Marston Moor (8 page)

‘Where is he?’ Stryker said, fanning his face with his hat to waft away the pungent stink.

From the shadows a small figure emerged. ‘Down there, sir.’

Stryker followed the pointing hand to where a prone body, curled into the foetal position, nestled under a table. ‘Dead or drunk?’

The figure, a man, moved into the room. He was tiny. Not a dwarf, per se, for his limbs were proportionate to his body, but his stature was that of a child, so that his head, at full height, did not reach beyond Stryker’s sternum. Yet one could never mistake him for anything but a man of forty years or more. His clothes and weapons were especially made to fit his form, but his bald head, weathered skin and crooked, half-rotten teeth spoke of his true maturity. His eyes were yellow – not merely a jaundiced hue, but a brightly blazing shade that gave him the stare of a hunting cat – and his hands were gnarled and calloused. ‘You know the answer to that, sir,’ he said. His voice, inflected by the accent of Scotland, was severely constricted, as if he suffered garrotting even as he spoke.

‘Thank you, Master Barkworth.’

Simeon Barkworth offered a short bow. With a sharp glance at Skellen, he followed the sergeant from the storehouse.

Stryker noticed a pail of grubby water and fetched it up. It slopped as he steadied it, rusty liquid leaking over the side and dripping on his boots. ‘A soldier who fails to return to colours when called, is clapped immediately in irons!’

The body under the table stirred, emitting a low groan.

‘Any soldier,’ Stryker repeated the article, stooping to clear the table top, ‘who should fail to return to his colour when called, will be clapped, Mister Hood, in irons!’ He swung the bucket on the final word so that the putrid concoction dashed the suddenly animated body in a stinking wave.

Lieutenant Thomas Hood rolled out from under his makeshift shelter, groping for a sword that had long since vanished from its flaccid scabbard. ‘Jesu!’ he spluttered viciously. ‘S’ precious blood, you bastardly gullion! I’ll gouge your eyes out, sir, I’ll—’

He cut himself short when finally he braved the light to look into his persecutor’s face. Fury turned to horror.

‘Eye,’ Stryker said. ‘Another knave has saved you half the task.’

Thomas Hood pitched on to his front and vomited. When he was done, chest heaving, he risked a glance up. ‘Christ on His cross.’ He spat and wiped a dangling tendril of greenish mucus from his chin with a heavily stained sleeve. ‘Major, I—’

‘You are in your cups, Lieutenant.’

Hood blinked rapidly, looked as though he would vomit again, but managed to hold himself together. His long hair was sopping from the untimely bath, and he was forced to peel the strands from his cheeks. ‘Nay, sir, not in … not
in
.’ He struggled to his feet, swaying as he finally stood tall. His face, ordinarily so fresh and handsome, was haggard. His eyes were deep red, his lips caked white with dried spittle. ‘Have been in them, I admit freely, but no longer. Sober as a monk, sir.’

Stryker dropped the pail, Hood recoiling at the clatter. ‘You know my rule.’

Hood dabbed his wispy beard with a sleeve. ‘I was not drinking during the escalade, sir, ’pon my honour I was not.’ He took a step forwards, then two in retreat. ‘P’rhaps a sip, then, but no more.’

‘Better a sip to get a man over the wall than sobriety see him cower in the ditch,’ Stryker conceded. ‘But after, Tom. I saw you. As the town burned.’ Indeed, he and Skellen had stumbled upon Hood in the smallest hours, or, rather, Hood had quite literally stumbled upon them. The sack was in full swing, terror unleashed with free rein and a prince’s blessing, and Hood had been sighted staggering along Churchgate with his sword in one hand and a blackjack full of wine in the other.

Hood set his jaw defensively. ‘The fight was over. It was won. Was it not my right to make merry with the spoils?’

‘You have the right to toast a victory, Tom, not to slump in a gutter like a common wastrel. You are an officer.’

A flash of defiance lanced across Hood’s damp features. ‘You are the arbiter of my revelry now, sir?’

‘I am your commanding officer, Mister Hood. Your goddamned chief!’ Stryker advanced angrily. Hood skittered back until he collided with the table. ‘You may imbibe what you like, Lieutenant, so long as you return to quarters at dawn. Look at you. Where is your dignity? Jesu, man, where is your sword?’

Hood’s hand went to the empty scabbard and the defiance left him. ‘Bastards,’ he whispered, evidently recalling something of the night. He met Stryker’s hard gaze. ‘Where is my dignity, sir?’ He shrugged. ‘What dignity?’

‘You are an officer of the King.’

Hood’s chuckle was mirthless, embittered. ‘With not a kitten to command.’

‘That is beside the point.’

‘It is precisely the point, sir,’ Hood answered hotly, insolence rearing within him again.

‘Mind your tongue, sirrah,’ Stryker warned.

Hood held Stryker’s eye for a second, then broke the trance with a pitiful sigh. He studied his boots for a short time, breathing heavily as he steadied his anger. When he looked up, his expression was wretched with contrition. ‘My apologies, sir. Sincerely.’

Stryker relented. He was angry at Hood, for the young officer was a good man, a competent leader, but his penchant for drink was beginning to be noticed in higher circles, something that would harm his chances of advancement. Hood was right, he had conducted himself no differently to the majority of Royalist officers in the wake of Bolton’s fall, but Stryker would be damned before he saw the young man throw his prospects away for the sake of a fine claret. And yet, deep down, he knew that his interference only seemed to breed resentment. He made to turn. ‘Clean yourself up. Meet me at The Swan.’

‘Sir,’ Hood said, though his watery stare had flickered to the open door.

Stryker caught the gesture and hooked the door with his foot, toeing it closed. Behind it, nestled against the wall, was a substantial flagon. He could see dark liquid just below the brim. Stryker looked back, saw the longing in Hood’s eyes, noticed how the lieutenant’s hands trembled.

The door swung open, concealing the flagon. ‘Major Stryker? Is he present?’

Stryker and Hood both turned to the doorway. Under the rotten lintel, wreathed in sunlight, stood a tall, finely dressed man. He wore the caged helmet and russet breastplate of a harquebusier, with lace at his falling band collar, a silver gorget at his throat, and a blue coat that was threaded in silver all the way down the sleeves.

Stryker squinted, but the light at the man’s back turned his features almost black by contrast. ‘He is, sir.’

‘Ah, good,’ the newcomer said, his voice loud and well educated. ‘Get him out here, would you? I have no wish to speak within these walls, for it smells like a latrine.’

‘One of my lads claimed he’d seen you in there,’ the dismounted cavalryman said as Stryker and Hood joined him outside. He breathed deeply and theatrically, and unfastened his helm, letting shoulder-length tousles of richly golden hair cascade around the leather straps running between back- and breast-plate. He tossed it to one of the troopers who ringed the group like iron sentinels, and smoothed his thin moustache between gloved thumb and forefinger. ‘Seemed unlikely, but here you are.’ His grin was permanent, etched by a sword slash that had left cleaved his mouth and healed in puckered lines so that his lips, forever upturned, appeared to stretch into his cheeks. But his smile was genuine in its warmth. ‘Well met, Sergeant-Major. Ha! Major. A pleasure to name you by your new rank, sir.’

‘Thank you, Sir Richard,’ Stryker said, returning the smile. ‘I am not entirely accustomed to it myself, truth told.’

Sir Richard laughed at that. ‘And how does life treat you in your new role?’

In truth, life was decidedly more dangerous. Everything had changed. He was still a soldier, still bled for the cause of the king, and yet so much now was alien to him. The sea had changed all that. It had taken a ship called the
Kestrel
, tossed it and smashed it and turned it to a tangled wreck of floating rigging and splintered spars. On that ship had been Stryker and his company, sailing for the Isles of Scilly and a cache of gold, and they had been sucked into the icy depths with the stricken vessel. A handful – Stryker and Skellen among them – had been thrown up on a hostile shore, and though they had faced yet more tribulation before their mission was complete, they had been the fortunate ones. Stryker’s Company of Foot had been shattered, and the remnants – both the wreck’s survivors and those remaining in quarters with the Oxford Army – no longer amounted to a unit worth salvaging. They had been scattered, dispersed amongst the rest of Sir Edmund Mowbray’s regiment, leaving the officers with nowhere to belong. The common term was
reformado
, an officer without a command, and that was the status under which Stryker and Lieutenant Hood had found themselves operating. The king’s nephew – and his majesty’s greatest warrior – had long meddled in Stryker’s affairs, often dispatching him on clandestine duties in the face of Sir Edmund’s understandable chagrin. Now Stryker had no colonel to tie him down. He was the prince’s creature; his personal attack-dog, intelligencer and assassin.

Stryker looked directly into the blue eyes of Rupert’s close friend. ‘It treats me well, Sir Richard.’

‘You’ll have your own regiment next. Lieutenant-colonel follows major, as night follows day, and then full colonel.’ He broke into a rueful chuckle. ‘Particularly when one considers the rate at which our senior officers seem presently to expire.’ Crane wrinkled his slightly crooked nose as he regarded the dishevelled form of Thomas Hood. ‘You look abysmal, son.’

‘It was a sleepless night, sir,’ Hood muttered.

‘That it was,’ Sir Richard barked happily, twisting back to observe the troopers that still clattered into the area in his wake. A large pearl earring winked from behind his golden tresses. ‘My brave boys have been a-hunting. The moors are infested with Roundheads. Still, we have cleared the way, have no doubt.’

Stryker had no doubt at all, because Colonel Sir Richard Crane was a killer. One of the king’s true veterans, Crane was the younger son of minor nobility, destined for a life denied inherited wealth. Like so many of his kind, he had seen only two avenues left open: a career in the clergy, or a career at war. Having chosen the latter, Crane had seen service with the Protestant armies on the Continent, returning when the Royal standard had been hoisted at Nottingham almost two years before. Since then his post as the commanding officer of a troop of horse had taken him across the country. Like Stryker, he had witnessed the opening salvos of England’s tribulation at Kineton Field, and had been embroiled in the storming of both Cirencester and Bristol. But Stryker knew he had done so much more. Crane would have been at Chalgrove and Bristol, Newbury and Market Drayton and Chinnor and countless other fights. He was a man forged in the furnace of this civil war, because Crane’s was no ordinary command.

Stryker stared up at the horsemen that packed the road. They were mud-spattered, their mounts’ fetlocks wet and ingrained with grime, but their bearing, to a man, betrayed nothing of the hard riding to which they had been subjected. They wore scarves of ruby red at their waists, and every trooper’s hair flowed long, framing lean, hard faces and restless eyes. These, Stryker knew, were the elite: Prince Rupert’s Lifeguard, a troop of a hundred and fifty riders, gentlemen all, forming the razor edge to his Regiment of Horse. Sir Richard Crane had the honour of their command, and he revelled in it.

‘Sergeant Skellen!’ Crane bellowed, touching a finger to his temple in acknowledgement. ‘You survived, I see.’

‘’Course, Colonel, sir.’ Skellen, who had been waiting outside the door with Barkworth, sidled forth and bowed low.

Crane beamed. ‘If the world were to burn tomorrow, I do declare this man would come through the conflagration with nought but a singe.’ He looked back to address his watchful horsemen. ‘These men are to be afforded all respect, you rogues. They may appear to be a party of vagabonds, but they serve upon good Prince Robert’s business, and they enjoy his protection.’ He met Stryker’s gaze again. ‘I’ve not seen you since Newark, Major. What a day that was! His Highness would not have outfoxed Meldrum without you. Verily sings your praises!’

Stryker felt heat pulse at his cheeks and he stared hard at the ground. ‘Kind of you to say, sir.’ It was true that he had played his part in that unlikely victory, but the praise embarrassed him nonetheless. ‘I did my duty.’

‘You’d have been well employed at Cheriton, I suspect,’ Crane went on, his tone turning sour. ‘What a dungheap of a campaign that turned out to be.’