War Game

by Anthony Price

  The tide of memory surged back: Charles I had angrily dissolved his Third Parliament one March day in 1629—which Firth had called “the most gloomy, sad and miserable day for England in five hundred years”—and hadn’t called another for eleven fateful years—

  And it had been whisky, not sherry.

  Audley nodded to the shade of Dr. Highsmith through the dirty window of the phone box.

  “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right, Professor. It’s all gone now, all quite gone,” he admitted abjectly.

  The shade grinned and nodded back at him approvingly. The old man had always held that what one knew about oneself was what mattered, not what other people thought they knew.

  Nayler sniffed contemptuously. “The Eleven Years’ Tyranny, Audley. The King tried to govern without Parliament. So he had to have money—this was the time of Ship Money and monopolies and the revived Forest Laws—surely you remember that?”

  Humbly now—“Yes, I do now you mention it.”

  “I should think so too! And there was Edward Parrott—or Sir Edward Parrott he had to become compulsorily because he owned estate worth more than £40 per annum, and pay through the nose for it; that was another of the King’s tax-raising dodges—there he was, sitting on the greatest single treasure to reach this country since Drake sailed into Plymouth fifty years before … and there was nothing to equal it until Anson took the Manilla galleon a century later … there he was, sitting on a king’s ransom. Or in that political situation it was more like a kingdom’s ransom. Certainly it would never have been sent back to Spain— never.”

  A kingdom’s ransom. Well, maybe it was still that—in the wrong hands at the wrong moment in time …

  “And he was against the king, of course.”

  “Edward Parrott?” Nayler made a judicious sound. “Say rather, Edward Parrott was for Edward Parrott. He belonged to an older era—he could remember Drake and the others, he’d sailed with them as a young lad. And by the 1630s he was an old man too—that last shipwreck ruined his health. It was his son, Nathaniel—your Parrott, Audley—he was the one who was against the King. A left-wing back-bencher in Parliament in 1640, he was—one of the Vane-St. John faction.”

  “So why did he wait so long to lay hands on the gold?”

  “Because he didn’t know where it was, that’s why. Not until the very end, in 1643, when his father was dying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “For certain, we don’t know. But by ‘43 he was an up-and-coming Parliamentary officer, one of Cromwell’s trusted lieutenants, we do know that. And we also know that he left his command in the Midlands right in the middle of the campaigning season, when things weren’t going too well for Parliament, to be at his father’s deathbed. Through Royalist country, too, that meant.”

  “And that wasn’t filial piety?”

  “Filial stuff and nonsense! There was no love between them.”

  “Only gold?”

  “Nothing else makes sense. The old man died on August 1, according to the Parish burial register. Ten days later Nathaniel was at Standingham Castle.”

  “And just what is the significance of that, Professor?”

  “Time and place, man—time and place.”

  “The Steynings were related to the Parrotts, I gather.”

  “More than that. Nathaniel Parrott’s heir was his daughter, his only child. And she was married to Steyning’s only surviving son. The other two Steyning sons had already been killed in the war. So Edmund Steyning and Nathaniel Parrott had the same granddaughter— their joint heiress.”

  “Steyning was a strong Parliament man, obviously.”

  “Fanatical. Parrott and Steyning were two of a kind, even though Steyning was past his soldiering days. Both fanatical Parliament men—and fanatical Puritans too. Blood, politics and religion, Audley: you can’t bind two men more closely than with those three.”

  Despite his dislike of Nayler, Audley found himself nodding agreement to that. Family and politics and religion … dead children and a live grandchild … those were the solid bricks of the Steyning-Parrott alliance. The Civil War had only bound them tighter together, becoming a make-or-break cause for both families.

  And the gold … normally the possession of gold divided men more than it united them, but in these peculiar circumstances it would have been the best cement of all—a loan on behalf of their joint grandchild’s future, an investment in the service of everything that they believed in.

  “So, when you think about it intelligently, Audley, Standingham Castle was the one place Parrott could really feel safe in between North Devon and London.”

  Audley frowned. “You mean—he went there deliberately? The newspaper report said he was chased there by the Royalists.”

  Nayler gave a derisive snort. “My dear Audley—you don’t really believe what the newspapers say, do you? Besides, he may simply have been chased where he intended to go.”

  “Even though it was being besieged?”

  “The siege was a rather intermittent affair, or it had been up to then, certainly. And Standingham was a great stronghold too; Monson was considerably reinforced that last time, of course.”

  And maybe the incentive was greater, thought Audley grimly. With a ton of gold as the prize Black Thomas would probably have chanced his arm on the gates of Hell.

  “Hmm … You said ‘time’ as well as place, Professor.”

  “I did indeed—don’t be dense, my dear fellow. Time and place are what makes the thing certain in my mind. There was absolutely no other reason why Parrott should ride out of his way to Standingham—it wasn’t as though the news of his father’s death was of the least importance to anyone. He should have gone straight back to his regiment, where he was urgently needed. That’s Point One.

  “And Point Two is that he took far too long to get there in any case. That is, if he’d still been travelling the way he’d come. Which of course he wasn’t, because now he had a ton of gold to transport. And that would mean wagons or pack horses, probably pack horses—or pack ponies, seeing that he was coming from the West Country. But for much of the route he’d be passing through Royalist-held territory, so that would mean using back-roads and circling the main towns and villages. Quite a deal of night-marching too, I shouldn’t wonder … all of which would play the very devil with the men and the animals.”

  True enough, Audley conceded grudgingly. The man might be a bastard, and for sure he was being wise after the event, but he’d done his work properly all the same.

  “I see. He had to have somewhere to rest up en route.”

  “At last you’re beginning to see the light! Somewhere safe, with someone he could trust. Preferably about halfway to London. Standingham Castle and Sir Edmund Steyning.” Nayler paused. “All inference, of course—all hypothesis. But when you throw a ton of gold into the scales you’ll see that I’m right… . And if you’re looking for more detail, I suggest you switch on your little television the Sunday after next and it’ll all be there.”

  Indeed it would. And Charlie Ratcliffe’s claim to fortune would be established to the satisfaction of tens of millions, too; established so that even those who loathed everything which he stood for would concede his right to his loot.

  So the gold was real.

  And the emergency was real.

  The phone pipped for more money and he automatically fed the last of his change into it.

  “Are you phoning from a call box?” Nayler managed to make the simple question sound contemptuous.

  “Uh-huh… . One more thing. Professor: where do the Ratcliffes come into the story?”

  “The Ratcliffes? Oh, they simply had the good fortune to marry the granddaughter—the Steyning-Parrott heiress. She was the only survivor of the whole affair, you know … and later on she became Cromwell’s ward. It’s interesting that he never married her off to anyone—interesting and possibly significant, because he was one of the first to look for the gold… . But then after the restora
tion of the Monarchy in 1660 she prudently secured her estates by marrying the first impoverished Royalist who came her way. A sharp fellow by the name of Charles Ratcliffe, oddly enough.”

  The original Charlie Ratcliffe.

  “Even without the gold it was a good match for him,” continued Nayler. “His family had lost everything in the war, confiscated or sold—I don’t know which, and she brought him about five thousand acres in exchange for his name. It was a good English compromise, even if he was a bit of a bounder.”

  Pirates, religious and political fanatics— and now bounders. If Charlie was a throwback to the seventeenth century he had everything going for him, no doubt about that, from the Parrott-Steyning-Ratcliffe connection.

  But time was running out—

  “You don’t happen to know how the gold was found, do you, Professor?”

  Nayler chuckled malevolently. “Yes I do—as it happens. But that’s classified, I’m afraid, Audley. You’ll have to wait your turn for that like the rest. It’s a little surprise we’ve got up our sleeves, don’t you know.”

  Bastard, bastard, bastard.

  “But I’ll tell you this, Audley: they were clever, Parrott and Steyning were. Both devious and ruthless men, no question about that. Just you wait for my little television programme, eh? Clever and devious and ruthless—and Parrott was the more ruthless of the two.”

  The pips sounded, and an obscene insult formed on Audley’s tongue.

  But then Dr. Highsmith shook his head: revenge was a dish which should always be served cold.

  “Thank you, Professor. You’ve been extremely—“

  The phone cut him off. Extremely, unpleasantly, humiliatingly helpful. Nothing was going to shake the historical existence of that gold. The first cutting had been accurate enough. It remained to be seen whether he could improve on the second one.

  3

  THE SIGNPOST was just where the Brigadier had said it would be, exactly at the crest of the ridge. But then the Brigadier was always exact.

  Audley parked his new 2200 carefully on the verge and studied the sign without enthusiasm. After his initial resistance he had felt the old inevitable curiosity stirring, not for the job itself, but for the ultimate why hidden somewhere at the heart of it. But now the reaction to the curiosity was setting in: such curiosity was well enough for Rikki-tikki the young mongoose, but for a respectable middle-aged husband and father it was a poor substitute for the soft breasts and soft cheeks of home after a long journey from foreign parts.

  The sign was small and newly painted, or even brand new, and it bore the legend To the Monument in capital letters, and Swine Brook Field 1643 in lower case beneath them.

  He climbed stiffly out of the car and surveyed the landscape. The crest of the ridge was quite sharp, almost a miniature hog’s back compared with the undulations to the east and west of it.

  But Swine Brook had to be the key, and in the valley to the west a straggle of willows and thick bushes marked the line of a stream. On his right the pastureland ran down towards the stream, flattening for the last two hundred yards into a rich water-meadow.

  Swine Brook Field: the field where they once let the pigs loose.

  He followed the signpost’s finger down a rutted track along the line of the hog’s back between overgrown hedges of bramble and hawthorn. If this had been the battle-front of one of the 1643 armies it would have been a strong position, no doubt about that with the hedge to hide the musketeers and the reverse slope to the east to snug down the cavalry out of sight.

  Except that he didn’t know which side had fought where at Swine Brook Field yet, only that it had been the King’s Cavaliers who had won the day.

  Cavalier—wrong, but romantic; Roundhead—right, but repulsive.

  Which side would Sir David Audley have been? Would he have followed his head or his heart? Or his religion? Or his father? Or his county? Or the source of his income?

  But there was another thing for sure: of all wars, civil wars were the cruellest, 1640s and 1970s no different. Because the winning and the losing was rarely the end of them, as old Sir Jacob had seen—

  Paul Mitchell was leaning on a farm gate set back in the thickness of the hedge, waiting for him with well-simulated patience.

  No mistaking Paul. The first time Audley had seen him, across a table strewn with maps and documents in the Military Studies Institute, he’d been hidden under a near-revolutionary shock of mousey hair, and the last time the shock had been tamed to an army trim, blond-rinsed. Now the mouse-colour was back and the length too, with a van Dyke beard and moustache, cavalier-style and flecked with ginger. But no disguise, natural grown or artificial, could hide the predatory Paul underneath; at least, not from the eyes of the man who had recruited him to the Queen’s service.

  At the time, almost at the first glance, it had seemed the clever thing to attempt it; and every aptitude test and training report since then had confirmed his intuition. If there was any logic and justice to promotion, Paul would be running a section in five years’ time, and a department five years after that, and the whole bloody show five years after that.

  And in the meantime, what could be more sensible than to let him win his spurs under the control of the man who had identified his natural talents at a glance?

  God help us all, thought Audley. Paul is a fine feather in my cap—and how glad I am that I won’t be wearing that cap in fifteen years’ time!

  “Hullo, David. You’re looking bronzed and fit.”

  For a bet, Mitchell knew where he’d been these last weeks.

  “Bronzed and fit, my eye! I’m tired and bad-tempered, and you had better believe that… . Good afternoon, Paul. You look like a sociology lecturer at a radical polytechnic. Does this gate open, or do I have to climb over it?”

  “It doesn’t open.”

  “But you have to watch out for your trousers—there’s a strand of barbed wire on the top, just this side. I’ve already torn my jeans on the danm thing,” said Frances Fitzgibbon as she came into view at Mitchell’s shoulder. “And I think I’ve spiked my bottom, too.”

  Audley stared at her against his will. The thought of Frances Fitzgibbon’s little bottom was arresting, as was the thought and sight of all her other components, miniature though they were. It wasn’t that she was in the least beautiful, or even that she was pretty except in a pert, early-flowering, childish way. But at first sight she was the sensual essence of every man’s imagined indiscretion with the girl glimpsed across the shop counter.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fitzgibbon— Frances,” said Audley carefully.

  It was always the same: after that first sight the truth about Frances Fitzgibbon dowsed desire like a bucket of ice-water. Despite appearances—which so totally belied reality that she was worth a fortune to the department as she stood, torn jeans and all—Frances was a kindly and serious-minded young woman trapped in the wrong body, who deserved a better fate than having to work with Paul Mitchell … and maybe with David Audley too.

  “How are Faith and little Cathy?” asked Frances.

  “They were fine when I last saw them some weeks ago.”

  The brown eyes became sympathetic. “Like that, is it? They double-crossed you again? Poor David—I’m sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry about the—barbed wire.”

  Mitchell grinned. “I offered to render first aid, but she wasn’t having any.”

  The eyes flashed. “I should hope not!”

  Mitchell too, thought Audley. But that was the predictable male response, a sort of protective lust, and at least they were of an age. Two more babies.

  “Never mind, Frances dear,” Mitchell went on unrepentantly, “you have an honourable injury On Her Majesty’s Service to console you—

  Then will she strip her … jeans

  and show her scars

  And say, ‘These wounds I had on

  Swine Brook Field’

  —and David has us to console him.”

  Babi
es. Or if not babies then mere children, they had given him to do this job. Clever children, but children all the same. And now they were making him feel older than he really was, and not a little jealous too.

  “Some consolation!” murmured Frances.

  Audley cleared his throat. He had to stop this sparring and start asserting his authority.

  “Very well, then …” He pointed to the plain stone cross which rose from the grass a dozen yards down the hillside. “I take it that is the monument, and Swine Brook Field is beyond it.”

  “That’s right,” said Mitchell. “And the stream down there is the Swine Brook, no less.”

  Audley was unhappily aware that he had observed the obvious, and that Mitchell had capped him deliberately by adding the equally obvious.

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened …” Mitchell paused momentarily. “Well, we’re standing just about midway along the spectator line. They filled in right along the ridge—“ he spread his arms out on each side “—about a quarter of a mile to the left and right of us here. And there were ropes strung along to keep them from spreading too far down the hill and getting mixed up in the battle. So—“

  “I meant,what happened in 1643?” said Audley waspishly. It was just possible that Mitchell hadn’t considered it necessary to take his researches that far back, and nothing would put him down more surely than having to admit a little healthy ignorance.

  “In 1643?”

  “In the battle. Swine Brook Field, 1643,” said Audley with exaggerated patience. “I like to start at the beginning.”

  “Okay.” Mitchell shrugged. “We’re on the attack line—they came over the hill from behind us—“