Warlord's Gold: Book 5 of The Civil War Chronicles (60 page)

Tainton whipped at the horse. The wagon lurched through the archway, mercifully sheltered from the rain, hooves clopping on the flint path that lead towards the bridge. Suddenly Lisette Gaillard groaned from under the thick sheet, giving him a start. Her moans were indistinct and slurred, and he was not concerned that she posed any threat, but a man carrying corpses would arouse suspicion if one of them moved, so he hauled on the reins. He slid down from the seat and went to the rear of the vehicle, peeling back the sheet far enough to reveal the Frenchwoman. She was slumped over the chests, her left temple caked and dark with drying blood, but the movement of the sheet seemed to wake her and she gradually sat up.

‘Where?’ she croaked, swaying. Her pupils tightened as she caught a glimpse of the blade in his hand. ‘You.
Fils de pute
.’

Tainton licked his lips. ‘I had hoped to keep you for later, where our final conversation could be more—leisurely.’ He tightened his grip on the octagonal knife handle. ‘But you are more useful to me as a cadaver.’ Tainton stood on the tips of his toes to grasp Lisette by her collar, and dragged her yielding body down so that her bloody face hovered just above his. ‘You destroyed me, woman. Robbed me of my body and my future. I have waited a long time for this moment.’

Lisette spat in his face. ‘
Va te faire méttre, connard
.’

He grinned, bringing the knife up to her windpipe. ‘For it is written. Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’

Her blue gaze twitched away. She was staring back at the Old House yard. Her purple lips turned up at the corners. ‘And behold,’ she whispered, ‘a pale horse. And  he that sat upon him, his name was Death.’

Stryker clattered on to the flint runway under the arch, hauling the mud-smeared gelding to a whinnying halt just a few yards to the rear of the covered wagon. Tainton was there, leaning against it, a long dagger in his hand.

‘You did not need to concern yourself, Captain,’ the rebel agent said, remaining stock still as he spoke. ‘All I ever wanted was the gold and the woman.’

Stryker swung his leg over the saddle and dropped to the hard ground. His hand was shaking and he drew his sword if only to occupy it. ‘Murderer.’

Tainton made a show of sniffing the air. ‘Stryker, you are the worst kind of liar. A man pretending noble intent when all the while it is you who kills for a corrupt king, you who thrives on blood and death, you who swives your Popish punk without concern for the sins you commit. You lust and you deceive and you are destined for hell’s purifying flames.
I
did what was necessary.’ He tapped a foot so that his spurs gave their metallic rustle. ‘You asked me why I wore these, remember? Rotating nine-point rowels, made from stamped sheet iron. Exquisite. Each point chiselled into a leaf effect, and devilish sharp. Proved their worth, would you not say?’

The ragged gash Stryker had seen on Jack Trowbridge’s mutilated face came back to him. He had gone to the subterranean chamber first, checked for the gold. All he had found was his musketeers, carved and bludgeoned as though a wild beast had savaged them, and a cart empty of gold. ‘My men I accept,’ he said hoarsely, his voice echoing under the stone arch. ‘But the boy?’

‘Casualty of war,’ Tainton said.

The youngster’s deeply slit throat had gaped in that dark vault, causing vomit to bubble up to sour Stryker’s mouth. ‘Victim of a depraved bastard.’

‘Spare me.’ Tainton’s voice dripped with scorn. ‘The rebellion must have the gold to survive.’

‘The Solemn League and Covenant,’ Stryker said bitterly.

Tainton shrugged. ‘The Scots are an avaricious tribe. The Parliament must do what it must do to secure their help.’ He patted the wagon. ‘This will do nicely.’

Stryker forced a mirthless laugh. ‘You’ve lost, Tainton.’

‘As far as your friends on the gate are concerned, I carry a cartload of Parliament bodies. We are honour-bound to return them for burial.’

Stryker shook his head. ‘You’ll die here.’

‘If that is God’s will, then so be it. I go to my maker, Stryker. To sit at the right hand of King Jesus. You cannot say the same for your own soul.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘And your demise will come, Captain, trust in that. You cannot win this war. We
know
you. We know everything you do, every move you make.’

The taunt pulled at threads in Stryker’s mind, ones he had forgotten still dangled. He took a step closer, twitching his sword in threat. ‘How did you know the gold was on Scilly? Who gave you that information?’

Roger Tainton laughed, his teeth, so incongruously handsome in so foul a skull, gleaming like strings of pearls. He grasped a fistful of sheet and dragged the covering back, exposing the glittering bounty. But Stryker’s eye saw only one thing. One prize. Curled like a still-born foetus atop the wooden chests, hair turned black and matted in her own blood, was Lisette Gaillard. Her eyes were closed, her face starkly white.

Roger Tainton threw his knife. It was intended for Stryker’s chest, but it glanced off his upper right arm. Stryker yelped in pain, dropped the sword, and his enemy made a desperate lunge at him. Tainton hit Stryker hard in the midriff, both men careening backwards in a tangle of limbs. They were off the flint path now, collapsing together in the quagmire of the yard, their grunts smothered by the rush of the rain. Shouts, muffled by the storm, rang out from the windows above. Stryker’s right arm was numb at the open flesh and stabbed by lancing pain down towards his wrist and fingers, so he groped for Tainton’s eyes with his other hand. Somehow he found the soft target, pushing, delving, clawing with his nails until Tainton screamed. They rolled apart, slipping and sliding in the filth, standing at once to face one another. Tainton’s hat was gone, his bald, patchy pate shining in the rain.

Stryker stooped to pull the dirk from his boot, but he swore viciously as he caught sight of his own sword in Tainton’s hand. They circled warily, each feinting to force the other to move. Stryker darted inwards, closing the gap, but Tainton kept him at bay easily with the longer steel, and then the Parliamentarian had his back to the gatehouse, and he edged towards it, never taking his gaze from the Royalist. He reached the arch, then the vehicle itself, and clambered up so that he balanced on the rearmost edge next to Lisette.

‘She lives, you know,’ Tainton said with an expression of exquisite relish. ‘You had a chance to save her.’

‘Tainton!’ Stryker pleaded, hearing the desperation in his own voice. He knew it would do no good, so he inched round the side of the vehicle in an attempt to reach the horse.

‘Stay where you are!’ Tainton ordered.

Stryker froze. He was still three yards from the animal. He turned back.

Tainton put the tip of the sword to Lisette’s breast. ‘With your own blade, Stryker. It could not be more perfect.’

Stryker dived. He went for the piebald’s rump, stabbing it as hard as he could. The animal shrieked as though it were being gelded, kicked out at Stryker, only just missing his head, and reared with another shrill wail. It bolted, hauling the wagon over the flint runway and out on to the rain-harried bridge. Stryker scrambled to his feet as it slipped on the far side, crashing over its forelegs, the heavy cart skidding and veering in the saturated mud until it slammed into the hapless, braying beast. Then all was still. Lisette seemed to stir, woken by the mad, brief charge and the pulsating rain.

He looked back. At the far side of the gatehouse, soldiers had appeared. The ones, he supposed, who had hailed them from the windows. They were armed, one of them barked something at him, but Stryker ignored them. Instead, bleeding and exhausted, he crossed to Roger Tainton. The Roundhead agent moaned. He had been thrown clear of the wagon, landing awkwardly on the mortared flint so that both his arms seemed perversely canted at the wrong angles. He held them up, agony etching deep valleys around his mouth. ‘Forgive me!’

Stryker thought of the torture he had endured at the orders of this man, of the stiff, mottled-blue bodies of the Trowbridge twins, of the red-headed boy whose reedy throat glinted in the dark like a ruby. He stooped, dragged one of Tainton’s boots from his foot, eliciting a shrill cry from the former harquebusier. ‘Only God forgives.’

He slashed the boot down and across so that the jagged spur tore a frayed line in Tainton’s neck. It was not deep enough to kill instantly, but blood spewed, hot and steaming in the cold, to pool around his hairless head. He gargled, tried to sit, eyelids flickering, shattered arms flailing. And then he slumped back, mouth agape, a look of pure amazement on his face. He twitched once, a last spasm of violence, and then he was still.

CHAPTER 29

‘Home!’ the single word erupted from the sodden faces arrayed in the fields just north of the village. There were thousands, brought up in their tight ranks, neat lines crafted expertly by sergeants wielding sharp halberds and sharper tongues.

Sir William Waller scowled as he rode across the front rank, chin dipped low so that his hat took the brunt of the storm. At his back the black edifice of Basing House loomed like a festering canker from the soil. A pestilence that refused to die. At his front was his army, so many regiments drawn up like toy soldiers in the lashing rain. It was a model piece of martial prowess, a lesson in drill and timing. And, he knew, it was all an illusion.

‘Home! Home! Home!’ the cry rose again, turning into a throaty chant that rolled like a wave, yet waning before it reached the foremost ranks, so that none could be singled out for having lent their voice to the mutiny.

Waller held up a staying hand, lifting his head against the rain. The city regiments had spoken. They had never wanted to be here, never wished to march so far from their families and livelihoods. After two shambolic attempts to take Basing, the rain seemed to have sounded the final death knell in their spirits. ‘Night falls swiftly!’ Waller shouted. ‘Will you take this malignant castle for your general?’

‘Home! Home! Home!’ the regiments rumbled.

A rider encased entirely in armour thundered to Waller’s side, wheeling his horse about. ‘This is the Devil’s work, Sir William!’ he called through his heavy visor. ‘Hang every tenth man!’

Waller wiped water from his eyebrows and offered the cuirassier a withering smile. ‘This is not Rome, Sir Arthur, and I am not Crassus. Tell me how we will renew the attack, if I have sent so many of my own men to the grave? Lord knows we have buried enough this day.’ He spurred past Heselrige as the chant gathered momentum again, pulsing like a beating heart up and down the tight lines of men from Westminster, Tower Hamlets and Cripplegate. When he was close enough to see the whites of the nearest eyes, he drew a pistol from its saddle holster. ‘The next man to use such base language will be shot by mine own hand! This will not do! Not do at all!’

The chant withered as quickly as it had grown, but the sentiment remained, etched on each and every face. Waller trusted his own men, the veterans forming his personal regiment, and most of the horse, dragoons and even the Farnham Castle greencoats. But the London Trained Bands were his core, the bulk of his army, and without them he was nothing. He pushed the pistol home, turning his mount. He was disconsolate. His ambitious attack had lasted no more than two hours. It had involved more than three thousand men, himself included for a short, unremarkable few minutes. They had been well armed, adequately kitted and equipped with brass petards and plenty of ladders. Yet on all fronts his army had been thrown back, humiliated by a rag-rag amalgam of Papists, peasants, aristocrats, artists and mercenaries. There were even unsettling reports of the garrison’s womenfolk taking up arms. Before he could renew the attack, the rain had come. The thrum of heavy, ruthless droplets on the sodden fields and against the glassy surface of the River Loddon had replaced the noise of drum and cannon, and now, at dusk, his grand army was teetering on the verge of open mutiny.

An aide appeared from one quarter of the dusky field, and Waller instinctively knew the message he conveyed would be laden with doom. He unfolded the proffered parchment silently, the inky scrawl immediately blotting and blurring as raindrops pattered amongst the letters, but he only bothered to scan the smearing lines. It was clear enough. Lord Hopton, it seemed, had made rendezvous with Sir Jacob Astley at Kingsclere, and was ready to march. Waller’s best friend and most formidable enemy would be at Basing House imminently, at the head of the king’s new western army. The report spoke of nearly five thousand men, divided evenly between foot and horse, and, unlike Waller’s hastily cobbled force, Hopton had several notable and experienced units under his command. Waller screwed the message into a tight ball and tossed it into the mud. He would fight Hopton, that much was certain. As he scowled into the driving storm, he made a private vow not only to engage the advancing Cavaliers, but to destroy them utterly. But not here. Not yet. He barked orders to his aides and officers, issuing a general withdrawal, and rode away, not knowing if the moisture on his cheeks was chill rain or bitter tears.

k

It was only when the light fully faded, oppressed by blue-grey clouds that pooled like immense bruises, that the inhabitants of Basing House finally believed in their miracle. They danced and sang, broke open the barrels of beer and claret they had rescued from the flames that had devoured the Grange, and jeered the distant torches that marked a retreating army on the black horizon.