Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (55 page)

‘Where now?’ the gummy sergeant hissed to his flank as the musketeers dropped back to protect them.

Barnwood jerked his chin towards a spot just twenty feet away. ‘There, by my reckoning.’

His reckoning was right, for they skirted another waterlogged and, thankfully, silent sap before reaching a flat stretch of sticky soil, at the centre of which was a large wooden board.

‘That’s it?’ one of the bluecoats asked sceptically.

Barnwood did not know precisely what the soldier had been expecting, so he simply nodded. ‘That’s it.’

The musketeers fanned out around the square board, facing outwards to counter any threat from the Royalist lines, but the enemy, it seemed, were still blissfully abed. A few days previously, such a thing could never have happened, for the besiegers maintained a tight, watchful guard throughout the night, so frayed were their nerves by Massie’s continual sorties. But the powder had ebbed away, Barnwood knew, and the raids had ceased, and the king’s men had begun to sleep easy.

The sergeant crouched above the board and heaved it sideways, sliding it over the slippery ground to reveal a gaping hole.

‘They’re at the head of the mine,’ Alderman Thomas Pury said in as excited a voice as Massie had heard him use.

‘Pray God the fuses are properly cut,’ Skaithlocke intoned.

Massie felt his fingers involuntarily grip the rampart. ‘Barnwood knows what he is about, do not fear. If there is activity down there, he’ll deal with it.’

‘He’ll damn well burn it,’ said Skaithlocke.

Massie nodded. ‘Just so, Colonel. Just so.’

Down at the entrance to the Royalist mine, John Barnwood was lighting a grenade. They had agreed to use just one, for there would be no time to loose the others, but Massie felt reassured by the city’s explosives expert’s insistence on taking three, in case the others failed. Yet the backups, he immediately saw, were not necessary, because Barnwood was standing astride the gaping maw, a clay sphere in his outstretched hand, and from its surface a bright light fizzed out to penetrate the gloomy dawn.

Massie sucked air into his lungs. ‘Have a care on the walls! Fire on my signal!’

The explosion sounded strangely quiet in the depths of the tunnel, and for a fraction of a second John Barnwood feared his grenadoe had misfired, but then a tongue of flame lashed out from the hole to singe his eyebrows and he knew he had struck true.

He reeled back, staggering and slipping, and as his ears rang like the bells of Gloucester Cathedral, he was only saved from falling by the meaty embrace of the sergeant. Screams burst from the mine, the ground vibrated like an earthquake below their feet, and then more shouts ripped through the half-lit morn, raising the alarm across the labyrinthine network of saps. Immediately a swarm of soldiers rose like so many startled demons from their underground lairs, running between the trenches from their posts out of musket range to descend upon the mine that they now realized was under attack. They bellowed war cries and waved swords as they leaped the man-made valleys, splashing through the pools of brown water and skirting gabions and fences.

And now the mine itself spewed men up to ground level. Filthy, shirtless ghouls, coughing and spluttering amid a billowing pall of smoke, rolled out of its mouth to spill their guts and gasp for air. The four bluecoats fired, killing the miners where they lay, mouths still open for the breaths they never had time to take.

John Barnwood stared down at the reddening mud, horrified at the sudden deaths, but now more gun shots rang out, this time from the oncoming Royalists, and he knew there was no time to think. The sergeant collared him with a hairy fist, dragging him away from the fuming cavern and the twisted corpses with brute force and snarled urgency. The group raced back through the abandoned saps, thankful that no more Royalists lay between them and the ditch, bullets whining over their heads. Barnwood could hear the enraged cries of the enemy at their backs, the threats and curses clamouring in his ears.

And then the walls either side of the East Gate lit up, a huge volley of musketry rippling all the way along the summit, smoke drifting sideways to obscure the blue-coated men who had come to their aid. Barnwood did not look back, but he heard the screams well enough and knew that at least one of his pursuers had been hit. He slung the cloth sack over his shoulder and put every ounce of power he could muster into his pumping legs. They had done it.

Edward Massie let out a great sigh of relief as he watched the sally party scramble across their ladder and pull it through the tiny port. It had been an unmitigated triumph: the tunnel closed for at least a few hours, and some of the king’s expert miners killed. But he was not altogether happy, could not join in the crowing celebrations that spread like wildfire across this sector of the tattered city, for the sortie had also confirmed his worst fear. The Royalist mine was still operational, despite the delays doubtless caused by the ever-seeping springs.

‘We must double our efforts,’ he said to Skaithlocke.

The hugely fat man had been turning to negotiate a safe passage to ground level, and he looked back in surprise. ‘Governor? The mine is blown.’

‘It will be resumed before long,’ Massie replied, keeping his tone quiet so as not to dampen the spirits of the men around him. ‘In truth, I had hoped Barnwood would not require his bomb. I’d wanted him to return to us with the message that the mine is filled with water, and that the malignants are no closer than when they started. Clearly that is not the case.’

‘Then we persevere with our own mining,’ said Skaithlocke.

‘We must.’ Massie stared down into the heart of the city. To his left, across the expanse of Friar’s Orchard, the doughty citizens had already constructed a humble earthwork as a second line of defence. But it would not stop a concerted cavalry charge, and he was suddenly assailed by images of thrashing hooves and glinting steel. ‘If we do not resist to our fullest endeavour,’ he said with a small shudder, ‘one of the mines will eventually succeed, and then all will be lost.’ He pointed down at Friar’s Orchard. ‘Have them heighten the breastwork, make the earth wall much taller, and I will see to further measures.’

‘Further measures?’

‘See there, where the ground rises.’ Massie pointed to a ribbon of raised land just behind the current defences across the orchard. ‘We’ll build a sconce just there. Place artillery on it.’

Skaithlocke nodded agreement and began his descent, while Massie simply stared down at the city he had come to love. If the Royalists found a way in, he would be ready for them.

The eastern trenches, Gloucester, 1 September 1643

Prince Rupert of the Rhine stalked through the saps like the angel of death, glowering at any who might dare meet his dark gaze. He reached the entrance to the mine, gave the steaming mound of mud and splinters a cursory glance, and stooped to stroke the muzzle of the gigantic poodle that had scampered up from Matson House in his horse’s wake.

‘What d’you make of it, Boye?’ The dog licked its master’s gloved hand and settled back on its filth-matted haunches, tongue lolling as it panted. Rupert straightened. ‘I’d give a deal o’ coin to hear his thoughts, you know, Killigrew.’

‘Highness?’ a small, pudgy-faced man with long, crooked teeth and tiny, shrewish eyes squeaked meekly some distance to the rear. He had been left behind, unable to keep pace with the long-legged warrior, and he bent double as he heaved air into his lungs.

‘Boye has been at my side for as long as any brother officer, do not forget,’ Rupert said. ‘Even you, Ezra. He has seen it all, done it all, been in the midst of battle and survived it without a scratch.’ He patted the poodle’s head affectionately. ‘You’d know what to do with this wretched place, wouldn’t you, old friend?’

Boye whimpered and lifted a black-stained paw to scratch at a clump of mud that dangled from his shaggy coat. Rupert left him to it, taking an extra step towards the messy scene with his hands planted firmly on his hips. The attack had been so well executed he could hardly have done better himself. The mine was not destroyed, far from it, but the timbers bracing its entrance had been reduced to kindling, and some of the experts brought down from the king’s Welsh mines had been killed, so the efficacy of the raid could hardly be denied.

‘Sir, is that wise?’

Rupert spun round angrily. ‘Is what wise, Killigrew?’

The aide’s chinless head cracked open in a worried attempt at a smile. ‘I fear we are in range, sir. Remember the stone.’

Rupert grunted, turning to stare defiantly up at the walls. He was well over six feet tall, elegantly dressed, with the broad shoulders and lean waist of a fighter. His hair was long and black, his hat adorned with a bright red feather, and the voluminous scarlet scarf at his waist bellowed his allegiance. All in all, Prince Rupert knew, he was a handsome target for the scurrilous criminals on Gloucester’s almost laughably tumbledown walls, and he would not have it any other way. ‘Let them try it,’ he said, deliberately ignoring the memory of the pebble that had almost floored him a few nights previously. ‘They couldn’t shoot a dog in a box.’

As if his stentorian voice had carried all the way across the moat and scaled the wall, the rampart opened up, half a dozen shots cracking out from the bluecoats who clambered to get a look at the man the rebel press painted as a Germanic warlock who communed with Satan through his demon dog. Rupert spat derisively as each ball whistled past.

Ezra Killigrew shrieked, covering his black hair, plastered flat across his scalp with glistening lavender oil, with shaking hands. ‘General, please!’

‘Enough of your whining, damn your spavined hide!’ Rupert snarled. He waved at the collapsed mouth of the mine. ‘Look at this. Just blasted look, God melt your bones! They’ve ruined the tunnel. Confounded our efforts yet again.’

The aide shuffled backwards as another shot snapped at them, holing a gabion off to the right. ‘It is bad news, sir.’

‘You’re goddamned right it is bad news, you obsequious little worm,’ Rupert raged. ‘Essex is en route, did you know that? He comes hither to lift this bloody ill-conceived siege and we slop about like so many pond-skaters. Christ, but we should have stormed when we had the chance.’

‘Forth will not countenance it,’ Killigrew proffered.

‘Enough of Forth! The decrepit old booze hound was only too keen to sit outside and wait for the Puritanical bastards to surrender. Convinced my uncle it was the best course.’ He waved a big hand, like the paddle at the end of an oar, at the defiantly resolute East Gate. ‘Now look. They laugh at us like blue-feathered jackdaws.’

‘We have the engines,’ Killigrew ventured. ‘Chillingworth’s contraptions.’

‘When will they be ready?’

‘Almost ready now, sir, or so I hear.’

Rupert turned his back on the infernal city, calling Boye to heel and striding past the aide with splashing boots that splattered the cringing man’s breeches. But he did not care. No indeed, he did not care for anyone at that moment. He had had enough of humiliation at the hands of the supposed genius Massie. Enough of the mockery at the hands of the Parliamentarian news-sheets, enough of bowing to the tottering fossil, the Earl of Forth. It was time to act.

Baynard’s Green, near Bicester, 1 September 1643

Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex and commander of the army of Parliament, squeezed his thighs together and his grey gelding moved off. Immediately he was greeted by a ripple of applause that swelled like a rising tide to roar across fields that had been transformed to a patchwork of bright colours by the mustering army. The force was huge, far larger than Essex had dared hope for when Pym sent him on his mission. Leaving the jubilant mob at Hounslow Heath, he had advanced northwards across a broad front, dividing his command into three columns to spread the burden of feeding and billeting the troops. The earl had led the main force, pushing up through Beaconsfield and Aylesbury, while the London Trained Bands forged a parallel route via Uxbridge and Chesham. To the west, a third column of six regiments, four infantry and two cavalry, marched up from Wokingham, through Thame, and eventually arriving at the rendezvous for the agreed muster.

Now here they all were. The young Lord Grey of Groby had come in the morning with the final detachment of cavalrymen down from Leicester, an arrival that, amid much rejoicing from the assembled throng, had brought Essex’s unlikely army up to full strength. With the Trained Bands, who had somehow been released from London, he now inspected a force of 10,500 foot and 4,500 horse. Enough to challenge the festering Oxford Army and more.

Essex kept his back straight and his expression calmly poised, gathering the reins in one gloved hand and whipping off his broad, feathered hat with the other. ‘Is it not a grand sight?’ he said as he waved the hat to the bellowing crowd.

On horseback beside him were two men, both in their early forties. One was dressed in a charcoal-coloured riding cloak, with long arms and powerful shoulders. He tugged at the triangular tuft of grey hair sprouting below his bottom lip. ‘Grand indeed, Your Grace. We shall give the Cavaliers a fright, and that’s for certain.’

Essex beamed, for there were not many men in the country whose opinion he valued more. Major General of Foot, Philip Skippon was a hard, professional soldier who knew his business. A veteran of the European wars, he had vast experience, sound judgement and was well loved by the men. The earl replaced his hat, for the afternoon had turned cold, but he continued to wave at the deep units of his new army as they cheered his progress. ‘You will command the first brigade,’ he said.