The Bleeding Land (50 page)

‘Heya, boy!’ he yelled. ‘Go on, Hector!’ And they flew, hooves hammering the ground, the cold wind scouring his face between the three bars of his helmet that framed his world whichever way he looked. ‘Kill them!’ he screamed. ‘Kill them all!’ and he outstripped Corporal Bartholomew, drawing level with Hooker who had drawn his sword. Off his right shoulder O’Brien was bellowing Irish curses, hanks of wind-whipped red hair escaping his own helmet. Mun hauled his sword from its scabbard, holding it wide as the front rank of the musket squadron suddenly vanished in a cloud of white smoke and he heard a clank of ball against steel plate and then a scream somewhere behind. But he felt no fear now. Only rage.

The rebel musketeers knew they could not stand against cavalry and now they panicked, some running, others drawing their own swords, inspired by the officer who held his ground, arm extended, pistol steady. He fired and Mun heard the ball thunk against Hooker’s breastplate and a heartbeat later the mercenary scythed off the man’s head as neat as ninepence. Mun crashed into the disintegrating squadron, slashing his heavy sword down into a rebel’s shoulder, Hector’s momentum wrenching the blade from the meat as they plunged on. And Mun hacked down again, cleaving another man’s arm off at the shoulder as he raised his matchlock as a shield. ‘Go on, boy!’ he roared, and Hector surged forward into the mayhem, trampling a man whose scream ripped through the battle’s din. Blades plunged and blood flew, the rebels having no defence against mounted men, and those who tried to run Hooker’s wolves chased down, slaughtering them with wild joy.

Turning Hector with his knees, Mun pulled his carbine
round
and fired at a man’s back, the ball blasting a hole right through him, spraying gore and flecks of white bone over a black mare’s hind quarters. His breath was like the sea, surging inside his helmet as he turned and saw O’Brien slam his poll-axe into a bearded rebel’s temple, the man’s legs buckling, so that his weight yanked the poll-axe from the Irishman’s grasp. Hooker spurred after a fleeing man and rode him down, his horse trampling the rebel until all that was left was a mangle of flesh and jagged, glistening bones.

‘That’s it, Corporal, teach the dog some manners!’ a mercenary cried to Bartholomew, who had dismounted and was throttling a musketeer to death with his enormous hands.

Then Mun saw his father’s old friend Edward Radcliffe striding towards the rebels, his one eye glaring like fire beneath the rim of an ancient, much-dented pot, his pistol raised. ‘Come on then, you idle bloody lot!’ he yelled at the garrison men behind him and those in a nearby trench. ‘Now is your chance!’ Then he fired and a rebel spun away in a spray of blood. ‘Kill the rabid curs! Send them to Hell!’ he roared, drawing his sword. The Shear House men cheered and charged, reversing their muskets and brandishing blades and ten or more tore into the stunned remnants of the rebel squadron in an orgy of vengeance, staving skulls and spitting bellies.

‘O’Brien!’ Mun yelled, hauling Hector around. Hooker’s men followed his lead and, leaving the murder to the garrison men, they galloped back across the grounds, hacking and slashing men who were running for their lives. Some of the rebels threw down their weapons and fell to their knees, baring their heads, hats or helmets held out before them, but their appeals for mercy fell on deaf ears and Hooker’s wolves savaged them.

Mun galloped past a man who had thrown his musket away and made a run for it, then he pulled Hector up and turned him so that they faced the rebel, who realized there was no escape.

‘Sir, I beg you!’ the man whimpered, falling to his knees, wringing his hands like some Hell-bound penitent. ‘Clemency,
sir
, I beseech you!’ the lad, who Mun guessed was younger than he, wailed, tears rolling down dirty, powder-scorched cheeks. Everywhere, men were shrieking and dying in the gore-flying havoc.

O’Brien came up and, working the reins to steady his mount, drew a pistol from his saddle holster and trained it on the young man. ‘This is my friend’s home, you traitorous dog,’ he growled, then pulled the trigger and the rebel’s face exploded in a crimson burst, the body slumping to the mud.

‘I was going to spare him,’ Mun called.

‘Bastard wouldn’t have spared you,’ O’Brien said, wheeling off to find more prey. What Parliament men still lived were running but they wouldn’t get far. One of Hooker’s men yelled that a small troop of rebel cavalry had turned tail and were riding off south.

‘Let’s run them down!’ another trooper yelled, no doubt hungry for rich pickings.

‘Let them go,’ Hooker replied, wheeling his horse in a circle, taking a brief inventory as the killing ebbed and his men dismounted to wipe the blood from their blades and loot the dead.

‘Edmund! My son! Is that you?’ Mun turned Hector towards the house, leaving the all but headless boy to be scavenged by two of Hooker’s men. ‘God in Heaven, it is you!’

‘Mother?’ For a moment he watched her walking across the churned, blood-slick lawns towards him, wearing a pikeman’s helmet and an old back- and breastplate that Mun recognized as his own. Then he dismounted, feeling as though a saddle girth had been looped round his chest and yanked tight. Hector whinnied and snorted his own greeting, recognizing Lady Mary despite the man’s armour that obscured her femininity, as Mun strode towards her on legs still trembling with the mad flush of battle. They both took off their helmets, Lady Mary dropping hers on the ground and stopping to properly take in the sight of her son returned from war. But Mun denied her
that
luxury, sweeping her into his embrace with a rap of steel on steel.

‘My son. My boy,’ she said, then pulled away so she could look up into his face. ‘You came.’ She put a hand on his cheek, her green eyes flicking across his face as though they found it changed.

‘I’m sorry, Mother, I did not know.’

‘I wrote to your father,’ she said, those eyes scouring his own for answers as ardently as Hooker’s men pilfered the dead.

‘He never received the last letter. Did you send Coppe?’

She nodded. ‘Then something must have happened to the poor man, for we have not seen him these last weeks.’

Mun nodded. ‘The rebels had the letter,’ he said. ‘I came from Oxford the hour I read it.’ His mouth filled with the foul bitterness of words yet to come.

‘These are the King’s men? The Prince’s?’ she asked dubiously, taking in the scene. Nearby, one of Hooker’s troopers in a bloodstained buff-coat was on his knees plundering a dead rebel as vigorously as a dog trying to get the marrow from a bone.

‘They are mercenaries,’ Mun said. ‘The Prince could not spare his own men.’

‘Are they . . . safe?’

Mun wasn’t sure he knew the answer to that. ‘They have done their work and will be gone soon. When I have paid them,’ he said, recognizing Peter Marten and Owen O’Neill in new armour and carrying matchlocks. ‘If I can pay them,’ he added, for it must have already cost a small fortune to arm Shear House’s garrison.

‘We are not ruined yet,’ his mother said, staring at him as though he had been gone for not one year but ten. An icy gust blew across the field of the slain and Lady Mary’s hair, more white in the red than Mun remembered, blew across her face. ‘Come, Edmund, let us get inside. I have a surprise for you.’

Mun nodded and called to Clancy and when the big Irishman
looked
up, Lady Mary frowned. ‘Don’t worry, Mother, O’Brien’s not one of them. He is my friend.’

‘Then you must introduce us properly, Mun,’ she said with a mother’s chastening look as the Irishman walked over.

‘It is an honour to make your acquaintance, Lady Rivers,’ O’Brien said, removing his helmet and bowing, a great grin splitting his beard, his wild, sweat-soaked hair steaming in the freezing day.

Mun looked for Hooker but he was busy seeing to his men, three of whom had been shot, though from what Mun could see only one was dead. So far.

‘My lady,’ O’Brien said, offering her his forearm. She gave a sober nod and put her arm in his, the dignified scene incongruous amidst the dead and those looting them. And they walked towards the house across mud and grass wet with melted frost, towards the men and women who were coming out to witness the carnage and enjoy their freedom now that the siege was over.

And when Mun saw Bess standing by the ruins against the front door, a linen-swathed bundle in her arms, a lump rose in his throat to half choke him and hot tears rolled down his cheeks.

In the midst of death, Shear House burst into life. Lady Mary tasked Major Radcliffe with seeing to Hooker and his troopers, whilst the men of the garrison set about preparing to haul the rebels’ demi-cannon up to the house. Though the greatest prize of all was the enemy’s baggage train: four carts laden with weapons and, more importantly, food. There was cheese and cheat bread, salted and pickled meats and livestock too, as well as apples, pears and other candied fruits, and more than twenty barrels of small beer. The defenders had all but exhausted their own supply of meat and grain, and so had given a raucous rooks’ chorus when Lady Mary declared that no one would go to sleep that night on an empty belly.

Of the carts themselves, two were immediately broken up for firewood and two put to use by men who were now free to forage for more fuel in the nearby woods, so that by late afternoon a great bonfire blazed on the lawn, casting Shear House in its copper glow and warming soldiers, old men, women and children alike, who celebrated the victory and mourned their dead in equal measure. Fires were set in the house too, in the parlours and the bedchambers, so that the chimneys spewed smoke that sweetened the crisp, cold air. The wounded were fed and made as comfortable as they could be and the dead were prepared for burial. They were washed, clad in clean shirts and wrapped with sprigs of rosemary in shrouds that for the most part had been household bed linens. Then each was laid out in the buttery so that friends and relatives could come to pay their respects and sit with the body if they wished to. A few days hence they would be taken to Parbold village and buried in the yard on the south side of Douglas Chapel. Those with no families to mourn them would be piled onto one of the carts and taken to Parbold or Lathom on the morrow. But the rebels who had driven the defenders from their own homes and then attacked Shear House were given no such respect, nor even consecrated ground.

‘The dogs stood shoulder to shoulder in their treason,’ Major Radcliffe had said, eyeing the Parliament men laid out by the trench those same men had dug some hundred paces from the boundary wall and gate, ‘so let them now lie shoulder to shoulder in the same worm-filled hole.’ And no one had spoken against the old veteran, so into the trench they went, some sixty men, including Captain Downing whose head had been found eight feet from his body. From her window, Bess had watched the tall, fierce-looking rider cut off Downing’s head, had been shocked and appalled by the savage quickness of it. One moment the handsome captain had been leading his men forward – bravely, it had to be said – and the next moment he was a headless corpse. She had been struck by
a
strange thought, that it was entirely possible that Captain Downing’s child was being born at the same moment its father was being killed. But then she had recognized a beautiful black stallion and the man, the killer, on its back viciously exacting vengeance on the transgressors. She had cast aside the musket that had bruised her shoulder and the match that had burned her fingers, scooped her baby from Winifred’s cradled arms, and hurried out to greet the conquering hero. Her brother.

‘What news from Emmanuel?’ she asked now, her patience worn through, cracked like the thin crust of ice on a shallow puddle. She, Mun and their mother had withdrawn to the parlour and had stood in awkward silence, watching Isaac set a fire, the swaddled baby sleeping soundly in Bess’s arms. Now the servant had gone and the flames cracked and popped as though joyful to be given life again after four cold, dark, damp weeks. ‘And Father, too,’ she added. ‘You must have so much to tell us, Mun. Are they in Oxford with the King?’ Mun took up the fire iron and prodded at the logs, raising a swarm of excited sparks, and Bess reflected that he seemed much changed. His jaw was grim-set, almost cruel-looking. His eyes were different too. Harder.

He did not look at her but leant the poker back against the hearth and picked up the cup of hot hippocras MacColla had brought him. ‘We fought a battle near a village called Kineton,’ he said eventually, then closed his eyes and inhaled the spiced wine’s perfume.
He is not yet used to the stench of death that fills the house
, she thought, yet she herself hardly noticed it now.

Then those steely eyes fastened on hers. ‘There have been other fights. Skirmishes. But this was . . .’ He shook his head. ‘This was a contest between two great armies. A deafening hell of pike-divisions and cavalry and regiments of musketeers.’ From the corner of her eye Bess saw her mother sit down and she felt in her own aching belly a sharper pain bloom, as though
a
length of icy rope was inside her, tying itself into a knot. She rocked the babe in her arms though it was fast asleep. ‘It went very hard for us in the heat of it,’ Mun said, ‘but His Majesty is fortunate to have such men of honour as would not quit the field and give the day to the traitors.’ There was a tremor in his voice.

Please, God, no!
she beseeched in the dark maelstrom of her mind.
I beg you!

Mun’s eyes glazed. ‘Men who would not yield even though they stared into the abyss,’ he said. ‘And we would have lost without such as they.’

‘They’re dead,’ her mother said flatly. Bess did not look at her, instead glaring at her brother, waiting for the words that would contradict Lady Mary. And yet she knew those words would never come, and Mun’s eyes suddenly thawed, so that she saw the pity in them and hated it.

‘No. No, it’s not true,’ Bess heard herself say. She stared at her baby, at his eyelashes that were dark against his white skin. ‘They are alive. They are coming home, aren’t they, Mun?’

‘They gave their lives fighting to protect the Royal Standard,’ Mun said. ‘They saw the colours were threatened and they rode into the hottest part of it to save the King’s honour.’ The words were encased in steel, ill-fitting armour that was coming loose. ‘I was nearby but could not get to them.’