Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (52 page)

Captain-Lieutenant Jedidiah Clinson knew he was in trouble. From his position in the south doorway of the Great Barn he could see that the Royalist counterattack was small in nature, for the torches did not number more than a score, but the bulk of Waller’s army were bivouacked outside the Grange, out at the churchyard or up on the hill. The cavalry had ridden down to the plateau of Basing Park. It left a good number of men in the Grange – three or four hundred – but only a fraction of those had continued the fight. Most were looting the outbuildings, sleeping in the haystacks or gorging themselves amid the Barn’s plentiful stores. They were not expecting such an attack, and now they drew swords with bleary eyes and unsteady legs. Half were drunk, with many more well on the way, and they staggered and stumbled as they formed a fighting front behind him, tripping on their own scabbards and fumbling with muskets they had no hope of loading in time. Clinson prayed aloud, at the top of his lungs, and he held up his sword to present a model for his pathetic charges to follow. And he prepared himself for death.

Stryker made straight for the Barn doors. To his right the fires were licking high in a dozen places where Rawdon’s group had scoured the outbuildings. Torches had been raked across the thatches, touched to beams and wagons and boxes and barrels, and then, finally, jammed hard into hay and straw so that deep, red, angry flames leapt out, hot enough to defy the rain. The Parliamentarians were running. He could hear their cries, and he knew that their weight in numbers did nothing to counteract the shock and fear. They would rally eventually, of course, when a stoic and level-headed officer finally corralled enough of them to form a coherent fighting group, but for the moment it was anarchy, a confusion of labourers and weavers and tapsters who had forgotten that they were supposed to be soldiers. Now was the time to enact their plan.

Stryker almost tripped on a discarded musket as he ran, and, catching the match-glow in the corner of his eye, he guessed it was primed. He jabbed his sword, point down, into the mud, stooped to snatch up the long-arm, levelled it at the gaping mouth of the doorway, and pulled the trigger. The ball exploded away, and beneath the arch a soldier in a red coat and morion helmet, stood briefly, as if fighting against a sudden squall, and then toppled face-first into the mud. Stryker tossed the weapon back into the morass, plucked free his sword and reached the entrance, barrelling into a man whose own sword shattered as it parried Stryker’s superior Toledo steel. They fell. Stryker was on top of him, smashed the man’s hooked nose with a butt of his head, and scrambled to his feet. The defenders were running, pouring out of the north doorway as if their breeches were aflame, and Stryker’s men gave chase. Some of the men with torches paused to fire the crates and hogsheads that were left in the huge building, then followed behind, pursuing the Roundheads into the open space below the fish ponds. Already drums and trumpets called out from the north and it was clear that Waller had dispatched a force to snuff out the audacious assault.

‘For the Church and the law!’ a deep voice boomed like a Cannon Royal to Stryker’s right. ‘For good King Charles, and a pox on the Parliament!’

Stryker squinted into the darkness to see Rawdon, and he nodded quickly to him. The team who had fired the outbuildings had converged, as planned, in the Grange yard and now they engaged the last, desperate group of rebels who had been too slow or too brave to fling themselves over the northern wall to safety. There were ten or eleven Parliament men in the gloom, their swords drawn, and Stryker saw that one was the elegant officer he had faced before. He shouted a challenge to the man, calling him on.

Clinson saw the demon and understood that his star had finally fallen. He could not run, but only stand and fight, and he went to the one-eyed man with a prayer on his lips. To his surprise, an auburn-haired officer stepped between them.

‘He’s mine,’ the man said. He was an officer, a senior one, by the look of his gold-laced buff-coat and blood-red scarf, and Clinson met his sword blow with a deft parry. His prayer had been answered, and he thanked the good Lord from the very depths of his being, for this high-ranking Cavalier was the kind of man with whom Clinson liked to fence. He danced out and in, keeping his elbow flexed and his left knee bent, turning the Royalist’s blade away with agile ease. Hand-to-hand duels had broken out all around, but his men were outnumbered. Many corpses had been left in the Grange, many men had fled, and Waller’s reinforcements would not arrive in time. The sally party, all snarls and crows, knew they would win this small skirmish, and they grinned wickedly as Clinson’s last few men were cut down. He could at least show the arrogant malignants how a real swordsman went to work. Clinson darted forwards, forcing a desperate parry from the gold-laced officer, then retreated, tempting the sweat-sheened soldier into a grunting lunge. He let the man come, drawing him off balance, and flicked the point of the blade away, then whipped his own sword up to jar at his opponent’s breast. It hit hard, but the man’s coat of buff hide was thick and of good quality, and it absorbed the riposte impressively. But the officer could not regain his balance and he sprawled away from Clinson with a shrill yelp, Clinson hooking his ankle with a well-placed boot. The officer went down, sliding on his side in the slick mire, and Jedidiah Clinson went to him.

Stryker thumped the swirling hilt of his sword into the thickly bristled face of a rebel sergeant, and battered the man’s reeling body away with a gloved fist. In one movement he was over the prone Roundhead, jumping into the path of the expensively dressed young officer, and he swept the sword up to meet the man’s blade as it came down to dispatch Lieutenant-Colonel Johnson. He had wanted to teach him a lesson for taking the Grange from the Royalists in the first place, but Johnson had interrupted him before he could engage. Stryker had watched in horror, blocked as he was by other desperate rebels, as the Parliamentarian set about tutoring Johnson in the fineries of single combat, and it was only at the last moment, as the fellow delivered what had been designed to be a killing blow, that Stryker had finally cut his way through.

The young man spun away as his single-edged sword jarred with a thunderous clang against Stryker’s weapon, his face a sudden mask of fear. Johnson spluttered and writhed in the mud below them, trying to stand, but Stryker ignored him, stepping quickly past. He hacked, battered and cleaved at the young swordsman. There was no finesse in his movements, only rage and strength, and he knew his enemy did not know how to respond to an attack such as this. It was like fighting a boy. Stryker felt strangely sorry for the officer, whose skills were polished but woefully inadequate against a murderer. He did not stop, could not stop, and soon the lad was slipping, stumbling in the grime, able only to parry and whimper.

Clinson did not know what to do. The demon, half his face torn away, the other half a creased and granite-hard manifest­ation of fury, was simply too strong, too implacable, utterly relentless. Every block sent ripples of pain up through his palm and wrist, jarring his shoulder and shoving him back. He was being bullied out of the duel by a man chillingly comfortable amid the flames and the mud and the powder-stink. Clinson tripped on the body of one of his men, slipped with his standing foot in a patch of waterlogged slurry, and toppled back. His sword was gone, vanished in the filth, and then the demon was above him. He did not even see the killing blow, just felt the pressure at his throat above his silver gorget, heard the crunch of his own sinews as they were severed, felt the bubble of blood rise into his mouth. For a second the dancing orange flames that raced and hissed throughout the Grange appeared before his eyes. Then everything became black.

*   *   *

Stryker jerked his sword from the dead officer’s windpipe and wiped it on the man’s breeches. He sheathed it quickly, offering a hand to the breathlessly thankful Colonel Johnson while Skellen knelt to rifle through the pockets of the fresh corpse. All around them the fires raged, raindrops hissing on the white-hot embers. In one of the outbuildings the powder boxes strung on a wounded man’s bandolier began to ignite, his shrieks piercing the night.

Marmaduke Rawdon and Robert Peake were gathering the men. They had lost two of Rawdon’s yellows. Skellen held up a square of paper. ‘Captain-Lieutenant Jedidiah Clinson,’ he read aloud, shaking the paper between thumb and forefinger. ‘His commission, sir.’

‘A brave fellow,’ Stryker said. He thought of Andrew Burton, his young protégé who had met his end on a blood-soaked hill in Cornwall. He felt suddenly wretched. ‘Brave lad.’

Rawdon gave thanks to the sally party. ‘We may not have this place,’ he added, ‘but nor shall the enemy. Now it is time for us to depart.’

As they turned south, the screams of men caught in the yard’s many outbuildings erupted, rising over the crackle of flames and the drums and trumpets. Men who had fallen asleep in their cups were woken as their skin roasted, ensnared by steel and blaze. The Royalists made their way back to Garrison Gate in silence.

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General Sir William Waller watched in utter disbelief as the flames enveloped the farm. His horse twitched beneath him as if it shared his consternation. The screams of roasting men carried up to his positions – distant, almost ethereal wails – like a wind through a narrow gorge, and he grimaced as he tasted bile in his mouth.

‘More, Sir William?’ one of Waller’s aides, mounted on a docile grey to his left, enquired in a well-bred voice that was pitched high and querulous.

‘More?’ echoed Waller.

‘You have used but a fifth of your army, General. Send the rest, I implore you.’

‘To what end?’ Waller answered without taking his eyes from the blazing farm. ‘We have no way of breaking the gates.’ Now he turned to look at the aide. ‘We have no way of breaking the damned gates!’

The aide swallowed thickly, fiddled with his grey’s pricked ears. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘I had rested on the premise that our force, having taken the Grange, would frighten the fight out of the enemy. Their very presence at Lord Paulet’s door would cow him into surrender. Clearly I was mistook in that. What is the butcher’s bill?’

The aide’s face screwed up in a maze of creases. ‘Uncertain as yet, Sir William, but we have lost many. Clinson among them, I hear.’

Waller drew a lingering breath, tugged gently on his whiskers with a gloved hand. ‘A pity. No more will be thrown at Basing this night. Our powder is damp and our will damper.’

‘We retreat?’ a new voice interrupted.

Waller looked to his right, where the irritating Croat, Major Kovac, had reined in. The blunt-speaking cavalryman had become something of a flea in his ear during the day, but before biting Kovac’s white-sprouting head off, Waller reminded himself that the man’s commanding officer, Dick Norton, was a powerful man in the county. To make an enemy of the Govern­or of Southampton would be unwise, even for a man such as Sir William Waller. ‘No, Major, we do not. I have had a gutful for today. My britches are sodden, my feet like blocks of ice, and I would rest. We will withdraw a mile or so for the night, to return on the morrow.’

‘But, General—’ Kovac began to protest.

Waller lifted a flattened palm for silence. ‘That is the long and the short of it, Major Kovac. Do not gripe, sir, for you will have your chance. That I can promise.’

CHAPTER 25

Basing House, Hampshire, 9 November 1643

The Grange fire blazed all night and deep into the following day, but it gradually cooled to a steaming ruin and by the next dusk even the greediest flames had been dowsed by the merciless rain. The Royalists pent up in Basing House spent the day after the battle simply staring northwards. The remnants of the Grange were a sad sight, to be certain, but it was the movement beyond that simmering charnel pit that so captivated the exhausted defenders. Waller’s army had withdrawn. They knew it was not a retreat; not a real, lasting one, at any rate. He had bivouacked in the surrounding fields after the assault, licking his wounds and, no doubt, plotting a new escalade, but the weather had not been on his side. It had hammered the hills, filled the Loddon so that it burst its banks and flooded Waller’s breastworks. It had bogged down their supply wagons and made their gun batteries subside as if they had been placed on sand. It had numbed the hands and feet of his men, dampened their powder and eroded their resolve, and Waller, so reported Major Lawrence’s ebullient scouts, had fallen back upon Basingstoke to wait out the storm.

Stryker had stood to arms with the rest of Rawdon’s beleaguered force all that day, even as rumour of Waller’s retreat had filtered through to the ranks. They were hopeful, for the downpour was relentless, cold and pervasive, and it seemed reasonable to think that the enemy would seek proper shelter under the solid rooftops of a town rather than sit like an army of bedlamites in the rain, waiting to freeze to death. And yet it was not until the second dawn that Garrison Gate had been opened and Stryker, Forrester and the few remaining men of Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot streamed out to take stock of the Grange and ensure there were no ambushers lying in wait.

The outbuildings were gone, devoured by the inferno, and the supplies they had contained were now reduced to a mess of mutilated silhouettes. The ground still smouldered in patches, and in its toxic brew of mud and water and ash the remains of men could be seen, scorched and raven-pecked legs and arms jutting up like rocks on a low-tide shore. There might have been as many as a hundred and fifty souls out in the swamp that still carried the scent of cooked flesh, and only the crows chattered as the men waded through.