Marston Moor

Marston Moor Read Online Free PDF

Book: Marston Moor Read Online Free PDF
Author: Michael Arnold
tainted by wholesale massacres conducted in revenge. But such hatred had been engendered by reason of religion, which had meant, mercifully, that the darkest acts of a city storming had not been visited upon this new civil war.
    ‘Until now,’ the sergeant grunted.
    Stryker stopped in his tracks, following Skellen’s gaze. Slumped in the doorway of a smouldering shop was a woman in a torn dress, her auburn hair flowing free where her coif had been ripped away. Her face was black with soot, tears carving pale gullies down her cheeks. Cradled in her arms was a small girl, hanging limp and lifeless, blue eyes staring sightlessly at the grey sky. The two men exchanged a long, silent glance. Eventually Stryker stepped close to his old friend, deliberately crowding him. ‘Have a care, Will. Do not be rash.’
    Skellen was a hard man; a man raised in the dockside tenements and taverns around Gosport, where sailors, pirates and smugglers converged and schemed and whored and killed. But his real education, like that of his one-eyed officer, had been gained on the Continent, fighting in the cruel fields of Germany. Those formative years had inured him to so much and yet left in him a residue of deep pain, a cavernous rage, plumbed so infrequently it was easy to forget. Now, though, it was there, brightening the black core of his pupils like a distant torch. ‘Rash, sir? Is it not a time for rashness?’
    Skellen was gripping his sword, and Stryker noticed that his gnarled knuckles were bleached white.
    ‘You are right,’ Stryker admitted. ‘It’s as you said. This is different than before.’ He glanced back at the dead girl. ‘Greed does not drive them, but hatred.’ Skellen’s face tightened, and Stryker placed a hand on the taller man’s elbow. ‘But you will be the one to regret the day, should you meddle.’
    Skellen’s cheek quivered. ‘Meddle?’ He pointed at the girl and her weeping mother. ‘This is slaughter, sir, plain and simple.’
    ‘Search the dead,’ Stryker said. ‘Take what you will, and do not be foolish.’
    ‘And you, sir?’
    ‘I will find our billets.’ Stryker moved away. ‘Do not be foolish, Sergeant, or you will answer to me.’
    Skellen nodded. ‘Aye, Major.’
    Stryker spent the next hour seeking the quartermaster to James Stanley, the Earl of Derby. The earl was the leading Royalist in the county, and, as host to Prince Rupert’s army, it was his dubious honour to arrange quarters for the victorious troops. Of course, most would not require a place to sleep for hours, even days, so distracted would they be with the search for plunder, but Stryker had no yearning to immerse himself in the indiscriminate savagery. Both he and Skellen would be better off away from it.
    When finally he discovered the quartermaster, he was directed to The Swan, a tavern on the corner of Churchgate and Bradshawgate, near the market cross, where most of the prince’s staff were being placed. It was a strange thing indeed, to be classed as a staff officer after so long as a leader of men, but fate and a storm-carved sea had conspired to twist his fortunes during the bitter winter months. He had survived hardship and danger, impressed the grandees of the Royalist cause, gained the rank of sergeant-major, but lost his command. Now he and his group of mercenaries, the last of his company, were little more than Prince Rupert’s hired swash-and-buckler men, fighters who drew steel on the whim of their Bohemian lord. Stryker had never felt more incongruous in a world to which he was otherwise so well suited.
    He paced westwards along Churchgate, loosening his grip on neither pistol nor sword. There were fewer horsemen now, and he guessed they had left the town to their counterparts on foot, carrying the hunt for Bolton’s fugitives into the surrounding fields and forests. The dead would be discovered in streams, under bridges and on the moors for weeks to come. There were bodies strewn here and there. Some
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