The White Cockade

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Action & Adventure; Classics; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

An enthralling story of high adventure, ambush and pursuit, plot and counterplot during the ill-fated United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798. When seventeen-year-old John Regan takes on a mission entrusted to him by his dying father, he rides through an Ireland seething with danger with more than just his own life in his hands. The first in a trilogy of books set in 18th century Ireland, from the bestselling author of Rape of the Fair Country.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 128

Sample

THE stars looked so cold that they might faint out of the sky as I took the road to Fishguard, and gave Mia her head. She was a big mare and used to the greater weight of my father, and now she revelled in her strength as if she knew that in us lay the fate of Ireland, and her hooves beat a rhythmic thunder past the tattered hedges all wreathed and ghostly in sea-mist. Breasting a rise I saw the cold, forbidding country of Pembroke stark white under the full May moon, and to the south the estuary lay in crumpled silver, with Nelson’s twenty-two ships of the line straining at their hawsers, sails unfurling in the storm like tigers raising their hackles for a new spit at the French. But I did not spare them another glance, and drove on with a billow of white dust rising in the wind blustering in from the wastes of the Atlantic, and the roadside trees were flattened into crippledom, with sand sweeping into my face in little needles of pain.

‘Mia, Mia, Mia …!’ I cried above the wind, and reached out, gripping her mane, and she snorted her delight at me, loving this, and tossed the rein, and I felt between my knees the buck and stretch of her, and the heat of her blood, which was one with mine in this mission for my father. Through Johnston we went at full gallop raising the dead with our commotion, with the inn signs creaking for coffin-lids in the storm and the squat houses sitting either side like animals awaiting the spring. On, on to Merlin’s Bridge now, and I knew that if they ambushed us for the truth of the white cockade they would do it short of the town: remembering the ambush I loosened the rapier at the hilt and flattened over Mia’s neck again, crying to her, and the road that unwound before her flying hooves was a snake of purple under the storm-tossed moon.

After another mile on the gallop, I reined her in and we trotted into a woodland clear of the road. Here a brook was foaming, boasting its way to the sea. Going full length beside Mia, I drank deep, then took off my leather doublet and threw it over her flanks, because she was sweating. And while she rested, grazing, I pulled the little flint-lock pistol from the doublet belt and balled and primed it with the horn, and sat in the shadows of the hedge, watching the road. Soon a coach and four greys came pounding for Milford Haven, and I saw the flash of gold braid, the officers of the line: rolling and bucking, it came, with the horses steaming under the whip and the driver battened down against the wind, the rain swishing from his broad-brimmed hat.

When the coach had passed, I looked at the pistol in my hand, recalling that, not a week ago, my father had touched it. Ambushed on this same road to Fishguard, they had shot him in the back, but Mia had held him and brought him at a trot back home. And when they lifted him from the mare he called for me, no other: he called for me and gave me the letter; the white cockade he gave me, too, before he died. And he bid me die for Ireland also, if I did not deliver the letter.

Now there came to me a great emptiness, and I leaned against a tree. And Mia, sensing my loss, came to me then, with her wet muzzle against my face, as horses do in companionship to those they love. This she often did to my father when he was pleased with her.

I would have wept, then, had Mia not been watching: there are disadvantages, I find, in being grown up, for I was seventeen.

‘Away with you, ye skillet,’ I said. ‘Are we hanging around all day?’

Before I remounted I checked the secret slot in Mia’s saddle: the letter for Lord Edward Fitzgerald was still safely there. Putting on my doublet, I adjusted the white cockade at my shoulder. Then I took her on the run, which always delighted her, and she reared up, trying to throw me, pawing the air.

The game was over: flattening her ears she lowered her flanks and we galloped away to the west. The stars were trembling in the storm-swept sky as we raced down the lanes to Fishguard.

For the first time since his death, while Mia could not see, I wept for my father.

A MILE or so short of Fishguard I reined off the road and took the back lane down to the harbour where the midnight packet was waiting, and I saw her clearly on the emblazoned sea. Almost immediately I felt Mia falter in a scent of danger, and she shrieked, rearing up to a gunpowder flash, and the road became a blaze of incinerating whiteness. In a clatter of hooves I slid from the saddle, rolled into the wayside undergrowth, and lay still: distantly I heard Mia thundering away over the fields, the escape and return my father had taught her. Gripping the hilt of the rapier, I lay there, and I saw, sliding over the stars the heads and shoulders of men and a flash of steel.

‘Sure to heaven, we’ve missed him!’

‘Is he away with the horse?’

‘He is not, Mike, for I saw him come off. Are ye there, John Regan?’

Motionless, I lay, face in the grass, praying that Mia would return before the hour, as my father had trained her. The tramp of boots came closer; a torch was lighted in a shower of sparks, and it floated along the hedges, turning the night scarlet. Black smoke from the gunpowder flash was lying thick in the hollows and I buried my face in the wetness of the bank, gasping to breathe.

‘Are ye there, Regan! You can show yourself, for you’ve landed among friends.’

I did not move. There were men in Ireland today who claimed the badge of the United Irishmen, but would flog a peasant for the wrong religion and break a man’s arm for the price of his silence. This was the scum that had come to the top of the brew; men like the terrible Hessians who carried the torture of the pitch-cap, the picketings, the half-hangings: men who shot in the back.

Now one of them was blundering along the hedge behind me, and, breaking through, I saw him instantly in a drive of the moon; his eyes wide and startled as I leaped up to face him, ducked his lumbering swing, and hooked him square. The meaty smack of fist on bone cracked through their stumbling search. The man sighed and slid against me, and I lowered him to the ground at my feet.

Four of them now.

But the noise of the fight turned them, and they ringed me on the road. Astonishingly, they were unarmed, and one cried, ‘It’s bound to be the young Regan. He’s laid one on Big Tim’s whiskers, and he’s sleepin’ like a child.’

‘Keep back,’ I said, lifting the rapier.

‘Is it true you’re young John Regan, lad?’ This one was young, with a saucy air on him, all done up in a scarlet doublet and gold earrings.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Well, whatever your name is, will you put that thing away before somebody gets hurt, for we’ve little time to spare.’

‘What do you want with me?’ They approached, their feet shifty on the road, and I backed away to the hedge. The pistol was primed in my pocket, but I dared not reach for it: one careless move, and they would be on me. Distantly I heard Mia galloping. She had been away but a few minutes. Any moment now she might come: she would come at a gallop down the road and slacken so I could mount her. If I was not there she would come again within the hour, as my father had trained her. I had to keep them away until Mia came.

‘In the name of heaven,’ cried another, ‘do we have to break your head before you know an enemy from a patriot. And d’you know something? If we hadn’t stopped you here they’d have done so outside Fishguard, and cut your throat from ear to ear.’

‘Sure, Patrick, me son, that rhymes!’ somebody said, laughing.

‘Rhyme it may, but it is God’s truth. We’re Lord Fitzgerald’s men come over special to receive ye, son. Will you put that sword away?’

‘Come and get it,’ I said.

Thi. . .