War Game

by Anthony Price

  He opened the booklet carefully and spread out a dog-eared and yellowing map on his lap. “We’re just about here—on the fold—on the north edge of the village by that dotted line. …”

  Audley studied the map. The village in the old queen’s day had been huddled around the river crossing, with the castle on the hillside above—

  “What’s this other castle?” He pointed to the map.

  “That’s nothing. Or there’s nothing there, anyway—that’s the old castle site, it says,” said Digby dismissively. “It’ll all be in the book—this is our castle here, and you can get to the line of the old ramparts up that track beyond the pub there—“ he pointed ahead across the car bonnet “—just by that bus stop. If you follow the ramparts round you’ll come to the kitchen garden on the north side, but you’ll be out of sight of the castle all the way.”

  It was on the tip of Audley’s tongue to suggest that he could read a map as well as the sergeant, if not better, having been reading maps since before the sergeant was out of his nappies. But there had been nothing in the sergeant’s voice except helpfulness, any more than there was nothing now but politeness in the way he offered the old guide-book once he had folded the map back into it. So perhaps young police sergeants naturally took senior Home Office officials to be doddering incompetents when it came to practical matters.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said with equal politeness. “I’m sure I shall manage very well now.”

  Digby regarded him doubtfully for a moment. “Well, it’s half-past now. Cotton can ring the caretaker, that’ll pin him down. And then I’ll deal with the gardener in the pub.”

  “If he’s there.”

  “If he’s not, then he’s on his way. Half an hour every night without fail, Cotton says, and I can make him stay longer. Will an hour be enough for you?”

  Five minutes.

  Audley looked down at the venerable guide-book which, according to Digby, would answer all his questions about Standingham Castle.

  The History of the Village and Castles of Standingham. By The Reverend Horatio Musgrave, BA, Resident Minister of the Methodist Congregations of Standingham, Worpsgrave and Long Denton.

  On the next page the Reverend Musgrave himself frowned up at him out of a luxuriant frame of hair and side-whiskers and beard, the very pattern of the late Victorian clergyman.

  “The felicitous tranquillity of Standingham in our own peaceful and enlightened times conceals a sad history of fratricidal warfare and intermittent pestilence which cannot but provoke the reflection that the blessings of education and scientific progress, sustained and advanced as they have been by the proper study of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, have conferred on the British Nation signal benefits which are nevertheless insufficiently understood by the generality of the population.”

  Evidently the Reverend Musgrave was determined to use his history to point a moral, if not to adorn a tale, in the best Victorian tradition. Which, in the circumstances of less peaceful and felicitous times, his latest reader might be allowed to skip—

  “That same happy juxtaposition of highways and waterways in the midst of an industrious and prosperous agricultural community which has lately resulted in the extension of the Great Western Railway’s passenger and goods services to the district served to identify the earliest settlement at the confluence of the rivers Irthey and Barwell as a place of some importance—“

  More paragraphs to skim across. Anglo-Saxon ploughman, marauding Danes, iron-fisted Normans with the tax-man’s Domesday Book in their baggage, adulterine castles going up like mushrooms when the kings were weak—and coming down smartly when they were strong … the Black Death wiping out the original settlement beside the Barwell, and the new settlement beside the Irthey being burnt during a peasant rising … well, no one could say that the Reverend Musgrave was really exaggerating the horrors of everyday life in rural Standingham in the good old days—

  “It was in the early fifteenth century that Sir Edward de Stayninge was granted the right to crenellate his manor on the ridge above the Barwell, on the site of the earthworks of the earlier castles; of which there yet remains not one stone upon another to testify the feudal pride before which the might of France crumbled at Crecy and Agincourt. For having espoused the cause of the wicked Richard Crookback, slayer of the innocent Princes in the Tower—“

  Well, that figured. Because if there was one thing for which the lords of the manor and the villagers of Standingham alike could be relied on, it was to back losers. If there was a lost cause to hand, or a disaster of any sort going, then Standingham was first in the wrong queue; it was only to be expected in due course that Sir Piers de Stayning, having lost the “e” off his name, should also ride to Bosworth Field in 1485 with the wrong army and lose the rest of it.

  A cycle bell roused him from the contemplation of late medieval lawlessness to catch twentieth-century law in all its majesty: whether it was because of the price of petrol or from a wise return to old-fashioned police methods, PC Cotton’s superiors had provided him with a bicycle rather than a car. And for a bet, the sight of a large, properly-helmeted policeman on a tall bicycle moving steadily and silently round his patch under his own power did more to deter the local lads from petty crime than an anonymous car driver in a bus conductor’s flat cap.

  Just a couple more minutes of the Reverend Musgrave, then—and he could finish the sad history on foot anyway …

  “It was not until the second decade of the sixteenth century that a collateral descendent, Sir William Steyning, having secured the reversion of his uncle’s estates, commenced the construction of the great house on the Irthey Ridge, across the pleasant open valley of the Willow Stream. Using stone from the castle ruins, he raised a residence in the Tudor manner which, though still taking the style ‘castle’, was yet an edifice at once more commodious and more comfortable than the frowning fortresses of earlier times, testifying both to the greater confidence of the gentry in their security of tenure and to the power of the monarch to impose his will on their feudal ambitions. It was to be a tragic irony of history that this gracious home, with its noble aspect and high-mullioned windows, was to feature in the most famous and melancholy chapter in our brief chronicle of former days.”

  Audley shook his head at the text. It was maybe tragic, but hardly ironic that Standingham had received a bloody nose during the Civil War; the village was simply running true to form. Even the fact that it had been staunchly Parliamentarian, following its lord of the manor as so many places had done, and yet had still managed to ruin itself although Parliment had won the war, was a predictable occurrence. He could only hope that in reviving the family fortunes Charlie Ratcliffe had also reanimated the slumbering fiend who turned every Standingham event into a misfortune.

  The track beside the bus stop sported a mouldering notice-board bearing the legend NO THROUGH ROAD, but, if the Reverend Musgrave’s map could be relied on, it led nevertheless straight up the ridge to the old sallyport beside one of the bastions along the south rampart.

  “Had the Lord of the Manor of Standingham been young and vigorous when King and Parliament parted from one another on the great issue of England’s liberties in the year 1641, then he would have assuredly have followed his inclination toward the banner of one or other of the belligerent parties—“

  Very true. The Reverend Musgrave could no more resist stating the obvious than he could pass up the chance of using a ringing adverb or adjective.

  “And, conversely, had he been old and unversed in the arts of war he would doubtless have stood aloof from the fratricidal strife which then ensued—“

  True again. So presumably the lord of the manor, Sir Edmund Steyning, had been neither young and vigorous nor old and unversed in the arts of war—

  “But it chanced that Sir Edmund Steyning was neither.”

  Bingo!

  “In Edmund Steyning, it might be said, piety and enthusiasm for the Protestant cause combined with a fiery and
martial spirit which no physical handicap could altogether extinguish. From his earliest manhood he had followed the drum, first under the veteran Dutch commanders in their long war against Catholic Spain and then under the greatest captain of the age, the veritable ‘Lion of the North’, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, in his homeric struggle against the Imperial tyranny of the Holy Roman Empire on behalf of German Protestantism.”

  There was no doubt where the Reverend Musgrave’s sympathies lay. No doubt he had also thundered from his pulpit against Catholic emancipation in his own time, so he certainly wouldn’t miss a chance of recalling the armed Catholic might of the Counter-Reformation—

  “It was on the glorious field of Breitenfeld, when his hero and mentor smote the Catholic power, that the accident befell which ended Sir Edmund’s active career. For, while attending to his duties with the Swedish field artillery which was a novel feature of Gustavus’s army, he was desperately wounded by the premature explosion of a quantity of gunpowder. Although attended by the king’s own surgeon, his life was despaired of for many weeks; and even when that indomitable spirit and iron will which sustained him throughout his life had triumphed over his injuries, it was in a body so shattered by war that no thought of further service could be entertained.”

  The track levelled between two low brick walls. Peering over the parapet of one, Audley realised he had reached the line of the Great Western Railway’s extension which had once been attracted by the Reverend Musgrave’s “happy juxtaposition of communications”. He was glad that the old Methodist minister was no longer alive to see the change which another century’s educational and scientific blessings had wrought on the railway: its tracks had long since been torn up and young trees were already pushing their way up through the granite chippings. So far as Standingham was concerned, the railway age was as much part of bygone history as Sir Edward de Stayninge’s crenellated manor.

  “It was to his patrimony at Standingham that the crippled hero returned, from a Europe now wracked by the worst excesses of the Thirty Years’ War, which had reached its apogee in an unparalleled outburst of ferocity, unsurpassed since the fall of the Roman Empire, with the last vain and discredited attempts of the Papalists to impose uniformity on the unconquerable Protestants of the North.”

  Hadn’t it been six of one and half a dozen of the other? Or was it that Musgrave had had to contend with a Newman-trained Catholic priest in his combined parishes? No matter—

  “Yet even here, amongst the lush water-meadows of the Irthey and the Harwell, the stormclouds of war were gathering. Debarred by his physical infirmities from taking part in the events which preceded the English Civil War, Sir Edmund was yet not unaware of their genesis, which were borne upon him not only because of his staunch Protestant sympathies, but also because of the excesses of his Catholic neighbour, Lord Monson, ever a favourite with the Queen and her priests.”

  Enter the Demon King himself, good old Black Tom!

  And here was another sign, a printed poster pasted on to hardboard: PRIVATE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. To which, in an egalitarian spirit which Charlie Ratcliffe ought to have approved, someone had added BALLS with a red felt-tipped pen.

  “It seems likely, indeed, that Monson’s enmity and depredations, threatened in times of uneasy peace, had already animated Sir Edmund to plan that unique and formidable line of circumvallation which, even after the ruinous passage of two and a half centuries, yet remains for the discerning student of fortification to marvel upon; and which, with the aid of his willing and sturdy tenantry, he was to encompass so speedily when the war commenced.”

  Audley looked around him. The Irthey ridge, which he had been steadily climbing, was now so heavily wooded that he had passed into the line of old Edmund’s circumvallation almost without noticing it. But here, where the track passed through what had seemed like a natural cutting in the hillside, he had actually come upon what the Reverend Musgrave required discerning students of fortification to marvel upon.

  Directly ahead of him was a pair of ancient wrought-iron gates festooned with rusty barbed wire and heavily padlocked. But the track had curved first round an isolated mound crowned now with trees, the roots of which straggled between the remnants of what looked like stonework. Except for the narrow beaten path up to the gates there seemed no rhyme or reason in the construction, though.

  “One cannot but reflect with satisfaction on the surprise with which Monson and his be-ribboned cavaliers, flushed with their early successes, gazed upon the cunning defences with which Sir Edmund had girdled his property in their absence, and upon which they were to dash themselves in vain for two long years—“

  Audley looked round again, and then retraced his steps to the point where the path had begun to sink into the cutting.

  Cunning defences? If they were, then they were as confusing as the Iron Age earthworks at the entrance of Maiden Castle, two thousand years older than Roundheads and Cavaliers, and their cannon—

  Cannon?

  He swung on his heel. Of course!—This had been the age of cannon, and he had been thinking foolishly of castles and towers!

  That sudden steeper rise in the hillside wasn’t hillside at all, but the earth shifted from the ditch ahead. A—what was the name?—a glacis, that was it.

  And the mound in front was a ruined horn-work, with ravelins on each side of it, behind the counterscarp, and with the flanking bastions of the main ramparts ahead of him. He was in the middle of a classic seventeenth-century defence line, far in advance of anything the amateur soldiers of the English Civil War normally built, much more in the style of Vauban and the great French military engineers.

  But, of course, Steyning hadn’t been an amateur soldier at all, but a veteran of a dozen battles and sieges from the North Sea to the Baltic, who had learnt his trade from the great Gustavus Adolphus himself. There had been scores of others like him in both armies—men like Hopton and Waller, and the Scotsman Leslie—who had taken the same tuition, but they had all been fighting in the field, whereas Steyning had been caged by his injuries in his own great house in the middle of Royalist territory—caged with his Protestant zeal and his military know-how—

  And, by God, he’d been an artillery expert too, if the Reverend Musgrave could be relied on! So he’d done the only thing left within his power to do: he’d turned his home into a strongpoint, overlooked by his enemies until too late, so that no one had had the knowledge or the resources to dislodge him. Or the incentive either … until Colonel Nathaniel Parrott had descended on him with a ton of gold in his saddle-bags. And then—

  “Indeed, Standingham Castle might well have endured all the shocks of war until Cromwell and Fairfax had crowned the Parliamentary cause with the laurels of victory, but for the malevolence of fortune which, by a singular coincidence, visited upon Sir Edmund a second and final disaster.”

  Audley glanced at his watch. The details of the second disaster would have to wait. A railing thickly encrusted with barbed wire now surmounted the rampart, but the beaten path he’d been following seemed to indicate that there was a way in to his right, among the trees.

  He followed the path through a thicket of holly bushes until the way was blocked by a moss-covered tree-trunk. Where the tree had fallen there was a gap in the overhanging roof of leaves and also in the rampart above him: the fallen tree had grown on the very lip of the old parapet, and in falling had dislodged a five-yard stretch of it into the ditch below. Although the break had been long since plugged with a tangle of barbed wire, the abrupt end of the path and the regular footholds printed up the side of the bank of earth clearly marked the barrier as being weaker than it looked from below. But then the usual run of trespassers probably didn’t wear good suits, thought Audley as he clambered up; this was the second time today that he’d had to negotiate barbed wire, even though the field gate on the ridge above the Swine Brook—and Frances Fitzgibbon’s spiked backside— seemed like distant memories.

  When he reach
ed the wire, however, he saw at once that its strength was an illusion, for the whole concertina was held in place by an unbarbed loop hung loosely over the twisted end of a broken railing: surmounting the cunning defences of Standingham Castle wasn’t going to be such a problem after all, thank heavens!

  He lifted the loop and stepped gingerly over the remains of the old railing. But then, as he was in the act of refixing the loop, he felt a sharp tug at his trousers, behind and right down by his heel.

  Holding the loop in one hand and cursing under his breath at his clumsiness, he reached down to free the snagged material, only to encounter something warm and wet and soft.

  There was something licking his hand.

  Audley looked down into the eyes of a beautiful, half-grown red setter.

  The red setter grinned at him, gave an excited but perfectly friendly little yelp, and made as though to grab his trousers again: the discerning student of seventeenth-century fortification was being invited to play a game with an idiot dog.

  Correction: an idiot bitch. A beautiful, half-grown, well-groomed, amiable and totally inconvenient idiot bitch of a red setter.

  Audley’s brain accepted the information. That the bitch was friendly was no surprise to him, because he was accustomed to animals liking him, even though he had no special affection to return. He had grown up in a household where there were only two kinds of animals: the ones which were eaten and the ones which worked for their living, guarding, mousing, pulling or carrying. He had never quite understood, when he became old enough to want to analyse their reactions, why they rewarded this unsentimental attitude with trust and affection, but he had had to accept the fact of it, that animals liked him. Maybe they just liked being treated like animals.

  But it wasn’t the setter’s behaviour that mattered, it was the combination of her presence and her appearance. She wasn’t just anyone’s dog running loose in search of canine adventure: that shining coat had been brushed not long ago, and the little brass plate on the real leather collar shone pale with recent polishing.