Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (28 page)

‘He
must
have been well oiled to find you good company,’ Penn remarked.

‘Sod off,’ Trencher said.

‘I would have sent a bloody regiment at the least with that much silver,’ Dobson said. They were all still watching The Scot and Colonel Haggett. And the carts that were filled with treasure.

‘And bring two regiments of the King’s horse down on them?’ Tom said and Dobson considered this, scratching his black beard. ‘Fewer than a hundred and there’s a good chance they’ll be ignored, better still unseen.’

‘Still one hellish gamble,’ Penn said and Tom agreed that it was, then noticed one of Haggett’s men bleeding from the nose. Others were coughing, some violently.

‘How far is it to Thame?’ he asked, standing and raking his wet hair back from his face.

‘Can’t be more than fifteen miles,’ Trencher suggested, ‘but those carts will make it seem like fifty.’

‘Those carts are not the problem,’ Tom said, ‘at least for now. You’re right, Matt, Colonel Haggett’s men are unwell. I’d wager some of them will be in the ground before we get this silver to Thame.’ All eyes turned to Haggett’s men, who were ragged-clothed and unkempt and seemed struck by some malaise that had them leaning against tree trunks and propped up on deadfall.

‘Soldiers usually stand a little taller and straighter when they meet men from another regiment,’ Trencher said, ‘but that lot are a shambles.’

‘They do seem to lack professional pride,’ Penn, a lawyer’s son, observed. ‘Could be typhus fever. That’ll have a man coughing his guts up.’

Even their horses’ coats, Tom noted, were dull, their tails and manes tangled and thick with dust. By contrast The Scot’s thirty men looked hard, battle-tested and ready for a fight should a fight come along.

‘Colonel Haggett must be relieved to have the company,’ Trencher said, ‘if his lads are fever-racked.’

‘We’ve done our job,’ Dobson said. ‘Those bastards in Oxford will be wiping their arse cracks with charred scraps of their damned newsbook for the next month. We could be back in London the day after tomorrow spending Captain Crafte’s money on women and wine.’

‘Our orders were to ride back to London with The Scot,’ Tom said. ‘So it’s Thame first and then London.’

‘That because you’d never disobey an order, Tom?’ Penn asked through a grin.

Tom half smiled at that. In truth he would happily ride back to London regardless of Captain Crafte’s orders. He would half drown himself in beer and perhaps find a whore to share his bed, for he had killed Henry Denton and
that
was
his
victory.
Mercurius Aulicus
and the destruction of the printing press that spawned it meant nothing to him, though what Crafte would do when he discovered that John Birkenhead was still alive Tom could not say.

‘What say you, Will?’ Tom asked, ‘shall we see this bounty safely delivered to Thame?’

Trencher had removed his battered old pot – part of the war gear The Scot had supplied when they had joined him outside Oxford – and was rubbing a patch of bristles on his mostly bald head where the pot had raised an angry red welt.

‘We do the Lord’s work and that’s the truth of it, but that coin will buy us the tools to do it. Powder and shot, blades and blankets. I’d have us do our bit in seeing it delivered into righteous hands and put to good use.’

Penn nodded. Tom looked at Dobson and the big man turned and glanced at one of Haggett’s men whose hacking cough,
sweat-sheened face, and hand clutching his swollen abdomen marked him as a dead man walking. ‘Well I’ll not ride all the way back to London like some friendless Devil-driver preaching to the damned rabbits and crows.’

So they would remain with The Scot and his thirty troopers and Colonel Haggett and his seventy-five ragged men and turn their horses north again to escort three wagons brimming with silver to Thame.

And the next day, as they lumbered on, the carts’ wheels sinking into the ground or wedging behind grass-covered rocks, the first of Haggett’s men died.

The man had been in his forties, a shoe-maker before taking up arms to fight for God and Parliament. It was the same man, Tom realized, whom he had seen bleeding from his nose the previous day.

‘He shook all night like a wet dog. I ’eard his teeth chattering and couldn’t sleep for it,’ another trooper had said as they stood gathered round the stiff body whose legs stuck out the bottom of a shelter half-heartedly put together using a fallen ash trunk and a wet-weather cape. ‘He won’t be the last neither,’ the man went on, sharing a forlorn look with another ashen-faced trooper.

‘There are worse ways to go than in your sleep,’ Trencher observed, ‘and the Lord will receive him gladly as a righteous man and a holy soldier.’ Some of Haggett’s men ayed and nodded in thanks to Trencher, grateful for those words, and Tom saw the fear in their eyes, because if the Lord truly
was
recruiting then the chances were their names were next on the roll call.

They hastily dug a grave and laid the dead man in it – with most of his belongings, for they feared, despite their godliness, that some ill luck might yet cling to his knapsack and his shoes and spare clothes, his tinder box, leather bottle and spoon. Though they evidently believed that ill luck could not adhere to coins, for the man’s five closest friends shared out the three
shillings and fourpence they found in his purse. The same must be said for his rusty hanger and his wheellock for they took those too.

Corporal Mabb, a grey-haired, grizzled trooper, told Christopher Allingham – for that was the dead trooper’s name – that he was sorry for not putting him in consecrated ground but that he hoped the man would understand that they could not be hefting corpses around the country. Though again it was the cause of death and not the inconvenience of it that put fear in men’s bellies. Colonel Haggett himself said a prayer, most of the words drowned by the raucous clamour of nesting rooks above, the birds seeming to disapprove of the rites. Or perhaps, Tom considered, they were warning them that whatever disease had carried Allingham off was still lurking amongst those beside his grave.

Then they took the road north-west through a valley of arable land and pasture, the rising ridges on either side thickly crowned with beech woods. Now and then they saw farmers and shepherds hurriedly moving their flocks further up the hills towards the trees, the lambs and calves that were being weaned from their mother’s milk bleating timorously as they were swept along. Late that afternoon they watched a man and boy up on the east ridge cut a cow’s throat. Leaving the beast on its knees, its blood washing down its chest onto the cropped grass, the farmer and his boy rounded up the rest of his animals and moved them off. Panicked by the sight of soldiers the farmer hoped his sacrifice of one beast might save several, and perhaps it was a ploy that had worked for him before. Yet he need not have killed the cow, because Colonel Haggett had already made it clear that God’s soldiers did not prey on honest men like common thieves. And so despite his men’s grumbling and The Scot’s barely concealed ire, they left the cow where it lay and moved on through the valley.

‘Well, that farmer and his brood will be eating like kings
for the next week,’ Penn had said, as chafed as the rest to be turning down fresh meat.

‘It was likely an ancient beast anyway,’ Trencher had replied, trying to make the others feel better, ‘and we’d have spent a tooth or two on the meat.’

The Scot sent two of his troopers galloping on to Thame, their task to warn Essex of the convoy’s approach and request an additional escort to see the silver safely in. He and his men now headed up the column, riding half a mile out in front to reconnoitre the ground. Tom had volunteered his party to ride as the convoy’s rearguard and Haggett, a careful-looking man with close-set, studying eyes and a yellow tinge to his clean-shaven skin, had seemed grateful and accepted. The colonel knew many of his men were afflicted and in such state were unlikely to be as vigilant as they should be. Tom suspected that Haggett himself was unwell for he was sweating profusely, had armed the grease from his forehead three times while they spoke, and yet he would not diminish his authority by admitting any such infirmity. In truth Tom had wanted to keep his party away from Haggett’s men as much as was possible and presumed that that had been The Scot’s thinking, too. Nevertheless, even lagging behind the column they could not put far from their thoughts the sickliness that was eating its way into those guarding the treasure carts up ahead. The breeze was northerly and it bore their barking coughs and their ragged hawking of blood and phlegm. Even from a distance Tom could see that many of Haggett’s men were almost lying in their saddles, their heads lolling beside their horses’ necks.

‘They’ll be digging more holes tonight,’ Dobson said gruffly, as ever unafraid to give voice to other men’s thoughts. Neither Tom, Trencher nor Penn disagreed, though in the event it still sent a shiver scuttling over Tom’s flesh when the next man died.

For an hour the long shadows of their horses had tracked them along a thick boundary hedge which was bathed in a cheerful copper glow, so that the black shapes flowed smoothly
through and over the briars, searching and caressing. Then one of Haggett’s harquebusiers fell from his horse like a sack of grain and never moved again. From the way the man fell Trencher surmised he had likely been dead for the last two miles and that his horse, knowing it, had decided enough was enough. It was the last hour of the evening sun and swarms of gnats brought out by the day’s warmth danced in their thousands, hovering above the track so that the men had to close their eyes and mouths to ride through them. Ahead, the whole valley and the sheep pastures on either side were glazed in a gold and crimson light that washed around Haggett’s dying troop on a cooling breeze.

This time they did not bury the man. The convoy did not even stop, for the payroll was more important than putting a soldier in the ground with the simple rites and prayers a good Protestant deserved, and later Tom heard that Haggett had announced that they would return and recover the body for a proper burial once their duty was discharged. Tom would have bet the price of a good buff-coat that the crows and the worms would strip the body of its flesh long before the bones ever got beneath the sod.

Now, as they in the rear rode past the dead man, left where he had fallen for his firelocks and helmet were still with his horse, Tom saw that his mouth was bloody and his breeches were fouled. Others up ahead were now and then dismounting to void their bowels in the long grass and Tom muttered, to the cruel God who would have men suffer so, as much as to his companions, that he would rather be hacked apart by sharp steel than die of some fever or gut rot.

That night they made camp amongst trees at the foot of the northern scarp of the Chiltern Hills. They lit no fires for fear of drawing attention, which did nothing to help the men’s spirits which were, as Dobson remarked, lower than an old whore’s apple dumplings. Several of Haggett’s troopers were by now in the fever’s maw and gripped by a muttering delirium. They were
picking agitatedly at their blankets and at imaginary objects, their faces sickly sheened, hair lank. Some, unable to get to their feet or simply oblivious, must have fouled themselves for the stench began to waft through the camp, Trencher remarking its strange similarity to pea soup.

Rather than lie in his blankets listening to their moans and coughs, their stink in his nose, Tom decided to keep watch, moving halfway up a rugged bluff through which sharp boulders had burst in a long-forgotten time. And it was then, by the light of the rising moon, that he saw a trooper walk his horse into their camp. Tom had not yet been asleep and his senses were on edge, disquieted perhaps by the disease preying on the convoy, and even in the dim light he recognized the man as one of The Scot’s harquebusiers, one of the two whom he had sent on to Thame that morning. The trooper must have ridden past them, picked up the tracks left by the heavy carts and followed them back into the woods.

Tom could not hear what the man was saying to the sentry who had challenged him, for they were some thirty paces away and their voices were low and muffled. But something told him that the man’s returning so soon, and alone, did not bode well and so he picked his way back down the bluff and followed the soldier.

‘Can’t sleep, eh, laddie?’ The Scot said to Tom, stepping into a shaft of moonlight arrowing through the trees. He greeted his trooper and sent another man to fetch Colonel Haggett. ‘I cannae say as I’m surprised. I’d sooner get ma head down in ma hoond’s basket than lie there listening to this troop o’ the damned coughing up their innards all night.’ He wore a smock over his buff-coat and gripped his scaled buff-leather gauntlets in his right hand.

‘I saw your man come in,’ Tom said, ‘and would know what news he brings.’

‘Aye, well ye might as well hear what reason Trooper Foster has for being back with us so soon when ah’d have wagered a
shilling on him being up to his neck in Thame ale and notch by now.’ The Scot beckoned Tom closer with a wave of his gloves.

‘What is it, Sir John? What’s going on?’ Colonel Haggett forced himself straighter as he approached. Clearly he had not been asleep either, though his eyes were sunken into pools of shadow and his face glistened sickly.

‘We’re gaunnae find out, Colonel,’ The Scot said, ‘but I dinnae think it’s good news.’ He turned back to Trooper Foster and flicked the gloves at him in a gesture that said
spill it then
.

‘We got within a mile or two of Thame and ran into the enemy. A troop of dragoons,’ Foster said, glancing from The Scot to Colonel Haggett, his begrimed face a taut knot. ‘Only we thought they’d be our lot, being so near Thame, and it wasn’t until we got close enough to smell ’em that I said to Lucas that they looked like bloody King’s men. Soon as we turned round they gave fire and chased us and Lucas must have been shot for he went down, his horse too. If I’d have gone back for him they would have got me too, so I flew like the bloody wind.’ He bit his lip. ‘Sir.’