Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (8 page)

‘They are not my forces, Captain. Not any longer. Colonel Rawdon is military governor now. But he and the marquess have heard such overtures before, old friend. They will be reluctant to so much as prod the hornet’s nest with a stick.’

‘I must deliver my message, nevertheless. Perhaps you might add your voice to mine?’

Lawrence nodded. ‘Gladly.’ He signalled the pair of sentries. ‘Here we are, Captain Forrester. Garrison Gate. Welcome to Loyalty House.’

CHAPTER 4

St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly, 3 October 1643

The face peered suspiciously through the slat set into the door. All that could be seen were the eyes, and they were like black slits, darting left and right, searching the little chamber’s stone walls for signs of danger. Evidently deciding all was safe, the face retreated into the shadows, and the metal shutter slid closed with a ringing slice and heavy clunk. A voice, muffled behind the door’s thick timbers, called out. It was the voice of a man, and another man immediately responded, his footsteps becoming louder as they shuffled along the flagstones. The men inside the windowless room stared up at the doorway through the gloom, flinching involuntarily as the jangle of keys echoed on the far side. A series of clicks and the sliding of bolts followed, heralding the squeal of large, aged hinges.

A gaoler stepped into the room. His face was ruined by livid ulcers that glistened at their white-crested summits, and in the glow of the flame held behind by the second gaoler, he seemed to leer like Lucifer himself, mocking his dishevelled, blinking charges as he filled the doorway with his bulk.

‘New pot, lads,’ the gaoler said. He held up his hand from which an empty bucket dangled by a fraying rope. ‘Give us the old one, if you please.’

The chamber was full. Seventeen men were crammed within its slippery walls, some of them terribly weak, all shivering from their collective ordeal as they huddled together in the centre in search of warmth. One of them rose and scrambled to a far corner where he hefted another bucket. He was tall, with a bald head and long arms, and he took the bucket’s weight easily enough, despite recent privations. It was full with a dark liquid that slopped over the rim, eliciting a hissed oath.

The gaoler grinned maliciously. ‘That’ll hum some.’

The tall captive spat into the stinking liquid and handed it over. ‘All the better, for I shall drown you in it.’

The fat man chortled, sharing the jest with a glance across his shoulder at he who held the flame. ‘That’s the spirit.’ He cast his gaze over the rest of the men. ‘Getting tired of changing your bloody pots. Try to cross your pox’n legs, eh . . .’

With that he turned back, holding the slop bucket at arm’s length with a look of revulsion. His companion moved quickly aside, swinging the flame clear, and pulled the door shut, the lock clunking noisily. Their laughter carried in smothered pulses from the far side, but darkness had already descended within the cell.

‘Do not antagonize them, Will,’ Captain Innocent Stryker said from his place amongst the mass of bodies.

The tall man made a guttural grunt as he strode back to drop the empty pail in the corner. Immediately he unfastened the string at his breeches and the tinkling of flowing water echoed around the low chamber. ‘They’re bastards, sir. Craven bloody bastards. Their locks and keys give ’em courage.’

‘I’d like to see them,’ a croaking voice with the accent of Scotland chimed in, ‘walk up Stratton hill into Chudleigh’s guns. See how brave they feel then.’

‘Aye,’ Skellen muttered as he hitched up his breeches and rejoined the group.

‘We are here, at their mercy,’ Stryker said. ‘That is all that matters.’

‘Two days of this, sir,’ Skellen said as he sat down, ‘and I’m dreamin’ o’ when I’ll get the chance to throttle these whoresons. Just two days. Don’t know how I shall cope much longer.’

‘That all it’s been?’ Barkworth said.

Skellen nodded. ‘Aye, I’d say so.’

‘A day and a night,’ Stryker corrected. ‘This is the second day.’

‘If we had a chunk o’ chalk,’ another of the men said, ‘I’d scratch it down for you, sir.’

‘No need,’ answered Stryker bitterly. ‘We have been here a day and a night.’ Of course, they all knew that he spoke with no more certainty than any other in their dank hole, for none could see the passing of sun or moon, but Stryker had campaigned for more years than even Sergeant Skellen, and he was a man to believe, especially when a situation turned sour. And this one most certainly had.

As Jethro Beck had told them, Great Ganilly, the island on which the ill-fated
Kestrel
’s survivors had washed ashore, was little more than a minor outcrop of granite and heathland on the eastern fringe of the Scilly archipelago. The real hub of this ocean-borne community were the four major islands, chief of which was St Mary’s, and that was where Beck’s tiny fleet of skiffs had taken them. The small flotilla had skated its way relatively comfortably beyond Crow Sound, the stretch of water to the west of Great Ganilly and the other Eastern Isles, and on into St Mary’s Road, and as they had slid round the jagged headland of that largest piece of rising rock, Stryker could well understand the infamy with which the Isles of Scilly were often associated. This was a harsh land, one defined by storms and waves and barren granite-pocked earth. Crops would be poor and fishing would be hard, which meant the locals would be forced to turn their hands to alternative enterprises if they were to survive. The islanders were often maligned for their propensity for smuggling and piracy, and as he had squinted against the salty spray jetting up from the bow of Beck’s skiff, Stryker decided he would have done the same.

It had been daylight by the time they reached the Hugh, a large headland located on the south-western corner of St Mary’s. Out of the grim dark, between the starry sky and the tar-black swell, they had seen the walls. They rose out from the high ground some hundred paces back from the shoreline, and Stryker had known that they were looking at a fortress. It was quite small, to judge from the sweep of the walls, but formidable for all that, the roof of a central keep jutting heavenwards from behind a stone-faced earthen rampart. And that rampart was built in the shape of a star, providing artillery with coverage of all flanks, its points sharp against the black of the night. Stryker had looked from the high walls to Jethro Beck, and the fisherman had grinned broadly, spat over the side of the skiff, and nodded up at the fort. ‘Welcome to Star Castle, cully.’

And it was into Star Castle’s dingy bowels that the seventeen Royalists, suspected of being Parliamentarians, had been thrown. They had grown accustomed to the dark, and, other than the surly guards who cleared away their effluent and occasionally gave them tasteless pottage and ominously gritty water, they had not laid eyes on a single soul. ‘So where the pissin’ hell is Miss Lisette?’ Skellen said suddenly, his deep voice reverberating about the stone walls.

This was the very question with which Stryker wrestled throughout each hour of their incarceration. While the army’s focus was squarely on the Earl of Essex at Newbury, Lisette had come ahead of the main party to locate the Cade fortune and keep it safe for Stryker’s impending arrival.

‘Dead?’ Simeon Barkworth suggested.

Skellen jabbed him with a fist to the shoulder. ‘Shut yer prattle.’

Barkworth shoved him back. ‘Och, it’s possible.’

Stryker put up a hand for peace. ‘Aye, it is.’ His guts twisted. Lisette had become something of a talisman for Stryker’s musketeers over the last year. Their captain’s love, and a woman who could wield a blade as well as any man.

Barkworth’s yellow eyes, strangely visible in the darkness, seemed to widen as his head shot round to look at the door. ‘Someone comes.’

‘Should we ask ’em of Miss Lisette?’ Skellen said.

‘No. Do not breathe a word, unless you wish to see me upset.’ Stryker cast his gaze about the shadowy outlines of his men. ‘We give nothing away until we know what we are dealing with. Understood?’

The lock clanked, a bolt rasped, and light streamed into the chamber as the door creaked inwards. Stryker squinted against the new brightness and waited for his single eye to adjust. It was not the rotund figure of the gaoler, nor his usual confederate. The newcomer, stepping casually into the room, hands planted squarely on narrow hips, had skin that was so dark, Stryker’s first thought was that the castle had been occupied by pirates from the Barbary Coast. His hair was black and thick, though beginning to recede at the temples, his brown eyes gleamed almost as brightly as Barkworth’s, while his nose was almost completely flat, as though a sword had cleaved it through the bridge. There were other scars too, white as chalk lines against the copper complexion, highlighted as it was in the light of a flame held at his back.

The newcomer took another pace into the cell, and Stryker noticed half a dozen others behind him. ‘Captain Stryker?’ the dark-skinned man said, casting his sharp eyes across the bunched prisoners.

Stryker heaved himself to his feet. ‘Aye, sir,’ he said, relieved. ‘You have heard of me?’

‘Absolutely, Captain. Your reputation precedes you.’ The man turned back briefly to address the small party. ‘This is he, gentlemen. Stryker. Blackguard, cut-throat and notorious rebel.’

Stryker advanced a pace, feeling the weakness in his legs as he moved, and the party shied immediately away like trout below a kingfisher’s shadow. ‘I told Mister Beck, I am no damned rebel!’

The dark-skinned man simply laughed and slunk back with his gawking group, the lion-keeper at the Tower menagerie. And then the door slammed shut.

Basing House, Hampshire, 3 October 1643

‘Glass. So simple a thing, yet so precious when made by talented hands.’ Sir John Paulet, Lord St John, Earl of Wiltshire and Fifth Marquess of Winchester, was standing at the window of one of the upper rooms in the Great Gatehouse, the most prominent of Basing’s sprawling structures. He traced the outline of the diamond-shaped pane, stained crimson to colour the light, and sighed heavily. ‘Now these high pieces are all that is left of my forebears’ exquisite home. Most have gone, shattered by the passage of time or removed for the good of our sharpshooters.’

‘A terrible shame, my lord,’ Lancelot Forrester replied awkwardly, feeling as if his presence as a soldier made him somehow culpable.

‘This whole place,’ Paulet went on wistfully, ‘once glimmered with such windows. When Queen Bess visited for the last time, my father had every pane removed, washed, repaired and replaced.’ He gave a short burst of laughter. ‘Such grandiosity. It is what the Paulets are known for, Captain. And our loyalty to the Crown, of course. Now look where it has brought us.’

Forrester had been summoned to this audience after a comfortable night in what must have once been a sumptuous bedchamber. He had climbed the spiral staircase into the upper level of the Great Gatehouse wondering just what kind of toll the conflict had taken upon this most ardent supporter of King Charles. But now, he saw a determination that had not been present the first time they had met. Paulet was thinner than before, his dark eyes sunken and saddled with shadowy bags, but there was steel in the gaze.

‘You hold this great seat in full defiance of the Parliament, my lord,’ Forrester said. ‘Your loyalty will be rewarded in time, I am certain.’

Paulet gave a wintry smile. ‘Much has come to pass since last our paths crossed, Captain, would you not say?’

‘Aye, my lord, it has. Too much.’

‘Over by Christ-tide, the news-sheets gleefully pronounced,’ Paulet said, staring down into the busy courtyard below. ‘The rebellion dead and buried. Look at us now. A year slipped by and nothing buried but English corpses, slain at English hands.’ He looked up to meet Forrester’s gaze, and immediately coloured. ‘Forgive me, Captain. You have seen enough of the war, I’d wager.’

Forrester went close to the glass, unable to meet Paulet’s eye. Down below, the people looked tiny, scuttling about their lives as though no war had come to this place at all. He knew it to be artifice, of course, but the aloof perspective cheered him nonetheless. ‘More than a man should see, my lord.’

‘In that, thank the Holy Mother, we have been spared, I am relieved to say. There was an attack in July, led by that dog Norton. Villainy in human form.’ Paulet moved to a large chest near the big hearth at the side of the room. It was made of ebony, and was polished to such a gleam that it might have been made of blackened glass. Paulet opened one of the doors to reveal a decanter and three silver goblets. He filled one and took a sip. ‘Norton has a particular antipathy towards me, by matter of faith.’

Forrester was not surprised. The marquess’s unashamed Catholicism inspired much derision from the Puritan-driven Parliament. ‘I thank God the attack failed, my lord.’

Paulet nodded. ‘Since then we have whiled away the months in preparation. We are a stone’s throw from Farnham, Westminster’s bridgehead hereabouts. It is a matter of time. The rebels will come, and there will be blood.’ He set his goblet down and filled another. ‘But enough of that for the moment, eh? Come, Captain Forrester. Share some claret with me. It will prove to your liking.’

As Forrester lifted the vessel to his lips, he closed his eyes. The wine seared his throat in a manner that was more welcome than he could possibly have described. He was about to say as much when there was a knock at the door.