Black Tom's Red Army Page 10

  She focused, aware she was being boosted away from the screaming, sobbing, shouting camp - none too gently.

  Edward Telling had ordered a couple of shame-faced rioters to haul her away from the carnage and deposit her beside the impromptu field hospital which had developed around a couple of commissariat carts.

  Surgeons in shirts blooded to the elbows as they extracted balls from shoulders or finished the work a sword had started. Limbs, buckets, bloody rags. Women tearing shirts to rags to bandage wounds as best they could. Tending the menfolk who hadn’t run off, or hadn’t the stomach for the piggeries by the camp.

  Bella wondered she hadn’t had the sense to join them the moment she’d seen the battle was lost. But the sudden collapse had caught them off guard, the camp gossips misleading them all, assuring everyone the battle was as good as won. Bella had stood on a coach to watch the distant horsemen gallop up the ridge opposite, taking the black and tan blocks of rebel horse with them.

  Convinced the battle was as good as done, she had wandered back to the coach to wait.

  Bella cursed her unbelievable naivety.

  “Fetch a cart. There’s plenty back there. Once she’d cleaned up and decent we’re taking her back to the camp.” Bella opened her eyes, regarded the blurred strangers standing above her.

  “Who is she then, friend of yours?” the impudent musketeer leered.

  “She’s my brother’s wife,” the chaplain grated, giving the fellow the sternest stare he could muster.

  “Brother? You mean she’s a ...”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” the elder Telling interrupted.

  The musketeers busied themselves locating a cart. Edward pulled a bloodied hank of hair from her face.

  Bella, delivered up to him. He could barely believe it himself. And no sign of his tormented brother.

  *************************

  The girl prised herself upright, tried to look about her and wished she hadn’t, fingered the wound below her ear and grimaced.

  It wasn’t the first battlefield she’d seen but this was her first time at the shambles which passed for a field hospital. Wounded officers with worried attendants in tow were being taken care of first. Head and gut shot soldiers were laid down by the waggon. Boys with brimming pails ran to and fro. Tipped streams of gore over the grass.

  Bella examined her jaw, appalled to feel the swelling had already transformed her features into a throbbing pig’s bladder. Her fingers came away slick with blood. She felt faint, tormented by the screams and sobbing all around her.

  She tried to blink her vision clear, looked up at Edward, standing above her alternately scanning the wrecked field and gazing down at her, his moist tongue moving over his lips.

  Turning her head, she could still hear the shrieks of the women and children over in the camp. Bella rested her hand on his forearm, felt the big man jump.

  “You should go back,” she told him. “They’re running wild,” she gestured weakly down the slope, toward what was left of the Royalist baggage.

  It had been reduced to a body-strewn and reeking boneyard, littered with the detritus of a lost army. Not to mention an emperor’s ransom of loot collected from the surrounding counties.

  The worst offenders had been rounded up or slunk away over the moor, leaving the smashed encampment to the mercy of the regulars.

  But the screaming hadn’t stopped. She could hear the men shouting now, hoarse and hateful chanting.

  “Whore, whore, whore!”

  “They’re running wild,” Bella repeated thickly. “They’re behaving like animals,” she explained, trying to get to her feet and failing.

  “For God’s sake, they’ll listen to you, they always listen to their ministers.”

  His sober suit contrasted starkly with the riot of coats around her. Royalist waifs and strays, shambling wounded, victorious companies marching by in some kind of order, officers keeping the men on a short rein lest they were tempted to join the outrages over the verge.

  “You were lucky I recognised you,” Edward explained gruffly. “The way you stood there,” he looked down, his face still swimming in her blurred vision as if he was peering at her from the bottom of her hand basin. “Hands on your hips as if you were going to give the rogues a piece of your mind.”

  “What are they doing?” The screaming, if anything, was getting louder. Where were the bastard officers? This army of Christ and his angels she’d heard so much about as greedy for loot and cunny as the rest of them.

  “Rounding up their whores and doxies.”

  “They’re not all whores,” she cried. “And they deserve better than this,” she accused. “They have their children there...” Bella sank back, senses swimming, overwhelming her.

  Edward snorted, passing the bible from one hand to the other as if it had been left too close to the hearth. He closed his eyes to blot out the racket from the abandoned camp, but knew he’d carry the terrible chorus to the end of his days. Just as he had carried a vision of Bella, strikingly at variance to the swooning maiden before him.

  “Cover yourself,” he ordered, angry at himself and her. He bent down, tugged the torn gown about her shoulders. The shift was soaked with blood from the gash to her head. A red trident across her chest where one of her attackers had clawed at her.

  He swallowed, bloody fingers grasping for the strings of her bodice.

  He gave up in disgust, walked over to the nearest corpse and brutally tore away the soldier’s scorched blue doublet. The body gave a silent jig as he wrenched the sleeves free of the lifeless arms.

  He sat her up again, wrapped the coat about her shoulders. As an afterthought, he picked a bloody red Montero from the clothes heaped beside the waggon, set it on her head, disguising the fine auburn curls.

  Standing upright, looking at her, he remembered the first time he’d seen her. His idiot brother had turned up with her in the middle of a blizzard, unveiled his precious Bella as if she’d been some fiendishly expensive work of art. He’d never seen anything like her, roving eyes, scolding tongue, beautiful. A faery queen made flesh.

  By God he’d dreamt of her ever since. And here she was. Delivered to him, a swooning spoil of war.

  He turned his gaze back over the moor toward the camp, lost in contemplation. The counterpointing shrieks and shouting had reached a new crescendo.

  Was there no officer to restore order? He’d been lucky putting Bella’s assailants to flight. But half the army was in there now, helping itself.

  He swallowed, straightened his hat. They always listened to their ministers, eh?

  “You stay here. For the love of Christ keep your head down. I will go to the camp. But I will come back for you,” he said thickly. Bella peered up at him, unable to see more than a black shape, solid against the dancing grey shadows. He’d grown a backbone, since he’d left his father’s rectory. And then he was gone and she was alone, propped up with the wounded in the middle of a battlefield.

  Naseby field.

  *************************

  His first battlefield had been bad enough, but the Royalist laager was a thousand times worse. Edward strode through the crowds, bawling soldiers delighted to have survived. Sergeants using their halberds on particularly unrepentant offenders.

  Around them the evidence of their celebrations. Edward didn’t know where to look. Naked or near naked women of all ages. Old hags with pendulous dugs crouched by maidens, weasel thin and smooth, marbled skin whiter than the shreds of their shifts. Legs bruised like ripe fruit, splayed like rabbits on a block.

  Shouting matches on all sides. Scuffles. Screams. Men pulled women to and fro, whether arguing over the spoils or protecting their honour he couldn’t say. Any more than he could think what he was doing here.

  Dozens of women lay still in the trampled grass. Children and babes cried and bawled over slaughtered mothers. The ones they were calling witches at bay with carving knives, screeching foul curses in some depraved tongue.

/>   A dragoon officer was trying to free himself from a shrieking woman, yelling at him in some outlandish tongue. He tried to fling her away but the pistol he carried went off and she slumped sideways. They stared at her, spread-eagled in the grass, the smoking shot a black and scarlet borehole between her partially exposed breasts.

  Telling stood astonished while the mob moved on for better sport. He glared at the dragoon, pistol smoking as he bent over his still wheezing victim. He bent down and prised a purse from the woman’s belt. The officer paused, misunderstanding Telling’s look. A small boy gaped at his still twitching mother - unaware she wouldn’t be waking up in this world.

  Telling laid his big hand on the boy’s thin shoulders, rocked to the core.

  “You shot her,” he said, dumfounded. “You’ve only gone and shot her,” he repeated, staring down at the dying woman. Bubbling blood covering her jaw, spotting and smearing her shift and pale freckled skin. The boy was blubbering and hiccuping now, his frail body racked with sobs.

  “I warned her off, you heard me,” the soldier explained testily, folding the purse away beneath a grubby grey tunic. “Irishers, the lot of ‘em,” he said by way of nervous explanation. He leaned forward. “Whores. Armed like border reivers too. More knives than a dog’s got fleas.”

  “All of them?” Telling asked, aghast, disbelieving. “You shot his mother. What do you suggest we do with the boy?”

  “Do with him?”

  The dragoon tipped his hat back. Pleasant smile fading from his almost angelic features.

  “What are we to do with him,” Telling demanded, thrusting the waif forward.

  The dragoon twitched in sympathy with his victim.

  “Makes no odds.” Sulky now, eyes sliding sideways. But there was nowhere nice to look, not here.

  “Put up a rare old fight some of ‘em, not like their menfolk,” he half grinned, nodded toward the moor behind them. “What did they expect, after Leicester? That we’d give ‘em a shillin’ an pack ‘em off home?”

  Telling stared at him, then at the boy. Brothers in death.

  “What is your name?”

  “Rondo. John Rondo. Okey’s dragoons.”

  But the murderous glow which had lit him from within like some glorious Renaissance painting was fading as fast as the woman’s life. He glanced down at her as if embarrassed by her stuttering death rattle.

  “You will assemble what men you can, form a guard. No more bloodshed, no more rapes. The army of the Saints does not slaughter and rape its victims. Irishers or not.”

  Rondo looked taken aback. Telling was taken aback himself, by the icily deliberate tone of voice. His voice.

  “What about the boy?”

  “What of him?” Telling growled, releasing his grip on his shoulders. The boy fell to his knees, feebly lifted his mother’s hand from the blood-splattered grass

  Telling strode on, holding the bible aloft.

  “You men! Stand down! Leave these people be!”

  The rest of the crowd ignored him, intent on picking through the plunder scattered around.

  Order was restored, not by the force of the Roundhead’s fire and brimstone preachers but by the sudden realisation a small fortune in loot was scattered about their boots.

  They dropped to their knees, attacking locked chests with pistol butts and axes.

  Beer, small and strong. Wine and sack by the jar, brandy by the bottle. Barrels of cheese and packed biscuit already being rifled by hungry soldiers.

  “Rondo, get guards on that cheese. We’ll hand it out by companies,” Telling ordered. “Get some sergeants here, form a queue. Hurry man!”

  Rondo tipped his hat, shrugged his shoulders. He’d dropped the pistol, or cast it aside.

  “What?”

  “The cheese. They’ve not eaten. Break out the damned cheese.”

  Rondo looked around, aghast at the glaring details. The bodies, the wounds, the children.

  “Rondo!”

  “The cheese...as you wish. Cheese it is then.”

  The boy shook his mother’s hand, her arm flopping uselessly, hands smeared with her lifeblood.

  *************************

  Several brigades had formed up in the ground previously occupied by the Royalist foot. An enormous crowd of prisoners, many of them sitting down or sprawled out in the grass. Unaware of what was going on here, Edward wouldn’t wonder.

  He strode away from the camp, the shrieks, startling shots. More troops were arriving, joining the queue for food. Mounted officers imposing some order, trying to avoid walking their horses over women’s corpses and wandering children.

  Troops of Roundhead horse were trotting this way and that, keeping immaculate formation despite the chaos around them. Hardly surprising as they had been warned against dismounting to plunder on pain of death. Nobody doubted the Ironside officers would have backed their threat with a pistol ball to the back of the head.

  Another regiment went cantering by. Telling recognised Cromwell at the head, waving his hat in dignified circles to mobs of cheering troops.

  He hadn’t noticed the field of bodies were mainly female.

  “We need to get these men out, get them reformed over on the moor,” Telling decreed.

  The dragoon nodded, confused by the minister’s shifting priorities.

  He looked back but the orphan boy had gone. Swallowed by the madmen in the camp.

  “They’ve got their cheese and biscuit now. More interested in stuffing their face than dipping their wicks…” Rondo remembered he was talking to a minister. Bad language and blasphemy could see a man’s tongue bored through with a white hot nail. They’d be drooling then right enough.

  “Ah, they’ll come to their senses now,” he modified his tone, gave the minister a reassuring smile. Telling’s face looked like a pot of rapidly cooling iron ore.

  “We’ve let the lads have a bit of fun, they’ll come back to the colours eventually,” he reasoned, uncertain now. Telling bristled.

  “And I tell you they will reform on the moor,” he growled. The dragoon’s nervous grin slipped another notch.

  “Aye, mayhap when they’ve finished off that cheese.They’ll..”

  “What? Shoot their own chaplain? Gather some men. I told you I’ll back you.” He brandished the bible, clutched it to his chest as if it might deflect random pistol shots.

  The dragoon officer seemed foolishly eager to please now.

  “By all means,” he said, nodding as if he had worked out where he was all over again.

  Telling turned, strode out toward a ring of hooting musketeers. He knocked them aside, found three men holding a black haired woman by the arms, bent up in shrill agony behind her back. A fourth held a twist of her hair and was trying to get his knife into her right nostril.

  “By Christ leave that alone! What in the name of God do you think you are doing?” he cried, shoving his way through the hooting spectators.

  The knifeman looked up, took in the sober black suit, the fleshy, flushed face. Then slit the woman’s nose to the bone. A gout of blood over the grass. Livid spots over Telling’s black-suited forearm and over the faded pages of his bible. The woman shrieked, fell to the floor as the grinning soldiery moved on.

  Telling stood there, the dragoon officer impatient beside him. The woman curled and cursed in agony.

  Telling felt sick. Tormented by his own helplessness in the face of this…war?

  “They’re all Irish, papist heathens sooner slit your heart out than smile,” the dragoon explained uneasily.

  “We’ve got to stop it,” he said at last through a mouthful of bile. “They’ll ruin all, ruin all if we let them play like beasts!” Telling touched the woman’s arm. She flinched, shrank back against the side of the cart, wild eyed over her steepled fingers.

  “Stay by my side, they’ll not harm you,” he said, poisoned by the emptiness of his own promise.

  The woman cursed him between her fingers, wild eyed.

  The
dragoon officer lifted a shirt from the heaped refuse, tore the arm off and held it to her. The woman changed hands and snatched the reeking bandage to her nose. Blood and snot sprayed the dragoon’s sleeve. He looked peeved. Another child approached but halted, mouth agape, a few yards from her wailing mother.

  “Do as you like,” the dragoon asserted, more forcefully now. “We can’t save them all,” he gestured across the camp, still filled with red faced men in red coats capering and bawling.

  “Then we’ll save those we can,” Telling said quietly. Something in the ring of his voice caught the dragoon’s attention again. He straightened his hat, easy smile slipping.

  “As you say,” he replied, looking around the ruined camp, wondering where on earth to start.

  *************************

  “Bastarding Bluecoats!” The musketeer stepped out of the loose ranks, stamped his boot down with all his might on the drowsy prisoner. His victim gave a startlingly high-pitched shriek and toppled over clutching his arm.

  The Roundhead bent over the crying soldier. “You could see it was all over but you went on playing the heroes, eh?”

  “Leave him Samuel.”

  “They’ve had enough.”

  Another kick.

  “Jeb Edwards, leave that poor bastard alone. He’s had enough.”

  “Those bastards hadn’t. Why’d they have to go on fighting? They could see it was over.” He aimed another kick into the Bluecoat’s groin. The Royalist soldier spewed blood and bile, whistling for breath face first in the trampled grass.

  “Stand straight in your ranks and files!” The order went down the line, the regiment dressing off as the sergeant strode along the grinning ranks.

  “Leave off, they’ve packed it in,” he called as the errant musketeer rejoined his grinning mates.

  The sergeant stepped over the sprawled Bluecoat, trying to see what the hold up was.