Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (50 page)

A cry of warning came from one of the assailants as they panicked. They tried to move, to bring their blades down at horse and man, but Vos was too fast, and he galloped straight at the white palfrey. The smaller horse’s eyes became huge, pushing from its long face like white toadstools, but its rider was wounded and seemed to list like a holed ship, and Vos smashed home. The palfrey skittered backwards with a terrified whinny, lost its footing and tripped over its own flailing hooves in a juddering, screaming mass of man and fetlock.

Stryker bolted. He regained the reins and thrust home his sword, kissing the garnet in its pommel and whooping at the pregnant clouds that smudged the stars and drenched the earth. He slapped Vos hard on his rain-soaked coat of glistening copper, and did not bother to look back.

CHAPTER 20

Brentford End, west of London, 27 August 1643

The chapel was on the easternmost fringe of the village, perched against the bridge over the River Brent. On the opposite side lay New Brentford, with the older conurbation further east. The small but heavily armed cavalcade had left the farmhouse that morning with no intention of making fast progress back to the capital, for it was a Sunday, and Collings had ordered that they would pause to hear the local priest’s sermon. And yet the time it had taken to travel the short distance had surprised even him. The road was choked with men and munitions, all headed out of the city, bound for the Earl of Essex’s slowly marching army and its quest to relieve Gloucester. Thus Collings’s black-coated band, with a wagon carrying two women at its tail, pushed against the tide, compelled to weave in and out of the Gloucester-bound traffic, which was struggling to make the rendezvous for His Grace’s brand new army at a place called Brackley.

‘Everyone in,’ Collings ordered as he slid down from his piebald mare.

Wallis, the red-bearded man who commanded the personal guard of Erasmus Collings, bellowed in snappy tones that had the blackcoats dismounting with smart precision. The soldier driving the cart brought his vehicle to a jangling halt up close to the chapel.

‘You stop to pray, General?’ Lisette Gaillard shouted towards the front of the short column.

Collings handed his reins to a subordinate and waved back over the heads of his thirty men. ‘Naturally. It is Sunday.’

‘You do not have a pious bone in your body!’ Lisette goaded.

While his men were tethering their animals to a fence at the side of the chapel, Collings strode along the road until he reached the side of the cart. ‘But most of my men do,’ he said, concealing the words under his breath, ‘and morale is everything, wouldn’t you agree?’

She nodded. ‘Right enough. Though I’ll not step in that heretical place.’

Collings laughed, looking back at the house of God. It was a square-shaped affair of whitewashed walls and simple decoration. ‘A Puritan chapel if ever there was one.’ He fixed Lisette with a twinkling eye. ‘You expect me to leave you out here while we pray?’

‘I am of the true faith, General. I would be damned if I sat in your foul little hovel. You say I am soon to die. Let me at least know where my soul will fly.’

Collings laughed again. ‘Have it your way, my Romish dove, though I doubt it will be heaven-bound.’ He summoned half a dozen blackcoats. ‘Stay with her.’

Lisette looked from Collings to the men and back again. ‘Do they not wish to hear the sermon?’

Collings’ eye flashed in a conspiratorial wink. ‘I said
most
of my men were pious.’ He caught Lisette’s sour expression and patted the side of the vehicle. ‘Come now, mademoiselle, do not tell me you had hoped you’d be left unguarded?’

Cecily Cade clambered down from the cart, her breeches snagging on a jagged timber, opening a small hole at the top of her thigh that elicited a chorus of bawdy sniggers. She pointedly ignored them, filing into the church as though she were at the chapel on her family’s estate. Lisette watched in grim silence as the party vanished within the stone depths, the preacher’s raving voice beginning to echo out through the chapel windows, damning Royalists, Catholics, the Irish and anyone else who opposed the Parliamentarian cause. She wondered if the ranter had decided to put extra venom in his ire this morning, in order to impress his martial congregation.

‘Papist ’ore,’ one of the guards muttered.

Lisette shot him a glance dripping with disdain. ‘No whore you’ll ever touch.’

The man was thin and ashen-faced, with gums that sagged open, each rotten tooth set into a crimson sore. He wiped his long nose on his sleeve. ‘See about that, won’t we?’

She turned her head away scornfully. The men laughed cruelly. One spat a jet of brown tobacco juice at the wagon so that it spattered her cloak.

The sermon went on, half an hour becoming an hour. She waited and watched, stared at the rushing flow of the Brent, considered how she might make a break for freedom, but knew there was no way she could feasibly outrun six men on horseback. Occasionally she would eye the dark recesses of the distant forests, imagining herself plunging into the depths, where horses would struggle to follow. But she knew this area all too well, knew that the land between the road and the hills was open and split only by hedges, and that the horsemen would eat the distance up in no time. Besides, Cecily was inside the chapel, rendering any attempt pointless. She had come too far to leave her now.

‘I need to go,’ she said, making to stand.

‘Hark at that, lads!’ the thin-faced blackcoat said with an amused cackle. ‘She needs to go! Shall we let her, seein’ as she asked so nicely, like?’

‘Not go away,’ Lisette spat, ‘you ox-brained bloody fool.
Piss
. In the bushes.’

Slowly the blackcoat’s thick eyebrows climbed to the top of his forehead. ‘Oh, I see. Call o’ nature, is it?’ He licked his lips. ‘Well, I’ll have to accompany you.’

Lisette shook her head. ‘No you damn well won’t, you lecherous bastard.’ She looked across at the faces of the others. All made her shudder, such was the hopeful lust in their eyes, but one seemed more shocked than aroused by the thought of a lady urinating in the undergrowth. ‘Him. He can escort me.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Thin Face asked. ‘Young Stee, eh? Think I’m stupid?’

‘I do not know what you mean.’

Thin Face excavated one of his nostrils with a grimy fingernail, a gelatinous blob of green mucus coming tackily away. He inspected it as though the answer to some great conundrum could be divined therein. ‘The trooper is a stripling. You think you can outsmart him.’ He deposited the slime on the tip of his sharp tongue and used the finger to indicate a small copse beyond, a little way along the riverbank. ‘Lead him off into the trees and blind ’im with yer juicy little paps. And while his muzzle blows, you’ll hop off like a hare in spring.’

‘Stupid bastard,’ Lisette hissed, gripping her stomach. ‘I
must
go now. You would deny a lady?’

‘You’re no lady, French bitch,’ Thin Face snarled. He nodded towards the chapel. ‘Go inside.’

‘I’ll not take a step into that demon den. Not even to piss.’

Thin Face seemed to appreciate that, and his lips peeled back from his rotten mouth in a crooked smirk. ‘Take the boy. But if he comes back walking like he’s spewed his britches—’

‘You’ll be angry,’ Lisette said as she jumped down.

‘I’ll be wantin’ a turn,’ said Thin Face wolfishly.

Lisette swore at him in her native tongue, and waited for the man he had named as Stee to dismount. He had a sword sheathed at his waist, and a pistol that he immediately cocked. She walked swiftly past the chapel and up to the west side of the bridge. The River Brent pounded below them, swollen by recent rains, and she turned left to follow its course rather than cross it. The trooper followed at a careful distance, one hand planted on his sword-hilt, the other holding the pistol out in front. Her eyes darted about as a matter of instinct, for it was unnatural for her to be a prisoner and not seek a way out, yet she saw that she was hemmed in by waterway and building, with rolling fields beyond the copse. There was nowhere to go.

‘How far you goin’?’

She looked over her shoulder. ‘Just there. The nearest trees.’

‘Do anythin’ stupid and I’ll stick a bullet in your back. Don’t think I won’t.’

Lisette saw that Stee’s face, though unblemished in its youth, was taut with either determination or fear. Regardless, she knew that this was not a man to trifle with, for the result would be a dangerous trigger finger, and she nodded assent.

‘Wait here,’ she said as she pushed past the drooping bough of a withered beech. It was Stee’s turn to nod.

It was more of a grove than a copse, with a ring of trees and dense shrubs encircling a grassy clearing. Lisette found a quiet spot at the edge of the open ground and took off her cloak, tossing it to the long turf in a dark bundle as she unfastened the pewter buttons at her breeches. She squatted without tarrying, unwilling to give Stee cause to come looking.

The trooper called out to her, his voice drifting through the shielding canopy, and she replied loudly to reassure him that she had not betrayed his trust. She stood, pulled up the breeches quickly, and made to leave. Only then did she notice the flat, grey rock in the centre of the clearing. On its smooth surface something moved.

The sermon ended not long after Lisette and Stee had returned to the wagon. Their arrival prompted a bevy of vulgar jeers; Thin Face and the rest of the guards taking turns to guess what lewd acts had been committed out of sight. Stee blushed, Lisette ignored them, and they all fell silent when Collings emerged from the chapel to take his mare in hand.

‘Hot gospeller,’ the general muttered, spurring the snorting piebald past the wagon as it trundled over the bridge and into New Brentford. ‘I do believe we are all destined for Lucifer’s flames.’ He shrugged. ‘At least it’ll be warm.’

‘He was certainly bitter,’ Cecily said. ‘Why do you inflict it upon the men?’

‘Soldiers are simple creatures, Miss Cade,’ replied Collings. ‘They fight, eat and copulate, then pray against all three. I make sure they are well trained, well fed and have coin enough for the third. That makes them loyal. But if I make provision for their faith, too, I can ensure the afterlife is taken care of.’

‘And so,’ Lisette said sardonically, as she arranged the folds of her bundled cloak between her boots, ‘they will be happy to die for you.’

He kicked the animal gently. It blew a gust of foam-flecked air through flared nostrils, but increased its speed obediently enough. Collings twisted back briefly to lift his purple hat in mock salute, and went to the head of his small column.

The traffic only worsened now that they were in the more densely populated heart of Brentford’s three areas, and the blackcoats found it tiresome to have to beat a path through the throng. They ground to an almost complete stop as the road curved down towards a much broader expanse of water.

‘The Thames,’ Lisette observed.

Cecily leaned against the side of the cart, squinting to the south, between the houses, to see the glistening river. ‘Really?’

Lisette nodded, looking up at the large steeple of another church that nestled in the wedge of land where the mighty river met its tributary, the Brent. ‘St Lawrence’s. See the holes?’

Cecily followed the Frenchwoman’s outstretched finger to gaze up at the impressive stone walls, which loomed over the road in a demonstration of High Church power. She looked back at Lisette in surprise. ‘Bullets?’

‘I have been here before,’ said Lisette as they hit a bump that made them jolt against the hard slats of the wagon. Her bundled cloak unfurled slightly between her legs, and she shifted her feet to pin it firmly in place. ‘There was a great battle fought along this very road.’

‘You saw it?’

Lisette almost laughed at the understatement. ‘
Oui
,’ she said, staring beyond the black cavalrymen, at the houses lining the road. Swirling images of gun smoke and steel flashed before her eyes, the sounds of bellowing officers and the screams of the dying drifting like distant thunder in her mind. ‘I was captured here, imprisoned for a time.’

‘By the Parliament?’

She shook her head. ‘By an evil bastard named Eli Makepeace. His creature, a sergeant called Bain, almost raped me.’

‘My Lord, Lisette!’ Cecily’s green eyes widened.

‘They are both dead,’ Lisette said bluntly.

‘And it was here?’

Lisette nodded. ‘The king’s men won. Now look at it. Stinking rebel nest.’

‘How did you escape?’

Lisette’s mind whirled back to the moment when Bain had his pistol at her temple. It was only then that she thought about the role played by a young officer. ‘Lieutenant Burton drew Bain’s attention, that was how he injured his shoulder. Though he was an ensign then, of course.’

‘Burton?’ Cecily gaped. ‘Andrew Burton? You know him?’

‘Knew him,
oui
. He died at Stratton.’

Cecily slid a hand across her full lips. ‘Dead?’

Lisette remembered the terrible agony on Stryker’s face as he had told her, and that same pain now flared again as she looked at her pale companion. ‘Do not pretend you care, Cecily, for you played your part in it.’