‘What about the night watch?’ Tom asked, avoiding a great puddle which would by the looks have reached halfway up his boots had he not at the last seen its surface glistening in the moonlight. There were other folk about, some merry with drink, but most were observing the curfew.
‘The men of the watch know me, Tom,’ Birkenhead said, ‘besides which, since His Majesty and the army moved in, the curfew has been more … relaxed. Take this parish,’ he said, throwing an arm out towards the timber-framed houses, the halls and colleges whose windows glowed dully against the newly fallen night, ‘these days it’s full to the rafters with noblemen, knights and gentlemen. Such as they do not take kindly to being told by the watch when they must be abed. Especially in time of war. They want their ale, their women and their games.’
‘And they don’t mind the stink?’ Tom said.
‘The smell is from the ditch outside New College and is, I’m sorry to say, noisome to the whole town,’ Birkenhead said. ‘But there are some five thousand souls now quartered in the city and all those … expulsions have to go somewhere.’ He smiled. ‘I assure you that you’ll hardly notice it by tomorrow.’
They followed New College Lane a little way south, but before it snaked eastwards, becoming Queen’s Lane, Birkenhead led Tom through a pitch-black passage and across a patch of grass and mud to a low, stone-built building behind which loomed the great bulk of All Souls chapel, whose sharp spires rose like silent sentinels keeping watch over the college.
‘I dare say you expected something rather more grand for the home of Mercurius Aulicus, scourge of the rebels and organ of our cause,’ Birkenhead said, turning the key in a stout iron-studded door and then pausing to look at Tom, one brow hitched. ‘But we’ve got corn piled in the law and logic schools, wood, grain and hay cramming the colleges, and even the town hall is bursting with provisions in the unlikely event that we are besieged. And so we must make do with what we have. Not what you’re used to, I’m afraid,’ the editor said, pushing open the door.
‘I have grown used to many things that I had not thought to,’ Tom replied, and no longer able to resist the urge he turned and took one look back along the street but saw no one.
‘As have we all, Thomas,’ Birkenhead said thoughtfully, then swept a short arm into the room, inviting his guest to make himself comfortable. Then he locked the door behind them. ‘A strange thought, is it not, that our king lodges at Christ Church not half a mile from where we stand now?’ Birkenhead said, using what little light there was by the window to see as he struck flint and steel, showering sparks onto a swatch of charcloth in a clay dish.
‘I’ll wager the King says the very same about John Birkenhead,’ Tom said with a grin, and the editor gave a short bark of a laugh just as the charcloth caught in a little burst of yellow flame. In no time his candle was burning and he took it up and neatly went from lamp to lamp until the workshop was illuminated and Tom could gain an appreciation of it.
‘I have never seen one before,’ Tom said, genuinely impressed by the great wooden machine that stood in the middle of the workshop. Seven feet long, three feet wide and seven feet tall, with its great screw and windlass, its frame in which the text-blocks were placed and inked and another two frames which were even now covered with paper ready to be folded down onto the inked type.
‘My fellow editor calls it a glorified wine-press,’ Birkenhead said, standing and staring at the contraption as though it still awed him. ‘And yet even Mr Heylin, who appreciates a fine drop as much as the next fellow, will assert that the nectar of our endeavour is more intoxicating to man than any French wine.’
Tom’s muscles had begun to tremble the way they did before a fight, and the thought that the King of England himself and all his loyal knights were only a few hundred strides away did nothing to calm him. He ran a hand along the smooth flat bed, recalling what Captain Crafte had said about the printing press being a weapon more powerful than any cannon, an opinion which Birkenhead clearly shared.
‘For we deliver what folk across the land crave. News of the King and the cause and of the base villainy of the rebels,’ the editor said, as Tom took hold of the hand-smoothed lever that had been hauled across countless times to lower the screw and transmit the pressure through the platen. ‘I will gladly give you a demonstration afterwards,’ Birkenhead said, beckoning Tom across to the desk behind which he was pulling up his chair to sit, ‘but first, Tom Rivers, we must write our story.’ He took up his quill and dipped it into the ink pot. Then he froze and looked across the room, his eyes fixing on Tom’s. ‘But it was appropriate to celebrate and be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found,’ he said, then grinned. ‘I must admit the Gospel of Luke is my favourite.’
And Tom drew his sword.
‘If you’re a God-fearing man now would be the time to make amends,’ Tom said, striding towards the editor, candlelight glinting off his rapier’s blade.
‘My God!’ Birkenhead exclaimed wide-eyed.
‘That’s a start,’ Tom said.
‘What is this? You mean to kill me?’
‘I mean to do more than that,’ Tom replied. ‘I’m going to blow up your press, Mr Birkenhead.’ He held the rapier’s point an arm’s length from the man’s neck. ‘Unless, of course, you can prove here and now that your precious words are a match for cold steel.’
‘You’re still a rebel,’ the editor said, dropping the quill and slumping back in his chair as though resigned to his fate. ‘You have played me like a prize carp, Rivers. I am humiliated.’
‘That’s the least of your worries.’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Open it,’ Tom said and Birkenhead walked over with his key and unlocked the door with a trembling hand, stepping back as though afraid of what might be on the other side. And he looked no less perturbed when Dobson walked in brandishing a club, his face all bristle and scowl as he glared about the room like a bear looking for hounds to rip apart.
‘It’s just us,’ Tom said and Dobson nodded, glancing at Birkenhead with an expression that was half disappointment, half indifference, then turning to step back out into the night to help the others, who were unloading barrels from a handcart.
‘So you’re the quill-driving bastard who mocks us,’ Weasel gnarred at the editor whilst rolling a barrel across the tiled floor, ‘and this is the machine that vomits your lie-ridden papers,’ he said, placing the barrel beneath the printing press’s flat bed.
‘In thy foul throat thou liest,’ Penn said, rolling his own barrel and setting it against Weasel’s. Then he snatched up a page of Mercurius Aulicus that had been set aside because the ink had smudged. ‘An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told,’ he said, ripping the paper into pieces and tossing them aside.
Birkenhead raised his neat-bearded chin defiantly. ‘Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end,’ he said, his riposte also plucked from Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, or so Tom suspected. ‘And you call me a liar, yet you, sir, and your fellows are all other than what you purport to be.’
A fair point, Tom thought, given his own performance, and his companions’ being begrimed with stone dust when none had ever shaped a stone.
‘Slit his throat and shut him up, Tom,’ Dobson growled, bringing another barrel in.
‘Where’s Will?’ Tom said.
‘He’s keeping an eye out,’ Dobson replied, nodding towards the door as he put his barrel in the room’s far corner, which meant it must be one of those that contained ale not black powder. To Tom’s eye they all looked the same but he trusted the others knew which were which.
‘The night watch came sniffing,’ Weasel said as though he had read Tom’s mind. ‘Suspected we were up to no good moving ale around in the dark. But when we gave them a barrel, thanking them for keeping the streets safe for honest folk, their questions seemed to run dry.’ He grinned, revealing small pointy teeth. ‘A curious thing.’
Tom nodded, not dwelling on how close they had clear
ly all come to being discovered. ‘Get over there with your contraption,’ he said to Birkenhead. ‘We need rope.’
‘Got some,’ Dobson said, heading for the door. ‘Used it to lash the barrels down.’
A moment later Trencher came in with a length of rope, having left Dobson on watch outside in the dark. ‘I wanted to see this here printing press before it goes up in smoke.’
‘You won’t see drier timber,’ Weasel said, pouring black powder from a flask in a trail across the floor. ‘We didn’t need all this damned powder nor the risk of getting caught with it. That press’ll burn like a witch dipped in wax.’
‘We could not risk someone seeing the fire and putting it out,’ Tom explained, taking the rope from Trencher.
‘Aye,’ Trencher said, staring at the printing press with an expression of reluctant admiration, ‘and I’d wager a nice explosion is Captain Crafte’s way of answering their arsewipe newsbook. Get on with it, lad,’ he growled to Weasel who had evidently pilfered a chisel from Guillaume Scarron’s tool cart for he was using the thing to punch a hole in a barrel which lay on its side and had been wedged to stop it from rolling away. ‘If we get caught they’ll string us up, pull out our guts and send pieces of us to each corner of the land.’
‘Don’t do this thing. This is a base act, Tom Rivers,’ Birken-head said, jerking, straining against the rope tying him to his press as Tom tested his knots. ‘This is unworthy of your blood,’ the editor dared, eyes wide with terror now, saliva churned white at the corners of his mouth, his whole body trembling.
‘What do you know of blood? Hiding here with your books and your ink. Weaving lies whilst other men die in the fields. Whilst they who were hale and strong are butchered like beasts and sob for their mothers.’ Satisfied with his knots Tom put himself face to face with the editor and glared into his tear-filled eyes. ‘We are at war, Mr Birkenhead. Real war, not some squabble of words and pathetic lies. And you have lost this fight.’
‘Your father would be ashamed,’ the editor spat, dredging up some courage or hate in the face of death. ‘He would turn in his grave.’
‘My father has no grave,’ Tom said, and with his knife he cut Birkenhead’s falling band from the neck of his doublet, cut it down and rolled it, stuffing it into the editor’s mouth and tying the ends behind his head.
‘We’re done,’ Weasel said, standing to admire his work. The powder trail would have stretched forty feet if it had been poured in a straight line. But it was not straight. It followed a saw-blade pattern which would slow the flame and give them enough time to get clear of the workshop before the three barrels exploded and the printing press with them.
‘We’ve a better chance of slipping out of the city alone than as a group,’ Tom said as the others gathered round. ‘The Scot will be waiting for us to the north-east by the river. There’s a footbridge. If any of us do not make it the rest must go on. The Scot won’t wait for sunrise, he’ll be gone and any of us left on foot in the valley will soon be rounded up by King’s men. So we go no matter what.’
‘I love you all like brothers,’ Weasel said, ‘but that’s not nearly as much as I love not swinging on the end of a rope. When The Scot rides east Weasel will be squinting at the sun.’
‘Good luck, lads,’ Trencher said, gripping each man’s arm in turn and finishing with Tom’s. ‘May the good Lord see us safe out of Oxford while the King’s curs are pissing on this fire.’
‘Off you go,’ Tom said, then walked over to Birkenhead’s desk and took up a candle lamp. ‘You too, Will. I’ll see you at the bridge.’
‘If you have no objections, Tom, I’d be the one to light the fuse that makes charred splinters of that thing,’ Trencher said, gesturing at the printing press. ‘That’d be something to tell my children’s children when I’m old and they’re readying to put me in my eternity box.’
‘You’re already old,’ Penn put in, grinning wickedly.
Tom nodded and handed Trencher the candle, at which the big man’s face lit up like a flame in the gloom, and rather than leave the workshop then, all of them were compelled to stay and watch the powder lit.
There was a flare of orange flame and a bloom of white smoke and the little blaze fizzed along its jagged course. And the small company scattered like leaves on the wind and vanished along the lanes, passages and amongst the messuages into the night.
All except for Tom.
Tom fumbled with the key in the lock, his chest thumping, fighting every instinct screaming at him to get as far away as he could, and then the lock clicked and the door was open again and he was inside. There was no time. Surely. He sawed at the rope which bound the editor to his printing press, the knife’s handle slick with sweat, as the furious seething flame scuttled ever closer. Only ten feet of unburnt powder remained. Seven feet. Five.
‘Move!’ he roared, a fist snarled up in the man’s doublet, all but hauling him across the room, through the thick, stinking smoke towards the door. Then out and down onto the grass, faces in the mud as the flame met the charge and the whole lot exploded like God’s wrath.
Birkenhead’s eyes were white orbs of unspeakable terror glowing in the moonwashed night, as Tom lifted him to his feet. ‘Run, you bastard, or I’ll cut your throat,’ Tom snarled, and they hurried down New College Lane, then Queen’s Lane, as the first shouts were raised in the darkness around them. Then, just past the church of St Peter-in-the-East, Tom shoved the smaller man up against a stone wall and pressed his knife against his white throat. ‘Make a sound and I’ll kill you. Understand?’ Birkenhead blinked rapidly and nodded and Tom cut through the gag in the editor’s mouth and threw the thing over the wall. ‘Now you’re going to help me, Mr Birkenhead,’ he said, giving a smile that was cold as death on his own lips. The shouts were getting louder and now Tom heard the scuff of boots and the jangle of swords and kit, knew men were coming up Queen’s Lane towards them and must surely be upon them in a matter of heartbeats.
‘Up you get,’ he growled, lacing his fingers, creating a stirrup into which he invited Birkenhead to put his foot.
‘Over there?’ the editor said, nodding at the stone wall that was a little over six feet high. On the other side were trees and bushes and no doubt graves. ‘Now,’ Tom said, ‘and don’t even think about running,’ he added as the man stepped into his hands and grabbed the top of the wall while Tom lifted him up. Up he scrambled, neatly for a man of words, and Tom followed, fingers clawing at the damp stone, his arms hauling his body up until he could throw his right leg over the wall and then jump onto the grass below. Just as the night watch clattered past, hurrying north up the narrow walled lane towards the confusion of shouting and fire. Towards the chaos.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘WILLIAM, LORD DENTON AND his son Henry. Where will I find them?’ Tom asked. He had taken a huge gamble by saving John Birkenhead’s life in exchange for information, but he knew there was a chance that Denton, his hated enemy, was in Oxford with the King. Where else would he be? And hadn’t Birkenhead himself said that Oxford was nowadays full to the rafters with noblemen, knights and gentlemen?
‘I do not know a Lord Denton,’ Birkenhead managed, the words squeezed through a throat constricted by fear.
‘You know him,’ Tom said. ‘The King and his court are here. Lord Denton is here.’ Tom glanced round and through a gap in the bushes saw the weak glow of candlelight through one of the church windows. But they were safe enough amongst the trees, for anyone curious enough about the tumult to investigate would be drawn away from them and towards Birkenhead’s flaming workshop at the college.
‘Why would I tell you? Why in God’s name would I help you?’ the editor said defiantly, so that Tom admired him, for all the good it would do the man. ‘You devils and traitors have destroyed my press and you will slit my throat the moment I have told you what you want to know.’
Tom grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt and brought his knife up to his bulging left eye. He could feel the editor t
rembling, could smell the terror on him.
‘Let me assure you, Mr Birkenhead, slitting your damned throat would be a mercy. If you do not tell me where Denton is I will cut off your ballocks.’ His mind recalled an image of George Green, Martha’s father, as they mutilated him, slicing off his private parts and casting them into a fire. ‘I will cut off your nose and carve the letters on your face so that the world will know you for a seditious libeller. And I will not kill you but will let you live in misery and abasement.’
‘I would still decry the rebels and their base villainy. I would still serve my king,’ the editor said, but even his short beard was trembling now, so that Tom knew his threats had taken root.
‘Denton,’ Tom growled, pressing the knife’s blade against the man’s nose.
Birkenhead held as still as his quivering flesh would allow and blinked slowly in place of a nod.
‘New Inn Hall. Lord Denton lodges at New Inn Hall. He has been appointed to oversee the establishment of the new Royal Mint.’
‘That comes as no surprise,’ Tom said, hatred for Denton welling in his gut and souring his mouth. Bats whirred above them, dark streaks against the smoky, moon-silvered sky. Some creature rustled in a nearby bush but did not show itself.
‘It’s half a mile from us.’ Birkenhead nodded westward. That sounded good in Tom’s ears. A chill ran up the back of his neck at the thought of bloody vengeance being within his reach at last. He was suddenly aware of the painful throbbing in the stub of his ring finger, could feel his pulse in it, and his mind’s eye summoned Denton again standing beneath his ensign on the plain below Edgehill. Before Tom had been shot and beaten down to the blood-churned filth.
‘What has the man done to you?’ Birkenhead asked, professional curiosity getting the better of mortal fear.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 14
