I put myself into Nathaniel Parrott's shoes.
Hiding a ton of gold ingots presented a great many problems, the more so when it had to be done in the middle of a siege, with the garrison all around. For if Parrott and Steyning had decided that the castle was doomed they could hardly rely on death shutting all the mouths of those who might have an idea of the hiding place.
Although in fact death had done just that very neatly indeed.
Too neatly?
And, by God, death had also covered up the hiding place too, for this was the site of the original explosion—the site of the powder magazine.
Audley stared into the crater. Clever and devious and ruthless, Nayler had said, and they'd been all of that, Parrott and Steyning—all of that and more.
The powder magazine would have been strictly out of bounds.
They had dug their hole in it, and dug far deeper than was necessary.
And then filled it in.
And then made a brand new hole above it—and who would think of looking for a hole in the bottom of another hole?
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And they had killed the men who had hidden the treasure at the same time.
Audley frowned. The men had included Edmund Steyning himself.
Parrott.
"Colonel Parrott, the sole survivor among the senior officers, took to horse and essayed to escape
—"
The murderous bastard!
The murderous double-crossing bastard.
"You got what you came for?" The question was a formality; Burton had been watching him intently.
"Yes."
Like Nathaniel Parrott—like Charlie Ratcliffe: it had maybe taken a murderer to spot a murderer.
"That's good, then," said Burton.
Not really so good, thought Audley. There was nothing more here for him, on the scene of a successful seventeenth-century crime. If there was any chance of catching Charlie Ratcliffe it could only be somewhere back on the site of the twentieth-century crime, beside the Swine Brook.
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6
AUDLEY hated English heatwaves. He could put up with foreign hot weather, even Washington weather, which was natural and inevitable. But English heat was like a betrayal by an old and dear friend whose greatest virtue had hitherto been a comfortable and reliable moderation.
And worst of all was hot English darkness, which always made him wonder, when he awoke after a few minutes (or was it a few hours?) of sweaty, unrefreshing sleep, whether he was in England at all.
He reached across tentatively under the single sheet to reassure himself. There were only two thighs in the world like that. Once upon a long ago time there had been other thighs, but none of them had had Faith's superb temperature control, cool in summer and warm in winter.
He was at home in his own bed in the midst of a heatwave, with the weathermen's records melting one by one around him—
Not since the summer of 1948 ...
Not since the summer of 1940 . . .
Hot and dry.
But the summers of the 1640s, especially the summer of '43, had been warm and wet, which spelt poor harvests and bad, unhealthy military campaigns.
No more doubts now. He had been thinking of the summer of dummy5
'43 when he had finally drifted off. Now he would think of it again for want of anything better to think about.
Anno Domini One Thousand, Six Hundred and Forty-Three.
What had 1643 to do with 1975?
He felt the sweat running down his throat.
Nothing.
But that had been a bad summer for Parliament and the Roundheads, no two ways about that. Maybe not with hindsight, because even defeat was teaching Master Oliver Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax their new trade the hard way, the way Grant and Sherman had learnt it.
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.
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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—
Money. That was what 1643 had in common with 1975.
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."