In time, the column was duly formed, and Lord Utterback placed himself at the head of it. I rode just behind, along with the trumpeter and his lordship’s standard of golden seahorses on a field of blue. I am sure we made a brave sight, all arrayed there in the morning sun, horses pawing the ground, pikes sloped over shoulders, plumes nodding over helmets, and everyone waiting the word to advance.
Which never came. For a party of dragoons had come into sight down below, and as they dashed closer to us, we saw their captain Frere was among them. Utterback rode forward to meet him, and I followed. As we came close, we saw their horses were lathered, and heard the breath rasp from their nostrils.
Frere threw an arm back and pointed. “The enemy, my lord!” he called as he reined up. “The enemy is upon us!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“We could not tell, my lord,” Frere said. He was a big man, large for a dragoon, with a black spade-shaped beard. “Their column curved out of sight below us. Yet they have foot and horse, and I counted the flags of half a dozen regiments. So they have at least as many as we, and very likely more.”
Utterback’s calm was so absolute that it began to seem unnatural. I could see his eyes making little jumps left and right, as if he were reading written instructions hanging before him in the air.
“I shall have to fight them,” he said. “I must fight them, then.”
I interrupted Utterback’s reverie with a question. “How long before they come?”
“Their advance guard, within the hour,” Frere said. “The main body will be two hours or more. My men will try to delay them, but dragoons can’t fight proper cavalry in the field.”
I wondered, as I so often had during the course of the campaign, what dragoons could fight, since they seemed unable to match either foot or horse. Lord Utterback, however, received this latest information with another long silence.
I turned again to Frere. “Can we drive in their advance guard? Be on them with the cavalry before they know we’re here?”
Frere’s bushy eyebrows closed in thought. “Ay, that is possible. But we must be right speedy, and be prepared to retire smartly if those infestulous custrels prove ready for us.”
Hearing this, Lord Utterback made up his mind, and turned to me. “I’ll go forward with the horse,” he said. “You must ready the foot and artillery for when we must fall back.”
“My lord?” I said, but a whirlwind had now taken Utterback’s soul, and he stood in his stirrups, turned, and waved the cavalry on. He trotted back to join them, then led the column off to the left so that all the elements could wheel and come into line, and the air was suddenly full of trumpet calls and shouted orders. “Ranks by threes! Farriers to the rear! Right wheel! Halt, dress! Walk! Halt, dress! By the standard—walk! Halt! Dress your lines!”
The Utterback Troop was experienced at this sort of thing by now, and managed the maneuver well, and as speedily as Captain Frere could have hoped. Soon, Lord Utterback had his troop formed in two lines facing down the slope to the east, with Lord Barkin’s Troop just behind them. The infantry, having received no orders, stood in their column and watched these maneuvers in some surprise.
Lord Utterback, now unable to be still, trotted back and forth in front of the lines as they dressed, then placed himself in front of the standard.
“Ready to advance! Walk!”
From the sidelines, I watched in complete astonishment as the cavalry walked on down the field. In his eagerness to strike the enemy, Lord Utterback had abandoned us, along with most of his army. Frere, who stood with me, turned to me.
“I should gather up my lads. Do what you can here.” His tone was not unkind.
I rode back to where the infantry stood in their marching column, and finding Coronel Ruthven and his party with their lead regiment, I asked him to have his trumpeter make the officers’ call.
I looked over the ground while waiting for the officers to come up, and tried to see it as an experienced soldier might. The flat pasture was nearly as smooth as a bowling green, for any trees or bushes were grazed away by sheep while they were mere sprouts. South of the narrow field, the ground fell away into a ravine, and on the north the land rose into steep cliffs until the escarpment bent away to make a passage to Exton.
The road to Peckside ran east and west down the length of the pasture, but closer to the south side of the field than to the north. At the crossroads, the road to Exton branched off to the north.
Erosion by wagons and other traffic had sunk the roads anywhere from three to six feet below ground level, and thick blackthorn hedges, where tender new leaves were mingled with last year’s black, half-rotted sloes, lined both sides of the roads, broken only occasionally by a wooden gate. The roads were intended as chutes to guide flocks of sheep and cattle to new grazing, but now after the rains, the roads were bogs of mud, and in some places were under water.
I could only think that the hedges and sunken roads that cut across the sett would aid the defense.
“An enemy force is coming on,” I told the officers when they arrived. “Lord Utterback has gone with the horse to attack their advanced body, but he expects he’ll be obliged to retire, and wants us to prepare to fight here.”
Coronel Ruthven was a man of fifty, in elaborate armor of boiled leather sculpted to look like the muscles of an ancient hero. He stroked his gray, pointed beard as he looked with narrowed eyes over Exton Scales. “Yon thick-pleached hedge will make a fine barrier,” he said. “This is a good field for defense, and no way around us.”
My friend Captain Lipton took off his bonnet and scratched his balding head. “I know not where to put the guns,” he said.
I ventured an answer. “In front, I suppose.”
“In front of the hedge? They will be overrun.” He closed one eye and looked over the sett with his remaining eye, as if pretending to view the ground with a telescope.
“We’ll find a way to site your guns,” I told him, “but first we must place the foot.”
That business went more quickly than I’d expected. I was as inexperienced in battle as Lord Utterback, but the customs of war made many of the decisions for me. Ruthven, commanding one of the Trained Bands of Selford, had by custom the position of honor on the right. Bell, as the senior of the two mercenary commanders, took the second position of honor, on the left. That left Grace’s Trained Band inside of Ruthven, and Fludd’s mercenaries between Grace and Bell.
While the sergeants-major ordered their companies on the field, Lipton and I rode off to view the ground, and found a place for his demiculverins on the far left, where the ground rose as it neared Exton. Were the eight guns placed here, they would overlook the entire field, and shot would be fired over our soldiers’ heads to land among the enemy.
From this point of vantage I could see the hedges and the roads winking with water, the flat brown ground, the companies marching to their places with shouldered pikes and hackbuts. Below Exton Scales, the road curved off to the right as it followed the line of the mountain, and from this point of vantage I could see well down the track, far more than I could see from the level ground.
Lipton brought out his telescope and peered down the road. “See you,” said he. “Our demilances return, sure.”
He offered me his telescope and I looked to see horsemen coming up the road. Not lines of disciplined troops such as Lord Utterback had led down to meet the enemy, but small groups, moving slowly. I felt my stomach clench at the sight, and I looked in some desperation for the standards and saw none.