The Bleeding Land (46 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE MAN JERKED
like a fish on a hook and the onlookers jeered. His legs wrenched this way and that, the sheer violence of it at odds with his slight frame and genteel looks. Not that he looked particularly genteel at this moment with his eyes swelling furiously and his tongue bulging grotesquely, forcing his lips apart. Then a dark stain bloomed at his crotch and within half a choke the piss was dribbling from his right foot and the crowd gave a great cheer at the sight of it.

‘I’d still rather hang than be crucified,’ O’Brien said thoughtfully, through the clamour, eyes fixed on the dying man and holding out his wrists. ‘It’s the nails I can’t bear the thought of. Do you think you still piss yourself hung up on a cross?’

‘I think I’d rather not think about it, Clancy,’ Mun said as another cheer went up, this one accompanied by wafting hands and fingers pinching noses. The man’s bowels had opened and the liquid streaming from his breeches’ leg now was brown, foul and stinking.

‘Death to traitors!’ someone yelled.

A seething, gurgling sound was escaping the man’s strangled throat.

‘I think Mister Blake is trying to tell us something,’ a soldier yelled.

‘That he’s sorry and he won’t do it again,’ his friend hollered back, rousing a chorus of laughter that made Mun think of the rooks back home in Parbold.

They had found more than rebel soldiers at Kineton. On the village outskirts, at the foot of Pittern Hill by the remains of the ancient earthworks known to local folk as King John’s Castle, they had found several carts loaded with muskets and pikes, and all sorts of ammunition. Guarded by a small troop of dragoons, some of whom were wounded, this train would have followed Essex’s army on its march towards Warwick. If it had got away in time. But it had not, and now it belonged to the King.

But they had also found letters. Most of them were from family members to their loved ones: men who were now the plundered dead and food for worms. But some of those letters were for the living, for the Earl of Essex himself no less, from the pen of a man called Blake, who was Prince Rupert’s personal secretary. And in them Blake had given details of Royalist manoeuvres, had even requested richer rewards for his betrayal. Which was why he was now dancing a jig at the end of a rope.

‘The bastard’s taking his sweet time about dying,’ Downes said, his handsome face made a twist of grimace by the stink of faeces.

Mun’s memory conjured Martha Green hanging from the old bridge across the Tawd, her face, beautiful in life, abhorrent in death. And that soul-wound flowed back to Shear House, to his mother and Bess who had lost everything and yet did not know it. He tried to picture their faces, tried to imagine their grief when they eventually learned what had become of Sir Francis and Emmanuel, for if he could envisage their desolation and sorrow perhaps he could somehow steel himself for the act of breaking the news.

I should have told them already, he thought, the heavy, choking truth of it flooding in on him. I should be with them
now
. But he could not tell them because the King still needed his army. They had marched south to threaten Banbury, but the cannon they had trained on that town had not needed to roar for the Earl of Peterborough and the six hundred of his regiment to come out, lay down their arms and ask His Majesty’s pardon. And now, two days later, they were in Oxford watching a traitor hang.

‘And to think the dog almost slipped his lead,’ O’Brien yawped in Mun’s ear, hauling him from his mire of dark thoughts. ‘They found him packed up and about to make for Warwick to lie on the earl’s lap and get a rub behind the ears.’

‘I heard he was so afraid of what the Prince would do to him that his legs seized up and he couldn’t walk,’ Downes put in. ‘Hooker had to put the bastard over his shoulder and carry him to Rupert.’

‘Nothing wrong with his legs now,’ O’Brien remarked, for Blake was still thrashing.

‘Hooker?’ Mun said, surprised to hear that name.

‘Aye, that ugly bastard over there,’ Downes said, nodding to the press of men on their right. ‘The one with the scar where someone’s tried to open his head like a boiled egg.’

Osmyn Hooker must have sensed he was the object of scrutiny for he suddenly looked up, locking eyes with Mun and nodding in greeting, a half smile playing beneath his elaborately curled moustaches.

‘You know him?’ Downes asked.

‘No,’ Mun lied. ‘Might have seen him around camp.’ He felt his cheeks flush at the lie and his pulse quicken at the thought that his past association with Hooker might be discovered.

‘He’s a mercenary.’ O’Brien all but spat the word. ‘He’d run the King through for a fistful of silver.’

‘And you’d step over ten pretty whores to get to a pint of ale,’ Downes said with a grin. ‘We all have our faults.’

But O’Brien wasn’t amused. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘better fifty
enemies
outside the house than one inside it, if you ask me. You can’t trust a man like that.’

‘Then let us hope His Majesty’s friends in Oxford come up with the silver they’ve promised him,’ Mun said, ‘so that he can ever afford to buy the loyalty of such men. For we have missed our chance to take London and I fear this war is just beginning.’

O’Brien nodded soberly at that and even Downes had no quip on the end of his tongue, as Blake gave his last pathetic salvo of kicks and died. For the Prince had urged his uncle to agree to a bold plan which would see Rupert lead a flying column of cavalry, dragoons and mounted musketeers to London, there to seize the members of the Lords and Commons in Westminster and hold them at Whitehall until the King arrived with the rest of the army. Taking the capital could, Prince Rupert argued, win them the war. But the King’s advisers had no faith that the scheme could work, claiming the city’s ancient defences, the London Trained Bands, and a force raised by the Earl of Warwick would combine to thwart any such bold endeavour. Now the moment was lost and winter was here and the King was making himself comfortable at Oxford.

‘Rivers.’ Mun looked round and found Corporal Bard standing behind him as the crowd fragmented and men streamed past, the evening’s first entertainment over.

‘Corporal,’ Mun acknowledged with a nod, clapping gloved hands to get some warmth into them for it was turning bitter. The winter sun was setting in the west, splashing bloody streaks above the city’s silhouetted towers and spires, fading to orange and then grey in the dusk sky.

‘Make yourselves scarce, you two,’ Bard said to O’Brien and Downes, who nodded and slapped Mun’s shoulder in solidarity as they headed back to their billets.

‘Let me guess, the captain demands satisfaction?’ Mun said, half hoping it was true for he was in a bloody mood.

The veteran smiled. ‘I think Captain Boone would rather
leave
your disagreements in the past,’ he said, ‘what with you being Sir bloody Edmund Rivers nowadays. Chances are at this rate you’ll be given a commission and end up outranking us all, so we ought to be bloody nice to you, God save our black souls.’ Mun almost smiled at that. ‘No, Rivers, I’ve come about something else.’ Bard’s raw-boned face turned grim; grimmer than normal. ‘Has the captain given you anything of late?’ Mun felt the frown darken his own brow. ‘Since that day we found those rebels in Kineton village?’

‘What is this about, Corporal?’ he asked. ‘Why would Boone have something for me?’

Bard tilted his head to one side, avoiding Mun’s eyes and scratching his bristled cheek.

‘What does the captain have that’s to do with me?’ Mun said, left hand resting on the pommel of his Irish hilt.

Bard looked him in the eye now, his brown teeth worrying at his bottom lip as though trying to keep words in that wanted to be out. ‘Look, Rivers, you’re a brave lad. A good soldier. That day in Kineton we found all sorts, ten types of horse shit. Including letters. Lots of ’em.’

‘I know, Corporal, and so does he,’ Mun said, thumbing back to the dead man hanging from the creaking jib. Bard nodded, then looked around to make sure he was not overheard.

‘Amongst that lot we found in the church was a letter addressed to your father. A letter Sir Francis never laid eyes on.’ The mention of his father’s name was like a blow to the gut. ‘Now, lad, I’m not good with my letters, never had cause to learn ’em properly. But Captain Boone can read like a lawyer. Maybe you should ask him what was in that letter.’

Mun felt the sullen embers in his stomach suddenly spark. What was that bastard Boone keeping from him?

‘Why are you telling me this, Corporal?’

Bard shrugged. ‘As I said, you’re Sir Edmund Rivers,’ he replied, leaving Mun to draw the inference that a favour given is a favour owed. ‘Just leave me out of it,’ he warned, pointing
a
filth-stained finger. ‘However you found out about that letter it wasn’t from me. Understand?’

Mun nodded. ‘Where is Captain Boone?’ he asked, eyes ranging across the crowds leaving the hanging. Music fought to be heard amongst the murmur of drinking men and the lowing of cattle being herded into the great quadrangle of Christ Church college.

‘I’d wait till morning if I were you, lad,’ Bard said, ‘he’s with the Prince. We’re to push on down the valley to Windsor. Some fat city merchant has earned His Majesty’s wrath and holed up with fifteen hundred rebels in the castle. We’re to prise them from their shell.’ Somewhere, a lute was making merry and a viol was trying to keep up. A woman laughed wickedly and a knot of soldiers gave a bawdy cheer.

‘Where is he, Corporal?’ Mun asked again, eyes riveted to the older veteran’s.

Corporal Bard considered his answer for a moment, then nodded as if to say
I’ve come this far
. . .

‘They’re at the New College. Saint Mary on Holywell Street. Grand as grand, like this,’ he said, nodding at the impressive square tower beside them, ‘you can’t miss it. It’s now the main magazine.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘The clever young sods must be doing their learning in the alehouses these days,’ he said.

But Mun was already walking, his boots scuffing the cobbles of St Aldate’s, then on, pushing through the crowds on High Street, through the whores and hawkers, the food-sellers and the drunks and all the folk of Oxford who had flocked like gulls to sell the King’s army whatever they could. With each step his anger wound itself tighter, like the spring of a wheellock, and those men and women who saw his face gave him clear passage even if they had to offend another to do it. Turning onto Queen’s Lane he saw the grand buildings ahead of him, their arched, glass-filled windows blurry with warm yellow light.

He ploughed through his own billowing breath but was
no
longer aware of the cold by the time he came to St Mary, built beside the looming four-hundred-year-old city wall. Then through a dark passage in which a woman was on her knees and the soldier she was servicing grinned at Mun but he did not grin back, and finally into the cloistered courtyard, where he stopped to get his bearings, his breathing loud inside his helmet. It made for an impressive sight, a perfect and ordered quadrangle of stone buildings. Across from him in line along the north range was an enormous timber-roofed chapel, its stained glass glowing dimly, promising respite from the sin and revelries of the bustling night. Above the huge windows gargoyles leered in the gloom, ignored by all who passed below. Flowing on from the chapel, sharing roof and façade though its windows were smaller, was a great hall. In the far corner of the east range stood a four-storeyed square tower above whose gateway three niches held statues of Virgin, Angel, and another figure who Mun supposed might be the college founder. Officers paced along the torch-lit colonnades, laughing and carrying on as though the war was as good as won, and Mun wondered how many of them had fought in the blood-drenched havoc at Kineton.

Then a dog barked and he looked to his left. At the western end of the quadrangle, by the gaping arch of a passage below the imposing apartments, stood a knot of men. Mun could not see their faces, but the dog, which was dashing between light and shadow having clearly caught the scent of a cat or some other creature, gave the party away. Far from the usual mangy, flea-ridden mongrels that accompanied the army this was a noble, lustrous-haired creature that Mun guessed ate better than most musketeers. It was the Prince’s white hunting poodle, Boy.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed the Prince, looking up as Mun approached. ‘Sir Edmund! The very man who wrested my uncle’s ensign from the enemy and spared us some considerable embarrassment.’

Mun grimaced at the introduction, but the others, except one, seemed impressed enough, shaking his hand and nodding and murmuring their appreciation. Boone made no efforts to hide his enmity, lip curled as though Mun had trodden in something of Boy’s.

‘I simply followed Captain Smith . . . Sir John,’ Mun explained, ‘and had little idea what he was getting me into.’

‘Now now, young man, there’s no need to be so modest here,’ a portly officer with a tuft of beard and a wisp of moustache said. ‘Save the coyness for the ladies.’ He laughed at his own wit. The other men smiled generously and Mun recognized one of them, a clean-shaven man with sloping shoulders, shrewd eyes and a hooked nose. But he could not place the man and so looked back to the Prince.