The Bleeding Land (19 page)

‘But if we lose shall we lose Shear House?’ Mun said, as much to himself as to his father. The thought, which had struck like lightning out of nowhere, horrified him. He had never considered what would come after this conflict. If indeed it came to war.
The young do not see beyond the morrow
, he could almost hear his father say.

‘Those who seek reform would not be reined in,’ Sir Francis did say, confirming Mun’s fears. ‘They would shake the world like a hound shakes a fox, and only the strongest would eat the scraps of what is left.’

Mun had been struck by this revelation that his father marched – would fight – more out of duty to his king and a desire to preserve the world’s natural order than out of a belief that their cause was necessarily just. But then it made perfect sense, he realized, for if the rebels won, the Rivers family would likely lose everything. As for his own future, what would that hold if there were no estate to inherit? No land to manage, no farms to maintain? No rents to collect? So they would fight for their king. And the rebels be damned.

And now Mun was soaked to his very bones. He was not alone; four thousand others who had come weary out of Warwickshire to Nottingham were waterlogged too, including the King of England himself. Perhaps it should have cheered Mun a little that King Charles appeared as miserably wet as he, but it did not. It was a pitiful force that had come out for their king and the column’s leaden progress through the kingdom had drawn a veil of melancholy over them all. A few
days
earlier the King had been denied entrance to Coventry. His progression through Newark and Leicester had met with a less than enthusiastic response and even here in Nottingham, a wealthy trading town, Mun sensed the disquiet of folk who resented having the cost of quartering the King’s army on the common laid at their door.

‘Damn this pissing rain,’ Emmanuel said, one hand on the reins and the other a tight fist gripping the cloak at his throat. ‘It’s keeping folk indoors when they should be here to receive their king.’

Mounted on Hector beside him, Mun stared straight ahead through the rain that dripped rhythmically from his broad hat and through the vapour rising from their horses’ muzzles and flanks despite its being high summer. On the field before them King Charles and his nephew Prince Rupert and divers other lords and gentlemen of His Majesty’s train stood in a soaking knot, shoulders slumped and talking in low voices amongst themselves.

‘’Tis not the rain that keeps them away,’ Sir Francis said, patting Priam’s thick neck. The stallion nickered softly. ‘Men are more keen to bring in the harvest than go to war.’

‘Then we shall have to drag them from the fields, Father,’ Mun said, ashamed of the gloomy rabble of men, women and children who had gathered to greet their king. Given its central position within the kingdom and its intersecting trade routes Nottingham had seemed to Mun the perfect town for the muster. The King would raise the Royal Standard against the Westminster rebels and thousands of loyal men would rally to form an awe-inspiring army. But it had not happened like that. Mun glanced around, taking in the glum faces, framed by bedraggled, dripping locks and broad-brimmed hats, of the mounted men around him. There were perhaps two thousand cavalry there on that sloping field beneath the great castle wall. Opposite them on the other side of the King’s party were, Mun reckoned, no more than six hundred infantrymen who
had
marched from Yorkshire and whom he’d heard one of Sir Francis’s friends refer to as the scum of the county. They did not look much standing there, drawn loosely into companies, with their assortment of pole-arms, clubs and muskets. They stank too, of stale sweat and wet wool, and Mun was reminded of his times in London with its thronging streets and its odorous masses.

‘Do you recognize any of them, Sir Francis?’ Emmanuel asked, for he knew that in his days at court Sir Francis had met many men who had fought in the Low Countries for money or honour or both.

‘A few. Not many,’ Sir Francis admitted. ‘But I’d wager the Earl of Essex is looking at his lot and thinking just the same as us. Devereux is an experienced soldier, but he is cautious. He won’t move against us until he is sure of having the advantage.’

‘They say he has already prepared his coffin and takes it with him wherever he goes,’ Mun said, smiling at the thought. ‘Not the actions of an optimistic man.’

‘Not optimistic perhaps, but well prepared nevertheless,’ Sir Francis said grimly.

All men knew that the earl was strongly Protestant, but during one of Mun’s sojourns in London he had heard the rumour that Essex was one of the Puritan nobles in the House of Lords. Now he asked his father if the rumour was true.

Sir Francis removed his hat and with his hand brushed off the rain that had pooled on its crown. ‘The man tends towards the zealous,’ he admitted, ‘frowns on gaming and drinking and, I dare say, fears for his soul.’ He put his hat back on and coughed into a fist. ‘Yet I maintain hope that he would not go as far as those whom he serves. The King’s right to rule, divine or otherwise, is one of the moorings of society which not even Essex would see severed.’ But to Mun’s eyes his father did not look convinced.

Parliament had wasted no time in choosing Essex, one of the few English nobles with any military experience, to lead their
army
, commissioning him to the post of Captain-General and Chief Commander. And neither was the man alone amongst the peerage and greater gentry to have apparently sided with the rebels, though such were few in number so far as Mun could gather.

‘Yet he is friends with the troublemaker Pym,’ Emmanuel said.

‘Aye, who holds the pursestrings of the army raised against us. We face capable opponents and must seek to put such men back in their place at the first opportunity.’ Sir Francis scowled. ‘Or else risk the flame of war spreading to ignite the whole country.’

As if to prove his fears well founded a cheer went up as the infantry company split and six men appeared from the mass carrying the Royal Standard which they had fetched down from Nottingham Castle.

‘This is war then,’ Mun said under his breath, half terrified half exhilarated by what he was seeing. Then the small party stopped before the infantry and there waited whilst His Majesty, Prince Rupert and several other dignitaries walked with great austerity across the churned earth to take their places beside the banner, which looked to Mun no different from those hung with city streamers used each year at the Lord Mayor’s Show.

The procession came forward with the standard and Mun stood in his stirrups to get a better view. The King was smaller than Mun had imagined him. Wrapped in a sodden black cloak and with a purple feather plastered to his hat Charles cut a pale, gaunt, sorry-looking figure. In contrast, his nephew Prince Rupert was remarkably tall, six feet and four inches men said. A most striking man, he was well built and handsome, causing Mun to muse that if one did not know better one might be forgiven for presuming that of the two men Rupert and not the other was the King of England. But for the solemn authority that clung to Charles even more determinedly than
the
rain-sodden cloak. Mun had never seen anyone look more vulnerable. And yet dignified.

‘Ground’s too bloody soft,’ Sir Francis mumbled under his breath. Two soldiers had been summoned forward and were now on their knees digging into the earth with knives and clawing handfuls of mud from the hole. ‘If they don’t go down at least three feet the thing will blow over in the first gust.’

Up went the Royal Standard and Mun felt the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck bristle. At its top hung a flag with the King’s arms quartered and a hand pointing to a crown.

‘What does it say, Father?’ Mun asked, for below that image were written several words but there was not enough wind to unfurl the flag and reveal the motto. ‘You must have seen it before.’

‘It says “Give Caesar his due”,’ Sir Francis replied, arching his back and wincing at some stiffness.

One of the lords barked an order and two sorry-looking trumpeters stepped forward and put their instruments to their lips but were forestalled with a raised hand belonging to King Charles himself, who was reading the proclamation he held in the other.

‘Pen and ink!’ the King called, throwing out an arm but not taking his eyes from the parchment. Someone hurried forward with a pen which the King accepted with a curt nod before seeming to strike out some parts of the text and make his own additions here and there. At last satisfied, he handed the parchment to a herald who proceeded to read, with some difficulty it seemed to Mun, the proclamation which declared ground and cause for His Majesty’s setting up of his standard, namely to suppress the rebellion of the Earl of Essex, in raising forces against him. The King required the aid and assistance of all his loving subjects to put down the traitors with all haste. When the herald finished he glanced nervously towards but not at the King, who nodded resolutely and waved his hand in small circles at the trumpeters. The fanfare sounded and an officer of
the
infantry flung his hat into the air, at which hundreds more did the same with cries of ‘God save the King! God save King Charles!’

An officer of the cavalry beside Sir Francis lifted his own hat from his head and yelled, ‘Hang up the Roundheads!’

Mun grinned at Emmanuel and together they took up the shout. ‘Hang up the Roundheads!’ they called, rain spraying from their lips, their horses whinnying at the sudden clamour. Mun waved his sodden hat in the air and shivered with the thrill of it all.

Because he was going to war.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE ROYAL STANDARD
was blown down that same night it was put up and could not be planted again for several days because the ground was too soft, and a storm raged, scouring the Royalist camp and making horses skittish and men whisper of ill portents. There were murmurs that even King Charles himself saw the gloomy ceremony as ominous, for he was by all accounts a man for whom solemn ritual was the foundation upon which authority rested firm. But if the King
was
fainthearted Mun had seen no sign of it as he had watched for three consecutive days His Majesty bring forth the standard to the field. Mun listened each time the proclamation was read aloud, straining to catch every word that was borne off by the wind, so that in the end he could have repeated it verbatim.

‘By God we shall teach the rebels!’ Emmanuel had said through a grin on the third day, patting one of the new Dutch wheellock pistols holstered on his saddle. A gift from Sir Francis, their polished ivory butt-caps gleamed in the pink dawn light. ‘We’ll send them running back to London with their tails between their legs.’

Mun had laughed at the image of the rowdy London apprentices as whining hounds seeking to win back their master the King’s favour, having been scolded. But then he had thought of
Tom
, whom none of them had seen for almost eight months. His brother should have been with them, witnessing the King make ready to whip his errant hounds. But where was Tom?

‘What has become of you, brother?’ he whispered. He could understand why his brother had run off the night of Martha’s death, especially after what had passed between him and their father, but they had all thought he would come back after a day or two, been certain he would. They had been wrong. They had even looked for Tom in London, but found no traces. Now all they could do was hope and pray that he was all right and that he would return to Shear House. To his family.

‘We need more men,’ Mun said, stating the obvious but wanting to say something, hoping conversation might edge thoughts of Tom out of his mind. The wind’s fury had abated and the day promised to be hot and dry. A good day. A new day.

‘They’ll come, Mun,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Their king has called them and they will come.’

King Charles turned his back on his army and, accompanied by his officers including Sir Francis, made for the castle.

But the men they so desperately needed did not come, not enough of them anyway, which was why Sir Francis, lately made a Colonel of Horse by King Charles himself, had ordered Mun and Emmanuel, yet to be placed in a troop, to ride out amongst the nearest towns and villages and gauge the mood of the people.

‘Better to use a neat hammer and strike the nail true than a rock and see it bent,’ Sir Francis had said, meaning the two of them would have a better chance of perceiving men’s willingness to fight than would a company of infantry marching through the streets beating the muster drum.

So on the fifth day, Mun and Emmanuel rode some seven miles north to Hucknall Torkard. Lying in a valley on ground rising towards the north and west, sloping south-east and watered by a lively brook flowing to the River Leen, Hucknall Torkard was typical of those towns that still clung to the open-field
form
of farming. Champion lands bristling with crops and thick with woodland surrounded a great cluster of habitation that could potentially field, according to the King’s officers, at least five hundred good fighting men, perhaps more still.