Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (8 page)

Lisette and Quigg exchanged mute glances, but already the newsmonger had darted across to stand beside the huge contraption’s mechanical core. Slowly, almost tenderly, Greetham began to caress the vertical screw with his dark fingertips. ‘See here; the spindle sits snug in this collar.’

The collar, as far as Lisette could ascertain, was a metal ring that covered the entire circumference of the screw, holding it in place. A long bar jutted from that collar, curved at the insertion point but straight after that, and she watched – more than a little discomforted – as Greetham let his hand snake up and down its length.

‘The bar,’ he said, ‘may be pulled down to lower the spindle and, being raised, will lift it. When we pull her thus, she will exert a great force, but precise for all that.’ He demonstrated briefly, easing the bar towards him so that the screw moved directly downwards into the very heart of the press. ‘The consequence is neat, legible, lettering.’ He grinned again. ‘News-sheets, pamphlets, decrees. Anything a man, or
woman
, could wish for.’

Now that was what Lisette had wanted to hear. ‘You will print what I ask?’

‘God save the King,’ Greetham intoned in a low voice.

‘
Bon
,’ Lisette said, her mind already wandering. She was standing beside a low table strewn haphazardly with sheets of paper, and something on those sheets had caught her eye. She noticed they had already been used, crammed from top to bottom with neat letters, all encircled by an elaborate floral border. She picked one up, scanning the printed pages with interest.

‘Oh, madam,’ Greetham stammered suddenly, unease inflecting his hitherto jaunty tone, ‘do not mistake—’

‘
Joyful news from Kent
,’ Lisette read aloud, scanning the page for the next piece of pertinent information. ‘
Troops loyal to God and the Parliament suppress heinous uprising by Papist plotters
.’ She dropped the pamphlet, casting Greetham an acid look. ‘You shift for the Parliament, sir?’

‘No no no,’ Greetham protested, the words tumbling from his narrow mouth. ‘I swear I do not. A more loyal man could not be found in this troubled city, I swear it.’

Lisette looked at Quigg. ‘What manner of man have you enlisted, sir?’

Quigg’s eyes darted down to search her hands, perhaps checking for the knife he knew she carried, but before he could respond, Henry Greetham had moved to the table, keeping his eyes on the Frenchwoman. He carefully gathered some more of the news-sheets, tapped them on the table gently to bring them into some kind of order, and handed them to Lisette. She leafed through them silently.

Greetham drew a lingering breath. ‘My cover, madam. I am a printer. There are not many of us hereabouts, thus we are all known to the authorities. What would you have me do?’

Lisette looked up from the papers, each one printed with a new anti-Royalist report. ‘Do not print this filth.’

Greetham’s face creased plaintively. ‘But I must print something, do you not see?’ He glanced at the press. ‘She cost me every groat I had. She is not something a man buys only to leave dormant. There would be more Westminster eyebrows raised were I to leave her silent. So I work her. And what does the Parliament require of me?’ He reached out, tapping a long, stained finger on the news-sheets in Lisette’s grip. ‘This drivel.’

Lisette paused a moment, then made to speak, but the newsmonger cut across her hesitation.

‘But in amongst the chaff,’ he went on, ‘you may find the occasional sheaf of purest wheat.’ He crouched suddenly. Lisette stepped backwards, reaching for her concealed weapon, but he was digging his long fingers into the crack between two large stones in the floor. He lifted one of the stones with a grunt, flipping it over. In the exposed hole was a small cloth sack. He snatched it up and handed it to her.

Lisette pulled the throat of the sack open, taking out more sheets of paper, all similarly inscribed with elaborate borders and stark, black lettering. She scanned the first, noting how the language carried the same triumphal tone as the rest. But the message itself could not have been more different: ‘
Joyful news from Cornwall
,’ she muttered. ‘
Being the true copy of a letter sent from a captain in Sir Ralph Hopton’s army to his wife in London, dated May 17th, 1643
.’ She looked up. ‘A report from Stratton Fight.’

Henry Greetham stared directly into Lisette’s eyes. ‘From the Royalist side.’ He took the sheet from her and pushed it gently into the sack, then stooped to return it to its hiding place. ‘Those,’ he said, straightening, ‘are my true works, madam. They are distributed throughout the land by the King’s couriers. His agents, like yourself. If I am caught with them, my life would be forfeit. But I am a loyal servant of King Charles.’

Lisette looked from Greetham to his printing press and back again. She nodded. ‘Then we have work to do.’

Near Bristol, 3 August, 1643

Sir Edmund Mowbray had further business in Bristol, and turned back into its winding streets as soon as his impromptu gathering had been dismissed. The rest of the men began to wend their way towards their billets at Hartcliffe, and soon the pack, hampered as they were by supply carts, returning refugees and troops of various denominations, found itself splintering. Goodayle and Baxter, the most senior men, set a brisk pace up ahead, with captains Kuyt, Taylor, Fullwood and Bottomley some distance behind, chatting happily and evidently enjoying the open country.

‘I cannot believe,’ the regiment’s fourth captain, Lancelot Forrester, muttered in low tones, ‘you had the audacity to join this party, Sergeant.’

The man trotting at his side on a lean-limbed bay mare sniffed the air as though he were a hound. ‘Rain again soon, I reckons.’

Forrester rolled his eyes in exasperation. Stryker rode some twenty paces ahead, and he stared at his friend’s back. ‘It wasn’t for protection, was it? Why you came, I mean.’

Skellen looked at him then. ‘It was, sir. Though not in the way you think.’ He joined the captain in watching Stryker. ‘Out in the woods, when that bugger stabbed me . . .’

‘Someone stabbed you, Sergeant?’ Forrester exclaimed in mock horror. ‘By the nail holes of Christ Himself, man, you should have told us!’

‘Out in the woods,’ Skellen went on as though Forrester had not spoken, ‘the captain was—’ He hesitated, watched all the while by Forrester’s searching gaze. ‘He was angry, sir.’

‘He’s always angry.’

Skellen nodded, though his face remained troubled, an expression Forrester had rarely seen. ‘Always angry, sir. But not this. This was . . . vicious. The man who stabbed me, sir. Mister Stryker broke his wrist.’

‘Quite right too, William. Decent sergeants are hard to come by.’

‘Thank you, sir, but he did it before the bastard drew his dirk.’ He shrugged. ‘Was more than that. The hate. The cold fury in his face. He’s not right.’

Forrester glanced from sergeant to captain and back again. ‘You stay with him to protect others,’ he said in sudden understanding. ‘You’re afraid he’ll get into some scrape on account of that temper.’

Skellen nodded. ‘He’s not right.’

Forrester turned back to Stryker, who still forged ahead out of earshot. ‘Cuts a lonely figure, does he not?’

‘Wasn’t his fault, sir.’

‘It was that damnable greenback’s, Sergeant, I agree.’

‘Not the skirmish, sir,’ Skellen said, instinctively touching a hand to the place on his right thigh where the steel had punctured. ‘The lieutenant. Witch-catcher pulled that trigger, and none else.’

Forrester let out a long, sad sigh, remembering Lieutenant Burton’s murder on that dusk-shrouded hill. He could still see the blood spatter in all directions, could hear the thud as first the young man’s knees and then his beaten torso collided with the ground. Those staring, lifeless eyes. ‘That being so,’ he replied quickly, ‘Stryker nevertheless feels responsible for his men.’

‘Lost a lot o’ men over the years, sir.’

‘Haven’t we all,’ said Forrester. ‘But Burton was different, William, you know that. More like a brother – no, a son – than a subordinate. And they’d quarrelled of course.’

Skellen sucked at an unseen tooth, wincing slightly. ‘Aye. Up on that bitch of a tor.’ He looked across at Forrester. ‘They’d resolved it, mind.’

Forrester sighed with a hint of impatience. ‘But young Andrew’s death was due to his recklessness. And that recklessness was nothing if not an attempt to regain some favour with the good Captain. Stryker knows that truth well enough, no matter what muttering platitudes we might offer to absolve him. He feels it as keenly as that wound in your leg.’ He dipped his shoulders, fixed Skellen with a stern stare and let his voice drop to a hoarse whisper. ‘If only you’d not quarrelled in the first place. That is what his mind whispers in the darkest hours.’ He straightened again. ‘And that quarrel, as you must know, was perhaps of Stryker’s own making.’

The sergeant’s dark eyes searched the horizon, a ghost of concern snaking across his features. ‘Couldn’t say, sir.’

Forrester studied the man, ordinarily so laconic and unflappable, and knew he was troubled. He wondered if the sergeant recalled the company’s time on Gardner’s Tor, hounded by a furious cavalryman and a vengeful witch-finder. They had rescued a young woman, quite by accident, and had taken her with them on to the tor. And there, so the rumour mongers said, she had come – irrevocably and, perhaps, fatally – between Stryker and Burton. Skellen would never articulate the rumours, of course, but every man had heard them.

Forrester shook his head. ‘Nor should you, Sergeant. Either way, that is how our friend sees it, so that is all that really matters.’

As if the very act would clear away the evil humours such a conversation had conjured, the pair kicked forward together, cantering to close the gap between themselves and Stryker. Almost immediately Forrester saw that they need not have bothered, for the lone officer had slowed to a virtual halt. He was looking across at a group of mounted men passing on the other side of the road, though they too were tugging on reins to hold their charges still.

Forrester looked from the group – numbering around twenty – to his friend, and realized Stryker’s face, visible now that he had half-turned, was rigid and strained. He had removed his hat in an evident show of respect, but something about his expression did not seem right. And then Forrester’s heart began to quicken, for he noticed that the coats worn by the troopers were dyed a rich yellow. He scanned the group, searching the faces for the one he feared was amongst them, until, with growing horror, he laid eyes upon a man he had prayed he would never again see. It was a countenance obscured by the three vertical metal bars of a gleaming cavalry helmet, but Forrester could nevertheless identify the white beard and thick, wet lips, and, as he and Skellen drew ever closer, hear that terribly familiar voice.

‘Shite,’ Sergeant Skellen intoned grimly.

Forrester swallowed hard. ‘Artemas Crow.’

Captain Innocent Stryker had been thinking of Lisette Gaillard. Dreaming of her as the stones of the road passed beneath Vos’s reddish bulk. They had not seen one another since early April when, after a night making love in the warmth of the Lion Tavern in Oxford, they had once again parted. Stryker had gone south and west with the army, sent to bolster Sir Ralph Hopton’s campaign against the Devonshire Parliamentarians, and she had gone . . . where? She had not been willing to say, but some well-placed threats in the corridors of the king’s new capital had given rise to rumours of Paris, or Rome or Madrid. But then she had returned, for he had been ordered to join her in London for the rescue mission on Cecily Cade, the girl with knowledge of great treasure. The girl who had been taken by the enemy from under Stryker’s nose. The order, of course, was countermanded almost immediately, as Waller’s great rebel army had threatened Hopton’s progress, and Stryker was denied the chance of seeing her again. Lisette Gaillard. He revelled in her image. Tried desperately to see her in his mind’s eye. See the faint white scar on her chin, the blue eyes that seemed to look right through him. Christ, he missed her.

‘By God!’

His dream instantly shattered. In a heartbeat those lovely images had disintegrated into a thousand shards, tumbling away like a great church window under an iconoclast’s hammer. What replaced them was a reality as bleak as it was dangerous. And it came in the form of a man. A short, plump man with tiny blue eyes and a flat, bulbous nose.

‘By God, I say,’ the voice of Colonel Artemas Crow rang out again. That voice. That shrill, furious voice Stryker recalled with the most terrible clarity. It was as though it drilled a hole into his very skull. He felt instantly sick, even as Crow tugged the helmet from his head, tossing it to one of his stern-faced dragoons. ‘If it ain’t the Prince’s little hero.’

Stryker simply stared, dumbstruck and frozen in his saddle, as Crow grinned his way down from atop his fine mount, grunting as his tall boots hit the mud. He was just as Stryker remembered; short in stature, stocky as a mortar and angry as a hornet. His white beard positively glowed against the livid red of his fat nose, and his huge lips glistened in the afternoon sun.

‘See how he conducts himself ?’ Crow sneered loudly so that his troopers could all hear. ‘Sits when his betters stand. I’d expect nothing less. A rogue, this one. A rakish cur, good for murder and deserving of the gallows.’