Now, as Lisette pressed on towards a summit eerily illuminated by the clear night, she silently thanked the Holy Mother because the going was not as difficult as she had feared. It was steep, certainly, but dread and excitement energized her tired legs and sore hands, and she was able to keep up a reasonable pace. Gradually the angular shape of the rampart came into focus ahead, sharp against the natural irregularity of the hill.
Suddenly a grey blur raced across the grass a few feet away, and Lisette stumbled back, drawing a dirk from within the folds of her cloak, heart pounding loud and terrible in her head. The shape was gone in an instant, and she realized it had been a hare. Lisette sheathed the knife with shaking hands and a sick stomach, and swore viciously. She took a moment to steady her frayed nerves, breathing deeply, waiting for the prickly sweat on her brow to abate.
Lisette reached the first rampart, climbing over the jutting earthwork and rolling into the deep fissure beyond. She stayed on her back, looking up at the sparkling stars, listening for the sound of approaching soldiers. Nothing. Gradually she eased herself up and darted across the man-made ditch to the bottom of the next battlement. It was steeper than the first, and she found herself imagining the torrid hailstorm of spears and slingshots that would have greeted the Roman legionaries caught in this trench so many hundreds of years earlier.
Up the second ridge she went, scrabbling at the slick grass for purchase, propelling herself up to its sharp peak. She reached it quickly and silently, peering above the brow with care. The fort spread out before her. In the darkness she could discern cartloads of barrels and weaponry, and beyond them the row of mounds where kings of the past had been laid to rest. Beyond those mounds, to the north of the fort, she could see rows of pale smears, the tents of her enemy, and she prayed she would not stir them awake. She glanced left and right. No sentries here. The southern slope was virtually unprotected because an attack up the steep incline was so unlikely, and Lisette thanked God that her gamble was going to be justified. She still had a few minutes left before the regular three-man picket would reappear.
Lisette broke cover, holding her breath and dashing to the hill’s artificially flattened crest. She reached the relative safety of the nearest wagon and pressed herself tight against it. The only sound was that of her teeth as they ground together. Edging out from beyond a broad wheel, Lisette studied the flat plain. Her eyes scanned from the right, taking in the tents again, and the far-off trees, sweeping to the left until they rested upon the westernmost burial mound. The Great Barrow, Benjamin had called it. At its base, just as she remembered from the previous day’s tour, a small tent sat grey and still. She thought back to the first time she had seen it. The way Sergeant-Major Hunter had skirted around it without explanation of its purpose. It was too small to be the billet of a soldier, and too heavily guarded to be a common storage area.
But now Lisette Gaillard’s heart sank, for there, at its entrance, at first indistinct amid the gloom, but gradually gaining clarity as she studied the area with keen eyes, were two guards.
‘God damn them,’ she whispered. ‘Or move them.’
‘Well, if I don’t I’ll soil me fuckin’ britches,’ one of the soldiers was saying as he rose from a small stool.
His seated comrade sighed. ‘Go then. Be quick, mind. They’ll string you up if they catch you.’
The standing sentry spread his arms confidently as he strolled away. ‘Don’t fret, Billy. I’ll be back to hold your hand in a moment.’
Lisette’s heart seemed to smash its way into her mouth as she realized the man was headed toward her. She ducked down, scuttling under the cart on all fours. She clamped her mouth shut, forced the air to stay in her lungs, and kept every muscle rigid.
The soldier appeared at the rear of the cart. From her hiding place she could only see his legs, and she watched him shift his weight from one foot to the other as he unfastened the pewter buttons on the front of his breeches.
With a grunt, the soldier hauled the garment down past his knees so that it bunched at his ankles, and crouched. He did not see Lisette at first, and his face was still twisted with the effort of answering the call of nature as Lisette drew her blade.
The soldier’s face turned from strain to shock as his eye caught movement, but the dirk was already springing out from the black night. Its tip found his throat without hindrance and burrowed deep into flesh, stopping only when it met bone at the back of the man’s neck. He rocked back, gargling quietly. Lisette knew she must move quickly, for the lone sentry might come looking for his mate, and, besides, the team of pickets would return to the southern ramparts at any moment, blocking her escape.
Erupting from beneath the wagon, Lisette broke into a sprint, covering the ground between her and the seated sentry in a few seconds. She was not laden with jangling armour or unwieldy weapons, and the soldier only registered her presence when she was too close to be easily intercepted. There was no time to draw his blade or shout a warning, and as he scrambled to his feet, she kicked him in the chest. The strike jarred all the way up Lisette’s leg, and she realized that he was encased in plate metal. This man was clearly not one of Hunter’s engineers, but a harquebusier. She recalled Sergeant-Major Hunter mentioning that the cavalry stationed at Old Winchester Hill were engaged on other duties.
The cavalryman did not fall, but he stumbled backwards, weighed down as he was by buff-coat, chest plate, gauntlet, helmet, cross-belts, sword and carbine. Lisette launched forward, closing the space between them before the soldier could unsheathe his sword. As he fought to free the weapon, she kicked him again, throwing him further off balance, and he slipped on the chalky ground. In a second he was down, struggling to find his feet, but she was on top of him. The trooper went limp as Lisette pricked his left eye with the point of her dirk. She felt his body relax beneath her, saw his tongue slide like a great slug across his bottom lip, and knew he was dead.
A sound carried across to her from the north. Lisette leapt off the stricken body and stared across the crest towards the tents of the main encampment. There was movement there too. She scampered to the Great Barrow and threw herself against the solid mound. The noise sounded again, but this time it was starker, more recognizable, and she knew it was the whicker of a horse. She raised the top half of her head above the brow of the mound, studying the distance for advancing cavalrymen. Again, she was surprised to see and hear nothing more, and she realized it was simply the contented sounds of the warhorses as they grazed among the trees on the far side of the hill.
Breathing more easily again, Lisette shrank back behind the Great Barrow and tracked its base to where the small tent stood. The corpse was at its entrance, still and silent, and she stepped over it, ducking as she reached the awning, and slithered into the gloom.
With no source of illumination, the blackness inside the tent was overbearing. She was on her knees, waving arms almost randomly around her, alert to the sounds of enemies outside. She could locate nothing. No treasures, no weapons, no victuals. But Lisette remembered Kesley’s claim that he had overseen the burial of the stolen strongbox and, with renewed vigour, she dropped on to her belly and began to scrabble at the damp earth with desperate fingers. The grass was dense, so when her nails snaked across a patch of loose soil, Lisette’s heart skipped excitedly. She hurriedly pulled at the turf, scooping it on to the grass at the tent’s edges in great, frantic handfuls, and a hole gradually began to open up.
‘Mother of God. Mother of God,’ she whispered, wracked by desperation and elation. Eventually her fingers began to labour against a harder substance, and she realized she had gone beyond the soil and was now prising away chalk. She drew her dirk and jabbed it into the hole, breaking up the compacted rocks and scooping them out with her free hand.
Then the blade hit something hard, causing a dull thud to echo around the white awning. She worked frantically, scraping and digging and clawing at the chalky blanket until a regular shape began to emerge in the gloom. It was a rec
tangle, the width of her palm and the length of her forearm. She could feel already that it was made of wood, but bound by sturdy iron straps that ran widthways along what she now took to be the lid. It was a box.
Lisette scraped at the chalk edging, working the blade in long sweeps, tugging at the object every so often until, eventually, it came free. She returned the dirk to its place within her doublet and bumped forwards in a sitting position towards the flap, exiting the tent feet first, the strongbox cradled at her chest. She got to her feet, hurdled the first body, and darted between the carts where she knew the second would be. In a heartbeat she was at the ramparts, barely noticing the big flakes of snow that had started to fall all around her. She leapt over the high edge of the first rampart, scrambling down into the deep ditch beyond, and negotiated the second rampart almost immediately. Then she was careening down the southern slope, barely able to control her legs, yearning for the forest in the coke-dark valley to swallow her up.
‘There!’ A sudden cry arose from up on the ramparts.
Lisette risked a glance back. She saw three figures at the edge of the soaring crest. One pointed towards her. She felt her toe catch on a pothole in the steep turf, and she fell, rolling and bouncing and hurting, all the while grasping the prize to her breast. Then all was black.
When she awoke, Lisette thought hours might have passed, but it was still dark. The thought crossed her mind that she might be in the next life, embarking on her sentence in purgatory, but the ground was wet and cold, and her arms were still locked in a painful embrace with the wooden box. She realized that she must have knocked herself senseless for only moments, a minute at most. She eased herself up, standing gingerly as battered limbs protested, and found that her footing was steady and flat. Lisette discovered she had rolled all the way to the foot of the escarpment. Now there were voices behind and above her, carrying clearly. Her pursuers would be upon her soon.
The light from a lantern played up high, highlighting the straining faces of the three pickets as they negotiated the greasy descent.
‘Bugger rolled all the way down,’ one of the sentries was saying.
‘Probably dead,’ replied another hopefully.
The third gave a short snort. ‘Let’s make sure he’s a dead ’un. Or at least that he ain’t around to blab. I don’t want a floggin’, do you?’
Lisette guessed that these were the three charged with patrolling the southern rampart. They were not interested in taking a thief, or avenging their comrades’ deaths, but only that her presence had gone unnoticed by their superiors. Lisette turned into the forest, sprinting, leaping over branches and weaving between trunks, and prayed that the pickets did not know she had taken the box, or that she had killed the two soldiers. If that were the case, then they had merely returned to duty to see a figure fleeing down the slope, and were only concerned that they might be reprimanded for allowing the intruder to come so close to the fort. They would not chase her for long. And she had, at last, what she had been searching for. She had the treasure.
CHAPTER 10
The nine men and five horses left the tithe barn and emerged into a landscape of silver. It had not snowed heavily, but enough to sprinkle the fields and trees in powder, over which the lingering moonlight danced.
Stryker urged the horsemen to maintain the quickest pace possible, and by mid-morning the company reached Basing village. The snow had accompanied them in thin but stinging flurries, and the men were dejected and tired, but the approach to the magnificent estate would have lifted even the most jaded of spirits.
Stryker himself gazed with admiration as they rounded the final turn, emerging from the cover of the tall oaks that lined the River Loddon and on to the main road through Basing. He could see the Great Gate House encircled by formidable fortifications. And within those walls he knew there would be fires burning merrily in wide hearths, inviting men to thaw their frozen joints.
The village itself was nothing more than a cluster of small redbrick houses grouped between the river, fast flowing despite the prevailing chill, and the main road. But the ostentatious Tudor edifice that loomed over the humble village was like a giant from the book of Genesis. Stryker had heard Basing was one of the largest houses in all Britain, and one of the most impressive.
Three harquebusiers emerged from the north gate and cantered to greet the newcomers.
‘Welcome back, sir,’ the lead trooper said with a curt nod to Lawrence.
The major returned the nod and removed his helmet. ‘Thank you, Simpkins. I trust life has been quiet since our departure?’
‘It has, sir.’
‘Very good. My compliments to Sir John,’ he said, turning to glance at Stryker, ‘and we have guests. Captain Stryker and party. They’re here upon important business. Please inform him of their arrival.’
Sir John Paulet, Lord St John, Earl of Wiltshire and fifth Marquis of Winchester, was not a happy man. He almost considered the rebellion a personal slight. Parliament, much of the south-east, swathes of the army and almost the entire mercantile class had bolstered the insurgence, watered its green shoots until they were great branches, and he and his fellow loyalists had found themselves powerless to hold back the tide. And now those malcontents had raised an army, holding the king’s forces to a stalemate on a fair-meadow below a hitherto anonymous Warwickshire ridge. There was to be no way back. No return to the ways Paulet held so dear.
‘I am at a loss, gentlemen, a loss.’ He placed a bejewelled hand upon the ramparts of Basing House, fingers gripping tight as if deriving strength from the cold stone. Stryker and Forrester had joined the marquis for his daily constitutional walk around the great walls. ‘Used to love to walk my property, bless me I did,’ he continued, ‘before the upheaval. Now it is more like a patrol. I take picket duty, God help me. Guarding me own house!’
The land about them might have been fraught with Puritan danger, but against the dull backdrop the marquis still stood out, like the parakeet Stryker had once seen in a Shoreham brothel. Paulet was resplendent in fine red doublet laced with gold trim. His stylish falling band collar, decorated with bobbin lace, fell elegantly over an expensive gorget.
As they stared down upon the village, Paulet studying every inch of the landscape, his lordship put Stryker in mind of the way soldiers study their breeches for lice. The marquis clearly thought it not unlikely that a Parliamentarian army would emerge upon the skyline at any moment. Beyond the small houses were clusters of tall oak and beyond that the great river, meandering westward, its banks a mass of bulrushes and stooped trees.
‘But you’ve had no trouble thus far, sir?’ Stryker asked as he followed Paulet’s gaze. The little thatches seemed to be drowning in the thin mist that veiled the land.
‘By the Lord’s grace,’ Paulet confirmed, ‘and only by His grace. Our proximity to London troubles me greatly. We are a lamb beneath Pym’s sharpened knife.’
Already, on arriving at the grand residence, Stryker had been treated to repeated tales of how the force at Basing might be of immeasurable value to the cause, if King Charles would but send extra bodies to man its walls and strengthen its patrols. ‘I’m sure you’ll have your troops before long, my lord.’ Stryker said. ‘And I doubt Parliament will detach a force of any significance while our army sits at its door.’
Paulet shook his head. ‘Farnham has fallen, Stryker,’ he said, his left eye twitching ever so slightly, ‘and Portsmouth to the south. The rebels could reach us and be back to face the king in no time at all. London’s no distance. So you see, Captain, for all your well-meant encouragement, if those troops don’t hurry up, I’m ripe for the picking.’
Stryker remained silent. The marquis may have accepted Prince Rupert’s order, set out in the letter Stryker carried, to supply reinforcements for the captain’s mission, but he had not been gracious about it. At a time when he felt soldiers were most needed behind his walls, Paulet found himself compelled to give them up.
The house itself was s
et on a Norman earthwork that rose high above its immediate surroundings. It provided excellent views of the road, the River Loddon and Cowdray’s Down to the north, and overlooked the hills to the south.
The Paulets had taken the old house, with its bailey and great walls, and extended the estate. To the east of the old buildings was the new house. This was larger and far more grandiose than the original residence, with massive fortified walls that enclosed a large garden. Wide bridges linked the two houses, making them effectively one large mansion. In recent months the marquis had refortified his position, building up the walls and guardhouses, and deepening the defensive ditches that surrounded the estate. He was as ready as he could be for Parliament. All he needed now was a big enough force to garrison the estate. He had a reasonable unit of musketeers, with fresh recruits levied from the surrounding settlements, and a smattering of decent cavalry, but it was a far cry from the formidable might upon which he had set his heart.
‘Given half a chance,’ Paulet said after a short time, his eyes fixed on the far horizon, ‘we could cause a world of trouble for the enemy.’ He turned to face the younger man. ‘With more men, more horse, more cannon . . . this place would be a tick buried deep within Parliament’s side, biting, drawing blood. Think on it, we could harass their supply lines, kill their patrols, and draw their forces from the front. And when the king finally launches his killing stroke . . .’ He paused, slightly breathless.
Stryker nodded. ‘This might be an excellent base for an offensive against the capital, my lord.’
Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles) Page 15
