The Prince's Gambit: Major Stryker and the the Relief of Newark Read online

  Michael Arnold

  The Prince’s Gambit

  MAJOR STRYKER AND THE RELIEF OF NEWARK

  March 1644, and a Parliamentarian victory at the battle of Nantwich is quickly followed by news that the Scots have invaded, placing the King’s northern territories in jeopardy.

  Royalist officer Major Innocent Stryker is dispatched to hunt a dangerous spy, the link between power brokers in Westminster and Edinburgh. But after running his prey to ground near the Royalist stronghold of Newark, disaster befalls the mission.

  A large Parliamentarian army is massing before Newark’s walls and the garrison is out-gunned and outnumbered: its fall would spell ruin for the King’s cause in the Midlands. But Stryker knows that the monarch’s formidable nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, is gathering his own force to march to the rescue. A contest of arms is inevitable, and Stryker, still pursuing his own quarry, finds himself embroiled in one of the most remarkable episodes of the English Civil War. Amid the clash of steel and the stink of powder smoke, he will need all his courage and ingenuity to prevail.

  Praise for

  Michael Arnold

  ‘The battle scenes are uncomfortably good’ Historical Novel Society

  ‘Every last part…oozes authenticity. Fans of Cornwell’s Sharpe novels will love Captain Innocent Stryker – he’s uglier, meaner and cleverer than Sharpe. Tremendous!’ Ben Kane, bestselling author of The Forgotten Legion Chronicles

  ‘Crackling with the sound of musket fire and punctuated with the roar of cannon, these books bring the Cromwellian conflict to life in an intense battle of wits and weaponry.’ Press Association

  ‘A swashbuckling novel which I did not want to put down…Arnold seems to have been an eye witness to the events he describes.’ Battlefield

  ‘A dark-hued romp, livid with the scents, sounds and colours of a country on the brink of implosion…impressive’ Daily Express

  ‘Michael Arnold’s Civil War Chronicles have the makings of a fun, Sharpe-like series’ History Today

  ‘If you love Sharpe, you’ll be knocked out by the 17th-century civil war adventures of Captain Innocent Stryker…at times this one-eyed veteran makes Sharpe look rather civilised’ Peterborough Evening Telegraph

  ‘Arnold is at his best describing real events…if you like Cornwell you will like Arnold’ Historical Novels Review

  ‘Heart-thumping action…Arnold brings the English Civil War to colourful life’ Lancashire Evening Post

  ‘Captures the grittiness, as well as the doomed glamour, of the Royalist cause’ Charles Spencer

  ‘You can smell the gunpowder and hear the cannon fire…Arnold’s passion for the period suffuses every page’ Robyn Young, author of the Brethren trilogy

  ‘A fast-moving, exciting novel…Forget Sharpe and enjoy the exploits of Captain Stryker in an earlier and dangerous period of history. Once hooked you will look forward to the next in this series’ Ryedale Gazette and Herald

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Praise for Michael Arnold

  Contents

  Map of Newark

  The Prince’s Gambit (Novella)

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Arnold

  Marston Moor – Title Page

  Marston Moor – Prologue

  Marston Moor – Chapter One

  Copyright

  The Prince’s Gambit

  Near Newark, Nottinghamshire, 10 March 1644

  ‘Get your arse on the ground!’

  Lornell McCroskey tasted soil. He spat, swearing bitterly as grit tainted his tongue. The hand, clamped against the back of his skull, pushed again, grinding his face into the leaf mulch. More soil, the stench of mould, the pain of twigs pricking his forehead and cheeks. He pushed back, but it was no use. It felt as though a wagon had been driven over him. ‘I’m down!’ he rasped, battling for breath. He prised open an eye, seeing the dark shapes of men snake through the undergrowth around them, weaving between trees, crouching low, always quiet, always furtive. They were frightened, like deer tracked by hounds, cut off from the herd and hunted to exhaustion. He would have laughed if his own fortunes were not so precariously balanced.

  ‘I said flat, damn you!’ the man above him growled, hard voice strained by anxiety. As he gave up the struggle, their hiding place erupted in fire and smoke. A huge musket volley, loosed from out on the road, tore through the tallest bushes and lowest branches of the riverbank copse in a bright and deafening blaze. Lead scythed the long grass, ricocheted off trunks to split them open in pale, gleaming rents. McCroskey was all too happy to be lying flat as splinters showered all around.

  Then the pressure was gone from his head. He rolled onto his back, pushed up to an elbow, and grinned as his persecutor – a black-clad devil of an Englishman – scrambled behind a canted trunk to prime one of his two pistols. McCroskey thought about running, exploding through the brush towards the yellow and black banner swaying out on the road, but he risked being enfiladed in the crossfire. He resolved to stay put, keep low and relish the deaths of his four captors. A man, he had always thought, must get his sport where he can in days such as these.

  The man in black eased his right arm round the tree and fired out towards the road. Other shots cracked from the flanks as his confederates added their own meagre efforts. The pistol balls screamed out from the shield of brambles to keep the larger force at bay, but seemed paltry in the face of such odds. The hounds were many, a solid score of dragoons, and each one of their weapons would be almost ready to fire again if McCroskey’s silent count was even remotely accurate. He squinted through a tangled nest of brambles to glimpse the dismounted horsemen just as the roadway flared and a dirty white cloud bloomed, slewing sideways across a long rank of man and beast and metal. He dropped onto his shoulder-blades as the foliage fluttered and shook all around, and then orders brayed again. He prayed they would advance across the treeline, but the dragoon officer was either craven or clever, for he appeared to be demanding a third volley before he would risk the charge.

  McCroskey took the opportunity to sit up as the dragoons prepared their muskets once more. He saw that all four of his enemies were upright and unhurt, although clinging like frightened apes to their trees as if they could hide for ever. The man in black was busily loading his second pistol, the first still smoking from its place in his belt. ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘You!’

  The man clicked his pistol to half-cock and looked up. ‘Shut your mouth, McCroskey.’ He patted the ornate basket hilt of his sheathed sword. It was a big thing, that blade, a double-edged murderer with a red garnet set into the pommel so that it winked as it cleaved. ‘Be still or I’ll open your belly and leave you scrabbling for your guts in the grass.’

  McCroskey spat. ‘You’ve lost, Major. Look around. They swarm like bees. I am their honeypot. Better to let me go, I’d say.’

  The major’s brutal face twisted. ‘Try me.’

  McCroskey held the bastard’s gaze for a moment, wondering if the time to make his break had come. But, by Christ, that face. It was a sea cliff of a thing: hard and jagged, burnished by sun and whipped by wind. Its lone, grey eye was set into a craggy right socket, feral and sly and savage all in a twinkling instant. Of the left eye nothing remained, save the puckered tatters of some distant horror. It was a face that told tales, of cold marches and hot battles, of cities sacked and men killed. McCroskey did not fear many things, but the English bastard made him shudder. He spat again.

  The single eye narrowed to a silver sliver as more orders bo
omed from the road. ‘Pissing into the wind, sir!’ another voice called from further into the undergrowth.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant!’ the major replied. A bullet slammed into the turf close to his left boot, flecking the leather with wet shards of grass. He spat a vicious oath.

  ‘The honeypot, am I,’ Lornell McCroskey announced, the heady sense of victory lifting his spirits for the first time in days. ‘The swarm descends, Major Stryker! Can you see them?’ He tutted. ‘They already have your mounts, sirrah! You have but a few trees betwixt you. The river at your back, inviting you to swim to safety. But you cannot, for you would sacrifice the honeypot. And to swim the mighty Trent?’ He whistled softly. ‘I would’nae try it.’

  The bastard ignored him, but a tiny man, dwarf-like in stature, with a curiously feline look in his yellow eyes, appeared at McCroskey’s side, a dagger in his tiny fist. ‘Let me cut him, Major,’ he croaked in a voice that sounded as though a garrotte had been tightened about the windpipe. ‘Just once. I would see him bleed.’

  The bastard, Stryker, shook his head, though his eye never left the road. ‘Leave him, Barkworth. Plenty of foes out there.’

  ‘Traitorous little hobgoblin,’ McCroskey hissed at the diminutive man. The only thing he disliked more than the English was a Scot who fought for the wrong side.

  The dagger twitched in Barkworth’s grip. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Foul wee dwarf,’ McCroskey persisted. ‘Your nation fights against Charles Stuart, did you nae hear?’

  ‘Charles Stuart is as Scottish as you or I, McCroskey,’ Barkworth croaked. ‘You’re the traitor. You and those fuckin’ Covenanters.’

  They were interrupted by the rustle of branches thrust and hacked aside. McCroskey laughed, for the dragoon commander had sprouted some stones and elected to advance without the third volley. ‘My friends come hither, Tom Thumb. I pray you can swim.’

  ‘Major! Found one!’

  All eyes turned back to the fourth man in Stryker’s malignant party. McCroskey knew him as Lieutenant Hood, a pathetically earnest pup.

  ‘Big enough for five?’ Stryker was asking.

  Hood came up from the direction of the thundering Trent. ‘It’ll do, sir.’

  Stryker nodded. ‘Then we retire.’ The evil gaze swivelled to McCroskey. ‘Up! Up I said!’

  ‘You’ll have to shoot me, Stryker,’ McCroskey replied levelly. He could hear the dragoons getting closer with every passing moment. ‘And the prince’ll be none too happy wi’ that, I’d wager.’

  To his shock, Stryker moved back from the tree and shrugged. ‘Happier than hearing of your freedom.’ The major had long hair that was as black as the clothes he wore, and he pushed a sweat-clumped strand behind his ear with the muzzle of his pistol. Then he cocked the weapon, angling its dark mouth at McCroskey’s belly.

  ‘Wait!’ McCroskey blurted, understanding with gut-churning horror that he had fatally overplayed his hand.

  Lornell McCroskey was saved by the death of a dragoon. The man was first through the trees, slashing his way through the scrub with his sword, and came upon the fugitives a half-dozen paces to Stryker’s right. The pistol swung up and away from McCroskey in an instant, its report echoing about the trees as the leaden ball travelled into the man’s gaping mouth and out through the back of his skull. McCroskey had found his feet before the dragoon had lost his, scrambling like a terrified fox towards the dense undergrowth. He heard the slicing song of a sword wrenched free, and knew the major had reached his winking steel, but he did not falter. He hit the flesh-tearing brambles, praying that none of the bastard’s men had any shots of their own to spare, and stepped as high as he could, knees almost hitting his chest as he vaulted the clawing, clinging scrub. Pain seared suddenly, as if a lightning bolt had traced a line from right shoulder to left hip, but he could see the road now, could see the advancing dragoons, and he yelled at them for help, for sanctuary, teeth gritted so hard against the pain that he began to taste blood.

  And then he was away. No hands grasped him, no pistols coughed at his back. Lornell McCroskey was free, and Major Stryker, the bastard, would die.

  The boat slid into the reeds with a hiss that preceded a dull thud. It was dark but the heavy clouds had parted just enough for the weak moon to illuminate the dense block of the rising bank. Thatched rooftops rose beyond, a cluster of gigantic mushrooms, all sprouting around the massive stone edifice of a church tower. An owl hooted from a stand of willows close by, but all else seemed deathly silent.

  ‘This will suffice,’ Stryker said, testing the depth of the marshy river’s edge with a dangled foot. He found a firm layer of stones a few inches below the surface and eased forth, hooking his trailing leg over the side of the boat and easing up through the rustling reeds.

  ‘Far enough downstream, sir?’

  Stryker, halfway up the bank now, glanced over his shoulder to take in the looming silhouette of a thin man, several inches taller than himself. ‘Aye, Skellen, far enough.’ The sergeant gave a short sniff. Stryker stopped short. ‘Further north and we risk meeting patrols out of Gainsborough.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Skellen said flatly.

  Irritated, Stryker turned back and resumed the short climb. ‘We’ll seek refuge in the church.’

  The others clambered ashore, hauling the boat further into the reeds so that it was not easily visible. Stryker crouched in the long grass at the summit of the bank and waited for them to join him. Their shadowy shapes resolved as they climbed – the lean, youthful build of Lieutenant Hood and the childlike form of Simeon Barkworth – and although Stryker was glad that they were with him, it was a feeling tempered by terrible guilt. Their loyalty had been tested in the flames of war too many times to count, but good soldiers did not deserve incompetent commanders, and Stryker knew their predicament was borne out of his own arrogance. They had taken the slippery Lornell McCroskey – the object of two months’ hunting – at an inn just outside Louth, and from there they had struck south and west across the Lincolnshire Wolds to join the ancient Fosse Way, with the intention of reaching the safety of the significant Royalist garrison at Newark. Except something had gone wrong at Newark. Far from a hero’s welcome, Stryker and his party had blundered straight into a troop of dragoons a mile out of the town. The riders had worn ribbons of tawny: they were men loyal to the Parliament. Now, because he had not been cautious enough, they were trapped in enemy territory, and McCroskey had escaped. It had been for nothing.

  They made for the church in silence. It was a plain thing, stout in grey stone and silvered by the moon. Its square tower dominated the village like a castle keep. They padded quickly across the band of wet pasture separating the hamlet from the Trent, their weapons and baldrics held firmly lest the jangling rouse folk best left to sleep.

  ‘What the blazes happened at Newark?’ Simeon Barkworth croaked as Stryker eased his shoulder into the thick timbers of the church door. ‘That place is staunch for the king.’

  Stryker closed the door quickly, gathering everyone inside in the pitch darkness of the porch, and leaned back against one of the cold walls to collect his thoughts. ‘It has fallen, Master Barkworth.’

  ‘When, sir?’ Barkworth persisted. ‘How? It’d take a proper army to oust Byron from behind its walls. We’d have heard the news before now.’

  Stryker had thought of little else as their overladen craft had slipped northward with the rush of the river. Muskets had coughed at their backs as the dragoons had swarmed through the copse in their wake, miniature clouds of rancid smoke slewing out to obscure the bank, the water kicking up on all sides as bullets plucked the shimmering surface. Mercifully, the enemy troop had not chosen to give chase. But where had they come from?

  Stryker shook his head. ‘It should have been so simple.’

  ‘You might’ve killed him.’ Lieutenant Hood spoke from the shadows, his tone coloured more by hope than judgement.

  Stryker smiled in the gloom. ‘I suspect not, Tom. He was too far away
before I could bring my blade to bear.’

  ‘Was a big slash, sir,’ Hood continued undaunted. ‘He’d be a tough old cur to recover.’

  Barkworth’s deeply jaundiced eyes glowed yellow. ‘We grow ’em tough in Scotland. McCroskey may be a proper bastard, but he’s hard as granite.’

  Stryker agreed. ‘It was a grievous wound,’ he said. The blow he had delivered to the Roundhead’s spine had nearly been a killing blow. Nearly. ‘But we do not speak of a green recruit. Lornell McCroskey is one of their finest agents, and a seasoned campaigner. He’ll live yet, mark my words.’

  ‘Aye.’ Sergeant Skellen’s voice was deeper and even more sardonic than usual in the echo of the stone porch. ‘We would not be that lucky.’

  ‘If Newark has not fallen,’ Hood said, ‘then by whom were we attacked? A patrol?’

  ‘The Parliament garrisons Lincoln, Gainsborough and Nottingham,’ Stryker replied, turning the possibilities in his mind as he spoke. ‘Dragooners make good scouts. They have the speed of horse and the weaponry of foot.’

  ‘But we were not a mile from Newark,’ protested Barkworth. ‘They risk a great deal to strive so close.’

  ‘Unless they tracked us from the hills,’ Stryker suggested. ‘Perhaps they were tasked with McCroskey’s rescue.’

  ‘They were ahead of us on the road, sir,’ Barkworth said, ‘not behind. They blundered into our position. They did’nae expect a fight.’

  He was right. Indeed, the unpreparedness of the dragoons was the only reason they had survived. ‘Which brings us back to Newark. What the devil is happening there?’

  ‘I’m just bloody glad you found that boat, sir,’ Skellen muttered.

  Hood’s reply was interrupted by a sudden stream of warm light. Every man screwed shut his eyes, every man reached for his sword.

  ‘You are welcome, gentlemen, in our Lord’s house.’ The voice, nasal but confident, came from the main door opening into the nave. It had been pushed ajar, the candlelit hall bright beyond, and a face poked through with a nervous smile. ‘Unless it is plunder you desire.’