Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 3

  ‘Some of your friends were here,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper, as though she was compelled to tell him but hoped he would not hear. She pushed his long hair behind his right ear, fingertips brushing his cheekbones and the taut ridge of his brows. ‘Matthew Penn and Will Trencher. They’ve been in a few times. They said you were killed at Kineton Fight.’ Tom felt some small lifting of his soul’s burden at the mention of his friends. ‘They miss you, Tom. Never said as much of course, but I could see it in their faces. You men can’t hide things like that. Matthew said you fought like a demon. That you weren’t afraid of anything.’

  ‘I was afraid,’ Tom heard himself mumble.

  ‘One of the others saw you ride into the King’s men, saw you shot from your horse.’ There was a short heavy silence. ‘I’m sorry if Achilles is gone,’ she said, ‘you loved that horse better than you love most people.’ Better than you love me, her eyes said. Tom said nothing and Ruth nestled a kiss amongst his hair and pressed her cheek against his head. ‘No one has heard from you since.’

  A short while later he heard Ruth say: ‘Well you’re safe now.’

  And then he had slept.

  Now it was mid March and freezing still, and Tom had resumed his old duties at the Lord, clearing tables, hefting barrels and doing whatever else Abiezer Grey, in grudging tone, asked him to do. Grey had not been cheered to see Tom again, had visibly chafed when Tom had said that he would work for food and fodder for his mare but not for a room, being as he would share Ruth’s bed. But it was more than distaste at the thought of Tom lying with Ruth, more than simple jealousy that Tom had seen in the innkeeper’s eyes. If it was not quite fear it was fear’s cousin, and it was a look he was coming to recognize in patrons of the Lord and in whores and tradesmen, even in the jakes farmers and rag-and-bone men he dealt with.

  For Tom was a killer. People saw it in him and it disquieted them so that if they could they avoided him. If they could not do that, they would equip themselves with dourness, incline towards few words and eye him askance. And for his part Tom did little to assuage their unease, saw no point in trying to be anything other than what he was: a man who had butchered others in the red-hot madness of battle. A man who had lain with the dead, been pecked at by the carrion feeders, and yet had been turned away from Hell itself and brought back to life.

  The freezing night he had spent on the plain below Edgehill was a haunting from which he could not unshackle himself. In the daytime, when he was busy earning his food and beer, the memory of that great battle was a thin gossamer web clinging to his soul. But at night, after they had enjoyed each other and Ruth was sleeping soundly beside him, its horror spread like a dark heavy stain that threatened to spill into his mouth and drown him. Somehow the smell of death, of open bowels and the copper stink of blood, would seep from his memory back into his nose. Pain would bloom in the wound in his shoulder – all healed now – where scalding hot lead had ripped through his flesh. He would clench his right hand, the savage stub of the third finger throbbing, reminding him of the indignity of being mutilated by thieves who had flocked to loot the dead.

  And he would hear again brave Achilles’s scream of pain as the musket ball punched into his noble chest.

  And yet he kept it all, its foulness and its shame, its savagery and its … thrill to himself. He knew Ruth would gladly hear the whole if he would tell it. She would listen sympathetically and then she would minister to him in her fashion, show him kindness the way a young girl will tend to a lame dog or a bird with a broken wing. No, that was unfair. There would be more to it than that, more than some ingenuous need to mend him. Truth be told he knew the girl was more in love with him than he was with her. Her eyes had betrayed as much when they had coupled the night after his return and Ruth’s soul had, for one fleeting moment, lain as bare as her body. Yes Ruth would care for him, and even given the affections of such as her, a serving girl who is every man’s friend, it would perhaps prove balm to his soul.

  But he said nothing, instead feeling the rank memory of that late October night suppurate and fester like a wound that is bandaged tight and given no air.

  Now, The Leaping Lord on Long Southwark, which Abiezer Grey leased off Mark Sayer for an annual rent of fifty pounds and a sugar loaf, was the nearest thing Tom had to a home, and each day he found himself doing the kinds of jobs that once, in a distant life, would be done by servants without him barely so much as noticing.

  ‘Looks like rain,’ Ruth said now, looking up to the slate grey sky as she handed two pails of kitchen slops to a small grubby boy named Snout on account of his snub nose.

  ‘I’ll not complain if it dampens down some of this damn smoke,’ Tom replied, putting a beer barrel down onto the cobbles and straightening to drag an arm across his forehead. The breeze was coming from the west, bringing with it palls of acrid coal smoke from the glassblowers, soapmakers and cloth-makers clustered cheek by jowl along St Saviour’s, so that even Tom’s sweat was grimy with soot.

  ‘When it comes, Snout, you stand out in it for a while, do you hear?’ Ruth said to the boy who nodded contritely. ‘Let God’s rain wash some of that filth off. I’ve known rakers that’d look like gentlemen of the King’s Chamber if they stood beside you. And tell old Jacob I’ll be expecting some bacon from him before long.’ The boy shuffled off with the heavy pails and Tom smiled to himself because he suspected it would be some time yet before Ruth saw any bacon in return for the Lord’s kitchen slops. He knew that old Jacob Payne kept his pigs up past St Margaret’s Hill and Blackman Street in St George’s Fields. Yet several times Tom had seen Snout turn right down Long Southwark instead of left. It was a far shorter walk north past St Olave’s and to the river than to Payne’s farm, and he would put money on the slops more often than not ending up in the Thames mud rather than the pigs’ trough.

  ‘He’s a little devil that one,’ Ruth said, shaking her head as she watched Snout go. The boy, no doubt feeling eyes on him, turned left this time, though that was nothing a detour across the road and through St Saviour’s wouldn’t fix.

  ‘I should go back to my regiment,’ Tom said, turning a palm up and eyeing the grey sky indifferently. A heartbeat later the first fat drop splashed onto his hand and he closed his fist around it.

  ‘You’ve done your part in this whole mess, Tom,’ Ruth said, ‘and no one can say otherwise.’ She did not have to speak then of the scars on his body for him to know that her mind’s eye was completing an inventory of them, and instinctively he closed his good hand around the right one with its ugly stub where the ring finger was gone. ‘I dare say the great argument will rage on very well without you, for all your ferocity.’ There was almost a smile with that last but not quite. ‘Let London’s other young hotbloods follow the drum,’ she said, ‘God knows there are enough of them. Do you good to leave it alone till it blows over.’ She turned back to look through the passage at the traffic of carts and horses and folk on foot streaming past. ‘I’ll bet that little bugger’s going to cross over and double back towards the river,’ she said suddenly, turning to eye Tom as though he were in league with the imp. Tom said nothing. ‘He’s a devilish little sod, that boy,’ she said, then seeing Ralph Hall, the Lord’s cook, who was on the way out, she reminded him to buy more tobacco from Timothy Bowell, but that no matter how much Bowell protested about his starving family, Hall was not to pay more than a shilling a pound for it.

  Then, hefting his own barrel from the vendor’s cart, which had parked on the street because its new young driver had been too afraid of scraping his master Jonas Reede’s wagon against the passage (though there was, all could see, room aplenty), Abiezer Grey swaggered back through the archway into the Lord’s courtyard. Seeing Tom resting, the big innkeeper shot him a disapproving look, though said nothing as he staggered on with his precious cargo of beer. Deliberately Tom waited a long moment, as though daring Grey to challenge him, then Ruth shot him a chastising look, the kind of look with which he imagined Sno
ut was wholly familiar, and so Tom bent his legs and wrapped his arms around the barrel, lifting it into the rain that was beginning to dash against its oak lid.

  ‘I don’t know why you have to antagonize him,’ Ruth said, shaking her head. ‘God knows there aren’t many landlords who would have you in their employ and under their roof.’

  ‘Because I fought? Because I was killing men while they were filling cups and keeping their heads down?’ Tom asked, puffing with the effort. Normally they would roll the barrels, but the cobbles of Long Southwark had been known to bust a stave and that was a risk Abiezer Grey was not prepared to take with Reede’s beer.

  ‘Because you are the worst worker the Lord has seen for ten years!’ Ruth said.

  ‘I earn my bread,’ he called behind him, then scraped his knuckles on the Lord’s doorframe and cursed as he entered the dark, musty-smelling inn.

  ‘Aye, maybe,’ Ruth said, suddenly behind him so that with a grimace he straightened, making the load look lighter than it was. ‘But you’re too proud to make a decent servant and too surly to be good company.’

  ‘Which is why I should be back with the regiment,’ he said, as a knot of men and women who were wreathed in their own pipe smoke and talking all at once parted to let him, and more importantly Reede’s beer, through.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT HAD NOT been easy saying goodbye to Ruth for the second time. Two nights ago, when most of The Leaping Lord’s patrons had either staggered off to their lodgings or home to their beds, he and Ruth had shared three pitchers of Reede’s strongest beer and a handful of the tobacco which Ralph Hall had, to his credit, bought off Timothy Bowell for tenpence a pound. Tom, who had in his mind loaded and primed the issue of his leaving, in the event found himself reluctant to pull the trigger and inwardly wondered at this cowardice which he had never felt in battle but which now held him to ransom.

  In the end, after hours of empty talk, it had been Ruth who gave voice to the thing, exhaling smoke that floated up to the dark-stained roof in a perfect, ethereal circle.

  ‘You’re leaving. When? Tomorrow? The day after?’ she had said, then taken a long draught of beer as though it meant nothing to her; yet all this outward disregard achieved was to betray the truth. She cared a great deal.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Tom had replied, caught off guard and feeling that one word both inadequate and cruel. ‘My wounds are healed.’

  ‘Are they?’ Ruth asked, blue eyes glaring, her plump cheeks flushing red.

  He had shrugged. ‘I have my duty. This war is just beginning and I won’t hide from it.’

  ‘You want revenge,’ she accused him.

  He had not disagreed with that and they had sat in silence for a long moment. Then Ruth had stood, thrusting her cup at him, so that some of the beer sloshed over its lip onto the table.

  ‘If you leave tomorrow then do not come back, Thomas,’ she had said, holding his eye, then downing the remaining beer in one go. ‘You will not be welcome here again.’ And with that she had turned and pushed off through the last of the Lord’s drinkers. The next day, an hour before dawn and his head ringing like the bells of St Saviour’s church, Tom had put all his worldly belongings into a knapsack and left The Leaping Lord.

  He had followed the Thames upriver, riding some eleven miles to Richmond where, he had heard, Sir William Balfour was recruiting. For Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and commander of Parliament’s forces, planned to move west to take Windsor, Henley-on-Thames and Reading, and the bitter winter months were the time to forge an army. A renowned man of principle and a good soldier, Balfour would be integral to Essex’s ambitions, Tom knew. The Scotsman had commanded Tom’s regiment as lieutenant-general of horse at Kineton Fight and Tom respected him. He was a fighter, a man who had broken several regiments of the King’s foot, and Tom believed that his own best chance of re-entering the fray, of exacting vengeance upon his enemies, lay with riding in one of Balfour’s troops.

  But five months had passed since that bloody day when they had ridden their horses into the storm of musketry and flesh-ripping pikes, and when faithful Achilles though shot through the chest had run on, carrying Tom towards his enemies until at last the stallion had faltered and fallen and bled to death in the mud. And now Tom stood shivering in the gathering dark, waiting for a corporal in Captain Clement’s troop to return and tell him whether or not Clement would see him. He had found the army easily enough, its myriad camp fires casting a copper glow on the dusk sky above the royal park, and he had walked his mare past infantry regiments each comprising anything from three to thirteen companies, their tents ranged across the uneven ground like the spume of wind-whipped waves. But from then on, when he came amongst the horse brigades, he had been sent from pillar to post and troop to troop because no one seemed to know which regiment was where. The open land of grass and pollarded oaks upon which the King so loved to hunt his deer was now a seething mass of men and beasts on which an army’s sense of order was struggling to impose its will.

  ‘What makes you so special, lad?’ the corporal had asked, his shadow-played face hard and scornful, tempered by a harsh winter spent in the field. ‘Why would the captain want to waste his time with you?’

  ‘Because I am back from the dead,’ Tom had replied, knowing that appearing insane was unlikely to ingratiate him with the surly man, but not caring. ‘Tell Captain Clement that Black Tom has come back from the dead to kill Cavaliers.’

  The corporal had eyed him suspiciously, scratching his stubbled cheek, then shrugged and turned, walking off into the dark without another word.

  Tom realized he was shivering, but rather than from cold it was more akin to the feeling he got after a fight, when his very blood seemed to bubble in his veins and his soul trembled like the ground under a troop of charging horse. He recognized the feeling for what it was: the thrill of being back amongst others like himself, men who had known the savage joy and the animal instinct to survive at all costs. It was not quite a sense of belonging, but it was something similar.

  He waited for what seemed a long time, letting the atmosphere of the camp – the noise and bustle and men’s raillery, the stink of latrine pits, damp wool and wood smoke – wash over him. Men were cold and likely hungry and were surely missing their homes and families, and yet the occasional peal of laughter or good-natured insult threaded officers’ bellowed orders and the horses’ neighs and the lowing of the artillery train’s oxen, so that Tom was reminded of those heady days when they all had thought it would be a simple matter of giving the King’s army a bloody nose to prove their resolve. Remove the King’s wicked advisors, they had said, and His Majesty would hear his subjects’ plight and attend to them. But it had not been as easy as that. Now the country was at war and men on both sides were preparing for the river of blood that must surely flow in the spring if the current peace negotiations failed. In his heart Tom hoped that they would.

  The corporal returned, appearing as a silhouette with a fire’s glow behind him. ‘You’re in luck, lad,’ he said, knuckling snot from his nose. ‘The captain says he knows you. Follow me.’

  Leading his mare by the reins Tom followed the man past tents and a troop of between thirty and forty men all clustered around a fire that was raging, cracking and spitting as it devoured three gnarly old oak boughs and other deadfall. Despite the cold and the apparent lack of wine and beer being passed around, the men seemed in good spirits. They were swaddled against the chill, red montero-caps rolled down to protect the backs of their heads and necks, and about half had pipes clamped between teeth. Five or six, Tom noticed, even had women sharing their blankets, had their arms wrapped around them like war booty, and he knew that this was a sure way to make yourself unpopular with those who had all but forgotten the feel of a woman’s soft flesh.

  Then he passed a horse picket and some of the animals looked up at his mare, tossing their heads and snorting steam into the cold air, and for a heartbeat the loss of Achilles hit him like a thin blade
in the gut. But the horse they had let him ride from Shear House was a fine animal too. The bay mare had Arab’s blood in her, that much was obvious from her refined, wedge-shaped head, the good arch to her neck, the long, level croup and a high tail carriage. But Tom recognized the Hackney in her too, in the high knee and hock action that gave her a gait that appeared effortless and made her a pleasure to ride, and in her powerful shoulders and large expressive eyes. She had speed, endurance and was strong of bone, and Tom knew he had done the creature a disservice by not yet having given her a new name to get used to. He resolved to remedy this and just then the mare snorted, which sounded like derision, as though she knew her new master’s thoughts. Then Tom recognized the man ahead taking his leave of a well-fed, fur-swathed quartermaster: the long face with its great livid stain.

  ‘Here he is, sir, the lad who says he’s back from the dead. I’ll bet the King’s quaking in ’is boots,’ the corporal said, a snort escaping his nose as he gave Tom one last look up and down before the officer dismissed him with a curt nod.

  Tom rubbed his mare’s poll but she was not in the mood and tossed her head and dragged a foot through the grass.

  ‘Sir, my name is Thomas Rivers. I fought with you at Kineton Fight.’

  Captain Clement, who all knew was a dour man, spread his lips in what would have been a smile on anyone else.

  ‘I heard tales of spirits walking the plain after that bloody day,’ he said, face tight as a good knot, chin jutting. ‘They say that ghosts of the slain have contested that fight many times since. I put it down to nothing but the idle prattle of superstitious fools. And yet here you are, Thomas Rivers, an apparition before my eyes.’