Gideon's Angel (2 page)

Someone in the crowd shouted out “Cut down the damned rogue!” and the halberdiers started to force back some of the more wild Roundheads that pushed towards me.

I looked at the officer and shook my head. “I will not, sir. Judgement has already been given.”

He stepped towards me. “Pick up a weapon, sir!”

“Go to the Devil. If Parliament still wants a life then one of you will have to take it. I am done with it.” And my shaking hand closed on the talisman that swung at my chest. I could feel its little flowers and twigs crackling in my palm as I dropped it back inside my torn shirt. She had saved me once again.

Never take it off...

T
HEY HALF CARRIED
me back to my cell. I remember seeing a man step towards me while I struggled to keep my shaking arms tight around the shoulders of the unwilling bearers. He had the face of a goat: long and thin, wispy beard, and eyes that seemed to bulge from his greying head. And as he reached me, he doffed his hat and fixed me with a most curious look. I could hardly keep my head up for loss of blood but I caught him smiling, and nodding at me. I saw his gloved hand place his hat back upon his head and then I was jerked forward once again and into the darkness of the Tower. Two days later they told me my fate. I was exiled, my estates forfeit. This final little gift of Parliament was wrapped with the promise of a traitor’s death if I ever set foot in England again.

But that was a future I thought I would not live to see. Lying in my cell on a broken and sagging rope bedstead with a straw mattress the thickness of parchment, my wounds burned me into delirium. Shadows coming and going, day and night confused, I drifted. I remember sipping water and being fed gruel. At some hour I was awoken by the stab of needle and the tug of horsehair as they stitched me up, the pain strangely distant. By the third day I knew I was to live, for I was again lucid and near mad with agony. My thigh was swollen and red like a joint of gammon and stiff as a tree limb, but there was no stink of rot, thank the Lord. And it was that third day that my keepers thought fit to let in a visitor, seeing that I had not yet expired.

I had my cloak rolled up behind, propping me up on the rope bed, when the bolt shot open and the studded door creaked wide to admit him. It was the goat-faced man. He entered and took off his tall-crowned hat.

“Your brother gave me admittance, sir. He has been a constant angel over you.”

I raised my head and shifted my weight on the bed, wincing. The voice was melodious and heavily accented: French.

“I should be grateful given he is a Parliament man,” I replied. “But we’re recently reconciled. Very recently. Do you know—in Paris—the adage about blood being thicker than water?”

The man nodded and smiled. “We say something much the same. And it was by Sir William’s invitation that I witnessed your fight. And why I visit you again today.”

William had risked his own standing in Parliament to get me the gambit of a duel rather than a quick drop from the end of a rope. What was he up to now? I pushed myself further up on the bed, my back to the stones of the wall.

“Will you not introduce yourself, sir?”

Beard waggling, the man grasped his hat before him with both hands and bowed. “My apologies, Colonel. I had not considered that your brother has said nothing to you given your grievous state. I am de Bellièvre, ambassador of His Majesty King Louis of France.”

“And what business does the King of France have with me?”

The ambassador smiled again and gently inclined his head. “Strictly speaking, it is by Cardinal Mazarin’s authority that I propose to you an offer of employment.”

My laugh turned into a retching cough. “And what service could a broken-down Cavalier on death’s door do for the Cardinal?”

De Bellièvre waved his hat expansively. “Your knowledge of soldiering is considerable, sir. The war here. A few years ago in the German kingdoms and in Sweden. His Eminence would pay handsomely for an officer of your experience. Your brother is most generous in his praise of your skills.”

“I think you’re wasting your time, sir. I may not even walk again, let alone ride.”

The ambassador laughed. “Nonsense. You will heal. My own surgeon will see to you. Besides, you are as strong as a cow!”

“I think you mean
ox
.”

The ambassador moved to the foot of the bed, one hand toying with the elegant golden braid on his hatband. He gave me a knowing look with his watery pug dog eyes. “Colonel, you are an exile now and without a penny to your name. Would you go back to the Danes again? They are as poor as you. Hanover and Saxony are barren lands now. Come to Paris. Take the Cardinal’s commission and find your fortune anew!”

One door closes, another opens. And that is how I ended up in the service of a new master, plucked from the viper’s nest to find myself in a different, but no less risky, employ.

For eight years I did good honest soldiering under the French. And I prospered. But then, I found myself again facing a man possessed of Righteousness and Vengeance in equal measure, like that young redcoat on the Tower green. And this time, it was a man guided by the Devil himself.

Chapter Two

H
ER HAND TRACED
a path along my scar, a mottled indigo trench gouged out of my thigh in the summer of 1645. It joined another, slightly newer and higher up, forming appropriately enough a letter T. By the single candle flame that trembled in the draught of my bedchamber, I watched her as she examined me. I took in the sight of her full breasts, bronzed by the soft light and swaying invitingly as she moved her arm towards my hip.

“So many gambles with Death, yet you are still here,” she said.

My hand went to the silver locket that hung on my chest, a trinket that now concealed a frayed and yellowed linen pouch, barely held together by the red thread that wrapped around it.

She snatched it deftly, and gave it a shake. “And what lies in this?”

“It’s a charm, given to me a long time ago... in Germany.”

“From a lover, perhaps?”

“Alas no. She was an old gypsy who took pity on a young soldier.”

“But it’s the secret of your survival,” she teased. “True gypsy magic?”

I smiled, pleased with her intuition. “Aye, that it might be.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, studying the pierced oval locket, looking for its catch. But I gently pulled it back from her and tugged the coverlet over our nakedness, gathering her up in my arms as I did so.

“I’ve spoken with those who have known you since you came to France,” she said as she stroked my cheek. “They say you’ve not changed a whit since. Barely a grey hair on your head even though you’re old enough to be a grandfather.”

“Foolishness.”

“It’s a powerful charm, then?”

I kissed her full upon the lips and her fingers ran through my hair.

“It would seem to afford other powers as well, I see,” she trilled.

“You’re my charm, Maggie.”

Marguerite St. John’s father was an adventurer who had, like me, chosen the wrong side. He was a good Royalist still, and was even now off somewhere in the kingdoms of Europe trying to raise money for our new pauper king, young Charles II. This suited me well enough, affording the time to acquaint myself with his daughter unhindered, if not unobserved in so intimate a place as the Louvre Palace.

“I think that the one about your neck will outlast me,” she said. “Something tells me you won’t remain here at court much longer.”

I hesitated in reply. She was a clever girl.

“No, you can’t fool me, sir.” She rolled over onto her back and sank into the mattress, one hand reaching down to play with my manhood. “If you
could
take me with you—I would don harness as well and fight alongside you! There’s nothing left for us here. The money has run out and the cause is lost. I may as well become a whore and get paid.”

“Don’t talk of such things. Think upon Christmas a few weeks hence, my sweet. And remember that in London not one Yule log will be burnt nor a figgy pudding steamed. Copper Nose Cromwell has forbidden it.”

She pulled her hands to her bosom and her fingers tugged the coverlet snug across her neck. “Christmas is just a child’s diversion for a fortnight. We’ll soon be back to the usual fare, short bitter days, and the endless bickering.”

I reached over and ran my fingers along her cheek and she turned toward me, a smile broadening in spite of her huff. “One day,” I said, “England will spit out the Puritan lump of gristle stuck in its throat and have done with the whole canting lot.”

“My love,” she said, stroking my chin and running her hand down my neck with the touch of a fairy, “you above all men must surely know, after all you’ve seen in this world, that people have a capacity to endure—to survive. To look the other way in the face of trouble. That is how they manage under Cromwell.”

“Aye, well, I won’t tell you otherwise. But where one door closes, another opens. And that’s from an old soldier who knows.” I leaned out of the bed and pinched the candle that guttered in the cold draught. Pulling her in to me once again, I drank in her perfume.

Softly, she spoke again. “I think it’s time you told me what happened to you this summer—what you did for the king. What really happened. And why he
knighted
you. I know you don’t have enough money to have convinced him. You must have done something else.”

I sighed and lay back, falling into the pillow with her head upon my chest. “Very well,” I whispered, “but there are good reasons why few people know what happened. You mustn’t tell a soul lest you bring harm to yourself and others. There are enemies who would learn such things of the Stuarts.”

“I swear to you,” she said.

Like a moth, my bumbling, aimless flight had brought me back into the Stuart flame after several years on the Continent as a soldier in the pay of the French. Or to be more exact, His Eminence Giulio Raimondo Cardinal Mazarin. The French had gotten it into their heads to have a little civil war like we English and my skill at arms drew a good price. So I told her of that day last July, as the French rebel army retreated to the gates of Paris in hope of being let in by the city fathers. The Parisians were much too wise to let any army into the town so the rebel leader, Prince Condé, pleaded his case at the city gates while King Louis, the Cardinal, and the royal army closed in for the kill. Condé knew he was trapped at the walls of Paris, so he barricaded himself into Faubourg village, and prepared to fight us.

“I know all that,” she said. “What was
your
part in all this?”

“Not so fast,” I chided. “I will relate that soon enough. What you probably didn’t know is that young James, the brother of our own good king, was also with us that day. Aye, the lad was doing good service as an adjutant to General Turenne, running messages and the like.

“It was late afternoon before what would prove to be a day of battle outside the walls,” I said. “I was leading a few squadrons of the Cardinal’s cavalry, harassing Condé’s stragglers. Andreas Falkenhayn was with me.”

“The loutish German fellow we saw today?”

“The same. My old comrade of many long years. There was a rebel musketeer behind every window flowerpot and every hedge and wall, all taking shots at us as we rode by. The whole afternoon we lay into them as they dug deep into the village like fleas on a poodle.

“Major Falkenhayn and I found a messenger waiting for us with orders to see the Cardinal at once. When we reached the summit of the hill above Faubourg, the Cardinal emerged from his tent, cassock flapping about him like an ensign on the field of battle.

“We had scarcely bowed and made a reverence before he barked at us to join him in his tent. His Eminence was not alone. There, next to a trestle table scattered with maps and documents, stood a soldier I had not met before.

“Mazarin’s hand rested on a letter that lay half crumpled upon the table in front of his chair. He gestured at the soldier without even looking at us.

“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘May I introduce
Monsieur
d’Artagnan, of the king’s company of musketeers.’ He picked up the letter and waved it my way. ‘And these two worthies are my trusted servants, Colonel Richard Treadwell and Major Andreas Falkenhayn, of my own regiment. Now then—listen well—we have little time.’”

“And who is this d’Artagnan?” asked Maggie, her voice quite muffled under the coverlet.

“He is some young Gascon of lesser nobility, come to Paris to find his fortune, and already a trusted emissary of Mazarin for such a tender age.”

“Pray, continue,” she whispered.

So I told her what Mazarin had told us, his Italian-accented French tripping so rapidly that I was hard-pressed to follow him. “‘That young fool of a Stuart prince has managed to get himself captured—or killed,’ said Mazarin, sinking further into his leather camp chair. ‘If the rebels discover they have the Duke of York in their grasp it will give them a strong hand to play against King Louis.’

“‘Where, Your Eminence? Where was he taken?’ I asked.

“But it was d’Artagnan who answered my question. ‘He fell off his horse in the main square of the village. He was seen to be dragged inside one of the houses by a group of rebel musketeers before the rest of his party could rescue him. Word is he was as limp as a sack of grain when they pulled him boot-first through the doorway. He might even be dead.’