Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (58 page)

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Roger Tainton unlocked the door carefully. He could hear the two guards muttering outside, their voices were only just aud­ible above the din of battle that seemed now to come from all fronts. The skeleton key clicked as it turned, and then a deep clunk echoed about the chamber as the lock was released. He froze, jaw clenched, hearing his pulse rush in his ears. But no shouts of alarm rose shrill above the gunfire. He was only wearing one boot, the other was in his hand, and he let go of the key, taking the long, thin, double-edged dagger he had stolen near Petersfield from his waistband.

He could have rushed out, played upon the element of surprise, but the flinging doors might force them to retreat out of range, and it seemed better to go to work away from prying eyes. So he simply rapped his knuckles on the door and stepped back into the darkness.

The double doors opened almost immediately.

‘Who’s here?’ a voice called from below the lintel.

‘Just your imagination,’ another man replied, his accent and tone remarkably similar to the first. Tainton remembered that the men were twins.

‘Who unlocked the bloody door, then?’

Tainton tightened his grip on the dagger’s octagonal handle. ‘Help,’ he whimpered.

The light at the doorway framed the two guards, making them seem gigantic. They walked gingerly into the room. ‘Hello? Who’s here? Show yourself.’

Tainton could only see one match-tip aglow, which meant they were not both able to give fire, and he thanked God for it as he leapt from the gloom. He went for the silhouette with the lit match, stabbing up at the musketeer’s throat as he lunged, jamming the blade as hard as he could manage into flesh and muscle and sinew. He released the oak handle without another look, and brought his other arm up in a diagonal sweep before the second, stunned sentry. The man rocked backwards, and might have avoided the boot heel itself, but Tainton’s bright, jagged spurs sliced through the middle of his face. His weapon clattered on the solid floor, hands sliding up to his face, and Tainton kicked him on to his haunches. Then he dropped the boot, picked up the discarded musket, and smashed down at the blood-blinded soldier with its solid wooden stock, bludgeoning through protective hands and wrists until he felt the softer crunch of nose and cheeks and eyes. It was over in seconds. The doors were wide open, daylight flooding the darkness, and Tainton ran to ground level, blinking in the unaccustomed brightness. There was no one.

He took a knee, hissed a prayer, and went back to close the doors. By now he had hoped to have seen Parliamentarian troops pouring over the rampart like a plague of rats. The note had been specific, his location clear. Kovac was to bring horses and soldiers to Tainton and together they would take the hoard out of the fortress in the chaos of the inevitable sack. He went back to the top of the slope, turning a circle on the spot, blood-drenched palm shielding his eyes. Nothing yet, though there seemed to be a fearsome exchange of fire down between the two towers on the south side. Perhaps the breach would be made there. It was irksome, but not problematic. He would simply have to await the inevitable victory.

Lisette was on one of the rear turrets of the Great Gatehouse and from here, with the lookouts and sharpshooters, she had jeered the advance of the divisions against Garrison Gate, and cheered their defeat. From this distance, with the smoke shroud thick and constantly scudding, it was difficult to make out individuals amongst the teeming soldiers on the rampart, but occasionally she was half-certain that she glimpsed Stryker amongst the men near the gate.

Perhaps half an hour had elapsed since the first assault, and the fight still spluttered on that northern front, but the twin rebel divisions had failed with their petard, and they were ensconced in the village and in the Grange. The real conflict now seemed to have shifted to the south, and from her lofty platform Lisette had watched the third enemy division trundle up to Rawdon’s carefully excavated earthworks. The whole area had vanished in gun smoke as the battle began to rage. It was time to move, she decided.

Lisette saw Roger Tainton on her way to the top of the stairs. As she went to take the first step, she glanced out on to the courtyard below. Some of the sharpshooters had also decided to leave the tower, and in deep shock she moved out of their way, clinging to the bricks. It was him. If he had not attacked her, she might never have noticed him amongst the hundreds of inhabitants, but their brief duel six days before was as fresh in her mind as the battle she had just witnessed. His bald head, his strangely lopsided gait; even from up high she was convinced. She steadied her breathing, and turned for the stairs.

CHAPTER 28

‘Glad you could join us!’ Johnson exclaimed brightly. ‘They hold the sconce at present, thus I expect an escalade imminently.’

‘They have ladders?’ Stryker asked, having galloped south ahead of his group on the unfortunate Lieutenant Hunter’s white gelding.

‘They do.’

Stryker nodded. ‘Then let us give them pause for thought.’

‘My sentiments exactly, Captain!’

Stryker’s party appeared in moments, their faces drenched in sweat despite the chill of the day. Seven wore the green coats donated by a contrite William Balthazar, while the rest bore Rawdon’s yellow. They were quickly ushered into line, all loading muskets except for William Skellen, who had abandoned his long-arm in favour of his beloved halberd. Johnson ordered the sally port open, and the piled debris was quickly hauled back, exposing a breach in the wall that was big enough for a single man to squeeze through if he ducked low. The men shuffled forwards muttering prayers and encouragement to each other.

Stryker moved to Johnson’s side and peered out through the hole. What he saw snatched the breath from his lungs and the moisture from his mouth. ‘Jesu, Colonel, there are hundreds of them.’

Johnson nodded. ‘We have a surprise or two, Captain, do not fret.’

Fret, Stryker thought ruefully, was an astonishing understatement. Out on the half-moon, edging forwards now that their ladders had been shuffled to the front, were dozens of men preparing to charge at the Old House. On both of their flanks, musketeers following red ensigns were already firing a steady stream of bullets up at the rampart, forcing Royalist heads to keep low, and to their rear was another wedge of musketeers, who, Stryker supposed, were being kept back for the time when the forlorn hope had broken the back of the defences. Stryker pulled the dagger from his boot and drew his sword. His bowels had turned to water and his jaw felt iron-tight. He knew it was madness, and yet nothing would make him turn back.

‘They’re coming!’ a familiar voice bellowed from above.

Stryker looked up to see the red-cheeked face of Lancelot Forrester peering over the edge of one of the two guardhouses punctuating the run of the wall. Forrester nodded briskly to him, but addressed Lieutenant-Colonel Johnson. ‘The Cripplegates are advancing!’

Johnson went back to the sally port, squinted through the small gap, then stood back so that he could see Forrester’s disembodied head. ‘Let them reach the ditch, then give the order!’

A great cry went up from outside. It began as a low grumble before rolling and building to a visceral howl of rage as the men of the Cripplegate Auxiliaries bounded out from the half-moon, ladders carried at the front, and raced over the few yards of land that divided the outer-work from the ancient moat. That moat, which lay immediately beneath the Old House wall, was now a dry ditch that had been staked and deepened at Rawdon’s instruction, but it did nothing to stop the swarm making it to the other side. The men on the rampart shot at the enslaught, winging a couple of men and killing one outright, but there were just too many to stem the tide, and the ladders clattered and scraped on the bricks as they were hurled up against the walls. The ensign with the blue sash was in amongst them, and he stabbed his huge colour in the foot of the ditch, planting it in the freshly turned soil, and the men surging around it cheered as they went to begin their climb.

A little way along the foot of the wall the sally port remained open, and, between the shoulders of men firing out into the ditch, Stryker witnessed the crushing charge. The noise was deafening, the terror within Johnson’s poised raiding party palpable, and every fibre of his being begged him to challenge the rash lieutenant-colonel’s orders. Forrester’s voice rang out again, the smooth, educated accent frayed by urgency, but Stryker could not discern the words. It was only when he heard screams of a different kind that he understood what had happened. Up on the guardhouse, he now realized, were women. Lots of women. And their shrill cries spoke of rage and vengeance. He looked up but could see nothing, so he pushed nearer to the port, only to discern glimpses of rubble falling like massive hailstones amongst the green-coated attackers. There were tiles falling like huge snowflakes, bricks spinning down on to the heads of the Parliamentarians, and stones too – large and small – clattering off helmets and into the faces of those trying to scale the ladders.

Johnson was grinning maniacally at Stryker. ‘Lady Honora!’

‘Sir?’

‘The marchioness, d’you see? She has her ladies up there, aiding our cause!’

The men all along the inner wall cheered, the women up on their raised platform continued to pelt the assault troops, and then, just as Stryker felt they must surely exhaust their stony ammunition, Forrester’s voice shrieked again and a gun fired. It was a falconet, he supposed, or something similar. A small gun, not capable of taking any kind of toll on wall or earthwork. But this one fired from the second guardhouse roof, at painfully close range, and the screams of the men in the ditch told him all he needed to know. It had been loaded with case shot, a wooden cylinder packed with musket-balls, and that cylinder had split as the charge spewed it from the barrel, the balls scattering in a wide, murderous arc that whipped mercilessly through the Roundhead ranks.

‘
Now
!’ Johnson brayed, drawing his sword as he went to the sally port. ‘
Charge
!’

Then they were outside, exposed on the southern edge of the wall, plummeting into their own ditch and the chaos of the shredded greencoats. Stryker’s men were all around him. ‘Loyalty!’ he screamed, for it was the field-word they had all agreed, differentiating his own green-clad troops from the Parliament men. ‘Give ’em a salvo, boys!’

The Royalist party, up on the far side of the ditch now, let rip with a ragged volley that pulsed in a shattering crescendo, and then flipped their weapons about, using them to club their stunned enemies. The men of the Trained Bands now panicked. The auxiliaries abandoned their ladders and went for their swords, but their front ranks, flensed by the case shot, were too frightened to press on, and they turned into the men clamouring behind, causing a melee amongst themselves while Johnson’s thirty Royalists slashed and snarled at their backs. There was a scramble up to the half-moon, through the fence of sharpened stakes and headlong into the second half of their own division. It was anarchy; the reserve troops could not move forward, the city men were not willing to regroup, and the whole division began to cave in on itself.

Johnson was on the man-made lip of the half-moon, whirling his blade high and beckoning his men on. Stryker was deeper still, and he battered a man’s hanger from his hand, kneed him in the crotch and smashed his face to a bloody pulp with the heavy guard of his own sword. He ducked a desperate swipe from a reversed Roundhead musket butt, drove his dagger up into his assailant’s belly and shouldered him out of the way. Men swirled on all sides like moths at a flame, careening into one another, hacking and snarling like rabid dogs. He could feel wetness on his face but could not tell if it were sweat or blood. He was deaf to all but his own pulse, revelling in the heady stink of blood and dirt and smoke that invaded his nostrils. He crowed to the darkening skies, feeling the wild, rushing, heart-searing joy of a battle won, of an enemy mauled, and spun on his heels, the mud sliding like ice as he searched for the next opponent. But not all the Parliament men had cut and run.

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‘How do you plan to escape?’ the woman said.

Roger Tainton looked up, startled. He had been seated, fastening his boot when the doors had eased open. There, standing beneath the lintel, framed by the grey afternoon, was the silhouette of a woman. He could see that she was short, wrapped in a long cloak, the hood bunched at her shoulders to allow freedom for her golden hair. One of her hands emerged from the folds of the cloak. White, delicate fingers were curled around the handle of a slender dirk.

Tainton eased himself to his feet. ‘Escape? I will stroll from here like a conquering hero.’

The glint of teeth showed briefly in the gloom as Lisette Gaillard smiled. ‘You were expecting Basing to fall?’ She made a tutting sound with her tongue. ‘Alas, but the waves break against it,
monsieur
. And Lord Hopton is on his way.’

Tainton tasted acid in his mouth. He swallowed it down. ‘You lie.’

She laughed, a dry, mocking cackle that made him want to draw the entrails from her. ‘Try it. Fetch a horse, take the gold down to the gates and see what happens.’

Tainton had his own knife in his hand, but he moved to the side, carefully placing his feet so that he did not trip on the bodies of the guards. He leaned against the wagon, pushing his free hand up under the heavy sheet. ‘This paltry bastion cannot stand against Waller.’