But without hindsight . . .
Beaten at Charlgrove in June, and that good man John Hampden dying in agony from his wound; beaten at Lansdown the next month by the Cornish infantry, and doubly beaten against the odds at Roundway Down a few days later by the Royalist cavalry.
Bristol, the second city of the Kingdom, stormed by Prince Rupert before July was out, and other towns falling like skittles: Poole and Dorchester, Portland and Weymouth, Bideford and Barnstaple— Henry Digby counting them off on his fingers across the dinner table—Gloucester in danger, Exeter on the verge of surrender, Lincoln and Gainsborough lost.
Trouble in Kent, trouble in London. And a rising even in Cromwell's own East Anglia.
dummy5
Plague in Waller's army—the warm, wet summer at work.
And John Pym, who held it all together from London, fighting the cancer in his gut that was killing him by inches and which would have him in the ground before the year was out.
Money desperately short, troops deserting for want of it—
In 1643 Pym was already levying taxes such as Charles I had never dreamed of, taxes on everything but the prime necessities of life—and even they would be taxed before the thing was finished. Money not just for weapons and powder and soldiers' pay, but also to buy the Scottish army.
This wasn't Digby, this was his own memory. Digby knew about the battles and how they had been fought, but he didn't know what had brought the armies to the battlefield.
Money.
The Scots, to their credit, would fight the King for the sake of religion. But to their eternal discredit—and their subsequent utter defeat—they would only do it at a price and a profit.
'Darling—are you awake?' Faith turned towards him.
Money.
He knew there had been something bugging him about Swine Brook Field, and that was it. In August, 1643, both armies had been at full stretch, the Royalists to take Gloucester and the Roundheads to relieve it. But they had each detached dummy5
men they could ill afford to spare to intervene in a piddling little country house siege, little better than a feud between two local magnates who hated each other's guts because of an old lawsuit.
'Darling ...'
But if there had been gold at Standingham Castle—if money and promises would make the Scots march it would also make them stay north of the border. Was that what both sides had thought?
'Are you awake, darling?'
And since the King was far shorter of it than Parliament, that made it doubly important for Parliament to stop him getting it, even in the depths of their bad summer.
That was why Swine Brook Field had been fought.
Was that what Charlie Ratcliffe had thought too?
'Sorry, love. Did I wake you up?' He stroked the cool thigh gently.
'You would have woken me up if I'd been to sleep. You've been grunting and mumbling like a mad thing.'
Audley felt guilty. She had wanted to talk and he had been too tired. And instead he had merely kept her awake.
'I'm sorry.'
She gave a gurgling chuckle. 'Oh, I don't mind you grunting and mumbling, darling. It's when you wake up and start thinking that you're really disturbing— you don't make a dummy5
sound then, and the noise is deafening.'
'The noise?'
'You get tensed up when you think. You went absolutely rigid just now—did you have a brilliant idea? I hope you did, anyway. I don't mind being kept awake by brilliant ideas.'
'Not exactly brilliant, but an idea.' Audley smiled into the darkness: she was as irrepressibly unawed about his job as she had been when she'd first met him. And he was still what he had been to her then—a cross between a high class refuse collector and the municipal pest officer, two unrewarding but necessary posts. Someone had to fill them, and she just happened to fancy the someone who did . . .
'And top secret, I presume,' she murmured.
'Not really. I was just thinking that the sinews of war are made of gold.'
'Not very profound.'
'But still true.'
'Hmm ... if it wasn't just past midnight I might argue that ideas were better than gold.'
'Ideas?' Audley squinted at the luminous hands of the bedside clock. It was only just past midnight: no wonder he hadn't woken her up, he hadn't been asleep for more than half an hour. And yet he felt as if he'd slept for hours. 'All right, I'll give you gold plus ideas, that ought to be unbeatable.'
