Authors: Michael Arnold
The Army of the Solemn League and Covenant had begun to die two days before the attack on the Manor. It started with a gunner, then a wheelwright and his family, their faeces turned the colour and consistency of the water in the siege trenches. Within two days the sickness was devouring a regiment of dragoons and rumours were circulating of sweating, vomiting musketeers in the ranks of Lord Fairfax’s Northern Association. It was all forgotten with the breach and the explosion and the assault. Eyes and minds went to that exposed corner of York, where flame and smoke pulsed, and where the din of battle smothered all. But that had gone now, replaced by lethargy, sickness and an insidious foreboding. Two days on from the abortive attack, and the pestis seemed once more to be in the ascendancy. All the while the carts piled with lime-sprinkled corpses trundled out to the burial pits, and everyone knew that disease would finish the grand alliance as sure as any army.
Leven kicked at the struggling grey as the slope became steeper. The horse grumbled but quickened its step a touch, snapping big teeth at a mangy dog that scuttled too close, a dubious looking scrap of flesh lolling from its mouth. ‘There they are, Davey.’
Leslie peered up from beneath his hat. ‘Black Tom looks ready to blow.’
Leven allowed himself a chuckle, though he barely felt the ghost of mirth. ‘That he does. A shame his mine does not.’
Up ahead, on the crest of rising land beside the River Ouse, Sir Thomas Fairfax’s slender figure craned over the neck of his horse as he jabbed a finger at the man forced to stand before him.
‘Crawford’s ears’ll be ringing till dusk,’ Leslie said.
Leven nodded. ‘So they should.’
‘Thirty-five dead,’ Fairfax was saying as they reached the meeting point, the river rushing on their left as they overlooked the smoke-wreathed battlements of York. ‘One hundred wounded, and twice that captured.’
Major-General Lawrence Crawford’s face was tight. ‘The mine was flooding!’ the standing man protested. ‘I had to blow it lest all our efforts go to waste.’
‘And flood so quickly, did it,’ Fairfax retorted caustically, ‘that there was no time to warn the rest of us?’ He shook his head in unconcealed frustration. ‘We might have attacked, sirrah. Sent thousands of men against the walls all around the city while you took the Manor.’
Leven gazed down at Crawford. ‘It was an ill-conceived and uncoordinated venture, General. Destined for failure from first shot to last.’
‘There was no time,’ Crawford argued. He was flanked by his immediate superiors, Manchester and Cromwell, and he twisted to cast the former a plaintive look.
‘Hubris,’ Fairfax scoffed, ignoring the line of dragoons that clattered over the bridge of boats fifty yards at his back. ‘Arrogance. You meant to steal the glory for yourself, General Crawford, and now your precipitation has ruined us. The failure so destroys morale that the men are not keen to attack again.’
That was the crux of the matter, thought Leven. What had begun with the undermining of a tower, had ended with the undermining of the entire Parliamentarian enterprise. Heralds had gone into York as the smoke had cleared. They had pleaded with the Marquis of Newcastle to see sense. Why fight the inevitable, they argued? Why put more lives at risk by this unnecessary stubbornness? The attack on the Manor might have failed, but it was merely a taste of things to come. There would be more assaults, more bombardments, more powder-filled tunnels sunk deep beneath the walls. They reminded the Royalists that their besiegers were not one army, but three, numbering thirty thousand or more, and when they cleaved a way into the city there would be no satisfying their hunger for destruction. Every man, the heralds claimed, had heard rumour of Prince Rupert’s action at Bolton-le-Moors, and every man thirsted for revenge. But Newcastle and his arrogant Cavaliers had not given an inch, so the forces of Lord Leven, Lord Manchester and Lord Fairfax had had to set about digging new saps, raising new batteries and planning new mines, and all the while the men on York’s walls, on its gates and towers and barbicans, fought back with musketry and cannon fire. The rain fought too, and because it was the Parliamentarians who toiled in the boggy ground, it felt as though God had sided with the king. More men fell sick, some died, so that new burial pits were dug alongside the works overseen by engineers, and always there were rumours of a relief force massing on the far side of the mountains.
‘And where is your own contribution?’ the Earl of Manchester said turning to Fairfax, finally coming to the aid of his man. ‘Must the army of the Eastern Association do all the real work?’
Fairfax bridled. ‘The Walmgate mine is flooded, my lord. Always flooded. It will take days to bring to bear. The rain is an implacable foe.’
‘As is Prince Robber.’ It was Cromwell who spoke. He was wrapped in his usual trappings of leather and metal. ‘You are beset with fever, Sir Thomas?’
‘It ravages my regiments as greedily as any other.’
‘Then we must look to the west.’ Cromwell continued: ‘If we cannot break York, we must break camp. When the Papists arrive, we cannot face them so ruined with pestilence.’
‘We have time, gentlemen,’ Leven said placatingly. ‘Have faith.’ He looked deliberately at Cromwell. ‘And Rupert may yet go south.’
Cromwell shook his head. ‘He will come, my lord, and he will fight.’
York, 18 June 1644
Though forty-eight hours had slipped by since the skirmish at the Manor, Lancelot Forrester’s entire body still ached. He was in the south of York, west of the Ouse as it snaked its way through the streets, the heavily guarded Skelders Gate straight ahead. Here, in the sector directly opposing the Scots army, Sir Edmund Mowbray’s Regiment of Foot had been billeted, and it was to the home of a lawyer – driven out for his rebel sympathies – that Forrester had been summoned.
He wore a heavy woollen cassock against the rain, and he pulled it tighter across his chest. The gutter running along the centre of the road was swollen to breaking, a torrent of putrid effluent rushing away towards the riverbank, and he leapt it as he approached the house where the meeting of senior officers was due to convene. It would be dull, he knew. A discussion of supplies and casualties, of sentry duty and of ammunition audits; but that was regimental life. He passed a doorway that was wide open to the elements, and ducked under the lintel for a cursory glance. Inside, a man was screaming. He was down to his shirtsleeves – his green coat hooked on the wall behind – a pulpy-faced whitecoat standing at his back with hands clamped firmly at his trembling shoulders. The chirurgeon leaned across the seated fellow, squinting through wire-rimmed spectacles as he probed underneath his patient’s collarbone with a metal instrument. On the floor, between the wounded man’s shuffling feet, was a bowlful of crimson water and a neatly placed sheet laid out with three saws of varying size, a couple of chisel-like tools and a large pair of darkly congealed scissors. The chirurgeon gave another speculative jab at the wound, the seated man brayed to the rafters, and Forrester shuddered. He understood why the door was open, for the whole place stank. Suddenly his own aches seemed to fade.
‘Beg pardon,’ he muttered when the chirurgeon noticed him. He ducked out of the building, but a voice hailed him from within the makeshift infirmary.
The chirurgeon was standing straight now, while two assistants bound the injured soldier’s chest. In his hand were long tweezers, their tapered jaws clamped around the half-flattened disc that had been a musket-ball. ‘Will you deliver a message for me, sir?’
‘I am expected by my colonel, sir.’
‘’Tis only upstairs, sir,’ the chirurgeon said. ‘I am exhausted.’ He looked down at his heavily stained apron. ‘And not dressed for polite interview.’
Forrester nodded. ‘Very well. Be quick about it, sir.’
The chirurgeon held up the bloody bullet. ‘With Chirurgeon Turner’s compliments, sir, would you let Master Killigrew know that this man will live?’
‘Dear Lancelot.’ Ezra Killigrew was standing at the only window in the small chamber, staring down at the street through diamond panes of glass. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’
Forrester bounded up the stairs two at a time. He took a few paces into the room, noting a shelf full of scrolls on the wall and a table neatly stacked with sheets of paper in one corner. ‘I have a message to deliver, sir. Master Turner’s compliments.’
Killigrew turned. ‘Well? What has our dear chirurgeon to say?’
‘The wounded man, sir. The greencoat.’
‘Ah yes,’ Killigrew nodded. ‘One of Manchester’s Roundheads. Found in the Marygate rubble, bleeding like a stuck pig.’
Forrester opened his mouth to speak, but paused when he saw shadows move under a door set into the far wall. Someone waited in the adjacent room.
Killigrew cleared his throat. ‘I dare say you are eager to attend upon Sir Edmund.’
Forrester blinked hard as he pushed the strange shadow from his mind. ‘I am to tell you that he will live, sir.’
‘Good,’ Killigrew said. ‘He will be able to answer some questions, then. Is that all?’
‘That is all, sir,’ Forrester replied, realizing that the building was designated for interrogation rather than recuperation.
‘Then you are free to go.’ Killigrew curled his upper lip. ‘Do enjoy Sir Edmund’s council, Lancelot. And try to stay awake, there’s a good chap.’
Forrester knew that loitering in the inner sanctum of Killigrew’s nest of spies was an invitation to trouble, yet here he was, back pressed against the panelled wall abutting the closed door through which he had walked only moments before. The shadow had been there, too close for anything but an eavesdropper, and Forrester wanted to see who the hidden listener had been. Killigrew had been too keen to be rid of him.
‘Dog.’ A stranger’s voice sounded from within the chamber. ‘That’d be right, so it would.’ Forrester slid as close as he could to the door hinges, breath held tight, ear pressed to the meagre chink.
‘Have a care, man,’ Killigrew was saying. ‘Do not speak of such things here.’
‘But dog?’
‘Suffer it, sirrah, or find another employer.’
‘We’re among friends in this fair city, are we not, sorr?’ the first man replied. He was an Irishman.
‘York is for the King, aye, but nowhere is safe. Now, to business. You are recovered?’
‘Well enough, sorr. Was a bastard of a swim. Still coughing up weed. But you got m’ report?’
No answer. Killigrew must have nodded, for he said: ‘And you say he searched Sydall’s house?’
‘Top to bottom, sorr, so he claims.’
‘Then he is right.’ There was a pause. Forrester heard the scrape of a cup as Killigrew lifted it. ‘The flagon is with this whelp. You say he knows where the bitch is?’
‘Aye, sorr,’ the Irishman said, ‘so he claims. Reckoned she was with an officer. Protected by him. Probably ploughin’ her fresh wee cunny, so he was, the lucky bastard. Still, he’ll be a dead’un by now. The girl will have squealed her secrets too. That’s all I was to convey to you, Master Killigrew.’
‘Christ, but this is a rare mess,’ Killigrew’s voice rasped, muffled, perhaps, by a knuckle pressed to his mouth.
‘You’re telling me, sorr.’
‘Yours is not to make sense of it, Devlin. I am the hammer. You and Kendrick are the nails. Understood?’
‘Understood. This particular nail is now without a horse, seeing as I’m not likely to get out o’ this goddamned hole in time to fetch it.’
‘You’ll be recompensed,’ Killigrew said, ‘have no fear. Now out of my sight. I have other matters to address.’
Everton Heights, Liverpool, Lancashire, 19 June 1644
There were dray carts loaded with coils of match-cord parked on the village green, a trio of small boys racing between them as they kicked a ball amid shrieks of delight. A group of harquebusiers cantered along the main street, helmets bright, scarves a livid red in the noonday sun. Stryker nodded to their leader as Vos stepped past, receiving a knuckled visor in reply, and let the big stallion climb the hill. When he reached the brick-built house he handed Vos’s reins to a welt-chinned ostler and bounded up the flight of steps to the large, red door, knocking hard and turning to look out over Liverpool. It seemed so tranquil from up on the ridge, the damage to its walls almost imperceptible.
The door opened to reveal a fresh-faced lieutenant who looked as though the angel of death had personally come for his soul. ‘Y—yes?’
Stryker smiled widely, knowing the gesture would only tug gruesomely at the mottled scars across his left cheek and eye socket. ‘Major Stryker to see His Highness.’