William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (10 page)

‘I have not.’

‘Are you a godly man?’

‘I am not god
less
.’

He knew I was evading the question; but how do you tell a young man who believes that God helped him rescue his dear friend that, to you, God is as much a story as fairies at the bottom of the garden? It hardened him, though. If there had been a chance we might be friends, it had gone. ‘I started running,’ he told me. ‘I got there in time. God had already intervened. He was dangling but not dead. I climbed to the branch and cut him down.’ Here he looked more sad than ever. ‘I knew the fall might kill him just as easily as the rope. But I had to cut. The surgeon has put a splint on his leg and both his wrists are shattered. Jacob’s war is finished, Master Falkland. He will return home as soon as he is able. That the rope has taken away his voice might even be a blessing. At least now his dear mother will not have to hear the story.’

Carew had his hands together as if to pray. Against my will I found myself doing the same. ‘I would like to ask him some questions,’ I said. It seemed strange that he had hurt himself so. I had dropped from the same branch but the night before and survived with nothing more than a twinge in my knees and bruises to my pride. The snow had cushioned my fall, true, but to such an extent?

‘Have you listened, Master Falkland?’ Carew’s voice was level, each word enunciated perfectly as if he was an actor. He was definitely a boy trained for a lordly life. ‘He cannot speak.’

‘There are ways,’ I began.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Things I might ask. I might need only a nod of the head.’

‘He needs his rest.’

‘Can he write?’

Carew snorted with derision. ‘Did you
see
his hands, Master Falkland? Broken so that the surgeon believes they will be little more use than stumps.’

‘But he knows
how
to write?’

I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Lucas, the surgeon, and had the sudden feeling that I was surrounded, trapped in a classic bluff by two small bands of soldiers. ‘Master Carew,’ I said, ‘I’m grateful for what you could tell me. I take it you know nothing of the other two boys who hanged themselves?’

‘Only their names, sir, and that they had no place in this army.’

I walked past the surgeon. At the door I turned around. ‘There was one other thing,’ I said. ‘There was another boy. Thomas Fletcher. You might know him as White Tom.’

‘The boy who stole the granadoe. Yes?’

‘You knew him?’

‘Only his story. You are right, sir – it is intriguing to wonder why White Tom and Jacob both went down to the tree where those boys died. I am afraid, though, that we have stopped thinking about it. There will be many more die before the winter is out. More if the King does not quickly come to terms as he must. These unfortunate incidents are best forgotten. We just want our friend back.’

CHAPTER 10

I’d spent much of the morning by now walking from one place to another, asking my questions and finding little by way of answers. I still couldn’t say whether the first two boys had hanged themselves or whether they had received some considerable help. They had been Catholics, and Catholics clearly lived in fear and perhaps some considerable peril. Edmund Carew knew more than he’d chosen to tell me but I doubted even a skilled torturer would coerce the truth from him. I suspected the same was true of the other boys who surrounded Jacob Hotham. Hotham himself would tell me a far more interesting story, I felt sure, but only if God saw fit to return his voice. I began to muse on ways to speak with Hotham alone and then stopped myself. Why? To what end? The answer I should give to Cromwell was simple enough:
you’ve pressed Catholic boys into service in your army of Puritans. There’s simply nothing more to say.
I doubted he’d be much pleased with such an answer but I felt sure that, at its core, here was the truth of this mystery. What did it matter whether they’d hanged themselves or whether Edmund Carew or some other boy like him had seen to their murder? It would happen again with some other boys in some other way, and again and again, and the cause would remain the same. Was not my task here as good as done? Was it not done before it even started?

I rose from where I sat, watching the surgeon’s house, and made my way towards Miss Cain’s, resolved to propose to Warbeck that I’d as good as completed my work. I doubted he’d be pleased but I thought perhaps he might see the reason of my argument, and, too, I knew he’d find the notion of an early return to London entirely agreeable. And yet as I walked I felt my resolve wither with each step. I didn’t know whether those two boys had died by their own hands or by others. I suspected they had been murdered, but I found that merely thinking it wasn’t good enough. They deserved better. Their mothers deserved better. They deserved not to live with the shame of a suicide. For the first time since we’d left London, I found myself cursing the conscience that had hounded me to hang that rapist and murderer in York. I’d confounded the King then. Now it seemed I would confound myself.

It was still possible, I supposed, that Warbeck might see matters otherwise, but when I got back to the house I found him in a foul temper. He didn’t speak to me or ask me where I’d been, only where Purkiss was.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I ordered him to wait outside while I went to see the third boy who tried to hang himself. I learned last night that he didn’t die and was cut down before he could strangle. Sadly he’s in no condition to speak. When I came out, Purkiss was gone.’ Or perhaps he wasn’t. For all I knew the little man had been watching me ever since. The simple truth was that I’d been too distracted thinking on ways to get Hotham to tell me what had happened, and Alfred Purkiss had slipped my mind. I wondered why Warbeck had any interest in him. ‘I dare say he’ll return tomorrow. Or perhaps not. He seems to be a simpleton.’

Warbeck snorted. ‘Purkiss? Fooled you so easily, did he, Falkland?’ He shook his head and grunted; and when I asked him whether his morning had been in any way productive, thinking I might lead on to the suggestion that I’d already found as good an answer to Cromwell’s mystery as any, he snarled more like a roused dog than a man. ‘What about Miss Cain? Have you seen Miss Cain?’

I had not, I realised, not since I’d left that morning. Something in Warbeck’s tone gave me to think that all might not be well and it troubled me how anxious I became at the notion. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have not.’

I thought perhaps he relaxed a little, which seemed a trifle odd. He glowered and appeared in no mood for further conversation, though, and so I left him there and went back into the street, leaning beside the doorstep, blowing on my hands. Now and then groups of soldiers walked by, some looking up with a dull curiosity as they passed, others deep in their own thoughts. I tried to set my mind back to thinking about Hotham and how I’d get his story out of him but I found myself constantly distracted. It had not occurred to me until Warbeck had planted the suggestion that Miss Cain might be in any danger; now, though, I saw only too clearly the perils for a young woman alone in this army of men. I wondered what made her stay.

I resolved to take myself to the edge of the camp and see if I could trace our path back to that first hut Warbeck and I had passed as we entered the camp last night; but before I could take a step I spied Miss Cain herself walking quickly along the street from the square. A wave of relief swept over me. It vexed me, the force of it. She had what I took at first to be a black basket swinging from her hand. As she came closer I saw it was a pair of dead crows. She didn’t smile as she reached the door but I sensed she was pleased with herself.

‘There’ll be meat in the morning,’ she said brusquely, and stepped past me into the house; then, with the door barely closed behind her, I heard a thud and a squeal of fear. I moved with a speed I thought I no longer possessed, tearing open the door and reaching for a sabre I didn’t have and hadn’t worn for almost half a year. In the hall, Warbeck had Miss Cain pressed against the wall, one arm almost across her throat. In the other hand he held a dagger almost touching her neck. ‘Papist whore!’ he spat, then saw me in the door. Something in my face must have seemed terrible indeed for he let Miss Cain go and took a pace back, and for a moment his look became uncertain. I suppose he’d thought I was gone and that they were alone. As I advanced, he took another step away, keeping a distance between us. I had no weapon, yet this time he was the one more afraid. In one hand he held his dagger. In the other he had something small and loose like a bracelet. He threw it to the floor at Miss Cain’s feet and I saw it was a rosary. He stared at me and then at Miss Cain, eyes full of accusation. ‘It was in her room,’ he said. ‘I’ll not shelter under the roof of a Catholic whore!’

I was of a mind to run him down, dagger and all, for words like that and see who would come out the best of it. Despite my months in prison I fancied I was the stronger man, and the odds lie with the knife only if the man who holds it won’t blink from striking. I supposed Warbeck wouldn’t flinch if he had to. I supposed, too, that if I were to get the best of him, I might go as far as to murder him, with all the consequences that would bring. With some difficulty, then, I reined in my temper and bent and picked up the rosary. I held it up and made a show of patting down my pockets and studying it. Then I looked Warbeck in the eye. ‘Where did you find it?’

His lips peeled back from his teeth in a parody of a laugh. ‘Yours, is it, Falkland? I don’t think so. I told you – I found it in her room.’

‘No,’ I said, continuing my appraisal. It was old, I thought. A few wooden beads and a crude wooden cross on a piece of twine. ‘Not mine.’ I held his eye. ‘Cast your mind back: when Fairfax led us past the church last night I saw two men watching us. They turned and ran when I looked back and called out to them to stop. I told you one of them had dropped something.’ I had said no such thing but hoped the lie might confound him.

Warbeck shook his head but I could see he wasn’t certain. ‘You did not.’

‘Why else do you suppose I stopped?’ I scoffed at him and tossed the rosary back. ‘That’s what I found, lying there in the snow.’

His laughter was forced. ‘You expect me to believe that, Falkland? This is the New Model Army. There are no Catholics hereabouts! None!’

I knew I had him now. I saw even Miss Cain, recovering from her shock, look at him with scorn and pity. ‘You have the evidence in front of you, Warbeck, but if that won’t do for you then shall I tell you what I’ve found today? The two boys who hung themselves? Pressed royalists. Catholics. They gave their confessions to a priest. They used to do it by that tree – I suppose that’s why it was chosen. Half your army here once fought for the King and a quarter of them were once Catholic, but if you don’t believe me then go and ask Fairfax, or ask Cromwell himself – they cannot either of them fail to know the truth of it!’

I think he hated me then more than ever he did on our way from London. He knew, however hard he fought against it, that a man cannot easily lie with such conviction. But I didn’t dare give him time to even breathe – instead I rounded at once on Miss Cain. ‘But how, Miss Cain, did this come to be in your room? I can only imagine it slipped from my coat pocket as I slept. What did you mean by taking it?’ I glared at her. I hoped she understood my pantomime and why it must be done.

‘I . . .’ She looked abashed and her eyes fell to the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to do, sir.’ She shuddered.

‘You should have returned it to me or given it to Warbeck here and told him how you came upon it.’ My glare returned to Warbeck. ‘And what sort of gentleman do you call yourself, prowling in a lady’s room?’

Warbeck hissed at me like an angry cat. He took his knife to the rosary and sliced the twine, then stormed past to the door and hurled the beads out into the street. He rounded on me then. ‘I do not call myself a gentleman at all, Falkland, and Miss Cain is no lady!’ He slammed the door as he left. Miss Cain and I stared at one another. Her green eyes glistened with tears, I supposed from the fright. Even men may fight as fierce as a bear in battle and then fall to weeping afterwards. Some scoff and say that tears are for cowards but I’ve seen it’s not so.

Miss Cain picked up the two dead crows from the floor. She started to turn away and then stopped. ‘Thank you, Master Falkland, but you didn’t need to lie for me.’

‘Beg pardon, Miss Cain, but I did not lie.’ I reached into my pocket and took the rosary I’d picked from the snow beside the church. ‘I did not say yours was the one I found.’ I offered it to her. ‘Do you have a better place to hide it?’ But she pushed my hand and the rosary away and took her crows to her kitchen.

The afternoon was bitterly cold though no more snow fell. The night would be worse. I walked the camp, trying to gauge the feel of it, but found nothing that seemed out of place save for the sheer size of it. When I came back, Warbeck hadn’t returned. I didn’t ask Miss Cain if she knew where he was or whether to expect his return, and she didn’t venture to say; all the same, I noticed that she seemed brighter, less cautious, now that he wasn’t around. As the evening drew in, she called me to the scullery and we ate crow soup. A lot of the soldiers, I’d seen, ate at camp fires or in the crude dining halls that had sprung up. As well as crows there were rabbits and whatever else could be snared, but the snows were going to make foraging worse. I’d heard there would be horsemeat tomorrow – it had been decided to butcher those animals too weak to make it through the winter before they grew too lean. Miss Cain told me she thought it was a good thing. There would be fewer fights tonight, she said, with all the soldiers filled up on thoughts of tomorrow’s bounty.

We emptied our bowls. ‘I wish there was more,’ she said, producing a rock of hard bread.

I wished there was more as well, but it was enough. ‘It’s a bounty to what I might have had.’

‘When they came we were told there would be no plunder. Mr Cromwell instructed us. They said the New Model wasn’t about plunder, that every one of its soldiers has his pay, plenty enough to feed himself and more besides. I’ve never heard of soldiers being paid before.’

I broke the bread and passed half back because I’d seen her plate was empty. ‘I’ve never been paid,’ I said.

‘And now?’

It was a good question. Carew, Hotham, Whitelock and Wildman – all of the soldiers I’d met were taking their coin from Parliament’s purses, but all I’d been paid was my freedom. Cromwell would have called it a fair and decent exchange. I could hardly disagree.

‘Miss Cain . . .’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Call me Kate.’

‘Kate. Katherine. Have they . . .’ I stopped, not much liking where that question was leading. I knew they had plundered from her home. I knew her rooms had been given over to intruders. What else they had done I hardly wanted to know. It troubled me that I felt the desire to pry. ‘Forgive me. I should not ask.’

‘Mr Cromwell hung men for it in the beginning,’ she said, after a silence that drew out too long between us. ‘Like that man still hanging in the chestnut square. Now that Mr Cromwell is gone, now the winter is here, things are a little different.’ She took away my plate and brought me beer. It was light and weak. She’d watered it down. ‘Don’t think me ungrateful, Master Falkland, but I didn’t need your help with Master Warbeck. I think it would have been better had you not intervened.’

I remembered how fearful she’d appeared and found this hard to believe. ‘He’s a soldier of the worst kind,’ I said darkly. ‘A true believer. I fear he’d whip you out of town.’

‘That . . . thing that he found. It was not mine. It belonged to my grandmother. I should have thrown it away when the army came but I couldn’t bring myself to. It’s all I have of her. But it’s not mine, it was hers.’

I scoffed at this. ‘True or not, I doubt Warbeck would care to see the difference.’

Miss Cain levelled me a long look. ‘Again, Master Falkland, I thank you for your concern. You are a soldier and prone to fight battles, but I must fight my own. You’ll be gone before long and I will still be here with this army around me all through winter. I mean to still be here after they leave.’

It seemed I was being chastised and yet I will admit I struggled to see why. ‘He had a dagger drawn, Kate!’

She smiled at me for the first time since. ‘He would not have used it.’ Her smile fell. ‘Do you think . . . Beg my pardon, Master Falkland, but those boys – do you think they suffered?’

Suffered? No hanging is a clean death. Jumping on a granadoe even worse. But I had an inkling this was not the kind of suffering Miss Katherine Cain meant. The rosary might not have been hers – in that I believed her – but I took her for a secret Catholic nonetheless. There were no crosses in her home, no other icons, but something gleamed in her eyes. She was drawn to those horrible moments the boys must have had before they took their lives, the twisted, terrible questions they must have asked themselves.