Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (38 page)

Lisette grunted and slumped back against the wall to sulk, but her thoughts only gathered pace. They led her to a room full of glowing gold and winking jewels, of plate that could be melted to coin and of sturdy chests brimful of possibility. Sir Alfred Cade’s treasure verily shone amid the darkness of the cell. One thing was clear; she had to get Cecily to the Royalist lines. Whatever the cost.

Near the Alvin Gate, Gloucester, 18 August 1643

The dawn tour of the walls ended in the north, where Edward Massie reviewed a restless mob of over four hundred musketeers clustered in muttering excitement by the Alvin Gate.

The young governor paced slowly, nodding to any who might catch his eye, offering his blessing on their forthcoming enterprise, but his mind was elsewhere. His thoughts were of tumbling, bewildering numbers. He calculated the city’s food supplies and tussled with the needs of the rapidly growing housing crisis. He considered the ever depleting stores of powder at the modest little church of St Mary de Crypt on Southgate Street, which had been commandeered for use as the garrison magazine, versus the reserves of ammunition, and wondered how best to man the walls when more men died every day. It was getting desperate, and with the enemy saps creeping ever closer like a spreading canker, it would not be long before a more concerted assault came. He thanked God that the huge demi-cannon out on Gaudy Green had been rendered mute, but surely even that unlikely miracle could not last. They were into the ninth day of the siege, far longer than any had imagined they would survive, and that was something of which the people of Gloucester could be immensely proud. The tactic of disrupting the enemy engineering work, continual vigilance against artillery bombardment, and the occasional raid against the Royalist lines had proven more fruitful than any dared hope, but how many more weeks could they endure? They had plentiful enough water, for God had kept the wells full despite the Royalists having cut off the main supply conduits at the springs on Robinswood Hill, but that was almost an irrelevance. What Massie needed – what he prayed for with every passing hour – was an army. Messages had been sent days ago, yet no relief force had appeared. No host of avengers marched over the eastern hills behind the banners of Essex or Waller. But what could he expect? The most recent reports placed Waller back in London, scratching around for men to replace the army that had been shattered up on Roundway Down. The Earl of Essex at least had an army, but it was laid low by some pestis that refused to relent, forcing him to stay put, festering uselessly in the Thames Valley. The situation seemed as hopeless as ever, and yet here they were. Massie breathed in and out slowly, letting the chill air settle his nerves as he paced before the heavily armed throng. He had taken a risk by refusing to surrender the city, one that would make his name, however the outcome. The die had been well and truly cast, and he must hold Gloucester with as much vigour and ingenuity as he could summon. The morning’s raid would be the biggest yet, and with any luck the enemy would know that the end was far from nigh.

‘God with you, men!’ Massie shouted over the heads of the bristling multitude.

They gave a cheer made half-hearted by tension, and turned as one to their commander for the dawn enterprise.

Major Marmaduke Pudsey stepped out from the side of the party. He was tall and lean, with straggly iron-grey hair and a face weathered to a leathery toughness. He stared hard at the largest body of men the city had yet mustered for a single operation, and nodded in satisfaction. ‘You’ll do.’

The men grinned. ‘Let us at ’em, Major!’ a voice piped from the back.

Edward Massie shared the smiles, for he was fond of these tough men, turned to diamond-hard veterans in such a short time. He bowed to Pudsey, a man who had had his utmost esteem ever since volunteering to take the initial declaration of defiance to the king, and left him to his duty.

Massie and his entourage, made smaller today by the need to post extra eyes down on the south and east walls because many of the regular defenders had been diverted to where they now stood, strode to the Alvin Gate bastion and climbed to its summit. From there he swept his perspective glass from right to left, perusing the dark tentacles of the Royalist works, the eagle-eyed musketeers in amongst the ruined northern suburbs and the new artillery pieces brought downstream from Worcester to reinforce Vavasour’s Welshmen. It was those cannon that would be the target.

Massie lowered the glass. He glanced to his right. ‘Captain?’

A tall man dressed in black turned to him. He was lean, but moved with a predatory confidence that spoke of innate strength. His face was narrow, coloured in places by the blue and yellow wisps of barely healed bruises, and a huge, mottled patch of scar tissue obscured the place where his left eye should have been. His right eye, though puffy from recent damage, seemed to dance with a silvery shimmer as he moved in the new sun. ‘Governor?’

‘Would you be kind enough to tell Lieutenant Pincock that Pudsey is ready?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Just so, Captain. Just so.’

Stryker moved from the bastion down to ground level, and found one of Massie’s runners. ‘Lieutenant Pincock is out towards the West Gate?’

The runner nodded. ‘He is, sir, aye.’

‘Tell him to make his move.’

‘Now, sir?’

‘Now.’

The boy scampered off along the line of the northern earthworks while Stryker returned to the Alvin Gate. His injuries still hurt, some of them terribly, but the recent action had gone a long way to reinvigorating him. A new energy coursed through his veins, and he welcomed it. It made him feel alive. Made him feel useful. But for whom was this usefulness employed? A pang of guilt hit him as he walked, knotting his guts so that his stride faltered.

‘What are you doing?’ he whispered at his boots. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’

Up high, Massie and the others had seen him, and they were gesticulating for him to return. Evidently, Pudsey’s daring sally was underway. He quickened his pace, eager to witness the raid, though the realization that he truly wished the bold manoeuvre success made him feel all the more guilty.

What
was
he doing? At every turn he had consoled his troubled conscience with the fact that he could hardly claim to have turned rebel and then refuse to fight. And who had sent him into the damned town in the first place, but Prince Rupert and his creature, Killigrew. The fault, he told himself – the treachery – was theirs.

He could honestly say that he had no new-found love for the Parliamentarian cause. But the people of Gloucester needed men who knew how to fight, and part of him offered that knowledge freely in return for the admiration he had gained for them during his time behind their battered walls. More compelling still was the presence of Vincent Skaithlocke. There had been a time when Stryker would have followed the colonel through hell’s inferno, if it had been asked of him. He had thought such blinkered loyalty had faded with the passing of so many years, replaced by world-weary cynicism nurtured by a life where death and cruelty had become commonplace. Yet now, confronted by his old tutor,
rescued
by him, no less, from torture and certain death, that long-forgotten compulsion had renewed its pull in a way that he found difficult to deny.

He reached the summit, clattered along the fire-step behind the staked palisade, and joined the governor’s party to watch the unfolding skirmish. Lieutenant Pincock, they were told, was advancing as planned. The young officer, finding himself with more responsibility since James Harcus’ death, had taken fifty musketeers across the Little Mead in a diversionary attack, and, though they could not yet see his progress from this position, the noise of frantic musketry was already pummelling the dawn.

Below them, Pudsey’s much larger force was moving swiftly northwards. They ran, swarming through the tumbledown brickwork of the flattened suburbs, smashing the protective screens and overwhelming the Royalist trenches. Stryker watched in astonishment as the king’s men buckled against the surging tide. The feint to the north-west had taken the besiegers’ focus away from the Alvin Gate, but the sheer size of the sally party simply overwhelmed them. They turned tail, scattering in all directions like rats before a terrier, all the while harassed and bloodied by Pudsey’s musketeers. The rebels fired in teams, loosing their musket-balls, not bothering to pause to reload but reversing the weapons to use as clubs. They tossed grenadoes in high arcs to clear the sticky saps, leaping through the smoke clouds to take the next obstacle, snatching up tools and weapons where they found them. In moments they had overrun the first of Vavasour’s two batteries. A single, black-mouthed cannon had been placed directly before the Alvin Gate, and enough of Pudsey’s men turned to wave up at the watching garrison for Stryker to know that the big gun had been successfully spiked.

Major Pudsey did not stop there. He took his men on, charging up the old road towards the village of Kingsholm, where a new, larger battery had been constructed. This one held three cannon, and the bluecoats found that the Welsh infantrymen based there had, like their compatriots, been duped by the diversion at Little Mead. They reached the battery with surprising ease, slaughtering those gunners foolish enough to stand and fight, and Stryker knew that they would be hurriedly driving nails into the touch-holes of the forbidding pieces, rendering them impotent for hours to come.

The battle grew louder suddenly, as more muskets were fired and more smoke slewed sideways across the fields, and it was clear that Vavasour’s men had finally managed to regroup and go on the offensive. They pushed out of their lines at Kingsholm, shooting and snarling their way southwards as one of Pudsey’s trumpeters gave the shrill call to retreat. The fight was nasty, men fell on both sides, but from up high Stryker could see that Pudsey’s men had had the best of it. They were falling back towards the walls now, though blue-coated bodies still slumped to the ground, and the folk all along Gloucester’s rampart bellowed their encouragement, beckoning them to safety.

Massie was beaming. He was a reserved character to Stryker’s mind, pensive and quiet, but even he pumped the air with a fist and openly gave his thanks to God. The others on the bastion, a couple of officers, Alderman Pury and Colonel Skaithlocke, patted him on the back and shook hands with one another. Marmaduke Pudsey would come back a hero, Massie had forged yet another inroad into the Royalist siegeworks, and the city could breathe easy for a few more precious hours.

Stryker realized that he too was grinning. It had been a marvel to watch. He was no Parliamentarian, but perhaps, he silently conceded, he was a rebel.

The eastern trenches, Gloucester, 19 August 1643

Prince Rupert of the Rhine stalked through the trench, the glow of the lantern making his eyes glint like an owl on the hunt. Night had not come quick enough on a day that had been catastrophic for his uncle’s great army.

‘Will we be out here long, sir?’

Rupert stopped abruptly, turning on his heels to glower down at the man who had to run to keep up with his long stride. ‘All night, Killigrew, so get used to it.’

Ezra Killigrew grimaced, his sharp teeth unnaturally white behind the lantern he held at arm’s length to light his master’s way. ‘It is dangerous, General. They’ll shoot at you.’

Rupert cast him a withering look. ‘It is midnight, Killigrew. They cannot bloody see me.’ He motioned that they should continue their progress, and the dumpy aide scurried to keep up once more. ‘We gave ourselves ten days.’

‘Highness?’ Killigrew chirped.

Rupert did not stop this time. ‘Ten days to complete this damnable siege. It is almost up.’

‘They’ve been stubborn,’ Killigrew offered unhelpfully.

‘We have been incompetent, Ezra.’ He spat at the side of the trench. ‘Feeble.’

‘But Forth is in charge, Highness,’ Killigrew said.

‘
Ha
!’ Rupert barked without mirth. ‘It is all of us who risk our reputations, and you know it. Forth, aye, but me also. Astley, Vavasour, Falkland. Even the King himself will lose face.’

‘You wanted to storm at the very beginning, Highness. It was you who told them not to sit and wait.’

‘But I did not get my wish, Killigrew,’ Rupert replied, his faint accent thickened by his brooding, ‘and now my argument will be conveniently forgotten. It was I who sued for the taking of Gloucester, that is what will be whispered by the Queen’s faction. The manner of the taking will not feature in their poisonous games.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I would still launch an escalade, but it is forbidden,’ Rupert said morosely. ‘The Council have decided to increase the bombardment.’

‘Increase?’ Killigrew echoed incredulously. ‘But we are low on powder, and our larger cannon have no ammunition at all.’

Rupert stepped over a basket full of tools of various shapes and sizes. A sapper had been sitting nearby, and he rose quickly, doffing his cap. Rupert nodded to him, oblivious of the way the man shrank beneath his hawkish stare. ‘We have enough powder and shot for the smaller pieces. We will concentrate our efforts around those, hammering the walls for as long as it takes.’

‘To what end?’

‘It is hoped Massie will be intimidated into surrender. And if not,’ he added before Killigrew could question the strategy, ‘we will be making every effort to bridge their cursed moat with faggots. The bombardment will provide covering fire.’