Now they were no longer attacking in waves, one troop after another. Instead Mun and his men and those of Boone’s troop and others sat their horses behind and amongst the musketeers and dragoons thronging the Frome Gate, firing at will and maintaining a constant hail of lead against the faltering bulwark that stood between them and Bristol’s brave but outnumbered garrison.
‘We’re running out of powder,’ O’Brien said, pouring powder down the muzzle of his wheellock and blinking sweat from his eyes. ‘Shot too.’ He put a ball and wad down the barrel then scoured home the charge. ‘And from what I hear Prince Maurice is still picking his nose on the south side,’ he said, grabbing the reins one-handed as his horse spooked at an explosion. He calmed her with a soft growl as he took his spanner and steadily wound the pistol’s lock.
‘We’re making hard work of it,’ Mun said above the din, aiming his firelock at a rebel who was leaning over the wall trying to shove a scaling ladder off with a captain’s leading staff, though it was clear the man was no captain. Mun fired but the ball struck the wall in a spray of stone chips and the rebel ducked out of sight. ‘We can no more sustain these losses than can they,’ Mun said, glancing at the bodies scattered around and at those wounded being helped to the rear. ‘One of us will break soon.’
A cheer went up and Mun looked over his right shoulder to see reinforcements in the form of Colonel Grandison’s brigade coming on to the drums in ranks as neat as could be across uneven, furze-strewn ground. Presenting a front some seventy paces across, they were arranged in six ranks of fifty: grim-faced musketeers who to Mun’s eye had the look of men who know that they have come to do a job, know that they are expected to change the day. Those horse and foot in loose order before the gate instinctively hurried left or right to get out of the way because they knew what was coming, that to stay was to face obliteration from their own side.
‘The buggers will wish they’d opened the doors for us now,’ Tobias Fitch called, grinning at the defences, and Mun noticed a musket-ball dent in the man’s forge-black breastplate that had not been there before the fight. The former stonemason’s apprentice would have been dead had the plate not been of good quality.
‘Opened the doors?’ O’Brien remarked as the approaching musketeers blew on their matches and cocked them, fitting the cords into the serpents. ‘They’ll wish they’d killed the fatted calf.’
The musketeers in the first two ranks were trying their match now, making sure the burning ends would reach the centre of the pan.
‘Present!’ one of Grandison’s officers yelled, and the well-drilled soldiers moved the muskets away from their bodies, muzzles still pointing at the sky, powder flasks clacking noisily.
‘Give fire!’ the officer bawled and the fifty men of the first rank levelled their matchlocks and squeezed their triggers. The sound was deafening and Mun felt Lady tense beneath him, though she gave him no trouble. Then as the smoke hung in the still air like an ethereal rampart before Grandison’s men, the front rank fell away to the rear to reload and the next rank stepped forward.
‘Fire!’ this rank’s captain roared and another volley ripped into the Frome Gate and the walls of Bristol. Mun and the men around him watched in awe as each rank came forward in its turn, so that Mun found he could not count beyond ten between volleys. It was impossible for the rebels to present their own firearms in the face of such fury and Prince Rupert knew it. Seizing his chance he ordered his men forward, calling on them to storm the gate in the name of the King. The clamour from Royalist voices was tumultuous. They poured forward unopposed and tore at the barricade like frenzied animals. And they forced a breach. The first two or three were killed for their efforts but then some were through, their own muskets barking, and when he saw that Mun knew it was all but over.
‘Forward!’ he roared, his ragged voice lost like a breath in a tempest, urging Lady through the throng. He found that the bloodied foot were happy to let him and his men pass, relieved even, to see others going forward instead of them, and then he was on the bridge, glancing down at the bodies in the water as he pushed on. A cold hand clutched his heart with the realization that he was the first mounted man through the gate, but he did not stop and Lady picked her way around corpses and took him down into the doomed city.
And there were the enemy, trying to retreat in good order, loading and firing matchlocks and wheellocks even as they withdrew, from the breach and those spilling through it like blood from a wound.
‘They may be short on fealty but they’ve plenty of courage,’ O’Brien remarked, licking dry lips. ‘Wait for the order, lad,’ he called to Jonathan who had drawn his sword and looked hungry for slaughter. ‘You bloody wait.’
Mun looked at Lord Lidford’s son and nodded, feeling his own lips pull back from his teeth. These rebels had bled the King’s men. They had bled Mun’s men. And they had killed Hector. Mun would no more curtail Jonathan’s sword arm than he would his own. ‘Those traitors would raise arms against their king!’ Mun pointed his sword towards a knot of a dozen or so musketeers between two houses in the shadow of the north wall. Two dozen or so garrison men were running east through the streets in the direction of Bristol Castle, but these others and some more brave fools were making a stand. It would be their last. ‘Give them your steel! Kill them!’ Mun bellowed, then he gave Lady the spur and she responded, showing no fear as she surged into the gallop. Ahead, Mun saw muskets cough their smoke before he heard the report, but he was not struck and the mare carried him on across the baked mud ground towards the enemy.
‘Traitors!’ Jonathan screamed, outstripping him and reaching the rebels first, hacking down onto a man’s bare head and splitting it like an apple. The rebels were reversing their muskets but Mun rode one down even as he slashed his Irish hilt across another man’s raised arm, lopping the limb off at the elbow. Then O’Brien was there too, cleaving meat with his ravenous poll-axe, his face all teeth and red bristles.
The King’s enemies screamed.
‘Mercy! Please, sir, mercy!’ a musketeer wailed, falling to his knees amidst the carnage and the flying blood.
‘No mercy for traitors,’ Captain Boone called, trotting lightly into the fray, and shot the man dead. The man whom Mun had maimed was on his knees holding the spurting stump against his chest, when John Cole rode up, his curved sword raised, and slaughtered him. Mun pulled Lady round and saw that Prince Rupert was establishing a command post at the breach, Grandison’s musketeers forming neat ranks and two pike stands gathering like forests, one on either flank, their steel-tipped staves threatening Bristol.
‘If the fools don’t give His Highness the city now that lot will turn the place inside out,’ Mun growled, tasting iron on his blood-spattered lips. But the defenders’ spirit was broken now and those that still could were surrendering. Or running for their lives.
‘Parley! Parley!’ someone was shouting as the crackle of musketry receded and Mun saw an officer coming forward with his company’s ensign. ‘Parley! Colonel Fiennes requests a parley that he may discuss the terms of surrender.’
‘Ours or theirs?’ O’Brien joked, making a frightening, gore-spattered sight. Some of the Prince’s men cheered and others hurled insults at the rebel officer, who looked exhausted and ashen-faced. All around Mun men took the opportunity to reload in case the fight struck up again, and the Prince rode forward flanked by his own officers and his white poodle, Boy.
‘It’s over, Clancy,’ Mun said.
And it was. At least for now. Prince Rupert had suffered too many casualties already and would waste no more lives if Colonel Fiennes truly meant to end the hostilities. And so Mun patted Lady’s neck because she had done well, and he turned her round to make his way back through the Frome Gate.
To find Hector.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TOM WAS COLD, hungry and tired. But worse than any of this he was plagued by the memory of seeing Mun in the woods south of Thame. That had been many moons ago and since then they h
ad marched with Essex’s army of fourteen thousand men and relieved Gloucester after a four-week siege by the King. Yet the memory of that near meeting clung to him like a wet shirt and try as he might he could not shrug it off. Now, the monotony of the march and the men’s exhaustion being such that they would ride or tramp several miles at a time without uttering a word, Tom’s mind would not heed his demands for silence. Again and again it had staged the memory of that day like one of the plays their mother loved so, and Tom had been but a captive forced to endure it.
What twist of fate had set Mun on his trail and brought him amongst those trees where Tom and Colonel Haggett’s disease-ravaged troop lay hidden with Parliament’s silver? It was only blind luck that Tom had not given the order to fire, that he had not killed his own brother as easily as drawing breath. Or had fate or some other force played a hand in that, too?
He had recognized Mun and with him some tenant farmers and labourers in his father’s employ. In Sir Edmund Rivers’s employ now, Tom had reflected, noting the hard, blood-tempered look of those riding with his brother. His own blood running cold he had watched Mun’s progress down the barrel of his pistol. And he had thought his brother a fool for coming amongst the trees on horseback and more so because he was riding with The Scot, who it turned out was as capricious as the wind. That turncoat bastard.
But he and Trencher, Penn and Dobson had seen that precious cargo of twenty thousand pounds in silver and coin safely to Thame, and Colonel Haggett, who had by some miracle survived the disease that had brought him to death’s door, had taken the credit for it. Tom did not care about that, but he did care that a Colonel Lambarde, seeing that Haggett’s troop was under strength, had ordered Tom and his companions to join the troop and serve under Haggett until such time as they returned to London.
‘With respect, sir, I report directly to Captain Crafte,’ Tom had said, holding the colonel’s beetle-browed eyes. The thought of serving with Haggett and his ragged, shit-stained troop was anathema. ‘Having performed our business against the King’s men in Oxford we must return in haste to the captain.’
‘What business in Oxford?’ Colonel Lambarde had asked and Tom had not wanted to elaborate. Captain Crafte had said that in a war of muskets and cannon his own work was a finely wrought rapier. Discretion and precision must be their watchwords, he had said. But then if telling this colonel would get Tom out of Thame and Haggett’s company …
‘We blew their precious printing press sky high, sir,’ he had said, almost hearing again the boom which had shivered the Oxford night.
‘Printing press?’ Colonel Lambarde’s expression had been two parts confusion, one part scepticism. ‘And was this printing press …’ he backhanded the words away with a soldier’s scarred hand, ‘was it squashing our men, Trooper Rivers? Was it squashing them and were the haughty Cavalier tosspots catching their juices in their silver goblets and drinking of them?’ He had narrowed his eyes accusingly, the grey bristles of his brows sprouting aggressively. ‘Was that devil prince toasting his victories with those godly, honest men’s fluids?’
Tom had thought then that Lambarde was quite mad and in that same thought he had known he would be marching with Haggett’s men.
‘The Royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus is a thorn in our side, sir,’ he had said, knowing there was really no point. ‘It mocks Parliament’s cause. One edition even mentioned you by name, sir.’
‘This newsbook mocked me?’ The colonel pulled his neck in, planting his hands on his hips. His grey moustache had quivered hotly and Tom considered the reaction well worth the lie.
‘It said you were too old to fight, sir,’ Tom had said, ‘that when Moses parted the Red Sea he found you fishing on the other side.’
The colonel’s face had flushed red as he sought to contain his anger, like nailing a lid on a cask of exploding black powder. Then he leant in towards Tom and Tom caught the smell of stale tobacco on the man’s moustache.
‘Listen, lad. And listen well. My men, proper soldiers, are out there dying for our cause, for the rights of Parliament and the liberties of good, God-fearing men and women, whilst you and this Captain Crafte … piss your breeches over empty words and idle jests. The Cavaliers’ falsehoods are but farts in the wind!’ His tongue poked out between his lips and he blew noisily, so that Tom felt the fine drizzle on his face. ‘You and your companions will do your damned duty and serve in Colonel Haggett’s troop and think yourselves honoured to do it. Good God, man, if not for the colonel, Parliament should have lost a fortune in silver and coin.’ He had pointed a finger at Tom then. ‘Haggett and his brave men are real soldiers and if you’ve got any sense at all of what that means you might learn something before you see London again.’
With that Colonel Lambarde had told Tom to report to Haggett, eyeballing him as he left the candle-lit room, and Tom had decided that compared with the mad colonel, Haggett was perhaps not so bad after all.
Haggett’s troop comprised sixty-two harquebusiers, seventeen of his original men having died of disease or bullets, or being too sick to serve, and Tom could not help but admire them, be impressed by their resilience. They had been in Thame only a few days before being called into action again, and had even missed out on what few supplies – coats, shoes and knapsacks – had been issued. They had spent weeks patrolling the country around Thame, even on occasion venturing to within a mile or two of Oxford and exchanging salvos with troops of Cavaliers out performing the same task.
Then, still under strength, ragged and weary, they had rendezvoused with Essex’s army and the London Brigade at Brackley in Northamptonshire on 1 September and set out to break the siege of Gloucester. Under Sir James Ramsay and Colonel Middleton they had fended off attacks by Lord Wilmot’s Oxford cavalry and by 8 September they had occupied Gloucester, having forced the King to break up his siege and withdraw to Painswick. By all accounts it had been a close-run thing and Tom had heard that the city’s defenders had been down to their last three barrels of black powder. But Gloucester, now the only major Parliamentarian stronghold between Bristol and Lancashire, was safe and could continue to disrupt communications between Oxford and the Royalist recruiting-grounds of south Wales.
Now Tom and Haggett’s men were marching beside a column of pikemen, leading their mounts by the reins to rest them because they were tired and had not been properly fed for two days. The sound of thousands of feet churning the mud, of powder flasks and sword fittings rattling, men coughing and hawking phlegm, insults being hurled up and down the line, the neighs of the horses flanking them and the monotonous beat of the drums – all of it, along with the stench of several thousand unwashed men, accompanied every plodding mile until Tom was no more aware of any of it than he was of what day it was or what village they had passed. It was into this dreary tedium that thoughts of Mun and Bess, and of his mother, poured. Thoughts too of his father who had fallen on the same bloody field as he, but who had not come back from the dead as Tom had.
‘I remember the good old days,’ Penn said beside him, palming sweat and drizzle from his face. ‘When we were proud young bloods with fire in our hearts. With principle and purpose in one hand and a sword in the other. Now look at us.’
‘Aye, Rivers, how did we end up in this troop of ragged-arse bastards?’ Dobson grumbled, not caring who heard. ‘The next time you need volunteers for some shady undertaking remind me to shoot you and save us all the misery.’
‘You were born miserable, Dobson,’ Trencher said, taking a swig from his bottle and dragging an arm across his brow. ‘The day you slipped into the world they took one look at your sour face and locked your mother up. The brothel-house lost money that day.’
Some of Haggett’s men laughed at that and Dobson swore at Trencher, calling him a bald, shanker-faced Puritan. ‘When you were born, Trencher, a passing cat tried to bury you,’ he said, and this got some laughs too, but then a fusillade of musket fire crackled in the distance and the men fell silent to listen.
> ‘Here they come again,’ Penn said, as Colonel Haggett gave the order to mount and the men of his troop put on their helmets and prepared for a fight that most likely would not come.
‘All this can hang for a proper bed and a night’s sleep,’ Penn said, getting into his saddle wearily. ‘That’s all I want.’
‘A full belly would do me,’ Corporal Mabb grumbled, stepping into his stirrup and hauling his old self up. From his headquarters in Tewkesbury Essex had sent cavalry north across the Severn to Upton as if he intended to march on Worcester. For a while the feint had worked, the King’s army having advanced to Evesham from where it would have a clear march to Worcester. Essex’s army, including Colonel Haggett’s bone-tired troop, had then slipped out of Tewkesbury and made a forced march south, headed for London via the southern route through Swindon.
Then they had arrived at Cirencester, taking by surprise two Royalist cavalry regiments that were quartered in the town and capturing forty wagon-loads of provisions and arms meant for the King’s army.
‘That’s blown the ruse, I should imagine,’ Trencher had said that night as one hundred men, billeted together in one old barn, had hunkered down to sleep. And so it had, for the loss of Cirencester was a blow against the King and now His Majesty’s field army pursued them, marching on a roughly parallel route, and the race for London was on. Tom had known that, strung out along Wiltshire’s Aldbourne Chase as they were, they would prove too strong a temptation to Prince Rupert, and sure enough the Cavaliers had come, attacking Essex’s rearguard time and time again, harassing them like devils. They would appear as if from nowhere, ride within range and shoot on the move, Parliament’s ranks making an unmissable target. By the time Essex’s musketeers had made ready to fire the enemy was gone, lost to sight amongst the Berkshire Downs, and even if the shot could be made it was at a fast-moving mark and all but impossible. As for the horse, Essex had forbidden them to fully engage the enemy, so all they could hope for was that by riding at Rupert’s men they would scare them off. It was frustrating, repetitive work but Tom understood Essex’s reasons. The earl could not afford to see his cavalry bloodied against the Prince – as they surely would be if they made a fight of it – before they had even made it halfway to London.
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