The world exploded for a second time, more smoke gusted out and over the slope, and then the whitecoats of the Marquis of Newcastle and the redcoats of Sir Edmund Mowbray were standing together, muskets turned about, butt ends brandished like clubs. Forrester had his pistol primed and cocked, and he stood too, leaning into the creaking trellis and squeezing the trigger as his men hacked and battered at the heads of the few Scots who had somehow survived the leaden barrage. A third volley ripped the night, and at first Forrester thought it had come from the enemy, but he saw the smoke billow out from the gun battery on the horn that formed the spike at the opposite end of the sconce’s southern face. The men had lined that platform, aiming along the face of the rampart, and their fire raked across the Scots’ flank. In seconds the rampart was clear, purged of the enemy, scattered blue bonnets the only thing left on the slope. Forrester squinted into the gloom, only to see the beaming face of one Elias Croak. He felt instantly ashamed, for he had presumed the young officer had fled in terror.
Down below, the ditch was filled with dead and wounded men who writhed like a pool full of eels; they were trampled as the next wave came upon them.
‘Pikes!’ Forrester bellowed. ‘Pikes!’
The pikemen came up, their musket-wielding comrades sliding back to the safety of the enclosure so that they might begin the laborious process of reloading their weapons. Scouring sticks plunged into barrels, scraping the clogging soot clear, while priming powder was carefully tipped into the pan of each musket. They needed wadding too, so that they might shoot down the slope without the ball falling out, and they hurriedly carried out each and every task as the seconds slipped by.
Forrester knew it was all taking too long. He reloaded his pistol and moved to the edge of the screen. The Scots were shoving and kicking their way across the ditch and hauling themselves up the slope using swords and dirks like climbers’ picks. He glanced along his line of pikemen, gave the order for the spears to be presented, and the steel-tipped shafts went up and over, jabbing down to stab and topple the attackers. But there were too many Scots this time, and though several were thrown back to earth, some dodged the pikes while others grabbed hold of the long stems of ash and pulled, dragging the defenders over the rampart and down into the killing field. There were more ladders this time, passed up from the rear to slam on to the rampart, and the Scottish horde suddenly found their climb made easy.
‘Fall back!’ Forrester called. He could see that most of his musketeers were ready now, but it was far too late to staunch the blue tide as it surged up and over the edge, smashing through the wicker as though the interlaced switches were so many brittle twigs. The Royalist defenders formed up in the centre of the enclosure, pikes providing a shield, muskets beginning to offer sporadic fire. The Scots kept coming, more and more, scrambling into the inner sanctum and firing their weapons. When they were spent, they reversed them to be used as clubs, while their officers brandished swords for the kill.
There was nothing left to do but fight. Forrester levelled his pistol and drew his own sword. More musketry rattled all around, immersing the sconce in bitter cloud. Forrester raised his blade high, hoping his men could see, snarled an unintelligible challenge, and charged.
At first he saw nothing, but then two bulging eyes above a russet beard leered from the acrid fog. He shot the man square in the face, features wiped clean in an instant, the trunk never emerging from the smoke. He moved on, swatted another man with his sword and ducked below a scything halberd. He was vaguely aware that others had joined him in the melee, bellowing their defiance as they fanned out to protect the redoubt. He saw bodies strewn here and there, and though they were half devoured by the mist, it seemed most flashed white and red in his peripheral vision, glimpses that told him the fight was not going well.
Then he was crouching, scrambling over terrain churned to sludge, barrelling headlong into a buckler and bouncing hard off its iron boss so that he landed with his rump planted in the cold filth. He rolled, slid wildly as he regained his footing, and swung his blade as the opponent came on. The sword glanced harmlessly off the shield rim, so he jumped backwards out of range of the inevitable follow-up thrust. The tip sliced air just inches from his nose, clanged off his sword-hilt as he frantically raised the weapon to block, and then he was falling again, battered off balance by a man possessed of impressive strength. The next blow would have cleaved him in two had not a thin rapier appeared a palm’s width from his face. The slender steel snapped as it parried, but it was enough, and Forrester was able to scramble clear to see Captain Elias Croak toss his sword-hilt away and shoot their shared enemy in the chest with a pistol. He gave a madman’s grin, spattered as he was in blood, and howled at the moon, then he was gone, plunging into the fray.
Forrester panted like an exhausted dog as he rose to his feet. They were overwhelmed, defeated in all quarters, and he screamed the order to retreat. Perhaps a few would make it to the safety of Micklegate Bar. All around him the fight raged. A musket coughed somewhere to the rear, the air pulsing at his left side as the ball flew into the attackers. It snatched one of the Scottish officers clean off his feet. And the attackers stalled. They hesitated, faces deflating as they stared, wide-eyed at the Royalist lines. Then they began to judder backwards. More shots came from behind him, picking away some of the retiring Scots as they faltered. And the Royalists were cheering.
Forrester turned. The whitecoats seemed to have multiplied exponentially. Dozens of them ran to the battle, emerging like ghosts from the tumbling smoke, grimacing like so many gargoyles as they screamed their victory, and Forrester joined them, cutting down a stunned Covenanter and looking for the next. He felt the battle-rage surge through his veins, intoxicating him, and he heard himself crow with the exhilaration he would later regret but could not hope to staunch.
The runner had made it back to York. The reinforcements had come from Micklegate Bar, and in the cacophony of battle, Forrester could hear the low thrum of hooves, and he knew then that they would win. The marquis had sent horse as well as foot, and the Scots would not face such odds with no horse or pike of their own. And then they were breaking, running, cohesion dissolved, the heads capped in blue were turning away, bolting pell-mell down the slope and into the cannon-pocked wilderness that separated besiegers and besieged. Forrester bent double, planting his hands on his knees, and gulped the caustic air into his lungs. Then he laughed, in bitter, mad relief. It was over.
PART 2
EXTREME NECESSITY
Chapter 8
Near Liverpool, Lancashire, 7 June 1644
The Royalist army moved westwards, bullied always by wind and rain. Talk was ever of York, of the fevered reports that spoke of an alliance of three vast armies, now fused into one. Men whispered of the inevitable collision with the feared Scots Covenanters in battle – a brew many of them had sipped in the Bishops’ Wars of the late 1630s, and one they would never willingly imbibe again – and of the need to relieve the Earl of Newcastle’s stubborn force that had been holed up in the capital of the north since April. But despite the talk and the bravado and the anxiety, they trudged in the opposite direction, Prince Rupert’s gaze remaining firmly fixed upon the conquest of the north-west.
The raising of troops had been Rupert’s priority in the days since the sacking of Bolton. With the arrival of the Northern Horse and efforts to recruit, equip and train as many Cheshire and Lancashire Royalists as possible, the army that marched out of Wigan, winding south via St Helens and Prescot, boasted some seven thousand infantrymen and more than six thousand horse. A drawn-out column of artillery, ammunition, stolen livestock, victuals and baggage formed the tail, shadowed, as ever, by as many camp followers as there were soldiers.
Stryker and his party were in the rear. They had been invited to join Sir Richard Crane and his Lifeguard at the very front, and it had taken some smooth diplomacy for the offer to be rejected without giving offence, but Stryker would not leave his baggage wagon and its secre
t cargo. Thus, they were forced to keep pace with the lurching vehicle driven by Simeon Barkworth, who swore viciously with each water-filled divot and rut. Stryker was pleased to ride, though the mud was fetlock deep, and even Vos seemed happy to brave the pelting showers. Hood and Skellen rode too, though the latter grumbled for much of the journey, his Monmouth cap stretched down as far over his ears as possible.
The going was slow but steady, the road a morass, but the drums and trumpets thundered and squawked so that the men kept rhythm as best they could. Packhorses whinnied as their hooves slid and slewed, soldiers – grudgingly suborned into driving cattle – spat threats and swung sticks at their lumbering herds, and all the while the north-west coast of England emerged out of the blurry deluge, inch by inch, mile by mile. First, the glistening expanse of a great river gradually resolved in the distance like a colossal gilt serpent, cutting a curve in the terrain to the south. It was the Mersey, and they had forced a crossing of the same river back at Stockport, a few days before their fateful arrival at the Geneva of the North. It had been wide enough there, its thrashing currents impossible to ford, yet this was something entirely different. The Mersey formed an estuary as it rushed out into the tumultuous waters of the Irish Sea, and here it was a titan, broad and glittering and mighty. The scouts up on a hill near a marsh-strangled village called Huyton reported it to be close to three miles wide at one point, and a new vein of fretfulness rippled up and down the meandering column as men wondered how they might possibly get across. So Prince Rupert himself galloped his great black destrier up and down the nervous army, bellowing for calm and for level heads, assuring the filth-spattered troops that there would be no perilous crossing this time. For it was on the east bank of the estuary that they would find the enemy stronghold, and the Royalist conquerors would hem Liverpool’s garrison between the vast waterway and their heavy artillery, and crush the rebels like hazelnuts in a vice. Sure enough, after a morning spent climbing into the undulating terrain that fringed the town, the walls of the region’s principal port seemed to blossom like grey petals, emerging from the bitter miasma as the storm waned to a fine drizzle. The army, tired and saturated, tramped into the fields to the east of their prize, even as the guns on Liverpool’s crenellated rampart coughed their first warnings, the flat cracks echoing back and forth between the mountains and the sea.
They fanned out in the area immediately to the east of their quarry, where the road from Prescot dipped towards the Mersey estuary. The scouts set off to investigate the terrain, while quartermasters and their teams began the arduous task of finding billets for the men. In reality it was only the most senior officers who would find warm quarters, for the villages in the region were small and sparse, and it was clear that there would not be enough houses to sustain this new population. Those fortunate enough to have canvas began pitching their tents. Those without were forced into patches of forest to construct rudimentary shelters out of branch and bracken. For a while the deep rumble of ordnance bellowed at them from Liverpool’s walls, but they were out of range and the guns soon fell silent.
It was around one o’clock when Stryker’s party reached the sprawling encampment. Hood went ahead, returning a short while later having found a modest clearing in the centre of a birch and beech copse. Mercifully, the rain had stopped, and it did not take long to stake the flax canvas sheets over freshly cut poles and bring the cart into the green shelter of a soaring beech tree.
Faith Helly emerged from her hiding place just as Stryker was shaking the rain from his hat. She went to the edge of the tree line and he followed. They could just discern the town’s outline from here, and he saw she was staring wistfully at it.
‘It will fall,’ he said.
She did not look up. ‘Pray God it does not.’
‘It will.’
‘Like all the others.’
He nodded. She was vehemently opposed to the king’s cause, and nothing he could say would change that. Indeed, he found that he respected her all the more for it. ‘The Prince will call on the garrison to surrender.’
‘Then I pray they do, for I would not see them share Bolton’s fate.’
Stryker wiped a gloved hand over his chin, pushing away the rain that had gathered on his short beard, and replaced his damp hat. ‘I will ask Skellen to light a fire.’
She turned, touching fingers to his elbow. ‘The men talk of battle.’
‘We will storm the town, aye, if its governor is foolish enough to resist.’
She shook her head. ‘Battle, Major Stryker. Real battle. They say you will soon fight the Scots.’
‘And more besides.’
‘Will you win?’
This was a question Stryker had suppressed thinking about in the days since he had learnt that the army of the Eastern Association had joined the siege at York. No one knew if they would eventually march to the Marquis of Newcastle’s aid, but all suspected it. Now he imagined those combined forces. Twenty thousand? Thirty? Perhaps more. He looked her directly in the eye. ‘Of course.’
She saw through the lie. ‘What will I do, if—?’
‘You survived Bolton, Mistress Helly. You will survive my demise.’
‘Do you not fear death on those cursed fields, sir?’
‘Idle armies breed nought but disease. I would rather face steel and shot on the field than plague in Oxford.’
‘I do not want to lose you.’
He shot her a crooked smile. ‘It gladdens me to hear it.’
‘Look,’ Faith said suddenly. Her gaze had returned to the town, and Stryker followed her pointing finger. Three figures were on the rampart; two women and a child, to judge by their coifs and the diminutive stature of the third. It was difficult to see what they were about, but the distinctive pose they each took up described a trio of archers. They held the bows high, aiming for the brooding clouds, and loosed, one after another. Stryker and Faith watched as the arrows careened skyward, vanishing to black specks, and then they were larger, darker, like diving peregrines on the hunt. Further out, in the open ground before the town where the beginnings of saps and gun batteries were being marked by teams of engineers, men shouted the alarm, but the arrows fell well short, thudding into the mud almost a hundred yards from any target. The Royalist teams jeered as they made obscene gestures at their would-be assassins, baring lily-white rumps to taunt the women, but the message was clear. The people within the town were not there under duress. There would be no repeat of Wigan’s joyous celebrations here.
In reply, one of Rupert’s small field pieces, a leather gun that was not part of the main train, spewed its murderous iron up at the walls, forcing the plucky archers to shy quickly away. The Royalists cheered again. And the siege of Liverpool had begun.
Prince Rupert’s regiments began to set themselves up for a siege even before the first summons to surrender was rejected. The lie of the land told them that much, for Liverpool’s western border was the Mersey, and on the east it was protected by a medieval wall, strengthened by mud and stake so that it was high and strong. A ditch ran in an arc around the landward side of the town, screening the looming stone from assault, and a stout castle dominated the southern approaches. In effect, she would not fall easily, and the men scattered around her likely knew it all too well. So after the tents came the latrines and the grain stores, the powder magazines, livestock pens and troughs for fodder. Foraging parties went out in search of berries and nuts, vegetables, wild watercress and meat, and all the while the engineers rode as close to the walls as possible to plot the points deemed most likely to degrade under heavy cannon fire. The prince himself – with his ever-present cavalry – was up on a high ridge overlooking the port. The slopes were capped by the emerald bands of mature hedgerow, while the summit was blotted by the stonework of some ancient monument.
‘Beacon?’ Skellen asked, as he came to stand beside Stryker. It was a murky afternoon, and they were out in the open, their copse behind, staring up at the ridge.
‘Like as not. In readiness for invasion.’
Skellen grunted. ‘By the Diegos, not the King.’
Stryker laughed. ‘Aye, I suppose you’re in the right of it, Will.’ He studied the high ground. There was a village halfway up, its chimneys spewing smoke, and he presumed Rupert and his men would be billeted beneath those inviting thatches.
Skellen took a tight ball of something resembling grass from his snapsack and pushed it into the side of his mouth. He gave a green-gummed leer and thumbed the air in the direction of the trees. ‘Brooklime and chickweed. Found it back there.’
‘Cannot abide the stuff.’
Skellen shrugged, and stuffed some more past his lips. ‘They told our herald to piss off, sir, beg pardon. We’ll be here a while, methinks, and I’ve no stomach for an empty belly.’
The first summons had indeed been rejected, and the cannon had continued to fire from Liverpool’s battlements. At least, Stryker thought, they had found a reasonable place to wait it out. He glanced back at the copse. The heady scent of wood smoke announced Simeon Barkworth’s successful attempt to light a fire. They walked back, high-stepping over clawing brambles and stooped bracken, to discover Lieutenant Hood had returned from a sojourn to the main camp with a good slab of venison and a wolfish grin. He had had the gumption to pay the quartermaster a decent bribe. Faith sat with them as they ate, perched on a damp log, saying little and forever scrutinizing the trees for interlopers. When she had finished, wiping greasy fingers on the wet grass, she waded into the undergrowth with her Bible, keen to find somewhere quiet to read before the day faded to dusk.
‘Never had children, did you, sir?’ Hood asked.
The question startled Stryker. ‘Not that I am aware of,’ he said, then he realized he must have been staring at the girl as she disappeared into the trees, and was immediately embarrassed. ‘I do not think her my child, Tom.’
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