'It's in the battle scenario, sir— Appendix F.' Digby nodded.
'Everyone has to know exactly what's happening, otherwise things are bound to go wrong. We've learnt that by bitter experience. So you see—'
Audley smiled into the stillness of his study, remembering the sergeant's meticulous account of the battle of Swine Brook Field with admiration.
Such a curious mixture, that account had been. Mostly it was still the formal recollection of a policeman trained to give evidence, but every now and then the youthful Civil War buff shone through, illuminating a sombre landscape of fact with shafts of enthusiasm.
He thought of Digby lying in the narrow bed in the spare room at the end of the passage, which had once been his own childhood bedroom, and realised without surprise that the thought was already edged with something close to affection.
It was hard to think of the boy as a police sergeant. If he had married young he could have had a son that age, and Digby could have occupied that bed as of right. To have a sharp son like that to put him in his place would be rather agreeable. . . .
He was growing old, and the measure of his years was that he was already beginning to relive his youth through those who still had the whole exciting game to play . . . and who could dummy5
still do all the things he had somehow missed doing.
Neither Faith nor Superintendent Weston needed to worry: he would keep an eye on young Henry Digby. A protective eye.
And the irony now was that in that very responsibility lay the key to the murder of James Ratcliffe on Swine Brook Field, which Weston and Digby himself had both missed.
The red dye—the tell-tale red dye—had been an unforeseen accident. But Henry Digby's presence twenty yards from the killing had been a well-known fact. A fact well known to Charlie Ratcliffe.
A fact Charlie Ratcliffe could not afford to overlook: Sergeant Digby of the Mid-Wessex Police Force.
He stared down at the four names which he had written on his blotter.
8
ON the corner of Easingbridge Village Green nearest the Ploughman's Arms public house a yellow-coated musketeer was vomiting up his heart and a quantity of beer, oblivious of his admiring audience of small children. Two of his comrades, obviously in little better condition, lay stretched out on the grass nearby, their muskets and bandoliers at their side. And from the pub itself came the sound of drunken, but nonetheless distinct singing—
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Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair?
Parlez-vous, parlez-vous!
Oh, landlord have you a daughter fair, With lily-white tits and golden hair?
Inky-pinky parlez-vous.
Audley manoeuvred the 2200 into a vacant slot in the pub forecourt, reflecting as he did so that if the song was anachronistic ('Three German Officers crossed the Rhine', which as he recalled was its first line, if not its title, could hardly be earlier than 1914), the condition of the singers was no doubt historically impeccable: from the position of the village on the western slope of the Easing valley, with the river between the Royalists and Oliver Cromwell's advancing raiders, the cavaliers must have been stoned out of their minds to let their enemies round them up so easily in broad daylight back in 1644. Mere incompetence couldn't stretch that far, only booze would answer the case.
He switched off the engine and picked up the leaflet which had been thrust through his window at the traffic jam by the bridge. It was crudely printed, but the map on one side told its story simply and directly: Cromwell, the cunning sod, had feinted at the bridge to draw the Royalists' attention directly dummy5
across the river while actually sending the greater part of his brigade up river to cross by a convenient ford. Once across the river, his men had swept down on the enemy's flank; whereupon the attackers at the bridge had advanced in earnest and had turned the Royalist defeat into a rout.
It all looked nice and clear-cut; suspiciously so, indeed. But the reality had probably been very different, he thought, remembering what Captain (alias Sergeant) Henry Digby had told him that very morning. This had actually been the future dictator's very first truly independent command, the raid to stop the King transferring his artillery from the Severn Valley to Oxford. If he had fluffed it, the odds were that he might not have been given his chance as Fairfax's second-in-command in the coming campaign—the Naseby campaign which made his reputation as a cavalry general.
By the time he'd reached the Easing valley he'd already fought two successful actions, smashing three of the Earl of Northampton's regiments in Oxfordshire and then bluffing the Bletchingdon House garrison into surrender. But he still had everything to play for, and it would all have gone for nothing if those Royalist pickets at the upstream ford had been made of sterner stuff.
He stared down at the crumpled paper in his hand, at the black arrow which marked the line of the approach march, the river crossing and the flank attack. So that was how it had been done.
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It wasn't even a proper name—more likely it had been just
'the old cow ford near Easingbridge'. But that was where history had been made—and changed— nevertheless.
Sweating, muddy horses and sweating, swearing men filing through the thick woods above the valley; jingling harness drowned by the distant sound of musket fire and cannon downstream, and maybe also diverting the attention of the Royalist pickets—'The buggers'll be catching it down by the bridge. Better them than us, though'; and then the terrible long cavalry swords drawn, the straight basket-hiked swords of the New Model Army . . .
And then General Cromwell's men were across the Old Cow Ford. And General Cromwell was on his way to the Cotswolds
—and to Naseby, and the Palace of Westminster and the conquest of three kingdoms.
