Traitor's Blood (Civil War Chronicles)

by Michael Arnold

  Bain frowned. ‘But there’s h-hundreds o’ rebels ’ere, sir.’

  Makepeace laughed mirthlessly. ‘And when the king attacks, he’ll hit these few hundred first. Brentford will be in the thick of that first assault. You wish to loiter for that?’

  ‘But ain’t they talkin’ peace?’

  ‘Peace? You think Charlie will make friends with Parliament after all that’s happened? No, Sergeant. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. His scold of a wife and roaring bloody nephew wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘So you want to get Moxcroft out?’ Bain said.

  ‘Aye,’ replied Makepeace, casting his eyes back to the flames. ‘The sooner the better.’

  ‘And what if Quarles refuses?’

  ‘He ain’t going to refuse, Mr Bain, because we won’t bloody ask him.’

  Bain scratched the scar at his temple and searched the floor and the ceiling with small, darting eyes. Eventually he looked at the captain. ‘B-but we can’t just walk out. On our own m-maybe; not with the spy. Not like he can move fast, is it?’

  Makepeace sank the contents of his glass in one gulp. His free hand made a habitual play for the thick gold hoop that dangled from his ear. ‘We cannot leave him. My master does not tolerate failure.’ He glared at Bain. ‘And your neck is as tender as mine, I fancy.’

  At some point during the night, though they could not tell exactly when, the hatch was hauled open once more. The prisoners winced at the sudden illumination, shrinking away from the candlelight that poured from the floor above.

  ‘You have a guest, gentlemen!’ Captain Tainton’s patrician bark echoed from the top of the stairs.

  Stryker and his men looked up. Two of Tainton’s troopers were climbing awkwardly down the stair, scabbards clanging noisily. Between them, held tight by the shoulders, was a third figure, short, far smaller than the guards, and dressed in a cloak of the deepest black. The man did not go willingly, leaning backwards against the soldiers as they propelled him into the makeshift cell, but their strength was too great to resist.

  At the foot of the staircase, the guards released their captive, slinging him across the room to crash into the barrels at the room’s edge.

  Stryker’s men stared as their new fellow-captive slumped to the ground. Burton went over and knelt next to the prone form.

  The troopers were already moving up the stair when Tainton called back down the hatch, ‘An awkward arrangement, granted. But one that cannot be helped. Still, while I’m a gentleman, my chivalry does not stretch to idolatrous French whores.’

  The hatch dropped back into place. Silence followed. Stryker’s eye strained against the gloom at the diminutive figure before him.

  Ensign Burton drew back the figure’s hood. A mass of blonde hair shone like a beacon in the diminished light. His jaw dropped. ‘It’s a woman, sir.’

  As the brandy scoured Lisette Gaillard’s throat, she was taken back to exquisite nights in warm taverns, imbibing spirits and singing songs. Then the image changed subtly, so that her drinking, dancing, singing companion was a tall Englishman with a lean, hard figure and a kind heart.

  And then the warm tavern vanished, replaced by cold darkness. But the taste of brandy was still on her tongue and the tall Englishman was still staring down at her.

  She sat up, head swooning uncontrollably. She rocked back again and felt strong hands catch her.

  ‘Lie back.’

  ‘Since when do I take orders from you, Captain?’ she protested, forcing herself to sit again.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said Stryker.

  For the next few minutes Lisette steadied her swirling balance and gingerly dabbed fingertips at her damaged eye. ‘Son of a whore hit me,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Tainton?’

  She shook her head, wincing at the pain it stirred. ‘Man at the river.’

  ‘I think you need to explain, Lisette,’ Stryker said.

  Lisette Gaillard recounted the story of her journey from Basing House.‘I was due to take a barge from Richmond, bound for the coast,’ she finished.

  ‘Why?’ Stryker asked.

  ‘To meet a ship of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I cannot say. Only that I need to leave England quickly.’ She peered round at the bemused stares. ‘The bastard rebels were searching all boats on the Thames.’

  ‘It stands to reason!’ Forrester exclaimed. ‘Our army’s on its way to wrest back London. They’re as nervous as kittens in a bear pit.’

  ‘I did not know! Not that they would search so diligently, anyway.’ She tentatively moved her jaw from side to side. ‘They found me just a way down river. I think they’d have taken me to London for imprisonment, but they got an order to come here urgently.’

  Stryker blew out his cheeks. ‘You might have explained your way out of it. Said you were sleeping on the barge, perhaps.’

  She looked about the room, her blue eyes furtive as she considered a response. ‘I was carrying a package,’ Lisette said eventually. ‘They took me for a spy.’

  ‘A package for the queen?’ asked Stryker.

  She ignored the question. ‘He has taken it. The young one with black armour.’

  ‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under ’t.’

  ‘Sir?’

  Captain Lancelot Forrester was slumped in a dank corner with Burton and Skellen. He glanced across. ‘The Scottish play again, Sergeant Skellen. Act one, scene five. Though the innocent flower in our midst may well conceal a blade, rather than a serpent.’

  ‘Who is she, sir?’ Burton asked.

  ‘Lisette Gaillard,’ Forrester said so that the Stryker and Lisette, sitting in the opposite corner, could not hear him. ‘She was Stryker’s woman once, a very long time ago. She supposedly died. Drowned in a wreck off Calais.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all Burton could think to say.

  ‘Oh, indeed, Ensign,’ Forrester said. ‘She was – is – an agent of the Crown. Of Queen Henrietta. She and Stryker were kindred spirits, I suppose. Each as hard, clever and untrusting as the other.’

  ‘An’ she’s a fine looker,’ Skellen added.

  ‘Undeniably, Sergeant. When he thought she’d died, it near destroyed him—’

  Skellen gave a small snort. ‘I first knew him around that time. He was a proper bastard.’

  ‘Aye,’ Forrester agreed. ‘He was in a rare dark place. Christ only knows what went on between them at Basing, but it must have given him the shock of his life.’

  ‘They are talking about me,’ Lisette whispered in Stryker’s ear.

  Stryker stared toward the faint outlines of his three comrades. ‘Do you blame them?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Lisette had sought him out in the dungeon’s murkiness. Her big eyes, azure pools in the heavy gloom, played across his face, studying him. There was softness there. The first genuine hint since she had reappeared in Stryker’s life.

  ‘Where did you go, Lisette?’ Stryker said after a time. ‘When your ship was lost, I mean.’

  Without reply, Lisette reached up to his face, fingers snaking through the short bristles of his chin and up past his cheek until they traced the contours of his formidable scar. She smiled as she traversed the rough skin, her fingers touching every furrow in turn. ‘I remember every moment, you know,’ she said. ‘Every cry of anguish when I dressed your wound, every feverish murmur. In a way I am pleased you have this scar. It binds us.’

  ‘Lisette—’

  ‘Sweden,’ she said, shivering suddenly. ‘They sent me to Sweden. I do not recommend it. Bloody too cold.’

  Stryker could see the dim light play across the whites of her eyes. His nostrils were full of her scent. It took all his strength not to lean forward and kiss her.

  ‘And now?’ he said, steadying himself. ‘Why are you really here, Lisette? What package were you carrying?’

  ‘I could not tell you before,’ she said, glancing quickly at the men at the far end of the room. ‘I sho
uld not tell you now, though I suppose I no longer have anything to lose.’

  She told Stryker of her clandestine mission, of how she had been so close to escaping with her prize when the Thames patrol had captured her.

  ‘You risk your life for a gem?’

  ‘You speak with such conviction. Tell me, mon amour, why are you here? It must be something nobler, more crucial, I’m certain.’ When he did not answer, she continued. ‘Do not lecture me, Stryker. My mistress’s orders are as absolute as any you follow.’

  Stryker nodded. ‘What was to become of this treasure?’

  ‘The queen means to sell it. She is at The Hague, even now, raising funds for Charles’s cause. That man would be nothing without her,’ Lisette hissed. ‘When she has the money, she will raise an army so powerful it will swat the Puritan sow-spawn like flies.’ She had leaned close, such was her zeal, and Stryker felt her warm breath upon his face.

  He opened his mouth to respond, but found his lips blocked by hers. Her tongue, hot and exhilarating, flickered out to touch his and a jolt of burning arousal ran through him.

  He reached out, feeling for her waist beneath the thick cloak, pulling her toward him. ‘You believe that?’ he said, as their lips parted briefly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That your mistress will forge a great army? No gem is worth that vast a sum.’

  She frowned, her forehead puckering in the darkness. ‘Of course. My mistress told me so.’

  The fleecelike mists of the darkest hours refused to shift with the rise of the morning sun.

  The Roundhead scouts had spotted red-sashed horsemen on the part of London Road that snaked away westward. Numerous hedged fields skirted that road, and sightings had also been made around those flanking enclosures. At first the Parliamentary pickets had reported back to Lieutenant Colonel Quarles, the senior officer at Brentford, that the king had sent out patrols, nothing more, for they were small groups, lightly armed, appearing for the briefest of moments before vanishing into the thick fog once again.

  Slowly, though, the scouts began to count more figures within the white miasma. From a distance, they were like spirits, partly solid, partly transparent, always fleeting. It was impossible to tell how many of the ghostly apparitions they could see, for as soon as one resolved from the roiling, pallid shroud it would disappear, only to be replaced by another. But as day reached high noon, one thing was certain. This was no patrol. It was an army.

  James Quarles, mounted and stretching upwards in his stirrups at the western fringe of Wynn’s modest estate, stared in bewilderment at the figures that began to emerge from the mist.

  ‘Cavalry, sir!’ an aide said brightly.

  ‘God damn it, but I know what they are, Benson!’ Quarles snapped. He raised his spyglass to get a better look, though the horsemen were close enough to see with the naked eye. Harquebusiers materialized from the dense mist like harbingers of Satan. They rode bays and blacks and greys, piebalds and brindles. They had leather buff-coats, broadswords, open-fronted helmets, carbines, pistols and armour across chest and bridle arm. ‘There is peace,’ Quarles said to no one in particular. ‘The king is at Windsor. He agreed a truce.’

  ‘Then we are betrayed,’ growled Timothy Neal, the regiment’s bluff sergeant major.

  For a moment Quarles just stared. He watched the Royalist cavalry gallop along the wide road, eating up the ground between them, seemingly transfixed by the sudden appearance of the enemy. Sergeant Major Neal cleared his throat with all the subtlety of a saker cannon. At last the face of his superior hardened into resolve.

  ‘Fall back,’ Quarles said quietly, as if he were weighing up the order in his own mind. Then, as the first – utterly impotent – pistol shots rang out from the oncoming cavalry, he wrenched on his own mount’s reins and screamed at the red-coated infantry units that milled uncertainly, awaiting orders. ‘Fall back! Make for the hedgerows!’

  Further west, on the frozen expanse of Hounslow Heath, Patrick Ruthven, Earl of Forth, clothed in full battle regalia and mounted on a glistening black stallion, shouted words of encouragement as line after line of infantrymen filed past. ‘On to London, my boys!’ he called. Some offered a hearty ‘huzzah’ while their officers doffed caps in salute to their Lord General.

  ‘This is it,’ Ruthven said to himself as his horse tore up a mouthful of frosty grass, crushing it between big teeth so that the froth at the sides of its mouth bubbled dark green. ‘The final push. If we prevail here, the war will be over by Christmas Eve.’

  The earl was confident. His force was strong, some twelve thousand men. They had left Colnbrook and Windsor that morning and assembled on the mist-smothered heath, the king finally giving the order to take Brentford, the first step toward his capital. The first step on the road to smashing this rebellion once and for all. Prince Rupert had led the vanguard mustering at Hounslow, but Ruthven did not entirely trust the reckless General of Horse, given his wild charge at Edgehill, and had ridden up himself to take overall command.

  Reluctant to commit his entire strength to an all-out assault on London, the earl had elected to split his army, sending a smaller force to purge the first real blockage on the road into London, and, in the process, establish a bridgehead for further eastward thrusts. To that end, infantry from the regiments of Sir Thomas Salusbury, Earl Rivers, Sir Edward Fitton, Lord Molyneux, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, Thomas Blagge, John Belasyse and Sir Thomas Lunsford had been mobilized and were now making haste to tackle the Parliamentarian defenders at Brentford. This division amounted to close on four thousand troops, enough to obliterate any opposition and clear the road for the remainder of the Royalist army.

  Ruthven leaned slightly in his saddle so that he could reach a deep pouch at its side. He extracted a small silver flask, jerked out the stopper and put its well-worn rim to his lips. Taking a long draught, he sighed with pleasure as the fiery whisky cascaded down his parched throat.

  He rammed the stopper back into the flask’s thin neck and returned it to the saddle pouch. As he straightened up, he turned to a nearby aide. ‘The Horse will have engaged by now.’

  The aide nodded gravely. ‘Aye, General. God willing.’

  ‘Amen.’ Ruthven had ordered elements from three regiments of cavalry to speed ahead of the infantry and shatter any Roundhead pickets they might find. He was taking no chances. That vanguard, formed from the regiments of Lord Grandison, Sir Thomas Aston and the Prince of Wales, was eight hundred strong. This was not the traditional fighting that veterans of the continental wars such as Ruthven had known. It was King Charles’s final assault on London. He would break the rebels, awe them into surrender and return to Whitehall, where he belonged. It would not be a matter of giant field armies staring at one another across desolate fair-meadows, but of the Royalist force swarming into the capital’s streets, overwhelming all resistance, forcing Parliament’s supporters to evaporate or die. And in order to achieve that victory, the earl needed a hammer to smash a hole along London Road, a hole big enough for an entire army to march through. His cavalry would be that hammer.

  He watched the last of the musketeer companies trudge past. They were straight-backed, confident and walked in swift, purposeful motion, and he felt a swell of pride. These were good troops. The earl offered a silent prayer that they would find little resistance at Brentford and even less beyond. The enemy had ample numbers to defend their heartland, but he prayed that they would lack the stomach for a real fight.

  The final company to take their leave of Hounslow Heath and file on to London Road were the pikemen of Earl Rivers’ Regiment of Foot. Ruthven watched them march by in their blue uniforms, black standard flying high. Good, he thought, let the rebels see these shadowy figures emerge from the mist like an army of demons. Let them piss their breeches and run home to spread panic and terror.

  As he watched the pikes bob in the cold air, noting with some displeasure the slightly shortened shafts, victims of the soldiers’ need for firewood, he thought of
a certain captain in the pay of Sir Edmund Mowbray. Stryker had been gone for more than a fortnight, and no word had been heard from him since his departure from Basing House. He considered the possibility of Stryker’s failure. It would be a damaging blow to lose such a respected – and feared – officer from the Royalist ranks. Mowbray would most certainly be unhappy. He had been most damnably uncomfortable with releasing Stryker in the first place.

  ‘Boys are away, General,’ came the bright voice of Colonel Lord John Saxby.

  ‘Indeed,’ Ruthven replied.

  Saxby reined in beside the Royalist army’s supreme commander. He flashed the most wolfish of grins. ‘On to the capital, and damn the rebels, eh? They give me a pain, Gabriel’s teeth, they do.’

  Ruthven’s mouth twitched slightly. ‘On to the capital, John. We’re taking His Majesty home.’

  Saxby whooped and wrenched on his grey mount’s reins. The beast reared and snorted and spurred away in an ostentatious truculent display that doubtless pleased its rider. The Earl of Forth smiled. Men like that would win this day for him.

  Ruthven had ridden out from Windsor with the clear instruction that Brentford was to be taken as a prelude to the assault on the capital. He had decided to take his force straight up the main highway to London. The king wanted to make the grandest of entrances into his country’s first city, and what better way than to follow the route he might have taken in times of peace? So they had reprovisioned the tertios of pike and musket at their Windsor billet and spent the morning massing on Hounslow Heath. From here they would launch the assault, which would take first Brentford and then Chiswick, and then devour Hammersmith until there was no more road, merely the metropolis itself.

  As the earl urged his mount away from the great heath and on to the cold mud of London Road, he turned to the stern-faced colonel who rode at his side.

  ‘Prince Rupert gives his word not to stray beyond Brentford. I do not wish him cut off from our infantry.’ Rupert had wanted to lead a flying column of cavalry directly into London, bludgeoning and killing as he went, but the earl had sought his word that he would do no such thing. Ruthven grimaced. ‘You know, Gentry, if the prince had held his dogs on a shorter leash at Kineton Fight, we’d be warming our bones before the great hearths of Whitehall Palace.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Instead, we find ourselves traipsing like peasants through freezing bloody countryside.’ The earl had resolved never again to allow Rupert such a free rein.