Traitor

Chapter 41

LIKE A LONG snake, the five-thousand-strong army of Sir John Norreys trudged across the north-west of Brittany. At their head, the drums and fifes sounded the time and warned the everyday traffic of farmwagons and draycarts to make way or be cleared off the road.

John Shakespeare rode in the mid-division, a little way behind Norreys and Eliska. The army was heading for Morlaix to flush out the last of the Catholic League garrison and secure the north-west coastline, before moving on to the Crozon peninsula and the Fort of El Léon. Shakespeare knew that Norreys’s big fear was that the war would drag on into another winter; he wanted decisive action. The fort had to be taken, and quickly.

A cold wind was blowing in, with a light, squally rain. Shakespeare ignored it and constantly surveyed the countryside they were riding through, hoping to see the promised reinforcements of pressed men emerge from the mists and woods, with Andrew among their number. He turned in the saddle and looked back along the endless line of men and wagons carrying military equipment. A rider on a grey stallion was approaching, galloping along the flank of the marchers. As he reined in, Shakespeare recognised him as one of Cecil’s most trusted messengers.

‘Mr Shakespeare, I bring you this from Sir Robert.’

The man was breathless as he reached into his pack-saddle and removed a waxed waterproof packet, from which he took a sealed paper. He handed it to Shakespeare, then wheeled his horse and was gone.

Removing his dagger, Shakespeare slid the blade under the seal and broke open the letter. He unfolded it and glanced at its familiar, neat hand. It was encrypted in a code known only to Sir Robert and himself. He read it once, quickly, and found himself smiling wryly.

‘John,’ the letter said, ‘by now you should have had your instructions from Sir John Norreys. Put your trust in him. Summon your courage and fortitude and do all that he asks of you. I suspect you may still harbour doubts about the Lady Eliska, but I would ask you to trust her also. I am certain she has the best interests of England at heart.

‘I know you will do your duty. In truth, I can think of no other man who could undertake this work. With this in mind, I wish to reassure you that the authorities in Oxford have agreed to look favourably upon the case of your boy, Andrew. All will be well with him. I can also tell you that your man Cooper has done all that has been asked of him in protecting the Eye and that, God willing, very soon his labours will bear fruit for England. God speed, John. Written in haste at Greenwich, your good friend, Robert Cecil.’

Shakespeare smiled because he saw again the implied threat there. Do this and all will be well. Fail me and then … Well, the outlook is not so fair.

Taking out a tinderbox, he cast a flame, burnt the letter and scattered the ashes to the wind.

By the light of a hunter’s moon, Andrew approached the village. Dogs barked and he stopped. Had they caught his scent on the air?

It was a large village of two hundred or more houses, mostly poor, but a fair number of good quality, including a blacksmith, a brewer, a tanner and other tradesmen. On a normal night, they would all be asleep, but he knew they would have one or more men keeping watch because of the English soldiers, six or seven miles distant.

The barking stopped and Andrew moved on. Close to the village, he slipped off his boots and carried them, walking barefoot for silence. He trod across the fields and skirted the village. He knew where he was going, for they had passed through this place two days earlier, marching boldly down the main street while the villagers slunk in doorways or watched from windows. Some had jeered, some had offered them bread and wine, but most eyed them sullenly and said nothing. They had seen too much warfare already. The sooner the soldiers were gone – be they English, French or Spanish – the better.

He spotted it quickly. It was easily the largest building in the neighbourhood. A wayside inn – an auberge – with a stable block. Pinkney had gone in there with two of his men for a midday repast, while the rest of the men huddled on the street outside, eating bread, oats and the rancid remains of the salt beef they had brought with them from England. Then they had moved on, for a town or village was never safe. Too many windows, too many rooftops, too vulnerable to ambush.

The dogs barked again, but they were further away now and Andrew did not heed them. He crept to the walled stableyard of the inn and saw straightway what he wanted: a two-wheeled cart with long handles that one man could lie on and another could pull with relative ease.

He knew the wheels would creak and rattle, so he had brought butter with him. Now he smeared it into the hubs of the wheels and every joint. He rolled the cart slowly, this way and that, listening for squeaks and creaks. Near by, a horse whinnied in its stall. He ignored it. At last, satisifed, he began to roll the cart from the yard, inch by inch. If he went faster, the iron-rimmed wheels would ring on the cobbles.

Once outside the stableyard, he dragged the cart away from the stone path on to the grassy verge of the field. He let out a breath of relief. He was away. Now all that remained was the long haul back to camp. Two hours it had taken him to walk here. It would be three or four hours on the way back, pulling the cart.

Half an hour before dawn, Andrew was almost asleep on his feet. His arms, shoulders and thighs were past pain and into numbness. He was exhausted from the long trek across country pulling the cart.

There was birdsong in anticipation of the dawn, but suddenly it was silenced and the stillness spooked him. He walked on, more cautiously now. Then he heard the crack-crack of musket-shots and the sinew-tautening blare of a trumpet. He stopped. The fatigue simply slid away from his body like a discarded skin.

He was instantly alert, his heart beating as though it would burst. The sounds were coming from the camp, less than a mile away. He dropped the handles of the cart and began running towards the commotion.

The sound of battle intensified as he came near to the bridge. He stopped again, trying to make out what was happening. A sudden thought hit him: he should run the other way. This place was death. He screwed his eyes shut and breathed deeply. How could he run? There was nowhere to go in this land of strangers. He was done with running. One boy alone could not survive and stay hidden long. He would be caught – and he knew well what happened when a common soldier was captured. The two ancients of the company had spoken of it in gory detail. Private soldiers who were taken would be slaughtered with cold efficiency and without mercy. Only the officers were kept alive, to be ransomed. It had ever been thus. Word had reached men-at-arms throughout England of the ambush two years past at Ambrières-les-Vallées, a few miles to the east of this place, when a hundred captured English soldiers had been butchered. Such tales served to make English blood hotter.

He had a vantage point behind a hedge and saw the backs of five men on the bridge, kneeling and using the parapet as a rest for their muskets. They were firing towards the farm buildings. He could see the glow of their matchlocks, then the flash of fire and the billowing of smoke each time they shot.

From the copse behind the farm buildings there were more gun-flashes in a wide arc, but how many? He tried to count them through the cloud of smoke, and reckoned no more than seven. That made twelve arquebusiers shooting. Were there more hidden away, waiting to attack? Archers and pikemen? It seemed almost certain. Cavalry, perhaps? Less likely. If there were horses, he reasoned, they must be well in reserve or they would have been heard by the English watches as they drew near. But it was bad enough as it was. The English soldiers in the camp were caught in a crossfire. At their backs was the river, which they could not traverse without being picked off at will. The only way out was the open road. If they broke cover and tried to run using that route, most would be cut down. They had little hope of escape.

What worried him was the thought of what was happening inside the camp. Were the men already dead or wounded? So far, he had not seen or heard any musket-shots from the old buildings. At that moment, he saw two flashes from the wreck of the byre, then three more. Thank God. They were becoming organised. But they were in the dark. They needed to know the deployment of the enemy.

Two of the men on the bridge picked up their guns and muzzle-rests and advanced at a loping run into the open ground, fifty yards from the buildings. They immediately drew English fire, but it was wild and speculative. They threw themselves down behind a mound. Andrew heard them laughing and could see them pouring powder into their weapons and pushing balls into the muzzles; they now had a far clearer shot into the heart of the camp, yet they were well protected by the mound. He watched them line up their sights. One squeezed the trigger, then the other. From the camp, two screams pierced the air.

The sun was not up, but its light glimmered on the horizon. The glow gave the old ruins a jagged, ghostly outline. It occurred to Andrew that his comrades would be in an even more perilous position in daylight, there to be shot like targets. If he was to help, he needed to act now. For the second time that night, he removed his boots, tying them to his belt. He checked his weapons: dagger and short sword. That was all he had. The shooting from the woods was growing more frequent. His first estimate of the number of guns there was way out; there were more like fifteen musket-flashes in the undergrowth at the edge of the woods, and they were shooting rapidly.

He dropped to his belly and began to crawl through the meadow grass, keeping close to the hedging to break the line of his form. He said a silent prayer that he would not be seen.

Thirty yards upriver from the bridge, he slipped into the stream. It was twenty-five feet from bank to bank. After he had taken two steps, the water was up to his chest, then he lost his footing. He had to swim a few strokes before his feet touched bottom again. Emerging from the river at the far bank, he lay in the grass and mud for a few seconds to make sure he had not been seen.

He crawled forward, towards the mound. Suddenly he shuddered. His hand was touching warm dead flesh. In the wan light he saw that it was the body of an English soldier, a quiet, dull-witted youth two or three years older than himself. His throat had been slashed and his belly ripped open. He must have been on watch.

Andrew searched his body for weapons. He had a long dagger and a pikestaff. He took the dagger, then moved on. He was twenty yards behind the two men at the mound. They were shooting and reloading constantly. Andrew knew the drill: first pour good corned powder into the barrel from your flask, just the right amount; too much would blow the muzzle apart, not enough would make the shot fall short; next, prime the pan with touchpowder from your secondary powderbox; finally take ball from pouch and drop into muzzle, followed by wadding, pressed home with a scouring stick. It was a laborious process, but he could see that these men were skilled and quick.

He came closer. Five yards away now, he hugged the meadow grass, certain that they must hear his heartbeat and breathing.

He counted. Between one shot and the next, he counted to twenty. But he knew they could not continue at this rate or their weapons would overheat. After eight shots, one of the men put his musket aside to cool down. The other man shot twice more, then he too stopped. Andrew’s hands shook. He knew what he had to do. He crossed himself. ‘Forgive me, Father,’ he mouthed. He took his dagger from his belt and gripped it in his left hand, willing it to stop shaking. Then he took his short sword in the right hand. He breathed deeply and launched himself.

He went for the man on the left first, stabbing towards the face and neck. The man twisted aside, but Andrew’s long dagger blade was quicker and went through the arquebusier’s throat, impaling him to the earth. Before the second man had time to react, Andrew was on him with the short sword, thrusting at his chest. It glanced off his ribcage. The man groaned and squirmed away. Andrew thrust again and caught him in the lower back. The enemy soldier’s torso arched in shock and pain. Andrew pulled back the sword. There was blood everywhere. His hands were thick with it, slipping on the ridged hilt of the sword. He grasped it in both hands to get more leverage, raised it above him and brought it down into the nape of the man’s neck.

He felt the wind of a musket-ball, then heard the crack. Looking up, he saw that the men on the bridge had turned their fire on him and that he was exposed. He pulled the two dying bodies on top of each other as a protective bank. The light was improving all the time. He cut the men’s powderflasks and touchpowder boxes from their belts. Keeping as low behind the wall of corpses as he could, he primed and loaded both their arquebuses. He blew on the matches and was satisfied with their glow. He prodded the first one forward, squinted down the barrel sights and pulled the trigger as John Shakespeare had taught him to do on holidays out with the trainbands at Artillery Yard. He heard a cry. Had he hit a man, or was that from elsewhere? As the smoke rose and cleared, he saw that he had felled one of the three on the bridge. The other two were backing off, to a safer position on the far side of the river; they must have realised that they were as vulnerable to his gunshots as he was to theirs.

‘Provost Pinkney!’ Andrew shouted. ‘This way – the way is almost clear!’

Even as he spoke, he heard a trumpet sound, then saw two dozen men emerge from the buildings with pike and shot. Pinkney was at their head, a pistol in each hand, charging straight for the bridge. The enemy arquebusiers were trying to reload, but they looked up in panic and realised the English would be on them before they could shoot. They threw down the guns and ran. Pinkney loosed off a shot, but missed.

There was a shout from the woods. ‘Avancez!’

Pinkney put up two fingers in the direction of the enemy, strode across the bridge and picked up the two dropped firearms, then returned, walking towards Andrew. Hands on hips, he stopped, looked at him and shook his head. Stragglers were emerging from the English camp. Pinkney turned towards them and ordered them into line, pikes and bills at the front and centre, arquebusiers at the flanks.

Andrew watched in astonishment. The provost marshal seemed as calm as though he were organising a game of football between villagers. Last of all came Reaphook, hobbling on a stick. Pinkney stared at him dispassionately.

‘We will march from here in an orderly fashion,’ Pinkney said when his men were all gathered in order. ‘If the Frenchies are foolish enough to follow us, which I doubt, we will turn and fight and we will kill them all. Any man of you who breaks ranks and runs will be shot by me.’

At that moment, the French soldiers from the woods arrived at the farm buildings. Andrew could see that there were about twenty of them. They had more guns than the English, but they were outnumbered man for man, and they no longer had the English trapped. They held back, suddenly lacking confidence, for they had lost their advantage of position and surprise. Pinkney took two steps forward, raised his arm, took aim down the muzzle of his wheel-lock pistol and pulled the trigger. The Frenchmen scuttled back into the cover vacated by the English. Pinkney laughed, casually reloaded one of his pistols, then turned again to his men.

Andrew did not move. His blood-wet sword hung from his blood-red arm. The stench of blood clogged his nose and his mind. He was dumbfounded, unable to take in the horror of what he had done. He made the sign of the cross over each of the corpses in turn and mouthed the Lord’s Prayer. It brought him no comfort.

‘About turn!’ Pinkney said sharply. ‘Ensign take point. Double your ranks by line. Open order. Shoulder pikes and march!’ He glanced at the motionless figure of Andrew. ‘That includes you, Private Woode.’