But no one knew anything about Thomas Rivers.
The pistol’s muzzle dug sharply into his back between the shoulder blades, forcing him forward, and then again so that he turned glaring, his fists balled at his sides.
‘It’s not worth the trouble, Sir Edmund,’ O’Brien said behind him, having already been shoved into the kitchen of the derelict house that was to be their prison. ‘There’s nothing to be done now.’ The Irishman put a big hand on Mun’s shoulder and squeezed hard enough to get Mun’s attention.
‘You’re not as stupid as you look, O’Brien,’ Captain Boone said through a grin, his pistol aimed at Mun’s chest. Behind the captain Corporal Bard stood stone-faced, a wheellock at the half cock across his chest.
‘Come on now, Mun,’ O’Brien said, ‘I’ll have no one to talk to if Captain Boone puts a hole in you.’ He frowned. ‘Then again, I’ve never known trouble like I have since making your acquaintance. And me being an Irishman, too!’
Mun held Boone’s eye, promising hurts he could not deliver being unarmed and at the wrong end of the captain’s firelock. Yet if Boone only knew that Mun had facilitated the escape of five rebel prisoners – Thomas Rivers amongst them – and had even helped kill Boone’s corporal Scrope in the process, he would surely murder Mun where he stood even before someone could fashion the noose.
‘You stole a man’s cannon and that man not just some cur rebel but a baron and friend of the King,’ Boone said as though he was at a loss to imagine why anyone would do something so foolish. ‘You’ll be lucky if you don’t find yourself at the end of a rope. Your collar day is coming, Rivers, and I’ll be right at the front of the crowd to watch you dance.’
Mun held his tongue and stepped back into the ruin, from which most of the roof timbers had been plundered for fuel or some other purpose, so that the earthen floor was puddled and what rushes yet remained were filthy and rotting.
‘By all means attempt an escape,’ Boone said, gesturing with his pistol to the kitchen’s crumbling east wall that stood about the same height as O’Brien. ‘My men will be on the other side and they have orders to shoot you if you try to leave us.’
‘I wouldn’t give you the pleasure, you whore-born jackanapes,’ Mun said.
Boone laughed, easing the cock down to the priming pan. ‘Those spurs which His Majesty gave you after Kineton Fight,’ he said, nodding down at Mun’s boots, ‘give them to me and I will petition the Prince on your behalf. I give you my word.’
Now it was Mun’s turn to grin. ‘The Prince would sooner take advice from his damned dog than from you,’ he said, ‘and as for your word, it is piss on a nettle, you vainglorious lick-spittle bastard.’
Boone’s lip curled beneath his long moustaches. ‘Enjoy your comforts, Sir Edmund,’ he spat. ‘You too, you Irish bloody hang-in-chains. You’ll be going into the hole tomorrow.’ He grimaced. ‘And those pretty spurs will be no use to you down there.’ Then he gestured to Bard who opened the door, allowing Boone to step out into the night.
‘It ain’t personal,’ Bard said to Mun, holding his eye for a heartbeat, just long enough for Mun to nod curtly to show he accepted the sentiment. Then the corporal closed the door behind him leaving Mun and O’Brien standing in the dark. It was raining, but barely. Mun had known heavier dewfall, his face now turned up to the sky. Now and then he could see stars through the cloud and the pall of smoke rising from Lichfield into the damp night.
‘It’s not so bad,’ O’Brien said, glancing around. ‘I’ve slept in worse than this.’ He sniffed, cuffing his nose. ‘Mind you, we’d have done better keeping on the right side of Captain Boone. Not that he’s got a right side,’ he admitted. ‘My da used to say keep in with the bad man for the good man won’t harm you.’
‘I’d sooner keep in with the Earl of Essex than that bastard,’ Mun said.
‘His Highness the Prince could have given us a warmer reception if you ask me,’ O’Brien grumbled. ‘We’ve been getting our swords dirty up north while half the King’s bloody army has been sitting around on their arses and what do we get for our troubles?’ He kicked a lump of charred roof beam across the grimy floor. ‘A drink would have been a start and we could have talked about the rest.’
‘What could he do?’ Mun said. ‘You think he was going to admit to having us steal the baron’s bloody cannon?’
‘Why not?’ the Irishman asked with a sullen shrug. ‘A prince trumps a baron.’
‘He may be a prince but he’s not an Englishman and unless Boone was talking from his arse Lord Lidford is known to the King.’
When he had first laid eyes on Mun the Prince’s teeth had flashed in the candle-lit gloom. But then he had noticed the man beside Mun in the fine cuirassier’s armour, noticed the stone-cold fury knotted up in the jaw, the man himself constrained by decorum not deference, and the royal smile had vanished.
‘The last time I saw you, Baron, we had just kicked the Spanish out of Breda and the Dutch were writing songs about us.’ The Prince had been genial but not friendly. ‘Poor old Goring, eh? He’s never danced since.’
‘Sod Goring! I was almost strung up and flayed alive for letting you join the storming party, your highness,’ Lord Lidford had said icily. Mun got the distinct impression that the Prince had been meant to enjoy a secondary role in whatever fight they were recalling, and furthermore that it had been the baron’s job to make sure that this remained so.
The Prince had wafted the tallow-smelling air with long fingers. ‘We were young,’ he said as if that explained all, as if he were not still young.
‘And now I have but recently returned, my shoes yet brine-stained, to serve His Majesty, and I find this gang of thieves making off with my beasts and my own cannon. I expect an explanation.’ Lord Lidford had been angry and haughty but not fool enough to openly accuse the Prince of ordering Mun to steal his gun and the oxen to pull it. Yet the unspoken words were loud enough and Mun knew that in the following frosty silence the Prince had been on the verge of hurling black powder into the embers rather than keeping the peace. Yet he had resisted and now Mun and O’Brien were locked up, their punishment for stealing the good baron’s cannon that they must climb into the tunnels even now being dug beneath the outer walls of the Cathedral Close.
‘I do not have the luxury of time to make use of your cannon, Baron,’ the Prince had said, ‘for you neglected to bring me shot for it.’
‘I did not bring you the gun at all,’ Lord Lidford sputtered.
‘Indeed you did not.’ Prince Rupert’s eyes were accusing then. ‘And now Essex lays siege to Reading and I may not tarry here. Sir Edmund, you will bring down the rebels’ wall and by doing so earn my forgiveness. And you will use the baron’s black powder to do it.’ He turned back to Lord Lidford. ‘You did at least bring powder, Baron? May we be grateful for that?’
Lord Lidford had simply stared, the ire coming off him like heat.
‘Yes he did, your highness,’ Mun had said.
And so now Mun and O’Brien were locked up in a collapsed house while the rest of their troop drank, smoked and ate, enjoying what scant comforts Prince Rupert’s besieging army could provide.
‘I’m not fond of small spaces,’ O’Brien said. ‘Ever since I was a wean and me and my brother Jack borrowed the parish coffin.’
‘We should have stayed up north,’ Mun said, thinking that mud and cramped darkness was an odd reward for bringing his prince a cannon. There was a long silence. Somewhere men were singing a bawdy song about weak-willed wives and strong red wine.
‘Well?’ Mun said.
‘Well what?’ O’Brien asked, as though he had not been filling the space with silence just for the opportunity to fill it with the rest of his tale. ‘Ah, now then, I thought you were never going to ask,’ he said, then nodded towards the source of the music. ‘But Jesus and Mary there’s not a singer among them! That’s the tune the old cow died of, heavens above! I shall have to give them a proper song later.’ He coughed into a fist
. ‘So where was I? Ah, the parish coffin. It was a daft idea thinking about it.’ Mun had no doubt that it was. ‘We wanted to know what it felt like to be dead.’ The Irishman looked at him accusingly. ‘Don’t be telling me you never wondered the same.’ Mun was not sure how to answer that and so he didn’t. ‘Jack said the only way we could truly know, short of leaping from the bell tower or running each other through with a pig sticker, was to lie down in a coffin and for the whole night too. Lucky for us our uncle was two days since bereft of life. As cadaverous as it’s possible to be. Just dropped dead one day still clutching his jar, but then my da always said Uncle Eamon was mostly in the field when luck was on the road. We waited till they had hauled him from the box and dropped him in the ground, as was only good and decent, then we lingered by the empty coffin which stood upon joint stools in the chimney in the hall, deliberating as to which one should have the honour of visiting the afterlife.’ Those broad shoulders lifted again. ‘The job fell to me, me being the bravest and most intrepid.’
‘Your brother was older than you, wasn’t he, Clancy?’
‘Aye, so he was. How did you know?’
Now it was Mun’s turn to shrug. ‘Pray continue.’
‘Our kin were off drinking to Eamon, giving him a proper send-off. No one missed us sprats. The bells were still pealing and the hall still whiffing of rosemary when I was in the box with the lid on. Jack said he’d give me tuppence if I stayed in it all night. Of course the little fartleberry never had tuppence, which I should have well known. But he’d have been the poorer if he had.’
‘You lasted the night?’ Mun asked.
‘Aye, I did.’
‘And you know how it feels being dead?’
‘I know how it feels to have a shit for an older brother,’ O’Brien said, going over to the east wall and stepping up onto the rubble until his eyes were just shy of its ragged top. ‘Walton, is that you out there?’ There was no reply, just the sounds of singing and officers barking at their men, and the occasional crack of a musket in the dark: men taking pot shots for want of something to do. ‘Walton, you merry-begotten tosspot, I know you’re the other side of this wall. I can smell the rag water on your breath, you miserable shanker.’
‘I’m not allowed to talk to you,’ Walton said.
‘If I’m going to crawl into a bloody hole to win this damned war for His Majesty the least you can do is be courteous.’ O’Brien shook his head as though there was simply no accounting for some folk’s manners. ‘This tunnel me and Sir Edmund have bravely volunteered to wriggle through, who’s dug it?’
‘Fifty men up from Cannock Chase,’ Walton said. ‘The Prince had them drain the moat and now they’ve got the tunnel almost to the bastards’ walls.’
‘So they know their business? The diggers?’ O’Brien said.
‘I should bloody hope so,’ Walton replied. ‘They’re bloody miners.’
‘You hear that, Mun?’ O’Brien clawed at his great red beard. ‘It doesn’t sound so bad.’
20 April 1643
His lungs felt as though they were filling with scalding liquid and his mind was screaming at him to get out. To crawl back the way they had come before it was too late. Before he suffocated to death or drowned in the filthy freezing water that was a foot deep and getting deeper as more seeped into the slick cavity.
‘Jesus, I’m stuck.’ He had never heard fear in O’Brien’s voice before but there was fear in it now.
‘You’re not stuck, Clancy. Keep going,’ he managed, fighting the panic surging in his own veins, flooding revulsion and terror through his limbs and loosening his bowels. ‘Move, damn you. We’re nearly there.’
But they were not nearly there. They were on their bellies, Mun in front of the Irishman, pushing themselves along, straining to keep their canvas-wrapped powder kegs out of the water as much as was possible. There were others in that cold black hell, several of the Cannock Chase miners following up behind with their own powder kegs, and perhaps those men were not half paralysed with fear and fighting for every breath. Perhaps being men who plied their trade beneath the sod they were as comfortable as moles. But perhaps not. Whatever, Mun found no comfort in company. Down here where the air was scant, where it was more precious than King’s gold or victory or love, every man was alone and Mun felt it deep in the marrow of his bones. At least the timbers propping the shaft felt strong enough whenever he brushed against one in the dark, so that he must hope the Cannock men knew their business as well as he knew his own.
‘How far?’ O’Brien growled, his voice intimate in that too small space.
‘Just a little more,’ Mun said, feeling his flesh begin to tremble though he knew not whether it was through fear or cold. The water was cold. ‘Can you see that light up ahead?’
‘I can’t even see your boots and yet they’re in my face,’ O’Brien rumbled.
‘Just keep going,’ Mun said, as much to himself as to his friend. Up ahead, twenty yards away, maybe more, the over-bearing dark was disturbed. A halo of non-dark eked out a frail existence and so Mun steeled himself to the task, the toe ends of his boots digging for purchase in the clay, gouging furrows, the flesh within them numbing as he pushed on, now and then half choking, spitting foul water that spilled into his mouth.
I can’t breathe.
Not far now, he told himself. Get to the end. Place the charges. Set the fuses. Then back, quick as a wet rat slipping through the gutter.
His arms trembled with the strain of holding his cask above the rising water, the muscles bunched and burning. If he dropped the cask he might well ruin the powder and then he or some unlucky Cannock man would have to squirm through one hundred feet of filth with another cask to make right his mistake. So he would not drop it. His agonized arms would not fail him.
He could hear O’Brien grunting with effort for the tunnel was narrow, and if Mun’s own face was as much in the water as out of it then the big Irishman must be in a worse hell still. For with his broad chest and shoulders he must feel like a bung in a bottle neck.
‘Ten feet. No more,’ Mun growled, and received no reply but for laboured breathing: his own and that of O’Brien and, faintly, the few men further back.
Thank God the tunnel was getting ever so slightly wider, so that he managed to get the cask up onto his right shoulder, the lanolin stink of the sack pricking his senses awake from their half-death, then pull himself along by repeatedly digging his left elbow into the freezing filth. He could see candles now which the miners had set in clefts scooped in the earth, but the little flames guttered and choked and threatened to fail.
Soon back above ground, his mind whispered. Back with the living.
Then he was in the chamber which the Cannock men had dug and he could reach out and touch the foundations of the Cathedral Close’s walls, press freezing fingers against the slick stones that bore the tool marks of the miners’ excavations. In the earth below these foundations, four feet beneath the stones, they had dug a channel for the explosives.
‘I’m suffocating,’ O’Brien said. ‘Can’t get a breath.’ Suddenly the Irishman was beside him in the chamber at the tunnel’s end, his own cask easily out of the water, his prodigious strength unflagging. His unblinking eyes, though, glowed white in that near-grave and were swollen with terror.
‘The worst is over,’ Mun said, knowing it to be a lie for worse was to come. Once they had lit the fuses. ‘Give it to me.’ Mun had already placed his cask up on the rough wooden platform which the miners had erected to keep the charges clear of the water. Now he took O’Brien’s and placed it beside his own. ‘Go on, get out,’ he growled.
‘Ballocks,’ O’Brien growled back, edging up so that they were almost level, their combined mass all but filling the cramped alcove. ‘You’ll need help with the fuses.’
‘Get out, Clancy,’ Mun said, seeing black spots before his eyes, the fear threatening to overcome him.
‘Fuck off,’ O’Brien said.
‘You’re to
o damn big and too damn slow,’ Mun hissed. ‘Once these are lit we need to be gone. I won’t have you lying there like a stopper in a flask leaving me at the back when this lot goes off.’
‘But you can’t do all the fuses.’
‘I can help,’ another voice said.
‘Who has match?’ Mun asked. He had brought his own lit match coiled round his right wrist but it had long since gone out when keeping the end burning had seemed less important than keeping his head above water. It was too wet to relight now.
‘I have two, both lit,’ the same voice came back from somewhere behind them, followed by the sound of the man blowing on his match to back up his boast.
Mun locked eyes with O’Brien, who passed up another powder keg from a Cannock man further back. ‘Go back. I’ll be right behind.’ For a heartbeat, by the frail faltering candlelight he saw pure turmoil in the Irishman’s eyes. He knew his friend would sooner half of Lichfield came down on his head than that he leave Mun to finish the job alone. But then a grimace showed white against O’Brien’s mud-smeared beard and he nodded and cursed, his reason to remain negated by the man behind who anyway had the only burning match and would need to come up to the foundation wall with it. That the Irishman was down there at all with his fear of confined places …
‘If you’re not back … above ground … before I finish the Lord’s Prayer … I’ll be back to drag you out by your feet.’ With that O’Brien pushed himself deeper into the meagre chamber, careful not to disturb the casks, and there contorted, bringing his mud-slathered knees up to his chest. Awkward as a cow on a crutch he got himself turned round and began to crawl past Mun, who sucked in his belly for every half an inch was needed, back towards the narrow shaft.
The next man behind squirmed into the space left by the Irishman and went to crouch in a dark corner, his wrists up by his begrimed face, blowing now and then on the match coiled round them so that the lit ends glowed menacingly before dulling again. Five more powder kegs were passed along by the Cannock men and Mun painstakingly set them side by side on the low trestle beneath the slick, stone-flecked earth and the wall’s foundations.
Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 20
