Marston Moor Read Online Free PDF Page A

battered bodies, scattered like old sacks all around what Stryker now saw was a floor rich in exotic pelts, now ruined by unspeakable stains and the black scorches of dropped match. He wiped his blade on a discarded hat and returned it to its scabbard, stepping over a corpse to come up against the sill of one of the shattered windows. He looked down at the road. It was almost empty. He leaned a short way forwards, craning out so that he could peer right the way down towards the church. Bolton’s defenders still resisted, to judge by the gunfire that crackled from thereabouts, but they were hemmed in now, trapped in a single enclave of a town conquered. Screams seemed to come from every house and street, and Stryker pushed back into the room, knowing that the real vengeance had begun.
    People were pleading away to his blind left side, whimpering like scolded pups, and he turned to find the source. There were half a dozen prisoners, all kneeling, faces dipped, palms raised beneath the points of looming swords. He started towards them, made to speak, but the first blade killed the words on his lips as swiftly as it killed its victim. He heard himself protest as the rest of the captives were slaughtered where they knelt, but no one else heard him.
    The toothless sergeant had given the order. He perceived Stryker with a surprised expression. ‘Any found under arms, sir.’
    And that was right. Stryker looked around the room, dumbstruck, as the stench of smoke was gradually replaced by the metallic hint of the shambles. None of the dead were Rigby’s, he realized. Not one. ‘Jesu,’ he said quietly, as Broughton’s musketeers filed briskly out.
     
    ‘They spare none,’ Skellen said.
    They were walking up Churchgate, a road that in happier times played host to Bolton’s vibrant market but which was now turned to a ruin of destruction and human misery. Shots still echoed in the houses, on rooftops and around the church, where the last rebels were determined to make a stand, but the battle was won. Already, Stryker expected, the unfortunate officer from Tyldesley’s regiment had been cut from his noose, never to know the import of his death, and already the tide of retribution had turned the Puritan town into a vision of the hell their preachers so delighted in describing. There were bodies strewn all about, doors put through, belongings thrown from windows to be ransacked by crowing Cavaliers in the persistent drizzle that saturated but never cooled the skin.
    ‘Any who fight are forfeit,’ Stryker said as he reloaded his pistols. If anything, a town was more dangerous after its storming, for the sack made a man shift for himself and his plunder.
    Skellen sniffed. ‘You know that won’t be true, sir.’ Stryker looked up, and the sergeant swallowed hard. ‘Forgive me, sir.’
    ‘No matter.’ In truth, Stryker agreed. Among the corpses littering the cobbles were women, and he had glimpsed the silver hair of the elderly amongst the dead. Perhaps they had been the folk flinging tiles from the roofs. He quickened his pace. ‘We have our orders. They should not have denied the Prince.’
    ‘They should not have hanged that fuckin’ officer, sir,’ Skellen said bitterly. ‘Beg pardon. That’s the cause. Now they’ll pay dear.’
    ‘The town is our prize. It has ever been thus. They do not slay the innocent in England.’ Stryker had seen such things many times. If a besieged town or city refused to surrender, the possessions of its inhabitants would be forfeit when finally an assault broke through. It was an unwritten understanding that besieging armies, often forced to dwell behind filthy, disease-ravaged siege-lines for weeks, were due more than their pay after surviving the murderous gauntlet of an escalade. The reward for those privations lay in plunder and, in turn, served as a warning to the next place thinking to trust in its defences. In the conflict engulfing the Low Countries, that plunder had been