Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (19 page)

‘Truss him up,’ Kovac ordered. He turned, still carrying the coat, and went to his mount, climbing up with the agility of an expert horseman. He lay the coat across his thighs and crammed the helmet on to his head, tucking strands of white hair behind his ears as he tugged the three-barred visor over his face. ‘In my country,’ he called to Forrester, ‘you would be dead already. You are lucky, Cavalier spy, for it is not I who will decide your fate.’

‘I am no spy!’ Forrester shouted as he was dragged to his own horse and thrown like a roll of sacking over its back. In the doorway of the workshop, George Webb stood, ashen-faced, with his goodwife. Forrester twisted his head away. ‘You cannot execute me!’

‘You are not a proper soldier, either,’ Wagner Kovac replied. ‘Caught by God-fearing, honest folk while you creep about the land like some witch’s puckrel.’ He looked down at the side of the road and tossed a coin into the night air.

Forrester watched the silver piece glimmer as it spun. It was caught by the wood-turner’s apprentice. The lad bit the coin, glanced over his shoulder to check that his master had left the scene, and grinned, offering Forrester a small shrug.

CHAPTER 9

Southampton, Hampshire, 11 October 1643

The Governor of Southampton was not what Forrester had expected. Here was no crusty clerk, buried in a drift of paper and ink, nor some flamboyant power-broker with daggers hidden behind a warm smile. He was a soldier, Forrester knew instantly. One without armour or weapons, save his sword, but a fellow marked by simple manners and gruff courtesy. It was dawn, and the governor, one Richard Norton, sat behind a near empty desk, his booted legs stretched out to the side, one crossed over the other. ‘You are a Royalist officer?’

‘I do not deny it,’ Forrester replied. He was tired, exhausted, for the ride had taken all night, thundering south and west to this most Parliamentarian of cities, but still he kept his nerves in check, his gaze firmly fixed upon a smudge blighting the wall slightly above Norton’s left shoulder.

Norton was eating a yellow pear dappled with brown and green blotches, and he sliced a thick chunk with a small knife. He slipped it into the side of his mouth so that it bulged as he spoke. ‘You are a spy.’

‘Now I deny
that
with every fibre of my being.’

‘How very verbose of you, Captain,’ Norton said. He tilted the knife up to scratch at his red beard. Even from this distance Forrester could see that below the bristles the skin was nearly as livid as its coarse covering, ravaged by some disease. Norton took the knife away, inspected the tip for a moment, and set it to cutting the pear once more. ‘You might have made a name for yourself on the stage, had not the playhouses been closed.’

‘True is it,’ Forrester said, ‘that we have seen better days.’

The governor smiled. ‘
As You Like It
.’

Forrester was impressed. ‘You have an interest in theatre?’

Norton gave a derisive sniff. ‘I was forced to study such friv­olous drivel in my youth, but that does not mean I approve. Parliament have done the Godly thing in putting an end to it.’ He set down the knife beside the fruit’s stripped core. ‘Let us be about our business, eh? I have recently been made governor of this place, and I see it my sacred duty to prosecute the cause of Parliament throughout Southampton’s environs.’

‘Keep this side of the Hamble, then.’

Norton laughed, sitting up straight and leaning into the table a touch. ‘The river is no border, Captain. The county is key. As governor, it is left to me to ensure Southampton is safe. She cannot truly be so until Hampshire itself is right-minded and loyal to Westminster.’ He glanced at the door where the white-haired Captain Kovac stood like a grim sentinel. ‘I am a colonel of horse. Wagner, there, patrols on my behalf, his task to weed out traitors and enemies from whichever hole they may crawl into. We are well aware of Master Webb’s allegiance. I have watched him since long before my tenure here.’ He paused, studying Forrester’s face. ‘You are shocked? Do not be. His skill is invaluable. We let him think he is clever, let him fulfil his commissions for the King, then swoop in like kites upon a dead lamb. His thousand powder boxes will not reach Royalist hands, I assure you.’

‘And Webb?’ Forrester asked, concerned for the man who had shown him such hospitality.

‘He will never know. The shipment will leave his custody bound for his friends at Oxford. We will intercept it on the road, and he will believe it went to its intended home. When later he discovers it went missing, as surely he must, he will think it an accident of war and begin another commission.’

‘Which you will steal.’

‘Which we will commandeer.’

‘Why do you not simply stop him?’

‘Stretch his neck?’ Norton said, his expression darkening for a fraction of a moment. ‘Because men of his ilk are few, and their necessity to this war increases daily. He is more useful alive.’

‘Then order him to make them for you,’ Forrester offered.

Norton shook his head, scratching in turn at his face and a scalp that was layered in greasy russet hair. ‘He is a king’s man. Boxes he makes for the malignants will be crafted with care. The very best quality. That is what I would have my men use. Let him believe he shifts for the Cavaliers, and let him supply the Roundheads.’ He grinned, sharing a look with Kovac so that they might dwell upon their own cleverness. ‘And the entire scheme turns upon his young apprentice, who, you will be amused to learn, is my kinsman!’ He leaned back in the chair, folding his arms heavily across his stomach like a man who has just enjoyed a satisfying repast. ‘It is exquisite, do you not think?’

Forrester could indeed see the near perfection in Norton’s ruse. Except that it was not perfect, for Webb was not simply a Royalist wood-turner. ‘It is abhorrent,’ he said, deciding outrage would hide the fact that he was glad Webb would be left in situ.

Norton sighed deeply. ‘If you are not a spy, Captain Forrester, then what are you?’

‘A soldier.’

‘One caught creeping around Parliament territory at night.’

‘I was sleeping, Colonel,’ Forrester retorted, ‘not creeping.’

‘In the home of a notorious malignant.’

‘And Hampshire,’ Forrester persisted, ‘is not Parliament territory. Not all of it.’

‘You refer, of course, to Basing House. From whence you came, it seems.’

‘I admit, I was taking Sir John Paulet’s warrant into the county.’

Behind him, Captain Kovac let forth a guttural growl. ‘And you were spying.’

Forrester rounded on him. ‘I was not, you beef-brained bloody German! I know your game, sir, do not think me a fool. You may not hang a soldier, but you may hang a spy.’

‘I am not German,’ Kovac said. ‘I am Croatian.’

‘We shan’t hang you,’ Colonel Norton interjected, ‘and I’m certain, Wagner, that the good captain is not interested in your heritage.’ He picked up a quill that was on the table and turned the blackened nib between thumb and forefinger. ‘But you shall be imprisoned, Mister Forrester. There is not a great deal of room in Southampton’s gaols, I confess,’ he added with a look that was wolfish and full of relish, ‘but you will be well looked after.’

‘You scrofulous rogue!’ The prisons would be overcrowded, Forrester knew. Full of men turned to skeletons and driven mad by hunger and filth.

‘Mind your tongue, Captain,’ Norton commanded, ‘or I shall let Captain Kovac off his leash to teach you the ways of his countrymen.’ He squared his shoulders, looking past the big Croat to the doorway. ‘MacLachlan!’

The door swung inwards immediately and a thin-faced man stepped smartly into the room. ‘Governor?’

Norton set the quill down having written something on a piece of parchment that he now folded and sealed with red wax. When it was done, he lifted the sheet, blowing gently on the seal, and held it out to MacLachlan. ‘Here is Paulet’s treacherous warrant. Take it to London.’

‘Sir,’ MacLachlan said, stepping forwards and tucking it carefully into a snapsack hanging from his shoulder. ‘Right away, sir.’

‘Hand it to John Pym himself,’ Richard Norton ordered. ‘Let them see what menace we face hereabouts.’

Off St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly, 11 October 1643

Roger Tainton’s ship was a square-rigged pinnace called the
Silver Swan
, and it battled out of the wharf at Hugh Town and into the bay. The inclement weather had delayed their departure through the night and much of the morning, but now, though the noon gusts remained strong, Tainton’s expert crew had advised an attempt to cross the treacherous stretch of water known as St Mary’s Road was no longer suicidal. Thus, the sailors had set about earning their coin manfully, scuttling about the deck of the small, three-masted galleon, tugging on the ropes and setting the shrouds and bawling at one another in terms that Tainton and his trio of hired killers could never hope to understand.

He looked to the south, back at the largest settlement in the islands, the houses of stone like pale warts on the green and grey mound of land, smoke trails belching out of chimneys and immediately swept by the wind into a dark mass above, like an ominous storm cloud. But there was no storm on the horizon, and Tainton was confident that he would reach his destination without difficulty. And what a destination. The place where he would make his name as a hero of the rebellion. He took a last glance at St Mary’s, to the jutting peninsula from which the brutish form of Star Castle rose like a hoary boil. He prayed Stryker and his Popish poll-cat were wallowing in their defeat, feeling the pain and humiliation with keenness that was white-hot.

He turned back to face northwards, pushing up against the prow of the pinnace as the sea sprayed a salty mist into his face. There, the better part of two miles away, was the dark mass of Tresco. It was smaller than St Mary’s but still one of the more significant islands in the remote archipelago, and it loomed above the isle of Samson, which lay off its south-west tip. Tainton revelled in the chill wind, wishing he could feel more of its bite than his thickened, dulled skin would allow. He was a better man than he had been before the fateful day in that battle-ravaged village to the west of London. And yet it was ever difficult to remind himself of the fact. The torment of his wounds haunted him still.

The Royalist soldiers who had found him at Brentford had assumed him dead. They must have received quite the shock when he had shown signs of life. A sudden gasp or a jerking limb, perhaps. He would never know, for he had no recollection of that day beyond the moment he had tumbled into the steaming cauldron, the leering face of Stryker’s whore the last thing his old self would see, but the thought of those frightened soldiers had ever amused him.

He had woken towards winter’s end, staring up at a fat chirurgeon by the name of Ptolemy Banks and the armed guard he had summoned. The wounds Tainton received in his duel with the French witch had been tended expertly, largely healed, but his skin, left so long to cook beneath its layer of sticky tar, had never recovered. His doctors were also his captors, and he had affected an air of confused vulnerability during his rehabilitation on an old farmstead just outside Oxford. A man so horribly, irreversibly shattered by war that he could barely recall his own name, let alone his allegiance. In the end they had let him go, as much out of pity as any other reason, and he had headed back to London. But the city that had been his home was no longer welcoming to a man with a face that sent children screaming to their mothers, and he had spent just one miserable week in the capital. It was, he now understood, a providential week, for there, at a chapel in Southwark, he had met a man who had talked of a new military force being raised on the flat plains of East Anglia. One that cared little for a man’s appearance or heritage, but only for the strength of his faith. Tainton had touched his father for funds and purchased a good horse, and then he had left the throng of the capital behind. He had gone north and east, to his new promised land, and found the welcome for which his heart had been searching. It was there that he had rediscovered his passion for the cause, and his passion for Christ Jesus.

‘They cared for me,’ he said, voice muffled by the wind.

Sterne Fassett had come to stand beside him, and he picked at his empty gums as he spoke. ‘Who did?’

Tainton did not look round. He was transfixed upon the dark hump that was Tresco. ‘The congregation of a little chapel outside Cambridge.’

‘Saint Big Tits, or something?’

Tainton turned, looking down at his employee with disdain. ‘Have a care, Fassett, I have warned you before.’ He breathed deeply, the air hurting his chest as ever. ‘The Chapel of Jesus the Redeemer.’

Fassett’s upper lip twisted. ‘Puritan.’

Tainton shrugged. ‘If you wish to term it so, but that name is derisive, mocking. We are merely those God-fearing folk who seek self-discipline in the ways of the spirit, on the path set out by pure, reformed doctrine.’

‘None of the bells an’ baubles of the Romish sort.’

That made Tainton smile. ‘Indeed. And of the Anglicans. Canterbury is, after all, simply a dilution of Rome.’ He craned his head over the side. The ocean seemed like an infinitely large cauldron, its potion a melee of grey and blue and green and black. ‘The folk of that simple congregation helped me recover my health and my wits. Through them, God healed me. Through them, I was able to see the truth in life, in creation, in all things. See that their way was God’s way.’