Marston Moor Read Free

at cheeks and chin, and his wide hat was black too. That was enough to frighten most God-fearing men, except that the soldier’s face made the rest of him pale in comparison. It was a granite scarp, ragged and rugged, lean and weathered. One eye was gone. Torn or gouged or burned to nothing, just a ruined socket of mutilated scar tissue remained where once it had been. The other eye glimmered, lonely and feral. It was grey, flecked with silver, and it never seemed to rest. Perhaps, Grabban thought, Prince Robber and his friends really did consort with the powers of darkness. He forced himself to look away, pointing at a row of rot-slanted shacks that ran north to south directly across their path. ‘There. Behind them sheds. Outer ditch runs right behind it.’
    The major followed his gaze. ‘How are they disposed?’
    ‘Rigby’s Foot number a thousand or two,’ Grabban answered.
    The tall, bald-headed fellow spat at Grabban’s shoes. ‘Nowt like a good intelligencer.’
    Grabban ignored him, scratching instead at the burning itch that ever afflicted his stones. ‘Rest are clubmen. Locals.’ Bastards to a man, he thought, deserving of everything that was to come. He walked on, the long line of men shifting into motion at his back, their progress concealed by the leaky rooftops of the tumbledown suburb. In moments they had reached the entrance to one of the shacks. The double doors were open, hanging at awkward angles from broken hinges and providing ample room for the first dozen men and their horses. There was a door on the far side that was closed and barred on the inside. Grabban stood beside it as his charges mustered beneath the low rafters. ‘They’ll have watchers on the wall, but most are to the south, near Bradshawgate. Your fedaries will come north from there.’
    The major wound his horse’s reins around gloved knuckles. He threw his grey gaze at his men. ‘We will crush them between us. Have they harrows on the roads?’
    ‘Chains,’ Grabban said. ‘Have you cutters?’
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘And the reward?’
    The major coaxed his mount to the door. ‘Will be paid upon the success of our enterprise.’
    Grabban did not bother to stifle his smile as he hurried to lift the bar clear. ‘Then God preserve you, Major Stryker.’
    Stryker pushed the doors open with his boot and led the snorting horse out into the drizzle. ‘We take the town,’ he commanded, swinging up into the saddle as soon as man and beast had cleared the lintel. ‘Offer no quarter to any person discovered under arms. By order of the Prince.’
     
    It was not the most intimidating earthwork Stryker had ever seen. Indeed, he had been present at Newark Fight in March, and that circuit was a far more imposing sight. But Bolton’s ditch would swallow all but the tallest man, and the heaped bank of mud climbing on its far edge – two yards thick and the same in height – was crested with a wooden palisade, below which horizontal storm poles jutted from the outer face like teeth, turning the whole structure into something akin to a gaping maw. Moreover, there were men stationed at intervals along the wall. Not many, for the garrison and militiamen were spread thinly right around the perimeter, but even a handful of eagle-eyed musketeers could bring slaughter from such a vantage.
    Which was why the Royalists had crept through the Private Acres, and why the cavalrymen, famously so ill at ease on terra firma, had dismounted, and why they had entrusted their lives to the avaricious stoat, Grabban. Because there was one weak point in the perimeter. Here, behind this dilapidated run of musty, mouldering structures, the ditch was not so deep. The defenders had evidently bargained on the buildings themselves providing obstacle enough. Which was true, so long as they could guard those dung-carpeted rooms. But Rigby did not have enough men for such a task. Indeed, he had only marched into town that morning, and might not even know about the secret