Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (41 page)

‘Caversham, sir,’ Vandruske answered.

‘And what were you about?’ Waller asked the boy.

‘Now’t, Your Highness,’ the blue-lipped lad bleated in abject terror. ‘Pickin’ apples was all.’

Waller looked at the Dutchman. ‘Jonas?’

‘He was eating an apple, General,’ Vandruske answered from the far side of his sotweed cloud, ‘but he also carried a most interesting letter.’

‘From?’

‘Sir John Paulet.’

Waller felt his eyebrows shoot up. ‘The Marquess of Winchester, no less. And what did it say?’

‘Requested men from Oxford. A large cavalry escort.’

‘An escort?’ Waller echoed. He drummed his fingers against his thigh as he mused. ‘To ride from Oxford to Basing House,’ he said absently. ‘I wonder what it was intended to protect.’

Vandruske shrugged. ‘Refers to the Cade matter, whatever that may be.’

‘Cade?’ Waller said. ‘There was a lawyer named Cade, I seem to recall.’ He stared hard at the captured messenger. ‘Well?’

A dark stain suddenly bloomed over the boy’s breeches. ‘I know not, Your Highness!’

‘He’s a spy, General,’ Colonel Vandruske said. He shot the prisoner a nasty smirk. ‘Let us see him dance a jig from the castle battlements.’

‘
No
!’ the boy wailed, falling to his knees in the mud. A foul stench poisoned the air suddenly. ‘I’m a messenger only! No more! I beg you, sirs!’

Waller shook his head. ‘There is no duplicity in those eyes. Tell me, lad, are you a God-fearing Englishman?’

The boy nodded as though he shook demons from his skull. ‘I am, Your Highness. That I am.’

‘But you are from Basing. A hive of Popery. Do you adhere to the old, corrupt faith to which the Paulets so infamously cling?’

‘No, Your Highness! I am for Canterbury, not Rome, upon my life!’

‘And will you fight for your rightful Parliament?’ Waller asked, though he already knew what the answer would be. ‘Will you bear arms against the King’s insidious advisers, risking your life to liberate his royal person from the shackles of those wicked men? Or does your conscience tell you to spend a spell in our dungeon?’

‘I’ll fight, Your Highness! I shall fight with all my heart.’

Waller nodded, glancing at the Dutchman. ‘Make it so, Col­onel Vandruske. Perhaps the auxiliaries will have him.’

Jonas Vandruske nodded and snapped orders at the boy and his captors, while Sir William Waller coaxed his mare into a gentle walk. He rolled the parchment back into a tight tube and inserted it into his coat, letting the horse take him back towards the castle. Men nodded to him, doffed their caps, even bowed, but he barely acknowledged their respect. His mind, instead, was considering a man called Sir Alfred Cade. A man long dead but whose name, for reasons he could not fathom, had been invoked by one of the most powerful personages of the old regime. He could not help but wonder why.

Basing House, Hampshire, 25 October 1643

The din of the stables was almost deafening. The buildings were large rectangles, solid and well set in red brick, ripe with the pungent aromas of horse dung, straw, sweat and leather. They met at right angles, forming one corner of the New House, the triangular wedge of space between made up of well-swept cobbles.

Perkin Yates, one of the senior farriers in Sir John Paulet’s employ, had led the way under the woodwormed lintel of one of the buildings, and now stood, hands on hips, surveying the chaotic scene. ‘Folk are twitchy. You’re fortunate they let you in.’

His companion nodded. ‘I convinced them of my allegiance.’

Yates pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘As I say, they’re twitchy,’ he said in the broad accent of the northern counties. ‘Ner­vous. Rumours of rebel armies reach Basing daily. People do not trust easily.’

Roger Tainton bobbed his head like a pious monk. ‘Then I thank God they believed my truths.’ He looked around. Young lads ran to and fro, carrying tools for the farriers and food for the horses, while the beasts themselves whinnied and brayed from behind their stalls, hooves clattering, dung steaming in the cold.

‘You had better know your business, friend,’ Perkin Yates said, ‘or you’ll be out on the road a’fore you knows it.’

Tainton had altered his appearance at Farnham, rolling his cloak up with his tall boots and stuffing everything into a sack. Now he wore simple latchets on his feet, stolen from Colonel Jones’s stores, and a thick woollen cap, akin to the Monmouths often issued to infantrymen, covered his head. As he spoke, he tugged it further down to ensure that it covered his ruined ears. His face could not be helped, the missing eyebrows and sheer lack of definition in his features was something beyond concealment, but the hat, at least, took the edge away from his freakish appearance.

He fastened one of the cloth buttons of his rough cassock as he watched an elderly man with taut, sinewy forearms hammer a shoe on to an irritable stallion’s hoof. ‘Thank you for your faith, sir.’

‘Well, good hands are scarce,’ Yates said brusquely. ‘Mister Bryant, our Gen’leman of the Horse, commands the stables, mews and kennels. Though we have no use for the mews, these dark days.’

‘How many hands do we have?’ Tainton asked of his new superior.

Yates breathed heavily through a long nose. ‘Had twenty down at Hackwood.’ He shrugged. ‘Now we survive with a skeleton complement. Rest are off to war or digging’ our earthworks.’

Tainton closed his eyes. ‘May the Lord smite this devilish rebellion soon.’

‘The Lord or Prince Rupert. I doesn’t mind which.’ Yates cackled maniacally and turned away, pacing past one of the urchins he had spoken of, who was busily sweeping huge clumps of faeces into a pile. ‘Bound for the drain,’ he said. ‘Fishes gobble it up.’

‘Where do I sleep, sir?’

Yates tilted up his bald head suddenly. ‘Hayloft, Mister Chivers. Up in the rafters.’ He looked back at Tainton, jabbing the air between them with a finger. ‘I’ll be watchin’ a week, got that? If you proves yourself by then, you’re in. If not—’

Tainton nodded rapidly as Yates made a thumbing motion over his shoulder. ‘I understand, sir.’

The corners of Yates’s mouth upturned. ‘Call me Perks. Where did you say you was from, Mister Chivers?’

‘Coventry, sir,’ Tainton said, affecting embarrassed laughter as he added, ‘Perks. And my name is Tom.’

‘Never been m’sen,’ replied Yates, ‘but I’m sure it’s a fine place. And you’re a proper Christian?’

Roger Tainton tugged down the sides of his cap again. ‘Catholic as Maffeo Barberini.’ He offered a wink. ‘Almost.’

‘Ha!’ Yates cackled again. ‘Very good, Tom.’

‘That is why I am here, in truth,’ Tainton said. ‘The country is not safe for a man of the old ways.’

Yates hawked up a wad of phlegm and deposited it noisily into a tiled gutter than ran through the room’s centre. ‘There ain’t nowhere outside m’ native Yorkshire that is safe for God-fearing men like us, young Tom. That’s the grievous truth of it.’ He crossed himself as he watched the spittle mingle with a fresh stream of horse piss and float away, a white raft on a yellow river. ‘Basing Castle’s not just a bastion for loyal men, it is a bastion for pure believers. The rebellion is not kind to the old religion, and that’s the nub of it. Why, they say the French ambassador were lately at Westminster. His confessor, an Englishman, was arrested and will shortly be quartered at Tyburn.’ Perkin Yates stared into the middle distance as his eyes became glassy. ‘No, sir, it does not serve to be a Catholic with a Parliament so rife with demons as ours.’ He blinked suddenly, staring hard at Tainton. ‘You’ve come to the right place, Tom.’

Roger Tainton felt sick. He closed his eyes so that Perkin Yates assumed he was giving thanks. Instead he prayed for gold.

Cowdrey’s Down, Hampshire, 25 October 1643

The horsemen trotting along the crest of the bare hill could see the clay-red sprawl of the great house below. Its structures and its walls, its crenellated towers and modest outbuildings, cluttered the landscape, nestled like a den of vipers between the plateau of Basing Park and the broad River Loddon. Basing House and its adjacent farm, split by a road of churned earth that had been barricaded at either end to form a secure defensive ring, appeared more formidable a site than Wagner Kovac had ever imagined. He had gone to Farnham with the purpose of gaining an infantry arm for his core mounted force, but always he had envisaged his ultimate assault would be against a palatial facade with grand memories and little substance. Now, as he cantered at the head of his armoured column, he understood that a detachment of greencoats would not have sufficed, regardless of the pig-headed Colonel Jones’s obstinacy.

Cowdrey’s Down loomed over Basing to the north-west, the Loddon carving its glistening route at its foot so that Kovac’s view of the fortress took in the busy agricultural complex first, then the two houses beyond. A stone wall encompassed the estate, higher than he had imagined, and even from this distance he could pick out the black scars where loopholes had been scored in the brickwork for defensive musketry. On the north side, where the ground sloped down towards the river, a second wall was set with formidable towers.

‘Fortunate Colonel Jones declined,’ a lieutenant, face bisected by the single sliding nasal bar of a helmet in the Dutch style, shouted over the rumble of hooves.

Kovac glanced right to shoot the man a rueful smile. ‘
Ja
. We’d have failed.’ He narrowed his eyes as the wind began to swirl into their faces. Tainton’s plan was truly the only viable option open to him. He did not like sharing glory with such a man, but without Tainton he would be forced to return to Southampton with nothing to report but failure. Norton would immediately strip him of his majority, and ignominy would follow.

The wind was strong up on the hill, bitter against the skin of the horsemen, who wore helmets with vertical metal bars that would protect against a sword slash but not the elements. They shrunk into their horses’ necks as best they could, pinching closed their mouths, breathing in shallow fashion through the nose, watching for the movements of the trooper in front when the wind prevented them from discerning shouted orders. Kovac stood in his stirrups, the pain in his thigh searing from groin to knee, reminding him of why he had come to this cursed place, but he kept his nerve and waved his charges on. They had languished at Farnham for three days, these warriors, and he understood the irascible humours that built in a man forced into such lethargy. Mutterings of dis­gruntlement had begun to be heard, fights had punctuated the evenings as troopers and greencoats clashed in angry exchanges, and he had resolved to take his men away from the castle while he waited for his part of the plan to swing into action. They wanted to see Basing – Loyalty
House, as it was known by the Cavaliers – and Kovac, in the end, had acquiesced. They would hack out, terrorize the local villages, pound the highways and infest the lanes. They would eradicate the cobwebs of inertia and parade before their enemy, daring him to send his own horse-borne warriors to challenge them.

Kovac twisted back to look at his thundering troop. They were resplendent in their bristling metal, creatures of slaughter, half man and half beast, martial, terrifying, and beautiful for all that. Some had curved sabres at their sides, others long, single-edged cleavers. Many were scarfed at waists and chests, and some had tawny ribbons tied at the shoulder or wrist. They were the colours of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and Lord General of Parliament’s armies, and he knew they revelled in the association, for they had earned it under Stapleton’s command at Newbury Fight. But it mattered not to Wagner Kovac, as long as they rode beneath his banner this day. He looked to his cornet, a young lad with a rebel heart and a wealthy father, cantering clear at the wing, gleaming in black and gold armour worth more than his steed, the black flag snapping madly above his head. A fitting standard for so strong a unit.

It started to rain. The droplets came at them like a volley of miniature bullets from the west, sleet-cold and stinging. Kovac dipped his helm into the torrent, letting the polished metal take the brunt, and gave the order to wheel about.

Stryker was with Forrester on the flat summit of one of the Great Gatehouse’s imposing corner towers. They were looking north, over the tiled apex of the Great Barn, squinting through perspective glasses borrowed from the marquess at the cavalrymen on the crest of Cowdrey’s Down. Save for the smattering of saplings in the park to the south and in spite of the rain, the view was clear all the way past the river and up to the escarpment that was now full of horses and men. They leaned into the rampart, propping elbows on the crenellated masonry, and trained the glasses from rider to rider, officer to trooper, reading the terrain and deployments as only a veteran could.

‘What are they about?’ Forrester said through the side of his mouth.

Stryker had lowered the glass to wipe the lens on the hem of his coat. It took time, for he wore a full-length buff-coat over the top, purloined by Forrester from Paulet’s stores, but he was in no mood to grumble. The oiled hide kept him warm and dry in the stinging drizzle. ‘Taking in the view.’ He raised the leather tube again. ‘Gauging the worth of an attack.’

He watched as the Roundheads began to file away, noting the tawny sashes that had been the Earl of Essex’s mark, though they were now almost ubiquitous with any rebel unit in the south. A cornet of horse carried the colour on a hefty staff, and Stryker could see that it was black, but that hardly differentiated them in a war when new regiments, even whole armies, seemed to be raised and deployed with every passing season.