The Great Siege Read online

  ‘This,’ he said, indicating the fairhead, ‘is Sir Edward Stanley, Knight Grand Cross. And this is Sir John Smith, likewise Knight Grand Cross. Knights of St John of Malta, warriors of Christ, and among the most courageous and chivalrous soldiers in all Europe.’

  Blackbeard – John Smith – remained expressionless. Stanley smiled faintly and looked at his boots.

  ‘I speak the truth,’ cried Sir Francis, clapping his hands on their shoulders like a proud father. ‘The Last Crusaders in Christendom!’

  They clasped hands, and without another word, the two rode away into the night.

  Nicholas was nearly bursting with questions. He had never known half the truth about his father’s long life before he was born.

  Ingoldsby saw his youthful eagerness and gave a great loud bark of a laugh.

  ‘Ha! So you never thought your rheumy, crabbed old sire was once a young gallant who fought like the Lionheart himself against the Saracens, eh? Eh? Ha!’ And he took up his sheathed sword and began to thwack Nicholas on the back and legs with it.

  ‘Ay!’ yelped Nicholas. ‘Ow!’ The thwacks were hefty.

  ‘Ha! Have at thee, thou swart infidel!’

  His father was moonstruck, an aged knight suddenly thinking he was on the battlefield once more.

  Nicholas ran upstairs.

  ‘Tomorrow, boy!’ his father roared after him, still swinging his sheathed sword dangerously around the narrow hallway. ‘I’ll tell thee more about the youthful battles and travails of your aged sire! There’s tales will make your lilywhite ears burn!’

  A door opened above and a female voice hissed angrily, ‘Ssshhh! You’ll wake the whole household with your noise and rumpus!’

  It was Mistress Copstick, the housekeeper.

  After that there was no more noise. Even old Ingoldsby himself, slayer of Saracens, was afraid of Mistress Copstick.

  4

  It was Hodge who came running, red-faced, saying there were soldiers riding down the hill towards the village. Nicholas’s younger sister Susan, already something of a scold at thirteen, flicked him with her cleaning cloth and told him not to be such a clodpoll. What would soldiers want with a village like this?

  She stared at her brother.

  ‘Unless … it’s to do with those strangers last night.’

  Nicholas froze.

  His father was in his library.

  ‘It’s true I tell you!’ cried Hodge. ‘And that Gervase Crake riding at the head of ’em.’

  ‘Crake?’ said Nicholas sharply.

  Hodge nodded. ‘Lookin’ as proud as a peacock too, the lubbock.’

  Gervase Crake. Local landowner, sycophant and cheat. Tax gatherer, informer and liar. Of puritan tendencies, but careful not to let his private convictions get in the way of his ascent to wealth and power. With friends in high places, and correspondent even with Lord Cecil himself, down in London, it was whispered. Above all, he was Justice of the Peace and Lord of the Hundred, and thus responsible for upholding the law throughout the neighbourhood. And he held some ancient grudge against his father – as he did against so many.

  Nicholas suddenly felt very, very afraid.

  He ran up to the top field and peered over the hedge. In the grey October morning, there gleamed the breastplates of a dozen scruffy-looking mounted men. Not soldiers, surely, but armed hire-lings. At their head, lean and small, hunched and gimlet-eyed on his grey nag, Gervase Crake.

  Nicholas dashed back down the hill.

  ‘Hodge! You haven’t – talked, have you?’

  ‘I kept as mute as a mouse!’ said the startled Hodge, flushing with anger.

  He ordered Hodge inside with the other servants and was just knocking on his father’s library door, when the farmyard was filled with the sound of clattering hooves on the cobblestones.

  They died down, and a thin, nasal voice called out, ‘Francis Ingoldsby, master of this house. You are a wanted man!’

  His father burst out of his room and strode out into the farmyard. He looked angry, and yet also … guilty. His father always was too honest a soul to be a player. He stood bow-legged and broad-shouldered before his front door.

  ‘Crake,’ he muttered.

  Crake did not dismount, but looked down his thin nose at him, and coughed his usual little dry cough.

  ‘To horse, sir. You are coming to the county jail, and perhaps thence to London.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  Crake’s smile was as warm as the midwinter sun on ice.

  ‘The very gravest. High treason.’

  The villagers lined the lane that led out to Shrewsbury, silent and white-faced. Many of them had taken bread and wine from Father Matthew’s hand. But among them was evidently one who preferred to take a silver shilling from the hand of Gervase Crake.

  As Ingoldsby stepped onto the old, moss-grown mounting block, suddenly looking an old and weary man, Crake called out, ‘Halt! This one knows how to handle a sword. Shackle him!’

  It was then that Nicholas saw red, a furious tide of anger flooding through him. That his father should be treated like a common felon.

  ‘No!’ he cried out, and flew at the soldier who had dismounted to hammer the shackles onto his father’s bony old wrists.

  What happened next was a terrible, blood-dimmed blur.

  Hodge was near, trying to restrain Nicholas. A soldier lashed out with the butt of his sword hilt, and struck Hodge, perhaps by accident. The sturdy servant fell back with a muffled grunt and lay dazed. Nicholas seized the bridle of the soldier’s horse and wrenched it with all his might. His father was stepping off the mounting block again, shouting, trying to calm him. Two more mounted soldiers crowded round, and above the noise Crake’s thin voice shouted orders. At last he drew a matchlock from his cloak and took a smoking fuse from one of the soldiers. He raised it in the air just as the powder exploded in the pan.

  A horse whinnied and reared. A soldier rolled to the ground with a cry. Another swung his sword. Sir Francis tried to seize his son and drag him clear, as the rearing horse came down again. Even amid all the noise and chaos, Nicholas heard the hollow, sickening sound of an ironshod horse’s hoof meeting human bone. His father reeled aside and crumpled to the muddy ground at the foot of the mounting block.

  Everything went still then. The horses were pulled back, soldiers remounted, dropped their drawn swords down by their sides. Yet the still air screamed.

  Nicholas knelt by his father’s side. His skull was shattered, there was blood, mess, shards of white bone. Blood poured down over half his face. Nicholas gripped his hand.

  ‘Father!’

  His father could not see. The world was fading. It mattered not.

  ‘Had I more hair,’ he murmured, ‘perhaps the blow had been less grave.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Grave indeed.’

  A cold terror clutched the boy’s heart. ‘Father! Speak to me!’

  The old man had some last sorrow for his children. Something dreadful had happened, he could not remember what … Yet God would provide.

  He spoke the words of the Scriptures that he loved, the words of David to Solomon as he lay dying. Nicholas leaned close to hear him, his words a whisper on the wind. ‘I go the way of all the earth. Be strong, and show yourself a man.’

  One last effort in this world. ‘My son. Such tales I could have told thee, such things. But … Care for your sisters. Be just, be faithful. To the very end.’

  Then the old man’s hand no longer returned his grasp.

  The boy’s howls filled the village. His sister Susan stood near, so stricken with grief and bewilderment she could not cry. She pressed the faces of the two trembling little ones into her pinafore so they could not see.

  The soldiers waited for orders to clear them away and collect the body, but Gervase Crake seemed strangely oblivious. He barely regarded the scene, which made even the soldiers’ hard hearts ache.

  Indeed it was as if some far more interesting thought had occurred to him. An express
ion of quiet satisfaction on his face suggested that he thought this day of clumsy tragedy had turned out really rather well. His eyes roved over the fine old farmhouse of the Ingoldsbys: the venerable oak timbers, the handsome stone mullion windows, the tall chimneys gently smoking in the autumn sunshine. The barns were pretty dilapidated, true. But for the rest … And then there were several hundred acres of hill and grassland, excellent sheep country. With the prices wool was fetching nowadays …

  At last he looked back and coughed dryly.

  ‘Pull the boy away.’

  It took three soldiers to drag him free. One received a kick in the shins, and responded with a mighty backhand swipe of a heavy leather gauntlet that set Nicholas reeling. Susan screamed out. The little ones wailed. At last Crake lost patience.

  ‘Drag them all here!’ he cried, pointing before his horse.

  All four children were pulled over and dumped unceremoniously before him in the mud. He looked sourly down at them.

  ‘Now listen to me, you traitorous whelps. You are not of the age of majority, or it would be worse for you. Though God knows under the reign of Bloody Mary, Protestant blood as young as yours was wickedly shed. Bodies as soft and young as yours burnt at the stake in Smithfield market. But your father was a foul traitor.’

  Nicholas rose up on his knees to cry out at this, and was once more violently cuffed into silence.

  ‘He was a Catholic – though not yet a crime in this Protestant kingdom, alas! But I doubt not we shall find his library stuffed full of the latest Popish propaganda from Flanders. Above all, we know he entertained two knights of the most élite and dangerous order of Catholic warriors in all Christendom. Known assassins. Here, in this house,’ he gestured angrily, ‘only last night! You should think it lucky he died as he did – thanks to you!’ His eyes bored into Nicholas.

  ‘Nevertheless he will be declared a traitor post mortem, his entire property forfeit to the Crown, and the name of the Shropshire Ingoldsbys utterly erased. How many servants have you in the household?’

  ‘Only one old retainer,’ said Nicholas.

  Crake moved with the snakelike swiftness of a small, lean man, and cut Nicholas across the face with his whip.

  ‘Liar! Do not think you can lie to me, boy! You have seven household servants, seven. I know their names, I know their ages and their occupations, their religious practices. Damn it, boy, I know when they last changed their underlinen!’

  Nicholas pressed his hand to the hot welt across his cheek. Tears pricked his eyes but he blinked them angrily away. His face burned, his heart ached, his whole world tilted.

  ‘I will deal with your servants. As for you and your sisters, you are now penniless orphans.’ Crake compressed his lips at the children’s cries. ‘Well, your dotard of a father should have thought of your fate before he entertained Knights of St John at his fireside, should he not? Your best course now is to quit this county, and throw yourselves upon your nearest relations, or else some charity or poorhouse. Either that or become mere hedgerow beggars, and join the great army of filthy vagabonds that infest this kingdom. It is no concern of mine.’

  ‘You cannot do this! You are a heartless villain, you will never sleep easy in your bed if I—’

  ‘Do not bring down the law upon your own head, boy!’ rasped Crake, his small eyes gleaming.

  ‘What care I?’

  ‘Nor the dainty heads of your pretty little sisters.’

  Nicholas scowled ferociously.

  ‘Ay,’ murmured Crake, ‘there’s the rub. You are head of the household now. But without a house, alas! So enough of your youthful fits of rage. You need to learn to govern yourself, boy. For it will not be easy to keep body and soul together, the four of you, in your new life on the road. As vagabond children of a traitor. A short life but not, I fear, a very merry one.’

  He pulled his horse around.

  ‘Turn them loose! Fire the barns!’

  ‘And the house, Sire?’

  ‘The barns would be sign enough. Leave the house.’

  Some of the villagers looked mutinous as the barns and outbuildings of the Ingoldsby farm were put to the torch, and the four children were driven off down the street. Men clutched hoes and billhooks, women’s faces were dark with anger. But what could mere peasants do against a dozen mounted men-at-arms?

  Crake observed it all with cynical penetration. If only the children could have been finally disposed of … But there were limits. Catholic priests on missions from France might be caught and lynched promptly enough, and night-time visitations from a foreign order of Catholic knights were certainly sufficient cause to argue treason. But you could not simply dispose of heretical Catholic children, as the Israelites slew the children of the Amalekites.

  The law of England was harsh but fair. He would have to let them go. Penniless, without friends or family, they would not last long.

  5

  The children passed away down the lane and into the open country under the gaze of a hundred villagers. Smoke drifted overhead from the burning barns. Flames crackled. Rooks rose indignantly from the tall elms.

  ‘Here!’ called out Crake at the last moment. ‘Something for your journey.’

  To everyone’s astonishment, he pulled a small but weighty leather purse from his cloak and tossed it down to the boy. Then he wrenched his horse around and trotted back up the hill. At the head of the lane, he turned in his saddle and watched them go.

  The children stumbled on for they knew not how long. Perhaps they would wake up and find it had been a nightmare. The short October day drew to a close and the sky darkened over their heads. A wind came up and whipped the leaves about in maddened flurries beneath the trees. They did not wake up.

  After a time, little Lettice said, ‘What will we have for supper? Is it to be only bread?’

  ‘We will ask at a farmhouse. Perhaps we can buy something more.’

  He drew Crake’s purse out and unknotted the strings as he walked and peered inside. Then he looked up.

  Susan was observing him closely.

  ‘Is it well?’

  He re-tied the strings, he wasn’t quite sure why, and stowed the purse away again.

  ‘Very well,’ he said quietly. ‘If I had a sling.’

  Crake had thrown him a purseful of pebbles.

  ‘I know what is in it,’ said Susan. ‘It is a favourite jest of Crake’s. He often throws purses of stones and pebbles to paupers, to see them run and grub in the dust. He finds their desperation amusing. But he says it is a parable, to teach them not to put their trust in gold.’

  ‘The man is a monster.’

  ‘God will make him pay.’

  ‘I will make him pay. One day.’

  ‘You cannot usurp God.’ She hesitated and then added, ‘It was not your fault. What happened to father.’ She swiftly wiped an eye.

  Nicholas said nothing. His heart was as locked up as a casket.

  They came past a barn near a lonely farmstead, but a huge dog barked and tore at its chain as they approached, and Lettice and Agnes refused to go any nearer. Finally they made shelter in a small copse, Nicholas laying a row of sticks against a fallen treetrunk and then covering them crosswise with brushwood. They slept fitfully in this makeshift wooden tent, damp and desperately hungry, like shivering puppies.

  Nicholas was lying awake in the bleak grey dawn when he heard footfalls in the leaves nearby. Someone knew they were there. He put his hand over Lettice’s mouth. Her eyes flared wide. He put a finger to his lips, and motioned her to tell Agnes.

  He peeped out of the shelter, just in time to see a burly figure step behind a broad oak tree, the glint of steel in his hand. A dagger.

  So Crake had changed his mind, after all, and sent one or more of his hired henchman after them to finish the job. Perhaps ex-soldiers, ex-mercenaries, hearts like flint. Come from the late religious wars in France, where they would have witnessed, or enacted, the foulest massacres. What would it be to them, to cut four chil
dren’s throats in this isolated copse, and bury them deep under the leaf litter? It would be nothing to them. And who would ever know?

  Nicholas’s heart raced fit to burst. His fingers curled around one of the half-rotten sticks above him. His only available weapon, to defend himself and his three sisters against hardened killers.

  The henchman remained behind the tree.

  Nicholas drew the stick free and crawled out of the shelter as silently as he could. Leaves rustled, a twig cracked, but it was soft and damp and made little noise. He was across the clearing in a trice, rounded the tree, and delivered the hardest blow he could to the broad leather-jerkined back in front of him.

  The stick snapped in two.

  The figure turned, hurriedly returning his privy parts into his breeches.

  ‘Master Nicholas!’

  ‘Hodge!’

  Hodge thought Nicholas had struck him in indignation at his relieving himself so near to his sisters. Nicholas, babbling with joy and relief, said he thought Hodge might be a mercenary come from the late religious wars in France, which only baffled Hodge the more.

  ‘And I saw you carrying a dagger!’

  Hodge frowned and then pulled something from his jerkin, tucked in above the belt. It was a fire steel.

  ‘We can have a fire!’

  ‘Ay, sir,’ said Hodge. ‘Though I do have a small knife too. And a pannikin, and some eggs and mushrooms. I stole the pannikin and the eggs from the farm, under the very nose of that crookback dungheap Crake back there, God rot his stones. But since it was Sir Francis’s pannikin anyhow, I thought he’d not mind.’

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas. His throat felt tight. ‘No, he’d not mind.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hodge, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Let’s have our breakfast then.’

  Soon he had a fire going, with hunks of bread warming on the end of twigs. He split open some beechnuts and squeezed out just enough to oil the pannikin, then got to frying the eggs and mushrooms. Field mushrooms and platter mushrooms and jew’s ear and lawyer’s wig. It was the time of year for them. They ate them straight from the pan with grimy fingers, and spirits rose a little.