William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (17 page)

CHAPTER 16

Warbeck didn’t return that night so I had no opportunity to quiz him. I spent the next morning hunting down boys who had known Whitelock and Wildman, worrying them with questions about what had happened in those last few days to raise such torment in Wildman’s heart. The boys had been camped together on the western edge of Crediton where the fields were less even and thus their tents more sparsely set out. A string of derelict farm buildings lined the fields and, though they were disused, provided something of a windbreak for snow storms coming in from the east. It looked almost as if a great white wall had grown up out of the earth, hiding Crediton from the rest of the world.

Perhaps because of those drifts and the sense of separation they brought, this part of the encampment seemed more settled than the rest. There were no tourneys here, no bored boys picking up sabres and harrying their companions. On the edge of the field nearest the town, timber shelters had been built – and against the old farmhouses too, where some of the constructions looked almost like fairy-tale cottages with their crowns of snow. Forming a circle nestled inside the timber constructions, were more tents like those I’d seen in the rest of Crediton. If this was how towns grew and spread then I wondered what would be left of the New Model once winter was finished.

The middle expanse of the field was broad and empty, a battlefield where I suspected drills were run and, if my past experience of camp was anything to go by, prayer meetings held. Indeed, as I wandered among them, I saw more than one boy with his face buried in his
Soldier’s Pocket Bible
. I was surprised they’d not had enough of it at Baxter’s gathering.

The boys here were meeker and, perhaps because of that, more willing to take me into their tents and let me ask my questions. I had nothing to offer in return, not even the coin an informer might usually expect of his intelligencer, but they didn’t cast me out and for that I was thankful. By asking only a few probing questions I learned that Richard Wildman and Samuel Whitelock, though brothers, had camped in separate parts of this field. This wasn’t to say, I was told, that they weren’t close. Indeed, they were as close as brothers ought to be – by which was meant that they bickered and fought and then thought nothing of it. All the same, they had their own friends, own camps, own fraternities.

By chance I spoke to Whitelock’s friends first. They were as ugly a bunch as I’d seen in camp, most of them boys no older than my own son John with the pocked faces of youth. They sat me down and offered me a hunk of bread, for which I thanked them but declined to take. I’d eaten at Fairfax’s table last night while some of these boys looked starving.

‘Did you notice anything untoward,’ I asked, ‘in the days before his death?’

Each time I asked it the answer came back the same: Samuel had not seemed unusually perturbed until the night Richard could not be found in camp. Come the morning, when the hallo went up that he’d been found hanging from the tree, Whitelock, naturally, changed.

‘He said it was his fault,’ one boy told me. ‘But that’s the way of it, isn’t it? You always believe there’s something you could have done.’

After I’d finished with Whitelock’s friends I found my way to the tents where Wildman had camped. The boys here were much like the ones I had just spoken to and I wondered why they had kept their distance. Perhaps it was only the natural nonsense that flows between brothers. I introduced myself to a rangy lad with dark red hair, the progeny of an Irishman if ever I knew one. This army was no place for him, especially if, like Whitelock and Wildman, he’d secretly been seeking confession. Cromwell had a reputation in this camp for hanging ravishers, but his longer reputation across the whole of England was for hanging Irish Catholics by the drove. I fancied he’d see them wiped off the face of the Earth if he could. The thought left me all the more perplexed that Cromwell tolerated this mongrel army – that he, indeed, had pieced it together. Sometimes there’s no accounting for the ways a man can compromise with his own ideals.

The rangy boy led me inside the tent where two other lads were sitting, gambling with sticks. This would probably have been a sin and seen them Admonished just like the camp whores, if only they had any coins to be gambling with.

‘This is Master Falkland,’ the red-headed boy said. ‘He’s come asking after Richard.’

The boys shifted to their pallets. Their game, it seemed, was now over. A mousy boy a full head smaller than the rest looked me up and down. ‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

‘I won’t tell a lie,’ I replied. ‘I’m here at Oliver Cromwell’s request.’

The little boy sat bolt upright, his eyebrows raised. If I was not mistaken, he was impressed. ‘Cromwell?’

‘Aye.’

‘Cromwell hisself knows about Richard?’

‘None other.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised but I’d expected associates of Wildman and Whitelock to be dismissive of Cromwell, not in awe. I wondered if they’d seen him leading his cavalry in battle.
That
would be enough to strike awe into any man, no matter his allegiance. I will admit it: having come up against them once before, it had struck awe into me.

‘Sit down, sir,’ the boy said. ‘We haven’t got much, but if it’s Richard you’re here for, you’re welcome to it.’

‘I see he was liked well enough.’

The boys muttered their agreement. Richard Wildman, it seemed, was not without his admirers. ‘He was the sort who cares for things, sir. Sometimes it didn’t matter what it was. He’d feel something when you cut down a tree. Found things like that everywhere he turned.’

It wasn’t quite the picture Mary had painted of him but perhaps it was closer to the truth. The Richard Wildman they described was a sensitive boy but not without toughness. He was, they said, a natural pikeman – perhaps not as stocky as most, but he took to drills well and his body seemed to remember each motion perfectly without the months of training that others often took. His superiors liked him for that. It might have inspired envy in his companions but Wildman was too ordinary a fellow to inspire much at all. Better than most with a pike perhaps, but he was still a novice in life. Of women and the world, Richard Wildman knew little – and his brother Samuel even less.

‘In his last days,’ I said, ‘he took to
The
Soldier’s Pocket Bible
.’ I watched them to see how they’d react. They were measured. Still. ‘He hadn’t been a boy for it before, had he?’

This time they shared a secretive look.

‘You can speak freely,’ I said. ‘I know he went to confession. I know he grew up listening to the Mass. He’d have been celebrating Christmas as well, wouldn’t he? If he had lived?’

‘You mean Christ-tide,’ the smallest boy muttered.

‘Do I take it you shared this with him?’ Not one of them wanted to say it but I could see it on their faces. These were boys who had grown up with communion and confession, red wine and wafers. ‘Were you from royalist militias as well?’

‘You did say Cromwell sent you?’

This time it was the rangy red-haired boy. He remained seated but he drew himself up and, for the first time, I pictured what it would be like to face him in battle. He wasn’t brawny like some soldiers but his arms were heavy and he looked as if he could stand for a long fight. I looked them all over, one by one, and felt a great sympathy for them. I could understand their wariness, how I must seem to them. ‘I was a King’s man,’ I told them. ‘I was in Yorkshire before it began, with the King. Afterwards I fought with Prince Rupert. I was at Edgehill and Newbury.’ Edgehill had been the most fearsome battle of my life. I mentioned it now so they might take me for a true King’s man. They didn’t have to know that I’d long ago given up choosing sides. Edgehill was still a byword for desperation, even for boys too young to have known it. Three years had gone by since we grappled for that Oxfordshire ridge and still no man on either side could say who won or lost.

‘You were pressed?’

‘Something of the kind. I’m here to learn what happened to Richard and his brothers. Doesn’t matter to me if he was a royalist. Doesn’t mean a thing to me if he drank the blood of Christ or kept a rosary or . . .’ I paused. ‘I know he kept a rosary,’ I said. ‘I spoke to his whore.’

‘You must be mistaken,’ the red-haired boy said. ‘Richard didn’t take whores.’

A boy who didn’t brag about his whoring? Wildman continued to vex my expectations. ‘She was one of those sent away at the Admonishment. She saw him the night before he died. Only it was the first time in days they’d been together. He came carrying that book, talking about Hell and damnation. Something had started eating at him. Something or somebody.’

I said it as pointedly as I could but not one of the boys reacted. They’d been with Richard through those days, they said, but they had noticed nothing unusual. If anything he’d been more dutiful, spending endless hours cleaning his weapons, practising the sweep and parry of a pike even without anyone to bark out orders.

‘And his brother Samuel?’

‘We went to see him on the day Richard was found. He wouldn’t speak to us. After that we didn’t know a thing about where he went. Somebody saw him at the church in the village . . .’

‘Looking at the glass Richard had smashed?’

The red-haired boy’s eyes opened fractionally. ‘You know?’

‘What made him do it?’ I asked. ‘A good Catholic boy like Richard Wildman taking a stone to the church? You boys aren’t like the ones I saw yesterday. Ripping up market crosses. Pouring church wine into ditches. Wildman wasn’t like that either – not until the days before he hanged himself. As best I can make of it he was a decent country lad, the sort who might easily have been forgotten. I’ve been thinking too much about that long, lonely walk he made. Knowing he was leaving his brother behind, knowing he was leaving his friends and his whore, his mother . . . I don’t think he deserved any of it. I simply cannot fathom what would make him do that. Or should I ask who?’

They didn’t reply. I stood up as if to leave. When I turned back they were staring at me with blank expressions. For all their courtesy they seemed eager that I should be gone. ‘There was another boy,’ I said. ‘Fletcher. He threw himself on a granadoe underneath the same tree.’

The red-haired boy nodded. ‘We heard the story but we didn’t know him.’

‘It strikes me as strange that he should choose the tree where Richard and his brother died. Perhaps he thought it fitting? He’d have heard, just like the rest of you, about the suicide tree. But you say you don’t know him.’ I took a step away. Then I paused, slowly and deliberately. ‘What do you know,’ I asked, ‘of a boy named Jacob Hotham?’

The red-haired boy rose. ‘Now, you look here!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re as sorry as any that Richard isn’t here. We grieve for him just like we grieved for the rest of our friends at Naseby and . . .’ He must have realised in saying the words that we had perhaps both been at the same battle. Had the day been different then one of us might have died at the other’s hands. No matter that we had both started out royalists, this war pitted Englishman against Englishman whoever they were. ‘Sir, we’d help you if we could.’

‘Hotham still lives,’ I said. I’d wanted it to be a revelation but I couldn’t tell if I was right. ‘You know him, don’t you? And Richard – he knew him too?’

‘Know and want to know are two separate matters, sir!’

‘Is Hotham like you? Seeking the confessional, carrying a rosary, Christmas instead of Christ-tide? Was he royalist as well as Catholic? Is that how Richard Wildman knew him?’

The red-haired boy seemed suddenly to calm. He must have risen to his tiptoes like a man making himself large to face down a wolf or a bear, because now he seemed to shrink. All the tension and anger evaporated from his body. His and the diminutive lad’s faces creased in quickly stifled laughter. ‘Jacob Hotham isn’t a boy who’d care to fraternise with us, sir.’ He gestured for me to sit back down. Cautiously, I did so. ‘Jacob Hotham was never in the King’s army like lots of boys round here. He was a Parliament man from the very beginning. A rabid pamphleteer from London. They say his uncle served in Whitehall. Oh, he’s not as vicious as some – he wouldn’t drag a boy out of his camp and goad him into a contest or a tourney, or whip him up into swearing an oath to the New Model or quoting from the
Pocket Bible
until his throat is hoarse. But . . .’ He paused. ‘Boys like Jacob Hotham can be worse than that. They’re quiet and they’re thoughtful and they’ll wait and . . . It’s like a spider with a fly, sir. He spins his web first so the fly can never get away. Hotham is too clever to be a bully. He and those friends of his, they’re everything Richard and Samuel weren’t. Sir, they’d hang every Catholic, every royalist . . .’ He took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. ‘Sir, Jacob Hotham would see the King dead and start marching in the street for joy.’

‘You know him well for a lad you wouldn’t call a friend,’ I said. ‘And yet he was found hanging from that very same tree as Samuel Whitelock and Richard Wildman, above the very same spot where Tom Fletcher blew himself to shreds.’

The red-haired boy nodded. ‘But we don’t count the scales balanced yet, sir. Three of us for one of them. That hardly seems just, now does it?’

CHAPTER 17

I pondered those last words long into the afternoon as I made my circuit around the camp, watching and waiting.
We don’t count the scales balanced yet
. There might have been a confession in those words, more in the way the red-haired boy looked at me as he said them, as if he’d decided he could confide in me. Yet . . . I found I didn’t want to believe it.

I thought I was beginning to see. The war between King and Parliament didn’t just take place on battlefields and in city sieges. It took place here, too, in miniature – royalist boys and roundheads brawling along the lanes of their shared encampment, seeking whatever petty victories they might. Somehow it had led to the deaths of two naïve brothers and one local lad who’d seen his home town turned into a sprawling garrison and could not stand to watch the horror unfold.

Hotham didn’t fit. If I’d ever fancied him a royalist or secret Catholic – and I have to admit that a part of me had so, even though I’d seen the nature of his friend Carew, smiling with a sanguine curiosity as he watched the crowds on the Day of Admonishment – that part of me was now thoroughly vexed. Jacob Hotham, spirited Puritan, ardent London pamphleteer – a boy who might spend his evenings at heated coffee house debates or setting in print the latest outpourings of some scholar disgusted with the state of the Crown – dangling from the same tree as two harried, tormented royalist boys? The matter didn’t make sense. Two Catholic royalists murdered and one of the murderers strung up for revenge,
that
made sense, although even there I couldn’t help wondering about the last boy with the granadoe. Yet the girl Mary had been adamant – Richard Wildman had taken his own life. I chased my own thoughts in circles as a demented dog chases its own tail until, after hours of hunting, I felt ready to throw myself on a granadoe too, so viciously did my head pound.

I needed to speak with Hotham. Alone. I would find out from him who among the royalist boys had strung him up and as I did, I’d slowly tease his own confession out of him.

I returned through the square and past the church, then stood in front of the surgeon’s house for an intolerable time, divining which of the many windows hid Jacob Hotham himself. I watched as Edmund Carew went in and later as Edmund Carew came out again, and after him the other boys who had gathered at Hotham’s bedside. I’d thought they’d given up for the day but promptly another gang of boys arrived, exchanged words with Carew and then disappeared within. Hotham had friends in this camp then, I was certain of that, but now a new certainty leapt to mind, one I could not fight down: none of the boys who came to tend the cripple were the kind I would have sought to be companions of my own.

There seemed little hope of getting inside and cornering Hotham, at least not in daylight hours, so instead I thought to sniff around the dead boy Fletcher. Fletcher, only so recently pressed into service, had not yet fought in any battle and so I didn’t expect to hear many tales from the common soldiery; but he was a local boy. The other locals would know him and might have a story to tell. Thomas Fletcher, I thought, must have had a mother.

There were few women left in Crediton. Aside from Miss Cain, the only ones I’d seen who remained were old and withered, the kind soldiers protect as cooks and cleaners and do not torment. At the surgeon’s house I asked a woman old enough to be my own mother after Fletcher and where he’d lived. At first she didn’t want to tell me but I didn’t think she had a secret to keep: hers was merely the common suspicion of a woman whose world has been upended. I was able, with patience, to convince her I didn’t mean to cause any trouble, that I had a vested interest in making certain Thomas’s memory was honoured. She gave me directions to a cottage at the southern edge of the village on the Exeter road and I realised I must have passed it every day on my way to Fairfax’s farmhouse.

I walked the familiar lane, watched on either side by soldiers in their camps. There were dogs here and a mongrel worked up a din as I passed the yard where it was roped to a tree. The cottages between the church and the edge of the town were set farther apart, and in the spaces between them, camps had been built. Enterprising soldiers had constructed walls of ice and compacted snow so that in places it seemed that each cottage bled into its neighbour. Some of the camps had roofs of a sort where the men had trained the snow in such a way that it crept out from the cottage walls and sheltered them beneath.

Halfway there I had the feeling of being followed and turned to see a lad, no older than seven or eight, traipsing after me with his hands outstretched. He walked barefoot, his trousers ragged things, his shoulders and torso wrapped in a cape that billowed open every time he took a lurching step. When he saw me looking he stopped dead, lifted up his cupped hands and suddenly nipped away between two cottages. Too young to be pressed – but it hadn’t stopped the New Model ousting him from his home. I was beginning to lose count of how many spies had been set to watch me. Warbeck watched for Cromwell, Purkiss for Fairfax and now, after last night, perhaps another. Was it Carew and his gang? Had I blundered too close to whatever secret they held? If so then I greatly wished they might do me the kindness of telling me what it was. Or perhaps the boy hadn’t been following me at all.

The cottage where Thomas Fletcher had been born and raised – and from which he’d been snatched and shoved into a Venice red coat – was at the end of the lane, nearly on the edge of Crediton itself. As I approached I saw that a soldier loitered outside. His coat seemed smarter and certainly less frayed than I’d seen in the rest of the camp, but he didn’t stand as firmly and statuesquely as the guards had done outside Fairfax’s farmhouse. I’d passed him before, I realised, or another man like him, standing watch on this spot. I’d walked this way each time to Fairfax’s house and each time a man had been here. At the time I’d thought nothing of it. Now I thought a great deal. A guard meant that something was inside and now I wanted very much to know what that something was.

I walked slowly by on the opposite side of the lane until I was certain this was the Fletcher place. The soldier watched me with the dull interest of the intensely bored. Snow rose in a great drift against the low stone wall that bordered the cottage. I turned back and approached him; when I looked him up and down, I saw he had a dagger in his boot as well as the sabre at his belt – but that was not what held my eye; I was more concerned by the fact that his boots were spotless, with barely a scratch on them.

‘What do you want?’ he barked as he gathered himself. ‘Can’t you see this is private property?’

‘Black Tom sent me,’ I said.

He was still. ‘Black Tom?’

I nodded. ‘It’s nothing to bother yourself with. You know it was the Admonishments two days ago. We’re rounding up wastrels, cleaning up the camp.’

He was a thickset man with wild black eyebrows that dominated his face. Beneath were piggy eyes and a crooked nose. Up close I might have taken him for any old pikeman in camp – he was certainly ugly enough to have had his face staved in in many a battle or brawl; it was only from a distance, in his fine red coat and cared-for boots, that he seemed distinct. I wasn’t sure if he believed my story but I was certain he hadn’t entirely dismissed it. Not yet. I decided to drive for the kill before he had time to think on it too deeply. ‘It won’t take more than a moment. But you wouldn’t want me reporting back that some sorry bastard got in my way, would you?’ I stopped. ‘Son,’ I said, though he was at least my age if not older, ‘if it’s a girl you’ve got hiding in there, it won’t matter to me. It’s meant to go reported but we’re all men here, aren’t we?’

He was silent for a second but then he broke. His mouth widened in a toothy mockery of a smile. ‘Ah, don’t fool with me!’ he laughed. ‘There’s no girl in there unless you count old Mrs Miller. And if she was a girl, it was in another century. There’s no one hiding out here. I see to that.’

I started forward, taking his merriment to be assent for me to pass, but his face changed at once. He stepped smartly back and his hand rested on his sabre again. Behind him the shutters were tightly closed on all the cottage windows. ‘I’m sorry, Mister . . .’ His eyes were on me, questioning.

‘Falkland.’ There seemed no point in pretending otherwise.

‘Mister Falkland.’ I thought I saw a slight glint of recognition. ‘The intelligencer. I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t pass here without Black Tom’s say-so. Go on, get about your business.’

So he’d been warned. By whom? ‘The boy who blew himself up with a granadoe lived here,’ I said.

I thought I saw a genuine sympathy now. ‘Aye. A tragedy, that was. Poor Mrs Miller. Took him on as if he was her own after . . .’ His face hardened again. I could see him thinking he’d said too much.

‘Who warned you I’d be coming?’ I asked.

He wouldn’t bite but I thought his answer telling enough. ‘None come past me, Mister Falkland, save with Black Tom’s blessing.’

I wished him a good night and left him at his post, head spinning anew. Something inside this house was under the supervision of Fairfax himself. I couldn’t see how or what this might have to do with Fletcher’s death, or that of any of the other boys, and yet surely there was no coincidence? I hurried back to Miss Cain’s house and accosted her in her kitchen. ‘There’s a house towards the end of the Exeter road,’ I gasped, out of breath. ‘A man stands guard there every night!’

The look she gave me was one of curious amusement. ‘Poor Tom Fletcher’s house? Yes, and every day too.’

‘You knew him?’

She almost laughed at me now. ‘Master Falkland, do you imagine before this army came upon my home that I sat upon my back doorstep with my eyes closed and never once went to church or market? Poor Tom used to live with his mother in that cottage. His father was gone two winters ago, fighting for the King.’

‘Dead?’ I asked.

‘Dead,’ she replied. ‘It took the longest time. They had a surgeon take off his leg but it didn’t matter. In the end they sent him home to die. I told you most of the women fled when the army came. Tom’s mother wanted to run too but Tom made her stay. Then, when the soldiers came, they made her take men in her house. She tried to resist. She barred the doors, just her and Tom inside. They let her go at first. You could hear them whispering up and down the lane about the mad woman making her home into her tomb. But eventually they got sick of sleeping under the stars. They forced themselves in.’ She looked away, paused a moment and then her eyes found mine. ‘We all heard well enough what happened. Tom tried to fend them off but he was a slight little lad, that one. Not much more than skin and bone, and not much of that. They locked him outside while they did what they did to his mother. Oh, they didn’t go unpunished. You’ve seen one of them already, dangling from that tree in the middle of the village. But it was enough for Tom’s mother to just disappear. Nobody knew where she took herself. Tom vanished too, disappeared into the army. Pressed. I saw him maybe twice after that, both times coming out of the church in a soldier’s coat that was far too big for him.’ Her words finished with a sigh of heavy melancholy. She turned away from me, back to busying herself with her pot.

‘Kate, what are they doing in that cottage? Fairfax himself has set the guard on it.’

‘I’ve heard nothing much. I’ve heard people see old Mrs Miller go in and out but she’s a spiteful old witch, that one, and doesn’t talk to anyone else.’

‘Where will I find her?’

Kate directed me to a cottage on the west side of Crediton. Outside, the November twilight was already turning to night. I would, I supposed, have to wait until morning but I desperately wanted to know what secret Fairfax was hiding in there. That was the King’s man in me coming out, who’d fought against Cromwell and Black Tom and their militias for too many years.

‘Kate . . .’ I hesitated to ask her but I needed help. ‘Does Fletcher’s cottage have a back door?’

She didn’t look round. ‘Yes.’

‘I only ever saw the one guard at the front. But I would need someone to distract him . . .’

‘You’d have me walk up to a soldier in the dark of night and engage him with idle talk while you break into the house? And what, Master Falkland, do you suppose he will think of that?’

The question hung in the air between us. He would think she was propositioning him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said after a moment.

‘You’ll be done and gone soon, Master Falkland. The rest of us have to weather this invasion for months yet.’

‘Perhaps one of the camp followers . . .’

She turned and touched my arm then brushed past me into the hall. I was surprised to see that she was smiling. She went upstairs and returned with a candle and a lighted lantern with a hood. ‘There’s another way, Master Falkland. Come. I’ll show you.’ She wrapped a heavy cloak around her shoulders and stepped out into the night.

At first the path she led me was a familiar one, past the market square with its defiled cross and the church. As we passed the graveyard she turned down an alley, dark as pitch, that made me think of the first night I’d come this way where the man had dropped his rosary. It was, I thought, the same alley. ‘Miss Cain, when you first set eyes on me did you really think I was here to hunt for witches?’

She hushed me. The alley exited into a narrow lane with packed banks of snow pressed to either side. It was clear this road was well used in daylight but now it was deserted. ‘Keep your ears about you, Master Falkland. We’ve learned it’s best to keep to the High Street after dark.’

I heard a burst of laughter from inside one of the cottages. Thin curtains of flickering light filtered out between ill-fitting shutters. Kate hooded her lantern. With the clear night sky above us full of stars, we had enough to see by. Almost at once Kate turned into another alley every bit as narrow as the first, then struck across some open ground where the snow rose up to my calves. There were tracks here, footsteps, but too few to have beaten a path. We followed them and then she began to pick her way across virgin snow. She turned once to put her finger to her lips. A pair of jesters we might have seemed to anyone who saw us, creeping in exaggerated steps through the snow, lifting each foot high and placing it gently down, but no one did. The fires and lanterns of the camp were distant, and though I could see figures moving in the tents and timbers against them, they were far too far away for me to see who they were.