Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (51 page)

The corners of Cecily’s mouth drooped in a mixture of bewilderment and horror. ‘Played my part? I do not know what you are talking about.’

‘You seduced him,’ Lisette went on mercilessly. She had grown to like Cecily Cade, but now, faced with too many memories and riled by the girl’s bare-faced denials, she could not stem her anger. ‘Do not think I do not know what happened.’

‘Where has this come from, Lisette?’ Cecily blurted. ‘Who have you been speaking to?’

‘You deny he loved you?’

‘Burton?’ Cecily plunged her face into her hands in astonishment. ‘Not at all. It was perfectly obvious, but that is not any fault of mine.’

‘You deny you seduced him?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘You led him on, Cecily, so that you could escape the tor.’ Lisette spoke coldly.

Cecily leaned forward. ‘Who the devil have you been talking to, Lisette?’ she hissed. ‘I did not lead him on, as you put it. I swear it!’

‘Quiet there!’ the trooper, Thin Face, called from behind the wagon. He and Stee rode side by side at the very rear of the troop.

Cecily set her mouth in a tight line and sat back. ‘I did try to seduce a man on that ghastly tor, I admit it, but not the lieutenant.’ She looked out at the houses as they rumbled past. ‘Why would I take aim at the second in command?’

Now it was Lisette’s jaw that lolled open. ‘Stryker?’

Cecily shook her head, utterly nonplussed. ‘How do you know these people?’

‘He is my man, Miss Cade,’ Lisette said, her tone laced with venom. ‘
My
man, you goddamned—’

‘Nothing happ—’

Lisette laughed bitterly, cutting her off. ‘Now you deny it?’

‘I told you I felt drawn to an officer,’ Cecily said, trying to remain calm. ‘But I also told you that it did not amount to anything. I did attempt to seduce him, Lisette, but the attempt failed. He said he had another woman.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Now I know who.’

They sat in stunned silence for the better part of half an hour, by which time the frustrated convoy had made it through to the eastern fringe of Old Brentford. At the head of the black-coated line, Major General Collings could be heard berating a quartermaster who had blocked the road with four cartloads of coats bound for the Earl of Essex’s men. One of his oxen was lame, and his drivers had vanished, doubtless decamped to one of the taverns that hedged the busy highway.

Collings’s nasal whine penetrated the sounds of man and beast as he ordered his troopers to dismount and shift the wagons themselves. Lisette caught a few moans of dissent, but the cavalrymen ultimately did as they were told.

‘All this time?’ Cecily said quietly.

Lisette looked back at Thin Face and Stee, who had both remained beside the vehicle. ‘What?’

‘All this time you knew the men on the tor. The redcoats. You knew Stryker, but said nothing.’

Lisette bent to rummage with her cloak. ‘Burton and Stryker quarrelled because of you,’ she said. ‘They were like father and son, but they broke with one another, and that is what caused Andrew’s death.’ She looked up. ‘I did not wish to speak to you about any of it.’

Cecily stared back, her eyes boring into the pale blue of Lisette’s. ‘Lest you find yourself with a knife in your hand?’

That was a perceptive comment, and Lisette could not stifle a rueful smile. She gathered a fistful of her balled cloak and lifted it a little way off the ground, the lowest part of the material hanging low, scraping the weathered boards. ‘Something like that.’

Cecily sighed. ‘I am sorry about Lieutenant Burton. Truly. But what I’ve told you is the truth. Did Stryker really say I seduced Burton?’

Lisette considered the question for a moment. ‘Not in so many words,’ she said eventually. ‘But he told me you tried to shy away from his protection by using your –
wiles
– and that Burton broke with him because of you. I suppose I did not consider that it might have been Stryker you were involved with.’

‘I was not involved with him,’ Cecily protested.

Lisette held up her free hand for silence. ‘It does not matter.’ She cast a glance back over her shoulder at the melee on the road. The blackcoats grunted and groaned as they heaved the quartermaster’s inert carts aside. ‘Look.’

‘What of it?’

‘They’ve left their horses unattended.’

Cecily shook her head rapidly, tensing her jaw as she bit down hard. ‘Do not do anything foolish.’

Lisette stood suddenly, lifting her cloak so that it hung like a sack at her hip. ‘I told you I knew this place.’

Thin Face kicked his sweaty bay forwards at her movement. ‘Si’down you jumpy bitch!’

Lisette peered down at him defiantly. ‘Keep your rotten mouth shut, you crapulous numskull.’

Thin Face’s gloved hand fell to his sword. ‘Now that’s plain discourteous, froggy drab. Sit down afore I chop you in two.’

Lisette grinned, and paused as an anxious-looking Stee urged his own horse closer. She threw her arm out hard so that the elbow snapped forth, her cloak unfurling like a flag in a gale.

At first the blackcoats merely swayed back in their saddles, but as they caught sight of the dark object circling towards them, a look of pure horror crawled over their features. It looked like a length of black and green rope as it twirled to the hoof-ploughed mud between the two horses, but the animals knew instantly what it was, and they reared and bucked in instant terror.

Lisette kept hold of her cloak, thrust it under an armpit, and vaulted over the wagon’s shaking side. She did not need to urge Cecily to follow, and the pair raced over to the nearest empty mounts. Lisette clambered up on to a dappled grey, and Cecily swung her leg up to straddle a black beast that skittered uneasily at the feel of a new rider but did not resist as she urged it into a gallop.

‘Follow me!’ Lisette called.

‘
No
!’ Thin Face’s high-pitched bellow rang out behind them.

‘Now, Cecily! I know the way out of here!’

Thin Face’s blood-shot eyes seemed to bulge like an insect as he watched them go. ‘Get back ’ere you fuckin’ pair o’ sluts!’ But his horse had lost its mind as the hissing, darting adder writhed at its fetlocks. Thin Face and Stee wrestled with their mounts as the white-eyed beasts pulverized the earth with their frantic hooves, desperately trying to stamp on the snake that had been tossed into their midst. ‘Sir!’ Thin Face screamed. ‘General, sir! They’ve gone!’

But Collings was shouting himself, berating the quartermaster and his brow-beaten men, who were now trudging out of one of the inns at the tips of the blackcoats’ blades. He did not turn, did not even glance round, and Thin Face and Stee were left to bully and snarl at their frenzied horses, all the while cursing the women who raced into the sunlit fields without looking back.

Beside the East Gate, Gloucester, 28 August 1643

The new week began for Lieutenant Colonel Edward Massie with a habitual tour of the walls, the sun carving bright shafts into the eastern horizon. He paced with his hands clasped tightly behind his back. He did so to give the impression of calm professionalism, of a man who knew what he was about, simply wishing to walk the perimeter of his domain, safe in the knowledge that it would remain his domain for the foreseeable future. In reality, his hands trembled. Not uncontrollably, but enough to be visible, and that, Massie had concluded, would be as bad for morale as any assault by Rupert and his demons. It was exhaustion, he understood. Sheer, red-eyed tiredness that sucked the strength from a man’s bones and, in the governor’s case at least, made his thin fingers quiver like feathers in a spring breeze. And so he pushed them together at the small of his back, laced the fingers in a tight ball, and held them there.

Someone up on the gate called down to him, shouting a rebel slogan Massie could not quite hear, but he nodded back nevertheless, grateful that the inhabitants of the war-worn city were still with him. He could not help but wonder what would happen when the walls were finally breached. They had all heard tales of other towns. Bristol had been drenched in blood, poor Cirencester had been sacked for three days by the rabid Royalist assault troops. He could not help but reflect upon his own decisions these past weeks. His policy of offensive defence, of disrupting the enemy lines, of bolstering the walls and of outright, audacious disobedience had kept the king’s men at bay for longer than any might have hoped, but it must also have enraged the common musketeers, who were forced to drag their comrades’ corpses out of those grisly, rat-infested trenches almost every day. And his tactic of subversion and duplicity had been a success too, with the king evidently dithering in his method of attack. But what had such deviousness actually gained? A few extra days and a sovereign with a grudge? He closed his eyes, revelling in the stinging sensation that only came with exhaustion, and prayed that his own hubris had not doomed this brave city to a sacking from which it would never recover.

But the facts were clear and simple. For all the garrison’s stoical defiance, the vast Royalist army was still camped at their gates and Gloucester’s powder and ammunition were now running seriously low, forcing him to curtail the sallies that had been so effective. Meanwhile, the two efforts to bridge the moat, one at the south wall and another at the east, were creeping ever closer. God had intervened, of course, for the downpour two nights before had raised the water level and made the work painfully slow, but Massie did not doubt the objective was to place large petards against the stone as soon as the moat had been spanned, and that, for certain, would see the end of the rebellion in Gloucester.

‘No word from Warwick,’ he said as his advisers caught up. Two men, sent out to seek word of Parliament’s plans for the city, had penetrated the Royalist lines forty-eight hours earlier. ‘I had hoped they would be back by now.’

Vincent Skaithlocke offered a smile of encouragement. ‘They’ll come.’

‘They’ll make it back through the lines?’

The corpulent mercenary lifted and dropped his huge shoulders in a manner that made his jowls quiver. ‘They managed it once, didn’t they?’

Massie rubbed his chin slowly. ‘Even if they return to us, what then? If Parliament is able to raise a relief force, how strong would it really be? Enough to oust the Oxford Army?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe,’ Skaithlocke said, evidently abandoning the tactic of bluff reassurance. They all knew the situation well enough.

‘I had hoped—’ Massie began, about to embark on another theoretical discussion as to the unlikely possibility of rescue. He had noticed something that stole his breath.

Skaithlocke frowned. ‘What? What is it?’

Massie pointed towards one of the traps he had set. They were essentially small cups of water, placed atop drums that had been positioned at intervals all along the vulnerable south and east walls. Every day, morning and afternoon, he checked them, and every day they had remained serene and flat. But now this one, just inside the foot of the East Gate, was not flat at all. ‘It trembles.’

Slowly the implication dawned. Skaithlocke took off his hat to scratch at his auburn curls; the others gazed nervously at one another.

‘They’re beneath us,’ a youthful captain muttered with a hard gulp. ‘Dear God—’

‘No,’ Massie said firmly, careful to intervene lest panic set in. ‘The ripples are only slight. They’re not here yet, but they’re close.’ He stared at the walls to his right, buttressed by the earthen slope, then dragged his eyes to the left, taking in the huge gatehouse with its tiled roof, now bullet-riddled and cannon-holed. All this time he had been worrying for the wall; yet now the truth dawned on him that the Royalist design was more ambitious than that. ‘Jesu, but they mean to undermine the East Gate.’

A fair-haired major ventured to step from the group. ‘Their contraptions are bullet-proof, Governor, but we’re creating a port in the wall from which we can fire a saker ’pon their gallery. The timbers are stout, but they’ll not stand that.’

Massie shook his head. ‘I am not referring to their bridge, Major.’ He pointed at the ground between them. ‘They tunnel under the moat.
Under
it, do you understand? They mean to blow the gate itself.’

The major’s jaw lolled. ‘What do we do, sir?’

‘Pray,’ Skaithlocke said unhelpfully.

Massie thought for a moment. They could combat a land-borne assault with shot and steel, and soon, with the help of the new gun port, they would be able to slow up the engineers beneath their protective wooden shells. But how could they fight off what they could not see? ‘We dig our own tunnels, gentlemen,’ he said as the assembled officers stared at him expectantly. He looked at the major. ‘Begin countermines at once. Two, straight under the gate. We’ll flood them out, or collapse them entirely, but their mine must not reach the foundations.’

The major nodded. ‘Sir.’

‘Just so.’ Edward Massie turned away. If the water was rippling, then the drums were transmitting tremors that, though deep underground, were frighteningly close. Perhaps they were too late already.

Kingsholm, Gloucester, 28 August 1643

Nikolas Robbens sat on the edge of his bed. With steady fingers, he took up the three silken strands, dangling them in front of his face as he inspected their quality. Beautiful, he decided. One green, one red and one white, unblemished and smooth to the touch. Carefully he moved them to his left earlobe and threaded them through the small hole, tugging on them to ensure that they hung evenly.