Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (20 page)

‘We fulfilled the Prince’s orders, leastwise.’

Skellen brandished a mirthless smile in the gloom. ‘And now Massie’ll stretch our necks for it.’

Footsteps sounded outside the room; the metallic clunk of a key wrestling with a sticky lock. Skellen shuffled along the wall, shying instinctively away from the threshold. The prisoners exchanged a glance, a shared acknowledgement of impending plight, and waited for their captors to enter. In would stalk Edward Massie, Stryker supposed, incandescent with rage and vowing to make use of the direst consequences at his disposal. Port will have scuttled straight for the governor’s headquarters at the Crown Inn, eager to impart what he had learned, and Stryker imagined his damaged arm stretched out in front as the young colonel dropped silver coins in his palm. He imagined, too, the noose being prepared. Measured, tied, and pulled taut, the thick rope creaking like the chatter of demons.

The door groaned open. The figure of a man stood there beneath the lintel, light streaming in from behind to frame him in a cowl of shadow. Stryker stared up, blinking hard despite the pain, so that he could see his captor clearly. He felt his eye strain against the new brightness, ignored the tears that welled like a minuscule flood, and let the man’s features rise from the darkness until a face he recognized took shape.

But it was not Governor Massie. Not even Captain Backhouse.

‘Good-morrow, Captain,’ said Richard Port. ‘Trust you slept well?’

London, 9 August 1643

‘
Peace
!’

The crowd cheered. They had grown in number and confidence during the course of the day, and now, as the bell in Westminster’s ancient clock tower chimed noon, they crowed and brayed and chanted their way through the city and down towards Parliament.

‘Give us peace now!’ the man bellowed again. He was in the upper floor of a building that had once been a well-frequented brothel. It had been closed down by the Roundheads at the turn of the year, though the fact that he was naked from the waist up seemed to suggest it had opened up again. The surging mob did not appear to care, and they echoed the words as one, the noise reverberating off the tightly packed buildings at either side to make it seem as though a great earthquake was rupturing London’s streets.

The crowd swept on, filling the roadways like a flood, pulsing with each new influx of bodies as smaller mobs merged with the main group at every junction. They jostled and shoved, shoulder to shoulder from one side of the street to the other, pushed up to shop fronts and houses on either side, the outermost protesters squeezed until they were forced to spill into the alleyways like rainwater coursing along so many drains. Every now and then the heaving mass would flinch at the sight of a soldier in one of the doorways, peeling away from the threat with one mind like a flock of starlings from a falcon. But when that threat vanished, the soldier sinking with his long musket back into the shadows, the chorus would start in earnest; a smattering of disparate shouts, rising in quick time to a deafening crescendo of anger and defiance.

It was a chant that rang with violence but called for peace. The protesters, mostly women, had had enough of war. Enough of their menfolk taken away to far-off towns, unnamed fields and unmarked graves, bleeding for the great and good of the land. Enough of the taxation needed to pay for this lingering violence. Enough of the gloom-laden reports that seemed to trickle daily from every corner of the nation. Reports that spoke of lost sieges and battles in their bland, official language, but whispered of the horrific reality that each engagement had wrought. They wanted an end to it. Why not now, when the situation might still be resolved? Things were not going well for the rebels, whose cause had been so heartily bolstered by the citizens of the capital. If the Parliament would not negotiate with their all-conquering sovereign now, then a far more terrible resolution might be forced upon them. It was common knowledge what Prince Rupert had done to Cirencester. Everyone had seen the blackened, beleaguered souls who trudged back from the ruin that was Bristol. They would not see London suffer that same fate.

Lisette Gaillard and Christopher Quigg were on King Street, to the north of Westminster Abbey. For once they made no attempt to conceal themselves, for the sheer mass of people assured complete anonymity. Just two more faces in a sea of humanity. Thousands of folk had come to Westminster this day, clogging the streets so that no traffic of any kind could get through, surrounding the abbey and palace, filling the palace yards, Old and New, and lining the Middlesex bank of the Thames right up to Westminster Stairs.

Lisette had wanted to come, wanted to see what incendiary effect the news-sheets had produced, but even she was astonished. It was as if the entire population of London had appeared before the great buildings of Parliament to voice their dissent at the ongoing war. As Quigg had foretold, the city was roused in opposition to the hostilities – hostilities the rebels were losing in all quarters – and the fake diurnals produced in the back room of Henry Greetham’s house had added fuel to the flames of discontent.

‘You wanted a riot,’ Quigg, at Lisette’s side, grunted into his sleeve. ‘Now you have one.’

Lisette could not suppress a smile, even as she was jostled by the swelling crowd. ‘We have done well.’

Quigg nodded. ‘
Peace
!’ he bellowed, joining the growing chant. ‘
Peace
!’

‘
Peace
!’ Lisette echoed, eager to appear part of the mob.

Quigg grasped her elbow suddenly. ‘Look!’

Lisette strained on to the tips of her toes, craning to see over the shoulder of a man in front. She did not have a great deal of difficulty for he was elderly and stooped, but he waved a long, bone-capped blackthorn in the air in time to the chants, and she had to shift her weight from side to side in order to see beyond it. Eventually, she managed to get a good view of the entrance to New Palace Yard, and there, spreading out along its northern edge, she saw soldiers.

There had been plenty of armed men patrolling during the morning, of course. Since the king’s perilously close capture of the capital the previous winter, the city had been a place of cautious martial law, with regular patrols becoming a part of the everyday rhythm. But this, Lisette knew, was different. The protesters swarming about the canopied octagonal fountain in New Palace Yard had hemmed themselves into a natural cage, easily encircled around the open area to the north of Westminster Palace, and the infantrymen were quickly marching on them, leaving men at intervals, to form a hedge of primed muskets. Even from Lisette’s position, the upended muskets rose like thin black trees above the heads of their bearers, silent yet, but each a harbinger of something terrible.

‘I’ve a bad feeling.’ The strain in Quigg’s voice was clear and raw.

Lisette silenced him with a savage glance. ‘We have seen enough. Let us be away.’

But the crowd seemed to close in on them just as they went to turn. The people were no longer moving as one, surging instead in all directions, the mob contracting and expanding in sudden, panicked anarchy. Enough eyes had seen the troops’ arrival, sensed the new danger, and passed the message back to the rest, so that now the mood had changed. The din of coordinated chants was being replaced by a low murmur of disquiet that quickly swelled to a roar as people shied away from the gunmen. There were no soldiers on King Street, and the crowded bodies there began to move northwards, away from the imminent threat at New Palace Yard. Lisette let herself be carried along, swept upstream with the fleeing protesters like a leaf on a tide, looking back just once. And then it happened.

It sounded like rain at first, or hail dashing the roofs of the tightly packed capital. But in moments her mind had distilled hoofbeats from the chaos, and her heart felt as though it was smashing through her throat and into her mouth.

‘
Cavalry
!’ she hissed, snatching Quigg’s sleeve and dragging him on through the crowd. She wrenched her head left and right, searching for the origin of the sounds, and in seconds saw the glint of a lobster-pot helm. Its wearer perched atop a huge mount at the entrance to one of the alleys to her left, and behind him trotted a dozen more horsemen. She did not stop to look for more, for she knew there would be cavalry units manoeuvring around them, coming, she supposed, from Tothill Fields, where, she had heard, a troop of harquebusiers were billeted.

‘Keep moving,’ she hissed. ‘Keep moving before the bastards charge, damn you!’

Shouts came, sharp and bold, riding the crest of the thundering wave, distinct in their martial tone. She could not hear the individual words, but the bone-chilling rasp of unsheathing swords was unmistakable. The cavalrymen reached the road in short order, but they did not charge, looking instead to the south, where the musketeers had cut off a section of the crowd at New Palace Yard.

Lisette did not hear the order to fire, but she heard the volley right enough. It exploded in a vast, ear-smashing torrent that funnelled its way up through the narrow streets towards the fleeing protesters. And they screamed. Wailed in their terror. Some fell and were trampled by those behind. Others began to fight and claw at their comrades, desperate to be away from the carnage at their backs.

‘Christ on His Cross!’ Quigg bleated at Lisette’s side. ‘They’re shooting at the crowd! They’re shooting at the fucking crowd!’ He turned back, staring in utter disbelief at the smoke rising in twisted shapes above New Palace Yard.

‘What did you expect?’ Lisette snarled mercilessly.

Quigg peered down at her with his blood-shot, bulging gaze. ‘Not this.
Christ
.’ He looked as though he might weep. ‘Christ.’

‘We wanted chaos, sir, and we have succeeded.’

Quigg seemed taken aback. ‘Chaos, aye, but not this. Not
this
!’ His bottom lip was trembling. ‘Oh, Christ!’

Lisette led them northwards along King Street, shoving her way ruthlessly through the crowd, thankful with each step that the majority of the mob had been women. Leaving the chaos of Westminster in their wake, they reached the sprawling palace of Whitehall. She could see its guards already leaving their posts, forming ragged units that she guessed would be destined for the protests. It was a brutal sight, proof, if any more were needed, that the leaders of the rebellion had decided they would no longer suffer this kind of dissent. They were going to end it, one way or another. But to Lisette’s eyes it meant hope. The hope that perhaps many more of London’s soldiers were on their way from all corners of the city, ordered to quell this challenge to Parliament.

They crossed under the arch of the Holbein Gate at a run, its towers already devoid of sentries, and continued north, Lisette leading the way while Quigg gasped and spluttered a short distance behind. And then they were into the cluttered buildings around Charing Cross, the carefully landscaped expanse of St James’s Park away to their left. The road was still busy here, but passable, and they crossed the junction easily enough, the weathered old monument looming over them as though in judgement. They had left a pair of horses at an inn in the shadow of the cross, and now Lisette darted around the side of the building to find the servant-boy who had been charged with their care. By the time she had pressed a small silver coin into his grubby hand, nodded her thanks and led the beasts out on to the roadway, Quigg had finally caught up. He took his mount’s reins in one hand, leaving the other braced against a knee as he doubled forward in search of air.

‘Let us,’ he rasped through heaving breaths, ‘be away from this sorry place.’

Lisette was already clambering up into the saddle. She glared down at the red-faced, panting intelligencer and cast him a withering expression. ‘Get on then, monsieur.’

St Mary without Bishopsgate, London, 9 August 1643

Major General Erasmus Collings looked down at the girl with a level of disgust that surprised even himself. He did not like women, found them to be shrill and vacuous, and had certainly never felt attracted to one in the base fashion that seemed so readily intoxicating for other men. But this one positively repelled him. She was the kind of wench he despised. Arrogant, stubborn and above all, Royalist.

‘You lied to me, Miss Cade,’ he said quietly. He was leaning against the wall of the little ground-floor cell that had been his prisoner’s most recent home.

Cecily Cade was sitting on a low bench in one of the room’s dingy corners. She was wan and gaunt, a result of so many weeks without sunlight, but defiance remained etched on her face. She lifted a hand to push a matted ringlet of black hair behind her ear. ‘I did not.’

Collings stepped forwards, pulling down the hem of his sky-blue doublet with an irritated jerk. ‘You most certainly did.’ He gritted his teeth, scratched at the smooth skin of his bald head with long, manicured fingernails, and stared at his charge. ‘And you are lying now. My people wasted an inordinate amount of time in their search.’

She shrugged. ‘They should have looked harder.’

‘Damn your malignant tongue, woman!’ Collings shouted suddenly, pleased to see her flinch. He licked his thin lips slowly. ‘I should cut it out myself.’

Cecily shuddered, but met his stare. ‘You would not dare, sir.’