‘I have seen them worn by others, my lord,’ Forrester said, taking the cross. ‘On the right sleeve.’
‘Its bearer has shown great valour in my service.’
He paused as a commotion struck up at the corner of the hall. A man was screaming. Two women struggled to fasten a tourniquet above his knee. Almost at once the noise faded. So too did the patient.
The marquis seemed to shudder. ‘A hard fight was had, yes?’
‘Aye, my lord, exceeding hard,’ Forrester said. ‘The Scots make able soldiers.’ He considered the truth of the statement, comparing the men in blue bonnets to the raw Londoners of Waller’s new army he had encountered at Basing House the previous autumn. The difference was stark and frightening. ‘More than able.’
The marquis looked at Lord Eythin. ‘Do they not, Jamie? If only all your countrymen marched for their rightful king, eh?’
‘Quite so, my lord,’ Eythin said sourly.
The marquis patted Eythin’s shoulder. ‘I chide you, sir, but it is not only the Scottish foe who endangers this fair city. Yorkshire rebels under Fairfax, East Anglian rebels under Manchester. Yorkshire is a crab bucket, my friends. Each army snapping at the other to feast on the carcass. Sad times, indeed.’ He suddenly seemed to notice Elias Croak, and shed his sullen reverie with a brilliant smile. ‘Captain! One of my own men! You are commended, sir. And your wounds heal?’
‘They do, my lord,’ Croak croaked, ‘that they do.’
The marquis handed the young officer another one of the silken crosses. ‘For recognition of your valour, sirrah.’
The chirurgeon, a rotund man in a hideously stained apron, bustled past, bowing as he went. ‘My apologies, my lords. I must administer this poultice. ’Tis for the blood flow.’
‘Does not William Harvey write of the blood,’ Forrester asked, ‘that it moves about the body in circuit? Pushed by exertion of the heart.’
The chirurgeon halted, twisted back, his face exasperated. ‘Harvey?’ He almost spat the word. ‘I employ his treatise to wipe my arse, sir, if you’ll forgive the base reply, for that is its proper use. Galen is our tutor in this. Galen, good sir, tells us that blood passes by means of invisible spores.’
‘I stand corrected, sir,’ Forrester said.
‘You are aware,’ the marquis cut in, ‘our other sconces were taken?’
‘A dire day,’ Forrester answered. ‘They are but a spitting distance from our hearths.’
‘All the more reason to celebrate the Mount’s salvation,’ responded Lord Eythin.
He was seconded by the marquis: ‘Quite so. It is our only protection in the south. The enemy creeps, insidious and ruthless. They have built a battery opposite the Walmgate. On a hill. Dismantled a windmill for it, would you believe? A breach is already made in Clifford’s Tower.’
‘And the Walmgate barbican suffers terribly,’ Eythin added morosely. ‘The Northern Association has taken the suburbs thereabouts.’
William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, swallowed hard. ‘The siege is too close, pressed with too much vigour. I need Rupert’s help.’
‘He will not come,’ Eythin scoffed. ‘He will look to his own skin.’
‘I will write to him, nonetheless, though God only knows if such word may get through.’ He lifted the nosegay as he continued to walk. ‘If they breach our wall, then all will be lost.’
Liverpool, Lancashire, 8 June 1644
The herald rode out from the Royalist lines just after dawn. The sky was purple, suffusing steadily with blazing orange in the east, and it lit the rider’s spurs so that they winked as if passing some clandestine message to the king’s nephew, who stood and watched from up on the ridge. The herald had been sent to parley with Colonel Moore, the rebel governor, and order his immediate surrender. Now he approached one of the gates set into the earthen rampart, and every member of the Royalist army waited with baited breath as his mount high-stepped through the barren no-man’s-land.
Stryker was with Rupert, Crane and a dozen other senior officers. He had spent an uneasy night down in the copse, wondering whether the girl’s worries possessed firmer foundation than he’d thought. But as the stars began to fade and the night softened to a hoary grey, he had let Vos take him up to the ridge so that he might see the terms delivered with his own eye. Now he watched in grim silence.
Down in the valley, the herald sat on his horse, as proud as a peacock, resplendent in silk and satin, a wide hat adorned with colourful feathers, a blooming scarf swathing his torso, the jewels in the hilt of his sword twinkling as the sun lit up the sea beyond. He waved to the Parliamentarian sentries as he approached the town, glancing back briefly, acutely aware that all eyes were trained upon him.
A puff of smoke cascaded over the palisade near the gate, followed in a heartbeat by the crack of the shot. Before the echo died in the hills, the herald’s horse was down. It was a chestnut thoroughbred, huge and powerful, draped in a silver-threaded saddle cloth, with white streaks slashing both flanks. A magnificent beast, costly and superbly trained, yet all that was wiped away by the single musket-ball of a Roundhead marksman. The beast thrashed as it hit the mud, turning a half-circle on its side as its hooves ploughed great furrows in the earth, its braided tail smacking wetly in the sticky soil, the scarlet ribbon, so expertly interwoven, coming loose to wriggle like a giant worm. The herald was bellowing, trapped beneath the screaming animal, his beautiful slashed doublet daubed in grime, while up on the rampart came the sound of cheering.
‘By Christ,’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine said softly. ‘By Christ.’
All else was silent on the ridge, as if time itself had frozen. Stryker watched, dumbstruck, as the herald finally freed his pinned leg from the stirrup and somehow squirmed clear, taking a kick or two from the wounded horse as he rolled out of range. The defenders looking down upon him jeered, they capered along the wall as though a fiddler played a jaunty reel, and waved the rebel flags that were set at intervals along the rampart. With a final shriek the horse expired, juddering violently and falling utterly still. Its master ran, all dignity punctured as he skidded and stumbled through the quagmire, clutching his ribs.
‘By Christ,’ the prince muttered again. He blinked rapidly, swallowed hard, and spun on his heels, glaring at the slack-jawed faces of his subordinates. ‘By Jesu!’ he bellowed, thumping a gloved fist into the palm of the other. ‘The knave! The bastardly gullion!’ He thrust out an arm, jabbing the air in the direction of Liverpool with an accusatory finger. ‘This is a paltry parcel of traitors and cowards! I tell you, gentlemen, that we will dine under their roofs in short order! It is nothing but a nest of crows that a party of boys might take!’
Huzzahs rang out, though Stryker wondered how many of the voices were inflected with trepidation, for they all knew what was to come.
Just then a cry went up from the men near the top of the slope, and everyone twisted round towards the lookouts on the beacon. Activity had been spotted to the south. Stryker clambered into Vos’s saddle and galloped with the rest to the ridge’s summit. They reined in, a great line of warriors squinting southward, hands shielding their eyes against the sun. In the distance was the road that ran all the way back to Bolton, and on that mired thoroughfare, as far as the eye could see, came a cavalcade of soldiers, horses and oxen, of wagons big and small, of coopers, smiths and men paid pretty sums for their knowledge of black powder. It was the Royalist artillery train, lumbering a day behind the rest, and at the very rear, hauled by doughty ponies and escorted by musketeers and dragoons, came the unmistakable forms of the big guns, trundling like captured beasts on their great carriages.
Prince Rupert emerged from Stryker’s blind left side, standing in his stirrups as his black stallion turned a tight circle. The king’s nephew, so young yet so formidable, drew his sword. It sang its metallic tune. The prince made the stallion skitter sideways with a deft touch, steered him about so that he faced the port below, and levelled the blade, peering down its length as if
he could shoot bolts of lightning on to the rebel stronghold from its tip. ‘Break them,’ he said, quietly at first, but then louder. ‘Break through their walls and push them out. We will drown the treacherous curs in the Mersey.’ He looked up, skewering a group of officers in his raptor’s gaze. ‘Prepare the heavy guns immediately.’
The Royalist army worked like bees at a hive. Prince Rupert resolved against a crossing of the protective river inlet, for Colonel Moore had astutely set trenches, mounts and guns at all the approaches to that south-eastern sector. Equally, the castle on the southernmost portion of the wall was extremely well fortified. Therefore it was to the north-east that the prince turned his furious gaze, from the point where the river spur petered out, all the way round to the main bank of the Mersey. Across this arc of land the first trenches were to be carved from the cloying mud. Often a besieging army would establish lines of circumvallation, a complete circle of fortified trenches running all the way around the place they wished to reduce, but here that option was negated both by the river and by Rupert’s impatience. He wanted to bring Colonel Moore’s garrison to heel, and that meant punching a hole right through Liverpool’s wall and injecting infantry to do the rest. So in the certain knowledge that he could not entirely cut off the town, his army laid down their muskets and exchanged them for shovels. They dug in shifts, scooping away the sodden soil with buckets, bottoming out the waterlogged gutters with timber and lining the inner face with stakes, and on a plateau below Everton Heights they threw up three gun batteries, from where they might bombard the port’s fortifications.
Stryker found himself overseeing the construction of one of the batteries. Fortunately, though the ground remained soft and sapping, the rain held off, and his surly team worked hard to erect the earthen banks. Men found branches thin enough to be woven into large baskets, and soon these baskets, known as gabions, were filled with spoil from the works and then lined like sentries in defence of the half-dozen siege-guns that were gradually hauled into position.
Teams of horses pulled the pieces, braying in exertion as they were whipped raw by their masters. The heaviest guns were demi-cannon, huge hulks of black iron set upon creaking carriages of oak and elm, and though their wheels were shod in iron, sharp strakes adding grip, they slid and stuck so that the crews had to manhandle them on to the wooden platform set upon the battery. But the task, for all its difficulty, was achieved in good time, with a small powder magazine set close by, alongside the supply of iron round-shot that would be hurled at the enemy positions.
‘They lie around like dogs, sir!’ exclaimed the lieutenant-colonel who came to take command of Stryker’s completed battery around noon. He was a fat man – broad as a mortar and almost as short – with cheeks speckled black by powder burns and jowls that quivered when he spoke, and he waddled on to the timber platform as if Prince Rupert himself owed him fealty.
Stryker, mounted on Vos below the biggest cannon muzzle, was lighting his pipe, and he nodded courteously as the irate man peered down at him through the gap between two gabions. ‘They have earned a rest, Colonel Wheatley.’
Wheatley shook his head, the saggy skin of his face swinging like a pendulum. ‘They are artillery crew, are they not?’ He vanished briefly, evidently inspecting the men who sat around the inside of the battery, their aching backs slumped against the baskets as they quenched their thirst on flagons of good beer that Stryker had ordered up. He returned, red-faced and spluttering. ‘Are they not, sir? Crew, sprawled about in my presence! It will not do, sir! No, sir, it will not! I’ll have ’em in chains, you mark my words!’
‘No, sir,’ Stryker said, puffing on the pipe and staring up through the smoke. Behind him the battlements of Liverpool opened up, but their aim so far had given him no cause for concern.
Wheatley balked. ‘No, sir?’
‘They are local labourers, brought here under duress. They have worked well to give you your battery, sir.’
That silenced Wheatley, who eventually waddled down to ground level. ‘Hang the buggers high till death, sir,’ he muttered angrily. ‘That’s the only road to discipline.’
‘I find such a road all too often leads to mutiny, Colonel.’
Wheatley thrust chubby palms on to his ample waist, taking a wide stance like a sea captain on a storm-ravaged deck. ‘Then how, pray, would you resolve the plague of indiscipline, Stryker?’
‘Coin, Colonel.’
‘Coin?’
‘Pay. A man does not consider mutiny with ease, sir. He understands he will be ordered to march long and hard, to fight, to kill, to die, mayhap. In my experience, even the most craven man will do all these things with a stout heart, if he receives pay enough to keep himself fed and warm.’ He pointed with his pipe stem at the battery. ‘These men are not soldiers, so I pay them in drink, but the principle remains.’
‘Pigswill!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Wheatley guffawed. ‘A womanly whimsy, Stryker. Thought better of you than that. No, sir. Hang the mutinous curs high and let ’em dangle for the crows, I say. That’ll frighten some obedience into the rest.’ He clapped his hands suddenly, eyes twinkling as he stared up at the stone and earth walls before them. ‘Now, Major. I believe it is time we got to work!’
The bombardment began and never seemed to cease, so many smoking muzzles were in play. For though the prince had three chief batteries, sixteen guns in all, his opponents within the town had many more. They were mounted all the way along the wall, and out on the approaches to the river-cum-moat, and amongst the earthworks to the north and on the castle to the south. Moreover, the ships of Parliament’s powerful navy, anchored out in the estuary, belched fire and iron from their inland-facing broadsides, sending their whining shot over the rooftops of Liverpool and out into the encroaching siege-lines. It was a conversation – a violent one – that could find neither conclusion nor compromise, reply after raging reply filling the air with stinking mist. The round-shot flung by the Parliamentarian guns smashed into the land, driving up great clods of earth and making the sappers and engineers shy away as they worked tirelessly to carve their trenches ever closer to the walls. All the while the Royalist guns boomed fire and threat, the heaviest sending cannon balls weighing sixty pounds apiece to smash relentlessly at the fortifications, and taking an almost immediate toll. The guns roared, flamed, smoked and recoiled by turns, their steaming barrels methodically scoured of soot and ember by sheepskin sponges after every salvo. and the bombardment did not let up. They quickly found the weaker places, those where timber and mud peeled away from the stone foundations like sun-parched daub to crumble into the ditch below, and it was there that the fire was concentrated in the hope that a significant fissure would soon be carved. And all the while, up high at the beacon, Prince Rupert made his plans.
Near Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire, 8 June 1644
More than a hundred miles to the north-east of Liverpool a lone rider made his way towards another great siege. He was a short man, skinny as a reed, features gaunt below a grubby Montero cap, the scabs infesting his cheeks whipped sore by the wind. The horse, a bay mare with docile temperament, had been a blessing, though the going had been slow in the marshland that passed for roads, and the rider whispered encouragement as she gamely struggled on. He took the reins in one hand and tugged down the Montero’s woollen flaps with the other, cursing the cold that made his ears leak pus that stank and dried crusty on his neck. At least it had stopped raining, he thought ruefully, glancing up at the pregnant clouds. Thank the Holy Mother for that.
The journey had not been as perilous as Devlin Greer had feared. Crossing the hills around Wetherby had taken time, although he had been forced to evade enemy units only twice during the arduous ride. But on this day, the third with his new horse, all was changed. Now the Roundheads were everywhere. Squadrons of mounted killers galloped in dense lines, fanning out to guard the approaches to York. They swirled around the roads and hedgerows, a sweeping cordon of menace, quick to attack and slow to question. Devlin G
reer had ridden close enough to see the revealing glint of sunlight against a trooper’s helm, but could not risk anything more ambitious. As an Irishman, capture would mean a swift beating, like as not, followed by an airborne jig from a high, creaking bough. Best to keep his distance and employ a measure of guile.
Now he was close to the gushing river, one of two that cut a course into the city. He brought the mare to a standstill at the thick scrub that tangled the water’s edge, and slid down on to the soft earth, cursing the ache in his thighs. Greer stared at the southern horizon, eyeing the thick grey funnels that spilled skyward from York’s chimneys. There seemed to be more than he remembered, and he realized that the smoke must be coming from fires outside the city. The Parliamentarians had evidently managed to swing round and plug the northern gap that had been his means of entry and exit. ‘What, in God’s name, has come to pass?’ he muttered.
‘There’s a siege, sir.’
Greer spun on his heels, pulling a short, hooked knife from his saddle. ‘Who are you?’
The man before him was old and stooped, a fishing rod in one hand, an empty pail in the other. ‘For—forgive me, sir!’ He dropped both items and raised both hands. ‘I did not mean to startle you! My name is Richard Weeks.’
Greer kept the knife raised. ‘Where’ve you come from?’
Richard Weeks jerked his bald head rearwards, indicating the river. ‘Yon Ouse, sir. Hunting supper, was I.’
‘My apologies,’ Greer said, lowering the little blade. ‘I am on edge, as you can see.’ He pointed towards the city. ‘You mentioned the siege.’
‘Aye, sir. ’Tis in its third month, if you can believe that.’
‘I know, friend,’ Greer replied, not bothering to conceal his accent, for he guessed the fellow would not know an Irishman from a Dutchman. ‘But I wondered how it is that the rebels do stretch their reach all the way up here, to the north of the city. When I was last here, they had not the manpower.’
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