Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Page 6

  Still staring at her, the old man scratched his cheek. ‘You remind me of her,’ he said, then he walked to the back of the room and stood with his back to Bess as the fire ate into the new log which cracked and spat in the silence between them. She thought he was studying the books, several of which she recognized from her mother’s library at Shear House: tomes by Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick. But when he turned back to her he was holding an apple, one of the hundreds from the crowded racks below the books. ‘It takes about twelve years to grow an apple tree from a pip to its first fruiting,’ he said, examining the apple as though he had never seen one before. ‘It is a labour of love. It requires enormous patience.’ He thrust his old thumbs into the apple where the stem emerged, splitting the fruit into two equal pieces. Then he pressed the halves together so that the apple looked whole again.

  ‘I will help you, Elizabeth,’ he said, putting the apple to his nose and inhaling. ‘I will buy your brother a pardon and you will give me your word that your mother shall never know that I have had a hand in the thing, or that you were ever here.’ Bess nodded and for the first time a smile found its way onto the old man’s lips. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘yours will be the hardest task, scouring this bleeding land for sight of the lad.’

  ‘I’ll find him,’ Bess said, excitement flaring in her blood at the reversal.

  ‘Perhaps you will. I will have a useful man accompany you, for the road will be dangerous. No place for a young woman.’

  ‘I have Joe,’ Bess said, glancing towards the door.

  ‘That wet-nosed boy out there? Nonsense. The man I am thinking of is resourceful and reliable. He will be your escort. Your … bodyguard.’ He tossed the two halves of the apple into the fire. ‘I would protect my investment,’ he said, walking to the door as the apple hissed and bubbled in the flames. ‘Merrett! Have the guest rooms prepared. My granddaughter and her skinny pup will be our guests tonight. And send someone for Dane! I don’t care if he’s drunk, up to his ogles in some whore’s notch or swinging from a gibbet, but I want him here by noon tomorrow.’

  ‘My lord, thank you,’ Bess said as he walked back over to his chair by the fire. He bent and picked up the chamber pot, waving his other hand at her, a grimace nestled amid his unkempt beard.

  ‘Now give me some peace, girl,’ he said sharply. ‘For I need to piss.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘WELL, I WOULDN’T wipe my arse with it,’ Trencher said, slamming the newsbook down onto the rough-hewn table and taking a lit taper from Robert Dobson who, his pipe clamped in his mouth, began digging filth out from his fingernails with a ballock dagger. The big-bearded trooper seemed not in the least interested in anything that was going on. ‘“Communicating the intelligence and affairs of the Court, to the rest of the kingdom”?’ Trencher mocked, voicing the statement written beneath the newsbook’s title. ‘I’ve heard more truth in a cow’s fart.’

  Weak dawn light seeped in through the farm kitchen’s window. The manuscripts which the secretaries had been so busy working on the night before still lay on the desks beside ink pots and quills, though the men themselves were absent.

  ‘Unfortunately, Trencher, not everyone shares your opinion of Mercurius Aulicus,’ Captain Crafte said, glancing at Tom as though seeking some assurance that the men in the room were really the right sort for the job at hand.

  Tom did nothing to persuade him that they were, said nothing to smooth the lines etched in the captain’s brow. Let the man work for it.

  With one hand Matthew Penn pulled up a stool and with the other grabbed the newsbook and brought a candle closer. He opened the printed pages and started to read. He had barely begun when Weasel cuffed him across the back of his head.

  ‘Come on then, you cunny! Tell me what it says,’ Weasel griped. ‘We didn’t all have a rich father and fancy schooling.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you, Weasel,’ Penn said, rubbing his sore head and running a finger beneath the words printed in long blocks up and down the newsbook’s pages.

  ‘What your friend means to say,’ Crafte said to Weasel, who seemed to have lost interest anyway and was busy scratching at an angry red boil on his cheek, ‘is that the half-truths and bare-faced lies printed therein are not worthy of consideration.’ Crafte walked over to the table and snatched up the news-book, holding it aloft as much to get everyone’s attention, Tom guessed, as to push his point. ‘This is our enemy, men. This flimsy, insubstantial binding of ink and paper does our cause more harm than that devil prince and all his Cavaliers.’

  ‘It’s just paper,’ Dobson said with a shrug of his heavy shoulders. ‘What ’arm can it do?’ Tom sighed inwardly at that, knowing he was about to hear the same sermon Captain Crafte had delivered the previous night. So he took the opportunity to pull out and study the crude map of Oxford the captain had given him. It was just lines and street names but the captain had said he must memorize what he could, for he must return it before setting off rather than risk being caught with it and giving the game away.

  ‘Just paper you say?’ Crafte enquired. ‘This is a concoction of vile squibs, mockery, satire and grotesques, all deployed to propagate the King’s cause and pour scorn on ours. This damn thing and its editor John Birkenhead lampoon us.’ He tossed the newsbook back onto the table and Penn looked about to pick it up but then thought better of it. ‘The pulpit and the press,’ Crafte went on, sweeping a hand through the air, ‘they are the bellows that fan the flames upon the world. We may have the pulpit but the King has the press and the press is the greater weapon.’

  ‘Can’t kill a man with paper,’ Weasel put in, a bony hand caressing the hilt of the hanger scabbarded at his hip.

  Crafte gave a bewildered shake of his head and looked at Tom. ‘Would you care to clarify, Thomas?’ he asked. ‘I fear your friends here can barely reach my ropes, let alone pull them.’

  ‘Ropes?’ Penn said, glancing at Tom, who gave a slight shake of his head in a gesture that said don’t ask, then waved the map at Trencher in a gesture that told him to pass over his pipe.

  ‘Thank you, sir, but I’ll let you carry on,’ Tom said, ‘for if these men choose to walk with me into the lion’s den and place their heads between the beast’s jaws, I would have them blame you not me if it turns out badly.’ He drew on the pipe and exhaled, watching the smoke drift up to join the haze hanging around the roof beams.

  Crafte sighed and turned back to Weasel. ‘The destructiveness of such a newsbook stems from its eloquence. Do you see? From its ability to project its disembodied voice, to travel long distances, to swarm over and infest the kingdom.’ He pointed down at the tatty-looking sheets still lying on the table by Matthew Penn. ‘The threat of Mercurius Aulicus lies in its capability of addressing a greater audience than manuscripts or the human voice. For John Birkenhead’s printing press spits out a thousand or more exact copies every week!’ He rolled his slight shoulders as though his own clothing were horribly uncomfortable. ‘Can you imagine?’ Clearly Weasel could not. ‘They are paper bullets and they harm us—’

  ‘Which is why,’ Tom interrupted, tired of the speech, ‘I am going to Oxford. I will silence John Birkenhead’s printing press.’ He looked at Will Trencher, who gave the slightest nod confirming that he was in no matter what. ‘We destroy the press, we silence the lies that plague our efforts.’

  Now he had everyone’s attention. Dobson was scratching his bearded cheek with his dagger’s point, brows bunched over dark, deep-set eyes. ‘You think you can walk into the enemy’s new capital and go around blowing things up?’ he asked, looking from Tom to Crafte and back again.

  ‘I’ll have more chance with some help,’ Tom replied matter-of-factly. It was important to appear confident if he was to hope for volunteers. But then, he was confident.

  ‘A handful of men, good men, have more chance than one alone,’ Captain Crafte said, ‘but more than that and the more likely you are to get found out.’
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  ‘It will be dangerous,’ Tom said.

  ‘I’m with you.’ Trencher picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away.

  ‘Why would we leave the soft warm bosom of the army,’ Weasel asked through a grimace, ‘to put ourselves in harm’s way like that?’ He glanced at Dobson who shrugged broad shoulders and looked to Tom. ‘Just so as I’m clear,’ Weasel went on, ‘you want us to steal into Oxford, which has got more bloody Cavaliers than rats, and risk being shot, or worse strung up, for the sake of that bunch of arsewipe.’

  ‘We might bump into His Majesty himself, Weasel,’ Trencher said, ‘and you could offer him a drop of General Balfour’s brandywine in exchange for his surrender.’

  Weasel shot Captain Crafte a guilty look, then glared back at his loose-tongued friend, who smiled conspiratorially.

  ‘I’ll admit it is an audacious scheme,’ Crafte said, taking in all the faces before him, before settling again on Weasel, ‘but perhaps not too bold for a man who would dare thieve his own general’s liquor.’ Weasel blanched at that but Crafte paid him no mind. ‘The newsbook is printed in Oxford for the consumption of cuckolds and fools,’ he said, ‘and in that city it seems least sense goes furthest.’

  ‘There’s ten pounds in it for each man if we get the job done,’ Tom said, sensing Crafte’s surprise, though the captain’s face showed no sign of it. There had been no mention of money when Tom had suggested his accomplices for the mission, but he knew that for Weasel and Dobson at least, silver’s lustre outshone duty’s.

  ‘A generous reward to be sure,’ Crafte said in answer to the eyes now on him, ‘but surely a pittance against the satisfaction of serving your Parliament and your country.’ Seeing how the captain had seamlessly endorsed his promise of reward, Tom cursed himself for not promising twenty pounds each. ‘Thomas here has vouched for your zeal,’ Crafte said, lingering a moment on Trencher whose face now looked granite-hard with the dawn light falling across it. ‘And that means something coming from a man who lay torn and bloody all night amongst the dead at Edgehill and yet stands before me now, willing to take the fight to the enemy once again.’ He flapped a hand. ‘But if your livers are too pale for such a task I will recruit others. The earl himself has recommended several men from his own guard with assurances that their valour is beyond question.’

  ‘Valour aside, Captain,’ Matthew Penn said, pulling his neat beard between finger and thumb, ‘what happens to us if we choose to decline your kind invitation to silence this John Birkenhead and his printing press? I presume your ambition relies on secrecy.’ He glanced at Tom then looked back at Crafte. ‘If even a whisper of it reaches Oxford the plot is dead.’

  Crafte nodded. ‘If you turn down this offer to help Parliament you will be placed under arrest until the deed is done,’ he said simply.

  ‘Ballocks,’ Dobson muttered.

  ‘When you were a wee snot-nosed brat did you ever poke a wasp nest?’ Trencher asked Weasel, thrusting an imaginary stick towards him. Weasel nodded. ‘Well, this will be fun just like that was.’ He looked at Tom, the slab of his face shifting, suddenly making him look younger, less fierce. ‘When do we leave, Black Tom?’

  ‘And your friends, Trencher?’ Captain Crafte asked, encompassing the others with a sweep of his arm, ‘must I lock them up and seek other confederates for you amongst the earl’s men?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary, Captain,’ Trencher said. ‘These lads are being coy now but that is just on account of you being an officer and a gentleman and a friend of the Earl of Essex to boot. They’re coming with us, all right.’

  ‘We are?’ Dobson said, his bird’s-nest beard jutting belligerently.

  ‘Yes you bloody are,’ Trencher said.

  Mun shivered in the pre-dawn dark. At last the feeble flames had eaten through the frost that sheathed the deadfall they had gathered and now the branches cracked and spat, challenging the spiteful cold. Mun had not wanted to make the fire. The reason they had been so successful, he knew, was largely their maintaining the element of surprise. They would track their quarry – recruiting parties, supply trains moving between Blackburn and Manchester – sometimes for days, always keeping downwind so that neither smell nor sound gave them away. Then, at his word they would strike out of the freezing dusk, falling upon their prey with savage joy like a starving wolfpack upon sheep, and the enemy died. But they had been out here for weeks now, sleeping under hedgerows, foraging on the move, and some of the men were beginning to suffer. He could see it in the clench of their jaws and the shoulders curling over their chests. They were filthy and unkempt, only briefly coming alive through the terrified elation of battle, and then retreating back into themselves once the blood-letting was over. Of the thirty-six men he had started out with, four had been killed and three had been wounded too grievously to remain with the troop. These men had ridden back to Shear House, their eyes full of shame at having to leave their comrades. The remaining thirty, himself included, had become hard, had been tempered like a sword forged in flame and cooled in the plunge, so that Mun was proud of them the way a man is proud of his best hunting hound. Yet he knew he must give them something. Knew too that a fire did more for a man than heat his bones: it revived his spirit. And so a fire blazed now, shielded from the west wind – and at least partially from sight – by a hillock that rose up towards the vast, black, star-flecked sky. His wolves hunched around that fire, some talking in low voices, others silent, their eyes feeding on the flames. All were swaddled in their cloaks and blankets, augmented by those pilfered from dead men who need fear the cold no longer.

  Mun looked east, his own eyes fixing on the sentry who stood with his back to the troop, peering out into the dregs of the night.

  ‘Move, damn you,’ Mun whispered, wanting even the slightest gesture that would tell him the man was not asleep on his feet. All around, the heather stirred so that the moor seemed to Mun like an ocean, ever shifting, restless and alive. The sentry, a strong young stonemason’s apprentice by the name of Tobias Fitch, crossed his arms to beat some warmth into his shoulders and Mun nodded, satisfied, then began up the hillock to relieve O’Brien from his watch.

  ‘Still limping then?’ O’Brien said, gazing up at the sky, barely turning as Mun came up.

  ‘Just habit,’ Mun said, gripping the short neck of his Dutch coat and pulling it tight against him. He had stripped the woollen coat from a dead rebel officer four days previously and now wore it over his buff-coat. ‘I barely feel it now,’ he said, remembering the brief but savage fight. A small troop of rebel dragoons had been scouting the land south-west of Bolton and had been approaching a farm when Mun and his wolfpack had swept down on them in a wave of steel and death. In the fray Mun had taken a sword blow to his left shin but luckily the dragoon’s hanger had been blunt, had not even pierced the skin. Though it had left an angry bruise and in truth it still hurt like the devil.

  ‘I’ll wager you’ve chipped the shin bone,’ O’Brien said, still staring at the night sky.

  ‘Go and get some sleep,’ Mun said, huffing into his hands. He wondered if this winter was ever going to end. If he would ever be warm again.

  ‘Have you ever wondered,’ the Irishman said, ‘how it is that so many stars blaze through the heavens, vanishing in half a sparrow’s fart, and yet there never seems to be fewer stars.’ He swept a gloved hand across the vast sky. ‘I’ve seen ten or more fall while I’ve been up here. Where do you think they go to?’

  ‘You’re supposed to be looking out for rebels,’ Mun said.

  O’Brien bent over and began rubbing some life back into his legs. ‘I’ll make sure Goffe relieves you in an hour,’ he said, lifting his hat and scratching his head.

  ‘Let him sleep. It’s nearly dawn and I’m awake now anyway.’

  The Irishman shrugged his broad shoulders and turned to make his way back down towards the fire and the ground sheet and blankets waiting for him. ‘You’ll see nothing, mind. No one is daft enough to be ou
t here at night,’ he said. ‘We’re safe as the dead.’

  ‘I’m not looking for men who might kill us,’ Mun said, scanning the bristling moor, the chill wind in his face, causing his eyes to water. ‘I’m looking for men whom we might kill.’

  ‘I’ll send Goffe up in an hour,’ O’Brien said, raising a hand as he picked his way back down the hill, the edges of the firelight spilling the colour back into his red breeches and russet cloak.

  And two days later, Mun got his wish.

  It was by Mun’s reckoning late afternoon. Before long the rooks and crows would be winging back to their roosts. Not that there were any birds to be seen, nor deer nor fox nor rabbit, nor any other living thing, because the weather was so foul. Freezing rain lashed the heath, running down men’s necks, soaking hats and cloaks and souls. It had even worked through the leather of Mun’s boots so that his feet were going numb. The wind came in sharp gusts, one following another like waves on the sea, snatching the last stubborn brown leaves from oaks and whipping them high into the freezing day.

  ‘I’ll be glad to get out of this wee draught,’ O’Brien said through a grimace, nodding ahead to the woodland that stood on the rising ground like a bastion against the elements. ‘Being cold is one thing. Jesus knows being wet is no fun. But both together and it’ll wipe the smile off a butcher’s dog.’

  ‘Let us hope that whoever they are they’ve already got a blaze going and some meat over it,’ John Cole said with a predatory smile, for they were not riding to the woods simply to get out of the storm. Earlier in the day they had come across a party of peat-cutters from a village near Pennington, who had told of a mounted column, some twenty to thirty men heading south towards Leigh.