Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (30 page)

‘I did. Much good it did me.’

‘And now?’

The tapster shrugged. ‘Now I pour ale and serve food.’

So he did not wish to speak of politics, Lisette thought. That would suit them just fine. She looked at Cecily, as the latter spoke again. ‘Are there soldiers hereabouts, sir?’

The tapster said that there were not. ‘Parliament men most recently, but they’re out to the west, pressin’ the Oxford garrison.’ He folded his arms above a tight paunch of a belly. ‘Now let us see to your room.’

Cecily dipped her head. ‘Thank you, sir.’ She shot him a coquettish half-smile. ‘And needless to say, there will be more coin, so long as we receive no—unwanted—attention.’

The man brandished a mouth full of chipped, rodent-sharp teeth. ‘Soul of discretion, mistress.’

They helped Goodwife Hulme to the house on Lake Street. The kin she had mentioned was a short, stooped man, probably in his sixties, with a grey moustache, grey hair and grey skin. They did not speak to him, for another man knowing their business was a risk too far, but they waited beyond the corner of a house across the street, carefully watching for his reaction at finding his milk-eyed kinswoman at the door. With relief, they saw only recognition and joy on that dour face, their guilt at leaving her lessened by the man’s welcoming embrace.

They went quickly back to their little room in the roof of the Black Sheep, careful not to tarry any longer than was required, and soon they were perched on the edge of their respective straw palliasses, staring at the floor and listening to the murmur of the men in the taproom below.

‘You would like to be down there?’ Cecily said.

Lisette looked up. ‘I am used to rough men. I have lived and worked with soldiers all my life. They have kinder souls than you might expect.’ She closed her eyes, thinking of the nights she had spent in warm, dark taverns with Stryker, held tight in his arm while his pipe smoke swirled in pungent halos about them.

‘Oh, I do not doubt it,’ Cecily replied. ‘I spent some time with a company of foot before my capture. They were kind in their own way.’ She yawned, stretching her hands high above her head. ‘You forgive my interruption before?’

‘
Naturellement.
It was right for you to step in. My accent is no help to us.’

Cecily regarded Lisette, her head cocked to one side. Eventually Lisette shifted her rump irritably. ‘What is it?’

‘Tell me, Lisette, do you have a man?’

‘Sometimes.’

Cecily’s dark eyebrows shot up. ‘Sometimes?’

‘My duty does not allow me a typical life.’ She waved the younger woman away. ‘But you would not understand.’

Cecily gave a rueful bark of laughter. ‘I have spent the past months hounded, threatened for my father’s money. Do not think to belittle me so.’

Lisette saw that Cecily was serious, and decided to relent. ‘My man is a soldier.’

‘Oh? A dashing Cavalier, I’ll wager.’

‘Not really.’ She leaned back on her elbows, the surface of the straw mattress feeling coarse against her skin. ‘A Royalist officer,
oui
, but perhaps not as you might imagine. He is with the infantry. Pike and shot.’

Cecily seemed intrigued. ‘And what does he think to your work?’

Lisette snorted. ‘He can think what he likes.’ But as soon as the words passed her lips, she regretted them. She was angry at Stryker, but Cecily did not deserve such a response. She sighed. ‘He does not care for it, in truth. I think he would have me with the goddamned baggage train if he could. Washing his bloody britches.’

Cecily grinned, and Lisette saw a flash of beauty. ‘But you laugh at such a wish, I’d wager.’

Lisette nodded. ‘He knows me well enough. Knows I would die in such a life. It is no life at all. I was born into war, and I will die at war.’ There was an awkward silence as Cecily searched for an adequate reply, and Lisette felt badly for it. ‘What of you?’

‘Men?’ Cecily shook her head. ‘None.’

Lisette wondered if she even knew what her casual dismissal of Lieutenant Burton had caused, but she did not wish to dwell on that subject for now. ‘None at all?’

‘I think of a man from time to time,’ said Cecily after a lingering heartbeat. ‘An officer, like your
amour
.’

‘Oh?’ this threw Lisette somewhat, for Stryker had not mentioned this aspect of Miss Cade. Perhaps he had not known, but one might expect such things to be discussed during their time shared on that lonely hilltop.

‘It is nothing. I knew him once, that is all.’ She gnawed her lower lip. ‘He was not the kind of man I had ever thought I would think of in
that
way.’

‘But?’

‘He was kind to me. Clever, strong, frightening for all that, but—’

Lisette smiled. ‘Exciting.’

Cecily returned the expression. ‘Yes, exciting.’

‘Handsome?’

Cecily seemed to consider that question carefully. ‘In his own way.’

The words reminded Lisette of Stryker, the man who had been so handsome once. Even damaged as he was, he was yet still able to draw her to him with that quicksilver gaze and blazing temper. ‘I understand.’

‘It was nothing, as I have said. A moment of attraction, perhaps, but I let him slip away. The fault was mine.’

Lisette pushed herself up from the palliasse and padded across the warm floorboards to a small table beside their single, unglazed window. The gentle fluttering of paper had caught her eye, lifted daintily by the breeze. She looked down at what she now recognized as a news-sheet. The parchment was well handled, its edges frayed and smudged by many a hand, and for an amused second she thought it might have been one of the pamphlets she had commissioned from Henry Greetham. But quickly she saw that it was one of the Parliamentarian diurnals, with stark black words emblazoned at its head. She read it aloud, ‘
An account of the fight at Lansdown
.’ She read on silently for a short while, until her eyes fixed on a point halfway down the page. She swore viciously.

Cecily was staring at her from the other side of the room. ‘Lansdown? What of it? I heard the king’s men triumphed.’

‘
Oui
,’ Lisette said, turning slowly back to return Cecily’s gaze. ‘But there were casualties.’

‘Aren’t there always?’

Lisette crossed back to the palliasse and handed her companion the paper. ‘See for yourself. On the morrow, I think you’ll agree, we ride direct for Oxford.’

CHAPTER 12

Near the South Gate, Gloucester, 14 August 1643

Stryker was on the wall near the bastion, a position he had begun to take by force of habit as he waited for his injuries to heal. From there he could see the square batteries that the besieging force had constructed against this vulnerable corner of the defences. Two had been placed on either side of the sharp intersection of the south and east walls – dark, gabion-hedged mounds blighting Gaudy Green like buboes – and the other a little way round to his left, directly facing the East Gate.

‘I saw it,’ William Skellen’s voice droned from somewhere behind.

Stryker turned to see his old friend struggle up to the parapet. There was no longer a wooden scaffold at this place, for the earthen buttress that Massie’s volunteers had been constructing was now as tall as the wall itself, and as deep as five feet in places. A man, therefore, could simply scramble up the new slope if he wished to view the sprawling Royalist encampment. Down below, the teams of townsfolk laboured with their clods, hauling them down from the water meadows by the wobbling cartload to slap on to the compacted face of the ever-growing mound.

‘Where?’ Stryker said.

Skellen pointed to the east. Beyond the ever more complex system of saps that had grown from the ruins of the burnt-out suburbs before the East Gate, another large concentration of tents had sprouted like a colony of toadstools. ‘In amongst that lot.’

They waited while a desultory volley of musketry rippled along the rampart down towards the corner of the wall at the Rignall Stile. Return fire crackled back almost immediately from the men down in the Royalist saps.

‘With Astley then,’ Stryker said when the musketeers had paused to reload. He fixed his gaze upon the tall pole from which the colour of Sir Jacob Astley hung lifeless in the sun. There were other flags around the camp, reds and yellows and blues, and Stryker searched for the standard that Skellen claimed to have seen. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Aye,’ Skellen said simply. ‘It was Mowbray’s all right. And they’ll be first in if they make a breach.’

‘Jesu.’ Stryker’s wounds were healing well, though they seemed to throb with more vigour at the dread thought.

‘Sir,’ said Skellen, leaning against the stone rampart and waiting for his captain to look up at him. ‘You know I’d march into hell if you told me to, sir.’

‘But you’ll not fight the King.’

Skellen snorted. ‘Fuck the King, sir.’ He stared out at Astley’s encampment. ‘I’ll not fight my mates.’

‘You’ll fight who I bloody tell you to,’ Stryker retorted, though without conviction.

‘What are we going to do, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

The sergeant made a growling noise and deposited a gelatinous globule of phlegm over the side of the wall. He watched it plummet into the ditch below. The digging of the man-made ravine had tapped into scores of natural springs that threaded through the soil on which Gloucester had been built, and already the ditch was beginning to resemble a moat. Skellen watched ripples pulse out as his spittle touched the stinking mire. ‘Can’t believe they ain’t stormed.’

‘They would have, had Rupert taken command.’

‘Bet he’s raging about that,’ Skellen said with the ghost of a smile. ‘Forth’s a doddering old palliard.’

Stryker shrugged. ‘Did well enough at Brentford.’

‘Should’ve stormed,’ Skellen repeated the opinion as he gazed out at the king’s army.

‘They’ve decided upon bombardment, and they must live with it,’ Stryker said, even as he noticed a flurry of activity around the shielded emplacement nearest their position. He could not see the detail, but he knew gunners and their mattrosses were readying the ordnance for another volley. It was a formidable battery. A pair of 24-pounder demi-cannon, the heaviest guns at Forth’s disposal by Stryker’s reckoning, together with a 12-pounder were gaping up at this section of the wall. They had thundered since late morning the previous day, attempting to soften walls and morale. The hastily piled earth on the inside of the stonework had cushioned the effect to an impressive degree, but that did not mean the guns were impotent.

Stryker looked left and right, cupping hands at his mouth. ‘Down!’ he bellowed at the musketeers lining the walls. ‘Down!’

The battery lit up before Stryker could turn, rippling light glaring at the back of his eye even though he had clamped it shut. He crouched; he was half running, half rolling down the turf buttress as the world shook to its very essence. He had never felt an earthquake, but some of the Italian engineers he had known would often speak of them, and he guessed this was just what it was like. It was not simply the boom and the howl of the iron shot as it cut a hot trail through the air, but the wall behind him was shuddering as though it would collapse into the ditch. Stryker found himself on his back, two-thirds of the way down the muddy slope, gazing up at the rampart. It did not fall, but he could see the pall of stone splinters shower the air like a great grey rain cloud. One man was already screaming, and Stryker caught sight of him at the top of the wall, wheeling away with a bloody hand clamped at his neck. Stryker watched the bluecoat as he rocked forward suddenly, thighs hitting the stonework, and toppled into the abyss beyond, his scream cut dead by the splash of his body as it met the quagmire below.

Rough hands were at Stryker’s shoulders. He saw Skellen’s face, grim and professional. ‘Thank you.’

Skellen nodded as he hauled his captain to his feet. ‘Careful, sir.’

Stryker’s old bruises smarted all the more now, but he managed to find his footing in the loose soil. A young man, perhaps not yet into his teens, was prostrate a short way up the slope, blinking dumbly at the darkening sky. Stryker scrambled across to help, dragging the lad upright as Skellen had helped him. ‘Slowly, son, slowly.’

‘Am I dead, sir?’

Stryker grinned at the stunned boy. ‘No such luck.’

‘They’ll break through, won’t they, sir?’ the boy said in a feeble voice. His red hair was matted with the mud of the buttress and his freckled face streaked with tear-carved valleys. ‘They’ll kill us all.’

‘No, son, they won’t.’ He ruffled the lad’s hair. ‘I won’t let them.’ From the corner of his eye, he caught Skellen’s arched brow. ‘Now let’s get you up, eh?’

The boy stood on trembling legs. All around them stunned defenders were scrabbling to climb the earthwork again, desperate to take stock of the damage, and, with a final pat of the boy’s shoulder, Stryker led Skellen to the summit.

‘Curious promise,’ Skellen rasped under his breath, ‘seeing as they’re the enemy, an’ all.’