Paddy’s outlook was, if anything, slightly worse. He had always been suspicious of good luck in any form. It didn’t seem to be the natural order of things and he was usually happier when his fortunes were bad. Yet they’d marched through Kent almost without incident, from Maidstone on. The king’s sheriff hadn’t been in the county seat when they came looking for him. Cade’s army had caught a few of his bailiffs around the jail and amused themselves hanging them before freeing the prisoners and burning the place down. Since then, they’d walked like children in the Garden of Eden, with neither sight nor sound of the king’s soldiers. With every day of peace, Paddy’s mood sank further into his boots. It was all very well spending the daylight practising with farm tools in place of weapons, but there would come a reckoning and a retribution, he was certain. The king and his fine lords couldn’t allow them to roam the countryside at will, taking and burning whatever they wanted. Only the thought that they were not alone kept Paddy’s spirits up. They’d heard reports of riots in London and the shires, all sparked off by the righteous grievances of families coming home from France. Paddy prayed each night that the king’s soldiers would be kept busy somewhere else, but in his heart of hearts, he knew they were coming. He’d had a grand few weeks in the Kentish Freemen, but he expected tears and the weather suited his gloom.
The rain had lessened to a constant drizzle, but there was mist thick around them when they heard a high voice shouting nearby. Jack had insisted on scouts, though they had only stolen plough horses for them to ride. One of the volunteers was a short, wiry Scot by the name of James Tanter. The sight of the little man perched on the enormous great horse had reduced Paddy almost to tears of laughter when he’d seen it. They all recognized Tanter’s thick brogue yelling a warning through the rain.
Jack roared orders on the instant to ready weapons. Tanter may have been a bitter little haggis-sucker, as Jack called him, but he wasn’t a man to waste breath on nothing either.
They marched on, holding pruning hooks and scythes, shovels and even old swords if they’d come across them or taken them from unfortunate bailiffs. Every man there stared through the grey, looking for shapes that could be an enemy. All noises were muffled, but they heard Tanter shout a curse and his horse whinny somewhere up ahead. Paddy turned back and forth as he walked, straining to hear. He made out small sounds and swallowed nervously.
‘Christ save us, there they are!’ Jack said, raising his voice to a bellow. ‘You see them? Now kill them. Pay a little back of what you’re owed. Attack!’
The lines of men broke into a lurching run through the thick mud, the ones at the rear watching their mates disappear into the swirling mist. They could see no further than thirty paces, but for Jack Cade and Paddy, that small space was filling with soldiers with good swords and chain mail. They too had been warned by Tanter’s desperate shouts, but there was still confusion in the sheriff’s ranks. Some of them stopped dead on seeing Cade’s men drift like ghosts out of the land in front of them.
With a roar, Cade charged, raising a woodcutter’s axe above his head as he went. He was among the first to reach the sheriff’s soldiers and he buried the wide blade in the neck of the first man he faced. The blow cut deep through mail links and wedged, so that he had to wrench it back and forth to free the blade, spattering himself with gore. Around him, his men were surging forward. Rob Ecclestone wore no armour and held only his razor, but he did bloody work with it, stepping past armoured men with a quick flick that left them gasping and holding their throats. Paddy had a pruning hook with a crescent blade that he held out flat. He hooked men’s heads with it, pulling them in as the blade bit. The rest were Kentish men for the most part and they’d been angry ever since the French had evicted them. They were angrier still at the English lords who’d connived in it. In that boggy field near Sevenoaks, there was a chance for them to act at last and all Jack’s speeches were as nothing next to that. They were furious men holding sharp iron and they poured forward into the soldiers.
Jack staggered, swearing at a dull pain from his leg. He didn’t dare look down and risk getting his head split at the wrong moment. He wasn’t even sure he’d been cut and had no memory of a wound, but the damned thing buckled under him and he limped and hopped with the line, swinging his axe as he went. He fell behind despite his best efforts, staggering on while the noises of battle receded away from him.
He stepped over dead men and took a careful route around the screaming wounded. It seemed an age of limping along, lost in hissing rain that made the blood on his axe run down his arm and chest. In the mists, it took him a little time to understand no one else was coming against him. The sheriff had sent four hundred men-at-arms, a veritable army in the circumstances. It was easily enough men to quell a rebellion of farmers — unless there were five thousand of them, armed and raging. The soldiers had made bloody slaughter on some of Cade’s Freemen, but in the drizzle and fog, neither side had seen the numbers they faced until there were no more soldiers left to kill.
Jack stood with his boots so clogged he thought it made him a foot taller. He was panting and sweat poured off him, adding to his stink. Still no one came. Slowly, a smile spread across Jack’s face.
‘Is that it?’ he shouted. ‘Can anyone see any more of them? Jesus, they can’t all be dead already? Rob?’
‘No one alive here,’ his friend shouted from over on his right.
Jack turned to the voice and through the mist he saw Ecclestone standing alone, with even the Kentish Freemen shying away from him. He was covered in other men’s blood, a red figure in the swirling vapour. Jack shuddered, feeling cold hands run down his back at the sight.
‘Didn’t the sheriff have a white horse on his shield?’ Paddy called from somewhere on Jack’s left.
‘He’d no right to it, but I heard that.’
‘He’s here then.’
‘Alive?’ Jack demanded hopefully.
‘He’d be screaming if he was, with a wound like this one. He’s gone, Jack.’
‘Take his head. We’ll put it on a pole.’
‘I’m not cutting his head off, Jack!’ Paddy replied. ‘Take his shield for your bloody pole. It’s the horse of Kent, isn’t it? It’ll do just as well.’
Jack sighed, reminded once again that the Irishman had some odd qualms for a man with his history.
‘A head sends a better message, Paddy. I’ll do it. You fetch a good pole and sharpen the end. We’ll take his shield as well, mind.’
The lack of an enemy was slowly being understood by his ragged army, so that cheering erupted in patches from them, echoing oddly across the fields and sounding thin and exhausted, despite their numbers. Jack stepped over dozens of bodies to reach Paddy. He looked down on to the white face of a man he’d never met and raised his axe with satisfaction, bringing it down hard.
‘Where next, Jack?’ Paddy said in wonder, looking at the corpses all around. Blood squelched around his boots, mingling with the rainwater and mud.
‘I’m thinking we have a proper army here,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘One that’s been blooded and come through. There’s swords for the taking, as well as mail and shields.’
Paddy looked up from the headless figure that had been the sheriff of Kent. Just the day before, the sheriff had been a man to be feared across the county. The Irishman looked at Jack in dawning astonishment, his eyes widening.
‘You aren’t thinking o’ London? I thought that was just fighting talk before. It’s one thing to take down a few hundred sheriff’s men, Jack!’