Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (26 page)

‘You’re tellin’ me you weren’t impressed?’ Barkworth went on unabated. ‘She bested a bloody harquebusier captain . . . in full armour, mind . . . and tipped him into a vat o’ tar! It’s astonishing!’

Skellen sighed. ‘Don’t know how many times I have to tell you this bleedin’ story, really I don’t.’

‘There’s nowt else to do, you steamin’ yard o’ dog piss,’ Barkworth snapped irritably.

‘Mind your—’

‘He was bested by his armour,’ a woman’s voice interrupted Skellen’s doubtless stinging retort.

Skellen peered through the darkness at her. ‘Miss Lisette?’ She had kept almost completely silent since returning with Stryker to the cell.

‘The armour,’ she said again. She was sitting against the wall on the far side from Stryker. ‘It was blackened, I remember. Beautiful work. But it weighed him down, made him slow. I had no armour.’

‘Why was he tryin’ to kill you, lass?’ Barkworth asked.

‘Because I was trying to kill him,’ she said simply. ‘He stole something precious from me. I wanted it back.’

‘And?’

‘And I got it back.’

Barkworth chuckled his appreciation. ‘And you did’nae know he’d survived his swim?’

‘I was wounded at Brentford Fight,’ Stryker said by way of explanation, inwardly hoping the memory would stir something within Lisette. ‘She stayed with me, nursed me.’

‘This water tastes like horse shit,’ Lisette said, paying him no attention as she lowered a wooden pail from her mouth. ‘It will probably poison us.’

‘Be thankful they’ve brought it at all,’ Stryker answered. After his ordeal with the seawater, the dubious liquid Balthazar’s men had provided was like a glacial lake. His guts still griped when he ate anything, and his limbs were only regaining their strength at a snail’s pace.

Lisette set the pail down hard, the sound clattering about the chamber. ‘Do not tell me when to be thankful.’

‘Just open the damned door, you thick-skulled dolt!’

The man’s voice, spoken from the far side of the door, punctured the sullen atmosphere like a culverin blast. Stryker, Lisette and the sixteen others looked up, eyes straining to pierce the murky air. ‘I said open it!’ the man bellowed again. ‘Now, you slovenly half-wit, or must I take the back of my hand to you?’

In a blaze of light, the door flew back on its hinges. Three soldiers burst in, holding flaming torches that cast long shadows throughout the cell, and between them strode the captain of Star Castle, William Balthazar. He glanced quickly about the room, then twisted back to address the man following in his wake. ‘I—I do not understand the—’

‘Christ, man, have I not explained myself enough?’ the second fellow snarled again. ‘You said his name was Stryker, yes?’

Balthazar nodded quickly. ‘I did, I did.’

The angry man pushed past his confused host and planted his hands of his hips as he scanned the room. Finally he set his gaze upon the man he so furiously sought. ‘Bless my soul. It
is
you.’

Stryker struggled to his feet. Despite the numbness in his limbs and the pains that still lanced mercilessly at his guts, he managed to smile. ‘Good-morrow, Titus . . .’

Tresco, Isles of Scilly, 13 October 1643

Roger Tainton was becoming increasingly frustrated. The obtuse Toby Ball had suffered the beating with a serenity that had antagonized the former cavalryman to a point of high vexation, and that was not the way in which he had envisaged this meeting playing out. They were in a substantial chamber near the front of Whinchat Place. As soon as he stepped inside, Tainton knew that Ball had not lied. At least not about the house. This was a place constructed for a wealthy family, but inhabited by a lone, simple man. A man who kept watch over Whinchat Place, waiting for the day on which his master would return.

‘Sir Alfred is not coming back,’ Tainton said. ‘You know it to be true.’

‘I do,’ Toby Ball mumbled. He was slumped in a high-backed chair at the centre of the room, wrists tied behind, swollen face lolling. Though the last vestiges of daylight clung on outside, the gathering storm had darkened the late afternoon, and Tainton had ordered the chamber lit using a trio of fat beeswax candles they found in a cupboard. Now they were set upon a shallow shelf behind Ball, held by sturdy brass candlesticks that Clay Cordell had discovered in an upstairs room, their glow flickering and ominous.

‘His daughter and heir,’ Tainton went on, his shadow snaking over the walls as he paced, ‘is gone as well.’

Ball managed to lift his head. The eyes were puffed to black slits, the nostrils dark with congealed blood. ‘So you claim.’

‘There are no Cades left upon God’s earth,’ Tainton continued undaunted. ‘No man, woman or child to give your life purpose.’

‘Purpose?’ Ball echoed. He spat a gobbet of saliva on to the boards between his feet. It was thick and crimson.

Tainton nodded. ‘Your purpose, Mister Ball, is to guard Cade’s wealth.’

‘My job was to guard his house.’

‘And his money,’ Tainton said, ‘which is here.’ He turned away, staring about the hall’s high ceilings as if golden baubles would hang in the beams. ‘Secreted within these walls.’

Ball managed a coarse, stuttering cackle. ‘You’re mad, sir.’

Tainton glanced at Locke Squires. The giant had been waiting patiently in the wings, but moved without a blink to line himself up with the hapless warden. He twisted his shoulders a touch, winding them like a muscle-bound spring, and unleashed a punch that sent Ball’s head snapping back. The chair rocked on its rear legs, teetering for a brief moment with the front pair in the air, before crashing back down again, the scrape of wood on wood echoing unnaturally loudly in the room. Toby Ball’s mangled face was concealed as his head hung limp, bobbing slightly with the juddering of the rest of his body, a thick trickle of blood trailing from his chin to stain his lap.

‘Too hard!’ Tainton snarled. There was a large rectangular tapestry hanging on the wall behind, and he could see that it was spattered in bloody droplets. The work depicted the moment Jesus miraculously turned water into wine, but now his face, and those of the awed onlookers, was violated by a trail of scarlet dots. Tainton did not approve of such frivolous furnishings, nor did he condone the imbibing of strong drink, but the damage irked him all the same. ‘Fetch the water, Squires, and be quick about it! I am tired of your stupidity, you lumbering oaf!’

Locke Squires went to the corner of the room, stooping to collect a bucket of water and proceeding to dash it across Toby Ball’s head. The warden woke immediately, screaming as if the pain had been hiding like a beast poised for the moment to pounce. Now it leapt at him, took hold, made him rock back and cry out in terrible, shrill anguish.

Behind them, a door swung abruptly open. Sterne Fassett strode in, the choleric-looking Clay Cordell in his wake.

‘Well?’ Tainton demanded.

Fassett spread his palms. ‘Not so much as a groat.’

‘You’ve looked thoroughly?’ Tainton asked, cool dread seeping into his chest.

Fassett nodded. ‘We’ve searched every nook and cranny. The cellars, the rafters, the outbuildings, the kitchens, even the fucking cheese cratch. Place is empty as a nun’s cunny. It ain’t here.’

‘It is here,’ Tainton insisted.

Ball spat a vile stream of blood and water as he looked up. A small noise rumbled from his throat. ‘It is not.’

‘Enough with your lies, Ball,’ Tainton seethed. ‘You know where the gold is hidden. You
must
know.’

‘Sir Alfred placed me here to watch his house.’

‘Because his fortune is within!’

Toby Ball let his head loll. ‘No.’

The denial was enough for Tainton, whose mind raced with increasing desperation. ‘Mister Squires, if you please.’

Locke Squires dropped his bucket and went to the fettered warden. Without breaking stride, he hit him with a thunderous upper-cut that knocked both man and chair on to the blood-slickened floor. Beyond a quick, sickening crunch, Ball did not make a sound.

Tainton glared at Squires. ‘What did I tell you, you dundering simpleton? Slap him, shake him, hurt the man, but keep him with us! Set him right this instant! Mister Fassett? You may take a turn.’

Before the words had completed their passage across Tainton’s lips, Fassett was grinning. ‘Wake him up, Locke,’ he said, produ­cing his nasty little blade. ‘We’ll see how he likes his fingers with no nails.’

Locke Squires lumbered over to the stricken Ball and stooped to haul the chair upright. He leaned close, touching thick fingers to the back of Ball’s dangling head before turning back to mumble something unintelligible to Fassett. The mulatto’s dark face seemed to take on a veil of grey as he discerned the giant’s stifled mutterings, and in turn he indicated that Clay Cordell should take a look.

Cordell pushed his fingers into the same spot his comrade had inspected. When he looked back, he held them up. They were bloody all the way to the knuckles. ‘He’s gone, Sterne,’ he said in a thin, reedy voice.

‘Gone?’

Cordell held up the gore-drenched hand. ‘Dead, Sterne. He’s snuffed it. Smashed a bastard-great cavern in his bonce.’

Fassett looked to Tainton, and Roger Tainton stared at the body of Toby Ball in disbelief. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached and drew his own knife, a curved length of serrated steel that appeared to glow blue in the feeble light. Outside, the storm raged, howling its violent song like Lucifer’s own choir. Tainton went to the newly made corpse, taking a thicket of Ball’s matted hair in his fist, and wrenched the limp head upright. He drove the knife upwards into one of the warden’s nostrils, twisting so that its jagged edge cut the thin flap of flesh easily enough, stopping only when it met with the bone of the bridge. He jerked it savagely free. Toby Ball was unflinching. There was nothing.

Tainton thrust his thumb between the swollen lids of Ball’s grotesquely puffy eyes, prizing the swollen flesh apart. The eye beyond was dull, sightless, canted off to the side so that only some of the iris could be seen. He really was dead, and with that understanding came a sudden, white-hot pulse of rage that caught Tainton by surprise. He brayed like a gelded bullock, heard his own scream echo about the polished panels of Whinchat Place, but could do nothing to stem it. He might have killed Locke Squires in that moment. He wanted to spin about and plunge the knife deep into the heavy-handed ox’s guts, but knew he might yet need him. So Tainton stabbed Toby Ball instead. He shoved the knife into the eye that was still pinned open by his thumb. The steel slipped in without resistance, blood gouting either side, squirting Tainton’s cloak and boots. He pulled it free and stabbed again, this time to the other eye, and then at the throat and stomach, again and again, venting his rage the only way he knew how, blood oozing out, streaking his hands and clothes, and in his rage he revelled in it. When there was nowhere left to destroy, Ball’s torso a ragged mass of torn flesh and shredded cloth, he let loose another wretched scream and spun away, pushing past Fassett as though he was not even there. Roger Tainton had failed. Right at this very last fence his horse had faltered, the golden deer had given him the slip, foiled his hunt, crushed his reputation, and, infinitely more importantly, diminished his faith.

‘How can this be?’ he roared at the floor and the walls and the ceiling. He kicked the body so that it flung rearwards to crash down on to the slick timbers again. He screwed shut his scarred eyes. ‘How can this be, Lord? I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me!
All things
, Lord!’ His hands were aloft now, and his feet were shuffling so that he turned circles where he stood, the beams above spinning madly as though he stared at the spokes of a racing coach, the world an utter blur. He sensed the other men with him, gaping at the savaged cadaver and at him, but he needed answers. God had led him this far. ‘Show me, King Jesus! Show me what I must do!’

‘We need to go,’ Sterne Fassett’s coarse accent rang out. ‘Can’t be found here like this. Looks like a shambles on market day.’

Tainton ignored advice and kept spinning, praying, begging for just the briefest word to guide him. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom!’ he intoned. ‘So says the Word of our Creator! I fear You, Lord. Lead me to wisdom now, I beseech thee in the name of Jesus!’

It was then that Tainton stepped in a pool of Toby Ball’s blood. He might have trodden upon a frozen pond for all the traction it afforded, and he lost his footing violently, sliding sideways as he spun, groping for balance and careening into Locke Squires, who in turn shoved him hard away. Tainton collided with the panelled wall, clattering into a high shelf, the wind knocked out of him, and there he stood. His head swam. He gasped for breath. He felt as though he might weep.

Sterne Fassett muttered a filthy oath and Tainton regained his senses. He stared at Fassett, but the hired killer had not been addressing him. Still clutching his wicked knife with knuckles gripped to milky whiteness, Fassett was staring wide-eyed at the tapestry. Tainton followed his gaze, immediately realizing that flames licked at the bottom of the material. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he whispered, for he saw that he had knocked the candlesticks from their perch. Two had been snuffed out when they hit the floorboards, but a third persisted, and it had rolled a few paces, coming to rest below the tapestry and quickly finding the dry textile. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said again, because the fire had already caught hold, racing up the cloth’s length, spreading like a stain on a sheet, its orange and red and yellow colours blooming uncontrollably. ‘Lord help us.’ Suddenly he was sharp-witted, his fury and desperation devoured by the flames. ‘
Out
!
Everyone out
!’