close, surprised at himself for his near suicidal attack on Gell. ‘He searched you well.’

  She kissed his neck, sending a jolt of desire through him. ‘Can you blame him, mon amour?’

  Stryker nudged her gently with his elbow. ‘Conceit, Lisette. You’d make a terrible Puritan.’ She laughed at that, and he looked down at her, his face suddenly serious. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Lisette replied.

  Stryker found he could not hold her gaze, and he glanced up to watch his comrades take turns on the pipe that now belched smoke to the ceiling. ‘That I could not save you.’

  She leant up to kiss him again, soft lips feeling cold against his cheek. ‘You risked the wrath of Prince Rupert to save me, mon amour.’ She smiled then, the expression impish in the dim and distant candle glow. ‘Besides, I could not expect an amateur to succeed in such a task.’

  Stryker smiled back. ‘If the roles were reversed?’

  She nudged him with her elbow. ‘Then we would all be sipping fine wine in Paris by now! Roaming where we may, free as birds!’

  Stryker chuckled ruefully. ‘I believe you. Speaking of birds, can you hear that damned tweeting out there?’

  Lisette remained silent for a moment, bemusement etching her face. ‘I can.’ She looked up at Stryker. ‘But why does it sing at this hour?’

  Out in the narrow space of ground between the infirmary and the north wall, Musketeer John Bunce listened appreciatively to the soft birdsong. It was tuneful, lilting and soothing to his ears.

  Bunce had not been told why he had been stationed here, only that it was his job to guard the windows that sat midway up the infirmary’s wall. It was a tawdry commission, one marked by boredom and coldness, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. Bunce had been one of Brooke’s original besiegers. He had fought Wagstaffe’s cowardly Cavaliers at the fall of Stratford, had been in the vanquished assault on the drawbridge, where the tar-filled pots had done nothing more than fizzle to their deaths in the Minster Pool, and had battled Blind Hastings’s harquebusiers in the streets of Lichfield. The action in this little city had been hard, bloody and, until Chesterfield’s eventual surrender, utterly fruitless, so to be given the task of strolling up and down for a few hours was one to be relished.

  Bunce looked down at his musket’s firing mechanism, marvelling at its design. It was a flintlock and he had never held one before this night. Gell wanted him armed and ready at all times, but understood that to keep a match-cord glowing through the night was both tedious and costly, so the colonel had arranged for the guards to borrow flintlocks from the men guarding the ordnance.

  Bunce looked up suddenly. There it was again. Birdsong.

  He paused his stride, listening to the beautiful tune, admiring its clear simplicity. It was dark, and he could not see from whence the sound came, so he closed his eyes, attempting to pinpoint the sound in the blackness.

  There, perhaps ten yards away, at the foot of the north wall.

  Musketeer John Bunce moved forwards slowly, silently. He had no wish to startle the bird, but wondered if it might be injured. Perhaps it had suffered a broken wing, or been mauled by the ginger tomcat he had seen prowling about earlier. He closed in on the sound, hoping perhaps to corner the animal and take it back to his new quarters.

  When he was four or five paces away, the song abruptly ceased. Bunce frowned, leaning forward into the shadows.

  The first he saw of the dagger was its dark hilt protruding from the flesh below his chin. He tried to call out, but only hot, sticky liquid came bubbling into his mouth. He tried to back away, but his limbs refused to obey. His hands failed him then, and the musket dropped to the ground. It was then that he saw a face. Pale-skinned, small and sharp-featured, like that of a rodent. The black eyes were tiny, like little pebbles of coal, and in their glimmering reflection he watched his own face droop as he collapsed to the ground.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Lisette whispered. ‘A thud, out beyond the window. Something falling.’

  Stryker nodded.

  The Frenchwoman looked towards the guards. They were still standing with Skellen and Forrester, paying no attention to this end of the infirmary. ‘The birdsong has stopped.’

  Stryker glanced behind and above them at the windowsill. ‘Probably nothing. That damned cat wondering what’s become of Doctor Chambers.’

  Lisette followed his gaze, then quickly looked back into the room so as not to arouse the guards’ suspicions. ‘Clumsy cat.’

  But Stryker did not turn back. Instead, his gaze remained transfixed upon the window, and the face that now appeared like a pale spectre from the depths of the night. It was a face he had never thought to see again, and certainly not here, at this desperate moment. ‘Jesu,’ he whispered.

  Lisette was careful not to turn round. ‘What is it?’

  Stryker looked down at her. ‘Abel Menjam.’

  ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be!’ Captain Lancelot Forrester declared, one hand thumped flat against his chest, the other thrust out in the manner of the great players. ‘The beloved bard wrote it in his Hamlet, the part I was fortunate enough to reproduce at the Swine and Swan near Lincoln’s Inn a couple of years back. He knew what he was about, did Shakespeare.’

  The musketeer still hogged the pipe, so fragrant and satisfying was the rare verinshe, and he stared hard at Forrester through the fug.

  ‘But,’ Forrester added quickly, ‘seeing as you’re the one with a gun at his side, I am perfectly content to ignore the bard and be a lender. This one time.’

  ‘Thought you might be,’ grunted the musketeer.

  ‘Here!’ a voice called from the far end of the room. ‘You there! I need help!’

  Forrester, Skellen and the two guards looked round to see Stryker standing over Lisette’s lifeless form.

  ‘What is it, old man?’ Forrester called back.

  ‘Christ, Forry, not you!’ Stryker snapped. ‘She has swooned. She must have water!’

  Forrester turned to the man with the pipe. ‘You have our water skins. Will you relinquish but one?’

  The musketeer glanced across at the pile of snapsacks by the door, inside which would be the precious skins. He seemed to consider going to them, but looked down at the glowing pipe bowl. ‘Needs tamping.’ He looked back to his comrade at the door. ‘You go.’

  The second musketeer shook his head. ‘Why me?’

  ‘ ‘Cau
se I fuckin’ said so, Woolly!’

  The second man sighed in annoyance but acquiesced all the same. He went to the snapsacks, fishing in one after the other until he had found a reasonably full drinking vessel. He paced past his colleague, and the two prisoners still awaiting their turn with the verinshe, and strode down the length of the long room.

  ‘Here,’ he said when finally he reached Stryker. He held out the bulging skin. ‘But be quick about it. Colonel Gell’s ordered you deprived o’ drink an’ vittles.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Stryker said, but made no move to take the flask.

  The dagger made a dull thud as it struck the guard’s chest. It had spun in a quicksilver blur from one of the three windows and the soldier had no time to react before it punched through woollen coat and linen shirt. He made no sound, for the blade must have punctured his lung, the air escaping out from the wound in a heavy, almost tired sigh.

  At the door, the musketeer with Forrester’s pipe was busy taking a great chestful of the grey smoke. He saw his mate speak with Stryker, but his view was obscured by the cloud swirling at his head. By the time he realized his comrade had fallen and danger registered in his mind, it was simply too late. Forrester was blissfully unaware of what was going on, but Skellen had seen the musketeer drop silently to his knees and knew that something was afoot. He hammered a fist straight into the guard’s cheek, sending the man sprawling on the flagstones. The man tried to get up, arms flailing in the direction of his musket, but it was too far away, and Skellen kicked him in the face. The blow threw him backwards and he landed heavily, the back of his skull meeting the floor with a wet smack. He did not move again.

  Stryker was last through the window, climbing on one of the beds to provide the extra height required to haul himself over the stone sill. Grabbing hands met him on the other side, helping him down into the alley, and, before he had found his bearings, they were on the move.

  ‘I’m only glad they weren’t wearing buff,’ their rescuer said happily. ‘The dagger would not have made it through if they had, and then where would we be?’

  Stryker grasped the shrewish man’s shoulder, more roughly than was deserving of a man who had risked all to liberate them. ‘You throw daggers? Christ, Menjam, you’re no bloody corn merchant.’

  ‘That’s for bleedin’ sure,’ Skellen muttered in the darkness.

  ‘And how the hell did you get up there?’ Stryker said, glancing back at the window that was positioned in the infirmary’s stone wall. A man of Skellen’s height might have looked through it, but not the diminutive Menjam.

  The little man grinned broadly, baring the sharp, rodent-like teeth Stryker remembered well, and nodded to a place at the base. ‘I had help.’

  The newly rescued prisoners followed the newcomer’s gaze. There, obscured by the night’s pitch depths, they laid eyes upon an object. It appeared to be a large, black sack.

  ‘It’s a body,’ Skellen said.

  Stryker stared at the object for a few more seconds before the shape of a man began to resolve. He seemed to be sitting with his back against the wall, but he was slumped forwards, head lolling, as though sound asleep.

  ‘A necessary evil,’ their rescuer said simply. ‘Unavoidable in the current circumstances. Made an excellent ladder, though. Come,’ he began to walk again, short legs moving rapidly along the passage between the infirmary and the north wall, ‘there’s a place up ahead where the battlements have crumbled somewhat. We’ll be over it in a trice.’

  Stryker stooped to draw the dead musketeer’s sword, before following the man they had first known as a humble corn seller to the wall. A pyramid of rotting timbers and bits of rubble had been piled on the inside, making a reasonable ramp, which they climbed quickly.

  And then they were over and standing in Jayes Lane, the path that bordered the Close to the north. Abel Menjam indicated a narrow track that ran away northwards between dense trees. ‘The horses are just along there. Now come, we must move quickly before you are missed.’

  Stryker and Skellen each took one of Lisette’s arms and the group ran along the track. After no more than fifty yards, the soft whickering of horses carried to them from a place within the tree line.

  ‘Who are you?’ Stryker said, as they waded through the tangled foliage at the side of the lane.

  The little man turned. ‘My name is Abel Black, and I have come to rescue you.’

  Brocton, Staffordshire, 7 March 1643

  The first light of day was pallid and weak. It broke through the forest canopy in grey shards, turning the trees into distorted, demonic claws.

  Four silent figures moved among those claws, their outlines glinting like wraiths gliding in the half-light. Their progress was slow, halting at every rustle and squawk from the depths of the labyrinthine wood.

  Major Zacharie Girns picked his way between ancient boughs and wizened branches, a hundred grasping hands of a hundred skeletal giants. Not far now, he told himself. He glanced over his shoulder, making certain Blaze, Rontry and Slater were with him. In twenty paces or so, the extent of the wooded kingdom would be reached and they would break out on to the clearing beyond.

  But there, in that clearing, they would be exposed. Their dark cowls gleaming silver beneath the clear dawn sky. And in that there was danger. They had seen a troop of enemy cavalry in the area the previous evening, and Girns could not be sure that the malignants had left the village and its surrounds. A pang of indecision stabbed him; a torrent of concern and self-preservation that was almost irrepressible. But repressed it must be. The reward would be worth the risk.

  Girns looked back again, signalling that the group should make their move. The prisoners hesitated briefly, but Slater shoved the bigger of the two, Jonathan Blaze, hard in the back. And then they were running. They burst from the protection of the last trees and out on to the open ground. The clear grey sky seemed to burn, as if to highlight the scuttling bodies in deliberate persecution. But Girns kept going, kept running, holding breath, tensing muscles, praying, praying, praying.

  No shouts of alarm went up. Not scraping of swords or rumbling of hooves. Silence.

  Up ahead were walls of stone, grey and stoical against the breaking morning, and Girns’s spirits soared, for their destination had been reached. To the right and left were more stones, markers for the bones of folk long dead, waist high and rounded at the summit. They appeared like gigantic teeth, jutting random and crooked from the earth, and Girns indicated that the group should duck behind the biggest to recapture their breath.

  The building was no more than ten paces away now, and, other than their own laboured breathing, nothing could be heard. Gradually doubt evaporated. Yes, thought Zacharie Girns, he would be rewarded mightily. For it was not silver or gold that awaited the success of this mission, but a place at God’s right hand.

  Girns offered a silent prayer of thanks and stood, making for the small oaken door set half a yard below ground level. It was as he remembered, just as it had been all those years ago. This place that preyed so heavily on his mind, the place so dear to his heart.

  They had travelled north and east, careful not to encounter soldiers from either faction, and, sure enough, as the previous night had begun to give way to dawn, Girns had pointed out a right turn in the road, leading them on to a track bisecting dense woodland that, his childhood memories promised, opened on to cleared land. It was a cemetery and, at its centre, they would find a chapel. Having tethered the horses to some oak trunks in the forest’s depths, the four had proceeded on foot.

  Girns descended the two stone slabs, their surfaces smooth from the footfalls of generations, taking him down to the chapel’s brick-floored porch and the little door at its far end. He reached out to turn the loop of dark iron, but the latch would not lift. The door was locked.

  ‘What now?’ Slater hissed.

  Girns ignored him. Instead he knelt to the side of the door and ran his gloved hands along the space between the red bricks and a line of grey fl
agstones that skirted the door’s threshold. In seconds he had found a point where the gap between brick and stone was slightly wider than elsewhere, and he forced his fingers into the crack, curling them under the flagstone’s rough edge. And then he heaved.

  ‘The good Lord,’ Girns said through gritted teeth, as he levered the flagstone out of its snug position, ‘will provide.’

  Slater stepped closer, peering down at the patch of earth suddenly exposed to the light. Something gleamed there, at the very centre, and his wispy-haired top lip curled upwards, exposing a mouthful of rotting teeth. ‘A key.’

  ‘Well, get it quickly then, fool,’ Girns uttered in a voice betraying the strain of the heavy stone.

  Slater did as he was told, darting forwards and snatching up the fat length of rust-plagued iron. Girns let the flagstone drop loudly back to earth and straightened up, holding out his palm, into which Slater placed the precious object.

  The door was unlocked in a flash, and Girns moved inside the little building, pleased that the large rectangular window above the altar allowed the blossoming dawn’s wan bounty to pour in, bathing the limewashed walls in a dull glow. The place looked as though it had been long abandoned. A thick layer of dust and cobwebs covered everything from the little pulpit and railed altar at the building’s north end, to the half-dozen pews that sat on either side of the short nave, to the high wooden roof beams. At the southern end, in the corner nearest the door, there was a great stack of hay where once the place had been employed as a stable, though now the material was dusty and ancient.

  ‘What is this place?’ Tom Slater asked, removing his cloak and closing the door firmly behind them.

  ‘This is Girns Chapel,’ the major replied, his voice low, reverent. ‘Built by our family three centuries ago. It is long since abandoned. Long forgotten. And far enough from the village that we will not be disturbed.’