Then the armored and padded clergyman had hidden his head in an old-fashioned casque and resumed his practice bout with blunted broadsword and main gauche dagger, stamping and grunting and swearing like any trooper.
He found Sir Francis had been correct, too. The trip north with empty wagons had helped mightily in planning the trip south with full ones, although the sufferings and difficulties of that northbound preview in no way mitigated the waking nightmare that the southbound main show proved to be.
Arrived finally at Whyffler Hall, having lost only eleven wagons out of the sixty with which he had left York, Foster was pleasantly surprised to find Buddy Webster, several companies of Welsh pikemen, the Royal Artificiers Corps and Riechsherzog Wolfgang.
The snow had been cleared or tramped away from the environs of the hall’s circuit of walls, and under direction of the European and the artificiers, levies of countryfolk and soldiers were feverishly strengthening the ancient walls, fronting them with deep ditches, and constructing artillery emplacements. Drawn by lowing, steaming oxen on log sledges, or huge, creaking wains, bombards captured from the French Crusaders were arriving at the average rate of three per day, each escorted by mounted artillerists and dragoons.
Every couple of days, Duke Wolfgang would have the five or six new pieces loaded and fired a few times. Then he would confer with their gunners, make a few calculations, and decide just where each gun was to be mounted on the walls.
“Each gonne an individual iss,” he told Foster and Sir Francis, one night after dinner. “If a man a £oot rider iss, vc poot him on a horse; if not, ve teach him to pike. So why not each gonne place vhere even its flaws goot are?”
By the time Foster’s caravan was ready to leave, Whyffler Hall was well on the way to becoming a stout fortress, and more royal troops were arriving to man the defenses. The walls were become stronger than ever they had been, and they and the newmade outworks now guarding them were bristling with bombards and swivels, and the powder manufactory had worked ceaselessly to fill each cask and gunbox to overflowing.
When a last, long powder train had departed, bound southwest toward the camp of the Royal Force, Pete Fairley supervised the loading of all his equipment and supplies into wooden crates bearing misleading markings; then, previously hidden repKcas of his devices were put in place of the originals, and empty fertilizer bags were each filled with a hundredweight of earth and carefully resewn before being stacked in the storage area. Whyffler Hall was to maintain as long as possible the appearance of still housing the manufactory and would, it was hoped, bog down sizable elements of the Scots army, whenever they organized sufficiently to cross the border.
Sir Francis’ sixteen-year-old daughter, Arabella, flatly refused to join the exodus of noncombatants, and neither cooed imporrunings nor heated shoutings would move her. A dimpled smile on her heart-shaped face,’ she gave that same answer to any who pressed her.
“Och, nay, I be chatelaine o’ Whyffler Ha’, by war or reavin’ or nae. My place be here. I maun care for Fither, an’ I cannae do sich in York. And I shall stay!”
But her expressed filial sentiments were not her sole reason for remaining . . . and all knew it. There was also the only remaining patient in the hall, who still was too ill to be waggoned south.
Several times each week, mounted patrols composed of royal dragoons and local lancers swung north into the Cheviot Hills, keeping watch on the likeliest routes of invasion, and one day Foster, beginning to feel a sort of cabin fever, joined the unit as a supernumerary. At midday they had paused on a prominence overlooking the very border itself, or so the cairns proclaimed. Staying below the ridge as they munched their rations, they posted a brace of Musgrave’s troopers to keep watch on the narrow gap below.
The patrol leader, one Lieutenant Edgar Lloyd, had just put foot to stirrup when one of the sentries slid down the precipitous slope with word of approaching horsemen. Both officers returned to the man’s vantage point and witnessed the unfolding of the drama.